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May 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:44
239 Global Warming As Metaphor

What horrors do fears of global warming mask?

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is... It's 1718 on May 16th.
16, 17, 18.
2006. And, ooh, what a fun day.
Just doing some coding. We're on a revenue drive.
And while I'm waiting for some deals to come in, I'm writing a little program which I think we might be able to sell to some of our clients.
So it's kind of fun working in.NET 2.0.
And kind of frustrating.
I could have rewritten a program that I wrote before, but instead I tried to use the conversion wizard, and now I'm not sure whether that was a good idea or not.
But my technical travails, I'm sure, are not of deep and abiding interest to you, the esteemed listener.
So, now, of course, that my expectations have been raised, if I don't get a $500 donation a day, I will be shocked and appalled, of course, but if you would come by and donate, I hugely appreciate it.
I will put the money to good use, and I will be able to accept your donations at freedomainradio.com.
So, I think...
I was actually not going to podcast on the way home because I'm enjoying an audiobook I'm listening to at the moment.
I didn't really have any particular topics.
And I was going to the washroom just before I was leaving work today.
And I sort of felt the tickle of an idea while staring at the tiles.
And I was like, No!
Don't come! Don't come! Don't bring an idea to me!
How to drive home!
But unfortunately, or fortunately, perhaps we shall see whether the idea works out or not.
The idea did come to me.
And we're going to take a swing at it.
It's completely unformed.
This is, you know, one of the lesser syllogistical kinds of approaches that I will be taking.
But it is an idea that I think is interesting.
We'll sort of see how far we can take it during this drive home and whether it makes any sense.
Now, as you may know if you've read my blog, I do subscribe to the idea that metaphors that are common are usually involving some sort of power structure.
So, for instance, if you have like a metaphor that is so common in science fiction as to be almost a commonplace, in fact, it almost has become science fiction over the past 20 or 30 years, It's the idea that in the future, machines have controlled us.
Machines have taken us over.
So, machines which are invented to be man's servant end up being man's master and dominating and ruling and blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, what is this all about?
Well, as I mentioned in a blog article, this is about the state.
See, the government is initially intended to be a servant of the people.
It is intended to be a tool that we use to make our lives easier and better, much like robots that we invent for housework and so on.
But unfortunately, these robots, these tools that we invent to make our lives easier in the form of government always end up dominating and controlling us completely.
And of course, this is The Matrix, right?
I'll do a media review of The Matrix at some point another time, but just suffice to say here that in The Matrix, a person is waking up to the fact that he is enslaved when he doesn't know it because he is put in this artificial world in the modern context.
The aliens, the bad guys who have enslaved us are the state and the bureaucrats, and the matrix is the media, which consistently tells us that we're free and virtuous and that there's no violence except for the occasional bad guy.
So we'll talk about that another time.
That is sort of an example of how a popular metaphor is understandable in its relationship to state power.
So the state is supposed to be by and for the people.
It's supposed to be something which is there to benefit us and to make our lives easier, but instead it ends up taking us over, much like the machines in the Terminator and just about every other science fiction movie or book or thesis that you can imagine, This tool that we invent to help ourselves ends up taking us over.
And, of course, the metaphor is that machines are dangerous and we should really be careful about them and we should put in fail-safe mechanisms like Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.
Which is something like rule number one is a robot shall never harm a human being.
Rule number two is a robot shall not through its inaction cause a human being or allow a human being to come to harm.
And number three, a robot will protect itself Except if protecting itself violates either rule number one or number two.
So this is the idea, that we can sort of build these technologies to be safe, and we can also, metaphorically then, we can build governments to be safe, we just have to put in these fail-safe mechanisms so that governments that begin to run awry can be restrained and controlled,
and of course it's completely a false concept that the introduction of coercive monopolies can be limited to Just being there to help you, that they're never going to, in a sense, as the computer, Skynet or WorldNet or something, Skynet I think it is, in Terminator wakes up one day, and this also occurred in an Arthur C. Clarke story about a telephone that becomes a brain, a telephone system that becomes a brain.
The idea that this tool which is there to serve you suddenly wakes up and has its own consciousness and its own needs and is no longer that interested in serving those who have created it.
I mean, if that's not the state, I don't know what is.
But of course, because people are twisted, They can't accurately identify this situation for what it is, with the exception of, I guess, George Orwell, one or two other people.
What they do is they say, ah, capitalism and technology is the danger.
We need a military to save us.
But of course, it's the complete opposite.
This is when I say artists don't reveal the truth, but rather reveal their own prejudices.
This is an example.
So in all science fiction, It's the free market machine.
So I guess with the exception of RoboCop, I guess RoboCop it's the...
No, I think it's a capitalist who's creating these robots, policemen for the state.
Not exactly a free market situation, but it's still a private manufacturer who creates something that doesn't work.
Because, of course, the idea that the government's going to create a military robot is just hilarious.
I mean, they can't even get doors to the Hummers delivered in the right way to Iraq, but they will create neural net robots and so on.
