Arendt Tackles Climate Change

Arendt tackles Climate Change

By Mathew Pye

“Educa�on is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable."

Hannah Arendt

“The Crisis in Educa�on” (1954)

The “No Common Sense” series mobilises some great Philosophers to tackle climate change.

Each book is writen in dialogue with the strongest minds of the past and in consulta�on with the latest climate science data and analysis.

In this book Hannah Ardent helps us probe the deep reasons why, in the face of such a catastrophe, our responses have been so banal. Her unflinching analysis of the human condi�on is matched by a brave and unsen�mental insistence on the power of love and natality.

Thinkers in this series:

(all the books have been writen, I am just looking for a publisher)

Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduc�ons

Chapter 2 - Thoughtlessness

Chapter 3 - Thought Control

Chapter 4 - Public Space – Private Space

Chapter 5 - Hopelessness

Chapter 6 - The Retreat into the Self

Chapter 7 - On Bureaucracy

Chapter 8 - On Organised Lying

Chapter 9 - The Na�on State

Chapter 10 - Conclusions

Chapter 1

Introduc�ons Hannah Arendt

This series of books starts with the voice of Hannah Arendt. In a discipline almost en�rely dominated by men, it is wonderful to be able to start this series with a brilliant female voice.

Her books are writen with striking vitality and authen�city. Many scholars and cultural commentators have praised her uncompromising and compelling analysis of modern �mes. Yet if we were to try and categorise Arendt’s muscular contribu�ons to philosophy, things get problema�c. She is an author who rather defies classifica�on. So, whilst there are bulging set of reasons to compliment her, the fact is, she is quite tricky to introduce.

The New York Times labelled Arendt as “a woman of this century” 1 in 1982. “Indeed, she remains a woman of this 21st as well. Her wri�ng can be as abstract as a Jackson Pollock pain�ng and as concrete and par�cular as the daily poli�cal news.” 2

We could start by thinking about her as poli�cal philosopher. This would recognise the centre of gravity of her interests However, such a classifica�on is does not fit her so well, because she does not go about her analysis of poli�cal life in a tradi�onal way; and that label would crop out the remarkable range of her thinking. The different chapters of this book will demonstrate the diversity of her analysis of the 20th century. She examined the totalitarian regimes of the early decades and the consumer culture of the later decades, all through the different lenses offered by History, Sociology, Psychology and Literature

In fact, arguably Arendt’s most original contribu�on to Philosophy came in the field of ethics. Her study of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was a major advance in Western thought about the

1 Peter L. Berger, “A Woman Of This Century”. New York Times, April 25, 1982, Sec�on 7, Page 1

2 Scot, J.V., “What St. Augus�ne Taught Hannah Arendt about “how to live in the world”: Caritas, Natality and the Banality of Evil.” 2010. Eastern Michigan University.

Photograph of Hannah Arendt in 1933

nature of evil. Her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1961) was writen from her observa�ons in the war tribunal, it will occupy us in Chapter 2.

Arendt lived through the pivotal events of the 20th century, not as a detached analyst, but as a woman who wrestled with everything, with all of her spirit and intelligence. Most famously, she looked unflinchingly at the apocalyp�c regimes of Hitler and Stalin, determined to understand the underlying forces at work. Her analysis in “On the Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951) is carried by a sweeping historical narra�ve that makes it very readable; many have called it a “page turner”

By contrast, Arendt also took into her hands, words of everyday use, such as “thinking”, “ac�on”, “space”, and “love” and wrestled out of them, with similar resolute strength of mind, new concepts. Her book, “The Human Condi�on” (1958) is complex, technical and hard to follow, but again, she makes important advances in mapping out key social and poli�cal ideas.

Arendt was a prolific academic at many leading universi�es in the USA, and the scope of her interests drew large and eclec�c audiences to her lectures. She was a brilliant teacher, and like any good teacher, it doesn’t really mater what material they are handling, what maters is that they pull you in to a place of depth.

Arendt does that.

Whatever page you are on, when Arendt is teaching there is a sense that you are with someone who is uncompromisingly driven to get to the truth. This yearning marks all of her prose. Arendt is in con�nual conversa�on with herself, and with the different voices of the world. Behind all the details of the following chapters, behind all the different angles of her life and insights, there is an overriding hankering for what is real.

In fact, Arendt herself has a concept for this. In her very first book, writen in her early 20s, she describes it as “amor mundi”. In English, “a love of the world”. It is a phrase that deserves to stand alone for a moment, before we venture into the wider world of her ideas. An understanding of this concept will help us navigate through the rest of Arendt’s ideas in the following chapters, as it demonstrates what Arendt’s fundamental project was.

“Love and St Augus�ne” (1929)

This recogni�on of amor mundi is important because it is founda�onal for Arendt; not least because she developed the idea in her first significant book, “Love and St Augus�ne” (1929). It was her PhD text, writen under the guidance of the famous psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers. Even though Arendt would go on to make seminal contribu�ons to the 20th century philosophical canon of books, she would con�nually return to this first text.

The fact that Arendt devoted her aten�on to Augus�ne (354CE - 430CE), an Early Church Father, was a bit of a prickly choice at �me when the mood music in Philosophy was either playing in the darker tones of Existen�alism, or with the modern vibes of Phenomenology. Furthermore, although love had been examined in the history of Philosophy, most notably by Plato and Schopenhauer, it was not a tradi�onal subject of enquiry.

Again, Arendt shows her independence of spirit and mind.

She wrote to Karl Jaspers, “I’ve begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world … Out of gra�tude, I want to call my book on poli�cal theories “Amor Mundi”.

Amor Mundi

In the briefest terms, Arendt notes that the concept of love is not simple. Inside a singular word there is a complex constella�on of different cultural points and tradi�ons. Following the lead of Augus�ne (in his “City of God” (426CE), Chapter 14), she maps out of different types of love

But depar�ng from Augus�ne, she brings the reader to her central idea: amor mundi.

Her bulging taxonomy of love sets up two major points of contrast.

Firstly, she atends to roman�c love, which she defines as “love-as-craving”. In this type of love, the world shrinks away, as the person that we pang for becomes the measure of everything. This type of love reaches out, with vulnerability, towards someone. 3 Secondly, by contrast, Arendt describes how human beings have a deep innate sense of value and beauty (“love-as-memory”). This experience of love pulls inwards. Our longing for happiness can be so profound that it is something that we experience as having its essence in a realm beyond this world.

Fundamentally, Arendt’s concern is that love is commonly understood, or orientated, away from the world. In roman�c love, compared to the object of our passion, the world typically shrinks into the background. In a transcendent experience of love, the true value of an ac�on or a person is located in reality that is above this one, so the present world is thereby rendered rather blank in value.

For example, Arendt is cri�cal of Augus�ne’s understanding of the word “caritas” (from which we get the words charity and care), because she suspects that when Chris�ans step out of their own egos and act as ‘good neighbours’ (Mathew 22:37-40) their charity is not authen�c. Arendt argues that the heart and mind of the carer is, in a sense, absent; because this world is only a shadow of the next life, and it almost seems as if people exist in order to provide an opportunity to do some good works. So people just become instrumental to a distant good, and love becomes func�onal.

Therefore, having iden�fied love as an irresis�ble and vital aspect of the human condi�on 4, Arendt wants to make sure the world is not overlooked or forgoten Her concept of Amor mundi is the an�dote to such a retreat. She invites us to be fully human through our prac�ce of it. For Arendt it was important to be directly engaged with the world, with all its jagged edges and with our gloves off, so to speak. Arendt argues that being a full human being requires us to be present, ac�ve and open, in all the funk of public life.

Arendt agrees with Augus�ne when he wrote, that the ordo mundis (the order of love), “is writen in the hearts of men, which even iniquity does not erase.” Whether it is the craving of roman�c love,

3 An introductory sketch does not allow for an expanse of details. So tucked into the footnotes here, a few extra descrip�ons of love as craving can be added. For Arendt, this craving emerges from a sense of lack, and is marked by a fear of loss, as the object of desire may not always be available or reciprocal. Arendt describes craving love as characterized by forge�ulness, both of the self, because the craving is always reaching outwards towards something else; and also a forge�ulness of the world, because all that maters is the object of desire.

4 Arendt, following Augus�ne, notes that “there is no greater asser�on of something or somebody than to love it, that is, to say: I will that you be – Amo: Volo ut sis”.

moments of joy or deep compassion, our experience love throws into sharp relief our deepest urges and values with the messy reali�es. Love is powerful, it has the trac�on to pull me towards this laptop in atempt to understand it beter and to ac�vate its potency into the world, and perhaps it had the gravity to pull a reader towards a book like this.

But how do we hold onto an inward “order of love” yet manage to take up our place in a world that has so many injus�ces. How can we manage to care, when the gap between what is and what should be, can be so painfully wide? These ques�ons burnt the soul of Augus�ne, who had been infused with a profound sense of divine love and yet lived in a Roman empire that was, in many respects, not at all holy.

Rather than recoil from the ver�go, Arendt invites us to sustain it. Rather than retreat into the self or into transcendence, she wants us to be bold enough to plant our feet in the public space with amor mundi, with all the richness of the imperfec�ons, plurality, and complexity that this brings. From her earliest years, Arendt was compelled to confront “the actual problem of how to live in this world”.

She commented, “we can only take shelter by showing ourselves, risking showing ourselves. We withdraw ourselves from others through concealment; but only the others, their love, can save us”.

Words, words, words.

But wait.

Is this not all absurdly abstract? Perhaps this book of Philosophy was picked up nervously, precisely because of a lingering fear that it would just be playing around with words and concepts Perhaps the last few paragraphs have started to fa�gue the abstract muscles in the brain a bit too far? How do defini�ons really help us? What is a book of Philosophy actually ‘doing’? Where is the ac�on taking place? Is not contradictory of Arendt to talk about engaging in the world whilst si�ng behind a desk? Indeed, we can easily imagine Arendt spending hours, bent over words, like a desk lamp, at a dissec�ng table.

Moreover, how can such ‘concept spli�ng’ help us with something as material as the climate crisis? Surely, given the urgency of the changes that need to happen in the infrastructure of the world, the last thing we should be doing is just shuffle around the furniture in our heads? Thoughts are phantoms, ac�on is real.

Arendt has an empha�c answer Her wrestling with the concept of love was not undertaken as an aloof librarian, detached from reality and only taking pleasure from pu�ng things in order, and ge�ng certain classifica�ons correct. For Arendt, language is not important in itself. It is important because it actually structures our world.

Our ability to put words on things is like a superpower that we have. It gives us a way to stand back from the material reali�es of the present. Our ability to reason and think enables us to create, to be original, to transform things. Or in Arendt’s language, we have a God-like capacity to ini�ate “new beginnings.” She wants to regenerate our thinking so that we can live more fully in the world

We are stuck in a climate crisis because we have not understood the true scope of it, and we have not had been given the space to imagine how beau�fully the world could be regenerated. We are in a rigidity trap, at so many levels. This entrapment is economic and social, poli�cal and psychological, and all these layers can be opened up with new ways of thinking about it all. What is required to break out of these nega�ve feedback loops is a profoundly different way of thinking about the state we are in. Admitedly, thought seems to be so thin, so ghostly. Yet, everything is organised and

conceived through words – so although our vocabulary and ideas might look like an unlikely star�ng point for social transforma�on, they are in fact profoundly potent. The birth of new systems of thought in our head, lead us into fresh and vital actual worlds to live in. Properly harnessed, Philosophy can take us to an en�rely different vantage point on the world and with amour mundi, transform it.

Tinkering with the current system has not, and will not be good enough. We need to think deeper, and act deeper. We need to be radically exploratory. Breaking out of the rigidity trap requires new paradigms of thought and economics A breakout that requires new defini�ons, new words, and new narra�ves. It will not happen on its own.

The taxonomy of love that Arendt offers the reader through Augus�ne, might look like it is just word spli�ng, and maybe just a bit head spli�ng at �mes. But she is onto something. And to finish this introductory chapter, and to bring this all together, we will follow Arendt’s lead. The word “growth” will be put onto the table. It will be picked up and examined, not simply as a mental exercise, but with amor mundi in the background.

Growth

“Growth”. One word.

It is a simple word that sounds posi�ve and natural. “Growth” is the mantra of all economic ac�vity and ambi�ons. It seems self-evidently good. It stands in healthy contrast to many nega�ve words, such as shrink, regress, downturn, reduc�on, loss and fall. Yet, if we crack this word open with genuine openness of mind and heart, then it soon becomes clear that there are profound problems with our simplis�c use of the word when thinking about the economy.

Growth is not always good, especially not in a limited space. The growth of a gut line is not ideal for staying inside a pair of trousers. Growth is not good when it is out of control, especially when cells have flipped into cancerous overdrive mode Simply, growth cannot be put about in public discourse as if it is self-evidently good for an economy. In Hickel’s clear minded book, “Less is More” (2020) he writes, “What is striking about all of this is that people are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to jus�fy the con�nued pursuit of economic growth. Whenever there appears to be a conflict between ecology and growth, economists and poli�cians opt of the later and try ever more crea�ve ways to get reality to conform to it. … And yet, remarkably, none of these people has ever bothered to jus�fy their core premise – the assump�on that we need to keep increasing produc�on, year-on-year, for ever. It is simply taken as an ar�cle of faith. Most people don’t stop to ques�on it, and indeed in some circles to do so is a kind of heresy. But what if the assump�on is wrong? What if high-income countries don’t need growth? What if we can improve human well-being without having to expand the economy at all?”

When we think about economic growth, how fruity is our thinking? What kind of society are we trying to grow? Our use of the word “growth” has become so thoughtless and banal. Is it not uterly bizarre just how limited the public discourse is about growth. For such a ubiquitous word, for such a fundamentally organising principle of our en�re civilisa�on, how odd that we don’t really subject it to scru�ny.

If we could teach young people in our schools, and pollinate the media with a new understanding of the word “growth”, it could bust us out of the systems rigidity trap that we are ensnared in. We need to “rewild” the concept in our heads, just like we need to rewild the vast tracts of land that have been made so sterile by our destruc�ve commitment to chemicals and monoculture.

We can all remember a teacher who was able to open up new dimensions to things, either in our percep�on of the world, or in our percep�ons of ourselves. Hannah Arendt has that superpower. When she was wrestling with words like “love” and “ac�on” she was hauling up to the surface wonderful new frameworks to understand the world with.

Conclusion

Arendt loved the world. And if there is a defining characteris�c of her work, it is marked by her commitment unearthing “new beginnings” with all her intellect and energy. She greatly admired Socrates. He was a man who simply walked the streets of Athens asking difficult ques�ons. In his grounded and civic life, by simply asking open ques�ons, he brought out of people important fresh insights into themselves and the world. Socrates once called himself a midwife of the truth

Arendt shares many of Socrates’ skills and ambi�ons. The public space needs revitalising, the hard ques�ons need asking. Climate change demands that we urgently start asking the right kind of ques�ons. Arendt is a formidable thinker who can certainly help us tackle climate change.

“I personally do not doubt that from the turmoil of being confronted with reality without the help of precedent, that is, of tradi�on and authority, there will finally arise some new code of conduct.”

Arendt, speaking at a symposium, “The Crisis Character of Modern Society” 1966.

A quick biography

Before ge�ng into the details, it is probably helpful to just establish the basic coordinates of her life.

Arendt was born into a secular Jewish family, in the town of Linden in 1906 (now a district of Hannover, Germany). She had a progressive educa�on which eventually took her to Marburg University in 1924. Here she met, fell in love with, and had stormy 4-year affair with one of her professors, the genius Mar�n Heidegger (she was 17, he was 35 when it started). A rela�onship made even more controversial by the fact that Heidegger was a supporter of the Nazis. Indeed, by 1933 the Nazi Party had gained full control of Germany, so Arendt, an outspoken cri�c and ac�vist against the regime, fled to Paris; and then, as most of Europe fell to Hitler, onto the safety of New York in 1941. She remained in New York (as a ci�zen from 1950) un�l her death in 1975, aged 69.

She was already a writer of tremendous authority and fame in her own life. Her relevance has never faded. In fact, a quick survey of the major issues that confront modern society today underline just how valuable her body of work remains.

Not least, for opening up some vital and fresh dimensions to the climate crisis.

Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, Archiv Barbara Niggl Radloff

Chapter 2

On the banality of evil

Rethinking our common sense about morality

The first book in this series, “No Common Sense” finished with an extended look at the abysmally dark chapter of the twen�eth century that happened under the Nazi regime. Some details of the Third Reich were used to establish, empha�cally, that we do have an agreed set of basic moral boundaries. Immediately a�er the war, trials in Nuremburg, Dachau, Auschwitz, Chelmo, Riga and many other courts, confirmed the judgement of humanity about the atroci�es that were commited.

A later Nazi war crime tribunal was held in Jerusalem in 1961. It was the trial of the Nazi desk killer, Adolf Eichmann. Arendt’s sat in observa�on of the trial. Her descrip�on of key courtroom moments captured the harrowing details of grief that were outpoured anew, some 16 years a�er the war had ended. Arendt’s reports for the “The New Yorker” magazine eventually became her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1961).

The material that she wired back to New York was compelling, not simply because of her ar�culate and poignant accounts of the suffering of her fellow Jewish people; something else was at work in the text. What Arendt’s probing mind had iden�fied and started to explore was a disturbing new dimension to humani�es setled understanding of evil. What Arendt opened up was the uncomfortable truth that there was more to understand about evil, beyond the headline judgements about the depravity of the Third Reich. This new dark centre of gravity was discovered in the figure of the man in the dock: Adolf Eichmann.

This chapter will hopefully unfold how Arendt’s groundbreaking reflec�ons on the nature of evil also carries with it some important insights into the ethical dimensions of the climate crisis we are faced with today. Back in 1961, her reports on the trail were not without controversy. By bringing Arendt’s

study of Eichmann back into play with the climate crisis there will likely be two reasons to find things uncomfortable.

The first discomfort with Arendt’s work was sharply felt back in 1961, with the original context of her book. It is normal to recoil from any no�on that there is anything more to say about good and evil when the boundary lines were so clearly illustrated by the Nazis. It is normal to flinch if we are invited to look further than these crimes, to do any more thinking about our moral map. What more could be said? What else could be added? Indeed, does it not diminish raw horror of the Third Reich if we try to add any further commentary?

Secondly, an extended use of the Nazi war trials seems a long distance away from anything to do with climate change. What do concentra�on camps have to do with levels of CO2 in the atmosphere? What do SS vehicles have to do with solar panels? Indeed, it might seem inappropriate to put these two worlds side by side. The following text will hopefully jus�fy this juxtaposi�on, whilst recognising from the outset, the unique terror of the holocaust. The only detail to insist on at this introductory point in the chapter is that, without undermining the scale of the suffering that Hitler brought upon millions of people, the scale of the climate crisis must not be underes�mated. If we only consider the climate crisis to be concerned with more floods or the fate of the polar bear, then such a juxtaposi�on would indeed seem uterly crass.

If we allow Arendt to interrogate our world view, there is much to be gained. Indeed, Arendt’s contribu�on to our awareness of the climate crisis is par�cularly welcome because the main moral map of the crisis is so well known. The narra�ve lines about different climate injus�ces have, quite rightly, been well trodden. What Arendt gi�s us is her unusual ability to flip the readers expecta�ons and say something refreshingly new.

And so, to Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Jerusalem

At the Nuremberg Trials, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had iden�fied Eichmann as a key part of the opera�on that had exterminated around 3 million lives 5. However, under a false iden�ty, Eichmann had fled to Argen�na. In 1960, the Israeli Mossad agents eventually caught up with him, just outside Buenos Aires, bundled him into the boot of a car, and smuggled him onto a plane to Jerusalem. As the trial opened on April 11th 1961, observers in the courtroom could see one of the major cogs of the Nazi machinery now finally sat in the dock. The trial was screened on US and Israeli television. In the courtroom, it was observed by a philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

Eichmann had been responsible for the transporta�on of millions of Jews to their deaths, but there was “no satanic greatness” on display behind the glass. He was an extremely mundane bloke, full of a cold (in the first days of the trail), and full of clichés. In a disturbing way, Eichmann appeared as trivial and shallow. His recollec�on of the events was very clumsy and his explana�ons were full of contradic�ons. He was o�en vulgar, and it became clear through ques�oning that he simply could not understand a point of view other than his own.

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a, “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am a�er examining him” 6. During the trial, Arendt wrote some sketchy

5 In his affidavit he stated 2,5 million had been gassed or burnt and a further 500,000 had died through starva�on or disease.

6 Eichmann in Jerusalem, intro xv.Penguin,

thoughts to her philosophical friend Karl Jaspers, “Eichmann is actually stupid…, but then somehow, he is not”, and noted that he showed a kind of “brainlessness” 7 .

Following the trial, she recapitulates all the mind-numbing suffering of the holocaust, in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, and at the same �me, Arendt vividly captures Eichmann in all of his banality. This horrendous parallel between the mass murder of millions and the superficiality of a bureaucrat in the SS regime who was proud of his efficient work is one that is uterly jarring. How could any human being sign off on those train �metable sheets, knowing the human content and des�na�on of that railway traffic? Where was Eichmann’s inner moral voice? Where was the deskkiller’s conversa�on with himself?

Arendt later explained her work by using Richard III as a contrast. In Shakespeare’s play, the opening monologue finds the protagonist in a tormented inner conversa�on with himself. “Now is the winter of our discontent…” and then, as Richard no�ces the appearance of his rival brother, his speech abruptly turns, “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes” 8 . Whilst King Richard could not be held up as a good character, he is at least in a dialogue with himself about his iden�ty, his plans and his mo�va�ons. Eichmann had no such second voice in his head.

Arendt notes, “… the only specific characteris�c one could detect in his past as well as in his behaviour during the trial and the preceding police examina�on was something en�rely nega�ve: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authen�c inability to think”.

This ‘thinking’ for Arendt was not the everyday, rou�ne thinking that we all do. This ‘thinking’ was the very specific ac�vity of taking a cri�cal distance from one’s self. It is the exercise of judgement, the exercise autonomous reasoning. Arendt writes, “When confronted with situa�ons for which such rou�ne procedures did not exist he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conven�onal, standardised codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognised func�on of protec�ng us against reality”.

Indeed, Eichmann’s main defence in this trial was that he was just carrying out orders. For example, he claimed that when he was informed by Rheinhard Heydrich that, "The Fuhrer has ordered the physical extermina�on of the Jews", Eichmann claimed to have responded, "I didn't say anything because there was nothing more to say… I now lost all joy in my work, all ini�a�ve, all interest."

Arendt’s book was sub�tled, ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’. Although the word ‘banal’ only appears in the last line of the work, it is the central idea behind the rest of the text. It is a quite brilliant exposure of evil as a priva�on. Arendt showed the cruel power of an absence of good. “Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay to waste the en�re world. Evil comes from a failure to think.” 9

There, on display in a glass box, was a very different kind of evil. It was evil demonstrated as a profound lack of thought and care. It was shallow and rootless. The four month trial of Eichmann was, in Arendt’s concluding words, a “long course in human wickedness… - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil”. 10

7 Ibid, xiv.

8 Richard III, Act One, Scene One.

9 “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, opening. .;

10 Last line of Eichmann in Jerusalem.

The doer and the deed

Many readers had clumsily taken deep offence with the associa�on of the holocaust with the word banal. But Arendt insisted repeatedly on the difference between the doer and the deed. The shallowness of Eichmann’s character sat in awful contrast to the depth of the suffering that he was causing. It is a dis�nc�on that is fundamentally important to her book. The doer was banal, but the deed was horrific. It is a dis�nc�on that opens up a very effec�ve point of entry for thinking through the morality of climate change.

In the case of climate change, there is a huge gulf between the doer and the deed. There is no morally depraved group that are piping gigatonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere because they are filled with biter animosity to people groups who live in houses close to the sea. No raging despot has set up a massive exhaust tube for emissions to wipe out, once and for all, the poorest, most vulnerable people of the world. Crudely put, climate change is the result of billions of well-meaning people just going about their lives inside an economy that is maintained, 82% of the �me, by the burning of fossil fuel.

In fact, the contrast between the inten�ons of the doers of climate change and the results of their ac�ons is perversely wide. Not only are modern human beings not ac�vely organising the extermina�on of a par�cular race of people, but quite the opposite is true. It is a total mismatch. How could a honeymoon flight to an exo�c island, to celebrate the deep love between two people, have anything to do with the sinking of an en�re island culture? How could the construc�on of a state-of-the-art hospital, to save thousands of people from cri�cal diseases and injuries, have anything to do with mass starva�on? Could the beef burgers at a child’s birthday party really cause the ruinous flooding of another child’s home? We are insulated from thinking about the consequences of our economic ac�vity because it is such a stretch of the imagina�on to think that noble acts can have such ignoble consequences. This gap between the doer and the deed, which distances climate change so far from our common sense, is a major reason why we don’t take meaningful ac�on.

Yet really, is it appropriate to put Eichmann into a book on climate change? Is it not the forced evacua�on and deaths of millions of innocent people an impossible distance from a few unusually hot summers? As always with climate change, all of these reflec�ons can be seen as wildly out of place un�l the sheer scale of the environmental catastrophe facing us is acknowledged. Any ethical delibera�ons on climate change have to be rooted in a realis�c vision of the science. If our understanding of climate change science is shallow, then our reflec�ons on the ethics of climate change will not get out of first gear either For anyone who is open minded and open hearted enough to engage with the human consequences of our current eco-system going over a �pping point will accept that such a juxtaposi�on is jus�fied.

It is not that we are like Eichmann, but we are all prone to mere common sense thinking about our situa�on that is not plugged in, at a meaningful level, with the seriousness of what is going on.

Imagine…

Indeed, the French philosopher, Jean-Pierre Dupuy in his book, ‘Pour un catastrophisme éclairé’ (2004) examines the cogni�ve difficul�es we have with ‘risk’ when we atempt to contemplate a disaster on the scale of climate change or nuclear war He writes, “In order to prevent a catastrophe, one needs to believe in its possibility before it happens." Dupuy cites World War One as an example of his reasoning; few believed it was possible before it happened.

