Why do some people believe in laissez-faire capitalism, opposing wealth redistribution or limits on the ability of the rich to unfairly exploit their existing economic power? Self-interest is obviously the dominating factor. You don’t meet a lot of poor capitalists, and everyone knows that rich socialists are consciously rejecting their best economic interests. But in addition to self-interest, there is the capitalist’s need to believe that they are inherently superior to other people and that they deserve to be rewarded for this. Never mind that I can’t choose my genes, parents, or socio-economic situation at birth, the universe clearly prefers me and I should be able to benefit as much as possible from the fact that I am luckier than other people, dammit!

It is the height of arrogance to think that you deserve all of the credit for your success in life. Certainly, it is usually true to some degree that a successful person has worked hard, but it is extremely likely that they also benefited from advantages that other people didn’t have and caught a few lucky breaks. For instance, even just by virtue of being born in the right place, most Americans are among the richest 5% of earthlings. Moreover, successful people invariably rely upon technology and circumstances created by the past and present work of countless other people. Society is a collective project, and it is incredibly arrogant to try to benefit from its fruits without giving your fair share back.

No man is an island. We live together. Everyone, even the super-rich, depends on the participation of everyone else in the economy in order for them to get money to buy things with. The people below you on the social ladder are essentially forced to participate in the system in order to live.  You are too, just to a slightly lesser extent. If you treat the people below you with less than complete empathy because to do so would require you to accept being a little less well off, then you are in a dangerous place should the social structures that shackle the people below you ever disappear. And a society with a large proportion of members who consider the people below them in this light, well, that is a society ripe for revolution.

Suck on that, Randroids.

This amazing cosmic conception of knowledge starts at 6:15.

Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse. And some of the matter, back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of – I think it’s a trillion suns.

Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn’t survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (Laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe, and model, and predict, and explain, above all – there’s your reference – what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other – the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.

Now that is knowledge. And if that weren’t amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property. That physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time.

So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this, or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world.

In the past few years, global warming has failed to reach critical mass in the mainstream consciousness, even as (or perhaps precisely because) the evidence has become increasingly clear that we have passed the tipping point after which it is impossible to avoid exponentially synergistic positive feedback effects that will lead to an unimaginably hellish future.

I’m not being hyperbolic. Just read http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/28/330109/science-of-global-warming-impacts/ (and maybe also the links at http://pinboard.in/u:metamw/t:global_warming), think about the cracks in the system already starting to emerge due to food insecurity, and tell me how the next 100 or even 50 years can happen without the collapse of civilization and billions of deaths.  (Then, consider what James Hansen, the NASA climatologist who has been sounding the alarm on global warming longer and more accurately than just about anyone else, has said: if we burn all the unconventional sources of oil left in the earth, we run a serious risk of setting off runaway warming that will boil off the oceans and leave Earth uninhabitable for life.)

Ultimately, until it actually happens, you can doubt whether it will; out of sight, out of mind, no need to confront ultimate despair, your cosmic impotence in the face of humanity’s mass suicide.  I am not going to respond to any arguments for denial, delay, or trust in geo-engineering that may arise in the comments as a rationalization of inaction.  I have read enough to decide that expecting this century to be anything but an unmitigated disaster is life-threateningly risky.  I have given up on humanity’s ability to wake up and organize itself in time to prevent catastrophic warming in favor of merely highly disruptive warming, and I, for one, am going to do everything I can to ensure that I live at least a natural lifespan.  If you’re not already preparing to obtain arable land at a high latitude away from population centers, you’re behind the game.  If you wait ten or twenty years, it may very well be too late.

If you are unwilling to continue further into this century awaiting the approaching collapse of normality while pretending that inhabiting whatever niche you inhabit of the system that got us into this mess is an acceptable course of action, then let me know, and we can all buy some land together and set up a sustainable, self-sufficient community.  A community, where, in the last days of the race to utopia or oblivion, maybe we can be a safe haven for work on things that have the potential to save us from ourselves, like technology that enables better forms of social organization, or superhuman AI.

Going forward, I think people who are conscious of the overriding importance of sustainable living as we face catastrophic global warming need to start using it as a litmus test.  If you are too proud of your learned ignorance or too content in your learned helplessness to admit the facts and take action, I can only regard you as a mortal enemy; you are hurting our shared future, and if I could, I would rather live on a different planet than you.  If geo-engineering saves the day in the end, you can laugh at my naiveté all you want, but if it doesn’t, and I was prepared, don’t expect me to help you.