The War on the Psyche
Against the Climate of Fear
I should like to write on the external manipulation of the emotions through fear which has come to take the place of a genuine motivational economy in contemporary politics.
Throughout my entire involvement in Green politics I sought to draw attention to the central importance of the ecological virtues, character, the inner motives, and notions of eco-citizenship. Without those, a cause and an ideal lacks an inner motive force. I was ignored in the main, dismissed and abused when I sought to press the point. It was made clear to me that anything to do with ethics and the humanities in general was considered of secondary, even ephemeral, significance, a sphere of the ‘made-up,’ prejudices, and superstition. It has taken an awful long time to get this message through to the liveliest minds in the environment, the people so dogmatically faithful to science and technology and the technocratic mentality that one could easily imagine that we are in the presence of a new religion. In truth, they haven’t got the message at all. A combination of political ineptitude and failure has caused environmentalists to reassess their approach to politics. During my decades in the Green movement I had urged Greens to take politics and ethics seriously and develop a motivational dimension. I argued this in terms of effecting a bridge between the realm of theoretical reason (the realm of fact, objectivity, science, and external nature) and the realm of practical reason (the realm of values, virtues, and visions, subjectivity, ethics and politics, the realm of human choice and agency, acting in light of scientific knowledge and guiding the use of technological know-how). Hooked on scientism and naturalism, environmentalists have proven utterly incapable of even seeing the point let alone understanding and assimilating it into a genuine politics. They have finally come to grasp a deficit somewhere. But instead of seeing their political failure as expressing a deficiency on their part, they turn to blame democracy, political institutions, and an ignorant and indifferent public. This is mere rationalisation and apologetics. What we get is not the transition from ‘the science’ to a genuine politics and ethics I have spent the past quarter of a century, but the cannibalisation of the humanities and the emotions by the same scientistic, technocratic, engineering mindset. The manipulation of human beings as mere meaningless balls of meat equipped with drives, in other words. One can only note the bitterest of bitter ironies in a movement that takes its stand on ecology only to engage in the most inorganic of political approaches. Such people are hell-bent of taking us into the Megamachine.
This kind of environmentalism is part of the process of ecologically impairing and inhibiting mechanisation, not a coherent response to it. It is also cynical, manipulative, and inherently inhuman to its rotten misanthropic core.
People are losing patience with the antics of the activists. I never had any patience with them. I condemned their fetish for law-breaking and civil disruption as misguided from the very first. By this point I had lost any hope of persuading people I had failed to persuade over the course of a quarter of a century. I wrote not to influence others but to mark their cards – their actions were wrong and, if a genuinely ecological society was their end, self-contradicting and self-defeating. These actions are the very antithesis of the eco-citizenship we need, an identity that combines short-term self-interest and long-range socio-ecological good, that brings ‘global’ problems home by restoring proximity to source, creating a sense of ownership and responsibility. Against this, environmentalist activists and campaigners place all the emphasis on ‘government’ and government action. In fine, their explicitly anti-democratic, anti-political insistence on ‘climate action’ translates directly into regulations and restrictions within an extensive and expensive climate programme voted for by no-one, least of all those charged with paying for it and burdened with the weight of its consequences for decades to come. The economy may be crashed and the heart of communities and their connections trashed, but at least ‘we saved the planet.’ It seems that the lessons of history are never learned over time, only through the repetition of the same mistakes. The pernicious doctrine of the end justifies the means – any means – has raised its head again. And, as usual, it is proving impossible to to get those employing ‘the planet,’ ‘nature,’ and ‘climate’ as a god of overriding significance to see that their approach justifies anything.
The criticisms apply to the extent that ecology and an ecological way of life is one’s concern. I trust that the overwhelming number of activists are sincere in their crusading. But they are utterly misguided and politically inept, which is never anything less than a worrying combination. Whilst much anger is being directed against the footsoldiers – who are indeed insufferable but most of all impenetrable – I’m more interested in the people directing these operations.
