On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 9:51 AM Felix Stalder <[email protected]> wrote:
> > But what struck me as really strange in this article is that everything > that Covid does in terms of making the future less certain, climate > change will do at orders of magnitude greater. Of course, many people > are living through climate disaster already, but it will help none that > many more will experience it the near future as well. > Well, intellectuals are very well trained in critique, so one can expect that as the climate and other Anthropocene disasters ratchet up (check the newspapers for the latest) there will be many people attacking peers for their too-personal expressions of sorrow and their purported inability to recognize the problems that others have suffered from for years. Prestige points are acquired in this way and I suppose it feels good too. Might as well enjoy it while you can, folks. I don't think this phase will go on much longer because the liberal state and its institutional structures - the ones that have fostered this peculiar pecking order of suffering - are beginning to break down. Will the insurance system last through this round of West Coast fires? Or the next round of Florida flooding? Once it goes, there will be at least an immediate form of relative equality in misery, and then maybe we can deal with the problems themselves. I have no idea how resilient the insurance/reinsurance system really is, or how far governments can go with their backstop insurance plans (which prevail in California and Florida right now). But if you want to a good guess for the identity of the tipping point that finally pushes us out of the liberal democratic state -- I mean, the kind of state that emerged historically from WWII, and made at least some guarantees of social well-being in terms of income, social services and environmental quality -- here it is: the liberal state will hold just as long as the insurance system does. best, Brian For more on the limits of the current state-form, and the chances of overcoming them, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09644016.2019.1680062
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