The Lost Cause

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, that’s what I figured. Once I saw that the injunctions were nationwide, I gave up on finding somewhere easier. Once I saw that they were setting up a world where there were winners and losers, people with the good luck to live inland, or on high ground; people with the money to relocate, they’re fine. The rest of us? We can drown or starve, so long as enough of us survive to wait on our social betters, cook their dinners, raise their kids and mow their lawns. That’s the endgame and the dumbasses here think that they’ll be rewarded for helping out, when the best they can hope for is to be allowed inside the compound to serve as a butler or a dishwasher.’

‘Here’s a thing about the law: there aren’t enough cops to enforce the law if people don’t believe in it. That means that society’s primary law enforcement tool isn’t cops, it’s legitimacy. And that goes double for judges: that’s why they wear the robes and use all that Latin and do the whole all-rise business: to reinforce their own legitimacy, to remind you that we, as a society, hold them in high esteem.

‘The reason for all those reminders is that if the esteem goes away, then so does their legitimacy. Remember when [Presdient] Uwayni just ignored the Supreme Court for her first term, just kept signing these wildly popular GND [Green New Deal] bills that they struck down, until they stopped? Everyone had been on her to pack the court from the start, but she was like, nah, I’m gonna hit these old fuckers where it hurts, right in their legitimacy. I’m gonna pass all kinds of super-popular legislation and dare them to void it, because every time they do, it makes me look like the true representative of democratic will and makes them look like an obstructionist relic that no one should take seriously.

‘It worked. Today, we did a version of that. Well, you did. When you occupied those building sites, when you whipped up a nation to see that the court had got in the way of doing the obviously right thing, you put the fear into those judges. I’m a hundred percent convinced that this is why they ruled the way they did. That’s the good news.’

Some of the Magas thought that it was hopeless, most of the world was already lost, and the job was to make sure that the patch they were on survived, along with the people they cared about. They hated refus because they were bigots, but also, they hated them because they saw themselves as living in a lifeboat, and saw every refu they hauled over the gunwales as one more mouth to feed from the dwindling supplies, and believed that if they let enough refus in, the boat would sink.

And then there was the gospel of the Flotilla, the idea that we could just nerd our way out of the emergency with geoengineer-ing and asteroid mining. The thing was, this wasn’t so different from the GND, which had built zero-carbon factories across every American desert that ran only when the sun shone, turning out all the material and technology we’d need to relocate every coastal city inland, retrofit all our housing stock, and solarise every home.

The difference was that Uwayni had nationalised all the knowledge and practices that went into building these factories, just shunting aside the big asset funds and patent trolls that stood in the way of the whole human race coming together to solve its problems.

The Flotilla believed that some of us were born to be wise kings, and that winning in the market was the modern equivalent to pulling a sword out of a stone, and that Uwayni and the GND were doomed because they had defied the natural order of things, like trusting toddlers to run the factory.

The Magas who believed this were a combination of pathetic and outraged: convinced that they were inferior to the superheroic ‘inventors’ and ‘founders’ they worshipped, but also sure that they were smarter than the rest of us, because we were too stupid to recognise our betters.

The smartest Magas actually understood our arguments, they just thought we were lying about what we truly believed and intended: they thought we were so offended by the idea that some people were just better than others that we’d sacrifice the whole human race and its only planet to prove the point.

All of this was gross and wrong and the years I’d spent arguing with Gramps and his buddies over it had been miserable, but one thing it had made me sure of was that the Magas didn’t want to watch the world burn. They sincerely wanted to save it. They weren’t wrong because they were cruel.

They were cruel because they were wrong.