Sunday Message for Sunday, 29th September 2019
This past week, we have experienced a fervent speech by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, founder of worldwide environmentalist group «Friday's For Future,» having begun as «Skolstrejk for Klimatet.» She has gathered international reputation, pressuring politicians all around the globe to accelerate their efforts to combat climate change, not only for them, but also for the rest of the world, especially countries being vitally endangered by the consequences of everyone's inactivity, e.g. Tuvalu, Bangladesh, the Netherlands or African nations bracing for longer, more extreme droughts, followed by devouring floods. Ms. Thunberg, thus, has also acquired a supportive fandom defending her from any shape of criticism, claiming that she could not be criticised – but is this true? Is it impossible to criticise her validly?
Before we begin this text, I would like to assure everyone that this piece does not intend to downgrade Ms. Thunberg's everlasting efforts to usher politicians towards focusing more on the developing threats of our planet in regards to climate change and how this planet becomes uninhabitable for any living being due to the effects on the environment. She is right about listening closely to scientists verifying her claims, thus it's pointless to discuss on whether climate change was real or a hoax by any side possibly profiting from subordinating the importance of economical growth, whoever that may be, since such a thinking would affect us all.
What is a merely negative side-effect of her popularity, and the energy she injects to the young people desperate to influence their political chairmen and -women is the frontier she has inadvertently motivated to protect her from any negative surrounding. Some of them have equipped something all-too familiar with the political Left: A holier-than-thou attitude of self-entitlement positioned above her critics who allegedly don't have a valid point to make against her, so that they must preferably be a group of middle-aged white men frustrated about their sexuality and the fact that a young girl has managed to gain such a popularity; has become so famous for her activism (and some are even frustrated enough to compare her to Nazi poster girls because of her braids). It is common among those who don't want to discuss a topic they embrace fully in the first place, it eliminates every kind of criticism preemptively, thus is commonly known as counterproductive when it comes to advancement of one's own ideas, in terms of refining them around the details. What I mean to say is that no-one is untouchable when it comes to critique, and so isn't Ms. Thunberg, in spite of her success de jure. On the other had, it doesn't take too long to find out what these supporters try to protect her fro, or at least her name: Most of the so-called critique turns out to solely consist of smears against her person, her age, her Asperger's syndrome (a mild form of autism). The more subtle critics focus on the economy, accuse her of creating hysteria around the issue, thus accelerating rash solutions that, in the outcome, were going to hurt us all without solving the problem they were supposed to end. And they are not wrong with this assumption; the problem is that her supporters have got another rash proposal to submit to the critics concerned about the economy's well-being: Screw the economy, we cannot put her before our planet's well-being. Although such a comment is similarly rash and simple-minded, it bears a correct observation nevertheless: Economical well-being does not (universally) harmonise with environmental well-being. The economical well-being we have been experiencing for years was born on intoxicated soil: Rivers were contaminated with wasted of the mining industry, ground soil was equally contaminated with wasted from the garment industry. Forests have been deforested to produce palm oil long before the Amazon rain forest began to be burnt down for the agricultural industry. If only those niches were intercepted, the global economy would struggle to withstand. It required a fundamental reversal of its environmental ethics, sustainability had to become a regular primary objective, even if this meant the decline of any future profits. This would contradict the most basic knowledge about entrepreneurship and surviving on the market. A wholly new way of thinking had to be installed inside the market, for existing and future generations either succeeding the leadership of concerns or companies to newly dwell on the market someday. Unfortunately, this is highly unlikely to ever happen–from where is this supposed to come? One had to await the unexpected messiah of economical thinking with the charming ability to persuade the responsible figureheads, combined with all the right facts to underline the arguments made in favour of the environmentalist movement. As long as the only ones loud enough to be heard are those yelling against the market's devastating maxim of putting profits before the market, there is no such progress to be expected to be seen eventually. Both sides currently harden themselves, are more eager to ignore one another than to assemble at a round table and figure out a mutual plan to proceed in the next few decades. Since the environmentalist side insists to be the smarter side, interested in making progress to save the planet, they should seek their more rational critics, accepting the factual existence of climate change and too confess that changes have to be accomplished in order to survive, but without going a way as radical as the environmentalists intend to undergo, and clear their respective plans to create what was hardly tried in the last few years: A common sense.
