What Would It Take?

I wrote this in July, 2020, while working in a somewhat corporate environment in the city. I had been feeling growing frustration with the way that my coworkers and bosses seemed to be ignoring the outside world -- the pandemic, wildfires, protests, climate collapse -- and I intended to send this to everyone. Instead, I quit my job, the next month.

In retrospect, I think my metaphor is still apt. I also think I was right about the social, economic, and psychological effects of the ongoing pandemic, even though the economic devastation was sometimes obfuscated by market manipulation. I regret that I bought into the narrative that there was a singular, deadly virus causing so much suffering. I now think it was mostly psychological warfare, combined with targeted poisoning of the population (which is quite a bit darker of a scenario than the standard narrative; but I'll elaborate on it at another time)

At any rate, from what I've heard, most of my coworkers were eventually laid off. If I had been better at ignoring the world and pretending to be fine, I could've hung on for a couple more years, and I would be much much richer today. But I couldn't take the cognitive dissonance.

What would it take for you/me/us to completely re-evaluate the work we're doing, and change course?
Here's a thought experiment: imagine that space aliens are invading earth. At what point during the invasion would you drop everything you're doing and start fighting off the aliens?

Many people would probably jump as soon as they saw on the news menacing spaceships descending from the sky. But others would wait and see. For instance, what if the aliens had landed in Japan first, but nowhere else has been invaded. Maybe those of us in the united states would look on in horror as Japan was reduced to rubble or the citizens turned into slaves, but we could also think that it's a problem happening far away, and anyway, it doesn't seem to be affecting the number of people buying our product. It's a terrible shame, what happened to Japan, but it doesn't fundamentally change our company's mission.

What would fundamentally change the mission? Would things change once the aliens reached the United States, or would that only be a west coast issue? How about Boston? If they marched down your street?

Every step of the way, I imagine that there would be some people who would drop what they're doing and treat the emergency with the urgency it calls for. They would finally realize that the particular software engineering or marketing or whatever that they've been doing is not appropriate or useful in the current situation. It's time to take care of fundamental needs, protect their family, protect the community, repel the aliens. These are all things that people do when a natural disaster strikes, or they're caught in some civil war or imperial invasion. There's a point where you simply can't keep pretending that everything's normal; there are lives on the line.

But I'm disheartened to think, based on my observation of human behavior, that there would also be a segment of people who refuse to see the emergency unfolding around them, hanging on for as long as possible to some sense of normalcy. Perhaps they would be keeping an eye on the metrics they care about, and for whatever reason, people keep buying their product. Or perhaps they simply would be drawn into the long backlog of work they have -- sure, there's a lot going on in the world (you know, the far-away alien invasion), but look at this pile of tickets we have to get through! There's so much to do!

Or maybe some would think that we've got to do something about this invasion; therefore, let's figure out a way to use our product in some way that will help other people repel the aliens. Of course, whatever solution we come up with has to be within the parameters of our corporate goals: that goes without saying! And of course, we can't change our product too much or too quickly because things just take time, and it's expensive to do things, and the lawyers are telling us that it's not worth the effort. After all, we need to focus on our strengths: writing some software, managing ticketing systems, promoting what we've done. Repelling alien invasions is other people's work. And unless or until the aliens reach our doorsteps, we've still got mortgages to pay and retirements to plan.

At the moment (July, 2020), we are still in the middle (perhaps the beginning) of a global pandemic that has killed at least 120,000 people in the United States alone. Because of the pandemic, our society is entering a period of economic contraction, unemployment, uncertainty, and suffering that hasn't been seen since the Great Depression. Amidst this depression, there is social unrest -- protests and rioting over police brutality, systemic racism, income inequality; as well as armed protests against government intervention during the pandemic. The flames of civil war are being fanned across the country, often aided and abetted by our country's highest officials. At the same time, our government responded by enacting the largest upward transfer of money the world has ever seen -- pouring trillions of dollars into the bank accounts of the richest companies and individuals, while tossing a pittance to the rest of the country, if only to stave off actual revolution. Across the country, it seems that governments at most levels have given up trying: perhaps they've looked at their metrics and realized that the viral invasion will mainly wipe out undesirable or unproductive people, and therefore it's a small cost to be paid until we can get the economy going again.

But the pandemic and social unrest right now is taking center stage against a more devastating backdrop: the ongoing climate and ecological catastrophe, perpetuated by humans onto the entire living world. Scientists say that we have to reduce carbon emissions at a drastic rate (consider that the lockdowns from the pandemic have only reduced emissions by 6%; we need to do the same thing next year, and the next, until emissions drop to 0, if we're to avoid the "worst" effects of climate change). Every day that we delay is another day that we're deciding to condemn others to more suffering. It is affecting and will affect the worst off in the world, first: those who have had least to do with perpetuating the problem. Yet, even those suffering people have voices and can protest before they're wiped out. The non-human world is being devastated to such a degree that the rapid loss of biodiversity threatens human survival more than climate change does. That is, at least until climate change renders many places uninhabitable or infertile, leading to more famine, resource wars, social unrest, collapsing institutions.

All of this is happening all around us, reverberating in different subtle or extreme ways throughout our globalized system. Things might seem alright to me: I'm healthy; I can acquire as much food as I want; for the time being, I'm still free to go where I want and hold most of the opinions I have; maybe there's even grass growing outside my house. Despite that seeming security, millions of people and non-humans are living through various catastrophes. Many are fighting off invasions; or being crushed by them.