Listen to a reading of this article: ❖ I talk a lot about how we're destroying our environment with a global system where human behavior is driven by the pursuit of profit, how the power structure which dominates that system does so by violence, exploitation, oppression, and the
The mind which we cannot quiet down is designed to focus on form...on things. The mind made “me” seeks ‘more’ in order to enhance its sense of self... in order to make the mortal and temporary immortal and eternal.
Our futile attempt to add more to our identity in order to perpetuate its existence makes us value the realm of form, of things and concepts because that is all the mind can truly know.
So we ignore, because we are largely unaware, the realm of the formless— the only dimension where immortality and eternity and fulfillment can be experienced.
The path of conscious evolution, of awareness, is the path of undoing and unmaking... of coming to notice we are the formless source of all things.
We begin to value stillness and spaciousness and being. We become aware that by unmaking our identity we no longer obsess over making.
The egoic condition propels us back into the arms of the survival brain and we suppress ( and therefore devalue) our sharing caring nurturing side...which is aligned with our unmaking tendencies.
A tip 'o the hat for your perennial spot-on perspective. Watching a half hour of commercial television tells us all we need to know about the true temperature of our society and what it values: half the commercials are to get us to buy more stuff of questionable need; the other half are for pharmaceuticals with ghastly fine print side effects. And they have the audacity to proclaim that we're some sort of shining city on a friggin' hill.
Is the ultimate logic of this argument a drastic population reduction? The ultimate un-making. Will people in China, India, and elsewhere agree to that? It is true that wealthy societies with educated women do have lower or no population growth.
The advocates of capitalism would propose instead privatizing oceans and atmospheres and other "commons" that are currently used and polluted by everyone including especially governments. Of course since no one has tried that yet, the technologies and the laws that would be needed do not yet exist.
I often share your articles with libertarians, left and right anarchists, Trump supporters, and a variety of other people, so some of the capitalism bros your hearing from may be from my social media.
1) A friend I shared this article with points out to me that the photo you are using is not fish killed by environmental damage, they are spawned out salmon who die after they have finished spawning.
An important perspective, Caitlin. And as always well presented. You say 'since the dawn of civilization humanity has valued ...' and go on to list all the various things which often deliver huge problems as well as benefits. But this is NOT true of all civilizations in human history. Far from it. There are quite a few examples of where sustainability and symbiosis with the natural forces of earth have been guiding principles. This is particularly true of some of the pre-Columbian civilizations. But there are examples from every continent. We have to find a way of synthesizing these older aspects of consciousness with our modern technical understanding and progress. One of the great lies of Western civilization is that only the profit motive drives invention and innovation. This is simply not the case. But what is the case is that in the West at least modern technological innovation is always publicly funded and then delivered to those for whom greed and power are the guiding principles. This MUST change...
We are at a very dangerous tipping point now, with the likes of Claus Schwab and "friends" who are currently ushering in, on a super fast, warp speed track, the implementation of a New World Order. And their convoluted plan for a Fourth Industrial Revolution, which most people are unaware of; what they have in store for us if we don't stop them, is the following: They have an idea for a "new" Capitalism, which is really a Marxist Neo-feudalism, where we are all to be reduced to slaves who will "own nothing and be happy." Everything we do in our lives will be surveilled, mined, and controlled as data for the wealthy to gamble on in Hedge Funds like a game. They will nudge us through our technology to behave in ways that are permitted, and punish us in ways that are not. They want us all to be financially dependent of this centralized control system. They want to turn us all into a new kind of Trans-human, that merges man with machine, equipped with little wearable sensors, or sensors implanted into our bodies and brains (see Musk, and Bezos) which will control our thinking, sleeping and behavior to benefit these rich hedge fund gamers. We will eat bugs and lab grown meat, as they are now currently ending sustainable animal agriculture in real time, as we speak. They wish to harvest and collect all of our personal information (even information on what we send down the toilet each day!) to collect that data and interpret it all by AI algorithms, in order to teach robots what we know, and then ultimately have those very robots replace us. The Human species as we know it planned to end! The idea that we should save the planet from ecocide has been coopted by these Globalists and replaced, by their use of very distorted language, to have us believe that they wish to conquer this "unsustainable" abuse of limited resources and climate change. But it is not to save the plant for us! It is just for the purpose of dictating a worldview to support the very wealthy, who want to take over the earth as their playground.
