The Ground Zero Fallacy & the Banality of Heroism

The social theorist Mark Fisher drew attention to a deep problem in modern thought when he wrote Capitalist Realism — “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”¹. Slavoj Zizek reframed it as: “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism”². The evidence of this lies all around us in the cottage industry of dystopian science fiction, especially in film and TV. From the Walking Dead to Bladerunner to Day After Tomorrow our society is infused with visions of the world ending, ironically all whilst generating substantial returns to capital. But there is very little evidence of a world that should offer us more hope. I’m old enough to remember reading comics that imagined a future filled with flying cars and walkways in the sky. But as Peter Thiel said at Yale: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” (27 Apr 2013).

As someone who is concerned about our current trajectory as a species this idea of capitalist realism rang true but also incomplete. This kind of thinking around climate change and nuclear war so often leaves us stuck in binary options. We are either brushing it off in some kind of naïve denial or end up accepting it as some dreadful inevitability. Climate change deniers often have to resort to speculative projections about the inaccuracy of the models they criticise but did not build. Will the final situation for climate change be quite as bad as the worst predictions seem to indicate? Probably not, all things considered, but is that really the point? Isn’t the issue that we have a significant problem which we face globally and which poses an existential dilemma that’s not easily resolved by a zealot for either side?

The ‘carnival’ of capitalism³ that many see is occurring because we have eroded civilisation through creative destruction accelerating to the point that our society eats itself. It is not the speed or force of the change which yields the impotency of the response but the nature of the choice it presents. We either sacrifice nature for a material growth that is uncertain because of the destruction of nature — why are we doing this? Or we yield to restraining material growth to harmonise with nature but seeing the avoidable poverty this creates are then faced with the same question — why are we doing this? If we are to hope for something better how should we square this circle?

The Ground Zero Fallacy

Solving apparently contradictory positions usually yields two kinds of response. Often people react apathetically and throw their hands in the air. Or, people feel they do have a solution and they hold to the dogma of their belief even in the face of contrary evidence. Sometimes they temper this with the acknowledgement that the solution won’t quite close the loop. But they feel its appropriate when we find contradictions to stand firm — better to have done something than to simply sit and watch the decay. It is this second reaction — of conviction — that I feel we need to explore. We have the impression when we discuss our ideas about politics and society that we are dealing with a blank slate. Since we are discussing things in an imaginative sense it seems reasonable to act with a total permission. To do whatever we might want to society in the service of whatever argument we are making. We imagine our solutions arising out of the earth, overnight, effortlessly, as if it was sat ready, ripe, and waiting for us to simply command it to grow. So we describe reality as if it fails to meet our needs and in a single breath we then lay it to waste and build our grand utopia without so much as a stutter. We have rebuilt the world from Ground Zero.

But in reality there is no ground zero to work from. Instead there is the long and arduous road to change our world. The cost of sustaining and maintaining a broken system whilst we build up the new one behind. The need for the new to occur ‘problem-free’ so we do not doubt the capability of our leaders to fix the problem. We must destroy the old ways of thinking, working, acting and believing, for being broken, whilst sustaining the impression that the new ways will solve those same problems. This requires technocratic acts of faith as we all have to go around imagining those in charge can actually ‘pull it off’. That the delicate balance of life we’ve built in our current civilisation isn’t jeopardised by yet more over zealous political interference. The partial failure of a part delivered solution is often the cause of the very budgetary changes and revisions to the original idea that then mean it never quite gets where we had originally intended. The fallacy therefore is in focusing on the outcome and efficacy of the preconceived solution and in not considering the cost or difficulty of its implementation.

I was working in Marble arch in 2019 when Extinction Rebellion camped outside my office and made their loudest call for change (at that time). Their headline banner was ‘tell the truth’. Whilst I comprehend the reasons they were asking for this and sympathise that part of our problem is an ostrich headed approach to potential Armageddon I feel compelled to ask: ‘what do you want the truth to look like’? During 2020 vehicle use in the UK dropped by 25% (c.125 billion kilometres). Emissions from electricity generation have dropped 70% since 1990. We have dropped 50% of total emissions since 1990 in Million Tonnes of CO2 equivalents — so not just carbon dioxide but all green house gases (c.800 MTCO2e vs c.400 MTCO2e)⁴. These look like significant milestones when viewed across the expanse of time and yet we’ve been told repeatedly that our efforts don’t go nearly far enough. But if a pandemic which shutdown our economy and locked us in our homes for months cannot reduce our production of CO² to acceptable levels what would a ‘truthful’ solution even look like?

There are intelligent people working on this problem who have answers to these questions. We can replace many plastics with plant based materials. We can run our transport on energy produced from renewable sources. We can insulate our homes to a greater degree and eliminate much of the wasted energy. A concerted effort directed at these problems could sensibly replace much of our wasteful civilisation with one that works in harmony with the planet. I am far from pessimistic on this challenge. But utopian visions of tomorrow don’t feed the poor today. I think the tougher question is to ask how we could make these solutions palatable when they ask us to make radical changes to both our current lives and our aspirations. If we cannot travel on planes in the future, or if that travel is severely limited then the lives of many globalised expatriates starts to look very different. The significant number of Asians living in the UK will not easily be able to visit family. Should we therefore expect to bring as many of their close family over here as possible? If not, how would we communicate this to large numbers of Indians, Pakistanis and Chinese without it coming across as a racist choice?