I think that's funny. But...
It's always the machines that we invent to make our lives easier.
It's the original sin.
It's like laziness. It's like wanting to shift the work onto others.
And it's also Marxist, right?
That those that we exploit, that those who do the work for us...
Are the people who are going to revolt and end up being our masters?
It's Christian, like the lowest shall become high.
It's Marxist, that the proletariat shall take over.
You can see this, of course, in Fight Club, where they end up forcing a guy to call off the investigation because they say, you know, we deliver your mail, we cook your food, we connect your calls, don't screw with us, and so on.
So this idea that sort of the lonely, the excluded, the metaphor is very tightly bound up, and it's common to a lot of different kinds of thought systems.
But the real idea, of course, is that what we invent to make our lives easier ends up ruling us.
And, of course, nobody ever talks about the state in this manner.
In fact, the state is the solution in terms of let's get a bunch of marines to go and blow up the bad guys.
But it's all kind of funny from that standpoint, because a complete reversal of what actually is the case.
The free market will not produce robots that enslave us.
The free market will in fact produce robots that save our time and energy and money.
It is the state who will enslave us, and the state is the enemy of the free market.
They're absolute mortal enemies, in a way that if we're really honest about it, science and religion are as well.
Another way of approaching these sorts of metaphors is to look at something like the Wild West.
Ah, the Wild West.
Now, the Wild West is a funny metaphor because the Wild West was not wild at all.
The frontier areas were violent insofar as there were clashes between the Indians and the settlers in places.
But between the settlers, there was almost no violence.
I mean, people who are aggressive don't go out to the frontiers, right?
They stay in the cities. But of course, when we look back at the 19th century, And the rise of the Western coincided with the rise of progressivism, right?
And so when we began to think in the early 20th century that the state could help us do everything that we could imagine and would be a wonderful and beneficial and benevolent and beautiful and lovely and this and that and the other kind of companion, then naturally we had a problem with the era that preceded it.
And so we had to begin to demonize the era that preceded The rise of faith in violence through progressivism and socialism in the early 20th century.
So what happens is you start to see a rise of myths around the robber barons and the wild frontiers with Black Bart and Jesse James and so on.
And of course, these are people that we know because they were so rare.
These kind of stick-em-up guys, the stagecoach robbers, were known to us because they're rare.
But you had to sort of make out that in the absence of the state it was all wild, shoot them up, guns in the air, horse stealing, woman raping, madhouse, but then the sheriff comes along.
Here's a way that you have to demonize the absence of violence so that you can advocate the increase of violence.
So now, this idea was offered by somebody who posted information on the board about global warming.
You can go to JunkScience.com and find out all the nonsense about global warming.
And then you can absolutely alienate all of your friends.
Because skepticism around global warming has been demonized to a degree that it's one of the few things that I've had a really great deal of difficulty convincing people of.
People get monumentally and mortally offended.
When you come up with skepticism around global warming.
And frankly, I could care less.
I don't think it's true simply because the government says it.
I don't think it's true because all the science that has been produced to...
The mathematical model that was produced to originate it has been proven false.
And of course, no one's changed any tack.
And yeah, of course, there are tons of scientists who sign all these petitions, but they're getting paid billions of dollars to do it.
So it really doesn't matter to me what people are paid to say.
I am knowledgeable enough to know that the commercials are going to focus on the positive aspects of the goods and not necessarily the negative aspects.
So you take them with a grain of salt.
The supermodel does not necessarily come with every sports car.
And so, of course, that's not something that you believe.
The pictures of the burgers in the fast food ads are not exactly the same as what you end up looking at down in your little styrofoam package.
So I'm fairly aware that when people are paid to produce messages, that those messages are not objective.
I'm fine with that.
And so the billions and billions and billions of dollars that is being pumped into global warming research, of course those people are going to say it's dire and it's coming and it's this and it's that.
I mean, the idea that this is objective science is really, really quite funny.
Anyway, I mean, I'm not going to get into the debates about global warming.
We can do that at another time.
In global warming as a metaphor for state power.
This is the idea that came to me that I wanted to preface with a few other examples, so it doesn't sound like I'm barking from the complete top of the loony tree.
But I was very interested, as you know, or may have known if you've been listening to these rambles in sequence, I've been interested in trying to come up with a metaphor that explains violence in society.
The state violence in society, the effects of the gun in the room, how does that show up in society?
What's a good metaphor? And I've been playing around with a whole bunch of different ones.
So then, of course, when I was staring at the tile prior to leaving work, the thought struck me that global warming is a pretty good metaphor, I think, for the growth of state power.
So... Mankind's activities are producing a change in the ecosystem.
This is the whole idea behind global warming, is that our industrial activities and car driving and so on are producing gases that release into the atmosphere, that trap heat, that cause a greenhouse effect, and blah, blah, blah.
And the greenhouse effect is not just that the temperature warms up, because up here in Canada we sure could use a little of that, but what it means is that the whole ecosystem becomes destabilized.