I can only praise the patience of the much abused British public, the ‘ordinary’ people routinely insulted as an ignorant, stupid, selfish, indifferent and lumpen mass to be informed and educated by those ‘in the know.’ I don’t have that patience, not least for the reason that those making claims to knowledge and appointing themselves as educators are nowhere near as clever as they think they are. On the contrary, it is the educators who are seriously deficient here, in both knowledge and politics. This is what happens when people who have zero understanding of practical affairs and zero connection with ‘ordinary’ people – other than outright contempt – try to do politics. It’s the adults who are inciting this as deliberate strategy I’m more concerned to expose and criticise. I had more than a few of them as ‘friends,’ Donnachadh McCarthy, Roger Hallam etc. I’ve been getting rid of them as quickly as they’ve been getting rid of me. I want nothing to do with them. They are wrong, badly wrong. They are thoroughly elitist and authoritarian. Conservatives lazily describe them as socialists, repeating that old snit about Greens being watermelons, green on the outside and red on the inside. This seriously misreads the nature of these environmentalists, dangerously so. They are not remotely ‘red’ and have zero interest in restructuring power and resources in favour of ‘ordinary’ people within a democratic economy and participatory social order. They are authoritarian to the core and are advancing an anti-politics that centralizes and monopolizes power and control.
These people are not socialists, they are Jacobins. What we are witnessing here is a phenomenon that has recurred throughout the socialist movement since its incipience, the supplanting of the working class by the bourgeois and bourgeois modes of thought and action. Bolshevism was a reversion to the Jacobinism of the French Revolutionary model of politics that Marx sought to extirpate. Far from being socialist, these people are its antithesis and dead enemy.
I still have that Rupert Read as a ‘friend.’ I’ve found him fairly reasonable over the years, but his deliberate strategy to manipulate the emotions by way of fear is unconscionable, especially when it is deliberately targeted towards children.
I know these people well from the inside of the movement. The only political party I have ever been a member of is The Green Party. I have also been a member of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth and other such organisations. From within I noticed their deficiencies and argued for Greens to develop a properly political and ethical dimension. The political failures of the environmental movement were and are in large part self-authored. Of course, there are external obstacles standing in the way of the ecological cause, even working against it. But that is politics! Those who expect any ideal or value preference to get a free run has zero understanding of what politics is. Such people already think that they know the truth and simply want all others to recognise and accept it. Politics is disagreement and dissensus based on the ability to raise alternative platforms. Those who don’t see this are either infants or authoritarians. Or both. Which brings me to the manipulation at work here.
This anti-politics is the product of the bogus metaphysics of naturalism that dominates ecology – a ridiculous nature worship on one side and an arrogant technocratic scientism on the other. I have put the point clearly and consistently to ecology friends and associates over the years – you have to translate theory/knowledge into the field of practical reason (ethics and politics, the realm of values and motivations). You cannot just override practical reason with assertions of ‘tell the truth’ with respect to ‘climate facts.’ The truth is something to be tested in the practical realm and, importantly, formulated into policy and applied.
There is some small comfort in being able to say that, alongside a catastrophic statement at extremes which I now deeply regret, I’m in print detailing the failures of environmentalism as politics, because this is ugly in the extreme. I can see what is being done, not least because I have done it myself – taking outliers in the science and taking extreme predictions and normalizing them as certainties and inevitabilities without drastic action. This is an attempt to coerce politics, policy, and public rather than engage and persuade and formulate. Climate scientists such as Tamsin Edwards and Richard Betts have called out the likes of Rupert Reid for doing precisely this, and they are 100% correct. Unfortunately, science and the scientific mentality is being supplanted by ‘the science’ as something under the sway of campaign imperatives.
