This is part 12 of A Climate Counternarrative.
The green movement invites comparisons with a doomsday cult because of the apocalyptic end of the world predictions and the cult-like pressures to follow The Science. But there is in fact far more to it.
Modern education is squarely to blame for enabling pseudoscience like climate science to proliferate. In the early days of Christianity, farmers mocked elites for believing the miracles that preachers told them about. Their modern peers mock elites for believing what experts tell them. This echo from the past betrays how unfit for purpose modern education is. Docile deference to authority gets drilled into kids from kindergarten. This conditioning makes educated elites the least equipped to spot if or when The Science is the new scripture. Keep your kids out of these places.
Devout students of The Science go on to become its priests. Their rite of passage involves writing their own scripture. In the final ceremony, a circle of judges assess the scripture’s quality and that of its lineage. New priests then get worthless sheepskin. These priests spend their lives sheltered in ivory towers, from which they symbolically fight heresies from competing truth parishes. They gauge their self-worth by how much scripture they’ve written, and how often it gets cited. Sophisticated jargon use in scientific scripture all too often betrays its vacuous vanity.
The Science teaches to marshal, surveil, and destroy because modernity itself is a control, fear, and hate based cult. It serves the imperialists who fund the military, mine the earth, and grow grain. Grain is a storable war food. It can feed troops in hostile territory. It is more dependable than grass hungry grazers or fresh fruits and vegetables that rot. These cult organizing storytellers have been refining how they control society for millennia. The only changes from an iteration to the next are the narrative, the tools, and the circuses. Fanatics take out heretics within and heathens without all the same.
Elite conditioning is amusing to watch in many ways. Herds of educated elites heed expert calls to follow The Science. They expect uneducated commoners to join their culture crusades in lockstep to avert apocalyptic doom. They trust authority approved experts only. Not commonsense platitudes that commoners blurt out. Much less themselves. They don’t believe their own eyes when told to look up. They despise the deplorables who call out their clown show. The cult organizers are mocking cultists at this point. They’re inverting reality and values nakedly.
Two issues make elite conditioning objectionable. One is that the cultists cheer when authorities decide to take out heretics and heathens. They do so symbolically, using peer review, its pedantic format, cancel culture, fact checkers, tech giants, or financial institutions; and at times physically, in camps. Ominously, nazis and marxists educated their fanatics, and used medical experts to vilify those who they sent to camps as subhumans and lunatics. The other is that pied pipers are marching the cultists towards a new age dystopia.