Sometimes I think that capitalism has nothing to do with economics, sometimes I think that wealth is only wealth if it is circulating in the system, interacting with the environment, with living beings. Capitalism is just about extracting.
How else does our world-wide, omnipresent economic system continue to power itself along at its exponential pace? What other strategies has it evolved to survive and grow? Recognising that economic systems are organisms too, and are the product of infinite reactions and interactions to end up where they are now. Up to now, what we have, is the ultimate survivor of how humans create their economic order. The ‘fittest’?
And, just pausing a minute, remembering the system it replaced. What was there before the present consumerist economic system began about 10,000 years ago, with the first human civilisations? It was the hunter-gatherer economy where people spent each day afresh in search of sustenance. A simple economy with little trade, little surplus and little interest in any aspects of life beyond keeping fed. The system, incidentally, that Australia’s First-Nation People created and preserved for 50,000 years! 40,000 years before ‘we’ became ‘civilised’. And their land was effectively the same as when they first stepped on it…all but perfect sustainability.
We, in turn, have devastated the entire planet in a mere…10,000 years.
The next strategy of our system, the next evolutionary development that has ensured it maintains its position as the top-dog of economic systems, is constant technological innovation.
We can relate to that easily enough in the present era where technologies come and go with breath-taking speed. Think television, cars, communication in your own lifetime.
What I wish to emphasise is the wastefulness of it. Yes, the wastefulness of it! How our land-fill carries the outcome of our inventiveness and as the new supersedes the old. Every new technology and its consumerist expression, all extracted from mother Earth, ending up in landfill.
Yet how can we have inventiveness without the waste? Referring back to the Australian First-Nation People, they had virtually ZERO innovation…and were superbly sustainable! How can we steer human inventiveness into a non-exploitative direction?
If the waste is the problem, that is, the planet’s permanently lost resources, then one obvious answer is, make us all pay for it.
Pay for the indulgence of buying it, using it and then throwing it away.
Demand and supply; if the supply is cheap people will buy it. If the supply is expensive (to cover its true costs), people will be more circumspect with parting with their wealth.
A planet or…a new electronic bit of wizardry?
The present wastefulness has become part of the economic model because we have sanctioned it. It is not inevitable, it has been condoned. Tragically, it serves most of us.
In my other ramblings (what I am writing are intellectual explorations…ideas), I refer to the strategies todays’ universal economic systems use to keep everyone occupied as, ‘Environmental Molotov Cocktails’. So, the first ‘Cocktail’ was to increase population, the second to pass productivity on to workers so that the market grows and hence boosts production.
Note, in a world where economic growth is a sacred cow it is important to realise that these sacred cows, population and income growth, are actually the Molotov Cocktails bringing us to the dire consequences of Climate Change.
For me, demand and supply are the foundation of economics and economic systems. Both are interdependent and together interact to determine the direction of any economic activity. Population and consumer income are essential in that demand, supply process.
So, my third ‘economic Molotov cocktail’ is; the optimisation of the use of energy.
The Industrial Revolution, which is the real start of the rampant, exploitative system we have now, was around 1800. And its cause was the ability to harness the energy of fossil fuels…first coal, then oil and gas.
Suddenly a machine had the power of ten, a hundred or, eventually, thousands of horses. Without the genie of fossil fuel energy, without the Archimedean lever of fossil fuel, we would not be ‘moving the planet’.
But fossil fuels are a two-edged sword. They literally power almost everything around us but, are simultaneously, foul our nest.
An economic system powered with fossil fuel is a supercharger toward extinction. Obviously, alternative sources of energy exist AND are available. And we need to change.
So, renewables are a solution. But, as I will show as I move through the 12 strategies, embracing them is…conditional.
Yesterday I advanced the idea that our economic system, no matter what its colour or shape (Communist, Capitalist, command, free enterprise, etc), has evolved a series of survival strategies to ensure the wheels of exploitation are incessant…until it goes over the edge!
