Normalcy bias is terribly corrosive to good planning. We're a decade or more into an education crisis, health crisis, jobs crisis, geopolitical crisis, debt crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis and moral crisis to the point that we only pick one or two seemingly egregious things as the abnormal features and forget that the majority of the parts of human history after the invention of writing did not consist of juggling triaging the symptoms of society teetering over.
I won't know whether Klein's book will address this until I get a digital copy by some means post-release but the review makes the book seem myopic about how our modern troubles and cohorts of "baddies" were generated by the undercurrents of secular antinomianism that permeated the liberal democracy she's apparently conservatively yearning for. Can it even be separated from our absurd debt buildout and declining metal ore discovery rates?
There were always crises, I think.
Cool, I guess we can all give up and go to bed then.
The propositions: (1) humanity has always dealt with crises and (2) absurd wealth and inequity gives those crises particular shape, makes new crises acute, and creates crises unheard of and (3) absurd wealth creates small, uneven amounts of prosperity; can all be true.
In other words, same as it's always been. The general rule is that inequality increases until a war comes along and burns everything down and levels it to ashes. The world has been relatively peaceful since WW2 ended so inequality has grown particularly egreguous.
The challenge is to figure out a way to reduce inequality without war. I hope everybody agrees that war is a cure worse than the disease.
We have a particularly inept executive that manufactures crises rather than solving them. This isn't the first such in US history.
Where did I say people shouldn't work on their societies?
Kinda interesting, but it gives me a sense of human history only beginning when the subject (Klein) came of age.
That's fine for pop culture stuff. But when she's an activist against a problem that's older than the pyramids - it leaves me with the impression that her cause is hopeless, because every single generation of humans forever will have to re-learn the hard way.
Cleaning my house is hopeless because it will get dirty again.
Maintenance of democracy takes effort, yes. We knew that from the start.
I'll guess that you clean your house regularly enough for it to be "pretty clean" all the time. Vs. going through cycles of letting it degrade into a stinking mess, then having to do an enormous clean-up, without ever learning to do regular cleaning.
And if you have kids, that you'll have done a good job of teaching them in turn, before they are grown up and have houses of their own to keep clean.
“I have found the image of a spiral really useful, in terms of how to make sense of the fact that our era is both familiar and different,” Klein says. “The thing about a spiral is that you’re going round, but you’re not going to the same place. If the spiral is pointing down, it’s deeper, it’s tighter, it’s carrying more velocity, it’s carrying more force, it’s carrying more heat, it’s carrying more violence.”
What do you think this means?
I was thinking a bit ago about how easy it would be for extreme success of any kind to tip someone into a kind of religious psychosis, a belief that one is some kind of main character in history or possessed of a divine mandate.
Anyone even a little bit prone to that kind of thinking could be pushed way into it by such an experience.
It’s not that these people are somehow worse than others. If you experienced runaway success and then ended up surrounded with people praising and yes-ing you (because they want your money), how long could you remain sane and grounded?
You also see it with celebrities, Nobel prize winners, politicians, people who become heroes to some movement, even social media personalities that gain huge followings and get “audience captured.”
> extreme success of any kind to tip someone into a kind of religious psychosis, a belief that one is some kind of main character in history or possessed of a divine mandate.
there was a part in Wolf of Wall Street where the main character mentions that money not only allows you to buy better food, buy better cars, buy better clothes, but also allows you to buy better friends, buy better politicians...
obvs didnt turn out the way they intended, and money isnt the only way to shape history, but it seems to make things easier (for a short while at least (until the next guy with money pays to undo yours))
.. i guess money is a cheap moat haha..