I fucking hate this. Its all for literally nothing. For fucking money. Money. Imaginary pieces of paper. Even worse, imaginary numbers on a fucking screen. Data. It’s all for fucking nothing. We won’t avoid the 1.5 C mark, and it might come in 5 years. 2 C would mean basically the end of any semblance of normal, at all, and the collapse of the global south. Forget even 3 degrees, I’d probably already be dead. They won. They fucking won. No revolution in the Imperial Core is possible. Everyone is a chud, or a lib, or a left anticommunist. We can’t fucking win. It’s over. The world is over.
Well if you’re saying we should believe something even if (we know) it’s impossible, aren’t you?
There are always a lot of good reasons to despair and doubt that change is possible, and not just as it regards climate change. Many of our predecessors fought their whole lives against great odds for a revolution that never came. Would it have been better if they had never tried? Some, after all, succeeded despite everything.
Revolutionary optimism isn’t delusion. It’s a precondition for making any change at all in the face of immense odds
I wasn’t arguing against revolutionairy optimism, I was saying that if you think things aren’t possible, then acting as if they are would be not accepting your material conditions.
I guess I would say that we just don’t always know what is possible. Obviously we work with the material conditions as we find them, but interpreting those conditions to predict the future and thus know what possibilities they present is difficult.
There’s a quote I wish I could remember the source of that talks about how, if you were a person surveying the political landscape of Europe in, say, 1750, you would be perfectly reasonable if you assumed that the status quo of hereditary monarchy would endure forever. Yet in hindsight, we know that was not true.
Are you thinking of the Ursula K Le Guin quote? “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words”. I think the difference here is that I don’t think capitalism is inescapable, but I think catastrophic climate change is, and pretending like it isn’t won’t help your mental health as you then cannot deal with it, nor will it help with organising.
I’m not disputing revolutionairy optimism. I think it’s just this statement to climate I guess
That’s not the quote I’m thinking of, unfortunately, although that one is in much the same spirit.
That’s an understandable perspective. If you can take all that on board and still fight then I applaud you. I often think, though, about my coworkers, who are normal, well-intentioned people who have largely concluded that nothing will ever change and the only thing an individual can do is try and secure their own financial well-being.
The way to create compliant, apolitical people like that is to first convince them that a better world is not possible. That’s why I emphasize the importance of believing in a better world even in the face of what seems like impossible odds