“The Nihilism of Environmentalism” with Richard Salsman

[00:00:02] Speaker A: I want to. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Invite. [00:00:05] Speaker A: You just sent him the invite. [00:00:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I see him here. He's now a speaker. That's great. [00:00:12] Speaker A: Thanks. Good to hear from you. [00:00:14] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks, everyone, for joining us. We're very glad to have Atlas Society senior scholar professor Richard Salzman talking about the nihilism of environmentalism. After Richard's opening remarks, we'll take questions from you. So if you want to request to speak, we'll try to get to as many of you as possible. Richard, thanks so much for doing this topic. [00:00:39] Speaker A: Thank you, Scott. And welcome, everyone. You know, this is the time of year where we hear a whole bunch about the environment and environmentalism and humans ruining the planet. For those of, you know, 1970, the Nixon administration, the republican administration helped enact the Environmental Protection Agency. That's when it began. That was also the first, quote unquote, Earth Day 1970. So this has been going on for about 50 or more years now. I'm going to liken it, by the way, to the marxist movement starting in the middle 18 hundreds with the communist manifesto as a very common parallel. But my focus will be nihilism. But let me just suggest Marx in the mid 18 hundreds, the anti capitalist, obviously the anti capitalist. Marx said that capitalism was an exploitative system, that the capitalist, the factory owner, the profiter, was exploiting labor, was harming labor. When you fast forward to what we have with environmentalism, the argument is widened to, well, not a subspecies of humans called capitalists who are vile. Humans themselves are vile. Humans themselves are exploiters. And it's not the laborer per se now. It's the planet. So you could say that this is Marxism on steroids. This is Marxism in macrocosm, not microcosm. But there's going to be another interesting parallel, I think also because it was fairly obvious by the end of the 18 hundreds that Marx was dead wrong, that the laborer was not being exploited, that the laborer was doing just fine. His call for the workers of the world to unite and throw off their chains and engage in violence by militantly and violently taking over the capitalist means of production. No workers was doing that. And the Marxists started blaming them for being so apathetic and being so stupid and not having the full consciousness of knowing they were being exploited. So what did they do? They moved to legislation. They moved to get people to vote for the marxist agenda and just put it in that way. So instead of overthrowing capitalism by revolution, it was done by evolution gradually. And instead of it being done by bullets, it would be done by ballots. But that would mean, you would have to convince people, you know, maybe through public schools or agitprop or various other things that they needed to resort to violence. But by this indirect mean of having government just mandate, you know, minimum wage or labor unions or work, work conditions, laws and things like that, that's exactly what's happening with environmentalism. That the cries over the last 50 years, the world's going to end in twelve years. That's their favorite, by the way. They keep saying twelve years. The awful track record of forecasting that we would run out of this or that, that the world would come to an end in a kind of messianic way, similar to the marxist view, capitalism is doomed, but not that it would, in the marxist sense, die of its own internal contradictions, but in the environmental story, that it would ruin the very planet it was dependent upon. See the parallels that the capitalist would ruin the very blood, the blood that it's sucking out of labor. And so by its very exploitation, it fails. So that's just as background. But my point tonight and relates to this, is nihilism. Now, nihilism actually is afraid, Neil literally means neo means nothing. So just so nihilism is, in effect, nothingism. Now, what does that really mean? It usually refers to the idea of moral relativism or that there are no values in the world worth pursuing. It is sometimes synonymous with existentialism, with the dread of existence, with the idea that life's a bitch and then you die. What's the point? And it actually comes from Turgenev. Ivan Turgenev in the mid 1860s coined the term. And he was looking at russian youth who were anti tsar and were explicating exactly this view. They couldn't overthrow the tsar, so they came up with this idea that moral values are relative and civilization sucks. And let's just be anti Civ. And fast forward to Stanford in 1988. And they were marching around saying, hey, hey, ho, ho. Western Civ has got to go. Well, Western Civ is what made capitalism possible. So you see the intent. Nihilism has two aspects. One would be apathy if there are no values worth pursuing, if life's a bitch and then you die. I mean, you could have that philosophy and you might not hurt anybody. You might just be a loser who doesn't do anything with your life, might even commit suicide. But there's another aspect of nihilism, and it's often associated with destructivism, a destructive bent. So that's why you sometimes hear, well, he's very nihilistic. He's apathetic, or he's nihilistic, therefore he wants to tear down and destroy. Well, I leave this to the psychologist, but it could be something like, I don't think values exist in my world. I do see other people, however, pursuing values, and I want to destroy that. I can't stand it. I can't stand to see other people doing what I say is impossible. And so you can see why nihilism might have that destructive aspect to it. That is my view of environmentalism. It is not a movement for clean air and clean water. It's not in effect a humanistic movement. It's not a movement to help humans get along with the planet. By the way, that was something called ecology, very old term nobody uses anymore. But anyone over 50 will remember that in the sixties and seventies, it was the ecology movement, not the environmentalist movement. And ecology, although it had its perversities as well, generally had this view of we need clean air and clean water. But then soon people realize, well, that means we need water treatment plants and we need catalytic converters and we need