Becomes destabilized, becomes unpredictable, And becomes increasingly violent and hard to control and destructive.
Now, I've got to tell you, when I'm sort of thinking about that as an idea, the global warming, why is it gripped our consciousness other than it's just another scare story to allow bureaucrats to provide endless regulations and control our property even more?
Well, why is it something that grips our imagination?
Because, of course, the state comes up with about a billion scare stories every year.
Just watch your nightly news. And there's only a few that grow into this kind of very large story or idea that changes people's consciousness in a pretty fundamental way.
Like this hooks into people's collective consciousness in a way that is pretty powerful.
Well, if you look at...
The idea that industrial activity is releasing a kind of gas into the air which is altering the ecosystem and making it less stable, less violent, and so on.
And what we think is helping us is actually poisoning the whole planet.
What we think is a tool or a useful thing for us, i.e.
manufacturing facilities and cars and so on, that what we think is helping us is actually destroying us in a way that almost no individual Can affect in any way whatsoever.
Because let's just say, I mean, if global warming is true, then the actions of each individual have almost no effect on it.
Almost no effect whatsoever.
Now, I myself didn't own a car until I was like 33, so I think I'm pretty much okay for life.
My family didn't have a car when I was growing up because we were kind of broke, but I think I'm sort of okay as far as the mission goes for life.
But... If I sort of said, well, global warming is real and I want to change, well, my behavior is going to have, like at an individual level, it's going to have almost no effect.
It's going to have no perceptible effect whatsoever.
All it's going to mean is that my income is going to drop pretty catastrophically because I can't drive anywhere.
I can't take a job that's not within bus distance, and of course I live in the suburbs, so there are almost no buses, so I'd have to move.
My whole life would be turned upside down in order for me to try and avoid this issue of my impact in terms of global warming.
So it's an enormous amount of inconvenience for each individual to alter their behavior to try and control this problem, and it will have no effect anyway.
Now, if you translate this over into the stateside, well, As we've been talking about off and on, each individual, if they wish to avoid participating in state coercion, then yes, you can rearrange your life such that that is minimized.
I would quit my job. I would go and work for a very charitably paid, very low-paid position for a think tank or, I don't know, Mises.org or something like that.
And I would avoid using roads.
I could really change my whole life to avoid participation in state power.
And it would do nothing.
Absolutely nothing. I mean, if we all did it, sure.
But I mean, not everyone is going to do it because the barriers to that kind of change are pretty high.
So I think that there's a couple of parallels.
One parallel, of course, is between this, right?
That you can change, turn your life upside down to reduce your contributions to global warming.
And all that will happen is your life will be sort of topsy-turvied.
And nothing will change.
And the same thing with the state.
You can change your life so that you end up trying to minimize your interactions and state coercion and all that will happen is that your life will be turned upside down and nothing will change.
And this is, of course, why people don't care about global warming and also why they don't care about changing the state because that's not going to occur.
Now, global warming...
Is the result of a use of a tool that is supposed to help us, where due to no individual action, but because of a collective action, everyone driving and using manufactured goods and so on, no individual action but a collective set of actions produces something which is dangerous and adds to volatility and damages human life and so on.
Well, that to me seems kind of obvious as a strong metaphor, an unconscious metaphor for the state.
No individual is making decisions that can be condemned in the state, but the system as a whole, the result of the collective decisions, is an increase in danger to human life.
You don't go to any particular individual and say, You bad.
You evil. You cause of state problems, right?
I mean, yeah, George Bush declared war, but so can I. So can you, right?
And the problem is that there are people who are going to go out there and shoot people, and then they're brought up in public schools, so they're propagandized.
They don't have any idea what they're doing is evil.
And the teachers think that they're doing good, and they don't actually wield the guns.
You can run around in circles chasing your own tail, just trying to figure out...
How to find somebody to blame for the state.
And you can't. I mean, there's just no way to do it.
And in a similar way, you could run around in circles trying to find people to blame for global warming, if it were true, and you'd find a couple of people that you could maybe sort of put up there, but not even any individuals, right?
Some big manufacturer says, is belching out smoke that contributes to global warming, and you sort of go, you're bad.
You're a bad manufacturer.
You're a global warming guy. Well, he's going to say, okay, but people want to buy my goods.
You go talk to them.
If they don't want to buy my goods or if they're willing to pay the extra amount for me to put my global warming scrubber things in, then for sure I'll stop.
You've got to talk to the people.
They won't buy and then people will be out of work and all this kind of stuff.
So again, you can't even, if you believe in global warming, you can't easily find a methodology for finding people to blame.
Now, let's look at the danger curve of both the growth of state power and what is propositioned as the results of global warming.
Well, the growth curve for global warming is tiny, almost imperceptible change which can only be measured and discovered by experts, followed by a massive increase in problems at some indeterminate point in the future.
I mean, if global warming was, well, the planet's going to heat up one degree every 2,000 years, then people would be like, yeah, and it was linear.
People would be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, fine.
We'll put a buck in a bank and then every year they can use it to rid the world of whatever.
Because every 2,000 years that will have grown to about a bajillion dollars.
So that's how we'll deal with it.
So they have to have this sort of hockey stick or asymptotic kind of Problem curve, right?
So it's slow, it's imperceptible, tiny problems that can only be discovered by people measuring the ice up in the Antarctic or the Arctic or whatever.
And then, lo and behold, the problems, they begin to escalate.
And then you end up with this, what is it, the day after tomorrow kind of scenario where suddenly the entire atmosphere freezes solid and we're all stuck like the Flintstones in these ice cubes.
And so there has to be this, you know, slow, imperceptible, and because it's imperceptible, it can't be proven or disproven, right?
This whole idea of the global warming caused by mankind, escalating, blah, blah, blah, destroy the planet, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, if all the planet does is heat up a little bit over time, so what?
You know, I mean, some places in the equator will become less habitable, but some places in the north will become more habitable, so it doesn't really matter, in my sort of humble opinion.
But it has to be catastrophic, right?
So it's a slow, slow, slow set of problems that experts can only tell you about and you argue and you take them on faith and so on.
And then kaboom! You know, the whole planet goes into this massive cyclodronic nuclear winter or something.
And that's what we're supposed to be afraid of, right?
That's what we're supposed to be focused on, having the government rush in and save us from.
Well... Let's look at the growth of state power in a similar kind of way.
Now, we know that the growth of state power is always racing the free market.
I mean, it's my particular opinion that the state A could not have grown as big and B would have already collapsed if it wasn't for the software and computer revolution.
But that's sort of neither here nor there.
It's an unprovable thesis.
We won't spend too much time on it.
But The increase in taxation that is occurring, for instance, is always keeping pace with the increases in productivity that the free market is trying to create.
So taxes here are very high.
Taxes where you are are probably pretty awful as well.
But if somebody came up with the thing that's in Atlas Shrugged, the 20th century motor company's static electricity generator or whatever, then our incomes would rise considerably.
And therefore, we would sort of beat back the power of the state a little bit, and then the taxes would rise to meet the additional income that came out of not having to worry about Generating stuff.
If you came up with teleporters, then you wouldn't need roads and cars, and therefore our incomes would go up quite a lot.
And then the taxation would...
So there's always this race.
Now, the government always wins because violence always beats innovation over time, and there's no question of that.
Just look at the history of every empire or civilization in the world that's had any kind of free market.
It always ends up in a complete ash heap of degradation and mercantilism followed by feudalism, followed by usually almost complete slavery.
So, the growth of this kind of power is very interesting because as government power increases, the market struggles to innovate.
As you're in the gravity well, you keep trying to walk, you keep trying to stagger forward.
To take a slightly less weird metaphor, if you are going through the desert, The heat, the dryness, you're running out of your energy and so on.
Well, so you're sort of being dragged down by your own...
Water reserves running out in your body and fuel reserves in your food and calories and so on.
And so you end up in this situation where you can't continue, but you continue to struggle.
Or if you're trying to cross no man's land and you keep getting winged by sniper bullets, you'll still continue to struggle.
In fact, your struggles will increase the more you get hit.
And this is similar to what happens With the free market, as the government layers more and more violent brutality on the free market, you do have this situation where the free market attempts to innovate to try and save itself, like in the short run.
So it's like, oh, okay, Sarbanes-Oxley, another round of legislation.
Okay, well... Let's lay off a bunch of people and we'll offshore a bunch of stuff more and we'll drop these product lines that are only marginally profitable and therefore are not profitable with these new regulatory overheads.
There's just this constant struggle.
And we do this, of course, all the time in our own personal lives.
So it's like, oh, I finally got some money set aside.
Bam! Oh, man, tax increase.
Okay, well, I was going to buy X, Y, and Z with that money or put it aside for a rainy day, but now I can use that money.
And, you know, if I don't go out for dinner anymore for another couple of months and I stop going to see movies, then I can pay.
Like, we're all doing this, right?
We're all constantly re-optimizing ourselves because we're getting buried and buried under more layers of violent coercion.
So there's this race between innovation or the self-healing of the economy and the consistently escalating blows of state intervention, which always ends up with state intervention winning.
A small amount of state intervention the market can survive and flourish under.
But, of course, as soon as it flourishes, there's more money and more activity for the government to tax.
So it begins to tax it, which then causes more struggle to innovate.
But then at some point, people just kind of give up.
And this is a very subtle emotional thing that occurs for people.
They just... We kind of give up.
And that's when the whole bottom of the economy falls out.
You can see the same things in marriages that are problematic, right?
People struggle, and they can struggle for years, 10 years, 20 years, or more.
And then one day they wake up, and it's just like, you know what?
I'm done. I'm just done with all of this.
I had that with the seven-year relationship.
I woke up one morning, and it's just like, yeah, I'm totally done.
