The Royal We and the Good Life

Alienation, addiction, and generational trauma

Abstract

This Critical Reflection problematizes the notion of a collective ‘we’ who cannot seem to achieve sustainability. The fiction of this notion creates a split in that we, between the simultaneous existence of a ‘comfortable we’ and an unmarked collective of that same ‘we’ which makes their comfort possible. It is the ‘comfortable we’ who seem unable to achieve sustainability. While it remains difficult to look at the unsustainable luxury of the ‘comfortable we’ and not desire it too, its costs are becoming increasingly visible. What my twenty years working at the resource frontier in Cambodia, where forest economies give way to the market, have shown me is that there seem to be no winners in this game. There are victims and there are perpetrators, each traumatized in different ways. I argue that the deep historical melancholy of ‘civilization’ is born of real trauma, the effects of which have been passed through generations of the privileged as well as the human labourers and the more-than-human world of mountains, rivers, and other species who make their privilege possible. The ‘global we’ certainly exists, but it includes far more actors than are currently acknowledged by the ‘comfortable we’, who are riddled with a deep and barely recognized anxiety.