California Wildfires Part I: Fantasy Ideology

First in a two-part series at The Stream.

Originally published January 27, 2025, at The Stream.

If you are one of those people who say our society is so corrupt that we should burn it all down and start over, you got your wish. Parts of California have recently burned down, and the fires still aren’t out.

If you were correct in your social analysis, this should be your time to shine. You should have a plan for making everything better than ever: more just, more fair, more inclusive, more sustainable, more peaceful, and more conducive to mental health for all. We are all waiting, with bated breath.

Just kidding. No serious person actually believes that the Burn It All Down people have a plan. These people are not the solution to any real problem. In fact, they created this latest problem.

Let’s give this problem a name: Fantasy Ideology. The purpose of a Fantasy Ideology is NOT to solve a problem. It is to help the partisans accumulate more power.

The process works like this.

Creating a Dystopia, in Five Easy Steps

Step 1. Sell the public on the utopian ideal of completely eliminating an Intolerable Problem. (Climate change. Systematic racism. Sexism. Homophobia. Injustice to transgender people. COVID. Take your pick, the possibilities are endless.) Catastrophize the Intolerable Problem. Demand nothing less than its complete elimination.

To be clear, even good ideas and noble goals can be transformed into utopian impossibilities. For instance, we can eliminate some inequality, but we will never have perfect equality in every dimension. That’s completely impossible. Human beings are irreducibly different from each other.

For instance, some environmentalists want to eliminate all pollution, all carbon footprints. That’s not possible. Can we reduce pollution? Sure. But eliminate it? No.

Some in the public health establishment insist on trying to eliminate all cases of COVID. Can we reduce the number of cases? Sure. But eliminate them all? No.

But these ideas must never spoken aloud, because realistic obtainable goals do not serve the purpose of accumulating power.

Step 2: Sell yourself and your ideological buddies as the potential Savior Class who can make this dream a reality, if only

Step 3: You have enough power. Doing the impossible requires a lot of power. Thus, the Savior Class requires unlimited power to bring about the Fantasy. But even with lots of power, you can’t really do the impossible. So, you must fill the society with

Step 4: Unlimited propaganda. The propaganda keeps people convinced that the Fantasy is possible and desirable. It diverts attention from the problems and costs associated with trying to do the undoable. Finally — and very importantly — the propaganda must divert the attention of ordinary people away from the failure of the Fantasy and toward the

Step 5: Scapegoat Class. The Fantasy will never materialize, even with massive amounts of power and propaganda. So the self-appointed Savior Class needs someone to blame.

Every totalitarian ideology you can think of has had a Scapegoat Class. The Communists had their kulaks and rich peasants. The Nazis had their Jews. Today’s Ruling Class has its “basket of deplorables,” the unwashed, embittered “garbage” people who “cling to their guns and their religion.”

Using this formula, power-seekers have turned the once-great state of California into a one-party state. The Democrats have been unaccountable for decades now, and they are destroying the state. But they really don’t care because the formula is working for them.

You may object that many people who are not directly benefiting from it engage in this magical thinking. They are not making money or obtaining powerful positions, but they are securing the psychic benefits of what Dr. Rob Henderson has called “luxury beliefs.” They indulge themselves in the belief of their own moral superiority.

The Moral Cause of the California Fires Is Fantasy Ideology

Whatever the initial cause of the California wildfires may have been, fantasy ideologies are responsible for their extreme devastation.

The Fantasy Ideology of Environmentalism has dictated numerous policies that magnified the extent of the damage and limited firefighters’ ability to tame these flames. (Reduce all forms of human impact on the environment. Don’t build dams. Start no unnatural water projects. Protect the fish and the native plants.)

The Fantasy Ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion demands prioritizing the Officially Oppressed Groups du Jour in state and local hiring decisions. Competence? Experience? Not so much. Los Angeles prides itself on hiring its first female, openly lesbian fire chief, Kristin Crowley. The head of the LA Fire Department’s Equity and Human Resources Bureau, Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, responded to a perfectly reasonable question, “Is she strong enough to carry my husband out of a fire?” with the flippant, “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”

We are seeing the results of a whole social infrastructure of wishful thinking.

The Ruling Class doesn’t have a clue what to do, now that they have allowed parts of California to literally burn to the ground.

As responsible citizens, we need to be on the lookout for signs of Fantasy Ideologies. Proposing an impossible goal as if it were a high moral duty is a big red flag. We need to tell the elites, “We don’t believe in your utopian schemes.”

The second Trump administration will put the brakes on some of the more outrageous Fantasies. But we as responsible citizens need to be on the lookout for signs of Fantasy Ideologies. Proposing an impossible goal as if it were a high moral duty is a big red flag. We need to tell the elites, “We don’t believe in your utopian schemes. We don’t want Heaven on Earth. We’ll be satisfied with Heaven in Heaven, thank you very much.”

And in the meantime, here in the material world, we need to be satisfied with progress toward reasonable goals that don’t involve continually lying to the public.