Naomi Klein: We Can Save Ourselves, But Only If We Let Go of the Myth of Dominance and Mastery and Learn to Work With Nature

 I dedicate this post to all those who have been and are in the 

path of Hurricane/Tropical Storm. Bless them. 

Bless all who suffer. Bless us all. ― Molly

 Quotes by Naomi Klein

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature.

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.

It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. 

We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because these things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism… We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe ― and would benefit the vast majority ― are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.

It doesn't have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: 'Where can I get my next fix?' It doesn't learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible... and then says: 'I want more'. Unfortunately we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict.

This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I'm arguing is that, in fact, what we've been told is a lie.  

The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

People without memory are putty.

Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. 

I do think that at this moment in late capitalism it is easier in our minds to imagine raising Florida 30 feet to escape the rising seas than it is to regulate capitalism to make it serve human beings. 

We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.

That's what's happening now. The world is being held up a mirror: "All roads lead here. Do you like it?" A lot of people don't like it. A lot of people are saying, "Wait a minute, if our system can produce that, there's something wrong with this system." That opening is ours to seize. It matters how we name it: It's not called Donald Trump. It's called capitalism. 

The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.

Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich. 

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves. 

Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we. 

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear. 

Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up. 

The anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement. 

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity. 

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.

The reason why nothing sticks to Trump - or very little sticks to Trump - is that Trump created his brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it. It's this ultimate power through wealth and this dream that represents in an age of tremendous economic precariousness and constrained options for so many people - that watching Trump be able to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants is this obvious vicarious kind of thrill for a certain demographic.

In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality. 

[On climate change:] What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing? 

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power. 

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.

But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. 

In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely. 

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age ― privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending ― are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market. 

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming. 

Because it is such a huge crisis, because it puts us on a firm science-based deadline, it's a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a better society and address raging inequality, create huge numbers of jobs, rebuild our public infrastructure. But, we can't do it unless we break every single rule in the free-market playbook. Which is why the worst people in the world all deny climate change. 

Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users. 

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.

It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist. 

There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation. 

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other. 

Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act...Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical. 

The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it's possible to change.

If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.

The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.

My favorite sign says, 'I care about you.' In a culture that trains people to avoid each other's gaze, to say 'Let them die,' that is a deeply radical statement.

So many lives are on the line right now. The system is crashing economically and it's crashing ecologically. The stakes are too high for us not to make the absolute most of this moment.

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.