I know that that the statement of trying to find a middle way is oftentimes uttered by those who would barely side with either aisle, mainly because they don't have an idea of their own on how to grasp the issue; comments like these are made by those who pretend to behave intellectually superior but in the outcome are pretentious imposters trying to fit in a debate they are not made for, thus were better off leaving aside and dedicating their time they better match in. Not everyone is supposed to be a jack-of-all-trades, despite a common point of view in today's society. What I try to say that both sides make points on their own; points that need to be considered when finding a solution without creating what can hardly be accomplished without a confession made by the states' leaders or by the moderates who don't dare to become radicals through their own attempts.
This is also the point that has to be understood when it comes to understanding what Greta too misunderstands when she tries to inspire leaders to finally understand what is at stakes when it comes to the aftermath of climate change: Our planet's habitability is at stakes, it has also exposed a disparage between the two leading motives of our society, which I also highlighted before: Economical well-being, which often relies on natural (usually finite, non-reproducible) resources and ranks environmental friendliness second, after the probable profits that can be extracted from them, and the necessity to maintain a planet according to our needs in terms of atmosphere. What I intend to say is that economic growth, a means of measurement the aforementioned well-being of the economy, can only be accelerated as much as the environment which is being used as a tool therefore (thus affects it subsequently, in shape of consequences, commencing fatal chain reactions) is able to withstand it all. In regards to the mass extinction of many species, one can tell that the environment's capability to withstand its exploitation by humans hungry for cheap food and infinite resources without adjustment in order to maintain a healthy environment, one can tell that this is not the case.
What does Greta misunderstand then, exactly? She still believes that the change she aspires to begin will be started from inside the political system of parliaments and ruling presidents, chancellors, and so on. This is a naïve belief she follows by; and yes, we have to speak of it in such a way, because throughout her career as an activist of worldwide reputation, she never insisted to understand how the system she calls upon works, what are the smaller functionalities that have to be ignited to make them work. She assumed that putting pressure upon them was enough to save the environment politically. The problem is that all (more technically speaking: most of) those responsible figureheads were/are being elected democratically, so that they were lifted into their respective offices through majorities inside their populations. These majorities are mostly oriented moderately, they are not interested in radical measurements moving masses with great powers. Most of these people inside the majorities are leaning Conservative; only the youth and younger adults lean more radical. As the well-known saying goes: “He who is no Socialist by the age of 20, has got no heart; he who still is a Socialist by the age of 40, has got no brain.” Of course the saying is flawed, populist, condescending. But this is not the point: The point is that many young people tend to be interested more into radical ideologies and philosophies, but their interest–and this only applies for the majorities, not for these people in general!–tends to lower throughout their coming of age. To then understand how this is linked to majorities in elections, we only have to take a look at the country's demography, and to keep in mind that voting is mostly limited to people of the age of 18 and upwards from this: Middle-aged men and women dominate the voting field, they make up the majority together with elders who still vote as they have been voting throughout their life as adults. The young people remain unheard as long as they are not old enough to vote. Assuming that only three quarter of these adults vote (this is the average amount of people voting during general elections) and half of them vote for the moderate party or candidate, they will still win against the younger voters who may have voted unanimously for the radical party or candidate. As much as Democracy is praised for creating the justest opportunity to make one's voice being heard, it mostly favours a moderate majority, to the detriment not only of the minority that has to cope with the majority's opinion (and usually being comforted by being told that they lived in the best of any system possible to be installed among people), but also of the environment, as it now turns out with environmental issues in the limelight of the public debate.
