“Don’t they have grandchildren?” was The case for universal basic income UBI

Posted by Russ Abbott on May 20, 2021; 6:07pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-case-for-universal-basic-income-UBI-tp7601843p7602056.html

Bill McKibbon writes a regular email sponsored by The New Yorker about climate change. His latest (no link since it's apparently not on the New Yorker website) how people (or corporations, e.g., oil company executives) knowingly continue to exacerbate the damage caused by climate change. He goes on to talk about "an interesting explanation in a new book from the British psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe. “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis”. The answer, he says, in the book's subtitle: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare. 

McKibbon goes on, "Weintrobe writes that people’s psyches are divided into caring and uncaring parts, and the conflict between them “is at the heart of great literature down the ages, and all major religions.” The uncaring part wants to put ourselves first; it’s the narcissistic corners of the brain that persuade each of us that we are uniquely important and deserving, and make us want to except ourselves from the rules that society or morality set so that we can have what we want. “Most people’s caring self is strong enough to hold their inner exception in check,” she notes, but, troublingly, “ours is the Golden Age of Exceptionalism.” Neoliberalism—especially the ideas of people such as Ayn Rand, enshrined in public policy by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—“crossed a Rubicon in the 1980s,” and neoliberals “have been steadily consolidating their power ever since.” Weintrobe calls leaders who exempt themselves in these ways “exceptions” and says that, as they “drove globalization forwards in the 1980s,” they were captivated by an ideology that whispered, “Cut regulation, cut ties to reality and cut concern.” Donald Trump was the logical end of this way of thinking, a man so self-centered that he interpreted all problems, even a global pandemic, as attempts to undo him. “The self-assured neoliberal imagination has increasingly revealed itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it causes,” she writes."

This is all related to the discussion we were having about whether a society of  reciprocity is possible.

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