Words&Dirt

“The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless.

All these people seemed to do was talk!

It supposed it was just what biologicals did.  If you wanted to feel you were still somehow in control of a ship or a fleet or even your civilisation, talking amongst yourselves seemed to be the way you convinced yourself of it.”

––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 42

“The ultimate paradox was that neoliberalism, meant to ensure individual freedom above all, led eventually to a situation that necessitated large-scale government intervention.  Classical liberalism was centered on the idea of individual liberty, and in the eighteenth century most individuals had precious little of it––economic or otherwise.  But by the mid-twentieth century this situation had changed dramatically: slavery was formally outlawed in the nineteenth century, and monarchies and other forms of empire were increasingly replaced by various other forms of ‘liberal’ democracy.  In the West, individual freedoms––both formal and informal––probably peaked around the time von Hayek was writing, or shortly thereafter.  By the end of the twentieth century, Western citizens still held the formal rights of voting, various forms of free thought and expression, and freedom of employment and travel.  But actionable freedom was decreasing, first as economic power was increasingly concentrated in a tiny elite, who came to be known as the ‘1 percent,’ and then in a political elite propelled to power as the climate crisis forced dramatic interventions to relocate citizens displaced by sea level rise and desertification, to contain contagion, and to prevent mass famine.  And so the development that the neoliberals dreaded––centralized government and loss of personal choice––was rendered essential by the very policies that they had put in place.”

––The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, pg. 48-9