In this Climate Genn episode I am speaking with Roger Hallam about his new book ‘SUICIDE: The Political And Legal Implications Of Endless Mass Death’
Written while Roger was in prison, the book draws on his own sociological expertise in an effort to shed some light on this strange time in which we are living, where human life – as well as the biodiversity of the planet – are on the brink of passing through the eye of the needle – brace yourself for more biblical references and a hard hitting analysis of what has happened, is happening and what dynamics are at play that will lead us into the future.
Interview transcript:
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
In this ClimateGen episode, I’m speaking with Roger Haram about his new book, Suicide, the Political and Legal Implications of Endless Mass Death. Written while Roger was in prison, the book draws on his own sociological expertise in an effort to shed some light on this strange time in which we are living, where human life, as well as the biodiversity of the planet, are on the brink of passing through the eye of the needle. Brace yourself for more biblical references and a hard-hitting analysis of what has happened, is happening, and what dynamics are at play that will lead us into the future.
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Roger’s views are provocative and I would love to know what people’s thoughts are. I do read all the comments and try to reply to as many as I can, so thank you for contributing. I’m currently recording a new set of episodes and the next one will be with two authors of a new research report from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the RSPB, about their report on how extreme climate change is threatening vulnerable UK bird species.
We need to act now if we’re to avoid a mass death of British birds in the coming years. I’m also interviewing the chair of the UK’s national emergency briefing, Mike Berners-Lee, to discuss why we need a mainstream national emergency briefing to help the country prepare itself for an increasingly hotter and riskier world for all of us. Thanks to everyone who listens, comments, shares, and subscribes.
It is greatly appreciated. Roger, it’s great to see you. Thank you very much for taking the time.
We want to talk about your new book, Suicide, the Political and Legal Implications of Creating Endless Mass Death. Mass death from climate destruction is very much now on our doorstep and collectively we are ignoring it, making excuses about why it’s not really happening, etc. Starting from the title of the book, can you describe the relationship between mass death and this so-called machine that kind of makes it inevitable?
[Roger Hallam]
Yeah, well, thanks very much for having me on and thanks very much for your audience being courageous enough to listen to me. You could switch this off at any point. The reality becomes too straining.
But yes, I mean, the main point of the title is basically to put a title down that absolutely no publisher would be able to cope with as a sort of statement in and of itself. You know, suicide, the political and legal implications of creating endless mass death. Every one of those words is important.
The most important word, obviously, is suicide, that we’re not dealing with a ruling class which is going to, you know, do the traditional routine, which is to take the social body and turn it into slavery and mass death to the extent that it creates slaves, which is the historical norm. In the end times, what the ruling class does is destroys the population and destroys itself. Destroys means kill.
So it’s a suicide project. It’s not a traditional Marxist-esque, you know, the ruling class is trying to exploit us all, right? So it’s more of a sort of Freudian orientation than the Marxist orientation, you know, the death wish and such like.
So, and yeah, I mean, the other thing to understand then is that the agency here is a system of being and a system of operating, which came in, you know, broadly with the enlightenment and the creation of modernity. And, you know, most listeners will be aware of the various facets of that, you know, reductive materialism, separation from nature, sort of imperialistic attitude towards the other, and just good old fashioned, you know, ruling class death wish. Yeah, ruling classes regularly destroy their populations through, you know, various mechanisms.
So there’s nothing unusual except that this time round, they are going to destroy the whole system.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
Coming back to this idea of suicide and the fact, it’s almost like the framing is that it’s a choice. And I remember Professor Kevin Anderson quite often said, we are choosing to fail. From your own experience, what makes the system or this idea of this machine so strong that when individuals or communities or broader organisations like the UNFCCC, for example, when they try to warn us, or they’re trying to steer us in a different direction, they get smacked down.
What makes that so strong, that sort of smacking down?
[Roger Hallam]
Well, the root cause is this paradigm or ideology, which has got various facets, but I think it actualises itself into two main moves. The first move is the greed of the ruling class, the elites, which is the traditional explanation, as you might say, you know, they’ve got the power, they don’t want to lose the power. And obviously, they will do what is necessary to defend that power.
That’s the first thing. The second thing is overlaid on this is the ideology of instrumentalism. And what paradoxically, the ideology of instrumentalism does is say you should only act if you’re going to succeed, which creates the mother of all collective action problems.
So no one thinks it’s worth doing anything because it won’t work because not everyone else is doing it at the same time. But it’s important to understand that the collective action problem is the ideology of capitalism. Traditionally in societies, you know, before the tragedy of the commons and such, like, you know, there’s lots of literature on this, as people probably know, societies were based around virtue ethics in order to try traditional taboos against individualistic free riding.
