Posted by RISKMONGER
In the introduction to this series, righteous risks were defined as the threat to societal well-being when value-based motives influence decision-making more than facts and evidence. Policies should be determined according to the best pragmatic solutions to complex problems with conflicting interests being addressed through a consensus approach. More and more though, regulators are being led by moral dogma and ethical exclusion techniques dictated by influential stakeholders.
Policymaking is often framed now in a virtue context rather than policy management.
- Fighting climate change is the morally responsible thing to do and takes an overarching precedent.
- Good leaders can only protect public health by banning synthetic chemicals and pesticides (associated with evil corporations peddling poisons).
- Plastic waste has caused moral outrage, from straws up a turtle’s nostril to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, so it is a righteous imperative that all plastics should be removed from the market.
- Industry has been profiting for decades at the expense of the poor, working class so the benign regulator must act to restrict company involvement in any policy process.
- The distinction is clear: industry lobbies (deceptive, bad) while NGOs advocate (supportive, good).Capitalism is inherently wasteful and unjust; we must transition to a degrowth, human economy.
- Sustainability is a virtue and pollution and waste are the key vices.
The problem though is that such moral dogma is usually framed in clear black and white (good v evil) distinctions while the reality of policymaking is usually more grey. Most plastic applications are more sustainable than the alternatives; a large proportion of proposed climate measures will damage the environment; industry is the key driver of sustainable innovations; agroecology and organic farming will lead to greater degradation and food loss… but any leaders who accept such realities are dismissed with a wave of righteous indignation.
Aren’t all Facts Value-Driven?
There has always been a normative influence to any decision-making process, often framed as “the right thing to do”. The values driving decisions may be socialist, Christian, liberal, conservative – such is the nature of politics. But these values were tones while the facts, the data, the scientific evidence, were always the anchors for their decisions. Such decisions had always been considered as objective or at the very least, respectful to the evidence.Post-modernists though want us to believe that scientific data is value-driven as well (by cherry-pickers with political interests). In reality, those who are funding the research are value-driven … and the scientists seeking such funding might be forced to pony up to the trough aware that they need to add those values or fit the research results to the funders’ interests. Today if a scientist wants funding or wants to get an article published, they need to exaggerate the link of their data to climate change, synthetic chemical risks, potential for biodiversity destruction… (reminiscent of debates on how many angels can dance on a pin). This creates a belief that there is morally correct data – a righteous risk.This mindset though raises a serious question for research integrity as seen with the recent debate after Patrick Brown admitted he had to over-emphasize climate effects to get his paper published. But it in no way means that scientific data is value-based as post-modernists portend.Much of the moralization of the environmental health policy process is driven by activist NGOs who are using their social media and mass media networks to define a narrative that funnels any decision into an ethical choice (our way or the bad way). Their simplistic solutions (organic food, renewable energy, zero-waste, carbon-neutral transportation…) are ethically framed as good things to do. Industry lobbies are bad but we are the good guys protecting you. Any industry that does not fit within their righteous framework is being systematically “tobacconised”: delegitimized and deformalized as evil scourges on the heart of humanity.But how did these activist groups become the key influencers in these ethically-driven regulatory chambers? How did policymaking shift from the pragmatic balancing of the best possible choices among the myriad of interests and stakeholders (Realpolitik) to pure virtue politics – leading by a sort of Divine Rite of Virtue? As always with any lobbying success, we need to follow the money.
