YOYO Americans

Sigh. So how did Americans get so selfish, or have we always been this way?

I’m a libertarian and I’m working with the progressives right now. Libertarianism is about rights, sure, BUT – it’s also about responsibility. Not just for your own behavior, but for how that behavior affects others and the world around you.

Being libertarian is not about doing whatever you want and screwing everyone else. It is about acting responsibly and encouraging others to be responsible as well. I’m sick to death of the label libertarian being hijacked to excuse stupid, greedy selfish behavior.

Enough of this selfish excuse of a people we call “Americans”. The NASCAR dads and security moms need to wake up and realize we’re all in this mess together.
They need to realize that some people really do need help, and sometimes, we all need help. There are things we simply can’t do by ourselves.

Like change our oil addiction so we stop overheating the planet, for instance….
preferably BEFORE global warming destroys our crop lands. Most people don’t remember the dust bowl, but it could happen again. I really don’t think most of us want a repeat of the 1930s, do we?

WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future: WITTs, YOYOs, and Why Americans Don’t Go Green

The findings of the research are too detailed to do justice here. But here are some big-picture takeaways:

# There is no common agreement on what environmental concern means or what to do about it. To the extent Americans are concerned, they are concerned about widely divergent environmental issues, from global problems to local ones to their ability to hunt, fish, swim, hike, and canoe. This diffusion of knowledge, perspectives, and interests makes it hard to gain credibility, let alone achieve consensus on most issues.

# Libertarian values are gaining over communal ones. Jaren Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute has described two competing mindsets that affect politics and the environment: “We’re In This Together” (WITT) and “You’re On Your Own” (YOYO). (Linguist George Lakoff describes a similar divergence between the conservative right, which values self-reliance and self-responsibility, and the liberal left, which favors caring, empathy, cooperation, and growth.)

The environmental community — and most green marketers — lean pretty strongly toward the communal, WITT side of the house, a position at odds with the political zeitgeist, at least as practiced for the past quarter century by the YOYO Republican Party. Clearly, there’s a need for more “macho” (in Lakoff’s terms) marketing — the notion of man as protector, and of personal responsibility to protect families, communities, and the planet.

Many environmentalists I know believe they have a better understanding of the state of the world than do other people. And they might. But that’s of little consequence. The millions of Security Moms and NASCAR Dads who haven’t yet tuned into how climate change and fisheries loss might mess with their kids’ future aren’t about to be beaten into submission by the latest arguments or evidence. They’re not about to make purchase decisions based on a maybe-someday rationale for stemming environmental problems. They want to know: what’s in it for me, today?

So, big news: Americans are shallow, misinformed, self-interested, and unsophisticated. But they’re our neighbors, our colleagues, and our relatives. And they’re likely your clients, customers, or constituents. If you want to move them toward greener behavior and actions, you’ll need to deal — carefully and creatively — with all of these sobering realities.

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3 Responses

  1. hmm…so i knit 150 interpretations of red wiggler worms, the kind that will eat garbage from your kitchen, turn it into compost. many, mostly women, to knit one too for my art installation in a NYC botanical garden. then the City closed all the compost projects, stopped recycling programs. couple of beats (years), started them again. it can be pretty discouraging, donna.

    now i’m knitting Condom Amulets. so far just two knitters who are stars in that particular galaxy have taken an interest. any suggestions? check out the “safe sex” category at my blog…would you feature one? wear one? just a thought.-naomi

  2. Naomi,

    I would get the design out there to other knitters, who I know would be interested.

    I have safe sex these days – it’s the sex from 30 years ago that has me messed up, apparently. Hpv leads to squamous cells leads to colon cancer – lucky I don’t have cervical cancer too (yet) – yeah, people ought to know this stuff and practice safe sex, for sure….

  3. I have a pretty strong belief in personal rights, so I suppose in that sense I am Libertarian. But I think there are a lot of things people ought not be allowed to do to each other. Several of radical libertarian assumptions about the freedoms parents have in dealing with their children I am strongly opposed to. JS Mill argues that a father ought not be allowed to keep his child out of school because the benefits of schooling accrue not to the father but to the child and to the society that child will live in as a member of a community as an adult. And I agree. I imagine there might be a number of things that have similar arguments. Similarly, I believe a lot of governmental restraints on corporations protect the liberties and interests of individuals.

    I am all for self-interest and independence. But I believe very strongly in enlightened self-interest. And though I have no children and probably never will, I am attached to the idea of leaving a world that people can enjoy living in, even after I am gone. So I believe in sustainability. I wish everyone would read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. Then we would have a common language to use when talking about the costs of living beyond our means – a common language to use in talking about sustainability, a common language to use to talk about the social cost of ingnoring science.

    When it comes to the enviroment I think people can respond positively when they understand the costs of environmental degradation. A recent blog I read about An Inconvenient Truth suggested that there was a segment that featured a Tennessee farm, and the kinds of people who do not respond to the normal global warming arguments – data and charts and so on – responded to that scene because it made the argument in a vary personal, local, concrete, visceral level.

    This was good to remember, because I take the data driven approach. I know, for instance, that the next home I buy will be at least 94m above sea level. I have done the math: I know how much ice sits atop the antarctic shelf. In the US this might put me on the lunatic fringe, but there are a number of people in England talking seriously about the issue. Half that nation’s real estate could disappear overnight.

    Solar panels are still future tense for me, but they are getting closer consideration. I am grateful that NJ has a rather progressive rebate plan for renewable energy projects and aims at making 20% of energy be renewable in some foreseable future. And I am writing my own rants about the abysmal state of public debate about energy policy in the US. see Power to the People..

    For all my belief in individual rights and responsibilities, I have a profound sense that there exists a communal well being that extends outside the walls of our gated communities. And I believe that the greatest failure of political discourse since 1980 has been the implicit attack on the notion of common good as a political category. YOYO, as a legacy of Reagan’s thinking may undermine all efforts to respond positively and productively to common threats at the national level- at least the sort where the solution cannot be achieved merely by ramping up the rate of gunfire. Hardly a day passes when I fail to wish I lived in a civilized nation. But most of them exist too close to sea level! 🙂

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