Fan Mail... I Get Fan Mail

Notes from a clean, well-lighted place

It’s always good to get engagement from readers, even readers who disagree with you. So I was pleased, after a fashion, to receive this note from “John Smith” in response to my earlier entry on Greed.

Mr. Smith’s short response reflects sentiments I’ve frequently seen on social media. He’s very concerned about UN Agenda 2030. He believes the UN is run by Communists. And he assumes that those who don’t share his interest are in on the Great Conspiracy.

Here I have to confess that not only am I not being paid off by the ICLEI. Until Mr. Smith’s note, I had never even heard of them. After looking at Wikipedia, a site that gives us nothing but the finest Woke Communist Propaganda, I discovered that ICLEI got its start in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, but has since changed its name to “ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability.”

ICLEI was founded by Nancy Skinner, a California Democratic state senator whose voting record is exactly what you would expect from a California Democratic state senator from Berkeley. Skinner describes some of her senatorial accomplishments in her website’s biography:

Skinner has authored groundbreaking laws including SB 206, the Fair Pay to Play Act, making California the first state to give college athletes the right to earn money from their name, image, and likeness; SB 1421, opening up police misconduct records for the first time in 40 years; and SB 1437, overhauling California’s unjust felony murder rule.

While in the Assembly, she authored AB 153, requiring Amazon and other internet retailers to collect sales tax; AB 1014, the first in the nation gun violence restraining order otherwise known as ‘red flag’ law; and AB 1930, giving college students access to federal food assistance, which has now been copied by most every state in the country.

In 2021, Skinner led the successful campaign to make California the first state in nation to make free school meals available to all public school children.

From its humble beginnings, ICLEI has become a multinational NGO with its main office in Bonn, Germany. ICLEI works closely with the UN although it’s not officially affiliated. It also receives a great deal of funding from Google. So what does ICLEI do and why does it do it? Here’s a screenshot from their website:

Here’s a sample pathway:

The resilient development pathway anticipates, prevents, absorbs and recovers from shocks and stresses, in particular those brought about by rapid environmental technological, social and demographic change, and improves essential basic response structures and functions.

Resilient development makes resilience a core part of all municipal strategies and prepares for new risks and impacts taking into account the rights and needs of vulnerable sections of our society. Resilient development continuously strengthens essential systems through a transparent and inclusive approach that enhances trust in public institutions.

This is pretty bog-standard bureaucratic gobbledygook. You could sum it up in four words — resilient development is resilient — but that would make the circular reasoning uncomfortably clear.

But when a local government, local authority, or local government association joins the ICLEI (for an annual membership fee of between $1,200 and $8,000), it can boast that it is Concerned About The Environment and Working For Sustainability. Those phrases, like ICLEI’s statements of purpose, are what S.I. Hayakwawa called “purr words.” They express good feelings but carry little or no factual content.

You could say the same about the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which promises:

We resolve, between now and 2030, to end poverty and hunger everywhere; to combat inequalities within and among countries; to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies; to protect human rights and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; and to ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources.

We resolve also to create conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all, taking into account different levels of national development and capacities.

Agenda 2030 passed on September 27, 2015. Among its resolutions was a commitment to eradicating extreme poverty by 2030. But yet another shadowy NGO, the World Bank, notes that:

For three decades, the number of people living in extreme poverty— defined as those who live on less than $2.15 per person per day at 2017 purchasing power parity—was declining. But the trend was interrupted in 2020, when poverty rose due to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 crisis. The number of people in extreme poverty rose by 70 million to more than 700 million people. The global extreme poverty rate reached 9.3 percent, up from 8.4 percent in 2019.

Given current trends, 574 million people—nearly 7 percent of the world’s population—will still be living on less than $2.15 a day in 2030.

John Smith believes Agenda 2030 is a shadowy plot to send us all into pods where we will eat bugs and own nothing. A more nuanced reading would suggest that Agenda 2030 has so far overpromised and underdelivered. Yet Agenda 2030 remains loved by NPR listeners and white-collar courtiers, and reviled by Fox listeners and Plan-Trusters. This is because we’re dealing with religious, not political movements.

The human instinct to worship can be traced with certainty to Paleolithic times and may well go back much further. Chimpanzees engage in ecstatic “rain dances” and even the enthusiastic atheists at IFLScience have noted that primates, cetaceans, and elephants appear to mourn their dead. (They could have added crows to their list).

