
Apparently world-savers don’t need to worry about the little people
Over the next several days, National Post will be resharing Rex Murphy’s best columns of all time. This one was originally published on Aug. 9, 2019.
Every little world-saver, and the big ones, too, are stars in their own private movie. They write and direct as well. The script never changes. They, and they alone, see a world in menace; they and they alone know, absolutely know, what the danger is and what the world must — must — do to avoid collapse and devastation. And that salvation always — always — means they must be granted the power to change the world and all it does, so that their vision and certitude can be validated.
Frequent world-saver Naomi Klein has a cause every half-decade, but the title of one of her books in particular, gives the trend: This Changes Everything. Naturally she was on about global warming, being the universal queen bee of protest politics. That title is the DNA of every radical — give way to my superior vision, let me change everything, and I, the social justice warrior superhero, will give you salvation.
Down in the states, another hero, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently released a Green New Deal with which to avoid “the extinction of life as we know it” — in 12 years no less. As a result the greatest economy in the world has to be, root and branch, transfigured and to a certainty, devastated in the process. Global warming, naturally, demands it.
A terrible hubris and arrogance walks with the world-savers. And I suppose if you think you’re the one to save all the world, it will inflate the ego a tad. It will also make you reckless, careless about lesser people, the “unanointed” — those outside the light, people who are not prophets and saviours, but who work, raise families, scrape by as best they can. Mere drones these.
You spend your life on platforms in front of microphones, daily preaching alarms and terrors, scatter yourself to great summits in the metropolises of the world, stay at exquisite hotels, and meet all sorts of pompous and important people who think exactly as you do. It’s electrifying. One minute you’ve saving the Maldives and fattening up the polar bears, the next you’re on to room service for a choice martini.