Put aside all your current thoughts and views on the issue of climate change, just for one moment, and consider the following:

The ‘problem’, as it were, is frequently presented to us in the form of a ‘fight’ — “the fight against climate change,” “the battle for our future,” and so on — obviously, the intent behind this rhetoric being to spark some feeling of resistance, or camaraderie with one’s fellow man. We are meant to think of ourselves as brave, selfless soldiers wading through the trenches, shoulder-to-shoulder as we unlikely heroes take up arms against the imminent, existential threat that is the changing climate — something along those lines, anyway.

It is alleged, with the use of all sorts of grandiose vocabulary and alarming imagery of massive floods and forest fires, that all of humanity must come together and cooperate with one another, should we ever hope to overcome our common enemy. It is stated ad nauseam that things can no longer continue on, “business as usual.” We must make the necessary sacrifices, shoulder the burden of protecting our world from this mess that we, ourselves — we are told — have had a hand in creating. It is our duty to future generations — this, too, has become a go-to phrase.

It all sounds rather romantic, doesn’t it? It sounds like the plot of a blockbuster movie, one in which the entire world gets to play the part of the plucky, noble warriors, charging through enemy territory with the wind in our hair and the setting sun at our backs. Indeed, it is quite easy to become enamored with this imagery — it is something like a daydream. But as with any other daydream, it is a mere exaggeration of the truth.

One of many problems with this appropriation (if you will) of very real, very devastating experiences of loss, horror, and — most of all — sacrifice in the battlefield, particularly when such imagery is conjured in our minds by those whom have never been in a real combat situation themselves, is that the expectations generated by such rhetoric is not at all matched by the actions that are subsequently taken in the real world. If this were a real war, if this truly was a conflict of global importance and a genuine threat to the future of our species on this Earth — if we really did have just eleven years remaining before all of hell would be unleashed upon us — our leaders, our commanding officers from whom we look to for guidance and order, would at the very least be acting as if this were the case.

Certainly, they would not be standing knee-deep in tidewaters of the coast of Tuvalu, a very remote island nation situated practically in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, posing for the cover of Time magazine.

Let’s get serious for a minute, here — if we’re really at war, we’re going to need to be adults about it.

First thing’s first: whom or what are we actually fighting against? Many of us have been under the impression that our enemy is called climate change; that we must take immediate, concrete action toward combating it; and that it is of utmost importance that we stop fooling around, pretending as if we have any time more time to waste than we already have — if not for our own sake, then for that of our children and our children’s children. Is this not what we’ve been told?

Why, then, does the Secretary-General of the United Nations — pictured above — alongside his many personal and professional aides; numerous heads of state or other high-ranking government officials, as well as all of their personal and professional aides; all hailing from nearly every conceivable corner of the world; choose to spend their valuable, limited time flying in and out of remote island nations to hold conferences and luncheons, “meet the locals” and attend all of the many photo-ops that are guaranteed to accompany either form of event? Surely we’re well past the point of needing to raise any more ‘awareness’ of the issue — nearly every war has had its conscientious objectors, so why are we still waiting around for the stragglers?

Here’s the thing: as it turns out, the enemy called climate change (or anything else related to the environment, for that matter) is little more than a scare crow; we could just as readily substitute climate change with geomagnetic reversal and end up, details aside, with much the same sort of scenario. Whether or not the climate is changing (which it probably is, as it has done for billions of years) or whether there’s anything we can do to stop it is, at the end of the day, fundamentally irrelevant. Climate change is not so much our enemy in the battlefield as it is the reason offered for our being sent to the trenches in the first place.

Give me a moment to explain.

