Another night in the Hypocricity
Governments say there’s a climate crisis. Empty skyscrapers still burn up the sky.
Photo by Jared Pellow on Unsplash
Seen from space the city lights are an emergency flare.
“Stop us before we kill again.”
A last desperate signal for alien psychotherapists.
We’ll say the lights prevent crime. We’ll talk about high efficiency LEDs or something. It takes infinitely more energy to leave a light on that could be off. That’s a fundamental we ignore. We don’t want to stop doing pointless things. We want to make them more efficient. Suicide with recycled cutlery.
I bob out the harbour on a diesel ferry, knowing electric ones are available but not yet adopted. Past the hulking outline of a car transporter. Its brutal brick squats in the dark. Steel back arched, ready to spew second hand Japanese cars onto the streets. Just like the one I bought two months ago.
How far from the elegance of sail and carriage? From cathedrals to the towering desktop boxes with their glowing threats? PwC. EY. Deloitte. We’re proud to not worship gods. We worship money. We labour under the flags of those who count it.
Meanwhile, China struggles for power. It’s turning some lights off. A superpower humbled by the longest and most extreme heatwave in history. Relentless. Robbing the monstrous hydropower dams of their water. As the dams rob the water from the rivers and the fish. Factories are falling silent. We’re out of McDonald’s Marvel farting dog toys. Sorry for the inconvenience.
In Europe too the lights are dimming. Jostling for dwindling gas has cut them off from their dodgy Russian dealer. Winter threatens a cold, shivering withdrawal. France has gone nuclear. Grasping for the next high energy hit with the radioactive hangover. In Ukraine they’re shelling their reactors.
There’s a black hole between rhetoric and reality. We orbit it. Pubic hairs round the plughole.
That night I’d been to another sustainability seminar. Redesign this. Transform that. At question time, refreshingly, the business audience asked if we’d left it all too late.
I imagined saying:
“Multiple crises are set for every country. They’ll drive a truck full of suffocating refugees through all our good intentions. We’ll default to denial, or defend our affluence. Some will be too bankrupt to care. The rest will retreat to their holiday homes. Grow some veggies. Hope for the best.”
The moment passes.
The presenter acknowledges the situation is ‘dire’. Says "We’re doing all we can”, and “The solutions are already available.”
We’re all getting paid. We clap, then head for the free snacks and booze.
Healthy food is available. It doesn’t seem to be stopping starvation. It’s not solving obesity or me binging on beer and Cheezos. Light switches are available for all those high rises. Nobody is turning them off.
We tut tut at the corporations not meeting their carbon commitments. Their lies are so obvious they make us complicit when we take them seriously.
We want to believe. We want to be lied to. Oil woman Liz Truss is British Prime Minister. The English appetite for self harm rivals that of the goths I tried to date at college. It’s the same all over the industrialised world.
We’re isolated and traumatised by hollow materialism. Too depressed to even wish for escape. The global battered partner syndrome. Mother Nature’s police have arrived. They wield extreme weather events and weapons of mass disruption. They’re trying to prize us from our narcissistic business partners. They’ve spent everything. They’ve wrecked our home. They are on the very verge of violence. We cling to their ankles, so they’re not taken away.
There’s a song about fascists, which says: “History can’t repeat, because history never happened.”
Our society acts like history never happened. As if we didn’t ransack the world. As if the present isn’t happening. As if climate change isn’t already well underway and unstoppable. As if the future won’t happen either. We’re promising changes in decades that will be derailed in months.
We’re working with the mentally ill, including ourselves. It’s no good trying to get crazy people to see sense. People who are crazy don’t know they’re crazy. That’s what makes them crazy. Telling them they’re crazy doesn’t work. If it did psychologists wouldn’t get to charge like hookers and still be in short supply.
Those of us who can should try to make the world a little safer. We must work around the mental cases that inhabit it. We must do the societal equivalent of discreetly removing the sharps from the cupboards.
Nod and smile. Maintain eye contact. Try to let as many family members escape out the back door to survive in some semblance of sanity.
The lights on the skyscrapers will go on burning. Until they don’t.
"The presenter acknowledges the situation is ‘dire’. Says "We’re doing all we can”, and “The solutions are already available.”
We’re all getting paid. We clap, then head for the free snacks and booze."
One of the reasons I think the whole sustainability professionals field is part of the problem and why I quit. You've written about the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance often. I personally don't understand how you, and so many others carry on in that space. I saw the program for the recent Climate Change and Business Conference. What a testament to trying to tweak business as usual without any speakers looking to have spoken to the actual reality of the unsustainability of modern techno-industrial civilisation.
I reckon the best thing the whole SP group could do is walk out en masse professing the "bright green lies" and rampant greenwashing and that this civilization is finished.
At the risk of being a party pooper realist, I firmly believe we well into collapse.
Collapse isn't an event, it's a process.
Most past civilisation collapses were linked to, in no particular order: Climate change, resource depletion leading to supply chain break downs, debasement of fiat currencies, biodiversity loss, military overreach and delusional often pathologically insane, disconnect, out of touch rulers.
Collapse is the Only Realistic Scenario.
Check out my interview with Arthur Keller and his You Tube presentation embedded below.
https://kevinhester.live/2019/09/05/collapse-the-only-realistic-scenario/