Dupuy’s reflec�on is confirmed by the popularity of the pre-war pamphlet: ‘The Great Illusion’. Writen by Nobel Prize winner Malcolm Angell in 1910, it was a very comfor�ng read for those Bri�sh people who leafed through its pages. In considera�on of all the bombas�c na�onalism flying around Europe at the �me, Angell's central point was that, “the economic cost of war was so great that no one could possibly hope to gain by star�ng a war the consequences of which would be so disastrous." 11 It eventually sold over two million copies. Those who read his ideas before 1914 were comforted by the common sense reasons to remain calm 12 .

Run-away climate change is equally inconceivable. In essence, it will be so unimaginably costly that we cannot imagine it. As it is not in the interests of poli�cians, businesses or the media to put our noses up close to the scien�fic facts, most ci�zens of the developed world live at a comfortable distance from the reality of it.

Eichmann was not the SS solider with his hand on a pistol or a gas-tap. He sat at a comfortable distance from the real ac�on. He worked in an office. He was surrounded by papers. He dealt with numbers and deadlines. There was no need for him to imagine the trauma on the lines of death that that he was busy with. Indeed, in one uterly startling line of tes�mony, he proudly tes�fied that, “In the department that I ran, I did not tolerate violence”. The �cking of the clocks and the tapping of the typewriters in his offices were all that was required to block out the voices of terror on his punctual network of trains. He enjoyed a distance from the ac�on that afforded him the op�on of simply not allowing the second voice in his head to ask him any uncomfortable ques�ons. He lived within a world of clichés. He lived his life full of false necessi�es.

Likewise, for climate change, there are some very dangerous clichés about. As consumers we are happy to recycle, the fight against the plas�c in our food chain is an important one, and reusing our towels in a green cer�ficated hotel is not an unhelpful gesture. Moreover, many of us do these things earnestly and with a genuine concern for the planet. However, these gestures only make the most uterly superficial difference to reducing emissions, and so they just seem to serve as in immunising shot against the truth.

Being known inside my school as someone who is ecologically concerned, I am approached almost weekly by students and colleagues who sincerely want to make a difference, but virtually every plan of ac�on, remark, or sugges�on is related to recycling or marginal reduc�ons in waste. There is no doubt that recycling is a good place to start in primary schools, where children can learn a sensi�vity about the human impact on the planet. It is a very tac�le response to the problem.

However, recycling has become such a cultural cliché that I have proposed explicitly banning the prac�ce in our secondary school, just to make a more important point. For a moment of perspec�ve, the en�re amount of plas�c is produced by the world’s economy is only responsible for 1 in every 257 tonnes of global emissions 13 There are many key environmental problems associated with plas�c that are not connected to climate change and such issues deserve some space. However, as an educa�onal ins�tu�on we are responsible for providing a clear landscape of reality for young minds that do not yet have the maturity or experience to see their knowledge in perspec�ve. And when the overwhelming focus of environmental ini�a�ves in secondary educa�on are focused on

11 In fact, this is the historian James Joll’s succinct summary of Angell’s work. (Joll, James (1992) The Origins of the First World War. London and New York: Longman. p.202 ISBN 0-582-08920-4)

12 Those who read it a�er were hoping that his arguments, along with the devasta�on caused by the conflict, would confirm Woodrow Wilson’s hope that World War 1 was ‘the war to end all wars’.

13 www.onlyoneearth.science

these problems, rather than the risk of the planet’s eco-system entering into an unstoppable collapse, it is hard to argue that we are providing an advanced level of educa�on.

We do not ask our Baccalaureate students to do simple spellings and addi�on, so why do we tolerate such a limited response to the most significant threat to their welfare? We don’t encourage our students to wash their hands more regularly when they are dying of sep�caemia. Our students have a right to know the truth and pacifying them with a lame understanding of what is really going on is not honest. It is not helpful. Recycling simply acts as insula�on from the hard ques�ons of reality.

Where does this general ecological delusion comes from? Is it a lack of knowledge? Is it a lack of thought? Is it a so� form of propaganda that comes from the machinery of those in power, or is it a self-delusion? This is not the place now to untangle this knot, it is just important to note that how we understand our social reality is not neutral. Our responses to ecology are embedded in social context which filters informa�on and shapes our reac�on.

Being a cultural here�c is not comfortable for either the here�c or those who have sincere and wellfounded concerns. Conversa�ons about these priori�es are o�en messy. Wri�ng as a teacher, we should not dare to call our educa�onal programmes modern, if students can graduate from our school with only the sketchiest understanding of the crisis. The hard conversa�on about our systema�c failure to actually teach young adults about the sixth mass ex�nc�on event that is happening at their feet needs to happen. It is not an easy conversa�on. It raises fundamental ques�ons about what it means to be educated. But we owe it to our students to look at this reality in an unflinching way. It would be inconceivable that a student could go to university not knowing who a man called Adolf Hitler was. Yet it is en�rely probable that a student can go to university today without knowing what a �pping point is. This level of ecological illiteracy should shock us, and the fact that it is not a major priority for the majority of policy makers, school directors and teachers demonstrates that we are far too comfortable in our roles and too detached in our thinking.

Our ecological illiteracy is a product of a whole matrix of social and economic factors. In many respects, it is difficult to get a clear view of the crisis. The media, the internet, and an educa�onal system that is s�ll rooted in a 19th century paradigm, hardly make it easy.

Eichmann was deeply embedded in Nazi ideology, and he clearly had no excuse. He had direct responsibility for the immediate transporta�on of Jews to their deaths. He knew what he was doing. The reason that Eichmann could be guilty of organising the deaths of millions of Jews was because he was guilty of a breath-taking level of self-decep�on.

This juxtaposition (not equa�on) of Eichmann with the normal ci�zen of the world is a deeply uncomfortable one to make, both for the writer and the reader. Indeed, it was not without real controversy that Arendt used the word ‘banal’ in the context of the Holocaust. Here, in alignment with Arendt, there is no claim that there is ‘a litle bit of Eichmann’ in all of us 14. There are no adjec�ves strong enough to mark the categorical difference between a well-meaning consumer on the one hand, and Eichmann’s poisonous ideology on the other. However, the appallingly brutal fact is that millions of people will die as a consequence of gas, and it is happening under the watch of a cultured and scien�fically advanced society again. And so, the ques�on poses itself, ‘how could it possibly be true that the mass destruc�on of human civilisa�on could occur in a society of ra�onal people?’ Eichmann’s banality forces us to realise that our understanding of how evil can arise cannot

14 Although Arendt did tackle the very thorny issue of how compliant some of the leaders in the Jewish communes were in the iden�fica�on of Jewish community members for export to the camps.

simply be limited to common sense. Our understanding of what it means to good cannot be to common sense either.

In ‘The Human Condi�on’ (1958), Arendt writes: “It is quite conceivable that the modern age which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human ac�vity may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known”. How can humans be so capable of technological advance and so crea�ve in social organisa�on, and yet at the same �me, be so incapable of stopping such an obvious and catastrophic danger?

It doesn’t feel like it at all, but these are extra-ordinary �mes.

The powerfully striking claim that Arendt makes in her observa�on of Eichmann is that “not thinking” can actually be genocidal.

Chapter 3

“On the Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951)

Eichmann was thoughtless. Is it not also true that our modern society is also thoughtless about climate change? It is categorically true that we are very though�ul about a vast range of social issues, but somehow climate change is the most fundamentally important problem that we are not thinking about.

Arendt sat in close observa�on of Eichmann in 1961 and her insights are rooted in the daily observa�ons at the trial, but at the same �me, Arendt is working to understand something beyond him. Eichmann was a sharp example of a Nazi desk-killer, but he was part of a system that had pulled quite ordinary people into an abysmal situa�on. It was cri�cally important for Arendt to understand the psychological and social precondi�ons that made it possible for people to par�cipate in such destruc�ve regimes

In fact, Arendt had been working for years on establishing a fuller understanding of the human condi�on. She wrote ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’ ten years earlier, in the immediate shadow of the soul-crushing developments of Nazism and Stalinism. It is a book in which she grapples with the new totalitarian poli�cs that had so deeply marked the first half of the century. There is a lot of history in the 500 pages that she writes, but it is the first major theore�cal atempt to understand the appalling seizure in human affairs that shook everything up. The book made her intellectual reputa�on and it is a highly engaging read. The awful mul�-dimensional puzzle posed to Arendt by these regimes was, how could they manage to develop and func�on with such an overpowering and with such invasive force?

Her responses to this ques�on could help us understand the modern crisis of climate change. Indeed, totalitarian regimes demanded the most urgent scru�ny because Arendt was convinced that both Nazism and Stalinism had not exhausted their poten�al. Her work on totalitarianism was writen with Nazism and Stalinism at the front of her mind, but her later experience of the Cold War

(especially McCarthyism) and the surge in consumerism in the 1970s, confirmed her understanding that even openly democra�c socie�es are capable of hos�ng and endorsing ‘thoughtlessness’.

Her words from 1951 strike with bristling relevance today: “Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on poli�cal forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”

A reading of Arendt’s work now, especially in the light of climate change, shows how much of her wri�ngs transcends their context. Arendt’s insights show how totalitarian systems of control can lead to large-scale human suffering, and how democra�c socie�es are not immune from such dangers.

What’s next?

Arendt’s wri�ng defies categorisa�on. There are so many overlapping themes in her work and she approaches poli�cal and ethical reality in a highly independent way. Using her three major works, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condi�on”, this book will group her ideas into the key concerns that Arendt held concerning our poli�cal life:

• Thoughtlessness - as with Eichmann, the main precondi�on of totalitarian rule is a shallowly rooted thinking.

• Thought Control - once people are atomied and deprived of any significant conversa�ons with their past, their community or themselves, they are then prone to manipula�on.

• Public – Private Space - Arendt looks back to An�quity to pay respect to how both Greek and Roman society had a genuinely dis�nct public space in the centre of their poli�cal life.

• Hopelessness – Nazi and Stalinist regimes created and preserved their control by demolishing people’s hopes. Hopelessness is also very real today.

• Retreat into the Self – Philosophy is o�en caricatured as a retreat from the world, Arendt staunchly argued that it must not turn inwards.

• On Bureaucracy – Arendt observed how the anonymity of bureaucracies make state violence more likely.

• On Organised Lying – Poli�cs and truth are not the best of friends. Arendt’s work explores decep�on on a number of levels.

• The Na�on State – The na�on state has brought us a world of human rights, but what if you don’t belong to one?

All of these concerns about totalitarian rule are rather prescient about the current poli�cal order and they make our passive a�tude towards climate change more understandable.

Chapter 4 - Thoughtlessness

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the dis�nc�on between fact and fic�on (i.e., the reality of experience) and the dis�nc�on between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

(On the Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951)

Nazism and Stalinism abolished the dis�nc�on between fact and fic�on through the dark forces of revenge and terror. The space of genuine public discourse was flatened by the atomisa�on of people and the availability of only one kind of story about life. For Nazism, this story was the racial supremacy of the Aryan race in its historical fight for true Lebensraum against defec�ve parasites in society. For Stalinism, the story was the historical march of the Soviets towards libera�on from its class enemies.

If the 19th century had been characterised by imperial expansion over land, then the start of the 20th century was marked by an invasive colonisa�on of the mind. Both Nazism and Stalinism only offered their popula�ons one singular way to think. Strikingly, Arendt had noted that this imposi�on on the ‘inner life of the mind’ even had the capacity to dictate how people experienced their own experiences. She offers the example of a Stalin Show Trial in which a factory worker is accused of vandalism. The worker is so embedded in Stalinist ideology that he admits that even though has no recollec�on of any sabotage, ‘The Party must be right’, and so accepts the guilty verdict.

His confession could just be read as a resigned plea, which would be coherent with the ability of totalitarian regimes to uterly squash people’s hope; however, that would underes�mate the power of ideologies to colonise the minds of its subjects. His mind was just a satellite state of the centralised consciousness, a humble node in the great Stalinist matrix.

Backed up with a terrifyingly policed state, both the Nazi and the Stalinist propaganda effort managed to gain a remarkably firm grip of people’s minds. They achieved an overwhelming colonisa�on of their na�on’s psyche. Both Hitler and Stalin were dicta�ng the only story on offer.

Moreover, their storytelling was not just about the control of a singular plot line. In their regimes, the storyteller also gets to define the values that drive the plot, they get to explain the significance of the past, and the meaning of the future. Very significantly, they get to decide who and what does not make it into the story. This level of thought control has the power to hollow out a na�on’s cultural memory and reduce people to rootless thinkers. It was this superficiality that deeply concerned Arendt. As exemplified in Eichmann, she labelled such a state of mind, ‘thoughtlessness’ with genuine anxiety.

She understood that the goal of a totalitarian state was to replace sense reality with irreality. With Plato’s Protagoras in mind, she wrote: “The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were sa�sfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more las�ng victory at the expense of reality.” 15 Later adding: “The true goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organiza�on of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

Arendt’s warning about the unexhausted scope of totalitarian power, and its ability to colonise democra�c socie�es was a shocking idea when she published her work in 1951. It was the year in which the Korean War become as entrenched as the Western world’s nega�ve view of the Soviet State. They thought Stalin was the great puppet master, pulling the strings in North Korea, and a man took thought control so seriously he even put his poets into Gulags or shot them.

The liberal West, by contrast, was free. All the problems with thought control appeared to be on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Indeed today, the no�on of “Thought Control” sounds like something out of a science-fic�on movie, or a chapter heading in a book writen by a whacked-out sect that believes that aliens are atemp�ng to take over our minds from their mothership.

However, given the coexistence of a massive cons�tu�onal crisis with nature and the passivity of our response, there has to be some major forces at work that are preven�ng us from thinking about climate change clearly. It takes a spectacular kind of thoughtlessness to allow our society to throw itself into such a major conflict with nature. Anyone who has seen the upward swings of all of the graphs related to climate change, and who understands the risks involved in se�ng off an ecological avalanche, will consider our docile response as disturbingly absurd.

Our lack of awareness and our lack of meaningful ac�on cannot be explained if the Western world considers itself to be a genuinely open democra�c and ra�onal society. It is true that climate change is a non-sensory problem, it is true that climate change demands us to take some difficult decisions now for the sake of our long-term future. However, we are capable of taking out insurance policies for our homes and cars using our ability to do some basic risk assessment, we are capable of planning for our re�rement with pension plans a�er a balancing of short and long-term financial needs. We o�en walk out of the house with an umbrella when it is not raining because we are aware that the forecast is not that posi�ve. Human beings have con�nually demonstrated that they are quite capable of ac�ng ra�onally even if issues are abstract and located in the future.

No books of philosophy are required to get governments to legislate against gas leaks in school buildings. It is so obvious. Any minister or local official who was responsible for allowing a major

crater to be torn into a town centre and into the lives of the families of the school children, would face major criminal charges. And yet, there are s�ll no adequate laws in place to stop the Earth’s most serious gas leak, the CO2 that will cause monumental global damage.

Indeed, the world responded to the threat caused by CFCs to the Ozone layer with swi� and effec�ve ac�on. The ‘Montreal Protocol’ was the first universally ra�fied treaty in the history of the United Na�ons. When all 197 par�es signed the agreement on September 16th 1987, there had only been a gap of 14 years between the discovery of the problem by the Nobel Prize winning scien�sts, Crutzen, Molina and Rowland 16 and the unified global response.

Climate change, another atmospheric problem, has been understood for over one hundred years and it has been very well understood for decades, and yet it is taking hold of the natural world in our blind spot. The contrast between the world’s response to the hole in the Ozone layer and the level of our response to climate change requires an explana�on.

Climate Change is playing in the wrong key

The fact is that climate change does not have a place in the modern story. It just does not fit into the script, it is a problem that is jarringly discordant with the themes of our current society. Climate change is about natural limits in a world of ar�ficially limitless appe�tes. It is about Enlightenment and Educa�on in an age of En�tlement and Entertainment. It is about data and analysis in an age of the image and tweets. It is about global ci�zenship in an age of powerful na�onalism and individualism. It is about long-term binding agreements in an age of short-term targets and inten�ons. At so many levels of our cultural currents, there is a strong pull against us ge�ng a proper understanding of the demands of climate change. It is not surprising to find very few poli�cians who have the convic�on and the guile to tack their poli�cal course against these strong cultural winds and �des in the fight for real climate jus�ce.

In the simplest possible terms, climate change has no place in a culture which is concerned with the Me and the More, the New and the Now.

We have been thoughtless about climate change because it is a problem that is at odds with so many of the precondi�ons of thought. All of this is not to claim some grand conspiracy theory. Just as every individual is reluctant to look at uncomfortable truths, it is no surprise to find society at large doing the same things. Indeed, these dominant cultural trends would have been in place with or without the inconvenient truths about the chemical proper�es of CO2, CH4, N2O and their other greenhouse gas friends hanging out in the atmosphere. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with consump�on and entertainment, it is just that it has some very unlucky side-effects. Our cultural mind set was formed independently of climate shi�s, and now we find ourselves with a serious conflict of interests. Doing what is Right just doesn’t feel right.

The problem is simply that climate change is in the wrong key signature to the themes of modern culture. It doesn’t mater how correct and precisely Nigel Kennedy plays the beau�ful violin stave of Vivaldi’s violin concerto in A major (Op.9, No.6) if he forgets to retune his G string to play one tone

16 Crutzen, Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995. Crutzen later commented that humanity had been extremely fortunate to only have a CFC problem and not a BFC problem. This is because if humans would have developed their industrial technology with BFCs instead, the problem would have been 100 �mes worse, and impossible to repair by the �me the scien�sts would have iden�fied the problem. Humanity lucked out, because the decision to go with CFCs was done in the dark.

higher (technically a scordatura). No one would ever want to listen to such horrendously gra�ng harmonies. It doesn’t mater how correct and precise the lines of scien�fic evidence are about the atmosphere if they don’t fit into the established modes of thinking in a culture. Few would want to listen to it.

Beter then, we seem to have concluded, to keep the two tunes apart.

What we have then is a very par�cular kind of thoughtlessness with climate change. We have poli�cians talking about their commitments to economic growth without any references to planetary boundaries. We allow them to talk about their commitments to climate change, without a proper parliamentary challenge about exactly what progress has been made to tackle it (The Climate Academy advocates for the robust and reliable CUTx Index as the most effec�ve measure). We have media campaigns about the evil of the plas�c straws, but do not have them ask any meaningful ques�ons about how the government is legisla�ng to stablise levels of CO2 in the atmosphere at a level that is compa�ble with keeping average temperatures under a 2°C rise. Having big campaigns against plas�c are worthwhile, because pollu�on and the purity of our food-chain are major issues, but they are uterly insignificant when compared with the problem of emissions and the threat of all of the major wheels of nature spinning off down the road.

Back in May 2018, Australia announcing an investment of A$500m to protect the Great Barrier Reef, the government pointed the finger at Crown-of-Thorns star fish, and farmers pes�cides. But they do not men�on the excessive carbon emissions from the highly developed na�ons, like Australia, who are in that club whose lifestyle is the overwhelming cause of the bleaching. In fact, Australia is a topranking member of the UN High Developed club, in 2022 it was 5th in the Human Development Index (UNDP) Yet we keep the Very High Developed na�ons of the world safe under the illusion that they have a low level of responsibility for climate change by making efficiency and recycling the prominent words in climate change discussion. These na�ons have typically exported the dirty, carbon heavy, manufacturing industries to less developed countries whom they then point a guilty finger at during COP mee�ngs (forge�ng where all their imported goods have come from) 17

When emissions are counted more equitably to include consump�ve and historic emissions on a per capita basis, the sharply discordant truth is that the Very High Developed na�ons are accountable for 50% of global emissions even though they only represent 18% of the global popula�on. 18

More generally, when the two tunes of scien�fic reality and social reality are kept so far apart, an important ques�on presents itself with urgency. It is a very legi�mate ques�on: “Which is more absurd, a university degree in Architecture that does not account for the laws of gravity, or a degree in Economics that does not consult the scien�fic laws that govern ecology?” For those who follow the news coverage of our poli�cal and economic plans, and who also follow the latest updates in scien�fic journals about climate change (and also rates of resource extrac�on), the dissonance between the two tunes is teeth gnashingly awful.

Arendt was a keen reader of Ka�a and for those who have engaged in climate change at a more than a merely superficial level, the juxtaposi�on of science and reality has strong overtones of Ka�a. Ka�a wrote with such sharpness, throwing his characters Gregor (Metamorphosis, 1913) and K (The

17 Read Chapter 7 of the Climate Academy Guidebook, “The CUTx Index”(available through the Climate Academy website) for the full details of how the Very High Developed na�ons have masked their responsibility.

18 Ibid.

Castle, 1926) into uterly absurd situa�ons in which an important job needed to be done, but the world around them was just limply unconcerned 19 .

Just like every society in human history, we live with a heavily edited account of what is actually going on in reality. No society has ever been immune from ideology, and no society should take its eye off the interests of those who are in power. It would be naïve to think that humans had suddenly become immune to ideology and equally naïve to think that the controlling elites had become disinterested in how people think.

The later half of the 20th century saw an extraordinary set of powers come together to form a formidable block of interests, the mul�-na�onal corpora�ons, the banks and the media. A shi� in power that was especially entrenched a�er the financial market collapse in 2008 and the subsequent transfer of wealth to those in power 20 . These elites are not tasked with figh�ng climate change and, without adequate laws in place to guide their future investments and their planning, there is no short term reason why they would want to bring the issue onto the agenda voluntarily. They all have another agenda that demands aten�on.

Although it does not feel like it in our everyday social awareness, when scien�fic research and cultural reality are placed side by side, it becomes shockingly obvious that a very heavily redacted version of the truth is in place with climate change.

We are alarmingly thoughtless about it.

Two Cheers

In the same year that Arendt published her major work on Totalitarianism, E.M. Forster published his, “Two Cheers for Democracy” (1951). Explaining the �tle of his book he writes, “… one [cheer] because it admits variety and two because it permits cri�cism.” During both World War Two and his experiences in India, Forster had seen the “military jack-boot” of totalitarian power stamp on the “fragile flower” of “tolerance, good temper and sympathy” 21; in response, he wrote in praise of individual flourishing. However, whilst Forster could celebrate in 1951, he remained acutely aware of how large the shadow of power loomed over any poli�cal system, including the democra�c one. He therefore famously added this further line in explana�on of his book �tle, “Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three."

There is litle ques�on that democracy is the best form of government that we have yet sustained. However, that is no reason to shut off any discussion about its weaknesses. Un�l now, Nature’s voice has only intermitently managed to break through the main theme tunes of our modern culture, only extreme weather events have punctuated the flow of news. Our democracies have not been forced to reconcile the conflic�ng lines of development that are quietly building up to an awfully dissonant climax. Climate change is the first radically sharp signal that human society is living in completely unsustainable way on the planet.

This is a serious weakness in our democra�c socie�es that has to be acknowledged and addressed with urgency. We will hold back on our third cheer, for good reason.

19 The fact that climate change depends heavily on the movement of bureaucracies to act also contributes to the Ka�aesque claustrophobia about the State we are in; something that will be fully explored in Chapter 9, “On Bureaucracy”)

20 It is claimed that this transfer of wealth was the biggest in human history (4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

21 Two Cheers for Democracy, p**.

Edward Bernays

Please don’t go to war again, “…because you're worth it!” (L’Oréal Shampoo)

When Arendt was wri�ng her book ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’ in 1951, those in power were s�ll trying to make sense of the carnage of war. The first half of the 20th century had been a crushing blow to the Enlightenment understanding that human beings are actually ra�onal. Despite our civilised exterior, it was evident that a turmoil of drives was at work in the human condi�on. Decision makers were rightly anxious about channelling humanity’s darker forces into a produc�ve ac�vity.

Sigmund Freud, who developed his no�on of the ‘death drive’ (in German, ‘todestrieb’) in observa�on of the trench warfare in World War One, had already atempted to map out this struggle between the impulsive and the civilised elements of the human condi�on 22. He labelled the successful nego�a�on of repressed ins�ncts as ‘sublima�on’ (‘Sublimierung’). Freud explains that he had been impressed a�er reading about a young boy 23 who was sadis�cally preoccupied with cu�ng the tails off stray dogs for the sheer fun of it. Yet the boy grew up to become a brilliant and noble surgeon who pioneered reconstruc�ve surgery – thereby successfully sublima�ng his passions and doing something construc�ve for society

Freud’s psychoanaly�c theories were about to have an impact on the world on a scale that would go far beyond his therapeu�c couch. This is because his nephew, Edward Bernays, had not only kept in close contact with his Uncle Sigmund and his psychoanaly�c theories, he had also gained a posi�on of tremendous influence in the USA. By the early 1950s, it would not be a grand overstatement to put forward the metaphor that Bernays had established himself as ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939) in the real Emerald City of Washington. The metaphor works nicely if “Oz” does indeed stand for either ‘ounce of gold’ or the O-Z folders inside the filing cabinets of the world’s most powerful bureaucracy - and also if the green glasses that are provided by the Wizard for the people to wear is a reference to the greenback paper money that gives everything an illusory worth.

The Big Idea that had a forma�ve influence on the 1950s was that consump�on could dull the primal dangers of the human condi�on. A consumer society would be too distracted and happy to go to war again. Under the wizardry of Bernays, thoughtlessness could be an asset; in the sense that a dummy (“pacifier”, USA) for a stressed and confused baby can sooth them and make the world a more peaceful place.

The writer Olasky notes: “Bernays emphasized that in a large scale society there were only two choices: manipula�on or social chaos. He saw history moving in a certain direc�on and public rela�ons prac��oners obliged to climb onto the locomo�ve." The two World Wars had demonstrated how high the stakes were. Bernays himself explained the task of propaganda in his book “Engineering Consent” in 1947: “This phrase quite simply means the use of an engineering approach that is, ac�on based only on thorough knowledge of the situa�on and on the applica�on of scien�fic principles and tried prac�ces to the task of ge�ng people to support ideas and programs”.

