We were supposed to go another way, but because it landed in the Climate Narrative across a handful of posts - prompted by events in society - let's put a frame around it.
The climate is changing.
The climate is one phenomenon.
The Climate Narrative is another.
The first is physics. The second is something that has torn itself loose from the physics and taken on a completely different form. It is that form I almost always write about - and what actually interests me.
A little over two handfuls of years ago, I began asking myself a question that wouldn't let me go.
It went something like -
"Why is it so important for some people to maintain their position regarding the climate?
Why do they behave as if they themselves are being attacked, when we discuss and debate one of the most complex phenomena that exists?
When something new appears, when reasonable questions with documentable data emerge, when some of the world's leading authorities show up and pose deep questions to the premise, when parts of the narrative are dismantled with logic and facts - why don't they change their position?
Why do they react as if something in them has been threatened, and not as if something in the debate has been adjusted?
What is actually going on?"
I have carried that question with me since. The answer came slowly, and it only came when I stopped looking for it inside the climate itself - after conversations with scientists, psychologists, historians, philosophers and theologians.
Because the same pattern has shown itself before.
It showed itself in communism, where the proletariat was the chosen people, the revolution was the Judgment, and the classless society was Paradise on the other side of blood and fire.
It showed itself in Nazism, where the blood was the sacred, the race was the chosen, and the thousand-year reich was the eschaton they marched toward.
It shows itself in identity politics, where skin color is original sin, anti-racism is the sacrament, and the privileged is the damned who can never be saved.
AND it shows itself in the Climate Narrative.
These are not four different phenomena. It is one form that has found four different shapes. Because the pattern does not lie in the climate, not in race, not in class. The pattern lies in Man himself.
The hypnosis does not work by convincing. It works by drawing on something that already lies in Man.
Man - no matter where we meet him on the planet - is created with a vertical axis. He has a sense of sin, a need to make his sin right again, a longing to belong to something greater than himself, and a deep intuition that history is leading somewhere. This inner architecture is not a cultural addition, it is a fundamental structure deep inside us. You can tear down the cathedrals, abolish baptism, forbid the Lord's Prayer in schools, but you cannot tear the form itself out of the man who remains.
And there the hypnosis begins.
Because when the original faith, connection and orientation are torn away, the need does not disappear with them. The need becomes homeless. It wanders around looking for another room to step into.
Let's take the Climate Narrative as an example, and see the pattern.
It offers sin - CO2. It offers Judgment - climate catastrophe. It offers penance - flight shame, meat shame, car shame, sorting, indulgence payments. It offers a chosen people - the enlightened. It offers a priesthood - the experts. It offers salvation - the green transition. And it offers an eschaton - an end to history, where the righteous remain standing, and the ignorant perish (that's people like me).
Insert one of the other names into the same schema, and it fits just as well.
Let me be precise. Not everyone who has a climate concern is caught in the narrative. But those who are, you know them by one thing: nothing can move them.
Nothing about it is a political position. It is a religion that refuses to call itself a religion. But that is exactly what it is.
A narrative the believer lives inside, deeply hypnotized and convinced of the Truth. A Truth that is unassailable, because the priesthood is closed and the holy book is sealed. The conclusions have been made. The Science Is Settled. Exactly as the Quran stands untouchable and infallible, only assailable if one is willing to pay the price for the attempt.
Because the believers are fierce in defense of their sanctuary. And each time it is challenged, it only strengthens their belief that they are right.
This is not new. Every time a prophecy in history has failed, the believers have not dissolved - they have tightened ranks and found new explanation for why the prophecy still holds. The pattern is the same now.
Therefore no numbers can touch it.
Numbers speak to the intellect. Hypnosis speaks to the layer in Man that lies beneath the intellect, and which the intellect itself cannot reach. The layer that wants to belong, wants to be good, wants to be on the right side, wants a meaning to it all. The layer that cannot bear that life is just life, and that one must find the sacred in oneself instead of having it delivered by a movement.
And because the need in Man is real, the substitute feels real. It hits something true. Just not what it claims to hit.
That is what makes the hypnosis so difficult to wake from.
You cannot argue a person out of it. You can only point to what he actually sought, before he found the surrogate.
Man needs sin, because he has always known that he owed. He needs Judgment, because he has always known that he was seen. He needs salvation, because he has always known that he could not carry himself home.
And there also lies the answer to why Christianity in particular is met with such persistent, such insistent, such never-resting hostility.
Christianity is not threatening because it is old-fashioned. It is threatening because it is true. It does not give a small modern identity to cling to. It gives the deep answer to why Man is here at all, and what he should do with the sin he always knew he owed.
It gives the answers all the surrogates only pretend to give.
Therefore it must go.
Not because it is weak, but because it is the only one that can expose the lie. The only one that can stand beside the climate church, the identity church, the class church, the race church and by its mere presence reveal that the others were costumes all along.
That is what the opposition fears. Not that Christianity wins a debate. But that it exposes the Lie so everyone can see it.
Give Man that back, and the hypnosis loses its power.
I will show what it is in the architecture of Christianity that constitutes the opposite movement to hypnosis. How it is orchestrated differently than everything else. And why it delivers the freedom and orientation toward truth that none of the surrogates can. Follow along, if that is something for you.
Accept nothing but a direction that points toward more truth. Not small closed lies. No matter how much money lies in them. No matter how good it feels in your gut, that others see you briefly as the good one, the pure one, the righteous one.
You were not born for a lie - and you do not need a costume.
You need to come home.
❤️🔥🪽
