post growth « Critical Mass

What moviemaker’s blog would be complete without at least one post reading a meaning no-one else sees into some movie?

Just in case you missed the block capital letters in the title of this post, I am about to share my interpretation of the environmental meta-narrative in Rian Johnson’s new film, Looper, and that will involve mentioning key plot points as well as the ending. If you have not seen this film, do not read this post until you have. It’s a movie worth seeing with fresh eyes. Don’t let me ruin it for you.

If you’re still reading this post, that means you’ve seen the movie, so I won’t recap the story for you. I’ll cut to the chase.

During the film, you may have caught many references that implied a period of instability prior to the 2040s setting of the film. The present day of the film is rife with neo-Western lawlessness, the Hobbesian war of “all against all”. A man shoots another man in the back for stealing his suitcase. Hoodlums run riot with guns. The line between law enforcement and the criminal element is non-existent, one behaving as an extension of the other.

The primacy of precious metals as currency points to some sort of economic collapse. The repeated mention of Mandarin being the language of the future, paper money being emblazoned with Mao, the sage advice that China rather than France is the place to go – these story elements tell us that the economic collapse was followed by the rise of China.

Cars, with few exceptions, are either battered ‘old world’ cars with solar panels or electric cars. The homestead on which Emily Blunt lives operates on solar power, which features heavily in the background of most of the exterior shots. Her crop, sugar cane, means biofuel. Her flying field sprayer points to small-scale domestic agriculture as a target market of innovation. At one point, when faced with the suggestion that they should burn her crop to get a clear view of who might be coming, she says that even if the crop is failing, it still contains the seeds for next year. No Monsanto terminator crop, then. Also, a telling statement that what we have now is worth something for the future and should not simply be defensively liquidated. All this points to the fact that the present day in Looper is a post-peak oil world. This is important, because peak oil entwines the environmental and economic elements of society. The morality play at hand here can be read ecologically or financially, socially or politically – by arguing that this is a post-peak world, I am saying that all of these are present intentionally as a holistic image of a near-future global situation.

So what of the characters? The four primary characters can be split into simple categories:

The ‘old’ generation: Bruce Willis, representing the Boomer generation.

The ‘present’ generation: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, representing those of us between the ages of 20 and 40, a group in which I include myself.

The ‘next’ generation: The boy, representing those currently too young to have political or social sway but still held hostage by the behaviour of the other two generations, in one scene literally.

These three make a trinity very obviously akin to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – the child’s telekinesis provides his character with an otherly nature that fits this interpretation. The conversation between Willis and Levitt in the diner is a father/son argument if ever there was. The idea that they are the same person strengthens my theory that they represent the cyclical destructive habits that one generation learns from the other.

This leaves Emily Blunt’s character: Mother Nature. Gaia, if you’re a fan of James Lovelock. She nurtures her child, the ‘next’ generation, in the face of the chaos and violence wrought by man. She is fierce and protective but not cruel. She is, eventually, held hostage by both the ‘present’ (Jesse, the hitman sent to find Levitt) and the ‘old’ (Willis playing out the Terminator/Sarah Connor dynamic). She makes peace with Levitt once he recognises how she and her child should be treated.

So how does this analysis frame Looper as an environmental morality play? Here goes…

The ‘present’ generation is engaged in a cyclical, self-defeating hedonistic exercise dressed up as a fulfilling life, mainly geared towards either repeating or clearing up the mistakes made by their forebears, the ‘old’ generation. The ‘old’ generation have rules that make this cycle of behaviour both inevitable and pointless – old criminals are sent back to be killed by their younger selves. The serpent devours its own tail. Administrating this closed loop is an ‘old’ generation puppet, who governs the ‘present’ generation with brutal control. Are we not currently ruled by the ‘old’, mainly through fear and brutality?