The Gilet Jaunes movement in France arose in reaction to increased fuel duties but had a strong riposte to the establishment figures who claimed they were merely anti-environment: “we assert fin du monde, fin du mois (end of the world, end of the month) — same logic, same struggle”⁵. The Giles Jaunt movement highlighted that such a large country as France, having based so much of its retail and economic infrastructure on out of town developments had made people reliant on cars. You can’t export jobs out of the country whilst exporting work to the outside of town and not expect fuel costs and the minimum wage to become serious concerns. We cannot make the transition to a green economy without making significant changes to the way we live. But for many of us, how we live is not a lifestyle but a means of survival.

I don’t mean to sound uncharitable. Extinction Rebellion is full of people who are more than aware of these issues and are deeply committed to justice for the Global South. It’s precisely part of why they became so upset about the lack of action on the environment in the first place. Rather what I am trying to highlight is that in order to make the change to something better we need a wiser vision than the dystopia of a barren wasteland beset by super storms and war. We need visions of flying cars but they should be a widening of the Overton window, not a comic book fantasy.

The Banality of Heroism

Opening this window may not be a case of throwing the latch off. We might have to force it open first. But perhaps we can all start by recognising that the visions of doom we are surrounded by push us to an impossible stalemate. We can only feel negatively about these possibilities and whilst a realistic, mature, sense of fear is sensible, what if the fact that we show ourselves this terrible image of who we are makes it all the more believable? We desire the bad outcome precisely because it’s supposed inevitability makes it impossible to stop and therefore releases us from any burden to make change. Greta Thunberg would like us to panic because our house is on fire⁶. The imagery is evocative and the sense of urgency is not unwarranted if some of the major scientific predictions for a rise over 2 degrees prove accurate. But the danger of panic is precisely its lack of rationality, its ability to balance the threat with the degree of reaction warranted. The existence of so many bad outcomes in capitalism arises because the only way we can reconcile competing claims of rights in a material sense is to perform some calculation that economises the value of human life and the natural world. We build civilisations that require smartphones to function but supply them via mines filled with the poorest people digging in unsafe circumstances. We build a chaos of rewards⁷ deep in our civilisation where the benefits must go to a ‘winner’ who only pays as much as is necessarily required, not what is due to all the contributing parties, some of whom may go totally uncompensated. Those who make our world are often not the ones benefitting the most from its construction. We live in a world where the accident of birth and luck of the draw run rampant through our institutions and structures.

Breaking out of this mode of working requires not just shiny new technologies but a way of life which doesn’t place us at odds with ourselves. Doing the right thing shouldn’t be something our institutions make us afraid of pursuing. Indeed the fact that we so often find ourselves wedged between what we should do morally and what’s ‘left in the budget’ should be a strong hint that our organisations are skewed to doing the wrong things. Reversing this course of behaviour requires changing the structures of our world but a first step will be something we all can take. Perhaps we could expand beyond the stalemate by asking: what if hope can be a self fulfilling prophecy in the same way as fear is? The power of hope is to deepen appreciation and widen perspective on what is desirable and also possible. If we can be evil in a banal ‘ordinary’ sense, if we can act as little Eichmann’s, enabling the global machine of capitalist destruction to roll over the natural world like a bulldozer, then maybe, as Philip Zimbardo points out⁸, we can also be brave, the same way, in a banality of heroism. What if we could make being a hero as banal as the evil we seek to destroy? The mocking dismissal of protest by governments and the media is often under the guise of assuming it has an insignificant impact. But the greatest impact of that kind of bravery is then when it assumes a simple banality. If it seems ordinary to do such a brave thing, if it does not strike us as unrealistic or impossible but instead as the only sensible option, then we will have arrived at place where hope truly overcomes the cynicism.

For those reading this who feel i’ve merely been a messenger of doom or naivety please note that i’m working on solutions and this blog is amongst them. You’ll find some tentative suggestions in other articles. As ever the first part of dealing with a problem is acknowledging that you have one. With thanks to Andy Wheeler, Andy Harrod, Matt Malone and Kevin Harris for reading and discussing drafts of this essay with me.

References

1. Fisher, Mark (2010). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Winchester, UK: Zero Books. p.2
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
3. Zizek, S., & Tolokonnikova, N. (2014). Comradely greetings: The prison letters of Nadya and Slavoj. Verso Books. p.58
4. 2020 UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Final Figures, National Statistics, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, 1 Feb 2022
5. Simon Fairlie, (2019), End of the world, End of the Month, Land Magazine, https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/end-month-end-world, accessed 31.03.2022
6. Thunberg, G, (2019), No one is too small to make a difference, Penguin, p.24
7. Young, J. (1999). The exclusive society: Social exclusion, crime and difference in late modernity. Sage.
8. Zimbardo, P. (2011). The Lucifer effect: How good people turn evil. Random House. pgs. 485–487