Things we can’t see, don’t have the language for, that MATTER (the mechanics of social movement organisations etc etc)

We can’t, usually, ‘see’ carbon dioxide. But we know it is there. Since the 1950s very very accurate measures of its concentration in the atmosphere have been kept (thanks to Uncle Sam and his military industrial complex).

While dickheads – to use the technical academic term – like ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott scoff at “invisible substances”, anyone who can read a Keeling Curve is able to see trouble ahead.

The thing the title of this blog refers to though, is something else altogether – it’s this: the ability of radical (or god, at this stage even small l-liberal) grass roots groups to sustain themselves – to attract and keep new members, to spread the skills and knowledge so there are no single points of failure (or fewer of them), to link up with other groups on the same or different issues and SUSTAIN pressure on local/national governments, on local/national/international corporate actors.

The need for this is occasionally mentioned, albeit in a footnote or in some throwaway paragraphs in the final chapter of a lengthy screed about how the cat should wear a bell.

But for the most part our “best and brightest” (god help us all) fill their Twitter threads with denunciations of the cognitive biases of other people and how easily these biases are debunked.

Because the only thing that matters is that everyone else sees the world exactly as our Best and Brightest think they should. The actual problem – civil society capture, exhaustion, the boom and bust nature (emotacycle) of climate ‘activism’? That’s an invisible substance, and therefore doesn’t matter.

It’s basically the same as Tony Abbott, it really is; a belief system built on myths, defended with pugnacious but irrelevant swings (and misses).

I used to think “we” were better than this. Now, now I am not so sure. I am beginning to think we are, as a species, living our “best lives”.

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