A Two-Faced Future
This book is Janus-faced. Its seductive face is the awareness of the climate problem, barely fictionalized and accessible to any reader. Its ugly face is the way to solve it, which is worthless. Why? Robinson is unaware of his initial assumptions and quickly sinks into inconsistencies. How can we predict the future and influence it when the entire book is based on a common but untenable presupposition? This premise is that of egalitarianism, at the heart of Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, yet which has nevertheless produced the most unequal society in the world. Shouldn’t such a paradox challenge Robinson when it comes to saving the planet? The time is urgent, so Robinson charges ahead, oblivious to the heavy boots he has put on, which will weigh down his stride.
Apology for Violence
Robinson pulls out all the stops. His book blends a wide variety of genres: documentary, political thriller, Stockholm syndrome, migration drama, scientific expedition, and improbable romance. The interest in such different subjects is too inconsistent, leading one to skip entire chapters. One goes from boredom to astonishment. For example, Robinson openly endorses climate terrorists, the new “children of Kali.” There’s no other way to make things happen than assassinating world leaders, shooting down planes, and capturing and reeducating the rich, we discover as the pages turn.
Robinson is careful not to go straight to the podium to encourage violence. He returns through the back door, noting that murderous actions are the only ones that produce results. We can’t count on people being held accountable! But, dear Mr. Robinson, are the rich the only ones affected? Is the average citizen really responsible? Are the underprivileged frugal on purpose, or because they have no choice and have even worse consumerist dreams than others? In reality, don’t terrorists have the most dismal carbon footprint in the world, due to their destruction and the necessary repairs? All this for actions that most often fail?
Manichean, Robinson would like to numb us to the deaths of the “bad guys,” the rich and, by extension, their families and collateral victims, then deeply move us to the deaths of the “good guys,” the killers of the former and those opposed to laissez-faire. The Ministry of the Future, a new Disney film?
Sour soup
All the Wokeisms are summoned and blended into a vile soup, a sort of ecological fast food where the contradictory flavors are smoothed over by quick humor. When the return of wild animals also means the return of predators, Robinson solves the problem with a brief witticism. “The deer will be less appreciative of the wolves’ reappearance,” remarks one protagonist. But doesn’t human society also have its prey and its predators? Is Nature supremely just in one place and entirely unjust in another?
Robinson sidesteps the problem of human population figures, pointing out anecdotally that the tens of millions of deaths that occurred after the heatwaves in his novel significantly contributed to the reduction in the carbon footprint. This fits neither with the premise of Kind Nature nor the Sacredness of human life. Robinson moves on, preferring to continue his list of heroic wokeisms while others fiercely fight over the number of humans that should be tolerated on the planet.
The End of Capitalism and a Return to Stalinism
The book is well-researched, that’s for sure, but it doesn’t offer any original ideas. After consuming the endless lists of glaciers and endangered species, the reader sees nothing emerging from this shower of data. No synthesis, no organization into a comprehensive theory. I expected better from the author, who wants us to recolonize Earth after recounting the story of Mars. Science fiction authors are usually good nexialists.
Robinson’s plan is a jumble of hackneyed Manichaeisms about our society. Primary anti-capitalism, a focus on the ultra-rich, a Rousseau-esque vision of a fundamentally good and sharing human being, moderns freed from the errors of the past, etc. Robinson is not a historian and only looks to the future. His binary thinking leads to equally common contradictions: liberalism savaged in economics but kept sacred for the individual. Robinson thus imagines a cumbersome bureaucracy controlling affairs while ordinary citizens live freely in an anarchic regime. Has he forgotten that this was the exact ambition of the former Soviet Russia, which degenerated into a giant internment camp under Stalin?
Egalitarian Egocentrism
Robinson’s egalitarian postulate leads the planet to a two-way destiny, which one of his characters crudely summarizes as follows: “Either we get through this together, or we shoot ourselves in the head together.” I don’t know if he believes this is how to define solidarity, but it’s the exact opposite. True solidarity consists of sacrificing oneself for others. It’s the ego that finds it unbearable to see a better fate than its own.
Egalitarianism, with its 1=1 equation for humans, calculates a simplistic result for the planet: if it can’t support eight billion inhabitants enjoying equal living conditions, half of them must be eliminated —an estimate quickly cited by Robinson. Yet another remarkable outcome of this wok-like, lunar pseudo-solidarity, which doesn’t hesitate to simultaneously declare itself an opponent of voluntary euthanasia.
The book was recently translated into French but was written in 2020, before Trump’s re-election. The Future already seems to be mocking Robinson with the popular rejection of wokeism, on which his rescue strategy is based. So, is it over? Are we definitively doomed? Of course not. But we must stop paralyzing minds with horrifying data, without the slightest practical solution, when everyone has to deal with more everyday and urgent problems.
Bunkerization of the Future
Let’s stop the stupid comparisons between every corner of the planet. Each is a particular social ecosystem with its own specific difficulties. A local problem is solved in a local circle, while the rest must be delegated to those who make the best world citizens, because they have the means. These means are not acquired by reading “The Ministry of the Future” but through decades of advanced intellectual training and openness to consensus. Wokeism, let’s note, is the exact opposite path: instant training and closureness.
Robinson makes only one correct prediction: decision-makers are locking themselves in bunkers to try to escape omnipresent Woke terrorism. He fulfills his prediction by doing the same thing with his book: he locks the mind in Woke terrorism, except this time the enemy is within, ordering the liquidation of bankers, the rich, CEOs, cops, mayors —all decision-makers, in fact. Presiding becomes contrary to right-thinking.
Submerged humanity survives like mussels
If we had effective representation, we would be led by the minds with the highest resources and not by those preoccupied with putting on a show, whether they be Trumpist copies of the ordinary voter or influencers with their eyes fixed on their follower count. Is the world more likely to be saved by public entertainers who pander to the crowds, or by good managers who seek out the discerning eyes?
Is advocating wokeness, as Robinson does, really encouraging the desire to belong to something greater, or flattering egos clinging to their idealisms like mussels to their rocks? Perhaps this is the first sign of rising waters. We are all becoming mussels…
Science-Emotion Author
Robinson, like a good author of popular fiction, wants to save the planet by awakening our emotions. Wrong! Emotions are today the biggest target of merchandising, manipulated by everyone, especially those who claim otherwise. These moods are manipulated to the depths of the unconscious, yet the majority of us continue to believe them to be true, especially young people who haven’t yet learned to distrust them.
We trust what we don’t see, these vividly blooming emotions whose roots are invisible. Before an army of consultants and bots sought to profit from them, this was actually an advantage, because a host of things will always remain invisible to us. We lost no confidence in it. But today, who can trust an unconscious manipulated in the shadows? The networks have transformed us into a band of suspicious conspiracy theorists.
Empirical or Anti-Pyrrhic Retreat
There remains reason. The only one that reveals everything, even its underbelly. Just because it’s the only honest actor of consciousness doesn’t make it the “I’m-always-right” one. Some reasons are stupider than others; in fact, note: it doesn’t take long to find one stupider than yours. Which implies that ours is also stupid for someone else. A great inequality hidden in the equality of stupidity!
Reason grows and matures by collectivizing. Not just any old way. Not by having the crowd vote on the correct course of action. By collectivizing the best skills. By ranking them. The most useful vote? The one that abstains because it considers itself lacking the skills. If we were truly collective, honestly activating this withdrawal, only true skills would remain.
At the end of “Ministry of the Future,” Robinson’s world is saved. A Pyrrhic victory, where the losses are so heavy that they amount to a defeat. What if we tried anti-pyrrhicism, for a true victory?
*