I agree somewhat, in the sense that climate change will have happened slow enough and on a wide enough scale that its impact on human geographic dispersion, social organization, and reproductive patterns will be imperceptible to those feeling its effects.
It won’t be a catastrophe simply by nature of lacking the sudden violence necessary to qualify. Will it suck, will it transform things for the worse, and will our successors envy us, if not outright loathe and resent us? Definitely.
It’s not the way, it’s a way. Life-saving notices are often redundant to reach as wide of an audience as possible, e.g. public radio, commercial radio, sirens.
They counted their friends and colleagues among their employers, actually. And the government’s GI Bill and veterans’ administration’s work placement and employee advocacy programs were among their most cherished programs.
My grandparents were dustbowl survivors and veterans who humbly attribute their survival and later success to their neighbors, friends, and colleagues that helped them, and whom they spent their later lives trying to pay back in kindness and friendship.
The influence of our relationships, and who we know, on our worldview is certainly fascinating.
My grandparents had church, social clubs, mutual aid organizations, and unions which all helped (paid for) support of one kind or another during their hardships.
Working together and accommodating others is probably one of the strengths we’ve actually failed to foster in the contemporary context, to our detriment. The atomization of the individual and the cult of silent suffering is something they’d balk or pity us for.
Maybe, but I’m cautious about assuming my own superiority, i.e. that my lonely cohort and I are the only ones able to read and infer the proper meaning from writing, and that others are too easily misguided.
It’s useful in the argument that (1) states, as they’ve grown in size have also been reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size, and (2) that companies, as they grow in size, must be reigned-in due to the power that comes with their size (anti-trust, anti-monopoly).
Metaphors are useful but they can also just confuse the issue through unnecessary abstraction. The fundamental question is already there at the surface: it’s not about market capitalization or about gdp, but about the power that size in either metric represents. That’s the characteristic binding these two dissimilar ideas together.
Using those three characteristics as necessary conditions for authoritarian dictatorship excludes many actual historical authoritarian dictatorships as well.
The size of some companies can be taken for granted. Living in a western industrialized country with many large companies, it’s easy to lose a sense of scale. The comparison widens the lens and grounds business organizations within the context of other human organizations e.g. the state. The comparison is also a setup for the next paragraph:
> One reason that’s significant: if many multinational companies actually were countries, they would be authoritarian dictatorships more ruthlessly efficient than any in existence. At many such companies, managers wield virtually unchecked power over subordinates and, thanks to modern technology, increasingly practice advanced techniques of monitoring and surveillance as well.
I read it as saying, “there are state economies that, even surrendering all of the goods and services they’ve created and provided in a year, cannot exchange them for the full market value of some companies.”
It’s a simple inert activity. One becomes functionally dormant for a period of time and returns to activity having done nothing material, in a literal sense.