I blame the kids much less than the adults behind this. I am much less generous with respect to the activists who are also adults. Their self-righteous certainty is in inverse proportion to their deficiency in political acumen. The worst crimes in history have been made by those so thoroughly convinced of the rightness of their actions as to not even hear objections. This is an anti-politics that is premised on a deafness to others’ views and concerns. Take it as read that anyone who enters the political arena think that they are right. Why else would they do it? Politics is the arena in which the clash between right and right is peacefully and reasonably mediated. Zealots, fanatics, and fundamentalists – people I call the inerrants – destroy the possibility of that mediation, thereby rendering the peaceful rational resolution of conflicts obsolete. Such people are a menace to the civic and social ecology, advancing an inorganic anti-politics ‘from above’ and ‘from the outside.’ Jacobin to the core, in other words.
Blaming others for their political failure – democracy, conventional political institutions, an ignorant and indifferent electorate, captured politicians – is mere apologetics that does a movement and a cause no favours, because it prevents the searching self-examination that is needed to identify and remedy one’s own failures. Political ineptitude is always possible, not least on the part of people who routinely express their disdain and contempt for politics and ‘greedy, stupid, selfish people’ …
Politics being politics, there will always but always be an obstructive other or others. For environmentalists to point to the machinations of political opponents as reasons for the failures of their politics stretches credulity even its most generous form. Are these people serious? Are there people who really are so naïve? Are there people who are so cynical?
In 2016 I wrote on a stripe of environmentalism that could be termed a naïve cynicism. This referred to people who advanced a view of nature as so impossibly pure and benevolent as to invite the inevitability of its despoliation. The naivety of the idealism, in other words, betrayed a core cynicism which made destruction and hopelessness the normal and irrevocable condition.
That leaves those environmentalists pressing for climate action in a conundrum – how to do politics when you are singularly bereft of anything resembling a political and ethical dimension.
These environmentalists have deliberately set out to radicalize, terrorize, and traumatize, pushing issues to extremes in order to force public, politicians, and business into a quick and unreasoning response. I have wasted far too much of my time trying to get those doing this – or, mostly, those defending those doing this. It’s like running into a brick wall. These people live in the hermetically sealed world of the zealot and the fanatic. And zealots and fanatics are the very last people we need in politics. They incite divisions whilst destroying the forms of mediation necessary for their resolution.
Offer criticism and you will be met with self-justifying assertions to the effect that ‘climate change is so much worse’ and ‘nothing is being done.’ I have been challenged to propose a better solution, a challenge which is merely an assertion that their way is the only way. The claim that ‘nothing is being done’ and variants to that effect is one straight from the activists’ handbook. It is a claim that justifies activism. It is a claim easily refuted by the facts. I have reminded the people who make this claim of the extensive and expensive climate programmes, subsidies, and levies that are already in place – all things which people have not voted for. The real issue is not that ‘nothing is being done’ but that the very substantial something that is being done is being done without the consent and support of the people who are expected to pay for it and bear the weight of its consequences for decades to come. The response? ‘It’s not enough.’ Nothing is ever enough for activists engaged in their permanent rebellion.
I note the extent to which many of these activists in the UK are also pro-EU Remainers. They are bureaucrats and authoritarians to the core and don’t care about democratic deficits. There is something about unelected leaders and authoritarian imperatives they love. These are the same people who see fascism everywhere, as if they give a damn about democracy. Democracy, they make clear, is trumped by ‘climate facts.’ Spend any time in the company of this group and you will see the assertion that ‘physics trumps politics’ and that ‘nature doesn’t care’ about your politics. The clear corollary of that view is that environmentalists, claiming to speak for nature through the reified voice of science, don’t care about politics, about democratic forms and civic norms, about citizens, about people – there are, as they consistently tell us, too many people on the planet.
I’ve spent years trying to rein them in, but they don’t listen. I feel I’ve earned the right to speak frankly here: they are the most arrogant, stupid, shrill, conceited, spoilt, and sheltered bunch of dweebs I have ever had the misfortune to come across.
The pernicious doctrine of the end justifying the means seldom ends well – not least when the end, in terms of policies, finance, and consent/legitimacy with respect to extensive and expensive climate programmes are less than clear. That’s where the debate really needs to be. An activism that incites an unreasoning response is not remotely helpful. And when it is relentless in ratcheting up the pressure, neither can it be considered accidental, either.
