Seeing the System, Not Just the Smoke

[…]this isn’t a pile-up of isolated crises. This is a metacrisis — a systemic failure driven by the logic that underpins our civilization. It’s not just that our tools are malfunctioning — it’s that our operating system is obsolete.

      • happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        19 days ago

        I think polycrisis is what John Bellamy Foster or James O’Connor use in their books. It makes perfect sense to me as someone who’s already an eco-Marxist but it seems more susceptible to recuperation than metacrisis. You can try to address many crises at once within the existing system, but it’s the system and its interdependent sub-systems causing those. Nothing but external critical analysis actually addresses those roots. Meta is a hard anti-capitalist critique from outside of the system.

        • fake_meows@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          4·
          19 days ago

          If you discover any singular big issue, and you go down deep enough, it will eventually prove to be this metastatic microcosm of all these other broadly systemic issues.

          For example, let’s say I am fighting ocean plastic. If I tunnel into that issue, there are energy and material inputs (a fraction of our raw oil we need to extract has no other use), there are economic considerations (why plastic is used because of the cost, how much it would cost to clean it up) and on and on. You almost can’t tackle any issue without eventually at a broad level seeing the whole system as all connected in combined crises.

          But we are in planetary overshoot. Humans eat at least double the food than what natural regeneration can provide on this planet. We are committed to artificial life support AND all the technical industrial processes because they literally make our living a possibility. Nothing is sustainable. So it comes back to this logical fork: do we choose to carry on and kill the ecosphere or commit suicide as a species in advance of natural die-off?

          Well…a part of what brought us to this place is that we were not wise enough. We were smart when we sat down and manufactured the green revolution, but we unwisely increased the stakes of the game. I think we are still somewhat stuck in a solutions seeking / problems solving cultural paradigm.

          I think we can’t muddle out of this with siloed thinking, we need to at least mentally acknowledge that it is systemic in nature.

          • eleitl@lemm.eeM
            1·
            8 days ago

            Emergent ensemble behaviour and evolutionary (including sexual selection for conspicuous consumption and winner-takes-all) are probably already sufficient explanation for us having near zero degrees of freedom collectively.

    • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      I wish the collapse community were collectively a billionaire so we would get the airtime these dipshits do. We were decades ahead of these idiots when the range of adaptations were better and more numerous and the severity of consequences less dire.

      By the time Ray Dalio says something publically, you could ask any shlub off the street first. My favourite Dalio truism is:

      • Ray Dalio sticks his hand out the window in a hurricane and says “it’s raining”.