The Collapsing Minds of the ‘Collapsing Climate’ Cult: Part V – Why Do They Do It?
Addiction. But to what?
Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack.
“They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.” – Nathaniel Lee.
Sadly, it is quite normal for the mass of people to uncritically accept that the sky is falling on their heads when repeatedly told so by politicians and political institutions. This state of affairs may be normal, but it is certainly not rational.
It’s time to address a specific, smaller subset of the population – the Western Left intelligentsia, and its mouthpieces in both the mainstream and alternative media. In uncritically regurgitating the official climate narrative, and insisting that catastrophe is certain, these people have displayed a limited understanding of the scientific process. They seem to think that science should be wielded as a political sword for clearing a path to move societies in a particular direction.
The reality is that they really don’t know enough about climate science to adopt certainty about the hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused global warming because the experts themselves don’t know, despite the attempts of a vocal and powerful group of bad-faith institutional actors to convince the world that they do know.
When people who ought to know better can’t say: “I don’t know”, it’s either because they themselves are bad-faith actors, or they are deeply emotionally invested in the issue in which they are professing absolute and ill-founded certainty. For my part, I’m open to the accusation that I am deeply emotionally invested in the idea that the dominant climate alarmist narrative is a scam. However, I think I’ve shown that the only thing we can be certain about in this whole debate is that a scientific consensus is an illusion – it doesn’t exist – and the science itself is riven with deep uncertainty. Given the politicisation of climate science and its horrific complexity, I’m comfortable that the position I’ve taken is more rational than the climate alarmists’.
If you’ve newly arrived at this series with Part V, then before we put the climate cult on the couch, let’s do a quick recap of Parts II to IV to show that I haven’t recklessly launched into pathologising mode without demonstrating the irrationality of their position:
- Regrettably, I had to start with an explanation of what science is, because the people expressing certainty about an unproven hypothesis seem oblivious to the fact that science is a process of argumentation founded primarily on scepticism, and bolstered by empirical evidence and observation, both of which are sorely lacking in the case of climate science.
- The IPCC, which is responsible for perpetuating the dominant hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused climate change, is not a scientific body, and nor is it engaged in anything that remotely resembles the scientific process. The IPCC is a political institution that uses scientific reports, biased in favour of its preferred hypothesis, and then massages them to craft consensus by exorcising the demon of uncertainty.
- Despite the juggernaut of climate propaganda, there is no scientific consensus on the interaction of the causal mechanisms of climate change and how to quantify them. This is mainly due to the horrendous complexity of the Earth’s climate system, and the deep uncertainty that permeates the critical areas of the debate. I could quote endless credentialled and good-faith scientists who dissent from the dominant narrative, and climate cultists could quote endless credentialled and good-faith scientists who support the dominant narrative, which points to one thing only – there is no scientific consensus.
- That absence of a scientific consensus and the ensuing uncertainty preclude the adoption of policies and statements signifying certitude.
There! The climate debate in a nutshell. Everything I’ve documented thus far is referred to by the likes of Jonathan Cook as “boilerplate climate scepticism”. In reality, it cuts to the heart of the whole debate without getting into technical arguments. In fact, it’s the only way to cut to the heart of the debate because the technical arguments aren’t settled. This approach infuriates the climate cult, so they call it ‘boilerplate climate scepticism’. The simple fact of the matter is that the IPCC, on which they rely for spiritual sustenance, is not doing science and the science itself is so riven with uncertainty that scepticism is the only rational position to take.
The climate cult would much prefer it if you insisted that the causal mechanism of climate change was the sun and not CO₂. This opens up the dead-end road of “my science is better than your science”, and allows them to avoid confronting the elephant in the room – their science isn’t science, it’s politics. It also opens up the dead-end road of identity politics, enabling accusations of all manner of things – hating nature, being right-wing, being unreasonable about the harms of industrialisation, and on and on. In short, you’re not a member of their club, so you can’t possibly be acting in good faith. And like all religious institutions, they will find the bad faith in you and cast it out with the holy water of ad hominem attacks.
As I’ve shown in Part IV, the obsessive focus on CO₂ is sanctioning behaviours and policies that are ruinous to the things they claim to be protecting – humanity and the planet. The ideological extremism of cults is always destructive.
The Drama Triangle – all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players
We have now reached the point in these essays where I will abandon rational arguments promoting scientific scepticism in order to pursue wildly speculative, and hopefully interesting, psychological frameworks to explore the Western Left intelligentsia’s irrational and dangerous politicisation of science. I make no apologies for this because the primary theatre of the war on humanity is the mind. They cannot win the war if they fail to invade and conquer our minds.
