How many posh yachts will we need? Environmentalism is now just a millinarian doom cult.

Raedwald observes:

With a ten day passage time to New York, the new J-class yachts that will need to be built to carry the current 3m passengers a year who currently fly from LHR to JFK will give business to Europe's shipyards for years ahead. Suggestions that this is all just money-grabbing virtue signalling by Saint Greta's parents were strongly denied.

I'm not any sort of climate change denier just a tad sceptical about some of the scarier claims. And when the Jeanne d'Arc of environmental extremists sets sail on a billionaire's yacht because she won't fly, I realise that we're being played here.

As I pointed out the other day the extremists need to be run out of town on rail. They are at best misguided and at worst - that other great saint of environmental extremism springs to mind here - deeply unpleasant misanthropes. They pretend that crashing the west's economy will somehow help the billion folk still in absolute poverty. Present an endless string of petty gimmicks like banning straws and cultish fads like veganism all aimed to make us guilty about 21st century life and culture. What we have isn't science but a millinarian doom cult little different to those people who climb hills on an appointed day to await the second coming.

John Locke warned us about 'enthusiasm', what he called an 'eruption' of the 'ungrounded fancies of a man's own brain'. Environmentalists are feeding us a faith based on creating a fear of ever more imminent planetary doom - "14 months" is the latest of these doom cultists warnings. They invoke the future in the most polemic of terms intended to stir up those ungrounded fancies - "think of the children"

The deadline for protecting our children from a ruined climate is close at hand

And so it goes - worst case is piled on worst case and environmentalists point to their desired apocalyptic horse riders - extinction, famine, carbon, death - and cry to the heavens. It has become the politics of chicken-licken as those captured by the cult's message of doom cry, scream and wail at those they claim are "doing nothing about the climate emergency". Politicians - left, right and centre - all line up behind the cultists, a tear in their eye, fine words in their mouths, and call for action, for bans, for taxes, for factories to be closed, oil wells capped and mines shut. "We must listen to the young people", they cry (while counting the votes and power they'll get as a result of indulging the doom cult).

Right now the world is largely doing exactly the right thing - moving slowly away from a resource-extractive economy - and there is no need to accelerate this or change the sorts of strategies agreed two decades ago. A marginal change in climate (the most likely scenario) means that current generations are accepting a similarly marginal reduction in the betterment of their lives as a precaution against that climate change becoming less marginal and more problematic. It isn't an emergency, we are not doomed, we don't need to stop flying, become vegan or eschew the convenience of plastic. And we definitely don't need to allow the environmentalist doom cult to dictate our policy responses to environmental challenges.

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UKIP, Momentum and the SNP are no more cults than the Liberal Democrats

I know it sometimes looks that way. Especially if you spend too much time paddling in the more febrile parts of social media. But politics has not become a contest between competing cults - Corbyn's success isn't cultic nor is euroscepticism or Scottish nationalism.

Although some seem to think so:

The political faithful dream of a glorious future: a Scotland free of English tutelage, an England free of the domination of Brussels, a Britain free of greed and poverty. Like the great religious dreams of the past, these causes take over lives. But all present formidable difficulties. In political as in religious cults, believers must be insulated against doubts. The most effective method is to blacken the outside world, and make alternative sources of information appear like the Devil’s seductions that tempt the godly into darkness. As Professors Dennis Tourish and Tim Wohlforth put it in their study of political sectarianism: “There is only one truth — that espoused by the cult. Competing explanations are not merely inaccurate but degenerate”.

Calling the forces challenging your world view a cult is a convenient excuse for worldly wise Guardian readers safe in their well-paid publicly-funded jobs. Now it's true that these causes do take over the lives of a few people - all of the causes and their leaders have a collection of fan-children, resplendent with badges, hands tightly clutching banners, faces suffused with joy at the sight of their campaign's human manifestation. But the people turning out to a damp Corbyn rally, sitting on uncomfortable village hall chair waiting for Nigel Farage or handing out yellow and black leaflets to Glasgow commuters - these folk aren't members of a cult but really do want things to change.

Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn aren't the leaders of cults but are the fortunate beneficiaries of people's political will - admittedly not all the people (so far it seems only Farage can lay claim to success in his campaign) but enough people to challenge the certainties of managerialist and technocratic centre-ground politics. Calling supporters of Scottish nationalism, UK independence or state socialism cultists may be jolly fun on Twitter or in your column in New Statesman or The Guardian. But it simply isn't true - or at least no more true than calling Blairites a cult - or, for that matter, doing the same for the growing band of Remain refuseniks and Brexit deniers.

It is true that we gather with people of like mind - I follow and am followed by far more West Ham fans than you because I'm a West Ham fan. And, in amongst the banter and vigorous discussion of why we haven't got a right back, we behave very similarly to those political in-groups with particular enemies and consistent lines of comment. Indeed, that group of West Ham fans will moan about how we're always last on Match of the Day, how teams like Chelsea and Liverpool get far too much coverage, and how the football authorities have it in for us. This doesn't make us a cult any more than very similar assertions by followers of Corbyn or over-enthusiastic cybernats makes them a cult.

The real point about cults - from the Manson Family and Jonestown through to Scientology - is that they get people to two things: cut themselves off from normal society to live within the cult; and get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise have done ('free love', suicide, even murder). And cults are characterised by leaders who control and direct the actions of members - none of the political leaders we've mentioned fit this characterisation.

For all the adulation afforded Corbyn, Farage and Sturgeon they are not leaders of cults. Rather they are the vehicles through which the political mission is delivered - Scottish independence, leaving the EU and a socialist Labour Party. So long as these leaders deliver - or seem to deliver - success their position is assured. Nicola Sturgeon is the First Minister of Scotland giving nationalists the hope that the mission is still achievable. And Corbyn looks likely to have his leadership affirmed by Labour members - a victory that, in the view of Momentum supporters, sustains that momentum towards 'socialism' (however loosely defined). If, for whatever reason, either of these positions falters does anyone think supporters won't turn to a different leader to take up the cause?

Cults are not made by confirmation bias or the clustering of people as communities of interest. Cults are deliberate creations that use ideologies - religious or political - as the vehicle for gaining and securing power for power's sake (although what is meant by power will vary). The adulation, the conspiracy theories, the aggressive defence of the mission, and a 'you're either with us or agin us' attitude that we see with political movements such as separatism are not features that define a cult even if they are things we'd superficially associate with cults.

What the solid, dependable centrists need to understand is that, very often, they fit the same pattern and description (if you don't believe me check out Liberal Democrat social media). Just because your mission is defined as 'mainstream' doesn't mean it doesn't take on those same cultic characters - clustering with like minds, aggression, adulation of leaders - that are falsely attached to separatist, far-left and right-wing causes.

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You WILL be happy - we will make you so!

The more I read about this obsession with “happiness” the more it sounds like some sort of hippy cult. Here’s the founder (or one of them) of “Action for Happiness”, which describes itself as a movement of people committed to building a happier society:

Lord Richard Layard, co-founder of Action for Happiness, said: ‘Our movement is based on a simple idea – if we want a happier society, individuals have got to create more happiness in the world around them. We want millions of people around the world to form Action for Happiness groups to do just that – using the tools which we are able to provide. This is a movement for radical cultural change which can provide the basis for a better culture in the 21st century.’

Now I’m in favour of smiles, hugs and cheering each other up – but forming some kind of “movement” to promote happiness is just creepy. And – if the state gets involved – quite scary. Welcome to our nascent Brave new World!

Our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel-and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get.

Some people seem to want a world with no tears, no anger, no edge, no grit in the shoe. It would be a dead world.

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