“The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there’s plenty that we can do to get there before it’s too late.”
“So the power is in our hands—if people in Haiti can do it then we can certainly do it.”
“Are we psychopaths? Everyone’s got to decide for themselves.”
2022 has been an insanely bleak year—it seems like every single day there’s another apocalyptic headline. I write about bleak things—global heating, nuclear war, US democracy’s collapse—because I think that it’s important to sound the alarm about dangers and scream from the rooftops about dangers.
And yet I’ve noticed that some people don’t want to take action—they see themselves purely as spectators. This is a shocking attitude in general, but it’s a particularly shocking attitude if you have kids—it’s one thing to not care about humanity in general, but it’s downright weird to not care about your own kids’ fate.
I think that it’s extremely insulting to explain to an adult human being that they should (1) care about humanity’s future and (2) care about their own kids’ fate.
So it’s hard to know how to respond to the idea that we’re spectators and that we should watch everything burn—you have to assume that passive people don’t actually recognize the psychopathic nature of their attitude toward the world, and yet to say that they don’t actually recognize this seems to be a huge insult to passive people’s intelligence.
Take a look at the following 2021 comments from Noam Chomsky about the shocking way in which people choose to be spectators as the world burns:
SC: Where do you see hope?
NC: Young people. In September, there was an international climate strike; hundreds of thousands of young people came out to demand an end to environmental destruction. Greta Thunberg recently stood up at the Davos meeting of the great and powerful and gave them a sober talk on what they’re doing. “How dare you,” she said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.” You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone’s consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.
We now have a struggle. It can be won, but the longer it’s delayed, the more difficult it’ll be. If we’d come to terms with this ten years ago, the cost would have been much less. If the U.S. hadn’t been the only country to refuse the Kyoto Protocol, it would have been much easier. Well, the longer we wait, the more we’ll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices. I don’t have many years; others of you do. The possibility for a just and sustainable future exists, and there’s plenty that we can do to get there before it’s too late.
Let me emphasize this comment from Chomsky:
You have betrayed us. Those are words that should be seared into everyone’s consciousness, particularly people of my generation who have betrayed them and continue to betray the youth of the world and the countries of the world.
Let me also emphasize this comment from Chomsky:
Well, the longer we wait, the more we’ll betray our children and our grandchildren. Those are the choices.
And here are some notes that I took based on some fascinating comments—from back in the 1990s—from Chomsky:
“There’s a strange cultural phenomenon going on. It’s connected with this enormous growth of cultism, irrationality, dissociation, separateness, and isolation. All of this is going together.”
“I think another aspect is the way the population is reacting to what’s happening to them. By margins that are by now so overwhelming that it’s even front-page news, people are strenuously opposed to everything that’s going on and are frightened and angry and are reacting like punch-drunk fighters.”
“They’re just too alone, both in their personal lives and associations and also intellectually, without anything to grasp.”
“They don’t know how to respond except in irrational ways.”
“In some ways it has sort of the tone of a devastated peasant society after a plague swept it or an army went through and ruined everything.”
“People have just dissolved into inability to respond.”
It’s striking that these comments are from back in the 1990s, since these comments apply so exactly to our current situation—I took more notes:
“It’s kind of dramatic when you take, say, the opposite extreme in the hemisphere: Haiti. Here’s the poorest country in the hemisphere. It’s suffered enormous terror. People live in complete misery.”
“I’ve seen a lot of Third World poverty, but it’s pretty hard to match what you find in the marketplaces in Port-au-Prince, let alone the hills. Here you have the worst conceivable situation, unimaginably horrible conditions.”
“Poor people, people in the slums, peasants in the hills, managed to create out of their own activity a very lively, vibrant civil society with grassroots movements and associations and unions and ideas and commitment and hope and enthusiasm and so on which was astonishing in scale, so much so that without any resources they were able to take over the political system.”
“Of course it’s Haiti, so the next thing that comes is the hammer on your head, which we sort of help to wield, but that’s another story.”
“However, even after it all, apparently, it still survives.”
“That’s under the worst imaginable conditions.”
“Then you come to the U.S., the best imaginable conditions, and people simply haven’t a clue as to how to respond.”
“People are asking the question here, What do I do?”
“Go ask some illiterate Haitian peasant. They seem to know what to do. That’s what you should do.”
It’s striking to contrast Haiti with our own society.
People in our society are “too alone, both in their personal lives and associations and also intellectually, without anything to grasp”—the result is that people in our society have “dissolved into inability to respond”.
But we can respond—we can do what the people in Haiti did when they “managed to create out of their own activity a very lively, vibrant civil society with grassroots movements and associations and unions and ideas and commitment and hope and enthusiasm and so on which was astonishing in scale, so much so that without any resources they were able to take over the political system”.
So the power is in our hands—if people in Haiti can do it then we can certainly do it.
Are we psychopaths? Everyone’s got to decide for themselves.
I think we all are.