From Kim Stanley Robinson's new Sci Fi Book, "New York, 2140" which is set after climate change.
"But okay, you can’t really imagine a catastrophe will hit you until it does. People just don’t have that kind of mental capacity. If you did you would be stricken paralytic with fear at all times, because there are some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren’t going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be. So, nice. Useful. Except when disastrously bad.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140 (Kindle Locations 2206-2210). Orbit. Kindle Edition.
"But okay, you can’t really imagine a catastrophe will hit you until it does. People just don’t have that kind of mental capacity. If you did you would be stricken paralytic with fear at all times, because there are some guaranteed catastrophes bearing down on you that you aren’t going to be able to avoid (i.e. death), so evolution has kindly given you a strategically located mental blind spot, an inability to imagine future disasters in any way you can really believe, so that you can continue to function, as pointless as that may be. So, nice. Useful. Except when disastrously bad.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. New York 2140 (Kindle Locations 2206-2210). Orbit. Kindle Edition.
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“It’s about climate change and sea level rise, but it’s also about the way that our economic system doesn’t allow us to afford a decent future. As one of the characters says early in the book, “We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, but we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws.”
Finance, globalization—this current moment of capitalism—has a stranglehold on the world by way of all our treaties and laws, but it adds up to a multigenerational Ponzi scheme, an agreement on the part of everybody to screw the future generations for the sake of present profits. By the logic of our current system we have to mess up the Earth, and that is crazy. My new novel explores this problem and how we might get out of it.” Kim Stanley Robinson (Scientific American interview 3/13/17) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/q-a-kim-stanley-robinson-explains-how-he-flooded-manhattan/
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