Fuck The Earth
Mindless Virtue Signaling Slows Actual Progress
There are few phrases worse than “Help the Planet” or “Save the Earth!”
Language like this isn’t innocent. It is idiotic, inane, and insidiously injurious:
Idiotic because you can’t impact the Earth. Might as well say you want to help the sun or save the van Allen belts.
George Carlin version:Inane because no one disagrees. Brad Pitt wants to “save the earth.” So does Ted Nugent. Patagonia, Whole Foods, Ducks Unlimited, Nike, FIFA, VW, BP (”Beyond Petroleum”), Waste Management, and Asarco LLC, the strip-mining company operating near Tucson. Might as well say you love oxygen, puppies, and Santa Claus.
Injurious because you can’t make meaningless statements that everyone endorses without opportunity costs.
There is an incredible amount of intense suffering in the world. Those who want to profit from (or simply ignore) this cosmic cruelty are deliriously joyful when people waste their breath squealing unactionable and meaningless mantras.
“But ‘the Earth’ is just shorthand.”
Yeah, it is shorthand for mindless virtue signalling. “Look at me! I’m impotent and weak-minded but oh-so-virtuous! Cute mammal picture! Massive expected value! Please Like and Subscribe!”
The best thing you can do to maintain the status quo isn’t to ignore the problems. Rather, the best thing you can do for Tyson, Trump, and Tuberculosis is to feed the self-righteous Doom and distraction machine of complaints, slogans, and memes.
There is a lot of hard work that needs to be done to make the world a better place. But actually making the world a better place requires:
Concretely and specifically naming what is wrong;
Recognizing what can and needs to be done to mitigate the wrong;
Understanding why that hasn’t been done already;
Identifying what can realistically be done to change that.
At best, meaningless slogans distract from all of that.
I like to call it a vessel phrase: empty language used to export a company’s image to the public without commitment or changes in business practice. Classic greenwashing. I can’t help but wonder whether all those “save the earth” campaigns companies put out cause more environmental damage in marketing and waste than actually mitigating environmental harm. It’s a structural problem…as long as companies can derive profit from vessel language, there is no reason for them to change their actions.
I would add: Not patting yourself on the back for some minimally beneficial (or perhaps full-on useless) gesture and treating that as a free pass to do whatever else you want. (valid for both large industrials and individual people)