Let’s begin with social engineering. It’s usually seen as one of the dark arts. For example, Wikipedia describes it as, one, “the psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or divulging confidential information.” It also describes it as something specific to socialist societies: “In the 1920s the government of the Soviet Union embarked on a campaign to fundamentally alter the behavior and ideals of Soviet citizens…” With the latter, the implication is that Western liberal polities encourage the freest thinking possible. You get to vote for your leaders, the market offers you more choices than your heart desires, you are free to decide which God created you and the entire universe, and so on and so on.

But of course, one has always already been socially engineered—this inescapable condition is also called interpellation. You were not born with the certainty that free markets produce the best social results. You were not born with a Christian soul. All of these feelings and ideas (feelings as concepts) are the result of social engineering. And so it is not a question if it’s bad or not. What matters is if it’s empowering or disempowering, if it presents feelings that correspond with the real state of affairs or does not. Social engineering’s material is human feeling. And what it does with this psycho/physical material, to use the language of the great British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, is structure it. A civil engineer builds bridges. A social engineer builds feelings.

With that in mind, let’s turn to this weekend’s unusually warm weather. How did Seattle feel about it?

As much as I admire Seattle Weather Blog, the last line in their March 17 tweet is alarming, if not horrifying, and certainly bad social engineering. To make matters worse, the weekend’s feel-good directive was universally expressed by the local news and social media. Even today, March 18, which is warm and breezy, KIRO 7 encouraged its audience to just “enjoy the sunshine.” But how on earth is this possible when the brightness of the sun and the warmth of the air are freaks of nature? It should be cool and dark during this time of the year. Instead, we are breaking records all over the place. 

KING 5:

Saturday brought record-breaking heat across western Washington, just days before the official start of spring. According to the National Weather Service, Washington broke daily temperature records at all of its climate sites on March 15. 

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport recorded 74 degrees, breaking the previous daily record of 72 degrees. Meanwhile, the city of Seattle clocked 71 degrees, which passes the previous daily record of 70 degrees. 

Bellingham broke records. Everett broke records. Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia broke records. Sunday also did not close without lots of broken records. 

We should be horrified by this weather, not enjoying it, not in the least bit. But what you found all around Greenlake, or going up and down Lake Washington Boulevard, or basking on Alki Beach, or filling the platforms of Pike Place Market were lots of people enjoying what is in fact a living nightmare. But this serious disconnection between reality (anthropogenic global warming and its year-by-year destruction of the world, brief as it was, we only know) is a failure of empowering social engineering. We only know how to enjoy sunny days, no matter what caused them. And unless social engineering intervenes (which is not likely at this point), we will be biking, hiking, and wearing tight shorts or no shirts when “perfect” arrives early in 2025. It’s only going to get worse. This is just fact.

Our city should have been depressed, disconsolate, deeply disturbed this weekend. A rainy and cold weekend, on the other hand, should have caused us some joy or, at least, a thin sense of hope. This structure of feeling (not enjoying these record-breaking sunny days) is consistent with the current state of things. Never expect anything political from shiny happy people.     

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

17 replies on “This Unsually Warm Weekend Was a Nightmare”

  2. Humans have made it clear that they do not care about the destruction of the planet.

    So enjoy the good weather while you can, before the planet becomes uninhabitable.

    When humans are gone, hopefully earth will be able to recover.

    Wouldn’t bet on it, though in terms of time, humans have been here for like a second, so I choose to believe that the earth WILL recover, we just have to have our extinction event and give the planet a few hundred thousand years and it will be like we were never here…

  3. Every living creature on earth always been marching towards oblivion, whether one was born 100 years ago or a million. Heck yeah I’m going to enjoy the evergreen pleasure of sunshine and another season of life.

  4. @5 the human RACE and the human SPECIES are the same thing. all human beings are human beings. race is a construct created by white people. there is only one race (the human race) and there is only one human species alive right now (that we know of) and that’s homo sapiens. it’s incomprehensible that the “white” humans (global minority) believe they are the only human beings on earth and all other human beings are subhuman or less human or not human. when i think about all of the time other human beings have to spend convincing “white” human beings that they (all “non-white” human beings) are human it makes my head hurt.

  10. Big Oil fucking

    KNEW we’d be in for

    some Climactic Disruption

    should we continue to purchase

    their Products but the Promise of

    massive Profits was eough for them to

    just say Fuck It

    let’s get RICH.

    Smoke Season’s

    not far behind

    will Cali Sur-

    vive this

    year?

    Will

    WE?

    –EXXON:

    we’re More

    than just a Massive

    Oil Spill — we’re your

    Future.

  11. Simple steps anyone can take to be part of the solution – take a bus instead of your car, take a staycation instead of a cruise or plane trip, eat less meat, stream fewer videos and connect with life instead. Make up your own list. Changing your outlook changes your behavior which will again change your outlook.

  13. Using weather events to make a point about the climate is silly, Charles. You are no different than some idiot politician in Texas joking that “global warming” can’t be real because it was unseasonably cold in the southern United States.

  14. @19: Well, TBF, he also has a serious point, and it’s deeply offensive. He hand-waves away the disastrous social engineering experiments conducted upon unwilling masses by a failed regime for which he still has some apparent sympathy, and pays those social engineers a compliment they absolutely do not deserve (unless actual bridges collapse with catastrophic loss of life on the regular).

  15. Radical thought? It’s possible to both be concerned over climate change (and be doing something about it) and enjoy an unseasonably warm day.

  16. Charles’ consistent dislike of sunny days makes me wonder if he understands the role of photosynthesis and how important it is to food production. From vegan to keto – we all rely on the sun to feed us.

Comments are closed.