Today I’m feeling especially demoralized about the state of politics, at all levels: local, state, national and global.
The impression I have is that a certain similarity can be observed in the dysfunctions at every level: an absolute refusal even to consider the possibility of long-term consequences of policy choices.
It’s like the entire world of human politics at every level has adopted the axiomatic view that the long-term future simply does not exist and therefore any reasoning that accounts for it is obviously invalid.
I simply don’t know how to live in a world where that’s the dominant mode of thinking. And today I’m despairing more than usual about it.
Clearly it’s a world where billionaires have arranged everything to suit their own preferences for thinking about the long-term future, which is to say not at all. At a basic level, billionaires understand they have no real control over what happens to their vast wealth after they die. All their efforts at shaping their legacies are dependent on unreliable systems they cannot totally control in life much less after death. So they’re organizing around simply denying the importance of having a legacy at all. Allowing billionaires even to exist was our greatest mistake. I used to think it was the hydrogen bomb and the fossil fuel refinery. Nope. Those were just consequences of allowing billionaires.
Add comment