Word choice matters. Why speak if you don’t want to be understood? It’s not their responsibility for me to be understood, even if I get mad at them for not understanding me.
I recently wrote how I was Replacing “sustainability” with “not hurting people” and “polluting” with “hurting people” since “sustainability” is too abstract in many cases, as is the “environment.” I’m not trying to help some abstract environment. I’m trying to help people and to alleviate their suffering. (I followed up with the post Corollaries to my recent post: Replacing “sustainability” with “not hurting people” and “polluting” with “hurting people”.)
I’m experimenting with another change of word choice. People talk about comfort and convenience and juxtapose these things with struggle and challenge. We treat struggle and challenge as more connected with meaning and purpose, comfort and convenience as superficial.
Well, I for one still like comfort and convenience. I don’t see them as superficial. I like bringing more comfort and convenience to my life. I cook and avoid polluting to create more comfort and convenience.
So what am I giving up when I switch cultures to living more sustainably? I believe I’m narrowing in on it. Notice that powerful and rich people today work a lot. They don’t necessarily have much comfort or convenience. They could, but they choose work instead. They enjoy that choice.
I believe we can generalize what they enjoy to “the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy.” Those perks could include comfort and convenience for some. Others might enjoy choosing to work hard.
This terminology clarifies that their perks come from control over a necessary resource with no alternative. That is, it comes from depriving others of something they need, or at least the threat of it. I see the situation as coercive. I don’t like coercion.
Since a dominance hierarchy is close to tyranny, I might alternatively call “the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy” “the perks of tyranny” or “the perks of being a tyrant.”
Mel Brooks lampooned the perks of being a tyrant in his movie History of the World, Part 1 when he played King Louis XVI saying “It’s good to be the king,” a line which has stood the test of time.
A king or tyrant may like his or her perks, but the people they lord over suffer. The problem with people exercising the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy is that they deprive others of freedom, liberty, and material well being.
I’m mission driven to do the opposite of decreasing comfort or convenience. I’m working to restore freedom, liberty, health, safety, security, and the like. As it happens, I end up achieving comfort and convenience too.
Yes, but even the people being hurt are hurting themselves. For example, by flying we are hurting the people living on Pacific islands that are about to go underwater. Yet their economy depends on people who fly to those islands and they themselves continue to fly.
I’m taking responsibility for my actions. If my actions hurt people and I want to stop hurting people, I’m going to find ways to stop doing them. I already know from 250,000 years of people living sustainably that I don’t have to hurt people to live, eat, breathe, etc, I know I can do it. Experience has also proved wrong the myth I felt that giving up the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy made life worse. Now I know it improves my life.
Their economies may be unsustainable. Ours are. I think the best way I can help them restore sustainability to their economies is to restore it to mine. Mainstream cultural beliefs say doing so would make my life and culture worse, but hands-on practical experience proves that myth wrong.
My book and workshop make these outcomes practical, joyful, and even fun, plus reveal a path to restoring lost values we love living by. I recommend them.