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Eccentrics and extremists have always been around. Whether they rise to prominence depends upon them having a large audience. Adolf Hitler and Sir Oswald Mosley shared an extreme form of aggressive nationalism. One took off, the other didn’t. The nineteen-thirties Germans were nationalists to their boot heels. The nineteen-thirties Britons mixed their more sensible nationalism with large doses of common sense and scepticism. It’s the quality of the populace and their cultural norms that count in the end result.
Islamic fanatics threaten, as Churchill put it, because of the “the fanatical frenzy [and] fearful fatalistic apathy” which Islam inculcates. It is easy to whip up significant numbers into mobs, for example, as we saw across the world, including in Australia for goodness sake, when that poorly made 14-minute video surfaced in 2012 of Mohammed’s life. Obama, Hillary and Susan Rice were deceptive, it didn’t cause the attack on America’s embassy in Benghazi, but it did create worldwide riots and mayhem perpetrated by mobs of Muslim dolts.
Theses dolts weren’t born that way. Islam has made them dolts and we have to live on the same planet with legions of them. Insufferable.
Global warming has also given a platform to extremists and eccentrics. In normal times people like Tim Flannery, Roger Hallam, Al Gore, the aging David Attenborough and the callow Greta Thunberg would be given the same regard as ranters at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. But these are not normal times. Superstition has gripped large sections of the population who have put aside their common sense in order to accept scientistic codswallop. We have twelve years to save the planet? Really, and Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee Indian because her papa had high cheek bones.
Something is going on that stretches beyond the global warming hoax. We are living in dangerous times. The aforementioned Pocahontas is the favourite among bookies to be the Democratic candidate for president. Here are just some (just some) of her mad policies. And this is not a spoof.
# Reversal of Trump’s tax cuts, plus an extra 7 per cent on company profits of over $100 million
# Plus increases in income tax for high-income earners
# Plus new payroll taxes
# Plus an annual wealth tax on the very rich
# Free public college and student debt cancellation
# Medicare for all, including illegal migrants, costing, on her estimates, over $5 trillion a year measured over the next ten years. This is more than the current total annual federal budget expenditure (circa $4 tr). All private medical insurance will go. Who knows where the doctors and nurses will come from?
# New federal charter for companies with an annual revenue of over $1billion, which will insist that they pay heed to various woke causes as a condition of operating. Would suit our current crop of corporate leaders.
# Forty percent of board seats reserved for workers’ representatives on large companies.
# Ban on fracking, phasing out nuclear power, among a suite of “decarbonising” climate policies
Surely no one offering this socialist recipe for the economic destruction of America would ever represent one of the two major parties. That’s right they wouldn’t in normal times. But, as The Economist reported on October 24, “Democratic voters like what they see. In a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, 40 per cent of respondents said Ms Warren had the best policy ideas, compared with 16 per cent for Mr Biden and 12 per cent for Mr Sanders.”
Right now, I would guess, hopefully, that only around 60 million American voters would support her in the next presidential election. This would give Trump a landslide win. Suppose, however, that the 60 million turned out to be closer to 70 million (as it might). Pocahontas as president. Sell your shares. It hardly bears thinking about. How about Corbyn as prime minster of the UK?
Susceptibility to extreme nationalism in Germany in the nineteen-thirties is explicable when set against the First World War and the aftermath at Versailles. The morbid influence of Islam is explicable by the very poisonous nature of its written creed. But what explains the hysterical appeal of the Earth coming to a fiery end and the growing allure of an economic system which has led to the death of countless millions and grinding poverty?
Let me say that I don’t know. However, the ground is shifting beneath us. Among large swathes of Western populations delusion is supplanting reality.
If I were to guess, I would plump for education as the culprit. I recall talking to the daughter of a headmaster at a local school around twenty years ago. She would have been about fourteen or fifteen. She was adamant that all cultures are equal. I looked at her father. He seemed to me from his expression to have resigned himself to the inevitable. It had echoes of Winston Smith’s cellmate, Parsons, in 1984. Dobbed in by his young daughter, he explained that “it shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.”
I recently attended a dance performance by a number of schools. To explain why I put myself through this – my granddaughter was performing. We, us adults in the audience, had to put up with young schoolchildren lecturing us at regular intervals about climate change and sustainability. Why couldn’t they just dance? How old fashioned of me.
I assume force feeding children socialist nostrums and climate change has been going on for decades under the radar. Many are grown and have become teachers, university lecturers, broadcasters and journalists. But, even if true, this explanation is deficient. Why did teachers become bolshies? Mine weren’t.
It might come down to God or, to the point, His absence. Modernity and God don’t seem to fit. Even a lady at my church used the “in this day and age” phrase to undermine some biblical teaching. Of course, it is nonsense. The prosperity we have is a superficiality which disguises the fact that nothing of substance has changed over the past two or three thousand years.
We have the same basic needs, exhibit the same emotions, commit the same sins and suffer from similar diseases of body and mind. We need God just as much as we always did. But if He ain’t around other things will fill the gap. Utopia on earth promised by socialism. Defeating the CO2 Archfiend replaces wrestling with Beelzebub.
I might be quite wrong about the cause of the current malaise. But there is malaise at the heart of our Western civilisation. As I said, we live in dangerous times.
