Status Updates From The Great Derangement: Clim...

…the one feature of Western modernity that is truly distinctive, is its enormous intellectual commitment to the promotion of its supposed singularity.

Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

"As an instrument of disempowerment oil has been spectacularly effective in removing the levers of power from the reach of the populace. “No matter how many people take to the streets in massive marches,” writes Roy Scranton, “they cannot put their hands on the real flows of power because they do not help to produce it. They only consume.”

While there are some great perspectives in here, the point is often buried under huge haystacks of facts which go on for way too long and only seem tangentially important at times.

"Similarly, at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike."

That means: the individual is where culture currently focuses, at the same time we are in a number of collective crisis.

Incredible and eye-opening. Not only about climate change but why we can't seem to accept uncanny or highly unusual events today as people in the past. And only 30 pages in!