I just ran across a nice rant about what needs to change if we want to fix our “economy.”
It’s what I call our “efficiency” but looking at it like a clusterfuck is a good way to go…
The minority reality (let’s call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the “consumer” era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we’ve come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.
My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.
Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can’t be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won’t care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.
[see this post for the “majority” view, which needs to change soon.]
And the guy is write, “history” doesn’t care about us. If we leave this planet, we’ll be nothing but a footnote for someone else to read.
I do, however, disagree with his “Dow 4000” prediction. Although I could be wrong about that.
Can someone here quote me on what Jesus said, explicitly, about gay marriage?
And telecom laws, and wireless networks, and nuclear weapons, and stem cells, and evolution?
Thanks, and please make sure those words are in his, please keep the interpretations to yourself.
Yea, Joel, we probably aren’t going to agree on this one. 🙂