## Metadata - Author: [[Kim Stanley Robinson]] - Full Title: The Ministry for the Future - Category: #books ## Highlights - Maybe there’s no such thing as justice, in the sense of some kind of real reparation of a wrong. No eye for an eye, no matter what. Especially historical justice, or climate justice. But over the long haul, in some rough sense, that’s what we have to try for. That’s what our ministry is about. We’re trying to set things up so that in the future, over the long haul, something like justice will get created. Some long-term ledger of more good than bad. Bending the arc and all that. ([Location 582](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FY1NXB&location=582)) - Evolution itself will of course eventually refill all these emptied ecological niches with new species. The pre-existing plenitude of speciation will be restored in less than twenty million years. ([Location 685](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FY1NXB&location=685)) - HOPE TO DO SOME GOOD, NO MATTER HOW FUCKED UP YOU ARE ([Location 939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FY1NXB&location=939)) - We have to create and employ an ideology to be able to function; and we do that work by way of thinking that is prone to any number of systemic and one might even say factual errors. We have never been rational. Maybe science itself is the attempt to be rational. Maybe philosophy too. And of course philosophy is very often proving we can’t think to the bottom of things, can’t get logic to work as a closed system, and so on. And remember also that in all of this discussion so far, we are referring to the normal mind, the sane mind. What happens when, starting as we do from such a shaky original position, sanity is lost, we defer to another discussion. Enough now to say just this: it can get very bad. ([Location 1265](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FY1NXB&location=1265)) - Globalization was many things— including a reality, in that they all lived on one shared planet in which borders were historical fantasies— but it was also a form of Americanization, of soft power imperialism combined with economic dominance, in that the US still had seventy percent of the capital assets of the world secured in its banks and companies, even though it had only five percent of the world’s population. ([Location 3011](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B084FY1NXB&location=3011))