Why the environment? It's obvious: Activists and environmentalists alike call for radical actions to save the environment, including Greta Thunberg. They were comforted by politicians who said that they listened to them closely and promised them to take action, which some of these activists declared their success; naïvely, as it turns out. To expect moderates and Conservatives to make a radical change likely to shake up the entire society to its grounds is comparable to expecting a Communist to rely on the individual committing the pursuit of its happiness on its own, without assuming the community to support it on this personal mission. It's needless to say that Greta's ideals are of a radical nature, but not only does she oversee the flaws in her plans, but also does she seem to bear little intentions to commit the necessary cataclysm required to save the planet in shape of how Greta expects it to happen, through off-turning of coal plants, curb of cattle and flights, and so on and so forth. All the changes she deems necessary to save the planet would take a long time to be executed through the ordinarily highly bureaucratic states we live in. What it required to execute all of these changes more quickly–and time is indeed an equally finite resource when it comes to combating climate change–it required a less bureaucratic system, to gather more freedom to move, to interact.
Now, people might interrupt me in my discourse, exclaiming: “It's easy, we don't need any radical changes, we just need to curb the bureaucracy itself, it doesn't need all these offices and bureaus to proceed demands and such. Why scrap the entire system just to cure some illnesses of the same?”
The question is right to be asked, but the proposal submitted by the enquirer is unfortunately short-sighted, thus inefficient to solve the problem. For it is up to the state to maintain such a thick web of bureaucratic procedures in order to maintain the power above the people living in its government, in its proverbial clockwork. Moreover do those who insist on purging the state give few hints on where to purge the state exactly. Of course they yell ideas like “market regulation,” telling us that we could do better if entrepreneurs and CEOs alike enjoyed more freedom in their actions, without all those obstacles slowing them down. But not only is this vague in its inquiry, but also little helpful to target a specific issue concerning them. What I mean is: You cannot expect something to be altered or changed when you are unable to name the specific issue aching you. It's like telling somebody to remove it, when all you say upon being asked what you meant was it. Maybe you did mean Stephen King's most famous book turned into a movie remade in 2019, but it's highly unlikely, especially when you were talking about politics beforehand.
In the end, it would be pointless to ask someone uttering such commands to be more specific, since most of the time, they either don't know what they actually meant, or they intended to take part in a real purge (no italics this time, on purpose) of the state's bureaucracy. If the first situation was recognised, then further discussions on the subject were pointless and heading nowhere; if the second situation was recognised, then the cause would be akin to one's own, although the ideas on how to solve it were different. Still, in the second situation, the unity in recognising states as the primary obstacle of saving the planet could function as a reason to assemble, even though imaginations of the respective participants might differ. As I state in a yet-unfinished text (in German), there can be no single utopia that satisfies every single being on earth, since we all have different interests. There are right-winged liberals and libertarians on the one hand, and left-winged liberals and anarchists on the other hand; there are Socialists and Stalinist demagogues on the one hand, and Conservatives, fascists and monarchists on the other hand. Altogether, there are too many different, even fundamentally contradicting, ideologies to serve them equally in a blended crowd, to express it more colloquially. Hence, it's pointless to declare one's own ideology as universally right, flawless or worthwhile implementing into society, against any opposition. Stalin's Soviet Russia was the most fitting example of why to go by this maxim is more rational than to become a demagogue for one's own ideology: As did Hitler in his Third Reich, Stalin persecuted enemies of his USSR, and constipated them in compounds, like animals. He called them counter-revolutionaries, bourgeois (which was merely related to being Conservatives, anti-Communists, or more extreme right-wingers). Not all of them bore anti-human beliefs, some of them simply disagreed with the ruling party's doctrine. In the end, Stalin didn't give any good reason to support his cause when it came to the persecution of political enemies, just as he didn't give a good reason to murder Trotsky. What he did was that he drew enemies of the people (and not only of himself, or his doctrine) which everyone who didn't want to end up inadvertently becoming an enemy as well had to apply and detest; to argue this enemy, Stalin of course also created some accusations: He claimed that those enemies intended to crush his societal order, crush law and order and create utter destruction and disorder (it's hard to believe that Stalin would argue in style of predecessors like Lenin, who duly followed the scheme of implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat to subsequently create a leaderless society). Whether there was any evidence for certain individuals to actually intend to disrupt Stalin's state or not, was of no interest, he just wanted to maintain complete control of his people. A typically autocratic system, as it was known during his reign already.