And people will have that when it comes to the economy as well, as far as innovation goes.
And that's when the whole bottom falls out, and the whole thing collapses.
But That approach to looking at the free market, that the innovation is constantly warring, that creativity and intelligence are constantly warring with violence and brutality, well, that is a strong metaphor, I think, for global warming.
In global warming, you have a small amount of emissions the planet can handle, like a small amount of coercion the free market can handle.
But as the emissions begin to escalate, then you go from, it's very imperceptible at the beginning, So it's not that, ah, we now have double the emissions that we had a year ago and our planet is doing half as well.
It's not like that at all. It's more like smoking, like a long, slow degradation followed by the possibility of lung cancer at the end, which is fairly catastrophic.
And so this issue with global warming, a little bit of emissions, of course, the planet can handle, and then you get more and more emissions, and then you have this sort of event horizon.
Which is part of the global warming theory, and it was part of the fluorocarbon debate of the 70s as well.
You have this event horizon wherein, if you stop before, or if you diminish the emissions before this time, then you're okay, because the planet will heal itself.
Or you sort of reduce it. And the same thing's true of the free market, right?
If you keep taxation at 10% or 15% and, you know, just wrestle it back and so on, then the free market can survive.
However, in the metaphor for, or in the fantasy of global warming, there's this point after which it begins to snowball, and it begins to become a self-feeding mechanism.
And the stuff that's in the air is now a catalyst which causes more problems.
You know, so the idea is that, you know, for nuclear winter, right, the idea is that a nuclear bomb goes off, you get a whole bunch of crap kicked up into the atmosphere, and what that causes is a lot of cloud damage, which then causes everything to freeze, and then more sunlight gets reflected back, so the planet never warms back up, and so on.
It becomes a sort of self-feeding mechanism, or fluorocarbons In the stratosphere that they are a catalyst which breaks down the ozone layer while they themselves are not diminished.
And so there's a snowball effect where this sort of stuff just begins to feed on itself and escalates to really catastrophic levels very quickly.
And of course, this is the same thing with state power.
As it begins to escalate, it becomes a self-feeding mechanism.
The more the state gathers power and resources to itself, the more it draws people to further grab a hold of those resources, and the more it escalates the spread of violence, which causes more resources to accumulate to the government, and so on.
So, this event horizon...
After which there was no possibility, there is almost no possibility of the system self-healing, is as true for state power as it is for the metaphor of global warming, and of course my argument is that that is one of the reasons why...
Global warming is a metaphor that works so well for people because it is that unconscious recognition of the actual reality of the world, which is that the planet is being poisoned by the violence of governments, not by the emissions of my lovely Volvo.
So that is another way of looking at it.
Now, to take a fourth approach to this metaphor, I think it's actually working out pretty well.
Let me know what you think. I think there's enough commonalities that I think it's actually working out quite well.
So to take a fourth approach, we can also look at it this way.
As global warming increases, the results of the temperature increase in the planet are not a uniform increase, but rather a series of seemingly random and ever-escalating catastrophes that cannot be predicted in advance.
So the future becomes wildly unpredictable and catastrophes occur And there's simply no way to figure out whether the sort of lightning is going to strike next, so to speak.
Now, if we look at the state, I think we can see that as state power grows, we end up with a very similar situation.
So as state power grows, what happens is catastrophes begin to escalate in an unpredictable manner.
So, for instance, if you look at something like Katrina or the war in Iraq, these really couldn't have been predicted five years ago.
If you look at September 11th, that this also could not have been predicted five years ago.
And we still have to have a big medical one.
There'll probably be a biochemical one, maybe even a nuclear one.
But there's no way of predicting these things.
But for sure, the incidence of disasters is going to increase as state power increases.
But it's impossible to predict in advance.
Where they're going to occur.
So the argument that global warming, that you could make in a facetious way, you could say, well, global warming makes life worse for some people, like those in sub-Saharan Africa and so on, and it makes life better for other people, i.e. me, which I know is, of course, everybody's first and primary, if not only, concern.
And the same thing is true of the state, right?
As state power grows, it makes life worse for some people, i.e.
helpless and bullied taxpayers, but it makes life better for other people, i.e.
everybody who's on the state side of the fence who is, you know, sucking dry the taxpayers like a bunch of parasitical political vampires.
And so you could say that, yeah, you know, it's a net gain, sort of, you know, one, one or the other.
But in the same way that people who say, well, if there is global warming, and it's true, it's a net game for some, and a net loss to others, and therefore we shouldn't fuss about it too much, well, the argument back is that, no, it's not a steady increase.
It is an escalation in randomly increasing systems of violence, which then end up with a complete implosion and significant amounts of destruction raining down upon mankind.
Well, the same thing is true of the state.
You could say of the state, if you weren't interested in opposing violence from a philosophical standpoint, you could say, well, yeah, okay, so money gets taken from me, but it gets given to someone else, so it's really like it's a zero-sum game, so, you know, is it really, the money doesn't get destroyed, it just gets transferred, so who cares, right? So in the same way, the climate doesn't get destroyed, but just transferred in the sort of shallow view of global warming, Well, no, that's not the answer.
