[W]hat allowed the Industrial Revolution to be such a success? The answer is sixfold. First, most obvious, it began with an abundance of high-grade resources. Second, the original bads, such as industrial waste, were relatively small compared to the atmosphere or the rivers into which they were discharged. The harm did not go unnoticed, but the damage seemed minor compared to the benefits. Third, the benefits and costs of industrialization were not distributed equally. The industrialists and their allies profited greatly, the natural world and the poor, disadvantaged, or colonized paid the price. Fourth, due to inertia in the system, a major portion of the costs of industrialization were shoved into the future. As with the climate regime, the effect of current industrial activity does not always become apparent until decades later. Hence grandchildren pay for the ecological sins of grandparents. Fifth, even the slowest rate of growth is exponential. Thus the absolute amount of both goods and bads grows steadily over time, doubling and doubling again until the burden of bads becomes impossible to sustain. Finally, sixth, economic growth involves an inescapable increase in complexity whose management requires ever more time, energy, resources, and money—a burden that, again, grows larger over time, forcing the society to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place.
That industrial civilization is being strangled by a slowly tightening noose of ecological scarcity has been apparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence without prejudice. Sadly, this patent reality continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.
Regrettably we would rather speak falsely, if doing so means we do not seem to contradict ourselves: we realise that it is much simpler for our point of view to be dismissed as self-contradictory than untrue.
[W]e are under almost irresistible pressure to adopt a view consistent with one hemisphere’s take or the other: it is too risky to draw, as we should, on both. And second, one of these takes, namely that of the left hemisphere, is very much simpler – indeed it is simplistic; and therefore far easier to articulate. It sees matters as black and white, ‘either/or’. The right hemisphere sees the nuances, as well as that we often must embrace two superficially incompatible truths in a ‘both/and’ – one, moreover, that includes embracing both its own take and that of the left hemisphere: altogether a far harder, and more complex, view to articulate.
This activism [left progressivism] shifted the scene from blighted urban neighborhoods and prisons to human resources departments, anti-bias training sessions, and BIPOC reading lists. It was less interested in social reform than a revolution in consciousness. The pandemic almost disappeared from mind as millions of white people experienced the kind of collective moral awakening that comes over Americans in different periods of our history. These awakenings can take on the contours of religious experience, a particularly American one—sin, denunciation, confession, atonement, redemption, heresy hunting, book burning, and the dream of paradise. Moral awakenings leap backward over the worldly philosophers of the eighteenth century, the secular and rationalist Founding Fathers, to our origins in the Puritan ancestors.
In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind, and it is hugely important to keep in touch with what makes it tick.
Time and again, the same pattern emerged. Those who spent a higher percentage of their income on others were far happier than those who spent it on themselves.
