In a previous post, I suggested that the anxiety over the climate makes way more sense as an anxiety over our quality of life. So for example, most young people will never be able to afford a home and so they know that there's something seriously wrong.
We have to remember that even if you take man-made climate change to be a real thing and fully agree with everything that everyone says, it's still 2° per century. People claiming that massive changes have happened in the past 10 years or 20 years aren't even being consistent with the science they are claiming to follow. It's an average change of about 2° per century.
Okay, so what? People are saying "okay, so we make the world a better place. What's the problem with that?" So here's the problem with that: the sort of things that you need in order to tackle the climate are the opposite of the things that you need to tackle people's plummeting quality of life and personal freedom that I think are the actual core of these anxieties. Right now the problem is that we have an oversized managerial class, and massive wealth and power disparities. Just owning a home, just being able to have an apartment to yourself is a luxury reserved for a tiny percentage of the population. And the reason for that is that we've aggregated all the wealth and power into a small number of people.
So what do we do about it? That's not necessarily an easy question to answer. Power and wealth flowing into the few while the many suffer is a continuous theme going back before the beginning of the written word. One thing that history can tell us for sure is that giving more power to a few people in order to reduce the amount of power and wealth being granted to just a few people is an absurd idea, like fucking for virginity or injecting heroin to end drug addiction. We know what happens, when you aggregate more power into a limited number of hands, more power is in a limited number of hands. And everyone goes "but I wouldn't be corruptible" but reality is you already have been corrupted. All of us have. By virtue of being a human being you've been corrupted, and so there is no way that you could give someone the sort of power required to spread out the wealth and power the way I'm talking about and have it work. All you're going to do is replace one aristocracy with another. (And as someone I follow pointed out, the original aristocracy was supposed to be ruled by the best people, and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about aristocracy in the sense of American orthodoxy, a bunch of idiots who just happened to get all the power by some accident of fate)
in the Soviet Union's fall we discovered that you can't just get rid of the bureaucratic class and expect that to fix everything either. The power vacuum caused by the removal of the bureaucratic class just caused a rise of oligarchs. That's not really much of a solution. Russia May lack the bureaucratic stranglehold that it used to as the Soviet Union, but it has the exact same problem of individuals lacking the power to go out and live their own lives the way that they want to.
It really seems like examples of this working in the past rely on a great civilizational project. I think that one person with a great vision could end up not through an iron fist but with a velvet glove presenting a vision to all levels of society a flatter civilization. Do we really need to have a bureaucracy that's larger than the productive economy? And in the absence of a bureaucracy, do we really need to have everything owned by some class of large scale owners? Does everyone who employs another person need to become a multinational just to be able to deal with the paperwork? It seems like by creating these bureaucracies, and setting up these rules, we've taken the power away of individuals to deal with one another. With every transaction needing to go between either a government entity or a multinational, it's inevitable that the levels of corruption rise and eventually college educated people can't even afford a home in the cities that they are helping to keep running.
So that's the insidiousness of what's going on: by diverting people away from being upset about the fact that certain people have absolute control over their lives and instead getting them to protest in favor of giving more absolute control away from their lives, and becomes an everlasting cycle. People's lives will get worse and worse because people have been tricked into calling for solutions that caused the problem, because they've been tricked into disregarding the real problem.
We have to remember that even if you take man-made climate change to be a real thing and fully agree with everything that everyone says, it's still 2° per century. People claiming that massive changes have happened in the past 10 years or 20 years aren't even being consistent with the science they are claiming to follow. It's an average change of about 2° per century.
Okay, so what? People are saying "okay, so we make the world a better place. What's the problem with that?" So here's the problem with that: the sort of things that you need in order to tackle the climate are the opposite of the things that you need to tackle people's plummeting quality of life and personal freedom that I think are the actual core of these anxieties. Right now the problem is that we have an oversized managerial class, and massive wealth and power disparities. Just owning a home, just being able to have an apartment to yourself is a luxury reserved for a tiny percentage of the population. And the reason for that is that we've aggregated all the wealth and power into a small number of people.
So what do we do about it? That's not necessarily an easy question to answer. Power and wealth flowing into the few while the many suffer is a continuous theme going back before the beginning of the written word. One thing that history can tell us for sure is that giving more power to a few people in order to reduce the amount of power and wealth being granted to just a few people is an absurd idea, like fucking for virginity or injecting heroin to end drug addiction. We know what happens, when you aggregate more power into a limited number of hands, more power is in a limited number of hands. And everyone goes "but I wouldn't be corruptible" but reality is you already have been corrupted. All of us have. By virtue of being a human being you've been corrupted, and so there is no way that you could give someone the sort of power required to spread out the wealth and power the way I'm talking about and have it work. All you're going to do is replace one aristocracy with another. (And as someone I follow pointed out, the original aristocracy was supposed to be ruled by the best people, and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about aristocracy in the sense of American orthodoxy, a bunch of idiots who just happened to get all the power by some accident of fate)
in the Soviet Union's fall we discovered that you can't just get rid of the bureaucratic class and expect that to fix everything either. The power vacuum caused by the removal of the bureaucratic class just caused a rise of oligarchs. That's not really much of a solution. Russia May lack the bureaucratic stranglehold that it used to as the Soviet Union, but it has the exact same problem of individuals lacking the power to go out and live their own lives the way that they want to.
It really seems like examples of this working in the past rely on a great civilizational project. I think that one person with a great vision could end up not through an iron fist but with a velvet glove presenting a vision to all levels of society a flatter civilization. Do we really need to have a bureaucracy that's larger than the productive economy? And in the absence of a bureaucracy, do we really need to have everything owned by some class of large scale owners? Does everyone who employs another person need to become a multinational just to be able to deal with the paperwork? It seems like by creating these bureaucracies, and setting up these rules, we've taken the power away of individuals to deal with one another. With every transaction needing to go between either a government entity or a multinational, it's inevitable that the levels of corruption rise and eventually college educated people can't even afford a home in the cities that they are helping to keep running.
So that's the insidiousness of what's going on: by diverting people away from being upset about the fact that certain people have absolute control over their lives and instead getting them to protest in favor of giving more absolute control away from their lives, and becomes an everlasting cycle. People's lives will get worse and worse because people have been tricked into calling for solutions that caused the problem, because they've been tricked into disregarding the real problem.
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