Rulers like him bear a question, even from a point of a freer society as I imagine it: Do nationalists like Stalin, fascists like Hitler, Mussolini or Franco legitimate beliefs as well? And where does this entire chapter relate to the question of environmentalism? We'll come back to the latter question immediately. But first: Are Nationalists legitimate ideologues? The question is comparably difficult, but we have to answer it nonetheless. Normally, we could say yes, but this Yes only comes with a catch: How do these specific nationalist individuals treat other individuals who disagree with them, especially when they are their fellow citizens? If they tell them to leave their country if they don't like it here, they could be equated to fiendish threats better placed under surveillance in case they might threaten the same individual's well-being. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen under the nation's leadership, depending on how authoritarian this nationalist movement is regulated. Such factors are important to mind when measuring the nationalst individual's legitimacy. Freedom, one could tell, is an important benchmark to rank any ideology's legitimacy, although this is comparably hard to measure in a utopia that wants to function as a gathering of different utopias. The reason is the following: Since there is no single utopia that satisfies everyone, a utopia has to make space for each legitimate utopia, even for the illegitimate ones. Thus, every single human being has to have the choice to depart from one Utopian community (that is a gathering of like-minded people who decided to live together to live as they wish, without bothering different-minded people with their ideology, having the choice of interacting with them, or rejecting to do so, without facing any consequences; it's to be questioned how consequences to be avoided would actually be avoided, without an international community supporting them against the oppressor), and perhaps be granted entry into another, as long as the community's members are fine with this (the entry should cause fewer difficulties).
What might read comparatively awkward is much easier to imagine: The perfect Utopia is a world comparable to ours existing now, but with much smaller communities shaped to each individual's or like-minded people's community's preference. It's comparable to the German Kleinstaaterei Napoléon Bonaparte eagerly diminished by three. Unfortunately, to go further into the details would actually burst the text's length and run further astray of the actual topic, which we will wrap up finally in the last paragraph.
... Which was the question how such a system would serve the environment on the brink of collapse. How does it? The answer is simple: Great nations usually depend on their economy, indirectly deciding who is to lead the nation, thus monitor the economy, and who isn't. The larger the nation, one could conclude in retrospective to the previous text in its entirety, the more dependent the nation is on its economy. This means that the worse the economy does, the more is at stakes for the nation. This dependence leads to a blackmailing situation: The economy can enforce its ideals with the ultimatum that the state's leader (or the state's leading party or coalition) has got no choice but to give them a hands-off approach to everything. Contrary to this, smaller nations should be more independent from the economy, one might insist, regarding this logic. Yet, this is not the case, since this question relates to more than just the nation's size. It also presumes the source of the nation's economic well-being, its wealth, what it has got to offer in terms of jobs that are related to the industry. Jobs are a factor to the economy, jobs create the economy, more or less. Since we are on the verge of diving deeper and deeper into the question of what marks the economy's movement, we have to break it off abruptly. The dependence on something as humanely constructed as the economy, supposed to provide us with a lifelong mission and objective to head forward to like horses heading forward for that carrot swinging before their eyes, unaware of the fact that the carrot is tied to a rope bound to a stick the rider holds on to, humans are supposed to work in their job to earn money they will later spend on taxes, bills, and food, beside their favourite pastime. As much as the nation is dependent on the economy, its people are dependent on their jobs given to them by the economy. It's a circular affair. A trinity to more religious people. But it's a lethal dependence when the planet suffers from it. To save the environment, the economy in its archaic shape has to be crushed in order to be reformed; and this is even the most moderate approach. Why, if this is the moderate approach, does it sound so radical? Because the problem surrounding it is unprecedented in humankind. Never before was humanity confronted with such a fundamental problem as with the planet's persistence. Humans have continued living in the same morale for centuries: Live on, develop further techniques in production, and eventually bring up combustion engines that create spikes in productivity, never mind the downsides of this revolutionary technique. Someday, scientists found out that the swaths of thick smoke bear particles that are bad not only to people's health, but also to the environment's. In the 1960's, people were upset about the carelessness of other people about the harm CO2 caused to each party's health and persistence. “Green” parties emerged from these protest movements demanding the environment to be heard in politics and policies. In Germany, they rank tête-à-tête with the Centre-Right moderates, showing that people are concerned about the environment. Unfortunately, most of them apply to the moderate wing nevertheless. As much as they are earnestly concerned, they are unwilling to follow the next step towards environmental protection. This is what has to change even in the centre of society. And it has to change urgently.
