Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twenty One

In this excerpt, Mikhail sums up the case against the apologists for climate denialism---.

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Final Summations and Verdicts---The Climate Trials and the End of Fossil Fuels, by Dino Payhas, from The Academic Journal of Restoration Ecology, vol 23, # 7.

When the final summations were delivered in the Climate Trials, it’s viewership had ballooned to become the largest audience in human history. The site by that time had amassed 20 billion clicks and was obviously being followed by a huge fraction of the world population. Even if Mikhail Bookchin hadn’t been so eloquent and logical, his last words would still be important to follow. To paraphrase Churchill, this wasn’t the “end of the beginning”, but rather “the beginning of the end” for the fossil fuel civilization.

It was like the old “unresponsive bystander” experiments that psychologists did during the 1950s. They would hire actors to fake something like a heart attack on a busy urban street. Often people would just walk by---even though when interviewed after the fact they had mostly wanted to do something. The key point was leadership. If someone stepped up, decided that the actor was having a heart attack, and, started saying things like “are there any medical professionals here?”, “can someone call for an ambulance?”, etc, people routinely jumped into action. But there had to be that first step.

Most people wait for someone else to take initiative. That’s because people take their cues from each other---it’s that old “wisdom of crowds” thing. But if everyone looks at each other to take the first step, often no one does, and, nothing happens---even though everyone wants it. Well, in this case politicians kept waiting for someone else to do something---young people, NGOs, etc. But there was such a tremendous power imbalance between the state and the large corporations---and everyone else---that no matter how much the environmental movement fought to be taken seriously, inertia always seemed to win out.

The Climate Trials seemed to create the “critical mass” needed to finally convince the governing classes that people would follow if they would lead. Moreover, it scared the rational egomaniacs into realizing that even if they didn’t give a damn about future generations, they would lose power unless they did step up and “get with the program”. The irrational psychopaths who still refused to do what was necessary quickly found themselves being sidelined---and ceased to be important.

Problems are impossible to fix until they aren’t. That’s how societies change.

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Wilson Gillespie gave the summation for the defence. He didn’t try to justify the continued use of fossil fuels. Nor did he defend their use well past the point where they were causing huge, long-lasting damage to the global climate. Instead, he asked for mercy in the court of public opinion. He said that the people who defended the industry were afraid that many gains humanity had made over the past two hundred years would be lost if the carbon economy was eliminated.

“Traditional societies were based on controlling the allocation of intrinsically scare resources. People don’t understand the lived reality of our ancestors. People starved while aristocrats spent scarce resources on great works of art and fought wars. There was rarely much of any provision for the sick, the disabled, people without skills, etc. They simply fell by the wayside and disappeared from history.”

“It’s true that many ancient societies lived in harmony with nature. But it was a harsh, brutal harmony where populations routinely expanded beyond their carrying capacity and were beaten back down to size by famine, plague, or, war over things like arable land and access to water. Fossil fuels changed that. Mining coal allowed people to smelt metals without destroying all the forests to make charcoal, and eventually to replace all the wood that was used to build things like ships. First coal and then oil allowed steamships to circle the globe and saved sailors from routine death whenever unfavourable winds drove their sailing ships onto rocks.”

“I’d like to draw people’s attention to a couple observations Henry David Thoreau made in his writings. First, while on wilderness excursion he mentions that it didn’t matter how wild and remote a place seemed, all that remained of the giant, old-growth white pines were the stumps---and this was before the civil war! Second, while in Cape Cod he went out onto a beach after a storm and saw the locals with wagons collecting the bodies of drowned sailors and passengers. He states that this was such a routine occurrence the cost of paying people to bury the drowned was a serious drain on the local government. That was two of the prices paid for using wind-based transportation---a ‘sustainable method’---before fossil fuels replaced it.”

“The ‘dark Satanic mills’ that William Blake railed against were built on vicious colonialism and slavery---but they also extended democracy to the newly-emerging middle class. And eventually, they dramatically raised the standard of living and extended the franchise to British workers too.”

“It’s simply an undeniable fact that fossil fuels have raised the standard of living and helped grow an equitable society for billions of people. Is it any wonder people would be terrified of the prospect of weaning our economy off the fossil fuels? Where an ecologist sees climate change and disaster, the denier sees freedom and prosperity.”

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Bookchin’s response was to ask people to not take Gillespie’s psycho-analysis too far.

“It’s certainly true that my colleague’s explanation of why people fought against doing something to prevent and then mitigate the Climate Emergency can be found in many apologist’s writings. But I would suggest that there are layers of moral culpability, and Mr. Gillespie’s analysis lacks any discussion of those. He spoke of climate deniers at their best---let me speak to what that really means.”

