We have created a monster, and it is us!

Solving the planetary crises requires accepting some hard truths.

Partying while the bombs are dropping. Scene from the movie Brazil by the great Terry Gilliam

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Forty years ago, Neil Postman warned that modern media discourages critical thinking and makes people stupid (Amusing Ourselves to Death). Since the internet and social media had not yet been invented, his analysis was limited to American television, but his conclusions are even more relevant today. Postman’s main point was that to appeal to the masses, news reporting has to be simplified to the point of trivialization: a story has to be short, easily comprehensible, and not too upsetting. Any topic – war, genocide, or natural disasters – is given the same 45-second time slot and is immediately followed by advertising and celebrity news. Viewers are never asked to pause and reflect, and news stories are selected and consumed for their entertainment value rather than their relevance. The problem is “not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.” The result is a society that always expects to be amused and becomes incapable of engaging in serious political discourse. In particular, it is unable to separate the relevant from the irrelevant.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984 […] people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Today, we know that Postman was right. A recent study by Mertens et al. (The rise and fall of rationality in language | PNAS) concludes that written language started to change during the late 1970s. An unbroken trend of increasing rationality that had lasted for 120 years was suddenly reversed (see figure below). For the last four decades, written language has become increasingly emotional and irrational. Note that the change happened before the introduction of the World Wide Web or social networks and cannot be blamed on the Russians or the Chinese. We are looking at a problem of our own making and need to understand what went wrong.

The rise and fall of rationality in language | PNAS

The 1970s was a transformative decade with a promising beginning and a disastrous end. Greenpeace was founded in 1971, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth in 1972, and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm the same year. Climate modeling progressed significantly, and the causes and effects of Global Warming were well understood by the end of the decade. Consequently, the only habitable planet in the known universe, aka the Earth, could have been easily saved.

This was not to be, however. Instead, we got Margret Thatcher (elected 1979), Ronald Reagan (elected 1980), climate denialism, and neoliberalism. The evil empire of entrenched capital struck back and achieved an overwhelming victory. The Scientific Counter-Revolution of the late 20th century was so successful that it managed not only to end the Age of Enlightenment but to wipe out any memory of it ever happening. Had it not been for the abovementioned study, it would have been a perfect crime.

Neoliberalism

To understand what happened, we need to remember that many Western nations were struggling during the 1970s. They had recently lost control over most of their colonies, and the remaining colonial wars – such as the one in Vietnam – were not going well. In addition, the US had just run out of cheap oil, leading to an oil crisis with a massive increase in global energy prices. This, combined with the cost of the Vietnam War, forced the US to abandon its gold-based currency and leave the Bretton Woods agreement in 1973. This was the era of stagflation, i.e., a combination of inflation, sluggish economic growth, and unemployment.

The decade was also characterized by the anti-war movement and a number of important social developments, but describing these would be outside both the scope of this article and the range of my knowledge. It suffices to say that the economy was doing poorly, and public trust in governments was declining (cf. figure below). Several cracks had appeared in the old patriarchal world order.

Public trust in government, PEW Research Center

At this point, the capitalist class came up with a brilliant plan: Rather than trying to restore people’s faith in governments, they decided to undermine it completely. Neoliberalism is the idea that the free market can do no wrong and governments can do no right. Since the latter had messed up, it was time to “shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub” (Grover Norquist).

Neoliberalism can best be described as the deification of the “free market.” It replaces the invisible God with the invisible hand of the market and introduces a set of dogmas that must not be questioned. Like all religions, it is not evidence-based. Its basic tenet — that capitalist free markets produce optimal outcomes — is not supported by empirical evidence. Neoliberalism is also anti-democratic and full of contradictions. What happens to my right to vote when the elected officials are essentially powerless? Why do politicians who profess to believe in free markets and small government still want to maintain enormous armies and engage in murderous crusades?

Follow the marble! If you want to understand who is running the show, you have to look at architecture: The Cathedral of St. Peter in the Vatican (left) and the head office of UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland) in Zurich (right).

Above all, neoliberalism is the “extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” It does nothing to address the problems of pollution and resource scarcity on a finite planet because these problems do not have a solution within a capitalist framework that requires growth.