22 The first extensive development of the ‘death drive’ is published in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920).

23 His name was Johann Freidrich Deffenbaugh, from Heinrich Heine’s, “Die Harzreise” (“The Harz journey”), published in 1826.

The Nazis had used propaganda to scoop out the different voices of cri�cal reflec�on in their ci�zens. For Arendt, superficiality and thoughtlessness were dangerous vices, as it made people vulnerable to exploita�on and control. Bernays was going to transform propaganda into a virtue. In the Brave New World of the second half of the century, there would be thoughtlessness, but it would bring order and conformity, and it would be good for us.

“Public Rela�ons”

A�er World War Two, various phone-calls were eventually made to Bernays. This invita�on to help shape the public consciousness in the USA provided him with a chance to fully establish the value of his work. One problem for Bernays had been the fact that a�er the fall of Berlin in 1945, and the suicides of the Goebbels family, inves�gators went through Josef’s possessions. Among the Nazi trinkets and clothes, they found a copy of Bernay’s book, “Propaganda”. Writen in 1928, it was the textbook on thought control. The Nazis had taken propaganda very seriously, and it was a book that had shaped Goebbel’s thinking and strategies. A�er Goebbel’s torrid use of the word, Bernays was forced to change the name of his cra� to the colourless alterna�ve, “Public Rela�ons”.

But colourless quite suited Bernays. It is ironic that the author of a book on propaganda that had such a pervasive impact on the modern world remains so unknown, especially because his Uncle Sigmund Freud spent so much of his energy trying to establish his own global reputa�on.

In the first chapter of his original book, “Organising Chaos”, he writes: “The conscious and intelligent manipula�on of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democra�c society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society cons�tute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of poli�cs or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the rela�vely small number of persons [...] who understand the mental processes and social paterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world ”

Perhaps the thoughtlessness of consumerism has enabled us to avoid another global conflict; although the M.A.D. prospect of a Nuclear Armageddon is most o�en credited with helping us to avoid that fate. Perhaps trade and the promise of prosperity has significantly diverted some na�ons away from developing fewer democra�c tendencies; however, China and Singapore stand out as two prominent examples to the contrary. Whatever the possible upside to Bernays’ sublima�on of our carnal drives, whatever the benefits of Adam Smith’s invisible hand might have had in soothing our primal impulses, the problem is that consumerism has brought with it a weakening of our civic abili�es.

Wri�ng in ‘The Human Condi�on’ in 1958, Arendt lamented “the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repe��on of “truths”, which have become trivial and empty.” Arendt suspected that this phenomenon was widespread and as early as the 1950s, and she called it the “outstanding characteris�c of our �me”.

This suspicion that Arendt had about that the increasingly trivial thinking of the western world was an important early iden�fica�on of a trend that gathered momentum in the decades that followed. These anxie�es have strengthened in recent years with the surging influence of social media and mobile technology. There is no �me for an extended examina�on of how smartphones have

upgraded our thoughtlessness. These are s�ll early days in the outsourcing of our minds. However, the most pronounced nega�ve impacts of social media seem to be upon our civic skills.

Briefly, Arendt would have par�cularly regreted the loss of different cultural voices in our head and the impoverishment of debate through the enlarging of our cultural silos. There are certainly some huge feedback loops in our media system, exemplified in one screeching moment of cultural feedback on ‘Fox News’ in April 2018. The evening show presenter invited President Trump, if he was watching, to flash his bedroom light on and off. He was watching, because live on air, he did. Fox News then proudly tweeted their scoop, which was inevitably retweeted by the President

Arendt would have noted the use of big data as an atempt to colonise our minds with influences for our consump�on and votes. Perhaps most of all, Arendt would have been troubled by the reduc�on of democra�c arguments into slogans that can fit into a tweet. As our culture has shi�ed decisively away from the word and moved towards the image, poli�cal batles are now fought in gifs and clips. They are fought with tribalism and emo�ve language, not through reason and exchange.

Do we not live in a society that con�nually refreshes the present? Under the ideals of the Me and the More, the New and the Now, all other kinds of reality get pushed away.

The las�ng influence of Bernays could be observed in the advice offered by President Bush Jr. a�er the terrorist atack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11. Answering press ques�ons, he commented: “We cannot let the terrorists achieve the objec�ve of frightening our Na�on to the point where we don’t conduct business, where people don’t shop 24. That is their inten�on. Their inten�on was not only to kill and maim and destroy. Their inten�on was to frighten to the point where our Na�on would not act”.

This Freudian slip should not be taken too seriously, but it could be revealing of how ac�ng authen�cally in our modern culture is reduced to mere consump�on. The boundaries of our thinking are regulated by those in power, and the modern duty is to ‘Enjoy!’ or as SpriteTM once declared, “Obey your thirst!”. There are many riffs on this theme that appeals to the inner-self or the indulgent self, “because you’re worth it!” (L’Oréal). Whatever the details, there is a clear moral impera�ve to not deny yourself and to “consume!”

Neil Postman delivers

With childish simplicity, a�er really losing control of himself a�er a joke at the dinner table, my 7year-old son Thibault said, “It’s funny isn’t it, when you really laugh, you can’t think”.

When he is much older, I could explain to him all the ways in which his remark would have been appreciated by Hannah Arendt (or Schopenhauer or the Frankfurt School). Indeed, when he is ready for it, I could also provide Thibault with a copy of Neil Postman’s prescient book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” (1985). It was writen at a �me when the technological advances of TV were having a major cultural impact; the sub�tle is a telling one: “Public Discourse in a �me of Show Business”.

Postman writes with unusual insight about how the TV medium had made informa�on subordinate to entertainment and he uses the President Reagan, with his Hollywood background as an example. “Our poli�cs, religion, news, athle�cs, educa�on and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular no�ce. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death”. If only he could have lived to witness President Trump, it would have blown up the cathode ray tube in Postman’s mind. Although 24

it has to be stated that Trump, in so many ways, is really just a madly distrac�ng side-show from the real ac�on that is taking place systemically within our culture.

Postman underlines the importance of the Word. This is because the detailed ar�cula�on that language enables in communica�on gives genuine depth to our understanding of each other and the world. It is what makes us human.

In a striking passage from the first chapter of his book, he looks back to something he was taught as a child, The Decalogue, more specifically, Moses’ Second Commandment, ‘Do not make a graven image’ (Exodus 20:4-6). He writes: “It is a strange injunc�on to include as part of an ethical system, unless its author assumed a connec�on between forms of human communica�on and the quality of a culture”. The word is heavy, the image is light, but if our society loses its strength to communicate in words, in real dialogue, it makes us very vulnerable to various moral dangers.

Postman writes: “Consider the primi�ve technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophical argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content”.

Climate change is not a major news item because it is heavy in words, o�en scien�fic words. The spaghe�-like truths that appear when studying the causes and effects of a changing climate system could never be reduced to an emoji or to a casual tweet.

Climate Academy students have mobilised their school peers to make short, focused videos about climate change in order to draw aten�on to their own hardnosed journalism about the heavy facts. 25 The difficult social reality is that ar�culate truths have to piggyback on entertainment to get any visibility. This problem is compounded by the fact that climate change is not really a topic to raise a laugh. Therefore, in order not to forsake the truth, many of the videos have resorted to irony in order to compress humour with the troubling facts of our situa�on.

A Brave New World?

In the opening lines of Postman’s book, he captures the same concerns about thoughtlessness and thought control that Arendt had with remarkable clarity and poignancy. He writes:

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, though�ul Americans sang so�ly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgoten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capaci�es to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of informa�on. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a cap�ve culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in ‘Brave New World Revisited’, the civil libertarians and ra�onalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, failed to take into account man's almost infinite appe�te for distrac�ons.

In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflic�ng pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflic�ng 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.”

Such a powerful text deserves several slow readings, and I feel reluctant to hustle the reader onto the next chapter. All I can do is double tap the Enter key to create a bit of space.

Chapter 5

Thought Control

The return of Eichmann - The unexamined life of a Mass Murderer

The comedian, author and social cri�c George Carlin put it like this: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Thoughtlessness has been described (so far) as a mainly shallow and conformist phenomena; it is poten�ally deep in consequences, but rootless in reality. The moronic figure of Eichmann sat on trial in Jerusalem demonstrated just how far this banal form of evil could go.

However, it must be admited now that Arendt did not read everything about Eichmann correctly.

This book is going to make a major pivot here. Just as the academic world needed to pivot when new evidence and analysis of Eichmann was put forward. A�er years of research, in 2011, Be�na

Stangneth published an acclaimed work of history, “Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer”. This book overturned our understanding of what was going on in 1961.

These new angles on Eichmann have been kept off the radar in this book on purpose. This is because Arendt had iden�fied such an important moral truth in her view of Eichmann that it deserves to stand on its own. She was poin�ng us in the direc�on of some deeply important reali�es of the human condi�on, her insights deserved the space to interrogate us.

However, it now seems that Arendt did not get the full picture of Eichmann. It could even be argued that she was duped by him.

Stangneth pieced together and validated a set of interviews carried out by a Dutch Nazi journalist Wilhelm Sassan, who had talked extensively with another Nazi living in Argen�na during the 1950s named Ricardo Klement. These interviews would become famous as the ‘Sassan Interviews’, because the real iden�ty of Ricardo Klement was Adolf Eichmann. What Eichmann said to his fellow Nazi émigré in Buenos Aires contrasted sharply with the image that he portrayed of himself in the trial in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Jerusalem presented himself as a small-�me bureaucrat with no sharpened sense of ideology. Arendt writes, "Eichmann was not Iago, he was not Macbeth… Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no mo�ves at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the mater colloquially, never realised what he was doing… it was sheer thoughtlessness."

By contrast, Eichmann in Buenos Aires describes himself as a “fana�cal warrior, figh�ng for the freedom of my blood” and he smugly signs photographs of himself as “Adolf Eichmann – SS Obersturmbannführer (re�red)”. In the 796 pages of evidence forensically examined by Stangneth, he frequently boasts about his sadis�c thuggery and the high profile and role that he played in the decision making of the Third Reich. When ques�oned in his exile about the deporta�on of 400,000 Jews from Hungary Eichmann responded, flushed with pride, “It was actually an achievement that was never matched before or since.” 26 Stangneth writes, “He dispatched, decreed, allowed, took steps, issued orders and gave audiences.”

Stangneth’s Eichmann simply pretended that he was numb to the events going on around him during the trial. His strategic manipula�on of his image during the trial was an agile trick in decep�on. Given the weight of evidence from the Sassan files, our understanding of Eichmann has been radically overturned. This level of decep�on not only shows his capacity for self-reflec�on and social awareness, it even shows that he had an excess of it.

Stangneth’s new perspec�ve on Eichmann does not invalidate the insights that Arendt had into the banality of evil, nor does it undermine her analysis of how totalitarian regimes can work. What her research does expose is how very clear-minded commitments and ambi�ons can disguise themselves as bland, neutral thoughtlessness. It now looks like Eichmann dressed up his sick ideology with the camouflage of mindlessness. Worse, he even tried to pass off his ac�ons as somehow noble. In one breath-taking passage of the trial, Eichmann tried to argue that he was fulfilling the Kan�an Impera�ve because he was prepared to act ‘universally’. In his truly gross misuse of Kant, Eichmann claimed that he was doing something that anyone else would have done in his circumstances. It made Arendt choke.

Stangneth’s update to Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann is very illumina�ng for climate change and the reality that lies beneath the surface of the poli�cal rhetoric. The indifference that the Highly developed na�ons show towards keeping emissions down to a sustainable level is in fact a purposeful indifference. The virtuous speeches, full of green sound bites, signal the right inten�ons, but the policy ac�on lags an incredulous distance behind. Their noble words mask a very ignoble reality.

At least Donald Trump is noisy about how much he “digs coal”. The introductory book, “No Common Sense”, demonstrated how unreasonable the current situa�on is. The speed with which we are heading to an ecological catastrophe is such a stark reality that something more than just a carelessness must be at work. Thought control must be happening on a more purposeful level.

Manufacturing

When I am faced with the daily poli�cal challenge of ge�ng my children into bed, I o�en ask them (in a mo�va�onal tone of voice) if they would like to brush their teeth first, or put on their pyjamas first. They are not yet old enough to realise that the superficial choice that they are offered is just a kindly manipula�ve gesture to get them to do what I want them to do.

The strategy of closing down freedom, in the name of freedom, is a decent trick. The reason I am unashamed about manufacturing my children’s consent is that I am confident that my ac�ons are mo�vated by a concern for their well-being. It might be true that the thought of a glass of red wine once the children have setled down to sleep might stray into the mind of a parent in those tricky twilight hours. However, the essen�al fact is that a parent is basically mo�vated by the well-being of their child who needs a lengthy night of rest.

In the case of commercial companies, their adverts invi�ng people to enjoy their freedom, has all the moral depth of a TV game-show host. In 1976, under the Freedom of Speech 27 (ironically), the United States released a number of controls on how much private companies could lobby members of congress 28. A study by James A. Thurber in 2014 29 , es�mated that $9bn was spent by major conglomerates and companies in atempts by an es�mated 100,000 lobbyists to control legisla�on. Studies by the Washington Post 30 and the Economist 31 demonstrated that it was a ‘white hot’ investment 32 when the rewards of that spending were mapped out. Labelling that $9bn as ‘lobbying’ and not ‘bribery’ makes many democra�cally minded American voters profoundly angry. The image of congress members spending hours a day flicking through their mobile phones trying to iden�fy a rewarding source of funds is a truly dispiri�ng reflec�on.

In the previous sec�on on Bernays, the arranged marriage between poli�cs and big business that he had presided over blossomed beau�fully well. Under this account, our thoughtless about climate change could be explained by the numbing of our poli�cal nerves. This deadening of our awareness and powers of cri�cal thinking is evidently a major factor of our inability to make a proper response. But it is now �me for the fuller picture. The strength and mo�va�on of massive economic nodes of power to block the move to green, carbon free energy must not be underes�mated. Behind our capacity for trivial responses to the crisis, there is also a very ar�culate and purposeful strategy that has been in play. The rela�onship between poli�cs and the fossil fuel industry is anything but passively banal.

It is �me for Bernays to show us “… how deep the rabbit hole goes” (The Matrix).

Bernays is back

Bernays had seen the power of propaganda to take a reluctantly isola�onist America into World War One in 1917 first hand. He had worked for the Commitee of Public Rela�ons and engaged in what he described as, ‘psychological warfare’ 33. Following this affirma�on of his understanding of mass

27 First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respec�ng an establishment of religion, or prohibi�ng the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to pe��on the Government for a redress of grievances.

28 Buckley v. Valeo, 75-436, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).

29 Lee Fang, March 10, 2014, The Na�on, Where Have All the Lobbyists Gone? On paper, the influence-peddling business is drying up. But lobbying money is flooding into Washington, DC, like never before. What’s going on?

30 Brad Plumer (October 10, 2011). "The outsized returns from lobbying" The Washington Post. January 13, 2012. ”Hiring a top-flight lobbyist looks like a spectacular investment”.

31 January 13, 2012. ”Hiring a top-flight lobbyist looks like a spectacular investment”.

32 Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen W. Mazza, & Susan Scholz. (8 April 2009). "Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures: An Empirical Case Study of Tax Breaks for Mul�na�onal Corpora�ons" Retrieved 7 March 2013.

33 Alan Axelrod, Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda; New York: Palgrave Macmillan (St. Mar�n’s Press), 2009

psychology, he realised that “what could be done for a na�on at war could be done for organiza�ons and people in a na�on at peace”. 34 Bernays then used his rela�onship with Freud and his astute understanding of public rela�ons to work for various corporate interests, most notably American Tobacco. This company was a market leader, but their major problem was the existence of a strong social taboo about women who smoked. If Bernays’ strategies worked well, he could breakdown this taboo and thereby double their customer base.

So, on Easter Sunday in New York, 1929, Bernays planted atrac�ve 35 women into the march who were smoking ‘Torches of Freedom’. He had also lined up the major media firms to capture their moment of social libera�on. In 1923, women smoked just 5% of cigarete produc�on, in the year of the march it jumped to 12%, eventually reaching 33% in 1965. 36 In the 1920s, Bernays also helped to turn around the struggling sales in bacon by an appeal to people’s ‘well-being’. In an adver�sing campaign that used doctor’s endorsements, he not only transformed the profits of the Beach-Nut Packing Company, but he also managed to install into the American psyche the enduring idea that Bacon and Eggs defined the history of the ‘Great American Breakfast’. Although Bernays was dealing with trivial products like bacon, he was taken very seriously by those with corporate and governmental power.

Bernays goes Bananas

The applica�on of Bernays’ insights into mass psychology had demonstrated their commercial poten�al by ataching our primi�ve ins�ncts for self-preserva�on, iden�ty, sex and power to products. In the deep freeze of the Cold War, he was invited from New York to go to Washington as the government wanted to use his cra� for a different kind of project. A problem was brewing in the United States’ sphere of influence in 1954, and they needed someone to lubricate public opinion. The problem was Guatemala.

The na�on had recently elected President Arbnez who was in favour of a moderate form of capitalism. His land reforms had increased agricultural produc�vity and inaugurated various levels of social care from educa�on to health. Arbnez’s supporters had spent 10 years trying to build a democra�c state from under the pressure of a corrupt dictatorship that took bribes from external landowners who had been exploi�ng the land and the people.

Here was the problem. The external landowner was the “United Fruit Company”, a huge American firm that traded in bananas from Guatemala. The effects of Arbnez’s reforms were en�rely nega�ve on their profits. In 1954, Allen Dulles was a board member of the United Fruit Company, and he was also the head of the CIA. His brother John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State, and he had previously served as a lawyer for United Fruit. For a company with annual profit margins of $65m 37 to protect (a sum equivalent to $661m in 2017), Guatemala now posed a very real problem.

For those with the power and resources to do something, the idea of invading a Banana Republic was just too tasty to resist. For a Guatemalan government with a gross state revenue that only equalled half the amount of United Fruits profits, the was only going to be one outcome. The CIA

34 Edward Bernays, Cutlip (1994), p. 168.

35 Models, but they were not too atrac�ve, so as to not be role models

36 O'Keefe, Anne Marie, and Richard W. Pollay. "Deadly Targe�ng of Women in Promo�ng Cigaretes." Journal of the American Medical Women's Associa�on 51.1-2 (1996). Web. 28 Apr 2010.

37 Immerman, Richard H. (1982). The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Interven�on. Aus�n, Texas: University of Texas Press

code-named the coup d’état, ‘Opera�on PBSUCCESS’ 38. It was a success. Only 9 days a�er the CIAsponsored troops went over the borders, Arbnez resigned. It was as easy as peeling a banana.

However, as the US administra�on was going to violate so many basic standards, they needed to iden�fy a good cover story and find someone skilled enough to co-ordinate it. It was a job wellsuited to Bernays, and so he orchestrated the extensive propaganda push to provide important cover to their military moves.

Bernays got to work portraying Guatemala as an existen�al threat to the USA, he plugged the move into people’s fears about the USSR (especially a�er it acquired an H Bomb in 1953). For example, a few months a�er the victory, an event was organised by the United Fruits’ Public Rela�ons department. Vice-President Nixon was joined on stage by the new dictator (Carlos Cas�llo Armas) and a huge collec�on of Marxist books - stacked up behind them. These books had allegedly been found in Arbnez’s central office.

The truth was that a�er an exhaus�ve search, the only direct evidence of a link between Arbnez and the USSR was one singular receipt from a Moscow bookshop found by the CIA for $22.95 in the Guatemalan Communist Party office; a fringe party that only held 4 seats in the 58-seat parliament of Arbnez’s government 39. (If anything, Arbnez had actually been inspired by Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ that pulled the US Economy out of the Great Recession.)

Against this background, Nixon addressed the crowd and the TV cameras: “This is the first �me in the history of world that a communist government has been overthrown by the people … and we are sure that under your leadership, supported by people, who I have met by the hundreds on my visit to Guatemala, that Guatemala is going to enter into a new era in which there will be prosperity for the people together with liberty for the people”. Nixon did not go on to fully explain what he meant by the words, ‘prosperity’ and ‘freedom’.

In another detail of this “Public Rela�ons” exercise, Bernays graphically illustrated the Freudian roots of his thinking when he placed bananas into the hands of strategically selected celebri�es who could endorse some of the ra�onale for the take-over The hand-held banana. A perfectly phallic symbol of what was going on in the minds of US administra�on as they looked across the Caribbean Sea towards Guatemala in 1954.

Does some context help?

My baccalaureate History students find this episode of the Cold War a litle surreal. Their reading of the primary texts provokes numerous ques�ons of qualifica�on. They struggle to accommodate the strong democra�c rhetoric of the United States during that period and their confessed respect for the rule of law with the violent overthrow of a government to install a dictator.

The takeover of Guatemala has to be seen inside the paranoid context of the Cold War. By 1954, the FBI had carried out over 100 inves�ga�ons through commitees like HUAC into people suspected of links to the USSR (including a man called Charlie Chaplin), as McCarthyism had reached its high-�de

38 United Fruit is the only company known to have a CIA cryptonym, ‘UFCO’, ‘UNFC’ or some�mes, ‘UNIFRUIT’.

39 A full analysis of the episode can be found in the well-respected, Stephen C. Schlesinger, Stephen Kinzer (1982) “Biter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala”, Harvard University Press.

mark in January of that year 40. The US was fearful of a communist ‘domino effect’ star�ng in La�n America to mirror the one that Eisenhower had observed happening in Asia 41 .

This context is not provided in order to excuse the naked economic interest that led United Fruits to lobby Congress for an invasion. However, it is revealing that the Cold War provided a generously so� environment for major companies to protect and expand their commercial interests. The Guatemalan coup d’état provides a bracingly clear example of how ideology, commerce and power can combine to atack democracy, even in a country which is so fervently outspoken about the importance of it

There is nothing new under the sun

Quite naturally, Adam Smith’s invisible hand has got some knuckles. Japan witnessed the strength of American trade interests when Commodore Mathew C. Perry parked his naval squadron into Tokyo Bay in 1853. He was equipped with high technology weaponry and he was there to complain in the strongest terms possible about Japan’s Sakoku period. The Japanese had enjoyed a period of extreme isola�on from the rest of the world, with minimal trade and cultural exchange with the outside world for a full 222 years. There had been several requests to play ball, but Japan was not coming out to play - un�l Perry’s US warships forced them to.

In 1856, the Bri�sh Navy had returned to Hong Kong to start the Second Opium War with China. The UK was very frustrated that the Chinese only accepted silver in payment for their massive export of tea, porcelain and silk. So, in order to try to balance up the trade deficit, the UK wanted to force China to deal in opium. Opium was unsurprisingly an illegal drug in the UK, but ge�ng over a quarter of all Chinese men addicted to the substance not only so�ened the trade deficit, it also so�ened the concentra�on of the Chinese army Forcing the Chinese to take over 1,000 tonnes of hard drugs every year morally outraged Gladstone who would later remark as Prime Minister, "that a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know, and I have not read of”.

And finally, and for different trade reasons, the shortest war in human history happened in 1896. The 38 minutes of figh�ng on August 27th in the Anglo-Zanzibar war started at 09:02am. It cost the Zanzibar Sultanate around 500 lives and 2 boats, it cost the Bri�sh navy squadron parked in the sea outside the capital a lot of shells and bullets. At the close of a very short day of play, the Bri�sh had won the right to choose a new Sultan who was more favourable to their trading ambi�ons.

The White Man’s Burden

Observing the very mixed map of Western history with a proper aten�veness to detail can help us to see some of the subplots in the present. Baccalaureate history students can find the past to be morally alarming, rather like discovering a dirty secret about an old family member. My former student Theresa Fuhrmann once remarked: “It is worse than finding out that Santa Claus is not real, it is like finding him downstairs fumbling around trying to steal some money out of your piggy bank”.

It is true that each of these 19th century incidents had their contexts, and these are just the simple headlines. Just as the aggression in Guatemala was jus�fied by the se�ng of the Cold War, these three examples of gunboat diplomacy can be understood as the pain inflicted from ‘The White

40 Robert Griffith (1987). The Poli�cs of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate Univ of Massachusets Press. p. 263.

41 China fell to Communist rule in 1949, then Korea in 1950 and it was threatening to happen in in Vietnam in 1954, a�er the French losses in the Batle of Dien Bien Phu.

Man’s Burden’. However, this should not prompt us to look away with indigna�on at our past, as if it were something that had nothing to do with our human condi�on. The opposite is true.

These moments in history are a useful reminder of how shockingly hypocri�cal every government and private interest can be in their global affairs. They illustrate how permanent the bond is between foreign policy and trade. Arendt would always insist that we listen to the different voices from the past in order to interrogate our current world order with some wisdom.

A similar context frames the current geo-poli�cal struggles over climate change. The fossil fuel industry is set to lose billions of dollars and they are able to exert a tremendous weight of lobbying pressure on the governments of the world to slow down the switch to green energy supplies. Admitedly, the dominant themes of our dominantly consumerist culture con�nue to provide a so� environment for the very narrow interests of oil, gas and coal execu�ves to keep their commercial interests in charge of public policy. However,

The Paris Climate Accord commited virtually every na�on in the world to keeping greenhouse gas emissions to a level that is compa�ble with a rise of ‘well under 2°C’, but foreign secretaries have been woefully slow in transla�ng this ambi�on into anything remotely realis�c. This is not because it would have a nega�ve impact on trade, but it is because it would have a nega�ve impact on the ‘wrong’ kind of trade.

Indeed, a�er affording their employees and shareholders a rich pipeline of pay-outs, the oil and gas industries have been able to afford the purchase of an irresis�ble level of power in both the media and poli�cs. For example, in 2021, IMF research es�mated global fossil fuel subsidies at about $6 trillion, with about 70% from "under-charging" for the environmental costs associated with the fuels 42. In 2015 the subsidy was worth $5.3 trillion, and in 2017 an es�mated $5.2 trillion. These figures mean that public money is being used to destabilise the future at a rate of over $10million every minute of every day.