And that edge is inevitable because its entire purpose is predicated on a blatant exploitation of the planet’s resources, hence it will/must go over the precipice…the world’s resources are not…infinite.
So, the first strategy was to promote population increase. More mouths, more money in hands, more consumption.
The second strategy to keep the wheels of industry rolling along ever and ever faster is to increase the incomes of those driving the DEMAND side of the equation. Simply put, it is increasing the wages or spending power of the consumers. The more money in the consumers pocket, the more they are able to spend!
Economists refer to this as increases in ‘productivity’, the increased output of labour in the production process. Even allowing for inflation most of us are aware that living today is more indulgent than it was for our parents. We have a lot more money and ‘stuff’!
The sharing of the increase in productivity is interesting. Why would employers share the increase in the efficiency of production with the workers? Again, the answer lies in simple economics…demand and supply. When labour becomes scarce wages go up.
It is also interesting to reflect how robotics and automation (more increases in productivity) will pan out. If the need for labour becomes superfluous, what happens to wages? And…what happens to DEMAND?
But at the present, rewarding labour for labour (reward for work), oils the cogs of the industrial machine. It puts money in the ‘labourer’s’ pocket and allows them to become the willing consumer of the next ‘thing’.
Yes, I agree Caitlin...the elephant in the room is 'capitalism'.
An economic system that is premised on constant exploitation of the planet in order to survive, is absurd. But note...we are talking about an economic system that covers every economy on the planet. America, China, Russia, Europe...all are hooked into the consumerism that requires the constant exploitation. While, paradoxically, sheltering under the names of socialist, dictatorship, Communist or free enterprise...All are identical in that all are screwing the planet.
I call l it the ECONOMIC ECSTATIC CONGRESS (which may resonate with any Tantric among you).
Over the next 12 days I will reveal the 12 the strategies of this system to ensure it feeds itself with resources and keeps us all on the treadmill...all complicit...AND...
how to reverse this strategy!
STRATEGY ONE; Increasing population. Economic systems need a DEMAND and a SUPPLY. Population meets both of those requirements. It creates the mouths to feed and their clamouring for 'stuff' (the collective detritus of consumerism from the phone to the car to the holidays). Once old enough they also supply the labour to produce the 'stuff'.
America and my country, Australia, were founded on immigration and natural population increase. The Ecstatic Congress needs an ever growing, ever hungry market.
The antidote is both simple and difficult. Reduce population increase. The immigration part is easy...shut borders to new residents. Curbing natural population increase is more complex as the right to procreate is deeply entrenched in our cultural values.
Our world population of 7 billion is still on a runaway trajectory and for an economic system that exists to exploit natural resources and to fill the market place with 'stuff', that's great. However, as a strategy of survival...it is a disaster.
Tomorrow; the second strategy for survival of the Economic Ecstatic Congress.
I understand this article is about environment but since you mention it, I have to ask- Caitlin, do you think today, in 2021, women are “second class citizen” and have “very little to say” and “gone unrewarded by money or esteem compared to traditional men's work”?
What is your source data of this - “Since that time women have had very little say in the construction of our society and its values systems, and for that reason the work they traditionally do — cleaning, caring, conserving, resolving conflicts and building community — has gone unrewarded by money or esteem compared to traditional men's work.”?
Because I don’t think your data is correct.
Simple example using nursing as a job which is one of the most “cleaning and caring” jobs around. - Scandinavian countries which are the most historically egalitarian societies have over 8-2 female to male nurses ratio and 9-1 male - female engineers ratio. Some of the countries is an even bigger disparity- In Iceland, men make up a meagre 1% of nurses.
Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia, one of the most non-egalitarian countries has the least female nurses (68%) and most male nurses at 32%.
So despite being the most egalitarian, women are still preferring to pick nursing as their jobs (and even more than in US). It’s a choice they are making. It’s not being forced on them as if they are some “second class citizen” and “very little to say” as you claim.