The addiction to ‘dropping’ (using a drug dripped into the eyes) can be read as any number of particular behaviours – fossil fuel usage, drug abuse itself – which quite literally cloud one’s sight, make one unfit for much other than alternating bouts of anti-social and hedonistic activity, lead to dependence and harsh withdrawal in the event of the drug’s unavailability. One could even read this as a representation of anti-depressants and more broadly the use of psychoactive prescription medications to allow people to be happy, or at least not catatonically depressed, by their senseless and unsatisfying existence.

All of the violence committed by the ‘present’ generation only afford them, eventually, a 30-year retirement as a member of the ‘old’ generation, in which they can do whatever they want with themselves, spending the money they accumulated off the back of the ‘present’ generation. The fact that both ‘worker’ and ‘retiree’ are the same person makes the metaphor all the more telling. Eventually, the ‘old’ man is sent back to be killed by his ‘present’ self – the loop is closed, the retirement account is spent/annulled, another worker retires to take his place. The serpent devours its own tail.

Enter Mother Nature, guardian of a child who in the future will wreak a horrible revenge on the ‘old’ generation by revolution, forcing them out of the picture altogether. Why? Because of what was done to it by that generation. By brutality, short-sightedness, selfishness and greed. The ‘present’ generation is in a curious position of simultaneously working for the ‘next’ and ‘old’ generations; do we not work for our children and our parents?

What is the ‘old’ generation’s reaction to this upstart ‘next’ generation? To destroy it in order to preserve the things the ‘old’ generation enjoys; Willis wants his life back, his wife back, his peaceful retirement back. To achieve this, the ‘old’ generation attacks not just the ‘next’ but also the ‘present’ generation, but there is a bitter twist to this: in the loop of time, the death of the present generation destroys the old generation but still leaves the next generation alive with what’s left of Mother Nature.

The only way that the ‘present’ generation can save the ‘next’ generation is by destroying itself, and by extension the ‘old’, in order to leave room for the new. Mother Nature can only watch as this all-too-human drama unfolds. She is held hostage, threatened, occasionally in jeopardy, but ultimately it is the human who is extinguished by human activity – Mother Nature survives. The ‘present’ generation is forced right to the brink, only making the decision of self-sacrifice when faced with watching the ‘old’ generation and ‘old’ ways obliterating any hope the ‘next’ generation has of doing things differently, of evolving. Levitt’s character, to atone for his earlier feckless selfishness, has to break the loop of repetitive and destructive foolishness against Mother Nature and the ‘next’ generation, and in so doing, he is redeemed.

All of the social, political, economic and environmental upheaval around us is right there on the screen. The age of austerity, trading the future of an entire generation for the retirement accounts of a few. The consumption of resources now that can never be used again. The bizarre trap our present generation feels, on the one hand knowing that to keep more for the next generation we have to take from our parents and grandparents, on the other hand slowly realising that whatever choice we make, it is us today, here and now, who will have to make do with less or even nothing at all.

So, Mr. Rian Johnson, my compliments to you, sir. Either intentionally or not, you have crafted a morality tale for the peak oil age, one where we live inside a time loop, visiting the sins of the father unto the son, robbing Peter to pay Paul, running in circles until we go extinct. It ain’t hopeful, but dammit, it’s good cinema.

And that’s the movie you didn’t see. Thanks for reading.

First of all, let me apologise for the long gap in writing, and for the lack of new comments being approved. Both of these have reasons:

1. I have been flat out trying to finish the film (which is looking good) and my writing/thinking time has been minimal.
2. I have not approved any new comments for a long time due to the preponderance of spam clogging up my dashboard. If anyone knows a fast way to delete over 1,000 comments from handbag- and shoe-bots rather than by 20 at a time, please tell me! We will be getting some kind of human-confirmation device installed shortly, and then hopefully all of these Viagra and SEO peddlers will leave us alone.

On to more pressing business – this post will be a little more like a news digest than a developed opinion, mostly because of my aforementioned lack of time, but also because the links speak for themselves.

