Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

1. Why do we collaborate in our own destruction? One of the answers, I think, is our determined commitment to irrelevance. We face massive, unprecedented challenges, but when you tune in to the most popular radio shows, you hear people talking all day about … nothing.

2. As climate and ecological breakdown happen at stupendous speed and scale, as democracy is hollowed out, as a handful of oligarchs accumulate massive economic and political power, we ensure that our heads are filled with meaningless noise.

3. If alien spaceships started incinerating our cities, and we turned on the radio, we'd be told “so the hot topic today is: what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to you while eating a kebab?”.

4. The great majority of what we listen to imparts no useful knowledge or understanding about our world. It feels like a defensive reaction: a determination not to know. I’ve come to believe that this frantic triviality is as dangerous as any propaganda.

5. It forms a loop. As our heads fill with determined irrelevance, it becomes socially impossible to talk about anything else. The mental shift required to discuss serious, crucial issues is too great.

6. Let’s not pretend this empty prattle is the preserve of the music stations. Most “political journalism” is court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. It studiously avoids what lies beneath: the dark money, the corruption, the shift of power away from democracy.

7. Even the literary pages of the newspapers are committed to gossip: highfalutin celebrity culture. The 23rd biography of a member of the Bloomsbury Set will get blanket reviews, while crucial books – such as The Good Ancestor and The Patterning Instinct – are completely ignored

8. It’s the kind of cultured small talk that TS Eliot, picking up the lyrics of a song, satirised in The Wasteland (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”). It fills our hours while time closes in.

9. So one answer to the question of why we collaborate in our own destruction is that we deliberately turn away from knowledge and understanding, and fill our heads with insistent chatter. It’s a subtle and insidious form of reactive denial.

10. Perhaps the denial reflex is inevitable in a species that's aware/not aware of its own mortality. But we have ramped it up in the 21st-century to the point at which it both dominates and threatens our lives.
Hurry up please, it’s time.