So the community would come together and basically, you know, prosecute or persecute anyone that was free riding, for the very obvious reason the community would not survive if people adopted what is now, you know, the standard capitalistic orientation towards the world, which is screw what you can while you can and don’t think about the future, which is obviously, you know, materially suicidal, but also sort of heretical in a wider sense to what it is to be part of a human community.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
You talked about this collectivism, this sort of, well, you know, what can I do amongst all of the things, this idea of agency, I suppose. How in your journey so far with all the exile stuff, Just Stop, all these other things, how successful do you think you’ve been in breaking through that? And where do you think that brings you now?
[Roger Hallam]
Well, I think how I see the situation is that the liberal class is basically the centre of the ideology of the collective action problem. I think the folk traditions, which are still maintained, even in the Western working class or lower middle class, i.e. being decent, you know, and doing your duty, have been sort of decimated by the liberal class, which has adopted neoliberal, the neoliberal orientation since 1989. And I think it’s important and you know, lots of people are a lot cleverer and more courageous than me have said this over the last, you know, thousand years is the problem with evil is not the people who are evil.
The problem is, is with the class of people that facilitate that evil in full knowledge of the evil they are doing, because after all, these are the educator classes. So the educator classes are really the main agent of the suicide project. You know, the ruling class cannot get its way unless there’s lawyers and lecturers and doctors and, you know, media people who basically facilitate the lies and the euphemism and the dampening.
So for me, like the, the liberal class is one. And paradoxically, it’s committed suicide as a result, because over the last 10 years, the liberal class will is going to collapse, you know, because the only things that are going to come out of the next 10 years is a revitalised left and a fascistic right. And the liberal class, you know, if you’re going to be moralistic about it, they’ve only got themselves to blame.
I can give you one or two, you know, obvious examples of this. The liberal class has promoted two fundamentally fucked ideas, right? The first idea is, is that when we go over two degrees, that has to be the average of the last 20 years.
This makes no statistical sense, right? It’s pure ideology. Because as we all know, if a data set is going up continually, you know, then obviously you need to take the average of our best the last three years and the projection for the next two.
If you take the average project, the average of the last 20 years, you come up with a nonsensical average. I mean, this is like putting boiling water into a bath and saying, you know, you’re boiling yet because, you know, for the last 10 minutes, the average temperature was quite low. So, you know, this is 101 rationality.
So liberal classes indulged in this nonsense. And this isn’t a small matter because the single biggest stat in the world is what is the average temperature? We all know the average temperature is now, you know, 1.5, right?
But you go to anyone in the climate industry and they’ll push the idea it’s 1.3 or even 1.2. Well, this is like criminal stupidity, right? And the second nonsense is we’ve got, what is it? Maybe you’ll correct me.
It’s something like 25 more years of a carbon budget before we reach two degrees centigrade. It’s the most fucked bollocks in the history of humanity, right? We’re at 1.5 degrees. In the last 10 years, we’ve gone up by 0.4. So we’re obviously going to hit two degrees centigrade, two degrees Celsius around 2035, 2038. I mean, nothing’s going to stop that unless there’s a revolution. And obviously, liberals don’t want to have a revolution.
So they’ve more or less condemned people to two degrees C. But no one’s telling the British public that we’re going to hit two degrees C at 2035, 2038. And this assumes, of course, that there’s not a nonlinear takeoff in the Earth’s, you know, feedback systems, which arguably there’s a 50-50 chance that’s going to happen.
You see what I mean? The whole industry, as you’re well aware, Nick, has a level of stupidity that would make any Enlightenment philosopher turn in their grave and want to kill themselves. Well, they’re already dead.
Because the whole Enlightenment project has created this absurd, you know, beyond words stupidity that the liberal class promotes.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
In one aspect of what you said, we are committing suicide, we have or we are, whatever, whichever. And the other, you’re saying unless we change course, unless we change our trajectory.
[Roger Hallam]
I’m not saying anything. I’m making an analysis. I’m not making, I’m not suggesting we then proceed to some sort of vague abstraction called we need to change course, right?
That’s like the language of the liberal class. Okay, but the word you would use is revolution, if there is a revolution. Look, there’s going to be revolutions anyway.
That’s the first point, right? It’s locked in. I mean, this is my own specialism.
You know, I’m just, I’m just going off, you know, O-level maths to predict that we’ll be in two degrees by 2035, 2038, right? I mean, this is anyone who, anyone who thinks that’s not going to happen is beyond dumb, right? The slightly more complicated analysis is when will revolutions happen, at least in Western societies, right?
