Trump can't fix it. In fact, nobody can.

[GliderGuider]

These words of wisdom were penned by a friend who shall remain nameless. I couldn't have said them better myself.

I totally get how Trump supporters want somebody to fix™ the myriad problems™ now facing the dominant human global culture. It's how most of the people in this culture have been taught to think.

The thing is, Mr. Trump will be unable to fix those problems.

The even deeper thing is, none of the other candidates would have been able to fix those problems either. None of them.

Runaway climate chaos? The growth imperative? Debt-based financial systems? The psychological workings of the human being? Resource™ depletions? Generations of accumulated trauma and epigenetic change? The unfolding 6th Mass Extinction Event? Overpopulation?

Do you think these things can be addressed through the institutions which created them, in the midst of cultural collapse, in the short amount of time left to address them, with margins for money and energy and resources now razor thin, by people whose minds were formed inside of family, cultural, and paradigmatic beliefs and assumptions which trip them up at every turn?

Nothing from my years of study and research has indicated that the members of this culture can "solve" their way out of this, at least not in this physical realm. We're up against fundamental laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. I think it's above our pay grade, as evidenced by the seeming fact™ that the chief cause of our present panoply of problems™ is our own previous solutions™.

[hatrack]

1. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate

The one exception I would take to this is the distinction between "fixing" and "actively striving to make this as bad as possible as quickly as possible". See also: Trump, Donald.

Buying some time matters. We sort of had that option before, but now we don't.

[truebluegreen]

4. I'm sorry--what does your subject line say?

[hatrack]

6. It's Dante: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"

[truebluegreen]

7. Thanks!

I was thinking it was Latin but couldn't quite get there.

[hatrack]

8. Well, you were pretty much within spitting distance!

.

[n2doc]

5. Yes

Also the failure to prepare for the shitstorm. Like sitting in your beachfront cottage drinking wine and surfing the web while a cat. 5 bears down on your location.

[littlemissmartypants]

16. Or fiddling while Rome burns.

Kick.

[CrispyQ]

18. Some clever DUer suggested how apt it would be for Trump to get a fiddle on inauguration day. -nt

[truebluegreen]

2. +a brazillion

[mdbl]

3. Ok, I give up!

Let's all go down together! Right?

[hatrack]

9. I can't speak for Glider Guider, but google "Vavilov Institute Siege Of Leningrad"

That's kind of where I've arrived.

It's trying to do the right thing, even though you know that the outcome won't be what you (or anyone else) were hoping for.

[GliderGuider]

13. Yes, that is my view too. Do what you know in your heart is right.

Then no matter what happens, your soul will be at peace.

[yurbud]

10. Elected officials who are owned by those causing the problems sure as hell can't

if by some miracle Hillary is inaugurated In January instead of the worst president before he's even inaugurated, she will be constrained by the bankers and corporate interests who backed her, including whoever it is that thinks war with Russia should be at the top of our agenda.

[SubjectiveLife78]

11. Just like no one person started the fire either

as evidenced by the seeming fact™ that the chief cause of our present panoply of problems™ is our own previous solutions™

The Green Revolution helped save a lot of people with increased access to food. Now there's a lot more people that need more food, jobs, are having kids, etc.

Unfortunately, we do live in a zero sum equation. Everyone can't have everything. We can have economic growth, but it's going to come at the cost of something. Like, for example, all that non-human life that was mentioned in the other thread about 70% of vertebrates dying.

On the other hand, if humans stop growing economically, we tend to get very pissed off. Mostly at each other.

Can't stop, can't continue.

[PatrickforO]

22. I will agree that NOW we live in a zero sum equation,

where for dirtbags like the Koch brothers to win, we all have to lose.

But, why must it be that way?

In terms of resources, in every case people who starve to death, or get some kind of pollution-induced disease, had these things happen because some greedhead reached out his old, liver-spotted white (usually) male (usually) hand for more profits and because of this people died.

In terms of jobs and job opportunities, we have two problems: first, that the fiduciary responsibility of the CEO of a publically held company is ONLY to increase value for shareholders, and that can and often is at the expense of the workers, the customers and the environment. The second problem is the merchants of lies - the K street consultants who are retained to publish pseudo-science pieces that merely serve to cast doubt on the findings of real scientists - a stall tactic allowing the company to maximize profit all the way to increases in regulation for public safety. We see this approach now with the global warming deniers who tell us we can EITHER have good jobs OR a clean, healthy environment, BUT NOT BOTH, which is an outright lie.

Then we have the Federal Reserve Act of 1912. Did you know it was ramrodded through by J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller during the Christmas recess of Congress, and that it represented the victory of bankers over economic populists - a battle that had been going on in American politics since the colonial days. They don't tell you that in your history books, but it is so. Article II of the Constitution gives Congress the power to 'coin money' and if we got rid of the Fed, then we could solve the problem of why we're paying all this money we owe to ourselves (national debt) back the BANKERS, with interest. Ellen Brown writes eloquently about this issue in Web of Debt.

Finally, we have the American people, who have been brainwashed with corporate propaganda caused by the birth and growth of Fox 'news' and hate-talk radio. These are the Trump supporters - people who genuinely believe Obama is from Kenya, unemployment went up on his watch and the deficit and debt ballooned out of control on his watch. None of which are true, but they have been told these things, and more, ARE true. And told, and told, and told. As in Goebbels' 'big lie.' Why? Because of the Powell memo of 1971, followed by Reagan allowing the Fairness Doctrine to die in 1984.

