This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate Analysis

This book is certainly not shy about its core arguments, but the reader can still interpret Klein's arguments to gain a deeper awareness about her point of view.

Consider Klein's nuanced argument about our social lives in late Capitalism. She says that we have slowly forgotten that Capitalism is only one hypothetical option for human life. That doesn't mean she doesn't support a free market, it just means that we should remember that there are different systems that we can use in life.

But Klein makes it more personal by explaining that our economic attachment to Capitalism is having inadvertent consequences. For instance, climate change was an unforeseeable aspect of Capitalism that we only learned about very recently in the grand scheme of things. But, Klein also says that Capitalism is harming us as people too, because we have forgotten the natural social order of being social communities, and we have forgotten our tribal roles in one another's life.

That is really astute, because, it shows that when we are hyper-individualistic, or when we are difficult to get along with, that perhaps we have wrongfully adopted Capitalism as our personal life strategy—but instead of money, Klein feels that we compete for social power and prowess.

By remembering that Capitalism is having ulterior effects, we can mitigate them. Following Klein's model, we should work together on climate change, and in our personal lives, we should compete less with one another for power.

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