A Matter of Machiavellianism
Most people, certainly in the developed nations, have never lived without indoor plumbing. I can, however, write about the inconveniences associated with all of the rudimentary alternatives. In the beginning stages of our childhood home, water came from an outside well, and was accessed using a hand-crank pump - a rusty, cast-iron unit that more often than not, required additional priming. Each and every Saturday the sauna was readied for the family and other usual attendees from the neighborhood. A two-seater outhouse resided in a woodshed that was attached to the sauna.
The house was heated with a large wood-fired stove located in the kitchen. Coal purchased from and delivered by, a local co-op store was burned most of the winter. The stove was also used for all of the cooking and baking. There was a steel sink in the kitchen, but no faucet, and used only for the elimination of wastewater. The kitchen, albeit small, also served as our living room and kid’s play area. Other than a laminate-top table and some old and odd chairs, the only other piece of furniture was a rocking chair, customarily occupied by my father and his latest Finnish version of Reader’s Digest.
The bedroom occupied by my sister and two brothers had a chamber pot or pee pot used only during the night hours. If the other type of discharge was necessary, it compelled a walk to the outhouse. That trip was made outside irrespective of darkness and weather – which at times in the north of Ontario in Canada meant a cold wooden seat at minus 40 degrees below zero. Jumping over or through snow drifts was not uncommon.
When I left home at 18, the house had an indoor water supply, a single toilet, and an oil stove. The wood stove had been replaced by an electric range. There was still no bathtub or shower. By hand, strength, tenacity, and unyielding determination, my father had dug the waterline, 6 feet deep, by 3 feet wide, several hundred feet from the house to connect to the township’s supply line. Through high school, physical education, and the local hockey arena, my showers had become fairly commonplace.
According to the linked article, as of 2020, there were 1.2 billion people in the world without electricity. While the majority of these are in Africa, there remain 60,000 in the United States without power. Despite the characterization of my youth, there are people that have it significantly worse even today. In youth, we never had to drink dirty water, eat unclean vegetables, consume aging unrefrigerated meats, or burn desiccated dung to stay warm. We never had to ingest smoke or particulate from these fires.
The most unfortunate communities of color are the people residing in many parts of Africa – a full 2/3’s that do not have electricity with “439,000 Africans dying every year because they have to cook in their homes with wood and dried animal dung”. The CO2 Coalition writes an eye-opening and eye-watering research paper on this tragedy.
Renowned epidemiologist Dr. Mikko Paunio, MD, MHS writes in his research paper, “The Health Benefits of Ignoring the IPCC”, “To their shame, those at the top of the WHO (World Health Organization) have another agenda entirely: an agenda that involves reckless decarbonization, in the process preventing the world’s poorest from getting access to the energy they so desperately need, and deceiving the rest of the world into thinking that there are ‘co-benefits’ from doing so.”
Once one realizes that renewable energies, can in no manner, absolutely no manner whatsoever, support the energy needs of the world, one realizes that those incessantly battling for them and supporting climate change are Machiavellians. Machiavellianism is defined as a psychological trait centered on interpersonal manipulation, unemotional coldness, and indifference to morality.