Stagnation

We refuse to reckon with global warming. It’s happening, obviously, and we’re responsible for it, and there’s a good chance it will be bad enough soon enough that it will personally harm or kill almost all of us. We could take action. We have the technology to mitigate it. But we don’t do anything, and we probably won’t do anything. It will most likely kill us all, most likely within a few decades.

The big question, then: why no sense of urgency?

The obvious answers: because we’re removed from its immediacy, because the causation is muddy, because of decades of lies and obfuscations, because of religion, because it’s scary. These are all true, but they miss a fundamental point.

Let’s do a thought experiment. I’m not being facetious. I’m really serious about this.

Say that Exxon somehow wiped out a whole city. Details don’t matter, use your imagination—they did something to the water, maybe, where everyone in a city who drank or bathed one day died. Let’s say 2 million dead. Direct, obvious causation. Piles of evidence. Everyone agrees that through a combination of malice and negligence, Exxon just killed 2 million Americans. Would anything substantial happen? Probably not.

By “something substantial,” I mean something that would deeply hurt the company’s financial well-being. I mean at least several people facing criminal charge. I mean strong, well-enforced regulations will be imposed so as to prevent this from happening again. I mean no one who got rich off of killing 2 million people would be allowed to stay rich. And I cannot think of any realistic circumstance under which that would happen.

Is there a line? What if they killed 20 million people? Again, absolutely directly. In this hypothetical there would be no question of causation or intention. Would we take action if an oil company killed 20 million Americans? Probably not. We would probably let it happen.

This is the American Condition. We are all helpless. We are all being killed. We all realize that we are helpless and being killed, yet we have embraced a worldview that makes this seem inalterable. We’ve been conditioned to believe that our helplessness is both inevitable and deserved. Anyone who suggests otherwise is dismissed as being either naïve or reactionary.

This Condition—this stagnation, the paralysis, the impotence—this is the defining feature of our time. It is a top-down relational issue: the mass of humanity under the control of people and industries who believe that empathy is weakness and human life is just a resource to be mined. Intersectional factors worsen the malignant effects of this relation, but they are not the cause of them. As shitty as they are, no Klan members or police force could kill 20 million people without any threat of repercussion.

There is no moving forward within this frame. The frame must be shattered, if we have any hope of survival. I don’t know how to do that, but I know that’s what we have to do.