It's Climate Week everybody! Checking in on my home country and former home province of Alberta, or as I like to call it, "Albertabama," (thanks Heather) and this is what I see. Both hockey teams, the Calgary Flames and the Edmonton OILERS, have been cleared for NHL games at full capacity. Look a little more and THIS is what I see. Alberta has asked neighbouring BC to take some of its Covid patients. BC said they can't handle them. They're not as bad, but pretty bad. Meanwhile Ontario, where they are taking a more serious and cautious approach to Covid, and where it hasn't yet been determined whether fans will be able to attend Toronto Maple Leaf or Ottawa Senators games, is doing better than Alberta or BC.
So let's recap: 42 cases per 100,000 people in Ontario where they are most careful about Covid and may not allow fans at hockey games to start the 21/22 season; 121 cases per 100,000 in BC where they will be allowing limited capacity; and 423 cases per 100,000 people in Albertabama where I guess they reckon hockey to be more important than health. Well, it's oil country, they're the Edmonton Oilers, not the Edmonton Solar Panels.
Covid 19 has become so politicized and partisan that, forget about ignoring the scientists and medical professionals, (which is happening) people are ignoring the obvious. The same goes for climate issues. During climate week, one of my friends who is always posting about what a jerk Trudeau is and how he's cost Canada jobs by battling fossil fuel companies and opposing pipelines and such, posted this:
Or is it John Galt? Who is John Galt? heh heh heh. A little literary humour there. John Galt IS the perfect objectivist human being. He invented a motor that runs on static electricity, but kept it from a "horrific," egalitarian world that would have used it to help everyone, not just himself. In "Atlas Shrugged," Galt makes a speech that Ayn Rand considers to be a massive mike drop that everyone should be able to suspend their disbelief completely enough to buy into. In reality, we hear John Galts all the fucking time and have since over 350 years before Christ (probably the exact opposite of John Galt) when Aristotle taught us how to debunk their rhetoric. Aristotle could pick apart John Galt's speech and expose it for the (ar ar) train wreck it actually was. You can read the whole thing for yourself here, but I'll just summarize it because it relates directly to the current mentality that enables the powers that be in our fucked up world to completely ignore climate change and other things like Covid 19.
To begin with, you need an audience of the previously convinced to get away with a speech like John Galt's. Like in my last post when I said everybody wants to be happy, so it makes the "happiness is your responsibility" argument easier to sell, in this case, the speech can only be successful if the audience possesses the selfishness and greed necessary to want to become super rich and powerful. That, John Galt, Ayn Rand, Gordon Gecko, Ronald Reagan, and every trickle-down bullshit artist we've heard in politics, religion, economics or any other arena BELIEVES... HAS FAITH IN... WORSHIPS like their religion, but claims to be atheist. Most of these brain damaged people believe their dysfunction is universal. They believe we are all greedy scumbags and that it's human nature to fuck everyone else for personal gain. A massively tragic flaw that has to be accepted before the speech even begins, but let's continue, shall we?
Another massive flaw that we need to suspend our disbelief in before the speech can even begin is Ayn Rand's personal creation of a dystopian world in moral crisis that would exist if society embraced only virtues that demand self-sacrifice and not those "virtues" that demand selfishness. John Galt lists them at the beginning of his sermon. "You have sacrificed independence to unity, reason to faith, justice to mercy, wealth to need, self-esteem to self-denial, happiness to duty..." and then proves his incredible arrogance by saying that HE has allowed them to do that.
Throughout "The Catcher in the Rye," Holden is a 16-year-old child who seems to have quite a privileged position in life attending a private (and undoubtedly expensive) American school like Pencey Prep. It's fictional, but it's in the book for a purpose. We know he's probably upper-middle to upper class. I'd say upper-middle. He seems to have a lot of money to throw around on dates, taxis, and older ladies he's just met. He is trying to find the problem in his life and everybody seems to be telling him it's his inability to apply himself. Take responsibility for his studies, his relationships, his family. Holden, beneath all the impetuous fighting and declarations of phoniness, is a good guy. He'd like to stop every kid from running through the rye field and off the cliff they can't see. He wishes people could maintain the adorable innocence of childhood, including himself. But when he sees his young sister Pheobe at the end of the book riding the carousel and grabbing for the golden ring, (as a perfect allusion to our Ayn Rand books) he realizes that "a body" can't "catch" all the kids running through the rye. They need to be allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from them. If they are never allowed to grow up and become responsible, they will become assholes. Probably unhappy assholes. So, at the risk of contradicting the topic of my recent post, without responsibility, we never grow up and we can't, therefore, experience fulfilling and happy lives. So, in short, duty is a requirement of happiness. Again, it takes a pretty antisocial, privileged, sick in the head individual to consider a life without responsibility as happy. But that's what John Galt's speech implies.
I don't want to get too caught up in the book, but I'm sure any of my readers can pick apart most of that quotation without too much trouble. Unity is not an ugly word, nor does it necessarily sacrifice independence. Indeed, in a world such as our REAL world where capitalist greed is firmly in control, independence is necessary to achieve unity. Just ask a protestor in Hong Kong how their independence was squashed. Now you might be drawn into believing that China is communist and Hong Kong's capitalism and desire for self-improvement was being punished by a government similar to that of Ayn Rand's novel. Or is it the pure greed and selfishness run amok of the Chinese Communist Party requiring mindless unity and devotion to the party trying to beat protestors into lockstep? You will often find the "I know you are, but what am I" syllogism in the lies and rhetoric of those trying to subvert you and control you. The bad guys almost always accuse the good guys of their own worst evils.
Reason to faith, well, as I said, there is an awful lot of faith (the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen) required to believe a world fully controlled by greedy, objectivist people won't achieve full on Armageddon as fast as intellectuals who act on reason and not faith can say, "We told you so."
Justice to mercy, as though the two are mutually exclusive. The person who stole bread to feed her family - give her the chair! The person who works two shitty jobs at prosperous businesses, but doesn't earn enough to feed herself - let her starve! The writer who uses female pronouns to represent all of humanity - execute HER!
Wealth to need? I mean, this is what I just mentioned. Only a fucking prick would think it's good to prefer wealth to need! You need that money, but I want it. I don't need it, but I'll kill you for it and convince myself it's a virtue because I'm just chasing happiness. Give me a break! This is unnatural and requires heavy brainfuckery to achieve even in those who want to believe it.
Self-esteem to self-denial? There are those of us who feel self-esteem by committing acts of self-denial. In fact, we are the majority. What better way to feel good about yourself than by helping others? Those who can only feel self-esteem by helping themselves are sick human beings. Helping myself past the point of need is only acceptable to a point. That point, to a normal person exists somewhere in relation to other people. There exists NO point of guilt or shame at helping ones self in the mind of the sociopath who cares only of him/her self. To a normal person, if helping myself causes others to suffer, I feel natural, and proper negative feelings of regret, shame and guilt.
Later in the speech, John Galt says, "Do not cry that you need us or beg us to return, we are on strike, the men of the mind. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil and we should feel guilty about it." The irony! The I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I!!! The world would not be a dystopian disaster that Rand outlines in the book without these greedy parasites! They, the morally reprehensible minority, are the ones responsible for the chaotic suffering in the world. Nobody would cry at their loss. Galt even goes so far as to say, "We do not need you" later in the speech. Again, the mirror syllogism. It is the majority who doesn't need those jagovs. Where would their wealth come from without the workers? But they are too brain damaged to realize this.
Finally, Galt says that the people sacrificed happiness to duty. Isn't this the spoiled rotten little man children (or women children) saying they don't wanna accept responsibility? Why not? Cuz I don't like it! Doesn't make me happy! You have to be pretty fucking rich and entitled to think that duty is the opposite of happiness. The world had 4 years of the most obvious example from politics, so I'll give you one from literature, since we're on that road today. BETTER literature than the books of Ayn Rand. Take Holden Caulfield as an example. And I'm not the first to draw this parallel...
You can agree or disagree with what I've written, but it has to be impossible, even for a proponent of ALL John Galt's erroneous points, to believe that EVERYBODY shares these ideas. Are there people like that? Really? Well, no one can say. There certainly are people who ACT like that for their own selfish purposes. The vlogger who cried when she saw a Chinese bank in France, then got enraged at the "scummy" people of Taiwan for criticizing her love of Chinese capitalism and economic imperialism. Again, China is NOT the egalitarian society that is considered so evil in Rand's novel, but the screw-your-fellow-person society that is prophesied by Galt to be a Utopia. Check her out when you get the chance. Here's what a citizen of the perfect Randian, objectivist society looks like:
We've seen her before, haven't we? Not just in China, North Korea, Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot era, but this is what Trump Nation is beginning to look like too. I don't want to give Trump more credit than he deserves cuz it's not hard to sell a philosophy of childish irresponsibility. What's hard is being born rich enough to pull it off and although he doubtlessly believes he had something to do with this, he didn't.
I see the same thing in people who are still refusing to admit they should get vaccinated against Covid. I see the same thing in people who still deny climate change. Objectivism is a socially irresponsible philosophy that many people, like willful children, continue to cling to at the peril of the entire planet. But let me show that in a less dire, preachy, doom and gloom way. All the major late night talk shows did their Climate Week episodes and they were awesome! Kimmel told us that there is no planet B.
Seth Meyers did his always hilarious Bernie Sanders impression and told us, "News flash: climate change is real!" "We DID Start The Fire!"
And Emmy winner, Stephen Colbert told us we need to do the one thing that no industrialized nation has done before to end the climate crisis: anything.
See if you can apply some Aristotelian bullshit cutting and spot the John Galt, Randian, Objectivist, selfish, anti-social thinking at the heart of world control that is the reason that our world bears a real resemblance to the dystopian situation in "Atlas Shrugged," which Ayn Rand created as the result of the exact opposite.
Ayn Rand's books made her money. There's no way of knowing if she believed any of that crap. If she didn't, she was pretty shrewd. If she did, she was an ignorant whore. Either way, she was wrong, and so are we. Our world, that is.
So we know the problem, it's just time to do something about it. It's our responsibility. It's our duty. And, as I've said before, it needn't hurt our self-enrichment. Converting to green energy will actually save the world while MAKING money. It's actually cheaper to change.
It's my suspicion that there is good news. Well, as good as a world like ours can allow. We'll get past this global climate crisis. But we'll do it without getting past the global moral crisis. All we need to do is be patient while the greedy, anti-social scumbags of the world figure out how to take over the green energy market. And that'll probably happen. They're nothing if not industrious. It's easier for them to be since they don't give a hunk of shit about anyone but themselves, which makes cheating second nature. So we'll probably avert the climate crisis. But the moral crisis will lead to something just as disastrous or even moreso. Nukes? Another pandemic? Aliens? Who can say?
There actually is a chance I'm being too skeptical here. There is an alternative. All the John Galts of the world might simultaneously reveal all the static electricity engines, all the globally advantageous technology they've been selfishly withholding and realize that they can get rich AND help the world. Yes, riches just might not have to come through selfishness. They might have a J.D. Salingeresque epiphany. All at the same time!
Eat your hearts out talk show hosts! That was funnier than all YOUR material!
No comments:
Post a Comment