this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’ (theconversation.com)
submitted 8 months ago by MrMakabar@slrpnk.net to c/degrowth@slrpnk.net
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[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 0 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Maybe get rid of those billionaires and capitalists first before trying to survive on scraps. Nearly half of the food in grocery stores is thrown out while it's still good. Meanwhile people are now starving and there's even a return of scurvy due to malnutrition from food inflation and food insecurity.

Same with clothing. Companies like H&M shredding good clothes before throwing them out instead of giving it away or even selling them to places like Winners.

It's light were living in a global version of the Irish famine where everybody was starving and dirt poor, but they were making a fuck ton of food for the British.

And finally, what about how companies are doing programmed obsoletion of their products like electronics and appliances and design their products in a way that produces more e-waste? Or how everything is wrapped in plastic all the time? How is that the consumer's fault?

Change needs to start at the top. Cut the greedy fuckers out of the loop and you'll see how much waste we can reduce.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

If you actually read the article, instead of just complained about what you presume the article contains, you would have found that it agrees with you on pretty much everything. It even gives some examples on laws and actions by different governments, which try to solve or at least help with those problems. Not perfect, but certainly a good place to start.

[–] hanrahan@slrpnk.net 1 points 8 months ago

Change needs to start at the top. Cut the greedy fuckers out of the loop and you'll see how much waste we can reduce

Well, sort of. The top needs to change but that change won't come from them, it has to come from the bottom. Alas it doesn't and won't as voters drift towards fascism looking for easy answers from the very people causing this rather then moving the political Ovrton Window and torwards more green, sustainable radical politcans that are currently sidelined by the orthodoxy.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/30/richard-seymour-on-far-right-environmental-crisis-disaster-nationalism

As to "some" starving, an estimated 9 million a year starve to death

https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/people-and-poverty/hunger-and-obesity/how-many-people-die-from-hunger-each-year

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

As a plan, "cutting out the greedy fuckers" may sound satisfying but it's a bit of a dead end unless you really are advocating some kind of bloody revolution. And in that case history shows with 100% confidence that, alongside all the misery and suffering, you will just end up with another bunch of greedy fuckers at the top.

The problem is humanity. It's not them, it's us. Unfortunately there's no quick fix for that.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I dunno man. If you look at aboriginal peoples around the globe who still live by their old native ways like in the Amazons, in isolated parts of Asia, Africa and Australia, and how American natives used to live, I'd say they were doing pretty well before western colonization happened. Greedy fuckers would get put in their place pretty quick or cast out of their collectivity for having antisocial behavior that is typically associated with greedy people.

The greed that we know today, historically speaking, is fairly recent. With its money and loans and debt and accumulation of wealth.

So no. I disagree with your argument that it is a problem with humanity. It's a problem with a system that's been built over time by a small group of people who were craving power.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Your analysis is certainly pretty easy on you personally, though, isn't it? Someone else is to blame, move on. Whenever you take part in modern society - eating meat, driving and flying, buying junk and throwing it away, everything basically - it's someone else's fault, move on. Personally I choose to accept that I also have some responsibility in the matter.

As for the virtuous-native argument, I don't buy that either. For one reason: population growth. A human civilization can never be sustainable unless its population is stable. It's just basic ecology. Well, AFAIK, there is no premodern human society that has mastered this. Their populations are all increasing, just from a lower baseline, since they haven't adopted farming yet. Their impacts may be lower because the absolute numbers are lower, but the trajectory is exactly the same. I know that's not a popular opinion among the race-obsessed modern American left, but I'm a universalist so that's how I see it. The color of people's skin does not exempt them from responsibility. We're all humans, we're all implicated in this endeavor.

Jared Diamond's book Collapse contains an anecdote which is a possible caveat. Apparently some of the premodern societies of the New Guinea Highlands have, in fact, mastered birth control and so managed to stabilize their populations. But AFAIK this is very much an exception. Even if one believes that premodern society - without proper healthcare, mostly patriarchal, often violent - is superior to ours, one still has to contend with the population issue. Humans in my view are all the same. We all want the same thing, we're just progressing at different speeds towards the same reckoning.

[–] andymouse@slrpnk.net 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think we can pick one story and show one thing, and then another one to show another thing. Or hell, pick the first one again to say something different than the first time.

History is a malleable thing, and what you base your argument on is a version of it, not sure it's the truth.

But the gist of what you are saying is that any people would have done what White folks did. Just give them time.

You know, I don't believe that. White folks were exceptionally OK with genocide, we always have been. Intergenerational traum, I guess, from the millenias of tragedy of the Continent.

To presume that our white trajectory is the necessary trajectory for ALL PEOPLES, because 'ecology' (which is a scholarly discipline defined by who, may I ask) is.... BONKERS.

I'm sorry, I am sure you are bright and you seem well-read and intelligent but the idea you propose as an infallibility for all humans is completely and utterly bonkers.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The concept of "white folks" is entirely unscientific, it's an American cultural construction.

But yes, I am indeed saying that we just need to give other cultures time and we will all end up at the same destination. I don't essentialize humans by their arbitrary racial characteristics.

[–] andymouse@slrpnk.net 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I think you miss the point of history and cultural legacies.

I'm not making the argument that genocidal violence is in the genetic markup of white folks.

White folks is broadly speaking "European-descended people".

I think this group of people is... Special in this regard. Most likely due to infighting and a long history of savagery - not due to their DNA!

So... Other peoples won't necessarily have this brutal background, and so would not necessarily have done what white folks did.

I think owning up to the uniqueness of what it means to be white, or European-descendant, is an interesting project. And that project should not be tossed aside by some rationalisation that, incidentally, is terribly convenient for.. white folks.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Boring meal on Christmas eve?

So it's not about DNA yet it is about being "descended" from these people whose culture was uniquely evil? This sounds very, very like essentialism.

The convenience of the "rationalisation" is in any case moot if the person you're addressing does not even accept your label of them ("white"). What do you propose to do about that problem? Tell them that you know what invented category they belong to better than they do?

What a mess! I resubmit my simpler solution: we are all humans, there is only one species, we are all implicated in its successes and failures, end of story.