I Choose Optimism

Humans no longer seeing themselves as the pawns of nature is nothing to be proud of. We still depend on nature, nothing have changed, only this dependence is now obfuscated. There is a buffer between us and nature, which makes us utterly blind to the consequences of our actions. We are not living in the best of times, we are living the biggest lie ever. Our way of life is utterly unsustainable, and by our way of life I mean us the upper 10% that gets to reap 90% of the benefits.

Robyn E. Blumner did not choose optimism, she choose ignorance, because she is among the priviledged few who can be freely ignorant. Optimism is not a choice in any case. We are biologically inclined to be optimistic, even when we are fatalistic, in which case we are optimistic about a negative outcome. This is a cognitive limitation, not something to be proud of.

It's easy (and popular) to be a pessimist but when I look at objective global data on decade+ time scales, the only rational conclusion is that things are generally getting better for more people in more places than ever before (data like global poverty, infant mortality, literacy, etc). That doesn't mean we don't still have a ways to go and it certainly doesn't mean that things aren't terrible for some people in some places at any given moment.

Addressing those things for those people in those places should certainly be a top priority but we shouldn't let that blind us to the broader reality that by most standardized, objective measures things are mostly getting better for more people more of the time.

Things did get better globally, even if marginally for most, but at what price. If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me? With the Industrial Revolution, and later the Green Revolution we began accumulating a debt. All the gains we made were borrowed against the future. This is not progress, this is ignorance.

Society decided we wanted good things and we took action to get those things.

I am against poverty and not having things such as electricity and clean tap water, abundant food, education, hospital care, sewage treatment and proper waste disposal. I like these things, they are good.

You would be surprised at how sustainable things are by sheer hard work and will. In other words, we get what we cause.

The alternative to these things is worse. To be sustainable (no or renewable electricity, sparse population, no cars, no factories, no meat, land used for growing food) you need to remove the things society wants by sheer will. And I don't think you'll sell anybody on that.

In other words, telling people that they need to give up good things is not enough.

"If I take out a loan to live it up for a year, but then have no way of paying it back, because I haven't invested the money into anything substantial did things really got better for me?"

Yes. Because those you spent it with must have, or you wouldn't have been able to buy anything with it. Therefore you caused things to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened.

Debt is one of human's greatest inventions. It's what allows us to ensure that the underlying currency - human labour time - isn't wasted because there is no call to use it today.

Instead we have a currency - "here's a pig, owe me one" that causes a surplus to arise. Some people won't be able to fulfil that promise in which case it will, in advanced societies, be cancelled. That's what bankruptcy is for. The assets you used to secure the loan are then transferred to others. However the use of labour time in others to create the capacity to generate a surplus remains somewhere down the induced transaction chain.

Debt is the magic by which money is created on demand. That causes information to be transmitted down the supply chain that causes the capacity to make more to arise.

Which is why those societies that use debt are more advanced than those that chose to outlaw its use. They ended up with fewer days wasted in aggregate and more capacity to produce.

Most people fulfil their promises since it is inherent in human society to do right by others. And quite a lot of people like holding the assets that represent the debt as a status symbol of how well they have done - whether they can actually really call in those promises or not.