There are four major scams that have
duped humanity more than any others –
three long standing ones, and now a new fourth one:
1) Atheism (the Promethean fantasy
that God doesn’t exist, and the narrow Dawkins-esque scientism that
often accompanies it)
2) False Religions (all the little
ones, and the massive ones like Hinduism, and especially Islam,
which is the worst of all by a long way)
3) Socialism (the mass economic
delusion - until it extends to Communism, when it becomes the mass
catastrophic economic delusion)
4) Climate Change Alarmism (the
Gaia-worshipping cult of mother earth, and the absurd beliefs that
accompany it)
Numbers 1-3 have been standard on my
list for most of my post-teenage life; and I’ve always been suspicious of, and
sceptical about, environmentalism. But for most of my life the environmentalist
movement has been a fringe cult, consisting of a few odd ducks who dress
scruffily, ride bicycles and eat root vegetables. But these days things are very
different: such is the proliferation in numbers, enhanced capability for
widespread communication, and the mass-politicisation of climate change
alarmism that I feel even more able to declare it is now deserving of its place
in the ignominious list of major scams that have duped humanity.
The delusion, of course, is not most
of the science behind the climate change, and the data showing temperature
increases over the years; nor is it delusion to accept that climate change has a negative effect
on a proportion of the population. The delusion is that the environmentalists
currently causing havoc in London, wasting police time and damaging people’s
livelihoods actually have the first clue about the right questions, the right
answers and their meagre understanding of highly complex phenomena. On that,
I’ll not say much more here (you can read more on the scale of delusion in my
30+ articles on this subject, see subject tab on my sidebar)
The main purpose of this article -
something on which I do think most readers will agree with me, is this. You
know how we look back on the slave trade and on the 19th century periods of
industrial slog, smog and poverty with despair, and how we are thankful that
we’ve made so many advances. Well, it got me thinking again about what
comparable analysis our descendants will have about us; about this generation
and the two generations that bookend this one.
A lot of our life will strike them
as unfortunate – even many of our modern
technological advancements will be seen as limited by our descendants. But the
big impression I think they will have about this generation is that never
before have such a large number of people been so quick to believe so many
foolish things and act on those beliefs in such a socially detrimental way,
with such a toxic combination of self-confidence and meagre intellectual
accountability.
This generation has been
unprecedented in its quick rise of technology, material progression,
connectivity, capacity for information and rapid exposure to everyone else’s
ideas and opinions – and they just haven’t been able to
handle the requirements associated with such an explosion of thoughts, ideas,
gimmicks, spin, memes and tribal identikit ideologies – all gushing through in a stormy reservoir of
analytical complacency and the insecurity-driven search for meaning and
belonging.
It’s been rather like a mass flurry
of ten thousand butterflies released into the wild alongside ten million bees – it’s all happened so quickly and so chaotically that
folk can hardly get to grips with whether the things flying past their eyes are
butterflies or bees; and perhaps even worse, they are surrounded by people who
confuse them about when to prefer butterflies and when to prefer bees.
There is just too much information,
too many competing ideas, too much manipulation, too many charlatans, too much
agenda-driven dogma, too much distortion of language and too much virtue
signalling – and more young people than ever before
are struggling to resist the allure or comfort of dodgy, over-simplistic belief
systems. And that, I think, will be one of
the most historically noteworthy facts about these few generations that our
descendants will look back on with incredulity. They won't be able to believe that so many people could be taken in by so much nonsense in such a short space of time.
