Yes, I get it, beating on the US is a fun thing to do, especially right now. But if you think there’s anything particularly wicked or decadent about Americans by nature, then you’re no different than the countless racist despots that have caused untold human misery through the ages. Every time someone makes an assumption that another group of people is somehow more evil by nature, that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. People are just people.
What you’re missing is that while the US does currently use an outsized amount of resources, we only do so because we are wealthy. If tomorrow everyone in the US dropped dead, the cost of various resources would decline, but all those resources would still be used. Sure a more globally equitable distribution of resources would be a good thing, but it won’t do anything to help humanity’s total environmental impact.
Earth has 8 billion people on it. The poorest 7 billion are scraping and scratching as hard as they can to live the same lifestyle as the richest 1 billion.
There’s a lot here to unpack, and it conflates things that don’t really make sense to conflate. Like, Americans using too many resources being a wealth issue is circular because wealth means resources. Maybe to make the perspective of others more clear, we’re saying that this zero-sum understanding of resource managment fails to account that resources can be recycled, and that their recycling is economically stimulating because it’s a form of resource capture. Manage the resources as necessary for the global population (with slack of course for emergencies) and keeping them on a closed loop. It’s possible, but is not an exploitive practice so its mechanisms arent easily exploitable. That’s the real issue. Humans only seem to gather and work together when there’s a possibility that any one of them can become a god king and get visits to whatever the modern Epstein Island is.
You’re arguing that progress requires death. We’re arguing that it requires effort and intentionality.
Yes, I get it, beating on the US is a fun thing to do, especially right now. But if you think there’s anything particularly wicked or decadent about Americans by nature, then you’re no different than the countless racist despots that have caused untold human misery through the ages. Every time someone makes an assumption that another group of people is somehow more evil by nature, that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. People are just people.
What you’re missing is that while the US does currently use an outsized amount of resources, we only do so because we are wealthy. If tomorrow everyone in the US dropped dead, the cost of various resources would decline, but all those resources would still be used. Sure a more globally equitable distribution of resources would be a good thing, but it won’t do anything to help humanity’s total environmental impact.
Earth has 8 billion people on it. The poorest 7 billion are scraping and scratching as hard as they can to live the same lifestyle as the richest 1 billion.
There’s a lot here to unpack, and it conflates things that don’t really make sense to conflate. Like, Americans using too many resources being a wealth issue is circular because wealth means resources. Maybe to make the perspective of others more clear, we’re saying that this zero-sum understanding of resource managment fails to account that resources can be recycled, and that their recycling is economically stimulating because it’s a form of resource capture. Manage the resources as necessary for the global population (with slack of course for emergencies) and keeping them on a closed loop. It’s possible, but is not an exploitive practice so its mechanisms arent easily exploitable. That’s the real issue. Humans only seem to gather and work together when there’s a possibility that any one of them can become a god king and get visits to whatever the modern Epstein Island is.
You’re arguing that progress requires death. We’re arguing that it requires effort and intentionality.