The details of how the fossil fuel industry has strategically managed to sustain public support for its exclusive priori�es will be exposed in some detail in “Popper Tackles Climate Change”. However, the truth can be put bluntly like this: Globally, over the last 50 years, the fossil fuel industry has made a whopping $52tn of pure profit. 43 This is a serious amount of cash to spend. An average profit of $3bn a day, can buy you a serious level of control.

The first countries to suffer from this destruc�vely myopic view of the economy will be the poorer na�ons, like Guatemala. Their democracy was overpowered in 1954 by military power, and a�er the US installed the authoritarian rule of Carlo Cas�llo Armas, the country eventually fell into a devasta�ng civil war that lasted from 1960 un�l 1996. Such developing countries are the least well equipped to handle the offensives that Nature will now throw at their borders.

History does not look back favourably on the 19th century trade deals. ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ was summed up well by celebrated inves�ga�ve journalist Edward Morel in 1920. He had been instrumental in exposing “the horror, the horror” 44 [sic] of Belgian King Leopold II's genocidal trade in Congolese rubber:

42 htps://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidies

43 htps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/21/revealed-oil-sectors-staggering-profits-last -50years

44 From Joseph Conrad’s “The Heart of Darkness” (1899) in which an ivory trader named Kurt whispers his final words, “the horror, the horror” as he remembers all the atroci�es he has carried out and witnessed in the Congo.

“In the process of imposing his poli�cal dominion over the African, the white man has carved broad and bloody avenues from one end of Africa to the other… what the par�al occupa�on of his soil by the white man has failed to do; what the mapping out of European poli�cal “spheres of influence” has failed to do; what the maxim and the rifle, the slave gang, labour in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do; what even the oversea slave trade failed to do, the power of modern capitalis�c exploita�on, assisted by modern engines of destruc�on, may yet succeed in accomplishing” 45 .

Neither does History look back favourably onto the Guatemalan coup 46. Stripped of its Cold War narra�ve it is difficult to believe that economic interests could be so ruthlessly single-minded about bananas. What will history make of climate change once our own cultural blindness is removed? How will history students read the ac�ons of our democra�c governments who facilitated the con�nued profits of a handful of major companies at the expense of so many other lives?

The irony of an outspokenly democra�c country invading another to install a corrupt leader will be usurped by the irony of global governments seeking economic growth and pursuing energy policies that lead to a global economic collapse.

As Arendt noted: “The outstanding nega�ve quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.”

(1) Thoughtlessness and (2) Thought Control …this �me together

Underneath the cheap slogans that came out of Eichmann's mouth, there was a ruthlessly dark force at work. What lay behind Eichmann’s thoughtlessness was actually a grisly example of thought control. Looking at the trail in 1961 with these two, seemingly contradictory, aspects of his responses put face-to-face, it becomes an invita�on for us to cross-examine our own society. It invites us to look at how our thoughtlessness might also leave us open to thought control.

With respect to climate change, the shallowness of our civic aten�on has enabled various short term interests to stall meaningful ac�on. The current combina�on of thoughtlessness and thought control, is se�ng up our current world order for the most withering cri�cism from the people who will inherit the ecological disaster.

This seemingly impossible combina�on of thoughtlessness and thought control is what makes modern culture very interes�ng to analyse. Philosophy enjoys paradox and apparent contradic�ons, and the state we are in with climate change is full of them. Perhaps with an apology for resta�ng the central contradic�on one more �me – but it so remarkably easy to forget:

How can our democra�cally elected governments allow a catastrophe, with the magnitude of unchecked climate change, to unleash itself on their ci�zens? How can elected leaders, with a mandate to protect the well-being of their people not inform their people of the most basic choices that they are making without knowing it? The threat posed by climate change is just so appalling that once the conclusions of science are held in focus then another part of the brain simply cannot reconcile the lack of policy ac�on with those truths. Maybe it is too absurd. Perhaps, we all just have a naturally child-like ins�nct to trust those in power? Perhaps we are just not prepared to accept a

45 “The Black Man’s Burden”, (1920) E.D. Morel.

46 Outside of the USA a clearly disapproving view was taken by both foreign governments and the foreign press. For example, the Bri�sh Prime Minister Clement Atlee described it as, “a plain act of aggression".

Ka�aesque world in which our symbolic order is so perverse and uncaring? So rather than doubt the government, we doubt the reality.

As the carbon data demonstrated in the first book, “No Common Sense”, we have not managed to stabilise greenhouse gas emission rates, let alone reduce them. We are only a frac�on of the way towards a solu�on to climate change a�er 30 years of trying. The scien�fic consensus is so strong, all the hockey-s�ck arrows are poin�ng to a global disaster, and the projec�ons are hardening into a grim outlook. The ‘litle by litle’ approach has failed but no-one is poin�ng out the failure. When this situa�on is genuinely considered, it just does not fit anywhere with our view of modern government. It is such a viola�on of common sense that it throws you back onto the evidence each �me in order to reassess your thinking.

Indeed, one of the darker aspects of teaching Philosophy and Ecology is that young teenage minds o�en see the ar�ficial nature of poli�cal reality for the first �me – and this awakening is o�en a hard one. Poli�cal philosophy can be shocking.

It really does not mater if inac�on with climate change is more a product of our thoughtlessness or more a consequence of thought control, the fact is that this is a very odd �me in human history.

Chapter 6

Public Sphere - Private Sphere

Social Blindness

As explained in the first part of the introduc�on, one of the fundamental problems of climate change is that we are all naturally ‘Mo�on Blind’. We are just a bundle of experiences with no plan-view of what is going on, and so it is very demanding for us to see the pace of change and make reliable connec�ons between the dots of experience. In our ambi�on to see reality more fully, Science can help us overcome this blindness with the help of graphs and charts. Without it, our vision of reality would always be stubbornly rooted in the present, or in a confusing mash of data.

It also seems that we are afflicted by a very similar problem which could be designated ‘Social Blindness’ because the same cogni�ve difficul�es afflict our awareness of social reality. We are very forge�ul of how things used to be and find it difficult to get a reliable sense of perspec�ve. We are stubbornly rooted to our current social set-up, we get used to the wallpaper of our values and expecta�ons.

It is always a bit alarming to be faced with a different moral world that was once transposed onto the same physical area because our spontaneous moral responses to the world feel authen�c and enduringly stable. For example, we have become so accustomed to a non-smoking policy on-board aeroplanes that it is a real jolt to see old TV footage of passengers si�ng in familiar rows of seats, being served a gin and tonic by an air steward, but then si�ng back and ligh�ng up a cigarete.

Whatever the social change, we tend to be very forge�ul of the past. This forge�ulness gives the present a sense of permanence that it does not deserve. It also alienates the past from us so that we become rather deaf to its voice. Therefore, in order to help us overcome our ‘mo�on blindness’, Phillippe Rekacewicz (Geographer and Associate Researcher, Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Helsinki) has produced some helpful maps. These maps are not of countries or con�nents, they are not maps of glacial decline or urban growth.

These are maps of an airport.

Rekacewicz is a celebrated cartographer whose maps are rooted in scien�fic research. However, the following sequence of maps are not produced with the help of science, they just take a simple plan view of Oslo Airport. They were not compiled to help us navigate our way through physical space, they were made to help us understand our social space. But there is a parallel between his scien�fic maps and these type of maps, they are both atemp�ng to make invisible trends, visible.

Here is the first one. It is from 2005.

In green, on the le�, is public area before the check-in control which leads to another large public area in blue. This sea�ng area has a restaurant and bar, which looks out through open windows to the tarmac. At the back, is a small red area for Duty Free shopping.

Copyright © Mathew Pye April 2024

In 2006 the airport was developed:

Now the passengers enter through the security control and immediately enter a greatly enlarged shopping corridor. Any passenger, who wanted to avoid the opportuni�es of Duty Free Shopping, would have to squeeze themselves past the shopping trollies that stretch out to the le�.

In 2007, the transforma�on of the airport was complete:

The blue public space has shrunk to its minimum. For those passengers who want to get to their gate without any purchases, most of them will have to pass through the check-out �lls empty handed with an apologe�c shrug to admit their reluctance to buy something.

Rekacewicz has a similar set of maps for Chris�ansen Airport (near his home town of Arendal, Norway), Paris, Berlin and many others 47. Clearly illustrated is a social truth about the growing incursion of the private sphere into the public sphere. Geographers are interested in iden�fying significant data and change, then producing clear representa�ons of it. Rekacewicz spent over a decade as head of the cartographic department at GRID, an organisa�on that provides expert graphs and data for the United Na�ons Environmental Program. This work was o�en for the climate scien�sts in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change).

The climate charts and the airport plans are not unrelated. How we think about anything is embedded in a material, social context. We are all so used to walking through airport shopping areas on the way to our flight that it is hard to imagine a �me in the recent past when the commercial space was less extensive. Of course, airport maps are not to be taken too seriously, but they do illustrate a general cultural shi� that many people sense, some�mes images can make plain that which is so difficult to capture with prose. They are just three s�ll shots of �me, but they help us to make sense of the flux of everyday experiences that we have by taking a bird’s eye view of reality.

As a long-suffering Manchester City fan, the �me when football was organised without the global financial interests is something that I can only remember with any clarity if I browse through old match day programmes. The incursion of huge private interests into football might have made my home club into a world power, but the change has had many nega�ve impacts on the sport in general.

The money markets are quite brilliant at achieving many diverse human ambi�ons. But accep�ng the benefits of a capitalist economy is categorically not the same as endorsing a capitalist society. There are some areas of public life in which the power and dynamism of the free market has given a properly defined space in which to work its magic. Lionel Messi would s�ll be the best player in the world if he was given a football pitch that was a few meters narrower.

We all accept that there should be legal limits for private industries that make food, because toxic food is so dangerous. By extension, we would all consent to legally binding limits for carbon emissions because a CO2 level well over 400ppm in the atmosphere is so dangerous. Climate change regula�on is just as basic as this. It is nothing to do with any sort of Marxist conspiracy, it is simply about se�ng reasonable boundaries for the free-market.

The twist that the airport maps illustrate is that the free market has a natural tendency to encroach on the space in our mind for thinking about these issues clearly.

The Human Condi�on

These maps also offer a good introduc�on to the third book by Arendt that could help us to understand Climate Change, ‘The Human Condi�on’ (1958). It is a book in which Arendt explores the differences between public space and private space. She looks back to An�quity when there were clearly defined boundaries between that which was the ‘Public Sphere’, and that which was ‘Private Sphere’. It is a very demanding and complicated work of philosophy, and it requires too many

qualifica�ons for the details of her book to be of useful here. Arendt spends many pages contras�ng the Ancient Greek and Roman understanding of the public and private realm with the modern world that func�ons in what she calls the ‘Social Sphere’.

What Arendt admires about these ancient socie�es is that they clearly demarcated a strong line between any private interests and any public interests. Private affairs, concerned with the economy of the household including the land, the property, slaves and everything else, got le� behind when the man entered into the public buildings of the city to debate the affairs of the polis. This is not to say that this is an endorsement of some of the violence and abuse that was carried out under the ‘alpha-male’ command of the private realm; instead, for Arendt a meaningful public space could only operate once all material concerns had been transcended.

Arendt took par�cular aim at the no�on of ‘public opinion’ as it gave importance to some kind of loose aggregate thought. The public interest was something uterly dis�nct that could only properly be acquired through direct and vigorous debate in a public space when people consider maters that lie far beyond private worries. For Arendt, the public interest had nothing to do with a vague common denominator, or sum, of private interests.

For any reader familiar with Kant’s ethics where “autonomous” acts carry a moral nobility that have an intrinsic worth, in contrast to “heteronomous” acts that are simply products of desires or tradi�ons and customs, then this vocabulary is an excellent star�ng point for understanding Arendt’s view of the difference between ‘public’ and ‘private’ ac�ons and realms.

When we think and legislate in a genuinely public sphere then we are crea�ng something uniquely valuable, and something beau�fully human. Arendt gave our ability to transcend ourselves to work towards jus�ce, equity and freedom a central importance. Any examples of human solidarity characterised by such values and ambi�ons she labelled as “Acts”.

The key point that Arendt wants to establish is that the modern world has strangled the human ability to ‘Act’. The mixing of the public and the private spheres, with its increasing bureaucra�c and technological machinery, has led to an atomised and rootless society that struggles to Act. As with ‘thinking’, Arendt has a very par�cular understanding of what it means to ‘Act’. She means the ability to debate and reflect with genuine liberty and depth. ‘Ac�ng’ for Arendt was the type of ac�vity that makes us truly human 48 .

Are you on The Truman Show?

In 1998, millions of people watched ‘The Truman Show’ from the comfort of a cinema seat, wai�ng to find out if Truman (Jim Carrey) would eventually see that he was living in a virtual world. Truman, an insurance salesman, lives the ‘American Dream’ in a place called Seahaven Island. He has no idea that the horizon of the sea actually meets a painted studio wall, onto which clouds are projected. He has never seen any of the thousands of hidden cameras, and he has no idea that all of the people in his life are ac�ng. Truman is the unwi�ng star of a reality TV show that is screened 24/7 to an audience around the globe that can buy any of the products that they see on the set.

All of the actors in his life must keep Truman from asking too many ques�ons about the world beyond Seahaven Island. When in school he declares his boyhood ambi�on to become “an explorer, like the great Magellan”, his teacher shows him a map of the world and regre�ully says, “well, there really isn’t much le� to explore”. When Truman sees a large studio light accidently fall from the roof of the studio onto the pavement in front of him, the incident is explained away on the radio news in

48 To be contrasted with ‘Work’ and ‘Labour’ (again each with its own very specific meaning).

his car as he drives to work as “a plane shedding parts”. The day when they faked the death of his father at sea, it wove a very useful aqua phobia into Truman’s mind so that he would be fearful of sailing too closely to the edge of the studio.

The clipped lawns and bright white picket fences, the sunny smiles of the actors, all keep Truman happy enough for a while. However, human curiosity eventually emboldens him to the get into a boat that sails through a manufactured storm and finally the spikes through studio wall. A�er walking along the outer rim of the studio (that used to func�on as the horizon), he finds the short steps that take him up to the ‘Exit Door’ of his commercial space. A�er his final words to the ‘Big Other’ in the sky, he takes a bow, and walks through the door into the real world.

In 2006, Joel Gold (MD) a psychiatrist at the New York University School of Medicine reported in an academic lecture that he had observed 5 49 cases of schizophrenia in which the pa�ent believed that they were stars of a similarly styled reality TV show. One man (Case 2, Mr ‘B’) had become so deluded that he travelled to New York to climb the Statue of Liberty in the belief that a�er a drama�c reunion with his high school girlfriend, he would be released from the show. The Bri�sh Journal of Psychiatry 50 confirmed its own cases of a condi�on that is now commonly known as ‘Truman Syndrome’.

As with the case of pa�ent 'LM' from Munich who suffered from ‘Mo�on Blindness’, those afflicted by the ‘Truman Syndrome’ in some perverted way, might have a more telling view of reality. Their predicament enables them to see beyond common sense. We live out our lives inside a world that is set up to keep us focused on certain interests, through key methods of tempta�on and distrac�on.

Truman enjoys his world, he grows up in a secure and loving environment. Seahaven Island is prosperous and the rela�onships he builds are not without some authen�city. There is no obvious need for Truman to wrestle with the truth behind the appearance. If Truman, his friends and family are happy, if all the people employed by the show and the viewers are happy, then what is the problem? There are many arguments that could be advanced in support of the sani�sed and communal life that Truman lives in.

However, the problem is that Truman’s curiosity about the world is always siphoned away by those managing the show. The greater his curiosity, the more heavily manipula�ve the control has to be. Truman is not as free as he thinks, the major truths about his life are withheld from him. The Director of The Truman Show who controls the show from his ‘The Lunar Room’ above Seahaven Island, has to keep Truman happy because the whole reality show can only con�nue to draw in huge revenues if he stays inside the illusion of his fabricated world.

When Truman walks through the exit door, into the ‘real world’, it is a moment of libera�on. Ironically, all the people on “The Truman Show”, watching ‘The Truman Show’ cheer and fist-pump at his moment of freedom, whilst watching TV themselves; a moment of pathos that becomes even more ironic when we think about ourselves as observers watching them…

It is not easy to see how much our social reality is a fabrica�on. In an odd way, caricatures o�en open up the truth about reality by distor�ng it.

Back to the Airport

49 The full paper was eventually published with his philosopher brother Ian Gold: Gold, J. & Gold, I. (2012). The “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 17(6), 455-472.

50 Fusar-Poli, P., Howes, O., Valmaggia, L., & McGuire, P. (2008). ’’Truman’’ signs and vulnerability to psychosis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 193, 168.

In an airport, there can be the mild irrita�on of not being able to get your favoured food or drink, your regular newspaper; an un�mely flight will mean that a major sport event passes you by. But these are just temporary problems, you will soon be out of the secured zone back into the wider world. But what if the wider world is not wide enough? What if the news coverage of reality is s�ll limited? What if all the major news organisa�ons are run according to private interests and public ones? What if the major truths about our economy are withheld?

In China, thousands of people who can afford to go abroad on holiday buy a VPN service whilst they are away to be able to access a fuller range of news and informa�on once they are back home. Westerners who visit China have good reason to ques�on why the Chinese have very limited press freedoms and closely controlled civil liber�es. Westerners enjoy a free press and a huge range of civil liber�es, but in the case of climate change, although we have a formal freedom of the press – in reality, very few meaningful ques�ons are ever asked about the cri�cal details outlined in the first sec�on about ‘What is Real?’.

In his book, “Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democra�c Socie�es” (1989) Noam Chomsky writes bi�ngly about the narrow bandwidth of the modern media: “Debate cannot be s�lled, and indeed, in a properly func�oning system of propaganda, it should not be, because it has a systemreinforcing character if constrained within proper bounds. What is essen�al is to set the bounds firmly. Controversy may rage as long as it adheres to the presupposi�ons that define the consensus of elites, and it should furthermore be encouraged within these bounds, thus helping to establish these doctrines as the very condi�on of thinkable thought while reinforcing the belief that freedom reigns” 51 .

Chomsky backs up his claims about the boundaries of the free press through a detailed empirical map of the frequency of various news items and an analysis of what informa�on is withheld. He reminds his readers that any news group today gets most of its revenue from adver�sing, and not from sales or subscrip�ons, this gives the companies behind the adverts highly influen�al control over the editor. Indeed, major media groups cannot afford to lose access to major inside sources, and so there are many implicit rules of engagement between the two par�es about press releases.

For anyone who might remain a litle dubious about the freedom of the press in their coverage of climate change, then the challenge is to iden�fy any realis�c coverage of the emissions gap, or any open ques�oning of where the responsibility for emissions lies. The more you look, the more you realise that it is not there. Doing a search like this puts you in some good company:

“One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet's house to see what Piglet was doing. It was s�ll snowing as he stumped over the white forest track, and he expected to find Piglet warming his toes in front of his fire, but to his surprise he saw that the door was open, and the more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn't there” 52 (A. A. Milne, 1928)

Control experienced as freedom

‘The Truman Show’, graphically illustrates how our public space can be dominated by private interests. Freedom is suppressed in the name of freedom. The first half of the twen�eth century was characterised by our escape from centralised control, but in the name of toppling authority we have excavated too much. In the name of Liberalism this freedom has gone too far. What started out as

51 Chapter III: The Bounds of the Expressible (p. 48), Necessary Illusions.

52 ‘House at Pooh Corner’, A.A. Milne (1928) Chapter One, “In Which A House Is Built at Pooh Corner for Eeyore”.

an ambi�on to be open and nuanced about the truth has mutated, and a very odd form of totalitarianism has returned. It is the totalitarianism of ‘freedom’, the impera�ve to only hold loose opinions, a totalitarianism of tolerance – if that makes any sense. In our new social space, we are encouraged to live without cri�cal thinking and to float freely in the world of the senses and the self.

In an age when dogmas were not easily challenged, Immanuel Kant defined the original goal of the Enlightenment as an ‘escape, a self-incurred tutelage’ through the fostering of autonomous reasoning. Now that we have cut ourselves free, the ambi�on has morphed into an individualism that is caged by sen�ments and customary thinking. Thinking clearly about climate change means that we need to win back some genuinely public space. Like Truman, we need to be determined to find the exit.

Or as Chomsky wrote, “ci�zens of democra�c socie�es should undertake a course of intellectual selfdefense to protect themselves from manipula�on and control, to lay the basis for more meaningful democracy” 53 .

Chapter 7

Hopelessness

Rela�vism – the Polish Corridor of Truth

Arendt noted how the Totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Hitler func�oned by atomising their popula�ons and knee-capping their hopes. However, the hopeless that many people feel today is not the intense powerlessness that overpowers the mind of someone looking down the gun turret of an armoured tank, confron�ng a high prison wall, or stealthily avoiding the prowling threat of a secret police force. Today’s Western hopelessness is more banal, it is rooted in a type of cynicism.

Such a claim requires proper sociological study. However, there has been a cultural move significant enough for the Oxford English dic�onary to name “post-truth” as the word of the year in 2016. This was followed by Collins announcement of “Fake-news” as the word of the year in 2017. Indeed,

53 Chapter I: Democracy and the Media (p. 8) Necessary Illusions.

Collins picked their word out of their body of a 4.5 billion-word register because it had spiked 365% since 2016. ‘Alterna�ve facts’ seem to be ubiquitous.

Propaganda is as old as human society, but the par�cular power of the current ideology is due to the fact that it does not present itself as a ‘paternal voice’. The modern ideology is not func�on like a megaphone, it does not try to persuade or coax. It does not even set itself up for any kind of dispute or challenge. ‘Post-Truth’ poli�cs dismantles the en�re system of meaningful debate and accountability. Instead of a boxing ring where real punches are thrown under established rules, todays poli�cs seems to be played out in the style of wrestling in a bouncy castle, where you cannot really stand up anywhere that has a firm base and without any rules the whole thing is rather farcical. Climate change requires complex economic and social choices, policy decisions need to be nego�ated in acknowledgement of the rules of science.

The reason why the introductory book in this series started by explicitly rejec�ng moral rela�vism might now become a litle clearer. The moral rela�vism that pervades our modern culture seems just like common sense, it seems harmless and even posi�vely tolerant. However, the deep end of it is genuinely dangerous. Pu�ng our own sen�ments and intui�ons as the final judge of truth claims serves to equalise everything, not allowing any truths to stand up more prominently than others, it just flatens our view of reality. This flatening creates a ‘Polish corridor’ for powerful forces to move through. Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin understood that impact of their forces were strengthened by taking advantage of the flat landscape in Poland, which is why they pushed their advances through that vulnerable country.

The winners in flat poli�cal landscape will be those empowered with rhetoric, emo�onal impact, tribal appeal or just simply those with the most spending power to occupy the social space. The losers are those who are concerned with dealing with complex truths, accountability, and transparency. Simply, those who are concerned about the fundamental condi�ons of a democracy.

Arendt noted ‘The Origins’ in 1951 as: “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteris�c of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an everchanging, incomprehensible, world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same �me, believe everything and nothing, think that everything is possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspec�ng primi�ve souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all �mes to believe the worst, no mater how absurd, and did not par�cularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assump�on that, under such condi�ons, one could make people believe the most fantas�c statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deser�ng the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tac�cal cleverness”.

A�er Donald Trump’s inaugura�on ceremony in January 2017 sales of Arendt’s book, ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’ spiked so much that Amazon briefly ran out of stock. It is worth remembering the fact that Donald Trump is the first US President to also be included in the World Wrestling Entertainment’s (WWE) Hall of Fame. In the pay-per-view ‘Wrestlemania 23’ (in 2007) Trump was suited up and throwing money into the crowd, whilst his appointed wrestler Bobby Lashley

performed Slam Dunks, Chop Drops and S�nger Splashes. In many respects, Trump had taken his experience of Wrestling into the poli�cal ring. He embodies the glitz and the poverty of our current poli�cs, where even if the viewers know that it is all fake, they enjoy the simula�on and showbiz of it all. With total assets in excess of $600m, it is a major business that works hard to keep the storylines rolling and the seats full. And just like with fake news, there are some ardent fans who cannot dis�nguish the line between fic�on and reality.

In an interview with the French writer Roger Errera in 1974, Arendt commented: “The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived, not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please”.

Hopelessness and Hope

Arendt does not leave her philosophy as simply an observa�on of hopelessness, her PhD, ‘Love and St Augus�ne’ (1929) is a work that she returns to throughout her life. In it, Arendt affirmed that humans are capable of transcending such cul-de-sacs through their capaci�es for reflec�on and transcendence. This fuller view of the human condi�on can easily be forgoten during �mes of s�fling cultural forces – but her work on Augus�ne is a reminder that it is precisely in situa�ons when these forces are at their strongest that humans create new beginnings out of the wreckage.

Arendt, so difficult to categorise, could be understood as the philosopher of ‘natality’. Or in her word, ‘Natalität’.

Chapter 8

A retreat into the mind

From her earliest studies, Arendt had been devoted to understanding Ancient Greek philosophy. The urgency with which Arendt wrote about Eichmann is informed by a close aten�veness to the ancient Greek thinkers. She greatly admired Socrates 54 , but she regreted the way in which his engaged teaching had been taken forward by his student Plato. Socrates represented the greatness of mankind, as both a ra�onal and social creature. By contrast, she judged that Plato’s eleva�on of the ra�onal had happened at the expense of the social. Ra�onal mankind had been encouraged to retreat into the inner self

54 And Aristotle.

For Arendt, the banal evil of Eichmann was made possible because he acted without thinking. However, she was also very concerned about the symmetrically opposite danger: namely, thinking without ac�ng.

Arendt saw Socrates as the last great philosopher and ci�zen. Socrates embodied, as he walked around the ancient Agora in his bare feet and grubby clothes, the fundamental virtues of a healthy society. He was someone who directly engaged people in robust debate in a public space, and helped people to nego�ate between plural perspec�ves. As Socrates willingly took the cup of hemlock from the hand of his execu�oner, he planted himself right into the centre of public life. Cri�cs would say that this was the ul�mate act of exhibi�onism, but Socrates remains standing as an icon of absolute engagement with the polis. Yes Socrates was an extrovert, yes he hustled and jostled the people beyond what many found comfortable, but he wrestled with the real world. Arendt applauded his remarkable life for how boldly he underlined the importance of dissent and consent.

In stark contrast, a�er witnessing the trauma�c death of his mentor and friend in 399BCE, Plato then took flight into an inner world. He established a school, or more precisely, the world’s first university. This place for deep thinking and theory, was set up outside of the main streets, elevated above the city in the suburb of Academia (which explains its name, ‘The Academy’). Perhaps it was a predictable move? The Athenian democracy had crassly voted to ex�nguish the life of the man who had played the most profoundly forma�ve role in the young Plato’s life. Socrates was a guru to him. His execu�on would have been a profoundly aliena�ng experience.

Indeed, the most significant background noise to Plato’s early life was a large-scale war between Athens and Sparta. A war that was started by the votes of a democracy that had no expecta�on of defeat. Therefore, when a crushing defeat did happen in 405BCE, it came as a shatering blow to both the material and symbolic order of the city.

The democra�c polis had con�nually shown itself to be both a dangerous and foolish place These deep personal and social wounds can easily explain why Plato took a step back from the knoted poli�cs of the urban world into the contempla�ve space of academia 55 . However, it is an inward move that Arendt vehemently opposes.

Arendt argued that Plato’s atempt to reach beyond the real world, to the high abstrac�ons of the Forms, had degraded the ac�ve life. She deeply lamented the loss of the public marketplace of ideas, in which people argue, wrangle and exchange their opinions away from their private interests. For Arendt, the Platonic turn away from plurality and ac�on to solitude and inac�on had reduced people from a ‘We’ to an ‘I’.

It was a failing that Arendt levelled at her lover too - the hugely influen�al philosopher Mar�n Heidegger. Their ardent affair lasted over several years, however, the prickly truth is that Arendt was a secular Jew and Mar�n Heidegger was a Nazi-sympathiser 56. Indeed, their rela�onship was made completely untenable when he accepted the Rectorship of the University of Freiburg in 1933;

55 Arendt’s angle on Plato as a mys�c is jus�fiable, especially in the case that she wants to establish about the dangers of retrea�ng from the real world. However, it is not the full picture of Plato. “Plato Tackles Climate Change” demonstrates how Plato’s ideals remained plugged into the real world. His theories were not detached from reali�es of desires and “pride” (a clumsy transla�on of the Greek word ‘thumos’), they were deeply informed by them.

56 Heidegger never renounced the holocaust, nor recognised the existence of concentra�ons camps (other than one alleged private comment).

a posi�on that was offered to him by the Nazi party, which he officially joined (and explicitly endorsed) 10 days later.

Arendt would later judge that Heidegger’s philosophy had nothing to do with Nazi ideas, and that he had been swept up in the mass hysteria around Hitler. Whatever truth there might be in this, the revealing aspect of Arendt’s thin defence of Heidegger is that she is concerned to cri�cise his retreat from the world. Philosophy must never become just some sort of abstract puzzle. It must not withdraw from life and turn into some kind of isolated fiddling of concepts, like an internalised fidget with a Rubik’s cube inside the head. For Arendt, genuine philosophy was engaged in the world, or more precisely, genuine philosophers were fully engaged in the funk of civic life. Philosophy must never lock itself away from reality and disappear into pure thought.

The year that Arendt’s affair with Heidegger ended, the Nazi party started its rampage through German democracy, and then over the borders of Europe. Arendt fled, first to Paris (1933-1941), then on to New York (1941-1975). Arriving in the US, she immediately emersed herself in the new language and added English to her “muttersprache” of German (alongside her French, Greek and Hebrew). This plurality of languages in her head is a nice metaphor for the kind of pluralis�c civic space that she appreciated in the real world. Indeed, Arendt greatly admired the openness of American poli�cs of the �me. Throughout her work, she underlined the importance of vigorous dissent in order to sustain a society with a healthy kind of consent.

Retrea�ng from the climate crisis

By exploring the pathways the Arendt has opened up, it is possible to bring into view some different types of retreat from climate reality that might not otherwise go less by no�ced. But first it is important to point at the most obvious one: the climate change deniers. A small minority of people who have chosen to filter, spin, and dodge the truth by construc�ng the most absurd alterna�ve fake reali�es to live in. 57

However, this retreat from reality into a silo of childish posturing is so infan�le, it does not deserve any aten�on here. So following the advice for parents who are faced with a child who refuses to listen by blocking his ears with his fingers, screwing his eyes closed, and making a very loud noise, this text will just walk away. 58

More subtle forms of intellectual retreat can be observed. For example, by the way in which people just push the climate crisis into the future; most typically expressed with the casual line, “the young people will sort it out”. Or they might imagine that technology and innova�on will come up with solu�ons, with an op�mism that is typically thinking about Elon Musk, or solar panels. This fe�shisa�on of crea�vity takes no account of the �ght proximity of the planetary boundaries (1.5°C is already effec�vely locked in, and the carbon budget for 2°C needs us be genuinely carbon neutral before 2040). It also is ignorant of the fact that in order to sa�sfy the growing popula�on and growing consump�on paterns, there is only a finite number of metals, minerals and other rare

57 In Chapter 11 of the Climate Academy Guidebook, “The Psychology of Climate Change” the poli�cal tribalism that is linked to this ugly phenomenon is opened up with the help some very illumina�ng research papers on the science of science communica�on (by D. Kahan).

58 The details of this suppression of the truth are fully explored in “Popper Tackles Climate Change”. This book analyses different forms of denial, from the parade of clowns who hose every atempt to face the reali�es of science with an nonstop shower of “doubt”, to the more sophis�cated strategy of the fossil fuel industry who have also funded a narra�ve capture campaign of “individual ac�ons”.

resources to make the renewable energy infrastructure 59. But of course, evasive mental gymnas�cs are not concerned with such inconvenient facts, those with a casual a�tude to the crisis are only really concerned about having peace of mind.

Anna Freud would call this type of denial “intellectualisa�on” (“The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence”, 1937). 60 61 In this retreat, real ac�on about the crisis is pushed away into the distance, and we discharge the tension of the situa�on by fiddling with it in our heads. By channelling mental energy into problema�sing, we unplug from emo�onal and ac�ve work that is required to deal with it. Therapeu�c examples would be cases where a parent might throw themselves into the prac�cal details of finding university accommoda�on for their daughter, as a mechanism for not allowing the sense of loss about them leaving home to hit them; or someone who is anxious about a disease might do intensive online research about it, in order to not directly process their anger or stress.

In this line of analysis, it is notable that the BBC coverage of the climate crisis is o�en put into a separate sec�on of their website under the �tle, “Future”. A sec�on in which mainstream science conclusions about the crisis are presented in area that is framed alongside specula�ve ar�cles about history, family dynamics, and health issues. If the climate crisis is going to be afforded a separate space on the website, it is not helpful to frame it in such a so�, conceptual area. When wars strike, when COVID19 hit, the website establishes a dominant posi�on for the updates and details in the central area; along with font size increases for the headlines in pronounced posi�ons on the page.

There is a sense in which we all simply have to suppress the reali�es of climate reality, because it is just too brutal to con�nually engage with it at a meaningful level. However, in both direct and in subtle ways, the BBC is reflec�ve of wider socie�es con�nual denial of the core depth and urgency of the situa�on. And in the case of the BBC, it has an important symbolic value, it has a global reputa�on for reliability and quality. In this intellectualisa�on of the problem into the “Future” it has undermined the proximity and reality of the threat. 62 If this intelligent barometer of public awareness is wonky, it is a real signal that there are wider problems of framing and understanding out there.

Arguably the most significant example of “intellectualisa�on” will be covered extensively on its own, in Chapter 10, “On Bureaucracy”. However, before leaving this issue behind, it is important to point directly at one last case of retreat. This system wide retreat has happened through the screen of a mobile phone. Reading Arendt’s celebra�on of the earthy poli�cal life of Socrates, and of her regret about the intellectual retreat that Plato took into a cerebral space, it is hard not to think of the escapism that has been made easy by smartphones. Not only can we choose what news and views we follow, but there are powerful algorithms that track us and amplify these choices back to us. The

59 And, to add yet more layers of complexity: the mining of these resources will create a huge carbon footprint, and because of the loca�ons of those mines it will also destroy vast tracts of biodiversity, and involve very complicated geo-poli�cal manoeuvres.

60 Anna Freud was developing the insights that Sigmund Freud had put forward under the label of “rationalisation”. Both of them had connected the teenage interest in abstrac�on, argumenta�on [sic] and philosophical ques�ons as a developmental phase of puberty as an atempt to dodge more uncomfortable or embarrassing ques�ons about their emergent sexuality.

61 Interes�ngly, a recent paper had observed the dominance (97% of cases) of intellectualisa�on as the most common response to a highly stressful medical situa�on. Norbert Grulk, et al. “Pa�ents Confronted With a Life Threatening Situa�on: The Importance of Defense Mechanisms in Pa�ents Facing Bone Marrow Transplanta�on. An Empirical Approach” Chapter 22. Advances in Psychology Volume 136, 2004, Pages 521-534

62 A fuller account of the BBC’s rather lamentable coverage of the climate crisis can be found in “Nietzsche Tackles Climate Change”.

diverse marketplace of ideas that Socrates hung around in, searching for truth and for what is real, cannot be found inside the place where many of us spend our down�me.

Indeed, Arendt wrote about the ‘twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self’ 63. She had noted the media frenzy surrounding the launch of the first ar�ficial satellite by the USSR in 1957. The vast imagina�ve space opened up to the global public by the launch of ‘Sputnik’, is not dissimilar to the virtual reali�es on offer through the portal of a mobile phone.

There are two major retreats from the climate crisis that can flow from this kind of escapism.

Firstly, the forma�on of social silos which makes it more difficult for those with a limited understanding of the crisis to become more informed about what is going on above their heads.

Secondly, it can restrict the understanding of those who see the dangers ahead into smaller, specialised bubbles of awareness and community. Such an atomised awareness is par�cularly problema�c if the people in those bubbles only spend their social energy on themselves, and not in bringing about a transforma�on of the real world. It would be too luddite to ignore the cohesive effect that social media has had in bringing people together around good causes, but at the same �me, it has been clear that the mobile phone has accelerated the polarisa�on of the modern polis. It has pulled people away from the firm grounds of consensus that we need to be able to push through asser�ve climate policies.

Chapter 9

On The Big Lie

& On Organised Lying

Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus

Arendt plays with the famous La�n phrase ‘Let jus�ce be done, though the world perish’ (Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus). A slogan used by the Holy Roman Emperor (Ferdinand I) to underline the sovereignty of jus�ce, no mater what the prac�cal consequences; flipping it to ‘Let truth be told, though the world perish’ (Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus). For Arendt, a commitment to truth is the first principle of human flourishing.

63 “The Human Condi�on” (1958), p6.

Introduc�on

It might look as if the modern technological world has got a real plurality of views. The internet seems to have opened up the democra�c space to billions of people in a new, direct way.

However, a crucial point needs to be made.

There is a fundamental difference between a plurality of views that are reaching out, towards consensus and the truth, and the morass of half-truths, lies and weaponised conspiracy theories that have become a dominant feature of the global media space today. The first describes the essen�al condi�ons for humans to become fully themselves in the fabric of a community. The second describes a toxic environment that pushes people towards loneliness and isola�on.

Arendt has two quite dis�nct episodes of work in her considera�on of truth and lies. The first emerges out of her analysis of totalitarian regimes at the �me when they were dominant in the 1930s and 1940s. The second episode occurs later in her life when, as a US ci�zen, she was wrestling with the deceit that was exposed in the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam war. The first could be labelled “the Big Lie”, the second Arendt calls, “organised lying”.

As noted in Chapter 7, sales of Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” spiked in the USA when Trump became president. Although Trump has not gone as far the fascist regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, (his poli�cal ambi�ons appear more like a heady mix of opportunism and narcissism), there are clear features of his poli�cal gaming that use the same playbook on truth and lies as those earlier totalitarian regimes. This chapter will start by indulging some of the details of his “big lie”, showbiz style of poli�cs, and advance some of the points raised about that in Chapter 7. It is important to note that this chapter does not want to create a misleading impression that Team Trump was pushing for a totalitarian state like the Nazis. There are a great number of key differences. However, we should also not be shy to no�ce the similari�es in poli�cal method between the two.

Then, Arendt will help us see the other type of manipula�on of truth and reality that is also at work in modern poli�cs “Organised lies, require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture –the making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack or fissure, exactly as the facts fited into their original contexts’.

The first type of lying is belligerent and disrup�ve. It has targets and is theatrical in its atacks. The second is more like a type of truth decay. It is more slowly invasive, more discreet, more subtle. As Arendt comments, “organised lying rewrites contemporary history under the eyes of those who witness it.”

Both types of lying are relevant for a fuller account of the deceit that is evident in our handling of the climate crisis.

1. The Big Lie

“Make America Great Again”

The “Save America” rally gathered just south of the White House They setled into place within the Na�onal Mall. Guiliani was the warm-up act. His mood music established the tone, with all its sharp accusa�ons. He talked about “crooked” vo�ng machines, “fraudulent ballots”, then raised the volume with calls for “trial by combat”. The Big Lie. The Stolen Elec�on Show. Then came the main man.

Trump spoke about an “illegi�mate president”. He drew his shoulders back. “Something’s wrong here. Something very wrong. It can’t have happened. And we fight. We fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore”.

It was great fun. A colourful parade. Trump was centre stage. The big man. The big lie. Throwing fake-truth bombs into the adoring crowd. Small. Sugary. Bombs. YUM. TASTY! Trump’s poli�cal candy. SUCK ON IT! They had come for this. Tweets. Like sweets. One-liners. One worders. BAD! MAD!

This wheeling out of “The Big Lie” was accompanied by jeers of derision. Many of the protesters were dressed for a pantomime show; all the familiar slogans and trigger lines drew boos and cheers. The stage full of fake villains and vic�ms. The air was full of fake virtues and vices. “The Proud Boys” and “Oath Keepers” on Capitol Hill, taking up advanced posi�ons in a post-truth society.

Let’s zoom in on the people in the crowd from QAnon. One of them is easy to spot. The QAnon Shaman. On his head, a bison-horned fur headdress. In his head? A box of explosive lies. The bigger the beter. This one is a super-sized whopper: A Satanic cabal of cannibalis�c child molesters is at the heart of poli�cal power in Washington DC; it tried to stop Trump from gaining or retaining the presidency.

Trump invited the crowd to “walk to the Capitol”. Approximately 8000 protesters followed his accusing finger As they moved towards Congress, Trump took his motorcade back to the Oval Office to watch the ac�on unfold on TV. The fake news loop had gone into overdrive. An es�mated 2000 rioters surged their way into the Congress building, hoping to stall the coun�ng of the electoral college votes. Many in the crowd carried weapons Trump was happy to have an excess of enthusias�c support. 64

The size of the lie about a stolen elec�on is big. It is MAGA big. There is not a scrap of evidence to support it. But that does not mater. In such a spectacle, the facts stood no chance against a barrage of feelings. It was a full display of the weapons of mass disinforma�on. A bombardment aimed at destabilising the civic ground. These degenerate shows are put on in order to create an environment where there are no reliable reference points for truth and where there is an ingrained mistrust of ins�tu�ons. The point of conspiracy theories is the blur the lines of fact and fic�on, and to undermine the very possibility of reaching a social consensus 65

In the end, 5 people died at the scene and 138 police officers were injured (4 of whom had commited suicide within 7 months of the atack). The gallows brought to the stage were accompanied by chants of “Hang Mike Pence”. A sharp reminder to those looking on that playing around with the boundaries between fic�on and reality can quickly �p into the most macabre kind

64 According to the tes�mony of White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, when Trump was informed by the security services that people were carrying weapons he ordered the removal of the magnetometers from the area, “I don't fucking care that they have weapons, they're not here to hurt me. They're not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here, let the people in and take the mags away.”

65 Arendt once commented, “Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” (“Truth and Poli�cs”, 1967)

of nightmares in the actual world. The visceral anger that burst over police lines and over social norms on January 6th was an expression of something very real. It was a manufactured riot, but the alienated social fabric that is plugged into is not fake.

Conspiracy Theories

Whilst there are important differences between the Trump administra�on and the regimes that Arendt was analysing, the clumsy power grab on January 6th was a direct atempt to overthrow a democracy. In the first third of her book, “On the Origins of Totalitarianism” Arendt spends �me mapping out the pre-condi�ons of absolute, toxic rule.

It is not a surprise to find that all the protagonists of the atack on Congress have links to an�semi�c groups and beliefs. She explains how important an�semi�sm was in crea�ng these condi�ons. Her sweeping historical view is contested, but what seems of enduring value in her study of the rise of mass movements is that the violent caricaturing and scapegoa�ng of the Jews provided powerful leverage for the Nazis to outmuscle the na�on state

Human psychology is very recep�ve to messages that come packaged with contras�ng opposites of “we/them” This polarisa�on can be fast tracked through propaganda and fear. Arendt argues that because the Jews had not been assimilated into European na�ons throughout history 66, they we easy bait for those orchestra�ng the propaganda to pick up and use in their messaging. The playbook of totalitarian regimes explains that in order to establish yourself in power you need to have a chao�c and confused social body that is eager to have a simple framework to understand the problems and a simple solu�on to it. Trump’s “America First!” slogan achieved not only this simplis�c ‘spli�ng’ framework of winners and LOSERS!, it also worked as a dog whistle for those farright Americans who understood its an�semi�c origins. BAD! Bigly BAD!

Philosophy well understands that there is not a clear borderline between illusion and reality.

However, it was one thing to be mindful of this profound paradox of human awareness that plays out at so many levels, and it is en�rely another thing to act as a circus master orchestra�ng a purposeful and vindic�ve state of confusion. What was playing out in Washington DC on January 6th 2021 might have seemed chao�c and absurd, but it was a predictable act that was constructed with poli�cal intelligence.

In many respects, the Trump administra�on were aiming for the kind of poli�cal landscape that Arendt observed as a prelude to totalitarian regimes, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same �me, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” 67

Indeed, when a Big Lie is put out there, you don’t need people to have a ra�onal connec�on to it. It doesn’t require people to subscribe to the idea with any cogni�ve depth. It just needs people to make an associa�on with it, to hold onto it tenta�vely. The rela�onship that people have with the belief is complex. "We tool-using humans look at every object and wonder, 'How can I use this?

66 A clear account of the historical veracity of this claim can be found in: Staudenmaier, Peter, "Hannah Arendt's Analysis of An�semi�sm in the Origins of Totalitarianism: A Cri�cal Appraisal" (2012). History Faculty Research and Publica�ons. 84.

67 Arendt, “On the Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), p

What is this good for?’. Poli�cal informa�on is no different. The Big Lie is no different. So most people don't whole-heartedly 'believe' the Big Lie, but they are more than happy to provisionally accept it because... why not? It might be entertaining. It might flater your iden�ty. It might help you bond with other people in your community. Or it might help you vent some rage." 68

Arendt puts it like this, ““Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all �mes to believe the worst, no mater how absurd, and did not par�cularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assump�on that, under such condi�ons, one could make people believe the most fantas�c statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deser�ng the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tac�cal cleverness.”

The poli�cal nihilism that Arendt observed popula�ons of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia 69 arose out of the crushing impact of the invasion of these totalitarian regimes into peoples mind 70 This haemorrhaging of authen�c poli�cal energy was also at work inside the culture of those who wielded the power too. Both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes enabled those at the top to act with impunity, yet also inside a culture of power that was profoundly erra�c and unstable. When all the usual coordinates of life and morality are wrenched into another – it is only predictable that ac�ons and values can start to feel arbitrary.

This is why Arendt’s work seems so sharply relevant today. Although the causes of the cynicism are different (we are not faced by belligerent fascist regimes), there is a pervasive culture of “what does it change if…”. Both at the top, “I could stand on 5th Avenue and shoot someone and s�ll not loose voters” (Trump), and at the botom, “there is litle point in my green ac�ons if no-one else cares” (anyone). The big lies of Hitler and Stalin were made possible because of the terror that surrounded them, the big lies of Trump and Boris Johnson (eg. Partygate) are facilitated by the prolifera�on of atrac�ve alterna�ve narra�ves on social media. In this cacophony of stories, only some kind of an overlap with the truth is needed.

Either way, the cynicism is real, and it is a form of truth decay that erodes meaningful ac�on.

An atack on common sense

Contrary to popular belief, “The Big Lie” was not something that neither Hitler nor Goebbels admited to using. The truth is that they accused others of doing it, whilst prac�cing it themselves. In “Mein Kampf” (1926), Hitler accuses the Jews of using the Big Lie to cover up their “back-stabbing” that he believed had ended German hopes in World War One. He explains how he thinks the Jews duped simple minded people to accept their big lie cover-up, “It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to

68 Dr. Mat Blanchard, a clinical psychologist at New York University speaking to Mathew Rozsa, “The psychological reason that so many fall for the big lie”. Salon Magazine, Feb 3rd 2022.

69 The language of the Soviets would confess to a belief in Marxist-Leninism, but their ac�ons seem to betray a lonely and isolated nihilism. A footnote is hardly the place to open up an analysis of the complex psychology at work inside the Soviet regime, but the whole opera�ng system of power seems to have been held at a cynical distance by those in power and those under it. Towards the end of the Soviet era this cynical gap comes under increasing pressure; a tension explored by Adam Cur�s in his documentary on the strained psychology of “Hypernormalisa�on”.

70 This inner colonalisa�on is outlined in Chapter 4.

72

distort the truth so infamously”. 71 Likewise, Goebbels accuses the Bri�sh of using it, “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and s�ck to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous”.

There are many conspiracy theories out there that do not have any poli�cal edge, but support for any wild conspiracy does throw into ques�on the general reliability of those in power. This makes such theories prone to weaponiza�on by those who want to undermine trust in ins�tu�ons and damage social cohesion. Conspiracies amplify the gap between what is the case and what seems to be. A climate of suspicion is a par�cularly powerful environment for poli�cal leaders to demonise minori�es, enforce aggressive policies and empha�cally push forward their own singular version of the truth.

Trump’s noisy presidency might have o�en looked farcical, but post-truth poli�cs, either consciously or subconsciously, is all about unroo�ng public discourse from reality. To return to Arendt’s language, the aim of weaponised fake news is ul�mately “loneliness”.

She writes, “What we call isola�on in the poli�cal sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. Isola�on and loneliness are not the same. While isola�on concerns only the poli�cal realm of life, loneliness concerns life as a whole. Totalitarian government, like all tyrannies, certainly could not exist without destroying the public realm of life, that is, without destroying, by isola�ng men, their poli�cal capaci�es. But totalitarian domina�on as a form of government is not content with this isola�on and destroys private life as well. It bases itself on loneliness, on the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is the most radical and desperate experiences of man”.

Arendt later comments, “no permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived without men willing to tes�fy to what is and appears to them because it is.” 73

And in defence of the grity public life that wrestles with facts and reality she writes, “Without this transcendence into a poten�al earthly immortality, no poli�cs, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm is possible… But such a common world can survive the coming and going of the genera�ons only to the extent that it appears in public. It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the natural ruin of �me”. 74

For Arendt it was the striving for truth, in communi�es of genuine dialogue that made us fully human; or in her more transcendent language, “immortal”. It was openness and honesty that enabled us to slowly build civilisa�on and consensus. In line with her thinking, conspiracy theories, especially the big ones, are targeted efforts to reduce us to poli�cal rubble. With double meaning, they are an atack on our common sense.

Climate Change Deniers

A big lie simply does not work if it is not repeated. And repeated.

71 Hitler, A, “Mein Kampf” (1926), Volume 1, Chapter 10.

72 Goebbels, Joseph (12 January 1941). (trans.) “Die Zeit ohne Beispiel”. Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP. pp. 364–369.

73 Arendt, “Truth and Poli�cs” (1967), p1.

74 Arendt, “The Human Condi�on” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p54.

Both Hitler and Goebbels understood this first principle of propaganda. A scan of Trump’s statements from – confirms that he also understood these opera�ng rules. In the chart below, CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale illustrates how “the stolen elec�on” dominated all of Trump’s writen statements a�er he le� office in 2021.

Indeed, this is just one slice of that effort to propagate the big lie into the democra�c space. The misinforma�on came from every angle: from hyperac�ve social media bots to hyper Trump enthusiasts willing to even buy a cap or a T-shirt with the message on. The fossil fuel industry needs no lessons in the art of propaganda. They are the experts in ‘throwing a dead cat’, ‘the Chewbacca Defence’, the red herring, and delivering a barrage of ‘whatabou�sms’. In fact, they even have an en�re opera�ng system hidden under the surface of our social fabric that con�nually feeds climate change disinforma�on into our brains. It is called the “Kochtopus”. Any image search for that name will reveal just how extensive the tentacles of their opera�on is.

Taken at face value, climate change denial is just childish kind of scien�fic illiteracy. A 5-year-old child could understand the basic chemistry of the problem. In fact, millions of educated primary school children do understand it.

But every word. In. This. Paragraph. Illustrates. How. It. Works. The theory is prolific because it even works when you try to delete it. Every refuta�on of the absurd pseudo-science kicks up more fungal pores of misinforma�on, and there are both real life zombies (brain dead to the science) and cyberbots that are programmed to repeat ‘doubts’ on any public statements of the facts. So there is an almost inexhaus�ble supply of climate denial. The big lie lives parasi�cally off the truth.

