August 31. This Adbusters page, Who the F**k Do You Think You Are, is almost completely wrong, and the popularity and unquestioning acceptance of this message is depressing. Here’s the text:

You blame China. You blame India. You blame America. You blame the CEOs, the oil companies, the vague and incoherent ‘system,’ the international regulatory regimes, the hypocrisy of the left, the righteous of the right, the educators, the economy, your parents, your childhood, your job, your bank account, your mental health, your government, everyone and everything but yourself. Wake up! This is no joke. Ecocide is actually happening and your five planet-lifestyle is the primary cause of it.

Adbusters is correct that sitting back and pointing fingers, without doing anything about it, is a mistake. But the alternative it offers is a worse mistake. At least if you blame some of those other things, you might organize to change them. But changing your personal lifestyle will not do anything to stop ecocide. Even if you could organize a million people to use fewer resources, those resources would just be freed to be used by someone else. To stop consumption by voluntary action at the consumer end, you would have to organize every consumer in the world. It’s like you’ve got a hose with a billion leaks. Do you convince a billion people to painfully plug every hole with their fingers, or do you turn off the faucet?

I wrote about this a few years ago in this post:

When we think about being “green,” reducing waste and so on, we almost always think in terms of stuff that we can do as individuals, and we almost never think about regulating manufacturing. Imagine: instead of making 50 million people feel guilty for using disposable cups at Starbucks, we could just pass a law prohibiting the manufacture of disposable cups. The reason we don’t is that in 1953 Vermont passed a law that banned disposable bottles, and the forces of Evil formed an organization called Keep America Beautiful, which has been working ever since to block that kind of law, and generally to make us think of waste “as an individual responsibility, and not one connected to the production process.”

Of course I was wrong to use the word “evil”. Corporations are just machines that are doing exactly what they were designed to do: generate profit with indifference to external cost. They were designed that way because humans are still beginners at designing large complex systems. As I mentioned in my post on evil elites, we apply moral condemnation to harmful systems because our ancestors lived in tribes, where moral condemnation worked by making its targets feel shame. Shame doesn’t work on governments and corporations and the people inside them doing their jobs. But it does work when those systems use shame on us! Bottom-up shaming is useless, but top-down shaming is used all the time. As with all top-down power, we must resist it.

I’ve never said that people should feel guilty for consuming resources or for any other political reason. Guilt is for when you cheat on your spouse. Politics is cold tactics. Tactically, I don’t see any way to stop or change the present system. But there are plenty of ways to build the new systems that will grow through its cracks. Personally I am a huge energy miser. I haven’t used air conditioning all summer, yesterday I baked a loaf of bread in a solar oven, and I seem to be the only person in Spokane who rides a bike to Costco. Why? First, to save money, which I can then spend on other things, like good tools, healthful food, and not having a job. Second, to practice for the coming times when most of us will have to live this way. Also, using external energy makes me feel like a slave to that energy and its sources, while doing stuff without it makes me feel free.

Some interesting thoughts here.