I favor living in the world designed and built by those with creative agency.

And capitalists often view the same abstractions as inevitable in a competitive winner-take-all landscape, quipping that if growth is suppressed (laws, unions) the growth will take place elsewhere. In this view, the only styles of design are invention and capital allocation.

My own take…

Our social world is structured by abstractions that 1) provide real utility (eg trust, insurance, fungibility) 2) have real environmental impact (eg production, deforestation).

Bioregionalists view these abstractions as non-inevitable and potentially subject to a design process...

That was an excellent read. “Sober,” you might call it, in its insistence on reasoned consideration of a complex problem.

Personal note: I’m into this new theme of essay: “humanist engineering” – in contrast to the “capitalist engineering” and “industrial engineering” that we are so familiar with.

Herzberg asks, “How does this system work?” “What are our effective levers?” “What has worked before?”

Absolute lunacy. The premise of any successful society is inclusion of the skillful.

Almost nothing else matters in comparison to that one attribute.

Do you suggest that the left is more comfortable with economic power being overturned, like a compost pile, producing yet more economic power?

Bullshit. The left literally invented marketplaces, impersonal trust (eg, signing contracts with strangers), accounting and financial mathematics, and modern legal system.

“There is likely to be one pileup of civilizations that don’t last very long — those that were “too dumb” — and a second pileup of civilizations that somehow figured it out, so to speak.”

This essay exemplifies the vanguard of our environmental movement. All effective action comes in the form of Aikido moves, redirecting existing energy. No person/group can create the energy required to form a new reality; it is necessary to harness the energy that already exists in the system.