Most of us who follow the news out of the US have been stunned at the backwards nature of the discourse there on contraception and reproductive health. I say backwards in no inflammatory way to imply mental incapacity – “backwards” is a perfect description of the direction signified by this swell of mostly conservative, mostly Republican, mostly male bleating about the issues. These so-called controversies are dragging America backwards in time. Here’s a smorgasbord of ridiculousness*:

– Terry England comparing women to animals.

– Sam Brownback promising to sign a bill taxing abortion.

– The Pope, as usual, having high-handed moral opinions about everything other than child abuse.

– Bill O’Reilly being Bill O’Reilly.

– Arizona being Arizona.

– Colorado setting up a possible challenge to Roe vs. Wade (the case which made abortion legal in the US) by the back door (pun not intended).

– Utah bans sex ed.

Before those outside of the US get too smug, here’s what’s up in Russia.

*Because of my aforementioned shortness of time, all of these links are from Raw Story, although you can find these stories replicated in most other media outlets.

Tied in with all this wrangling over what seems to the rational mind to be the most basic interpretation of human rights, we have the ongoing debate over whether long-term (i.e. after 2050 at the earliest) population stability or shrinkage is a catastrophe for modern economies. In a nutshell, this centres on the fact that modern economies are predicated on growth (in order to provide consumers for mass-produced goods and in order to provide an ever-expanding labour base to service debt and pay liabilities). Since population growth inherently demands economic growth, in the sense of more goods and services, and since economic growth is represented almost uniformly as the only way forward for any nation’s economy, this debate unintentionally represents a deeper question, namely: Are human beings economic components to be ‘brought online’ according to the needs of the market, or should the market perhaps adapt to the needs of human beings?

Exhibit A: This New York Times article by David Brooks.

Exhibit B: This excellent rebuttal on Slate.

Lest I run the risk of writing a blog post without being overbearingly opinionated:

1. Women should have contraceptive/reproductive health care if they want it, and that access shouldn’t depend on what other people think.

2. Abortion is a matter for the couple, not for the government, the church or any other organisation. I’ve known enough women who have had abortions to know that none of them entered into it lightly. That’s about as far as any man’s opinion should intrude on the matter as far as I’m concerned.

3. Anti-homosexuality measures/discrimination/inequality are just plain rude. Stop it, America. And for that matter Russia, Uganda, Malawi…oh, the list is too depressing to go into.

Trying to finish a feature film with no money can be mentally and emotionally exhausting, and never have I worried more for my own sanity than when I found myself agreeing with Pat Robertson. Scary stuff. It must be the end times…

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

What makes this movement so special and, from my perspective, so poignant, is that there are no enemies here.

Some of you will have been beaten or arrested by the police. Non-protesters may have had personal property damaged during the course of these events. The police may have had abuse or worse hurled at them for what they are doing in seeking to control the direction of these protests. Those of you who have been hurt have not been hurt by your enemies. You have been hurt by your brothers, your sisters and those who one day will be your strongest allies. Why do I see it that way?

The law is such that the police will enforce it as ordered regardless of its substance. In instances when the police have used heavy-handed tactics, they have done so because they are upholding the law as it has been explained to them and along the lines by which they have been instructed to do so. This is not a semantic point, but a very important key to our future as social beings on this beautiful planet of ours. A change in the law will change the behaviour of the police.

The police force is exactly that – it is a force, a tool which does the bidding of the hand which wields it. I may personally disagree with a great deal of the laws currently on the books, and I may wholeheartedly disagree with the manner in which those laws are sometimes enforced, but the police are not the enemy. They are our brothers and sisters, born into a way of life they did not build, conducting their life in accordance with the information they have been given over the course of their lifetime. With whom does the blame lie if they have been given the wrong information, or told to enforce unjust laws? Is it the fault of a child who has never been taught language that he cannot speak? In all of this action and rhetoric, the true tragedy is that we are falling prey to the exact divisive strategy which has allowed us to be governed so unjustly for so long.

