the brilliantly leaping gazelle

My last post concerned the deluded belief that many people labour under. Namely that using air conditioning to mitigate the heat which has become an increasingly routine part of the summer,  is somehow not making the problem worse. Not making the periods of hot weather more frequent, not making them last longer and not making them hotter. Nor are they causing knock on effects, and nor are these knock on effects causing yet more knock on effects to occur. What these knock effects are though, I’m not too sure. Hopefully I’ll be dead before these effects become very real. As long as I’m dead before the meat runs out, that is.   

Is that in itself a self delusion, one among the many that climate change engenders? Even the term climate change itself is a delusion. Global warming, as it was known before the makeover, had an immediacy about it. Things are getting warmer and the whole world is affected. Climate change, by contrast makes me think of a wealthy Victorian consumptive who retreats to the Swiss Alps for a year on the orders of her doctor. It isn’t frightening, and that’s exactly why the makeover happened.

So yeah, there’s more than enough delusion to go around, from the kind we tell ourselves to ourselves, to the kind campaigners and politicians tell us and the kind they tell to each other. Who is worse, the person who believes the bullshit – the bullshat? Or is it the bullshitee –  the one doing the bullshitting?  What if both the bullshat and the bullshitee are aware that bullshiting is going on, but as that as it suits everyones needs to pretend that it isn’t, pretend that it isn’t. 

One example of this phenomena is the idea that all of us have a part to play in helping to reduce the problem of climate change. Nowhere is this phenomena better encapsulated than by ‘The Guardian’ newspaper. It manages to reconcile the seemingly incompatible positions of continually banging on about the inevitability of the looming apocalypse if we don’t change, whilst publishing fawning articles about foreign holiday destinations, the newest consumer electronics and recipe ideas for food that need imported ingredients. All newspapers do it.

What is especially offensive about this kind of hypocrisy is that the ‘The Guardian’ would have us believe that because it is funded by its readers – 1.3 million of whom paid a total of £100 millions last year – that this confers upon it a moral superiority that other newspapers – owned by a family, a corporation or in the case of News International, by both – lack. And precisely because it is so reliant upon this model of funding, to ensure its continuation, that it ruthlessly panders to its readers preoccupation. One of which which involves them reassuring their readers that yes, they can have children, and yes can they still be can concerned about global warming. 

Indeed, it is this very contradiction, that of becoming a parent whilst being environmentally virtuous, has escaped not only ‘Guardian’ readers, but various groups who one would hope would spot the hypocrisy. Political parties, ‘think-tanks’, charities and academics, to name a few. But as I wrote earlier, there’s more than enough delusion to for everyone to have a share of, and if both the bullshat and the bulllshitee are content with the bullshitting, then it’ll continue.  

And there is no greater bullshit than the bullshit that those who vehemently oppose the two-child benefit cap (TCBC) believe. The TCBC, introduced in April 2017, prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after that date. It wasn’t suddenly announced in the March of that year either, but instead as part of the 2015 budget, with the implications made abundantly clear. If people on benefits can’t practice proper birth control and then not have the sense to abort or else put the child up for adoption, then how is that the governments fault? 

And a reversal of the TCBC would only make things worse. Would there even be a limit, a point beyond which it was deemed both socially and politically unaffordable to go? Are the opponents of the TCBC really suggesting that any cap is somehow wrong? That even with our ever rising benefits bill, we should shoulder yet more? And it it is this hypocrisy, on top of all the others, that rankles the most. The opponents of the TCBC, the ones who want to see it abolished, the ‘Guardian readers, the politicians et al, they will suffer no worsening of their comfortable lives if such a thing – added claims on the welfare budget – were to happen. 

They only read about hardship. They are ones who bemoan social inequality, agitate for action to be taken to reduce it, unaware of the fact that if their wishes were to become true, then the sufferings endured by the as yet unborn, would be even greater.