So, you disagree with our beloved leader? That’s okay. We still have freedom of speech here. Let me get your names down and off you go and play.

Then comes the knocks in the night…

Johnny and Mary aren’t in school today, boys and girls? That’s okay… I have a feeling you won’t see them for a while. Best to forget about them…

Gosh, I thought the teacher was going to turn out to be a Slitheen or some other sort of Doctor Who like alien…

But no, she was human…All Too Human…

There’s one thing I always meant to ask Jack. Back in the old days. I wanted to know about that Doctor of his. The man who appears out of nowhere and saves the world. Except sometimes he doesn’t. All those times in history when there was no sign of him, I wanted to know why not. But I don’t need to ask any more. I know the answer now. Sometimes the Doctor must look at this planet and turn away in shame.

Why paranoid I ask ?

It is a common feature of extremists that they believe they are doing it in a good cause; that the ends justify the means. If your cause is saving the world, is it not logical that any means necessary are justified to achieve it?

We have a problem in my country with animal rights protesters who have taken to terrorist methods against businesses they oppose. James Jay Lee did it in America. Greenpeace recently used the “we know where you live” line to warn deniers.

Luckily, people who think we should actually go that far are a small minority.

But its presence has an influence on the wider movement. There is a tendency towards intolerance and dehumanisation of dissent. An attempt to make it socially unacceptable, evidence of stupidity or malice, not worth listening to.

And it’s already happened. Teachers already do political advocacy for Green politics, and it would be a brave child who stood up against a teacher and the rest of the class to express a contrary view. Employers already do the same, mostly for more cynical reasons it has to be said, and there are few employees independent enough to speak up against the boss.
No, mostly people will stick their hands up in support in public, and then ignore it in private. They don’t believe, but they’re not going to make their own lives any harder by opposing it.

But that’s just the first stage. Once you have made it socially unacceptable to speak in defence of scepticism, you can then introduce stronger methods of encouragement without anyone being able to object. Not execution, of course, but regulation and compulsion.

And that’s what scares people about this video – that it portrays a ridiculously exaggerated version of this already worrying tendency. We’re not worried that you’re actually planning to do it, we’re worried that you’re already in the mindset where you would find it funny. Where you don’t even seem to notice that the authoritarian message it sends is horrifying.

The scariest bit of the movie was not the explosions, but the teacher’s speech leading up to it.

But I’m sure that next time a teacher or employer tries to get people to follow along, the words “no pressure” will make an amusing and useful riposte.

People are familiar with dystopian future archetypes like Orwell’s 1984, as well as being familiar with past events associated with authoritarian regimes. You tread on such subjects lightly, and if you’re going to joke about them, it needs to be a sufficiently clever and worthwhile joke to make it worth it.

The thing is, the 10:10 film seems to have stumbled into the role accidentally without realising it, and have thus bungled doing anything clever with it that might have justified arousing those images. You see the shocking set-up, wait for the punch line…, and there isn’t one. This gives the strong impression that the authoritarian aspect of it wasn’t intended as a joke, that they really meant it. That they didn’t even recognise the evil inherent in this behaviour.

People inside the movement implicitly see themselves as the good guys, their methods justified by the high character of their ends, and thus any sort of comparison of this sort is literally unthinkable, not to be taken seriously.

But for people outside the in-group, who do not share the same world view, who have perhaps found some of the things Greens have said or done a bit bossy and intrusive but mostly don’t take them very seriously, it comes as a shock. For those who have been watching the Deep Greens for a long time, who know about Linkola and Ehrlich, who were not surprised on reading James Jay Lee’s manifesto, their astonishment is that here Greens are openly shouting out in public what they had previously only been able to infer indirectly, or through obscure channels.

Worse, from 10:10′s point of view, it makes a total joke of the situation when the management stand up now and try to persuade their staff to take part in the 10:10 campaign. Instead of an awkward peer-pressure moment, it becomes a humorous opportunity for subtle allusions to red buttons. Rather than increasing the social pressure to conform, it has defused it. (Or turned it into something a whole lot more unpleasant.)

People will get over their offence and disgust quickly, but this is a blow that the Green movement will not quickly recover from. It will become a joke. That’s a lot more of an problem for Greens than it is for sceptics.

I actually thought the one with the soccer coaches/players was a little funny and came the closest to be on point.

However, those first two segments showing people in authority blowing up their subordinates for disobeying suggestions were beyond creepy.

Very well said.

Thanks for reading and commenting, good ideas and points all around.

Personally, I didn’t think that this video would have shocked me, but it kind of did. I also don’t like that it really didn’t try to make a point about climate change–but I guess its point was to get out the word about this 10:10 movement, not prove to people that climate change is happening.

It’s been successful in that respect, at least.

Jen