It feels wrong to be happy that me and my country are going to (maybe) be (relatively) ok when the shit (that we threw) hits the fan for many other people and countries.
You should read Zeihan's book. One of the main premises is that the US allowed for international peace (known as Pax Americana) via enforcing peaceful international trade with a large navy. Zeihan's position is that this was largely done for security post WW2, not financial benefit. The Americans pay a very high price for this international trade security.
There seems to be an overwhelming assumption from Americans that the US is destroying the world, but in many ways we've enabled the greatest time in human history by allowing peaceful cooperation.
I'm assuming your country is the US, and they're who you believe threw the shit in question.
Peaceful cooperation amongst countries that are very important to world security. There was a peaceful cooperation amongst all major world powers, which is a drastic turning point from the prior few hundred years that bred indefinite wars amongst major world powers. Cambodia, and most other countries that have seen wars since the end of WW2, don't really matter on the world scale. Doesn't make the negative impacts on them any less real, but in general sweeping statements, the world did see peaceful cooperation.
I think this is a common problem. Some of us sometimes feel guilty for being happy.
> the shit (that we threw) hits the fan
I'm not sure anyone is to blame because no one created human civilizations except all of us. My view is aligned with the human potential movement. As I understand it, we need a lot more work to overcome our tendencies towards what Catholics call the Seven Deadly Sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride. We are over-coming our primitive animal nature to something more intelligent and refined. Buddhists among others have a lot to say about letting our troublesome thoughts and emotions go and focusing on our resting nature. I like the Kundalini model for a nice way to visualize our human potential.
> I'm not sure anyone is to blame because no one created human civilizations except all of us.
The West generally, and US specifically, tends to release much more carbon into the atmosphere than the countries that will suffer the most from climate change. The US further uses a lot more energy per capita than just about anyone else (in the Top 5?) in day-to-day life.
Most other industrialized countries can achieve the same level of comfort and lifestyle as the US with much less energy use.
> My view is aligned with the human potential movement
And yet, it's largely the global north, and America in specific - a small subset of humanity - who will escape the reaping, even though they did a disproportionate amount of sowing, to keep the Catholic thread going I guess.
> Some of us sometimes feel guilty for being happy
That's not what they said. They said they feel guilty for being happy that others will suffer immensely while they get to skate relatively unharmed. I agree that some folks do feel unnecessarily guilty sometimes, but I don't think that applies here.
> And yet, it's largely the global north, and America in specific
Are you blaming Americans for China's environmental destruction because we buy their products? Americans have created systems that protect the environment that China could take advantage of
> They said they feel guilty for being happy that others will suffer immensely while they get to skate relatively unharmed
I can't do anymore than I am doing to correct wrongs. I'm not mad at the English currently alive because their ancestors starved my Irish ancestors and I don't feel guilty that some of my ancestors might have owned slaves. I want to be happy, but weirdly some people don't and are always finding reasons to be unhappy.
“I have noticed that a man is usually about as happy as he has made up his mind to be.”
Look at the CO2 chart in the link above, China only recently became the biggest emitter and even then they make up maybe a quarter of CO2 emissions.
The vast majority of emissions and environmental destruction has been done by the global north, only recently has the rest of the world started to become the majority in this sense. You can’t just point the finger and forget all of history up to this point.
> Are you blaming Americans for China's environmental destruction because we buy their products? Americans have created systems that protect the environment that China could take advantage of
Some of the systems may make products expensive, and the whole point of offshoring production to China (from the US and other places), so to make them inexpensively. Are consumers willing to start paying the externalities of climate change in their products (regardless of where they are produced)?
And as Kurzgesagt points out in "Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It?", while China as a whole releases the most, per capita each citizen is relatively low(er) emissions (especially compared to the US). Further, the country with highest cumulatively/historically released carbon to date—which has led us to the climate change problem in the first place—is the US:
It's going to be more like you put on the only oxygen mask in your seat row but you're the reason why there aren't more and also the reason why we need to use the masks in the first place.
No single person — no single nation, even — bears quite that much responsibility for climate change, let alone the other things. Too many people did too much for too long, the blame is diffuse over all of us.
But yes, we are a bit short on metaphorical oxygen masks.
Of course no single person or single group bears all of the responsibility, I was leaning on the already established mask metaphor in this conversation.
But if you mean "all of us" as in all people in the world? No we are absolutely not all equally to blame for this. And it is true that, overall, in general, the ones who disproportionately caused this, and disproportionally benefitted from it, will also be disproportionally protected from its worst effects.
Focusing on the diffusion of blame or the weakness of the metaphor without acknowledging that dynamic is cowardly imo.
However, I would be surprised if more than a mere few million humans alive today are sufficiently harmless to the ecosystem that they can be counted as blameless. While I would of course accept that minors can’t be counted as at fault due to lack of power or awareness, I would say that in practice this also applies to virtually everyone, given the safe emissions level is 0.1% of actual emissions and that this means that even most eco-friendly food production isn’t friendly enough yet, let alone all the other things.
Still, I recon we can get there without loss of quality of life. I may be pessimistic about politics, but I’m optimistic about technology.
There seems to be an overwhelming assumption from Americans that the US is destroying the world, but in many ways we've enabled the greatest time in human history by allowing peaceful cooperation.
I'm assuming your country is the US, and they're who you believe threw the shit in question.