Yet in parallel with the tac�cs of both Hitler and Goebbels, the fossil fuel industry (and the poli�cians caught up in the sprawling rhizome of misinforma�on), the reality is flipped upside down. Just as the Nazis disavowed the strategy of the Big Lie and pinned it onto their opponents, climate change deniers pin the conspiracy theory onto the government and onto scien�sts. They claim that the science is either a scam, or that it is overplayed to extract financial benefit from the taxpayer.

“The lady protests too much, me thinks”, (Hamlet, Act III Scene II).

Of course, climate deniers do make some effort to look reasonable. When Myron Ebell calls climate scien�sts “urban terrorists” his conspiratorial language appears more believable because he is the Director of the Global Warming and Interna�onal Environmental Policy at the Compe��ve Enterprise Ins�tute (CEI). A very respectable looking job �tle. But then, Robespierre was the head of ‘The Commitee For Public Safety’ during The Terror of The French Revolu�on, and I would not have asked him to babysit my children. Indeed, Goebbels was the Minister for Public Enlightenment; and Clemen�ne zu Castell-Rüdenhausen was in charge of the “Faith and Beauty Society” of the Third Reich.

Having a nice job �tle doesn’t say anything about what you are actually up to.

2. The Organised Lie

The previous sec�on on the Big Lie is familiar terrain for those engaged in the struggle for climate jus�ce. Trump unashamedly “DIGS COAL”. He was rightly lambasted for his regressive climate policies, his withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, his ignorant tweets about climate science, his deregula�on of important environmental laws, the appointment of conserva�ve judges to the Supreme Court with retrograde climate views, … Quite simply, there is a devasta�ngly long list of dumb and damaging decisions that Trump pushed through when he was in office

However.

In an odd way, at least he was bluntly honest about his climate policies. He was outrageously, venomously, aggressively honest.

The important, perhaps surprising truth, is that Trump was not that much different from all the other US Presidents in terms of the emissions count. The fact is that under every single President the greenhouse gas emissions of the USA have only ever accelerated. They accelerated under Clinton and under Obama, they accelerated under the Bushes and under Biden. Some Presidents may be smoother talkers, but the greenhouse effect has only been made worse by the White House effect.

Arendt’s later works were not concerned with totalitarian regimes. In 1951, the year that ‘Origins’ was published, she became a US ci�zen and lived through both the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal. These na�onal crises brought into view a different kind of danger, a different type of lie.

She called it “Organised Lying”. It is a professional, atrac�ve kind of lying that is very relevant to the climate crisis. It is a system of decep�on that masks reality through the savvy manipula�on of public story lines and images. Uncomfortable truths get a make-over done by diligent, highly qualified administrators and execu�ves who enjoy doing all the specialised pruning and preening. Since both poli�cs and commerce depend on popularity, there is a shared interest in massaging hard facts they find it easy to work together on the problem; and since both domains can pull on the talents of the most highly qualified individuals, they are very good at their job.

Perhaps there is an alterna�ve universe somewhere in which more prime minsters and presidents talked like Trump. In this universe the fossil fuel industry had a more explicit face. The public debate was more conflictual and feisty. Perhaps in this comba�ve alterna�ve reality, climate change has been dealt with beter? The gloves were off, it was a fist fight between two alterna�ves, and in the end, common sense prevailed.

Who knows? But on this planet, in this universe, the climate crisis has been managed. And given the con�nual rise of emissions, Arendt’s concept of “organised lying” seems to be per�nent.

In a lecture she gave shortly before her death in 1975, she commented, “this is what America has to face: It’s gone further and further away from itself into a culture in which poli�cs is marke�ng, in which poli�cs is PR.” The concern that Arendt has is that the war in Vietnam and the Watergate Scandal had exposed how skilled government apparatus had become at crea�ng a virtual world of truth for the public which subtly and discreetly folded into its messages and communica�ons a range of violent injus�ces. Arendt frequently underlines the fact that lies are more atrac�ve than the truth. The art of organising them is therefore task that has the natural �de of public opinion on your side, if you carefully study its ebbs and flows. 75

75 Modern poli�cs, now informed by monumental amounts of metadata, is about telling people what they want to hear, and not about a genuine wrestling with the difficult truths or complexi�es of real life. Indeed, if we go a litle beyond the scope of Arendt’s works, and look at the new depths opened up by the internet, those in power don’t just give us what we

In “Lying in Poli�cs” (1971) Arendt writes, “… It is this fragility that makes decep�on so very easy up to a point, and so temp�ng. It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were. Lies are o�en much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consump�on with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcer�ng habit of confron�ng us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.”

Two examples will help bring out what Arendt is saying with beter clarity. The first establishes the main coordinates of her concept through the example of the US campaign in Vietnam; more precisely, through the revela�ons of the Pentagon Papers (1971) that she famously commented on at the �me; in both her lectures and her books. The second applies it to the climate crisis, through the example of a UNEP event.

Vietnam & The Pentagon Papers

The US had become horribly entangled in Vietnam since 1955. No mater how many dollars or marine officers, Agent Orange or Napalm cannisters they poured into the Vietnamese jungles, the only return the US got on their investments came back in body bags. The simmering discontent with the war suddenly surged with renewed force a�er the publica�on of the Pentagon Papers, that had been leaked to the New York Times. It wasn’t so much that the papers revealed informa�on that was already available somewhere, it was more that the papers revealed an en�re opera�on in which government officials, from the highest rank downwards, had assiduously combed and cra�ed the informa�on to pass into the public sphere with the least alarm.

In “The Violence of Lying” (2008) the scholar Guaraldo put it like this, “The lying that was to be found at the founda�on of the U.S. Vietnam policy did not consist in hiding some secret plans from the American public, but in neglec�ng substan�al factual informa�on, in pretending that theory could prevail over facts. In order to remain consistent with their theories based on mathema�cal calcula�ons, game theories, and other abstract criteria the problem solvers neglected simple and solid facts.” 76

One short cita�on from the Pentagon papers illuminates an important point. It is Paper 193, a memo sent from the Defence department under President Johnson. It starts by sta�ng the aims of the war:

70% – To avoid a humilia�ng U.S. defeat (to our reputa�on as a guarantor).

20% – To keep [South Vietnam] (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.

10% – To permit the people [of South Vietnam] to enjoy a beter, freer way of life.

ALSO – To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.

NOT – To help a friend, although it would be hard to stay in [Vietnam] if asked out 77

Arendt comments, “The problem-solvers who knew all the facts presented to them in the reports of the intelligence community had only to rely on their techniques, that is, on the various ways of

want, they even shape those desires themselves. However, that would be going to far for this book, we are heading towards a public space that is ruled by algorithms, but we are not there yet. Arendt wrote in the US at a �me when subways were crowded by people and who open up the broad wings of their newspapers, not hunch over their smartphones.

76 p1, Guaraldo, O. (2008). “The Violence of Lying”. In: Hyvärinen, M., Muszynski, L. (eds) Terror and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. htps://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614130_12

77 htps://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v02/d193

transla�ng quali�es and contents into quan��es and numbers with which to calculate outcomes, which then, unaccountably, never came true, in order to eliminate, day in and day out, what they knew to be real. The reason why this could work for so many years is precisely that the goals pursued by the United States government were almost exclusively psychological, that is, matters of the mind (italics added).”

This memo reveals the central concern of the decision makers: image. In the end, Vietnam just became a propaganda war, it had almost nothing to do with their publicly stated aims. Policies were pursued to sustain the reputa�on of the USA, both globally and na�onally, and they were detached from the reali�es on the ground.

Indeed, behind the bullet points of the memo, there are also a wide range of false assump�ons. For example, the USA jus�fied its involvement in Vietnam under a concept: the “domino theory”. An idea that the fall of one na�on to communist rule would lead to the surrounding na�ons tumbling into the same regime. The victory of Mao in China (1949), The North Korean invasion (1950) and a brief conflict in the Straits of Taiwan (1954) all lined up in the minds of US strategists as a set of states falling to communism that had now knocked on to Vietnam; and in turn, could lead to the rest of South East Asia turning red. The theory also imagined that Moscow was playing a leading role in the game of dominoes.

What Arendt was keen to point out in her lecture (“Lying in Poli�cs”) is that both of these assump�ons were simply wrong. There was no causal link between the events, and Moscow did not have any powers of puppet master in the region. Each na�on had their own discreet, independent conflicts and there were a number of nakedly obvious documents, known to the US, that would have exposed their organising concept to be an error. For example, Ho Chi Min had repeatedly writen to President Eisenhower back in 1945-1946 to request support for their independence (from the French), 78 and they had con�nually fought for independence against different imperial powers for many centuries of their long history. For the Vietnamese it was na�onal freedom that was necessary, the communist details were just con�ngent. But the basic model of the “domino effect” was too deeply embedded in the minds of the US analysts for them to allow these inconvenient truths to affect the model of their thinking.

Arendt quotes a journalist, Richard J. Barnet, to make her point, “The bureaucra�c model had completely displaced reality: the hard and stubborn facts, which so many intelligence analysts were paid so much to collect, were ignored.” Adding, “it is this remoteness from reality that will haunt the reader of the Pentagon Papers who has the pa�ence to stay with them to the end”.

Anyone familiar with the abject failure of governments and COP mee�ngs to get any trac�on with actual emissions will be able to read the next lines from Arendt with a double understanding: “What caused the disastrous defeat of American policies and armed interven�on was indeed no quagmire (“the policy of ‘one more step’ each new step always promising the success which the previous last step had also promised but had unaccountably failed to deliver,”…) but the wilful, deliberate disregard of all facts historical, poli�cal, geographical, for more than twenty-five years.”

When the UNEP gave birth to the UNFCCC

79 it is was established with one singular objec�ve: to stablise emissions at a safe level. This singular goal has been smothered out of sight. The decep�ons

78 Indeed, Ho Chi Min had even handed the same appeal to the Secretary of State Robert Lansing as far back as 1919. He was in Paris (working in a kitchen) during the ‘Treaty of Versailles’ nego�a�ons, and took the opportunity to remind the US delegate that na�ons in Indochina were also interested in “self-determina�on”.

79 With the help of another parent, the World Meteorological Organisa�on (WMO)

are too long to list here, the strategists have been busy. But here are some of the key manipula�ons that can be put under a heading that uses Arendt’s concept “defactualisa�on”. Her cri�cisms of defactualised poli�cs are sharply relevant to the climate crisis:

Defactualised, “organised lies”, of climate change ac�on

• The science data.

o The remaining carbon budget numbers are distorted by the inclusion of vast amounts of unproven ‘nega�ve emissions’. 80 Such implausible calcula�ons make the �meframes for ac�on look much more comfortable than they really are. These fake numbers were introduced into the standard climate models in 2014 ahead of the Paris Agreement, against the advice of eminent climate scien�sts such as Prof. Kevin Anderson. 81 82

 These misleading hopes of nega�ve emissions mainly rest on a technology known as BECCS which, even if implemented at a large scale would cause monumentally destruc�ve biodiversity loss. 83

o The remaining carbon budget is not divided per capita. How can an equitable view of the commitments be possible in the absence of this?

o And no na�on is required to measure their commitments to the actual budget. (See Chapter 7, “The CUTx Index” of “The Climate Academy Guidebook” for the full details).

o Net zero? The net has huge holes in it.

o Shipping and avia�on emissions don’t exist. They do of course, but not in the official numbers.

o The graphs that and messages used by the media and poli�cians include something called “overshoot”. In “overshoot”, emissions go beyond the agreed budgets, but then get sucked out later. A scenario that buys more �me for poli�cians to act, but rests on the very dubious assump�on that nature will setle back into its old equilibrium.

o The poli�cians and media do not report on the ‘whiplash’ of hea�ng that will happen if we were to suddenly shut down coal fired power sta�ons. This whiplash is caused by the chemical fact that the burning of coal not only emits par�cles of CO2, it also emits sulphur ‘dust’ which acts as a mirror when it is up in the atmosphere. A mirror that reflects heat away from Earth. Therefore although, the shu�ng down of coal power is necessary in the long term, the short-term impact is a sudden rise in temperatures. A rise that is es�mated by scien�sts to be worth around 0.3 to 0.8°C, most likely, a whiplash that will take us beyond the 2°C threshold. 84

o The construc�on of an extensive renewable infrastructure will require vast amounts of mining and the extrac�on of limited raw materials. A map of these

80 Sabine Fuss et al., “Be�ng on nega�ve emissions”, Nature Climate Change 4(10), 2014, pp. 850-853.

81 Kevin Anderson and Glen Peters, “The trouble with nega�ve emissions.” Science 354 (6309), 2016, pp42-50.

82 Prof. Kevin Anderson was kind enough to spend half a day with the Climate Academy, at an event in the European Commission. He took the �me to scru�nize and endorse the numbers and analysis of the CUTx Index that is central to our work.

83 V Heck, D Gerten, W Lucht, A Popp., “Biomass-based nega�ve emissions difficult to reconcile with planetary boundaries”. Nature climate change 8 (2), 151-155, 2018.

84 htps://doi.org/10.1029/2005GL023902

minerals shows that are most o�en located in areas of cri�cal biodiversity and places that will require complex geopoli�cal moves to access them.

o The Interna�onal Resource Panel (IRP) has calculated that a sustainable level of resource extrac�on is 7 tonnes of material, per person, per year. At the moment, the Ultra High Developed Na�ons extract an average of 26.3 tonnes (pp, pa) (eg. Norway, 38.8t, Ireland 59.6t, Singapore 50.4t, Spain 13.5t and France 17.1t). Compared to an average 3.1 tonnes for the Low Developed na�ons (Ethiopia 0.5t, Gambia 3.8t, Pakistan 3.5t). Is there a public conversa�on about how this fundamental issue about our ambi�on to con�nue an accelera�on of material growth?

• Storytelling

o Our overall climate strategy (designed and promoted by the poli�cal and commercial strategists) has been characterised by a near total emphasis on individual and voluntary ac�ons.

o The highly developed na�ons of the world are quick to point at industrial images of less developed na�ons who are manufacturing all the goods that they consume. Emissions are s�ll counted territorially, not by consump�on.

o There have been many strategies, eg. ‘The Blue Economy’, ‘The Green Economy’, ‘The Circular Economy’, at the macro level. And ‘recycling’, ‘less this, less that’ at an individual level, all of which are hugely important frameworks and tools to achieve a sustainable world. But, there is only derision or hos�lity about the one fundamental concept that is actually necessary behind all of that: degrowth. 85

o When the scien�sts of the IPCC have finalised their monumental work of pulling together the most recent conclusions on the state of the climate the body of research it results in a formidably large document. There reports happen about every 6 to 7 years, and the latest of these Assessment Report (AR6) was published in 2023. These documents are so huge, briefer summaries are needed for policy makers to wrap their heads around the facts. The rooms in which these summaries are compiled have �ghtly locked doors. This is not to help the scien�sts concentrate on their work. If we were to sneak in on such a mee�ng (which always lasts for days), we would not only find scien�sts in the room. Remarkably, beside every scien�st is a poli�cian. Every word of the Summary Report for Policy Makers (SPM) is overseen by representa�ves from every na�on in the world whose primary concern is image, not reality. It is this Summary Report that is used by the media to update the public on the climate crisis.

Such is the empha�c nature of the mainstream conclusions of science, it is not possible to filter out the biggest research conclusions. It is a job of manicuring, not amputa�on. However, any clandes�ne observer to these mee�ngs would be able to see type of organised lying happening live in front of them. It is a shockingly naked example of procedures that are always kept out of view, and which need to be leaked to the press to be exposed.

85 “Less Is More” (202O) by Jason Hickel is a great star�ng point to start unwrapping many of the misconcep�ons about degrowth.

To sum up, our en�re awareness of climate change is framed inside a fic�onal reality with so�, appealing stories lines that might seem empowering but are profoundly disempowering. The COP nego�a�ons are so litle about the actual carbon budget, and so much about poli�cal image.

Propaganda is as old as poli�cs itself, just as truth is as old as language. What snags the modern reader’s aten�on in Arendt’s account of poli�cs and decep�on is her scru�ny of manicured messages of what was going on. It is no coincidence for Arendt that this systemic embedding of lies and denial was emerging in the early decades of a consumer culture.

“Organised lying is the rela�vely recent phenomenon of mass manipula�on of fact and opinion as it has become evident in the rewri�ng of history, in image-making, and in actual government policy”. 86 It is the result of “gigan�c interest organisa�ons” and government offices.

UNEP 50th Anniversary Event

Perhaps the most lamentable example of this sterilised, ‘corporate’ approach to the environmental crisis could have been observed at the 50th anniversary of the United Na�ons Environmental Programme (UNEP). This organisa�on was set up in 1972 with a mandate to provide leadership, deliver science and develop solu�ons. Yet, given the imminent threat of humanity crossing over cri�cal planetary boundaries, the delegates could be found primarily celebra�ng the reduc�on of plas�c waste.

The press release from UNEP on February 28th 2022 carried the headline, “UN Environment Assembly opens with all eyes on a global agreement on plas�c pollu�on”. 87

Evidently, plas�c pollu�on is an important issue, however, the threat it poses to human civilisa�on is simply not anywhere close to the dangers posed by a breakdown of climate systems or the destruc�on of the Earth’s tapestry of biodiversity. Such anodyne events are not conceived with a clear understanding of the different sizes and weights of the environmental crisis.

Compare the significance of the collapse of the AMOC with an island of plas�c waste that is bobbing up and down on the surface of the Atlan�c. The first is a massive cog in the opera�ng system of the planet, the collapse of which would trigger an inconceivably large reconfigura�on of human civilisa�on. The second is a nasty pollutant with consequences at a mostly discreet and local level of impact. 88

Yet if the media or schools were approached to cover these two environmental issues, there is litle doubt that the largely cosme�c problem of plas�c waste would get more aten�on, and few would no�ce the jarring difference in scale between the two. Likewise, systems of both bureaucracy and business are geared towards ge�ng tangible results. Plas�cs are a very visible problem, and ge�ng involved in ac�on brings the reward of a tac�le and immediate experience

Educa�ng young people about plas�c waste is an important introduc�on to environmental issues for primary school children. But if in the midst of our charge towards irreversible �pping points, the leading global organisa�on on the environment chooses to showcase plas�c waste at a 50th anniversary summit, there is either a major failure of understanding, or, more likely, a clear example

86 Arendt, H., “Truth and Poli�cs” (1967).

87 htps://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/un-environment-assembly-opens-all-eyes-global-agreementplas�c

88 Whilst it is true that the problem of plas�cs is a global problem, with islands and mountains of waste piled up in innumerable places, the point being made here is that having plas�c enter the biosphere (and most par�cularly, the food chain) is not going to cause the collapse of en�re biomes.

of organised lying. It is important to underline again that whilst organised lying might start with people in thinktanks, or policy units, grooming the details of a situa�on to smooth out different unatrac�ve bugs, bumps or bristles, Arendt would point out that those lies soon become so endemic that those involved in the storytelling quickly internalise them.

Indeed, who knows what goes on inside Trump’s head? It is likely that the Big Lie of the stolen elec�on could well be a firm belief of his. 89 Likewise, how did the bishops, cardinals, and Popes of Medieval Europe understand the selling of indulgences to poor people? As a genuine mechanism of redemp�on, or as a money raising ruse? The answer is certainly ambiguous. And so here we are, invited at every corner of climate awareness, in schools, by the media and by poli�cians to play our role in the climate change rituals. We should do our individual best to “reduce, reuse and recycle”; green sacraments endorsed by those in power to provide us with a sense of agency. This selling of climate change indulgences is responsible for a huge global loss in vital climate change social energy. It is not a Big Lie like the absurd claims and doubts of the climate change deniers. It is a comfortable, organised lie with arguably a more damaging overall impact.

Why was the focus so far skewed away from the most cri�cal issues? Were explicit decisions made at the top of the poli�cal tree to sidestep the biggest facts? Or was it just an example of a general system blindness?

Arendt writes, “This sheds some light on one of the gravest dangers of overclassifica�on: not only are the people and their elected representa�ves denied access to what they must know to form an opinion and make decisions, but the actors themselves who receive top clearance to learn all the relevant facts remain blissfully unaware of them. And this is not because some invisible hand deliberately leads them astray but because they work under circumstances, and with habits of mind, that allow them neither �me nor inclina�on to go hun�ng for per�nent facts in mountains of documents.” 90

Conclusion

Her ar�cle in the New Yorker, “Truth and Poli�cs” (February 25th, 1967) opens with these lines:

“The subject of these reflec�ons is commonplace. No one has ever doubted that truth and poli�cs are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the poli�cal virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary and jus�fiable tools not only of the poli�cian’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the poli�cal realm, on one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness, on the other? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be decei�ul? … is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth? These are uncomfortable ques�ons, but they arise necessarily out of our current convic�ons in this mater.”

Arendt’s uncomfortable ques�ons remain open. If a major business has con�nually bled major losses, they would not dare announce their annual reports with a celebra�on of reducing the number of plas�c cups in the office. The residual power of Arendt’s work is that she keeps asking the important ques�ons. Bluntly. Some�mes tactlessly.

89 This is made even more likely given the evidence scatered through his messages and speeches that he appears narcissis�c.

90 “Lying in Poli�cs”, 1971.

Organised lying might sound too harsh for the work, events and conferences that are arranged by the different UN organisa�ons. To call it lying seems tough on those involved in the system that can proudly post messages on Instagram or LinkedIn about their involvement in environmental policy.

Indeed, if you truly want to make an impact, the UNFCCC and the UNEP are the two of the biggest structures out there that could deliver significant change. Those working within these frameworks are o�en aware of their limits.

When we look at the major global responses to climate change, are they actually dealing with the truth? Are they asking the tough ques�ons? Or are they caught up in more comfortable narra�ves that gloss over the violence and destruc�on that is unfolding.

In the end, it all comes down to the concentra�ons of CO2 in the atmosphere. That is it.

It is predictable that we have a system of organised lying around this core problem. It is uncomfortable, but helpful, that Arendt reminds us of this.

Chapter 10

On Bureaucracy

Arendt’s body of work is alert to the dangers that can arise from bureaucra�c systems of control. Her thinking in this respect is informed by the founda�onal work of Emil Durkheim (in Sociology) who was aten�ve to the unroo�ng, aliena�ng effect of capitalism on the social fabric. It was also informed by the very basic fact that the totalitarian regimes of the Nazis and the Soviet Union arose in the 20th century, and therefore these modern authoritarian governments would include modern machinery in their opera�ons; not only with tanks and planes in their military, but also with typewriters and telephones in their offices.

In a bureaucracy, people are reduced to units and sta�s�cs. This quan�sing of people and nature into assets on a spreadsheet makes it that much easier to move them around. In her thinking, the retreat from the polis into the suburbs of academia has a parallel in the retreat from the polis into the sterility of an office and into all the paperwork that goes with it.

Arendt found the work of Ka�a par�cularly powerful in this respect. His claustrophobic novellas rank among the greatest literature of the 20th century. Ka�a’s characters find themselves trapped inside compellingly surreal worlds in which they find it impossible to get a grip on what is going on. The profound aliena�on that is writen into the texture of his short stories is informed by the experience he had working as an insurance clerk (an office job that paid the bills and kept his mentally abusive father at a safer distance). We now have the word ‘Ka�aesque’ to describe situa�ons that are

overwhelmingly odd, especially when the trigger to the anxiety is rooted in a losing batle with the banal forces of bureaucracy. 91

The opening lines of his book “The Trial” (1925) is illustra�ve, “Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”

Of course, there are many good reasons to have bureaucracies. In principle they aim at fairness, clarity and efficiency - aspira�ons that we should applaud. However, these steps away from the funk of life into abstrac�on, opens up an awful new poten�al that Arendt expresses here with characteris�c forcefulness:

“The greater the bureaucra�za�on of public life, the greater will be the atrac�on of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy, there is nobody le� with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of poli�cal freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

This chapter will proceed by first digging into the key problems that grappling with the climate crisis through a bureaucracy presents; then it will flip, like Arendt herself does in her wri�ng, to present some of the opportuni�es that bureaucracies actually afford.

The problems

1. Violence

So spare a thought for those people who live in ancient cultures whose en�re world will be wiped out by climate change – either by rising seas, or impossibly frequent floods, droughts or clima�c instability. The global accounts of the bank and insurance spreadsheets only hold the value of the MAPA (Most Affected People and Areas) as marginal interests to the main calcula�ons; and in the poli�cal gaming that happens in climate nego�a�ons, these smaller na�ons and cultures are very easily sidelined. Conferences such as the annual COP might appear to gather everyone at the same table in democra�c equality; everyone might get a name badge, a flag and a microphone; but as the controlling pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm put it, “some are more equal than others”.

For the MAPA the climate crisis is not a threat that can be held at a comfortable psychological distance. It is on top of them now. Their speeches are rooted in a lived reality, their word documents, pdfs and excel files, try to capture the immediacy of this existen�al reality. However, even if the gap between the visceral reali�es of the real world in all its complexity and the clean lines of a cropped policy summary are underlined, put in bold, and enlarged to font size 92, the interests of the most vulnerable seem doomed to be literally paper thin.

Under Arendt’s understanding of the nature of bureaucracies and power, “death by powerpoint” has a deeper level of meaning.

This is not to doubt the earnest work that goes on in these conferences. It is surely right to engage with all our understanding and energy with all the processes that have been set up to get us through the climate crisis exit door. Despite all their flaws, the COP mee�ngs are the most important game in the global village for collabora�on against climate change. Neither is this analysis intended to

91 Franz Ka�a Interna�onal Airport got spoofed by The Onion Report, illustra�ng many of these aspects of Ka�a’s work: htps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ

undermine the powerful leverage that assembling a host of diverse sta�s�cs and lines of argument into a compact space can achieve. Even if there are powerfully nega�ve poli�cal and commercial interests at work at COP, there are many who want to bring climate nego�a�ons forward with more holis�c thinking, o�en by affording the representa�ves from na�ons on the margins of the spreadsheets brief moments of aten�on on stage.