I avoid conspiracy theories and instead engage in institutional and structural analysis. I like to identify the underlying causality at work behind surface level personification. I speculate that the activists are being gamed by strategists who want to push emergency and necessity, normalize crisis and extreme measures. Is this so implausible in an age when ‘nudge’ has supplanted ethics? I keep asking eco ‘friends’ who has the power and resources to push technology to scale and undertake the ambitious climate schemes they propose. I give them a clue: not green hippies with start-up companies. I’ve been unfriended and blocked a few times now for asking that question. They know the answer and don’t like it. Either they know the game that is being played and seek to shutdown those who expose it, or they want to shield themselves from the horrible truth that their ideal is being corrupted and perverted by forces they cannot control.
How does the Left so easily betray itself? How could so many have fallen for the massive lie that the Soviet Union was socialist, all fact, reason, and sound good sense and conscience to the contrary? George Orwell is more routinely celebrated than read and understood.
If one accepts Orwell’s premise that for the common man socialism means improved living and working conditions and “nobody bossing you about,” sentiments we would imagine to be shared by most people, the question arises as to why socialism has proven to be so unpopular. The fault, Orwell argues, lies with socialists: socialism attracts more than its fair share of cranks:
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, Part Two, 11
They are Vegans and not mere vegetarians now. (I should add that I am a socialist vegetarian myself). If some of these categories can now be dropped, many more new ones can be added. But Orwell’s sentiment is spot-on. An ideology of fringe issues that appeals to a congeries of oddballs possesses little hope of being adopted by the ‘ordinary’ folk that R.H. Tawney named ‘Henry Dubb.’ Old Dubb is now held in open contempt.
‘George Orwell was a rare individual, a socialist with worldly experience and a capacity for introspection. Capitalism’s future is secure for as long as the political left fails to produce men like him.’ (Tim Reuter, Why Socialists Are Despised, As Explained By George Orwell)
Climate campaigners and activists have added accusations of ‘solutions denial’ to climate denial now. This is inadmissible, betraying a clear failure to appreciate the point I have sought to establish with respect to bridging the realms of theoretical and practical reason. There is a clear distinction between science and the realm of facts and things on the one hand and the realm of politics, policy, and democratic consent and self-assumed obligation on the other. The strictures that apply to denial of facts, research, and evidence do not apply to the realm of politics, policy, and values. But the tendency to refer to ‘solutions denial’ is indicative of the mechanistic, scientistic, technocratic mindset at play here. People who think in this way plainly hold that politics and values can be engineered as a matter of design and behaviourism. There is a denialism at the heart of the ‘solutions denial’ accusation, a denial of creative, moral, knowledgeable human agency and a denial of each person’s inner ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ It’s the authoritarian and totalitarian mindset at work. Such people have zero respect for politics and democracy. We should always remember the misanthropy that has stalked environmentalism. It takes little for this to resurface. Given power, the assault on humanity will return with a vengeance – these people are seeking power and control over resources and people. The old socialist struggle for democratic control over the means of production has been supplanted by the authoritarian impulse to control, monopolize, and manipulate the means of existence. Such people think human beings a plague on the planet, a virus, a cancer. I have the scars from challenging these people on this very question, trying to have them locate the problem in precise social forms, institutions, and relations rather than ‘human nature.’ That there has been a real resistance to such analysis tells me that environmentalists have zero interest in democracy, socialism and a self-governing people giving the law to themselves. As a substitute for socialism, environmentalism and Green politics has been a disaster. There ought to have been a reckoning after a quarter century neoliberalism. Instead we have had these Green cretins giving us another form of “there is no alternative,” all of it giving “government” licence to sell what’s left of the public realm to the corporate form. True, Labour and Democrats conspired in the mid-1990s to press on with globalisation and liberalisation. This technocratic neoliberalism merges seamlessly with Green anti-politics. Between them, these people have blown the radical moment with an utterly regressive anti-politics.
