Rock the Nations, Part III: Ruling by Messianism

Saving the planet has been our ultimate pastime for centuries, but ruining it is the most common result. Obviously, something is wrong with our messianic attitude.

Hero wanted. Must have pulse.

Regardless of the widespread belief in democracy based on diversity of opinions, we crave heroes and mass-uniting ideologies. Be it boredom with our lives, anxiety or just plain group dynamics, we tend to need a strong leader who gives us a clearly defined perspective, a predefined ‘way to go.’ Politicians like J.F. Kennedy, military leaders like Alexander the Great, or top terrorists like Osama bin Laden all have one thing in common: the masses follow them blindly, no questions asked. Put aside their moral, national or racial background; by promoting their personal ideas, myths, and goals, they offer us the ultimate cure to anxiety, frustration, and weltschmerz.

Heroes are ubiquitous in both ancient and modern history. We tend to look up to individuals who offer us some kind of ‘vision,’ a supernatural objective that becomes ‘common sense,’ a public property. This vision can be very simple (let us win a tournament) or overly ambitious (we will conquer the world), and it magically mobilizes the crowd to blindly follow the self-elected leader. Some goals may promise stardom and fame or dominance over other nations; some just a plain ‘we are the winners’ kind of feeling. It must be simple so that the common citizen can jump on the bandwagon without too much thinking. Look at popular mass idols, such as star soccer players. Soccer is, just like most of the sport disciplines, not too challenging intellectually, and it does not carry a promise of a material gain to the fans. Twenty-two guys chasing a leather ball are basically just twenty-two guys chasing a leather ball, with a very simple purpose: place that piece of rag behind the other team’s guy with number ‘one’ on his t-shirt. Despite the absurdity of this game, whole nations follow soccer tournaments as if they were a matter of life or death. Interestingly, not the entire national soccer team is admired and loved equally. There are always favorites who are interviewed in the press, discussed in the media, and known by literally every child in their home country.

That is, once again, what the crowds need. They need heroes. However, the heroes must stand for something. If soccer were just a local pastime of some small town or other individual place on Earth, it wouldn’t have the power to excite the masses. Obviously, the concept of a ‘national soccer team’ is the critical fuel powering the whole idea. The team wins for the entire nation, and people celebrate the game and their soccer heroes as if they were part of it, despite the fact that modern soccer teams are mostly made up of immigrants who came from foreign countries, simply following the call of big money. The vision of being the ‘winning country’ and of ‘saving the nation’ from being beaten by foreign soccer teams seems to unite the crowd into a single, simple-minded fan club.

Similar reflections can be made about most other ‘visions’ and ‘heroes’, be that charismatic politicians with their supposed reforms, tough military leaders with their national enemy concepts, etc. There is always a big vision behind them: they are heroes who promise to save the world from some ugly, dangerous, or at least generally unpleasant thing.

Who are those heroes we worship so passionately? The ‘heroes’ do not necessarily have to be overly smart, beautiful or talented (though it does sometimes help); sometimes they are just lucky—in the right place at the right time. They just happen to fill gaps that open shortly before they came, and will instantly close when they die.

Nazis and communists wanted to save the world too

One reason why we follow those more or less phony individuals and trust their promises is our odd urge to save the world. It is our very private world we want to save; the very personal, small space that represents the immediate environment of a human individual. Defending it is manifestation of the fundamental struggle for survival. This instinct is the most powerful one. However, individuals tend to adjust their survival strategies to broader mainstream trends. Since an individual does not have the power to know everything, he will tend to follow the majority of the population, thus hoping to avoid mistakes based on lack of individual knowledge or its proper information. Consequently, uniting masses on that lowest psychological level is probably the strongest social force imaginable, and it is fascinating to see how our authorities, our heroes and leaders, use it to turn us into mindless, obedient agents. It is hard to see the truth behind their strategies. In fact, it is bewildering that nobody is ever interested in scrutinizing them. In my favorite example of the popular mass trend, the environmental anxiety and the fear of global warming offers interesting insights. This megatrend is irrational because in most cases it is induced by mass media only. It is not based on individual understanding of complex scientific matters. I have never met anyone who has actually ever seen numerical results of a climate simulation, or even knows anything about how those algorithms work. Interestingly, the ‘scientific’ simulation results turn out to be moving targets. Recently, the estimated climate-warming curve had to be very significantly corrected, as the climate scientists were forced to admit that the average temperature had not increased for the past ten years, a fact which very clearly contradicted virtually all known preceding forecasts. It does sound like a real ‘Climate-Gate’ affair that has the potential to shake the foundations of the global warming fan community. But what was the reaction of the world population to this baffling fact? Lo and behold, no one cared!

