GUEST BLOG @TomLennard Why Aren't We Worrying More About Climate Change? Action not Words

In July, Green Party candidate and academic Rupert Read declined to appear on a BBC programme. The tweet in which he justified this, read as follows: BBC Radio wanted to have me on today to debate a climate-denier in the context of the drought/heatwave. I said NO. I told them it was a disgrace that they still give climate-deniers airtime at a time like this. I won’t be part of such charades any longer. Please RT if you agree. @GreenRupertRead

Read's contention is that giving climate-deniers airtime is a ridiculous move from the BBC, when there are more important debates about climate change; it is here, and is dangerous. This impatience is echoed by other activists, but ones that will not wait for a comfortable discussion around the pros and cons of different strategies. They are unwilling to make polite appeals to our government, when it is clearly in the pocket of big business and major polluters.

On September 25^th I chaired a discussion entitled “Why Aren't We Worrying More About Global Warming?”  where one of Extinction Rebellion's main activists, Roger Hallam, spoke. At this event he laid out his arguments – arguments for starting a public rebellion against the government over their climate change inaction - and then he left before the Q & A began. 

Action, he explained, not words, are important in the little time we have to do something. We should not get caught in the over-analysis of the information. He painted a picture of activism as a sacrifice of personal freedom, and the importance of rule breaking to achieve ones goals. And knowing Roger a little, I can corroborate that he lives by these ideals. Here is a link to Roger's speech https://ytcropper.com/cropped/EA5bd4dc118a72b

It is easy to view the non-violent action that Roger proposed as extreme and drastic – it is. It was only a week after the talk, on October 1^st, that the IPCC released their damning report: we have only 12 years to keep climate change temperatures under control: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report And this is to put widespread devastation and societal unrest into emotionless facts and figures.

I am no longer convinced that political parties of the Left have enough energy or gumption to turn us toward serious responses and solutions to climate change. Political cycles are short and politicians have even shorter memories. 

Roger's walk away from the discussion, and abandonment of polite convention had a very polarising affect. It generated an emotional response –  and such responses are necessary for going beyond our willingness to rationalise and normalise the impending chaos. 

Whilst the positive stories are definitely something that can keep us going in the darker moments outside activism, many people around the globe are engaged in great projects that facilitate us moving to a more ecological way of living. But these are alternatives, and not the mainstream, socio-political reality. 

Extinction Rebellion's method is to shock the system. They plan to do this in the coming months, starting with a big demonstration and direct action in Parliament Square, with the backing of George Monbiot https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/18/governments-no-longer-trusted-climate-change-citizens-revolt

The present moment seems terribly fragile and frightening. Even the climate change deniers seem to be keeping rather quiet. But since the IPCC report the media has returned to its regular coverage of minutiae and gossip. It is a fragile moment that we live in, but fragile moments, are ones in which the status quo is broken. How things will look from the other side of a social revolution is much harder to say. But to be climate extremist in these times is nothing but common sense.

 Tom Lennard @TomLennard

Kensal and Kilburn Better 2018 @KKBetter2018

 You can become involved in the necessary campaign to force politicians to account over climate change at Extinction Rebellion - https://risingup.org.uk/XR/

 For a recent, short analysis of the political strategy of Left Wing politics see Graham Jones'  “The Shock Doctrine of the Left” (published by Polity)

Edward Bernays: the invisible master manipulator of the West over last 100 years

Few people have had as profound an effect on the Western world over the last century as Edward Bernays, who died in the USA at the age of 103 in 1995. He is often referred to as the “Father of Public Relations”. 

Bernays opened the world’s first public relations office in New York in 1919. He has been the invisible master manipulator of the West over the last 100 years. 

He would not mind being called a “master manipulator”. In fact, he would be proud. Manipulating the thoughts and ideas of ordinary people, whom he often called “the masses”, was his life’s work. 

Nor would he mind being called “invisible”. He saw himself as part of an “invisible government”. 

Here is the opening paragraph of a book he wrote in 1928, called Propaganda.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” 

The invisible governors according to Bernays are “the higher strata of society - the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual.”  They would not necessarily even know each other but would control the masses,“It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

Bernays regarded rule by the invisible governors as necessary and benign. The alternative he said would be chaos and confusion. He thought the masses “were really pretty stupid”, according to his daughter Ann Bernays, quoted in The Century of the Self, a BBC TV series by filmmaker Adam Curtis.

Bernays viewed the power of manipulation as going far beyond politics, “We are governed, our minds moulded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of”. 

For most of the twentieth century, Bernays manipulated the masses for an extraordinary array of purposes on behalf of those who could afford his services.

At the heart of Bernays’ work were two core beliefs. 

The first was the belief that the masses are too stupid and irrational, too swayed by emotion and impulse, to be trusted to make decisions. This, of course, was the same rationalisation used to justify colonialism and to deny the vote to women, poorer men and others.

After the First World War in most Western countries - after years of struggle - most adults were finally able to vote. This fact made the task of manipulating the masses and ensuring they did not take control, one of urgent and grave importance for Bernays and his clients.

It is striking to read Bernays candour about his views of the masses. Many in today’s elites may share his views but few would be so open about it.

The second core belief was that the insights of Sigmund Freud, the famous father of psychotherapy, could be used to effectively manipulate people on a mass scale.  Freud was Bernays’ uncle. In fact as Bernays’ mother was Freud’s sister and his father was the brother of Freud’s wife, Freud was Bernays’ “double uncle”. 

Bernays was particularly attracted to Freud’s view of the unconscious. Freud believed that people’s thoughts and actions are often motivated - without their being aware - by factors  in their own unconscious, which they have forgotten or repressed. One expert has described the unconscious as being “guided by instinct, by the most primitive dimensions of our essence.”  The emotions found there, according to Freud, are often aggressive, fearful, sexual or needy.

Whereas Freud used his knowledge to try and cure people, Bernays used the same knowledge to manipulate people by targeting their unconscious rather than their rational mind. 

Ann Bernays has said her father thought the masses, “might easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing: so they had to be guided from above. It’s enlightened despotism in a sense. You can tap into their deepest desires or their deepest fears and use that to your own purposes.”

Most of Bernays work was for huge corporations. He was central to an extraordinary change that happened in Western economies in the twentieth century, namely the advent of consumerism. He persuaded people to become consumers, to buy not only what they needed but what they wanted, what they desired.

An early example of Bernays’ work occurred when the giant American Tobacco company  gave him the task of doubling their potential market by getting women smoking.

Bernays enlisted the help of a Freudian psychoanalyst, who suggested the cigarette was a symbol of male power. If women could see it as a symbol of their own power and independence, then they would take up smoking. Cigarettes were to be held out to women as “torches of freedom.”

Bernays organised for a number of stylish young women to take part in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York and for all to light up cigarettes at the same time on a signal from him. 

Bernays ensured nationwide coverage of the women smoking under headlines, “Torches of Freedom”. Millions of women took up smoking. 

Today, we are constantly exposed to appeals - in advertisements and elsewhere - which bypass our rational minds and target our unconscious. 

Bernays techniques are highly effective. He was shocked when he learnt that the infamous Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, used his ideas as the basis for his campaigns. Goebbels targeted the unconscious of the German people and was terrifyingly successful in creating adoration of the Fuhrer and hatred of the Jews.

In 1954 Bernays was central to overturning a democratically elected government in Guatemala. He worked for the giant United Fruit Company and his client was very unhappy with the policies of the democratically elected President Arbenz.

Although, Arbenz was neither a Communist nor had links with the Soviet Union, Bernays convinced the American public that they faced the Communist Menace in Guatemala. He was tapping into the fear in the American people’s unconscious and accomplished this through his manipulation of the US press. In the words of a New York Times reporter, reflecting later, “A hostile and ill-informed American press helped to create an emotional public opinion. This in turn worked on [government].” 

According to Larry Tye, Bernays’ biographer, “He totally understood that the coup would happen when conditions in the public and press allowed for a coup to happen and he created those conditions…Ultimately he was reshaping reality and reshaping public opinion in a way that’s undemocratic and manipulative.”

The technique used by Bernays in Guatemala - to build up an enemy and then demand its defeat - has been used on a number of occasions since 1954.

It is reported that Bernays also persuaded President Eisenhower that fear of Communism should be induced and encouraged, because by unleashing irrational fears it would make people more loyal to the USA. Some might argue that some governments exaggerate the threat of terrorism in 2018 for similar reasons.

Adam Curtis wrote that “in the 1980s, Bernays’ ideas had come of age.” This was the time when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher started the current neoliberal era in the West.

Margaret Thatcher famously once declared, “there is no such thing as society”. This was a description of the kind of society Bernays had helped create. Many individuals had come to believe that their feelings and desires were the most important thing. They had little or no care for the wider society.

In 2016, Donald Trump came to power in a campaign that was almost textbook Bernays. Trump made no real effort to appeal to voter’s rationality. He tapped into some of the most powerful and dangerous unconscious forces, such as fear and hatred.

Bernays provided the world with an effective means of mass manipulation. So that people can be made to do what others, with money and power, want them to do: be that to buy what they don’t need or elect someone who does not represent their interests or to do the bidding of powerful leaders.

Two final Bernays quotes read as if they could have been written in a dystopian novel by George Orwell.  Every day powerful people are using Bernays’ techniques. This is part of modern life. We should at the very least be more aware of what is going on. Then, perhaps, we can start to combat it.

“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment…But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others; so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints.”

“Propaganda is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.”

Proposal for a TV programme called PM 1-to-1 to strengthen our democracy

All is not well with democracy in the UK. I propose improving it by letting a far wider range of people into the centre of the political process by means of a new  TV programme on which the prime minister of the day would meet one-to-one with representative members of the public. The "reality TV element" is likely to ensure high ratings.

Just as for centuries, ordinary people were denied the right to vote, now they are excluded from the crucial democratic business of setting the political agenda and holding power to account. These roles are restricted overwhelmingly to a privileged few in our politico-media elite who almost always share all or most of the following characteristics - well-educated, well-off, middle-aged, white, London-based. Their agenda inevitably reflects their own background and experience.

On the proposed new programme, members of the public would be given proper airtime. They can have their say without having to yell a question to the PM visiting a hospital at election time or being packaged in a vox pop or shouting down from the audience to the panel on BBC’s Question Time.

The PM would meet a genuinely representative sample of the public, “the questioners”, in a monthly live show. They would be in one-to-one conversation with each of the questioners, one after another.  

If a questioner is shy, inarticulate or angry it will be for the PM to deal with the conversation as best they can. The PM would demonstrate their own qualities such as empathy (or lack of empathy).

The programme would include all sorts of people from the whole range of our diverse population, who are not currently heard in the national political debate, such as: an 85 year old pensioner, an 18 year old single mother, a deep-sea fisherman, a paraplegic ex-soldier, a corner-shop owner or someone working hard on poverty wages and relying on a food-bank.

The proposal is rooted in the belief that everyone matters in a democracy and everyone has political concerns. It would dramatically widen the range of voices that are heard in the political debate, increase political engagement and help people escape their own information bubbles and better understand their fellow citizens.

In the same way that it is not necessary to be on Twitter to be aware of President Trump’s tweets, the programme would affect the political agenda beyond those who watch it.

Here are details of the proposal.

1. UK would be divided into 12 areas and the programme would come from a different area each month.
2. An independent body would select (like a jury) ten questioners per show from the area where the programme is based that month.
3. The questioners should collectively form a representative sample from that area. The factors used to select a representative sample may, for example, include sex, income, race, age, religion and disability. The selection process must be rigorous and transparent.
4. If someone selected does not want to take part, then someone else similar would be selected.
5. Each questioner would have five minutes one-to-one with the PM. 
6. There would be no chairperson and no studio audience. There would be the necessary security.
7. The programme would go out live (with usual short delay) and there would be an edited version of highlights.
8. An independent body would deal with any complaints or other issues

There is an obvious risk for any political leader in taking part. A questioner might launch a furious attack on them and they would be trapped for five minutes and it would all go out live. But the likely benefits for a politician should outweigh the risk and, as for the risk of a furious attack - even if the person attacking them is unlikely to be convinced, they can defend themselves and may persuade some of the watching public.

We should not fear the people, as those who denied them the vote once did. We should trust them to speak on their own behalf and to ask the questions that matter to them and to put their own issues on the agenda.

One day, a programme like this may well be seen as an essential part of any properly functioning democracy. 

If you would like to help turn this proposal into a reality, please email me on tomlondon@rocketmail.com

Thomas Paine: champion of the common man

“The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.” -Thomas Paine

If the writer Thomas Paine, who died in 1809, were alive today, in the age of Trump, he would be a brilliant, uncompromising and effective voice of opposition, writing in a way that reaches the common man and woman. In his lifetime, much of what he wrote affected contemporary events. Much is still relevant to this unsettled world of 2018.

Often called the first international revolutionary, Paine’s weapon was his pen. He denounced government by one unelected individual or small elite, and argued for equality, human rights, freedom, representative democracy and social justice. In his lifetime, these were dangerously radical ideas. Paine challenged many of his society’s ruling assumptions. Slavery, monarchy and the Christian religion were just three of his targets.

Before Paine, educated people had written political works for other educated people. Paine was different, noting, “As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet." At a time when many people were illiterate, his works would be read aloud in coffee-shops, homes and taverns.

Paine was born into a family of modest means in England in 1737. He played an important part in the 1776 American Revolution (or the American War of Independence) and the 1789 French Revolution, writing later, “A part played in two revolutions is a life lived to some purpose”. He died in poverty and isolation in the USA, then still a new country.

Paine’s first thirty-seven years did not suggest that he would later become an important historical figure. They were marked by failure. He left school at 12 and was apprenticed to his father as a maker of ladies’ corsets. He later had a succession of jobs - corset maker, sailor, teacher, excise man, and shop owner. None were successful. Married twice, his first wife died in childbirth, as did the child; and his unhappy and childless second marriage fell apart. At thirty-seven, he was sacked from his job and sold everything he owned to pay off his debts. 

This was when Paine’s life changed. He took a boat across the Atlantic to America, arriving in December 1774.  The American colonies were then part of the British Empire. He arrived just months before the start of the American Revolution, which turned out to be perfect timing.

Soon after his arrival in America, Paine wrote a magazine article denouncing slavery, commenting“Our traders in men (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the slave-trade, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their hearts.” Such views were not popular with the American elite. Paine was, as he so often would be in the future, brave and ahead of his time.

What was to make Paine famous overnight in America was a pamphlet called Common Sense,published in February 1776, arguing for independence at a time when many Americans were unconvinced. He also argued that what was at stake in America was of universal significance, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”  Common Sense sold half a million copies and is credited with decisively changing opinion and paving the way for the Declaration of Independence in July 1776.

Paine attacked monarchy and ridiculed the hereditary principle. He also argued that the Rule of Law must be supreme, “But where say some is the King of America? In America, THE LAW IS KING.”

By the end of 1776, however, the fight for American independence was not going well. Paine wrote another pamphlet, Crisis, which was so powerfully inspirational that Washington ordered it to be read out to all his soldiers on the eve of battle. “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” 

The Americans won the battle and it was a turning point in the war.

At the end of the war in 1783, Paine’s energies went in a completely new - and surprising - direction. He designed a new iron bridge and his (ultimately fruitless) search for funds to build it took him to France and then back to his home country of England.

In England, despite his role in the American Revolution, Paine did not face arrest, but the government targeted him with something that we can recognise today - a smear campaign. They made lurid claims: that Paine was a fraudster; that he beat his first wife to death when she was pregnant and - for good measure - that he had sex with cats!

In 1789, while Paine was in England, the French Revolution took place. Edmund Burke - now known as the father of modern Conservatism - wrote a book denouncing it and Paine took up his pen and wrote his most famous work The Rights of Man in direct reply. 

Paine insisted that men were free and equal in respect of their rights. “It is by distortedly exalting some men, that others are distortedly debased, till the whole is out of nature.”

He attacked monarchy as oppressive and absurd, and the aristocracy as useless “mere consumers of rent.”

Paine wanted to educate the common man. “Ignorance is of a peculiar nature: once dispelled, and it is impossible to re-establish it…though many may be kept ignorant, they cannot be made ignorant.” 

He also went into considerable detail about his proposals for what is in effect a welfare state, well before such a thing existed anywhere in the world. He produced tables setting out how progressive taxation and inheritance tax could fund support for the poor, for children, pensions for the aged and State education. 

In a later work, Paine advocated that every man and woman reaching 21 years of age should receive £15 (a significant sum) “to enable HIM or HER to begin the WORLD!”  This idea can be seen as an early version of modern proposals for a Universal Basic Income.

Paine was driven by a desire for social justice and abhorrence at great wealth co-existing with dire poverty. "The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.”

The Rights of Man made Paine a marked man in England. Facing arrest and likely execution for treason, he fled to France in 1792.

Arriving in France, as the famous author of The Rights of Man, Paine was immediately offered French citizenship, and elected to the Parliament of Revolutionary France.

Whereas, in England Paine had been seen as a highly dangerous radical, in Revolutionary France he was a moderate compared to the leaders of the Revolution. This moderation almost cost him his life.

The leaders of the French Revolution wanted to execute the French King. Paine, brave to the point of foolhardiness, argued the King ought to have a trial and, in any event, should not be executed. He made powerful enemies and was later arrested and thrown into prison. Due to be guillotined, he escaped only because an “X” was marked on his door when it was open, and so was not visible to those collecting prisoners for the guillotine when the door was later closed. The very next day, the revolutionary leader, Robespierre, himself fell from power and was guillotined. Paine’s life was saved.

Paine’s motivation was not sympathy for the French King but his belief in the Rule of Law and his - then unusual - opposition to the death penalty.

Paine wrote his final famous work, The Age of Reason, in France. He made it clear that he believed in a God but launched a fierce attack on Christianity, deeply shocking many people. 

In 1802, Paine returned to the USA. The next seven years until his death were not happy ones. He was widely shunned because of The Age of Reason and also because he had furiously attacked George Washington, by now revered in the USA, for having abandoned him in the French prison.

In 2018, Thomas Paine has much still to offer the world. He would be appalled at what is happening in the USA. He would take up his pen - or tap his keyboard - and attack the assaults of the Trump administration on democracy, freedom, the Rule of Law, human rights and truth itself.

He would attack corruption and perhaps single out the particular evil of encouraging wars in order that some may profit. “That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord and cultivate prejudices between nations, it becomes the more unpardonable.”

Additional Quotes

 On Paine challenging received wisdom

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” 

On Paine insisting on the Rule of Law, even for unpopular people

"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

Paine on social justice

‘“When it can be said by any country in the world, my poor are happy, neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them, my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars, the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive, the rational world is my friend because I am the friend of happiness. When these things can be said, then may that country boast its constitution and government.”