As politics becomes increasingly polarised, policymakers are no longer focused on giving voters what they want, but on making voters want what they are given. Rather than presenting policies as rational choices for individual voters, policies increasingly ignore the intelligence of individuals in support of a collectivist agenda.

Informing the battle lines is a process of collectivist reinforcement through ideologically informed policy supported by policy-framed teaching. And it is manifesting in our youth as a failed social experiment where virtue-signalling trumps critical thinking skills.

This represents a dangerous time for liberal democracy with some teachers focused more on ideology than on providing rational individuals with the tools to think for themselves.

The meaningfulness of others’ actions, framed through individual desires and beliefs, is lost in the madding crowd. According to political science theories, rationality or irrationality of an individual’s actions is judged ‘within the context of a particular system of meaning, or discursive formation’.

School students demanding ‘faster action on climate change’ were out in force earlier this month with more expected at the annual Global Strike for Climate on March 25. Within this ‘discursive formation’, protestors’ actions are not only deemed to be rational, but are facilitated by many teachers and their educational institutions.

Yet all of the indicators suggest that the costs and timeframes for Snowy Hydro 2.0, along with purposely overbuilt transmission lines, and ‘big batteries’ are blowing out of all proportion. They are also falling well short of their ‘effective life’ projections which means the costs will be even higher over time.

And ‘greenflation’ awaits as suitable areas for wind and solar farms decrease, amid energy bosses warning that energy prices will go up 20 per cent from July 1, 2023 despite the Albanese government’s gas and coal price caps.

Not to mention the amount of mining needed to produce these so-called ‘green’ technologies and the up-front carbon emissions produced. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the whole idea is unworkable.

Going faster and harder without nuclear results in the situation that is happening in Germany. There is no example anywhere in the world of a functioning 100 per cent renewable energy system. It is all speculation and those countries that are ahead in terms of the proportion of renewables are in the most trouble.

But somehow children claim to know more about the global economy and reducing emissions than everyone else.

Where do they get all the answers? From memes.

‘There is no Planet B’ apparently. Yet staring us right in the face is a technological solution to reducing emissions without sending us into bankruptcy and blackouts. Do we see school children demanding nuclear reactors to replace coal-fired power stations? No, because that is not part of the meme.

For that is what knowledge has been reduced to: a ‘meme’ – a ‘unit of cultural information spread by imitation’ from the Greek mimema, meaning ‘imitated’.

Most of these memes are imported without question from the United States and have formed the basis of our children’s knowledge. I was surprised to hear American comedian Bill Maher say an American acknowledgment of country recently. I’d heard the same thing word for word at the start of a Zoom meeting in Australia that very morning.

The situation is perpetuated by teachers who are failing our children by focusing on reproducing memes rather than providing students with the tools to think critically and for themselves.

How did we get to the point where school children can claim to be energy policy experts?

Along the road to collectivism achieved through ideologically driven policy that is then taught as memes. These memes are then adopted as facts.

Don’t just take my word for it. Former Productivity Commission Chair, Professor Gary Banks, said the same thing recently in The Australian:

Professor Banks said “the monumental bungling of the so-called energy transition” had seen multiple governments contrive to “maximise the cost to the nation of reducing emissions” while evidence-based policy had been abandoned in favour of “simple-minded belief”.

And simple-minded beliefs, or memes, readily inform pejorative terms like ‘science sceptic’, ‘climate change denier’, ‘RWNJ’, sexist, racist … you name it.

Who needs knowledge when you have memes?

The trouble with cultural reproduction of snippets of information is obvious. As the snippet is reproduced, it becomes a copy of a copy, losing and gaining different meanings as it snowballs through the community.

Memes are little more than gossip. Where there’s smoke there’s fire you might say. But there is also that children’s game called Chinese Whispers, where a message passed from one person to the next becomes unintelligible as it is passed from child to child.

But even the term Chinese Whispers could be considered racist (another meme). Is it really because the British thought the Chinese language was unintelligible? Or was it because messages passed along the Great Wall of China became unintelligible over the length of the wall?

After visiting the Great Wall of China near Beijing in 2019, my Chinese students, both male, and female (or should I say of all genders?), told me that I was a ‘real man’ now I had visited the Wall and I received a round of applause. I made the mistake of posting the story on Facebook, only to be shouted down as ‘sexist’ by my Australian peers.

It’s all Greek to me. Or is that racist, too? Or is it from the monks who understood Latin but not Greek? Graecum est; non legitur. Or was it from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar? (Wait – isn’t Shakespeare an ‘old white man’?)

My point is that memes are nonsense. They say everything and nothing which means they don’t mean anything. They certainly do not represent knowledge or wisdom.

And who would you trust to know more about energy policy? The former chair of the Productivity Commission, or a child suffering from climate anxiety while attending a climate protest dominated by unions and Extinction Rebellion?

It’s not something I will be gluing my hand to any time soon.

But beware the meme, for memes pave the road to collectivism. And there is nothing rational about memes or their destination.

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