Part 1
Capitalists love to sponsor ‘green initiatives’. Why not? It’s about appearances (style) over substance. Smoke and mirrors, In reality, Capitalists, their elites, and the politicians they own do everything possible to be perceived as listening to scientists, meanwhile those with the ability and knowledge to actually determine the truth, realize that Capitalists are actually doing — next to nothing.
Fossil fuel capitalists sit atop an empire that won’t change until it is either made to, which is unlikely, or they have extracted every cent from the resource. They, the Capitalists and Corporations that actually run this little blue orb, will use any device to assuage, mollify, deny, threaten or bankrupt anyone willing to use facts and illustrate exactly what Capitalists are doing to enrich themselves at the expense of the environment, nature and ultimately the public.
We saw this with the chemical industry, (Bhopal), tobacco industry (cancer), asbestos industry, mining (black lung), electrical generation (C02 emissions), etc. etc. There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples of how Capitalists have used and abused people and the environment in order to enrich and ingratiate themselves and the 1%.
As George Monbiot last week stated in the Guardian, “There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first. This is true of other species. When confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, they invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter.
When faced with an impending or chronic threat, such as climate or ecological breakdown, we seem to go out of our way to compromise our survival. We convince ourselves that it’s not so serious, or even that it isn’t happening. We double down on destruction, swapping our ordinary cars for SUVs, jetting to Oblivia on a long-haul flight, burning it all up in a final frenzy. In the back of our minds, there’s a voice whispering, “If it were really so serious, someone would stop us.” If we attend to these issues at all, we do so in ways that are petty, tokenistic, comically ill-matched to the scale of our predicament. It is impossible to discern, in our response to what we know, the primacy of our survival instinct.”
I will link where Mondiot’s complete article can be read, but without people actually ‘reading and internalizing the information”, it is all of little consequence. The problem today is that misinformation, disinformation and outright lies, meant to dissuade those without enough intelligence to discern fact from fiction, science from pseudo-science pervades the media. People, unwilling to believe that things are really as bad as scientists suggest, seek diversion or sources of disinformation to provide comfort to their biases and thereby negate any actual response, action or further inquiry. They blissfully go through life taking disinformation in and repeating that same disinformation to others of like mind within silos of ignorance.
They refuse to face facts, because it requires a change, action and personal sacrifices, no matter how modest. So they in turn, immediately switch to the ‘banter of ignorance’, those echo chambers of disinformation and outright lies that enable them to feel comfort in like minds of ignorance. They even go so far as to suggest that there are alternate-facts. Alternate facts? There is no such thing as ‘an alternate fact’, it simply doesn’t exist.
Facts are not belief, faith or suppositions. Facts require proof, (data), its testing, validation, verification (peer review) and replication. Without that, nothing has been proven, and all one has is a ‘belief’, as immaterial and irresponsible as repeating a lie, in essence, can be.
But when a government, it its entirety decides to lie, in order to serve its own interests and not the public, it has lost not just credibility, – it lacks ethics and morality. Those prone to being unethical, dishonest or those able to justify their actions by the use of mitigation, are not fooling anyone willing to actually do the work of discovery. Facts require proof, not fabrication and the compounding of lies, yet, today, lies have become the bedrock of many corporations, businesses, and governments.
I remember a corporate leader saying to me, “Feed them like mushrooms and you can harvest them like mushrooms” while attending a private sector ‘leadership’ conference. That was eleven years ago, and it’s only gotten worse. Those either without the capacity, tools, knowledge or willingness to discern the truth become easy targets for capitalists to manipulate and use, politically. Democracy is fragile. It depends on truth and trust if it is to succeed. Today, both are in very short supply.
No greater example of that exists, than Donald J. Trump. A man devoid of ethics and morality, he denigrates Christianity by calling himself a Christian while breaking every tenet of Christian beliefs, save one. (Maybe now that he’s going to be President again, he can make it 10 out of 10). The future President is a man who proudly states, “I love the uneducated”. Of course he does, for obvious reasons, as most of them elected him.
But I digress.
Instituting real change to protect, ecosystems and the environment, requires real ‘science-based’ work. Tinkering with bio-degradable coffee cups, instead of dealing with pollution from farming, global warming or human industrial waste, is not useful or important. Monbiot suggests,
“We focus on what I call micro-consumerist bollocks (bullshit for my American Friends) or (MCB): tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.
‘Rich people can persuade themselves they’ve gone green because they recycle, while forgetting they have a second home.’
We are rightly horrified by the image of a seahorse with its tail wrapped around a cotton bud, but apparently unconcerned about the elimination of entire marine ecosystems by the fishing industry. We tut and shake our heads, and keep eating our way through the life of the sea.”
Willful ignorance at work, led by Corporations, the rich and governments, in order to make the 1% happy, actually do nothing substantive. Because when the 1% become unhappy, they will buy another group of kleptocrats or replace the government, which means the gravy train for the existing kleptocrats, expires, and no crooked bureaucrat wants that.
And it’s important to note that such commentary receives immediate scorn, but no analysis, no introspection. Instead, one can expect an attack, because speaking truth to power, will get you sanctioned, isolated and demeaned. It might mean you could lose your livelihood, exactly as Monbiot did for illuminating the lies of those committing the offences.
Part Two to follow, soon.
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