psychology

When ethics is kicked out of public life, it returns in the wrong place - denying the ethical wrongness of criminality, denying that there can be expected standards of behaviour, even towards one's opponents, indeed, denying the rights of complete innocents, such as their right to privacy or protection from violence.

Fakegate

Fakegate is the name that has adhered to the latest debacle in the global warming hoax. For the brief background: In 2009 and again in 2011, two series of emails were released from the email archives of the University of East Anglia. It has never been discovered how these were obtained, but they bear all the hallmarks of a whistleblower, since they revealed a long and astonishing history of deceit, possible criminality, and dirty tricks by central figures in the "climate change" aka "global warming" movement. Hence the moniker, "Climategate".

Then, in mid-February, it suddenly appeared as if the tables were turned: an astonishing memo and other documents appearing to come from the Heartland Institute revealed that they were planning a campaign to dissuade teachers "from teaching science" and "keep opposing voices out"! At last, the warmists were vindicated: all the opprobrium they had endured in the wake of Climategates 1 and 2 was about to be repaid upon the skeptics, now exposed as anti-science and anti-free speech, amongst other things.

The only problem: it soon emerged that the memo containing the devastating statements (widely republished by the world's media, whose staff hold journalism degrees and would have been taught to check their sources) turned out to be a fake. The other genuine documents released alongside it were fraudulently obtained from Heartland by the President and co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, Dr Peter Gleick. Numerous commentators have indicated that they believe he is the most likely, or perhaps only, candidate for concocter of the fake document as well. Donna Laframboise writes:

The evidence is coming out that "climate change" is not merely a description of an ongoing process in the life of our planet, but a new religious phenomenon. In an article in New Scientist one of its "professors" comes out of the closet and tells us as much:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has constructed a powerful scientific consensus about the physical transformation of the world's climate. ... One way I [make sense of what climate change actually means] is to rethink our discourses about climate change in terms of four enduring myths. ... The value in identifying these mythical stories in our discourses about climate change is that they allow us to see climate change not as simply an environmental problem to be solved, but as an idea that is being mobilised in various ways around the world. ...

The world's climates will keep on changing, with human influences now inextricably entangled with those of nature. So too will the idea of climate change keep changing as we find new ways of using it to meet our needs. We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.

This is from one Mike Hulme, professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The UEA clearly needs to ask itself whether it is funding a professor of science or a professor of his own non-theistic religion. There's lots of disturbing stuff in the complete article - please do read it. But let's look at the short pieces above and ponder.

Sentence one is classic PC/postmodernist/anti-science obscurantism. Leave aside the fact that science can not and should not work by consensus. For those who haven't followed this stuff, "construction of reality" is a required tenet of the false postmodernist religion: the truth is not out there; we all make up our own 'truths', no one's 'truth' is any better than anyone else's 'truth'; he who believes the Sun rises because the Earth is rotating daily is no more correct than he who believes it rises because the morning chant was correctly intoned by the priests. Harsh? I don't think so. Only space and time prevent giving any number of examples. Here's how it works: first you convince yourself that 'truth' is whatever you choose to believe; then, a sufficient number of people choose to believe the prognostications (the "truth") of the committee of high priests (in this case, the IPCC) - who were busy planning out how to deal with global warming before they had established that there was any (see Plimer's Heaven and Earth amongst many other places). There's your consensus, and it is a "scientific" consensus because we all believe that it is (it is our 'personal truth'). Sad, but that is how the widespread psychological malfunction which I call the false religion operates.

Those who have taken a look at the background materials on this site will know that one of the dangers I see threatening humanity is a widespread psychological malfunction I have called the false religion. This isn't a religion in the old sense, it has no personal god, it isn't an overt competitor with other religions. Indeed, believers in normal religions often are also believers in the core doctrines of the false religion. In fact, because we are immersed in the false religion from birth (it having now taken over as the unofficial religion of the state), we all probably have been suckered by one or another of its beliefs, even if we saw through most of them and even if we later wised up when we looked closely at the evidence.

Perhaps Jung understood it in talking about an expansion of the ego - a belief that the individual, or the human species, has infinitely perfectible nature and powers, instead of being limited, as are all creatures, by the restrictions of our evolution, our environment, and our instincts. The framers of the American Constitution also understood it when they designed a structure that could work in spite of human frailty, rather than gambling on a mass spiritual transformation. So it clearly is a mistake to think the false religion has a single, identifiable manifestation. Human hopes and dreams can outrun reality in a thousand different ways - and how hard it is to reign them in when they are framed in words that uplift the heart and enthuse the spirit, even as they guarantee that the hopes must end in disappointment and tragedy. The false dream can infect any group or any organisation, and it does infect many, all at once. Over the top? Too alarmist? The following video was put together by a black person, Kevin Jackson of theblacksphere.net, so if you want to accuse me of racism for the following, please don't bother. It scares me, and it should scare you too.

I just noticed something on the local TV (9am show, Ten Network) that disturbed me for two completely different reasons.

They interviewed film maker and Orangutan activist, Stephen Van Mil, who discussed "the devastating effects of Indonesian deforestation to plant palm oil plantations, a commonly found substance in our grocery items." I have seen these plantations, and it is the typical 'monoculture' so loved by big business, keeping everything nice and simple and sterile. Nice for business, deadly for native animals. Disturbance number one.