If we feel uneasy about their ascendance, then the most important lesson we need to learn is to stop fighting them with facts, and instead come up with better stories: with 21st Century myths. And while there’s clearly no one set of myths that will work for everyone, the kind of myths we need today will share some key defining features.
First, they need to prompt us to think of ourselves as part of a larger us – a seven billion us, that has “more in common than that which divides us”, as the late British MP Jo Cox put it. (Contrast this with identity politics, which typically centres on a smaller idea of ‘us’ that needs to fight back against some ‘other’.)
Second, we need myths that help us think in terms of a longer now – to situate ourselves at the intersection of a deep past and a deep future, to think across generational timespans, and to protect and cultivate the future rather than gorging ourselves on it and leaving our successors to pick up the bill.
And third, we need myths that nudge us to imagine a better good life. One that decisively does away with the notion that we are what we buy, and in which we reimagine growth as being not about material consumption but instead about growing up as a species and moving past our current, dangerously adolescent moment at which we’re testing all the limits to see what will happen.
Don't have time for a detailed commentary but for now I'll just say, "I dunno about this, I'm suspicious."
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Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
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