When the laws are changed to better suit the idea of justice and governance that befits us as an intelligent life form, the police will be on the front line of keeping those laws intact. The neutrality of the police may be a most incomprehensible thing to those witnessing violence as a result of it, but that neutrality is also to our advantage.

Police men and women who will use baton and pepper spray to subdue those allegedly violating public order will steadfastly turn those weapons on whomever is designated an opponent to public order, no matter how it is defined. If this is the case, as I believe it to be, then we have no enemy in the police. They are human beings, just like us, and the structure which they are a part of has convinced them that we must be watched and subdued.

The police in Britain and across Europe have undergone some of the most stringent cutbacks in wages, man-hours and employment numbers. These protests stand, among other things, for equitable wages in return for fulfilling work. These police men and women are the people we are fighting for. They just don’t know it yet, and if they do, they have pressures of their own to account for their silence as they wait patiently for the law to allow them to act in accordance with their beliefs.

Whether or not people should follow orders they disagree with is by the by. It is both dishonest and unfair to expect them to behave differently to how we think we would in their place, because we are not in their place. They are not our enemy. There is no “they”. There is only “us”.

So this is the crucial aspect of this movement that must be shouted from the rooftops. Any human of flesh and blood who resides within a society whose laws and financial system bind them is one of us, because that is who we are and that is what we represent. One who has no enemy also is no enemy. This is the way in which peace can be built on the foundation of compassion.

This movement is exactly that – a movement. Like a nuclear chain reaction, movement can become a revolution over time if a critical mass is reached. If enough of us really begin to see each other for the commonly bound humans that we are rather than the social roles into which we are divided, then the rest falls into place.

The media calling for an agenda, for a plan, misses the necessary process of a movement:

– We become aware of something wrong, so we move towards where we think the answers may be.

– We find over time that we are moving in concert with others like us, and in that shared understanding of seeking answers, we begin to help each other to formulate the right questions.

Looking for answers is not an egotistical activity. Anybody who can help us in our search is an ally, anyone who hinders us in our search simply has not yet found the drive within themselves to begin looking. This is how we move together; this is what a social movement is. This is not about the selfish imposition of a certain preference on others who do not share that preference. This is about openly stating what can be factually supported, regardless of how much the media choose to leave out or ignore, regardless of how current comforts mollify people into defensive acceptance of the status quo. Again, they are not the enemy. They are us, and they will figure it out one day.

True revolution begins in the mind. If we learn the ways of the oppressors only to replicate those ways when we have replaced them, then we have achieved nothing. The only true revolution begins with the realisation that we are all one. Beneath political and social definitions and dynamics, there is no oppressor and oppressed. There are only vulnerable, fearful people manipulated by deeply rooted buttons which those who wish to retain power know how to push.

I am one of those vulnerable, fearful people, but I am trying my best to awaken my mind, to awaken the wellspring of compassion within me which fears no-one because by fearing, I avoid understanding and empathising. I try to acknowledge what my buttons are and observe how they are pushed by others, by information, by activity. Only then can I see how close to everyone else I am, because we are all just as vulnerable and just as fearful as I am, since we are all biologically the same and exist within localised modulations of a single social structure.

Those who currently wield power and influence, who line their pockets, manipulate markets and governments in order to extend their power and undermine opposition – they are also not the enemy. They too are us, but they are confused. They have become confused by the very system which they are struggling to maintain as it wheezes and grinds to a halt around them. They think their power is real. They think their money is real. They think that by defending their claim to power, they can hold onto their money, which in an evidently circular manner, is also the fictitious source of their fictitious power.

Any threat to power can be very frightening. This is why ideas are the commodity most tightly regulated in our cultures. Our modern global system is built on piles of abstractions and unquestioned assumptions. To maintain the structure of this ideology, built as it is on quicksand, only a superficial amount of idea variation is tolerated before the protectors of the structure crack down.