The lame excuse of the scientific community, which explains that the mistake happened because the oceans had not been considered while designing the original simulation rules, does not make the global warming hypothesis any more credible. In fact, it actually proves that the scientists’ work on climate forecasts is error prone and produces arbitrary results. However, people’s readiness to sacrifice their freedoms and wealth in exchange for the promise of ‘saving the world’ remains unshaken. It is but a blind faith, a religious submission, a common belief based on willingness to trust and obediently follow the prophets. It appears as if people just want to believe myths. It seems as if we prefer to stick to our beloved ideology, even if it turns out to be falsified.

What makes things worse is the fact that we ignore the damage resulting from the ideas propagated by our leaders and heroes. We just don’t want to hear the bad news, as long as saving the world remains the main goal of our favorite vision. That is why the idealistic do-gooders of this world are able to cause so much suffering, death and destruction. Socialists, communists, and fascists – they all proclaimed to rescue us from the ultimate evil. They wanted to save the world too.

Stupid is as stupid does

Our readiness to sacrifice our values and even our lives in the name of some phony ideologies is astonishing. Why are we willing to do that? Maybe, in order to avoid too much thinking, we ‘outsource’ our world-saving, heroic desires to our leaders and the obscure forces behind them. Having done that, we just switch certain areas of our brains off. Perhaps most of us just lack the self-esteem required to stick unwaveringly to our own ideas and principles. We often prefer the chewed-for ones.

And the heroes, prophets and messiahs all rush to offer us various ideologies that sound pretty, are nicely packaged, and make us feel good. They offer us their ‘ultimate solutions’ to our worries, organize great mass events to make us feel united, create enemy images we want to believe in, and make us think that we are going to be all-time winners. Their goal is to satisfy mass anxieties and popular longings of ordinary individuals so that the solutions are usually oversimplified and one-dimensional.

Some of those simplified ‘ultimate solutions’ remind me fatally of the Nazi’s endloesung (‘final solution,’ the idea that led to the holocaust) rhetoric. Such ideas are designed to satisfy our need to feel superior toward other people and nations. For example, the blurred idea of the ‘social welfare state’ in some European countries is constantly being upheld by the almighty PR agencies and propagated by state-loyal mass media as the best way to organize a country, as opposed to the ‘cowboy capitalism,’ as the US system is frequently called. No one ever cares to see actual similarities or differences—most Europeans just take this opinion for granted. The result of this idealistic attitude will be a European superstate, an obscure, bureaucratic monster, in which no one understands who is in charge, the taxes are constantly rising, and individual freedoms and liberties are being increasingly undermined. Still, most Europeans blindly believe in the social welfare myth, come hell or high water.

The results of our ignorant obedience can be severe, as the previously mentioned example of the ecological hysteria shows. Certain grimy opinion makers, like Al Gore, literally ‘rock’ our nations by frightening them first and then showing them solutions that ultimately benefit the leaders themselves most, e.g., trading of carbon emission rights. Al Gore owns a fund that has shares in carbon rights trading agencies. That is, of course, a pure accident, as some may like to make us believe. The amazingly brilliant PR-action of Al Gore, the movie An Inconvenient Truth, is probably the first and so far only commercial advertisement in history that people actually paid to see in movie theatres. Gore is just one little example. In nearly every country, at least one ‘ecological prophet’ successfully advertises his or her vision of saving the world by redirecting money flow in a way that actually benefits the prophets and the powerful profiteers behind them. The consequences are alarming. The shaky, short-term ‘oil scarcity’ arguments are currently being used by speculators as an excuse to drive the crude oil prices to the current breathtaking levels. At the same time, the romantic idea of replacing fossil oil by biofuel does more harm than good, since the farmers increasingly prefer producing heavily subsidized oil-bearing plants, the food prices are rising quickly worldwide, causing hunger in many poorer regions around the world. Also, the Kyoto-protocol, which basically solves nothing, is used to force developing countries to pay a far higher price for building their infrastructure and implementing individual mobility, than the developed, rich countries have ever paid. And, ideologically motivated huge spending on public transportation often causes even more energy waste than wisely improving the individual automobile-based traffic strategy on highways and in the cities.

