The world is not a level playing field. It is a vast collection of ladders. Every institution, every profession, every movement, every ideology erects its own hierarchy, inviting people to climb toward wealth, recognition, and influence. Yet wealth and recognition are merely visible currencies. The prize almost everyone is truly pursuing is status.
I have watched more than one manager accept a position that paid exactly the same salary as the previous one, while demanding greater responsibility and exposing them to greater risk. Financially, the move made little sense. Socially, it made perfect sense. The new title commanded greater admiration from colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. It elevated them on the invisible ladder that governs so much of human behaviour. The compensation remained unchanged; the status increased. That was enough.
This is why attaching oneself to a grand cause is such a remarkably efficient instrument of status accumulation. Whether the cause is environmental salvation, social justice, national renewal, corporate virtue, or any other fashionable crusade is almost secondary. For those aggressively climbing the ladder, the specific banner matters far less than the opportunities it provides. Prestige, admiration, invitations, influence, and moral authority become rewards that are often more intoxicating than money itself.
Once the climb begins, questioning the narrative becomes dangerous. Not because the evidence is weak, but because doubt threatens the very mechanism that delivers status. The narrative ceases to be a description of reality and becomes the foundation upon which one’s social standing rests.
That is why people so often continue defending ideas even when their own actions stand in complete contradiction to the objectives they publicly proclaim. The contradiction is obvious to outside observers, yet almost invisible to those performing it. Their careers, identities, friendships, and reputations have become intertwined with the narrative itself. To abandon it would not merely require changing an opinion. It would require stepping off the ladder.
This is where Carlo Cipolla’s famous idiot enters the picture. The idiot, in Cipolla’s framework, is not merely uninformed or unintelligent. He is capable of causing harm to others while deriving no rational benefit himself. Modern ideological movements produce a peculiar variation of this figure. Reality itself becomes expendable. Facts become negotiable. Contradictions become virtues. All that ultimately matters is preserving the narrative.
Reality is not debated. It is argued away.
When that fails, it is ridiculed.
When ridicule fails, it is prohibited.
Those who continue insisting on observable reality are collectively branded with labels carefully designed to end the conversation before it begins. “Denier” has become one of the most useful of these instruments. Once attached, no further engagement is considered necessary. The label replaces the argument.
A Minister for Climate Change—or indeed any politician entrusted with administering a narrative rather than merely governing—must ultimately respond to the demands of this status-bound community. Either he genuinely belongs to it, sincerely believing every article of its creed, or he fully understands the contradictions and participates anyway because he knows the price of refusing to bow before the totem.
In either case, reality occupies a subordinate position.
The narrative comes first.
This is why expecting such movements to correct themselves is usually futile. Their incentives point in precisely the opposite direction. Every admission of error costs status. Every concession weakens the ladder. Every uncomfortable fact threatens the architecture upon which countless careers have been built.
Like every form of extremism, they eventually become insulated from reality. Their members are no longer capable of seeing the world as it is because doing so would require dismantling the very identity they have spent years constructing. They cannot willingly abandon the totem because, by then, the totem has become indistinguishable from themselves.
History offers little comfort here. Extremes rarely dissolve through persuasion alone. They persist until individuals possessing both authority and the mandate to act are willing to dismantle the structures that sustain them. Until then, the ladder remains intact, the climbers continue their ascent, and reality waits patiently below—ignored, mocked, and declared inadmissible, but never actually defeated. https://www.news24.com.au/politics/climate-change-minister-chris-bowens-department-slugs-taxpayer-42-million-to-put-up-cop-delegates-in-luxury-fiji-hotels/news-story/e28286c5ffffe7cb88d6458de3e5ba6f