Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more-equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than are those in unequal, consumer-driven ones.
Equality is essential for sustainability. The science is clear — people in more-equal societies are more trusting and more likely to protect the environment than are those in unequal, consumer-driven ones.
My brothers and I got into an argument over student debt forgiveness, all 3 of us have paid ours off but the oldest brother was 100% against forgiveness. Him and I have not seen eye to eye on many things, he means well, and I think we all want the same thing, we just differ in how to get there. My younger brother and I were pro-forgiveness, he summed it up nicely imo,
paraphrasing
“if you agree that student loans are predatory, but since you paid yours off others should have to as well, that doesn’t change the root causes, it just reinforces it and youve become the thing now that youve hated then. I want the slate wiped clean even if I get nothing, because the best revenge, the best conclusion for me, is making it impossible to happen again. It sucked. I got thru it, we all got thru it, even tho we shouldn’t have had to go thru it at all, but I can at least help efforts that it not hurt any more people”
At some point we have to stop looking behind and become forward thinking. In life, that usually takes forgiveness, and whole careers and industries have been built trying to help people achieve that.
In short, if we, at the micro level, want a society full of well-meaning helping people who are intelligent, patient and empathetic then we, at the macro level, can’t fall short on those ideals, ever. The ideals have to be the baseline we do better FROM, not an ideation to reach for.