Apparently Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio hasn't fully considered the concept of unintended consequences.
Recently announcing to the world earlier this month that anyone who denies climate change should be banned from politics, he successfully and no doubt inadvertently managed to knock the progressive movement back a peg or two.
A ban on barring someone from running for politics based on the person's belief sounds like one slippery slope, and it would set a less-than-exemplary precedent. Might as well start screening people to see whether they believe in climate change — if they don't, sorry, can't vote!
While no doubt well intentioned — and financed — DiCaprio, also a climate activist, is not doing progressives any favours by making such ridiculous declarations.
But it was just in his “humble opinion,” mind you.
And then what, ban from politics anyone who disagrees with any well-established science such as vaccines and evolution?
I wonder how long it actually took to largely uproot the once-widely acknowledged erroneous “truth” that Earth — a tiny little marble rock racing around the sun that itself is hurtling through the Milky Way Galaxy, which is also itself in motion within the infinite vastness of the universe — is actually the centre of all existence. Certainly such a major shift in the collective human consciousness did not happen overnight. It took time and education, not sweeping bans.
It doesn't really matter that some people might never be convinced the industry that spent countless millions of dollars during a decades-long, self-preserving, profit-making agenda battling against well-established and documented science that clearly showed lead in fuel was poisoning the environment — and us with it — cares any more about the average person today than it did then.
“The severe health hazards of leaded gasoline were known to its makers and clearly identified by the US public health community more than seventy-five years ago, but were steadfastly denied by the makers, because they couldn't be immediately quantified,” points out merely one lie in a deplorable list in an article called The Secret History of Lead, found on thenation.com.
It would not be such a stretch of reason to speculate the industry that fought tooth and nail against proven science in the past to save its profit margins would not resort to its same old tricks in the face of new science that threatens its bottom line.
Still, even though it took decades, the legal fight to prove leaded fuel was catastrophic to our environment and our own health eventually prevailed.
That slow march of progress is just how our system works. What's the saying — Rome was not built in a day. The idea is not to force people out of politics based on their beliefs, but rather to challenge the questionable claims and expose them to the public, which ultimately decides in a democracy the next government and therefore policies that will be enacted.
Winston Churchill said many a great thing.
Among them, “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all others.”
Democracy unfortunately can bring out the worst in us, as evidenced by European democracies that are seeing small, extreme right movements gain a foothold in politics — albeit it a small one, for now — after years of political obscurity and obsolescence.
But democracy can also bring out the best, from women's suffrage to the civil rights movement to a wider acceptance of human diversity with the LGBT movement.
Banning people from politics — perhaps with scant reasonable exceptions such as violently ill and malevolent convicted criminals — is not the way forward.
Until we come up with an improved version of democracy, it's better slow progress than no progress. And bans such as the one proposed by DiCaprio are a roadblock along that path.
The best way to confront regressive policy is not to legitimize it by attempting to ban it — the unintended consequence — but rather by making a better case for the alternative to initiate a shift in our collective consciousness.