The Drama Triangle is a psychoanalytical paradigm for explaining dysfunctionality in relationships. It is intended as a tool for analysing interactions between individuals and within smaller groups. However, I am taking what is essentially a ‘micro’ theory of personal interaction and applying it to a ‘macro’ social and political theatre. ‘Theatre’ is probably the right word to use given the theory’s name – Drama Triangle – and how the theory is rooted in the unconscious and reflexive adoption of role-playing in conflict situations. In adapting the theory to a macro level, I have made some adjustments, which I will explain in due course.
Drama Triangle theory posits that the dynamics of inter-relational dysfunctionality play out within the context of one of three roles that individuals adopt in personal conflict situations – victim, rescuer, or persecutor. While the tendency to adopt a particular role in the early stage of conflict remains relatively stable, the theory makes allowance for a dynamic swapping of roles as the conflict situation evolves. This has to do with the concept of individuals seeking ‘payoff’ as the conflict progresses. While individuals display a strong tendency towards adopting a particular role, conflict resolution may involve switching roles as the individual seeks the most expedient emotional position to achieve a desired outcome.
I’ll describe each role briefly, painting the political dramatis personae onto them as I go along in order to adapt the theory to the group politics of the climate cult.
Victims are characterised by passivity. They feel powerless and allow decisions to be made for them. They do not take responsibility for their own situation, and depend on saviours to rescue them. They discount their own ability to be creative and to solve problems.
The victims in the climate drama are ordinary people who instinctively trust authority figures like scientists and the government, and do not critically question information fed to them by these institutions. In this sense they render themselves powerless to exit the victim role. They are the subjects of this BBC climate propaganda piece titled: “Heatwave anxiety can make you feel ‘incredibly helpless’ – here’s how to manage it.” The victims are the people the BBC has identified as having ‘heatwave anxiety’, and therefore in need of help.
Rescuers feel compelled to help others, even when help is not requested. They focus on others so that they don’t have to look at themselves. They feel morally superior to most people around them. They are constantly looking for basket-cases (victims) or situations to fix. They take on the mothering role to satisfy their psychological need for being acknowledged as protectors. They do not address root causes, and tend to drive conflict intensity with aggressive responses. To come across as competent and effective rescuers, they find it difficult to admit gaps in knowledge: if someone needs their help, they must appear competent. They therefore exude confidence when it is unwarranted. The corollary of this is that they downplay others’ ability to think for themselves.
The rescuer can slip into the role of persecutor if they feel that their ‘help’ is unappreciated.
The rescuers in the climate drama are media figures, influential members of the intelligentsia, academic talking heads with significant platforms, and scientists who have chosen to act as activists for the official narrative, thus compromising their scientific integrity and scepticism. Referring back to the BBC climate propaganda piece, the BBC is a rescuer stepping in to help ‘victims’ cope with heatwave anxiety. In doing so, they are also creating new cases of ‘heatwave anxiety’ that would not have existed but for the BBC’s relentless propaganda about the ‘collapsing climate’. The people writing the article probably don’t know that ‘heatwave anxiety’ is a condition that has been created by persecutors crafting a ‘climate collapse’ narrative. There is little incentive to question the narrative, and therefore interrogate root causes, because they are content with having victims to rescue. Delving deeper might reveal that the cure involves educating the victim to understand and explore other perspectives about climate change. That in turn would expose persecutors.
As Judith Curry succinctly put it: “Letting go of apocalyptic rhetoric is difficult for those who have built careers based on climate catastrophism.”[i]
There is an unhealthy co-dependent relationship between the rescuer and the victim. The rescuer needs to keep the victim dependent on them, and the victim reinforces his powerlessness by having the rescuer take care of him.
Persecutors feel that others are responsible for the problems experienced by the persecutor. They feel that others should listen to them because they are right. They feel more powerful than others around them, and also fear being powerless. They firmly believe that they are okay, but others around them are not, so their opinions supersede those of others. They therefore demand respect from those around them and insist on things being done their way. They keep the victim oppressed through threats and bullying. They are often the survivors of some type of abuse or neglect and seek to compensate for feelings of helplessness by overpowering others. Their greatest fear is powerlessness. They have internalised a view of the world as mean and unforgiving, and they feel they must be ruthless to survive.