Since many people — especially economists — seem confused about how the economy works, let me offer some hints. First, we must understand that money is simply a medium of exchange. If you have one ton of steel, you can use it to build wind turbines or airplanes. The choice is political and should be based on what is best for society. No financial magic in the world will allow you to build both a wind turbine and an aircraft from the same piece of steel. Likewise, the workers and engineers needed to construct things can only work on one project at a time. Thus, somebody has to decide how to allocate the available resources.

A market economy is controlled through money. If you want to build wind turbines, you allocate money for this purpose and use it to buy the steel and pay the workers. Obviously, this means that people with a lot of money have a lot of power and can dictate how to use the scarce resources of our planet. If there are enough billionaires, a lot of steel and manpower will be devoted to building luxury yachts.

Capitalism is based on the societal decision to treat money as a scarce resource. This creates a market for money, allowing people with lots of it to engage in usury. The money lenders do not only want to get their money back but also demand interest, which is referred to as capital income or return on investment (ROI). For this to work, the total money supply has to increase, meaning that central banks need to continuously print more money. This would lead to inflation unless there is also more stuff to buy. If the economy does not grow, the supply of money (adjusted for inflation) does not increase, and capital income ceases to be relevant. When the economy stops growing, the financial sector will vanish. It is as simple as that.

BTW, Aristoteles was against capital income 2400 years ago. His sentiment was shared by Christianity, Islam, and other major religions.

Limits to Growth argued that unlimited growth is impossible on a finite planet. Since this is obviously true, the neoliberals had no way of countering the conclusion using factual arguments. Instead, they launched a dirty campaign to discredit the report and its authors. For more details, I refer you to the excellent podcast by Katy Shields.

The Propaganda Model

Note that the neoliberals never answered the question of how unlimited could be possible on a finite planet. Rather, they banned the question from the political discourse. The mantra that there was no alternative to capitalism and economic growth was drilled into our heads through constant repetition, and anyone who dared to question this was ridiculed or taken off the air. TINA – There Is No Alternative – became an article of faith, and only the faithful were given access to the media.

Today, this approach is all too well known. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified by Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program that did not exist. People who dared to question the sanity of the war were quickly silenced. Chris Hedges was fired from the New York Times, and Phil Donahue was taken off air by MSNBC.

The biggest lesson, I think, is how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage. The decision to release me came from far above. This was not an associate program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC. They were terrified of the anti-war voice, and that is not an exaggeration.

Phil Donahue, Democracy Now

If you have an hour to spare, I encourage you to watch The War You Don’t See by the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger. It details how corporate media were complicit in creating a pro-war narrative in “the defense of the indefensible” (George Orwell). An essential source for understanding the process is Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky, which introduces the Propaganda Model.

I leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to apply the propaganda model to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Hint: the stories you hear on mainstream media might not be correct.

Peter Turchin is right when he argues that Western democracies are plutocracies. A small number of wealthy people have all the power, and they are prepared to commit murder to keep it that way. The parallels to the outbreak of the First World War are uncanny (cf. The Mendacity of the Elites). In 1914, an obsolete aristocracy held on to power and considered war preferable to social reforms. What better way of preventing the workers of the world from uniting than to have them kill each other? In the minds of the powerful, human lives are expendable. Madeleine Albright famously argued that 500’000 dead children in Iraq was a price worth paying. We still have to figure out what the purpose was.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda (1928)

To Edward Bernays, propaganda (or marketing) was simply a tool. It did not matter whether the purpose was to sell a product or to promote a political idea, or whether the cause was good or evil. He even complained that politicians were too sluggish in applying the latest techniques of mass manipulation invented by the private sector. I guess he would have been fascinated by the power of social networks but would have been bemused by the debate on whether various political organizations “abuse” Twitter or Facebook to spread disinformation. If you develop a tool for the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” you should not be surprised when it is used for precisely this purpose.

If we combine the insights of Edward Bernays (1928) about the need for the elites to control the masses using propaganda, the conclusion from Limits to Growth (1972), and the observation from Neil Postman (1982) that television can be used to make people stupid, we understand what happened to written language at the end of the 1970s: the people in power had both the motivation and the tools required to turn the population of the Western world into mindless consumers. The accomplishments of the Enlightenment were sacrificed at the altar of Neoliberalism and Consumerism. In a way, the study by Mertens quoted above is direct empirical evidence that the propaganda model works.

