What about ambulances, fire trucks, and hospitals? Don’t they help us and require polluting?
Sustainability doesn’t promise you’ll live forever or that it will end all suffering.
I don’t want to shock you or hurt your feelings, but we will all die. People we love will die. We will conflict with neighbors forever.
No matter what advances we make in medicine, at some point a doctor will be unable to prevent you from dying. Worse, for all the advances made in extending life, other advances will be made in doof, addiction, and weapons that sicken and decrease life.
Indigenous people still exist not because they are ignorant of our culture but because they know about it. There is no appeal to mythology of the noble savage to say that they see that the sacrifice in freedom, equality, mutual support, or other values aren’t worth our technological wizardry. They don’t buy into our myths. They don’t die at 30, as podcast guest and anthropologist Michael Gurven published in peer-reviewed literature.
With sustainability, I’m not offering a utopia, eternal life, or peace on earth. I offer a different way to bring humanity to sustainable levels—not through collapse and wars over borders and resources.
People inexperienced in a field tend to see it as black and white: can we save everything or will it all collapse. Tens of millions of people die annually already. We can’t change the past. Pollution will linger for centuries. But everything we do affects others. We can reduce suffering. In fact, doing so can be rewarding to ourselves. Alleviating suffering of innocents is among the more rewarding things we can do.
We can do the best we can to help others and ourselves, despite knowing we’ll all die, that people we love will die, and we’ll suffer. The best we can do was all we could ever do.
My way avoids credible projections from people whose predictions have happened so far, including people suffering and dying by the billions, leaving behind a world polluted far beyond ours today, maybe irradiated, almost certainly infused with plastic like the oceans are infused with salt. I imagine humans and much of complex life having birth defects as normal for centuries. I don’t want that outcome.
I prefer restoring sustainability immediately, resulting in retaining democracy, arts, sports, freedom, and culture, increasing freedom, liberty, innovation, health, security, safety, and so on. I offer a path there. Loosely speaking, it would be today’s equivalent of avoiding the Civil War by leading the slaveholders to choose to free their slaves instead of seceding.
To imply modernity creates a better life because of ambulances, washing machines, and artificial intelligence misses what life is about and creates straw men claims that without those things we would suffer more than with them plus what comes with them.
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