They ally with rescuers to persecute victims. The persecutors in the climate drama are the people at the top of the pyramid, and their senior managers, who are constantly looking for ways to exploit both victims and rescuers in order to maximise control over them, thereby addressing their deep fear of powerlessness. The persecutors in the climate drama, and indeed nearly all current global dramas, are the ruling transnational oligarchs — they are the narrative and conflict creators and controllers, attempting to steer events towards greater control to manage their fear of powerlessness. They are the Maurice Strongs of the world, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Musks, the Trumps, the Bidens, the Thiels, the Rubios, the Burnhams, the Netanyahus, and on and on.
My adaptation of the theory departs from the standard depiction in two main respects. First, in conflict between individuals, there is more fluidity in role adoption, as a victim can turn into a persecutor and vice versa as the dynamics of payoff unfold. However, in the political setting, victims tend to remain victims, and persecutors tend to remain persecutors unless exposed. What remains constant between the individual and political group setting is the tendency for rescuers to adopt a persecutory stance in the event that victims refuse help by rejecting rescuer narratives.
The second departure concerns the tendency of persecutors to conceal themselves by either posing as rescuers or using unwitting rescuers as cover. In the political setting, while victims display an intellectual understanding of the existence of persecutors, they prefer to ignore the possibility of persecution in the heat of a drama situation. Persecutors only abandon a persecutory stance when a sufficient proportion of victims reject persecutory narratives or openly call out the persecutor.
The climate drama started with a narrative con, which unwitting rescuers seized on to play their own role – the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. Recall the Club of Rome’s statement in their 1991 report highlighted in Part IV: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we suggested that […] the threat of global warming […] would fit the bill […] The real enemy then is humanity itself.” Also recall from Part II that the IPCC had made up its mind before the scientific jury was in, and it’s still not in.
The victims buy into the con because of their tendency towards feelings of powerlessness and the need for saviours. This is compounded by low levels of self-esteem, which allow the victim group in society to accept guilt for the destruction of the planet, and to agree to self-destructive measures to make amends for the perceived problem.
The persecutor hovers above it all constantly manipulating the scene to ensure that victims and rescuers remain engaged until the con has served its purpose. Persecution only stops if the narrative fails to achieve its objective, or if the persecutor is exposed and narratives are rejected. If the persecutory group is called out and seriously threatened at any stage, it may take on the mantle of victim as a defence mechanism. The more common response of persecutors to exposure is to throw lower-ranking persecutors or rescuers under the bus, and/or to acknowledge limited aspects of the con to serve as an offering of insincere contrition while avoiding full blame and its consequences. This is known as a ‘limited hangout’. In other words, damage limitation.
The way out of the drama triangle
When we are swept up in political narratives that create conflict within and between groups, the aim should always be to recognise the role/s one is playing and step outside of that role to focus on resolving the underlying issue. For victims and rescuers (genuine rescuers as opposed to persecutors posing as rescuers), this does not merely entail following the script by attempting to resolve the underlying issue presented in the script, but rather critically assessing the script handed to the actors.
The underlying issue in climate change is not really about whether the world is boiling, which is an implausible Chicken Little claim. It is a dispute, generated by a con, about scientific claims, and whether those claims have validity in informing drastic policies that have far-reaching consequences for the lives of billions.
Thus, the first step to ending the drama triangle in politics is to question the script, since all politics is about script creation and stage direction.
Victims will remain victims and feed the compulsion of rescuers until they accept that they have more power in the relationship. The first step for victims is to take responsibility for understanding the core issue by listening to all sides of the debate, rather than being passive bystanders. That will involve stepping outside the comfortable rescuer media sources which have propagandised them into believing that the sky is falling on their heads. That in turn will lead to questions about the persecutor who they have misidentified as a rescuer.
When the victim begins to understand that they have more power than they think, they will begin to take responsibility for their feelings of powerlessness. The mere acceptance that they have more creative power to solve problems would, in itself, foster the curiosity to explore a wider knowledge base. They would then be able to read books by people like Judith Curry without feeling threatened. As it currently stands, fear and the belief in their own powerlessness closes the mind to the ideas that would challenge current paradigms. New paradigms create new possibilities, thus helping to remove fear.
The belief that a rise in global temperatures of 2°C higher would be ‘catastrophic’ is a belief, not a fact. No-one knows that with certainty because no empirical study exists with data and observations to support this prediction. Setting a specific target has created the illusion that a complicated scientific calculation has been done by geniuses in white coats when the reality is that the target is arbitrary, and there is no reliable empirical evidence to support the prediction. I would go so far as to say that the prediction is actually not scientifically falsifiable or testable, so why accept it uncritically?
Furthermore, why accept that it is beyond the wit of humanity to adapt to change? Adapting to change is what we’ve been doing since we crawled out of the proverbial sludge. Curry highlights one example of human ingenuity that confounded the Malthusians: “while land use for agriculture has increased by 8 percent since 1962, agricultural productivity has increased by 300%. Between 1900 and 2010, the intensification of agricultural productivity allowed France and Spain to reforest.”[ii]
Human ingenuity has defied the Malthusians, and it will do so again, provided the pessimists don’t suffocate us. The only climate to fear is a climate of fear. Belief in human ingenuity is an unconditional first step to seeing its fruits.
The combination of the victims’ low level of consciousness and the rescuers’ need to feed off the energy of victimhood generates spiralling catastrophising paradigms. The persecutory ruling class in the West has been doing this so relentlessly for so long that, perhaps for the first time in history, it is no exaggeration to say that we have allowed ourselves to be held hostage by a death cult whose apocalyptic rhetoric is unquestioningly accepted. The victim-rescuer dance must end before it’s too late.
When more victims begin to overcome feelings of worthlessness and fear, they will start to reject unsolicited offers of help from rescuers, and bullying by political persecutors. This is what breaks the triangle. Rescuers will be forced to look at themselves rather than seeking out victims. Persecutors will have neither victims nor rescuers to manage, bully, and blame.
Drama addiction
The Drama Triangle framework tells us about role adoption in dysfunctional situations, but it doesn’t fully explain how or why people choose the medium of drama to express unconscious mental impulses and dysfunctionality. Indeed, it does not elucidate the unconscious mental impulse itself that gives rise to the adoption of the drama triangle roles.
In other words, the drama triangle on its own is unsatisfactory as a complete explanation because it merely states that conflict is the source of drama and, when conflict arises, participants choose specific roles which entrench dysfunctionality and block problem resolution. My own reinterpretation of the drama triangle for application to the political context goes a bit further in that it inserts manipulative narrative creation by persecutors as a cause of unnecessary conflict, which then plays out in the context of the roles. But there is still a gap to be filled to explain a bigger ‘why’ – as in, why are manipulative persecutory narratives so readily accepted by victims and rescuers? They seem to need these narratives.
Here, drama must be thought of not as literal acting or pretence, but rather an unconscious engagement in an archetypal role that is not consciously understood by the participant. The unconscious adoption of this role does lead to an ‘act’ in the sense that the participant attempts to superimpose a fantasy onto the real world they inhabit. In doing so, they must convince themselves that a situation which has no basis in reality – the superimposed fantasy – is in fact real.
In this section, I will repeat a theory to explain the root cause of drama in mass events like Covid or ‘climate collapse’ and then explain why the drama mechanism takes hold and how it works. What follows does not negate the role adoption explained in the previous section, but rather helps us to appreciate why drama is adopted as a mechanism to express dysfunctionality. In this sense it supports the drama triangle theory, which is a subset of the main mechanism.
Back in the heady Covid days, I co-authored a few pieces with Amy Willows, based on her ideas, to explain what was at the heart of mass hysteria. Those pieces were motivated by a critique of Mattias Desmet’s theory of the existence of a state of mass hypnosis, which itself is a manifestation of mass formation, or mass hysterical events. Amy disagreed, and I found her thesis compelling. The Covid and climate collapse phenomena have much in common, being rooted in a scientific fraud which induces cult-like behaviour that drives societies in dangerous directions. I’m going to revisit one of those essays in an attempt to distil what Amy and I think is at the heart of mass formation or mass hysteria.
To aid better understanding as we go along, let me say at the outset that the drama mechanism at play is not hypnosis, as posited by Desmet, but rather addiction as posited by Amy. As I’ve said, this complements the drama triangle theory already discussed. There seems to be an ongoing addiction to senseless dramas that tend to use ‘science’ as a cover story, although science is not the only medium of travel for these dramas. Fear of the other is the other common drama set-up – the immigrant, the Muslim, the Russian, the terrorist. Whether it’s rooted in The Science™ or The Other, they all constitute bogeyman narratives. It is certainly the case that victims and rescuers in Western societies are particularly vulnerable to narratives purportedly grounded in The Science™, but scientism isn’t the whole story. It is a symptom of a deeper malaise.
