What do Cars and A-bombs Have In Common?
Not freedom, as Ford contends, reminding us of the glories of the Mustang. This the level of insight in the corporate world.
What do a cars and the big bomb have in common? Simple. They are both lethal power placed in the hands of people who have no business using them.
Oh, but we have designed everything FOR the car! And we have made them custom-comfortable. And the millions we kill and wound with cars is hardly comparable to the intense pleasure we get from using — What?
Power that no human being should want to mess with.
We have most driving of trucks and cars done by a single human being, bringing 1–200 pounds of being to a device of lethal power weighing more than ten suits of armor, with the relative power of speeding bullets. We make this the default of global aesthetics. We stuff global films with them Then there is detritus of car graveyards on their torturous way back to “nature”.
What is the analogy?
Atom bombs and cars may be said to have peaceful uses. But over the long term this is false. Cars have ravaged community and enabled lethal polarization.
Atom technology has arrived at ever larger prospects of disaster.
Both are dangers of equal impact.
Cars are more and more weapons. They are of course staples of the military in various iterations.
Both suggest and create a scale of living that is the essence of turning people into things. We should live in reasonable density in areas reached by foot. The sprawl model is inhuman and destructive.
So are the world’s ticking nuclear plants. At some point we will tire of them but their dangers will continue to create mega-risk.
The commonality is neither nukes or cars are appropriate for human use. They are harbingers of disaster. They are the truth under our noses we are incapable of seeing.
Cars left to the devices of Elon Musk and Google and many others will eventually choke the world to death. They will lead to massive conflicts as oil becomes nonexistent. Atom tech left to their able defenders will ignore the clear and general risk of meltdown and accident, creating ever more serious disasters.
Moral — we are human we should not be empowered with instruments of supreme lethal capacity.