People march all the time, for St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, Gay Pride. They protest against war, they petition embassies and picket the White House. But none of these variations comes close to the sea change in structural thinking that this movement can bring about if it is preserved, if it maintains integrity and does not collapse in on itself or become what it offers to replace.

If the purpose of this movement is to simply replace the current way of doing things with a structurally identical but ideologically different way of doing things, this movement will fail because it will find itself fighting against ideas which oppose it, just as revolutionaries have throughout the ages.

We must structurally alter the manner in which we govern and inhabit this planet as a species. Doing it for Jesus instead of Yahweh, or Allah instead of Jesus, or science instead of religion, or money instead of science – these are all the same thing. We have always done the same thing, and we all know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

In this way, it is not the wealth of a small number of people which is the problem, nor is it the tax avoidance of large companies. These things are examples of the hypocrisy that our system engenders, but they are not the enemy. Getting bogged down in this level of discourse automatically plays to the system of averages and financial valuation which has confused so many of us for so long. Believing that justice is a simple matter of us getting our hands on what other people have is exactly the kind of thinking that got us to this point in the first place.

Capitalism is not the problem. All economic systems are capitalist systems because capitalism is simply the use and management of capital, most commonly referred to as surplus wealth. Whoever told you that capitalism is somehow different from other economic systems does not understand economics.

The deeply extractive, materially fixated, morally bankrupt, ecologically and socially destructive number games which are played world wide right now are simply a washed-out perversion of an underlying economic truth which has been lost over time, namely that people require access to goods and services in complex societies and the easiest manner in which to distribute those goods and services is by the use of a common means of exchange which frees the labourer from needing to find a supplier who wants the thing he produces. I can buy shoes with money instead of trying to find a cobbler who needs cucumbers or hats. This is a social service which is necessary for any society functioning above a certain threshold of size and complexity.

The fact that money has been turned from a service into a thing, and in so doing has been concentrated in very few hands which seek to perpetuate their control of that money and the system which allocates it does not constitute a proof that money is somehow evil or unnecessary. Like all gods, money gets a bad rap for what fundamentalists do in its name.

People have the highest degree of learned behaviour of any animal which has been studied, and as such, we respond very quickly and unwittingly to social and structural expectations. We thank someone for a meal we didn’t enjoy, we get a job at a faceless big box store and begin using the words “we have” to describe the selection of goods on offer. We identify with structures and social norms, and it is those things which must change if there are to be really meaningful alterations to mankind’s trajectory going forward.

It can no longer be a social norm that goods arrive before us with no provenance and no moral association other than our desire for them. It can no longer be morally (let alone intellectually) justifiable to bang on about economic growth in the OECD nations when the major purpose of growth is to support the growing debts we accumulate through a persistence in allowing money to be created as a debt-bearing thing rather than circulated as a debt-free service.

The strict extractive system which is currently in place in the OECD nations, centred on taxing the people in order to service debt generated wilfully, will never resolve inequity either at home or abroad. The emphasis placed on work (particularly non-productive work) is a by-product of a system which requires work in order to meet the basic needs of life.

From birth, we are told we live on someone else’s property, eating someone else’s food, wearing someone else’s clothes. There is no birthright for the modern citizen. We were told that democracy meant no taxation without representation, but what we have is no representation without taxation.

Brothers and sisters, in the streets and squares, in the offices and apartments, in the banks and agencies, in the police and military, we have a lot of hard work to do. We can only succeed if we do it together, with compassion for one another. With the world’s population hitting 7 billion at the end of this month, there has never been a clearer sign that we sink or swim together on this pale blue dot. The immaturity of ego, which wants for itself and cares nothing for external consequences, must grow to a mature and compassionate understanding of our responsibilities to each other and to the planet.

Asking for what the wealthy have is irrelevant. We should have something far greater in our sights: a real birthright for every living thing on this planet, in balance, understanding and peace.