So why does it HAVE TO BE a zero sum? Or can we reorganize ourselves so it isn't? Will we have the foresight and wisdom to begin thinking and making policy decisions as a species, or will we continue to support parasites such as the Koch brothers, Soros, Gates, the Waltons and the like? Tune in next year...

[SubjectiveLife78]

23. "So why does it HAVE TO BE a zero sum?" Because we live in physical reality.

Not just in the essentially limitless human imagination. That's where our problems come from; the intersection of Human Imagination Rd and Physical Reality St. For example, is climate change, objectively, a problem? Not really. The planet doesn't care. The universe doesn't care. Other life on the planet does what it does, and sharks don't care about lions, and birds don't care about rabbits, etc, etc. Humans, on the other hand, have to fight climate change(not just adapt to it), and care about polar bears, and whales, and whatever else, all at the same time as we want to grow our economy. We want the best of everything, and that's just not physically possible. There has to be a downside, and there is, to everything we do.

It's always been zero sum. It's just that humans are very good at getting around limits. We can use the Fed as one of many examples. We're quite clever when it comes to that. The downside to that skill, is that we throw things out of balance, and then do our best to get around the limiting factor of that downside. So then we end up trying to fight the climate change that we're helping to cause through our actions, by doing more of what got us to this point in the first place. Our attempt to get around that limit is based on what we hope is clean and green energy, but since we still exist in physical reality, I'm going to guess it won't work as well as we hope it does.

Or can we reorganize ourselves so it isn't? Will we have the foresight and wisdom to begin thinking and making policy decisions as a species, or will we continue to support parasites such as the Koch brothers, Soros, Gates, the Waltons and the like?

That's tough to do, because of that human imagination. There's a lot of people, and we all want different things. What amounts to a global hive mind, that's going to take more than foresight and wisdom. It's a huge limit to get around. We have an idea of what the downside would be if we don't get around it. What would be the downside if we do accomplish it?

[GliderGuider]

24. Very well said.

Last edited Tue Dec 13, 2016, 08:14 AM - Edit history (1)

Welcome to DU! It's always nice to find another systems thinker who gets it!

[PatrickforO]

25. That's easy. Enough for everyone, and far less freedom for people

to screw other people. But you're right. The key negative characteristic is greed. Or, perhaps the fear that if you have enough, then I won't have enough. Or maybe the desire to have more than you so I can feel superior to you.

You know, we are really a loathsome species. All other life on the earth would be better off if we went extinct.

[SubjectiveLife78]

26. Greed can be a two way street

Greed has also led to the sort of medical science that allows more people to live longer. Or this instant communication. Or the ability to travel at 60mph, or fly in the air. That kind of greed we call progress. Human progress comes at a cost somewhere. Zoos, factory farms, monoculture, pollution, all that stuff.

The real problem comes from the want of everything. We want the benefits of human progress, without those costs. Like our desire to decouple the economy from resources for example. Energy that's too cheap to meter! We can just walk on water, without a care in the world. What we want to do is not have to obey the laws of thermodynamics. Which are, of course, laws that humans made up through our limited observational abilities, so maybe they don't actually exist. Who knows, it's a weird universe.

You know, we are really a loathsome species.

We're just another species. We just happened to develop the ability to build and play with complex tools. To the point where we may make our own existence unnecessary. Which it always has been anyway.

[hatrack]

27. Maybe themodynamics don't exist? OK, whatever . . .

.

[SubjectiveLife78]

28. Humans have thought a lot of things existed

and then they didn't, or not the way we thought they did, or some variant of that.

I've been talking about how we live in a zero-sum reality, and that everyone can't have everything, despite of what our idea of progress says we should have. So I don't believe in perpetual motion machines. I think what we call thermodynamics is at play in every human action. I was just saying that the human imagination can make a lot of things seem real, and the universe can be weird. We think there's a 11:30am, on a Wednesday, in the month of December. None of those things actually exist, but we all seem to be tied to that collective delusion.

[Chiquitita]

12. So well described

But we still must fight on!

[nolabels]

14. We are evolution's latest attempt for the solution

and what is even weirder is we are and will be connected in some facet as and or if and when it does go down. We could fault the human race but inevitably things would happen regardless of whether or not we were smart enough to figure it out before it happened.

The other great extinctions also happened because of design flaws in the string. Our world might change a lot in the near future but you can be sure that the most adaptable, changeable and complex thing that has ever existed on the planet is in the here and now. Will some of our genome survive into the next millennia and should anyone of us personally be at party to that undertaking, only chance and change will know. The lot of us all living now will turning into dust by that time

I don't feel like a perpetrator but rather an unwitting co-collaborator. Do we have a solution? We don't know because we will not be here, but there is the possibility that someone or even something else will be here to find out. Despair is not a place and traveling forward would indicate no destination is actually needed

[Ligyron]

15. Anybody see the movie Inferno?

That's one option but a bit extreme.

[lagomorph777]

17. Bizarre that the owner of so much coastal property would deny global warming.

Perhaps he doesn't actually own anything. Maybe all he has is funding from Putin.

[NickB79]

20. Oh, the fucker believes in it where it suits him

Like when some of his expensive golf real estate in being swallowed by the sea.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/donald-trump-climate-change-golf-course-223436

The New York billionaire is applying for permission to erect a coastal protection works to prevent erosion at his seaside golf resort, Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland, in County Clare.

A permit application for the wall, filed by Trump International Golf Links Ireland and reviewed by POLITICO, explicitly cites global warming and its consequences — increased erosion due to rising sea levels and extreme weather this century — as a chief justification for building the structure.

[lagomorph777]

21. Nice catch!