1. Truth-telling. American civilization is
an abusive parent who provides more material goods than most, but lies about
just how violently he acquired those goods. With hundreds of military bases
abroad, American authority is like a Mafioso who brings home big bags of toys
and candy with blood all over them, and strictly forbids any discussion of
where it all came from.
In such a family, some kids will prefer to
keep the stuff and repress their own guilt and terror. This is not just so they
can keep the presents! They do it because if they don’t, their Dad’s illusory
goodness will disappear; their necessary idealization of him will collapse, and
they will be flooded with a painful ambivalence that they are not equipped to
process or contain. With more citizens in prison than any other country
on Earth, America is also a disciplinarian to be feared by his dependents.
The abusive parent has an addiction: oil.
The analogy with alcoholism expresses the links among the addiction, the
violence, the hypocrisy, and the deterioration. But the analogy breaks down
when we consider that oil doesn’t just drive the bully in charge, it also
powers the profligate lifestyle that is all the kids have ever known.
While some kids will need to stay with the
abuser’s program, other kids will find a way to speak the truth. This doesn’t
just happen because they are older kids (sometimes they aren’t), but because of
temperament, or insight, or some external source of support, like a mentor
whose values are different (say, Shakespeare), or friendship with a family down
the street who live in a far different and better way (say, Denmark or Cuba).
Speaking that truth will both risk the wrath of the abusive father, and
alienate the kids who are still trying to love him. But in a regime of endless
lies and unacknowledged open secrets, speaking the truth can feel so important
as to drive us to risk ostracism and punishment. We have to do it.
2. Orientation. Mammals are wired to
orient themselves in their environment, periodically doing threat assessment by
scanning the place with open eyes and ears. Think of meerkats on their hind legs,
peering at the horizon so they can know what’s coming. Climate change is not a
discreet entity that we can track with our eyes, like some leopard who’s in one
place at a time and can be present one moment and gone the next. It’s an
entirely different sort of threat from the kind we are equipped to find and to
confront. But that doesn’t change our nature, part of which is this need to
look at what dangers are out there as they approach. It is still absent because
the worst of its hardships (e.g., sea level rise in the tens of meters, and
temperatures so high the human body can’t thermo-regulate anymore) are yet to
come; yet it is also already present as Katrina and Sandy, epic wildfires,
droughts, and floods, lethal heat waves, falling crop yields, mass extinctions,
sea ice loss, and all the other anomalies of the past ten years. People with a
strong orientation drive will continue to assess threats—even those which they
are relatively powerless to stop, because what prompts me to orient myself is
not only the nature of the threat (in which case I might say, “well, this great
white shark is too big for me to stop, so I may as well ignore it”) but my own
need to try and protect myself, whether that is possible or not.
3. Integration. The false story costs a lot.
In order to continue believing in it and enjoying its advantages in relative
comfort, I have to make and maintain a deep split right down the middle of my
psyche (there are other solutions besides this splitting, such as sociopathy,
but this essay is about bleedingheart doomers such as myself). To stay happy
inside consumerism’s nationalist culture of endless growth on a finite planet,
I have to repress not only the giant ethical issues raised above (see # 1), but
also the tide of evidence that precisely because of these living arrangements
the world is rapidly becoming inhospitable to human life (see # 2). Unless this
repression is so complete that I am unaware of it, it will cost me much of my
energy and some of my mental health just to maintain it. If I turn toward the
truth instead, I will be forced to endure an awareness of it; in return, I will
be free of the need to split and compartmentalize and pretend.
4. Erasure. When I’m confronted with the
evidence of possible near-term human extinction (NTHE) from pollution,
depletion, and climate change (especially when the story includes methane, not
just CO2), part of me indulges in the thought that such an apocalypse would
take with it much of what I hate, including illegitimate authoritarian power,
militant stupidity, cruel poverty for billions of people, for-profit prisons,
torture, and so on. Make it stop. Let it stop. In Scorcese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle is so
disgusted with the pervasive crime and depravity of the city, that he
fantasizes about a great cleansing: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all
this scum off the streets.” The Biblical precedent is Noah’s flood. Like Job or
Ecclesiastes, one gets heartsick of entrenched injustice—waste, fraud, and
abuse—until the most soothing thought is to have something just smash it all,
vaguely hoping for a better outcome in some other time (whether future or
past!) or place. For example, whoever feels the obvious emotional reality that
elephants are non-human persons (they have self-awareness, love their children,
mourn their dead, live by matriarchy, form deep social bonds, weep when sad,
play joyfully, communicate, and so on) cannot bear the unbearable knowledge
that these people are now being rapidly murdered out of existence. According to
some sources, the African Lion population is down 90% since 1980. That stings
so bad that I find myself thinking this world is so far gone and so perverse
that it should be finished off.
This is a totally irrational thought which
I do not endorse, but there it is.
5. Displacement. Threats make us want to
act defensively in the protection of ourselves and those we love. But the state
of the whole world is so vast a predicament that I can’t discharge the powerful
impulse to “do something” that will fix it. I can take a 99.9% symbolic kind of
action and reduce my carbon footprint. But I can’t stop the timber industry
from cutting down every last tree; I can’t stop Monsanto from poisoning every
inch of ground with patented horrors like Agent Orange (“Roundup”); I can’t
bring flood relief to Bangladesh or Biloxi, restore the toxic Gulf of Mexico,
undo Fukushima, alkalize the seven oceans, or conjure with a wand the
replacement of a century of car culture with a whole new infrastructure of
local production, bikes, and handicrafts. The helplessness is overwhelming. So
my mere awareness (though from a social point of view, there in nothing “mere”
about it) of the dire facts comes to substitute for the impossible improvements
I yearn to make. I do make (or try to
make, or plan to make) the infinitesimal improvements I can make, but the helplessness is barely diminished. I stop eating
beef for a year, but the industry never reduces the size of the factory farms’
herds in response. I cut down on my plastic use, but Somebody keeps on refining
petroleum into gasoline and using the byproducts to make cheap plastic. When I
reach for the feelings of well-being that would come from an experience of
personal agency and instead feel totally powerless, I turn to the only thing left
on the shelf: my awareness. I can’t fix reality, but at least I can keep
acknowledging it.
***********
These thoughts come from my personal experience (I’ve written about the
issue before, in “Collapse Awareness and the Tragic Consciousness”), informed by several excellent books on the psychology of climate
change, including: Don't Even Think AboutIt: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change by George Marshall
(2014); Engaging with Climate Change: Psychoanalytic and Interdisciplinary Perspectives edited by Sally Weintrobe;
several books by Guy McPherson including Killing the Natives: Has the American Dream Become a Nightmare? (2009) and Walking Away from Empire (2011); and Reason in a Dark Time: Why the StruggleAgainst Climate Change Failed, and What It Means for Our Future by DaleJamieson (2014).
In conclusion, here is a very recent and potent presentation by Jennifer Hynes on the Arctic Methane problem. It may stir up in you some of the thoughts and feelings I've described here. You need not fear that every counselor out there would pathologize-and-diagnose if you came to them for help with these issues. Some would not.
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