“Many years ago I had a conversation with an old man who’d been a railway worker in Switzerland during the Second World War. He said that as a young labourer he’d been working on the track next to a stopped train filled with sealed cars. He took a break and because the wind was making it hard to light his cigarette, he leaned against one of them to have a smoke. To his surprise, he heard voices inside speaking in Italian. He was afraid to tell anyone---because he’d been given strict orders to stay away from the trains. Later he found out that there were rumours that Switzerland allowed German trains to ship slave labourers and Jews out of Italy through the St. Gotthard Pass in Switzerland once the allies had bombed the Austrian Brenner pass in 1943 and put it out of action.”

“The reason I raise this is because that old man felt tremendous guilt because as a young man he’d been too afraid of losing his job and ‘making waves’ to look into what was going on or to even tell the shop steward of his union. Roman Catholic theologians would call this behaviour a sin of omission. Existential philosophers would call it bad faith. The former is when you sin by what you don’t do instead of what you do do. Letting a child fall into a well when you could have stopped it from happening is a sin---although you haven’t actively done anything. The latter is when someone refuses to look into something because they are afraid that doing so will reveal evidence undermining their assumptions. When the Pope refused to look through Galileo’s telescope he was exhibiting bad faith.”

“Most people labour with the delusion that they are ethical people if they just do what society tells them to do: they don’t steal, they follow the laws, they don’t act disrespectfully towards authority figures, are nice to their family, etc. But that isn’t being ethical or moral, that’s being conventional. Ethical people don’t just avoid doing things that everyone else says is wrong. They actively try to learn what it means to do the right thing, and do it no matter how unpopular it may make them with others. Being ethical require curiosity, courage, and, self-sacrifice.”

“I accuse the people who organized and paid for the fight against dealing with the Climate Emergency of being at best conventional. They had the benefits of an education, wealth, and, privilege. They were intelligent men and women. They could have been curious about whether or not climate change is a real thing---instead, they put their careers first. They could have taught themselves that what humanity was facing is an existential crisis, but instead they distracted themselves with learning the “finger exercises” of their profession and applying what they’d learned to create disinformation campaigns. Ethical people use the gifts the universe has bestowed them to become better people, leaders who make a better world for everyone. Conventional people squander these gifts to constrict themselves into beings who follow others in order to avoid conflict, become wealthy, and, raise their status among other conventional people.”

“Confucius understood conventionality thousands of years ago when he said that in a just society it is a shameful thing to be unsuccessful---but in an unjust one, one should be ashamed of his success.”

“It’s true that many people over the last several hundred years have advanced humankind by inventing things like the steam engine, plant breeding, the blast furnace, etc. But it does a profound disservice to them to suggest that the people who inherited their technologies and used them to make money at the expense of future generations are cut from the same cloth. People didn’t build steam engines by lacking curiosity or ignoring the implications of their inventions. They just didn’t know what would happen a hundred years or more after they had unleashed their inventions on the world.”

“The real innovators right now are the ecologists who discovered the processes that are damaging our ecosystem and the activists who are mobilizing the human race to prevent the problem from becoming a catastrophe. They are the people designing solar panels, wind turbines, more efficient and less destructive farming methods, etc. These people are the inheritors of the mantle created by the innovators of past age---not the conventionally-minded “enablers” who benefit from preventing society from dealing with a clear and present danger. That’s the people at their best.”

“Let’s not forget the folks who fight to preserve the fossil fuel economy because of the worst motivations. Studies by people like Hare and Altemeyer have shown that top corporations and conservative political parties have a disproportionate percentage of psychopaths in positions of authority. These people make up only 1% of the general population but as much as 15% of CEOs. That’s because psychopaths want power much more than ordinary people and they have no internal sense of right or wrong that would stop them from doing anything they believe is necessary to get it.”

“The defining element of psychopathy is the lack of a sense of right or wrong, or, obligation towards other people. This diminished sense of social responsibility means---almost by definition---that they will not feel any obligation towards the environment, the poor, or, future generations. All these people want and care about is their own wealth and power.”

“Unfortunately, another key aspect of psychopathic individuals is their ability to mimic normal human concern---when necessary. That means that they are very good at finding plausible excuses for their behaviour. (Indeed, they are such fast studies of the human condition that prison officials forbid their access to psychotherapy. Not only do they not benefit from the experience, but it helps them become more adept at manipulating other people.)”

“When you contemplate the people who fought so hard to prevent society from making the necessary changes to prevent or mitigate the Climate Emergency, ask yourself the following question. ‘Are they conventional people who avoided taking any personal responsibility to make the moral choice? Or, are they psychopaths who simply cannot understand why anyone would do something to help other people instead of amassing wealth or power?’”

“I’m not saying that either group of people are ‘evil’ or ‘bad’. I’m saying that they are dangerous. We don’t say that a tornado or a cougar are ‘evil’ or ‘bad’. But that doesn’t mean that we ignore them. We take measures to limit the damage that they can do to us. It’s the same thing with conventional and psychopathic individuals. We need to limit the damage that they can inflict on us, the environment, and, future generations. We don’t do that by getting angry. There’s no sense punishing either group---no matter what you do to these people, they won’t change. But what we can do is change the way our institutions, our businesses and political parties operate so a small group of these sorts of damaged people don’t get to amass so much power over everyone else. That’s what these trials are all about. They are a ‘wake up call’ for people to stop handing over power to others who don’t give a damn about who they hurt.”

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part One

This week I start a series on how one goes about helping youngsters develop one of the most important skills a human being can have: the ability to tell the difference between fact and nonsense. There is an academic discipline that makes studies this process, philosophy. But unfortunately, most people don't have a great deal of respect for this subject---and given the current state of the world, that really shouldn't come as any great surprise. This week I begin a conversation with a high-school teacher who has been instrumental in getting local school boards teaching philosophy to teens.

Cloudwalking Owl · Who Is Marie Snyder

One of the things I've learned from writing this blog is how important newspapers can be for creating a written record of the day. When I wanted to find out how the Carnegie library was built and torn-down in Guelph all I had for information were microfilms of the "Guelph Mercury". Without a local news source recording the facts in at least a little detail, future generations will have nothing to go on. That is part of the job of the "Guelph-Back-Grounder". These articles preserve part of our local history---and the people who are making it, like Marie Snyder. I back everything up on the Internet Archives "Wayback Machine" in the hope that this will preserve significant fractions of our history. If you think this is as important as I do, why not subscribe? It's easy to do with Patreon and Pay Pal.

Cloudwalking Owl · Can People Be Taught How To Think Critically

Pay attention to the point Snyder is making where she talks about how labourious it is to a teach critical thinking. 

 

 

When uncle Fester starts unloading about how he's heard the Rothschilds were behind a Jewish plot that involved space-born laser devices setting last year's California wildfires, we need to remember that it is simply impossible to come up with an argument that will change his mind. That's because the problem isn't the argument he is putting forward, it's the way his mind operates. Teaching children philosophy is not just stuffing facts in their minds, it's about helping them learn how to use their brain to its full potential.

As for the ranking of newspapers and journals, I've mentioned NewsGuard in the past, but I think it might be useful for readers to see what you get when you subscribe to the service. I have the app as an extension in my Thunderbird web browser and when I click on the notorious Breitbart News Network, the little shield on my Thunderbird app turns red and a white exclamation mark pops up on it. When I click on the icon, I get a short synopsis that looks a bit like this. (I couldn't get a screen shot of the pop-up window, but this is pretty much the same thing---only it comes from another part of the message.) 

This is just the synopsis. If you choose to learn more, there is a very long "deep dig" that goes with the ranking that describes things like who owns it, what it's history has been for publishing fake or misleading news stories, and, a lot of hypertext links that allow the interested reader to learn a lot more if so inclined.

If someone throws around a reference to a scientific journal, most people don't really know what to do. There are, however, as Ms. Snyder says, ranking services that allow people to "separate the wheat from the chaff".

There are several of these, but one of the most used is the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). It creates a rank based on the number of times a given article gets cited as a reference in other articles. The naive reader might think that a "popularity contest" is a weak reed to lean upon, but contrary to the myth perpetuated by countless bad science fiction books and movies, science doesn't advance because of isolated individuals "proving" something in their basement or garage. Instead, it's a collective activity where various institutions with groups of employees share information around the world and collectively piece-together a picture of the world that slowly becomes clearer and clearer. A large part of this process comes by publishing journal articles that allow all the relevant experts to pool their expertise. In effect, science is a consensus-building exercise and the SJR tracks how much a specific article (and the journal that publishes it) fits into the emerging consensus. 

Here's a screenshot of one particular listing for an academic philosophy journal, Noûs. (Click on the picture to get a better image.)

I'd suggest readers pay particular attention to the second set of graphs. That's because it compares the "Total Citations" to "Self-Citations". This is an important thing to understand, because some fake journals try to "spoof" the ranking systems by doing a lot of "self-citations". That is, if your article/journal is ranked according to how often they get cited by another article/journal, it might be possible for a big publisher to "juice the ranking" by just inserting a lot of unnecessary citations. 

 

No one expects the general public to be able to navigate the nuances of an academic ranking system. The NewsGuard system is something that might be more generally used. (I have the app because a local business pays for it in lieu of a subscription to the Back-Grounder.) But the really important thing is for the general public to learn to be a little more humble about their ability to understand what is going on when someone throws a reference to a scientific article into some post on social media. If you don't know how, or don't have the time, the rational thing to do is just tend to follow with the recognized experts are saying instead of someone who says they have "scientific proof" that Jewish space lasers set the California forest fires.

 

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There's a lot to digest in the above, so I'm going stop here and come back to the conversation next week. Until then, wear your mask, keep your distance, try to get along with the people you live with, and, remember that the epidemic will end soon.

 

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with. 

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Twenty

In this week's instalment, Mikhail has serious questions about the Elders and he gets some serious answers back---.

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Mikhi had gotten used to attending events at the Holy House, but this time he had some serious questions to ask of the people in the basement.

“What the heck was that all about? I saw four people killed before my eyes! Am I still in trouble? And just who exactly are you guys that you can do that sort of shit?” Mikhi was almost hyper-ventilating. He had thought that he had dealt with his experiences, but he suddenly realized that he was in denial. He was really freaked out by the previous week’s experience.

The short, old woman with the super frizzy hair in long braids answered. “There are lots of different answers to your questions. Let me start with the one that you haven’t asked, but probably is the most important one for you.”

“When people go through a shocking experience they generally feel numb for several days afterwards. This makes perfect evolutionary sense because it dramatically lowers our chance of survival if we immediately dissolve into emotional goo whenever we witness extreme violence. We need to get away from or fight a danger, not freeze. You are experiencing the emotions that came from your experience now because you feel comfortable in our presence. Don’t be afraid of your emotions. They are natural. And the fact you are experiencing them now, in the basement of the Holy House, with us, means you feel part of the community of Elders---which is a compliment to us more than anything else.”

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Mikhi realized that the next person to speak, a heavyset, middle-aged fellow with short iron-grey hair, was one of the people with the two dogs that he’d met on the trail. “The Elders have had many centuries to hone their ability to protect themselves from violent people and institutions. We have special subgroups who have learned how to apply a subtle understanding of force in order to protect ourselves and others without drawing attention.”

“Generally we are able to operate with a minimum of violence. But sometimes we have to deal with opponents who are so crude that the only logical response is to respond in kind. Ong Kata and the Rukka are probably as crude and violent as any force we have ever encountered. We had been watching the people watching you very carefully, and, as you saw, we were able to protect you when push came to shove. But I will admit I personally consider the fact that four individuals died in a public park at our hands a colossal failure on our part. I would rather have resolved the issue, if not peacefully, at least with minimal direct involvement.”

“I can assure you this will not happen again. Our operatives have manipulated Mr. Kata’s extreme anger and arrogance to trap him into a suicidal war with the Rukka.”

At that point the tall, thin, elderly black man stepped into the conversation. “I think we need to get you into a program of therapy. You’ve been through a really traumatic experience and we need to help you deal with it. PTSD is a real thing, and your experience could cause a really good case of it if left untreated. We will hook you up with a good therapist this week.”

Mikhi wasn’t finished with his questions. “I think I need a better explanation about who exactly the Elders are, and, where I fit into the plan. I just had four people attack me and watched them get very efficiently killed. I think I’m owed a better explanation.”

The middle-aged Asian guy with the smooth face and tired-looking eyes spoke up. “Yes, you are. And I’ll try to give you a bit of one. But you must realize any real answers will have layers of meaning, and the person hearing the answer won’t understand all of it until they’ve assimilated a certain amount of information first.”

“We don’t know when people began to realize that---contrary to the democratic slogans---all men are not created equal. It’s a combination of genetics and childhood experience, but there is a small percentage of the population who have the potential to have a significantly greater level of self-awareness. Within that small set of individuals, there is a much smaller group that have had the opportunities in life to get the necessary education to live up to their full potential. No one can know how many brilliant people wasted their gifts in menial labour as slaves or died in silly wars, being not much more than cannon fodder, etc, over the centuries.”

“But eventually schools of wise folks grew up in various countries. For example, when Alexander the Great entered into India he found a group of wise men he called the ‘Gymnosophists’. There was another group the Greeks found in Egypt that they called the ‘Ethiopian Gymnosophists’. When the Romans invaded Britain they found a school for Druids on the island of Ynys Môn---which they destroyed in order to end resistance to their colonization effort. In China a group of individuals called “the Old Ones” wrote a book of theory titled The Book of the Way and Its Power which people still read and which has been translated almost as much as the Bible. You would know it by the title Tao Te Ching. Later on, under the Islamic civilization, orders of Taṣawwuf---what you might have heard of as the ‘Sufis’---were established. In addition, under the Turkish diaspora a secret society called “the White Beards” collected information and directed efforts aimed at saving their civilization from the ravages of the Mongols. At the same time, the Free Masons were established in Western Europe as a means of creating an intellectual ‘sub-current’ aimed at freeing the population from the tyranny of the Catholic Church.”

“There were successes and failures. Some organizations degenerated into being not much more than lodges aimed at self-help, charities, or, even superstitious cults. Individuals and groups suffered persecution. But there were always enough individuals who went undetected and who kept the light of reason burning so new progress could be made in learning what it means to be an awake, aware, concerned human being. Eventually human technology and social organization developed to the point where different groups could easily connect with each other and eventually co-ordinate their actions on a greater scale.”

“What really helped the Elders take off was the creation of the World Wide Web. It had been tremendously difficult to co-ordinate actions across international and cultural boundaries before. But the Web has created a real global civilization for the first time. This has allowed us to extend the reach of our activities in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible before. Moreover, the way in which modern societies have become dependent on technology has meant that the specific strong suit of the Elders---knowledge, wisdom, and, self-awareness---are increasingly important assets for asserting influence over the greater society. In other words, it is getting harder and harder for brute force to trump brains---as Mr. Ong Kata recently learned.”

