Some lies, if prepared correctly like squash or pumpkin, can appear delicious and irresistible, concealing a dark reality: “I can’t believe you’re not a model! For five thousand dollars I can photograph you so you have a portfolio.” The central aim of most lies is to avoid consequences. When an untruth is especially desperate and self-serving, it can be unintentionally hilarious: "Yes I tried marijuana... but I did not inhale.”
Embezzling money or murdering someone for the insurance pay-out are part of a phylum of lies that cross into serious criminality. These deceptions’ sphere of influence often stays fairly localized. But sometimes covering up the initial lie can spawn lots of other lies that spread and spread, like with Watergate or Bernie Madoff. What started as a little decorative Thanksgiving-gourd-sized lie suddenly becomes larger and quite ugly. This family of lies strives to not only avoid consequences, but to gain status and resources, another common end game of many deceptions. And then there are the large society-wide lies: hulking distortions and misrepresentations watered and tended to by leaders, mass media, culture, and industry.
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Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. There are the lofty-sounding promises to reach “Net-zero emissions by 2050,” as if 24 years from now was soon enough. There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations. There’s the accusation that anyone who expresses urgency is a “doomer.” There are those who treat climate as an abstraction to win political campaigns, first arguing that the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a victory despite doing nowhere near enough to address the scale of climate collapse, and more recently that Democrats should just stop talking about climate and focus on more “winnable” issues. Most damaging and common of all, there are those who simply don’t mention it.
All of these distortions have robbed us of the most critical element people need to understand a threat and adjust their actions accordingly: context.
And make no mistake, when it comes to how much time we have, the data and the geological record are crystal clear.
For some badly-needed context, the last three years, likely for the first time in over 100,000 years, have averaged above the Paris Accords’ “do not cross” 1.5 degrees celsius planetary warming. Only ten years ago, that was considered catastrophic, but now mainstream news tells us it’s just a number
There is this idea floating around from the cultural sector. The basic premise is that the cultural products like art, music, fashion, movies, tv, pop culture, literature etc are all stuck in this period of unoriginality and repetition.
The usual analysis goes that if you went back in time 50 or 75 or 100 years, there were these decadal fads / trends / movements where a person wearing 1955 clothing in 1965 would look decidedly out of date.
Most of the commenters started to notice that starting around some date that was maybe in the mid 1990s or early 2000s, the decadal sense of progress and change collapsed and ever since we have been more or less in one long "now".
Music, for example, is a bunch of "tribute bands" or "retro acts" that don't label themselves as such. Movies are all about sequel franchises. Fashion is all about 'vintage ' and so on. You get the idea.
So... If you have read this far...
There have been a number of cultures in the history of the planet where politically and culturally the sense of the passing of time is meddled with at a linguistic and cultural level. For example, they could have a bunch of religious beliefs about immortality, or a tweak of the verb tense where you can't refer to the future or past tense, or they have a belief in a deterministic political cycles / dynasties that are super-naturally unavoidable or whatever. Cultural anthropology has a bunch of examples, often where these seemingly unstable power relationships get propped up and perpetuated and stabilized simply because the passage of time becomes unknowable, unspeakable, loses salience and so on -- the population can't imaginethe possibility of a deep change in society.
For me, this all connects. We had Bush I, Baby Bush, Clinton, the Other Clinton, Trump I, Obama's VP came back, Trump II. Like all these repeats of reruns...
What decade is this? We are in this societal state where it's like the snooze alarm keeps going off and being reset and the limbo state continues to play...
My personal thought is that this is a bottom - up phenomenon. I don't think Trump is a mastermind puppeteer keeping time from passing. Rather he is the beneficiary of the popular vibe that people prefer to keep sleeping away the years. Trumps decade of significance is the 1980s. People, on some level, would rather go back in time than forward to the future.
And the "why" of it is that waking up, you wake up to a kind of waking nightmare. We have no ready made cultural narrative to comprehend what's really happening.
The climate picture is clearly moving ahead, but culturally we have taken a step away into this abstraction. "The climate in 2100". " 2 degrees". "Net zero in 2050". Nothing is about right now.
Cynically and pessimistically, I think when we reach 2° the headlines will have already been about 3° for years as we cross that line. We will never be present to our lives. We can never be horrified or alerted. The worse it becomes the greater the disconnectedness...