scrubbers on smokestacks and wow, I guess we need technology and capitalism and science and the profit motive to clean up the environment. Well, what if you hated all those things? You would not want to see capitalism as a solution to capitalism. You want to get rid of capitalism. So you're not going to go that route. You're going to go the route of saying, no human. We're that the environment, big t h e. The environment is anything but humans. We're going to redefine it as the environment is this allegedly intrinsic value. They call it existence, value of the planet apart from man, apart from human beings. It's the idea of an intrinsic value. The earth has intrinsic value, not value to any species, living human or animal, but value in and of itself. Apart from the further premise that humans themselves are not natural, that they're not only not part of nature, but they're unnatural. So you have this model of an unnatural entity or being definitely interacting with the planet, definitely changing the conditions of the planet, rearranging the elements of the planet, which is what humans do. Humans produce things uniquely, and animals and plants just consume things. So if we were just consumers, if we just were literally couch potatoes like planted in our place, of course animals have mobility, but the idea that we could survive just by eating whatever is off branches and things like that, it's impossible. We would literally be animalistic. We wouldn't survive. If that's the model, you have to ask at some point, maybe they don't want that being to survive. And that is very unique to human beings. They're not only equipped with the faculty of reason and the free will to use it, they also have the free will not to use it. And so humans, like no other species, not only produce and achieve the greatest things ever seen on the planet, they also can destroy themselves. They also can go at war with themselves. They can also kill each other. And in effect, it's the only self loathing species that can have self loathing within a subset of it. I'm looking here at an essay from a Clemson professor in the New York Times a few years back titled would Human Extinction be a tragedy? You can guess what his answer is. This is Todd May writing a book, a fragile life, accepting our vulnerability. His answer is no, it would not be his tragedy. A tragedy. New York Times. This is not, you know, obscure stuff. This is a tenured professor in the New York Times, and, you know, just discussing casually, you know, like, is that a cocktail party? You know, would it be so bad that humans were extinct? And, you know, you've known if you know, some of the past comments from various famous environmentalists. Here's Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institute. The planet is about to break out with a fever, and we human beings are the disease, or Stuart brand of the whole Earth catalog. We have wished, we eco freaks, for a disaster, for a social change that will bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our village, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion. Guilt free at last. Unquote. Adore David Graeber at the US National Park Service. See these, these people at the US National Park Service. He's not there now, but years ago, human, quote, human happiness and certainly human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line, about a billion years ago, maybe half that, we quit the contract and we became a cancer. We've become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth. And until such time that homo sapiens decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along, unquote. I wonder what he would have thought of COVID would have welcomed it. Paul Taylor, author of Respect for Nature, a theory of environmental ethics. Quote, given the total, absolute, and final disappearance of homo sapiens, not only with the earth's community of life continue to exist, but in all probability its well being would be enhanced our presence, in short, is not needed. And if we were to take the stand of the life community and give voice to its true interest, the ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty good riddance, unquote. Ecotage, an environmental activist group quote, we must make this planet an insecure, an inhabitable place for capitalists and their projects. This is the best contribution we can make towards protecting the earth. Unquote. Jeremy Burgess is it just me, or does everyone else feel guilty for being alive? Eventually, and probably soon, we shall be reduced to creeping about in disgrace, nervous of our simplest pleasures. Alan Weissman, 2007 the world without us that was the name of his book, subsequently made into a documentary. What is the world without us? He envisions, I'm quoting now, how rapidly the earth might regain its health if only the human race were to disappear and the infrastructure that it had built withered away, thus restoring nature to its pristine condition. Unquote. He won awards for this book. He's a professor of journalism, and he got a genius grant from the MacArthur foundation. This is genius. Today, I'm looking at a poll of teens from 2019, teenagers in America. Title of is us teens have a mixed emotion about climate change. Question how do you feel about the environment and climate change? And they had these options. 57% the top most common answer afraid 2nd 3rd most common answer 52% angry 42% guilty this is 13 to 17 year olds. Why would a 13 to 17 year old who probably couldn't even define what climate or climate change is have those emotions? They're obviously being instilled with kind of ideas I've been talking about. Now, there's an interesting. So I think at this point, we could say more, and I'll stop 25 minutes into this so we can take questions and talk about this. There's, you see a connection, a little bit, between nihilism and what I call what anyone can call misanthropy. Environmentalism is rife with misanthropy. If you look it up. Misanthropy is hatred for humans, and obviously the opposite, philanthropy. Philo love, a philanthropist we think of as one who gives money. But technically, the word means love of humans. Well, the opposite of that is hatred for not any particular humans, not bad humans, not vicious and criminal humans, not mass murdering Maoists, Stalinists, hitlerite humans, all humans. We hear the word today all the time, misogyny. Well, that's hatred of women or misandry. That's hatred of men, but hatred