A recent report claims that people in European countries such as Norway, France, the UK and Germany are experiencing significant stress and symptoms of mental disorder due to “climate change.”
I find it interesting. The governments of these countries have strict environmentalist policies. They preach global warming, climate change, restrictions on fossil fuels or whatever the latest weather forecast suggests to be the newest political narrative. Shouldn’t people in these countries be LESS upset and stressed, if they’re really comfortable their governments are taking care of the problem?
These European nations are also democratically socialist. They all enjoy cradle-to-grave socialized medicine, unemployment insurance, retirement insurance, paid family leave and just about everything else imaginable. You think they’d be less anxious rather than more anxious. You think they’d have confidence in government’s trustworthiness to rescue them from anything and everything, real or imagined.
Unfortunately, you can’t cheat reality. Our natures as human beings require rational intelligence. We cannot be mentally serene and healthy unless we engage in critical thinking. Being taken care of by the government might seem comforting, until we realize we have placed all our liberties and destinies in the hands of that same government. Politicians are deciding the course of their lives. Now that’s scary! It makes total psychological sense that people who live in countries with more democratic socialism, rather than less, experience more anxiety about anything.
Here’s what citizens of Norway, France, the UK and Germany desperately need: Critical thinking. (Americans need it too.) Consider and weigh all the evidence both for and against climate change. Consider not just the damage actually or allegedly done to the planet and environment by man’s use of fossil fuels; consider and weigh the benefits, as well. Consider the fact that if fossil fuels disappeared from the planet tomorrow, millions and possibly billions would die. Life as we know it would grind to a complete halt. Fossil fuels save far more lives than they destroy, assuming they actually destroy any at all. The onus of proof is on environmentalists to show how our lives will be better without fossil fuels than with them. And claiming they can forecast the weather decades and centuries into the future, when we can barely forecast it 3 days ahead, does not constitute a reason.
A good state of mental health means relying on more sources than your government to tell you what’s true. Government, even in democratic socialist countries, has a vested interest in control. While it’s wise to be critical and objective about any source of information, government deserves the most skepticism of all. Because government does not merely want to sell you something, like a private business does; it wants to control you.
Environmentalists and leftist politicians who rule all of Europe are trying to use these studies (which are suspect themselves) to claim that governments must provide “mental health services” on demand to help people cope with the effects of climate change. Such demands take it for granted that people have already let go of their critical and objective thinking, and since they already opt to believe everything the government tells them, they’ll now go to “psychotherapists” and counselors who work for the government. What kind of mental health is that?
It’s not climate change or global warming causing mental disorder. It’s the lack of attention to scientific rigor, objective logic and sources of insight and knowledge other than the government (or government allied media) that’s causing the problem. We’re not losing our minds because of temperature change or fossil fuels. Many of us are losing our minds because we’re losing our reasoning and our independence. And democratic socialist governments, similar to their totalitarian brethren, like it that way.
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