Things are crook

The majority of working Australians say that work "“ for all its benefits "“ has negative effects on the rest of life, creating strain and restricting time they have for themselves, families and friends, and communities. Many of those affected are not parents. More than half of all workers find that work interferes with their activities beyond work and feel often or almost always rushed and pressed for time.

Given productivity has gone to hell, unless we are working harder and dumber this is a bit difficult to explain. Especially as the OECD says we work fewer hours than the average for advanced economies.

But why let stats get in the way of a worldview when making us all miserable, and then reporting it, helps advance a cause? Thus the climate change industry says that "loss of social cohesion in the wake of severe weather events related to climate change could be linked to increased rates of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress and substance abuse."

Cyclones will do that to you "but as Katrina demonstrated it was less the event than the incompetence of officialdom that made New Orleans miserable" and if climate change is beyond humanity to halt public sector inefficiency isn't.

But be it obesity, over-work or global warming activists argue that we have made a mess of things (if only by allowing capitalism to control us) and that unless we do what we are told by our betters things will get worse. No one wonder a fair swag of citizens aren't content with life when we are told there is so much to worry about.

Which confuses the Crows. You don't have to deny climate change or inequality exists to wonder whether the doomsayers are either permanent pessimists or perpetually aggrieved variously wed to worrying about whatever is available or angry that nobody pays any attention to them.

A generation back critics used to point to all the flaws in Australian society and suggest socialism was an alternative and when that idea didn't work they switched to suggesting that there was something crook about our culture, especially the way academic and public sector elites are ignored.

At the end of the 1990s sociologist Michael Pusey worried that the leadership of officialdom was undermined:

it's as our public institutions weaken, the esteem which used to attach to being a public servant who did things in the public interest, or a person in public broadcasting, serving a public without fear or favour, I mean the public esteem which these roles hold is being whittled away. I mean quite deliberately by corporate Australia, if you want to point the finger at somebody. And that has consequences for individuals and the way they live their life. After a certain time, they say "The game's not worth a candle, it's too exhausting".

But they were re-energised by a new cause. A decade on the ABC's Angry Beast screened an extraordinary hip hop video of climate scientists sneering at everybody who dares disagree with them "“ the very thing they attack sceptics for doing.

So we are now in a position where smart people see their status as depending on everybody believing them when they explain how crook things are and how much worse they will get if we do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Perhaps they are right. The Crows don't have a clue, but it seems the grim are determined to win the argument, less by convincing than unsettling everybody. (The other side does not help with conspiracy theories and warning of economic ruin.)