But the ques�on needs to be asked: what is the end result of these conferences? Dare we believe that live moments of poignancy can have any grip on the material forces at work in the laptops of the diplomats and delegates? Are these appearances not just like ghosts in the machine? Are not all the gestures towards including the MAPA just empty? There might appear to be a plurality of voices in the room, but do they have the power to break the underlying paradigms of the systems that brought the people together?

The answer is unambiguous: The historic data shows that the world has only ever accelerated their emissions 92, bringing the climate system �ght up against some �pping points 93 that will hit the most vulnerable people hardest, and first. And this breathless movement towards planetary �pping points has been led by the wealthiest na�ons.

Frankly, Arendt would not call the results of the bureaucra�c climate nego�a�ons disappoin�ng, or a failure. She would call it violence.

Language maters.

It is much harder to call the con�nual overlooking of the MAPA as violence when it happens in comfortable aircondi�oned rooms in which the delegates are provided with nice chairs, great food, and a feeling that they are in the middle of an important event about something virtuous (saving the planet" 94). Indeed, the main issue here is that, at the most basic psychological level, a bureaucracy is one crucial step away from reality. It was a gap that afforded Eichmann that ability to proudly declare that he had “never killed anyone” and that there was never any violence in his office.

Arendt writes, “For when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, poin�ng to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial… to put the mater colloquially, Eichmann never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness something by no means iden�cal with stupidity that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is 'banal' and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, this is s�ll far from calling it commonplace… That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil ins�ncts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

To repeat. This is not to make any connec�ons at all with the poisoned Nazi heart of Eichmann (exposed by Stangneth in Chapter 4) and the inner moral world of any of the climate nego�a�on delegates. This line of reasoning would be so easy to rip out of context if someone really wanted to go to the effort of trying to malign the thinking here. The simple underlying fact about the bureaucra�c process set up by the UNFCCC in 1992 is that it created a distance by abstrac�on from

92 With the excep�on of the years that were directly affected by COVID-19.

93 Some �pping points in the climate system have almost certainly already been crossed. For example, the West Antarc�c Ice Sheet has been irreversibly undermined by global hea�ng, it will take over a hundred years for this collapse to happen because the processes involved are slow. However, we have already locked in that event, which will have massive implica�ons for sea level rises.

94 Or more precisely, saving humans from a planet that is hos�le to their ambi�ons.

the real lives and losses of the crisis. It so easy to get caught up in the fake meta-reality of a conference.

Of course, we need to set up proper structures and mechanisms for nego�a�on. However, when we do so, there must be a con�nual mindfulness and counterbalancing set of efforts that keep us alert to the hard fact that pu�ng the crisis into policy documents and diploma�c role play, makes the propensity for violence far more likely.

2. Anonymity

It is a violence that would never be tolerated by the interna�onal community today, if it had taken place in the style of some 19th century colonial invasion, with batalions, bayonets and bullets. Such messy forms of invasion or conquest are thankfully no longer acceptable. It might be jarring to make links between the fate of the MAPA of climate change and those who were killed, abused and exploited by colonial control in the past. However, the uncomfortable truth is that so many of the features of the climate crisis are the same.

If we accept that the atmosphere belongs equally to everyone, it is not jus�fiable to have a small percentage of wealthy industrialised na�ons rapidly consume the remaining carbon budget. The consequences of destablising the Earth’s Systems will be just as deadly and brutal, so is it appropriate to quibble about the details of how millions of people will suffer? And in both cases, the primary cause is ul�mately a drive for material economic expansion at the expense of people who can do litle to defend themselves. 95

Yet, despite these similari�es, the ‘death by powerpoint’ that is happening through the policy decisions made in bureaucra�c offices has some strikingly unique features that Arendt’s work brings to the surface.

As stated in the quote at the opening of the chapter, the violence of the climate crisis is profoundly anonymous. It is not at all like squaring up to the faces of an invading army. Firstly, the damage is caused by an invisible set of greenhouse gases. And secondly, who can those so deeply damaged by the crisis point the finger at? At a process? At a system? If they point it at one UHD na�on, there are dozens of others with more or less the same per capita emissions stood right beside them. If they point their finger at the governments, there are mixed voters behind them who put them in power. If they point their finger at mul�na�onal corpora�ons, there are millions of shareholders involved, and billions of consumers who are buying their products. There are a kaleidoscopic range of causes to the crisis.

Indeed, returning to the sharply bureaucra�c space of the COP nego�a�ons, the UNFCCC is fiercely commited to a forum of nego�a�ons in which there is no finger poin�ng at any one na�on. It is o�en said by those who run the UNFCCC, that it is a global problem that requires global co-

95 Concerning Imperialism, Arendt’s aten�on was snagged by a quote of Cecil Rhodes, a Bri�sh mining magnate who was successful in his imperial conquests in southern Africa that he ended up with a whole country under his name, “Rhodesia”. Once, when looking up at the stars at night, Rhodes commented, “The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is le� of it is being divided up, conquered and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I o�en think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”

opera�on. There is heavy implicit and explicit pressure to keep the nego�a�ons “posi�ve”, where the game is to rachet-up commitments.

Whatever the advantages might be of trying to underpin these mee�ngs with feel-good vibes, there is one fundamental problem with this strategy: namely, if you cannot point a finger in accusa�on, then you also cannot point a finger at a diagnosis of the problem. The mul�ple layers of bureaucracy might be able to bring a vast range of interests into one uniform space, but in the end:

1. There is no clear focus of aten�on on the actual problem of a carbon budget. The absolute gigatonnes of carbon dioxide 96 is never centre stage. (For a full jus�fica�on of this point, read Chapters 4 and 7 of the Climate Academy Guidebook).

2. There is no sharp understanding that it is the lifestyles of the “Ultra High Developed” na�ons that are the real problem.

3. The only possible way to actually exit the crisis is to fundamentally rethink our economic models. However, our conversa�ons about degrowth are a best limited, and at worst, the concept is ridiculed.

Even though the en�re edifice of the UNFCCC has only one objec�ve, “the stabiliza�on of greenhouse gas concentra�ons in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” (Ar�cle 2). All the cogs, mechanisms and layers of complex bureaucracy that have been constructed around this ar�cle, have made it easy for those who are responsible for the mess to hide from their responsibility to act.

It is as if the UNFCCC made a clock with many technical and complex components to it, they brought in specialists to assemble it, and every year they update the machinery with the latest knowledge and exper�se… but it is a clock without the most important, simple feature: the fingers to point at the �me.

Arendt wrote, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make func�onaries and mere cogs in the administra�ve machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them. And one can debate long and profitably on the rule of Nobody, which is what the poli�cal form known as bureau-cracy truly is….we have become very much accustomed by modern psychology and sociology, not to speak of modern bureaucracy, to explaining away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that kind of determinism”

In COP mee�ngs, every na�on can hide behind another’s lack of commitment, everyone can point to economic troubles or diploma�c difficul�es. It is the rule of Nobody, in which nobody is the winner. Indeed, the reason for highligh�ng the fate of the MAPA is because, not only is their suffering so acute and present, but they are symptoma�c of a wider breakdown that will occur right across the global system in due course.

3. Language

AAU AGGI AMO AO CDM CDR CER ENSO GWP IOD IPCC IPO MSL OHC PDO REDD UHI SSP TEWI UNFCCC WMO

My keyboard is not broken.

These are just some of the acronyms that can be read throughout climate change policy documents. They are bemusing. But if we are honest, it is quicker to write TEWI than it is to tap out the words,

96 More precisely, carbon dioxide equivalent There are numerous greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but it makes it simpler to count them in units of CO2 because they all have different degrees of warming potency.

“Total Equivalent Warming Impact”, and wri�ng AMO is easier to spell than “Atlan�c Mul�decadal Oscilla�on”.

A par�cular problem with the climate crisis is that some of the science is irreducibly complex, and this makes most research papers on the issues almost unreadable for anyone without a degree in that field of enquiry. This gap between scien�fic knowledge and public awareness has been difficult to bridge. A problem made more difficult by the woefully low standard of ecological literacy in all our modern educa�on programmes, and the poverty of the media repor�ng of the crisis. Like the La�n of the medieval world, the acronyms are part of a language that is exclusive to the offices of knowledge and power that func�on way above the range of ordinary ci�zens. Both the Climate Academy and this series of books are an atempt to help bridge that democra�c gap.

We also have “No Common Sense” of the crisis because of the absurdly contorted and misleading way in which na�ons make their climate policy commitments (known as NDCs, btw). This problem is fully explained in the opening book of the series and in the free chapters of the Climate Academy Guidebook.

Simply put, what on earth/in the atmosphere, does the EU’s commitment to reduce its emissions to 55% of 1990 levels by the year 2030 mean? It is a commitment that has nothing to do with the remaining carbon budget, and takes no account of how much the EU is ea�ng up of that budget. We do not have such mangled number sets for any other economic repor�ng. GDP, infla�on, stocks and shares, they all have a simple single number with an established set of data and principles behind them. So why is the most important vital sta�s�c for all future economic development so weirdly put? Why could we make helpful dashboards of public informa�on for COVID19 in a mater of weeks, but go for decades without having them for the climate crisis? Why do we not have a clear, universally agreed emissions index that makes it easy to hold governments to account about their commitments?

The answer to this ques�on does not need to be spelt out. But, perhaps the acronym for it would be: COS WEED PFER NOT2.

One final aspect of bureaucra�c language to be highlighted concerns the three types of climate ac�on that have become the standard way of classifying different types of response:

a) Mi�ga�on (reducing greenhouse gas emissions)

b) Adapta�on (adap�ng and building resilience to climate damage)

c) Loss and Damage (compensa�on paid for losses that go beyond what can be adapted to)

In the earliest days of climate change conferences, the promise was for decisive ac�on that would mi�gate the risks to human civilisa�on. Then a�er decades of inac�on, the bar was lowered to comprehensive strategies of adapta�on, to cope beter with the new level of hos�li�es that nature was unleashing. Finally, in recent years, the bar has dropped down as low as compensa�ng for “loss and damage”. An approach that admits that the damage is irreversible, and cash is offered apologe�cally in response. In each of these new phases, despite their declining ambi�on, the plans would o�en be presented as something progressive or virtuous.

The vocabulary of mi�ga�on, adapta�on, and loss and damage is not widely understood, especially with respect to the downward slope of commitment that it signals. This gap between the pulpit and pew makes it possible for those behind the microphones to speak with apparent virtue about

standards of commitment that are heavily compromised. For example, the UNFCCC website, has a page about “the moral impera�ve of loss and damage” 97 .

Of course, it is beter to have some commitments rather than none. Now that we already have 1.2°C warming and have locked ourselves into even higher temperatures through inac�on, it is beter to try and deal with the consequences of that, than to just ignore them. However, there is no doubt that the darker arts of diplomacy are at work in how our iner�a is being framed.

It is quite a nasty game.

The price of the Ultra High Developed na�ons guzzling up of the carbon budget with their heavily consump�ve lifestyles was the total destruc�on of millions of lives and the elimina�on of countless tradi�ons and cultures. Yet this violent three-step downgrading of expecta�ons in UNFCCC conferences has happened with such quiet changes of gear, it is actually hard to really hear what is going on. The establishment of a fund with billions of dollars of compensa�on in it looks like a posi�ve development in climate nego�a�ons; but even if the wealthiest na�ons actually paid up on this latest third rate promise – it is a rather empty gesture to offer cash to a na�on where the people will be required to carry out all their trade and tradi�ons, culture and community, either underwater, or under the desert sands.

Evidently, the loss of thousands of years of culture has no possible price, and that millions of years of luxuriant development in biodiversity can never be measured as a monetary asset. But somehow, under the spell of bureaucra�c wizardry these brutali�es seem a bit more comfortable.

What should MAPA ac�vists fight for now? The limited funds that are being made available address very real losses and damages. Such repara�ons are especially atrac�ve when you are in a vulnerable posi�on in the teeth of a crisis. Yet to accept the deals on offer, especially in the drippy form of cash, is at the same �me an acceptance of defeat. The game that really maters, the numbers that really count, are quite simply the concentra�ons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

4. Numbness and dumbness

Arendt’s awareness of the odd psychological detachment that comes from handling the world with the gloves of a bureaucracy is certainly informed by her reading of Ka�a. As just noted in the previous sec�on, bureaucracies create their own points of reference, their virtual world of targets, uniformity and procedures affords managers and officials the space to unplug from reality.

Any unplugging from reality allows for some period of ignorance.

However, in the end, reality bites.

The sustained lack of real engagement with the climate crisis has le� us with a remarkable crescendo of background pressure on the planet’s environmental systems. A new economic paradigm is on the way soon, simply because nature demands it. This rapid shi� could be led by humans in a managed way, or it could be forced upon us by the environment chao�cally. Either way, it is going to happen. And in the build up to that flip, it is almost spooky for those who are observant of the real situa�on, to observe all the different types of deep contradic�ons that are in play at the moment.

For example, this Tweet by George Monbiot li�s the lid on the misunderstandings at work in the UK when thinking about the ac�vi�es of Ex�nc�on Rebellion.

The major clamp downs on the right to protest (“Public Order Act”, 2023) by the Conserva�ve Party are rooted in the idea that the peaceful protests of XR are simply an annoying disrup�on to the efficiencies of our daily lives. Pri� Patel (the sponsoring government minister of the bill) is blind to the fact that the protests are symbolic intrusions into the status quo because we have entered into the most absurd level of dissonance with nature. The XR protests have many different levels of meaning and purpose, but one of them is an atempt to shake awake our public awareness about the severity of the environmental crisis because our policies and bureaucracies simply do not register the threat at any meaningful level.

Now, here is the opening line to Ka�a’s most famous work, “Metamorphosis” (1915), “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigan�c bug”.

Such a profoundly alarming state of affairs should trigger a wild spasm of panic in Gregor. Yet, if we con�nue to read, we find that Gregor, in the immediate wake of this existen�al event, is actually only, oddly, interested in trivial details about his situa�on. The reader wants to shout at Gregor and remind him that he is now an insect!

The text con�nues, “ … What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper human room although a litle too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls.” So even the narrator of the story is oddly complicit in missing the most important consequences of waking up as a bug. Otherwise, why would he be so concerned to drop in a quiet complaint about the fact that Gregor’s room is ‘a litle too small’. Are there not more alarming facts invading the present tense? This unbearable tension between the existen�al shredding of normality and the indifference of those involved is key to the power of Ka�a’s work.

Likewise, Ka�a is invi�ng us to look at ourselves reading the book and shout to ourselves, you are a human being! He wants us to do a double take. Things are really odd. There is nothing natural or necessary about human existence. We are just a truly weird lump of carbon hanging around in �me and space, our oversized walnut brains are capable of producing a fascina�ng inner TV experience, that can look both in on itself thoughts, and out into the deepest dimensions of the surrounding physical universe. And yet, despite all this incredible reality, we also might some�mes moan to ourselves about the rela�ve size of our bedroom.

Gregor’s response is haun�ngly remarkable for its sheer banality. Such jarring juxtaposi�ons of existen�al irregulari�es on the one hand, and uterly trivial thinking on the other, are familiar to people who understand the climate crisis. It is just breathtaking that so many people carry on as if

nothing is happening, they fuss about mundane details, and at the same �me the most important seams and s�tches of the natural world are coming undone.

“Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hi�ng the pane, which made him feel quite sad. “How about if I sleep a litle bit longer and forget all this nonsense”, he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn’t get into that posi�on. However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was. He must have tried it a hundred �mes, shut his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before.

“Oh, God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen! Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there’s the curse of travelling, worries about making train connec�ons, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the �me so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!” He felt a slight itch up on his belly; pushed himself slowly up on his back towards the headboard so that he could li� his head beter; found where the itch was, and saw that it was covered with lots of litle white spots which he didn’t know what to make of; and when he tried to feel the place with one of his legs he drew it quickly back because as soon as he touched it he was overcome by a cold shudder”.

“Metamorphosis” (1915)

A posi�ve view

Franz Ka�a: Appreciated Anew

Which brings us to Ka�a. As noted at the start of the chapter, Arendt was an admiring reader of his work. His direct, uncomplicated wri�ng conjured up strangely dislocated worlds in which the characters have to wrestle with absurd situa�ons. The people in these claustrophobic spaces are oddly limp and passive, in the face of the unjust systems of which they are a part. It is as if they have been crumpled by the weight of procedures, rules, or limita�ons that have come from without – or as Ka�a puts it, from above.

Ka�a’s modernity is a place in which faceless offices of bureaucracy have taken up the space once occupied by God. Both higher reali�es bring with them absolute laws and non-nego�able truths, it is just that the modern technocra�c laws are profoundly blind and uncaring. Ka�a’s characters live in an uncanny realm, in which an odd, heavy fog clouds the mind and blocks purposeful ac�on. Indeed, in his lesser-known short story, “Poseidon” (1920) Ka�a extends the background fabric of his universe to the gods themselves. With almost slaps�ck humour, the Greek god is to be found at the botom of the ocean, unable to enjoy the sea because he is too busy with admin. Or as Ka�a puts it in the opening line, “Poseidon sat at his desk, doing figures”. This really is a short story. It is only two paragraphs, so it is possible to cite half of the whole thing below.

Franz Ka�a, “Poseidon” (1920).

“Poseidon sat at his desk, doing figures. The administra�on of all the waters gave him endless work. He could have had assistants, as many as he wanted   and he did have very many   but since he took his job very seriously, he would in the end go over all the figures and calcula�ons himself, and thus his assistants were of litle help to him. It cannot be said that he enjoyed his work; he did it only because it had been assigned to him; in fact, he had already filed many pe��ons for   as he put it   more cheerful work, but every �me the offer of something different was made to him it would turn out that nothing suited him quite as well as his present posi�on. And anyhow it was quite difficult to find something different for him. A�er all, it was impossible to assign him to a par�cular sea; aside from the fact that even then the work with figures would not become less but only pe�er, the great Poseidon could in any case occupy only an execu�ve posi�on. And when a job away from the water was offered to him he would get sick at the very prospect, his divine breathing would become troubled and his brazen chest began to tremble. Besides, his complaints were not really taken seriously; when one of the mighty is vexa�ous the appearance of an effort must be made to placate him, even when the case is most hopeless. In actuality a shi� of posts was unthinkable for Poseidon   he had been appointed God of the Sea in the beginning, and that he had to remain…”

As the previous chapters have outlined, Ka�a’s fic�onal worlds of despair soon became a reality. Not only through the expansion of bureaucracies in open democra�c socie�es, but also inside the suffoca�ng regimes of both Stalin and Hitler. Ka�a himself died in 1924 (aged only 40), but his 3 sisters lived un�l their world was invaded by the Third Reich. As Ashkenazi Jews, all 3 of them were deported and murdered by the Nazis. 98

Arendt comments, “The reader of Ka�a's stories is very likely to pass through a stage during which he will be inclined to think of Ka�a's nightmare world as a trivial though, perhaps, psychologically interes�ng forecast of a world to come. But this world actually has come to pass. The genera�on of the for�es and especially those who have the doub�ul advantage of having lived under the most terrible regime history has so far produced know that the terror of Ka�a adequately represents the true nature of the thing called bureaucracy, the replacing of government by administra�on and of laws by arbitrary decrees. We know that Ka�a's construc�on was not a mere nightmare.” 99

Yet.

Arendt makes a surprising move. Having no�ced how powerfully Ka�a could depict the background aliena�on of modernity, she then points at something in Ka�a’s novellas that is redemp�ve. For Arendt, the prophe�c role of Ka�a is unexpectedly posi�ve.

This pivot is most clearly described in how Arendt looks at the central character “K”, in “The Castle” (1926). The novel opens with K arriving at the village belonging to the Castle, which has summoned him there to do a job: to survey it The young K is an earnest man who simply wants to fulfil his role. However, he immediately finds himself having to deal with mistrus�ul villagers, evasive officials and arbitrary regula�ons, and most maddeningly, the castle remains weirdly inaccessible. “K” never gets to do the job he was invited there for: there is a fuzz on the line when he tries to call, a snow dri� when he tries to walk… In fact, despite the villager’s asser�ons that the Castle administra�on is very efficiently run, it turns out that K’s invita�on was actually a mistake.

The original German is full of brooding word plays. The �tle “Das Schloss” does indeed mean castle or palace, but “Der Schluss” means “ending”, or “conclusion” to something. And the castle official

98 Elli and Valli died in the Lodz Gheto. Otla died in Auschwitz.

99 Hannah Arendt, “Franz Ka�a: Appreciated Anew” p5.

with whom “K” has frustra�ngly intermitent contact, is called “Klamm”. In German, “Klammer” means peg, clip, staple or brace - all of which keep things in place; and in Czech, it means “illusion”.

So we have a hero, trapped in a world with slippery and odd expecta�ons; and this is it this haun�ng quality of the prose that is most memorable about Ka�a’s work. However, what Arendt wants us to no�ce is something else. “Franz Ka�a: Appreciated Anew” is eager to point at how autonomous and determined K is, despite all the obstacles. K refuses to accept ‘the given’, and pursues meaning and connec�on even when things are dislocated and alien. 100 Arendt celebrates a novel “in which the ac�ons of man depend on nothing but himself and his spontaneity.”

It is a quite brilliant piece of thinking. The luminosity of her wri�ng in this short essay is made even more thrilling because she finds resources for hope and renewal in probably the most unlikely place of all. Is there a more compelling writer of dark fic�on than Ka�a? Yet, by holding Ka�a’s books in view, and allowing Arendt to focus on the playfulness of some of his characters, some interes�ng things emerge. By pu�ng these two thinkers together, an insigh�ul dialogue of sorts opens up which can capture some essen�al truths about what faces us when we genuinely engage in the struggle for climate change jus�ce.

Ka�a creates worlds where it seems impossible to get a straight answer to the most basic ques�ons, and most of the people in these places don’t even realise how odd and skewed reality is. Arendt then reminds us that the underlying arbitrary nature of those rules and reali�es are also an invita�on to act ourselves in a radically open way that is not confined by expecta�on or custom. Indeed, the laws and culture that the protagonists find themselves struggling with are also not permanent of necessary, so they too can be dismantled and reconstructed.

Ka�a brings an unflinching directness about the difficul�es that confront us when we come up against systems of power that make it seemingly impossible to be heard or understood. Arendt then presents us with a focus on people who s�ll strive to find trac�on in the world, even though their ac�ons are consistently dissonant with how everyone else seems to think. There is a bolstering nobility to their bravery that Arendt applauds.

She writes, “For the villagers K.’s strangeness consists not of his being deprived of the essen�als of life but of his asking for them. K.’s stubborn singleness of purpose, however, opens the eyes of some of the villagers; his behaviour teaches them that human rights may be worth figh�ng for, that the rule of the Castle is not divine law and, consequently, can be atacked.” 101

And finally, the psychological intensity of Ka�a’s work is rooted in his profound sense of aliena�on from the world. Born in 1883, into a (minority) German speaking Jewish family in Prague (at a �me of sharp an�semi�sm), Ka�a had to live all his life with the sense that he was an outsider. The alienated texture of the world was felt most acutely in his private life due to the shadow cast over him by his bulking, obnoxious and bullying father. In Arendt we find a writer who is convinced that there is something irreducibly crea�ve at the heart of the human condi�on. Indeed, it is precisely when we are stripped down to face the most basic ques�ons, when all our fundamental assump�ons about reality are overthrown, that we are drawn into states of mind that can give birth to the most original and crea�ve responses in us. 102

100 The same is true of Josef K, the protagonist of Ka�a’s “The Trial” (1925); although in this novel, the hero fails in the end, as he accepts the necessity of the system and becomes obedient to it.

101 Hannah Arendt, “Franz Ka�a: Appreciated Anew” p4.

102 As her Existen�alist contemporary Albert Camus penned, “In the midst of winter I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” (Essay, “Summer in Algiers”, 1936).

The Climate Academy

By finding something refreshing inside Ka�a’s dark depic�ons of modernity, Arendt underlines an important aspira�on of The Climate Academy. Students face many difficult bureaucra�c and alien structures when they want to make a real impact in the world. The young people who demonstrate the resilience, autonomy and playfulness that Arendt observed in the lives of Ka�a’s protagonists could achieve the highest level of cer�fica�on that is awarded: that of systems entrepreneurship.

Systems Entrepreneurship

The first pillar of the Climate Academy is a commitment to providing the students with a fully systemic view of the crisis. The second pillar is an invita�on to the students to bring that understanding into the democra�c space through civic engagement. If their projects, ar�cles, media or events are properly informed, they will create fric�on and dissonance with some of the standard clichés about the crisis. Naviga�ng the tension between the scien�fic reali�es and the social reali�es can be a deep test of a young person’s mind and character. There are so many social, psychological, poli�cal and economic layers to the problem. At the root of all these overlapping layers, we are in what complex system analysts call a ‘rigidity trap’, that makes genuine progress truly difficult to achieve.

The gap between where we are and where we need to get to is very wide, is something that is well understood by anyone who has a clear systems view of the situa�on.

Therefore, there are thousands of students across the world who are leaving school or university, who are confronted with a very difficult choice. They understand the depth and scope of the crisis, and they truly want to make a difference through their lives, but when they look for places to work, they have to make a very difficult choice. Either they take up a job in the current system; in a company, organisa�on or ins�tu�on which is embedded in a matrix that is profoundly entrenched in a pathway towards climate �pping points. Or they commit their skills and energy to non-profit organisa�ons or other projects that try to operate outside of the normal priori�es and paradigms. If they choose a tradi�onal job, they know that if they try to make an impact, their work will be compromised by the structures that they are plugged into. Whereas if they choose to invest their abili�es and understanding in more funky ini�a�ves, their efforts will struggle to find leverage, because they don’t fit neatly into the major cogs of capital or spokes of bureaucracy. So what to do?

Pour your energy into the eddies of NGO projects, or invest yourself into dysfunc�onal systems of power in which the truth about the crisis is always diluted or filtered?

