Individualized survivalist narratives require rationalizing others’ mass suffering as natural selection

Evidence

Among such narratives is the one that the climate justice movement has been telling for years—the same one Avi was running on: people of good conscience, across all the lines meant to divide us, can band together, build power, and transform our societies into something fairer and greener, just in the nick of time. But that story is getting harder to believe with each day that goes by. So, another narrative, this one spreading much faster, goes like this: I’ll be okay, I’m prepared, with my canned goods and solar panels and relative place of privilege on this planet—it’s other people who will suffer. The trouble with that narrative, though, is that it requires finding ways to live with and rationalize the mass suffering of others. And that’s where the stories and logics that cast other people’s deaths as an unavoidable form of natural selection, perhaps even a blessing, come into play. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 558

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Completes a causal chain that runs through the whole book: collective narrative losing plausibility -> privatized survivalism -> dehumanizing culling logics to make that survivable. This is the analytical architecture at the heart of Klein’s diagonalism thesis.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice’ — the permission-stories that let beneficiaries look away from sacrificial victims are the same logic-strand Klein identifies here, just applied to climate.
• XREF: connects to: Autonomy-oriented culture amplifies despair when individual effort fails — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1170