I reserve my greatest anger for the adults. They contemptuously ignore everything people like me have sought to tell them on politics, ethics, and change in history, because they have ‘the science’ and technology. Change in history, I shall repeat, is the synergistic combination of moral motives, metaphysical ideals, and material interests, and no little belly-to-earth nous and understanding. Those who approach change armed with some geometrical slide-rule are really no more than unarmed prophets, of value only to those who are able to take what they offer and turn it to other ends.
“We own the science, and we think that the world should know it,” says Melissa Fleming, the UN's Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications. This is all about the ownership and control of the means of existence, bringing all resources, including ‘human resources,’ under the power of a directing centre. This is the new class war. I call it a Techno-Bureaucratic Managerialism under the corporate form. It is waged by a ‘classless’ class of the trained, educated, and professional, the global network of experts. They see themselves as neutral and classless, removed from the world of production. But their connections to the corporate form are easy enough to trace. But, yes, the old war between capitalism and socialism is being superseded by a new collectivist force, that of the corporate form.
This new class war entails a very funny, and phony, form of politics. Hence the war of attrition on the streets being fought by the entitled, privileged, and very white bourgeois against the working class – young people without jobs glueing their extremities to hard surfaces, old people without jobs holding up those trying to do theirs. Hence the odious right wingers who, in the past, did their level best to put the workers in a legal and financial straightjacket now claiming to speak for the inconvenienced workers against pampered protestors. The same right wing defenders of the workers will scream in horror should these same workers ever go socialist again. The whole rotten, rancid scene is bourgeois to the core, wherever you look. This is what happens when the working class are kicked out of politics and denied a voice in the dominant culture.
Hopeless. I have several long pieces on this out there, from 2017/2018. I see dear Greta is now saying we should keep nuclear as an option. Of course she is. If you make impossible demands with impossible timetables, those with power and resources will appropriate necessity and emergency – the reboot of the capital system with clean green energy under the corporate form. And somebody somewhere has to keep the lights on. Germany has made such a complete mess of energy that Green ministers are voting for re-opening coal mines and going nuclear.
The emphasis on energy has all been beside the point, from the very start. The problems lie in faulty social relations, not energy forms. In translating these sociological questions into politically neutral technical terms, environmentalists have neutered radical politics and delivered us into the hands of a naturalistic and scientistic materialism that scotomizes the socio-economic and political issues at stake.
That leaves them with the problem of having to come up with a politics that provokes some response from the public. Realising, after decades of failure, that they have nothing, environmentalists have come up with a crude form of behaviourism and external engineering, manipulating motivations and emotions from the outside rather than working with them.
“Listen to the screams of the children!” one climate campaigner I know urged. I challenged him on this, stating that it was activists like him who traumatized and terrorized these kids with their assertions of the “end of the world” in the first place. They should be done with child abuse. He unfriended and blocked me without a word. Of course he did. I know these campaigners and the way they are schooled in climate communication. They are trained to avoid debate with people who are capable of putting contrary points. They are trained in these environmental ‘schools’ to proselytise. They seek opportunities to repeat without criticism and scrutiny. They are taught to shutdown opposition and move away immediately. It is cynical and manipulative. But there it is. People I have known through decades of Green campaigning have closed me down, unfriended, and blocked me without a word as soon as I have made critical comments. In 2017, a few weeks out of intensive care, I campaigned door-to-door and leafleted for The Green Party. All that hard work. It counts for nothing. I wasted my time with the Greens. I had thought they would listen to someone who knows a thing or two about politics, ethics, philosophy, history, change and people, someone who worked in the community and was on nodding terms with Henry Dubb and ‘ordinary’ folk. Not a bit. Lesson learned. The environment needs to be reclaimed from the activists and ideologues, for its own sake and for ours.