The answer is that it's not a zero-sum game.
It's not that some people gain some land masses that are now habitable that weren't before and other people lose them.
It is a constantly escalating situation which results in the complete destruction of the ecosystem or something.
And this is the same thing as true, that the massive transfer of wealth that occurs through state coercion It's not a zero-sum game.
Yes, the money doesn't get destroyed.
The money goes from A to B and then to C, but the problem is that you end up with these ever-escalating situations of violence wherein the end result is a catastrophic destruction of the social system.
So you have the ecosystem in global warming, which gets destroyed in these escalating problem situations, and you have the social system or the market system or the economic system, which gets destroyed by the state in ever-escalating situations of destruction.
So that's another way of looking at why this metaphor, I think, works, why people have found it so gripping to deal with, to accept, or why people are so susceptible to accepting something as silly as global warming, something which tons of people argue about and so on.
Now, the fact that the early indicators of global warming are only available to, quote, experts, Who obviously have a completely vested interest in getting paid to say that it's happening.
Well, in quite the opposite manner, the early indicators of the collapse of the social system because of state power is something, of course, that quite the opposite is occurring for, right?
Because everything's in the service of state power these days.
So the scientists are saying, those who have been corrupted by state grants and handouts, are saying, ooh, global warming, ooh, yeah, baby, you give me another grant, oh, yeah, oh, that's right, you give daddy that money, oh, yeah, baby.
And the other people who are on the state side of the economy are being paid very well, of course, to say, no, there are no problems.
Everything's fine. It's all sustainable.
Don't worry so much about this national debt.
The thing that we really need to talk about is what kind of tax reform we might need, whether we should have a national sales tax or whether we should have this tax or that tax or whether these regulations are a bit excessive, that we really need to focus on the absolute minutiae While the sky is falling.
So that is very similar to me as well.
So in the same way that intellectuals are paid to say that there is a problem with global warming and it's coming, the same intellect, and you can't sort of see it for yourself because it requires a lot of expertise, Well, the same thing is true of economists and pundits and media people.
They're paid to say that there are no major problems, and of course the state power that is going on is really only available to experts in terms of figuring out the effects.
It's very complicated to figure out what's going on with state power and how it should or shouldn't be, or how it manifests or doesn't manifest itself in particular areas.
So, that's another way in which both global warming and the increases in state power, to me, are pretty analogous and well worth looking at from that standpoint.
Now, let's take a final gander at this, sort of another reason why it strikes people's imagination quite strongly.
Let's look at the long-term effects.
Now, nobody, of course, is saying that global warming is going to result in turning our planet into Venus.
Which, you know, is this sulfuric acid-laced kind of hellhole that you'd melt your spaceship landing on.
Nobody's saying that at all.
What they're saying is that with global warming, the actions of each individual is sadly contributing in a way that is systematic and unstoppable towards an ever-escalating cataclysmic rise of problems followed by a severe disruption in the ecosystem which is going to destroy large amounts of human life and habitability and so on.
And then what's going to happen is there's going to be a certain indeterminate period of time where the emissions are reduced by virtue of the fact that the economy has collapsed.
So we'll go back to burning wood rather than oil or something like that.
And so that's going to last for an indeterminate couple of hundred years or a thousand years or two or whatever, or a couple of thousand years, who knows.
And then things will slowly return to normal.
Well, of course, this also ties in with the long-term effects of state power.
Assuming, of course, that we who are brave and few and loud and endlessly chattery do not reach the masses in the way that is going to work, which is sort of why we're, at least I'm in a bit of a rush to put these podcasts out, because I do feel time sticking away.
So, in the absence of people like us intervening in the social consciousness and telling people exactly what's going on and why, then what's going to happen, of course, is you're going to get a fall of the Roman Empire situation with the state, right?
So, what happens is the state collapses, and we can sort of go into that another time, the sort of situations that occur, the sequences that occur.
Well, the state collapses, and then you enter a period of Dark Ages.
It could last generations or thousands of years, who knows?
I guess the Roman era is about a thousand years.
You could argue for 700 or 800, but to me, pretty much the last 100 or 200 years of the Roman Empire was pretty savage.
So you could say about a thousand years, and prior to that, I don't know, like a thousand years...
Between the Egyptians and the ones that came after her, you've got at least 1500 years of complete stagnation in China under the warlords.
Unfortunately, they didn't listen to Lao Tse, which would be a good thing if they had.
And so what happens is, when this cataclysm of violence exhausts itself, you go into a period of stable and significant problems, which then slowly heal themselves over time.
Well, of course, this is exactly the case with state power.
State power does not destroy people, per se.
I mean, it kills millions and millions of people, but it doesn't wipe out the planet.
What happens is, it engulfs society in a cataclysm of violence, like the culmination of the global warming theory, And then everybody lives these incredibly diminished lives for, you know, 20 or 30 generations or more.
