Monday, April 26, 2021

Saying the quiet part out loud.

In the midst of encouragement to eat bugs and not meat, a recent video surfaced highlighting an older World Economic Forum article which asked the reader to imagine a 2030 where the protagonist owns nothing and is happy about it.

While author and Danish parliamentarian Ida Auken added a disclaimer saying she was opening a conversation and not setting forth a dream of the future, that is difficult to square with the ending paragraph:

All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realised that we could do things differently.

There is a group of people missing from the urban "better path" here: children. 

Which is baffling, given that Auken herself is apparently a mother of three

But reading through the scenario, space for children is entirely absent. Indeed, you can't raise kids when "the living room is used for business meetings when I am not there" and you have to wait for cooking utensils to be delivered.

No country for toddlers, this place. And it is striking that this appears to be a mirror image of Ayn Rand's child-free cutthroat capitalist utopia. 

In each, humanity has to be cut to fit--with predictable results.

2 comments:

  1. I'll believe we need to eat the bugs when we

    - Stop paving over prime farmland
    - Grow gardens in every front yard
    - Raise chickens in every back yard

    and are still hungry.

    Until then, it's a propaganda exercise and should be treated as such.

    ReplyDelete

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