Idiots
2 years, 11 months, 7 days, 22 hours
14 August 2026
We have society more cowed by those in power than ever before.
‘Any idiot can see that the climate has changed and climate change is accelerating’. Sir Chris Hohn, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund TCI Fund Management, was quoted in the most recent edition of The Sunday Times.
I agree, but idiots or not, it doesn’t seem like we yet have enough of a shift in attitudes, and then actions, to do what is necessary to respond to the severity of the crisis. The question I ask myself over and over is, why not? Especially given in this ‘world on fire' summer the evidence is so blindingly obvious.
Perhaps one reason is because it is very hard for humans to be non-conformist in society. History books are littered with the stories of martyrs who died for their beliefs - but those stories are so prominent because they are the exceptions. The overwhelming majority of us find it much more comfortable to ‘fit in'. After all, those stories tell us that those who depart too much from the ’norm’ are those who end up burned, sometimes literally. Change in this environment is either painfully slow, or sudden and violent.
The wonderful book “Strangers and Intimates” by Tiffany Jenkins, that I read earlier this year, charts how society has come full circle from a medieval world where personal privacy and belief wasn’t really a thing, to the Age of Enlightenment where it was fiercely protected, to today where governments collect ever more data on the individual, aided by how most of us lay ourselves bare on social media.
I write from a conviction that social media can be a medium for changing attitudes. But perhaps it is more successful at entrenching them. At a moment in time when we desperately need more individuals like Sir Chris Hohn willing to speak up for climate action, it seems instead we have society more cowed by those in power than ever before, because everything we say or do is potentially on an indelible record to be held against us, arbitrarily, in due course.