And then things...
Slowly sort of revert back to normal, right?
So after the fall of the Roman Empire, you got seven, eight, nine hundred thousand years of the Dark Ages, and then things slowly begin to revert to normal because they rediscovered Roman law and old thinkers, and the Black Death wiped out a lot of people,
so the cost of labor went up, so the serfs could demand some freedoms, and lots of things occurred, and it sort of Interesting and complicated situation that brought about an increase in freedom, but it's exactly parallel to what is talked about with global warming, that there's going to be this cataclysm, and then we're going to live these diminished lives, and then over time the planet will heal itself.
And so that's exactly the same as what occurs with state power, destroys society, everybody lives these diminished lives for a couple dozen generations, and then things begin to heal, and you sort of begin your upward climb again.
Now, the last thing that I'll say about this is that because global warming is a fantasy, it will absolutely lead you in the opposite direction.
This is the great danger of fantasies, as we talked about briefly this morning.
Well, sorry, as you listened to extensively this morning, to be a little more clear about the lines of communication here.
The problem with fantasy is that it leads you in exactly the wrong and opposite direction.
It identifies the problem and then leads you in the opposite direction.
So to take the example from this morning, fantasy It identifies that you have a problem with your family.
Like, you have a problem with your family, that creates an impetus for movement.
Defenses will always create fantasies which push you in the wrong direction, completely and totally and utterly.
And that is something that's very important to understand.
So, in reference to this morning, there's a problem with my family.
That's sort of what happens, right?
So you get this impulse to sort of not see them, and most people mistranslate that into, oh, I better go and see them more.
The fantasies lead you in the opposite direction.
So people who have no reason to forgive those who have brutalized them, in fact, have every reason to not forgive them, end up in these fantasy camps wherein they must forgive these people, and that's the only right thing to do.
So the impulse to not forgive, which is the accurate one, gets translated into a fantasy of infinite forgiveness, which then causes them to be trapped with the very people who continue to harm them.
So this is where you don't want to be in life.
You don't want to be in this place where fantasy is leading you in the opposite direction.
So this is the same thing, of course, that occurs with global warming.
So, fantasies are that global warming exists, and of course, one fantasy always breeds another fantasy, right?
You can't ever deal with fantasies unless you get to their root, right?
You can't reason from 2 plus 2 is 6, and then build, whatever theory you build on that is going to be completely incorrect, right?
So, in the fantasy that global warming exists and is caused by the free market, then of course that fantasy is one thing, and it leads to the next fantasy, which is that the government can solve the problem of global warming.
Because the government is, of course, so wise and is full of so many people who take nothing but the long view of society and who are never corrupted by power in the way that voluntary participative capitalists are.
And so the first fantasy is that it exists, of course.
The second fantasy is that the state will solve it.
And so as far as pollution and danger to human life, because we're really only concerned about global warming as far as its danger to human life goes, right?
I mean, when it comes right down to it, all environmentalism, It's about the danger to human life.
So the funny thing is, of course, that you make up this fear called global warming, which is a fear because you're afraid of its effect on human life.
It's going to be deleterious to human life, so it's, oh, I'm frightened.
It's going to be bad for us. And then you say, well what we need to do is give these crazy psychotic mad bastards over there in the state nearly infinite capacities to enslave us in order to save us from global warming.
So your fear about something which is damaging to human health and human survival gives you the impetus to hand over the power of murder To a huge social monopoly and to surrender all of your rights to people who are going to end up getting you killed.
I mean, that's what the state does. It gets people killed.
That's its job. That's all it does.
Or it enslaves them or whatever.
But basically, it's a murder machine.
It's a killing machine. And so, that is an important thing to understand, that a fantasy will always lead you in the wrong direction.
A fantasy will tell you that there's something in the grass when there isn't, and it will then propel you towards the lion that really is there, that's the opposite direction.
So, that's really something to understand about fantasy.
Now, the last thing...
Okay, the one last thing that I'll say about this...
I had a long traffic jam, so this has been a tad longer than expected, but that's alright, I hope.
The last thing that I'll say is that...
Even if we do say that global warming is an absolutely real phenomenon, an absolutely and totally real phenomenon, and it is going to be damaging to human life and human property, and it's just all-round double-plus ungood, well, how on earth can a government or would a government ever care about that in any way whatsoever?
I mean, let's look at how a free society might handle something like global warming.
Let's just say it's completely real.
Well, We're good to go.
Well, DROs are going to lose a fortune, of course.
And so, DROs have a very specific and detailed financial requirement to minimize damage through the elements, right?
Through the natural forces of weather and nature.
And so, if they do figure out objectively that something is occurring that is dangerous to human life and human property, all the DROs are going to leap into action pretty quickly.
Now, they're not going to leap into action if it's only going to occur 300 years from now and has a 1% chance.
And they're also not going to produce a whole flurry of spending and documents and papers and lawsuits and cases and this and that and the other, news articles and scientific journal articles, the sum total of which is the Kyoto Protocol, which has the capacity to affect...