Now as for money- money is dependant on how many lives you are impacting. That’s why one can make more money over the internet as compared to traditional newspaper as more lives are being impacted. Your own posts for example ask for donations. Obviously there’s more chances of you getting a donation over the internet as compared to if you were to use traditional old school pamphlets to distribute your thoughts. Because you are impacting more lives over the internet. That’s why an app developer can make more money (if successful) than a nurse. Because despite the love and care, a nurse can only be at one place at one time. So they can only affect one life at a time. An app developer on the other hand could be sleeping and still making money from apps.
Also your money is dependent on how dangerous/dirty your job is. If you are a coal miner or garbage picker or construction worker, you obviously should get paid more money and that happens to be the case why men get paid more money there as vast majority in these occupations are men. 95% of work place accidents and deaths are men. Do you not think this should be the case? Should a caring job get more money than a dangerous and dirty job?
And based on my Scandinavian model example- women are choosing to be nurses and not garbage picker or construction workers or coal miners, it’s not being forced on them.
Lastly I would like to talk about esteem. Be very careful for what you are wishing for. Do you think a garbage picker or construction worker or coal miner has more esteem than a nurse? Which one do you think will get more hits - a person with a dating profile with “garbage picker” or “construction worker” or another with “nurse”?
I find a lot of these discussions only talking about billionaire jobs like Jeff bezos or Elon musk and comparing it to nursing as if that’s somehow proving a point about caring jobs not being paid enough. When it’s actually the dangerous jobs and size of impact which really determines your worth.
Also it’s not like society isn’t willing to make people in caring jobs well worth. Female doctors and surgeons make loads of money. The main problem is the fascination of people being jealous of others who are better off than them.
As for the rest of the article - I can see your point. However what you are asking for is sort of breaking the laws of nature- humans like all animals want to go forward, not backwards. Even if the forward may or may not be risky, we like building new and innovative things. We are also addicted to dopamine. As long as dopamine is around, kids will keep using their phones and social media and keep making the ceos rich.
The mind which we cannot quiet down is designed to focus on form...on things. The mind made “me” seeks ‘more’ in order to enhance its sense of self... in order to make the mortal and temporary immortal and eternal.
Our futile attempt to add more to our identity in order to perpetuate its existence makes us value the realm of form, of things and concepts because that is all the mind can truly know.
So we ignore, because we are largely unaware, the realm of the formless— the only dimension where immortality and eternity and fulfillment can be experienced.
The path of conscious evolution, of awareness, is the path of undoing and unmaking... of coming to notice we are the formless source of all things.
We begin to value stillness and spaciousness and being. We become aware that by unmaking our identity we no longer obsess over making.
The egoic condition propels us back into the arms of the survival brain and we suppress ( and therefore devalue) our sharing caring nurturing side...which is aligned with our unmaking tendencies.
This makes so much sense.
This article and the picture used is an example of why we shouldn't write an article on things we don't understand.
Our world isn't dying. At least not compared to, say, 50 or 100 years ago. Freedom has expanded around the globe and life has improved greatly, especially where freedom has expanded. By way of example: https://www.humanprogress.org/good-news-the-world-is-getting-freer-faster/ and https://www.humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2019/
A tip 'o the hat for your perennial spot-on perspective. Watching a half hour of commercial television tells us all we need to know about the true temperature of our society and what it values: half the commercials are to get us to buy more stuff of questionable need; the other half are for pharmaceuticals with ghastly fine print side effects. And they have the audacity to proclaim that we're some sort of shining city on a friggin' hill.
Whaaat? And admit we were wrong?? Not a chance.
Is the ultimate logic of this argument a drastic population reduction? The ultimate un-making. Will people in China, India, and elsewhere agree to that? It is true that wealthy societies with educated women do have lower or no population growth.
The advocates of capitalism would propose instead privatizing oceans and atmospheres and other "commons" that are currently used and polluted by everyone including especially governments. Of course since no one has tried that yet, the technologies and the laws that would be needed do not yet exist.
I often share your articles with libertarians, left and right anarchists, Trump supporters, and a variety of other people, so some of the capitalism bros your hearing from may be from my social media.
Two questions:
1) A friend I shared this article with points out to me that the photo you are using is not fish killed by environmental damage, they are spawned out salmon who die after they have finished spawning.
