"Truly, what is the destruction of planet earth if not a toxic mix of profound arrogance and self-rejection?"
Would we ever consider the current destruction of planet earth to be the failure of modern civilization to adapt to our changing times in the 21st Century.
We are still living within a social narrative of being human that we inherited from the 19th Century by way of the 20th Century. That 19th Century is a narrative of PROGRESS through technological innovation and economies of scale into an infinitely receding horizon out of which we can always take more, and into which the consequences of our taking will disappear, without consequence to us: Nature is vast, and we are not; we do not have to reckon with the future impacts of our present choices because the consequences of our choices will always just be absorbed back into Nature, without consequence - we are not being reckless, because there will be no reckoning.
During the late 20th Century, Neoliberalism stripped PROGRESS of its moral reckoning through a frontier of infinite absorption to replace it with GROWTH: the unqualified quantitative increase in transaction volumes measured as prices paid in money.
GROWTH is unreckoning not because of some safety value of a Frontier, but because it is reckless and uncaring.
That is the Neoliberal social narrative in which we live today: we can be reckless and uncaring in our pursuit of unqualified quantitative GROWTH, because somehow, magically, Growth itself will always make things alright.
Except it doesn't.
Neoliberalism is a fundamentally flawed social narrative.
"Truly, what is the destruction of planet earth if not a toxic mix of profound arrogance and self-rejection?"
Would we ever consider the current destruction of planet earth to be the failure of modern civilization to adapt to our changing times in the 21st Century.
We are still living within a social narrative of being human that we inherited from the 19th Century by way of the 20th Century. That 19th Century is a narrative of PROGRESS through technological innovation and economies of scale into an infinitely receding horizon out of which we can always take more, and into which the consequences of our taking will disappear, without consequence to us: Nature is vast, and we are not; we do not have to reckon with the future impacts of our present choices because the consequences of our choices will always just be absorbed back into Nature, without consequence - we are not being reckless, because there will be no reckoning.
During the late 20th Century, Neoliberalism stripped PROGRESS of its moral reckoning through a frontier of infinite absorption to replace it with GROWTH: the unqualified quantitative increase in transaction volumes measured as prices paid in money.
GROWTH is unreckoning not because of some safety value of a Frontier, but because it is reckless and uncaring.
That is the Neoliberal social narrative in which we live today: we can be reckless and uncaring in our pursuit of unqualified quantitative GROWTH, because somehow, magically, Growth itself will always make things alright.
Except it doesn't.
Neoliberalism is a fundamentally flawed social narrative.
We have to reject it.