Violent Acres on pervasive lying:

I consider myself an Average Joe in that I have lost faith in it all. I have turned my television off and I have canceled my subscription to the newspaper. I have lost the will to sift through partial truths, minor falsities, purposeful deceptions, and bald face lies. Instead, I have focused all of my attention on My World and I pay little mind to what goes in The World.

But, someday, I wonder what will happen if some vital information was suddenly stumbled upon. Perhaps the politicians will try to warn us and we will all sneer at them in disgust. Maybe the media will frantically attempt to report the news…to billions of people who only roll their eyes in response. Scientists and Activists may beg us to believe them only to be met with bored, apathetic sighs.

I wonder if one day this world will be met with tragic consequences simply because those in power refused to stop crying wolf.

If so, we’ll all be royally fucked. But at least we can take our children by the hand and say, “This. This is why lying is bad.”

A lot of my friends are as apathetic, dependent on and switched off to globalisation as ever, despite that environmental and social pressures of The World are increasingly and repeatedly encroaching on every single “My World”. Never mind, a mass penny drop occurred last year that included a lot of powerful people. Enough of them were talking about it at Davos this year that we’ll soon have little option but green.

Apparently, Exxon recently stoppped funding their main greenwashers and began rolling up the rest, saying things akin to: “Yeah, we should talk about this. We’ve probably broken the planet. The glacial melting we dismissed as environmentalist fiction a decade ago has now occurred… shit”. Some very wealthy Saudis are busy buying into solar and biodiesel. Corporate Green is shutting down 20th century energy policy.

This is pragmatism rather than cultural hysteria. I’ve met environmental activists who say they read the FT because it can’t afford to pollute itself with spin. If the business community, en masse, are coming up with green alternatives to 90’s crusty penitence and self-denial, something’s up.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 16:55 and is filed under Culture, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.