The temperature by 0.1% or 0.1 degree over the next 80 years is full of sound and fury, of course, signifying absolutely nothing.
The Kyoto Protocol is a complete waste of time and money, except, of course, for the state slavering parasitical bureaucrats that are feeding off all our jugulars, shuffling all this paper around.
I mean, that's an example of how the government's going to solve this issue, right?
Put this Kyoto Protocols in, which are going to cost jobs and, you know...
Hundreds of billions of dollars the world over, you know, for the sum total of affecting things, you know, virtually not at all over the long run.
So DROs are going to leap into action.
So they're going to figure out, okay, well, the cost to human life and to human property over the next 50 years from global warming is going to be X. So we can spend X minus $1 and still come out ahead.
And so if they say, okay, well, it's the gasoline, then they're going to say, look, to all the people they represent in the gasoline companies, they're going to say, look, this gasoline thing is going to cause X amount of damage, which is going to affect you.
It's going to drive up your DRO rates.
It's going to be really bad, and it's going to be unpredictable, which means that it might be so bad that the DROs get blown out of the water financially or economically, and so your house is going to get blown away, and there's going to be nobody there to help you replace it.
This is all pretty bad. Here's the science.
Here's the facts. Let's sit down and figure it out.
So, you have an enormous number of people with a huge amount of vested interest in protecting persons and property within society over the long run.
So, if they figure out, oh, it's gasoline, right?
Then, I don't know, switch to ethanol or, I don't know, they'll fund research into creating personal flying machines that run on body farts, I don't know, something like that.
They're going to come up with some way to be able to reduce stuff.
Or, at the very least, if...
If there's no conceivable way to deal with the problem of gasoline, it's unthinkable.
But let's just say there's no way to deal with the problem of gasoline.
Then, of course, the DROs are going to say, okay, well, those of you who drive are now going to pay for the cost of us figuring out a way to reverse or scrub the air or figure out how to deal with this issue of emissions.
But, I mean, that's not really a solution at all.
Whatever is going to be economically productive, i.e.
better, For human life and human property is going to be the optimum solution that DROs, in conjunction with manufacturers and drivers and everyone, because in a private free market DRO-based system, the social costs can be easily applied to individuals.
So if it is just the use of gasoline, then how much gasoline you use is going to be what you pay for, you know, continuing DRO coverage.
And of course, the DROs that might scare up all these stories and raise their rates, well, all their other DROs will be competing to find the absolute optimum solution.
So even if we accepted that global warming were a perfectly real phenomenon and was occurring and was going to be terrible and escalating and all the things that we've talked about, even if it was not a fantasy at all, Then you would absolutely in no way, shape, or form ever, ever think that the government would be the mechanism by which it could ever be solved.
And I think that's sort of important to understand.
I mean, you can take this sort of double-pronged approach to environmentalism, as we've talked about before.
One is that, look, it's not really a big issue.
All these government scientists are just another special interest group.
They're just another bunch of jackals in the state court system.
We're trying to grab handouts and feast on the body politics.
So let's not take anything that they say seriously.
And let's at least wait for some kind of consensus with people.
But of course, everybody says, when the consensus comes, it will be too late.
Everything will be destroyed.
There will be cows flying through the air and so on.
And of course, that's just something where you say, yeah, okay, fine.
Yeah, I gotcha. That's so religious.
It's funny, right? By the time you die, it will be too late and it's all unverifiable anyway.
So... I think that's the way to approach it.
One is to say, well, I have a lot of skepticism towards this stuff, but even if it's completely true, I mean, what do I know, right?
I'm no climatologist.
Even if it is completely and utterly and totally true, Well, the last social agency that's ever going to solve the problem is the state.
The state's just going to get bribed by the manufacturers, going to get bribed by the oil companies, going to get bribed by the unions, going to get bribed by everyone to put a flurry of activity together, and it's going to end up putting a whole bunch of stuff together that's going to have no effect, that's going to raise everybody's taxes, and it's going to siphon away funds from every other possible social solution to the problem,
whereas in the DRO model, the dispute resolution organization model, The anarcho-capitalist model, you have a situation, of course, where you have everybody who has specific and measurable financial incentives to deal with this problem, getting together and working it out in an incredibly powerful and efficient manner, and that's how these problems get solved.
They don't get solved by bureaucrats waving guns around and trying to expand their own political empires.
I mean, forget about it. That's never ever going to solve the problem of global warming in a million years.
So, you know, it's either not real, In which case, let's forget about it.
Or it is real. I mean, oppose it, of course.
Or it is real, in which case we absolutely need to get rid of the government as soon as possible so we can actually get these problems solved.
I hope this is helpful.
I think it's a useful metaphor to understand why global warming has gripped people's consciousness so much.
And I think it's a good way of understanding the parallels between the rise of state power and the fantasy camp of global warming.
So, again, I appreciate donations.
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And I will talk to you soon.
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