Thread by @maxgladstone

It's that special type of day I never saw in Boston before two years ago, where the temperature spikes forty degrees and the snowdrifts steam.

I'm thinking about global warming and what better place to do it than on Twitter on Friday during Eastern Time commutes when nobody's watching?

Timothy Morton calls things like global warming Hyperobjects: so vast and spread through time and space that our tiny plains ape brains can't grasp them.

Like demons they possess stuff—but instead of possessing people they possess moments. Is this just a warm day? Or is it global warming? Is this civil war just a civil war? Or is it the fault of climate change?

So at any moment anything, anyone, anywhere, could be a manifestation or tool of the hyperobject. In fact, they certainly *are*—in addition to anything else they are.

We, as tiny little plains apes, *don't know* in any given moment whether a given moment is "possessed" in this sense, because our brains don't work that way.

We see whether we won that spin of roulette, whether the market just went up or down. We don't naturally see higher dimensional properties: what the market or the weather do over time.

This means that people will always be able to point out the window at the snow: "look, it's cold outside! what do you mean, Global Warming?"

Just like even practiced magicians can still fall for good slights of hand on an instinctual level. They may *know* they're being tricked. But the slight works on their brain circuitry.

I also like Hyperobjects because they lend themselves to Star Wars analogies.

You're on Alderaan. You look up into the sky. "Woah, a giant space station just appeared!"

"Nah," your buddy says. "Just the moon."

"It's like two pm," sez you. "The moon won't rise until later."

Buddy: *shrugs*

You: "The markings are all wrong."

Buddy: "Eh, I guess? Maybe clouds or something?"

By the time the question is decidable, it's irrelevant.

The killer of this is, our prestige decision making strategies are based on an idea of rational choice, an assumption that our cognitive equipment is adequate for its environment.

It's not.

We can hack our environment to make it comprehensible—we've done that with e.g. highways, built to allow humans to make meaningful decisions when traveling at speeds we were never evolved to get anywhere near.

Highways are built to look normal when you're driving 80. The lane dashes are painted to look like they're the length of city surface street lane dashes when you're approaching them at 80mph.

But we can't do that everywhere. Heck, we can barely do that with highways these days.

And we expect humanity to be able to, en masse, solve global warming through the power of, what, independently forming and acting on accurate strategic judgments about a problem our brains did not evolve to comprehend?

I less than three you, Enlightenment, but I don't think you're properly specced for this raid.

(First person who makes a joke about global warming and [Leeroy Jenkins|standing in the fire] gets an angry gif)

An added kicker: what our culture tells us we are, that is, cognitive-rational actors, is ineffective against hyperobject challenges. BUT.

It doesn't tell us that.

It says, why aren't you making better / less world-destroying consumer decisions? *You* bought that computer, you like those Funko Pop figurines, you drink diet soda.

So we end up demoralized and depressed because the sort of thinking about ourselves and our options that we're encouraged to do all through our education, is ineffective.

I think part of the fight here has to be giving up the notion that we (who?) stand at the center of the universe as rational actors. I think religious logic and thought helps, here.

(I'm not sure that "god" and "hyperobject" are equivalent, but I can find a one for one mapping from "hyperobject" onto "god" pretty quickly.)

Helps how?
1. The arrogant, self-complete, "the mind is its own place" self is no longer the hinge of the dilemma. It may be the dilemma's cause
2. Instead of atom-selves, we are elements in a ten-thousand year project for human survival and liberation from suffering.

3. Rituals can endure on that time scale. Rational informed consumer decisions rarely last from week to week. Which probably means refocusing from the self to a community of praxis and practice.

4. Okay, so what practice, what praxis, what community? Tough question. Worthy of thought. Wish I had an eightfold path ready for you, but I don't yet. But I don't think the question is unanswerable.

Sorry if that got a bit tangled. But I do think this is the right direction.

In part because people who do things in this vein make people who make decisions like rational consumers so uncomfortable!

Like, I'm not a vegan, but it's interesting to watch people argue against vegans. Mile after mile of hair splitting about cruelty, about environmental impact, about health, about bees—at the end of the day, the vegan's still practicing.

You can say the same for any ritual-focused lifestyle—distance running, for example. And of course for actual religions. A decision's made to enter the religion, to bind yourself to the thing (res + ligio). And then you're beyond choice.

(apologies if I've gotten the latin spelling wrong, it's been a while)

But you're not *not* choosing. You're just acting differently, recognizing that your own choicemaking is not sufficient.

We have a whole economy based on interpreting and comprehending and predicting our desires and offering to fulfill them.

But I don't think it's an accident that so much of the grand flowering of Axial Age philosophy and religion, in another age of change, focused on freeing humans from the chains of just this kind of desire-based "individuality"...

(Yeah, I delete tweets, some of them, when I make mistakes or overstate and catch myself in time. Sorry, archivists.)

Anyway. I spend most of my life thinking about some form of these questions, so I could go on forever. So I'll wrap it up.

Global warming is a hyperobject, and as such it has many of the properties we commonly ascribe to gods.

And how do you fight a god? I'm not positive, but I suspect: with another god.

And if you feel daunted by your inability to make smart consumer decisions that will, by themselves, have visible impact on this mess: that's okay. You're okay.

There are so many forces designed to convince you that the world is all about you, mostly so they can sell you things, including your own powerlessness.

They're wrong.

Even if you're not a Christian, I think it's meaningful that the temptations of Christ were fundamentally about convincing him he was the center of everything.

(There's a lot going on in that story. But that's where the core stands for me right now.)

Yes, the challenge is so much bigger than any of us. But also so much bigger than any of us: the striving. The response. The action. The ritual.

The steam rises from the snow, and in it we see intimations of our future work.

Have a good weekend, everybody.