Sustainability
A conservative dictum co-opted by ideologues who imagine it as a progressive novelty. They do not seem to notice their conspicuous change of political lanes, likely because their fragile partisan identity could not manage the blow.
Highly desired by supply management firms and lobbyists, who use it as a means for control.
Sustainability is not inherently a political issue, which is why we should challenge those who insist party lines are the most appropriate way to manage conscientiousness. If the politicization of sustainability is legitimate, then it is up to the speaker to justify this framing.
Everyone cares about the sustainability of systems that generate prosperity, retiring those that have outlived their utility, and the creation of a promising few that appear to have potential. The contention is not the topic itself, rather it pertains to how we identify which systems fall into which category. The pressure comes not from the pretention, but from the parsimony.
There are enough arguments and evidence to justify most positions in their own respect, which means that this parsing is best decided first by articulating or establishing moderate values, and then using them to assess the quality of each system. This is a delicate process not only due to the temporal sensitivity of such assessments, but it demands that we are capable of identifying our values.
Human values exist, and while we may disagree on their respective validity due to how prolific they are in any given moment, pretending that we share nothing in common excuses you from the conversation. Making sustainability political implies that third parties who benefit from dividing us know what is best for us while insisting we have nothing in common. This is a bad game.
Our duty as ordinary citizens are therefore twofold: to establish common values at regular intervals so we remain agile when confronted by the problems of an unpredictable world, and to safeguard our minds from the tendency to conclude that our preferred system is pristine or wholly generative.
Every system has trade offs, and things can change quickly in very dramatic ways. It is the sustainability of human ingenuity and cooperation that needs to be prioritized if we stand a chance at contending with the fallout of our past, present and future.
See: POLITICS, LEFT VERSUS RIGHT
Posted: 13 Feb 2023
