All illustrations are from: Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction by George Monbiot/The Guardian October 30, 2021
1. Theme: People beholden to capitalism “always” believe some myth.
Illustration: “There is a myth about human beings that withstands all evidence. It’s that we always put our survival first.”
Alternative: Some people believe things that may not be true, at least for a while.
2. Theme: Capitalism triggers runaway processes that ultimately lead to widespread misery and environmental devastation.
Illustration: “Human civilisation relies on current equilibrium states. But, all over the world, crucial systems appear to be approaching their tipping points…which may trigger] a cascade of chaos known as systemic environmental collapse. This is what happened during previous mass extinctions.”
Alternative: Capitalist markets self-correct. Well-regulated capitalism can increase overall wellbeing, protect the environment, and correct for negative externalities of the capitalistic system.
3. Theme: Capitalists like and rationalize small solutions to big problems because it’s in their self-interest to do so.
Illustration: “I don’t believe our focus on microscopic solutions is accidental, even if it is unconscious. All of us are expert at using the good things we do to blot out the bad things. Rich people can persuade themselves they’ve gone green because they recycle, while forgetting that they have a second home… And I suspect that, in some deep, unlit recess of the mind, we assure ourselves that if our solutions are so small, the problem can’t be so big.”
Alternative: Capitalists may be hesitant to accept proposed solutions that hurt their businesses, especially if they see these solutions as wrongheaded in other ways. However, I try not to read minds so I’m not going to speculate about other people’s motives for the opinions they hold. If people suggest solutions to problems I care about, I’ll focus on the merits of the solution and not the possible motives of its advocates.
4.. Theme: Corporations control how people think and feel.
Illustration: “The corporate focus on litter, amplified by the media, distorts our view of all environmental issues. For example, a recent survey of public beliefs about river pollution found that “litter and plastic” was by far the biggest cause people named. In reality, the biggest source of water pollution is farming, followed by sewage. Litter is way down the list. It’s not that plastic is unimportant. The problem is that it’s almost the only story we know.”
Alternative: How people think and feel is influenced by all sorts of things.
5. Theme: Some broad generalization about what people think, believe and feel.
Illustration: “We focus on what I call micro-consumerist bollocks (MCB): tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing the world a favour by buying tote bags…
Alternative: Avoid mind-reading. What people say they think, believe and feel tends to change with time, circumstance and experience.”
6. Theme: Light-hearted fun is a distraction from the existential crisis we face and is an obstacle to avoiding the crisis.
Illustration: [I see] “a determined commitment to irrelevance in the face of global catastrophe. Tune in to almost any radio station, at any time, and you can hear the frenetic distraction at work. While around the world wildfires rage, floods sweep cars from the streets and crops shrivel, you will hear a debate about whether to sit down or stand up while pulling on your socks, or a discussion about charcuterie boards for dogs...This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with banter.”
Alternative: Alternating work and play boosts creative problem-solving. We all need off-time.
7. Theme: People party to avoid thinking about the sheer awfulness of the world and what awaits them.
Illustration: It’s not just on the music and entertainment channels that this deadly flippancy prevails. Most political news is nothing but court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from the democratic sphere, the gathering environmental collapse that makes a nonsense of its obsessions.
Alternative: Try not to exaggerate.
8. Theme: Capitalists stress individual change to fix big problems to dampen interest in structural change that would hurt their bottom line.
Illustration: “In 2004, the advertising company Ogilvy & Mather, working for the oil giant BP, took this blame-shifting a step further by inventing the personal carbon footprint. It was a useful innovation, but it also had the effect of diverting political pressure from the producers of fossil fuels to consumers.”
Alternative: Environmental activists, scientists, capitalists, conservatives and many others all support changes in individual behavior as a way to address societal and global problems. Support for small-scale individual change does not preclude support for big policy fixes.
9. Theme: Corporate marketing has turned people into easily-manipulated consumers uninterested in collective action.
Illustration: “The great political transition of the past 50 years, driven by corporate marketing, has been a shift from addressing our problems collectively to addressing them individually. In other words, it has turned us from citizens into consumers. It’s not hard to see why we have been herded down this path. As citizens, joining together to demand political change, we are powerful. As consumers, we are almost powerless.”
Alternative: Messages with persuasive intent lose impact with repetition. Don’t assume that greater exposure to marketing messages translates to greater impact on how people think, believe or feel. The pervasiveness of advertising may be a sign not of dominance but of its limited power.
10. Theme: Sweeping generalizations about how clueless people are.
Illustration: “Most people struggle to define the system that dominates our lives. But if you press them, they’re likely to mumble something about hard work and enterprise, buying and selling. This is how the beneficiaries of the system want it to be understood.”
Alternative: People who don’t believe as I do may still have valid points, or not.
11. Theme: Sweeping generalizations.
Illustration: “In consenting to the continued destruction of our life-support systems, we accommodate the desires of the ultra-rich and the powerful corporations they control.”
Alternative: Learn how to evaluate evidence, be familiar with the scientific method and principles of causal inference, and try to be humble about what you think you know.
12. Theme: Economic growth is necessarily bad for the environment.
Illustration: “What do we see if we break the surface tension? The first thing we encounter, looming out of the depths, should scare us almost out of our wits. It’s called growth... All the crises we seek to avert today become twice as hard to address as global economic activity doubles, then twice again, then twice again.”
Alternative: Economic growth by itself is neither good nor bad for the environment. The effect of economic growth on the environment and climate depends on a multitude of factors, such as developments in agriculture, energy intensity (per unit of GDP) and carbon intensity (emissions per unit of energy consumed).
13. Theme: Saying something is “taboo” when it isn’t.
Illustration: “Just as it was once blasphemous to use the name of God, even the word appears, in polite society, to be taboo: capitalism.”
Alternative: The absence of a word in conversation is not proof that people are afraid to say it.
14. Theme: Capitalism is theft.
Illustration: “In reality, the great fortunes amassed under capitalism are not obtained this way, but through looting, monopoly and rent grabbing, followed by inheritance.”
Alternative: Any economy is capitalist as long as private individuals control the factors of production. However, a capitalist system can still be regulated by government laws, and the profits of capitalist endeavors can still be taxed heavily. Investopedia
15. Theme: Catastrophism
Illustration: “…the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe…a determined commitment to irrelevance in the face of global catastrophe…This is the way the world ends...the gathering environmental collapse…the continued destruction of our life-support system…”
Alternative: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has provided a range of possible climate futures, from the manageable to the catastrophic. There is no consensus that catastrophe can only be prevented if we get rid of capitalism.
These themes reflect an ideological mindset, by which I mean: being possessed by an army of convictions about how the world is and how it ought to be, fueled by a sense of threat kept at bay through a fortress-like structure called the ideological square. The ideological square comes in many flavors, including:
Basic 'Us versus Them' Square
Exaggerate our wonderfulness
Exaggerate their awfulness
Downplay our flaws
Downplay their virtues
Incompatible Views of Reality Square
Exaggerate how awful things are now
Downplay how good things are now
Exaggerate how much worse things will be if we don’t prevail
Downplay how much better things will be if they prevail
Incompatible Visions of Possible Futures Square
Exaggerate how great things will be if we prevail
Exaggerate how awful things will be if they prevail
Downplay the potential harm if we prevail
Downplay the potential good if they prevail
Reference:
Van Dijk, TA (1995). Discourse Semantics and Ideology. Discourse & Society, 6(2): 243-289.