They are very suspicious these people, especially in their concern to avoid scrutiny and criticism. We are not on for collapse and extinction, unless we implement the austerian policies these environmentalists are demanding. One wrote to me saying that we have to ‘involuntarily crash the economy’ to stop emissions. He had read my book The Coming Ecological Revolution and so thought he was among friends. I replied to make it clear that he is wrong, profoundly so. But at least he had identified that my argument in that book, an argument for a Green Republicanism and an eco-citizenship, was an argument for the long term ecological transformation of ‘the political.’ Radicalised by constant terror talk, he asserted that ‘we don’t have time.’ My response to everyone who insists on putting climate politics on the clock is this – if ‘we don’t have time,’ then it is already too late for meaningful action. They should stop pushing for actions that are futile gambles and instead come to terms with the godless age of self-made man and his undoing. And make their peace as best they can.
They play a dangerous game. Once more, I note the absence of a genuine politics. The assertion of timetables and deadlines is all about creating a sense of urgency. It’s a campaign trick. But it can easily rebound. If it is so late then it is too late.
These people have all the hallmarks of cultists. It’s a death-cult. We’ve have the destabilisation of energy systems. Food supply is now being targeted. Food and energy systems are being deliberately stressed, with the deleterious consequences being blamed on climate change. This is precisely the wrong way round – it is the policies purporting to avert disastrous climate change that are causing the social and economic disasters people are now suffering.
I have a simple test now when it comes to politics:
Are you on the side of the people who make, move, build, and grow things?
Or are you seeking to undermine them and put them under external control?
Which brings us back to the tactics being employed by various environmental campaign groups. These have no interest in finding practical solutions to our energy problems. There are people working on those things. It takes time and space, for innovation and investment. These people seek instead to foster a climate of urgency. It is an apocalyptic cult fuelled by and in turn fuelling anger and fear. It’s all a bit creepy, too. I’ll just quote the predictions of Roger Hallam here: “This means starvation, and the collapse of our society. This means war and violence, the slaughter of young men and the rape of young women on a global scale.”
“This is what's going to happen to your generation, and this appalling situation is liable to become commonplace. A gang of boys will break into your house demanding food. They will see your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, and they will gang rape her on the kitchen table. They will force you to watch, laughing at you. At the end, they will accuse you of enjoying it. They'll take a cigarette and burn out your eyes with it. You will not be able to see anything again. This is the reality of climate change.”
Roger Hallam, Advice to Young People, as you Face Annihilation
This is so laughably weak that it’s hard to credit anyone would take any of it seriously. But we’ve seen these messages being delivered to children with the likes of Rupert Reid and others too. That’s where these people are seeking to strike. Terrors for children, you might say dismissively as an adult, but that is exactly what these terrors are for.
The website of the Climate Emergency Fund, which funds Just Stop Oil, contains this statement: “Feelings of grief and terror are healthy and normal responses to the climate emergency. Let them motivate you to get heroically involved!”
For a quarter of a century I wrote of the need to develop a civic environmentalism and a moral ecology that reinstates emotions and feelings alongside reason, takes character construction seriously, and nurtures the inner motives. It was clear to me that environmentalism was seriously deficient in the motivational economy and the effects were debilitating in the practical realm. This is still the case. The campaigners have finally, at long last, noticed the deficiency in the ‘humanities.’ How utterly predictable that they attempt to fill the void by technocratic, engineering, behaviourist means – manipulating the emotions by way of terror and fear rather than engage in the hard work of working with them by way of cultivating the moral and intellectual virtues. MacIntyre was spot on – we live ‘after virtue,’ and the loss is apparent in the inability to motivate and move except by external compulsion. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how are not in themselves virtues in that they lack appetitive quality; that is, they give the ability to act but do not, in themselves, make people want to act. I have made this point over and again over the years. The age is in the grip of a scientism that means people are unable to engage in a genuine politics and ethics – the enlightenment that blinds.
