How to avoid negativity
https://www.hbo.com/george-carlins-american-dream
George Carlin had a point: One impulse is to want to see it crash and burn. So many things are so no good.
But his expression started to trend toward nihilism. At the end of the documentary Stephen Colbert says: “He got too dark.”
* * * *
“Green” is bright, verdant. It conveys a feeling of hopefulness.
I think plenty of people are naive about the situation we’re facing. They’re too short-term sanguine. Jonathan Porritt is a hero of mine and I was just reading his book The World We Made. As if. As if society will have been greened by 2050.
http://www.jonathonporritt.com/the-world-we-made/
Such naivete and utopianism just makes a person seem credulous. Or a little childish.
* * * *
The situation is of long standing and a hopeful perspective is necessarily a long-range perspective.
Samuel Alexander strikes the right balance between short- and medium-term difficulty and long-term possibility. He presents a plausible scenario. The key is the spreading, over time, of the counterculture.
The first wave of it peaked during the 1970s. What’s kind of amazing is how it sprang forth full-blown. It was all there: ecologism, egalitarianism, communitarianism, bioregionalism, pacifism; voluntary simplicity, participatory democracy. To live more lightly and more locally.
When Theodore Roszak wrote The Making of a Counter Culture in 1969 he was kind of groping to understand. And he was coming at it as an outsider, as an academic analyzer. But he recognized the significance, and he got fully drawn in, and when he published Sources in 1971 he was able, as an insider, to convey the full vision.
The pathways were clear. The direction was all there. But it’s very counter, so we can expect wave upon wave, ebbing and flowing, gaining influence very gradually over time.
It will predominate in enclaves and then more generally. What it is and where it leads us is already known. It could unfold over time.
Samuel Alexander has perspective on it. “Over time” being a very long time . . . but, nonetheless, the counterculture could prevail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpITBoaUsGk
Should prevail.
