At least I don't have kids to look at me with contempt.

[GliderGuider]

I first wrote the words "We're fucked" on the Internet in 2006.

In the eleven years since I wrote that fateful phrase humanity has:

• Added almost a billion people;
  
• Emitted 370 billion tonnes of CO2; and
  
• Extirpated 800,000 species.

I don't know about you, but that doesn't look much like "progress" to me. We're far more fucked now than we were a decade ago, if such a thing is possible.

Some people are inclined to blame our predicament on dysfunctional politics - which is usually defined to include various corporate overlords. The implicit belief is that if we could change our politics we might have a chance.

IMO politics of any sort can't fix this. There is no political constituency for degrowth, anywhere on the planet. Especially not for the scale of reduction in both population and economic activity that it would take to bring the world back into balance. That goes for any kind of government you can name, from monarchies, dictatorships and theocracies to all flavours of democracy.

While politics can shape social growth, it can't (and in general has no desire to) halt or reverse it. There has never been a political body in human history that has actively reversed the growth of the society it governed.

There have been two - just two - examples of deliberate steady-state societies in the last mumblety-thousand years: Japan during the Edo period from 1603 to 1853 (when it was effectively ended by the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Matthew Perry) and the tiny Pacific island of Tikopia. Every other society that rose to power, crushing all aboriginal societies in the way of their expansion, has been based on the principle of "growth if possible."

There is a popular myth that the Chinese ideogram for "crisis" is the same as the one for "opportunity". Unfortunately, there is little or no opportunity in this crisis, just a lot of twisting, turning, posturing, bargaining and wishful thinking. It's an ever-tightening crisis with no resolution short of rupture.

Paradoxically, there's some peace of mind to be found in coming to terms with that realization.

May all beings find peace.

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[NNadir]

2. I've always tried toto imagine what it would be like to go to a party...

...where the guest list consisted entirely of solipsists.

Of course they'rd be only one guest, but a very diverse opinion - assuming one could actually get more than one solipsist to show up - about who that guest was...

Hesse wrote beautifully about the sacred nature of the human being:

...Jeder Mensch aber ist nicht nur er selber, er ist auch der einmalige, ganz besondere, in jedem Fall wichtige und merkwürdige Punkt, wo die Erscheinungen der Welt sich kreuzen, nur einmal so und nie wieder. Darum ist jedes Menschen Geschichte wichtig, ewig, göttlich, darum ist jeder Mensch, solange er irgend lebt und den Willen der Natur erfüllt, wunderbar und jeder Aufmerksamkeit würdig. In jedem ist der Geist Gestalt geworden, in jedem leidet die Kreatur, in jedem wird ein Erlöser gekreuzigt...

...and so I try to make myself believe that all other world views have some value.

But I'm also very attached to John Donne: "Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."

Saying "We're fucked" to me is even less satisfying than actually believing that buying an electric car and a solar roof will save the world. One position is defacto death and the other, while delusional, is at least being alive.

I have two sons, and the pleasure of seeing them becoming men, albeit men who will bear the awful burdens of humanity, not that there has ever been, so long as there have been humans, some humans, at least, who take that burden on.

But if I didn't have sons, I would still give a shit about everyone else's son's and daughters beyond a smug declaration that their lives are not worth living.

[GliderGuider]

3. You're allowing irrational sentimentality to impede your reason.

Even if you do quote in German to make it appear otherwise.

[NNadir]

4. I don't call giving a shit about humanity "sentimental or irrational. Assuming that nothing can...

...be done is not rational; it's lazy and irresponsible.

I don't find naked cynicism for its own sake to be worthy of the slightest esteem and I think I'm educated enough, and smart enough, aware enough and alive enough to have some sense of ethics. "We're fucked" doesn't pass as high ethics in my view. Call that "sentimental" if you will, but I stand by it and will not be dissuaded from seeing it as so.

[GliderGuider]

5. Physics pays no attention to feelings.

It doesn't matter how mad you get at me, or how much you love your children and your own special species. The trajectory that human civilization is on ends in planetary catastrophe. All the nuclear reactors, windmills and solar panels you can dream of would not change that trajectory enough to keep the world from from its eventual rendezvous with destiny.

Physics doesn't care. About anything.