Arendt comments on the nobility of the characters like K in Ka�a’s novellas, “the motor of his ac�vi�es is good will, in contrast to the motor of the society with which he is at odds, which is func�oning. This good will, of which the hero is only a model, has a func�on too; it unmasks almost innocently the hidden structures of society which obviously frustrate the most common needs and destroy the best inten�ons of man. It exposes the misconstruc�on of a world where the man of good will who does not want to make a career is simply lost. It helps reveal these aspects of respectability before they are actually pulled apart.” 103

The limits of the modern workplace have to be taken seriously. They are real, and they can be crushing. It can feel as if the scripts set out for a young life are inflexible and difficult. However, they can be transcended through play

103 Hannah Arendt, “Franz Ka�a: Appreciated Anew” p7.

The Academy has a third pillar: systems entrepreneurship.

This pillar is explicitly not social entrepreneurship.

This is because to define it as social admits an opposi�on to private entrepreneurship. This polarisa�on of the world into public and private is one of the most damaging dichotomies of the modern world. It is like admi�ng defeat that the world of private industry is mutually exclusive to our wider social ambi�ons, and vice versa.

Systems Entrepreneurship collapses the dis�nc�on between public and private. This new framing is not born out of a fake idealism, but out of a very real understanding that the climate crisis demands a new paradigm of growth in which our organising systems are fundamentally rewired. In the current model of economics, social and natural assets are only considered as external extras. They get to be ignored or included at the whim of the systems that operate in a capitalist framework. In the current economic paradigm, these fundamentally important reali�es can some�mes break through into the corporate sphere. However, these examples are typically momentary – either because there is commercial value to that authen�city, or because the organisa�on can afford a break from its usual produc�vity. Perhaps most tellingly, an increasingly common reason for the inclusion of ‘externali�es’ in the capitalist decision making framework, is that the social fabric or the environmental fabric is in such a crisis mode, they violently invade it.

Whatever the reason, our deeper well-being (which includes a stable climate) is only ever an intermitent concern, it is not a primary organising principle. If a new paradigm of economic growth ever becomes standard, we will look back at the 20th and early 21st century and maybe wonder how it was ever possible to think of the environment and well-being of people as externali�es.

It is the outward looking, crea�ve challenge, of building this new paradigm that The Climate Academy invites students to par�cipate in. The spli�ng of the world into narrow private interests and wider public assets needs healing with the playful cra� of systems entrepreneurs.

Chapter 11

The Na�on State

The main component of our poli�cal world is the na�on state.

104

There are there are trade agreements and defence agreements, there are poli�cal par�es and labour unions, there are clubs, associa�ons, lobby groups and hobby groups, there are IOs and NGOs, there are DOMs and TOMs, there have been empires and tribes, confederacies and city states. But the most important connec�ng hub on the modern poli�cal map is the na�on state.

This unit of power has gained in power and strength since it was first defined with depth by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. His groundbreaking work, “Leviathan” (1651) constructed a model of a na�on that was built up with human rights.

Even though Hobbes was only working on paper, his design of a social contract took root, not only in England, but across Europe and beyond. Na�on states have become strong units of social cohesion, in which everyone inside them understands that they are a legi�mate part of the poli�cal body.

104 It could be argued that the exponen�al growth of mul�na�onal corpora�ons have given them a dominant role, as some of their annual profits that are bigger than some na�on states GDP.

Predictably, his work as the godfather of the modern state back in 1651 has been extensively cri�cised, applauded and developed. A measure of his success as a thinker is easy to realise, if we look outward and observe just how ubiquitous the no�on of rights are now; and if we look inward and no�ce how sharply we feel the existence of rights for ourselves. It is now hard to imagine that they were once just a thought experiment by an old English bloke. 105

Indeed, the concept of rights as a first principle for safe and stable government seemed to work so well that a�er the cataclysm of the 2nd World War, the na�ons of the world scrambled together to try and extend the concept to a global level. The Universal Declara�on of Human Rights by the United Na�ons has been an important headstone of our collec�ve imagina�on ever since it was signed into existence in 1948. However, the truth is that the main centre of gravity for human rights has remained the na�on state. It is your na�on that gives you the vote and the courts. It provides your health care and educa�on. It affords you the power of a passport and the protec�on of the police.

If you are lucky.

What if, by expatria�on or exile, famine or flood, persecu�on or extreme poverty, war or whatever misfortune comes your way, you end up stateless? What if you find yourself as an alien inside a foreign state? Where are your rights then?

The blunt fact is that, in such situa�ons, you don’t have any. You are an outsider to the social pact. You cannot walk into a vo�ng sta�on, courtroom, hospital or school holding your rights out in a jar to the person in charge. They don’t exist like that. They only exist with papers from the network of connec�ons and agreements that circulate inside the members of that na�on state.

In her essay of 1948, “The Rights of Man: What Are They?” 106 Arendt made the point that the Universal Declara�on of Human Rights was poin�ng at thin air. Her typically counter-cultural arguments ar�culated the fact that human rights are not inalienable, they are simply unenforceable.

In a passage that was later absorbed into the final chapter of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” she writes, “The first loss which the rightless suffered was the loss of their homes, and this meant the loss of the en�re social texture into which they were born and in which they established for themselves a dis�nct place in the world. This calamity is far from unprecedented; in the long memory of history, forced migra�ons of individuals or whole groups of people for poli�cal or economic reasons look like everyday occurrences. What is unprecedented is not the loss of a home but the impossibility of finding a new one. Suddenly, there was no place on earth where migrants could go without the severest restric�ons, no country where they would be assimilated, no territory where they could found a new community of their own. This, moreover, had next to nothing to do with any material problem of overpopula�on; it was a problem not of space but of poli�cal organiza�on. Nobody had been aware that mankind, for so long a �me considered under the image of a family of na�ons, had reached the stage where whoever was thrown out of one of these �ghtly organized closed communi�es found himself thrown out of the family of na�ons altogether.”

In the historical cases observed by Arendt, the fate of the Jewish people is most prominent. The rise of na�onalism in the dark shades conjured up by the Nazis, defined the German na�on to the explicit

105 “Leviathan” was published when Hobbes was 63. Remarkably, he lived un�l he was 91.

106 This short text would later be integrated into Chapter 9 of her book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951).

exclusion of the Jews. 107 The infamous Nuremburg Laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938) were dismal preludes to the ‘Final Solu�on’ in which the goal became genocide. To whom could a Jewish person complain about the cropping and eventual elimina�on of their rights? They were considered to be a parasi�c sub-species. Under the Nazis, the Jews were dehumanised then marginalised, ghetoised then deleted 108. Even if the Declara�on of Human Rights had come a decade earlier, it would have been a hopeless act to point at them as a Jewish person inside the Third Reich. Arendt writes, “The stateless individual could no more hope for salva�on than to find ‘a way out of the barbed-wire labyrinth into which events had driven them’.

Crucially, Arendt is not wri�ng about the fate of the Jews in a narrow historical sense, by depic�ng the process through which they were made outlaws she was establishing the key features of how totalitarian, and par�ally totalitarian regimes, exclude and oppress minori�es in the machinery of the state. 109 She prefers to call the vic�ms of this process “stateless” people because it retains the echo of what the community that they once had, rather than the paler and more common term “displaced” people.

The complexi�es of Arendt’s extended historical survey that leads her to these points cannot be handled here. The most relevant point for this chapter and climate change is to observe a close parallel that is evident here between the minority groups that have been made stateless and mistreated in history, and the minority interests of the MAPA who are now hit by climate change like a wrecking ball.

When the sea levels rise a few more cen�metres, how can the Pacific Island people of Vanuatu enforce their right to property? What court can they go to? How will their right to life, liberty and the security of person be enforced? What about the Sami people, living across different borders in the arc�c; which office can they approach to make sure that their ancient civilisa�on is not uprooted and scatered like snow dust into the heat of different urban spaces?

And young people? Without a right to vote, how are their interests in a safe and stable future recognised?

It is not enough to throw a set of concepts and a group of offices at a problem. By looking at the crisis through the lens of Arendt’s work on the na�on state, it becomes clear that her concerns about the Declara�on of Human Rights are sharply relevant to the ways in which the United Na�ons have failed to get a grip on the climate crisis. It simply has not had the muscle to get the individual na�on states to act with enough depth of imagina�on or solidarity as bigger, global community.

107 The awful truth about the fascist state building undertook by Hitler is that whilst he claimed the Jews were a parasi�c ethnic group, it was actually Hitler himself who was feeding off a hatred of the Jews as a key nutrient in the nascent development of the Third Reich.

108 In her typically comba�ve essay of 1943, “We Refugees” she opens with the line, “In the first place, we don’t like to be called refugees… The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupa�on, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reac�ons, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We le� our rela�ves in the Polish ghetos and our best friends have been killed in concentra�on camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.”

109 Na�on states don’t have to be in the business of building empires to exclude and mistreat minori�es. Arendt no�ced that the trea�es writen in Versailles, in the wake of World War One, had thrown a very unhelpful abstract blanket of “na�on” over the top of diverse people, cultures and histories. She gives many examples, especially from Eastern and Southern Europe where an ar�ficial grouping of different peoples under a new umbrella concept of a na�on led to a terrible jostling for posi�on and conflict.

Going forward

Where do we go from here?

To restate the basics, the na�on state is most important unit of power.

There is no ques�on that the ability of na�on states to assimilate the stateless refugees of the climate crisis will come under increasing pressure as the environmental stress marks grow. Hannah Arendt’s cri�que of the modern poli�cal map will therefore remain sharply relevant. Whatever the advantages and failings of the na�on state network have been, it will be this unit of poli�cal power will need to be the main node of change. In the �ny amount of remaining �me available to stay under the threshold of 2°C warming, there is not another op�on available. Therefore, we need to push forward with making this structure work.

There are two levels to this. The na�on state as a unit in interna�onal agreements, and the na�on state in itself.

a) The Paris Agreement

As noted in previous chapters, when the na�ons of the world gather together for COP mee�ngs, there is an absurd lack of focus on the remaining carbon budget. If the UN is serious about its founding principles of equal rights, then the first move in COP nego�a�ons is simply to plant the remaining carbon budget at the centre of all the aten�on and then divide it per-capita.

It is lamentable that for decades na�ons have been allowed to come to the table to talk the crisis without this simplest of agreements in place as a star�ng point. It is profoundly incongruous that the UNFCCC can host conferences without an explicit acknowledgement that the atmosphere belongs equally to everyone.

Whilst na�ons are allowed to submit their climate policy commitments with no reference to the carbon budget, and as long as they talk without recognising everyone person’s equal right to that budget, the whole process will remain uterly ineffectual.

Predictably, the na�ons who are using up the carbon budget much faster than their fair per capita share would allow, will not be very enthusias�c about having their unjust ac�vi�es exposed. But these na�ons are in the minority, the majority of na�ons at COP would benefit from having a clear global map of emissions laid out in public. A statement of the square truth about who is who would not, at the same �me, resolve the problems of nego�a�ng a pathway towards 2°C or lower. However, if the lower emi�ng na�ons would be clear minded enough to insist that the true map of emissions should rolled out, it would certainly be a construc�ve first step in holding those governments to account about their commitments and ac�ons.

The current fog of “% reduc�ons by x date, based on z year”, or targets for (so called) “net zero by date y”, need to be cleared out.

The Ultra High developed na�ons of the world represent only 12% of humanity, but they hold 64% of global wealth and cause 50% of cumula�ve climate change emissions from consump�on. Over 50 years, since the science was well understood, they have not meaningfully reduced their emissions, and they are currently s�ll increasing them. (The full details and scien�fic data behind these

numbers can be found Chapter 7 of the Climate Academy Guidebook, “The CUTx Index”. It is downloadable for free). 110

In the absence of this mental clean-up, it is there will only be a tragic rise in the number of people that Arendt insisted on labelling, “stateless”.

b) Na�onal Commitments

Switching the focus to inside the na�on state, there are enormous opportuni�es for leverage. The na�on state is a hub for so many social, poli�cal, economic and psychological threads to the crisis. It is at the na�onal level that courts, parliaments, media channels, historical and cultural symbols, have the most grip.

Perhaps most importantly, with a final glance back to Thomas Hobbes where this chapter started, the na�on state is a body of laws. This matrix of power has its roots in the no�on of human rights which are upheld by the courts. There are myriad projects and ini�a�ves, campaigns and movements, for climate jus�ce. All of them wonderfully valuable and enriching.

But to conclude this chapter:

Is there a more powerful lever in the world than na�onal law? Is there a more comprehensive way to affect change across a whole system? If we need a coherent, coordinated response to emission cuts, how do we grab hold of so many diverse aspects of a na�onal economic and social fabric? If we need to make infrastructural change to affect the deepest cuts, how will we achieve that if it isn’t through legisla�on?

Arendt was right to no�ce that the development of the na�on state can dump people into a noman’s land of acute insecurity and suffering. Her insights remain important because we can see that the climate crisis is crea�ng a new genera�on of such people. However, this important hub of imagina�on and power is arguably the best tool we have for leveraging change.

And if the court of public opinion will not demand climate ac�on with enough depth, if our parliaments fail us, we have the courts of human rights to uphold a full picture of what is going on and what needs to change. These courts and offices of jus�ce, following the blueprint set up by Thomas Hobbes, were established to provide security and peace for the public body.

110 The numbers of the CUTx Index can be found in a simple pdf document. A visit to the www.cutxpercent.org website provides that document. These numbers, endorsed by the world’s leading climate scien�sts, unambiguously point to the fact that the leading emiters of greenhouse gases have been and remain, the Highly Developed na�ons of the world.

Chapter 12

Conclusions

Arendt’s con�nual concern in her wri�ngs is about maintaining a plurality of voices in our heads. The atomisa�on of society that was so brutally imposed by the Nazis and by the Soviet regimes led to a polity in which there was no debate, no real exchange between people.

Copyright © Mathew Pye April 2024

The famous fron�spiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), in which the body of the Sovereign is made up of the people, turned towards him in an act of collec�ve imagina�on.

This series of books on different philosophers provides a framework for tackling different aspects of climate change. “No Common Sense” mobilises the most powerful voices from the past to speak to us about this most profound challenge. This sequence of thinkers also allows the general reader, or a student of philosophy, to pursue a par�cular interest or thinker. Descartes and Popper help us understand more of the science of the situa�on, Nietzsche and Rousseau open up different dimensions of psychology, and Paine and Plato address the poli�cal aspects of the crisis (but anyone familiar with Philosophy will appreciate just how 360° the view is from each of these thinker’s work).

This book on Arendt invites us to open up a wide conversa�on with ourselves, and her work is part of a rich family tree of history and culture to look back on and learn from. It affords the possibility of having a sustained conversa�on with our past. A society that is engaged in a genuine dialogue with itself is much more robust and resilient. Evidently, each philosopher wrote in a context; and the dialogue that the thinker held with their world is part of a rolling conversa�on that we need to uphold.

Bleaching

Arendt’s philosophy, so difficult to categorise, could be loosely summarised with the insight that we enter into the world through thought, ar�culate thought. How we think is not a secondary ac�on in a human life, for Arendt it was a primary one. Eichmann’s mind had been bleached by Nazi ideology, he had no other voices of history in his head. As informa�on and social media technology increases in potency and reach, so does the threat that our minds become reduced to a thin, singular story. Or perhaps even worse, our social consciousness becomes litle more than an ahistorical flickering of images in a feed. Arendt described the banal evil on display in Eichmann’s performance at the trial in Jerusalem as like a fungus. A rootless, quickly spreading organism that is happy to feed off dead material.

Governments need to be aten�ve to the importance of protec�ng public spaces where a rooted dialogue of words and reflec�on can happen. We need to have the space and �me to put words on things, most crucially, through robust investments in schools and a robust defence of a genuinely ar�culate and independent media. With Nature’s systems rapidly approaching �pping points or irreversible destabilisa�on, we cannot afford to be banal, neither in thoughts nor in our acts.

Being tactless

Philosophy should not be comfortable. It puts you on the outside of common sense.

At Eichmann’s trial, Arendt explicitly, and o�en tactlessly 111, contrasted her work with the focus of the general media and the chief prosecutor, Gideon Hausner. This made her seriously unpopular.

111 htps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1963/02/16/eichmann

This was because the focus of the media and the courtroom was occupied with the individual tragic tes�monies that Eichmann had ordained at his desk, and it just seemed very inappropriate to approach his trial with a highly abstract agenda. It was 1961, and the Holocaust s�ll had a powerful sensory impact. The scars of grief were wide open, especially in the edgy consciousness of the newly formed State of Israel. Her detractors had a point, but Arendt was never atemp�ng to undermine the gravity or the sheer horror of the Holocaust; she was just trying to gain a foothold of understanding into arguably the greatest tragedy to hit the human race.

The opposite psychological problem with climate change is now the case – because the whole reality of it is so far from our senses, and the worst consequences are in the future and current death tolls and sufferings are oddly out of sight. Even when the abstract dots of the scien�fic graphs jump off the page and express themselves as extreme famines or floods, storms or heatwaves, they can easily be bracketed off as sta�s�cal anomalies. Extreme events that could easily be seen as cruel, spasmodic swipes by the hand of fate, and not the �ghtening grip of a man-made climate crisis. The causal link between these sensory impacts and the background data can only really be displayed in algorithms, probabili�es and spreadsheets.

This gap in our experience of the climate crisis, is a fundamental reason for why we cannot bring ourselves to make a properly propor�oned response to it. When 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers in the final death throes of the war, we have no problems at all in imagining the visceral evil of the situa�on. The cruelty on display is compact and compelling. We know that the distressed and disorientated faces of the holocaust vic�ms in those train carriages were arriving at their des�na�on because of a line of papers The official documents clenched in the black leather gloves of the SS commandant at the sta�on were the last in a paperchain that went all the way back to Adolf Eichmann’s desk. In his quiet office, filled with terrible zealous pride and energy, he was maximising the efficiency of the holocaust in its last window of opportunity.

This chilling story carries much more psychological impact than the disparate, es�mated 250,000 deaths per year that scien�sts have calculated occur as a direct result of climate change now. The vic�ms of climate change don’t all share the same story They are not all in the same place. They are all killed by widely different causes. And perhaps most significantly for our psychology, their deaths have no clear human owner.

Looking forward, the scien�fic projec�on 112 that 5 billion people will live under the con�nual threat of severe drought by 2050 due to climate change is a reality that remains beyond our most immediate concerns. Even if this situa�on will lead to several million avoidable deaths, the emo�onal immediacy of it all remains missing.

It is not comfortable to make these comparisons and contrasts with the holocaust. As I write about it, and bring back to life all those countless tragedies, some of which were vividly told at the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, my heart shrinks away in pain and revulsion But if the graphs of science have not proven strong enough to mo�vate us to move fast enough – it seems legi�mate to point at parallel examples of mass, global human elimina�ons. We don’t need to keep our gaze on this suffering, but we are not allowed to look away by denying the scale of the suffering that is taking place, and that will take place.

For example, Arendt had always preferred a ‘homeland‘ for the Jews in Pales�ne rather than a state. And she cynically wrote, “Clearly, this courtroom is well suited to the show trial that David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, had in mind when he decided to have Eichmann kidnapped…” in the first lines of her report for the New Yorker.

112 htp://www.unwater.org/publica�ons/world-water-development-report-2018/

Hannah Arendt was unflinching in her gaze at Eichmann’s trial. She depicted the misery of the individual holocaust stories with pointed poignancy. But her analysis did not stop there. Her reports to the New Yorker magazine probed deeper: she wanted to get a grip on the roots of things. Just as she had done with her book ‘On the Origins of Totalitarianism’, she was looking for the systemic causes of the evil on display, because that kind of understanding would be necessary to help prevent such seismic convulsions of human civilisa�on from happening again.

It is the awkward role of the philosopher to take this task of systems thinking. It can easily be seen as something superfluous to the short-term visible details of a situa�on. Indeed, reframing the narra�ve of a tragedy will always be very prickly at best, and in most circumstances, very painful. This is because the lived experience has many layers to it, the facts and the interpreta�on are fused together. And this fusion of facts into the senses of a storyline is especially �ght when we are dealing with suffering and iden�ty.

But this is the role that Arendt bravely took on in the 20th century. Her contribu�on to our understanding of Evil was pioneering, and will endure in the history of Philosophy. Paradigm changes in understanding never happen without serious fric�on. What is par�cularly striking about Arendt’s work is the fact that she not only offered a revealing diagnosis of the present evils of her �me, but that in doing so, she also challenged some of the categories and assump�ons of how good people looked at it.

Likewise, climate change is forcing humanity into another paradigm, not only of economics but in every zone of human affairs. It is just obvious that infinite material growth on a finite planet is not possible. It is also clear that the laws of physics and chemistry are stubbornly insistent that we cannot burn an accelera�ng number of carbon dioxide gigatonnes and yet somehow keep the average global temperature at a safe level.

Yet, although the fric�on between these basic scien�fic facts and the old paradigm of economic growth is now seriously hot, there are s�ll regimes of power, social silos, and individual zombies who s�ll prefer to explicitly pretend that the problem is banal. It is quite clear that these dark forces are centred in the fossil fuel industry, and in the parasi�c poli�cal and social systems that are plugged into their resources.

The deep challenge that a rereading of Arendt brings, is that she invites us to consider how far the regime of climate denial has permeated our own thinking.

There was no ambiguity in Eichmann’s courtroom about where the good people and the bad people were sat. It was the Nazi’s who had carried out the holocaust. However, in the case of climate change, the most profoundly awkward of truths is that even good ac�ons, such as buying a birthday present, or flying a plane full of aid towards an area of famine, are all ac�ons that are part of a system that is damaging, and ul�mately, it is deadly. Therefore, the excava�on of thinking and ac�ons that is required to exit the climate crisis is necessarily a deeply systemic one. We will never make inroads into the climbing level of greenhouse gases if we keep performing at a clichéd and common-sense level.

And so to conclude this book, it is worth pu�ng Arendt’s work into this much wider zoom.

The wider zoom

Our percep�on of the natural world was flipped on its head by Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th and 17th century, then by Darwin in the 19th. The disrup�on caused by the Copernican revolu�on and the

Darwinian revolu�on went far beyond the boundaries of science. Both paradigm shi�s upset some deeply vested interests in the status quo 113 .

The first major hammer blow of modern science came from the hard facts that the Earth was not located at the centre of a great celes�al order. The modelling of Copernicus and the observa�ons of Galileo made it clear that the Earth was just a rock, amongst many others, spinning inside a giant bit of cosmic machinery. Their physics dealt a devasta�ng blow to the common-sense view that we were in the centre of everything. Their conclusions are now so firmly printed in our imagina�ons, that we forget how profoundly odd it must have been in the 1600s to be told that the Earth is not sta�cally sat in the middle of the universe. Few people today think of themselves as people sat on board an object that is flying at over 100,000kmh around a sizzling sun. Few people reflect on the fact that the planet is spinning on its axis at over 1000kmh. 114 We just accept these things as true, and don’t give much thought to the fact that, because of these crazy speeds, every day should be a really bad hair day When the new physics about the solar system was put forward, these abstract truths were rejected by the authori�es and everyday people as being not only rather freaky, but also rather offensive.

The second hammer blow was delivered by Charles Darwin. 115 In one book, ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1856), humans were reduced from their dignified place above the animal kingdom to being close rela�ves of cheeky monkeys. Darwin’s evolu�onary theory showed humans to be just another random muta�on in a blind biological process that was cruelly, “red in tooth and claw”. 116

Both of these cases are good illustra�ons of the aphorism that is atributed to the philosopher Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three phases: first it is violently rejected, then it is ridiculed, un�l finally it is accepted as common sense”.

Indeed, we have mostly assimilated these scien�fic findings into our worldview now. Admitedly, we might some�mes forget our cosmic insignificance and fragility. We can also o�en neglect to treat animals with the respect our wider family deserves, and get complacent about the animal ins�ncts that lie just underneath the surface of civilised life. Yet, despite lapses such as these, these two revolu�ons in scien�fic understanding are irreversibly knited, at every level, into our thinking and lives.

Climate change needs to be understood with a similar gravity. It is of equally profound size and consequence to these previous revolu�ons. Whether we like it or not, a revolu�onary paradigm shi� is taking place right now. The consequences of climate science extend far beyond the boundaries of the research departments of physics and chemistry in our universi�es. The physicists in the polar regions who are measuring ice melt rates, and the biology field researchers who are observing the stresses playing out in animal migra�on paterns are, at the same �me, char�ng the underlying facts of a huge shi� in human civilisa�on.

We cannot afford to underes�mate it.

Our view of “progress” will be redefined, our view of “growth” will be overturned. The truths of climate science are profoundly at odds with the globalised economic model that now structures our social world and inner world. Climate change is an offence to common sense, but the concentra�on of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will radically reframe everything – from society to the self.

113 A full account of the Copernican Revolu�on can be found in “Descartes Tackles Climate Change”.

114 at the equator.

115 And, less famously, by Alfred Russell Wallace.

116 Tennyson’s, “In Memoriam” (1851) is given fuller aten�on in “Nietzsche Tackles Climate Change”.

As Arendt herself commented, this “environmental awakening” promised to counteract what she calls “the doctrine of Progress,” which facilitated the rapacious processes of mass consumer society “at the expense of the world we live in”. 117 She later added, “We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other”. 118

Indeed, it is clear that this shi� brings with it enormous opportuni�es. Any shaking up of the status quo, provides a chance to put right so many structural deformi�es that exist in the modern world. It holds the promise of recalibra�ng so many of the entrenched inequali�es and injus�ces that have resisted the overall progress we have made in democra�c life. When scien�fic knowledge made radical incursions into human society in the past, it broke up many damaging regimes of power and control. This one is no different.

The potency of Arendt’s bold reframing of the moral world can help us see the true significance of what is going on. Her clear cultural and moral radar can help us navigate the challenging route ahead.

117 Arendt, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address”. p262, January 26, 1975. New York Review of Books.

118 Ibid, p259.