2) In the past 50 years cleaner environments are associated with freer markets, increased wealth, and newer technology. You have to be richer to clean the environment: https://www.humanprogress.org/study-finds-economic-prosperity-is-associated-with-a-cleaner-environment
An important perspective, Caitlin. And as always well presented. You say 'since the dawn of civilization humanity has valued ...' and go on to list all the various things which often deliver huge problems as well as benefits. But this is NOT true of all civilizations in human history. Far from it. There are quite a few examples of where sustainability and symbiosis with the natural forces of earth have been guiding principles. This is particularly true of some of the pre-Columbian civilizations. But there are examples from every continent. We have to find a way of synthesizing these older aspects of consciousness with our modern technical understanding and progress. One of the great lies of Western civilization is that only the profit motive drives invention and innovation. This is simply not the case. But what is the case is that in the West at least modern technological innovation is always publicly funded and then delivered to those for whom greed and power are the guiding principles. This MUST change...
We are at a very dangerous tipping point now, with the likes of Claus Schwab and "friends" who are currently ushering in, on a super fast, warp speed track, the implementation of a New World Order. And their convoluted plan for a Fourth Industrial Revolution, which most people are unaware of; what they have in store for us if we don't stop them, is the following: They have an idea for a "new" Capitalism, which is really a Marxist Neo-feudalism, where we are all to be reduced to slaves who will "own nothing and be happy." Everything we do in our lives will be surveilled, mined, and controlled as data for the wealthy to gamble on in Hedge Funds like a game. They will nudge us through our technology to behave in ways that are permitted, and punish us in ways that are not. They want us all to be financially dependent of this centralized control system. They want to turn us all into a new kind of Trans-human, that merges man with machine, equipped with little wearable sensors, or sensors implanted into our bodies and brains (see Musk, and Bezos) which will control our thinking, sleeping and behavior to benefit these rich hedge fund gamers. We will eat bugs and lab grown meat, as they are now currently ending sustainable animal agriculture in real time, as we speak. They wish to harvest and collect all of our personal information (even information on what we send down the toilet each day!) to collect that data and interpret it all by AI algorithms, in order to teach robots what we know, and then ultimately have those very robots replace us. The Human species as we know it planned to end! The idea that we should save the planet from ecocide has been coopted by these Globalists and replaced, by their use of very distorted language, to have us believe that they wish to conquer this "unsustainable" abuse of limited resources and climate change. But it is not to save the plant for us! It is just for the purpose of dictating a worldview to support the very wealthy, who want to take over the earth as their playground.
Sometimes I think that capitalism has nothing to do with economics, sometimes I think that wealth is only wealth if it is circulating in the system, interacting with the environment, with living beings. Capitalism is just about extracting.
How else does our world-wide, omnipresent economic system continue to power itself along at its exponential pace? What other strategies has it evolved to survive and grow? Recognising that economic systems are organisms too, and are the product of infinite reactions and interactions to end up where they are now. Up to now, what we have, is the ultimate survivor of how humans create their economic order. The ‘fittest’?
And, just pausing a minute, remembering the system it replaced. What was there before the present consumerist economic system began about 10,000 years ago, with the first human civilisations? It was the hunter-gatherer economy where people spent each day afresh in search of sustenance. A simple economy with little trade, little surplus and little interest in any aspects of life beyond keeping fed. The system, incidentally, that Australia’s First-Nation People created and preserved for 50,000 years! 40,000 years before ‘we’ became ‘civilised’. And their land was effectively the same as when they first stepped on it…all but perfect sustainability.
We, in turn, have devastated the entire planet in a mere…10,000 years.
The next strategy of our system, the next evolutionary development that has ensured it maintains its position as the top-dog of economic systems, is constant technological innovation.
We can relate to that easily enough in the present era where technologies come and go with breath-taking speed. Think television, cars, communication in your own lifetime.
What I wish to emphasise is the wastefulness of it. Yes, the wastefulness of it! How our land-fill carries the outcome of our inventiveness and as the new supersedes the old. Every new technology and its consumerist expression, all extracted from mother Earth, ending up in landfill.
