Roger Hallam
(FB, 5/9/21)
I’ll be alright Jack
No you won’t
I recently spoke with a XR friend who is in his fifties like me and he said “I’m really sorry for the younger generation, they’re going to live through all this mess. I will be retired soon so I’ll be okay.” I thought you don’t have a clue.
One of key reasons why XR is being unsuccessful is because it refuses to communicate accurately and concretely in everyday language what is going to happen in the next two decades. This can be summed up in six words: the fiscal crisis of the state. Forget dolphins, whales and icesheets – there is only one reality here and it is what the state does when it runs out of money. This has very little to do with politics or values – it’s much deeper than that. The first principle of the state is to maintain itself. And when it experiences extreme economic stress it raids society to get cash. This means it takes money from unproductive parts of the society to pay for the parts that are productive. So, for instance, in World War Two the UK government raided the assets of the rich to pay for the war. This was done by Tory MPs – it was not a matter of politics but national survival. So you know what is going happen in a decade or so when western countries are having to pay for the massive cost of electrifying their economies, retro fitting their entire housing stock, and dealing with “defence” costs of social breakdown in the sub tropics: it’s going to raid the pensions of my generation. The brutal reality is that the interests of the retired won’t matter.
And as we enter the 2030’s and start experiencing the critical infrastructure tipping point of 40C plus temperatures on a regular basis, our children’s generation will be presented with having to upgrade or replace the melting roads, wiring and god knows what other stuff that stops working at such temperatures - just about everything (see the articles on 40C plus temperatures in British Colombia this summer). The costs will be eye-wateringly astronomical. Maintaining pensions, care homes, and the rest of the welfare state for the elderly is going to be last of the worries of the government.
But there is a darker side to all this. My generation will go down as the most selfish and immoral in human history, for being bystanders and allowing the corporate capitalist machine to decimate the biosphere over the critical decade of 2010-2020. Even after 2018 when it was bleeding obvious that we had to enter into civil resistance against this holocaust machine we continued to shit on our obligations to previous generations who died to give us our prosperity and liberties, and the next thousand generations who will have to deal with this “mess”, as it euphemistically gets called.
Well just consider that our children and their children will have no motivation to act any differently than us. Payback time is coming. It could be merely structural. The younger generation will come to power and the logic of the state, as mentioned, will lead to the rapid impoverishment of my generation, presently in our 40’s and 50’s as we get into our 60’s and 70’s. But more likely there will be a visceral contempt: you created this shit and so you can pay for it. Polluters pay and all that. We are not heading into some ecological steady state circular economy new civilisation. Much more likely we are heading into a time when people over 60 will be spat at as they walk down the street, and be literally left to die in urine stinking death homes.
Of course this is very unfair. Individuals should not be blamed for structural pathologies. But fairness does not come into it. What is “fair” about people eating meat and taking flights in 2021. Let’s be honest it’s a matter of “I can so I will”. That is the moto of today’s adults in Western societies. So don’t expect our children to be any different – they will follow our example. They can so they will.
I recently watched the film “The Father”. It was very upsetting. At the end of the film the elderly man returns to being a helpless small child calling out for his mother. But there is no mother to comfort him. Instead a care worker puts her arm around him as he sobs. The fiscal crisis of the state concretely means this: there will be no one to put their arms around him. Our generation will be left to wallow in self contempt for our cowardice, and to left to die, hated and alone.
If you want to speak with some effectiveness about the actual reality of the climate crisis to the public, this is what you have to start talking about. I did the world’s first “heading for extinction” talk in 2018 at King’s College (see it on you tube below). I started with the story of the 3 million soviet prisoners of war who were deliberatively starved to death in the autumn of 1941. And then told the audience that four years later soviet soldiers entered Nazi Germany and raped 2 million women in a couple of months. The point I was making is that under extreme pressure human beings are indescribably cruel to each other. In 2021 our governments are locking in this horrendous social stress because my generation of adults are refusing to go into civil resistance to stop it. It’s as simple as that. This is our war, but we are refusing to fight it.
Unsurprisingly this part of the talk along with the other “tell the truth” sections were taken out by the middle class liberal “let’s not upset people” regime that soon took over XR. But taking things out of talks which upset you does not stop then from happening: that is the post modernist conceit.
If XR is to have a future the realists in it have to enact some tough love and tell to some home truths to the “post modernists”. XR has to start telling the public what is really going to be happening with the raw passion and emotion it demands. And start saying the obvious, to quote ACTUP activist Larry Kramer:
“get out in the streets otherwise you’re gonna fucking die”.