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Human achievements are cool

Published by marco on

Updated by marco on

As in 2020, this year COVID prevented my wife from spending the holidays with our family overseas, So, over the holidays, I was once again made to partake in a smattering of Christmas classics, of varying quality. Most of these stem from the late 60s and 70s and were already classics when we were growing up. Like watching Dinner for One in Switzerland, they are a tradition, regardless of their objective quality.

One of the newest in the stable is The Christmas Chronicles. That movie is more bearable because you have to try really hard to ruin anything with Kurt Russell, who plays Santa Claus. At one point, the young protagonist Kate—who is incidentally less insufferable than many child actors—enters Santa’s voluminous and dimensionality-defying bag of presents. She wends her way through mazes of presents and finally comes upon a giant present-covered tree from which presents emanate upward through a funnel of some sort.

 Christmas Chronicles Present Funnel

I thought that it looked like an abstracted representation of the world economy. When Kate whispered to herself, “that’s so cool,” it was hard to disagree. It is cool. It would be amazingly cool if humanity’s cleverness, ingenuity, and productivity were to be as free as it appears to be in the movies.

But it isn’t…yet. It could be, but so far we only have a shadow of the real version, one that runs on overuse of resources and overproduction of pollution and greenhouse gases and exploitation of workers—and benefitting only a tiny, self-selected and -perpetuating minority. If we had a version that didn’t exploit people and kept the world in balance, then it would truly be “cool”.