It’s the Apocalypse, Stupid
Size matters—the scale of the problem, the size of your audience, the level of coordination necessary to overcome an obstacle. Tackling the climate crisis has always been an immense and impossible task necessitating a global effort unlike anything preceding it, and with every year, the scale of the problem balloons and as the rational animals approach the heat of their burning future they increasingly lose faith in the institutions that have both created this crisis and failed to adequately address it for a half century. Civilization does not always end the moment the volcano erupts. Sometimes civilizations end because they know the eruption’s coming. Civilization is collapsing in its panic at its coming collapse.
In his speech at Davos, Canadian PM Mark Carney makes a simple claim, “La puissance des moins puissants commence par l’honnêteté.” The power of the less starts with honesty. He goes on to talk of Vaslav Hovel and his essay, The Power of the Powerlessness. “And in it, he asked a simple question. How did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with the greengrocer. Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window. Workers of the world unite. He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.” The illusion has begun to crack.
But what is this illusion? That there is a rule-based order? That the arc of progress has been stalled but it’ll right itself any moment now? That the world of the 20th Century still exists in the 21st? Or that the Enlightenment’s project is finished?
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