Within the truther movement, it is now clichéd, but nevertheless true I believe, to acknowledge that while the Enlightenment unleashed a degree of freedom of thought, it created a new prison of nihilism for the West. The Enlightenment ushered in scientism, and scientism ushered in nihilism, vanquishing meaning, purpose and God. At the cusp of the transition from God to science, it was tacitly understood that science was a tool for understanding the natural world, and that God still had a place in the human psyche. God and science coexisted peacefully in the minds of many of the greatest Enlightenment scientists and philosophers. But at the point that Science decreed that it could not co-exist with God, and therefore sought to usurp God, the new religion of Scientism took hold. The deep irony being that Scientism is antithetical to science because it banishes scepticism, and sets science up as the mystical arbiter of all problems. Science becomes a god, and its practitioners high priests.
There is, therefore, some truth in Desmet’s theory of mass formation to explain covid hysteria, and indeed ‘climate collapse’ hysteria. Amy and I agree on the underlying societal conditions of alienation and meaninglessness in societies prone to hysteria. These conditions provide the fertile ground in which mass hysteria events flourish. A scientific priest class has replaced a Church-ordained priest class, but the former — allied with, and sponsored by, powerful political institutions — uses the same method of narrative control over the masses as the Church once did.
Crucially, Desmet posited that these mass hysteria events – he called them mass formation events – were underpinned by a state of hypnosis. This is Amy’s key point of departure from Desmet’s theory. Whereas Desmet believes that the state of mind that governs mass hysteria events is hypnosis, Amy provided compelling counter-arguments and, in my opinion, more accurately labelled it an ongoing state of addiction. In other words, alienation and meaninglessness lead to addiction not hypnosis. This makes far more sense to me, and this is a crucial point of departure which ties back neatly to the drama triangle framework.
Thus, we are dealing with drama addiction as the overriding state of mind in mass hysteria events or narratives, be they explosive in nature or ongoing.
There is a deep longing to fill the void of an empty and meaningless life, and indeed an empty mind, with stimulation that has the illusion of a threat to life, and therefore serves to provide purpose and meaning. It is a safe threat, which is oxymoronic but necessary to understanding that a cheap thrill is being sought. The thrill is cheap in the sense that it is unconsciously understood that the illusory threat is not real, but one must act as if it is.
There is some evidence to support this. Covid masking at the entrance to a restaurant but not while sitting down and eating. Again, I recall seeing EU polls that showed most EU citizens view Russia as a dangerous threat to their lives, but the polls reverse when they are asked if they’re willing to be conscripted into the army in a war against Russia. At that point, the threat becomes too real.
Thus, the challenge of the drama game is to really believe it is happening in order to experience the thrill that fills the void. Recall that the essence of drama in this setting is the attempt to superimpose a fantasy onto the real world, and to then convince oneself that a situation which has no basis in reality – the superimposed fantasy – is in fact real.
In this state of addiction, the victim oscillates between two main phases. The first is a state of emptiness in which the desire for a ‘fix’ becomes all-consuming. This empty phase is characterised by a period of helplessness during which the addict feels as though they are watching an ongoing disaster, powerless to do anything about it. The mind becomes agitated and, to escape from the deprivation of meaninglessness, it will latch onto any activity or object – the fix – for relief. Fixes provide relief to the addict because they are packed with sensory stimuli. Social media addicts might engage in behaviours to accumulate ‘likes’, ‘friends’, ‘followers’. Covid and lockdowns were the ultimate fix that provided numerous elements of drama all at once: the thrill of danger and locking down, together with irrational and ever-changing rules and regulations.
The rescuer is no less crisis-addicted than the victims. Rescuers have made a choice to busy themselves with managing the problems of other people rather than confront their own problem of isolation and deprivation. Covid provided an added thrill for both victims and rescuers, who were given permission to become persecutors of rule-breakers. ‘Climate catastrophe’ is the same, albeit on a slower burn.
The satisfaction derived from this intense new drama is the nearest the addict can experience to love. The diligent adherence to the rules and the expressed fidelity to the cause attract affirmation that elicits an emotional reward that may replicate experiences of nurturing childhood interactions with adults. The addict has not only filled the void, but they have been ‘good’ in the process. Both covid theatre and ‘climate collapse’ amplify this false love with the flood of media and other rescuer messaging reinforcing the moral rectitude of compliance, and vilifying non-compliance.
