The Green Leap Backward
The western version of the cultural revolution has arrived
When Ideology Meets Reality…
The Great Leap Forward was an effort by Maoist-era China to jump-start the country into modernity. It was as ambitious as it was unrealistic, promised a utopian future, and delivered a nightmare.
The Great Leap was supposed to turn backward rural China into an industrial prosperous nation. It focused on eliminating for good the anti-proletarian “4 Olds”: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, Old Habits.
Beyond economic “reforms”, the period was marked by political and social upheaval and mass hysteria. Removing the “Olds” usually happened by removing symbolically or physically the people who incarnated them.
If you want to have a feel of how that period felt, I warmly recommend reading The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin (who, interestingly, is a very CCP-friendly author despite his honest depiction of these times). It’s also a very good sci-fi novel.
Through violence and starvation, it ended causing anywhere between 15 and 55 million deaths. This put its death toll at the levels of other events like World Wars or the Black Plague.
Many discussions have gone around about the cause of the death toll. I can point out a few factors:
Economic dislocation from mass deportation or absurd small-scale furnace policy.
Labor shortage, diverting toward metal production.
Forced labor for massive irrigation projects.
Pseudo-scientific and unproductive farming methods were imported from the USSR (Lysenkoism).
Ecological destruction, like the dogmatic mass extermination of singing birds, leading to insect infestation and locust plagues.
Grain exports to finance the acquisition of foreign technology and machinery.
…Reality Win
All of those were just symptoms of the actual cause.
The real cause was a predominance of ideology over reality.
Traditional farming methods are too reliant on genetics, a bourgeois science? Easy solution, adopt communism-friendly Lysenkoism.
Local officials and scientists are reporting the early failure of this “progress”? Punish them and remove them from a post of influence.
Does production fail to meet targets? That’s because the reforms are implemented too slowly, too timidly. We need MORE of it, quicker, faster, bigger.
This is why the most ideologically-driven system tends to fail. Any failure or problem is either pushed under the rug or blamed on not enough of the ideology that will of course work in due time.
Still in doubt? Are you an enemy of the people?
How Leap Forward Works
Where I am going with this?
Well, I feel by the day that Western society is sliding toward a similar type of hysteria. You see, it does need to be associated with communism. Any religious-like type of fervor works. Especially if it simultaneously promises utopia when obeyed and doom to the unbelievers.
The Great Leap Forward is just a recent iteration of madness regular among humankind. From religious holy war (jihad & crusades, the 30 years war, ISIS, …), civil war (USA, Spain, Yougoslavia, …), to revolutionary or political mass hysteria (French Revolution, fascism, …), human society tends to lose the plot every so often.
Here is how the process goes:
Society identifies a very real issue threatening society's stability.
An ideology emerges promising to solve that specific issue.
This ideology gains traction as it sounds able to solve the problem.
Its leaders (all of them “pure” ideologues) acquire massive political, social, economical, and military power to solve the problem.
Once in power, the ideologues start to expand their “solution” kit to all problems of society, and all topics.
These solutions include plenty of bans, prescriptions, and excommunication of previously normal things.
Any resistance is met with a mix of oppression, shaming, re-education, and forced policy to adopt the ideology on everything.
Mass hysteria becomes common, from violent mobs to flagellants.
Any failure of these solutions is analyzed as “not enough of the solution”. Utopia is always a few years away and the economy and society get less and less stable.
As I referred to Chinese society before, I will now use the Thirty Years’ War which killed up to 60% of the population in areas of Germany as an example.
This way you can see it is not an Asian, Chinese, or communism-related phenomenon. Just a human thing.
Corruption in the Catholic church leads to inequality and social division
Reforms are proposed to reduce the Church's power, some reasonable, some quite extreme.
Moderate reforms are repressed, leaving only ideologues in charge.
The ideologues start with Church reform. They quickly turn their gaze to all aspects of society:
Private lifestyle (diet, entertainment, clothes, …)
Social arrangements (marriage, land repartition, ...)
Economic arrangements (banning loans, commercial law, …)
New religious mass movements appear, uprooting entire villages and communities into new, more “holy” lifestyles (like the Hussites, whose more moderate descendants are people like the Amish).
Any backlash only demonstrates the wickedness of the old order. Revolution and civil wars followed.
If you are especially unlucky, like Germans in the XVIIth century, foreign powers get involved and put more oil on the fire, using the local tensions/insanity in a proxy war against other powers.
Are we leaping forward as well?
The key characteristic of an ideology's ability to cause this phenomenon is how disconnected from reality it can be. The farther in the future the utopia, the more existential and immediate the perceived threat, and the less open to discussion and feedback it is.
Feelings of absolute certitude are also a key component.
The proletariat WILL dominate at the end of history.
God WILL give victory to the righteous.
No doubt about it for the faithful.
In my view, our dominant ideology today is what I call Ecologism.
Ecology is a perfectly respectable science and laudable idea.
Ecologism is seeing everything through the prism of a biased, dogmatic and truncated version of ecology.
Ecologism is a disconnected ideology.
It KNOWS that humans are destroying the planet.
It KNOWS the unique set of solutions needed to solve Global Warming.
And it WILL replace the old world with an eco-friendly alternative, the only debate is on the timeframe for it to happen.
Instead of going forward, Ecologism aims to go backward. Less energy, less population, less technology.
Hence my moniker of the “Green Leap Backward”.
No alternative authorized
The green transition HAS to happen exactly like its leaders say it will.
For example, let’s imagine we have a carbon-neutral, low-impact, low mortality way of producing electricity. It consumes little metals and rare earth as well. Almost no land footprint. We would have thousands if not millions of years of fuel reserves available.
You would expect that green enthusiasts would welcome it with open arms right? After all, if global warming is an imminent and existential threat, going carbon neutral with a cost-efficient, 50-years old technology would make sense. Any detail could be solved later.
Well, we have such a solution and it’s called nuclear power. And this is what the very Green Germans have to say about it:
https://www.euronews.com/green/2022/05/17/germany-will-vote-against-eu-plans-to-include-nuclear-energy-as-a-green-investment
https://energycentral.com/c/gn/germany-tells-france-nuclear-not-green
Carbon-neutral abundant energy?
Nein, Danke!
Nuclear does not fit the dogma about green energy, so let’s ignore the most obvious solution to the problem we claim to care about.
Disconnected from reality
Ecologism is a simple religion, following a few tenets:
1/ Humans are inherently bad and are killing the Earth.
The fundamental evilness of humans and their effect on the Earth is a central tenet of most militant ecologists. This is just a re-framed version of the age-old misanthropy of religious fanatics.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/humans-are-a-plague-on-earth-sir-david-attenborough-warns-that-negative-effects-of-population-growth-will-come-home-to-roost-8461570.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-race-just-001-of-all-life-but-has-destroyed-over-80-of-wild-mammals-study
2/ Fossil fuels are the root of all modern evil, including racism, pandemic, etc…
Fossil fuels and global warming are not just polluting, they are the real reason behind everything bad. Life must be comforting when you figured out everything.
Pandemic?
Global warming.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/09/10/climate-change-covid-19-does-global-warming-fuel-pandemics/5749582002/
Racism?
Global warming
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/fossil-fuel-racism/
Sexism?
Global warming
https://www.laprogressive.com/firstpeoples/how-fossil-fuel-damages-womens-health
Previously, earthquakes, plagues, and tornadoes would be blamed on the Gods’ wrath.
Ecologism makes everything Mother Earth’s punishment for our sins.
3/ The world will end if we do not all follow the religious prescriptions soon. And no other solution can be allowed to flourish.
Electric cars are going to stop fossil fuel consumption, even if most fossil fuel use is plastic, maritime and air transportation, and trucking.
Hydrogen is the way forward, even if, as I explained previously, it makes zero sense due to basic physics.
I already mentioned the rejection of nuclear, picking solar and wind instead.
I could also add the obsession with industrial “organic” farming, instead of rational regenerative practices AND fertilizer usage.
4/ Salvation comes from self-punishing restrictions, not unlike fasting and asceticism of other religions.
The proper eco-citizen will have no car, use little electronics, will not eat meat but insects, live in smaller housing, will not travel, etc…
The common streak between all of these is a puritan tendency toward “holiness” through self-punishment and a religious-like purification lifestyle.
The green monks don’t have fun, but they are righteous.
5/ Outrage, mobs, and outward manifestation of purity are to be praised and empowered.
From corporate green-washing to bizarre absurd actions to mass protests to the media-constructed celebrity with no independent thoughts, signaling your allegiance to Ecologism is becoming a social obligation.
Takeaway
Ecologism and its associated mass hysteria are not going away.
It will get a lot more oppressive and crazy before it gets better. This is just how such a crisis unrolls.
So I fully expect the Green Leap Backward to keep going in full swing for a while. It will wreak havoc on Western economies and societies.
It will stop one day, but probably only after quite a few blackouts, economic crashes, and famine.
Subscribers will be able to access the associated report on how to profit from it through a carefully timed investing strategy. Each phase of the process to come and how to manage each financially.
Some very intriguing parallels here that I also am seeing in society.
At risk of sounding like an idiot, please let me offer a devil's advocate retort: maybe this time it's different?
Broad scientific has been reached. We know that by existing this way is harmful to the earth, and moreover, to our future selves.
We also know that we must change relatively fast. Of course maybe there are extreme pockets and fringes, but maybe this time it's justified to take extreme actions even if there are probably bad outcomes?
Also, regarding nuclear power, I absolutely agree that we need to include it more. But one overlooked fact seems to be dealing with the (eventual) nuclear waste that will occur over time.
Thanks for entertaining my questions. Great job as usual.
Hallo Jonathan,
ich bin gerade auf diesen Artikel gestoßen, nachdem ich bei Reddit deine ganz vorzügliche Analyse zu Rakuten gelesen habe. Chapeau, du hast dir eine Wagnsinnsarbeit gemacht; vielleicht solltest du einige Artikel bei SeekingAlpha veröffentlichen, um gegebenenfalls auch deine ganze DD etwas zu monetarisieren (größeres Publikum etc.). Ich würde es dir gönnen.
Zum Thema Klimawahn: Kazatomprom ist eine Aktie, mit der man das Ganze spielen kann. Du hast aber, glaube ich, auf finmasters einen anderen Atomwert vorgestellt. Warum?
PS: Verfolge ich über finmasters all deine Artikel oder gibt es noch Seiten, auf denen du überdies schreibst.
Liebe Grüße,
Markus
PS: verzeih bitte, ich bin einfach einmal davon ausgegangen, dass du Deutscher bist/ Deutsch sprichst