I mean, in the majority world, the main scenario is that there’ll be dictatorships and, you know, levels of chaos because those nation states are not well established. Within well-established nation states, the default is revolution when the ruling class tries to destroy society, right? You know, French revolution, Russian revolution, American revolution in that classical sense.
So the, the first thing for anyone who’s sort of vaguely interested in reality is, is to interrogate what these revolutions could and should look like in so much as they’re now inevitable. And the broad debate is whether the default will be fascism or whether the default will be a revitalised democracy. But that, that construction in itself is hopelessly like secular.
And I can talk about the religious, you know, the religious elements in a minute. But this, this is, this is where anyone who’s got any sense is, needs to situate the debate. We’ve just, you know, got a new leader of the Labour Party, Burnham, who has zero intention of doing anything other than tinkering around with, you know, converting the electricity supply, which everyone knows is like beyond pathetic.
It’s that Marie Antoinette territory, you know, let the people eat cake. That’s the level of stupidity we’re looking at.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
And you’ve, you’ve also quite purposefully, I think, referred to it as the climate industry. And there’s a, like a climate, a climate week in London, as we speak, mostly being cancelled because of extreme heat, but that’s going on at the moment. And many scientists and all the people involved stop short of using language, like just like the title of your book, as you said, you know, no publisher would want to go near it.
You’ve reiterated the need for telling the truth, both just now and constantly throughout all the work you’ve done. I mean, how effective, how do you think it’s been so far? Because I remember interviewing Jim Hansen in 2012, and I said, can’t scientists do more to communicate what’s going on?
And his reply was, well, if you run around with your hair on fire, after a while, everyone just points to you and says, hey, look, there’s that guy with his hair on fire again. And do you think there’s some of that in all of this? Or does it just not matter?
Do we just plough on? Because, I mean, it’s very difficult if you’ve been doing this for a long time, to keep doing it when the response is, as you say, that collective shrug and people say, well, you know, this is it, whatever.
[Roger Hallam]
There’s basically, you know, you have to take a long term anthropological view of what the human does, right? And there’s basically two main traditions, there’s a virtue ethics tradition, and there’s a utilitarian instrumentalist tradition, in human history. The virtue ethics tradition is broadly associated with a religiosity, a religious orientation towards what it is to be alive for 70 years in this particular, like, you know, sliver of reality.
And the other attitude is, the other orientation is, is to ignore all that sense of being, and to pretend that basically, you know, reality is a and you press button A, and you get button, you know, you get result B, or whatever. So these are very, two very different paradigms. And, you know, it’s not like one is necessarily intrinsically better than the other.
Obviously, instrumentalism is important, you know, after I’ve done the interview with you, I’m going to walk to the tube, I need to know where the tube is. Obviously, I want to make the go the shortest route. The problem is in McGill-Grist and, you know, 101 other observers have written long books about, is if the instrumentalist side of the human culture becomes dominant, then the human becomes stupid, because they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing.
They’ve lost their moral compass and a bunch of other dynamics. But the fundamental point here, the fundamental point here, is the very question, what is to be done, is the reason we’re going extinct? And the question, what does it mean to live a good life, is the very question that will save humanity in so much as it will be saved.
Because when you ask the question, what is it to live a good life, or variations on the theme, such as what would God have me do, or what does it mean to be part of the universal consciousness, you know, you do the quantum physics routine, you need the Christian routine, you can do the Stoics routine, right? All these basically are variants of the same thing, which we are not responsible for the world. We are responsible for our reaction to the world.
That’s what we’re in the world to do. We exist to be good. If we’re not good, then we get mentally ill in the secular version, or we go to hell in the religious version, right?
So this is the perennial philosophy that people have been saying for the last 5,000 years. For the last 30 years, you know, in the neoliberal period, we’ve just forgotten all these traditions, because they’ve been systematically patronised and, you know, removed from the public sphere. So whenever I go on an interview, you know, you do what you’ve just done, Nick.
People say, well, Roger, what do we need to do? And then I have to explain, that’s not the main question. The main question is, are you going to be an arsehole, or are you going to be a good person?
If you’re not going to be an arsehole, then you have to be in resistance. In the same way as in Nazi Germany, you can just go along with the situation, and for the next 10,000 years, people thought you were an arsehole, or you can actually do the business, and you go into resistance, you might die, right? You know, that standard orientation towards the Nazi period.
The period we’re in now is not going to kill, you know, 50 million people, it’s going to kill 4 billion people, according to the British insurance industry, who presumably know what they’re talking about, and you’re going to look at it in their appendix, right? The proposition that we are going to sort this problem out is for the birds. It’s irrelevant.
