The predicament of industrial civilization

Louis Helbig 

To understand the predicament of industrial civilization, it’s not enough to grasp the outward shape of the crisis of our time: the looting of a finite planet’s stock of resources, the destabilization of the global climate, the breathtaking cluelessness with which politicians, pundits, and ordinary citizens alike insist that the only way we can get out of this mess involves doing even more of the same things that got us into it in the first place, and the rest of it.

Follow the roots of our predicament down into the soil that feeds them, and you’ll find yourself in a murky realm of unspoken narratives and unacknowledged desires—the “mind-forg’d manacles,” as Blake called them, that keep most of us shackled in place as the great rumbling vehicle of global industrial society accelerates down the slope of its decline and fall.

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