*

Recently, the eponymous Morgoth of Morgoth’s Review (if you have not heard of this channel, his content comes highly recommended by yours truly) had a fascinating conversation with fellow YouTuber Keith Woods, wherein the latter made a particularly excellent point regarding what we might call “virtue capitalism.” While discussing the issue of over-consumption and rampant materialism in our modern society — and, I tend to agree with both gentleman that we could do with a solid reduction in either, though certainly not at the scale nor in the manner that has been proposed by our Green Overlords — Woods expressed his dislike for the increasingly popular slogan, Get Woke, Go Broke: in his eyes, the meme misses the mark entirely in the tacit implication that the market would, eventually, punish these “Woke Capitalists” for inflicting this tired tripe on tired consumers: as Woods rightfully points out, they’re not the target audience that this sort of marketing is designed to appeal to. After some thought, I completely agree — as Morgoth adds, the CEOs of companies such as Nike or Gillette have almost certainly factored in an expected amount of backlash to this woke branding; they’ve simply decided that there’s more money to be made off those who do fall for such tactics. And in all likelihood, I believe that they’re right.

Though their discussion of the matter is related back to a conceptual “white-guilt market”, Woods makes another excellent point, one that is highly relevant to our present concern, slightly earlier in the conversation. I’ve transcribed this section below, lightly edited for clarity and with the more important bits in bold (or you can listen to it yourself here):

You see this all the time now with neoliberalism, where the guilt of being within the system of this very advanced form of late-stage capitalism, the guilt that’s associated with that is now marketed as a product within that. So now when you book flights on your budget airline you get an option to tick a box at the end to donate one pound or one euro to offset the carbon emissions of your flight. And you see these, you know, the fair trade auctions and, you know… options to do all these kind of meaningless things. And people love it, because [we’re] part of this system that we’re constantly told is creating this great ecological catastrophe in the third world. The perfect product to sell to people with money, to the upper-middle class and middle class, is the opportunity to offset this guilt. But of course, when it’s stuck within the paradigm of the people that are doing it, providing you with that option, it’s completely meaningless.

This captures quite well a virtually-identical thought that I’ve had floating around my own head for some time now: that the guilt we naturally feel after several generations of being chastised for our birth into this particular part of the world is now being used to push us toward this newer, more ‘sustainable’ mode of capitalism; in theory, a form of mindless materialism that we can “feel good about.” As described earlier, we are constantly assaulted with claims that we all really need to pull together and do our part to combat this existential threat that humanity faces, which we are told is climate change — in reality, we are fighting less against climate change than we are for the ensured sustainability (if you will) of the dominant, global architecture of power. This is why nothing particularly serious or meaningful has been done in order to fight climate change, despite all of the manic proclamations of impending disaster that are so frequently tossed into the public discourse by co-opted environmental groups worldwide: if we really were going to radically, perhaps permanently up-end and transform our way of life as we have known it for centuries, the structural paradigm sounding the call for change would itself have to come crashing down, too — obviously, this is not what they intend to do.

None of this has truly gone unnoticed; rather, my belief is that it has gone largely unchallenged out of pure, psychological necessity. The immense level of cognitive dissonance that is incurred by witnessing this state of affairs — of our supposed-leaders desperately imploring us to do something, anything we can to pitch in, while they themselves erase a whole lifetime’s worth of using solely re-usable shopping bags with a single trip by private jet — has driven many of us to defer back to the delusion that there really is anything that we, personally, could do about the situation; assuming that the situation itself even exists. Perhaps it doesn’t make much logical sense in the grand scheme of things, but it’s far more preferable to believe that those who hold power over us really are looking out for us than it is to try to come to terms with the ugly truth. But this form of arrangement is far from humanity’s first.

Before the Reformation, the Catholic Church had a practice of issuing what were called ‘indulgences’ — this, despite popular belief, was not the sole reason for Martin Luther’s eventual rebellion, but it is perhaps the most well-known of them. For the uninformed, an indulgence was something of a “get out of jail free” card: one could be purchased from the Church as way of ‘excusing’ a non-mortal sin that one had committed, or on the behalf of a diseased individual who may have been languishing in Purgatory as punishment for their own sins. At the time, the scripture that guided the moral and spiritual fabric of life was available primarily in Latin; a language entirely foreign to the peasantry and the otherwise unlearned. As such, the congregation had no means of telling for themselves what the Words of God really were — the clergy disseminated it to the masses, and they had to trust in its veracity. In this way, the Church was able to justify the ethically-questionable practice of scrubbing one’s soul clean with money: it’s not as if anyone could really “fact check” the claim. But when Luther translated the Bible into vernacular German, the Church lost its advantage over the common folk. This, and many other factors, led to the turbulent period of the Reformation: armed with the ability to read and interpret the Word of God for themselves, innumerable new churches, schools and sects began to spring up across the Holy Roman Empire.

