Category: politics

Parts of an article by Roger Hallam at https://rogerhallam.com/the-elite-death-project/. It stands despite references to Psychoanalysis (shit theories by and derived from Sigmund Freud). See the original is best …

Every day the political class announces another initiative, pledge, roadmap or “ambitious target.” And every day, the material reality moves closer to total collapse. At some point, we must confront a simple truth: the elites are not failing accidentally — they are participating in a death project. They are driving a system that destroys itself, destroys life, and destroys the conditions for civilisation, even when warned by their own institutions and scientists.

This is not just incompetence. It is not even simple greed. What we are witnessing is something deeper and more pathological — a mixture of elite degeneration, the death wish, and a civilisation unable to confront its own end. This piece gathers my recent reflections on why elites refuse to act, why capitalism is running toward its own destruction, and why the outcome is now structurally revolutionary.

Do we want a place in this miracle?

We live in a universe – do we want a place in this infinite miracle?
Do we want to stand for life?
Do we want to live rather than die?

Because at this point — to repeat a million times — we have become revolutionaries. Not in the neoliberal performative identity-bollocks way.
But actually, literally revolutionary.

Even Colombian President, Petro Gustavo, put it plainly:

“I know that decarbonisation requires a transformation on a global scale, a revolution. But it must be undertaken if humanity is to live on for millennia, or even millions of years, in the universe.”

Reality is no longer ideological.
It is existential.

Gustavo’s Full Statement after COP [dizzy: Recommended]

The death wish: why elites act against their own survival

The biggest misunderstanding in the world is that people act out of material self-interest.

No.

Many people want to die — and want the world to die with them — because they hate themselves and they hate life so much. This is the death wish. It is supported by a century of psychoanalysis, social psychology, and history: under existential threat, societies often choose self-destruction over transformation.

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This insight is reinforced by decades of experimental work in Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon), which shows that under conditions of heightened mortality awareness people become more authoritarian, more aggressive and more willing to support destructive systems, even against their own material interests.

The repeated historical pattern of elites knowingly destroying the very systems they depend on — from late Rome to pre-revolutionary Europe to today’s fossil economy — fits this psychological picture far better than any rational-actor model. What we are seeing is not rational self-interest, but the death wish operating at a civilisational scale.

Why else do capitalists knowingly act in a way that will destroy capitalism?

Gunther Thallinger of Allianz SE, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, spells it out: “The financial system as we know it ceases to exist and capitalism ceases to be viable at 3°C.” A few years ago, I sat down with a director of E3G — a leading climate think tank. Privately, he admitted that the “death project” will destroy the British state. Publicly, he would never say it.

Yet elites continue to accelerate the trajectory toward 3°C.
This is not rational self-interest.
It is civilisation-wide self-destruction.

Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer

Action urgently needed to save the conditions under which markets – and civilisation itself – can operate, says senior Allianz figure …

Here’s an example of such elite madness: Heathrow’s third runway. The news last week is that it will finally be built by 2035.

Just as the world hits 2°C.
Just as the global economy collapses.
Just as flying becomes impossible.

But don’t worry — there will be a “full public consultation by July next year.”

This is the death wish as public policy.

Heathrow airport’s £33bn third runway plan chosen by government

Scheme includes plan to move the M25 and could mean up to 760 more planes in the skies around London every day ..

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See the original article at https://rogerhallam.com/the-elite-death-project/