Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Kinda interesting, but it gives me a sense of human history only beginning when the subject (Klein) came of age.
That's fine for pop culture stuff. But when she's an activist against a problem that's older than the pyramids - it leaves me with the impression that her cause is hopeless, because every single generation of humans forever will have to re-learn the hard way.
by bell-cot - “I have found the image of a spiral really useful, in terms of how to make sense of the fact that our era is both familiar and different,” Klein says. “The thing about a spiral is that you’re going round, but you’re not going to the same place. If the spiral is pointing down, it’s deeper, it’s tighter, it’s carrying more velocity, it’s carrying more force, it’s carrying more heat, it’s carrying more violence.”by beardyw
- Cleaning my house is hopeless because it will get dirty again.
Maintenance of democracy takes effort, yes. We knew that from the start.
by ajuc - I was thinking a bit ago about how easy it would be for extreme success of any kind to tip someone into a kind of religious psychosis, a belief that one is some kind of main character in history or possessed of a divine mandate.
Anyone even a little bit prone to that kind of thinking could be pushed way into it by such an experience.
It’s not that these people are somehow worse than others. If you experienced runaway success and then ended up surrounded with people praising and yes-ing you (because they want your money), how long could you remain sane and grounded?
You also see it with celebrities, Nobel prize winners, politicians, people who become heroes to some movement, even social media personalities that gain huge followings and get “audience captured.”
by api - > extreme success of any kind to tip someone into a kind of religious psychosis, a belief that one is some kind of main character in history or possessed of a divine mandate.
there was a part in Wolf of Wall Street where the main character mentions that money not only allows you to buy better food, buy better cars, buy better clothes, but also allows you to buy better friends, buy better politicians...
obvs didnt turn out the way they intended, and money isnt the only way to shape history, but it seems to make things easier (for a short while at least (until the next guy with money pays to undo yours))
.. i guess money is a cheap moat haha..
- Normalcy bias is terribly corrosive to good planning. We're a decade or more into an education crisis, health crisis, jobs crisis, geopolitical crisis, debt crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis and moral crisis to the point that we only pick one or two seemingly egregious things as the abnormal features and forget that the majority of the parts of human history after the invention of writing did not consist of juggling triaging the symptoms of society teetering over.
I won't know whether Klein's book will address this until I get a digital copy by some means post-release but the review makes the book seem myopic about how our modern troubles and cohorts of "baddies" were generated by the undercurrents of secular antinomianism that permeated the liberal democracy she's apparently conservatively yearning for. Can it even be separated from our absurd debt buildout and declining metal ore discovery rates?
by OgsyedIE - There were always crises, I think.