Foundations: Virtue Capitalism
Time was that NGOs would raise money through membership dues, coin drums and the clipboard brigades on street corners. As the non-profit sector expanded in size and influence, around the beginning of the millennium, they grew in staff and campaigns, some becoming global powerhouses. Greenpeace had a fleet of pirate ships that needed funding, Friends of the Earth needed to hire the best lobbyists, Pesticide Action Network needed to pay for scientists … loose change just didn’t cut it.At the same time, the world of foundations and charitable trusts was changing.Time was that foundations and family trusts funded research into deadly diseases, humanitarian missions, scholarships and the fine arts. But their coffers increased and their boards became more ambitious (not to mention an influx of dot-com and Web 2.0 billionaires all taking the “Pledge”). In a recent Firebreak article, I examined this evolution in the non-government sphere.The policy arena is changing rapidly as certain righteous-driven foundations (from Bloomberg Philanthropies to the Rockefeller Brothers to Soros’ Open Society Foundations) are donating to NGOs who are driven to advance a fundamentalist narrative, put their values at the core of policy campaigns and lobby policymakers relentlessly to put their virtue policies above evidence and other stakeholder interests. In the last decade, foundations have become the key funding source for most environmental-health NGOs, and the number of these groups have grown impressively (while memberships and internal dialogue have declined to insignificance). Some of the more abrasive and less scrupulous NGOs, like US Right to Know and Corporate Europe Observatory, are entirely funded by the same group of, often, militant foundations or non-transparent donor-advised funds.Donor-advised funds allow interest groups like tort law firms and the organic food industry lobby to anonymously support activist groups without disclosing their support or their conflicts of interest. It allows NGOs to operate non-transparently while condemning other groups for, well, the same thing. I recently showed how Jennifer Baichwal, director of the film Into the Weeds, was funded via dark sources to produce a film saluting the tort law industry for taking on Monsanto and their non-transparent practices. As they travel the world promoting their film as part of the anti-glyphosate campaign, do these activists not see their hypocrisy? And Baichwal is excessively righteous.
As social media campaigns can deliver more efficient lobbying returns, as research studies can be more economically financed and poor findings more easily published, and as media groups can be more easily manipulated (by the same foundation funding), these foundations have grown more successful in advancing their ethical values onto policy measures. The public policy landscape has changed as these soft lobbyists are able to instal activists to represent their moral objectives.
For ambitious young people today, I would recommend working your way up a foundation’s management structure. The directors of large foundations carry more influence and (moral) power than many global leaders. The president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Mark Malloch-Brown, for example, was the former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. But what you gain in influence you will likely have to pay for with cynicism.
Uncompromising PromisesEthics may speak of good v evil in some absolute virtue theatre, but there are grey scales … or should I say: “white lies”. These are ethical compromises for the greater good. A white lie is pragmatic and removes the uncompromising sanctimony that rigid, righteousness demands. Politics is the art of compromise but moral zealots would refuse any compromises to their level of virtue excellence. If you hold yourself to a higher noble standard, and you identify others as pure evil, then any compromise to the interests of the heathens (ie, industry, researchers or consumers) is inconceivable.
People do not compromise if they don’t have to. If activists, or their NGOs, are handsomely paid by ethically-driven foundations to pursue some policy outcome that is deemed morally pure, then they will fight it out to the bitter end. Some examples:
- Earlier this year, The Risk-Monger leaked an internal document from a group of German anti-biotech campaigners who had admitted the evidence on plant breeding was against them. Their solution was to reframe their campaign as a social justice struggle of good v evil. As the organic retail chain, Bioland, is still funding their admitted lost cause, it is inconceivable for them to sit down with policymakers and find a compromise with industry.
- If foundations like Bloomberg Philanthropies pay activists to campaign to stop the use of nicotine alternatives like vaping, and they have identified the companies promoting e-cigarettes as evil, then it will be very unlikely that they would be open to a compromise. They are accountable to their funders and no one else.
Ironically, in order to hold to their higher moral identity, these activists are lying to the public and spreading baseless fears. But as they see themselves as crusaders, I’m sure they don’t see it that way. As long as these foundations keep the NGOs well-funded and ready to fight over the long haul, then compromises are not on the table. Their righteous virtue is not for sale.
