The wildfires which have devastated Los Angeles of late have been harrowing to watch, and in more ways than one.
Of course there is the baseline level of human decency, where it pains us to watch people lose everything. Their homes. Their pets. Their neighbourhoods. It was one thing to know these things intellectually by reading the newspaper, but now we watch them flee through flame and smoke via seemingly endless videos online. Even divorced from all political contexts, it weighs heavy on the heart.
Then we have the increasingly prevalent voices of those who see such a disaster and cannot help but attach a conspiracy theory to it. Like U.S. congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who asked “why don’t they just use geo-engineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down?”
Lest this seem like a reasonable request, because cloud seeding is a real process that can produce rain in certain conditions, keep in mind that Greene is among those who contended that the government was responsible for producing the severe hurricanes of this past season. This vein of conspiracy-theorism often points to cloud seeding being real as an excuse to then blame the government for basically any weather event, specifically ones cloud seeding could never produce.
For the record, cloud seeding requires already-present clouds to be stimulated into raining, which is not viable for drought stricken California.
But aside from ridiculous conspiracy theories and crass political opportunism, there is something more subtle and pernicious that ought to be addressed. There was a recent news story about how in the wake of these fires, some Los Angeles landlords were illegally raising their rents up to 134 per cent.
Disaster capitalism is nothing new. Of course there is the more macro-systemic issue one could be talking about when discussing disaster capitalism, thoroughly deconstructed in the fantastic work of journalist Naomi Klein.
But for our purposes, we will focus on the more ground-level form. For example, a person who buys up a large cache of bottled water, knowing that the supply in stores will run out and consumers will be forced to purchase that necessary good from their personal supply at an outrageous mark-up.
This is the practice these landlords are engaged in. And it was striking the manner in which some people were lining up to defend the practice in the comment section of this story.
There were no wild conspiracies necessary. Just a complete outsourcing of one’s own moral judgment to the principles of free-market economics.
The defenders seemed to find it laughable that the landlords do anything else. What enterprising individual could let such an opportunity pass? An “unexpected demand windfall” for landlords is how one commenter described the destruction of thousands of homes.
This slavish devotion to entry-level economic principles falls well within the category of religious fundamentalism, where one need not exercise their own judgment and can spout thought-killing dogma which brokers no room for further discourse. Ironically, many of these libertarian types are the quickest to label those who disagree with them as NPCs, or non-player characters one might find in video games. As if it isn’t they themselves parroting predictable reactionary responses to any and all stimuli.
Unfortunately, given the current political climate, the U.S. and soon Canada will be under regimes that view things like morality and the environment as “economic externalities.” In other words, things that do not need to be seriously considered in economic assessments.
And I fear in the wake of this there will be another such outsourcing of morality.
Because liberal democracy can serve as such a crutch, where people convince themselves that because they’ve gone out and voted for the good guy (or against the bad guy) that they’ve done all they can. Our society is geared towards convincing the citizenry that we are primarily consumers of products and services, and occasional political actors who get a semi-consequential vote every few years.
Do not let voting be your opiate.
It is imperative that we direct more energy into our communities than the occasional casting of a ballot. To roll over simply because we have been outvoted is tacit acceptance of this system which increasingly values offering economic windfalls to the shareholder class at the expense of the working class that the democracy ostensibly ought to serve.
We need to educate ourselves in moral philosophy and look out for each other, as it becomes ever more clear that we cannot rely on the powers that be for either. Lest we all succumb to this economic dogma which insists we are all little more than numbers on a spreadsheet.
Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.
