The Climate Change Meta-Narrative
How people's perception of reality is warped by one simple trick of the elites
Dutch farmers protesting a gov’t decision to close dozens of farms and ranches to reduce nitrogen by 30%. The headlines for this story are quite unsympathetic to their righteous indignation, as well.
Euronews headline: "Thousands of Dutch farmers block roads in protest against emissions targets"
France24 headline: “Dutch farmers protest livestock cuts to curb nitrogen”
You can see the frame, right? “These foolish, sheepshagging double-digit IQ morons out in the middle of nowhere hogging up ALL this land with a carbon footprint way higher than us city-dwellers have the audacity to protest science! Haha! I laugh! Don’t they know about the poor seals dying from icecaps melting!? Or how evil stinky diesel tractors are so destructive to the air that we breathe!? Pfft, these fools just don’t understand the world like I do.”
Now we will set aside the level of reliance the average green city-dweller has on this complex, industrial society, and focus for a minute on why it is so easy for elites to demonize the Salt of the Earth.
Simply put, the religion of the progressive is more Faustian than they think. As in, they are more for the Myth of Progress, of expansion, of marginally increasing lines on graphs, than any of us are. Increasing rights for x group, bringing more wealth to x group, making our measured impact of carbon production on the world less, etc. They love charts. But why? Well, it is the world-image, the materialization of a concept of increasing marginal returns on whatever their “goal” is.
This paradigm isn’t just years old, but a couple centuries. It was the same for generals conquering land, businessmen who wanted to turn forests into parking lots, and it is the same for the average Starbucks-drinking progressive. They worship progress. The elites themselves, rely on a perception of progress to maintain relevance and legitimacy. Whether a leader of a corporation, government, or NGO, the dialectic is all the same.
However, the paradigm of progress is not a teleological religion, and its followers more or less have no conviction about their beliefs as they drink liquid concoctions made up of several poisonous ingredients that are sourced from corners of the Earth, which no doubt had to reach them while burning many a fossil fuel. Then, once the beverage is consumed, this loyal follower of progress discards the plastic container that once contained their Frappuccino into a trash can that will haul it off to some landfill far away from the conscience of this city liberal.
See, their conscience goes so far as whatever cogently-guided media trend controls them, or what new city ordinance lays more passive-aggressive shame upon them. It doesn’t stop anyone, especially progressive elites, from living a life that has such a detrimental material impact on the world around them, but such trends and vague laws give progressives another etch into the wall of progress.
The last thing these people want to recognize is that their lifestyle itself, irreligion, and a rejection of a concept of beauty and art, where they treat all human interaction as a give-and-take, and all humans themselves as economic units, is all just as ruthlessly avaricious as their business mogul and generalissimo ancestors. They do not know how to operate outside an ontology based on expansion. If they truly believed in limiting something as irrelevant as carbon footprint, they would change their life to reflect modesty, beauty, and civility, but that is simply not in their playing cards. If it were, they wouldn’t be turning half of Texas into a farm of wind turbines, or admonishing cities’ and states’ histories and turning them into expansive oceans of concrete.
For the city dwellers themselves, who unrealistically think they can make the perfect city through cogent city-planning, the same mindset wracks them. They see suburban hells, increasing crime, and just plain and simple ugliness of car-centered cities and want to reform them into cities that focus on people. No problem! It’s just your entire city still runs on the same mindset that brought about the endless seas of suburbia that you vilify. You still have to burn and mine to sustain your complex metropolises. You still have to rely on faceless farmers, international laborers, and municipal bonds to create your utopia. Much like any progressive, there is a hint of originality and sense of what is right, but drowned in a sea of self-indulgence and naivety.
If one wishes to care for nature, they have to have a mindset that reflects that of ecological limitation, as Chad A. Haag discusses in both Being And Oil and Hermeneutics of Ecological Limitation. The progressive mindset is wholly against the idea of genuine austerity, of a philosophical approach to limitation rather than one coming from the mouth of science man. Their religion is about consumption, expansion, and growth. It might not use the exact same frame as a capitalist looking for growth in profits, but the progressive yearns for growth in the ability for people to self-indulge. They’re all about creating a world where everyone has discretionary income to enjoy endless martinis, IPAs, and internet porn. They think there is this happy medium of hedonism that can be achieved if just the gosh darn corporations weren’t so greedy bro. The basis of their entire being is founded upon the selfishness and self-centeredness of the Industrial Age, and it is groundbreaking to speak in a dialectic any other than that of expansion.
So to bring it all back. The media can make anyone it wants into its enemy, if it uses the frame of environmentalism and climate change, because those are its rhetorical weapons for which to do evil. No matter what it is, if the issue relates to science, especially climate change, it can twist and turn any sense of right and wrong because those beholden to the Soma of the Industrial Age - line-go-up, growth, increase, expansion - will drop any belief they had previous about a subject if it means, “Muh climate will be hurted :’(!” Only those who accept that limitation plays a role in our relationship to this world will be actual shepherds to convoy humanity and nature into the equilibrium we wish to achieve, if we can reach that world at all.
In my opinion, the climate change mantra seems to be facing the same scrutiny and just plain disinterest that the short-lived health mantra for covid faced. The meta-narrative is flimsy because it has no telos - it has no God (no truth), and because it is flimsy, those in power who attempt to use it for selfish means will only be faced with flimsy power they cannot increase as the drug of environmentalism becomes impotent.
And that is exactly what happens when God and family, modesty and love are removed from the epicenter of a society. We go back to worshipping the golden calf.
“We cannot experience the world, even for an instant, without experiencing it through some myth, some narrative structure that sorts out our experiences and gives them meaning to us.”
John Michael Greer
Consuming climate change and consuming the Frappuccino is no different, both are due to uncontrolled unfettered emotion and the product of never being told no and never taking personal responsibility. These progressives act only regressively to stimuli and propaganda sold as improving the situation based on the lie that you went to college to change the world and you do it by purchasing a Frappuccino on the basis that 0. 5 cents goes to the transgender surgery of the endangered rainbow fly of the Ukraine wilderness.
Your correct in the framing and the sophist problem solving ability of the regime.
Where I disagree is with the example of the Dutch "Farmers". The system that they operate under as an export based industry is destructive to say the least. The problem doesn't lie with the GOV it lies with the GOV giving the LOBBY what they asked for. After populist get what they want from the state they get what they need the State. These "FARMERS" and their reliance on globohomo to maintain their model will be exported elsewhere to REEK the same HAVOC.