Wednesday 4 March 2015

Fiction

This is a piece of fiction.

It is a popular delusion that wealthy and powerful people feel the need to be members of clubs or secret societies and that they spend their time conspiring to manage the 'World order' to suit their best interests.

There are clubs and societies. Some of them are very exclusive. In some of these clubs, some of the members will sometimes talk about politics, capital, and so forth, quite possible over a bottle of old rare port. But this is no more than ordinary social behaviour. There are no grand conspiracies.

The main reason that this is so is that there is no need for such conspiracies. By and large, the more powerful or wealthy a person is, the more likely he or she is to have a certain set of values, expectations and prejudices, just like everyone else. The shared values and desires of a group of people are sufficient to generate understandings and agreements which do not require contracts, promises or secret meetings. Most of these are clever, or at least cunning people. They have experience, habit, often history, as well as a broad understanding of how the world really works.

So, when I say that in the early twenty-first century there was an agreement, I don't mean to say that anything was made explicit or written down or even directly discussed. Call it instead a feeling, a mutual understanding, a general sense that certain problems implied certain solutions.

Nor need all of these people shared an agenda, world-view or ideology. They did share a knowledge of power and its applications.

The agreement related to Climate Change, or what some people call Global Warming.

There was no serious doubt in these people's minds that this was a real phenomenon, with real risks and a real possibility of a number of social and financial crises attached to it. These people were smart enough to understand that the projections of tens of thousands of scientists was not random and needed to be addressed.

The direst warnings were of social, political, environmental and financial collapses which would cause millions, perhaps billions of premature deaths, large scale extinctions, anarchy, famine, extremism, brutality, the end of the rule of law (in some places).

But there were certain items at risk which could not be let go. Perhaps surprisingly, it was understood that the environment, nature, ecosystems, had to be protected in the long term. Nothing would survive if this was destroyed, so  radial measures to protect the environment from the worst ravages of exploitation were considered justifiable.

Given the nature of the wealth and its sources, the other item at issue was the survival of Markets and Capital, trade and business. Without these, there was no basis on which to generate, protect or justify wealth.

And the agreement was this: let it run its course. Any rational analysis came to the same conclusion; that there were too many people on earth for the planet to sustain, and that the imbalance of resource demand over supply would worsen if population increased as projected. So the solution was reasonably simple: without having to make hard decisions, or get involved in ethical finery, a simple strategy of inertia (no need to rush to change anything) would produce the desired result -  a reduction of the world's population, a reduction on the unsustainable demand on resources, a reduction of poverty by eradicating the poor, rather than the cause of poverty, inequity.

And so, not consciously, nor conspiratorially, the program was set. The usual balance of fine words and half-hearted gestures, of grand plans and good intentions, mixed with the absence of real action or the necessary hard decisions. This was the simple, elegant solution; let what will be come to pass.

And that is how we get to where we are today... the dawn of the Passive Holocaust.

4 comments:

  1. I wish it were fiction, but from early childhood I have heard that behind closed doors letting poor people die is part of the program, now that we have machines to do their work.

    That's a bit radical. Moving on (because it's stomach-turning to think about it), it is true that even people who agitate for action are comfortable with all the modern conveniences we use, and mostly inclined to tune out the consequences on anything more than a trivial level (taking bags to the supermarket, getting fuel-efficient cars, eschewing a bit of unnecessary travel, cutting back on eating meat, maybe) that will not be enough.

    I have been even more on edge since I perused Philippe Squarzoni's Climate Changed, which presents our state of knowledge in such a well organized fashion it was hard to ignore.

    However, it does seem that some market forces outside of government are beginning to use their intelligence and develop solutions. So fingers crossed.

    Getting a large majority of the population to take action does seem less and less likely amidst the careful manipulations and polarizations of advocacy. Much more likely is that in a decade or two when things get really bad they will plump for geoengineering and makes things a whole lot worse.

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    1. I've been checking and my childhood memory seems to have been a distortion of a more hypothetical conversation. Just for the record.

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  2. Well said Susan. The flip side is the sinister faction that profits from the pollution of the commons using vast sums to grantee the "fortuitous" big cull carnage by spending vast sums of money promoting war and buying government to maximize their ROI.

    I did not envision that direction when I first became aware of GW in the early 1970s but started to see that avenue when the Raygun took Solar PV off the White House.

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  3. It's kind of hard to make a retrospective fit on policies related to climate, but it's reasonable to assume that pollution and peace have both been consistently low on the agenda, and that this has allowed some big corporates to harvest huge returns.
    This also illustrates a point about dealing with climate in policy: if you don't think about the consequences of a major political decision (like invading a country), reality is going to come right back and bite you in the ass down the line.

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