Is there a commonality of reasons for why you rise up? The idea of what is just can be very much interrogated from “do you mean in terms of justice?” And then who’s conception of justice? What philosophical, what ethical background of justice are you referring to? Or are you talking about justified? What justification leads you to rebel?
Archive
I was 25 years old when I went to law school. I was 28 when I came out. And I was a bit older than the rest of the kids in law school. And when I came out, I was equally qualified be a tax attorney or a civil litigator or an entertainment lawyer. And I just chose to be a prosecutor. No special training. No special equipment. No special tools.
Today, in America right now, we only can think of growth in quantitative terms. And in a resource-constrained environment, how frickin’ stupid is that? You’re actually imposing your own death sentence by not being able to get over the grip of this quantitative dynamic.
Generally people don’t see the skirmishes that are always always always going on in the background to preserve where we are now in terms of laws against sex discrimination or laws that would promote sex equality. But compared to where we were when the ERA came out of Congress in 1972, we are very much better off in terms of equality of rights being guaranteed by the law, because so many laws that did discriminate on their face are off the books as a result of the struggle for the Equal Rights Amendment.
I actually think you can trace many many of these big systemic crises to being symptoms of the flawed idea that economic growth can go on indefinitely, exponentially, on a finite planet. That’s sort of my North Star. And then as a finance person, why do we think we need economic growth? Well, because the way our capital system works is that capital demands that growth.