Monday, October 08, 2007

Bravo

Well, Salon.com is hitting it out of the park today. What a lovely deconstruction of the Cardinal Flaw in modern environmentalist thinking:

A new politics requires a new mood, one appropriate for the world we hope to create. It should be a mood of gratitude, joy, and pride, not sadness, fear, and regret. A politics of overcoming will trigger feelings of joy rather than sadness, control rather than fatalism, and gratitude rather than resentment. If we are grateful to be alive, then we must also be grateful that our ancestors overcame. It is thanks to them and the world that made them possible that we live....

If popular psychological wisdom has it that you have to love yourself before you can love another, my story suggests that you have to love life before you can care about anything. The wager is that, to some small but irreducible extent, one must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it in order to be capable of donating some of one's scarce mortal resources to the service of others."
It makes Pretty Lady shudder, the number of progressive, conscientious environmentalists she meets who seem to feel hatred and shame at the very fact that They Exist. Their lives are a constant state of handwringing at 'reducing their footprint,' and Unending Guilt at daring to wish to selfishly procreate.

Pretty Lady would like to tell these people, sternly, to stop it at once. Joy and gratitude are contagious and highly motivating; Guilt and Shame are the opposite. If you wish to Save the Planet, the best, and possibly the only, method is to Love the Planet, starting with your very own self. After all, you are part of it.

7 comments:

Doom said...

Ah, Pretty Lady,

With notions as such, it should be Beautiful Lady. Pretty might be descriptive, but this shows you are beautiful to your bones.

There is a song by Leonard Cohen that brings me warm (social, friendly, kind) thoughts of you for reason I cannot say. Hmm, I can't recall the name of it, I'll have to look that up soon.

Be well, Blessings.

Desert Cat said...

Doom, haven't seen you in a while. Welcome back from wherever you've been.

Pretty Lady said...

Hi, Doom! We've missed you!

Chris Rywalt said...

Bucky Fuller said pretty much everything this article said, only at least thirty years earlier. Not that it's bad to hear it again, not at all. But Bucky told us for many years that we could choose between Utopia or Oblivion, and as a consummate optimist, felt that Utopia was likely.

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is a fantastic book, and a great place to start if you want to be a positive environmentalist. And you can always get involved with GENI's What the World Wants Project or Medard Gabel's World Game.

Anonymous said...

It's all so transparent...

One of their highly touted, famous and successful of today's modern women has been exposed as a liar and a cheat and has to return her five gold medals.

What is a modern woman to do if her idols all turn out to be frauds?

Anonymous said...

The root cause is of the self hatred and shame is impacted narcissism. The illogic chain works like this:

* The Human Condition is the root cause of all evil in the world.
* I am human.
* In fact, I am the most significant human (from my perspective).
* Therefore, I bear the burden of all that is wrong with the world.

Apply this little tool to any behavior that makes you think "what in the world causes this objectively intelligent person to be such a whack-job on this topic" and suddenly things click. If the person is lucky, the cognitive dissonance induced by the loop makes them lash out against the most amazing variety of transference objects. If the person isn't lucky, worse things happen.

k said...

mark poling, that's why I think of warped guilt as being egotistical.

*Impacted narcissism.* Nice turn of phrase.

And doom! Yes, welcome back! We've been looking around for you, lately, and haven't seen hair nor hide. Wherever you were off to, I hope it was good.