Reality

Philip K Dick once wrote that “reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn’t go away”. Even if “reality” has never been a defining feature of Rawls & Me, I still found Trump’s dismissal of his own administration’s report on climate change to be nonsensical to the extreme: “I don’t believe it”. As I have tried to explain over and over again, it is one thing to not believe in the Malthusian policy paradigm as promoted by mainstream environmentalism (I do not either), it is a completely different thing to not believe in the geophysical processes behind anthropogenic climate change. In part, some of the resistance to basic science of course comes from an evangelic worldview in which the climate is simply beyond human control but even so I find it strange that Trump has such problems disentangling facts and values (at the end of the day, I guess he is simply not that “very smart”).

Having said that, I do not claim that it is always easy to reconcile the world and our own place in it. The kind of champagne socialism pushed on these pages is of course easy to criticize from a whole host of directions but hopefully a reader will understand that this is just one story of many and that, on darker nights, I also think of everything from precarisation to the nuclear holocaust.