People’s refusal to panic has been a great source of frustration for the establishment in recent years.
‘The planet is burning’, they lie, in relation to climate change, and yet we do not weep or wail or even pay very much attention.
‘I want you to panic’, instructs the newest mouthpiece of green apocalypticism, Greta Thunberg, and yet most of us refuse to do so.
A No-Deal Brexit would unleash economic mayhem, racist pogroms and even a pandemic of super-gonorrhea, they squealed, incessantly, like millenarian preachers balking at the imminent arrival of the lightning bolt of final judgment, and yet we didn’t flinch.
We went to work. We went home. We still supported Brexit.
Our skittish elites have been so baffled, infuriated in fact, by our calm response to their hysterical warnings that they have invented pathologies to explain our unacceptable behavior.
The therapeutic language of ‘denialism’ is used to explain the masses’ refusal to fret over climate change.
Environmentalists write articles on ‘the psychology of climate-change denial’, on ‘the self-deception and mass denial’ coursing through this society that refuses to flatter or engage with the hysteria of the eco-elites.
Likewise, the refusal of voters to succumb to the dire, hollow warnings of the ferociously anti-Brexit wing of the establishment was interpreted by self-styled experts as a psychological disorder.
‘[This is] people taking action for essentially psychological reasons, irrespective of the economic cost’, said one professor.
How curious. In the past, it was the hysteria that was seen as a malady of the mind. Now it is the reluctance to kowtow to hysteria, the preference for calm discussion over panic and dread, that is treated as a malady.
Today, it is those who prefer reason over rashness, whether on climate change or Brexit, who are judged to be disordered.
According to the new elites, their apocalypticism is normal, while our calm democratic commitment to a political project, such as Brexit, or our desire to treat pollution as a practical problem rather than as a swirling, cloudy hint of nature’s coming fury with man’s hubris and destructiveness, is mad, deranged, in need of treatment.
Their End-Times nervousness is good; our faith in moral reason is bad.
This strange, fascinating tension between the apocalypticism of the intellectual and cultural elites and the skepticism of ordinary people is coming into play in the Covid-19 crisis.
Of course, Covid-19 is very different from both No Deal Brexit and climate change. It is a serious medical and social crisis.
In contrast, the idea that leaving the EU without a deal would be the greatest crisis to befall Britain since the Luftwaffe dropped its deadly cargo on us was nothing more than political propaganda invented from pure cloth.
And the notion that climate change is an End-Times event, rather than a practical problem that can be solved with tech, especially the rollout of nuclear power, is little more than the prejudice of Malthusian elites who view the very project of modernity as an intemperate expression of speciesist supremacy by mankind.
Covid-19, on the other hand, is a real and pressing crisis. It poses a profound challenge to humankind.
It requires seriousness and action to limit the number of deaths and to mitigate the economic and social costs of both the disease itself and of our strategies for dealing with it.
But what ties Covid-19 to the other fashionable apocalypses of our nervous elites, including the green apocalypse and the Brexit apocalypse, is the interpretation of it through the language and ideology of the elites’ pre-existing dread, their pre-existing cultural skittishness, and moral disarray.
Predictably, and depressingly, Covid-19 has been folded into their narrative of horror, into their permanent state of cultural distress, and this is making the task of facing it down even harder.
The media are at the forefront of stirring up apocalyptic dread over Covid-19. In Europe, there is also performative apocalypticism in some of the more extreme clampdowns on everyday life and social engagement by the political authorities, in particular in Italy, Spain, and France.
Many governments seem to be driven less by a reasoned, evidence-fuelled strategy of limiting both the spread of the disease and the disorganization of economic life, than by an urge to be seen to be taking action.
They seem motivated more by an instinct to perform the role of worriers about the apocalypse, for the benefit of the dread-ridden cultural elites, rather than by the responsibility to behave as true moral leaders who might galvanize the public in a collective mission against illness and a concerted effort to protect economic life.
Read rest at Spiked Online
Climate change is real and to save the planet our only hope is to appoint Greta Thunberg as the supreme dictator of the world and not worry about the fact that she’s a mentally ill bubble-gummer.
Liberals have a history of claiming that those who disagree with them have a disease. Consider the term “homophobia.” Panic on the other hand is just as bad as a mental disease and perhaps it should be considered one. This causes people to take action that doesn’t make sense which is exactly why Greta wants people to panic.
The author says that climate change is a practical problem. He should use the same calm reasoning that he advocates and review the relationship of carbon dioxide and the earth’s temperature history. He would find that CO2 is not a major influence.
I would like to read the whole article but unfortunately I haven’t got time – the SKY is FALLING and i must get to a safe place.
The climatemongers want a panic to impose serf-like restrictions worldwide, destroy whole energy sectors and make humans no more than slaves. The motives of the warmists are corrupt having been based on corruption. The Covid-19 restrictions are simply a mild preview of any response to a “climate panic”.
I can still remember back when they were telling us all this poppycock about the Rain Forests of South America were being wiped out at the size of ten(10)city blocks the Rain Forest Action Network and Rain Forest Alliance was feeding us this line of hogwash I can remember when the WWF was inserting their fake news on the George of the Jungle VHS tapes