Systemwide failure is always an option (major read)

I

We are so used to hearing “failure is not an option!”, we forget reality is often the other way round: We manage complex critical infrastructures as reliably as we do because their systemwide failure is always the dreaded option to be prevented.

This means it’s more than passing odd that those exhorting “failure is not an option” seem to believe the rest of us are not trying hard enough to manage what must be managed better. It’s thus not surprising that those who dissent justify doing so by focusing on what they know can be managed–even while admitting the climate emergency we find ourselves.

Consider one such example:

We emphasize the importance of taking political time and maintain that collective social responses to major climate impacts must center actually existing material and symbolic inequalities and place procedural and distributive justice at the heart of transformative action. This is so even where climate change will have devastating physical and social consequences.

https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/122/1/181/319765/Taking-Political-Time-Thinking-Past-the-Emergency

Such dissent has the merit of at least recognizing the human devastation entailed in its approach, unlike those who insist we must do whatever it takes, regardless. Nor is the quoted passage a lone dissent. Others too insist the pre-eminent fact is that “doing whatever it takes” will be on the backs and in the flesh of already poor people and impoverished minorities globally (e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4416499).

II

So what?

“In your plans for reform, you forget the difference between our two roles: you work only on paper which consents to anything: it is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or to your pen, whereas I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more prickly and sensitive,” so wrote Catherine the Great to Denis Diderot, the French Enlightener.

How has it come to pass that so many today think they are Enlighteners but act as our Empress, as if there were not alternatives?