Spreading their Wings of Influence
Each foundation has, by definition, a set of moral objectives that earmark their philanthropy. Bloomberg Philanthropies‘ objectives, for example, “guide initiatives that tackle a wide range of issues to save and improve lives around the world”. This cause includes funding campaigns on public health and the environment, promoting NGOs taking a strong position against sugary drinks, snacks and vaping. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation aims to create “enduring solutions for just societies and a healthy, resilient natural world”. In seeking justice on issues concerning human health and the environment, it is not surprising that much of their money goes to moralising, militant NGOs.But these foundations are not just funding NGOs to do their bidding; they are also buying ink in the mainstream media, paying tort law firms to pursue public nuisance lawsuits and using their donations to UN agencies as free microphones for their activism (COP28 in Dubai seemed to have a special hall dedicated to speeches from philanthropists who have donated to UN activities).As media organisations go through a painful economic transition with the shift to digital news, foundations have discovered the benefits of funding news organisations like The Guardian or creating new ones like the The Examination. But we would be naive to think their funding was not tied to issues and values that are central to the foundations. These foundations are effectively buying off struggling journalists to articulate their shameless sanctimony.
Through their well-funded, multi-pronged programmes and a diverse army of NGO activists, media groups and public figures, these foundations are able to manipulate public perception on food diets, energy sources, new nicotine products, packaging materials, livestock and farming practices… They don’t need to be scientific or evidence-driven, just forceful and ethically-postured.
I have referred to this trend as eco-prohibition or greenhibition. This can be seen as NGOs start to impose their righteous restrictions on consumers who may enjoy snacks, alcohol, meat, vaping, fashion or travel. Not everyone can or wants to pay more for elitist organic food they are told is morally better. Affordable energy supplies should be a right in the West and not a privilege for the wealthy. In fact very few consumers welcome or share the green ideals, appreciate how they are being imposed and share their values. But when foundations have billions to spend, control the media and have convinced themselves they are in the moral mainstream, the democratic process is just a minor detail.There is, of course, a poison pill to protect these foundations. Should any group attack how the foundations are undemocratically imposing their values, they would be seen as “shooting Bambi” and come across even more despicably. The Risk-Monger has shot Bambi on several occasions when the campaign sanctimony had fermented with too much hypocrisy (and has paid heavily for it).And then, just when we thought it could not get any worse, in the last five years, the nature of foundations and activist philanthropy evolved to a worrying state: virtue on steroids.
Effective Altruism and Earn to Give
The FTX-Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman episodes of the past year reflect another type of righteous risk to be considered, when foundations start to interfere with capitalism and democracy for all the wrong reasons. The “foundation consortium”, Effective Ventures, ties together a series of donor-advised funds targeting high-income individuals (particularly in the tech and crypto sector).
In cult-like fashion (including multiple cases of sexual abuse of young women pulled into the organisation’s opportunistic appeal), the Effective Altruism (EA) philosophy is that you should try to earn more to be able to give more in order to more effectively save the world. It started out as a methodology to determine the most efficient way for busy, high-net worth individuals to donate to charities making a difference (like malaria nets, vaccines…), but the algorithms (and the key influencers) shifted to promoting more existential risk projects like preventing nuclear meltdowns, climate collapse or runaway AI bots taking over the world. It morphed into a type of algorithmic philanthropy and their solutions could only justify the argument why bots should not have money.
And while the Effective Ventures organizations did well with third-party donor-advised commissions, conference fees and a rapidly expanding following of young worshippers flocking to San Francisco, some young billionaires got a little too caught up in the idea of having the power to save the world. Sam Bankman-Fried, an outspoken advocate and board member of the Effective Ventures group, took the “earn more to give more” righteous philosophy to a higher level by stealing billions from his Alameda Research hedge fund investors, using their money to save the world.
This morality stuff is hard for millennials to get right.
Effective Altruists in the Silicon Valley are forming an influential network for pushing (their conception of) ethical policies forward with large donations aimed at advancing their interests. This network was made evident when two EA-connected OpenAI board members tried to remove Sam Altman as its CEO (for pushing forward the commercial interests of AI over the group’s philanthropic objectives). See my assessment of how aggressive these EA philanthropists have become.