of mankind. The fact that we even have a word for this misanthropy. It's interesting. Now, of course, you have to separate out. I get this all the time from students. They'll say, well, I know environmentalists who study the science of climate change and meteorology and water treatment plants and the science of chemistry. Yes, yes, those are all sciences. But the kind of things I've been quoting which drive public policy is plain misanthropy. And even if you took a poll and said, well, maybe only, I don't know, 10% or 20% of environmentalists, when you scratch deep, are these misanthropists. Yes, but if they're driving 100% of policy like the Green New Deal, and talking about banishing a range of human conveniences delivered up by capitalism, then it doesn't matter what the subset percentages are. It's what's driving the debate. It's what's driving the motive to depopulate what's in economics called the degrowth movement. Not just, not just slow growth and stagnant and have a, quote, steady state. Oh, that's, that's old fashioned stuff. That's 1970s stuff. Degrowth is the goal is a contraction every year in output. That's what degrowth mean. They should say anti growth, but that's the goal every year. Not only we reduce, quote on missions, but reduce the sheer number of people on the planet and the output of the planet. And obviously this range of wonderful energies that have been discovered since the industrial revolution, from coal to crude oil to hydro to nat gas to nuclear. It's interesting that they embrace the only energies that existed pre industrial, the sun and the wind that's acceptable to them. Why? Because it's pre industrial implication. They hate the industrial revolution. What did the industrial revolution did? It made possible a mass increase in the number of humans on the planet, and not just that healthy, longer living, happier, healthier, wealthier humans. I have said in talks in recent years that capitalism is the habitat for Humanity. It's the only real habitat for Humanity, broadly construed as the social economic system of private property, the profit motive, individual rights, and governments that are constitutively restricted to preserving and protecting those rights. And no other system has done this. And if you were really a humane person, if you were really a humanitarian, if you were really a philanthropist, you would be foursquare for capitalism and you would be fighting against anti capitalist elements wherever you could. And by the way, it's not as if there haven't been experiments in anti capitalist systems, socialist system, fascist systems. And what has been the result. Just read the book called death by government 1994 by Rumel, R U M E L a professor at University of Texas, who, when the soviet archives were emptied out in the early nineties and could do some research and people could collect the data, just collected the data. And that's where we get this number, although students and others don't like to hear it. 100 million people were killed in the 100 years after the russian revolution of 1917 by socialism, by that habitat, by that uniquely inhuman anti human habitat. And yet people still yearn for it. Let me finish and then take questions and comments with just something about a different take, a very odd. This one will strike you as odd, but it's very interesting. Different take on environmental, the environment and nihilism. I have said that environmentalism as a movement and as a philosophy is itself nihilistic, misanthropic. But if you google environmental nihilism and you might think, wow, this is what Salzman's talking about, guess what you'll find? It's fascinating because 99, almost 100% of the essays, articles, and there's a lot of them, environmental nihilism is a hand wringing aspect of the environmental movement itself, which worries about, guess what? Apathy. Apathy among environmentalists, apathy among students, apathy that. What is the point? The world is coming to an end. We can't really singularly do anything about it. We give up. We could try to be Greta Thunberg and run around the world brow beating older people and trying to get change, but we can recycle only so much, and we can march in the streets so much, and we can go into british museums and throw soup cans at the Mona Lisa, but we can lie in the middle of the road and this and that. But what good is it? We can't overcome this juggernaut of power and privilege and profit from the capitalists, so we give up. That's notice, that's the apathetic part of nihilism. And you gotta. In one way, you could look at this as follows. Thankfully, the crazy environmentalists have so scared and so inured younger people to the supposed dread of what's coming, that the younger people are frozen in inaction and won't do anything about it. And yet I'm not encouraged. This is not a good thing. To me, it's just a sign of worse things to come. Unless we really fight for capitalism and humanity. Because the crazy environmentalists will conclude as follows. We need more shock therapy if these students are, especially the young ones, if they're becoming apathetic. If they're not willing to engage in activism, we're going to have to step up our scare tactics. We're going to have to step up our scare mongering. We're going to have to become even more outrageous in our claims. And not just claims about the world coming to an end and humans being terrible, but the guilt trips imposed on people. I believe, again, I'm no psychiatrist, but I believe the combination of young kids being told blatant lies about the future of the planet and climate change and all this, and at the same time, to the point where they think, what can I do about it? It's not that their guilt is being relieved and absolved. They still feel it, and they're going to feel anxiety, or as I mentioned in this poll, they're going to feel deep guilt. And that is not good for the human psyche. But the environmentalists don't care about that. They want you either marching in the streets and engaging in violence to tear down the system and stop humans from enjoying themselves. But short of that, they don't mind people deciding, I'm not going to buy a car because I don't want to spoil the planet, and I'm not going to have kids because we need depopulation. And so they love this because it literally ruins the personal life and happiness of individuals. If you're not going to join our movement and overthrow the exploiters, we're going to make your life