I’ll be honest with you

Steven Welzer
2 min readNov 20, 2023

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We’re not supposed to say “go back.”

It’s unappealing. It sounds fringy.

Greens can’t run for office and go around saying: “Let’s deconstruct all of this and go back to 1491.”

We’re supposed to sound reasonable.

Yes, one can phrase it: “We need to go forward toward a very different direction.” OK. Forward. Onward. Reasonable. But, between you and me (and don’t say a word of this to anyone else), we really do need to go back.

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This public secret is one which distinguishes the Reds and the Greens.

For example, the Reds go nuts when I say I think we need to reduce the human population.

The Reds are great in focusing on injustice and exploitation. To their credit, they’ve come around to also prioritizing ecological unsustainability. They get flummoxed when Greens go into the realm of social unsustainability. When we say: Being untenable, non-viable, irrational … things will devolve, degrow, settle back down.

Things will re-localize.

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People are coming to distrust the remote institutions and the mediating technologies.

Latest greatest: You’re communicating through the screen to the … What?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html

What if the simulacra become mass influencers? Horrors. They can’t be trusted.

But can you trust what your government or the mainstream media tells you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

Again: People are coming to distrust the remote institutions and the mediating technologies. It will lead to breakdown. And the only actual real solution is to get back. To go back. Back to interacting mostly with local real people face-to-face.

Preposterous? Impossible? Sorry, that’s the only actual real solution.

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Steven Welzer

The editor of Green Horizon Magazine, Steve has been a movement activist for many years (he was an original co-editor of DSA’s “Ecosocialist Review”).