Wishing you all a relaxed Sunday, nevertheless. Enjoy! It might be your last laid-back Sunday for a very long time.
This is also the point that has to be understood when it comes to understanding what Greta too misunderstands when she tries to inspire leaders to finally understand what is at stakes when it comes to the aftermath of climate change: Our planet's habitability is at stakes, it has also exposed a disparage between the two leading motives of our society, which I also highlighted before: Economical well-being, which often relies on natural (usually finite, non-reproducible) resources and ranks environmental friendliness second, after the probable profits that can be extracted from them, and the necessity to maintain a planet according to our needs in terms of atmosphere. What I intend to say is that economic growth, a means of measurement the aforementioned well-being of the economy, can only be accelerated as much as the environment which is being used as a tool therefore (thus affects it subsequently, in shape of consequences, commencing fatal chain reactions) is able to withstand it all. In regards to the mass extinction of many species, one can tell that the environment's capability to withstand its exploitation by humans hungry for cheap food and infinite resources without adjustment in order to maintain a healthy environment, one can tell that this is not the case.
What does Greta misunderstand then, exactly? She still believes that the change she aspires to begin will be started from inside the political system of parliaments and ruling presidents, chancellors, and so on. This is a naïve belief she follows by; and yes, we have to speak of it in such a way, because throughout her career as an activist of worldwide reputation, she never insisted to understand how the system she calls upon works, what are the smaller functionalities that have to be ignited to make them work. She assumed that putting pressure upon them was enough to save the environment politically. The problem is that all (more technically speaking: most of) those responsible figureheads were/are being elected democratically, so that they were lifted into their respective offices through majorities inside their populations. These majorities are mostly oriented moderately, they are not interested in radical measurements moving masses with great powers. Most of these people inside the majorities are leaning Conservative; only the youth and younger adults lean more radical. As the well-known saying goes: “He who is no Socialist by the age of 20, has got no heart; he who still is a Socialist by the age of 40, has got no brain.” Of course the saying is flawed, populist, condescending. But this is not the point: The point is that many young people tend to be interested more into radical ideologies and philosophies, but their interest–and this only applies for the majorities, not for these people in general!–tends to lower throughout their coming of age. To then understand how this is linked to majorities in elections, we only have to take a look at the country's demography, and to keep in mind that voting is mostly limited to people of the age of 18 and upwards from this: Middle-aged men and women dominate the voting field, they make up the majority together with elders who still vote as they have been voting throughout their life as adults. The young people remain unheard as long as they are not old enough to vote. Assuming that only three quarter of these adults vote (this is the average amount of people voting during general elections) and half of them vote for the moderate party or candidate, they will still win against the younger voters who may have voted unanimously for the radical party or candidate. As much as Democracy is praised for creating the justest opportunity to make one's voice being heard, it mostly favours a moderate majority, to the detriment not only of the minority that has to cope with the majority's opinion (and usually being comforted by being told that they lived in the best of any system possible to be installed among people), but also of the environment, as it now turns out with environmental issues in the limelight of the public debate.
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| (Image by Bela Geletneky from Pixabay) |
Now, people might interrupt me in my discourse, exclaiming: “It's easy, we don't need any radical changes, we just need to curb the bureaucracy itself, it doesn't need all these offices and bureaus to proceed demands and such. Why scrap the entire system just to cure some illnesses of the same?”
