Tag: authoritarianism

What is the Courageous Response to Climate Chaos? Not eco-authoritarianism.

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Are you hearing more people talk about needing to do “whatever it takes to save the planet”? Have you heard people blame democracy as the reason for our intractable problems, including persistent poverty, extreme inequality, and the unaffordable cost of living, or environmental damage and breakdown? I have been hearing variations of that perspective, particularly from people rightly dreading the impacts of climate chaos. Over three decades of work on the topic, I witnessed authoritarian musings of frustrated environmentalists being expressed in private. But now I hear them articulated in public. One person who has brought this topic into the open is the environmental academic John Foster. Writing at the Greenhouse Think Tank, he argues: “the intelligent and informed who do recognise the urgency of transformation must organise themselves for a vanguard seizure of power…” He has a new book out this year, which reminded me I hadn’t responded to his critique of my arguments against such eco-authoritarianism. As John’s Lifeworld book will go deeper into his philosophical justification for authoritarian rule by an ecologically-minded elite, I think it is a good time to rejoin the conversation. If you are interested in the future of politics in a metacrisis, where societies experience environmental breakdown, then I hope this long-form essay will provide some stimuli for your own political opinions and campaigning. 

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Let’s Turn the Tide on Surveillance – starting with radio biometrics

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Do you ever feel a quietly gnawing discomfort at the direction technology is taking us? Not just a concern about screen addiction or misinformation, but a deeper unease: that a world is being built in which our presence, thoughts, and behaviours are constantly detected, catalogued and analysed, often without us even knowing? Perhaps it’s the sense that the tools of surveillance, often accepted for personal convenience or public security, are being normalized in all aspects of our lives. Perhaps it feels like a tide: as if an inevitable force of nature, rather than a set of human choices. 

I have known that feeling of uneasy resignation for some years. But recently I came across a new study which snapped me out of that torpor. Suddenly I wanted to be clearer on what I think is unacceptable, what should be resisted, and to identify some small steps to take. Consequently, I realise this issue of technosurveillance should be firmly on the political agendas of any serious political party or individual politician. So I want to share with you some ideas on that and why it matters within my particular niche of the environment, metacrisis, and societal collapse. 

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Why we must ALL challenge authoritarian views in green politics

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Lancaster University academic, John Foster: “Forcefully transformative government… would have to be authoritarian…” “…if [Dr] Bendell wants to send GH [the Green House UK thinktank] an argued objection to what I said in my piece, GH will publish it along with a response from me. This is too important an issue not to encourage responsible debate on it.”

The following in an edited excerpt from the chapter “resisting the fake green globalists” in the book “Breaking Together: a freedom-loving response to collapse.” I am sharing it here in response to the Green House think tank supporting the views of the academic John Foster, which I quote further below. They invited a more substantive dialogue than possible on twitter. That seems appropriate as the thinktank claims to be “leading the development of green thinking in the UK” and has influential people on its board. The concepts I mention in this excerpt, and the evidence for them, are argued in detail elsewhere in the book, which is currently available as paperback/hardback/kindle, and will be available as a free epub download from The Schumacher Institute (TSI) from July 10th 2023 (as TSI always notes, these views are the author’s not the institute’s).

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