The authoritarian approach delivered population control and then cultural change so that population control is no longer needed.Potemkin Villager wrote: ↑02 Sep 2024, 16:58 There may be fewer obstacles on China's path to where they say they want to go but this will not necessarily lead to the desired outcome as previous examples of mass social transformation programmes have very vividly shown. A perusal of any texts on the cult of Mao will show how badly the authoritarian top down approach panned out for the people before.
None. My interest is westernising the concept of ecocivilisation, not running the world.How may million deaths have you in mind this time around?
I know.There is also the added difficulty that the people people will be asked to accept substantially less, than they have become accustomed to, rather than promising more and have to be made to believe that this huge reduction in material comforts is good for them.
This is the current blurb I am planning for the back cover of the book:
This book explores how the impending collapse of civilisation as we know it, rather than being solely a catastrophe, can be seen as a pivotal opportunity for essential ideological and systemic transformation. As we approach the most significant paradigm shift since the Scientific Revolution, the flaws in our current worldview—particularly the dominance of growth-based economics and politics, metaphysical materialism and deconstructionist postmodernism—have become increasingly apparent. Yet, despite the evident failure of our growth-driven economic model, there remains no clear consensus on what should replace it. Politically, neither the neoliberal right nor the postmodern left are willing to confronting the realities of this. And despite the total failure of materialistic science to account for consciousness or explain what quantum theory tells us about the nature of reality, the scientific establishment cannot, in the words of Thomas Nagel, “wean itself off the materialism and Darwinism of the gaps”.
In contrast, China has embraced the concept of "Ecocivilisation" as one of its national goals, positioning it as the ultimate societal state. This raises profound questions for the West: How might the concept of Ecocivilisation be adapted within a Western context? What could substitute for Taoism in this adaptation? What will happen to growth-based capitalism when the unsustainability of growth can no longer be denied? How could Ecocivilisation be achieved without abandoning democratic principles, given that almost nobody in the West shows the slightest inclination to accept restrictions on their own individual rights to behave in an unsustainable manner?
At first glance, these challenges appear insurmountable, with few serious attempts—inside or outside academia—to address them. The majority of people are not even fully aware of the questions that need to be asked, much less prepared to explore the answers. This book aims to explore what real options remain for humanity and for western civilisation in particular. When viewed from the perspective of somebody who hasn't accepted the inevitability of some degree of collapse, all these realistic options look so bad that the differences between them might seem irrelevant. But in fact, the range of possible futures still open to us is unimaginably vast, and small differences now could make an enormous difference in the future. We can think of it as something like the butterfly effect, except with ideas.
. And 'orc apologist'? You think this is Lord of the Things or something? Perhaps this is what has affected your judgement so badly all the way through this conflict.