As a writer, I enjoy narratives — stories, or rather, storylines. They are how we explain our world to each other and to our children, and so are perhaps more important than truth.
But I’ve come to distrust the power of the word over the years, since it’s easy to construct a semi-plausible and appealing storyline, and draw others into it. Their minds are then infected with that meme, and unless they force themselves to analyze it thoroughly, they won’t be rid of it.
For example, there’s the salesman narrative. When you walk into an electronics store, probably just looking for that $10 HDMI cable, they hit you with the pitch: Would you look cooler with this thing?
Television commercials do the same thing. Look at the pretty models using product X, Y or Z. Watch them do fun things, in beautiful places, without a care in the world. Don’t you want to be like them?
Our “news” agencies use the same technique because they are also selling a product. The news has a liberal spin because liberalism also creates a wish-fulfillment fantasy through pleasant fictions centered on the individual.
This worldview is not so much political as the intersection between polite flattery, a good sales pitch, and pleasant fictions that make us feel good about our place in the world. Liberalism tells us that if we just pacify each other as individuals, all our problems are solved and we are good people making life better.
Global warming, while apocalyptic, is a pleasant fiction because (a) it’s a simplified symbol for a more complex and difficult problem and (b) it tells us that we can handle this problem as individuals, through individual acts. No need to get into the hard business of telling others what they cannot do.
Instead of talking about how we’re screwing up the environment as a whole, we’ve found a symbolic representation that we’ll battle it out over. Much like abortion rights debates are about pro-con on the sexual liberation movement, and drug laws are about filtering out people with low impulse control, our global warming debate is both the environmental debate we cannot have and, because it’s in the hands of the left, another callow attempt to justify property redistribution.
But let’s look hard at the environmental problem outside of global warming:
- Pollution. Somehow, our industrial chemicals make it into water, air and earth. Toxic waste is expensive to dispose of so gets chucked in the woods. In addition to CO2, we blast tons of particulate matter.
- Species depletion. We overfish our oceans, overhunt our lands, and then to cap it off, we run roads through every forest and build giant subdivisions wherever habitable spaces are found. The result is that we run out the biodiversity of natural creatures, and replace them with adaptive generalists like squirrels, rats, raccoons and pigeons, who have learned to live within our excess. Animals need wide-open natural land, and a lot of it, undivided by roads and fences, so that they may fight, frolic, feed and breed. Small populations lose internal genetic diversity, inbreed, and die out.
- Uglification. There’s no easy way to put this: we leave behind ugly wherever we go. Whether strip-mining mountains (which is also habitat destruction) or leaving behind industrial wastelands, or just nearly-abandoned ugly concrete cities covered in graffiti and playbills, we leave once-nice places as ugly ruins.
- Interruption. We interrupt nature’s regulatory systems with our reckless and brain-dead designs/patterns of habitation. Suburbs make sense, if they’ve got big lawns that are mostly untended. Cities make disaster. We cover everything in concrete, rerouting water and reflecting sunlight back into the air. The result is localized climate change in addition to boring, grinding ugliness.
Our media knows we are looking for simple solutions to our growing bad feeling about what we’re doing to the environment.
Their answer is as simple as a commercial or a little white lie told to a friend: cities are the answer! And products that are labeled Green(tm)! Now you can live your life as you want, and be environmentally conscious too.
It is only because we have brainwashed people with a hundred years of high-intensity media blitz that they accept this at all. Our ancestors would have said something like, “What, are you joking?” They knew the difference between a solution and a band-aid.
We should ask ourselves: what truth is the media concealing because we, the consumers, are afraid of it.
The answer is as simple as it is obvious: liberalism caused our environmental crisis. Under liberal impetus, we removed social roles and allowed people to, just by having a line of personal credit, take on responsibility for more things than they can biologically understand.
Your average person thinks paycheck-to-paycheck, buys whatever shiny car they desire, and finds it pleasant to go shopping “recreationally,” bringing home lots of neat cheap plastic electronic junk that then goes straight out into the trash when its six month lifespan or the trend that made it popular is up.
Approximately 90% of humanity do nothing but consume beyond reason, leave behind a huge mess, and then blame those in authority for the disaster the 90% have created. Every “revolution” fits this pattern, although they have a narrative that says otherwise.
Since the rise of liberalism in France in 1789, human history has been a farce. We have “revolutions”; everything that is supposed to be new is actually an inferior version of what used to be, except now everyone gets to participate equally. No kings. Just billions of demi-Kings, buying junk at Wal-Mart, SUVs from Ford, “food” from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, and throwing it all into the landfills.
They also vote, and they vote for whatever is pleasant-sounding and defers consequences so they can continue enjoying their pleasures now. Fix the environment? Not until it’s such a disaster our Big Macs and prime-time TV are endangered. Besides, we have it so hard, having to go to these jobs and stuff.
Civilization is its own worst enemy, and liberalism is the manifestation of this self-destructive trait. By trying to be polite, and make everyone like us, we ignore the inherent inequality of individuals. Thus liberated, they expand like a plague of locusts on our environment.