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- Title
Climate Change: Your Money or Your Life.
- Authors
ADAMS, KENNETH ALAN
- Abstract
This article sketches the outlines of the catastrophic eco-future that awaits us unless extraordinary measures are taken to limit carbon emissions. It argues that fossil fuel interests block progress toward solving the problem of climate change and suggests the massive resistance to a carbon-free future that corporate interests will mount, which may include armed conflict. The issue of hyper-consumption is another crucial component of the climate problem. American consumption habits have been engineered to meet the recurrent problem of a capitalistic economy, overproduction, and a variety of initiatives have been devised to resolve this dilemma, including planned obsolescence and massive advertising. Contemporary consumer capitalism, it is argued, is premised on infantilization, a deliberate effort to utilize human development as a weapon against citizens, turning consumers into kids and kids into consumers, as the inchoate boundarilessness of early human development becomes the regressive basis for ensnaring the populace in endlessly varied inducements to consume. The primary goal of infantilization is hyper-consumption, which utilizes advertising as propaganda favoring the continuation of the capitalistic status quo. Advertising creates group-fantasies as the basis for consumption, the primary one being that consumer choice offers the avenue to a better life. In so doing, the obligations of a shared social world are ignored and a privatized existence is privileged. The market thus trumps democracy. With regard to climate change, it is suggested that we are at a tipping point. The road to the future will be paved, one way or another, with sacrifice. Either consumers will sacrifice the choices, aspirations, and lifestyles that have been assiduously cultivated in them for decades, or millions will be forced to sacrifice their lives. The article closes with an effort to contextualize the role of psychohistory and a call for psychohistorians to practice advocacy research.
- Subjects
CLIMATE change; ECONOMIC consumption &; the environment; PSYCHOHISTORY; ENERGY consumption &; economics; CARBON dioxide mitigation; CAPITALISM
- Publication
Journal of Psychohistory, 2020, Vol 48, Issue 1, p2
- ISSN
0145-3378
- Publication type
Article