The Young Dream of a Green Dictator

Did you know that a majority of sub-30’s Europeans believe that an authoritative regime would be better suited than a democracy to address the climate catastrophe? According to a eupinions-survey published last year, that’s where the new generation’s head’s at.

Surprise. That’s how the Oxfordian academics summarized the survey. That the results were a surprise. A bit of startled shock, just enough to make you look up from your morning tea. Imagine a world, that has suffered through world war after world war to bring the stinking European proletariat their precious voting rights, and here they are turning their hopes to steel-fisted tyrants to bring them out of their dismay.

Permit me to react to that polished Oxford surprise with absolute disdain…

Of course the younger generations have more faith in authority than cooperation when it comes to quick and forceful re-alignments of our economic systems! Just look at what fuck-all our current modes of governance have accomplished over the course of decades of climate change alarmism! Only now, when wildfires rage indiscriminately, when tornados touch down in the European heartland, and heatwaves set record after record, there’s barely even an inkling of urgency. When an elected president in western Europe actually tried to stem the use of fossil fuels, it sparked a wave of international demonstrations only eclipsed by the BLM protests about systemic police brutality. Of course people don’t have any faith that our elected officials can handle the crisis! These are the exact circumstances for which the Romans invented the office of Dictator! To avert a disaster that the Republic couldn’t handle by way of compromise and debate.

Even the survey itself gives a clear indication of why a democracy can’t shift us away from ecological collapse. More than thirty percent of Europeans won’t suffer any lifestyle changes to accommodate the climate crisis goals. Another thirty percent could maybe accept a ban on non-essential plane flights. Fewer than one in ten people in Europe would accept a ban on diesel and petrol fuelled vehicles. People aren’t willing to change anything drastic to reach our middling goals to alleviate our drastic circumstances. Goals that, mind you, are set to try to safeguard the survival of human civilization and the planet as a viable habitat for not just us, but anything more complex than Keith Richards and five cockroaches.

I recently replayed the Dark Souls series. A story about an endless spiral of bleak life, repetitive death, despairing decay, and the need to endlessly satisfy a dying fire with your own immortal being, just for the sake of buying the world a few more gasping breaths. The best possible outcome you can hope for, after being smashed to a singing pulp every which step you’ve taken on your journey? To just rekindle the fire with yourself. Self-immolation for the sake of buying a new generation the shot to have to do it all over again under even worse circumstances.

Sisyphus’ sympathy is ours…

You can’t take yourself out of a self-destructive circle with the same means that perpetuate that circle. The only way to break a vicious cycle is to actually break it. Break it, it’s mother, and the horse it rode in on. Break the framework the circle was founded on, break the lifeblood which sustains it, and break the foundations upon which it was built. You can’t put out a house on fire from inside the house.

Are you tired of suffering for the past generation’s largess, egocentrism, and poisonous mistakes? Then you need to break the circle. Smother the embers. You break the wheel.

I think democracy is a beautiful thing (even if the empowered public is collectively a bunch of mad-cap morons). Liberalism is the light of humanity (even as our rights have come undone from the fetters to their respective responsibilities). But they are privileges. Democracy and liberalism are not fundamentals to life. A living, breathing, viable habitat is. And if our way of enjoying our privileges get in the way of making damned fucking sure that we can achieve a sustainable habitat, then we as a general population are not responsible enough to constructively enjoy our privileges in a time of existential crisis.

Our elected leaders continuously prove themselves incapable of affecting sustainable change. And when they try, we the public punish them for it. Our global companies, with their free market God, have proven themselves unwilling to affect sustainable change for fear that it might negatively impact their short-sighted bottom lines and shareholder reputation. Our own population have told us over and over that they won’t put away their luxuries for the sake of their own breathable air or potable water supply. Is it really so surprising that people are beginning to suspect that they need an authority figure to make them adjust before an impending apocalypse?

Turns out that we shouldn’t fear the rise of AI and the arrival of our robot overlords, but that they’ll come too late…

/Sebastian Lindberg 29/6-2021