The perceived need to promote a growth economy is one of the deepest held meta-beliefs underpinning industrial civilization. Capital formation and accumulation is the highest goal of the economy, and debt is the vehicle. But whose debt? Well, just about everyone’s. The vast majority of citizens must take on debt to own a car, a … More Seeking the Good Life: Growth is Not Development
Photo Credit: Werner Ustorf via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) Race has always been an ambiguous concept. Racial identity is held to desperately by the socially insecure and the psychologically anxious, who turn their ignorance and confusion into fear, which then becomes hate. Then there are those who consciously exploit the fears and confusion of others to encourage … More The Ridiculous Race
[Image Credit R. Christie. A google search yielded no graphic image that reflected more or less inequality in a society, so I drew one. Notice where the widest parts are. More inequality exists where the bottom of the figure is wide (the very poor) and the top (mega-billionaires) is narrow. Less inequality is shown by … More Inequality is a Verb: It is a Process, Not Just a Condition
[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
DISCLAIMER: I do not consider myself a poet. I don’t think I’ve written a poem in over forty years. However, the confluence of events in this past week or two, the two eloquent lines bracketing the text I wrote here, and reading the book on immigration, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, … More A Pain Poem
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 