I mention all of this because, as I have said before, I believe that we ourselves are in a state of moral and spiritual subservience to the global oligarchy. Like those sixteenth-century peasants, we too are permitted to purchase indulgences as a means of assuaging ourselves of our guilt: the corporations have carbon credits; the rich have overpriced goods and misguided philanthropy; and we, contemporary peasants, have biodegradable shopping bags and paper straws — though, of course, we are always told to give more. Crucially, just like the sale of indulgences, there is little to no evidence to suggest that any of this actually does anything productive; it is simply a good and easy way to profit from the blind faith that we retain in our moral culpability.

Where the two differ significantly is in terms of consequence: The Church had no meaningful competition to consider; the virtue capitalists certainly do. The great thing about making virtue into a commodity, however, is that this “extra feature” can give a company an edge over its competition. “We are a responsible company; they are not. Buying from us is more responsible than buying from them.” From here, the logical extension comes naturally: “Buying from us makes you a good person — buying from them makes you bad.” They used to write catchy jingles to try and keep an advertised product in the audience’s head; nowadays, corporations and businesses have figured out what the non-profit industrial complex has known for decades: that guilt is truly the most effective form of marketing.

Indeed, they are acutely aware of how well the image of an emaciated African child, too starved to even bother swatting the flies from his face, sparks a deep, existential guilt within much of their Western audience, some of whom are likely to see such a commercial while sat in front of more than their fair share of pizza. By the same principal we are, as Woods observed, psychologically beaten senseless with tales of pain and suffering that is alleged to be caused by our sins; we are told that the only way out of this torment, this Hell of our supposedly “rational” age, is to sacrifice our dreams and our livelihoods at the altar of Sustainability. If only you buy more expensive products and more expensive food; if you sacrifice more of your time and your energy; if you give more and do more and care more — then, and only then, do you have a chance at salvation. We accept all of this, because we believe that the proof — the “science” — is written in a language that we do not understand — even though we ought to see no good reason to trust those whom wield the weapon of “expert knowledge” above us and, in doing so, subjugate us to their every whim and command, when they say that we are incapable of doing the commanding ourselves.

Let’s return to the metaphorical battlefield; let’s jump back into the trenches and submerge ourselves in as much mud, blood and shrapnel as did the Secretary-General in salt water. Perhaps what has happened is that most folks, like many drafted soldiers, just want to be left alone. Perhaps they have convinced themselves that once they have ceded enough ground, the powers that be will stop asking them to cede more — it may not have worked for Neville Chamberlain, but perhaps this time it will be different. Others do not need to be drafted; they go to wage war willingly, convinced that theirs is the side of True Virtue. They are so assured, in fact, that they do not stop to consider why it is that the very ones who did the convincing — kings, queens, and presidents in a real war; corporations, elites, and bureaucrats in our metaphor — are not there themselves; risking neither life nor limb for the virtues that they claim to uphold.

Or perhaps my cynical suspicions are correct, and the question goes unasked because we’d rather not know the answer. It is indeed difficult to fathom the notion that we’ve been played for fools — it is much easier on the human psyche to go simply along with it; to continue to follow the orders we’ve been given and leave these uncomfortable questions in the hands of those whom we have deemed capable of managing any uncomfortable truths that may arise from their inquiry — at least, this is what we’d like to believe. In this way, like the good, diligent soldiers at war that we’ve been led to believe ourselves to be, we continue to march in the prescribed direction and dare not question the choice of our destination. In full defiance of Kant’s immortal wisdom, far too many of us do not yet posses the courage to use our own understanding. It is as if Luther published his translated Bible and all of German Christendom were too terrified to read its pages.