The Inevitability of the House Winning (If the House is the Earth and We're Just Playing Penny Slots)
A casino is a place where people buy slices of hope.
They put their ten dollars in the Game King and for that split second before they hit the button, there is this momentary flash of hope that this time the slots will line up and they’ll get a payout. It doesn’t much matter that they’ve pushed that spin button a thousand times and only been rewarded a handful and that the house has absorbed far more money than any jackpot could achieve. It is this sense of hope that fuels the entire industry.
The smart players know that when it comes to slots, they only get two choices that have anything to do with the outcome: how much they bet and how fast they play. The smart ones still feel that bit of hope but understand that the numbers are generated randomly and that they ultimately have no control whatsoever on the results. But they still hope. Each time. Despite that knowledge.
Climate activist Naomi Klein argued recently during an interview with The Intercept, “So many environmental responses have just been minor tweaks to an economy based on endless consumption — take your electric car to the drive-through for an Impossible Burger and a Coke with a paper straw. Of course it’s better than the alternative. But it’s nowhere close to the depth of change required if we hope to actually pull our planet back from the brink.”
On the flip side, in The New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen posits a different approach. “If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.”
I’m a true blue optimist but I’m not blind or stupid, and am inclined to see the latter of his choices as a bit more realistic. Betting on oligarchs and activists to battle it out leaves us with only two choices: who we vote for and how much time we can spend on promoting our candidates while still holding jobs, paying bills, and getting a meal every now and then. Yet we still have that flash of hope every time we vote.
Let’s face facts. This has been an alarm bell crisis since Jimmy Carter was president. We royally fucked it up and there’s simply no realistic way to even slow it down. We want desperately to believe we can move the needle back, that we can save the environment, we want to hope.
The U.N.'s latest report put together by over ninety authors and editors from over forty countries is probably the most dire warning yet about the inevitability of climate change.
The report says that, unless the world immediately begins reducing the burning of coal and oil and gas that drive up global temperatures, the world will suffer tremendous consequences. In a mere twenty-two years from now, global food supplies will be threatened by increasing droughts and heat waves.
Below sea-level nations could be flooded by a rising sea, triggering huge caravans of refugees. Storms and wildfires will grow in intensity, costing billions in damages and lives lost.
It’s in the reality of the necessary immediate change that dooms us. As Klein points out, thus far our attempts to curb the deleterious effect eight billion humans are having on the planet have been largely cosmetic rather than substantive. This isn’t the fault of our politicians and leaders (or Baby Boomers or Generation Z or White People or Men) as much as it is in our inability to radically change our day-to-day plugging ten dollars into the machine and hitting spin.
Tell an ordinary person that investing into clean energy will cost this much or that much and he’ll be able to see it in the abstract and either agree or disagree but it has no personal stake in it. That abstract perspective is easy. Tell the same guy he has to get rid of his automobile and walk to work or no longer eat in a fast food joint and he’s gonna push back pretty hard and the abstract becomes concrete.
The True Believers proselytize that unless we all pitch in and change our entire structure of being and consuming, the planet will become a living hell but they’re preaching some sort of eternal life for the planet that it’s too late to hope for.
I have respect for the eco-warriors and four million activists who marched last week. They see a problem that is catastrophic and are doing something to change that. Politics is about power and the fight for that power is participatory rather than spectator-driven. It is, however, theater. So is religion. Unfortunately, all the theater in the world isn’t going to change certain indelible and undeniable facts.
These two kids are exactly the same as one another…
The science says that we would need curb carbon emissions by 70 percent to keep the carbon dioxide level stable right now. Seventy percent just to keep the water level where it’s at, to stem the tide just a bit. Seventy percent immediately.
The odds of the entire planet of eight billion people and the industries built up around consumption ceasing the use of carbon emission producing technology by 70 percent in the next year are astronomical. Impossible odds. Only under global marshal law is this going to happen in a world where discomfort and inconvenience is considered the ultimate evil.
There’s an older guy in the casino about four times a week. He comes in and does the same thing every time: he plops down in front of the same two identical machines, plugs $100 into each and plays. When he runs out, he puts another couple hundred in and continues. He then proceeds to complain that the games are stealing his money and gets free packs of cigarettes. Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that definition, this guy is batshit.
By that definition, so are we all.
…and both are no different from these folks.
We know we aren’t going to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent. Ever. The magnitude of that ever coming to pass is like getting the entire globe to simply cease using the internet ever again. Christ, it’s taken decades to get enough of us to agree that gay marriage is no threat to straights and that marijuana should be legal. Reducing carbon emissions by 70 percent immediately is as fictional as the idea of original sin and heaven in the clouds.
We know it and yet we keep barking and marching and lobbying for substantive change while driving to the marches, using paper to print the pamphlets while drinking out of plastic bottles filled with water stolen by Nestlé and grabbing a Hot Pocket or packaged bowl of yogurt. We keep having babies to add to that eight billion mark thinking that more people isn’t the actual cause of the global decay.
The casino game that pays out the best is the one that provides the player the maximum amount of choices on how to play: blackjack. The player controls the bet, the choice to Hit or Stand, the observation of the cards on the dealer’s side, side bets, surrenders, insurance. It’s a slower game than a slot machine and gives some control over the outcome to the player. Blackjack is the Plan B for the degenerate gambler.
Blackjack players look down at slot players because they know that playing slots is basically just giving your money away for a slice of that hope with the inevitable end of going broke anyway. The house still wins over time but Blackjack still gets a higher payout than even poker.
When it comes to the impending disaster of climate, it might be prudent for us to acknowledge that we’ve screwed the pooch on this and go to a Plan B. Prepare for the coming deluge and drought. Expand our choices and gain just a smidge of control over the outcome. Focus the theater of activism on increased birth control and stem the tide of constant expansion of the global tribe. Preach the mantra of expanding FEMA to Homeland Security funding. Train the military in disaster relief measures. We aren’t going to roll this thing back but we can prepare for massive starvation, horrifying earthquakes, floods and fires, and maybe invest a whole in industrial sunscreen.
Trust me, no one is going to give two shits if we roll back carbon emissions by 20 percent or 40 percent when their kids are starving to death in 135˚ heat and the only fresh water is the slowly evaporating Great Lakes region.
