of the UK online Spectator presents a highly interesting portrait of environmentalist, doomsday-believer Dylan Evans and his Utopia Experiment. Lewis concludes from it: “Designs for living always end in tears, or worse.”
So disconnected from reality was Evans, and academic, that he believed he could actually make himself a better life departing the comforts of the modern age and getting back to the natural beauty of raw survival with other like-minded persons – in the raw climate of northern Scotland of all places.
Strangely Evans selected a site that he thought would allow the generation of electric power to accompany his natural living.
Some excerpts on how his “Experiment” turned out:
Evans admits that his utopia was doomed to failure. It attracted only idealists and disaffected romantics when what was needed were people with practical skills… […]
…the small group began to disintegrate. One member even started to invent his own religion, building a shrine. […]
He himself was soon fed up with sleeping under rancid fleece blankets … the sanitary arrangements were grotesque. […]
It soon became apparent that ‘the whole experiment had been a huge mistake’. […]
Evans was eventually detained under the Mental Health Act in a maximum security psychiatric hospital. […]
He fretted unduly about global warming and ‘the looming energy crisis’… Evans, the doctors concluded, was already craving the abyss and in the throes of panic-attacks and a breakdown.”
If the story of Evans tells us anything, it is that it vividly illustrates how far out to lunch academics in the ivory towers can sometimes become. Why on earth would policymakers ever listen to their loony utopian ideas to begin with? Evans just proved that its all lunacy.
Evans and the loads of past academics show that their radical formulae for rendering utopian life are pure delusions of deranged minds. Yet these are precisely the minds behind the doomsday global warming scenarios, and the advocacy of a carbon-free utopia.
The proof that these minds are deranged is the fact that none, except for Evans for a brief time, are willing to give up the carbon life themselves. Man was destined to escape nature, and not to stay at its mercy.
Finally one cannot help but notice the contempt loony academics and pseudo-intellectual journalists hold for humans. Lewis writes;
It’s best to muddle along as we are, not because human beings are morons or suckers, or traitors to the cause, but because life is meant to be messy, muddled, contrary, comic.”
Actually, as Evans clearly illustrates, the real morons are the academics and all the gullible media and policymaker idiots who believe the utopia that they preach. At least there is hope for Lewis as well, who seems to grudgingly concede that maybe the current system isn’t so bad after all and sure beats living in the cold mud.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9435652/they-sought-paradise-in-a-scottish-field-and-found-hunger-boredom-and-mosquitoes/
Nice “house”
Wait a moment. FLEECE blankets? polymerized rock oil in other words? What’s wrong with these people? Can’t they even play by their own rules?
No. He meant sheepskins, raw, untanned, sheepskins. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been rancid.
Ah thanks.
Dylan Evans is comedy gold, even his wikipedia page is a riot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_Evans
Highlights:
Doctorate from the Fabian borg cube itself.
Hilarious failing attempt at trying to get a girl.
As to his Utopia project, didn’t he even know about New Harmony? Why do these people have to repeat the same mistakes over and over and over again?
He must be the exact genetic copy of one of the three stooges.
Here’s THEIR attempt at living in the wilderness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6pzXgDHjbw
“From the Russian Revolution to Jonestown, programmes for human happiness come a cropper. It’s best to muddle along as we are, not because human beings are morons or suckers, or traitors to the cause, but because life is meant to be messy, muddled, contrary, comic.”
He got that completely wrong. We don’t “muddle along” – everyone of us makes the best decision he CAN make at any given moment in time. Human society is constantly self-optimizing IF LEFT UNDISTURBED and far superior to any central planning.
or better: to the extent possible under the prevailing level of disturbance – because we always get disturbed to some degree (that’s what governments are there for, primarily).
For anyone who hasn’t seen it yet, L. Sprague de Camp has excellent advice for those of us who feel they must do all they can to deal with the never-ending supply of nut-cases.
>>>In the United States, the Fundamentalist crusade of the 1920s, led by the eminent William Jennings Bryan, sought a constitutional amendment against the teaching of evolution. Luckily, that effort petered out. In recent years, however, it has been revived, especially in California. There it had the blessing of the then governor Ronald Reagan. Goodness knows what might happen if a real, red-hot Fundamentalist were to become President of the United States.
Still, this is no reason for not knocking a head off this particular hydra whenever we can. The scientific debunker’s job may be compared to that of the trash collector. The fact that the garbage truck comes by today does not mean that there won’t be another load tomorrow. But if the garbage were not collected at all, the results would be worse, as some cities have found when the sanitation workers struck.
