Sunday, February 18, 2007

The Crushing Stupidity of Crowds

It takes some of that fantastic magical thinking to try to plausibly say that Maoism, or any other mutation of Marxism is “green” or ever was. They were the biggest polluters that ever were, completely against anything non-standard or biologically diverse, and were the lovely sort who tried to force people into a mono-culture using as their tools good old fashioned lefty “re-education” camps, mass-starvation, and repression.

And yet, and yet, there is a large subculture of zombies out there who think that red-makes-green. It might, but only in the way Arbeit macht frei, and there’s no-one left out there to pollute the world with their horrible dependence on oxygen. Despite all the facts, despite reason, they still believe that the environment would somehow be better when more people are farming smallholdings, and being less productive – which is defined by the amount of activity, including energy, chemical, and human that it takes to produce anything.

They continue to believe this trash because they are a cult. They are offered the grand, redemptive perfection of a future bucolic existence that would require them to spend they shortened lives in backbreaking work in the fields, even though the adherents are almost entirely urban, young, and employed for 35 hours a week if they have work at all. They are scared with a Armageddon story, but not SO MUCH or SO MEANINGFUL an Armageddon story that you cant repeat it to them incessantly to keep them hooked in. They are fed a steady repetition of the exact same “it’s worse than we thought” story every 2 to 3 weeks. The world-view sold to them is meant to reinterpret modernity, just as a cult tries to keep adherents well programmed by destroying their understanding of the outside world.

The buzzword is "decroissance" or dismantling of the sustained civilization we live in for one sustainable at a miserable level. They literally want to dismantle the product of active human effort of the sort that feeds, heats, employs, inspires, and entertains civilization. They don't want to be the only ones to pack up and leave town to live a third world existence, they want everyone else to as well. Granted, going back to a subsitence level would make "happy valley" a crowded place, which is why virtually all of humanity doesn't actually do this anymore by choice, so I guess 95% of us will just have to die for their sustained happiness.

They want to impose this on people by taking development away. Living in a developed socity would no longer be a choice you could make, because they would have it dismantled, presumable by people with some mechanical skills that aren't exactly agrarian in nature. I suppose they will compensate us all their concept of an sustainable afterlife.

To the hardcore greens the human world is irredeemably cruel, and there is no method such as reason, limits, or force that can deal with it, so one must make a paralyzingly large set of rules for all of those scary people. Capitalism, the individual act of creating something of value, is of course, very, very bad – but occasionally and regrettably seen as sufferable, but not normal, and only temporary – as if the notion of a entirely ruled and managed society and world is somehow normal, good, or fit for adults. It isn’t.

In turns there is affirmation, scares, engagement, and opportunities for public displays of redemption. “Greens” are nothing more than a cult. Your life really doesn’t matter to them – regardless what they say. All captured assassins who are sociopaths pretend they’re destroying someone or something in the interest of the common man. They wat your attention, and they want to believe that they died for your sins.

Even stranger is the link right under this image, offering comebacks to people who offend members of the crop cult greens. It includes comebacks like: “so you think material gain is economic development?”

True, but only when you’re wrong. China will surpass the US in the carbon emissions in 2009, but it’s economy is smaller. Will these Greens bring themselves to march against China or India? Certainly not. It doesn’t fit their simplistic script of class-struggle theory replacing reason and action, which is something they as a group are less likely to be capable of. Think back - these people were not the kids in school that excelled at math, they were the kids who did well at Sociology, and it was probably because they were looking for answers to personal questions that would otherwise require them to fess-up to family or friends without a written theory to fall back on. So too the imagined ills of society, and an imagined end to life itself. They came looking for answers, and they left as evangelists, kool-aid in had and ready to (once again) starve China to see if their theory is sustainable.

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