🔥 Hothouse Holocaust: Awaiting The Glory of Resistance
Humanity stands in the darkest valley — caught between denial and panic, waiting for the catastrophe that will finally break through our apathy.
This article was recorded down a prison phoneline. You can listen to the original audio with subtitles here.
On our present path, civilisation as we know it will disappear. Only if we meet current commitments — net zero by 2050 — perhaps some form of humanity will survive, managing the challenges of continuing extreme weather events, ice loss, and sea level and temperature rises.
Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, 2024.
What strikes you about the title Hothouse Holocaust? Well, obviously it's the “H” that starts each word, the way it rolls off the tongue. It's not really about what it’s saying; that somehow drifts into the background, some vague unpleasantness. The H’s — that’s the thing. Human beings, eh? We’re a strange bunch. I have this sneaking feeling that when it becomes official, and someone very important finally comes on telly to tell us, “Unfortunately, it is true. After all, we have left it too late. Climate collapse is now locked in; billions will now die” — when this happens, there will be a not-insignificant number of viewers who will be more interested in his tie being out of place or that there’s something wrong with his hair. Anything but what he is saying. Human beings...
We've heard it all before anyway. It’s been in the air for a long time; those not enmeshed in the mania of denial can smell it. It’s not good. It’s not going to end well. A week or so before writing this, it came out that the carbon sinks are collapsing. Last year they failed to absorb more carbon than they gave out — the forests, the soils, the oceans. It could not be worse news.
I did a tweet. I wrote “fuck” 4,657 times. Yes, I was wondering too whether that is a world record — at least from someone in prison.
The billionaire Elon Musk has given me £700 from his fortune for my efforts, so that’s something, I suppose.
It got 35 million views, but no one’s on the streets. That sums up our present moment. I don't want to sound overdramatic, but isn't there someone out there who agrees with me? We are living in the most morally decrepit time in human history — this unbearably surreal moment between reasonable denial and panic-stricken action; the darkest valley of spiritual death, where we can no longer deny but not yet act. We can click on the tweet by the tens of millions, but going to the street? “Make me good, but not yet.” Each day is just a waiting, waiting for that one-in-a-million-chance climate event that is now going to happen once a decade for the next hundred thousand years — which finally breaks through, that kills tens of millions of Black people or a few hundred thousand white people (after all, racism has not gone away, right? Let’s at least be honest about that).
Waiting, waiting, waiting, and then it happens.
The phone rings. It’s some rich person in a mad panic; he’s never donated money in the past, but now he wants to give us millions. Each day of waiting for that phone call means more uncountable, unique lives are condemned to slow, agonizing starvation. I play with variations on the most human of reasonable responses: “You fucking idiot, you should have given it 10 years ago. Now it’s too fucking late.”
I’m reading George Bataille at the moment, the forgotten French thinker who, in the cauldron of hell that was the period of the First and Second World Wars, believed the only consolation was that real idealism was a fraud, cynicism worse. Early on, he realized the most important human attribute is laughter in response to our “thrownness” into this life, as Heidegger put it. Bataille would not have been published by the Guardian for reasons not unlike why they won't publish me. I got one or two pieces in at the beginning of the Extinction Rebellion period, but as soon as I got real — well, that was the end of that.
What's the phrase? Knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing. The Guardian does the facts about the climate crisis but none of the meaning, because the facts apparently are sacred, and so the meaning must be profane. Which is why they say liberalism is not able to stop fascism. I’m writing this just before Trump wins the election. Harris gives the facts; Trump gives meaning. And any social observer who is interested in the real — the really real — knows which one wins out. Evil is dull. I suggest we follow St. Augustine on this — after all, he fought about it a lot — and accept that evil is simply the distortion of the good, a lack of the good, in which case what we face is a total wipeout of the good. But evil, even in its absoluteness, is still dull.
There are always the bad guys, no? What makes the blood really boil, what makes you stride around the room in an uncontrollable rage, is hypocrisy. And even worse, betrayal. That great Liberal lie — that I am good, I am upright, I act upon the facts. It is simply not true. You believe in the facts as a substitute for believing in anything else, because to believe in what the facts mean would force you to have to start to live. You would have to move out of the comfort zone of your economic privilege, your secular nihilism.
What matters now is life itself. Not preserving life — that is in the hands of powers beyond our understanding now. What I mean is the decision to live a life now rather than sitting there, clicking, stewing, waiting. What will save us is if and when enough people start to live their life, the life they have been given — that one chance in X trillion that each of us is. Who think it’s a little ungrateful not to take up the offer? Personally, I find myself opting for Neoplatonism. It has a certain mysterious ring to it, don’t you think? The realisation that love, truth, beauty — they’re all one thing, and that one thing is God.
We are put onto the stage of life to choose. The right choice is to choose God. We all know what that means; we just need to stop reading the facts and listen for a moment, for the signal in the noise. This is the right choice — a choice of love, truth, beauty. My fellow human beings, it means to enter into the glory of Resistance.
Roger Hallam
Her Majesty’s Prison Wayland, UK, October 2024
As always, you can sign up for nonviolent civil resistance with Just Stop Oil in the UK or via the A22 Network internationally. If you want to get involved in the democratic revolution, join an upcoming Welcome to Assemble talk.