On Wednesday September 21st 2011, The Irish Examiner ran an editorial by Steven King (not the horror author) on the world reaching 7 billion people. All personal politics aside, the main problem with the article was that it was in many places a direct copy of a speech delivered by Brendan O’Neill, the editor of Spiked Online, at a debate at the Battle of Ideas in London on October 30th, 2010.

I know this for two reasons. First, because I was filming that debate for my documentary almost a year before King published his editorial. Second, in order to bypass my possible self-delusion in spite of video evidence, I obtained a transcript of O’Neill’s talk from a third-party website in order to compare it with King’s article.

Although I will not go into the background of O’Neill here, this article will give anyone with a high pain threshold a very good round-up of the origin of the network which has its roots in the Revolutionary Communist Party here in the UK, later known as the Living Marxism (or LM) Network whose peculiar brand of “humanism” is a beautiful demonstration of Orwellian doublethink.

Leaving aside the questionable motives of the original author and the spurious nature of the content, let’s merely compare the texts:

O’Neill (30/10/2010): “The main Malthusian idea I want to challenge is the idea that resources are finite. The idea that the Earth itself is finite. The idea that we live on a finite planet and therefore we can only have a certain number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food.”

King (21/9/2011): “the notion that we inhabit a finite planet and, therefore, we can only have a certain maximum number of people, living in a certain number of homes, eating a certain amount of food, must be challenged.”

O’Neill: “It seems commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and a bit mad to say that it isn’t, but it’s important to recognise how fluid and changeable resources are. It’s important to recognise that the usefulness and longevity of a resource is determined as much by us – by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the existence of that resource in the first place.”

King: “It might appear commonsensical to say that the Earth is finite, and slightly perverse to say that it isn’t, but it’s imperative to understand how fluid and changeable resources apparently limited are. It’s important to recognise that the utility and longevity of a resource is determined as much by humankind — by the level of social development we have reached – as it is by the amount and availability of that resource in the first place.”

O’Neill: “Resources are not fixed in any meaningful sense. Resources have a history and a future, just like human beings do. The question of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

King: “So, resources are not static in any meaningful sense. Resources have a past and a future, just as human beings do. The issue of what we consider to be a resource changes as society changes.”

O’Neill: “So in Ancient Rome, one of the main uses of coal was to make jewellery. Women liked the look of this glinting black rock hanging around their necks. No one could have imagined that thousands of years later, coal would be used to power massive steam engines and an entire Industrial Revolution, forever changing how we produce things and transport them around the world. “

“Two thousand years ago, the only way people used uranium was to make glass look more yellow. It was used to decorate windows and mirrors. You would probably have been locked up, or subjected to an exorcism, if you had suggested that one day uranium might be used to light up and heat entire cities – or indeed destroy entire cities at the push of a button. “

King: “the supposed limits to resource-use have been transgressed time and time again by advances in human productivity — whether that is in terms of discovering that coal could be used not just for jewellery, as it was in Roman times, but to power an entire Industrial Revolution, or the use of uranium to heat and light (or destroy) entire cities, or the so-called “green revolution” in agriculture.”

O’Neill: “Thomas Malthus himself, the messiah of modern-day Malthusianism, argued in the early 1800s that food production wouldn’t be able to keep apace with human reproduction, and as a result there would be ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would sweep off millions of people. Yet in his era, there were only 980million people on Earth – today there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

King: “Malthus argued that food production wouldn’t be able to maintain pace with human fertility. Yet in his time, there were only one million [sic] people on Earth; today, there are more than that in China alone and they all have food to eat.”

O’Neill: “Malthus’s problem was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His fundamental pessimism meant that he considered it impossible for mankind to develop beyond a certain, nature-enforced point. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the industrial revolution and various social revolutions, mankind did overcome many social limitations and found new ways to make food and deliver it to people around the globe.”

King: “Malthus’s problem — shared by much of the environmental lobby today — was that he saw natural limits where in fact there were social limits. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. His essential pessimism meant he thought it impossible for mankind to advance beyond a certain, nature-enforced level. And yet, shortly after he made his population pronouncements, through the Industrial Revolution, mankind did overcome many social limitations and discovered new ways to make food and transport it to people around the globe.”