The self-elected messiahs, the doom-and-gloom preachers, and other idealistic heroes tell us what to think. They influence our beliefs and our beliefs eventually affect our doings. As a result, we act irresponsibly. Stupid is as stupid does, and those phony individuals and their ideologies often tend to make us believe and do many stupid things.

Money for nothing

We pay a huge price for following obscure megatrends. Our future, our money, and our freedom are all at stake. The middle class and the lower class in dozens of countries around the world suffer most. It is not some kind of global conflict in which rich countries try to outmaneuver the poor ones; the manipulated ‘megatrends’ impact everyone. For example, the aforementioned environmental craze is not only hurting the poorest of the world; it has a heavy impact on populations of developed countries. It is actually even worse than it looks, because our generation is currently being double-tricked. For one, our forefathers left us with collapsing social welfare states, and we—the 20 to 50-year-olds—are paying the bill. At the same time, we are supposed to sign another carte blanche to save our planet in the distant future from some ‘global warming’ chimera! Indeed, we are paying it all twice: first for the mistakes made in the past, and second for saving the supposedly rotten future world! For whom are we saving this planet anyway? Did our fathers and grandfathers think that way? Certainly, they did not.

When talking about the often advertised need for ‘responsibility for future generations,’ I would like to know how we get the idea that our children and grandchildren will ever thank us for our supposedly wonderful ‘global solutions.’ Who will receive the benefits from the ever-rising taxes and social fees, the supposed environmental wonders, and the overpriced ‘clean energy’ sources we work so hard to pay for today? Our children? Think twice. It is more likely that our peers, the industry captains and smart politicians, are the ones who are stuffing their pockets with what we are paying them as a contribution to their plan to save our world from supposedly inevitable evils.

We have agreed to work very hard for the promise of a better future. Putting aside the question whether to trust our leaders or not, we who provide all the money to create this ‘better future’ will never be part of it. We will be dead by the time the promised payout is supposed to happen. By that time, our children and grandchildren will most likely face a different reality, in which some other heroes and prophets will teach them that they have to pay again for all the blessings we are paying already today, because of some new ‘shadow of the future,’ a made-up menace that only benefits the gang of messiahs, heroes, and their lobby.

Solve the puzzle

The most alarming fact is that the governments around the world know exactly how our infantile desire for heroes and ideologies works. They misuse their knowledge effectively to give us the feeling that we are doing the ‘right thing’ when we do what we are being told. But we are not doing the right thing. We are not Jesuses, not Mother Theresas, not heroes. We are just being taken in for our own stupidity.

We must finally stop thinking in the categories of saving the world. It has never paid off. We should learn to be more humble and honest with ourselves. We won’t save the world. No one will. We live on a gigantic planet, and it will take care of itself. We, the proud Homo sapiens, are just visitors, passing by, and we will fade away when our time comes. There is nothing frightening about it—we all know very well that none of us will come out of here alive anyway. We will not be able to take our clean environment with us, or our political system of social ‘justice,’ or anything else we believe to be our ultimate solution to all evil on Earth.

If we really want to do something good, then we should just let our world work as it naturally does when we let it. We need true free capitalism (which is radically different from the big state-supported corporations we are seeing today), small governments, more personal involvement in our local communities. These are simple solutions that actually work by default. We do not need any prophet to make them function. They have worked for centuries despite being frequently interrupted by many mega-trends, wars and ideologies that fatally exploit the ‘save the world’ principle.

Besides, we should put more faith in the intelligence and abilities of future generations. Various horrible visions propagated just 100 or 200 years ago about the horrors of the future world never came true. Humans have this wonderful, unique ability to work out good solutions in nearly any thinkable situation, regardless of its criticality and the level of urgency for immediate action. Our children will make it work. They must have the chance to figure it out by themselves. They deserve it. We must not limit them with our ideologies. Instead, we should respect the liberty of our children and grandchildren to live their own lives. The unlimited freedom of minds is all they need to meet the future challenges, of which we do not have the slightest idea today. Let them find their own way to deal with what is then their reality. We are so very arrogant to think that we can somehow design the future world. Many of our fathers followed that damned path of ignorance, arrogance, and violence. We should prove that we are wise enough to avoid repeating their mistakes.