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Personal Change Does Not Equal Social Change

9/23/2016

2 Comments

 
People do NOT want to recognize that they are utterly screwed.. and that their entire lifestyle is about to radically alter. We as a culture are way too addicted to our smartphones, cars, grocery stores, etc. To tell people that all of that is going to go away one way or another is to tell them the world is literally ending. They freak out. Too much cognitive dissonance.

Many times, the deniers shift the attention to those who talk about it. They accuse them of hypocrisy. Ecologically-minded people can’t complain, they say.  After all, they use the internet, they have homes, they drive cars. According to these people, even writing a book about the environmental destruction is hypocritical, since books are written on paper and delivered by truck.
This kind of thinking is a mental disease. It holds no validity and must be opposed by all rational people.
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Individual/residential consumption of oil, electricity, water, etc, is inconsequential at any level. The true change must be systemic. If the corporations don't stop raping the land and taking the resources for profit margins then we could gather millions of individual people and convince them to lessen or stop their use of these things completely and it would not mitigate the coming collapse by more than a day or two.

A friend of mine asked me: So the actual impacts of the individual and combined actions of the average consumer are dwarfed by the scale of extractive exploitive for profit growth based system behind it all? We can reduce, recycle, reuse until we get dizzy and it's a proverbial drop in the bucket? We can spend, burn and fritter?

Sounds right to me. If it is systemic, then what use is an individual bringing their 'footprint' to zero? Even if millions of individuals did all that in their daily lives, at best it would be as if the population of the planet was reduced by a few million people. That would not stop the leviathan system that is unceasingly exploitive by nature.

His reply: I agree. There seems to be something about the sheer scale of what has been constructed that precludes individual based collective remedy even if that goes against the promise of the modern age (the oil-drunk "we can do anything" myth).

One individual-based collective remedy would be something along the lines of revolt/insurrection/sabotage. Which I personally advocate for. But for those not so inclined I always suggest building resiliency, both as an individual and in your community. Transitioning through a collapse of industrial civilization is going to force us to be local. Better to prepare your locality and neighbors now than to wait to be thrust into the situation.
2 Comments
Arthur Noll
4/12/2018 01:26:55 pm

I'm in favor of intellectual revolt. Physical revolt against the majority of humanity, doesn't look at all practical. It is the issue again of counting what you have to accomplish goals... But pointing out that expectations about counting on imaginary things isn't scientifically rational, and pointing out that we need to live in cooperative groups and that we can consider how effective we are at this with scientific measures like food energy and rates of use of things vs how fast they replace or regrow, is more scientifically rational than what we are presently doing. People sometimes joke about being irrational, but to have it seriously pointed out isn't generally felt to be funny at all. It can have serious effects on people. They can admit that they have been making serious mistakes and deep changes need to be made, or they can dig in their heels and push even harder on what they feel is rational behavior. And if they aren't right, that can be more quickly self destructive. No need for physical force to do this.
As far as the first issue of personal change, without an intellectual revolution it can't be expected to change society. But it can be practice for when society is forced to deal with reality. Learning that you can live with far less, learning skills that would be useful in a society not living on fossil fuel, are things that can end up as very useful. It fits with building resiliency, as you talk about.

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