Green Politics: A Radical Shift in Consciousness

6/2/2019

In keeping with my goal of reducing mass media exposure, I have not read much or listened to much concerning the European Parliamentary elections that took place last week. Nevertheless, I am aware of the notable gains many Green parties made this time around, particularly in countries such as Germany.

Toward the end of last week, I caught a snippet of some media talking head praising the success of the Green Party as "a radical shift in consciousness" in Europe, one that was "very much needed."

Europeans, who have actively chosen to commit demographic suicide by refusing to have children, now strive to save the planet for "future generations."

Yeah, that's radical a radical shift in consciousness, all right.

It is incoherent, strategically evil nonsense like this that has turned me completely off politics in the past month or two. The radical shift in consciousness the talking head referred to is no shift at all. Even if it can be qualified as a shift, it is a purely horizontal shift along the political spectrum. The Green Wave is, at best, a restricted shift in materialist thinking. These kinds of shifts solve nothing and do not address the core disease eating away at our terminally ill civilization. If anything, this radical shift will only exacerbate the disease and hasten, what has surely now become, our civilization's unstoppable decent into full-blown chaos followed by an inevitable collapse.

I will grant this much to the talking head - a radical shift in consciousness is needed above all else, but the only real radical shift would be vertical, not horizontal in nature. A true radical shift in consciousness would involve a shift toward deeper things and higher things. A true radical shift in consciousness would be religious in nature; more specifically, a true radical shift in consciousness would be Christian in nature. Not some rehash of Churchian doctrine, but a true Christian Renaissance inspired by a recognition of the divine within rather than mere obedience to the divine without.

But Europeans are obviously not ready to commit to such a radical shift, regardless of how much it is needed. So cue the apocalypse and have faith in the idea that every new beginning stems from some other beginning's end.

5 Comments

Eric

6/2/2019 23:38:02

Hi, I'm Eric from Sweden. I found out about your blog via Bruce Charlton, and I've been a "secret" reader ever since. I enjoy personal, genuine blogs that give me "aha"-moments when reading, and this has been one of them. Although I'm not currently able to be as public a persona as I'd like, I hope you don't mind a comment.

I've contemplated on environmentalism lately myself, and have arrived at some conclusions. It is certainly ironic that this is referred to as a "change in consciousness". If anything, "environmentalism" looks more like a pretense without any true underlying reverence for nature. Mainstream green politics stems from an objectifying social consciousness, from people who are not much subjectively immersed in nature at all. Environmentalism rarely seems to mention the word nature, as a primary objective. At least we don't see it in the media. It's always the buzz-words "environment" or "climate change". Both seem to reflect a collective "inner-city"-consciousness, looking at nature from "outside-in", as a separate "thing" to feel sorry for. I'm pretty sure the "climate" is doing fine, but that our heads might be the object that is in need of actual rescue - from solipsistic hyper-inflation that is.

The paradox is that these self-proclaimed nature-lovers are detached urbanites who rally for the environment, but do not take time to look within for a second. In many cases they have a disgust-sensitivty toward nature, and are inimical to it. Is nature really something to have an anthropomorphizing political cause for, or is it something to be revered for what it is? Because nature does not seem to pity humans. It seems environmentalists are just trying to save the face of metropolitan individualism by attempting to regulate pollution/consumption through individual actions, not to embrace nature or make an inner shift. If anything, caring for nature would entail a severe compromise on the beloved human rights of these same people, who apparently want to extend them onto animals.

So it basically comes down to unearned virtue-signalling. What I have noticed from personal experience about political vegans is that they often have underlying eating disorders resulting in their veganism, which they then rationalize as virtuous, proceeding to lecture all "evil" meat-eaters on the vegan manifesto.

Indeed, they are often for some reason disgusted by meat, reflecting an aversion toward nature. So their inner motives for being vegan does not correspond with their outer commitment to green causes. It's like Jesus said, it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles person, but what comes out of the mouth.

Furthermore, we can observe that our urbanite society has developed a lot of allergies and unnatural habits. Here in Sweden, kids are almost always allergic toward or overly sensitive to something. People in general are also overly hygienic nowadays, as if they were afraid of their own natural bodies, trying to create a chimera of cleanliness and tidiness corresponding with their outer persona and image. This seems to result in all sorts of insecurities and dissonance.

With all this in mind, its pretty laughable that they term green politics a shift in consciousness, when its anything but, a simple add-on to a fundamentally flawed outlook and attitude towards nature. If anything, these equality-types do not seem to like nature in any way or form, and are even antagonistic toward themselves. I wonder if they have any subjective connection to their natural naked selves at all, or if it's all about the cover.

Instead it seems more sane to recognize that our cities are fundamentally unhealthy, thus the solution is likely to come from something that does not flatter the majority since they could not figure it out.

Therefore I think that our fundamental task as people who take interest in spiritual questions, is to encourage a real shift in consciousness in the inner workings of man, rather than fixating on wordly questions with methods that are obviously broken. We need to fix the causes not the methods, even if we may not get social credit for it. It's a bit like being a doctor. Nobody likes going to see the doctor, but only the doctor can diagnose and cure the ailment.

And for Christ's sake, let's leave the climate alone in the meantime.

Francis Berger

6/3/2019 08:34:18

@ Eric - Thanks for the great comment and the insights it contains. You have gone into far more detail about the Green Movement than I felt inspired to do, and I thank you for that. Your points are spot on, in my opinion.

What bothers me so much about all of these contemporary political movements and parties - and this includes all prevalent politics - is they essentially deny the reality of Man and Reality itself. They all end up doing little more than pouring fuel on a fire that threatens to consume us all.

While professing to save the planet and, with it, human society, the Green movement will do little more than exacerbate the disunity, disengagement, degradation, and alienation plaguing our false sense of community.

Yet, people are flocking to this sort of thing, which only demonstrates how alienated and estranged from Reality most of us really are.

6/3/2019 12:53:40

Francis,

You're welcome. Sorry if the post was a little lengthy, I got carried away which tends to happen but I'm sure you recognize the phenomenon as a writer yourself. The funny thing is that I don't know anything about the green movement at all, these are just personal impressions, that might be wrong in some ways and right in others. When a person gets spiritual, certain things just come to the surface, because thinking starts to extend from the mind into nature. This also reflects what you say about reality vs politics. We went from a practically oriented civilization to a socially oriented one, where society is entirely in the abstract. The mind does no longer extend outside itself, and becomes a self-referential social echo-chamber. So this "shift in consciousness" thing must really be the joke of the year.

Bruce Charlton

6/3/2019 14:51:42

I have pondered the Green politics movement over the years, since I began as a keen adherent - from about age 14 - as a result of Tolkien, William Morris, Schumacher, and the Self Sufficiency and 'Ecology' movement of the early/ middle 1970s.

At that time, Greens were envisaging a radical deindustrailisation and a 'distributist' small scale, agraian society - almost like Medieval Feudalism. This has been incrementally diluted and turned-around into a high-tech, centrally controlled consumerism - as examplified by banks of useless/ subsidised wind-turbines owned by multinational holding companies; defacing a lot of the most beautiful countyside and coastlines, making loud noise and scything innumerable birds.

In other words, completely mainstream crony-capitalist-totalitarian state-bureaucratic-leftism....

6/3/2019 17:20:49

@ Bruce - Good points. I was attracted to distributism for a long time (at level, perhaps I am still am), but the Greens have veered far away from any such concept, as you point out.

The Austrians are quite keen on wind turbines. There is a massive wind turbine farm across the border from my village. At night, I can see at least a hundred flashing red lights in the far distance when I go out for walks. It's an eerie scene - like something out of Lord of the Rings.

The Greens' sociological doctrines also leave much to be desired, in my opinion. In many ways, they are even more left than the extreme left.

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Green Politics: A Radical Shift in Consciousness

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