BP oil spill
Out of context: Reply #527
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- TheBlueOne0
".. if we all looked to ourselves and adjusted ourselves / lives... I think we could make a dramatic change in overall consumption of our natural resources..."
-PonyBoyNo. No. No. All this is is a continuation in the magical beliefs of libertarian free market thinking. That "individual effort" is what makes us super special snowflakes. While individuals do matter, the whole premise of consumption/consumer markets (which you brought up by saying the problem is people consuming) is atomizing individuals and solving their independent little worries with mass market consumerism. The underlying basis of the entire psychology is the atomization of the individual - problems can only be solved by individual effort, reinforcing the value of the self vs. the group, while at the same re-enforcing the actual powerlessness of individuals.
For e.g. look at sports & sports marketing. It sells these figures as unique incredible athletes who succeed by massive individual effort and application of will - which is 95% bullshit. Yes, individuals do rise up, and application of will and character matter - but all these athlete have a huge million dollar support structure. Coaches, sports science, team building, administrative structures.
The average individual athlete - the guy cut from college ball but still putting in huge efforts indiviually to succeed most likely won't not because he's lacking willpower but he is lacking the access to the support structure.
But the myth is all focused on the individual effort and not on the system supporting it, which does most of the heavy lifting.
Humans are social creatures, our gifts & efforts are best realized within a group structure. We survived and bested nature NOT because their were some rare individuals who beat it, but we banded together and adapted our own social orders to make our chances in different environments more successful.
Our ability to create and adjust social orders in different hierarchies is our #1 human technology. The Spartans bested the other Greeks on the battlefield because of their social order, not technology. The US bested the Soviets because of social order, not technology. Any coach will tell you that he'll take the ordered motivated team with 2nd rate equipment over a bunch of indiviual stars with the latest endorsement deals. It's not the shoes. It's not the individual effort. It's the social structure. It's Google/Apple structure vs. Microsoft.
Everything in modern US consumer / political / industrial control culture is set up to reinforce and sell you on the idea that group effort is, if not ineffectual, is something odd and outside the norm. It sells you acceptable rebellion models that have no power anymore, symbols divorced from power (nice mohawk and rave lights there. Is that a Bukowski book under your arm. Very radical.) It's when groups form and radicalize that power structures take notice and are forced to adapt.
Sure Martin Luther King was a great man, but if he stood alone preaching without masses of individuals organizing in protest, and on the fringe some groups trying to take on the use of violence (always a right the State likes to hold for itself) in the effort of social change, then forget it, Civil Rights wouldn't have happened.
So to sit there and say "It's up to you, Joe Consumer to stop driving your humvee and filling up with gas" is just total bullshit. It's like telling individual Southerners in 1870 - "It's up to you to be nice to them balck folk". Sounds good, it happened. Didn't change jack shit. It took people marching in streets and guys dressed up in black carrying AK-47s in Harlem, Detroit, LA to wake up the power structure. It's a systemic problem that takes a group approach and a group realization and the ability of people to organize en masse to overcome. But the powers that be do not want organized masses, and use the soft power of social control & markets to make the idea of organized system criticism as taboo.
Think about it. It's what evolutionary science tells us. It's what behavioral economics is starting to tell us. It's what sociology and anthropology and even our own history tells us.
Not what people in power and the whole neo-liberal free market bullshit tells us, which is all fairy magic bullshit designed specifically to create a neo-fuedal lock-in of existing power holders. They sell you the idea that you can influence things as an individual, which you can't period. At least not on scales effecting social order.
And wake up from the Ayn Rand Special Fucking Snowflake Theory.
Aw, why bother. Go ahead, call me a commie or something.
- Anyway, just saying we need to change the system of energy use, not just change our lightbulbs.TheBlueOne
- yes! +1xcarlx