I had a friend in high school who was a litterbug. He threw fast food trash out of his car window — and claimed it was okay if he simply yelled the word “biodegrade!”
Both liberals and conservatives (and probably every other granfalloon) have magic words that cost less than action.
It’s easy to say you’re an anti-capitalist, even if you willingly benefit from the system every day, just like the others who do. Maybe nothing you actually do is anti-capitalist?
And it’s easy to say you love the Bible, but never bother to read it. Or to wear a shirt that says FREEDOM while actively supporting an authoritarian. “Thoughts and prayers” comes to mind, too.
My girlfriend makes fun of me because I claimed to be romantic. “I’m still waiting for you to do one romantic thing…”*
And then there’s writing angry rants on social media, or screaming at our favorite sportsball team on TV, which have an equal impact on the outcome.
Like the Sneetches, we join our arbitrary little tribes. “We’re the good monkeys; those guys over there are the BAD monkeys.” What are the odds? We all think we’re the good ones.
We don’t want to believe that our deeply personal and perfectly well-reasoned political beliefs — used to form in-groups and out-groups — are driven by the same basic evolutionary instincts seen in other social animals. Dividing us is beneficial for survival and selection.
If an alien documentary crew were to ignore the empty slogans we yell (our own takes on “biodegrade!”) and only observe our human actions for a day, I wonder: what would be the big difference?
Is your enemy, that redneck in Alabama or that vegan in Portland, far more like you than different? Aren’t they also ruining everything with their cellphone batteries mined through child labor and retirement funds invested in Amazon server farms? Are we not counting that? Does having bad stuff in common not make it bad? Does it get canceled out?
Maybe our ethics are nothing but team flags. Maybe all humans are fundamentally parasites, an invasive species, and we’re going to consume and destroy the planet no matter what political party we feel superior to. Maybe we’re sharks denying we’re fish killers.†
As Marc Maron said, “We did everything we could.”
As far as I can tell, for modern humans to live on Earth in a truly sustainable way (to not be fundamentally parasites), it would require the most radical transformation in human history: mass cooperation, sharing all resources, abandonment of conveniences, governmental planning on a level we can’t imagine, lifestyle change on a global scale. Our civilization might not even be recognizable.
Most of us, on an individual level, can’t even take care of our own bodies (eat healthy, exercise, sleep enough). Me included. How can we be expected to do something so Star Trek?
I don’t mean to make the absolute argument that we’re doomed. I’m no expert. I really don’t know if some new technology (maybe something that can counteract our stupidity) will save us. Maybe?
In the meantime, I’m trying to be more aware of my own “biodegrade!” moments. At the very least, it makes me a good person.
*Extra credit! Alex Hormozi reduces everything to action. Paraphrasing him: “We think that we need to feel a certain way to be a patient person. But the truth is, you don’t need to feel that way to take the action that a patient person would take.”
†Ayn Rand attempted to design a philosophical system that would help us escape moral relativism, based on the concept of objective reality, but… it had some problems.