Come on and join us , M.L., us being the bastard outcasts, the universally, reviled “cynics” you allude to. We need your distinguished company -there are plenty of bullshit “Keep Hope Alive” thought content producers out there.
The Lancet does another of the highly researched Pie In the Sky thought experiments that paycheck earners at the research level of environmentalism have produced since the 60s. Those are marvelously fanciful projections of needed “radical societal transformation,” or whatever term they might come up with for reality-denying anti-sociology.
Where’s the description of the absolutely required prerequisite Mechanism for enforcing limits on the existing and growing global fossil fuel supersystem? Asking Gigantic Corp. nicely? Showing a picture of a oil-slickened bird and asking politely for F-250 owners to consider voting for tree-sitters? Miraculously finding ways to enforce carbon tax penalties on historical “legacy” externalizing corporations?
What more in the way of data do “we,” as members of a species that inherits irrational, beastly social governance, need to confirm that it is not cynicism but simple, common understanding that sees no way out?
Hah, well said, Martin. I did say "my fellow cynics", suggesting a group to which I belong, but I understand that the final call to "grow up" is still asking the impossible of our species. "Irrational, beastly social governance" is precisely what we have.
I'm living in one of the only countries that has made significant strides to halt and scale back petroleum production (there was just another article today about offshore drilling stymied by Indigenous and ecologist action groups winning a court appeal to demand impact assessments), but even then, the so-called green energy movements being used to replace oil and gas are more extractionist nightmares.
So... we are definitely screwed.
The Lancet piece, to me, only highlighted the Herculean effort that would be required to fix things, but I promise to share something properly bleak in an upcoming Tuesday post. (Shouldn't be hard to choose!)
I sometimes wonder if one benefit of how I was brought up was that I was always required to straddle several religious, racial, and ethnic communities. One can never tell about the causality of one’s personal traits but I believe this always made me feel like an outsider, all the time. Even in family gatherings, I would be an outsider in a way because my parents were different races and religions so you never get to be exactly like the people you’re with. This trait seems to extend to every possible collective I find myself in. So I always seek commonality, but I can’t ever fully embrace whatever is present within those group settings. I can’t easily take up the norms of the group, and so on. (Obviously, there are some real difficulties about this, as well. I’m usually doing or saying ‘the wrong thing’ and I can’t wholly succeed socially within the group. But I am used to this, and don’t mind it.) I’m not sure I fully know what it’s like to feel like ‘I belong’ in any situation. I observe that people want to belong a lot, and that they want to be accepted. But some people also feel very threatened if they don’t have a firm identity, and sometimes they form that identity by contrasting themselves with others who don’t have it. When that happens (it doesn’t always) it can be hard to avoid conflict, because the mere presence of another group, and the contrast, is partly what constituted their own identity. That’s not the truly serious problem, which comes from supremacy or the idea of wanting to be better than others.
Anyway, that’s a very roundabout way of saying groups that seem to have that idea of heterogeneity like the church you mention are very interesting! You can never completely get it, because you ARE contrasting yourself with those who seek homogeneity. But you can have a general ethos where you just aren’t going to freak out about whatever people are like. You’re going to be curious, and try to understand them. So the norms you’re embracing aren’t quite as prickly, and leave the boundaries of the community fuzzy. Yes, it is a good model for a different way of being, one that makes it easier for people to get along with one another. But I also notice that some people dislike this. They want something firmer, something they imagine as real and authentic. They seem to need this sense of closed-offness. I don’t understand it but I think it’s a partly a way to avoid the disorientation that comes with freedom. If you join a group that directs your thoughts sufficiently, it is possible you reduce the sense of anxiety you have about who you are because it’s always being validated by all these other people in the group. People seem to really need this. They don’t want who they are to seem arbitrary, and they find the collective validation affirming. I think they are perhaps deluding themselves. It’s every bit as arbitrary, it’s just a bit more elaborate and explicit as a process for shaping your identity than doing it on your own.
Anyway, this seems like a hard problem to solve—to get people to let go of that sense of who they are by exclusion and comparison. But it’s easy to do if you can overcome the idea that there is some right way to be human (other than morality, which can’t be completely arbitrary).
