Mid-Sized Meditations #11: Thoughts on Localism and Resilience
[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]1) The growth-centric paradigm which dominates so much economic activity around the world isn’t really the result of politically powerful actors; it’s the consequence of a worldview. Thus fulminating against the defenders of–in some ways undeniably beneficial, but also socially and culturally harmful, not to mention ecologically unsustainable–globalism, whether their motivations are libertarian like the Koch brothers (whose influence is omnipresent in Kansas) or statist like the Davos bunch(whose influence around here doesn’t really exist beyond the paranoid fears of a few black-helicopter-watching Tea Party types in our legislature), is to mistake symptoms for the disease. That’s not to say particular actions by particular actors shouldn’t be organized against; they should be. But we need to recognize that, as important as, say, an overturning of Citizens United might be to getting the message for local and economic democracy out there, simply accomplishing that, without a paradigm-changing language to explain why it’s important to do so, probably won’t change much.
2) The language that defenders of steady-state economies and local democracy need probably won’t be political in nature, and probably won’t emerge from the major cities or the state-based political entities of the world, despite those locations and polities being the site of so many productive nodes of intellectual input.
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