2084: How the Politicization of Climate Change Serves Totalitarianism
Psychologists have studied the source and reason for climate science denialism. They’ve shown links between denialism and a need to uncritically accept paranoid conspiracy theories, and between denialism and an acceptance of authoritarianism. Most true believers of climate science denialism tend to embrace irrational conspiracy theories, and to accept and need authoritarian structure.
That explains, in part, why some members of the public allow themselves to be manipulated by paid science deniers. It doesn’t explain what drives the propagandists who advance this anti-science message.
Part of the driver is economic interest — big oil and coal companies clearly face diminishing profits in a world that transitions to methods for producing energy that don’t require fossil fuels. These wealthy corporations buy a lot of political influence, which is one way science denialism works its way into our politics.
Both the psychological and economic influences matter, and both are powerful drivers of anti-science propaganda. But there is a more insidious use for climate science denialism, and that is the way it advances totalitarian autocracy. Researchers may be reluctant to investigate this path, for it ventures directly into partisan politics. It may however be the most powerful driver of denialism. It certainly is the most dangerous. Follow the logic below.
Real science isn’t political. It’s a search for data and for rational and comprehensive explanations of reality. A scientific topic is only political when it’s used for political purposes.
Scientific discoveries can be used to advance political ends, but that’s usually done in the context of technology or applied science. Advances in weaponry are the easiest example of this, as nations use military or surveillance machinery, or economic might, to further their aims.
But corruptions of “pure” science can also be used for political goals. As George Orwell showed in his classic novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the power of a totalitarian state rests in convincing the public that the ruling class is the ultimate source of truth. The public then relies on the rulers to inform them, and to shape their world through edicts and pronouncements.
This move toward totalitarianism has succeeded once the public is prepared to believe statements that are obvious lies, to willingly repeat those lies, to embrace them, and to insist upon their truth. In Orwell’s novel, we witness the hero, Winston Smith, undergo conditioning to remove his critical faculty and force him to accept, as truth, things he knows to be lies. According to Orwell, that’s the essence of totalitarianism: the surrender of one’s ability to discern reality from fantasy.
This is the behavior, taken to extreme, about which writers from Galilleo to Sagan warned us. Gallileo said, “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” Carl Sagan insisted, “Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view. Arguments from authority carry little weight.” When political voices dictate reality by executive order, truth dies. When scientific inquiry is censored or destroyed, freedom and any notion of rationality is destroyed with it.
We have, frighteningly, witnessed this process first-hand here in the United States. The day after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, his then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, angrily announced the crowd at the inauguration was the biggest ever to witness a presidential inauguration. Obvious nonsense, this statement was well-documented as an outright lie, which could be seen simply by comparing photographs of that year’s activities to the inaugurations of the previous president.
This might seem like a harmless and rather silly lie, but it was part of an ongoing pattern of much more sinister fare. As merely one example: the new administration insisted, against all evidence, that millions of people ineligible to vote voted illegally. This nutty theory was advanced to “explain” why Trump’s opponent actually received nearly three million more votes than Trump did. The truth proved Trump’s unpopularity, and was therefore inconvenient to the incoming administration, so it was a truth that needed to be erased. More than that, by insisting upon the new “truth”, the “truth” of millions of illegal votes, the administration could launch an attempted purge of voters who would be likely to oppose Trump’s reelection. The incoming president then established an “election integrity commission” which was tasked with finding undesirable voters and negating their voter registration.
One clear part of the totalitarian drive here was to disenfranchise people who could threaten the incoming administration by exercising their power to vote against it next time. But a more subtle aspect rested in the irrationality of the justification for the disenfranchisement. If these voters were registered to vote, then their votes were legal. The irrational lie about “millions of illegal votes” was to be used to prevent the votes of legitimate voters. Americans were pressured to accept this obvious non sequitur as being a reasonable argument.
The “election integrity commission” proved to be an obvious scam. But its purpose was not to pursue a serious investigation. In addition to the attempt to subvert democracy by the direct means of disenfranchising undesirable voters, it was a test to see how far the public could be led into accepting a lie as truth, if that lie came from the president.
That is Winston Smith in a nutshell. When the public is prepared to accept as true statements that cannot be true, totalitarianism has won.
The deceitful pattern of this administration is astounding. As of January 20, 2018, the Washington Post had cataloged well over two thousand lies spoken directly by Trump in the year since his inauguration. This is not merely a matter of causal incompetence or the usual sort of partisan spin in which politicians have engaged since the invention of politics. It is a deliberate and systematic assault on truth, a mountain of mendacity beyond anything we have previously witnessed.
Some of the lies are enormous whoppers clearly told to underhandedly obtain political advantage. But some are tiny fibs which seem to have no discernible reason, as if Trump can’t help lying. Some analysts and observers have theorized this may imply something about Trump’s mental state or declining acuity. It’s more than that.
It’s a deliberate attempt, conscious or not, to accustom us all to accept lies as truth, to allow even casual and obviously false pronouncements of Big Brother to continue unchecked, to infest our public discourse with an unreality which will substitute even for our own personal experience of the world. Reality is to come from on high, not from our own reason and discernment. Once this is achieved, the new rulers can do anything to us.
One of the first actions taken by the new administration was to begin scrubbing information about climate change from government websites. This destruction of data is both pervasive and systematic. The existing science is accepted worldwide. There is not a single accredited university or scientific organization that disputes it. Studies repeatedly show the acceptance of climate change is nearly universal among scientists, because it is based on well-understood physics and careful observation and the most rigorous testing and verification of any scientific theory in history.
There is really only one large organization in the whole world that disputes climate science and the reality of human-induced global climate change, and that is the Republican Party. They have made climate science into a political issue — when it is not a political issue, but an established scientific reality.
Joseph Goebbels is held to have said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty,” and climate science politicizers have followed that advice, laying the blame for politicization of climate science upon the scientists who are documenting climate change, rather than the people who have politicized it. I have even seen one science denier use the Republican attack on climate change to argue that climate science (and science in general) has been politicized, and thus shouldn’t be trusted.
This is more than the Republican tendency to break government and then whine that government is broken and so shouldn’t be allowed to function. It is a direct assault on the concept of reality. It is an insistence that only the Dear Leader can be trusted — not scientists, not one’s own experience, not logic, not observation, not data, not even your own lying eyes, but only the irrational pronouncements of the ruling class.
Saint Augustine said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” The clear implication is that “faith” is to be trusted beyond that which is observable and measurable, and that the force of belief is enough to mold reality to be that which is believed. This is precisely the authoritarian ideal, but removing the believer from the point of causation and substituting Big Brother.
This is the credo of the climate science denier, and it is the driving force behind political science denialism. We are to have faith in that which we are told to believe, however irrational. In fact, the more irrational the belief, the more contrary to reason and verifiable data, the better it serves the purposes of totalitarianism, for when we are able to accept that which we know to be false, we will allow any monstrosity to be visited upon us.
That is the lesson Orwell tried to teach us, and Galileo, and Sagan. We ignore it at our peril, for climate denialism threatens not only to help cement a totalitarian regime into our nation, but to cause the collapse of human civilization. The latter is but one of the many monstrosities to result from the former.
