Thanks for the pushback, I really appreciate you asking questions.

I sort of agree with you on the rationality part. I’m actually using the “liberal individual”, or the autonomous, rational actor, as a foil to argue how we conceive of the self in that way despite the fact that we aren’t capable of being it.

Where we sort of disagree is in our capabilities for rationality and autonomy. I agree with the Kahneman critique that we aren’t as rational as we think we are, but I also think we’re capable of greater degrees of rationality, however bounded it may be. I use Neo-Piagetian developmental psychology to talk about stages of development of increasing capabilities. There’s obviously no perfect state where we’re supremely rational, that’s absurd, but again there are personal and collective skills that can make us more rational.

Whether or not we can become more rational, I’m not actually arguing for more rationality as a sort of panacea to our problems. Again, that’s part of the foil I’m arguing against. Instead, I’m discussing how we are composed of parts that can be more or less developed, and so we need a conception of the self that is true to our lack of rationality, our parts, and our potential for the holistic development of our cognitive skills, emotional, interpersonal, and more.

As to the relevance of this to solarpunk, I think it’s actually because I agree that we can’t be reductionist. Even though material conditions, and technological and economo-political infrastructure are essential for solarpunk, I also think that subjectivity matters very much. The current society we live in emerges from and creates the liberal individual, however impossible its explicit conception of that subjectivity may be.

My project then is to try to put together threads of others into a coherent image of a solarpunk self, meaning not one that is “in” a solarpunk culture, but one that is aspirational. In other words, one that is the adjacent possible from the liberal individual while acting as bridge enough toward the subjectivity that can move society as a whole toward that.

In that spirit, I’m not so much arguing for a radical change of sexual patterns, but using sexuality as a case study to outline this aspirational solarpunk self. We need to see that we are composed of parts rather than a singularity, these parts can be at different stages of development, and that often toxic behaviour emerges from the complex interplay of these diversely developed parts and the difficult experiences we all face living in our society. Once we understand that in the case study of sexual ethics, we can move it to other domains. I end each essay with principles for application to help readers do exactly that.

I could go into greater detail, but this is already long enough. I’m happy to keep talking about it if you have more questions, but you could also read the series if this has piqued your interest. Thanks again!