After COP we’re all Eichmanns nowRoger Hallam
Complexity and Moral Collapse
I recently did a talk for my patreon supporters on this subject and I thought it be good to do a post about it.
There was a time, until quite recently, when there was a clear division between good and evil. If you wanted to murder someone you had limited choices. You generally needed a sharp object and you had to plunge it into another person several times. If you wanted to kill more people it would take a long time and even the most evil person could not kill people outside of his locality and certainly not those who were not yet born.
Complexity has changed all that. Complexity refers to the increasing connections between actions and consequences across time and space. Complexity has been increasing exponentially for decades. When I was a kid the only veg we ever had was carrots and peas. Milk came from the local farm. Now just about everything comes from all over the world, and there’s so much more of it.
The moral point is that today due to the ecological crisis you are murdering billions of people just by going to the supermarket. You only push the knife into them a tiny bit but millions of people are doing the same thing. And the result is mass death. We are in the process of going over 2C, and so as we go about our ordinary lives we lock in mass killing. 2C locks in 3C, and so on due to irreversible feedbacks, as Johan Rockstrom said at COP last month.
This is how complexity creates moral collapse. The system makes you a murderer– you are all at it all of the time. This is what Hannah Arendt was referring to when she spoke about the banality of evil at the famous Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann was a key administrator of the holocaust but looked upon himself as just doing his job competently. Arendt was attacked when she used this phrase because people had the old pre complexity idea that killing is a self conscious physical act. A person stabs another person to death. In fact the Nazi death machine was a proto complex system – where thousands of ordinary people in a banal way organised the small parts cogs in a vast bureaucratic system of mass murder.
That is what we have today.
But this time it’s on a global scale and it will annihilate the whole of humanity. The banality of evil has become universal. We are entering into mass death and human extinction because everyone is just “doing their job”.
As with Arendt in 1961, in 2021 lots of people will outraged by having this reality pointed out to them because they cannot accept they are murderers. They would not physically murder another person. But they absolutely are murderers in a banality of evil sense. And the moral point is that the outcome is the same. Billions of people will be subject to indescribable suffering because of your actions, combined with the actions of millions of other people, primarily in the Global North. The top 10% of the world’s population puts out 50% of global carbon emissions. That’s you.
The real challenge is doing something effective about it. The climate movements are catastrophically unsuccessful because they pretend we can deal with complexity with more complexity. Campaigners use abstract repressed middle class language to try to stop mass killing. It obviously does not work because people and governments will not change in the drastic way required of them on the basis on detailed information and polite engagement. They are 100% going to fail because nothing they do or say creates any connection with reality. This is why twenty six COPs have failed. The last one in November reduced the increase in carbon emissions from a 16% to 13% by 2030 – when what is needed according to the IPCC is a 50% decrease. The whole approach is psychologically illiterate and morally catastrophic. It is a sick totally fucked joke.
The only chance of creating the complete transformation we need in the next few years we have available is to recognise that most people most of the time cannot deal with complex abstract and technocratic arguments. We are not wired for complexity. It’s cognitively exhausting and we switch off.
There are three things which cut through the noise:
• A simple demand which is concrete and doable – you understand it in a sentence.
• Disruption: day after day economic disruption of people’s lives – as we recently saw with the 17 motorway blocks of Insulate Britain.
• The display of extreme emotion – shouting and screaming – like when you are in a relationship and your partner finally “gets through to you”.
None of this is cognitive. None of it is about information. The demand, disruption, and emotion create a super concentrated proxy for dispersed mass murder you are involved in. It makes the complex system a simple system. I want to go to work – I can’t get to work. Someone is calling me a murderer and screaming at me – I hate that. You agree to the demand because you are hard wired to respond to such visceral stimulus. The banality of your evil is made real to you because it is now literally in your face.
Of course this might not work, you might fail to create enough disruption with enough people as in the case of Insulate Britain– or you might go too far, as in “blowing up a pipeline”, and create an overreaction. Civil resistance aims at the nonviolent sweet spot between too little and too much. The critical and practical point is not that this might not be successful, but that conventional approach has zero chance of being successful – as shown by the last 30 years.
It’s civil resistance or mass death in 2021. It’s resistance or complicity. After COP26 there is no middle way.
The biggest barrier to success in 2021 is the climate movement itself because it is full of people whose privilege and power enable them to stay in the dream world of polite verbal persuasion and they work hard to stop effective approaches from happening. That is why Martin Luther King called white moderates worse than the Ku Kluk Klan. That is why the NGOs are far worse than Trump supporters. It is why we have to subject them to the same approach: demands, disruption and high emotion.
There is nothing pretty about civil resistance. But as people are realising – we are going to get hurt anyway so we have nothing to lose. If the world is to saved it will be because people now get this truth. It’s finally starting to happen and the carbon death system will be torn apart in the next few years. Better late than never.
Note if you doubt what I say here – think what stood out most in the text above – was it when I said “it’s a sick totally fucked joke”? Why was that?
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