Doubting Reality : (Koch's red slippers) birthing DENIAL in a Mayberry sort of town

"Denying Life after the 1950s"  (birthing DENIAL in a Mayberry sort of time & town)

Growing up in a Mayberry sort of town, a little place on the prairie , is just the sort of thing that might make a feller want to doubt reality: current reality anyway.

So it can hardly be unexpected that Charlie-Koch-from-Wichita turned out the way he has : spending his vast fortune in trying to turn the whole world back to a time and place long gone ---- the heyday of high Modernity and Scientism in the early 1950s ----- in a small city in rural Middle America.

So it is not surprising to discover that Mr Koch and all the front organizations he funds are not really into denying climate change and science as such.

They are more into denying the changes in the physical world, in society - and yes in science - that allowed us to even notice that the climate was changing and in fact had been changing, ever since the birth of Scientism in the 1870s.

A collective set of changes that we call the Post-Modern World and even "the Age of Global Commensality" .

The process of man-made climate change is so tied to the period of High Modernity & Scientism (1875-1965) the period that Koch and hundreds of millions of others regard as the high point of humanity, that to accept the first is to deny the worth of the second.

This they can not and will not do.....

Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN

     Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
     While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.

   Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
   Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
   Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
    It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
    Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
   By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
   One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
   But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
   So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
  The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
   What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
   In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
   But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....

* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there  IS  intelligent life on Earth....

We got the birth certificate , CATO : Denialism was birthed in America, more precisely in Wichita

    DENIERS are busy,busy,busy people, but among  all their other denials, they never hesitate to find time to deny that America could have possibly birthed the current president.
   They seem to feel that he is either the spawn of the Devil or the spawn of darkest Kenya ----and as part of the DENIERS' overall "Southern Strategy", either hallucination will work equally well at the ballot box.
   One thing they will never ever deny (or its bye-bye that life-sustaining greenback oxygen) is that the DENIER Movement was birthed in America - more precisely in Wichita Kansas's Koch-funded CATO INSTITUTE, back in 1974.
   Unfortunately for The-Fate-of -the-Planet, the rest of the world was too busy to notice.

   Too busy witnessing what they thought was the soon-to-be triumphant Environmental Movement, thrown up after the late 1973 spike in Oil Prices marked the end to Modernity and Scientism.
   "Wrong, wrong ,wrong", said the Koch bros.
    America might have temporally have left bucolic Kansas for the seductions of Big City Environmentalism, but they's be back - back to the land of the ruby red slippers.
    The Koch bros decided to devote a lot of their enormous wealth to 'Denying' their way back to "The Lost Hegemony of Scientism".
    Back to the the sort of science their dear old Dad had made his fortune in : HARD Science, Newtonian - Daltonian - Darwinian Science , not all this post-quantum gobbledygook.
    The pity was that the Kochs simply didn't get it : yes the old Scientism Hegemony of 1875-1965 was gone : that perfect harmony between political/economic and intellectual hegemonies.
    But it hadn't been replaced by a new green-looking hegemony.
    In the postmodern world of posthegemony, there was no overall Hegemony anymore.
    Scientism still held all the cards among the politically and economically powerful and among those middle-aged or older while the the new green vision had only captured most of the younger intellectuals and most of the younger scientists but only some of the younger voters.
    It was a sort of stand-off : Scientism was still in charge but its orders no longer went unquestioned.
   Now if there is ANYTHING a denier hates worse than being questioned, well I haven't yet discovered it.
    Spoiled as rotten as only upper middle class WASP male teens can be spoiled, their every whim has always been granted all their lives : from mom to wife to secretary to mistress.
    Their animus at having their thoughts questioned sharply, in public, by young whippersnappers, is - I believe - what fuels the DENIERS' energy and anger.
    And to think that all this global bile was birthed in that little ole sorta Mayberry town of Wichita, Kansas : truth is indeed crazier than fiction.....

Most effective DENIER message isn't a think-tank or a blog : its a song

     Or accurately a song industry: the one that keeps pumping out Nashville's road songs.
     I am thinking particularly of  Tim Nichols' "HEADS CAROLINA, TAILS CALIFORNIA" and "YOU AIN"T IN KANSAS ANYMORE" , as sung by Jo Dee Messina.
    God, how I love those songs: songs so infectious that they'd make a graveyard of old tombstones get up and dance a two-step.
    Yet I know I really shouldn't.

    They might seem innocent enough - just modern day variants of ole Huck Finn's decision to 'lit out for the Territories', keeping well ahead of Grecian aunts bearing Civilization.
    Ultimately though, they're DENIER MUSIC, in much the same way that Western novels and Hard SF are DENIER LIT.
     Unfortunately it is their same spirit that fuels every pollution-denying, wage&tax&safetystandards-moaning greedy SOB's decision to close his factory and head off to newer pastures where there are no unions, laws or taxes.
   When the smallest, poorest nation on Earth gets 'too expensive', too 'regulation-bound', too 'democratic', these greedy SOBS are just going to head off for PLANET B (Mars) --- only this time they'll leave the 99% behind.
    The new workers will all be robots and the planet will be privately owned - sorta like the way KOCH INDUSTRIES is already owned and operated today : only the KOCH BOYS will be running a gated planet, instead of just a gated company.
    I mention the Koch boys not of any particular sense of malice but because their company (seemingly the monetary archangel to every single denier worth funding) was founded in and is still housed in Wichita Kansas.
    "You Ain't In Kansas Anymore" plays off the famous line from Dorothy and "The Wizard of Oz" and off the general sense in America that the NEW YORKER magazine and its sophisticated ilk are precisely edited so as to not appeal to  people from Wichita.
   The addressee in the song tells the singer that he's from Wichita, a kinda 'Mayberry sort of town'.
      The singer already knows this, because after kissing the headlights out of him under the Hollywood sign, she cuddles close and whispers, out here we call it "ronel, not rodeo" : sonny, you're in the big fast megacity of LA - not in Kansas anymore.
   So Wichita has long been set up at the epitome of non-coolness or alternatively, as the home of decent law-abiding,God-fearing, Constitution-worshipping red-blooded Americans.
    The Koch boys see it as the latter, and in 1974 as Environmentalism blossomed after the Oil Spike, they choose this armpit of non-coolness to thumb their nose at what they thought was the NEW green Hegemony ,as they birthed the Cato Institute and the DENIER movement in Wichita.
    We will never ever understand or halt what the Kochs began, until we emotionally understand the power over all of us that Huck Finn and Joe Dee Messina's message has: otherwise as in the film "The Seventh Seal", we will all sing and dance our butts off, while driving happily in our gas-guzzler on an one-way trip into our graves.....