Red Herrings, Transhumanism and well… Pitchforks

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash

I’ve been thinking recently why so many otherwise sharp-eyed commentators deny so vehemently (almost with a religious fervor) that there might be limits to the human endeavor, and that the climate is changing. It would be all too easy to just wave a hand, and blame it all on denial, though. I think there is much more to the topic than that, and when it comes to human behavior, these people actually have got something important to say.

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As I was searching for background information, I found some really good sources in the past two years on geopolitics, corporate and government wrongdoing. However, when talking about the reasons why governments behave as they do when it comes to climate change and material limits to growth, the same commentators simply throw the baby out with the bathwater. They all treat these issues as government propaganda, aimed at forwarding the nefarious cause of “transhumanism” and getting rid of traditional values. They see the “climate scare” or the depletion of natural and mineral resources as a red herring: dangled in front of our faces to mask the true nature of the system, ending in a total corporate takeover over every aspect of our life. And while that might be true (more on that later), that doesn’t necessarily mean that the root causes behind such actions are also automatically wrong. One can do all sorts of wrong things, for all the good reasons.

To illustrate this point an interesting cultural parallel comes to mind here. Have you noticed that whenever the topic of how unsustainable our ways are is coming up in a movie, it is always uttered by an evil or otherwise despicable person? The latest example I can recall is the Three Body Problem. (Spoiler alert: skip the next paragraph if you haven’t seen the series running on Netflix yet, and intended to watch it.)

According to the story one of the protagonists ends up betraying humanity after realizing what we have done to the living world around us. She “of course” deserves punishment for that, and ends up becoming a defeated and bitter person, ultimately deciding to end her life. The blind fate in the unstoppable progress of technology switches to overdrive from that point on, and the question of ‘perhaps we should stop killing the biosphere and driving ourselves extinct before the visitors arrive' gets conveniently swept under the rug.

We can see the same narrative unfolding in many other movies built around natural disasters and all sorts of crises. Progress must not be questioned, and those who highlight its ill effects must be dealt with. Decisively. Although this seems innocent, we are watching a movie after all, this is cultural indoctrination building on the fallacy of guilt by association. Thus when evil characters in movies give a reason for their wrongdoings (which they always do), then viewers can instantly label the source of their motivations being evil, and therefore wrong. 

Guilt by association is such a persistent mental bug, that it gets automatically called upon each and every time a judgment seems to be necessary on the motives of others. “Taking our freedom away on the basis of a climate emergency is evil, thus mentioning climate emergency itself is evil, and therefore: wrong.” The same goes for resource depletion, limits to growth and ecological overshoot in general: anyone who just dares to mention these topics risks instantly being labeled “Malthusian” or God forbid someone propagating eugenics, and therefore evil. The underlying evidence thus no longer needs to be examined, and can be dismissed out of hand. 

But is the unfolding ecological disaster and corporate takeover indeed mutually exclusive?

Actually there is another, better explanation as to why our betters and elders might be doing the bad things they do. Moving past the fallacy of guilt by association, and making a value judgement about the core issues, we could frame our predicament as part of a recurring theme in Naomi Klein’s books: disaster capitalism. According to her theory, put out in The Shock Doctrine, one (government / corporation / evil villain) should never let a crisis go without taking massive advantage of it first. Examples are abound in her books, from using a crisis to restrict people from exercising their fundamental rights, to raising prices in an exorbitant way. And while these measures are always marketed as temporary, nothing is more permanent than such “temporary” acts. So while the control over what we can and cannot say, over our data, our money and ultimately our lives is being slowly taken away by governments and corporations as we speak in the name of acting on a crisis, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no real emergency to speak of.

Evil lies in the action of centralizing power in face of limits, not mentioning and acting on limits per se.

Meanwhile, the true extent of these material and energy limitations, let alone the lack of our ability to “tackle” the climate crisis is denied by even governments themselves. Such an admission, were it possible, would interfere terribly with the neoliberal economic agenda of more industry, more consumption, and higher GDP. 

The fundamental issue, no one really wants to mention here, is that every technologically driven society needs raw materials and energy to build up and maintain itself. And while all previous civilizations used the power of the sun, wind and muscles to grow crops, raise temples, and travel to distant lands, this current iteration uses fossil fuels to do all that. Thanks to their energy density, portability and abundance, these fuels remain absolutely essential to everything we do to this very day.

Metals, sand, stone, even nutrients used up by our crops are all extracted or “produced” by burning diesel, coal and natural gas. Out of the many energy resources only fossil fuels provide us with the necessary amount of work and high heat needed to mine and refine these raw materials at scale, and at a reasonable energy return on investment… Something which is also worsening as rich metal and fossil fuel deposits deplete and being replaced with ever lower quality ones. We have found ourselves in an energetic conundrum. The energy demand of mining every resource (including fossil fuels and the metals needed to build “renewables”) are just going up and up, while the energy returned to society is falling. We are approaching a technological tipping point where it will be impossible to power all these activities, let alone growing the economy.

This last paragraph alone should be enough to dispel any myths that anything like we have today is even remotely possible without releasing gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere, let alone by any other means. Never mind, pundits say, we will draw that pesky carbon down later, at a more convenient time, and mine the seafloor for those minerals... Except we won’t. Delay and fail is the name of the game here. After so many failed climate conferences it should be glaringly obvious that “solving” global warming was never really on the agenda.

Something else was.

As a result of this deep and unresolvable contradiction, and the rabid focus on carbon emissions, all the air was sucked out of the environmental movement, effectively disarming and co-opting all conservation groups. Environmentalism has become synonymous with “tackling” the climate crisis, and global warming in turn has become synonymous with a threat to global civilization. As Max Wilbert put it:

“We are solving for the wrong variable. The environmental movement, instead of being about saving the planet and stopping the destruction of the natural world, has become about how do we save industrial civilization; how do we save the very thing that is causing the destruction of the planet.”

Climate change has thus fulfilled its tragic role. While slowly becoming a real disaster, it has also become the narrative behind more extraction, more industry, more consumption, together with tightening the screws on “liberal democracies” even further. The sad thing is, that even though the greenhouse effect is a sound and perfectly reasonable argument, it has also been hijacked by the wrong people for the wrong reasons: to ensure the survival of industrial capitalism with its technocratic elite on top; not to change the world for the better.

One glaring example of this is what’s happening to farmers these years. People growing our food have found themselves squeezed from both sides. Their input costs (seeds, fertilizer, pesticides etc. all sold by big agricultural firms) has been steadily rising, while they are increasingly forced to sell at depressed prices, often competing with very low standards producers. What we see here is disaster capitalism at its worst: carteling on both ends of the food growing process, while tightening corporate and government control over every aspect of the farming business in the name of “saving the climate”… Add to this: wars, the sabotaging of gas pipelines, sanctions, increasingly byzantine regulations, and one would be hard pressed not to think that this is all deliberately coordinated.

In the meantime climate change just soldiers on, and wreaks havoc on an ever more fragile food system; increasing the precarity of farmers further still. If there were a free market for seeds and other vital inputs, as advertised, and farmers could sell at a comfortable margin, they could be making all the necessary steps to increase their resiliency, and at least try to adapt to the twin challenges of climate change and resource depletion. Who knows, given a little support many of them would’ve even converted to regenerative farming practices already… But as we have seen, that was never the goal.

This is how every civilization’s age of reason ends from ancient Greece to the modern state: in technocracy. Under the guise of science and knowledge a selfish and hubristic leadership elite grabs the steering wheel and runs the ship ashore. Dazed by the riches to be made, they fail to recognize (let alone respond to) the many underlying predicaments of their time — rising inequality, injustice, depleting resources, skyrocketing debt levels, climate change — just to name a few. Instead, they focus on obtaining more and more power and amassing more and more wealth in hopes of jumping ship at the very last moment.

In the meantime real world scarcities stemming from hitting energetic limits to growth turn cooperation into competition, and the signs of the many unresolved problems bubble to the surface. Is it any wonder, that we in the West need a new war every few years? Or that dealing with mis- and dis-information has become the number one priority…? But just when change seems to be impossible, it slowly becomes inevitable: such disastrous schemes rarely end in a peaceful happily forever.

“Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand. That’s the way it always happens. If inequality keeps rising as it has been, eventually it will happen. We will not be able to predict when, and it will be terrible — for everybody. But especially for us.”

Nick Hanauer, a Seattle-based entrepreneur

Until next time,

B

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