Konstantin Caged
My fifteen minutes on the Interwebs this last month were dominated by Konstantin Kisin’s attack on Woke culture at Oxford University. The video went mega viral in days, and he has been the darling of right wing shock jocks across the Anglosphere ever since.
So this week, Sweet Ears, I dedicate the Cage to three things.
- What are Kisin’s essential arguments?
- Why are they effective?
- How do we counter them?
His essential argument has two parts.
- Woke culture is one of complaint and protest rather than building and progress.
- Only the rich can afford to worry about the environment, the rest of us are too busy surviving.
Let’s pick those little gems apart. (The video and audio includes soiundbites of Konstantin’s original phrasing.)
The first section of his speech, weaponises the anti-woke debate by conflating empathy with elitism, protection of minorities with racism, critical thinking with complaining. You complain, we build. You block streets, close down farms, pour soup on paintings … we feed people, build water and sanitation to save lives, provide power stations and infrastructure to lift people out of poverty. We create, you destroy.
Now, Sweet Ears, resist the temptation to dismiss these arguments out of hand. Your drunken uncle who last year was telling you that climate change is geological is right now lining up a bunch of news items for the next family function you attend.
Recent headlines. The Dutch government’ climate policy will reduce the production of milk and increase milk prices, and The Australian government’s cap on gas prices will be a disincentive to exploration and so gas prices will rise due to the consequent lack of supply.
Well yes, that’s true, but that is actually the point. Kisin’s argument uses the truth, without the full context, to remind people what is actually scary about the future. We ARE going to have to learn sufficiency instead of endless, wasteful consumption. It is a more sophisticated version of Scomo’s “the electric car will kill the SUV and ruin the Australian weekend.”
Kisin even employs his new baby son to tug at our heart strings using a straw man argument that if the only way to save your baby’s life was to press a button that releases of plumes of CO2. “There is not a parent alive who would not smash that button so hard their hand bleeds.”
While he cheats a little, he is fundamentally right. No-one wants to give up their privilege and many will fight to the death for what they consider to be their “god-given rights”.
The second part of his speech builds this fundamental and self-centred personal concern of his target audience into a global concern for the world’s poor. Poor countries want to be rich, like us, and it is extremely arrogant for us to tell them that they can’t do that because it is bad for the planet.
“Who is going to go home tonight and say ‘Let’s rip out the bathroom and install a Siberian shit-house in the back yard. And if you won’t, why should they?’”
Again, this is the actual argument used by developing nations in international forums to demand that rich countries should compensate them for the damage that climate chaos wreaks on their countries and fund their development pathway to post-industrial affluence.
He focuses on China because that is a convenient bogey man, and points to the reality that it is the promise of future prosperity that holds the Chinese political system together.
So once again, the major problem with countering his position is that you cannot simply refute the key arguments because they are true.
He concludes his argument by saying that in the face of the climate chaos, the role of rich countries is to develop new technology that allow us all to be prosperous and green.
This is the Ross Garnaut decoupling argument that we have tackled at length here in The Cage.
We can decouple economic growth from environmental harm and so have our cake and eat it too.
This is the fervent hope of every neo-liberal government, every circular economy consultant and the climate conscious corporations who they work for. This is the rewilding dream of George Monbiot and the synthesised plant protein advocates. And it splits climate activism into two camps, the industrial green growth camp and the small foot print camp.
What Kisin effectively does is challenge the well-educated, middle class, climate conscious consumers to desert climate activism that actually threatens economic growth. That’s why he is so effective.
Let’s look at how he does this.
His first major shift is that he eliminates climate denial as a factor.
“For tonight and tonight only, I will agree that we face a climate emergency … and stocks of polar bears are running low. I will worship at the feet of St Greta of climate.”
He cleverly acknowledges that the climate debate has been won, it is time to move on at the same time as he flags to his followers that he knows it is a load of crap. He says to us that he is only teasing “I accept your premise and I am going to convince you that your motives are correct but your response is wrong.”
“I want to reach out to those woke people still capable of rational argument. A tiny minority I admit.”
Note again, the way that he undermines us as his opponents even while he pretends to appeal to us. One more reason that I say this man is very very sharp, very very articulate and very very dangerous.
Which brings me to his next major shift. He does not invoke any conspiracy theories, he does not lie about the major facts, and so it is extraordinary difficult to argue with him. This is misinformation at its most sophisticated and refined. It cannot be dismissed as ridiculous in the same way as Trump and Brexit.
What he does brilliantly is use debating tactics to drive these points home. He uses emotional descriptions of poverty as a technique for making us emotionally identify with the argument and repeat it passionately. Given the core of truth this makes him very difficult to rebut.
He brings together the disaffected opponents of government, science and the media with the rational thinkers with jobs and lifestyle who rely on a healthy economy. As a result, we find ourselves fighting on two radically different fronts. On one hand we are trying to counter the hi tech, rewilding biosynthesis arguments of a glorious green capitalism and on the other hand deal with the envy of the dispossessed, who are told that educated middle-class greenies care more about the environment than they do about you.
Ironically, both these very different arguments suit the very few individuals who own most of the world’s wealth — you call them the one per cent, I call them the one per crore. While they invest in protecting themselves from the shitstorm they call the Event, they fan the flames of hatred felt by the dispossessed for the educated by blaming the “system” for the collapse of the prosperity that relied on continuous economic growth. In their view, a crash in the world’s population, the tanking of the global economy and the reduction of the working class in rich countries to serfdom and slavery is just the market at work, social Darwinism red in tooth and claw. This is the apocalypse we have to have. Let’s wipe out that arrogant middle class who despise you so you can work directly for us.
Konstantin Kris sugars the apocalypse with a coating of green growth. He leads with cheap renewable energy as the mechanism that will make the West Great Again. Green Hydrogen, electrification of transport and heating and the removal of fossil fuels will save us all. Standing in the way of Green Growth is to endanger the future of billions.
To counter his argument we have to perform the same trick in reverse. We have to unite the disaffected and the thinkers in understanding that rampant capitalism is destroying human society and the natural systems that support us, and that sticking together and looking after each other is the way out of the shit fight.
To do that we have to acknowledge and be prepared to sacrifice our middle class privilege to show solidarity with the disaffected at the same time as patiently separating their distrust of the “system” from their distrust of communal effort. We need to be organised to survive, but we need that organisation to be transparent and grass roots. If the leaders are not visible members of the community they lead, that trust cannot be regained.
We need to use his method of saying two things at once to both acknowledge that protest does not immediately help the general population at the same time as pointing out that protest ended slavery, earned women the vote and established the eight hour day.
We also need to build the community-based future that we believe in so that we can demonstrate that it is better than the corporate feudalism that gobbles human values as its tentacles expand into every aspect of our life.
That is the way that we counter Konstantin Kisin.
