This Changes Everything is the most important book ever written. Because it changed nothing.
You need to read the book in order to understand my point. And therein lies the problem: people don’t read anymore. Almost half (48.5%) of Americans haven’t read a single book in the past year. And, surprising to me, the U.S. has the highest average (according to the survey I consulted—see below). And so, people are now, by and large, stupid. (And by ‘stupid’ I mean both unintelligent and uninformed.) (Because if one is intelligent, one tends to become informed.)
One typically needs, at a minimum, a long paragraph in order to make an argument (that is, present a claim with evidence and/or reasoning), let alone also consider objections and present replies. What people read now, typically single sentences on social media, cannot therefore be arguments. Single sentences can be only claims. Without the supporting evidence/reasoning, how does one judge which claims to accept and which to reject? Not with any intelligence, that’s for sure. One can accept or reject only according to what one likes, according to what resonates best with whatever one currently believes (for who knows why).
And most people won’t listen to, or will have trouble following, a whole paragraph presented orally. Consider that even on podcasts and interview/discussion programs, on which intelligent people discuss issues, participants present, typically, only one or two sentences at a time.
What Klein does in her book, her 576-page book, is make an airtight argument for leaving the rest of our oil in the ground; burning more from this point on (well, from that point on—2014) will be catastrophic. Fatal to human life on Earth.
This is no exaggeration because we cannot change the molecular structure of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (to name perhaps the most important three chemicals), and, so, we cannot change their interactions and the consequences of said interactions. Nor can we change the temperature range at which the human organism can survive (or the need for a certain amount of water and food).
That the book changed nothing proves that most humans are either stupid or selfish. Or both. Stupid in that they don’t know what they’re doing when they continue to use fossil fuels, for example. Selfish in that they do know what they’re doing, but choose (let’s say) personal power, wealth, status, and/or employment over the common good (the survival of the species).
Note that I say most humans are either stupid or selfish. Because many people knew, even back in the 1980s (probably the more accurate time after which we should not have burned more oil): David Suzuki, Guy McPherson, Bill McKibben, and many others. And they did act for the common good. But there has never been a critical mass of those neither stupid nor selfish.
And that’s the problem with democracy: it’s government by the masses. Which are stupid. Or selfish. Or both.
What we needed, back in the 1980s, was a ‘benevolent dictator’—more specifically, a knowledgeable dictator motivated by the common good. We needed someone like Klein or Suzuki or McPherson or McKibben to say ‘This has to stop now’ and to fire or even exile (to the tropics, perhaps) everyone who didn’t agree to ‘make it so’.
Now, it doesn’t matter. Predictions about temperature (to name just one indicator of our impending death) for 2050 are ‘coming true’ now, in 2025. Which is to say we’ve already jumped over the cliff and are ‘just’ on the way down.
There have been relatively slow changes, but unless you know better, they are not considered alarming, and so no action is taken, and there have been abrupt changes, but unless you know better, they are dismissed as anomalies, and so no action is taken.
And so everything will be normal until it’s not.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-books-read-per-year-by-country