O’Neill: “The idea of sustainability is anti-exploration, anti-experimentation, anti-risk – all the qualities we need if we are going to make the kind of breakthroughs that earlier generations made with coal and uranium and other resources.”

King: “the whole idea of sustainability is, at core, anti-exploration and anti-experimentation — the qualities we need if we are going to replicate earlier generations’ innovation breakthroughs.”

O’Neill: “The ascendancy of the Malthusian outlook can really be seen in the way people are frequently discussed these days: exploiters, the mere users of resources, the destroyers of things.”

King: “We need to think about people as positive agents of change not mere users of resources, destroyers of things.”

O’Neill: “we created the means for extracting and transforming those resources; we created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources; and every time, we managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and created new resources along the way.”

King: “We created the means for extracting and transforming mineral resources. We created cities, workplaces and homes on the back of those resources. Every decade that passes, as a species, we have managed to get more and more stuff from fewer resources and create new resources along the way.”

Well, that was fun. So who is this (un)masked man who publishes his opinion in the form of other peoples’ words?

Steven King, or, to give him his full honorific, Dr. Steven King, is currently the director of the New Delhi office for APCO Worldwide. The man has degrees from three universities, one of them Oxford, and for years was the chief political adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party. He ostensibly left politics to join the Policy Exchange, a British think tank where he worked as the External Relations Director from 2006 to 2008. The Policy Exchange is “powering the renaissance of the centre right” according to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

I’ve written about the creeping (and creepy) influence of the think tank system before. The Policy Exchange isn’t to my knowledge affiliated with the IEA/Antony Fisher crowd, but the intellectual high ground they profess to inhabit can be shown as quicksand very easily nonetheless. Today, the Policy Exchange are having a debate at the Labour Party Conference called “Remonopolising power? Reforming the electricity market”, which is sponsored by Oil & Gas UK, who describe themselves as working “to strengthen the long-term health of the offshore oil and gas industry in the United Kingdom”. So both major political parties in the UK are participating in a debate about energy issues which is sponsored by an industry lobby group which recently danced on the grave of the mooted EU offshore drilling moratorium. The only other speakers were representatives of Policy Exchange, another think tank called the Regulatory Policy Institute and a representative of the lobby group sponsoring the whole sordid farce of “policy-based democracy”. Policy written by whom, based on what and enforced by what public mandate, one might ask. As we will learn from the heads at APCO, this falls under one of the global PR machine’s primary strategies: “the imprimatur of a respected third party”.

So back to Steven King, now that we’re familiar with his pedigree. He works for APCO Worldwide, one of the largest PR companies in the world. Frankly, I’m at a loss as to where I can begin with these people. Let’s just go through their greatest hits:

In 1993 APCO founds TASSC (The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition) on behalf of Philip Morris after secondhand smoke is classed as a carcinogen; the intention of the “grassroots” movement is to “prepare and place opinion articles in key markets”.
In 1995 APCO, on behalf of Philip Morris, spearheads the “tort reform” drive to stem the rising tide of product liability suits. APCO also represented Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha that year after the adverse press caused by the detention and execution of nine environmental activists including Ken Saro-Wiwa.
In 2007 Ken Silverstein gives an excellent account of a meeting he took with executives from APCO while pretending to work for a company interested in livening up the image of Turkmenistan – I won’t go into further detail here but his article is a riot.
Speaking of riots, that same year Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat in India, hires APCO after over 1,000 people were killed and thousands more injured in riots in 2002 which Modi was accused of turning a blind eye to. In 2005 he was refused a visa to enter the US on the grounds that he was “responsible for, or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom”. This from an American government that had Muslims detained without trial at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. Go figure.