When victims and rescuers are in the bustling phase of a drama fix, getting on top of the situation by actually resolving it is not an objective. What matters is that the activity itself is satisfyingly absorbing and thus fills the void. Gamblers don’t stop gambling when they have lost all their money: they steal or borrow to double down. That is not to say that the addict can’t exhaust themselves in this phase. They can and do. But, as we saw in covid and again in ‘climate collapse’, damage assessment and measuring goal attainment are not taken seriously. The participants simply oscillate back into the empty phase in order to recharge for the next fix. The ultimate aim is not a measurable victory, but rather total immersion in thrilling, albeit meaningless, activity. This is why the news cycle is a ceaseless, disjointed narrative of sporadic events that are never followed up to their logical conclusion. The purpose of the news cycle is not to inform or to educate. It is to instil fear, or to reinforce desired behaviours and beliefs.
‘Climate collapse’ is perhaps more lethal for being a slower burn narrative. But it has all the same hallmarks and benefits for the persecutory ruling class pulling the strings. It’s really no less ridiculous than covid was. The human species is extremely poor at understanding the microscopic world. At the other end of the spectrum of ignorance, we are hopeless at assessing threats from things that can’t be seen because they are simply too vast, complex, and dynamic: like consciousness, the cosmos, and climate. The threat is automatically magnified, partly because of its incomprehensibility. Knowledge of the threat is then greatly exaggerated in order to compensate for ignorance and fear. Things unseen and things too vast are excellent fodder for crafting nightmarish bogeyman narratives.
Faced with a multiplicity of never-ending crises – indeed, ‘polycrisis’ is the technical term conjured by the professional managerial class for the hell on earth we are currently being subjected to – you would think that victims and rescuers would step back and begin to notice a distinct pattern to them all. It is patently obvious that they are all initiated, sponsored, and underwritten by the political leadership. There is actually a nagging suspicion among many ordinary people – mainly victims but also rescuers – that the real problem we need to fix is our political leadership, but the addiction to drama is so entrenched that the population would rather subject itself to the thrill of ceaseless and senseless drama than to call for the demise of the political leadership and the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC) who are manufacturing or stoking the crises.
At some level, victims and rescuers know that the supplier of their drama is their political leadership. Perhaps the reason that they can’t or won’t get rid of their rotten, evil leaders is the same reason a drug addict can’t get rid of their supplier. Why else would otherwise decent people refuse to put supporters of genocide and war criminals in jail? The sad fact is that the victims and the rescuers need their persecutors to generate the drama to which they’re addicted. Drama is their drug. They really are all in it together. It’s a very sick dance, and frankly I’m tired of watching it.
A speculative and more cynical look at the anti-imperialist Left psyche
The psychoanalytical model that assigns the role of rescuer to the drama-addicted Western Left intelligentsia does not preclude attributing an additional layer of Machiavellian conniving to that section of the professional managerial class. It is quite possible for them to be drama-addicted rescuers with Machiavellian motives too.
Let’s first split the Left into two broad camps, because this analysis does not apply to the neo-liberal Left intelligentsia who are deeply embedded in the Establishment hierarchy.
Within the Western Left intelligentsia, I can broadly make out the rough contours of two main camps – the neo-liberal Left and the anti-imperialist Left. The neo-Liberal Left is not merely aligned with every single critical Establishment agenda; it is the Establishment. When you look at the Labour Party and its apologists, you are looking at both the face and the boot of Big Brother. The neo-Liberal Left is The Guardian and its faithful readers. Polly Toynbee advocated in The Guardian for digital ID using all the Establishment talking points about convenience and immigration. The most jaw-dropping piece of gaslighting was this:
“What’s not to like [about digital ID]? Some will protest at the apparent loss of a romantic freedom, the right to vanish and start life anew, the call of the open road. But that’s a fairytale, a fantasy of a bygone era. Everyone knows everything already. As Richards puts it to me: ‘Last night I drank a Guinness. This morning I’m getting ads for Guinness.’ The algorithms catch us already everywhere.”
In other words, if you’re using a smart device, you’re being spied on everywhere, so why bother resisting Big Brother? Just surrender and learn to love him. The Left has gone from setting the streets on fire in 1968 to telling you in 2025 to look at the bright side of fascism.
