Yes, it’s important to note that the mainstream is not the whole of reality. When something in 99% recyclable, that’s 1% of it that is not recyclable, and probably made of nasty molecules that simply won’t go away easily.
The “democratic” “rule of the majority” is abused nowadays to make believe things are OK. But they’re not. Since peanuts per cent are caring for the biosphere’s limits, and it’s almost – 99% – impossible to get rid of plastic on an individual level ; if we cannot address the pressing issues at a political level, we cannot make it.
Moreover, this idea of “democracy” that makes the majority rule is turning against us: not only the mainstream is crushing all alternatives into the same bucket, it also creates a massive inertia. There’s no way we get out of this without political intervention that seriously threatens the top 10 media giants. Of course, for the EU, it’s a reservoir of money to tap (in the form of fines – since those corporations won’t pay their fair amount of taxes), so most believe it’s easier to let the free market (another dominant but fake ideology) auto-regulate – we well know what auto-regulation pattern so-called free markets operate: less mysterious than black holes, although their operations are similar, attracting mass towards mass and destroying matter in the process.
Given that the political and mass media (unified) discourse is to invest in “AI” and robotics, that is: in automation, we’re not at all on a way to find technological solutions to our problems, but well on the way to accelerate the destruction of our civilization: on this path, we are nowhere on a path to redemption, towards less carbon emission, less matter shattering, less life support annihilation. On the contrary, in less than a Century, we’ll make ‘pop’ and our million years of expansion will be gone without leaving a trace in the cosmos.
If we want to avoid this, we must get rid of most of what we now know as normal, and that did not exist a couple centuries ago. Fascism is one of them. There’s no way we can survive this Century without removing power from the (invisible?) hands of the fascist combo of “Corporations and the State”. But this is not an individual prospect. We can follow all the individual best practices to consume less, pollute less, reduce our “ecological impact”: it won’t work ; it’s too brittle, too little and way too late, and a peanut compared to what the military alone counterbalance on the polluting side.
Our individual gestures are fine but we must organize across the planet to show the damage and trace the responsibilities to stupid power-hungry people willing to take it all and leave nothing. When the planet was hosting less than a billion humans, it was easy to decide anything and not face the consequences ; all little inconsequential decisions to grow power into the hands of a few accumulate, and now that their heirs have more than any human before them, it is their responsibility to turn things even. It is our responsibility to cap wealth and invent an economic regime that won’t turn redistributed wealth into more consumption and destruction.
The current solution to climate change is rushing forward to be the first to find a solution and leave the competition down and subjugated. If we were acting like that between us, we’d be at zombie apocalypse by now, wouldn’t we? Yet, pushing AI, global surveillance, military tech, so-called smartphones, etc. is simply killing more people, tearing families apart, killing children, turning a genocide into sleek UIs. A couple thousand years ago someone preached love and infected a whole empire. Now, the dominant preach is war. What could go wrong?
In a word: we need to face complexity and get rid of simplications, especially where they dominate and have been making themselves part of the core of civilization: like economic theory, which poses as a science but is only a tool for domination.