The key issue is, are you going to actually be what it is to be human? And if you don’t know what it is to be human, then, you know, read some mysticism. You know, you are going to die at some point, right?
You know, Nick, how old are you? You’re 50, 60, I don’t know how old you are, right? You’re going to be dead in 20 years.
You know, at a certain point, you’re going to be slabbering around on a hospital bed, thinking about what you did in your life, and you’re going to be thinking, well, at least I interviewed Roger Hallam and no one else interviews me because it’s too scary, you know, and then you’re going to have a sense of peace. You see what I’m trying to say? I’ve been saying this for ages, and obviously until, as Steve Keener said, until white people are dying, there won’t be the spiritual crisis, which will enable white people to transcend, right, to a virtue ethics orientation.
And this is, at the moment, the whole situation is the extreme denial before the explosion of reality, if you see what I mean. This is another phenomenon that’s well, well, you know, well researched in literatures. It’s before the crisis, people don’t go into less denial, they go into more denial.
You know, look at the 2001 internet bubble. They all knew it was going to happen, but that made them even more sure they weren’t going to resign their jobs, right? This is called the, you know, the predictable irrationality.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
You asked a very direct question, not just to me, but are you going to be an arsehole? What are you going to do in face with this huge thing? And I’m not supposed to be asking you what the future plan is to change trajectory, I suppose.
It’s when so much of us are captured by legal frameworks, political ideologies, media, social, judicial, commercial, all this stuff that makes up our construct of the world we live in, and you start picking it apart. And then you say to that person, well, look, you know, the climate’s breaking down, virtually all the nature around you is dying and you’re importing everything from so far away, you’ve never even heard of the place. And they say, yeah, I know, but I just want to get the upgrade on my new phone and a new car or whatever.
Isn’t that the gap where we’re just, it’s very difficult to break through that. I mean, I have this with my own old friends that I speak to, they’re just not interested. And I am amazed, but I think it’s like you said.
[Roger Hallam]
You’re amazed because you were, you know, an enlightenment ideologue, right? No disrespect. Like most people, most people historically aren’t enlightenment ideologues, right?
Basically they’re children of God. That’s how they see themselves, right? You know, like for 99% of human history, religion was the main thing in people’s lives.
In the world at the moment, 80% of people are religious, depending on your definition. You know, the class that you belong to, and I belong to too, to a certain extent, is the 1% of humanity, 1% of the history of humanity that thinks there’s nothing other than calculation, right? And this is a form of madness.
You know, the reality is this, we are absolutely free in any moment to do whatever we want to do within the physical limits of time and space. You can decide tomorrow to go down to downstream, take all your clothes off and cover yourself in blood, right? There is nothing physically stopping you from doing that, Nick.
And this is what, you know, Sartre was saying. He was saying it’s bad faith not to accept the absolute freedom of being human, right? And people have been saying this for 5,000 years.
There’s no, the notion that you cannot change is pure ideology. It’s pure ideology. You can do whatever you like.
And the reason why people don’t do, this is the paradox, right? The reason that people don’t do whatever they like is because they tell themselves and other people tell themselves, and there’s a herding mechanism, that you can’t do whatever you like, right? And this is the function of prophetic witness in the historical, like, in the historical record.
Prophetic, you know, in the neoliberal period, the notion of the prophet is, you know, are best patronised and at worst looked upon, you know, as some sort of cult routine. The prophetic witness function in human society is absolutely vital because someone gets up and actually says, we are free, and you have to do the right thing, otherwise you’re going to go to hell. And that can mean material hell or, you know, there’s various definitions of hell, right?
You know, it can be a spiritual thing, it can be a material thing, it could be a post-death thing, or all free in different variations. And that’s, that’s what’s missing. You know, there’s about three prophets in the world, you know, there’s me, there’s Greta, there’s two or three other people.
And at a certain point, there’ll be a critical mass of these prophets, and, you know, we’ll probably all get shot or something, because that’s what happens. But the upshot of it is, the upshot of it is, is what sociologically happens is those prophets get shot, and then they have like 12 followers like Jesus. And like 30, 70, 300 years later, depending upon the density of the network connections, then they basically become the hegemonic ideology.
Because if they don’t, the society will die. And that’s how it works. The whole liberal class talking to itself in sort of what I call left defeatism, you know, oh, we can’t do anything because it’s so difficult, and the oppressed are so oppressed, and we’re so oppressed, and we can’t do it because of collective action problem.
These are the machinations of collective madness, right, of spiritual poverty. And, and there’s, you know, just read some of the Old Testament, for God’s sake. It’s like, you know, you’re just out, you’re just out on the total outlier, in terms of the human experience.
This is pure, as I say, for me, like the best analogy is, you know, Marie Antoinette, right, you know, which is the main historical mean of, of the arrogance of privilege, you know, leading to the most chronic level of stupidity. You know, there she is on a farm, pretending that she’s growing veg, you know, and all around France, the peasants are literally starving. And then she says, well, let the meat eat cake.
Everyone laughs about it, right? Everyone laughs about it, because we all like, we think we’re nice liberal rationalists. But that’s what we’re doing when we’re saying, oh, it won’t be two degrees until 2050.
So still get on a plane to go to a conference in Berlin, because you’re, you’re worth it.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
And it’s the fact that everything we’re talking about is happening right now. And to be honest, it’s no surprise that it’s happening right now, because 10 years ago, everyone I was speaking to, in fact, you know, in 2012, again, that Hanson interview, he said, if we wait 10 years, before we start bringing down emissions, it won’t be possible to do it within the society that we have, because of what the ramifications of those changes. And we’ve gone way past 10 years, and emissions are still going up.
And that comes back to this idea of this was the choice that society has made. And we’re, we’re following it through. I just want to come back to quickly to something you said, about this idea of, you know, the going to hell.
And the last time I interviewed you, you were awaiting sentencing. And you went to what I think many people would regard as hell, which is prison. And the book that you read was written in prison, I believe.
In everything we’ve just been discussing, that is a very relevant threshold to cross, if you like a Rubicon, if you want. Can you talk a little bit about how that, how the book came out of that? And how that’s impacted back to your activism?
How do you feel about everything that you’re talking about and saying?
[Roger Hallam]
Well, just as a little aside, and I’ve never described myself as an activist, I’ve never been an activist, as far as I’m concerned, I’m a revolutionary, I want a fundamental change in the government structures of Western societies, right? So need to call a spade a spade. People stop calling themselves activists, on the assumption that they want to be historically accurate and what and the attitudes they have towards the political class, right?
So that’s, that’s, that’s one thing. The second thing is, is like, going to prison has the potentiality to be an ecstatic experience, as much as a hellish experience, because basic psychology, right, shows us that whatever’s happening in reality, you choose how to react to it, right? And the extent to which you choose is a function of training, whether you call it spiritual training or psychological training, right?
So I’ve been training in various ways since I was in my early 20s, to basically look upon whatever’s happening to me as something that I have the freedom to interpret it. So my own interpretation of being in prison for a year and a half was it’s fucking great, right? You know, I get up in the morning, you know, I get my food, the sun’s shining, I read my books, you know, I do my writing.
It’s fine. It’s fine. Which isn’t to say, you know, really bad things could happen on a material level and other people, obviously, as a matter of observation, you know, interpret their experience in other ways, right?
So, you know, this, again, I’m trying to, you know, continually break out of the assumptions of your questions, I think the point that the reason I wrote the suicide book, you know, and I wrote it in about four weeks, because, you know, it’s just in my head, right? Which is basically, the thesis is, is that the rationality project since the Enlightenment has basically been betrayed by the liberal class that can’t think straight in the neoliberal period, right? And arguably, rationality, you know, in and of itself leads to irrationality, for lots of reasons I’ve got time to go into.
But the specific instance that I talk about, of course, is the judges, right? So I’m saying like the judges, you know, the big, the big problem with the climate movement is it approaches the judiciary from a sort of human rights point of view, it needs to approach the judiciary from the ideology of the judiciary, which is Hobbes, right? So Hobbes says, as you know, we all know, unless you impose order on society, you have, you know, brutally shortened, nasty lives or whatever it is.
Okay, so let’s assume that’s correct within the ideology. As everyone knows, there’s an exception, which is when the agents of the state are destroying the state through their own actions. So then the Hobbesian logic reverses, which is it’s absolutely necessary to rebel against the state in order to save the state.
You see what I mean? So all the judges should be in prison by now if they chose, you know, they were rational and looked at the stats, right? The British ruling class is destroying the British state, you know, we’re going to have a mark what within half a century and British society will be destroyed.
Well, that’s what’s commonly called treason, right? You knowingly engage in actions which destroy your state and society. Well, all the stats are out there as you well know, and you, you know, great people like you spend every week trying to tell the world what the stats are, you know, British society is now going to get destroyed as, you know, 90% probability unless there’s a massive revolution in the next three years, let’s say, right, you know, give or take.
