Quotes from Philip Clayton

Most people find it counterintuitive that a system motivated exclusively by greed and cutthroat competition would bring the greatest benefits to the greatest number of people. We now see that there is a good reason people find this claim counterintuitive: it is false. Abuses are only overcome when governments, multinational agencies, labor groups, consumer advocates, and a well-organized system of checks and balances all serve as watchdogs over market competition.

Derrida believes that the "triumph" of capitalism in the West has only served to highlight its own failures, as human suffering continues and environmental catastrophe appears inevitable. Western economic systems have only exacerbated the plagues of underemployment, foreign debt, arms trade, and inter-ethnic violence.4

First is the recognition that the world's major problems are all interconnected. The global crisis is not neatly divided into separate problems, some social and some environmental. As Pope Francis notes, we have "one complex crisis which is both social and environmental."2 To focus on environmental issues without considering the social, or the social without the environmental, is a failure to grasp the true nature of the crisis.

The whole concept of absolute individuals with absolute rights, and with a contractual power of forming fully defined external relations, has broken down. The human being is inseparable from its environment in each occasion of its existence. The environment which the occasion inherits is immanent in it, and conversely it is immanent in the environment which it helps to transmit.28

The virus is fostering a commonality that we weren't aware of, a biological commonality, where someone else's health and behavior can really affect our own—whether they have health insurance, whether they are wearing their mask. It's a rehearsal for climate change in that we recognize that there is no escaping our predicament. There's no other place to go. We're coming to see that we're really all in the same boat.

Part of the American dream, for example, is to deny that there are class lines drawn through the middle of American society. Each year, however, the widening gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent turns that persistent American dream into more of a myth. Particularly instructive in this regard is the famous boast by Warren Buffett (quoted by the Marxist theorist Joerg Rieger) that "there is such a thing as class warfare and that his class is winning it."1