Thread by @SteB777

The primary problem in our culture is the thinking style we've developed, which stops us seeing the big picture - "Loss of biodiversity threatens the human race just as much as climate change". We need radical change not just to address climate change.
independent.co.uk/environment/un…

1) The analytical thinking style our culture has developed, means that when we think about a particular problem we focus so much on it, that we lose complete sight of all else, the big picture, and it become out of sight, out of mind.

2) It is this thinking style, not the discovery of technology, which allow us to start the perpetual economic growth industrial capitalist model, although it should have been obvious at the beginning, that it would destroy the natural systems which sustain us.

3) It is this ability to wear intellectual blinkers, which cuts out the wider reality, which both facilitated this suicidal economic model, and which prevents us stepping outside of it, and changing to a sustainable economic model.

4) It must be understood that the mode of thinking our modern culture has developed is quite arbitrary, it is not innately human, and it doesn't have to be like this.

5) The economic model which has cast a spell on our modern culture is a scam, a "multi-generational Ponzi scheme" initially designed to make a few people who held the reins of power, stupendously wealthy. Like all scams, it is facilitated by selling people a false dream.

6) Like all scams, which humans seem particularly prone to falling for, the secret to breaking out of the hold they have on us, is admitting that we have been conned, and breaking the denial and blindness to the big picture, which enabled it.

7) Everything we take for granted about our modern society, our governments, our way of life, the values imposed on us, are one big illusion. This is how con-artists work, by casting this big spell of false ideas, with big promises that aren't real.

8) The big lie of this scam was that things were always going to get better. That we'd all get wealthier, have more stuff, the sort of thing that appeals to our ambitions. Yet infinite growth in a finite system is an impossibility. We've been conned, now wake up to it.

9) Ideas can be so powerful, seem so real to us, that the idea that this illusion of perpetual growth can continue, blots out the evidence that we are heading towards an ecological crisis, which will result in the eventual collapse of our civilization, and mass starvation.

10) The way to break the spell that these false ideas have on us, is to realise that all ideas are only crude approximations, and many ideas are completely illusory, by understanding that the map (the idea) is never the territory (reality).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80…

I briefly and rapidly wrote this short essay to encapsulate what I was saying. For brevity there is much not mentioned, and it was rapidly written, and may contain typos. @GeorgeMonbiot @GretaThunberg @ExtinctionR

Overall, what I'm saying is that the way we've been taught to think, is presented as the only way to think, but this is simply not true. It is not the way humans originally thought, and I say this to illustrate how our thinking can be changed.

Ultimately, what I'm saying is one that single logical fallacy, the mistaking the map for the territory error, has facilitated our destruction of the natural world which sustains us. Perpetual growth is self-evidently a fallacious idea, but the idea has beat out the reality.

I believe that if every person was educated in the simple concept of the mistaking the map to the territory logical fallacy, it could change everything. People would be able to spot when they were being conned.
rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mistaking…