Wall Street Journal Projects Its Inhumane Theology Upon the World

There is a category of psychological illusion called "projection" which serves the purpose of reducing personal anxiety. It's a defense mechanism in which one attributes one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and emotions to others.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal provided a textbook case of the phenomenon in an editorial called Global Warming as Mass Neurosis. It is yet another installment of exemplary denialist rhetoric in need of some Freudian analysis.

The author, Bret Stephens, accuses those concerned about global warming of practicing a sick-souled theology. He doesn't realize he's blaming others for his own illness: his dogmatic embrace and belief in the perfect functioning of free markets.

It's not clear whether Stephens believes in God or not, but he does seem to believe mightily in his Invisible Hand at least. It is an idolatrous theology that worships a divine appendage, in the face of an abundance of rational evidence that demonstrates its imperfect functioning.

Stephen's faith leads him astray -- to deny climate science practiced by climate scientists in peer-reviewed settings and to embrace the pseudo-science practiced by political operatives in the world of manipulated public opinion.

Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.

It leads him to suspect an anti-capitalist conspiracy, verging on the edge of McCarthyist paranoia.

Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism.

And it leads him, as psychological disturbances of this sort often do, to odd sexual notions.

A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Au contraire, Mr. Stephens. Make love, not oil war.

Global warming is the mother of all market failures that challenges your pure faith in the perfection of free markets. And so you lash out, not recognizing the signs and symptoms of your own distress.

Instead of attacking those who are trying to deal with the reality of global warming and accusing them of succumbing to mass neurosis, try looking at the state of your own mental health, and of those around you in the same ward who share in your dogma and denial.

You are highly qualified, from personal experience, to comment upon that directly, rather than projecting your own ills upon others.

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