The use of fear and terror to radicalize and recruit activists is straight out of the extremists’ handbook. I come at the issue as someone who has participated in and argued for Green politics since the late 1980s. That’s a long time out of someone’s life. I hear critics claim that the tactics of the campaigners is counter-productive in that it is alienating the people they need on their side. The tactics are counter-productive in a much deeper sense than that, however. The activists are not interested in politics, democracy, and building support and legitimacy and consent. They denounce such things as failures, or as inadequate to addressing the urgency of the crises facing us. In their cack-handed ransacking of history, the liveliest minds in the movement calculate that they just need to cultivate a 3% critical mass of the public to force change. This betrays zero understanding of history and the importance of particularities and contexts. Yes, peaceful civil disobedience worked for Gandhi, but it helped, too, that the British were reasonable, decent, rulers rather than brutal dictators. And it mattered, too, that Gandhi led a nationalist movement against an occupying force. But, yes, the Bolsheviks, were a tiny minority, organised, determined, ruthless, relentless. Jacobins. That didn’t end well for socialism, and this route won’t end well for environmentalism, either. Even if – if – the activists succeed in pressing their demands and getting governments to commit to large-scale environmental policies and projects – and who voted for Net Zero? – questions remain about the nature of the environmental regime administering these policies. Once you address questions of scale, quantity, and complexity it soon becomes apparent that the climate-controlled polity is an utterly inorganic form about as far away from ecology as it is possible to be. Tactics such as these involve a dual dereliction at the level of both principle and practice. Assertions of truth and denial obstruct fruitful debate of problems, solutions, and alternatives and is no fit style for the kind of diverse democratic ecology we need.
This environmental activism is exploiting people’s fears and anxieties, especially those of the young, and far from addressing the energy crisis is pushing business and government into actions that are starving investment and stressing systems.
The executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund (CEF) is Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of the Climate Mobilisation which called for a World War II style global mobilisation for climate action. I was once a member. Until I noted the problems with the war analogy and the demands to put politics on a war footing. There is no external enemy, since the problems arise within prevailing social relations of production. I saw the refusal to address these points and took my leave. (I write at length on this elsewhere, so shall not pursue it here). Margaret Klein Salamon is a FB ‘friend,’ or at least was. I don’t follow her and have no idea if we are still connected. What attracted me at first was the fact that she is a clinical psychologist. This encouraged me into thinking that, at long, long last, some people in the environmental movement were beginning to see the missing ethico-psychological dimension and setting about filling. I loved the work of Per Espen Stoknes for this very reason. Klein Salamon, I would have thought, would have worked with vulnerable individuals who suffer from high levels of stress and anxiety. That, I would have thought, would have given her some empathy, some experience, some knowledge of human beings. These are the very things an environmental reared under the sign of scientism desperately needed. Unfortunately, I see merely the extension of this scientism in the form of a crude and manipulative behaviourism. Klein Salamon seems to be using her knowledge, experience, and authority to frighten vulnerable people into actions in furtherance of a political agenda.
Klein Salamon is also the founder of Climate Awakening. It’s worth noting in passing how many of these organisations, ‘schools,’ ‘think tanks,’ off-shoots, and spin-offs there are out there. It is a wholly incestuous world of educators who are forever at school, remote from the social world they seek to educate and inform. According to her page on the CEF site, Climate Awakening is ‘a project to unleash the power of climate emotions through scalable small group conversations.’ Is this the reinstatement of the emotional intelligence I, influenced by Martha Nussbaum, have always argued for? Not in the least. The first page of the Climate Awakening website contains this statement: ‘Share your climate terror, grief, and rage with people who understand. Join a Climate Emotions Conversation – a small group sharing & listening session about the climate emergency.’ Below that there is a screen with images of three young people and the words: ‘What are you FEELING about climate emergency? Make sure to name the emotions (fear, grief, anger, despair, isolation)’. The approach is thoroughly exploitative. This is merely the accumulation of fears to present to government and the public to support a demand for protection.