One facet of this:
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-university-of-narcissism/
I’m absolutely certain the feminista would like to disembowel me for this, but it is my hard observation that most women regard STEM as blather. Such knowledge is unimportant to them, to be disregarded – feelz, not factz, matters. So ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) is about nurture – saving the planet – not the various strands of science. Scientific research which shows little to obsess about is just mansplaining. Most teachers are now women.
As I said, one facet of this destruction.
Should Ms Pocahontas become President, or another Democrat, her first act in office probably will be to rejoin the Paris 2015 Climate Club, introduce carbon (dioxide) taxes and other follies. St Greta would be invited to the White House with her US clone and so on.
Are we, then, approaching a pivotal moment in history in November 2020? Civilisation, such as it is, has been about developing – or accepting from a God – a set of rules and values designed to contain the irrational nine-tenths of the collective psyche. With the help of social media, the irrational has latched onto “climate change” as the Bogeyman of our age, at least in the West. (In Mecca and the ME there are other demons.).
Growing “climate anxiety” is one symptom of this collective phenomenon:
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191010-how-to-beat-anxiety-about-climate-change-and-eco-awareness
As for the “malaise at the heart of Western civilisation”, it may well be due to a growing realisation that it is approaching – or has past – its use-by date. If so, one driver is surely demography: the West has “shrunk” to less than 20% of a still growing global population, projected to reach about 11,,000 million in 2100, ceteris paribus.
Perhaps we should be suffering from “demographic anxiety”, not “climate anxiety”.
“Theses dolts weren’t born that way. Islam has made them dolts and we have to live on the same planet with legions of them. Insufferable.”
Captain Richard Francis Burton, on his 1853 pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Dervish doctor, described extreme religious belief as a form of psychic possession. Infidel Burton was ‘wonder-struck’ by the fervour of his fellow pilgrims. Late one evening he saw a ‘Negro in the state called Malbus – religious frenzy’, resembling a ‘chained and furious elephant, straining out the deepest groans.’ Africans appeared to be especially susceptible. To ‘the ignorant and imaginative, it would at once suggest demonical possession…Often they are seen prostrate on the pavement, or clinging to the [Kiswah] curtain, or rubbing their foreheads upon the stones, weeping bitterly, and pouring forth the wildest ejaculations” (page 398).
Burton witnessed a similar phenomenon in Medina while visiting the burial place of Fatima, Mohammed’s favourite daughter. Men were ‘weeping silently like children’ then “shrieking like hysterical girls and utterly careless to conceal a grief so coarse and grisly, at the same time so true and real, that I knew not how to behold it.””
Today, in the West, people similarly wail and shriek over another invisible deity, “climate change”,…
The destruction of the myth that increasing CO2, man-made or otherwise, will cause global temperatures to rise is simple. As a greenhouse gas, the heat uptake potential of CO2 is saturated at the present level; i.e. we could shovel as much CO2 as we liked into the air, but the temperature would not rise.
Our problem is that the scientific knowledge of the great bulk of the population has been dumbed-down to such a degree that people are incapable of following a simple scientific argument. They would far prefer to believe in nonsense such as that Greta Thunburg can see CO2, a colorless, odorless, tasteless trace gas.
“They would far prefer to believe in nonsense….”
T’was ever thus. Spinoza on superstition and uncertainty:
“People would never be superstitious if they could govern all of their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity.” (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)
Peter, I enjoy your articles, sprinkled as they are with common sense and basic indisputable reasoning.
That is unless the High Priest of whichever persuasion has indoctrinated someone who disagrees at which point reasoning and logic take a poor second place.
Whilst working in various parts of Africa I was amazed as to how easily the locals could be convinced that an evil spirit of whatever kind was at work. Some poor hapless soul would be brutally despatched as a result.
Socialism, Climate Change or Gender bending is first mooted as benign, even benevolent. Socialism starts with compassion for the poor and underprivileged and progressively morphs into the hideous monster that history shows.
Climate Change started innocuously with compassion for endangered species and preservation of nature, but progressively as a greater and greater foothold is established, so the polarising power emerges demanding idiotic ‘Sustainability’ at the expense of the populous..
Take homosexuality, which sought gentle understanding by the wider community and slowly changed into a the draconian monster that demands compliance by heterosexuals as the increased perversity prevails in society.
We live in changing times and in retrospect I marvel at how far our civilisation has evolved in my lifetime.
Not quite from the horse and cart era, but the age of steam, kero fridges and slide rules.
What the next seventy years will bring will not be so benevolent as we descend into social anarchy and civil wars. I despair for my grand children and great grand children.
Indeed as Andrew Bolt recently did in his print column in the Herald-Sun, it is time to openly acknowledge that the Climate Change Myth is a full-blown heresy of the Christian faith, with all the trappings of a false religion worshipping Gaia (the creature rather than the Creator, Who is blessed for evermore, Amen [Romans 1:25]).
Unfortunately, like most cults and heresies, reality is denied, and thus arguing facts will never budge the true believers.
Somehow we have to expose the hypocrisy of these irrational believers who stand in God’s lap to slap Him in the face.
They may want to de-industrialise the West, and they may decry the robber barons of the energy industry but you can’t get them to leave their mobile phones and laptops alone, and they will still organise their protests via Facebook, WhatsApp, Messsenger and so on ad nauseum.
They come and go like mini skirts and Beatle hair cuts, the dynamics are the same, only the pain they cause changes.