The road to rebellion is paved with poor logic
For a group preaching that the world is about to end, the “Extinction Rebellion” mob are really lacking imagination.
These particular activists specialise in lying down on city streets, most recently in Brisbane, to block traffic.
Listen to us, they say, or we’ll hit you with – sharp intakes of breath – congestion.
If these people had jobs featuring a regular commute, they might have noticed that such hold-ups are not uncommon.
Just look at the M1. It gets blocked every day of the week, without the need for Millennials taking afternoon naps on its tarmac.
Add in roadworks, major events and the rush to beaches and public holidays. The roads are never clear.
It’s the same around the country. Your correspondent is visiting Sydney this week. Every pathway is mobbed by people. Every road is stuffed with vehicles. It’s a wonder any of them get anywhere.
It’s entirely possible I’ve walked into a crowd of protesting “rebels” in this city and not noticed. Public spaces
in Sydney are already so thoroughly crowded that if a couple of hundred doom mongers began carrying on in the middle of it all, you’d be hard put to tell the difference.
All these activists are achieving is adding themselves to a long list of reasons you might be delayed getting home.
Equally ridiculous is their latest target. The group is heading to Mullumbimby on Friday to protest at the headquarters of the Greensdominated Byron Shire Council. A case of Frankenstein’s monster if ever there was one.
What is interesting about the current movement, however, is its unusually large scale.
Most previous groups promoting “the end is nigh” narratives – and there have been many in history – have numbered only in their hundreds. One of the best studied was led by an American housewife Dorothy Martin in the 1950s, who predicted humanity was to be swept away by floods – which amusingly enough, doesn’t sound too dissimilar to contemporary voices talking about rising sea levels.
She also told her followers they would be rescued by aliens in flying saucers.
Sadly, the current students of the apocalypse have been given no such glimmer of hope. All they’ve been offered so far is Bill Shorten. Take me to your leader? Think we’ll pass.
Despite their disappointment, Ms Martin’s group clung hard to their beliefs. The same holds for today’s true believers.
They genuinely think the apocalypse is coming. They even use the word.
“We are heading for an apocalypse and unimaginable horrors the like of which have never been seen,” warns an activist on an Extinction Rebellion website.
One of the group’s founders also recently wrote that “we’re facing imminent societal collapse” and “It’s not clear whether or not we’ll survive (as a species).”
This sort of alarming talk can have dangerous consequences if impressionable people take it as representing reality.
An offshoot of the Extinction Rebellion movement, called Birthstrikers, comprises people who have pledged not to have children because they believe they will be born into a world of “climate breakdown and civilisation collapse”.
Forget the obvious joke about people removing themselves from the gene pool. This is actually very sad to read. There are many factors which should go into a decision about whether to start a family, but the predictions of the Mother Shiptons of this world should not be among them.
The thinking of these people has echoes of the behaviour of fervent followers of Dorothey Martin, who quit their jobs and sold their belongings, so sure were they 100 x $100 RUNNER-UP PRIZES TO BE WON! that the world was facing its demise. Like the adherents of Mrs Martin, these people have been led astray.
The Extinction Rebellion founding member who predicted “societal collapse” did so in an article that claimed the group was more concerned with tearing down Western civilisation than it was about climate issues. The headline on the article was straight to the point: “Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the climate”.
As the article made clear, and is so often the way with these groups, environmentalism is the flag of convenience through which they can rally the troops to what is ultimately more a red cause than a green one.
Among the very boring details, this clown lists “delusions” of “white supremacy, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, heterosexism/ heteronormativity and class hierarchy” as the group’s chief gripes.
So in short, they’re “rebelling” against Western society as a whole, claiming that despite the fact modern advances have led to record life expectancy, we are somehow doomed to “extinction” if we remain on our present course.
The logic is really no more coherent than that of Mrs Martin and her followers in the 1950s. It’s a “rebellion” against reality. Somebody send them the tinfoil hats.
A CALL TO ARMS - P12
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