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

What is Democracy? What is a Politician?

Like a lot of people who have been looking at the news lately, I've spent a lot of the last month thinking about both democracy and the role that politicians play in it. Unlike most casual observers, however, I have had a fair amount of experience in political organizations which has given me something of a particular perspective on the subject. In lieu of writing anything else this week, I thought I'd put out a few somewhat random ideas on the subject to share with my readers. Make of them what you will.

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Over the short years of my life, my political orientation has wandered pretty much all over the map. But I can remember one particular time when a text produced a revolution in the way I think about such things. The book in question was Hitler's Pope. What struck me was a short passage where the author argued that Pope Pius XII sold the pre-war German Christian Democratic party "down the river" in order to secure protection of Church property and personnel from the NAZI party. 

This really stuck with me because like most people who've read much about politics, I'd never really thought very much about democracy as an ideal. I don't think that this is because of my own idiosyncrasy so much as our society-as-a-whole.

To start with, the two courses at university that I took on the subject promoted two ideas. The first one was that politics is ultimately a mechanism for allocating scarce resources between groups with different ideologies by using the minimum use of violence. The second one built on this idea by suggesting that liberal democracies can only exist if a ruling elite exists that is willing to manipulate the masses (through things like propaganda and lying) into voting for things that are in their objective best interests, but which they don't consciously want. 

Consider the above as two "book ends" that cover the same worldview. That is, the idea that political decision-making all comes down to groups of people with interests who use politics instead of naked force to get what they want.

Most of what I would call "radical progressives" believe much the same thing. The only difference I find is when I talk to them they tend to oscillate between venting outrage with the state of world and snide, and, exasperated, cynical comments to the effect of "what else do you expect from a capitalist system?"

I've come to the conclusion that the reason why politic discourse often ends up like this is because our society has lost the ability to have cogent conversations about ethical issues. This is a very big deal, in my humble opinion, because democracy didn't come about because people could use it to gain power but because lots of people over generations believed that it was the only really moral way to govern a society.  

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Previous generations of people spent a lot of time writing and talking about the concepts of "right" and "wrong". Highfalutin philosophers talked about things like Kant's deontological theory, Mill's utilitarianism, Sartre's existentialism, and others. The masses, however, usually based all their moral beliefs on what the priests told them.

The problem with this is that the priests are usually in the same boat because they don't know how to reason through their ethical teaching either. In other words, it is a case of the blind leading the blind. That's why, for example, even in the face of dramatically rising inequality, racism, sexism, ecological collapse, potential nuclear war, etc, many religious leaders still routinely say that the most important ethical issues people should be concerned about are keeping women from having access to safe abortions and gay spouses from their partner's dental plan. If you doubt this, take a look at the following excerpt from the speech "Mother" Teresa gave when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In it she opines that the gravest "threat" to world peace is women's access to safe, therapeutic abortions. 

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The old churches used to have institutional leadership that were able to keep the wilder flights of fancy among parishioners from taking hold of the congregation. As religious freedom expanded through generation after generation, however, more and more independent congregations came into existence---and each of them was free to embrace their own set of ideas. Next came cults that were led by charismatic leaders. The last iteration of this splintering process are groups like Q-anon and others that are based upon an on-line "group-think" process. These conspiracy theory messages mutate based upon the promptings of "clicks" that individuals can read through social media analytics. The result is akin to what game designers call "Live Action Role Playing" (or "LARP"). 

A LARP is like a big game of Dungeons and Dragons where each individual piece is a real human being making their own personal choices, and the Dungeon Master has to interactively play with them to keep them in the game. It's a bit like the fake news that was coming out of Macedonia when teenagers found out that they could make a lot of money by printing stories about things like the Pope endorsing Donald Trump for the presidency. If a story had "legs" and made a lot of money, they wrote more like it. If one dropped like an anvil, then they didn't do another like it. It's much the same thing with regard to writing stuff about Q-Anon and other conspiracies---whatever gets clicked is reinforced and whatever doesn't gets dropped. 

Donald Trump was a star from a "reality tv" show, and these too are a type of LARP. The show-runners and producers' job is to interact with the people in front of the camera and create new stresses and situations as the audience learns more about the cast. That's why Trump is so fluid about policy and truth---he's not stating facts that he believes in, he's just constantly throwing dust in the air to find out which way the wind is blowing.  

This is an insane way to make decisions---far, far worse than simply doing whatever the priests tell you to do. That's because the priests at least had to go to a seminary and not get too far from what the Bishop wants. It's hardly surprising that given this type of ethical reasoning we ended up with a horde of wack-a-doodles storming the Capital Building---in defence of "democracy" as the social media AIs have defined it.

Image from the L. A. Times, used under the "Fair Dealing" provision.

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There have always been arguments between cynics who see politics as being exclusively a game of power, and, idealists who really do believe that democratic decision-making is a type of ethical paradigm. If you read Plato and Machiavelli, you can see the same arguments and types of personalities that are on display today. I do think, however, that there is one significant difference. All past societies above hunter/gatherer seem to have been dominated by elites: all types of politics were politics by aristocrats. 