Oh, I almost forgot. TASSC, the APCO front espousing concern over “junk science“? They’re also the leading purveyor of doubt-fog on other “controversial” scientific topics like pesticides and climate change. George Monbiot outlines their role at length here. With reference to my previous article about the Institute of Economic Affairs, it’s worth noting that Ralph Harris wrote a screed about secondhand smoke during the same period as APCO’s campaign against the “controversial” scientific assertion that breathing in secondhand smoke might be bad for you.

This PR strategy/trend appears again and again – multiple “unconnected” sources producing counter-intuitive, market-led objections to common sense concerns about the social or physical environment. So how is it any surprise that a representative of APCO publishes an “opinion” in The Irish Examiner that happens to tie in with exactly the market-uber-alles corporate dogma peddled by the clients of the company that pays his salary? What is surprising is that a man with three degrees working for one of the world’s largest PR firms puts his name to an article largely copied from a source which goes unmentioned and unacknowledged.

Even more shocking, or, perhaps worryingly, not shocking at all, is that an established newspaper will accept editorial opinion from a representative of a PR firm retailing specific market ideologies without pointing out that the same guy saying that human population growth is not a strain on our biosphere works for a company that defends dictators, excuses human rights abuses, casts doubts on the carcinogenic effects of smoking, refuses to see pesticides as potentially harmful to humans and classes climate change due to CO2 as a controversial theory.

I cannot help but see a certain irony in Steven King arguing the “human ingenuity beats scarcity” case with words he plagiarised. Perhaps honesty is a finite resource.

I’ve just uploaded a new podcast with the guys from Positive Money.

The Magic Box of Money Creation with Ben Curtis and Ben Dyson of Positive Money by Critical Mass Podcasts

Talking to them about money creation really got me thinking about the predicament we find ourselves in these days. For a society such as ours, money is the enabler of activity, the lubricant, the expedient, the salve, the reward, the goal. It seems utterly mad that so few of us would really know where it comes from, how it comes into being and what kind of pressure that places on our system.

I spoke at a conference a couple of weeks ago and they asked me to hang around for the round table discussion after my presentation. I joined the table which was discussing population growth. The head of the table was pressing for us to come to an agreement that we could present in the closing remarks. His main interest seemed to be in asserting that Britain was filled to capacity with a population of 63 million and that therefore projected gains from immigration which would take us to 70 million over the next decade or so were bad.

A general air of discomfort descended over our table, no doubt helped by the posh Middle England/ NIMBY-ness of our discussion leader. I’m not one for political correctness but it did feel that his statement about immigration was at best disingenuous. Several people in the group raised perfectly valid points about the manner in which we in the UK live and consume and were summarily dismissed.

I decided to take a shot at explaining that from my perspective, complaining about immigration and population pressure was not going to be constructive unless we looked at the economic and social system that makes those things inevitable. I began to talk about the manner in which money is created, which automatically demands growth to service debt, which demands more work and more workers at all times. I wanted to get across what I consider to be the key point of the issue, which is that we have built a pyramid scheme instead of a sustainable economy. A pyramid scheme requires an ever-increasing supply of new participants in order to function. If you have an economic system that categorically cannot function without a constant influx of new people, you will never reconcile the pressures caused by more people without fixing the system that demands their presence. In a modern, complex world, that system is driven at the root by the way we create and distribute money.

The head of our discussion interrupted me to say that I was going off topic into conspiracy theories, that we were talking about people, not economics. When I attempted to stress the connection between the two, he told me that I was “getting on [an] economics hobby horse again” and changed the subject. This man was a well-to-do, well-respected retired journalist of over thirty years experience. He was at a conference intimately targeted at environmental issues and without reservation I am sure that his heart was in the right place. However, if (a) people feel that money is irrelevant to environmental damage and population growth or that those who see the connection are peddling conspiracy theories, and (b) those people are the good guys, then (c): Houston, we have a problem.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. Please check out what Ben Curtis and Ben Dyson are doing with the Positive Money project – it’s one of the most constructive things happening in Britain right now and they make killer videos too.

Tag Archives: post growth

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