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Satellites passing overhead, east to west, west to east, even once north to south. People were watching, they knew what was happening. They knew but they didn’t act. Couldn’t act. Didn’t act. Nothing to do, nothing to say.
I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.
Easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: the old saying had grown teeth and was taking on a literal, vicious accuracy.
You have to get people to listen to you before you can make your case.
Can’t charge premiums high enough to cover pay-outs, nor could anyone afford to pay that much. Lack of predictability means re-insurance companies simply refusing to cover environmental catastrophes, the way they don’t insure war or political unrest etc. So, end of insurance, basically. Everyone hanging out there uninsured. Governments therefore payer of last resort, but most governments already deep in debt to finance, meaning also re-insurance companies. Nothing left to give without endangering belief in money. Entire system therefore on brink of collapse.
Some things we can mitigate, some we can’t. Some things we can adapt to, others we can’t. Also, we can’t adapt to some things we are now failing to mitigate.
If one percent of the humans alive controlled everyone’s work, and took far more than their share of the benefits of that work, while also blocking the project of equality and sustainability however they could, that project would become more difficult. This would go without saying, except that it needs saying. To be clear, concluding in brief: there is enough for all. So there should be no more people living in poverty. And there should be no more billionaires. Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise.
Therapy had mostly made it crystal clear to him that he would never be cured. In a sense, maybe that was progress. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Hope would have to reside in something like this: hope to do some good, no matter how fucked up you are.
One person had one-eight-billionth of the power that humanity had. This assumed everyone had an equal amount of power, which wasn’t true, but it was serviceable for this kind of thinking. One-eight-billionth wasn’t a very big fraction, but then again there were poisons that worked in the parts-per-billion range, so it wasn’t entirely unprecedented for such a small agent to change things.
But then also there were particular people, many still alive, who had worked all their lives to deny climate change, to keep burning carbon, to keep wrecking biomes, to keep driving other species extinct. That evil work had been their lives’ project, and while pursuing that project they had prospered and lived in luxury. They wrecked the world happily, thinking they were supermen, laughing at the weak, crushing them underfoot. He wanted to kill all those people. In the absence of that, some of them would do.
But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.
Since one percent of all electricity created is burned to make bitcoins, seven percent for saving sea level could be seen as a deal.
Look, if you have to do something, you have to do it. Don’t keep talking about cost as if that’s a real thing. Money isn’t real. Work is real.
And so India is coming into its own. We are the new force. People around the world have begun to take notice. This too is new—no one elsewhere has been used to thinking of India as anything but a place of poverty, a victim of history and geography. But now they are looking at us with a little bit of confusion and wonder. What is this? A sixth of humanity on one big triangular patch of land, caught under the blazing sun, cut off by a mighty range of mountains: who are these people? A democracy, a polyglot coalition—wait, can it be? And what can it be? Do we make the Chinese, who so decisively
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Indeed it seems to be the case that there’s simply a kind of inherent, inbuilt resistance to change! Constipation is a bitch. Sometimes you just have to sit on the box and push harder. Well put! I guess you could call that the story of our decade. Or the entire century for that matter. Why stop there? Such a trenchant image for history, I must say. Tremendous relief when all that shit is out of you. No doubt!
“Davos Man,” that newly emergent subspecies of Homo sapiens, eighty percent male and in the top ten percent of the top one percent when it comes to personal wealth among other attributes.
Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet? Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.
