It is also very problematic when those stories are told by people with influence. Money, connections, aggression - these all influence us.
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| Donald Trump via Twitter. Nov 6, 2012 |
There is an old proverb I was reminded by on election night because of Donald Trump's Tweet:
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
Abraham Lincoln
However I am glad he didn't remain silent. He exposed his thinking. He exposed how much more dangerous he is than a fool. Historically, the fool is something for our amusement and has little influence. Donald Trump has proven he will use his money, his connections and his dominant voice in to influence and persuade. And people listen to him.*
The desired outcome of this thinking is a belief that we can carry on business as usual. No need to course correct and work to protect our home, the planet.
This ups the stakes and takes me to another quote:
If we in privileged nations continue to encourage business as usual we are committing genocide on a global scale that will be looked upon by future generations as a greater atrocity than any that had come before it simply because we were too attached to our lifestyles to course correct.
"Stupidity and Evil are the same thing if you judge by the consequences."
Margaret Atwood, Payback
If we in privileged nations continue to encourage business as usual we are committing genocide on a global scale that will be looked upon by future generations as a greater atrocity than any that had come before it simply because we were too attached to our lifestyles to course correct.
After spending the week with Rachel Carson, (mother of the modern environmentalist movement) via Mark Hamilton Lytle's lovely biography The Gentle Subversive I am particularly raw when I see such stupidity and persuasion in one package. It encourages me to do the only thing I can do when I am lost for words & my soul is aching due to the blindness of so many, including myself - I need to learn. This is the action that is needed at this time and place in history.
Ms Carson knew that, as a matter of fact she linked the act of learning as a moral imperative.
“Superficiality, intellectual laziness and moral indifference were qualities Rachel condemned. For her, the waste of one’s intellectual gifts was akin to the “reckless squandering of natural resources”
Mark Hamilton
She continue throughout her life to try to refine her stories so that they more accurately reflect the realities of life (living systems/human systems). She writes of the challenge of waking up to pockets of blindness or ignorance (the absence of that which could be learned that could be helpful) in her thinking, that although painful and hard, this led her to write the seminal work Silent Spring.
"The whole world of science has been revolutionized for a decade or so... It was pleasant for me to believe that much of nature was forever beyond the tampering hand of man - he might level the forests and dam the streams, but the clouds and the rain and the wind were God’s"
"These beliefs have almost been part of me for so long as I have thought about such things. To have them even vaguely threatened was so shocking that, as I have said, I shut my mind, refused to acknowledge what I couldn’t help seeing. But that does no good and I have now opened my eyes and my mind... Time someone wrote of Life in the light of the truth as it now appears to us.”
Rachel Carson
There is a truth in this we must all face if we want to grow up, existentially. Life is not about our happiness and the more we chase happiness the further we get from doing the work that is actually needed. Learning about the world and all it's ugliness (and profound beauty, of course) is diametrically opposed to the pursuit of happiness perscribed by so many aphorisims and platitudes.
Do not be lulled to sleep by the superficial pursuit of happiness. It is a trap. I implore you to continue and dig deeper into your learning in these times of such import. Keep reading, choose well, keep thinking. We, all of us need to learn so that we can understand how stories are
created, understand how we create our stories, and tell better stories,
because that is how culture is built.
Thank you for joining me here today.
* Previous to Gentle Subversive, I spent some time reading and thinking about Ayn Rand Nation by Gary Weiss and Pity The Billionaire by Thomas Frank. I found these books very helpful in framing the story of America and how this election grew to the silly mess it was. Summarized by Alex Pareene, so succinctly:
