From the original moonbat himself, a pitch-perfect concerto of the resigned defeatism that fuels so many statist power grabs. Dystopian populism is always the flip side of Hope and Change utopianism, if only because it’s where inevitably frustrated, muddle-headed utopians end up. You have to blame someone or something for why your grandiose plans to lower the oceans aren’t working, and it can’t be that the whole project was just kind of a stupid. So either you go all-in on the fantasy, scapegoating yet another group of bankers or producers for your failures, or you give up.
Or, if you’re fueled by seething resentment like this tool, you swing wildly from one extreme to the other and justify it with self-important pathos-soaked pretension.
I particularly like how the whole manifesto is done in a tone of belligerent pertulance, as if there’s something admirable about finally confronting the sheer uselessness of it all. College stoner ethos meets infantalized European abjection. We have to stop trying to defy our natural constraints. We have learn to live within limits. We have to – above all else – learn to be humble and passionless. Those are quotes.
If Monbiot isn’t getting paid by Mark Steyn to produce copy, he’s getting ripped off:
This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity – It’s hard for a species used to ever-expanding frontiers, but survival depends on accepting we live within limits – Here, in the plastic corridors and crowded stalls, among impenetrable texts and withering procedures, humankind decides what it is and what it will become. It chooses whether to continue living as it has done, until it must make a wasteland of its home, or to stop and redefine itself. This is about much more than climate change…
The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint… In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous…. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.
There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.
His broader point is that “economic growth” needs to be forsaken. Even if we fix the climate and curb carbon emissions, the argument goes, we’re still all doomed because capitalism encourages companies to “maximise supply.” Which it doesn’t, but you know – whatever. Hugo Chavez, a guy who’s destroying Latin America economically when he’s not busy trying to destabilize it with nuclear weapons – is the breakout star of Copenhagen. So this isn’t the place for rationality. It’s the place to reverse the Industrial Revolution.
You do have to read this entire self-caricature, though, because there’s just so much I couldn’t include. There’s an entire section on how the people who disagree with him – the bullies who call him bad names – are angry because he’s just too decent. Then there was a part about how we have to reign in “adventurers,” which a cynical person might read as a pointed version of banal Blue State nannyism. “I’m too priggish to have fun so you’re not allowed to have any either.”
As I never tire of pedantically intoning, a basic course on psychoanalysis and sublimation is easily as valuable as rereading Ayn Rand for the 7th time. Not that you won’t find this character all over Rand. But there are so many wonderful shades and colorings to degeneracy – and they come from so many places – that you’re just cheating yourself if you don’t appreciate them all. We’re in a world where juries sign off on criminal property destruction and Western tourists are told to fly less out of fairness to poorer nations – all in the name of global warming. Limiting yourself to just one flavor of pathological seething is like being an oenophile who only imbibes white wine.
In any case, never underestimate the power of a few resentment-driven statists to ruin the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Give/take.
References:
* George Monbiot Denounces Patriotism [Moonbattery]
* This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity [Guardian]
* The Tehran-Caracas Nuclear Axis [WSJ]
* Chavez Cheered Wildly in Copenhagen [JWF]
* Cleared: Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law [Independent]
* Poor nations call for ‘levy’ on air tickets to help adapt to climate change [Guardian]
Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* Liberals Unhinged
* World News
* Economy