miserable anyway. You're either going to feel guilt for doing nothing, or you're going to, like everybody else, lose all these conveniences and enjoyments of life. So another way of looking at this would be, as I said at the beginning, what did the Marxists do when they realized they could not get the workers of the world to revolt? The workers of the world were just fine and happy under capitalism. They went to legalized robbery and legalized violence. They legislated it, all the things that the Marxists wanted. If you look at the ten planks of reform in the communist manifesto, every major western country has, I don't know, seven or eight of them. The planks that Marx wanted to curb and dilute and erode capitalism. That's what's happening with the Green New Deal. That's what's been happening since 1970 with the EPA. The argument is, if we can't convince people singularly on their own to, quote, save the planet, we'll just ram it down people's throats. We'll elect people like AOC and others to pass the Green New Deal. And if we need to do it in pieces, fine. If we can do it in one big sweep, we can. And notice the word they use, which is very clever. New Deal. What was the New Deal? It was the 1930s leftist FDR program to severely curb capitalism by creating massive government agencies and regulations and spending and social welfare programs and all that. Right? And so if you just put green in front of all that, they want an extreme version of all that to wipe out capitalism. So that's what I have on nihilism and environmentalism. It's a nihilistic movement. It's destructive, it's inhumane. But be aware, there's also this phenomenon of environmentalists looking at each other and saying, oh, my God, we have so scared people that they're not going to do anything anymore. And what would be the result of that? Maybe a small respite from the craziness, but really behind the scenes, codify it all. Put it in law, start banning cars and appliances and all the other things you're hearing about. If you're wondering where is all that coming from, it's coming from the environmentalists who can't convince people that they should surrender capitalism and surrender their conveniences so they will ram it down people's throats. That's it. Scott, great opening. [00:25:52] Speaker C: Richard. If you'd like to join us, just request to speak. We'll bring you up. I've got some questions. In the meantime, is the purpose of scaring people just to bring about an agenda of people that just want to say, we've got to take this action now for global governments or whatever it is, to make sure the earth doesn't become uninhabitable in ten years. [00:26:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's part of it. And if you think of Ayn Rand's point about motion should not be tools of cognition, that emotions result from an interaction between our values and our premises and what we see in the world? Yes, this method, call it fear mongering, call it scare mongering, call it conspiracy theories. It's funny that on one side of the spectrum today, you hear all the time the right being accused of conspiracy theories. There's no greater conspiracy theories than that come from Marxism, that the capitalists exploiting the labor and capitalism will run out of energy, or that capitalism is exploiting the environment. I mean, these are conspiracy theories, like, to the max, that they're almost like so big people can't even get their, their heads around them. So. But people who go by emotions instead of reason are going to be susceptible to, obviously to scare mongering and fear mongering. And I think in this particular area, this field, you could say that there's a, there's a level of knowledge and technical expertise necessary that people also don't know what they're dealing with. In other words, environmentalism does have in its toolkit, so to speak, or I should say weapon kit, the science of a climate and climate change. And what is the climate? Are we cooling? Are we warming? Are we this or that? A meteorology. And so it is partly political science and partly economics, you know, resource running out and prices, but it's also science of the kind that people aren't comfortable with. They're not comfortable with what, what, you know, anthropology has said or what the history of the earth has been or what all the swings in climate. I mean, they have no idea, for example, that the climate has always changed. I mean, however you define it, it has always changed. So the idea that humans are substantially responsible for climate change is utter nonsense, but they would have to know that. And so if they only go by emotions. Yes, Scott, I think this is just a method to get them to act. But if there's no successful forecasting record, and there isn't in the case of environmentalism, we've had 50 years of it and it's been well documented. If you go to the competitive enterprise institute, CEI, they have this wonderful report called 50 years of something like 50 years of bad forecasts. And they just give you chapter and verse about scare toward end of the world stories and, and they just forget about it. After the forecasts come out badly, they just drop it and start all over again. For some reason, twelve years comes up a lot. A twelve year seems to be like some kind of sweet spot where it's not so short that you can remember that the person was wrong, say, two years ago, but it's also not, you know, like 120 years where people would say, well, I don't give a damn. Why do I care? Now they keep saying the world's going to end in twelve years. And it's almost like they all got the memo and they all say that roughly every twelve years. So, yeah, it's a tactic. [00:29:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I think it started in 2018 and there's been a lot of agenda 2030 stuff. But just to your point about it being a conspiracy theory or not, it's a part of the culture now. It's so ingrained that there's a portion of customers that are encouraging businesses to show their green efforts. [00:29:46] Speaker A: Yes, I think it's the. Yes, absolutely. There's no other way to describe it. And one way of putting this would be the same thing we've talked in the past about the spread of woke and the spread of. Or when there was a spread of cancel culture. And people would say, well, God, man, it used to just be in the universities and then it just. Wait a minute. Then it just used to be in the public schools and then Hollywood. And then they would say, now it's everywhere. It's in the Pentagon. It's in the corporate suites. It's in. It's in the end zone of football teams, you know, end race. What's going on here? It's everywhere. It's everywhere. It's in symphonies. They're taking out symphonies because they have too many white instrument players. It shows the power of philosophy. And that's the same thing with environmentalism. It shows that this is a philosophic battle, that when something spreads like that, like a cancer to every institution and notice sequentially out of the universities first and then say, into the public schools and then into Hollywood. See how it's more intellectual or the news. I didn't even mention media. Yeah, for years people have said the media leaned left. And now how can corporate executives lean left? Well, because eventually the cancer spreads to every outer region and it eventually reaches the ones that initially say were least anti capitalist. That's what's happening with environmentalism. In many ways. It has had more success than the spread of Marxism. The spread of Marxism, you know, after the 1880s was significant and it definitely got and spread like a cancer and went into legislation and got codified into the. Into the body politics, so to speak. And we still have that cancer in us. And. But I think environmentalism is worse because how could Marxism look good relative to environmentalism? That's how bad environmentalism is. The Marxists did pledge, however fake this was that they'd liberate the worker, that they would their. That their system would out produce capitalism, that they put an end to, you know, financial crises and class antagonisms, that they were the scientific, you know, materialist conception of that said that it was inevitable. So it had this patina of science and industry to the point where environmentalists today hate Marxists because they're too capitalist, they're too pro production and people and labor and unions and industry. The environmentalists are like, we don't want any of that. So we're in, we're not just anti capitalist as the factory owner. We are anti human. Humans are the problem. So I think it's what you're saying, Scott, that it's everywhere. It's a testament to the power of philosophy. But this also means that a better philosophy can clean this out faster. If this was just a matter of hacking away at the branches and the outer limbs and the branches and the leaves, that would seem like a more insurmountable task. But if what we're discovering here is, wow, look at the power of philosophy, then a better philosophy, rooted in starting with humans, are great. A humanistic approach that we must put humans first, just as we put America first or ourselves first. Same thing. Humans first. That kind of philosophy, if it takes hold, will root out all of this. [00:33:17] Speaker C: So I know you talked about the differences between Marxism and environmentalism, but I think there are some people that see environmentalism as kind of a next generation Marxism for more of a less industrial world. [00:33:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that would be one way of putting it. The other thing I've noticed because I first got into this in 1990 when I was in New York, and it was the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Day. So a lot was made of environmentalism and the movement in 1990 just because of the anniversary. And it was an interesting time because 1990 was not only the 20th anniversary of the first earth Day. The Soviet Union was collapsing, the Berlin Wall was falling, and it looked like, wow, capitalism has won. They didn't quite put it that way. They would say, socialism has lost. And when I did my research on the environmentalism movement at the time, I discovered a kind of sub culture or sub literature where they're, like, talking to each other. And the, and the message was something like this. Socialism has failed. Socialism has a very bad reputation. We need to go from green, from red to green. We were reds. We were socialists. Bolsheviks, reds. But that doesn't look good anymore. We still need to be anti capitalist. So we're now going to be anti capitalist, as greens, I used to call them watermelon. Watermelons. Green. Red on the inside and green on the outside. I've heard that you've heard that before. So maybe I wasn't the one who initiated it, but you see the alliance, how crucial this would be. You could, you could continue your anti capitalist insanity and crusade, but now, under the patina of, we're just trying to save the planet, who could be against that? We just want clean air and clean water and. But it's an alliance that is not very stable, because the environmentalists truly do not mean, they not only don't want labor of the, of the old marxist kind of, you know, Detroit and machines and assemblies and, I mean, the environmentalists hate all that. So it's not going to be a, it's not going to be a durable alliance. But they still ally. Of course, anyone who's anti capitalist would look for alliances, and the three main ones that remain are Marxism, environmentalism and religionists. I mean, not all religions, but, you know, if you look, if you just, if you just look up pope's view of environmentalism, I mean, he said the other day that capitalism is sinful because it rapes the planet or something like that. So how about a united front like that? You get the atheistic Marxists who yearn for the old style of industrial capitalism. You get the Catholic Church, which is obviously not atheistic but is sympathetic to the anti capitalist message. And then the environmentalists who are truly, you know, misanthropic. Interestingly, when the environmentalists come up against the religionists, they'll hear the religionists say something like, well, God gave to man the planet to enjoy himself. Well, they don't quite say it that way, but, you know, and, you know, go forth and multiply. And the creatures of the planet are, you know, for humans, that's too much for environmentalists. So the environmentalists of the three are the most extremely anti capitalist because they're the most extremely anti human. So I hope people understand that if you're truly anti human, you have to go after the socioeconomic system, which is most humane. You have to, you wouldn't go after socialism, fascism and the end theocracies. You would target precisely that system which has most enabled and enhanced humans, and that's capitalism. So that shouldn't be a mystery either, that what they're targeting is. That is exactly what confirms what I'm saying. Capitalism is the habitat for Humanity. They hate humanity, so they have to hate and destroy capitalism. Thank you. [00:37:43] Speaker C: I want to encourage others to come up. I've got more questions, but this is a great discussion. You know, it's almost a cliche these days to say that the greens are like a religion. But, you know, I don't how that contrasts. If they're a religion and building something, you know, they're not as nihilistic. [00:38:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, there's, there is a whole literature on environmentalism as religion. Mother Earth. There's a whole bunch of books by a guy named Lovelock, James Lovelock, the ages of Gaia, a biography of our living earth. Gaia, a new look at life on earth, homage to Gaia. So the idea of the earth as one of intrinsic value, it gives life to us. We are just steward, you hear this before. We are just stewards of the planet. We shouldn't, we shouldn't own any part of the planet. One of his last books was called the vanishing face of Gaia. A final warning. Gaia, by the way, comes from greek mythology. The first goddess, Gaia just means Mother nature. Mother Earth. So there's a religious aspect there, too. Yes, that you can argue that. And the religion, the conservatives will say this, it's so funny because they'll say, as a critique, they'll say environmentalism is a religion. Yes, true to a point. But then you have to ask the conservative religionists, are you complimenting them or not? I mean, you're religious and you're saying this other thing is religious. So I can't tell whether you're complimenting them that they're religious or criticizing them, if you're criticizing them, that they have this religious fanaticism and they throw out science and they'll sacrifice humans for the greater good of this thing. Well, that's what you guys do. That's what religionists do. So as someone like me, a secular capitalist, looking at this debate and just laughing because they're, they're haggling over who's more religious and whether that's legitimate or not, what the conservatives are really saying is you have a false religion. You, instead of bowing down to my God, you've put earth as a God. Or they always do this with statism, too. They'll say, the problem is you made Stalin a God. Okay, but we need to get rid of the concept of God, don't we? Then we aren't obeying your fake God guy in the sky, but also not obeying Stalin. So it's such a, it's such a, you know, kind of fruitless debate. But at least people should see where this is coming from. The other religious part of it is, if you want to study this, I have pantheism. I mean, pan just means all, and theos means God. And pantheism is that view that all the earth, the universe, but all the earth is divine and ought to be worshipped. The earth ought to be worshipped like a God, not profaned, you know, not despoiled. This came up once when I forget, an environmentalist who had this kind of attitude said, international oil companies are like racists. I mean, are like rapists. And I said, what I don't get. What's the connection? And they said they have these penetrating rigs that go into the planet and penetrate and try to set and they know this is how crazy they get. They're like. And you're defiling, you're raping the planet. Literally raping it. Well, now, literally, figuratively, I guess they would say so. So I'm, you know, looking at a book here, pantheism, a non theistic concept of deity. Yeah, here's another one. Elements of pantheism, religious reverence of nature and the universe by Harrison, they're all over the place. So. Yeah. Great. I don't know if that helps. [00:41:41] Speaker C: Yes. And we're very pleased to have Atlas society founder David Kelly here with us. David, can you unmute? [00:41:50] Speaker B: I can, yeah. Thanks, Scott. Thanks, Richard. Fabulous presentation. [00:41:57] Speaker A: Thank you, David. [00:41:58] Speaker B: Definitely worth writing up and listening to. Again, I have two questions, one very specific, one more general. The very specific one is you mentioned that environmentalists are okay with sun power from sun, power from wind. But, you know, it's kind of paradoxical because the, the wind power that is being constructed in the Atlantic among these coasts, involves an incredibly high level of technology. All the wires that have to be laid under sea, these, these pylons, hundreds of feet high and huge, huge blades that are only possible from advanced manufacturing capacities. And as far as sun goes, think of all the chemicals that are extracted from the earth to make a photovoltaic cell. And does that make the environmentalists uncomfortable or am I just engaged in. [00:43:04] Speaker A: They. [00:43:04] Speaker B: Just like sun and wind and we'll deal with the all high tech later. That's the first question and very specific. The second one is picking up on what you said about religion. I've always thought, and many people have commented, it's not unique to me, that the parallels between environmentalism and religion go very, very deep to the essence of religion, in particular of man is evil. That's embodied in Liszt Christianity, by the idea of original sin, which you then have to atone for by various sacraments. Environmentalists think humans are evil as such. We atone for our evil by recycling and voting green. And that the idea that there is an apocalypse coming. Yeah, judgment day or, you know, the exhaustion of resources at twelve years out or whatever it is. And those, I just have to ask, is there something underneath the appeal of both of religion and for secular people of environmentalism that those concepts strike a human chord with, that, you know. [00:44:28] Speaker A: What. [00:44:29] Speaker B: We consider virtues like reason and productiveness and progress are really acquired, but we have this. So it's so easy for people to revert to these tropes that have been with us for many years. They just keep taking different forms, different. [00:44:50] Speaker A: Forms that second one is much harder to answer than the first, David. But I don't think it strikes a human chord. I think it strikes an inhumane chord. And I know you agree with that as well, but other than saying it comes down to free choice, yes. The design that does. I sometimes think that, I sense when someone says the world's coming to an end, that if you really