The people who founded the US democratic system, for example, were mostly wealthy landowners. There were many problems with such a system, but one thing that probably was good was the fact that most of them had benefited from a good education. And this included the people who were religious. That's because even if they were pious, they had been taught by very well-educated priests. This is why the writings of various leaders from the past often contain some very fine ethical reasoning. 

Now, however, we are to a large extent at the mercy of the "unwashed mob". And it simply doesn't have much experience thinking through the choices it makes. That allows them to embrace idiotic ideas like Q-Anon, antisemitism based on the idea that Jews are Lizards from outer space, etc. 

This lack of understanding also allows the mob to fall for the patent venality of opportunists like Mitch McConnell. Taking a look at the following clip, you might be excused for thinking that McConnell voted for conviction of Donald Trump---but he didn't. If you pay only slightly more attention, you might be fooled into thinking that he wanted to vote for conviction, but that he felt that he couldn't because doing so would go against the rules of the Senate---which is false. There is a precedent that says it can. Moreover, there was a vote by the Senate that also said that you can---and the tradition is that once an issue is settled this way, everyone taking part should abide by the decision made. You might also have the idea that McConnell would have voted for impeachment if the trial had happened when Trump was still in office. But you'd be wrong, because he was the man who decided to delay the process so the vote would happen after Biden was sworn into office. McConnell may not be an illiterate boob---but he is certainly a Machiavellian who doesn't believe in democracy as a moral imperative.    

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Personally, I think that we are currently going through what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called an "Axial Age". This is a period of time when human society dramatically changes for one reason or another. In the first one, Jaspers said that the major religions of the world came into existence. This second one that we are currently living through is based on the profound changes to society that modern technology is imposing upon us. The Web has created the problem of weird conspiracy theories because of a variety of factors. It has also triggered the rise of populist authoritarians---like Donald Trump. It has also created the pandemic that we are facing now because of the universal fast transport through jet airplanes. And, of course, there's also climate change. One big problem after another is roaring down the historical highway and humanity is going to have to rejig just about everything we do if we are going to survive the potential pile-up. Democracy is perhaps not the most important item on this list---but it's one of the big ones.

The first step of fixing anything is to understand it. I hope that the above will get at least some of my readers thinking about it.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Nineteen

In this instalment of The Climate Trials, the Elders get rid of a minor inconvenience.

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Albert Tuttle had worked for Klytemnestra Industries for 30 years and eventually rose to head of Financial Services. He was under no illusions about either the corporation or his boss, Ong Kata. They were both evil, violent, and, stupid. But they paid very well and he’d found it was best to just do what he was told and not bother to think about what he was doing. He had expensive, vicious, vices (involving young children) and the money he made doing what he was told to do allowed him to indulge them without having to worry much about being caught. People with a conscience get sifted out of organizations like his before they get to any position of responsibility. Moreover, his loyalty began and ended with doing what he was told. Kata was not a man to be second-guessed---and he had no qualms about killing any employee who inquired into what was going on or attempted to show the wrong sort of initiative.

This was why Albert simply took it as a matter of course when a man he’d never met before came in and told his receptionist that “J. J. Clarke” wanted to see Mr. Tuttle. He wasn’t the same “J. J. Clarke” that he’d dealt with in the past, but accepted his request with the instant compliance he’d been told was required. Tuttle didn’t even ask what the going rate was for the mineral before he told Klytemnestra to secure and transfer a ton of Rhodium to a warehouse in the harbour district ASAP. “J. J. Clarke” told him that if he had trouble securing the Rhodium quickly, Clarke’s associates would be happy to take a first shipment within a week and accept the balance when it was available. Having said that, he intimated that everyone---including Tuttle’s boss---would like to see as much of the shipment as possible delivered in the first consignment.

Tuttle knew what that meant. He’d gotten his current position after his previous supervisor had tried to “double check” a “sketchy looking” similar order by contacting Mr. Kata. In doing so, he’d broken down the “fire wall” between accounting and the head of the company. The rumour was that Ong had been furious, the supervisor had never been seen again, and, Tuttle was offered his position. He signed the requisite forms, and put his best people on procuring the precious metal. He was able to get the full ton together and delivered to the warehouse within five days.

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When Ong Kata found out that Albert Tuttle had given $111.144 million to a complete stranger, he was so angry that he literally saw stars. When he’d finished smashing most of the furniture in his office, he had one of his henchmen beat his head of financial services to death and then dispose of the body. And since he knew that only the Rukka had the password necessary to get paid this way, he immediately put a $10 million “hit” on the head of the organization through his contacts with the Russian Mob. This led to further complications under the surface of the criminal subculture, which in turn resulted in Ong Kata’s disappearance and Klytemnestra Industries going into receivership. Since no one wanted to buy a company with so many liabilities, it quickly went completely out of business.

