Guest post: A particularly fiendish iteration of the Trolley Problem
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? at Miscellany Room 8.
We as a species are now taking part in a real life version of a particularly fiendish iteration of the “trolley problem,” in which we are pondering whether or not to throw the switch, riding in the trolley, and tied to the tracks all at the same time. We are the dinosaurs and the asteroid. Our current situation is an unprecedented superposition of disasters and catastrophes reinforcing each other and reverberating around the globe. The greatest threat to our way of life comes from our way of life. Climate, biodiversity, water, food, resources, war. The people who are in the position to control the situation (to the dwindling degree that such control remains at all possible or effective) are ultimately going to be subject to many of the same dire consequences as those riding the trolley or caught in its path. The timing might vary depending on locale and wealth, but like some nightmare moebius strip, but we are all on the trolley, and we are all on the tracks. As the seconds tick, the power of the switch to do anything at all ebbs away.
This has been your daily reminder that we are all so very, very fucked.
Thanks YNnB!
It’s actually an excellent summation of where we all are. I’ve come to the conclusion that most people still don’t really know about the issues, or if they do sort of know and feel something should be done, they expect that someone else will be doing it and that their particular life and habits will be somehow exempt from sacrifice or modification.
It’s almost enough to make one join the Earth Trisolaris Organisation. I’d probably be in the Redemptionist wing. Probably. I still have faith in some humans.
I kinda think war is the solution… Kill enough people in the right places to maximize the amount of time you can use dwindling resources to maintain your in-group’s standard of living, hopefully long enough to expand into the solar system and gobble down even more resources.
But that’s just how *I’d* do it… Smart bad guys would probably be doing the same algebra of necessity.
Margaret Atwood’s impressive intellect, scope of knowledge and ability to communicate in writing are all evident in her address to a conference (2013) on “How to Change the World?” in Burning Questions. One anecdote (p. 213) gave me pause.
“I was talking to a Canadian Indigenous man who sells whitefish at a local farmers’ market. I mentioned zebra mussels, an invader that was dumped into the water from the bilge of incoming freighters and is now a large and destructive presence in the Great Lakes. … What did he think should be done about this problem? I asked the fisherman. Surely he was concerned: these mussels could affect his livelihood. But he only smiled. “Nature will take care of it,” he said.
I took him to mean not that Nature would eliminate the zebra mussels but that some new balance or status quo would eventually emerge. If so, he was right, because it always does, but Nature doesn’t care about our human wishes. Physics and chemistry do not give second chances.”