So what I’m saying here, I’m using that as an example of the absolute irrationality of the rational judicial class, right? They’re so fucking stupid, they can’t actually work out what their ideology means. You know, I mean, there’s no Cromwell’s in there that work out that the king is basically betraying the British state and you need to have a civil war and overcome the king, right?
You know, that the issue I’m saying, so I’m using that and, you know, you could, you know, that obviously is a personal thing, because, you know, I stood up in court and said, you know, I need four hours to explain why the Hobbesian analysis requires absolute revolt. And obviously, the judge said, No, you’re not. And I said, I was going to talk anyway.
And so, you know, he got very upset and left the room as if he was a five year old, and he couldn’t cope with a bit of debate. And then, you know, the police came in and dragged me out of the queue, because, of course, I’m pursuing a British civil war orientation, right? And in English civil war, you know, the courts were a central political struggle, right?
People were banging each other into the Tower of London, all the rest of it, right? Because the law was politicised by, you know, the king in order to maintain his illegitimate power. And the ruling class has politicised the courts in order to maintain that juries don’t hear that basically we’re all going to die.
You know, and when the juries every now and again, there’s a glitch in the system, like a friend of mine was in court, you know, a little while ago, and, you know, maybe the judge was having an off day or something, but he allowed an agreed fact to be that three degrees C, four billion people would die, because that’s what it says in the British insurance report. And do you know how long they went out for? 50 minutes, came back unanimously not guilty.
Well, obviously, you know, if you’re Mrs. Jones, and you’re told like four billion people are going to die, what are you going to do? You’re obviously going to come back into the courtroom and say, what the fuck, these people should be statues made about them, for God’s sake. But, you know, in my court case, we were allowed to speak for 20 minutes.
And we were all dragged out of court because we refused to leave the witness box. That was great stuff. You know, the Guardian was there, and the Guardian, you know, did their usual liberal fuck response, which was, oh, isn’t this interesting?
Yeah, the hobbits are getting dragged out of court. They should have made a statement saying they’re going to rebel against the British state because apparently they believe in human rights and the British state is going to facilitate the destruction of the British nation, but obviously they’re not going to do that because they’re total cowards.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
And as you have spoken about this sort of liberal mass of the UK, and what we’ve seen recently is this sort of splitting in politics or fragmentation maybe, and the Greens have developed a voice in a position, the far right have got their position, Labour now saying it’s finding its voice in Burnham again, which is more of a left-wing voice. Conservatives have virtually just vanished from what you’ve been saying. It feels like the liberal order is fragmenting and people are trying to figure out, well, none of this is working, so where do we go?
And you think we’re at that vital signpost moment where hopefully people do think this is untenable, we have to stand up, our food systems are going to collapse, nature’s collapsing, policies don’t make sense, etc.
[Roger Hallam]
Well, I did a video people might want to watch because, you know, I’m going to make some slightly outrageous claims over the next five minutes or even more outrageous claims from a liberal ideology point of view. So, you know, I’ll preface what I’m going to say to say there’s a video called…
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
I’ll put a link, I’ll put a link to it.
[Roger Hallam]
Yeah, pivoting to the end game where I’d go through this in about an hour and a half, but basically there’s something called the sociology of revolution, right? It goes something like this, which is, you know, the bad guys, you know, the ruling class is basically starving the state, which is what the ruling class does and this is why revolutions happen. In a French revolution, the French ruling class wouldn’t support the king, you know, even though he was having wars and he needed the money and so the state ran out of money and then they had, you know, an assembly and then it all slid into a revolutionary episode.
The other example, you know, classical example is the Russian revolution. So the Tsar and his regime refused to make peace with Germany, right? And objectively, you know, in the same way as climate science is objective, you know, military dynamics are sometimes effectively objective, right?
You know, the Germans had loads more, you know, materials and discipline and organisation and so there was a revolution because the Tsar refused to do the objective thing, which was to make peace with Germany. And then what happens is the liberals take charge. So what the liberals do is talk revolution, but don’t enact it, right?
So they’ll say, oh yeah, you know, we need to revitalise Russia, but they won’t do the key thing that the Russian state needs to do, which is to make peace with Germany. What they do is in July 1917, is go and do an offensive against the Germans, which is totally driven by a sort of motherland in, you know, liberal nationalism. The Russians will overcome the Germans, like it’s totally fuck bollocks, right?
Because the Germans, you know, I think they advanced for about two hours or something and then the Germans advanced 400 miles in a fortnight. It’s something along those lines, right? And so the liberals are discredited, which makes way for the Bolsheviks.
