Problem-posing education does not and cannot serve the interests of the oppressor. No oppressive order could permit the oppressed to begin to question: Why?

Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in “changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them”; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.

Implicit in the banking concept [of education] is the assumption of a dichotomy between human beings and the world: a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others…In this view, the person is not a conscious being (corpo consciente); he or she is rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside.

https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    8 months ago

    How do we reconcile in the West especially the incredible amount of waste and carbon emissions each person puts out, especially compared with the global south.

    By advocating for solutions that the global south adopts out of necessity. Or moving to places where they are mitigated to some degree. Mass transit, drastically reduced disposables, denser living, extended family homes, and localized agriculture all go a long way towards shrinking per-capita waste.

    The highlights of Western living are rarely the biggest carbon contributors. Air travel is miserable. Coal power is archaic. Our homes are overflowing with junk mail and funko pops in a way that creates no real satisfaction. Our beaches have become waste dumps. Our forests have been decimated by logging and shriveled up by our irrigation policies.

    None of these have anything to do with your personal decision to have kids. Your child will not factor into the volume of carbon we put into the atmosphere, because your child isn't the one setting the policies that favor fossil fuels over renewables or air travel over HSR.

    I think it is an important fact to recon when considering having a child in the west.

    I think its just another edition of "Individual Solutions for Systemic Problems". No better than a pledge to do more recycling or to swear off eating red meat. This simply doesn't impact industrial forces.

    • MattsAlt [comrade/them]
      ·
      8 months ago

      Definitely agree it's an individual solution for a structural problem line if reasoning and something I'm conflicted about when mulling this over. Where I encounter difficulty is the ability to prevent the additional emissions and waste of another human in the West by not having kids rather than individual responsibility items like recycling plastic bottles that are already existing in the world and consumers are supposed to be responsible for that. I guess that same argument can be applied to having kids in so far as individuals are not responsible for the state of the environment today. Certainly something I am still thinking through and not an area where I pass judgement on others who think different

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        8 months ago

        Where I encounter difficulty is the ability to prevent the additional emissions and waste of another human in the West by not having kids rather than individual responsibility items like recycling plastic bottles that are already existing in the world and consumers are supposed to be responsible for that.

        Think of it this way. The federal government spends an enormous amount of money propping up failing industries. We've got tons of agricultural subsidy going to (ostensibly) highly profitable businesses that still end up destroying something like 40% of their industrial output. You get back to the old Grapes Of Wrath parable:

        The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

        that puts the lie to the notion of human demand driving industrial productivity and waste.

        I guess that same argument can be applied to having kids in so far as individuals are not responsible for the state of the environment today.

        We have a systematic problem, one in which people in power have devised a mechanism of control over the body public that relies on artificially inducing rising profits through engineered lower wages and higher prices. The waste we generate as a consequence of this planned economic model is incidental to its number of participants. If the population of the US were to shrink by half tomorrow, the social engineers at the top of the political food chain would scramble to maintain the rate of profit first and foremost. That would still create unsustainable amounts of waste, because waste - in the neoliberal growth model - still remains "free". Arguably more free now that there are fewer people to contest natural resources.

        Nothing puts paid to this more than bitcoin and AI schemes in the tech sector. Turning highly efficient and effective calculation engines into ever-escalating busy-boxes that gobble up natural resources at an enormous pace. All to feed the illusion of productivity into the finance sector model and to justify the Big Line Goes Up mythology of American economic growth.

        Population size isn't driving consumption of bitcoins. It isn't driving the consumption of air travel. It isn't driving the consumption of waygu beef or skyscrapper steel. This are decisions entirely beyond your control, and your decision to procreate has nothing to do with them.