In what I consider to be both the greatest Doctor Who serial ever made and the most underappreciated work of the great Douglas Adams, there is a lot for modern Canadians to relate to in The Pirate Planet (1979). The story chronicles the planet of Zanak which teleports through space, envelops other planets and extracts the minerals and energy before leaving behind a lifeless, drained husk.
Its people live under an authoritarian regime that routinely carries out extra-judicial killings of dissidents, killings that are popular with the general public and cheered-on as a sad necessity of living in a prosperous society. The inhabitants of the planet do little work and appear to have no interest in understanding the automated processes that provide them a luxurious, indolent life.
The killings, it is revealed, are not simply about preventing the rise of dissident political movements. Because of the extraordinary scale of the death from which they are benefiting, events of mass death, when trillions of lifeforms and every ecosystem on a planet are annihilated in a single day, some sort of psychic energy is released causing the more sensitive, empathetic members of the population to become “Mentiads,” a group of telepaths who can pool their energies into gestalt capable of telekinesis.
When a planet is destroyed, the new Mentiad converts begin screaming “lifeforce dying!” When the Doctor first observes this, he asks whether this happens often to the afflicted man and the man’s friend replies “only when the Captain announces a new golden age of prosperity.” Ultimately, the more planets Zanak consumes, the more of its residents experience the psychic grief caused by unwittingly presiding over so much death and the more Mentiads come into being, swelling the ranks of the resistance, who ultimately confront the despots running their planet and destroy them with psychic powers.
Douglas Adams offers us a compelling metaphor to which many young environmentalists just starting off in the world can relate; I certainly did when I first saw the show in syndication when I was thirteen. In this story, we suddenly become conscious of the scale of the omnicide; it deeply upsets us and it spurs us to action.
But Adams actually warns us of the pitfalls of this story as well. When the Doctor arrives on Zanak, he castigates them for the fact that, until his arrival, they have not taken any action. All they have been doing is living in a cave in their creepy hooded robes, avoiding the government death squads and loudly lamenting the death of each new planet Zanak consumes, focusing all their efforts on identifying community members and building their grief-based gestalt.
And this is why I believe the Pirate Planet needs to be watched today more than ever. Because more and more of the energy and money needed to address the omnicide is being redirected into something called “climate grief.”
As I have observed more than once, if there is a single fairy tale that expresses the class politics of the ruling class, it is the Princess and the Pea, the fable in which a young woman who does not know she is a princess has a single dried pea placed under her mattress. She is so sensitive that she cannot sleep and tosses and turns all night. To try and make a bed soft enough, people keep adding more pillows and mattresses but she can always still feel the pea, even through a dozen eider down mattresses and pillows. This sensitivity reveals her to be the true princess.
Although the sensitivity politics of the original Enlightenment bourgeoisie, for and about whom the Princess and the Pea was written, were different from those of the contemporary Commissar Class, they have many points in common. It is for a future essay to describe the substantial differences between their respective politics of emotion and sensitivity.
When members of that class engage in dominance competitions in meetings or other interactions, both inside and outside the workplace, they are structured by competitive claims of special identities (white-passing Indigenous, psychologically disabled and non-binary are favourites because any assertive high-status white man can make them) and demonstrations of emotional upset, ideally tears.
There is no world leader more effective at the latter than Canada’s own Justin Trudeau who has perfected the art of using his tears as a replacement for government action or public policy. And the BC legislature, the most Woke legislature in the country passed the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous people and all eighty-seven members of the chamber had a big long cry together. And then went back to their multipartisan campaign of sending heavily-armed security forces to incarcerate the Wet’suwet’en land defenders to smash a new gas pipeline through their territory.
It is not that people cry while they act on climate or Indigenous rights. It is that they cry instead of acting.
Our governments constantly cry about things they are still doing and apologize for wrongs committed by the dead. So, naturally, aspiring commissars desire opportunities to demonstrate their own sensitivity, shed their own tears so as to rise is status within their class. And consequently, there is money to be made. Climate grief seminars, courses and retreats are being rolled out by private institutes and public universities. Zoom calls comprising a dozen middle aged white women each with “she/her” pronouns next to their names, in case anyone was going to get confused, allow the Woke to engage in miniature practice competitions to become the Apex Victim. And they can come away from the call all feeling like they have done environmental activism that day, that they are, in some small way, the Mentiads.
The area of environmental action that has been most damaged by this turn is the forensic. Efforts we used to put into assessing responsibility for quasi-natural disasters, magnified by human negligence we now put into mourning floods and fires. What has sped this up is increasing government funding for “commemoration,” “mourning” and “grief.”
And this phenomenon is not just limited to climate or environmental issues. Grief money is spreading into more sectors as demonstrations of sensitivity replace action as a new frontier in the post-political.
In 2021, the Trudeau government unveiled tens of millions of dollars in new spending on murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. Although four government commissions in the Highway of Tears area have all had the same two core recommendations since 2000, close the camps and restore daily bus service. None of this money went into buses going anywhere, never mind a government even considering doing anything other than expanding the man camp system faster. The biggest area of funding increase and the fastest money to be released was, of course, money for commemoration, mourning and grief.
I am not one to suggest that we should not experience grief about the omnicide. I cry about it myself every couple of days and, in my social time, my friends and I talk each other through the grief over a pint or nine. But we do not mistake those times for taking action against the Greenhouse Effect. There is more work to be done than ever when it comes to taking down the fossil fuel industry. And the work continues to grow more urgent every day.
Wake up people! We’re not the Mentiads. Your tearful gestalt does nothing. Because this is reality, not science fiction.
