But that class was specifically defined as: "This ideology of wanting everyone to use less--but striving every single day of your life for more--is worse than hypocrisy. It's life-denying. It is reality denying." So (as my last post reaffirmed) I'm only talking about those who advocate using less while they use more. That's a subset of people. We all want to use more. But it is a smaller subset of us who judges the rest for wanting more "in the wrong way."wayfriend wrote:Actually, you called a whole class of people "worse than hypocrites" and "life-deniers".Zarathustra wrote:I'm not the one calling everyone hypocrites. That was Serscot.
Think of it this way. You can take 3 steps forward and 1 step backwards (i.e. consuming more, but doing so in an "efficient" way), or you can take 2 steps forward, and no steps backward (i.e. also consuming more, but doing so in an "inefficient" way). It's the same damn thing, yet one has moral superiority while the other apparently does not. The difference between 2 steps forward (i.e. 3 - 1) and 2 steps forward (i.e. 2 + 0) is indistinguishable in terms of how much it hurts the environment. But one certainly has the moral high ground, doesn't it? Why is that?
The only sense in which this is "better" is if it costs less money. Otherwise, the only person who is "better" is the one who has the least. And that is the road to poverty or stagnation. As long as you are using more than someone else, what right do you have to tell them to use theirs more efficiently? And as long as we all want to use more, "efficiently" doesn't stop the encroachment upon the environment.Do you disagree that it is better to use less resources in order to have what you have than use more?
A slow destruction of the environment is no less destructive than a fast destruction of the environment. Why should destroying something more slowly make us feel any better? Why is that a source of righteous indignation?
The Hummer user has cause to judge the jet user. The hybrid user has cause to judge the Hummer user. The motorcyclist has cause to judge the hyrid user. But the jet user does not have cause to judge the Hummer user, despite how much sense it makes to us who don't drive Hummers. And if we're all open to the idea of using a private jet, then why does our position farther down the ladder give us any justification to complain about the Hummer driver?
Yes, some things are better than other things. But again, if you are consuming more than before--and intend to consume still more after that--what difference does it make?? More is more. Taking more out of the environment--either efficiently or inefficiently--still takes more out of the environment. The direction of our progress hasn't changed. So it is only a matter of time before A (using more efficiently) and B (using more less efficiently) becomes the same damn thing. So if we're only postponing our damage, in what sense is it better? It's slower, not better.I don't know why you need to change the argument from better vs worse, which is all it needs to be, to an argument about right vs wrong. Some things are better than other things, even though none of them are wrong.
We all live on previous Indian homeland. America is all one big Na'vi tree. If you don't see Cameron's movie as an indictment of the life which you take for granted, then you weren't watching closely enough. If you don't see your own incrimentally increasing consumption as the demand which causes corporations to "rape" the land, then perhaps you were simply applying the film's logic to other people than yourself.Cameron's message, as far as I can tell, is its bad to destroy someones home because you want the rock under it. You've declared that the message is that we should consume less and thereby rape the earth less. But it's no where in the movie I saw, that's for sure.
And that's exactly why the message of the movie so easily becomes our personal battle cry ... even while we contradict it. We always imagine that someone else should pay the price ... and we convince ourselves that we are exempt from this logic because of that one step we take backwards while we're taking three steps forwards.
I'm just content that we're moving forwards at all, despite the dance of contradiction some feel they must take to make themselves feel better while we advance.