On Totalitarianism
A guest post by John Cullen
Posted on 01 Sep 24
In August, across on his thread ‘The Case Against Net Zero – a Fourth Update’, Robin Guenier made the very strong case that the UK’s Net Zero policy is unachievable, disastrous and pointless. The subsequent discussion noted that currently the UK contributes only about 1% of humanity’s CO2 emissions. The question then arose as to why the UK is making such a huge effort to reach Net Zero when most of the rest of the world is evidently little interested in that policy objective. In short, the UK’s approach seems most irrational.
This led to a discussion of UK politics and its apparent drift away from effective representative democracy. Specifically, in trying to understand the UK’s energy/climate irrationality I quoted (see below) from page 17 of Phillip W. Gray’s book on totalitarianism which is a political ideology that, Gray claims, will often adopt policies that look irrational (or even borderline insane) when viewed from the outside. This subsequently led me to write a longer commentary on totalitarianism based upon my reading of, primarily, Gray’s book. The text of that intervention is as follows.
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On 9th August I quoted from Gray’s book on totalitarianism and, on 13th August, Richard suggested more should be said. I have therefore reviewed Gray’s short book (177 pages) and listed a few quotations (see Addendum below) that, for me, illustrate the way we in the West are already heading – even if we have not yet reached the possible final destination of technological totalitarianism sketched by Gray.
https://cliscep.com/2024/09/01/on-totalitarianism/
