rtod: this changes everything

Revolutionary thought of the day:

All of this is why any attempt to rise to the climate challenge will be fruitless unless it is understood as part of a much broader battle of worldviews, a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective, the communal, the commons, the civil, and the civic after so many decades of attack and neglect. Because what is overwhelming about the climate challenge is that it requires breaking so many rules at once - rules written into national laws and trade agreements, as well as powerful unwritten rules that tell us that no government can increase taxes and stay in power, or say no to major investments no matter how damaging, or plan to gradually contract those parts of our economics that endanger us all. . . .

This is another lesson from the transformative movements of the past: all of them understood that the process of shifting cultural values - though somewhat ephemeral and difficult to quantify - was central to their work. And so they dreamed in public, showed humanity a better version of itself, modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible. They were also unafraid of the language of morality - to give the pragmatic, cost-benefit arguments a rest and speak of right and wrong, or love and indignation. . . . .

As the historian David Brion Davis writes, abolitionists understood that their role was not merely to ban an abhorrent practice but to try to change the deeply entrenched values that had made slavery acceptable in the first place.

-- Naomi Klein, from This Changes Everything