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Overdrawn at the Bank of Trust

Like lots of other people, I've spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why so many people are willing to believe the craziest of notions. This isn't just an artifact of the global pandemic---things were well on the way to crazy-town long before everyone started getting used to plague doctor memes. 

Where I used to work---at a university library, no less---I had co-workers who believed in things like chem trails, Masonic conspiracies, Nikola Tesla had invented a time machine that the US government used to control the world (!!!), vaccines are poisonous, etc. Now, of course, we have things like Q-Anon. Where is this coming from? 

I have a tendency to believe that most problems don't have one single cause, but rather several different ones that work together. To that end, I'd like to posit one more potential cause of this plague of idiocy that is afflicting us at the same time as Covid-19: a chronic social deficit in trust.  

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Rene Descartes, a little paranoid?

Trust is an interesting thing. Philosophers have pointed out that if a person is really honest with herself, she really doesn't know an awful lot. Descartes pushed this idea to the point where he said that he didn't even know if there are other human beings in the world---it could be that he was surrounded by robots that perfectly mimic his conception of human behaviour. Indeed, modern thinkers have similarly posited that there is no real way of proving that we aren't all living in a computer simulation that was created by some intelligent race of super beings. 

We have to take a great many things in life simply "on trust". It's true that we have laws governing contracts and thievery, but the fact is that we are at the mercy of the companies that supply goods and services, our neighbours, the government, etc. That's because our court system would be completely overwhelmed if it was expected to police 100% of all human interactions---or even slightly more than it does right now.

This need to trust each other has grown dramatically in recent years as we have become more and more interconnected. I sometimes order parts, tools, or, other things from people running small companies in other countries---some of them with quite sketchy reputations. That has included things like a specialty bolt I needed to fix a chair but which I had to purchase from Hong Kong (because the only North American supplier I could find sold them exclusively in 1,000 piece lots), a box of old-fashioned safety razor blades from Turkey (you can get them here---but they are outrageously expensive), and so on. I've never gotten stiffed and I generally get a good price. If this wasn't people's general experience purchasing goods online, the entire industry would come crashing down---so companies like Ebay and Pay Pal go to great lengths to keep their customers happy. 

Because trust is important to business, there is a polling company that keeps track of how much the global population trusts it and other social institutions. In the words of the Edelman Trust website: 

"We have studied trust for 20 years and believe that it is the ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions—companies and brands, governments, NGOs and media—build with their stakeholders. Trust defines an organization’s license to operate, lead and succeed. Trust is the foundation that allows an organization to take responsible risk, and, if it make mistakes, to rebound from them.

For a business, especially, lasting trust is the strongest insurance against competitive disruption, the antidote to consumer indifference, and the best path to continued growth. Without trust, credibility is lost and reputation can be threatened."

To this end, Edelman has been polling levels of trust for several years and publishes an annual report. The latest one is worth looking at because it shows a very steady and significant decline in people's trust in several key authorities.

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(Before I get any further, I want to warn readers about the information I'm getting from the Edelman Trust Barometer. 

• This is a private company, which means that by definition, it serves the interests of stockholders, not the public interest. Looking at the report, it appears obvious to me that the people creating it are supporters of the neo-liberal consensus. 
• The "report" consists exclusively of graphs without any attempt to interpret the information or place it into a context.
• Most of the graphs specifically refer to business "brands" and how willing citizens are to believe corporate "spin".   
  
• It gets its information through polling a relatively small number of people: 30,050 for the entire planet. Modern polling is a science, which means there is an attempt to limit different demographics so they aren't over-represented---but just remember that this is a very small percentage of the world population!
• Their data comes from on-line surveys. That means that only people with access to the Web could physically fill it out---and that no one was holding a gun to these people's heads forcing them to answer truthfully. So only relatively well-off people with nothing better to do filled out the form---that's hardly a representative sample of the world population!
• The parent company Edelman has been caught recommending unethical practices in support of things like the Keystone and Energy East pipeline proposals.
  

Having said all of the above, I believe that some of the information we get from these reports is useful---especially insofar as it shows trends from year to year. That's because one can assume that using the same sample year to year will cancel out the self-selection bias.)

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Let's look at what the Trust Barometer has to say about what and who the world population does and doesn't trust over the past few years.

It's important to parse out a poll's context if we are going to understand what it means. For example, what does the survey mean by a "search engine"? I suspect that they just mean "Google". But it isn't the only one---I use Duckduckgo, for example. That's because I don't trust Google to not sell my browsing history to nefarious actors. I do trust Duckduckgo on that score. But I do trust both to objectively present links according to a mechanism that uses both popularity and respectability as part of the criteria. Where do I fit on the graph? Do I trust search engines or do I not? 

There's another element to this. It appears that the Republican party in the USA simply does not believe that it is possible that some of their policies are objectively harmful to large sectors of the population or that because of this they are very unpopular. When the search engines reflect this unpopularity, they assume that there is a conspiracy against "conservatives". In this sort of context, what exactly does it mean to say that you lack trust in "search engines". Is it simply because they agree with the lies of a major political party? If so, then perhaps the problem isn't a lack of trust in search engines, but rather too much trust in the Republican leadership?