Compared to the neo-liberal Left, the anti-imperialist Left is radically anti-Establishment. They have abandoned identity politics, and perhaps were always suspicious of it anyway. But they lag far behind in getting to grips with the Establishment’s core agenda – digital enclosure and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) comprising programmable money, asset tokenisation, Digital ID, and AI. You cannot be a complete anti-imperialist and ignore these issues since they are core financial imperialist strategies.
Perhaps their biggest blockage to seeing the global digital agenda is the belief, rooted in Cold War nostalgia, that China and Russia could be a genuine force for a more egalitarian and authentic multipolar world. If you tell them that the UN’s Agenda 2030 is a transnational corporate agenda, they would dismiss you as a nutter, partly because they have a soft spot for the UN. They see it as an instrument of genuine multipolarity.
These are speculative reasons for why the anti-imperialist Left have a blind spot for the advancing digital enclosure. At the more cynical end of the spectrum, it may simply be that they can see it coming, but they also believe that coercion is a natural facet of human interaction. So, better to see force wielded by what they perceive as anti-imperialist ideological allies – represented by Russia and China – than by NATO.
I have seen no evidence that the anti-imperialist Left believes in the sovereignty and freedom of the individual. And that’s why the conservative truther movement doesn’t trust them, even when they share many of the same goals. This prevents political solidarity. The anti-imperialist Left believe in defeating Capitalism, but Voluntaryism frightens them as much as capitalism. Yet they know that capitalism is anti-Voluntaryist, so if they were truly anti-Capitalist, they’d also have to be pro-Voluntaryist. They believe in defeating US-NATO imperialism – certainly a noble goal in itself – but they also believe that the ends justify the means. Any victory by the anti-imperialist Left would therefore be pyrrhic if it did not embrace Voluntaryism.
But they can’t embrace Voluntaryism, and therefore individual sovereignty, because they don’t believe it can co-exist with group welfare. They wrongly believe that individual sovereignty will trump group welfare when in reality, it’s the sine qua non of group welfare. You cannot have group welfare without individual sovereignty.
They almost certainly do not see, or at best are yet to acknowledge, the climate scam, which is an integral component of digital enclosure. The climate agenda is not some peripheral issue that you can treat as a spectator sport. It’s fundamental to the construction of the New International Economic Order leveraging carbon-based (and numerous other criteria) consumption tracking and control in real time, at the individual and transaction level. Carbon rationing is the shoehorn for all the other arbitrary tracking measures that will be used in the three-layered control grid of programmable money, asset tokenisation, and digital ID. The Establishment can’t pull it off without the threat of a boiling planet hanging over the populace for the next 80 years. Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) is already a religion and, if it turns into a great religion, it could last for centuries at a minimum.
Here’s where it might get Machiavellian. Even if the anti-imperialist Left know that the climate is not collapsing, I suspect they think they can ride that scam and use it as a sword to slay global capital, in the same way that they mistakenly believed that lockdowns were going to deal a death blow to Capitalism. Lockdowns were, of course, the most lethal dose of Disaster Capitalism administered by Capitalism in the history of Capitalism. At any rate, based on the quotes I shared in Part IV, one of which expressed the imperative “to ride this global warming issue”, I more than suspect that the anti-imperialist Left are ‘riding’ the issue.
The ‘collapsing climate’ is just another cheque written and signed by transnational capital and the international banking mafia. Even if the anti-imperialist Left were aware of that – and some of them have to be – it would be extremely challenging to talk them down from the ‘collapsing climate’ ledge because they’re in a double bind. They’re in an identity trap, and are more afraid of looking and sounding too much like the ‘right-wing’ truther movement. Gabriel Rockhill, an anti-imperialist Left intelligentsia member, has done a thesis on the identity trap that was laid for the Left by Western intelligence agents. This explains the contradiction that arises in trying to beat Machiavelli (the Establishment) by trying to be more Machiavellian, if that is what is actually going on. The Left understands contradictions very well; they just can’t see them when they’re presented in a mirror.
If the anti-imperialist Left think they can beat Machiavelli at being Machiavellian, they’ve got another think coming. And that’s because Machiavelli – global capital – doesn’t do ideology. It just does what works. Global capital’s pragmatism in applying deception is not something the anti-imperialist Left appears to have fully grasped. They still think they need to thumb through Das Capital to understand the latest scam.
In any event, the Left – both camps – are engaged in a confected struggle over CAGW in which all sides are really pulling in the same direction – CAGW controls as part of the top-down Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) digital enclosure agenda. The ultimate aim is not to actually do anything about curbing ‘fossil fuel’ emissions, but to create the regulatory framework for sacrifices to be made by ordinary people in pursuit of the unattainable goal of ‘decarbonisation’.
