Ian Welsh Virtually Speaking with Jay Ackroyd

Jay and Ian Welsh continue the discussion rerun last week regarding the need to develop a new ideology in the face of the failure of our technocratic centrist elite to  deal with the consequences of the petroleum economy:

A powerful ideology is a scary thing. If your ideology isn’t strong enough, doesn’t create enough fervent belief that people will die for it, then it won’t change the world.  But if it does create that level of fervent belief, then it will be misused, so the question is simply: will this do more harm than good?

An ideology which leads to us killing a billion or more people with climate change, let me posit, is a bad ideology.  At the end of its run, neo-liberalism will kill more people than Marxist-Leninism did, and will be thought of by our grandchildren as monstrous.  Most of them will no more be able to understand how we submitted to it or even believed in it than we can understand how Hitler or Stalin or PolPot or Mao came to power.  Hyperbole?  Not in the least, because the body count is going to be phenomenal.