So the Bolsheviks were sensible enough because they have a rational strategist called Lenin to work out that you need to make peace with Germany, you know, as material analysis. So everyone hates the Bolsheviks because they think they’re betraying mother Russia. So they’re getting nowhere.
But after July 1917, they become the main show. So it’s what you might call like there’s a sort of cascading across the political space that happens as the ideology of the liberal class or the ideology of society hits physical reality. You know, that’s basically the thesis and it’s totally sociological.
I’m not saying the Bolsheviks were good or bad or the Tsars good or bad, right? It’s just like social dynamics in terms of the relationship between physical reality and ideology. Basically, in the present moment, the function of the climate is the same as the function of the Germans on the Eastern Front in 1917.
In other words, it’s a physical reality which is coming, right? And what Burnham is, is like the cadets, right? You know, the cadets were the German, German, were the Russian liberals.
So they go, oh, we don’t want full on aristocracy. You don’t want reform. We don’t want the Tories.
We want Burnham-esque liberalism, which basically means they talk the talk, but basically they facilitate the destruction of the British state because they won’t slash carbon emissions, right? I mean, obviously it’s complicated because you need everyone else to do it. But the fundamental point is, is there a transitory noise in the run of history?
I mean, who remembers the cadets? I know, you know, you’ve got to be a total nerd to remember the cadets thought they were going to be the new ruling class of Russia, right? But they obviously hadn’t read any history.
So the people who are going to rule the UK is either going to be the fascist right, i.e. restore, or it’s going to be, you know, something to the left, in inverted commas, of the Green Party. And the Green Party are like the Mensheviks, if you want to carry, you know what I mean? They will do some of the business, but they’re still nice liberals at the end of the day.
They’re not going to say to the British population, basically within five years, you’re going to have to have food rationing, you’re not going to be able to fly anymore. You have all this sort of standard state socialism thing that will be like standard obvious stuff by about 2035. In the same way, and if you don’t believe me, just think about the Tories enacting state socialism in the middle of COVID, right?
Those are threats to the continuation of British society. So they basically brought in an authoritarian regime, right? You know, you’re not allowed to go out, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.
So the climate is basic, you know, a 2000 long COVID regime. That’s what we’re looking at. And it starts, I don’t know what you think, Nick, but I know I’m putting my bets on somewhere around 2035, with a strong outlier that the insurance industry will collapse by 2030, in which case it will be brought forward.
The infrastructure of Western societies, particularly in the warm temperate and cool temperate zones, where all the infrastructure is dependent upon temperatures staying under 40 degrees. All those societies are going to become bankrupt in the next 10 to 15 years. No, you’re just not going to have the money and the labour to pay to do the five or six mass infrastructure things.
When I did Insulate Britain, I talked to this, you know, this reform-esque sort of bald, beer-bellied sort of 55-year-old, you know, builder in Leeds. So he was great. He couldn’t be fucked like lying.
So he just said to me, look, Roger, basically, yeah, we need to all the houses in Britain, right? I was going, cool, cool, cool. You know, that’s what we want to do.
And he said, there’s no fucking way this is going to happen. Right. Number one, there’s not enough people to do it.
It’s a skilled job. Number two, there’s not enough materials. Number three, if everyone else is doing it, there aren’t going to be any materials anyway.
You see what I mean? Like, they’re going to have to do it in Scandinavia, Germany, France, you know, everywhere in the cool temperate regions where the houses aren’t already built. So in other words, it’s not going to happen.
The analysis is the British state is going to go bankrupt, right, in the next 10 to 15 years. The main scenario is we’re going to go into a restore Britain-esque downward spiral of, you know, everyone drinking themselves to death in the bunker in 1945, right, which is dance now, get shot next week, right? And all this sort of dynamic, which is well documented in the human experience.
So that’s what fascism offers, right, is an escape from reality. What the left or what’s going to come after the left has to do is create an escape from reality, which basically re-engages with reality on the basis of love, which is basically what Christianity is, which is the opposite of fascism. The fundamental point here is, is transcendence is coming one way or another.
It’s a fascist transcendence, which is, we’re just going to live for death, or we’re going to have a form of transcendence that says, I don’t exist in this world. I exist in another world, the world of God, and I will enact love in the world, right? And this, you know, obviously all your liberal cynics will go, what’s the load of nonsense, right?
But obviously I don’t know what they’re talking about, right? Because, you know, this is the fundamental ideology of the pro-social West over the last 2,000 years. So what that looks like is unknown, but those that are going to engage in prophetic witness need to really re-introduce religiosity into the left, because otherwise everyone will just burn out or commit suicide or have nervous breakdowns.