It’s a protection-racket, a cult. The approach is to incite fear and build on that fear until it engulfs the reason. Children are being told that they should be terrified by the climate crisis and that they have a moral duty to spread the fear to other children. Such behaviour is unconscionable. It is immoral. But it is also worth noting the extent to which it is rooted in despair. This is not so much a low politics as an anti-politics. The people who resort to such tactics do so precisely because they lack politics and political nous and, importantly, lack connection with the great public. Hence they fail at politics. This leads them not to revise their approach but to dismiss politics and democracy. It is the alarmist rhetoric that is causing children to feel frightened and anxious in the first place. Then the alarmists urge the rest of use to listen to the cries and respond. This is totally unethical behaviour. It also has hugely destructive consequences. Manipulating the emotions in this way will result in their perversion and suppression. The nervous fatigue will cause a closing down. People cannot live in a constant state of anxiety, still less when the stress is being constantly ratcheted upwards. Cries for resolution have to be met. Instead, people are being gamed – groomed, frankly – at the emotional level. It will cause a mental and emotional shutdown. (As someone who suffers from chronic anxiety, I know what I’m talking about, and I know the damage to mental and physical health). The approach will also breed cynicism, leading people to be wary of feelings and emotions in the future. That will leave people like me still fighting an uphill battle for the recognition of emotional intelligence. That’s my point – these campaigners are taking qualities of importance and value and perverting them to serve political ends. These campaigners are instructing children to spread the fear like a contagion going from frightened children to adults, triggering the natural instinct to protect. This all to further the climate agenda. This is the use and abuse of natural emotions and is utterly inhuman.
In an article in Psychology Today, Salamon, as ‘The Climate Psychologist,’ offered ‘relationship advice for the Climate Emergency’. A reader asked: ‘How can I tell my partner I am afraid to have children? . . . Why would I want to bring a child into this world, right now? Imagining the future they would grow up in fills me with terror.’
Inhuman to the rotten core.
Salamon replies: ‘Let me be clear; despite widespread denial of the Climate Emergency and how it will affect our society, your worries are in fact based in the reality of what the global scientific community is telling us, and you have every right to feel that way. You are already in touch with your fear about the Climate Emergency, but it’s always important to explore, express, and process more emotions. You haven’t been able to successfully communicate about these feelings with your partner, so make sure you are articulating them to others. Consider joining a discussion hosted by Good Grief Network or Conceivable Future. Also, consider joining the Climate Emergency Movement – this will not only help protect humanity and the living world, it will also help you by finding other people who share your alarm about the future.’
Women and children first. To be terrified, terrorized, and traumatized – and to share the fear. Rather than relieving the terror, climate campaigners encourage it and justify it, saying that people are right to feel that way. Then they try to recruit them to the movement. ‘After you have had some practice talking about the emotional and personal parts of the climate emergency, try to bring the Climate Emergency conversation to your partner in a new way . . . Invite your partner to attend a meeting of a climate emergency organization with you . . . Try to have self-compassion and compassion for your partner during these stressful conversations. Neither of you asked to be born into this age of ecological crisis. It is an unprecedented emergency, and it is extremely difficult to intellectually and emotionally make sense of.’
This is creepy in the extreme. This is cultist behaviour. Incite and feed the fear, induce people to close their ears to contrary voices, get them to spread the terror and rope significant others into the cult. This is the very antithesis of the eco-citizenship and Green Republicanism I spent decades arguing for. And by now, enough is more than enough – I am very decidedly ex-Green and anti-environmentalist.
I’m waiting for the adults to turn up and show some respect for people and politics. This is a clown show. Beware the people of money and power waiting, monitoring, and organising in the wings. And ask yourself why government and the authorities are so lenient. Anyone would think they are on board with austerian environmental economics – so long as they entrench and extend the corporate form. From my dealings with Greens I can safely conclude that in the main they are utterly deluded. I am less a conspiracy theorist than an “It’s Flaming Obvious and Hidden in Plain Sight” Theorist. “They” are actually telling you what they are doing, you just don’t want to believe that they have taken control of your ideals and turned them into their opposite.