I moved to a country and culture with a romanticism of socialism and similar ascetics but have found it these traits to much more rationally informed than I would have originally given credit for—there was an awareness of the supply chains that source energy and a consequent ability to articulate the impact to there ethic rather than solidarity for its own sake.
That being said—its my suspicion—that a portion of the input that drives this zero sum mindset, where not appropriate, is the consequence of under-estimating individual agency of individual actors working outside of dominant power structures. The cultural solution to fixing the environment is so often abstinence and protest, rather than, lets say, getting a finding an open hard problem impacting the feasibility and costs in current ‘green solutions’, and implementing the solution. The perception so often seems to be that to exercise our moral muscles we need to limit our own agency and channel it towards limiting that of others: rather than expanding the corpus of available solutions or, quite frankly, going outside your home with a trash picker and cleaning up for its own sake. This under-confidence humans have I think is a result of heavy disillusionment with social systems and the absence of shared and coherent moral value system. That’s just a guess, though.
I moved to a country and culture with a romanticism of socialism and similar ascetics but have found it these traits to much more rationally informed than I would have originally given credit for—there was an awareness of the supply chains that source energy and a consequent ability to articulate the impact to there ethic rather than solidarity for its own sake.
That being said—its my suspicion—that a portion of the input that drives this zero sum mindset, where not appropriate, is the consequence of under-estimating individual agency of individual actors working outside of dominant power structures. The cultural solution to fixing the environment is so often abstinence and protest, rather than, lets say, getting a finding an open hard problem impacting the feasibility and costs in current ‘green solutions’, and implementing the solution. The perception so often seems to be that to exercise our moral muscles we need to limit our own agency and channel it towards limiting that of others: rather than expanding the corpus of available solutions or, quite frankly, going outside your home with a trash picker and cleaning up for its own sake. This under-confidence humans have I think is a result of heavy disillusionment with social systems and the absence of shared and coherent moral value system. That’s just a guess, though.