Culturally, all of us in the capitalist English-speaking world are trained to have tremendous respect for individual initiative, freedom of action, the Protestant work ethic, or whatever other description you prefer. This ideal dates back to the Enlightenment era, if not earlier, and was a driving force behind the American revolution.
Caitlin Johnstone's column today points out that this paradigm is basically incompatible with our global reality. She's mainly focused on climate and ecosystem issues, but I think this relates to cornucopian oil theories as well. And if there's more undiscovered oil than the PTB are admitting, and/or it's being regenerated, it only makes all the rest of the problems worse.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/0...ot-save-us-only-enlightened-collectivism-can/
Caitlin Johnstone's column today points out that this paradigm is basically incompatible with our global reality. She's mainly focused on climate and ecosystem issues, but I think this relates to cornucopian oil theories as well. And if there's more undiscovered oil than the PTB are admitting, and/or it's being regenerated, it only makes all the rest of the problems worse.
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/0...ot-save-us-only-enlightened-collectivism-can/
A society that is pouring all of its energy and creativity into the drive of the individual to get ahead of the other individuals will never be able to overcome the fundamental problem of looming ecosystemic collapse, setting us instead on a massive rat race to be the first to destroy the environment for profit before someone else does. Which is why strict adherents to individualism must tell each other fairy tales about the ecosystem being fine in order to avoid cognitive dissonance.
In reality, we are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops.
We’re never going to compete our way out of this situation. We need to turn around, all of us, together. Now. Sure, in an entirely individualist paradigm we’d see some people inventing renewable energy sources and new materials which would compete with more ecocidal existing models, but that wouldn’t suddenly make it unprofitable to keep destroying the rainforests or pouring poison into the atmosphere. If we had centuries for more environment-friendly models to rise to the top we might have a chance, but we don’t have centuries to turn this thing around, we have years. Relying on human ingenuity directed by nothing other than competition and profit will not focus our efforts with anything like the necessary urgency.
Individualists know this, which is why their ideology relies so heavily on denialism of scientific consensus regarding the disappearance of the ecosystemic context in which our species evolved. I’ve studied the arguments of this denialism closely, and personally have found nothing that couldn’t be swiftly debunked with a little research. The science showing the warming effect of man’s carbon-releasing industrial activities has been public knowledge since it was discovered in 1896 by a man named Svante Arrhenius. Nobody accused him of being a pawn in a globalist conspiracy at the time; the scientific world simply noted his discovery with an “Oh cool yeah, that makes sense.”