Of Sophisticated Hopium Ignoring Trajectories; an exhausted rant on Solnit, Morton, the Kleins etc

tl;dr – there is a market for “brightside-ing” that relies on ignoring the relevant trajectories and instead cherry-picking largely irrelevant factoids. Even otherwise worth-reading writers peddle it some of the time. Examples are given, “what is to be done” addressed.

I’m not going to recap the scale and scope of the shit we are in. If you haven’t spotted the ecological crises, the collapse of even-vaguely sane governance, then a) it must be nice being so ignorant and b) techno-feudalism is gonna come as a shock.

But there’s plenty of people who want/need to believe that even though the hour is late, some kinda salvation might be at hand. These people are catered to, including by people who probably, in their heart of hearts know better.

Two examples kick this (short) rant off.

Rebecca Solnit (liked her “Paradise Built in Hell” btw) opens a piece on her “meditations on an emergency” blog with this attempted killer zinger.

“There’s a reason why sports teams don’t chant “I believe that we will lose” before a game, a reason so obvious that I’m pretty sure it needs no explanation in that context. Words have power….” [continues for 94 pages]

But this is bollocks. Because the analogy does not hold for several reasons.

First “We” the good guys wanting to prevent ecological catastrophes etc and “them” the bad guys are not two equally-matched teams. It’s like a village football team taking on a team of professional superstars. You can call it a “match” if you like, but you’re deluded.

Second, this isn’t a “match” with agreed rules and a neutral umpire.

Third, this isn’t a game. (I couldn’t continue, but won’t).

Solnit knows this, would agree with this, but her Hopium purpose requires her to lead with it The whole metaphor is off, and its actual function is to prime people for to swallow some Hopium, wrapped up in a Saint Vaclav Havel quote.

If we were to stick with the metaphor, though, we might ask why our team keeps losing, what we need to do differently, in training and actual performance, and how we tackle the fact that the other team cheats all the time and has bought off the umpire and the linespeople. We might need to think that urging our team on via emotion (Kevin Keegan 1995) is not actually going to work in the long term.

Sigh.

Second up, Adam Morton has just written (August 20) something I’ve seen so many times over the years. It makes the good point that primary energy demand includes waste energy (heat lost etc), so that the talking point on how 80ish per cent of energy comes from fossil fuels is not the whole picture. Useful insofar as it goes. Then there’s something on China and “dirty car sales down.”

At NO point does he say that human emissions are in the region of 40bn tonnes of CO2 annually.

At NO point does he say that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide continue to climb sharply.

They would not help the hopium narrative and so must be ignored.

On the Kleins mentioned in the title? Well, Ezra is stealing the word “abundance” in the same way sustainability and resilience were stolen. The BAU-technocrat arseholes must always steal what they fear, empty it of meaning and then sell it back. Naomi? Good reporting, but very much in the Solnit boat in cheerleading “blockadia” (Naomi Klein’s word for all the nice social movements) without addressing the fact that these spasms of activity come and go (on three-ish year cycles), and that blockadia’s victories – such as they are- are a) fragile and often reversed and b) are in the context of 40bn tonnes annually and rising atmospheric concentrations.

Two things matter, amidst all the guff.

One, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

Two, the phenomenon of social movements resisting ecocide to wax and then WANE. We lack a vocabulary for this. (My neologisms and retronyms – smugosphere, emotacycle, stolidarity, potemkinclusivity, decruitment, ego-fodder, eargout, Sequential Consensual Autophagous Meetings etc – have, for reasons that escape me, not become household words.)

What is to be done?

Realise that any article that fails to frame its analysis in reference to these facts is almost certainly not worth your time. (see my “social movements” Ctrl F test).

Create functional resilient social movement organisations (ha ha ha ha ha)

Or go for the Cocker Protocol – scroll to the end of this post and you’ll see a short video…

The mise-en-abyss, the double-bind and the Hirschman & Cocker Protocols…