Pathologizing Concern for the Common Good
Capitalist rag The Wall Street Journal recently set a new low for its willful ignorance, gaslighting, and attacks on anyone who cares about the common welfare. “Climate Change Obsession is a Real Mental Disorder” blares the headline of a new op-ed, which declares: “Alarmist stories about the weather, not the warm air itself, are behind the left’s anxiety and dread”. Allysia Finley, the hack who wrote this garbage and a member of the paper’s editorial board, can only be compared to a first-class passenger on the Titanic mocking anyone who declares that the ship is sinking.
Keep in mind the publication of this tripe follows a summer of unprecedented extreme weather events, including the world’s hottest month on record. Canada is still literally on fire, consumed by wildfires from coast to coast whose effects were felt across much of the Northern Hemisphere. As far away as New York City, the skies turned orange and smoke from the wildfires made the air unbreathable. Devastating flash floods have shown how ill-prepared we are for the accelerating effects of climate change. A recent peer-reviewed study has announced that the Gulf Stream, a key part of the global climate system, could collapse as soon as 2025, which scientists warn will lead to catastrophic impacts.
The truth of the climate emergency is plain for anyone with eyes to see. Yet the mass media buries the lede, often neglecting to link the climate crisis to these extreme weather events, or not even bothering to report findings like the collapsing Gulf Stream. The latter was buried deep inside most newspapers when it was mentioned at all. Meanwhile, opinion-makers in the bourgeois press have projected their own deranged climate denialism onto others and proclaimed that anyone concerned by the environmental crisis we can see with our own eyes is, in fact, mentally ill.
It’s the same gaslighting tactic that the Wall Street Journal, and bourgeois media in general, have taken with the COVID-19 pandemic. Back in March, the same paper ran an op-ed titled “Normal People Say ‘No Mask’” (I’m deliberately not linking to these articles because they don’t deserve the clicks). That piece of garbage was written as millions of people continue to be infected and reinfected by COVID-19, leaving many disabled and many others dead. Even the COVID-minimizing Center for Disease Control says that one-fifth of those infected with COVID now have a health condition related to it. A long COVID support group found that 18% of members reported suicidal thoughts since developing long COVID.
Masks are one of the most effective and proven means of stopping the spread of COVID-19, yet they’ve largely disappeared from public spaces at the behest of a capitalist ruling class that falsely claims the pandemic is over. Indeed, people are actively discouraged from wearing masks, such as employees at In-N-Out Burger who are no longer permitted to protect their own health and those of others by wearing masks on the job. Meanwhile, the capitalist press demonizes and stokes anger at the dwindling minority who still try to reduce the spread of COVID by masking and protecting the most vulnerable. They are, the Wall Street Journal says, not normal. To be normal, apparently, means to disregard the health and very lives of oneself and others. Whether COVID-19, the climate crisis, or any other problem capitalism is unable to solve, the message is clear: we must “learn to live with it.”
Umair Haque described the mantra of “learn to live with it” as “essentially a proto-fascist message” in its subtext and clear implication: “that it’ll be good, if not personally for you, then for the purity of the tribe, clan, nation. The weak will perish, the strong will survive, and be strengthened more”. The logic of eugenics is implicit in capitalism, as we’ve seen throughout the pandemic. Even in 2020, a time when politicians were forced to acknowledge that there was a pandemic, COVID minimizers consistently tried to reassure the public that those who died were mostly elderly or had underlying medical conditions. In other words, from the point of view of capitalists who measure everything by the yardstick of profit, those most at risk were unproductive members of society, and therefore their deaths a net benefit.
The morality of “learn to live with it”, Haque points out, could be used to justify any atrocity or suffering, and has been throughout history. It’s a morality that precludes any effort at meaningful change for the better. Haque calls this the “morality of the idiot”—specifically the ancient Greek meaning of “idiot”, which means a person only interested in their private gain and who has no conception of the public good or common interest. As Haque writes of “learn to live with it”:
Nothing is possible under this idea. Nothing. No progress. No enlightenment. No truth, beauty, justice, goodness, grace — not a single end we prize in mature moralities, let alone societies, economies, and polities. Because of course its message is: nothing matters but the eternal rise of the “strong” over the “weak.” No amount of bloodshed or pain or suffering matters to it one iota — the reverse is true: pain and suffering cleanse away the weak, and leave, standing above them, only the strong.
Who’s going to be left, this time, if this is the morality of our civilization? A handful of billionaires, and their butlers? Maybe the shredded remnants of a few once-rich and mature Western [bourgeois—MP] democracies, themselves fallen? CEOs circling the globe eternally in private jets, hovering over the smoldering wreckage of it all? A thimbleful of politicians and the giga rich, hunkered down in a silo somewhere, with enough canned food to last a decade or five?
Nope. This time, “the strong survive and the weak perish” is recipe for wanton destruction. Of our stability, future, past, history, truth, beauty, the planet, and much of the life on it. Wasn’t that history’s great lesson so far? Where did millennia of “learn to live with it” lead? Nowhere. Only when we began to care, then question, then rebel, and put the higher and larger and truer good first, over divine rights of power and violence, did Enlightenment spark Revolution.
It’s no surprise that the dominant message of a ruling class faced with crisis on all fronts and unable to solve any of society’s problems should be “learn to live with it.” This could be the mantra of any class society which has long ceased to play a progressive historical role. Its only response to a population sinking ever deeper into poverty, misery, sickness, and death is to “learn to live with it”—which of course for many people afflicted by illnesses such as COVID means “learn to die with it.” That, and ever more brutal forms of repression.
Haque is correct that revolutions are characterized by concern for oneself and others, which leads to questioning and rebelling against the existing order. But to leave it at that would be an idealist error. The truth is that the spark for revolutions tends to come from intolerable material conditions: from the masses of the population unable to meet basic needs such as food and housing; from lost wars, from constant police violence. Both the French and Russian revolutions began in earnest when women marched in the streets demanding bread.
The efforts of the bourgeoisie to suggest anyone who cares about unbearable social and environmental problems or about public health is “abnormal” reflects their own delusion and disconnect from reality. They have no solutions to the problems their own system has created and exacerbated, so they pretend there is no problem at all. It seeks to pathologize and gaslight, then imprison or kill those who point out these problems. But sooner or later reality asserts itself, as we see in ongoing revolutionary movements around the world.
When the masses finally move, it always comes as a rude awakening for the ruling class. The longer these out-of-touch, wealthy elites ignore reality, the greater their shock when a mass uprising erupts. The worse the crisis of capitalism becomes, the greater “mental disorder” the capitalist class exhibit as it retreats further into a delusional dreamworld where everything is fine. Headlines like those in the Wall Street Journal are a perfect example, and as such are a case of pure projection.