Discussion
Don’t know if I can put this into words but I’ll try.
There is, I feel, a widening chasm between our material cultural predicament and the conception of what parliaments are capable of integrating and therefore addressing.
The 20th century was filled with battle lines drawn on the territory of rampant industrialism. It’s ultimately been a contest of who gets to share the spoils but never really about whether the spoils are spoiling the prospects for living at all…
…Until we take into our hearts that the material basis for the past 150 years or so is going away and never coming back, we’ll keep kettling ourselves into political cul de sacs
…To expand a bit further, WEIRD social democracies could (under duress) integrate the enfranchisement of white men who were not land owners, and then white women, and then people of colour, because none of that was arguing with the stability of extracting more resources and putting more energy to work year on year.
But now that project is fast approaching an impasse. 19th century Parliaments have no mechanisms for addressing that
…The endless growth of throughput is broadly understood to be the game we’re all supposed to be signed up to.
What is not broadly understood is that there is a 20th-century-embedded structural expectation that the *rate* of growth increases too.
But the rate of growth has been slipping and slipping. I could update the Chancellor in the graphic below but it doesn’t really matter who it is. Any party that’s electable is pushing the same fantasy https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/113998114844279545
You need to log in to see that page.
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
…I hold to the view that before it is anything else, the primary role of governance is the maintenance of the status quo. When its foundations are fundamentally flawed, it is just not capable of integrating that.
But because we have false narratives that it is and that it has, we get political projects that pursue what it cannot do.
And so we end up with collective energies directed into dead ends