So let us do our best to get rid of this ideological garbage, lest it inundate the earth. Our work will never be decisive, since old cults are almost unkillable and new ones keep springing up; but that is no reason for not doing what we can. If we can save even a few from the lure of the higher nonsense, our efforts will have been worthwhile.<<<
More: http://bookre.org/reader?file=205676&pg=1
You do realize these same Utopian thinking “Scholars”, who fail in reality, teach evolution??
Academics and reality – an English approach.
In Hyde Park in London, there is a section known as Speakers’ Corner, where of a weekend people stand on boxes and lecture the passing public. One time an academic was heard calling on people to overthrow their employers by violent means. He was heard by the police, arrested, and charged with sedition. In court he defended himself by claiming that he was merely expounding the economic theory of Marx, not actually inciting revolution. He was found guilty and sentenced to a week in jail. About his defence, the judge remarked: “there are some views so absurd that only an academic could hold them”. The judge seems to have been less troubled by any prospect of revolution than by the academic insulting the judge’s intelligence in his court.
I’ll go out on a limb and guess Dylan Evans has been a bit bonkers since he was a toddler and a pain in the butt to his family. At least he didn’t kill anyone – others with similar issues have, including their children, because of such beliefs. Those pushing catastrophe are accessories to these outcomes.
On MarketWatch dot com there is a writer named Paul B. Farrell that has been writing such things (I’ve quit reading months ago). His latest equates Earth to the Titanic and climate change to an iceberg. This analogy makes no sense but, as mentioned, I did not read it.
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PG said:
“Actually, as Evans clearly illustrates, the real morons are the academics and all the gullible media and policymaker idiots who believe the utopia that they preach.”
I’d qualify that sentence by saying that the problem, the biggest problem that is never faced nor admitted to by academics and the politicians precisely because they are utter morons. In that, they are unable to take their mad suppositions and expound, to project what will happen when their insane policies are realized, “sustainable living” [WTF?] is propagated to the Nth degree – the enormity of that self induced calamity – ending of all fossil fuel generated power – is too bloody awful for their tiny brains to appreciate.
Forthwith: they need to consult with Dylan Evans to draw a picture, to get a clue of how bad, how insane it will actually be. Or, is it the intended goal – like Mao and Pol Pot – their mad schemes of ‘back to the land’ and catastrophe = human genocide?
You are overgeneralizing here. To condemn academics, we would have to ask: Is the percentage of academics who embark on utterly crazy endeavours higher than in the general population. Because, look at the sheer number of academics who DON’T build primitive shacks in moist meadows but rather, and quite sanely, stay in their cosy taxpayer-funded offices for years on end. I consider that a rather sane way of behaving yet it is underappreciated by the general public.
What we need is a “Sane Academic Appreciation Day”.
He received his doctorate in philosophy from the London School of Economics. But there is a jewel in his Wikipedia profile: In spring 2010 Evans was accused of sexual harassment of a colleague, Rossana Salerno Kennedy,[7] by showing her a published article about oral sex among fruit bats. His employer imposed a “two-year period of monitoring and appraisal under the university’s duty of respect and ‘right to dignity’ policy.”
Batty.
One of the commentors on the article noted that he and his wife tried something similar in the early 1970s – trying to be self-sufficient – also a big failure.
But the human race has not prospered by trying to be self-sufficient. We have prospered by being “skilled specialists” and trading our extra value-added work for the extra value-added work of other “skilled specialists”. Trade through money mostly but all kinds of trade count.
This has just expanded the overall standard of living because specialists are more productive in their select field than any generalist can be trying to cover all the bases.
Specialists also include people who have invented new tools and/or engineer new tools and/or those who just supply the raw materials to make the new tool.
If it is worth more to other people (the price) than the sum of the costs that went into it (the cost of the goods), then that just adds further to our standard of living. The higher that differential – the more that is added to our standard of living. In other words, profit. In other words, the free enterprise system.
That is what environmentalists don’t get. The more free enterprise, the more profit there is, the better off everyone is. After that, a society needs laws and unduly harming the environment in pursuit of our higher standard of living is just wrong and should be regulated. But just like environmentalists don’t understand why specialization and free enterprise benefits everyone, they also don’t understand what harm to the environment is either. They just don’t understand what reality is compared to fantasy.
Lew Skannen had me going for a sec.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9435652/they-sought-paradise-in-a-scottish-field-and-found-hunger-boredom-and-mosquitoes/#comment-1855839246