The question is right to be asked, but the proposal submitted by the enquirer is unfortunately short-sighted, thus inefficient to solve the problem. For it is up to the state to maintain such a thick web of bureaucratic procedures in order to maintain the power above the people living in its government, in its proverbial clockwork. Moreover do those who insist on purging the state give few hints on where to purge the state exactly. Of course they yell ideas like “market regulation,” telling us that we could do better if entrepreneurs and CEOs alike enjoyed more freedom in their actions, without all those obstacles slowing them down. But not only is this vague in its inquiry, but also little helpful to target a specific issue concerning them. What I mean is: You cannot expect something to be altered or changed when you are unable to name the specific issue aching you. It's like telling somebody to remove it, when all you say upon being asked what you meant was it. Maybe you did mean Stephen King's most famous book turned into a movie remade in 2019, but it's highly unlikely, especially when you were talking about politics beforehand.
In the end, it would be pointless to ask someone uttering such commands to be more specific, since most of the time, they either don't know what they actually meant, or they intended to take part in a real purge (no italics this time, on purpose) of the state's bureaucracy. If the first situation was recognised, then further discussions on the subject were pointless and heading nowhere; if the second situation was recognised, then the cause would be akin to one's own, although the ideas on how to solve it were different. Still, in the second situation, the unity in recognising states as the primary obstacle of saving the planet could function as a reason to assemble, even though imaginations of the respective participants might differ. As I state in a yet-unfinished text (in German), there can be no single utopia that satisfies every single being on earth, since we all have different interests. There are right-winged liberals and libertarians on the one hand, and left-winged liberals and anarchists on the other hand; there are Socialists and Stalinist demagogues on the one hand, and Conservatives, fascists and monarchists on the other hand. Altogether, there are too many different, even fundamentally contradicting, ideologies to serve them equally in a blended crowd, to express it more colloquially. Hence, it's pointless to declare one's own ideology as universally right, flawless or worthwhile implementing into society, against any opposition. Stalin's Soviet Russia was the most fitting example of why to go by this maxim is more rational than to become a demagogue for one's own ideology: As did Hitler in his Third Reich, Stalin persecuted enemies of his USSR, and constipated them in compounds, like animals. He called them counter-revolutionaries, bourgeois (which was merely related to being Conservatives, anti-Communists, or more extreme right-wingers). Not all of them bore anti-human beliefs, some of them simply disagreed with the ruling party's doctrine. In the end, Stalin didn't give any good reason to support his cause when it came to the persecution of political enemies, just as he didn't give a good reason to murder Trotsky. What he did was that he drew enemies of the people (and not only of himself, or his doctrine) which everyone who didn't want to end up inadvertently becoming an enemy as well had to apply and detest; to argue this enemy, Stalin of course also created some accusations: He claimed that those enemies intended to crush his societal order, crush law and order and create utter destruction and disorder (it's hard to believe that Stalin would argue in style of predecessors like Lenin, who duly followed the scheme of implementing a dictatorship of the proletariat to subsequently create a leaderless society). Whether there was any evidence for certain individuals to actually intend to disrupt Stalin's state or not, was of no interest, he just wanted to maintain complete control of his people. A typically autocratic system, as it was known during his reign already.
