There is a notion in political science circles that suggests the response to harsh, critical, or otherwise harmful speech is more free speech. The theory being the truth always wins out, eventually, and anyone saying harmful things can be outdone by more people speaking up against it. That rather than limiting the harmful speech through legislation or policy, we should go the opposite direction.
Similarly, I am intrigued by the answer to environmental harms as a result of over-zealous capitalism is, in fact, more capitalism. The "Green New Deal" has been bantering around for a while and you don’t hear much about it lately, but I suspect in the next few years we’ll be hearing more.
There is one obvious problem to both of these scenarios. The harm done in the interim isn’t mitigated at all, and often people suffer real harms. People have always said hateful things about other people, often resulting in war. And it is a uniquely human-industrialist perspective to think we can capitalism our way out of an energy crisis or whatever else befalls us.
I am not sure this isn’t just wishful thinking to some extent.
We all know that in one or another, all the remedies to problems are not always obvious, though they will certainly be difficult. Often, remedies in our personal lives result in harder, more laborious, or costly circumstances. Illness, divorce, and deaths to name a few. The solution to hard problems for individuals almost always seems to be give up things we like or things we’ve come to think we can’t live without.
This mentality never seems to impact the government, large corporations, or other industrialists. There is rarely a point where culturally or economically we recognize a limit or say, "I guess we’ll just have to give up on oil," or rare earth minerals, or soil, or growth, or any number of other things.
There is a certain belief among nearly everyone that technology will find a way. "We’ll figure it out," we assume, of any real or perceived threat. Climate change? The end of cheap energy? Aliens? We’ll figure it out, whether it happens or not.
This is unusually optimistic from a group of people who are not entirely all that optimistic. How, in one breath, "We’ll figure out a solution to famine" and "We may just not have any jobs for people thanks to AI" is really something.
At the risk of wandering off the plot, this feels different from how we used to consider addressing problems, at least in the US. After the Civil War, "Forty acres and a mule" was considered the best way of helping black families build new lives, sustain themselves, be independent and unbossed, and, yes, help growth wealth and participate in the market for their skills and labor. When is the last time our government considered some method other than a tax cut (usually of a few hundred dollars here or there) as a means of helping people live independent lives?
Even among Democrats and liberals today, the notion of solving threats from environmental destruction, to name one, involves more capitalism. That the industrialists who got us into this will also get us out of this, if only we spent more toward industry.
There’s a reason I’m not a political strategist, because if I were, I’d have a hard time telling clients, "Maybe you should say what is obvious: culturally, this is mathematically unsustainable. The earth only has so much rare earth mineral for gadgets, so much oil for gas, so much air to breathe. And everyone, certainly including industrial operations, will need to buy less, do less, and limit themselves."
We will never hear that.
