Sunday, April 08, 2007

Connections, or: My 1573 Pet Peeves

From time to time people ask me why I get worked up over an issue, like say solar power. Well, it's far more general than just energy issues. The thing is, I can see connections between very different fields. When I was an adolescent, I saw the connections between parenting and politics, politics and psychology & biology, and so on. And I couldn't stand, or understtand, how people were so stupid as to "focus" on only one little area to the detriment of everything else. It's all connected so if you don't understand everything then you understand nothing. And it's all connected in ways you can't imagine. There's even a direct connection between quantum mechanics and moral theory.

When I talk to people, I can tell a lot about their thoughts, their way of thinking and their values from things they don't mean to say and the way they speak. And remember, it's all connected. So a solar power enthusiast is someone who doesn't care about industry and doesn't care about economics. It's someone who doesn't care about industrial civilization. It's someone who doesn't care about humanity. They haven't made the effort to care.

And politics plays into it. Because when they talk, they give ammunition (political leverage, space, lebensraum) to the eco-zealots who are magical thinkers who literally want to destroy humanity. You think these people are fiction or exaggeration but I've met them. You probably have too except you don't know what to look out for. And think about this. The Nazis only wanted to destroy part of humanity. The eco-zealots want to destroy ALL of it.

The same for right-wingers, many of whom are mostly sane, who give ammunition to the militarists and the anti-human market fundamentalists. Who are literally mentally handicapped and whose vision would destroy any society they are handed the reigns to. There's all kinds of political connections in a public space. A whole web of thoughts and positions. And violently hacking at a little piece of it is going to tug on distant parts. And you may think they're unrelated but I see the connections. And I wonder how you can not see them.

Think Globally, Act Locally. It's not just a slogan, not for me.

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