Christians believe that before time began a band of rebel angels sought to dethrone God. In 1789, a band of French rebels set out to do the same thing. While both rebellions ultimately failed, the losers left their mark on the world. Satan seduced Eve and Robespierre seduced Karl Marx. Since 1789 the West has become much less concerned with religious questions and much more skeptical of the idea that a divinity might care about or directly intervene in the world.

Oswald Spengler prophesied this skepticism, which he also saw in Classical Hellenism, would end as it had ended then:

Before us there stands a last spiritual crisis that will involve all Europe and America. What its course will be. Late Hellenism tells us. The tyranny of the Reason — of which we are not conscious, for we are ourselves its apex — is in every Culture an epoch between man and old-man, and no more. Its most distinct expression is the cult of exact sciences, of dialectic, of demonstration, of causality. Of old the Ionic, and in our case the Baroque were its rising limb, and now the question is what form will the down-curve assume?

In this very century, I prophesy, the century of scientific-critical Alexandrianism, of the great harvests, of the final formulations, a new element of inwardness will arise to overthrow the will-to-victory of science. Exact science must presently fall upon its own keen sword. First, in the 18th Century, its methods were tried out, then, in the 19th, its powers, and now its historical role is critically reviewed. But from Skepsis there is a path to a “second religiousness,” which is the sequel and not the preface of the Culture. Men dispense with proof, desire only to believe and not to dissect.

Like all organic beings, every civilization has a period of growth and decline. I believe that in our case the Technocratic civilization that began with Gutenberg’s press and rose to dominance with the Industrial Revolution has begun its slide downward. What we see with “Wokeness” and the Trusters of Science is the Second Religiousness of Enlightenment philosophy. Its devotees continue chanting their prayers in the hopes their reverence will save their machine gods from irrelevance.

If their philosophy seems illogical and incoherent, it is because they are not concerned with logic and coherence. Theirs is a religious revival that has no gods but man. But their fervor is no less ardent than that of Pentecostals praying that heaven will rapture them away from their hell on earth.

John Smith wants the world to hear that Agenda 2030 is bad and that evil men are seeking to enslave us. Many people are already broadcasting that message. Yet we are no closer today to overthrowing those evil men or to casting off our chains. I’ve chosen a different path. I have looked to that frustrated religious impulse in the hopes that I might understand my opponents, and from there find ways to defeat them.

The devotees of Secular Humanism have reached the limits of materialism and now they wish to escape the limits of the material. They have cast aside Sin, but yet they seek to evangelize the ignorant world until it is liberated like them. And while many still wait for the oppressors to wither away and a brave new world to dawn, every day more are starting to realize their war is already lost.

Fra Angelico, The Coronation of the Virgin (1432)

I expect that within the next 5 years the United Nations will have less power than they have now, not more. I expect that the Global American Empire will continue crumbling and that fantasies of pod life and bug cuisine will look as silly as 20th century dreams of space colonies and moon bases.

What we see from our professional-managerial classes and bureaucrats is not the confidence of superior forces sealing their triumph. It’s the fear of those who have seen the barbarians at the gates. And in their fear they have doubled down on their ideology. They dream of holding onto power with ideology because they fear they can no longer hold it by force.

I could be wrong, and the shadowy forces John Smith fears may succeed in their quest for power. Good is often defeated and evil often triumphs. Anybody who thinks this world is a fair and just place should visit a pediatric burn ward, then get back to me about fairness and justice. We may lose this battle, and we may even lose this war. But I believe that there is a Truth that will not be destroyed. And I believe that Truth will still exist long after Agenda 2030 is forgotten.

I came back to Rome in search of weapons. I knew that evil could only be conquered by somebody who accepted the existence of Good and that lies could only be countered by one who believes in Truth. In time, I came to understand that my enemies were already defeated.

If my prayers are words cast into a void, then so are their slogans. Their heroes do not Rest In Power, they rot in oblivion. And if that is to be my fate, then so too is it theirs. Ernest Hemingway saw their void and put a shotgun to his face praying Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name. Perhaps my prayers are as empty as Hemingway’s, but at least they don’t stink of gunpowder and buckshot.