Naomi Klein: Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. Turns you into a supremacist

bell-cot

Kinda interesting, but it gives me a sense of human history only beginning when the subject (Klein) came of age. That's fine for pop culture stuff. But when she's an activist against a problem that's older than the pyramids - it leaves me with the impression that her cause is hopeless, because every single generation of humans forever will have to re-learn the hard way.

OgsyedIE

Normalcy bias is terribly corrosive to good planning. We're a decade or more into an education crisis, health crisis, jobs crisis, geopolitical crisis, debt crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis and moral crisis to the point that we only pick one or two seemingly egregious things as the abnormal features and forget that the majority of the parts of human history after the invention of writing did not consist of juggling triaging the symptoms of society teetering over. I won't know whether Klein's book will address this until I get a digital copy by some means post-release but the review makes the book seem myopic about how our modern troubles and cohorts of "baddies" were generated by the undercurrents of secular antinomianism that permeated the liberal democracy she's apparently conservatively yearning for. Can it even be separated from our absurd debt buildout and declining metal ore discovery rates?

api

I was thinking a bit ago about how easy it would be for extreme success of any kind to tip someone into a kind of religious psychosis, a belief that one is some kind of main character in history or possessed of a divine mandate. Anyone even a little bit prone to that kind of thinking could be pushed way into it by such an experience. It’s not that these people are somehow worse than others. If you experienced runaway success and then ended up surrounded with people praising and yes-ing you (because they want your money), how long could you remain sane and grounded? You also see it with celebrities, Nobel prize winners, politicians, people who become heroes to some movement, even social media personalities that gain huge followings and get “audience captured.”

gos9

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