Come on and join us , M.L., us being the bastard outcasts, the universally, reviled “cynics” you allude to. We need your distinguished company -there are plenty of bullshit “Keep Hope Alive” thought content producers out there.
The Lancet does another of the highly researched Pie In the Sky thought experiments that paycheck earners at the research level of environmentalism have produced since the 60s. Those are marvelously fanciful projections of needed “radical societal transformation,” or whatever term they might come up with for reality-denying anti-sociology.
Where’s the description of the absolutely required prerequisite Mechanism for enforcing limits on the existing and growing global fossil fuel supersystem? Asking Gigantic Corp. nicely? Showing a picture of a oil-slickened bird and asking politely for F-250 owners to consider voting for tree-sitters? Miraculously finding ways to enforce carbon tax penalties on historical “legacy” externalizing corporations?
What more in the way of data do “we,” as members of a species that inherits irrational, beastly social governance, need to confirm that it is not cynicism but simple, common understanding that sees no way out?
Hah, well said, Martin. I did say "my fellow cynics", suggesting a group to which I belong, but I understand that the final call to "grow up" is still asking the impossible of our species. "Irrational, beastly social governance" is precisely what we have.
I'm living in one of the only countries that has made significant strides to halt and scale back petroleum production (there was just another article today about offshore drilling stymied by Indigenous and ecologist action groups winning a court appeal to demand impact assessments), but even then, the so-called green energy movements being used to replace oil and gas are more extractionist nightmares.
So... we are definitely screwed.
The Lancet piece, to me, only highlighted the Herculean effort that would be required to fix things, but I promise to share something properly bleak in an upcoming Tuesday post. (Shouldn't be hard to choose!)
I sometimes wonder if one benefit of how I was brought up was that I was always required to straddle several religious, racial, and ethnic communities. One can never tell about the causality of one’s personal traits but I believe this always made me feel like an outsider, all the time. Even in family gatherings, I would be an outsider in a way because my parents were different races and religions so you never get to be exactly like the people you’re with. This trait seems to extend to every possible collective I find myself in. So I always seek commonality, but I can’t ever fully embrace whatever is present within those group settings. I can’t easily take up the norms of the group, and so on. (Obviously, there are some real difficulties about this, as well. I’m usually doing or saying ‘the wrong thing’ and I can’t wholly succeed socially within the group. But I am used to this, and don’t mind it.) I’m not sure I fully know what it’s like to feel like ‘I belong’ in any situation. I observe that people want to belong a lot, and that they want to be accepted. But some people also feel very threatened if they don’t have a firm identity, and sometimes they form that identity by contrasting themselves with others who don’t have it. When that happens (it doesn’t always) it can be hard to avoid conflict, because the mere presence of another group, and the contrast, is partly what constituted their own identity. That’s not the truly serious problem, which comes from supremacy or the idea of wanting to be better than others.
Anyway, that’s a very roundabout way of saying groups that seem to have that idea of heterogeneity like the church you mention are very interesting! You can never completely get it, because you ARE contrasting yourself with those who seek homogeneity. But you can have a general ethos where you just aren’t going to freak out about whatever people are like. You’re going to be curious, and try to understand them. So the norms you’re embracing aren’t quite as prickly, and leave the boundaries of the community fuzzy. Yes, it is a good model for a different way of being, one that makes it easier for people to get along with one another. But I also notice that some people dislike this. They want something firmer, something they imagine as real and authentic. They seem to need this sense of closed-offness. I don’t understand it but I think it’s a partly a way to avoid the disorientation that comes with freedom. If you join a group that directs your thoughts sufficiently, it is possible you reduce the sense of anxiety you have about who you are because it’s always being validated by all these other people in the group. People seem to really need this. They don’t want who they are to seem arbitrary, and they find the collective validation affirming. I think they are perhaps deluding themselves. It’s every bit as arbitrary, it’s just a bit more elaborate and explicit as a process for shaping your identity than doing it on your own.
Anyway, this seems like a hard problem to solve—to get people to let go of that sense of who they are by exclusion and comparison. But it’s easy to do if you can overcome the idea that there is some right way to be human (other than morality, which can’t be completely arbitrary).