When I was seventeen years old the world was a terrible place. Not my personal life or my immediate environment, which were not too bad at all. No. I'm talking about the big world, the wide world, out there. It was full of wars, and of violence in general. It was overrun with horrible people: vicious, ruthless, uncaring, manipulative. Everywhere I looked was greed, greed, greed. The environment was being destroyed by avaricious capitalists. Wickedness was the hallmark of life in 1970.
I felt desperate. Desperate to do something - anything - to improve things. I heard about 'ahimsa', harmlessness, and tried to put it into practice. I wanted to live a life that was pure, in order to counter the gross impurity that I saw and felt all around me.
I became a vegan. Now, being vegan in 1970 was not so simple as it has become in 2019. Nevertheless, I did it. Not only did I become vegan, I paid careful attention to the quantity of food that I was consuming, not wishing to exploit the Earth an iota more than was possible.
I began to feel very pure, not just psychologically but energetically and physically as well. Spots disappeared, greasy skin cleared up as if by miracle. I said goodbye to sluggish bowels. I felt light, clear, and pure, pure, pure. I was having none of the contaminated life that surrounded me.
The thing was, though, that I was starving myself to angelic death. Never exactly a fattie, I lost weight alarmingly as I carried out my carefully measured diet, compensating for consumeristic greed and avarice of the outside world. It took my mother breaking down in fits of anguished tears at the state that I had fallen into to bring me to my senses. I started stuffing myself with food suitable for a high metabolism teenage male again. I have lived to tell the tale.
This story is true. And, as a result, I am able to understand the mentality of some anorexic people well. More to the point here, I can see into and right through the neuroses which characterise many of our modern-day 'climate activists'. For them, too, the world and its people are terrible. Wanton destruction is the typical behaviour of older generations, which consist largely of psychopaths and Earth haters. Climate activists - 'Extinction Rebellion' ideologues in particular - need to compensate. Fuelled by anger and anxiety, their response to an extreme situation requires an equal opposite extreme. The world is going up in flames, and you bastards are the cause. What did Saint Greta say at the UN just a few days ago? "How dare you?"
The thing is, I got over it. I saw that things weren't quite like that. The problem was about 'me' as much as it was any world out there. If I wanted to make a difference, I had to get my own act together first: take responsibility for my own life, my own mind, my own consciousness. All of which most of these screaming enraged activists have singularly failed to do. It is, after all, easier to blame someone else....
And then there's 'The Psychedelic Society'. I've always considered it a misnomer, since psychedelics don't generally take to being organised into societies with rules and regulations. Anyhow, there they are. The Edinburgh branch (which seems to have now disappeared) organised a really good talk by Graham Hancock a few years back, but for the rest...… The Psychedelic Society are very big on, enthusiastic about, 'Extinction Rebellion', the vanguard of climate change activism. They are gearing up for another season of out-on-the-streets, socking-it-to-'em, in October. It's funny, really. Their founder, in particular, is known for his espousal of non-dual philosophy. But they don't seem to have quite connected the dots. This climate change activism is based in extreme dualistic thinking, serious polarising. It's 'us versus them' writ large. Confrontational, with no attempt at understanding 'them', whoever they actually are.
Well, I suppose it's proof that psychedelics don't lead to automatic enlightenment after all. Anyhow, I've unsubscribed.
Part Two
'The unexamined life is not worth living'. It's a quote from some time back gleaned from Neil Kramer. I can't recall whether it's an original, or whether he got it from someone else. I suppose it doesn't matter much. It's the message that counts.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
There will be exceptions, but in general it's this. It seems to me that climate change activism is populated by seriously unexamined lives. Despite their faux revolutionary fervour, despite their belief in their own superiority, they are playing the mainstream game, that of kneejerk unconsciousness. You see, there is another layer of conditioning that shapes them, and of which they appear gloriously unaware:
They are our new evangelical Christians.
That climate change is the new religion, and that its most fervent devotees act like cult members, is a view bandied about with increasing frequency nowadays. I think we can be more specific than that. Much of the behaviour and attitude of the cult members is a direct hand-me-down from a certain type of Protestant/Puritan conditioning that remains characteristic of much of Europe north of the Alps and parts of North America - precisely the regions where the new religion takes root most strongly.
I am no expert, and I'm going to do no more than throw out a few ideas, with some dots to be connected. But the overall conclusion is that, while Christianity in on the wane in these places, both in terms of numbers and of cultural and political influence, its legacy continues in the form of a pattern of social conditioning which manifests in the unexamined lives of climate change fanatics and Extinction Rebellion members.
A few easy ones to get going. Dogmatic evangelism, intolerance. Climate change activists tend to be extremely intolerant of those who differ. Someone like me will be considered a heretic. Burning at the stake is no longer in vogue, although some of them might consider this a deserving end for Pale Green Vortex man. So shouting down, calling nasty, emotionally-loaded names ('climate denier'), and silencing will have to do. It is all justified, you see, since I am effectively damning the Planet to extinction with my attitudes.
Then there is a certain moralism, and a distinctive moral superiority. Self-righteousness and moral indignation are the flavour of the day. We are the righteous, the pure in heart, and all you carbon-spewing monsters are for hell: this is what comes across. 'Saving the world' strikes me as another distinctive Protestant attitude. I don't think that people from other cultures normally think in terms of saving the world. It is northern European, northern American. There were folk in the 1960s and 70s alternative societies who talked in these terms; I never did it myself. It's ridiculous. I can't save the world, and neither can Extinction Rebellion.
Apocalypse Now. End-of-world scenarios, the end of the world is nigh. The Book of Revelation writ large as cities topple into the ocean and the earth burns, burns, burns. You could imagine St Greta out there preaching fear and dread, scaring the wits out of the ordinary people, four hundred years ago. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that none of the apocalyptic panic predictions have yet come to pass. The polar bears are doing very nicely, it seems. Walruses don't topple off cliffs due to climate change; they've been doing it for ages. There are still little islands in the Pacific. New York has not been washed away. The apocalyptic panic is all manipulative bullshit, shameful, really.
And we are left with our saint fit for the modern age, little Greta. 'It's the science' she tells us. I don't think she really knows much about science; we share this in common, at least! In our post-enlightenment age of scientific rationalism (not so scientific or rational, actually, but let's leave that) it is fitting that a religion for the masses should come with a scientific gloss, though that's all it is. Check this: Greta has been declared the successor to Jesus Christ by the Church of Sweden. I kid not; this is true, it happened last December.
If you haven't seen it, and have the stomach, you might look at Greta Thunberg's address to the UN just recently. I find it disturbing. She is being exploited by very dark beings, who couldn't give a toss about her well-being. She is angry, fearful, despairing, and unbalanced. About to crack. It is child abuse. And is it only me who finds disturbing the sight of all these children out protesting, when they are not of the age to evaluate anything much. Adults who encourage this, be they politicians, teachers, or local authority bureaucrats, are twisted and distorted in my view. This is true indoctrination of young people through fear and anxiety.
Interestingly, even some UN official has admitted that the climate change thing is not primarily about the climate: it's about redistribution of wealth. And in case anyone begins to wonder whether this is a noble cause worth supporting, think again. Redistribution programmes exist not because of infinite compassion for poor people in Bolivia and Nigeria. They exist because of a globalist imperative. Globalism comes into being only when significant discrepancies, differences, between peoples are eradicated. Rich people here, poor people there: that's not globalism. All should be reduced to automaton-like mediocrity before we can usher in the One World dream.....