retranslate their tone, you know what they're saying. God, I hope the world comes to an end. Yeah, I've had enough of this. There was a. There was a famous musical from the first, early 1960s, stop the world. I want to get off there. There are people who are just. Their reason is not confident. Their self esteem is low. They do not feel comfortable in this world because it's a world that you can't be an animal or a plant. You can't be vegetative. You have to be human, which means you have to be active. And if you're deprived of the power of reason and the power of self esteem, you will feel alienated and you will feel, and you'll be susceptible to, I think, these kind of scare tactics, but also you almost kind of want to get in the grave early to just sleep. Do I have to really do things and make decisions all the time? It really highlights the importance of having a psychology of capitalism, not just the economics and politics of it. By the way, the first thing you said is, it's absolutely true. They're worried that the only reason I mentioned solar and wind is it is factual that we did not have nuclear, nat gas, crude oil before the industrial revolution. So I just think philosophically in culture, it's very revealing that the only real energy sources they want are the ones that predate capitalism and predate industry and support a planet, you know, with like half a million, half a billion people, not 8 billion. But yes, they will say, of course, solar panels need metal and glass and plastic and all the means of producing them and delivering them and installing them on homes and everything. And yes, it's not technically just waiting for the sun to beat down on our grass. Yeah. So they feel guilty about that. So the consistent view would be, don't even build those because they use minerals that they use. And then how about with the EV as well. So electric vehicles, same thing. It's true. They need batteries. They need rare earth minerals. They need mining and battery. And when these are all done, by the way, when the turbines rust out and when the solar panels don't work anymore and when the batteries are depleted, where's the landfill. Where are they going to put all these things? And you know, it. So it's gonna. It's gonna cause, you know, underground bleeding out of. So, yes, David, you're absolutely right. It's a total contradiction. And there is a kind of like a what about ism that we say to them, hey, you're not meeting your own standards, because if so, you wouldn't even build solar panels. By the way, another way of looking at this is the energy mix is if you say to anti fossil fuel people, you say, oh, so you should be for nuclear, because nuclear generate. Nuclear generates almost no greenhouse gas emissions. The only time it does use fossil fuels, when they build the damn things. Well, a nuclear plant has not been built in the US since 1980. And between 1950 and 1980, they built 110 of them. So the US uses us electricity. Only 20% of it comes from nuclear. But it's a real litmus test of environmentalists, because if you say to them, why don't you embrace nuclear? France relies 70% on nuclear, and they don't really have an answer. I mean, they'll say something about nuclear waste, or they'll say something about nuclear accidents, and those are inconsequential compared to what the fossil fuels are doing. So they don't have an answer. But it's a litmus test for me, because what it basically says is, here's a case where you could use this energy, it would not generate the concerns you are and you don't want it anyway. Could it be that you don't want this very clean, very powerful energy source precisely because it would most propel capitalism into new and greater achievement? You know, so that would be the reason. And by the way, every year that they're against it, every time they stop and prevent and the nuclear plant being built, we're still getting the fossil fuels. So they're, by their own design, they are contributing to the greater reliance on fossil fuels by opposing nuclear. And some people, like Michael Schellenberger and others, have realized this and have switched sides. And when he was in the movement all those years, and then he realized that, he said, oh, my God, these people are going out of their way. I don't think they get damned about anymore. And he switched for that. [00:50:02] Speaker C: You were breaking up just a little bit there, Richard. [00:50:04] Speaker B: But Scott, can I ask one quick follow up here on the religion issue? I think I ran put her finger on what the common denominator is between the kind of environmentalist outlook and in parallel with the religious outlook. In her essay for the new Intellectuals. She said reason, human capacity for reason has to be exercised by choice. But there are. There are incentives that people feel that resist that choice. And she mentioned three. One is it takes effort to think. It's easier not to think and just drift. Two, you could be wrong. Reason is not infallible, and you could make a mistake. So how confident can you be safer to go with the majority. And number three, what if you think for yourself and end up disagreeing with people? That causes social disruption. So it's much easier just to be a Peter Keating, to mention the guy from the fountainhead and go along with the drift and not think for yourself. And I think that's the deep level common phenomenon that unites a lot of these. A lot of these causes, secular or religious. [00:51:30] Speaker A: Yes. And I think, David, the pressure to have teenagers believe this, I mean, everybody knows, whatever the issue is, they'll always say that the young and the teenagers are impressionable, so that the idea of impressionable. Well, if you were someone who was pushing a set of ideas which are really unfounded, which are really not, science based, which are really not. And then you said to you, and then you said to yourself, who was my ideal audience? The ideal audience for a charlatan would be young people. The ideal audience would not be a fully knowledgeable, grown up human who knows the range of things you need to know, like science and economics and philosophy. There's a lot of noise background. Scott, I can't. [00:52:23] Speaker C: Yeah, David, you made it. [00:52:25] Speaker A: Maybe David should mute. David, can you mute? Mute? Yeah. Otherwise it's the DC traffic of rush hour. I lost my train of thought here. Yeah, no, I think David's right about that part of it. But I would also mention this altruism, other ism, the idea that it's noble to deprive yourself or sacrifice yourself for the sake of others. Now, the others in this case is the planet or the others here, in this case is future generations, as yet unborn. And I said before that environmentalism is akin to a religion. But I'll tell you something, where they both agree on the unborn, the anti abortionists will say we need to sacrifice human beings who are actually living like women for the benefit of the unborn, the fetus or the embryo. Right. The environmentalists do the same thing. The environmentalists have the same exact view. Their view is the current living generation must sacrifice itself for the as yet unborn future generations. So here's two groups which seemingly, since the environmentalists are often left wing or democrat, they seem to be enemies but notice how they unify on the idea that it's noble to sacrifice yourself for the unborn. And they just have a different conception of what the unborn is, but they're definitely unborn. Ayn Rand wrote a book called we the Living, that the earth and us are for the living, not for the dead or the to be born. And it's truly a pro humane attitude. It's not a myopic attitude as often portrayed. It's not one that doesn't care about other generations. It does care about our generations, but it's heirs to us. It's not, you know, generations thousands of years from now. And you have to ask yourself to any environmentalist who said, we're trying to save the planet for the next generation, the first question would be, why that generation? Why does the next generation have a selfish right and interest in the environment, but this one doesn't? And what are you going to say 30 years from now to that generation? You're going to say the same thing you're saying to this one. You need to sacrifice yourself for the next generation. They've actually been doing this for 50 years. In 1970, they told that generation to sacrifice themselves for the generation of the 1990s. And in the 1990s, they told that generation that they needed to deprive themselves and nobly sacrifice for the benefit of the generation of the now. Here we are in the. They're saying the same damn thing. So they want sacrifice and asceticism and all the time. And that's bad. That's really inhumane. [00:55:08] Speaker C: Just going back to the seventies limits of growth and part of the appeal of environmentalism sort of related to what David said. But is it from people who feel maybe the world is changing too fast for them and these regulations maybe slow things down? [00:55:27] Speaker A: Yes, that's definitely part of it. This is to the spirit. This is to the issue of the spirit, say, or the psychology of capitalism, which objectivism used to spend a lot of time on and doesn't anymore, or doesn't as much, and it really should. We always talk about the politics, the morality, the economics of capitalism, which is all fine and good, but there's a definite psychology to capitalism. And if you don't have that, you feel uncomfortable in the system and you want to overthrow it. Edith PackEr years ago had this great essay called the psychological requirements of a free society. Nathaniel Brandon wrote a very penetrating essay called the divine Right of stagnation. This is all in the old objectivist literature, so look it up. But the divine right of stagnation Brandon was talking about people who can't stand change and prefer to stagnate and therefore are going to prefer a social economic system that does that. That is literally anti progressive, anti progress, anti progressive, and must be anti liberal. So, you know, so one of the great scams going on today is that the environmentalists or the socialists are liberal and progressive, but they're against liberty and they're against progress. I mean, they're literally against something like nuclear energy, the most advanced, technologically advanced, progressed, if you will, energy. So, yeah, the psychology of. It's very big, Scott. You're right to pick up on it. Certain psychologies are very uncomfortable with capitalism, and they will fight to get rid of it or to immunize themselves from it by legislation and by violence. Great. [00:57:10] Speaker C: Does the green apathy that their view that they're terrible and shouldn't do anything, does that act as a check on them for now or just make them susceptible to, you know, some sort of environmental savior? [00:57:26] Speaker A: Great, great question. It does, I think, temporarily check them from being activists. And so for a while, someone like us might say, good, they're not activists. They're not out there trying to push the Green New deal, but they have. But their inaction is not due to the fact that they've come to the realization that they've been lied to and that capitalism is just fine and that the world is not coming to an end, but that their world would come to an end if the Green New Deal and these other things are implemented. That's not their view. So they stick. So here's the problem. They still have the view that humans are terrible. The humans are wrecking the planet. The only difference is they're thinking, what can I do about it? I'm just one individual. And the answer from the environmentalists is, well, if we gather together and force legislation, it's as if everyone agrees. It's as if we've taken this minority view and it's gone from apathy to, well, get behind the legislation, and then you'll feel like you actually have done something. So that's why I believe, unless we root this out, the next step will be to turn that apathy into just plain, sheer, straightforward, brute legislative mandates. That's where these mandates are coming from. They're coming from the fact that they, people realize they have not convinced the average voter that the world is coming to end and capitalism is terrible and they should give up all their conveniences, no more than Marx convinced people 100 years ago. So they're going to forced legislation on it and we need to resist that to our every fiber as humans, we need to resist it. [00:59:03] Speaker C: Great way to wrap things up. This was a great discussion and I really appreciate all your insights. Next week, Wednesday, April 24 at 05:00 p.m., Eastern, the Atlas Society asks John Agresto. That'll be across multiple channels, and we'll look forward to seeing everyone back here. Next time we may be back here with our CEO, JAg, so stay tuned. [00:59:27] Speaker A: On our.