Troubled Times

[avingail]

I have felt for some time that there is a big stink lurking in the future, waiting for the human race. We can't sustain our current path of industrialized destruction of our planet, and as resources become increasingly scarce there will be social and political outbreaks resulting in violence and general destabilization

Comments

[f1ymetothemoon]

Great post. And I agree... this can't, and shouldn't, be sustained. It will end in misfortune.

[avingail]

Thank you!

[ladymora]

I agree. I have been observing in several areas of the world and how it works, particularly regarding money, that disconnects between significant aspects of a system can cause significant trouble, because there is no appropriate feedback between parts that affect one another.

(In another realm, it's hard to get people on campus to pay attention to their energy use, even the managers of huge labs, because they don't pay the bill. What's worse, even if they do make efforts and expend money to decrease their energy usage, they never reap any of the benefits of the savings

[avingail]

Yeah, I know the funds exist, but people don't want to invest in them because they don't earn much of a return just yet. I recall that the Mrows had that same objection to them at one point(long ago, probably different now).

The difficulty of the change is what leads me to believe that it won't come easily. Wars have been fought over smaller issues. I don't want to make it so by believing that violence is the only way, but I'd also rather not be ignorant of my foresight. This is a huge change for our society, and even the people who want to see some sort of change will fight it because it affects the status quo and they don't understand why they should give up what amounts to be peanuts at the end of the day.

[dushai]

Even the relatively minor matter of reversing "corporate personhood" would go a long way. Corporations shouldn't be able to claim "free speech" as a defense of what they do -- free speech applies to people, not corporations. Corporations shouldn't be able to donate to political campaigns or anything else -- again, politicians should represent people. Business is one aspect of society that can be good for people, but there are many other such aspects, and it's skewed and unfair to allow business to be so grossly overrepresented due to corporations' ability to concentrate great wealth.

[avingail]

I agree. Corporations shouldn't be allowed personhood. While there may be an element of groupthink among stockholders, a corporation is still made up of people who make very real and conscious choices that should have consequences for them, because they certainly have consequences for the rest of us.

[whswhs]

The way you deal with businesses making bad decisions is to set a price on their making bad decisions. For example, if a corporation spills toxic waste onto your farm, you can sue them for damages. The trouble is that we don't have any recognized "owner" of resources such as the air and the oceans. So no one has standing either to charge fees for permission to use them or to sue for using them without permission. And anything that there's no price for will be overused.

So what we need is some sort of defined ownership structure. Probably not private ownership; it may be that the only sensible "owner" of the atmosphere is humanity as a whole. But some sort of formal legal structure that causes the use of common-pool resources for private dumping to result in private costs to the dumpers, instead of costs falling on everyone indiscriminately.

[avingail]

I like that idea. I envision some sort of Public Defender of the Commons. The idea that the commons don't exist is a fallacy, I think, though they are still neglected and abused as always.