Nearly everyone thinks they're working for a better world. The conflict arises between values, not intentions. There are nihilists who want to let it die or actively make it die, but the majority of people do try to live their values and think of the world they will leave for their children and grandchildren. It's just that some of those visions are cruel, hostile, exclusionary, and require the deaths of millions to create the future that the specific faction will dominate. The prime example is "the white ethno-state." Christian Nationalism or any theocracy makes for bad neighbors both inside and outside of a nation's borders. And that's hardly a comprehensive list of political philosophies that run on death.
When people gather to chat informally about the world's problems, around the keg, the bong, or in the church of your choice, the concept of monoculture can seem comforting. No more disagreements! How incredibly bland. How fundamentally impossible. You can neither persuade nor kill your way to absolute uniformity of thought and behavior. But it's tempting. At any given time, millions of people are drawn by it. We're being ruled by a cabal of them now in the USA. One of the few things that helps us oppose them is that their visions don't perfectly align. Even on the dark side, so dead set against diversity, their own diversity leads to conflict. And these are not people who handle disagreement productively.
The reason our country has been dragged into a far-right lagoon of manure is that the right in general has been tugging that way for more than 40 years. If you want to get super technical about it, it's been since the 17th Century, with early antecedents in the 16th. Heck, even the 15th. European conquest and colonialism underlies the entire modern civilization of the Western Hemisphere. Looking down on inferior people has made us feel better about ourselves for as long as there have been people. When inferiority centers on skin color or command of a certain language it lumps masses of people into a quaking mat beneath the feet of the people with the "superior" appearance. You might respect some aspect of their skills, but still annihilate them in whatever numbers you have to when a material goal demands it, because they're ultimately inferior overall, and disposable.
Working toward a better world is not inconsistent with reducing human numbers and acknowledging that life is pain and ultimately pointless as far as we can tell. Not everyone should raise kids directly, but many of us grumpy bastards can still be helpful in a variety of ways. Remember I said "self extinction," not "self annihilation." Life can be good, and we can raise the standards of it for nearly everyone. I say nearly because some children are born with congenital diseases that will make their lives painful and short. Other people might get a little further before some built-in defect takes them down. Or a big storm hits, or an earthquake, or wildfires, or you're unlucky enough to live during a pandemic and die before we develop a treatment -- assuming we can -- you know: circumstances beyond our control. That still leaves a vast array of circumstances that are most definitely within our control, such as how we view and treat each other.
I'm not a sociable person. But I'm not an antisocial person. If people want to gather and have fun, that's great. I prefer if it's not intrusive and destructive, but that still leaves a lot of room for all kinds of activities I find distasteful or boring. Sometimes you have to grit your teeth and put up with shit because it's not your business, it's only temporary, and it's not really hurting anything. Other times, seemingly innocuous acts like leaving your car or truck idling for hours are truly antisocial when you add up all the instances of this selfish behavior that occur in a country of 340 million people, or a planet with 8.2 billion people on it. It's a lot of little things, along with the high profile big things like mass shootings, wars, and economic policies that turn the working class into beggars.
The internet and social media are full of content creators promoting community activism and local involvement. I don't ever talk to my neighbors, and they don't talk to me. It's not hostility. It's New England. I do reflexively avoid people who display symbols of the regime, but they have probably been avoiding people with rainbow flags and touchy-feely bumper stickers already. I display none of that, but I have published a cartoon or two that made me wonder if I was going to get beaten up after a public meeting. Did it do any good? I don't know. Point is, I know I'm a weirdo and not much of a conversationalist, so I keep to myself. If I see a chance to do something in a group that helps the group, I do it and then fade back. Community involvement sounds so positive and friendly and involving, and it intimidates the shit out of me. I would still do my best to pull you out of your burning car, no matter what your bumper stickers say. Then I would run away.
When it comes to voting with your wallet, how you fill it is as important as how you spend. Assuming that the human species will try to continue, our definition of success will control how cruel or benevolent that future will be. We will still need skilled workers in practical trades and in supporting roles. Compensation will depend on how we structure our economy. Arguing or calculating from existing numbers is wildly misleading to say the least, because current numbers are based on suicidally rapid resource depletion and grotesque overpayment to the topmost tier of the ownership/management class.
I tried to train myself to live within a very modest -- not to say meager -- income, but associating with normal people has lured me into the culture of routine luxury that we call a middle class lifestyle in the United States. Restructuring the scale of wealth may mean that I get stripped of what little I have, because I can no longer afford it under fair distribution of the reduced income each generation receives in order to preserve something for the succeeding generations that they create. It's a scary calculation, but the alternative is to assume that we will develop interstellar flight and find a ready supply of new planets we can deplete in our voracious quest for endless growth. Either that or just go out in a gorging, guzzling blaze of glory depleting this one.
Choose your vision and support it, or just live by impulse and let evolution choose for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment