2: A Crash Course in Revolutionary Science
One of the biggest obstacles of all to environmental sustainability is that so many people have so many misconceptions of what science is. Most of what people believe they know about science is either misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, superstition, political correctness, or emotional defense mechanisms. So I’d better start with a chapter on how to distinguish real science from fake science, why real science works, and why fake science doesn’t work.
(If you already know those things, you could skip this chapter, but knowing how to explain those things to other people in simple terms is just as important.)
A lot of progressive activists have severe emotional allergies to science, and make a lot of arguments against it. I’ve heard every argument that’s ever been made against science—or at least, it’s been years since I’ve heard an original one.
They’re all bullshit. People who make these arguments either don’t understand what science is and how it works, or else they’re confusing science with the Capitalist cultural values that have built up around science. In the first case, you’re spreading negative propaganda about a certain group of people, their occupation, and their system of thought, even though you obviously understand nothing about them. In the second case, you’re blaming the wrong people and not doing anything to solve the real problem—just like if you tried to prevent violent crime by outlawing guns. All this misinformation and disinformation so-called progressive activists are spreading is just helping the Capitalists to divide and conquer people who could oppose them, and to keep everyone from learning why the Capitalists are winning.
By now, all the information we need to solve all of our global problems has been discovered. Scientists are always discovering more, and the more we know the better off we are. The critical things to know are how a stable environment works, how we destabilized our environment, why it seemed like a good idea to us, and how to recognize whether things we do will help stabilize the environment, or will destabilize it further.
We don’t know everything there is to know about the global environment, but we know a lot about some things and a little about everything. Between the things we know a lot about and the things we know a little bit about, we know enough to see that the things we know a little bit about are just different versions of the things we know a lot about. Out of all the countless things there are left to learn, we can already tell that learning them will only add to our understanding of the world; it won’t fundamentally change it.
Everything the scientists have discovered has been figured out by someone somewhere in the general worldwide progressive activist movement. What progressive activists haven’t figured out yet is how to fit all the pieces together. So what I have to tell you about in this book will sound an awful lot like typical anti-Capitalist rhetoric. But the difference between my way of doing things and the typical anti-Capitalist revolutionary approach is that I’m not talking about my opinions about things. I’m talking about atomic physics. Everything I have to say is evidence admissible in court.
It isn’t possible to use science to prove that miracles don’t exist, because miracles (if they do exist) happen so rarely. But it isn’t possible to build a sustainable economic and political system by depending on miracles either, because, once again, miracles happen so rarely. At this point, the global environment and humanity’s relationship to it is understood well enough that miracles don’t need to be invoked to explain it, and miracles don’t need to be invoked to show how we could make a peaceful transition to environmental sustainability.
Science is the study of the big things that affect everyone most of the time. (In other words, everything except miracles.) By now, all of environmental unsustainability can be traced to big things that affect everyone most of the time. We also know how to make the transition to environmental sustainability using big things that affect everyone most of the time. At this point, if we don’t make the transition to environmental sustainability, we have no one to blame for it but ourselves.