The Society of Spectacles

The approach was so successful because we were essentially told what we wanted to hear. The narrative presented to us by the plutocrats was “bread and circuses” on steroids and the ultimate Faustian bargain: if we give the capitalists a license to destroy the world, they will provide us with a pleasing pseudo-reality of material abundance. We designed a Potemkin society to satisfy our desires without requiring us to interact with the real world or to understand the consequences of our actions.

IN THIS BOOK I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.

Boorstin, Daniel J.. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962)

To some extent, this is not new. The advanced lifestyle of ancient Rome was made possible by a constant influx of food, treasures, exotic animals, and slaves from all corners of the Roman Empire. If you travel to any of the capitals of former colonial powers – London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St Petersburg – you can still allow yourself to be awestruck by all the stolen goods on display. Empires exist because they manage to subdue other countries and steal their resources. There has never been a sustainable empire, nor will there ever be one. And yet, the people living in the imperial capitals were encouraged to ignore the atrocities necessary to acquire the wealth and focus on trivialities related to affluent life. We do not know whether Marie Antoinette responded to the news that the people did not have bread with “let them eat cake,” but it is a good story.

Today, the role of the Roman Empire is played by the United States of America. It is the only nation with a truly global military presence, with hundreds of bases in some 80 countries (cf. Infographic), and it regularly uses its military to ensure access to valuable resources and to suppress any opposition. An excellent overview is given in The Churning of the Global Order by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

If we divide the world’s nations into three groups – Global North, BRICS, and the rest – and use data from the World Bank (from 2022), we can create the following three pie charts.

The Global North has less than 14% of the world’s population, 56% of global GDP, and almost two-thirds of all military spending. The excessive consumption of the rich countries not only destroys the planet but also requires a massive inflow of natural resources from all over the world and an outflow of waste that is either disposed of in poorer countries or in the atmosphere through waste incineration. The large military spending is necessary to force poorer countries to hand over their resources and labor without asking too much in return. Even if we were to believe that the purpose of NATO is to “ensure peace and stability,” we ought to fire its leadership for incompetence anyway. Should we not expect more peace and stability for $1341 billion per year (SIPRI)? Anyone who believes the Global North is fighting for “freedom and democracy” rather than protecting the business interests of large corporations has watched too many Hollywood movies. “War is a Racket” was the conclusion of Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated Marine ever to have served.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler

Episode CD269 of Congressional Dish by Jennifer Briney gives an excellent introduction to the politics of corruption and war profiteering.

Allegedly, Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought about Western civilization. “I think that would be an excellent idea,” he quipped, and this answer is still valid. The data on population, GDP, and military spending in the charts above blow a massive hole in the myth of Western liberalism: we live in a society built on colonialism, slavery, genocide, and fossil fuels. The combination of modern technology and industrialized mass production made European armies invincible from the middle of the 19th century onwards. This allowed the Global North (aka the colonial powers) to engage in Extractivism on an unprecedented scale, gobbling up natural resources and exploiting people all over the world. This was never going to end well. Firstly, as the planet is finite, we will either run out of resources or poison ourselves within the foreseeable future, just as predicted by Limits to Growth. Secondly, “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” In a world of increasing resource scarcity, the fact that a small part of the population is consuming far too much becomes unacceptable and leads to violence and war.

In Christa Wolf’s magnificent novel, Cassandra wonders how the pre-war – the conditions making war inevitable – can be prevented. Her most important rule is “don’t allow yourself to be deceived by your own.” Today, the world is again marching down the road to Armageddon. Military spending is exploding, and many Western nations are discussing reintroducing compulsory military service. The major powers are again investing in nuclear arms (ICAN). Why? If nuclear weapons were only considered a deterrent, we have more than enough of them. Are some people crazy enough to believe that nuclear wars can be won?

Our Pseudo-Reality

More importantly, do we actually believe that governments who are prepared to introduce mandatory military service and spend trillions on weapons of mass destruction to protect corporate interests really care about biodiversity and the future of our children? If they are fine with sending young people off to die in needless wars, they are probably fine with allowing them to die of heat stroke.

Governments lie all the time. They have to lie, as they do not represent the people who elect them.

Howard Zinn (You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train)

Propaganda is not only about disinformation. It is about creating a narrative or an illusion that is more appealing to our senses than the truth. Juvenal got it right some 2000 years ago when he coined the term “bread and circuses.” Today, the “circuses” consist of modern media, starting with television and continuing with the internet, streaming services, and social networks, whereas the “bread” is provided by industrialized mass production, allowing us to live in a world of unprecedented material affluence.

