Last year, I came across two Persian rugs on a website. A private seller was offering them for sale and claimed that both were original, handmade Persian rugs.
I am not a rug expert. Looking at a photograph, I would have had little chance of reliably distinguishing a genuinely handmade rug from a machine-produced imitation. Fortunately, I had someone with me who knew how to assess them.
One of the two turned out to be a machine-made rug. Cheap, mass-produced, and nowhere near the value the seller was asking. In fact, a new machine-made rug would have cost less.
The other was of questionable quality and had suffered considerable damage that was not apparent in the photographs.
I walked away from both.
What interested me was what happened afterwards.
The seller insisted that the rugs were genuine. He had bought them as originals, he said. That was apparently enough for him.
Eventually, however, the story came apart.
He had bought some cheap rugs. He had then told his wife that they were originals. She believed him. He apparently kept repeating the story, first to her and eventually to himself.
At some point, the lie ceased to be a lie in his own mind.
He believed the story he had originally invented.
That is a remarkably human phenomenon. People do not always construct elaborate lies because they are consciously trying to deceive others. Sometimes they construct a version of reality that becomes psychologically more comfortable than the truth. They repeat it. Others repeat it back. Eventually the distinction between what they know and what they have said begins to disappear.
And this is where I think we should look at climate activism rather differently.
A significant part of the movement appears to have reached the point where it genuinely believes its own narrative.
Reality has become secondary.
For years, climate activists could point to what they believed was overwhelming public support. Every election result, every opinion poll, every government declaration could be interpreted as confirmation. The public wanted the transition. The public wanted aggressive climate policy. The public wanted more renewables, more electrification, more restrictions and more spending.
Except there was always another possibility.
Perhaps much of the public was not enthusiastic.
Perhaps it was simply quiet.
There is an enormous difference between political support and political passivity. People can tolerate policies they dislike for a surprisingly long time, particularly when the costs are diffuse, hidden or still somewhere in the future.
But eventually the costs become visible.
Energy becomes expensive. Housing becomes more expensive. Cars become less affordable. Industrial jobs disappear. Infrastructure struggles. Promises become targets. Targets become bills.
And then people start paying attention.
That appears to be happening now in a number of places. Polling begins to show greater caution. Voters become less enthusiastic about the more extreme versions of the programme. Governments start retreating, delaying or quietly modifying commitments that once appeared politically untouchable.
The activists notice this.
But they do not necessarily accept what the public is telling them.
Because if the public has genuinely changed its mind, then something much more uncomfortable follows.
Perhaps the activists were never speaking for the majority in the first place.
Perhaps they mistook silence for consent.
That is difficult to accept after years of believing that history, morality and public opinion were all moving in the same direction.
So another explanation becomes necessary.
It must be misinformation.
It must be vested interests.
It must be the fossil-fuel companies.
It must be the political opposition.
It must be some conspiracy.
Anything, apparently, except the possibility that ordinary people have looked at the consequences and decided they do not want what was being sold to them.
The most dangerous stage of any ideological belief system is not when people tell a lie.
It is when they can no longer recognise it as one.
At that point, reality itself becomes the enemy.