Greer - Alternatives To Nihilism Part Three - Remember Your Name

[hatrack]

EDIT

The squirmings of the leftward end of American culture and politics are a little subtler, since the Left by and large responded to the end of the Seventies by clinging to its historic ideals, while quietly shelving any real attempt to do anything about them. It’s discomfort with this response that leads so many people on the Left to insist angrily that they’ve done all they can reasonably be expected to do about the environment, in the midst of pursuing a lifestyle that’s difficult to distinguish, on any basis but that of sheer fashion, from that of their Republican neighbors. It also drives the frankly delusional insistence on the part of so many people on today’s Left that everyone on Earth can aspire to a middle class American lifestyle if the evil elites already discussed would simply let it happen, and the equally, if more subtly, delusional claim that some suite of technologies currently in the vaporware stage will permit the American middle class to have its planet and eat it too.

Look beyond the realm of partisan quarrels and the same deeply troubled conscience appears over and over again in American life. Consider, as one example out of many, the way that protecting children turned from a reasonable human concern to an obsessive-compulsive fixation. Raised under the frantic surveillance of helicopter moms, forbidden from playing outside or even visiting another child’s home except on the basis of a prearranged and parentally approved play date, a generation of American children were held hostage by a galaxy of parental terrors that have only the most distorted relationship to reality, but serve to distract attention from the fact that the lifestyles chosen by these same parents were condemning their children to a troubled and dangerous life in a depleted, polluted, and impoverished world.

The irony reached a dizzying intensity as tens of thousands of American parents rushed out to buy SUVs to transport their children to places every previous generation of American children proved perfectly capable of reaching by themselves on foot or on bike. It became the conventional wisdom, during the peak of the SUV craze, that the safety provided to young passengers by these massive rolling fortresses justified their purchase. No one wanted to deal with the fact that it was precisely the lifestyle exemplified by the SUV that was, and remains, the single most pressing threat to children’s long-term safety and welfare.

A great many of the flailings and posturings that have defined American culture from the Eighties to the present, in other words, unfolded from what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith” – the unspoken awareness, however frantically denied or repressed, that the things that actually mattered were not things anyone was willing to talk about, and that the solutions everyone wanted to discuss were not actually aimed at their putative targets. The lie at the heart of that bad faith was the desperate attempt to avoid facing the implications of the plain and utterly unwelcome fact that there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable.

EDIT

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-04-27/alternatives-nihilism-part-three-remember-your-name

[RandomThoughts]

1. You make a comment.

the desperate attempt to avoid facing the implications of the plain and utterly unwelcome fact that there is no way to make a middle class American lifestyle sustainable.

If the hours of labor used to sustain the lifestyle, are more then the average hours available for production, including all sectors, and ammerization over the usage of items, then you can actually calculate that.

Then the fixes become the opposite of consumerism, opposite of planned obsolescence, opposite of the entire profit motive actions in demand less then production environment.


For instance, if there is a production short fall not letting everyone have some things, then the fix is for people to use less, or use stuff more wisely. But that does not make profit, and most indicators, the creation of consumerism, is there is enough production if it was not wasted on stuff people don't need, they buy based on marketing.

In truth the middle class lifestyle, and full global employment (minus 5-7% of people in transition), is completely possible. The production capability exists, it is the distribution model that stops it.


Here is the thing, all the equations changed when production above need is now possible, and capitalism becomes a predator where it has to create scarcity, where scarcity used to exist due to lack of production.


The easiest way to visualize it is think of the replicator from star trek. what if that tech was possible. Conceptually it is an easy way to visualize production capability above demand. The entire money system and for profit system would have to try and stop it becuase it removes scarcity. But production capability also makes things like health care, energy, food, and housing possible for everyone.

[Nihil]

2. Interesting comment ...

> ... and the equally, if more subtly, delusional claim that some suite of
> technologies currently in the vaporware stage will permit the American
> middle class to have its planet and eat it too.

It strikes me that this is what so many are hoping for in the technological
miracle that will happen "real soon now": something to "permit (people) to
have its planet and eat it too".

The response that you get if you mention the "C" word ("C*ns*rv*t**n") in this
country (never mind in the USA) is largely a form of frightened denial that
there could be any problem in existence that would be serious enough as to
require any restraint in their duty to consume, consume, consume.

:shrug: