Whether the science is about carcinogenic substances in our environment, tobacco’s threats to health, unsafe cars, AGW, pollution, or even guns, the real opposition arises from the threat that addressing these concerns present to corporate profits. All of these issues require increases in taxes or regulation, or the alteration of consumer behavior and mass consumption that will threaten highly lucrative industries. There is no fundamental difference between denialism and strike-breaking, union-busting, or price-fixing. It really is that simple.

It is no coincidence that all these positions are highly correlated with conservative political movements, the organized representatives and wanton handmaidens of brutal corporate power. The public manifestations are the product of wannabees with aspirations to commercial success or the exercise of their own masturbatory entrepreneurial fantasies. These latter people aren’t born that way, they have been manufactured by partisan propagandists who are perfectly aware of what they’re doing and why.

Sure, there may be a few deplorables out there who have been conned into following these positions because of the implied promise of some future commercial success; but the origin, the cause, the reason these attitudes have been molded and created is because people are getting rich from these activities and they don’t want them to stop. And they don’t give a damn who dies as a result of their business model.

The psychocultural aberrations you refer to are epiphenomena, they do not exist because of human mental states or for obscure anthropological or social reasons; they have been programmed that way deliberately by organized commercial interests and their political representatives.

Denialism is not a delusion, its a crime. This is not artsy fartsy behavioral science, its good old-fashioned class struggle. And we progressives are partly to blame because we have allowed ourselves to be shamed and coerced into avoiding the theory and language, the perfectly legitimate mental constructs and linguistic tools, that best describe and explain what is really going on.

I don’t think they particularly want science to be on their side. These climate-change deniers are part of a tribe that thrives on martyrdom, knowing that they’re despised for their beliefs, and giddy with delight when they can offend a science-loving liberal with their contempt for science.