The problem with mass production is that it also requires mass consumption. As soon as the fundamental material demands of the population have been met, the economy can only grow by convincing people to buy things they do not need. In the affluent society, companies do not develop products to meet existing demand. Instead, they first have to create the demand using clever marketing strategies. As J. K. Galbraith pointed out in The Affluent Society (1958), this breaks the classical model of the market as an equilibrium of supply and demand since the same corporations are responsible for providing both. Unfortunately, classical economic theory has failed to take this into account:

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society (1958)

Sticking to the old model was simply more convenient than adapting it to reality. Galileo would have understood Galbraith’s frustration.

Daniel J. Boorstin was more concerned with the psychological consequences of affluence. In his remarkable book The Image (1962), he talks about how exuberance has created an illusion or a pseudo-reality designed to satisfy our desires. It is the difference between encountering a wild animal while walking through a forest and paying to see the same animal in a cage at the zoo. The former case is a real event resulting from our interaction with the physical world. The latter is an example of a pseudo-event, because the animal was put in the cage to be seen by us.

The pseudo-reality is designed to satisfy our desires, thereby creating a culture of “exaggerated expectations.” Or, to turn the above metaphor on its head, we have become lazy zoo animals that do not have to use their brains anymore. There are interesting studies showing that domesticated animals are stupider than their relatives in the wild. Stop using your brain, and it will deteriorate.

Mass processing of pigs and people.

Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle,1967) offered an even more profound analysis, considering the political and social consequences of “the spectacle.” He concluded that:

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Bureau of Public Secrets.

and

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Bureau of Public Secrets.

The economist, the psychologist, and the Marxist philosopher agree on one thing: mass production requires mass consumption, which in turn requires mass marketing (aka propaganda). To keep the economy going, corporations got a license to appeal to our basest desires and make people greedy and stupid. Once this process was completed, constructive political discourse was no longer possible. After all, people who believe unlimited economic growth to be possible on a finite planet have a very loose grip on reality. It is not surprising that they are confused on other issues. They have all become Marie Antoinette — spoiled, pampered, and clueless.

The problem is that this process has been going on for at least 50 years, meaning that the current generation of politicians and business leaders were brainwashed already as children. The people in suits and ties who like to complain about the misguided youth are at least as confused themselves.

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults—people who are masters of their own lives—are in fact nowhere to be found.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Bureau of Public Secrets.

Politicians have always lied to the people, but I have a strong feeling that Bismarck or Churchill knew when they were lying. The same might still be true for Putin and Xi Jinping. I am not so sure about Western politicians.

Perhaps we need to introduce a Bullshit Index (BSI) to describe societies. A BSI of zero means that people are not being lied to. If the BSI is 1, people are being lied to by politicians who know that they are lying. We currently live in a society with a very large BSI. Generations of politicians and business leaders have been mired in bullshit for so long that they have lost touch with reality. It will be difficult to make them see the light.

How do we know what is true?

To get out of this mess, we must accept that we have been lied to — even though it is painful — and start reconstructing the truth. I know it sounds horribly old-fashioned to quote Karl Popper, but that is precisely the problem. Just ask your friends, colleagues, or students how they know that something is true, and most of them will have absolutely no idea. People tend to believe that something is true because it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or because it has been stated by a person of authority. Both answers are wrong.

Karl Popper made a serious effort to establish the limits of knowledge in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). The main idea was that a hypothesis becomes an established theory once it has been tested often enough and passed all the tests, i.e., when many independent groups have failed to falsify it. In other words, what Popper refers to as scientific knowledge is what we today call the scientific consensus. When two scientists disagree on something, they are supposed to collaborate on designing an experiment to find out who is wrong. Otherwise, no knowledge is generated.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to happen anymore. When it comes to the energy transition, some scientists are convinced that it will be possible to replace fossil fuels with renewables, while others argue that this will not work because we are running out of raw materials. Both sides publish in peer-reviewed journals, but their views do not seem to converge. Thus, no knowledge is generated, and we simply do not know to what extent the energy transition is possible. Likewise, whenever there is a recession, some economists argue for austerity and others for deficit spending. Again, no consensus can be found, as they simply do not know.

