Guilt Money

Neither Obama nor the New York Times goes through any serious motions of pretending that the Copenhagen conference achieved anything like its insane goal of an enforceable global cap-and-trade agreement. Copenhagen is a big nothing, as it was destined to be.

What accounts for the bottomless insanity of constructing and believing a palpably fraudulent end-of-the-world scenario that requires, as the only way to save the world, the mass transfer of wealth from the productive West to the non-productive non-West? I would suggest this answer.

Great wealth and great well-being, particularly in a democratic age, and particularly if the wealth has not been earned by personal effort, makes people feel guilty for their advantages and implants in them a compulsion to eliminate the inequality between themselves and less well-off people. In short, great wealth makes people-and indeed whole societies-take leave of reality and embrace suicidal ideas, or ideas that would be suicidal if they were consistently applied. The modern democratic West has great wealth. The West utterly transcends most of the non-Western world in its material success and comforts. Therefore it has taken leave of reality and considers itself guilty for existing. Further, as a result of the West’s dominant material and cultural influence, non-Westerners pick up on the Western message of Western evil and willingly enact their designated role in the Western script as the righteous victims of Western evil, demanding, as a right, that the West’s wealth be handed over to it. Thus global cap-and-trade. – Nik Schiffmann