...continued from Humanarchy – Chapter 1

Humanarchy

Part One of CHAPTER TWO – Belief and Fear

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

— Nietzsche

Two thousand years ago a humble carpenter from an obscure part of the Roman Empire was executed for the crime of preaching some rather radical ideas. Ideas are clearly dangerous when the ruling system does not share them. However, it soon became apparent that this cranky new belief system, that embodied such bizarre ideas as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" and "the meek shall inherit the Earth", had found favour with an ever-increasing number of people. The weirdest and most radical thing of all was that no one had to pay for it – it was free.

The Romans tried their damndest to stamp out the foolishness that was spreading around the Mediterranean, but they couldn’t. The Christians were not terrorists. They did not attack the Roman army or burn Roman towns. They had no military, political or territorial ambitions at all, but the Romans were forced to crack down on them because they refused to do one simple thing. They refused to believe that the Emperor was God and if they could not accept the Emperor as God then they could not accept the Empire – the state as holy.

It had to be said though that these cranks who "turned the other cheek" were a lot less hassle than some of the Roman’s real enemies who were doing their damndest to wipe the Empire off the map. Not only that, but the Romans were fighting among themselves. In the year 312 AD the Empire was divided and in turmoil. The Emperor Diocletian had abdicated, the co-emperor Galerius had died and the remaining two co-emperors Maximian and Constantine were slugging it out in a bloody war for the control of the Empire. One night, Constantine had a dream. He dreamed that if his soldiers painted the Chi-Rho symbol * on their shields they would triumph in battle. It worked. Whether it was a divine miracle, or just plain luck, Constantine’s soldiers took the heavily defended Milvian Bridge and poured into Rome. The cranky new religion got his OK from then on.

*A Christian monogram and symbol formed from the first two letters X and P of the Greek word for Christ. – ed.

The persecutions stopped. The religion flourished. Pretty soon it got so big that the various rulers of the Mediterranean world got together and made it formal. They installed their own Bishops and priests, their own bureaucracy to use the new belief system to keep everyone in line and of course, they levied the necessary tithes and taxes. It worked – it worked well and everyone had to conform or they were out, excommunicated, sent to hell. The Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire – it merely had the sense to replace the Emperor’s divinity with Christ’s. And it carried right on with business as usual – which was of course, screwing every last drop of wealth out of as many people as it could and making as many jobs for the boys in the system as it could. With whole nations at its command it could set out and conquer new lands, subjugate new peoples who were basically invited to join the herd or die. Let’s not forget that Christianity was a Roman religion for a long time and to a large extent still is to this very day. Does something sound a little familiar here?

The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

— Voltaire

Still standing – the Milvian Bridge in Rome was already over four hundred years old when the battle that gave Christianity its big break was fought on 28th October 312 AD.

An Offer You Can’t Refuse

The story of the success of Christianity is not just a testament to the power of the teachings of a carpenter from Nazareth, but more to do with the success of the powerful system of social control that went along with it. Being a religion based system, it naturally took care of everything from law and order to education. It collected the taxes; it built the monasteries, the hospitals, the universities and the libraries. It not only defined its people; it also defined knowledge, wisdom, justice and morality. To be on the out side of the system was to be an outcast, a heathen, or a Jew. Christianity insinuated itself into every aspect of the lives of every man, woman and child in the whole of Christendom from before they were born, to beyond their deaths. The ‘Bounty Bag’ they got was nothing less than eternal life – a place in heaven – if they conformed .

Nobody can deny that this system was guilty of some pretty un-Christian behaviour at times. We should never forget that plenty of people were put to the fire and the sword in the name of the carpenter from Nazareth. It was the Christian church that also gave us the slavery of the clock. Some bureaucrat in the church figured that the daily prayers were being said at more or less any old time, so the Church commissioned the clock to be made. When it was successfully made and sufficiently accurate, some other church bureaucrat had the bright idea of putting the clock up on the church tower and ringing the church bells along with it. Now all those illiterate peasants could get their lazy good for nothing hides out of bed and out in to the fields to work on time and have no excuse for not paying their tithes and taxes. We have been doing likewise ever since. Christianity ran the western world like clockwork and until recent times was probably the most effective, powerful and all-encompassing social system of all time. Until it was replaced by another one that is.

While we are talking about Christianity, we should note that there were a group of Christians who didn’t go along with the idea of the carpenter’s teachings being formalised and hi-jacked by the Romans or anyone else. They believed that to be a true Christian you couldn’t be born into it – you had to ‘know’ it from intimate and personal experience. These non-conformists were called the ‘Gnostics’ after the Greek word ‘to know’. It may come as a surprise to some, but neither they, or their ‘Gnostic Gospels’ were included in the New World Order of the time. To some this might seem like the trimming off of a few stray, radical oddballs – but to others it must surely be a classic example of the suppression, if not the murder, of both individual freedom and individual truth – and so it was.

Organised Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.

— Richard LeGallienne

Now, it may well be that the hi-jacking of the Christian faith as a means of social control was, on the whole, greatly beneficial to the human race, but that is not what I really want to illustrate here. Thousands of books have been written debating the subject, but this isn’t one of them. Neither do I wish to denigrate or offend the followers of any religion. What I’m trying to show is that the most effective methods of social control utilise ideas and concepts that are popular – those which the populace believein. Once the herd accepts the belief, then you can pretty much do what you like with them. Whether you do it for the good of the people, or not, is something we will be addressing a little later on, but for the moment, let’s play it safe and stick with the herd.

If we take away the simple beauty of the teachings of the carpenter from Nazareth, we can see Christianity as more of a multi-national protection racket than a religion because belief was at the core of the system, belief and fear. If you didn’t go along with the herd you could be cast out, excommunicated, or even burnt at the stake. That meant that as well as having a pretty lousy time while you were still alive, you would have an even lousier time when you were dead because you didn’t get to go to heaven, you went to hell . Belief and fear are the two basic human weaknesses that are always there to be exploited. Our beliefs are there to keep us in line, to structure our lives and our society, and our fears are there to enforce our obedience.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

It is the common consent to a common set of beliefs that binds us, more or less together it forms us into a herd. We have laws that have been made by our leaders to punish those who stray beyond the parameters of our belief systems, but these laws can only come in to play when they are broken. Or more accurately when they are seen to be broken and when the transgressors are caught in the act of breaking them. Above all though, it is our fear of non-conformity that maintains our adherence.

In a sense we are still like those nomadic peoples of our distant past. For them, leaving the herd actually meant death, for if you could no longer keep pace with the herd you were left behind to die. We have a natural inbuilt fear of being left behind. Fear that if we go against the moral code that structures our society we will somehow be excommunicated from it. Fear that if we transgress we will be cast out and punished – whether we know the truth or not.

So where do our beliefs and our fears really come from? From our own free will or from those who drive the human herd along the trail? It is easy to see how in the past when we were simple agricultural folk who believed in the concepts of heaven and hell that such fears could keep us in line, but what of the present? We are no longer simple peasants bamboozled by the rantings of hellfire priests, are we? We know far more about our world and what makes it tick than our forbears ever did, don’t we? We don’t believe in heaven and hell any more than we believe that the Earth is flat or in the existence of the Tooth Fairy, do we? What is it that we believe in now? What are the beliefs that keep us in line in this scientific and secular age of information technology?

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

— Stendahl

GLOBAL WARMING

The concept of global warming was first proposed by a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, in 1896. He put forward the theory that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere would eventually result in a global temperature rise. The scientific community paid little attention to his hypothesis at the time and understandably, the huge industrial concerns of the day were not in the least bit interested either.

In the 1970s, Dr. Stephen Schneider, among others, contradicted Arrhenius’s thinking, by claiming that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were, in fact, causing global cooling and some rather sensationalist articles began to appear in the popular press as well as the scientific journals warning us of a coming ice age.

The continued rapid cooling of the Earth since World War II is also in accord with the increased global air pollution associated with industrialisation, mechanisation, urbanisation, and an exploding population, added to a renewal of volcanic activity....

(Bryson 1971)

According to the academy [National Academy of Sciences] report on climate, we may be approaching the end of a major interglacial cycle, with the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age a real possibility...with ice packs building up relatively quickly from local snowfall that ceases to melt from winter to winter.

Science Magazine March 1975

So, no need to worry about global warming – the danger is global cooling, right? However, in the 1980s, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) held a conference in Toronto, and thereafter created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which put global warming firmly back on the agenda.

By the 1990’s, the ulterior motives behind the furtherance of the global warming theory were beginning to be stated publicly. Senator Timothy Wirth (now Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs) went so far as to say:

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy .

It became the view of the U.S. State Department that:

A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the green house effect..

And to this end Dr. Stephen Schneider (who, it should be remembered, was one of the first to counter Arrhenius’ original global warming theory) told a group of scientists:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In fact, there is very little scientific data to support the theory of global warming and what there is can be described, at best, as unreliable. The theory of global warming is based on computer models, which the IPCC has revised downwards three times since 1990. But, you may say, what about the weather these days – the storms, floods, droughts and tornadoes? But, if we take the trouble to look back at the weather patterns from the past, even the recent past, those bizarre weather patterns have always been there. The weather is always unreliable.

For some reason we expect the weather to conform to how we want it to be, but the weather is naturally nonconformist – it isn’t a part of the herd. The weather is dynamic and its patterns and cycles operate over thousands of years and are infinitely complex and unpredictable – as the so-called ‘Butterfly Effect’ illustrates.

The global warming debate should have been resolved in November 1995, when a group of world-renowned climatologists and other scientists met in Leipzig, Germany. The conference document they adopted, now known as the Leipzig Declaration, said this:

...most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever. Based on the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the so-called "scientific consensus" that envisages climate catastrophes...

All the real scientific studies that were undertaken revealed that the actual global temperature has declined during the second half of the20th century, that is, during the period of the sharpest increases of carbon dioxide.

Much of the belief that there is global warming is based on the International Panel on Climate Change's five year report, issued in 1996, which claims that there is a scientific consensus that there is evidence man is causing climate change. However, in order to arrive at that consensus, Chapter 8 of the IPCC report, which was carefully written by over 1200 scientists had to be drastically altered by eliminating the scientist’s key statements. These had clearly revealed that there was in fact no consensus, nor is there any solid evidence that man was causing any climate change.

Deleted excerpts from the report included:

None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of the increases in greenhouse gases.

And:

No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [manmade] causes.

And perhaps most telling:

Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.

Futhermore, on April 21 1998, more than 15,000 scientists, two-thirds of them with advanced academic degrees, signed a Petition against the climate accord that was concluded in Kyoto (Japan) in December 1997. They urged the US government to reject the Accord, which would force drastic cuts in energy use on the United States and other nations.

In a period of less than six weeks, the 15,000 basic and applied scientists – an unprecedented number for this kind of document – also expressed their profound scepticism about the science underlying the Kyoto Accord. They reiterated the hard facts that the atmospheric data simply does not support the elaborate computer-driven climate models that are being cited by the United Nations and other promoters of the Accord as "proof" of global warming. By April 1998, they joined by another 2,000 signatories – that’s a total of 17,000 scientists who don’t buy the global warming scam.

Dr. Frederick Seitz, President Emeritus of Rockefeller University and a past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, stated:

The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds. This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.

The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries.

— Frederick Seitz

The White House claimed that a "consensus of 2500 climate scientists" were alarmed by the prospect of global warming. This is entirely spurious. The 1996 UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) actually number less than 2000, and only a fraction of them – who were actually never even polled, can claim to be climate scientist. Many of those scientists are known to be critical of the IPCC report and have now become signers of the anti-Kyoto petition.

Here we have a clear example of the high-jacking of a belief and a fear no less relevant to the lives of millions of ordinary people today than the Christian concepts of heaven and hell were way back in the middle ages. The only difference is that today God has nothing to do with it. In a secular age, individual religions are irrelevant when the creation of a global belief system is being engineered to keep the human herd in line.