Yet how can we have inventiveness without the waste? Referring back to the Australian First-Nation People, they had virtually ZERO innovation…and were superbly sustainable! How can we steer human inventiveness into a non-exploitative direction?
If the waste is the problem, that is, the planet’s permanently lost resources, then one obvious answer is, make us all pay for it.
Pay for the indulgence of buying it, using it and then throwing it away.
Demand and supply; if the supply is cheap people will buy it. If the supply is expensive (to cover its true costs), people will be more circumspect with parting with their wealth.
A planet or…a new electronic bit of wizardry?
The present wastefulness has become part of the economic model because we have sanctioned it. It is not inevitable, it has been condoned. Tragically, it serves most of us.
In my other ramblings (what I am writing are intellectual explorations…ideas), I refer to the strategies todays’ universal economic systems use to keep everyone occupied as, ‘Environmental Molotov Cocktails’. So, the first ‘Cocktail’ was to increase population, the second to pass productivity on to workers so that the market grows and hence boosts production.
Note, in a world where economic growth is a sacred cow it is important to realise that these sacred cows, population and income growth, are actually the Molotov Cocktails bringing us to the dire consequences of Climate Change.
For me, demand and supply are the foundation of economics and economic systems. Both are interdependent and together interact to determine the direction of any economic activity. Population and consumer income are essential in that demand, supply process.
So, my third ‘economic Molotov cocktail’ is; the optimisation of the use of energy.
The Industrial Revolution, which is the real start of the rampant, exploitative system we have now, was around 1800. And its cause was the ability to harness the energy of fossil fuels…first coal, then oil and gas.
Suddenly a machine had the power of ten, a hundred or, eventually, thousands of horses. Without the genie of fossil fuel energy, without the Archimedean lever of fossil fuel, we would not be ‘moving the planet’.
But fossil fuels are a two-edged sword. They literally power almost everything around us but, are simultaneously, foul our nest.
An economic system powered with fossil fuel is a supercharger toward extinction. Obviously, alternative sources of energy exist AND are available. And we need to change.
So, renewables are a solution. But, as I will show as I move through the 12 strategies, embracing them is…conditional.
Yesterday I advanced the idea that our economic system, no matter what its colour or shape (Communist, Capitalist, command, free enterprise, etc), has evolved a series of survival strategies to ensure the wheels of exploitation are incessant…until it goes over the edge!
And that edge is inevitable because its entire purpose is predicated on a blatant exploitation of the planet’s resources, hence it will/must go over the precipice…the world’s resources are not…infinite.
So, the first strategy was to promote population increase. More mouths, more money in hands, more consumption.
The second strategy to keep the wheels of industry rolling along ever and ever faster is to increase the incomes of those driving the DEMAND side of the equation. Simply put, it is increasing the wages or spending power of the consumers. The more money in the consumers pocket, the more they are able to spend!
Economists refer to this as increases in ‘productivity’, the increased output of labour in the production process. Even allowing for inflation most of us are aware that living today is more indulgent than it was for our parents. We have a lot more money and ‘stuff’!
The sharing of the increase in productivity is interesting. Why would employers share the increase in the efficiency of production with the workers? Again, the answer lies in simple economics…demand and supply. When labour becomes scarce wages go up.
It is also interesting to reflect how robotics and automation (more increases in productivity) will pan out. If the need for labour becomes superfluous, what happens to wages? And…what happens to DEMAND?
But at the present, rewarding labour for labour (reward for work), oils the cogs of the industrial machine. It puts money in the ‘labourer’s’ pocket and allows them to become the willing consumer of the next ‘thing’.
Hesse
Yes, I agree Caitlin...the elephant in the room is 'capitalism'.
An economic system that is premised on constant exploitation of the planet in order to survive, is absurd. But note...we are talking about an economic system that covers every economy on the planet. America, China, Russia, Europe...all are hooked into the consumerism that requires the constant exploitation. While, paradoxically, sheltering under the names of socialist, dictatorship, Communist or free enterprise...All are identical in that all are screwing the planet.
I call l it the ECONOMIC ECSTATIC CONGRESS (which may resonate with any Tantric among you).
