Who Exactly is "WE"?


Empty field at Camp Creek State Park in West Virginia




How often do you hear someone say, "Well, we should do _____ [fill in the blank]." In a conversation with another person, one tends to automatically think that "we" means the two of you. But when used in the context of society at large, it fails for different reasons, one of which is due to people not seeing the same things on any given idea. Still, it is important to define precisely who "we" actually is, and Tim Watkins helps us in this article. Most notable is this quote from the article:

"War, of course, is but one of the many bottleneck crises washing over us. The declining energy and resources which are the cause of war is a more existential matter. As are climate change, freshwater shortages, environmental decline, depleted soils, etc. And in each case, the use of “we” is more often deployed as a psychological device to mask individual powerlessness. Because if the supranational technocratic kleptocracy have failed to resolve them, while the nation state is no longer fit for the task, what collective is left to us to resolve crises that are global in scale?

The sad reality is that in the face of all but the smallest of crises, it turns out that there is no collective “we,” and that we are each on our own."



When I present the fact that ecological overshoot is a predicament with an outcome, not a problem with a solution; people often ask me questions such as, "Well, what should we do then?"

See - there's that "we" that is the focus of this article. So, I tried to cover this aspect in the series of articles titled, So, What Should We Do?  That links to Part Four of the series, which includes links to the other three parts as well. Given the facts that Tim Watkins points out above, and being that "we" lack agency in the first place, a valid argument can be made that no prescriptive actions can truly be dictated as we collapse, as most will be unenforceable anyway. So, what we "should" do is actually a personal matter for the most part. Some actions will achieve better mileage than others, but I have tried to point out actions which might be beneficial and ones which will not help.

So, whenever you hear the word we being used in this context, it might be a good idea to point out these realities.


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