If you do not know, you either have to conduct an experiment or play it safe. Climate scientists fell into a trap of their own making by overselling the accuracy of their models. This created the impression that climate change is a manageable problem. However, some scientists — such as James Hansen — argue that the climate models severely underestimate the consequences of climate change. I am not saying that James Hansen is right. The point is that since we only have one planet and there are uncertainties in the models, we must play it safe and reduce emissions as quickly as possible.

Let me summarize what we do know regarding the climate crisis:

1. We need one carbon atom to create one carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane (CH4) molecule. If this atom is part of the natural carbon cycle, it will be reabsorbed by vegetation within a year and will not contribute to global warming. Thus, the only way to increase the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is by extracting carbon from fossil reserves.

2. The opposite is also true: if we stop extracting fossil fuels, no carbon will be available to produce greenhouse gases, meaning global warming will be halted. There is a one-to-one correspondence between fossil fuel extraction and global warming.

3. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) was invented to counter the two points above. However, we do not know if carbon capture will ever work. Thus, arguing that CCS will stop climate change is propaganda, as it is not based on evidence.

4. There is already too much carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Therefore, carbon budgets are irrelevant; we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases as soon as possible.

5. The most efficient way to reduce the demand for fossil fuels is to impose a carbon tax. This is not rocket science: if all products and services that rely on fossil fuels become more expensive, people will have to buy less of them, whether they like it or not.

6. Since only a couple of hundred corporations in the world engage in fossil fuel extraction, it would be trivial to introduce a global carbon tax. These corporations would simply have to pay a fee proportional to their production.

7. If the revenue from this tax were distributed equitably, most of the world’s population would benefit.

8. The tax could be increased annually until the carbon emissions decrease fast enough. This corresponds to a negative feedback loop to stabilize the world’s climate.

I do not claim to know how high this tax would have to be, but neither does anybody else. And if you do not know, you conduct an experiment. The great advantage of Global Climate Compensation is that the system can be set up in a couple of days, as it only involves transactions between a small number of large corporations and governments. We are currently conducting an uncontrollable, irreversible, high-risk experiment with the only habitable planet in the known universe, even though we know that the consequences will be disastrous. What is the problem with conducting a controllable, reversible, low-risk experiment with the economy?

You cannot have your planet and eat it

If it is that simple, why did we not introduce a global carbon tax long ago? Let us assume the we introduce a global carbon tax of $100 per ton of CO2 and distribute the revenue equally among the people of the world. The total revenue would be $3800 billion, which compares favorably to global military spending of $2400 billion. This is enough money to give every person on the planet a universal income of $478 per year, alleviating hunger and poverty in many poorer countries.

Next, we look at the global money flows using the data from the World Bank. Every country would have to cope with higher energy prices but also receive money from the fund. If we assume the carbon footprint of a country to be proportional to the GDP, we can produce the following table for the contributions to the global fund:

The Global North would be the net contributor to the fund, with $1619 billion per year. All other countries in the world would benefit, as the payouts from the fund would easily cover the higher energy costs.

Remember that the Global North has roughly 14% of the world’s population. If the world were a democracy, 86% of the voters would favor Global Carbon Compensation. The plutocrats of the Global North would not be happy, as they expect the money to flow in the other direction, but what about the rest of us? I hope to have convinced you that most people in the Global North would also be better off if energy were more expensive. This is particularly true for men, who have been emasculated by the invention of the combustion engine. When my father was a child, there were still lots of jobs that required muscle power. Since men are typically larger and stronger, they had a competitive advantage on the labor market. Automation based on the combustion engine destroyed many blue-collar jobs, just as AI will render many white-collar jobs superfluous. Automation and AI use fossil fuel to replace humans, but only if we let the plutocrats get away with it.

There will be no healing without remorse. The Global North has wrecked the planet and gotten rich and powerful in the process. Now it refuses to pay for the damage done. Unless this changes, we will have to cope with the destruction from countless wars in addition to the droughts, heat waves, and severe weather resulting from climate change.

You cannot have your planet and eat it.

In 1992, when the US was the world’s only superpower, President George H.W. Bush arrived at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro with a simple message: “The American lifestyle is non-negotiable.” With this mindset, it will be impossible to save the world.

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

Boorstin, Daniel J.. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.