Having thousands of little Robin Hoods running around feeling better about their questionable business practices is a righteous risk in itself. Today billions of dollars of unaccountable donations are flowing through these shell foundations to activist groups and zealot lobbyists who are aggressively running communications campaigns to raise their dogmatic ideologies to the centre of public dialogue, shaping a particular value-driven narrative. From these anti-capitalist campaigns, there has been a marked increase of vilification of practices from conventional farming to vaping to using fossil fuels. The American donor-advised fund structure, where investors can advance their interests non-transparently by donating dark money to activist groups through these third party laundering foundations, should be made illegal.US Right to Know was exposed for accepting USD 360,000 in stolen Alameda Research investors funds in 2022. Until this day, they have refused to give these illegitimate funds back. Their righteous sanctimony must never be used against themselves.
Controlling Righteous Funding
Righteous risks are like any other risk management situation. In order to reduce exposure to righteous risks, the methods in which foundations are operating needs to be addressed. As they are becoming larger and more influential, their role in the influence game must be controlled.
- Foundations should not be funding news organisations directly or through media foundations.
- The dark money, non-transparent, donor-advised funds should be made illegal (or at least not tax deductible).
- Without a representative population (outside of some billionaire), foundations should not be actively involved in policy debates
While foundations present themselves as virtuous, philanthropic endeavors to improve the world (along their objectives and goals), they are effectively undermining democratic institutions by enabling a small group of activists to impose their elitist value system on the greater population with little dialogue or consultation. With seemingly unlimited funding, their influence is expected to expand.
We will not be able to manage righteous risks until we manage the fuel that is powering the key drivers.
The Righteous Risks series will now look at some case studies where policymakers got a bit carried away with their sanctimony.
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Progressives want to save the world. Their last great outbreak gave us eugenics and prohibition, among other failed projects. They are like the Bourbons, who never learn and never forget.
‘Their last great outbreak gave us eugenics and prohibition…’
There have been countless outbreaks by the Left since the ‘Progressive’ era. But I think we could agree that Wilson belongs at the top of any serious list of worst US Presidents.
He certainly tanks in my top three of said list. It is important to recognize that under his watch, the elite simultaneously imposed the Federal Reserve, the income tax, and the establishment of the tax-free foundation while eliminating an important check on centralized power with the 17th Amendment, the direct election of the Senate. That suite of fiscal and political distortion was a major coup for the social architects that have plagued us ever since.
Ranks. The inability to edit post-post is a pain.
There is a good book about prohibition:
https://www.amazon.com/Smashing-Liquor-Machine-History-Prohibition/dp/0190841575
Over-torqued, I think someone commented. I believe that puts it mildly. I don’t think the author portrays himself to be anything like informed or is thinking this through to the end. in sum, there is no such thing as a value-free bureaucrat or elected official. We most certainly do NOT vote for a candidate’s technical aptitude or even his specific proposals. We vote for his worldview, because from that starting point the right sorts of policies flow (and, I feel compelled to add that, empirically, the better policy is usually to remove regulations).
We, most of us, agree that CO2 is a trace gas that, in the felt environment, is innocuous, and to the extent there is something going on that can be influenced by human activity, then free markets will solve the niggling issues sooner and more cheaply than anything the government could do; put more strongly: emplaced and proposed government ‘solutions’ are deleterious to human flourishing.
Here is the thing: We vote with our feet and vote with our wallets in the light of the above for exactly the righteous motivations that the author condemns in the alarmists. In other words, the author condemns them for organizing and acting upon their beliefs as if such political actions are inherently undemocratic and unrighteous. In fact, it is much simpler: the warmistas are just simply wrong. In still other words, his thesis is to shut down much of the outworking of the democratic process because he doesn’t like the outcome, which is just simply the totalitarian’s way of doing things. I share his concerns, but he is quite off the scent.
A bit over torqued, in my opinion. There is a simpler restatement.
Do gooders usually fail to do good for many basic reasons:
As to your first point. One can ignore the consequences of ignoring reality if one has enough money to ensure that someone else has to suffer those consequences.
It does not have to be just money. Russia has been governed by do-gooders since forever.
Well, at least until the someone else gets a gun and organises.
And now they want to save the planet! That sounds soooo virtuous!