Rulers like him bear a question, even from a point of a freer society as I imagine it: Do nationalists like Stalin, fascists like Hitler, Mussolini or Franco legitimate beliefs as well? And where does this entire chapter relate to the question of environmentalism? We'll come back to the latter question immediately. But first: Are Nationalists legitimate ideologues? The question is comparably difficult, but we have to answer it nonetheless. Normally, we could say yes, but this Yes only comes with a catch: How do these specific nationalist individuals treat other individuals who disagree with them, especially when they are their fellow citizens? If they tell them to leave their country if they don't like it here, they could be equated to fiendish threats better placed under surveillance in case they might threaten the same individual's well-being. Unfortunately, this is unlikely to happen under the nation's leadership, depending on how authoritarian this nationalist movement is regulated. Such factors are important to mind when measuring the nationalst individual's legitimacy. Freedom, one could tell, is an important benchmark to rank any ideology's legitimacy, although this is comparably hard to measure in a utopia that wants to function as a gathering of different utopias. The reason is the following: Since there is no single utopia that satisfies everyone, a utopia has to make space for each legitimate utopia, even for the illegitimate ones. Thus, every single human being has to have the choice to depart from one Utopian community (that is a gathering of like-minded people who decided to live together to live as they wish, without bothering different-minded people with their ideology, having the choice of interacting with them, or rejecting to do so, without facing any consequences; it's to be questioned how consequences to be avoided would actually be avoided, without an international community supporting them against the oppressor), and perhaps be granted entry into another, as long as the community's members are fine with this (the entry should cause fewer difficulties).
What might read comparatively awkward is much easier to imagine: The perfect Utopia is a world comparable to ours existing now, but with much smaller communities shaped to each individual's or like-minded people's community's preference. It's comparable to the German Kleinstaaterei Napoléon Bonaparte eagerly diminished by three. Unfortunately, to go further into the details would actually burst the text's length and run further astray of the actual topic, which we will wrap up finally in the last paragraph.
... Which was the question how such a system would serve the environment on the brink of collapse. How does it? The answer is simple: Great nations usually depend on their economy, indirectly deciding who is to lead the nation, thus monitor the economy, and who isn't. The larger the nation, one could conclude in retrospective to the previous text in its entirety, the more dependent the nation is on its economy. This means that the worse the economy does, the more is at stakes for the nation. This dependence leads to a blackmailing situation: The economy can enforce its ideals with the ultimatum that the state's leader (or the state's leading party or coalition) has got no choice but to give them a hands-off approach to everything. Contrary to this, smaller nations should be more independent from the economy, one might insist, regarding this logic. Yet, this is not the case, since this question relates to more than just the nation's size. It also presumes the source of the nation's economic well-being, its wealth, what it has got to offer in terms of jobs that are related to the industry. Jobs are a factor to the economy, jobs create the economy, more or less. Since we are on the verge of diving deeper and deeper into the question of what marks the economy's movement, we have to break it off abruptly. The dependence on something as humanely constructed as the economy, supposed to provide us with a lifelong mission and objective to head forward to like horses heading forward for that carrot swinging before their eyes, unaware of the fact that the carrot is tied to a rope bound to a stick the rider holds on to, humans are supposed to work in their job to earn money they will later spend on taxes, bills, and food, beside their favourite pastime. As much as the nation is dependent on the economy, its people are dependent on their jobs given to them by the economy. It's a circular affair. A trinity to more religious people. But it's a lethal dependence when the planet suffers from it. To save the environment, the economy in its archaic shape has to be crushed in order to be reformed; and this is even the most moderate approach. Why, if this is the moderate approach, does it sound so radical? Because the problem surrounding it is unprecedented in humankind. Never before was humanity confronted with such a fundamental problem as with the planet's persistence. Humans have continued living in the same morale for centuries: Live on, develop further techniques in production, and eventually bring up combustion engines that create spikes in productivity, never mind the downsides of this revolutionary technique. Someday, scientists found out that the swaths of thick smoke bear particles that are bad not only to people's health, but also to the environment's. In the 1960's, people were upset about the carelessness of other people about the harm CO2 caused to each party's health and persistence. “Green” parties emerged from these protest movements demanding the environment to be heard in politics and policies. In Germany, they rank tête-à-tête with the Centre-Right moderates, showing that people are concerned about the environment. Unfortunately, most of them apply to the moderate wing nevertheless. As much as they are earnestly concerned, they are unwilling to follow the next step towards environmental protection. This is what has to change even in the centre of society. And it has to change urgently.
Wishing you all a relaxed Sunday, nevertheless. Enjoy! It might be your last laid-back Sunday for a very long time.
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