Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [195]
That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation in 1936. In the same speech he said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”
But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We lived on in that strange new feudalism, in ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said “people are like that,” or “human nature will never change” or “we are all guilty of original sin,” or “this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself.” And we went along with that analysis, and it became the law of the land. The entire world was legally bound to accept this feudal injustice as law. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts—all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naive, insane, utopian.
But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can’t quite remember how it happened or what it means. Change is real and unavoidable. And we can organize our affairs any way we please. There is no physical restraint on us. We are free to act. It’s a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a “flight from freedom”—that we fly into cages and hide, because freedom is so profound it’s a kind of abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to endure.
So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream, things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Some pretend that making a plan is instant communism and the devil’s work, but it isn’t so. We always have a plan. Free market economics is a plan—it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know—it’s blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis we now face without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saying, We have to solve this problem so first let’s put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?
Because we’re going to have to imagine our way out of this one.
That’s why we made the deal with China. It’s one of the greatest win-win comprehensive treaties of all time. Consider that we had a massive trade deficit running with China, and they had bought a lot more of our debt as well. And because of their population, and their manufacturing capabilities, and their low wages, which by the way depressed wages for every other worker in the world, there wasn’t an obvious way out of that huge imbalance. They had us. We were getting whipped in the so-called free market by a communist command-and-control political structure that could inflict austerity measures on their own people, which allowed them to win that game. That just goes to show you how free the free market really was, by the way; dictatorships did better at it than democracies! I leave it as an exercise for the blog’s responders to hash over what that might mean, but in the meantime, in the real world it was a big problem!
And yet at the same time this so-called success of the Chinese was achieved in part by treating their people and landscape like disposables, and it simply wasn’t true, and those false economics were beginning to backlash on them in bigger and bigger ways. They were creating terrible physical problems, worse problems than ours, really, because we’ve been cleaning