[Photo credit: Al Jazeera] I’m sorry, but billionaires have no excuse for promoting ignorance as knowledge. They cover their tracks well, but have all the access in the world to find the truth of anything. But that is not what their pontifications and prognostications are all about. As always, they are about their obsessive compulsive … More Billionaires Who Carefully Know Nothing and Care Less
Hopeful realism today is about assessing our planetary emergency, focusing on observable facts, and finding hope in the search for optimal solutions to the global predicament we face. Most News is Bad News, and It is Worse Than Ever Current carbon emissions have surged to greater rates than ever. The headline for the New York … More The Beat Goes On: But It Is Getting Extremely Loud
[Photo credit: World Economic Forum] Industrial-consumer modernism is often infused with glorified techno-imaginaries, unconstrained by the boundaries of scientific knowledge or by the requirements of achieving a society based on the wellbeing of people, not the accumulation of more capital by the hyper-rich. But what if we were to step back and take a look … More Back to Basics: “Green Transition” Imaginaries and the Limits to Growth
What? Well, I was just thinking about how people deal with habits and addictions when either may have both pleasurable and self-destructive consequences. Some folks may be victims of another’s categorization, or of their own. Of course, categorization is a linguistic mechanization that is closely involved with both framing the world for many purposes, and … More Categorical Consciousness: Imaginaries and Experience
Photo credit: NASA, via Unsplash Earthrise viewed from our moon gave many a broader perspective on the living Earth. There are so many well written and seriously researched analyses of where we are today and where we need to go, that there is simply no way to read them all. Most debates within that literature … More The Missing Debate: Modernist Illusions and the Urgency of Now
Image Credit: “Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023” I hear a lot about the assertion of sovereignty these days. And I see even more evidence of the confusion and destruction surrounding it as a fact and a value. Each nation values its own sovereignty above all else. However, … More Accepting Earth System Sovereignty
Photo credit: R.M. Christie ~ ~ ~ What? Well, I was just thinking about how people deal with habits and addictions when either may have both pleasurable and self-destructive consequences. Some folks may be victims of another’s categorization, especially if it causes them to be ‘disappeared.’ Of course, categorization is a linguistic mechanization that is … More Categorical Consciousness: Imaginaries and Experience
Political power disintegrates when the people withdraw their obedience and support. ~ Gene Sharp The Musk’s hyper-tech-bro ruffians storm-trooping through the federal government has moved as fast as phantom fairy dust from the Wicked Witch of the West. The initial response of widespread protest has moved fast too, but not nearly fast enough to have … More It’s Only the Beginning: Tyranny and Resistance
Of course, in the United States and in other industrialized nations many people wish they were billionaires. That is what the culture of consumerism has taught them. Even the billionaires who turn out to be scoundrels at best, are idolized for their wealth however ill-gotten. The “greed is good” value system of ‘Gordon Gecko’ (played … More Energy Equity Requires No Billionaires
Image credit: NBC News. This post was first published on my new Substack platform, Illusions Transformed. The idea that economic growth is the road to progress is so ingrained in the minds of we ‘moderns’ that the growing disconnect between capital accumulation and human wellbeing is hardly noticed. Yes, we know about poverty, but the … More The Great Battle: Economic Growth vs. Human Wellbeing
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 