Microblog Memes

One thing I have noticed recently, and I suppose it was the Pandemic that did it for me, is that we are sort of culturally narcissist in the West as a whole. People are very worried about their liberties, but few people stop to consider their social responsibilities. Libertarianism really is the idea that nobody has a responsibility towards other people--it's a very selfish and narcissist way of thinking and requires you to be able to walk past someone who is suffering and who you could help with minimal effort/inconvenience, yet you mutter to yourself how it must suck to be them and continue on with your day.

The whole appeal to rational self-interest depends on a false premise.

I mean, potentially. We also hate cancer cells because cancer cells kill people, you know, like, we are capable of higher reasoning. The reasoning that co-operating with somebody else is oftentimes of more benefit to us than not doing so. The reasoning that, you know, we fucking die, grappling with our own mortality, and making plans for after we're dead, based on reasoned principles that we can come to as an idea for what might be "good" for people, generally. We're capable of long term planning and decision making, all in our own self-interest. It doesn't make sense for someone in the energy sector to keep burning oil precisely because of the effects climate change in the long term, likewise with environmental cleanup, or keeping your restaurant open. It is not effective for society to do these things in the small or in the broad.

The people in the energy sector aren't burning oil because they're just assholes. There's a little bit of that, of like "fuck these guys because I just kind of hate them now", but it's mostly just because they're not convinced that climate change is real. They're convinced that some short term concern or other concern about "national security" trumps the threat of climate change. They're convinced that they're the best locus for power, in the field of energy (or maybe even generally for the egomaniacal), even if they're actively destroying the environment by holding onto their power. It's not because they're incapable of long-term reasoning, it's because their long-term reasoning is flawed and neglected.

I dunno, it works out to basically be the same as though they only had access to short term dogshit reasoning, in the actual environmental effects they have on the people around them, but I find it pertinent to know that they had access to long-term reasoning skills, and those skills were just co-opted, warped, and ignored. The long term reasoning was applied to rationalize their short term goal, their ideal shaped their reasoning, rather than the other way around. Not really to say that you can't just start out from a different position and come to a different end point, you know, just to say that. The memes are more complicated, even in their malignancies.