Editor’s note: This commentary is by Dan Jones, of Montpelier, who is a managing partner of Net Zero Vermont Ventures and former chair of the Montpelier Energy Advisory Committee.
[M]y wife recently returned from a business trip to Silicon Valley, where she had spent much of her career. “It’s dry, dusty and depressing,” she moaned. “There is no greenery. The trees and grass are brown. I have never seen such smog in San Francisco.”
Hearing this, along with watching the video of summer’s fires in the Sierras, got me thinking. Most of us are aware of the damage being wrought by global warming. We cannot be ignorant of the compound failures of our Congress and of the continuing weakness of our economy. We all see our youth sinking into addiction as they lose hope of decent jobs. We can see the damage our fossil-fuel-centric economy is forcing on the world, yet we seemingly find it impossible to actually talk about the personal changes we must all make if we are to keep the world from burning up.
No one wants to contemplate the radical changes needed in our transportation, housing and consumption behaviors. Politicians and pundits flee from offering meaningful prescriptions out of a deep fear that they would be pilloried and unelectable. Meanwhile, many of us blithely continue to assume the future will look much like yesterday while everything in our environment screams that this will not be so. Such denial is understandable. Who among us wants to face the prospect of losing their comfortable lifestyle and privileges?
The awareness that we must change our expectations, and soon, is a kind of death for us American consumers. No wonder so many people embrace denial or take refuge in a psychological dysfunction called “magical thinking,” which holds that some supernatural force or developing technology will save us from ourselves.
A recent book titled “The Worm at the Core,” by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, has helped me understand this phenomenon more deeply. The authors are three social psychologists who had done years of research into what our uniquely human knowledge – the awareness that we are all going to die — does to us psychologically and socially. Basically, this knowledge leads us to do two things: 1) shore up our personal self-esteem, and 2) cling more fiercely to our worldviews, no matter how dysfunctional. Doing this helps us deny the reality of death and promises some form of continuance. Without such denial, the authors suggest, we would be paralyzed from acting at all in the world.
The awareness that we must change our expectations, and soon, is a kind of death for us American consumers.
“The Worm at the Core” demonstrates how people try to support their self-esteem and worldviews through strange rituals that harshly enforce the rules and morality of their society. Such rules promise a continuance of the culture even after our death, so they offer a kind of symbolic immortality. More primitive versions of such responses might take the form of tropic islanders trying to appease the fire god in the volcano by offering a virgin sacrifice. Today, people frightened of change sacrifice those who go against the accepted rules. They crack down on behaviors like homosexuality or drug use that challenge their personal view of self-esteem and contradict their narrow community worldview. Some people defend their self-esteem by collecting guns, and support their worldview by embracing the notion of deporting or killing anyone who is “other” and calling for war against any other culture that is different.
This book helped me understand what underlies those who ignore climate change. Denial is a natural human response to fear; it’s a common behavior we all exhibit when faced with the prospect of wrenching change, including death. Climate change denial comes in many forms. Some people ignore what is in front of their face and claim that what we’re experiencing is a natural solar cycle for which we have no responsibility. Their chosen leaders might demonstrate that there is no such thing as global warming by tossing snowballs in the halls of Congress. Then there are those who admit that warming is happening, but don’t appear to give a damn: “I will be dead by the time the crisis arrives, so why should I do anything now?” is a common response.
Tragically, we are just now learning that many aspects of climate change denial are actually products of a carefully manufactured campaign of deceit fostered by some of our largest corporations. As the Times Argus pointed out recently, we should be enraged at discovering how internal research by Exxon/Mobil ( back in the ’70s, mind you) proved that burning lots of fossil fuels would lead to global warming. But instead of responsibly changing their business plan, Exxon acted as perfect corporate capitalists. They lied.
Even worse, the company went on to spend hundreds of millions promoting the notion that global warming was a delusion of liberal do-gooders out for more government control. Their business plan was basically to destroy all of our futures in the service of their present profit. Let’s be honest though, such corporate criminal activities will only work if they are launched into a population that truly wants to avoid uncomfortable truths. Sadly, many of us were happily complicit in this abomination, because believing Exxon/Mobil allowed us to go on guzzling gas and continuing business as usual.
Times are changing. I believe, deep down, most people understand that we must make massive shifts in our lifestyles and our expectations of privilege, and soon. Accepting the truth of global warming means confronting a whole bunch of uncomfortable personal choices. This situation reminds me of a cartoon I just saw. A man on the stage asks: “Who wants change?” and everyone in the audience raises their hands. In the next panel he asks, “Who wants to change?” Nobody raises their hands, and all eyes are on the ground.
It seems to me that if we are going to alter this paralyzed state of affairs, we will need some kind of a collective form of psychotherapy – to help us discover the worm at our collective core. It’s time to face our fears and confront the deep drivers of our current paralysis. Only then will we be able to actually act to stop the horror of climate collapse.