Even more to the point; Facebook, Netflix, Youtube, etc, all use search engines and artificial intelligence to decide what shows up on my feed. What I expect (but certainly do not want) them to do is quickly create a "filter bubble" based on past choices that will feed me more and more content that is designed to make me upset about the world around me. They do this to encourage me to watch even more content from their social media feed because this will make me a more useful commodity to sell to advertisers. This feeds my "distrust" insofar as I know it will act like Grima Wormtongue (from The Lord of the Rings)---whispering poisonous half-truths and out-and-out falsehoods into my ears in order to poison my mind.

Facebook's employee of the year

So, do I "trust" search engines? Or don't I? 

(I rarely finish filling out a survey because I generally end up raising quibbles like the above. If there is a human being trying to get me to answer their questions, they usually look like deer in the headlights of a car and mumble that I should "just tick something".)

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I suspect that part of the reason why there has been such a decline in trust is because we have had it betrayed so many times. This is especially important with regard to government. Just off the top of my head, I'll list some things that have eroded my trust in politicians.

• the fake "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" that resulted in Congress giving president Lyndon Johnson the authority to get the US military mired in Vietnam
• the fake "Weapons of Mass Destruction" propaganda that George W. Bush and Tony Blair used to justify the invasion of Iraq

These are really "stand out" incidents because a lot of people died as a result of each. 

But there are other, smaller, "drip, drip, drip" scandals that routinely happen and slowly erode any belief that the government can be trusted. These include:

• the "ME to WE" charity that seems to have not been much of a real charity and involved several members of the Trudeau family in a conflict of interest
  
• the "Panama Papers" scandal where a whistle-blower at a large legal firm gave evidence that an entire industry exists that allows hordes of wealthy people to avoid paying taxes
• the "Me Too" scandals that seemed to show that wealthy, powerful men like Donald Trump, Bill Cosby, Peter Nygard, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Jian Ghomeshi, etc, can get away for decades with serially abusing women
• the SNC-Lavalin case where an international engineering firm got caught bribing foreign governments to gain contracts---and it looked like the Prime Minister's office was willing to lean on the Minister of Justice in order to let it off the hook 
  

Another problem seems to be that the institutions that are supposed to protect us seem to be not much more than "paper tigers". 

• Elections Canada seemed totally uninterested in punishing the federal Conservative party even though it had clearly involved itself in voter suppression through the "robocall" scandal
• when Liberal leader Stephan Dion wanted to form a coalition government after the 2008 election, Governor General Michaelle Jean allowed Stephen Harper to instead prorogue Parliament
• Revenue Canada seems to have given up chasing tax cheats---if they have enough money to make things difficult
  

Beyond the above, there are other types of "drip, drip, drip" that kills people's trust in government.  

• constituency offices that increasingly seem like the entrance to prisons because of excessive security
• badly-designed and poorly-maintained web-based government application systems that threaten dire consequences if you fill out the forms wrong---but which can be impossible to use
  
• phone messaging systems that force people to wait on line for hours while inane recorded messages spit out the obvious lie that "your call is important to us"  

My "gut feeling" is that every time a politician goes into "mealy-mouth mode" and refuses to express themselves in a forthright manner, a little more basic trust in the democratic process gets eroded. Every time a bureaucrat refuses to speak honestly to a citizen and refuses to admit that there is something wrong with the system they serve, a little more trust in the government chips off. Every time the government gets caught doing something they shouldn't and takes refuge in the statement "no laws were broken", people's faith in government declines. And every time a government oversight body says something to the effect that "they didn't find enough evidence for charges" the respect for regulators declines.

In effect, what I'm saying is that several of the pillars of society---such as government---depend on a certain amount of trust by the citizenry. All the actions I mentioned above are like withdrawals from a bank account. If more comes out than goes in, eventually there's nothing left and a person becomes insolvent. I would posit that many of the old authorities in our society are perilously close to bankruptcy and that's why so many people are willing to seek out alternative authorities to rely upon.

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One of my "bête noires" are people who don't take into account the opportunity cost of their actions. In this case, the trade-off is that every time a person in authority refuses to "fess up" and speak "punk and plain" they seem less trustworthy. The public relations profession has done such a good job of "keeping on the message" and "controlling the spin" that a significant fraction of the public have pretty much lost every scrap of trust they might have once had in our authority figures. The result is that these folks have started casting about for new points of reference. 

Unfortunately, many of these people have fallen into the hands of social media Wormtongue clones who take advantage of this naive cynicism. And that's why we have people falling prey to ridiculous conspiracy theories about reptilian overlords, blood-drinking Hollywood stars, etc. Let's hope this is just a passing fad---. 

Remember to keep your distance, wear a mask, get vaccinated if you can, and, hopefully this idiotic epidemic will be over soon.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!