In other words, material reality will become unsustainable for the human psyche. And the good news, of course, is that once people have that transcendence, people are perfectly capable of being calm and pro-social in situations of mass death. You know, there’s loads of evidence for that.
So that’s the first thing. And then for all you, you know, liberal rationalists out there, the other thing that is required is sortition-based decision-making, because from a social scientific point of view, the only way you get maximum rationality is by getting ordinary people in the room with the legal power to enact policy on the basis of free and extensive deliberation on what the facts are, right? And this is the problem, as we all know, with representational democracy, is it’s in the herd.
It’s not just dominated by the ruling class because the ruling class determines, you know, who can stand and what they say and, you know, capital flight if they try and do something rational, right? It’s deeper than that. It’s about herding.
You know, if you believe X, I believe X, the audience believes X, so you believe X, so I believe X, right? And the two ways to break that are sortition and God. And sortition is a secular sense God, because the concept of chance is similar to the concept of God, i.e. it’s outside human agency. And if there’s human agency, then you get herding. It’s quite a complicated point, right? But what he’s trying to say is what, you know, the Christians have been saying about Nietzsche for the last 150 years, which is without God, the human destroys himself.
It’s nothing to do with whether God exists, right? That’s just old 19th century materialism debate. That’s not what we’re talking about.
What we’re talking about is that the human has to be subject to something outside the human. And that’s what sortition does. I mean, it’s a complicated fact, so if you don’t know quite what I’m going on about, then you can ask me.
But in the book, that’s what the last chapter says. These are the two doors into some form of survival, stroke transcendence. One’s sortition-based, assembly-based government, which I think is inevitably going to come along.
It’s waiting in, you know, it’s waiting in the wings like socialism was, you know, in the 1880s. And the other thing is a return to what you might call normal, where most people don’t live their lives in order to make the world better. They live their lives in order to follow some transcendent virtue.
That paradoxically is how you create collective action.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
Now, I did follow you, and it’s kind of this timeline that we have to process, to go through, because there’s going to be a lot of suffering, but there’s no sort of end point where we just switch it off in the next five, 10 years. It’s just that there’s going to be a lot of suffering.
[Roger Hallam]
All of that is a given.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
I know, yeah, but out of that, we’ve somehow got to get to what you’re talking about.
[Roger Hallam]
The word somehow is liberal ideology. See, what liberal ideology does is actually says, it’s really difficult to do good things when there’s bad things happening. That’s empirically illiterate.
The historical and sociological record shows the opposite, that when bad things happen, people become good. The most famous spiritual text in Western society is the imitation of Christ. You can turn to chapter seven, and it’ll tell you, hardship is bad because it brings you closer to God.
Basically, that’s what it says on every page. It’s 250 pages of it. That’s mediaeval Christiality.
Now, we all know as secular liberals, that’s a little bit tricky because there’s various dysfunctionalities of fetishising suffering. The point is still fundamentally correct because we all know from our personal lives, when we’re shitty to people and we realise it, or when people are shit to us, it enables us to grow and accept death and become a more mature, sensible sort of person. This is what will happen on a social level.
As everyone who has read the literature is saying, unfortunately, only six people have read the literature because people don’t read the imitation of Christ anymore, but you should go and read it. That was the best book I read. I read 95 books when I was in prison.
The best book was the imitation of Christ. Not because, just for the record, I’m going to become some fundamentalist, suffering, fetish-loving Christian. The point is, is I’m instinctively a liberal in the deepest sense that I believe in a plurality of different ways of being.
What we have now is a metaphysical totalitarianism where certain ways of being are completely removed from the public sphere. No one’s going to allow me to get onto TV to talk about the imitation of Christ, are they? You see what I mean?
Or not until 2030 when they’re all having nervous breakdowns, right? Then obviously, we’ll all come back with a vengeance because blah, blah, blah.
[Nick Breeze – GENN]
On that note of transcendental Roger TV in 2030, thanks very much for going through it. It is totally fascinating because as I said now, it is on our doorstep. It’s all around us and how we navigate it in our own worlds is kind of what everyone who’s paying attention is trying to get some, I don’t know, strength from, I suppose.
[Roger Hallam]
Just before we finish, can I just do a plug, which is for the 1% of your audience who’s going to have a sleepless night tonight because of what I’ve said. That 1% is very warmly invited to join 4 Billion Dead. I’ll put a link to it, which is a new thing.
I’m not going to call it a campaign, which involves silent processions with people holding signs saying 4 Billion Dead. For reasons I’ve got to explain, this in my book will become the next XR, so I’m making a prediction. It’s something you can do in five minutes or two hours.
It’s always good to do something, as we know.