I bet a pound to my dear old dad’s watch (you couldn’t give it away) that Prof John’s predictions can only be staved off with a small contribution from the taxpayer in some shape or form.

Not content with that lunatic Milliband imposing huge taxes on the energy companies by making them grossly inefficient as a way to save energy (!), the government is aiming to tax us personally for our own climate crimes.

So Prof John – presumably earning a big fat fee for framing this 2012 GCSE “science” question – justifies his existence by placing yet another straw on the poor old camel’s back.

There is something to that; certainly to the extent that a state of continual crisis is very useful to a certain sort of government. I’m not so sure that poverty and hardship are necessary, though. Orwell wrote at a time when the crisis was poverty, but things have moved on since then, and they can maintain the state of crisis, ignorance, impotence and apathy even while achieving relative prosperity.

But my point was that whatever the leaders might think, a lot of people truly believe. There would, after all, be no point in producing the propaganda if everyone knew it was a con.

I don’t know if it’s a hangover from an earlier strategy, or a takeover attempt from an independent player, but I don’t think the zero-sum story necessarily suits a ruler’s interests, either. Surely the idea that inequality is good, and the natural order of things, would better suit them? I’m not sure that many of our politicians don’t see it as an outside influence, but one they can take advantage of and use, or even that they haven’t been fooled into truly believing it themselves. I don’t know. It would be interesting to know where it comes from and what it intends, anyway.

“In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped…

“Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there. From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

“But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in
a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.

“Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of capitalism, roughly between 1920 and 1940. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity. But this, too, entailed military weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. … In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy — his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter -— set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ’the proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”

– George Orwell (in voice of character Goldstein), “1984″

Whether through war or a similarly all-encompassing crisis (e.g., “climate change”), the necessary thing to maintain a hierarchical society with a privileged elite at the top is to divert production to economically useless goods and services, and keep everyone in a sense of being on the brink of economic failure. Orwell got it right in the 1940s, but great numbers of people continue to be taken in by the con, only to fall into the trap. Amazing.

“The End of the World is Nigh”. All human history is littered with abandoned wayposts that told us we are all doomed unless we revert to the simple life.

From where does this insane idea originate? Actually, technological progress means more people can be supported from a given area of land.

Once stone-age peoples developed agriculture, there was no way back to hunting and gathering (unless you consider a 90+% dieoff acceptable). Similarly coal saved the forests (which in Europe had been almost entirely cut down for firewood) and petroleum and later electricity saved the whales (by eliminating the use of whale oil for lighting).

Today, at least two-thirds of humanity wouldn’t be here were it not for the Haber-Bosch process (which is used in fertilizer production). Perhaps this may change in the future though, if GMO technology allows future crops to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere.

We should treat technological reactionaries as a genocidal enemy of humanity (as the Nazis were to the Soviet people).

As Stalin would have said, “Not a step back!”

Wealth, food, energy, clean water, …, it’s all the same. If you want those who have least to have more, then you inevitably have to bring down those who have the most. You can’t create more of it, you can only redistribute it.

It is the idea of new wealth and resources appearing from nowhere that they can’t get their heads around. It sounds too much like a free lunch.