Over the next 12 days I will reveal the 12 the strategies of this system to ensure it feeds itself with resources and keeps us all on the treadmill...all complicit...AND...
how to reverse this strategy!
STRATEGY ONE; Increasing population. Economic systems need a DEMAND and a SUPPLY. Population meets both of those requirements. It creates the mouths to feed and their clamouring for 'stuff' (the collective detritus of consumerism from the phone to the car to the holidays). Once old enough they also supply the labour to produce the 'stuff'.
America and my country, Australia, were founded on immigration and natural population increase. The Ecstatic Congress needs an ever growing, ever hungry market.
The antidote is both simple and difficult. Reduce population increase. The immigration part is easy...shut borders to new residents. Curbing natural population increase is more complex as the right to procreate is deeply entrenched in our cultural values.
Our world population of 7 billion is still on a runaway trajectory and for an economic system that exists to exploit natural resources and to fill the market place with 'stuff', that's great. However, as a strategy of survival...it is a disaster.
Tomorrow; the second strategy for survival of the Economic Ecstatic Congress.
I understand this article is about environment but since you mention it, I have to ask- Caitlin, do you think today, in 2021, women are “second class citizen” and have “very little to say” and “gone unrewarded by money or esteem compared to traditional men's work”?
What is your source data of this - “Since that time women have had very little say in the construction of our society and its values systems, and for that reason the work they traditionally do — cleaning, caring, conserving, resolving conflicts and building community — has gone unrewarded by money or esteem compared to traditional men's work.”?
Because I don’t think your data is correct.
Simple example using nursing as a job which is one of the most “cleaning and caring” jobs around. - Scandinavian countries which are the most historically egalitarian societies have over 8-2 female to male nurses ratio and 9-1 male - female engineers ratio. Some of the countries is an even bigger disparity- In Iceland, men make up a meagre 1% of nurses.
Interestingly enough, Saudi Arabia, one of the most non-egalitarian countries has the least female nurses (68%) and most male nurses at 32%.
So despite being the most egalitarian, women are still preferring to pick nursing as their jobs (and even more than in US). It’s a choice they are making. It’s not being forced on them as if they are some “second class citizen” and “very little to say” as you claim.
Now as for money- money is dependant on how many lives you are impacting. That’s why one can make more money over the internet as compared to traditional newspaper as more lives are being impacted. Your own posts for example ask for donations. Obviously there’s more chances of you getting a donation over the internet as compared to if you were to use traditional old school pamphlets to distribute your thoughts. Because you are impacting more lives over the internet. That’s why an app developer can make more money (if successful) than a nurse. Because despite the love and care, a nurse can only be at one place at one time. So they can only affect one life at a time. An app developer on the other hand could be sleeping and still making money from apps.
Also your money is dependent on how dangerous/dirty your job is. If you are a coal miner or garbage picker or construction worker, you obviously should get paid more money and that happens to be the case why men get paid more money there as vast majority in these occupations are men. 95% of work place accidents and deaths are men. Do you not think this should be the case? Should a caring job get more money than a dangerous and dirty job?
And based on my Scandinavian model example- women are choosing to be nurses and not garbage picker or construction workers or coal miners, it’s not being forced on them.
Lastly I would like to talk about esteem. Be very careful for what you are wishing for. Do you think a garbage picker or construction worker or coal miner has more esteem than a nurse? Which one do you think will get more hits - a person with a dating profile with “garbage picker” or “construction worker” or another with “nurse”?
I find a lot of these discussions only talking about billionaire jobs like Jeff bezos or Elon musk and comparing it to nursing as if that’s somehow proving a point about caring jobs not being paid enough. When it’s actually the dangerous jobs and size of impact which really determines your worth.
Also it’s not like society isn’t willing to make people in caring jobs well worth. Female doctors and surgeons make loads of money. The main problem is the fascination of people being jealous of others who are better off than them.
As for the rest of the article - I can see your point. However what you are asking for is sort of breaking the laws of nature- humans like all animals want to go forward, not backwards. Even if the forward may or may not be risky, we like building new and innovative things. We are also addicted to dopamine. As long as dopamine is around, kids will keep using their phones and social media and keep making the ceos rich.