chp3: minority cognition

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@@ -90,4 +90,76 @@ New Deal stand far off, and remain largely outside your control. The call must
 then be to make a sacrifice for what is good, even if, paradoxically, it costs
 you.
 
-This is, in John Collin's terms, an 'ethic for martyrdom.'
+This is, in John Collin's terms, an 'ethic for martyrdom.' So, could John's
+apocalyptic rhetorical strategies be of use in motivating UK citizens to take
+political actions to advance the cause of a Green New Deal?
+
+First, I'll consider minority cognition. This was the first aspect of John's
+strategy which I considered in the previous chapter. While the particular kind
+of minority cognition favoured by John -- that is, direct testimony imparted by
+a divine authority -- may be unpersuasive to many UK citizens, the preference
+for a minority cognition is still necessary.
+
+Recall that, as Thompson [@thompson-revelation] argued, St. John needed to use
+minority cognition in order to resist the overwhelming weight of the majority
+epistemology of Greek society, which would have pressed his audience into
+submission to the imperial cult. Likewise, in our society, there is are
+empire-like forces constantly reinforcing dominant epistemologies, and among
+these is the fossil fuel industry.
+
+The fossil fuel industry has repeatedly bought out the science \[EVIDENCE\]. It
+continues to do so \[EVIDENCE\]. It has also reinforced conceptual frameworks
+such as 'carbon footprinting' which serve its interests by shifting blame for
+social harms from themselves onto individuals [^See chapter 1]. Therefore, as
+long as the fossil fuel industry has significant power, the majority
+epistemology of our society cannot help but be partially shaped by fossil fuel
+interests. To escape fossil knowledge requires minority cognition.
+
+This has precedents even within the green movement. In the view of Linda Lear,
+the effect of _Silent Spring_, Rachel Carson's damning exposé on the chemical
+industry, was to not only bring about regulation, but end an era of
+unquestioning trust in government agencies and chemical companies. She exposed
+that they hadn't done their homework or had lied. In a Cold War context,
+questioning the techno-scientific-industrial authorities could be perceived as
+traitorous. Chemical companies fought hard against her, sued the publishers to
+try and prevent it being published, then spent a quarter of a million dollars
+on an aggressive publicity campaign against her. She was attacked for being
+'emotional' and an 'hysterical woman.' The fact she had published novels was
+cited as evidence that she couldn't be a real scientist, and her literary
+writing style as evidence that what she was writing couldn't be real science.
+Real science, the chemical industry hastened to remind the impressionable
+public, is necessarily presented in the format of laboratory reports,
+maximising their utilisation of technical jargon in order to avoid
+under-qualified persons from understanding their contents.  Carson had no PhD,
+no academic institution, and no network of scientific colleagues to back her
+up. [@silent-spring, Afterword]
+
+To fight the chemical lobby, Carson had to adopt minority epistemology. So,
+alongside her considerable arsenal of traditional scientific facts, she
+included in her book historical facts based on lived experience, with no
+attempt to fit them into clearly-defined quantifiable metrics, in the
+scientific style favoured by the chemical industry. One memorable example was
+her report that parathion poisoning had been known to induce serious illness
+not only in those exposed directly, but also to the physicians who treated
+them, and even the hospital staff who washed their clothes. \[PAGE NUMBERS\]
+
+Like St. John, she was also forced to undermine the chemical industry's
+majority epistemology.  In _Silent Spring_, she showed how the chemical
+industry funded the same science which enabled its profits \[CITE\]. She
+undermined their conceptual frameworks, arguing that the use of words like
+'pesticide' and 'insecticide' function to mask the truth that the chemicals
+involved are in fact poisons (and in some cases were originally developed by
+military scientists for the purpose of deliberately injuring and killing human
+beings) \[CITE\]. And she showed how the chemical lobby used science to dismiss
+valid first-hand experiences and impose their solutions on people against their
+interests and expressed desires. For instance, she told the story of Joseph
+Sweeny Todd, a \[WHO\] in Ohio, who, in opting for a targeted approach to
+containing dutch elm disease rather than blanket poisoning, had to go against
+the advice of the chemical companies, the universities, and the US Department
+of Agriculture. \[CITE\]
+
+If rhetors today want to persuade their audiences to support a Green New Deal,
+they're going to have to fight the majority epistemology, held firmly in place
+by fossil interests. To do that, they'll need to exploit minority cognition,
+undermining the epistemologies that best serve fossil interests and finding
+alternatives that oppose them.