The second point is missing some facts.
Families across the world are growing smaller as women learn that most of their children will survive.
The increased birth control options give people with a little bit of money the means to control their family size.
Modern environmentalism has morphed into a cult religion. The transformation started in the 1990’s. We now have phantom risks appearing all the time. Tom Halla comment here is spot on. The parallels with prohibition are startling. Do good-ers aka progressives trying to enforce their religious/moral values on us
I am for re-introducing wolves in their ancient habitats. New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park would be great starting points.
Wolves are ok, but mountain lions are probably more effective.
Siberian tigers. More bang for your buck.
There are already too many predators in those parks.
The rich who own the media are the ones pushing the so-called “climate emergency” agenda. They also exert control of the politicians with their campaign contributions and influence universities and researchers through their grants.
Bloomberg estimated it will cost $US200 trillion to meet the 2050 goals.
The wealthy plan on making trillions.
Environmentalism jumped the shark in the late 1960’s, just as pollution became solvable. Paul Ehrlich was the poster boy for maximalist anti-human greens.
Risks of righteous weather: hail storm destroys 14,000 solar panels in Nebraska solar farm:
https://youtu.be/zvOF_n_tnz4?si=APuA0Fghd_euRSMj
But,,but.. solar panels STOP bad weather, don’t they! 😉
I’m too tired now to read all of this essay but I will in the morning. It’s the kind of discussion that’s important but mostly lacking in the MSM- which prefers simplistic discussions if any at all at the 8th grade level.
When you read you will see what we know, the MSM is financed by these organisations. The Guardian is called out in the piece but the Daily Telegraph is financed by Bill a Melinda Gates Foundation for Global Health Security stories which gaslight the readers.
There ain’t nothing new in this guy’s writing. You take the usual greentard tirade, twist it around to attack as many different demographics amongst your ‘enemy’ and then sit back to claim victimhood.
I must admit, though, this guy is good! He touches on near every emotional trigger amongst the non-pop culture, then he pretends his argument is purely intellectual.
This is pre-bunking, a classic example of a double agent, the termite in the foundation, the worm in the corps (sic).
Regulation benefits large corporations that have the resources to lobby and work their way legally around regulation thereby keeping potential new competition out of a market.
History shows how ostensibly ‘virtuous’ regulation leads to corruption crime and fraud for example ‘baptists + bootleggers’ fake carbon credits and carbon sequestration frauds as well as fostering crony capitalism as mentioned, epitomised recently by the UK government succumbing to ‘blackmail’ by offshore wind auction bidders.
Award-winning journalist Alex Newman, author of the popular book “Deep State,” is back from the recent so-called COP28 conference in Dubai, UAE.
Newman continues to report on the not-so-secret plan to destroy everything in America by pushing scams on the West in energy and education.
Let’s start with what Newman calls the “scam” of CO2 reduction. Newman explains,
“The thing that really jumped out at me with this whole UN COP28 summit, my big take away… is they were talking about phasing out carbon emissions and phasing out fossil fuels, but that’s just for the suckers in the Western world.
That’s just the United States under Joe Biden. That’s just for European Union under their treacherous leaders.
The communist Chinese, the Arab dictatorships, the Russians and all the different socialist kleptocracies, they were literally making oil deals at this summit.
According to a recent Pew Research poll, two-thirds of US adults support the so-called “climate change” agenda.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/
Biden is doing what the voters say they want.
What they say they want, in an opinion poll, isn’t necessarily what they actually want. I suspect that the great majority will support the climate agenda only as long as it doesn’t inconvenience them or cost them money.
The phrasing of the questions by pollsters goes a long way to influencing the answers. Here is the same question phrased in three ways:
Q1: Do you support policies that reduce CO2 emissions and reduce climate change?
Q2: Do you support policies that reduce CO2 emissions in your country while increasing CO2 emissions in China by a greater amount?
Q3: Do you support policies that will force you to give up your gas furnace and gas stove, use an electric heat pump to heat your home and drive only an electric car, while trebling the cost of electricity and leading to regular power outages lasting days at a time?
