It is well-nigh certain that when someone refuses to answer a question and ducks a challenge that that person is peddling a lie and either knows it or is too gutless to admit it to themselves. Such people are cultists and fanatics and are a plague on politics.
"In an increasingly educated society, in which millions of people are capable of taking part in decisions, in which there is all the experience of a mature labour movement and a political democracy, in which there is a growing and vital confidence in our ability to run our own lives, we are faced with something alien and thwarting: a manipulative politics, often openly aggressive and cynical, which has taken our meanings and changed them, taken our causes and used them; which seems our creation, yet now stands against us, as the agent of the priorities of money and power."
These words are from the May Day Manifesto of 1968. They bear the imprint of Raymond Williams. The words were written by socialists protesting the appropriation and perversion of socialist ideals by a Labour Party committed to very different ends. It is my contention that something very similar is underway in the environmental movement. I ask people for clarity and precision on social forms and relations as well as class dynamics, and they either respond with vacuous and banal assertions of a classless ‘humanity’ or they silence, block, and excommunicate. Very dubious. Trust these people with an ounce of power and they will remove democracy in the name of a truth that is riddled from top to toe with unquestionable, unchallengeable lies.
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others… A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I remain firmly committed to the creation of the ecological society in which human beings come to live in peace with one another and with nature, a peace with God and Creation. I am worried by the extent to which many who profess the same commitment to the ecological society resort to the most mechanical means of authoritarian imposition and regulation in the name of ‘necessity.’ They betray ecology to the megamachine. That is not the ecology I support. In fact, that is not ecology at all, that is the final triumph of the corporate form.
Democracy is currently being stalked by autocrats and authoritarians who despise the people.