Rupert Read > Quotes

“What’s really difficult, rather, is to be willing to see or understand what one doesn’t want to.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We need to understand that many of the profound challenges ahead will only be faced up to if we are willing to change our way of life, the way we organise ourselves and, yes, our values.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“This is a crucial question. The way I have been talking about ‘this civilisation’ (as finished) has been shorthand. What for? Basically, for what Joanna Macy calls ‘industrial growth society’. That is what is finished. The fantasy of endless ‘progress’ (aka endless economic growth) is dead.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“this civilisation is finished.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“it is completely unacceptable for us to conceive of ourselves as having achieved a superior mode of existence to hunter-gatherer and to certain peasant societies.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We are going to have to learn to become, on balance, less dependent upon complex technologies. Such learning will either be voluntary, or we will suffer the consequences of extending our technological dependence too far into a future that we cannot control. Our fantasies of being able to control nature are exactly why we are in the predicament we are now in. The model of conquest of nature has proven cataclysmic.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“Technology ought to be our servant, while ethics and these most profound emanations of our collective and individual imaginations ought to be our masters.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“I would say that ‘around the world today—because of several centuries of capitalist development—there are literally billions who are poor because there are others who are rich.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We’re turning the planet—and the future—to junk, and not even making ourselves happy in the process. If we were to learn from the Stoics—or Jesus, or the Buddha, or Lao-Tze—we would understand this, and seek to live simpler, calmer lives, which would actually be highly likely to be happier.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We cannot endlessly expand the economy and still be green; it’s oxymoronic”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“One of the main reasons why this civilisation is finished and why collapse is now so likely is the rank failure of mass media to be honest about the horrific decline in biodiversity (i.e., in life on Earth) and about human-caused climate-decline being a white swan and a mortal threat.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“It’s time to leave behind the label of humanism.20”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“but we should be looking on balance to reduce our dependence upon technology, not increase it.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because it is more comfortable.’ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”
― Rupert Read, Parents for a Future

“It is beyond reasonable doubt that we are at present driving ourselves toward a cliff, maybe one with a fatally larger drop below it than our best current science suggests. We desperately need to slow down. But we show little sign of doing so.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“In fact, arguably there is an information surplus in our world. What is lacking is wisdom, which is something completely different.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“It is true that we can go no further with this civilisation—we need fundamental systems change.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“Our economy, our system, our world, is not really ‘consumerist’. It is producerist. Capitalism is a producerist system.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“Consumerism and economic globalisation are going to end. The only issue, once more, is: will we choose, intelligently, to end them voluntarily, or will a tortured and enraged nature force that ending upon us, in a violent collapse?”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We are nothing without a living planet. We are nothing but part of it.”
― Rupert Read, Parents for a Future

“we ought to be thinking about how to dismantle the system, much more than about how to ‘share the wealth’.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We cannot endlessly expand the economy and still be green; it’s oxymoronic. We can’t keep growing the cake when the ingredients are running out and the kitchen is filling with smoke.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“how much ‘First World’ way of living, and in particular our technology, can or should survive the end of this civilisation?”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“There is an abyss opening up before us. It challenges everything we thought we knew about our culture and about nature. We need to look into it and concentrate on what we can see. —Paul Kingsnorth”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We try to fill the hole within us with things. But all that that does is feed a never-ending craving.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“The world we live in is a ‘full’ world. Its central problems are the greed of those running the show and the degrading of ecosystems. We need to share far more equally what we have; but we also need to recognise that the idea that we have high or even inexhaustible material needs is itself an ideological assumption that needs unmasking and rejecting.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“It still seems, tragically, far more likely that growth will end because of collapse than because of informed decision.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“Climate disasters or a collapse scenario will blast us out of what Charles Eisenstein calls our story of separation; we will be forced to quit the sad little silos that consumer culture encourages us to ‘live’ within.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“Loving technology is merely loving ourselves by proxy.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond

“We are living, nowadays, in ways that involve us in a virtually permanent absence of community. Disasters enable this to be overcome. They enable us in our small selves, our limited and limiting egos, to be overcome. For such overcomings to be possible and to take place, there must be a full-scale disaster, not merely an accident or something bad. Charles Fritz, who is a key influence on Rebecca Solnit’s work in this area, emphasises this point.52 He writes that disasters need to be big enough to not leave behind ‘an undisturbed, intact social system’.”
― Rupert Read, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond