for climate change - wartime mobilization, interview - Seth Klein - A Good War, polycrisis - conflict, climate crisis - conflict, Naomi Klein - brother

summary

• An interview with activist Seth Klein on his book: A Good War. Klein studied how WWI and WWII stimulated a rapid mobilization of Canada with an eye to translating the same methods to combating climate change.

• This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
• It makes me think of the old cliches:
  • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
  • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
• the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
  • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
  • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
    • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
• The conversation explores the process of:
  • othering,
  • coopting and
  • abandoning
• of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
• and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
• In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
• Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
• There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
• however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
  • a sense of helplessness,
  • anger emerging from injustice
• a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
• is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
• Another cliche springs to mind
  • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
  • hence the amplifying role of social media
• When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere: