Ideologues are Often at the Ready to Profit from Crises

When professors around the country were busy figuring ways to deliver their classes online, two faculty members at the University of Alberta wrote a letter and enlisted the endorsement of […]
Published on April 29, 2020

When professors around the country were busy figuring ways to deliver their classes online, two faculty members at the University of Alberta wrote a letter and enlisted the endorsement of some 200 of their leisured colleagues at 33 universities in Canada. A crisis must not be wasted.

From the privileged positions of publicly paid jobs, the Alberta authors urge Ottawa to stall the COVID-19 help to the oil industry with an old idea minted in bureaucratic hell: they want the prime minister to start a new cycle of consultations. All other aid should be expedited. Only aid to oil companies needs to be trapped in a nightmare. 

Their dream is to shut everything down that can be shut down in the oil patch, start an endless process of consultations while oil workers are sent to retrain. The recommendation does not include training camps for oil workers. 

It’s hard to imagine such a rushed petition from level-headed people during a national emergency. In what seems a lack of awareness of the consequences, they advise to get on it right away because “we have no time to lose.” The classic let’s-hurry-up-and-wait!

It is radical ideology at work. Ideologies are grids of interpretation (and we all use them). In radical cases, however, ideology descends into zealotry and induces the adopter into a self-inflicted disconnect from reality. There is no greater evidence of a mind infected with a radical ideology than when ideologues subordinate all things to their awaited goal, including human lives and their welfare. 

Radical ideologues are prepared to inflict pain and suffering for the sake of accelerating the advent of the future they expect to arrive soon. Some skilfully use crises to rush their goals. Typically, they see the misery they unleash in the process as the price to pay for the application of the ideas to create a new world, a new society, or a new natural equilibrium–in the case of eco-radicals.

The Twentieth Century is littered with examples of enlightened creatures who have unleashed unfathomable suffering upon more than 100 million people. 

Some great works of literature have depicted the inner workings of ideological systems. They make excellent quarantine reading.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston and Julia fall victim to extraordinary indignities at the hand of the state apparatus, are subjected to constant surveillance, abuse and torture, to enforce a status quo of squalor and oppression that had long betrayed the society of equality and prosperity the enlightened revolutionaries once promised. 

In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler depicts the experiences of Nicholas Rubashov, a Communist party official charged with enforcing ideological purity, until the repressive machine he helped to build turns toward him. Slowly, he becomes aware that the compassion he now hopes from others has been replaced by the conviction of ideas, discernment has been replaced by the dreams of the future, and decency thoroughly eroded by ideology. 

In both novels, people who belong to a group deemed politically or economically undesirable are sacrificed by the designs of a few enlightened figures, who claim to know and speak for the collective good of all. Only the final goal mattered.

In real life, radical environmentalists similarly eclipse humanity behind the dreams of a soon-to-be-realised eco-nirvana. “Earth First!ers” once relished the thought of millions of people dying of HIV, viewing people as parasites. Today, with similar impulses, Extinction Rebellion seeks to place the environment ahead of all things and replace governments with eco-sensitive assemblies to rule over us.

It is not that concern for the environment is bad. It is no worse than the Communist concern for workers. But deep-ecology ideologues favour “Nature” to the detriment of human welfare (as though humans were not natural) in the same way that communists sacrifice workers to create a “New Man.”

To be clear, I am not suggesting UofA academics want oil patch workers exterminated. They only want oil workers’ jobs to disappear by incantation. But I am saying they want to use the COVD-19 crisis to push their agenda of ecological purity at the expense of human welfare in Alberta. 

Their position is radically ideological. It demonstrates three disconnects in certain corners of academe: an unusual disconnect with compassion, with the socio-economic realities of the present crisis, and with the sentiments of the common Albertan, who is wisely capable of simultaneously supporting environmental concerns and responsible energy extraction. 

 

Marco Navarro-Génie is president of the Haultain Research Institute and Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

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