David,
As one with similar views derived from research, I welcome your series and the publicity it gets.
After study of works by Prof Edward Calabrese of Amherst, Mass, this article was kindly accepted by WUWT.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/07/18/corruption-of-science-by-money-and-power/
It covers some similar ground.
IMO, the battle is about socialism versus the free market. That has been a battle forever, highlighted by events like the 1833 Lloyd essay on the Tragedy of the Commons. Rud Istvan commented here that “Paying inner city mothers to ‘help’ their fatherless children just leads to more fatherless children.”
This is the fundamental type of mechanism that tips the battle one way or the other from time to time. Currently, the pendulum has swung way too far to be sustainable and a correction will happen in time.
My main concern is the corruption of proper science. One remedy is for science to return to funding by private enterprise, like used to be the case for 3M, IBM, the agriculture sector like Monsanto, the mining industry and many others. This succeeds because private scientific researchers are paid for productive work that creates measurable profits, in stark contrast to academic researchers who presently dominate – they are not even held accountable for improper work.
Geoff S
Anti-social activists acting illegally are useful idiots being supported by organisations benefitting from those activities. There is no point putting an activist in an overnight lockup or fining them. The people funding these activities need severe penalties. People losing income or being inconvenienced through aggressive activism need a path to seek compensation.
What right have activists got to impede law-abiding citizens going about their daily chores.
Righteousness has enveloped government and is the best reason to minimise government. The people in government in places like Washington DC, Brussels, London and Canberra pay themselves unreal wages because they are doing righteous work. They no longer represent the people. Look how strongly these strongholds of socialism support the socialist agenda.
Indeed, follow and go after the money.
TL;DR
The so-called “Climate Change” articles are ignoring some basic facts.
The Earth is still very cold.
The Earth is still in a 2.5 million ice age named the Quaternary Glaciation with 20 percent of the land frozen either as permafrost or underneath glaciers. The ice age won’t end until all natural ice melts.
Outside of the tropics, it is too cold to live outdoors with no shelter and no warm clothes for the entire year.
Ten times as many people die from cold-related causes compared to heat-related causes.
When people breathe in cold or even cool air our bodies constrict blood vessels to conserve heat. That causes our blood pressure to rise, causing increased strokes and heart attacks during the cooler months.
The article eventually brings up the issue of tax deductibility, but only in passing.
The surest way to minimize NGO political activism is to disallow deductions for the portion of outlays used for political lobbying. Better yet, only allow deductions on funds used to directly relieve human suffering, e.g., food, clothing, shelter and medical care.
It is not often…as a matter of fact I think it dangerously stupid to comment on stuff you have not read. I got to paragraph two, this guy is confabulating a horde of straw men, which he then equates with all the personalities on that famous FBI list of “people of interest”. You know, it was leaked around 1998, lists people who jog as potential domestic terrorists. The “logic” ran along the lines of:
” If you do what those around you don’t do, it means you are a contrarian, thus the urge to be fit points to a dangerous propensity for disregarding social norms” or some crappadoodle like that.
This guy is resurrecting that list, trying to popularise his version of “follow the science”.
It used to be that great philanthropists did things to benefit the poor, sick, needy or things that uplifted society. Thus they established hospitals, provided free specialty medical treatment, established free schools for poor children, provided scholarships, established libraries etc. So the emphasis has changed from humble giving to help people to self-centered efforts to save the world by making others conform to their religious and political views. It’s the difference between a religion that says “I’ll demonstrate my faith by my good works” and “You convert to my religion or else.”
The problem with this approach is that its only dealing with the mechanism for policy advocacy. This isn’t really the issue. The same mechanism could advocate lots of different policies. Right now its the woke ones. In the fifties of the last century a much smaller set of foundations and pressure groups were mainly on the right. If you just focus on the mechanism you miss the really important question.
The really important question is how the policy objectives and supporting beliefs have come to prominence and acceptance. You have to look at the specifics and ask this for each one, as well as for the collection.
You have to ask also why the beliefs cluster. You will, for instance, rarely find someone who believes both that biological sex is primary, that the US is mainly not an institutionally racist society any more, and that there is a huge climate crisis to be dealt with by eliminating CO2 emissions. Why not? Why can you predict fairly accurately someone’s view of gender and border policies and homelessness from their view of climate? And similarly, their views on climate from their views on gender? And you can also predict pretty confidently their views on Israel and Palestine. Why is this?
I don’t know the answer to either question. I don’t understand why irrational and inconsistent ideas on race, climate, energy, sex and gender, border management, have come to command a consensus among the political and media classes in the English speaking countries. I also don’t understand why people seem to be buying into a cluster of similar ideas on all of the subjects as a set.
But I am sure this is where the enquiry needs to start. Don’t worry about the mechanisms of transmission. Worry about where the ideas are coming from, where they get their credibility, why people want to set up foundations to agitate for them in the first place. This is the deep cultural issue of this generation. You also have to track back to the origin, which historically seems to have been about the mid 1960s, where many of the ideas first began to get traction. Understanding the phenomenon of the sixties is probably the key to the nature of what is happening with wokeism today.
I agree that post modernism is a significant factor. But its not causal. It took me a while to understand this, but it is so. The question to ask is why it has gotten traction. Its not an explanatory factor in itself. I think its main role has been to excuse people from connected reasoning by allowing them to invoke the supposedly value laden element in all perceptions or arguments, its been a justification for far fetched or absurd beliefs by excusing them from rational scrutiny. But the question to ask is why the beliefs in the first place. Why the powerful drive to hold the, why this is so strong as to lead to the acceptance of such an absurd method of justification as the invocation of the post-modernist absurdities?
Well said, Michel. BTW it isn’t just the English-speaking countries; it affects all the western European democracies, and it seems to have got a lot of traction in parts of South America where it apparently partners with indigenous activism.
That is a thoughtful observation.
Fashion is something I have never really understood but it now dominates over value and utility.
The new Russian EV highlights this conflict. BEVs are fashionable but a BEV for really cold climates has challenges to face.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-ev-prototype-yes-really-223530117.html
Waste heat in an ICE is readily available to keep occupants warm but a BEV has to use precious range to stay warm. So a fundamental requirement for a BEV for the sake of utility in a cold climate is reducing heat loss. Even in Australia, I have seen stories of range cut in half in cold weather and traffic delays to the point of having to be towed to the charging station.
It would be an interesting test to put this Russian concept car against a Tesla, for example, over some distance in Siberia. That would test the fitness for purpos rather than its fashion statement.
Teslas are a fashion statement. They are difficult to own. Something like ten times the breakdowns of convectional vehicles. A serious fire threat. They are expensive to own and operate. They are hugely wasteful of precious resources. No responsible adult would own a Tesla. And yet there are quite a few on the road.
The recent crypto bubble highlights how fashion can overtake assessment of value.
You will notice that every one of this “cluster” of beliefs involves denying objective reality. People, in their view, are forced to submit to reality. As a relative used to say, “Life is a shit sandwich. Eat it or starve.” The humility of bending the neck, bowing down, and humbly submitting to the created order as it is, is unacceptable to a prideful person.
Whether they believe in a creator God or not is immaterial; they must submit to reality or die. So they desire to make their own reality, be their own creator, in effect be God. Just pretend hard enough and men can get pregnant.
Why now? It is very difficult to develop much pride with the boot of dangerous and painful environment stomping your face. Disconnect from the basic needs of survival leads to an overarching pride with attendant refusal to submit to the creation as it is. Farmers understand how people survive, people living solely off the labor of others – politicians, bureaucrats, bankers, activist scammers and so on – do not. It’s obvious when you see city beliefs as compared to rural.
At this time in history the west, where you noted these ideas are prevalent, has the luxury of being largely disconnected from the brute force of reality in many areas of life.
I, for example, am not rich by any definition of the term. Yet I live an easier life right now than most of the kings who ever lived on the earth. .