Don’t Question Authority, They Don’t Know Either

Ben Debney || I was sitting in lecture theatre in Binghamton, New York one day in about 2017. The World Ecology Conference was all the way over yonder that year, so yours truly said arrivaderce to the antipodes and howdy-do to LAX sometime later, fuck aeroplanes. I did give a girly squeal also when presented with a Budweiser at the first bar coming off the exit ramp, metres from the door. It’s like they know. I was listening to the keynote lecture from Jason W. Moore, who is so around his research he’s a target for personality attacks. Something along the lines of capitalism forming its own historically specific ecologies in conformity with the machinery of extractivism, tracable from 1492 to the present in terms of the spatial and technological evolution of commodity frontiers. Exhausting one and moving on to the next like locusts, and exacerbating metabolic rift with every step. In Two Treatises of Government that’s called improvement. Isn’t that amazing? A solid dose of world-ecology talk got the old gears turning is the point I’m trying to get at, at any rate.

This is a very long-winded way of introducing the topic of why did I decide to start worldecology.info. The thing is, there’s actually halfway a point to long-windedness, because hopefully it highlights how much ground there is to cover in even addressing the question of how do we meaningfully address the root causes of encircling ecocide with a view to not getting completely just bulldozed into extinction. Any teacher will tell you that students work best in groups, which is why unimaginative shitlord academics force group projects on undergraduates, instead of maybe talking to learning designers about breaking tutorials up into JIGSAW groups in class and the like. Because most educators at the tertiary level don’t actually have pedagogical training which is a standard must at a lower level and it shows. The neoliberal academy has rationalised the study of history as hostile to the demands of necessity in terms of everyone keeping their jobs inside a mill for meal tickets anyway.

What this means really is that it’s playtime for autodidacts the self-taught. If you read any critical literature on the ecological crisis, you’re miles ahead than the vast majority of academics in the global North who still have jobs, even if you’re sitting around in your jim-jams on the couch with a nice hot cup of tea. They sure as shit aren’t rocking the boat. They’re definitely not rocking the boat now that there’s a tyranny of woke that isn’t the mentality that saying bad things about crimes against humanity means you you’re a vacant, gutless bigot taking out all your repressed anger and self-loathing on people you think you can intimidate physically (academics are free do think and write as counterterrorist conspiracists dictate, but the academics are the ones with the hotline to the Almighty and the raging sense of entitlement. Probably be a good time to quit the sector; better a soul than the approval of other bribe-takers and intellectual silos around the historical inevitability of the rat race).

Authority are fucking idiots in the first place. Authority says, of course we can have altrustic outcomes from selfish means and recast everything harmful we do as actually a service to a greater good. The victims’ own best interests even. The world has to be saved from itself by kleptocrats and predatory manipulators and exploiters expert in coercive control techniques. Who doesn’t love a bit of Tough Love? Who doesn’t love a bit of, well I represent the right values, so the harm I do serves a higher purpose, whereas I don’t like you therefore you should suffer the harm I do as a lesson? Anyone still looking to get into higher education at this late as shit stage of late capitalism and late empire can do so easily by internalising the necessity of Tough Love: only those who still serve the private empire of capital are worthy of sympathy. Ideological nonconformists will be corrected and punished, severely.

Would that I was kidding, really.

(Let yourself be hypnotized by the commodity fetish, even, such that you can intuitively sense when you’re deviating into potential thoughtcrime, and you’re home and hosed.)

Maybe with “violent silencing,” this old world and its old ways that we’re encumbered with is painting itself into a corner? What are the chances? Let us recap: the United States is dependent on Middle-Eastern oil extraction and the petrodollar recycling system to artificially maintain the value of the dollar. The mask of democratic civility comes off when it senses its power threatened. The Republic is a colony and vassal of its parent conglomerate oligarchy. The big knobs at the top of the shitheap built a mighty empire on a mode of production that requires endless growth from a finite planet. So they’re a little bit fucked. The fascist reaction is as much a freakout that we might figure the big knobs in charge out as much as it is a tantrum that the wheels are falling off the bandwagon of endless upward class mobility, which first requires endless planet to expand into. Respectable mainstream politics is acting out the endgame of imperial resource dependency; respectable intellectual discourse is performing the death rattles of endless growthism. Liberal academics can’t even deal with class long enough to notice the class order behind an endless-growth economy. Is this a corner?

Imagine you’re standing outside of the silo of an old world disppearing up its own rectum. That’s what I do every day on the dole personally, using my academic research skills for the benefit of the class struggle, instead of for neoliberal academics who talk about recouperating anarcho-syndicalism for neoliberal pluralism while studiously ignoring you whenever you bring up things like endless growthism or the systemic violence of a class-based order that reverses the democratic burden of proof on power to justify itself to the individual. If you read anything on worldecology.info, you’re ahead of people who are professors now. Oh also I’m a pest and harasser with a bunch of crazy fool ideas in his head case anyone’s interested. I’m actually the worst person; sympathy for me if I’m a Trot, punishment for thee if you’re not etc.

This was a long roundabout screed; the fun is in the tangents and you’re welcome. What I’m saying is, as counter-hegemonists, we need to back ourselves intellectually. No one is going to do it for us. All the secular priesthood of the late capitalist downward spiral can and will do is try to gaslight us into silence and submission, when they’re not trying to angle the endgame of world capitalism to their own advantage so they’re the last ones to go under. All yuppies and preppies do after aborting ethical core in return for rat race bribes is policing morality to recast themselves as moral actors anyway. Who gives one fuck if they have testamurs.