Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Pat – Guardian Climate Agoniser Madeleine Somerville, who has a BA Sociology, with a concentration in Criminology, Deviance and Social Control, has provided what might be the most hilarious excuse ever, for not personally practicing the green philosophy which she preaches.
… This hypocrisy is a delicate balancing act. It speaks to the seemingly inescapable reality of this North American machine we’ve built and which now runs our life.
In order to avoid it, one needs to escape to the woods, go off the grid. You’ll subtract most of your environmental impact by doing so. I think everyone fantasises about it from time to time (I certainly do), but you’ll also lose priceless human connection and culture, alongside the ability to educate or inspire change in others.
The fear of navigating this cognitive dissonance, as well as the fear of armchair critics declaring that you’ve failed is, I believe, at the heart of many people’s reluctance to adopt more green practices.
…
By doing so, you open yourself to harsh criticism; you’re asked to justify your decision to change anything when you’re not committing to change everything. It can be intimidating: suddenly you’re expected to have all the answers. “Why bother recycling when you still drive?” “How can you wear leather when you don’t eat meat?” “Aren’t those annual flights erasing the impact of anything else you do?”
My reluctant decision to continue owning a car came about as a result of a handful of carefully considered factors: the limited public transportation options in my city, six months of Canadian winter, car shares which can’t accommodate a car seat for my daughter, and a custody agreement which requires me to drive her to see her dad three hours away, twice a month. To be honest, it makes me feel bad, but I’ve also realized that choosing to try means also accepting that you’ll fail, at least some of the time.
You can either accept the status quo, or you can work towards something better. Doing so often looks less like an off-grid hut in the woods and more like finding a way to exist in an uncomfortably unsustainable society while also trying to change it. …
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/05/environmentally-friendly-green-living-ideas
You see, it is not reluctance to give up modern life, and live in a mud hut in the wilderness, which stops greens from practicing what they preach; It is the fear of being mocked by armchair critics, when they dial out for a pizza delivery.
So Madeleine works for a future in which we all live in mud huts, and nobody has access to pizza delivery – except perhaps for a handful of special people like her, who may still need access to planet destroying fossil fuel powered badness, to travel the world, to inspire the rest of us stay on message, to be certain that ordinary people don’t slide back into embracing the evil conveniences of modern life.
Keep writing Madeleine. Now that we are aware of your heroic efforts, to navigate that fine green balance between recycling urban kitchen waste, car ownership, and racking up air miles, I’m sure we are all looking forward to you sharing more pearls of green wisdom, to add to your growing list of titles, which includes How to make your own toothpaste and lotion – and help the Earth in the process, and How to green your home: make your own cleaning spray for every task.
While I was in the army, I spent a lot of time living “off the grid”, in all kinds of climates and terrain. Of course, I did have C rations, LRRP’s and then MRE’s to eat. Shelter was either in the open, under a poncho shelter, a snow trench and sometimes a tent. Due to security concerns, seldom did I have a fire. I am now retired, and I’ve got to tell you, living under those conditions was not fun. I did it because I was trained and paid to do it. I believe all the CAGWers should be forced to live under those conditions. Let them see how much fun life without electricity, running water and heat (or air conditioning) really is.
Or they could just join ISIS for a while.
She claims that “six months of Canadian winter” means she needs a car. For starters, she lives in Calgary which has, at best, a 3 month winter (by Canadian standards.) When we lived in Calgary, my partner rode her bike 365 days a year for work and errands so the idea that she “needs” a car because of winter is just a lame cover story for laziness. She simply choses her standard of living and then rationalizes it with her intentions.
Her essay confirms the worst suspicious of everyone who mistrusts the self-proclaimed greens. Another glimpse into the banality of evil.
Researchers believe they have examined the ideological basis for dissenters and Lewandowski believes he has produced insights into the deviant (d*Nying) minds of the dissenters’. It seems to me that the most fertile and classical place for social research is not being studied, at least properly. The apparent mental fragility of a significant number of scientific proponents of a warming crisis and their non technical cheering throngs is not being objectively probed.
The agonies of Madeleine are remarkably like those of Bill Mckibben who’s easily brought to tears contemplating the dark prognoses for climate. Neither a scientist, both stridently certain in their faith, they likely are representative of throngs of influential supporters of a meme that gives their lives meaning it otherwise lacks.
The climate science blues, which a number of prominent CAGW proponents succumbed to, is a classic Freudian (studied by both Sigmund and daughter Anna) case of psychological d*Nile in the face of painful, unacceptable realities, a phenomenon identified in the 1920s before it became linked to the h0l0caust. There is no doubt, from the rationalization and Karlization, that the “Pause” had become the elephant in the room of climate science resulting in niggling doubts arising about CAGW theory in the minds of the afflicted scientists.
Desperately repressing these doubts their own minds were raising, the afflicted made themselves sick and have largely dropped out of scientific work. Egregiously, unethically, psychologists became enablers who simply accepted depressed scientists’ rationalizations that they were depressed because they had worked so hard to present the dangers of global warming and the public was just ignoring it. It should have been clear that the pause was falsifying the meme and that what these people faced was having to acknowledge they had wasted much of a career on a falsified theory, loss of rock star celebrity and being heroes in front of millions of the deluded.
Wikipedia has an uncommonly good article on D*nile that I encourage all to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial please mods, this is a scientific article on the subject!
Here are some money quotes:
-“in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.”
-“.. Anna Freud. She classified denial as a mechanism of the immature mind, because it conflicts with the ability to learn from and cope with reality.”
[trimmed by request. .mod]
-“…denial is one of the most controversial defense mechanisms, since it can be easily used to create unfalsifiable theories (wow!!!): anything the subject says or does that appears to disprove the interpreter’s theory is explained, not as evidence that the interpreter’s theory is wrong, but as the subject’s being “in denial”
Seldom does such an opportunity arise in the social sciences to do some rock solid research. Am I surprised they don’t see it?
Mods, I don’t know what happened to the above with the repetition in the middle! Please remove the middle part from “Researchers believe down, leaving in the last two paragraphs. Sorry, thanks
The ex-husband seems to have been the brains of the outfit — he moved three hours away.
Graphite, LOL!
In a truly green sustainable society Maddy wouldn’t have a job writing crap for the deluded.
I feel badly for Madeline, I really do. Her Manmade Climate Belief is one based purely on emotion, not intellect. She feels that humans are destroying the planet via their use of fossil fuels. This serves the function, though, of placing her above others (in her mind) morally, because she “cares”. The cognitive dissonance this can cause can indeed be considerable. By airing her own dirty emotional laundry, she can, at least temporarily, relieve some of that cognitive dissonance. The sad part is that, if only she didn’t have the brain of gnat, she would be able to research the subject on her own enough to realize that her Belief is an ill-founded and very damaging one.
So, basically, it’s just too inconvenient FOR HER to live by her beliefs. But everyone else is guilty of selfishness for choosing convenience over saving the planet. Yup.
http://taketheredpill.org/more-on-climate-change/
At least with Christian original sin, you can pray for forgiveness. With green original sin, your existence on this Earth is the sin and no one can be washed clean of it. Even breathing generates the sinful gas. Gaia wants us all to go away. You first.
There actually is a certain logic: if a Green believes that you ignorant masses are destroying the planet, then of course he(she) thinks he has the right to tell you what to do. The problem is the gap between that belief and reality.