Topic and Questions We Can Help You To Answer
Paper Instructions:

PROMPT
To critique how certain restrictive ways of thinking can prevent global coordinated action, in “Hot Money”, Naomi Klein describes how after the fall of the Soviet Union, “ideologies in Washington [..] waged a frontal attack on political experimentation, on the idea that there might be viable ways of organizing society other than deregulated capitalism.” Klein argues that the “three policy pillars of the neoliberal age” are each incompatible with the actions needed for combating climate change and “together these pillars form an ideological wall”. The author feels that although there is still time to address the catastrophic changes in the earth’s climate, it cannot be done within the rules of “free market orthodoxies” as they are currently constructed. The greatest tragedy, according to the author, is that much of the climate crisis is actually “eminently avoidable”.
In your first essay, I invite you to analyze and make use of the textual evidence in Klein’s “Hot Money”, to respond to the following: To what extent and in what ways do “ideologies” create barriers to radical change?
THOUGHT-PROVOKERS
Below are some further questions that may be useful to consider in generating your argument. Remember that you
only need to address the above prompt in bold:
➢ How would you define the term “ideology”? What are some of the “ideologies” Klein talks about? Can you come up with instances from the text where the term “ideology” wasn’t used explicitly but it could have been?
➢ Do ideologies only create barriers, or can they also facilitate change? What is the role of “ideologies” in finding solutions to global crises?
➢ What are some of the actions or polices which can be adopted at the “individual” or “collective” level that can help tackle the climate crisis? Are they feasible given the current political and economic infrastructure of the world?
➢ The author cites Anderson and Bows-Larkin’s remark “we need to have the audacity to think differently and conceive of alternative futures”. What are some of the “alternative futures” the author refers to? What “ideologies” do we have to embrace or compromise on to make “alternative futures” a possibility?