Scientists are understandably upset when they see $2 billion per year devoted to research on climate change, much of it irrelevant and concerned only with imaginary consequences of a hypothetical warming – while other fields of science are starved. They are also appalled and angry that an increasing fraction of this research money is diverted into "community workshops," thinly disguised brainwashing exercises to create public fears about climate catastrophes.

— Dr. S. Fred Singer, president of The Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) Author of
Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate.

There you have it in a nutshell. Whether you believe we are going to fry or freeze is irrelevant. The truth of the matter is the whole scam is being deliberately engineered to create belief and fear. Even in a world where God is widely deemed redundant, heaven and hell are still used to control us, though now the bishops and the priests are dressed up in green. – or in the rainbow coloured clown suits of eco-fools.

The Enviromental Holocaust.

It’s happening now – we see it on our TV screens and our kids can read it their schoolbooks, so it must be true. A highway carved through the last Garden of Eden – the virgin Amazon rain forest. Mighty trees felled in their millions to make paper and cheap, chipboard furniture. The green earth gouged open and plundered for minerals, the precious top soil washed away by flooding rivers, oil fires blaze, darkening the blue sky, seabirds wade in tar and oil slicks, countless species driven to extinction. Our oceans fished out, stinking with sewage, whales and dolphins slaughtered, turtles struggling up the hostile beach, seals pups clubbed, blood on the virgin snow.

The environmental holocaust takes no prisoners – innocent species exterminated by the capitalist consumerist western world juggernaut. Black children swollen bellied, emaciated women scratching the bare earth for grain. Mass migrations of ethnic hordes to the concrete deserts of bursting cities. War and famine raging across sun baked savannahs, the AK47 raised in hatred, the SAM missile silhouetted against the African sky, the empty bowl and the dirty water hole, the starving children lying, covered in flies, the human rivers of refugees. The ‘ethnic cleansing’, the tanks rolling, the bodies burning. Truly undeniable and yet seemingly unavoidable, inevitable.

Undeniable maybe, but un-avoidable? No. Some might say deliberate. Third world countries forced to produce for export to repay impossible debts rather than feed themselves. Wars fuelled by outside political interests, arms manufacturers and drug companies exploiting the emerging nations. Western ideology and culture forced upon the rest of the world – the Avon lady paddling her canoe through the Amazon rain forest. Condoms and sterilisation programmes initiated by the secular New Age missionaries from the UN, the golden arches and the plastic clown in onion-domed Moscow, slave labour mining the earth, child labour producing goods for western companies, children forced into prostitution. Old ways, old religions, old cultures trampled under the consumerism cancer of the western herd. Everybody wants a slice of the action and the third world herd is stampeding towards the future, the scent of hamburgers in their nostrils, technicolour visions of consumer heaven flashing before their hypnotised faces. Deliberate? Undoubtedly.

Has our world been raped and plundered? Are our world’s resources coming to an end? Not exactly. Although there is no doubt that human beings have left their mark on the world, things are not quite as desperate as we are being lead to believe and the reasons are perhaps being deliberately misinterpreted.

Mark Sagoff, a research associate with the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and author of the book ‘The Economy of the Earth’, is optimistic. He states that the rising tides of technology, efficiency and enlightened self-interest are collectively lifting humanity away from the gross consumption of the world's resources and into a more targeted and, ultimately, truly sustainable economy.

Certainly there was a lack of respect for the environment and the old industries did cause some very unpleasant pollution, but: smog has declined by one-third, despite a doubling of both numbers of vehicles and miles driven, while in Los Angeles it has dropped by one half. In 1972 one-third of the bodies of water in the United States were safe for fishing and swimming, while today, two-thirds are safe. The last load of municipal sludge was dumped into a body of water in 1992. Hazardous chemicals are being produced in ever lessening amounts and the percentage of trash heading for landfills is decreasing. And, contrary to most people believe, the amount of forest in the United States is actually increasing.

Are our oceans polluted and fished out? Dire warnings about the world's annual fish catch, said to be at "unsustainable levels" due to over-fishing are clearly untrue. Even the UN funded Worldwatch Institute was forced to admit that the "total fish harvest ...[had] climbed to 109 million [metric] tons in 1994," a new annual record, in their publication ‘Vital Signs’.

Over the four-year period from 1992, Worldwatch reported that 1990's "world fish catch fell to 97 million [metric] tons, down from a record 100 million [metric] tons the preceding year," and that prospects for future increases in production were grim. But despite all the hype and doom forecasts about "over-fishing" and "depleted" fish stocks, the fish harvests are somehow continuing to grow.. Worldwatch continues to warn us that "fish supplies cannot keep pace with increasing population," – but somehow they do. Clearly, fish do not read UN environmental publications.

As to the numbers of species we are told are being driven to extinction we find that the situation is again confused by myths and propaganda.

...many oft-cited `facts' used to paint a picture of impending ecological disaster are more myth than reality.... Although field studies had documented an extinction rate of only one species per year world-wide, in 1979 biologist Norman Myers [The Sinking Ark] predicted that the rate would balloon, with the loss of 1 million species by the end of the century. Myers offered no basis for his prediction other than to call it a `reasonable working figure'. Nonetheless, the number received much attention and is still frequently cited by activists.

— U.S. News & World Report

We have to bear in mind that new species are evolving constantly as nature continues the process of evolution by natural selection – first brought to our attention by one Charles Darwin. It is certainly true that some species – the Rhino, the tiger and a few other large mammals have been seriously depleted by human interference. This is a sad, but perhaps the inevitable consequence of the increases in farming and the enclosure of wildlands, but to claim that 75 to 100 species per day are becoming extinct – as the Evangelical Environmental Network's action alert states is pure propaganda.

Even the well-known Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson can’t make up his mind. On different occasions he has heavily publicised his claim that 4,000, or 30,000, or 50,000 species a year are being driven to extinction. Environmental groups have been naturally quick to grasp such figures and use them in calls to action. Such claims carry the ring of scientific authority, but they predictably may have more to do with claims for funding rather than environmental reality. Nevertheless, such diverse figures have featured prominently and have played a persuasive part in the debate over the U.S. position on recent international treaties to slow deforestation and protect biodiversity.

It’s true that drought and famine do ravage some areas of the Third World – but again, if we look back, this has always been the case. Just as the people of Bangladesh have always been plagued by floods, the climate in parts of Africa has always been dynamic. As unpleasant as they may be, these are the hard facts that go with the territory. For some reason we are being conditioned to believe that every place on the planet should expect to have the balmy climate of a New England summer. The tropics are far more volatile than the temperate regions to the north and south. This has always been so, yet today every natural disaster is portrayed as having its roots in the way we have abused nature with our selfish western consumerist attitudes so that the natural is now behaving unnaturally. We are told that the starving and the homeless are our problem, our responsibility, that we, through our callousness and our greed, have made them that way. We are all guilty.

In a sense, Western society is guilty, but this has nothing to do with the perceived environmental problems we have created. Famine is being caused not by a lack of food, but by the unequal distribution of it. The world produces more than enough for all of the teeming millions – it just isn’t shared around equally. Every year millions of tons of food are piled into grain, butter and meat-mountains, milk and wine lakes for purely economic reasons. Farmers are being paid to overproduce crops that are not needed, to leave land set aside and empty to conform to insane economic policies. This state of affairs is a classic example of market economics over riding human necessity. This is hardly the fault of the herd – we should not be blaming ourselves for this insanity. We should rightly blame our drovers.

At the height of the Ethiopian famine, cans of exported Ethiopian meat were on sale in Western supermarkets while we were being implored by the images on our TV screens to dig deep into our pockets to aid the starving and dying victims. At the same time, the UN General assembly voted to spend £54.8 million on a United Nations conference centre in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. Eleven years later the huge complex was still not completed and the projected costs had risen to £69 million. So much for the UN’s commitment to end global hunger.