I’m still waiting for an anti-imperialist Lefty to dip their toes in the water and declare that we have no proof that the ocean is going to boil, or that the climate is going to collapse. But I’m not holding my breath, because five years on, they still can’t acknowledge the covid scam. As with the 1960s assassinations, they’re probably waiting for the 60-year conspiracy moratorium to expire.
As long as we collectively remain a species of idiots and savages, saving the planet can wait
I have always thought that the prioritisation of ‘curbing emissions’ over civilising the human race is both perverse and counter-productive to solving whatever ecological problems we face. Human beings are no less savage now than they have been at any point in history, and our savagery is the cause of ecological disasters. You cannot view ecological disaster and humanity’s crimes against humanity in isolation.
I mean, which disgusts and frightens you more – genocide or ‘carbon emissions’? If the answer is genocide and you can’t do anything about it, what makes you think it’s still worthwhile to prattle on about emissions when a savage predator ruling class is devoting all its energy to making our lives hell on earth? And if you’ve answered carbon emissions, then you’re exactly where the predator class wants you to be – worrying about a gas molecule over which you have no control while the predators kill, cheat, lie and steal. How can people not see that it’s the predators who need reining in, not CO₂?
As I’ve argued, the psychological acceptance of a ‘polycrisis’ in the absence of an ability to confront the ultimate cause of all crises – the OCGFC pulling the strings of the political leadership – with a real revolution speaks to a crisis-addicted population that doesn’t actually want to see an end to all these crises.
Until we improve humanity’s relationship with humanity, we are not going to resolve humanity’s relationship with nature. Pretending to solve carbon emissions while committing, supporting, being indifferent to, or unable to stop a genocide is cart before horse. To use a more vivid analogy, it’s a bit like watching a patient in an asylum smearing his own faeces on the wall while he tries to solve an algebra problem, and then fixating on whether he’s correctly solved the algebra equation.
For the controllers, it’s obvious to me that getting us to fixate on the weather is a fix for a drama-addicted population to stupefy us into the control trap they’ve set. It’s also displacement – an unconscious mechanism to avoid confronting the fact that we are collectively utterly insane. It’s much easier to say “let’s fix the ‘collapsing climate’”, than to say “let’s fix ourselves”. So, how do we fix ourselves?
If you haven’t already seen it, I urge you to watch this six-year old documentary – Planet of the Humans – because it is both so right and so wrong. So right for exposing the sham and lunacy of the corporate green movement, and so wrong for blaming all environmental problems on the mass of humanity. This documentary unsubtly comes to the same conclusion as the Club of Rome: “The real enemy then is humanity itself”. The documentary makers are asking the climate cult to remain depressed and fearful by delivering an alteration to the message – it’s not CO₂, it’s you because there are too many of you. This is worse than the old message, but still fits the bill entirely for control in the coming digital enclosure.
In this sense the documentary grossly contradicts itself. It paints a picture of oligarchal manipulation and greed on the path to the corporate hijacking of the green movement, but still concludes that we the people are the problem. Thus, this documentary allows Global capital to have its cake and eat it. A small clique of greedy psychopaths, whose driving animus is a contempt for the mass of humanity and a compulsion for control, devote their energies to disempowering people at the local level in order to exploit them and the environment. But when it inevitably goes wrong for people and the environment, this documentary still slyly puts the mass of humanity squarely in the cross hairs. Its message is clear – there are too many of us. That is not the correct diagnosis!
The correct diagnosis of the disease is a parasitic and cancerous growth on humanity called “the ruling class”. We are not the cancer; ‘They’ are! And the cure for that is obvious.
The solution for ameliorating the ravages of industrialisation lies in the rejection of global corporate centralised control in all its forms, and returning control to local communities. I will only start devoting my attention to the specifics of ecological problems when consciousness has risen to the degree necessary for humanity to recognise that all of its problems, including ecological ones, arise from the surrender of human sovereignty and control to a plutocracy. That realisation must lead inexorably to putting the lunatics who are running the asylum in straitjackets. At that point, problems, ecological and otherwise, will be entirely soluble. Until then, a human species that is collectively collaborating in its own physical and moral destruction is not worth saving.
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[i] Judith A Curry, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response, Anthem Press, 2023, Ch. 15, Pg. 252.
[ii] Ibid., Ch. 13, Pg. 194.
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