Commanding Hope by Thomas Homer-Dixon

Author:Thomas Homer-Dixon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2020-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

SUPERORDINATE GOAL

The protagonists in The Lord of the Rings face a version of this dilemma. The single action that would be enough to stop Sauron forever— throwing the ring into Mount Doom’s fires— doesn’t seem feasible, at least on first assessment. Yet other actions that are feasible— trying to hide the ring in the countryside, giving it to the ancient creature Tom Bombadil, or dropping it into the deep sea— ultimately won’t stop Sauron.

The Fellowship’s dilemma seems impossibly difficult, but it’s actually more tractable than humanity’s version today. First and most obviously, Tolkien creates for his group of heroes a conventional “war” problem: an external and willfully malicious enemy threatens the group with annihilation, which catalyzes its members to bury their differences and collaborate to defeat the enemy.

In contrast, today the enemy isn’t “out there” but at least partly “in here,” right inside our own societies, communities, families, and even ourselves individually. Our severe problems are rooted in factors like bad technologies, poorly designed institutions, greedy corporate elites, aggrandizing states, self-interested consumers, and ingrained patriarchy and racism. And they’re rooted in deep aspects of our human nature, like our rapacious appetites as top predators, our tendency to prefer our own group to other groups, our powerful desire to procreate, and, not least, our seemingly boundless capacity to lie to ourselves when faced with unpleasant truths. As in the sinking lifeboat, nearly all of us have contributed somehow— if to greatly unequal degrees— to the dangers we’re facing. To quote the wonderful mid-twentieth-century American political cartoonist Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” 6

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.