Truth Hurts: The Science Behind Why People Don't Care About The Death Of Our Planet And Democracy

[GliderGuider]

Truth Hurts: The Science Behind Why People Don't Care About The Death Of Our Planet And Democracy

System justification research has proven most noteworthy for its ability to explain counterintuitive phenomena that existing self- and group-based frameworks could not. Put simply, if you are relying on the system to survive, believing that it is good and just helps to keep your fear, insecurity, futility, alienation and meaninglessness at bay.

Another counterintuitive implication of system justification is that the more flawed a system, the more motivated people become to support and defend it. Cracks in the system (system threat) jeopardise the psychological sense of safety, meaning and connection.

One of the most common sources of system threat is criticism. In countless studies, when people read passages or articles highlighting flaws in their political, economic or social arrangements (eg. “Many citizens feel that the country has reached a low point”), they respond defensively, with greater rationalisation of, faith and trust in, and support for the system in question.

As (Feygina) points out, climate change carries powerful system threats on many levels, “not only because of the scope and unpredictability of the projected disasters” but also because it requires re-thinking “ideas on which much of modern Western civilization is predicated”, such as consumerism, materialism, the free market and the primacy of industry, as well as “highlighting the failures of political leaders”.

She found that framing environmental action as “system sanctioned”, by deeming it patriotic and American, did just that. After reading a passage describing the seriousness and urgency of climate change, participants also read the statement, “Being pro-environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life. It is patriotic to conserve the country’s natural resources.” These two sentences eliminated the anti-environmental effect of system justification.

To reach a system-justifying audience, Feygina recommended “creating the perception that caring about one’s country (and its socioeconomic institutions) is compatible with a concern for the natural world” rather than pitting the environment and the socioeconomic order against each other, which she described as “deeply flawed”, psychologically speaking.

[daleanime]

1. kick, kick, kick.....

[GliderGuider]

2. The BAU folks already have this one figured out.

They have been framing the issue as environment vs. jobs for a long time now. According to this research that means they already have a very large, committed base in place world-wide, and to expand it they need to do nothing but continue the messaging already in place. Look for activism of every kind (that's us, folks) to be portrayed increasingly as system threats.

[The2ndWheel]

3. I would say they don't even need to frame that

It is environment vs jobs. At least when it comes to the kind of jobs that we think should exist. That's closer to physical reality than it not being environment vs. jobs. To try and frame it so that it's not that, is like going from the gold standard to our digital currency. The value of gold is all perception as well, but it was less psychological than digits on a screen.

We can dance around in the human mind all day long, but physical reality doesn't care. We can create this or that perception, but our socioeconomic order is an odds with the environment. It's give and take.

[GliderGuider]

6. Reality don't care

The carbon trap we've been in since 1850 or so has CO2 and economics inextricably entwined in direct proportionality. Economic activity keeps us all alive. In order to reduce CO2 emissions, economic activity must go down. If economic activity is reduced people begin to suffer and die. If economic activity stays up, CO2 keeps building up and people begin to suffer and die.

It's a bit like like a monkey trap, where the coconut shell is made of CO2 and the banana we can't let go of is a dollar bill. Except it's worse - if we hold onto the banana we will die, but if we let go of the banana we will die as well.

We're hooped.

[kristopher]

9. Renewable energy creates more jobs than centralized thermal.

A major part of the cost for renewables is labor, which diminishes to a degree the advantage relative to thermal of no fuel costs. If you'd like to google it, you shouldn't have any trouble confirming it.

[The2ndWheel]

11. That's great. Never said it didn't.

You don't really need jobs to make renewable energy. You could step outside and watch renewable energy in action. That's obviously not enough though, so we need to harness it. That's where the jobs with the retirement plans(or not) come in. That's where all the human activity comes in.

Knowing what we do with energy that has some sort of limiting factor to it(pollution), I wonder how we'll carve up the planet to fit humanity with what we hope is, and define as, a limitless source of energy.

[kristopher]

12. That certainly seemed to be your implication

...when you repeated the rightwing trope and wrote as a fact that it was either the environment or jobs. The technologies behind renewable energy already employ more people in GOOD jobs than the coal industry,

[The2ndWheel]

18. I wasn't talking about good or bad jobs

I just meant jobs in general. Ever increasing, specialized human activity. Whether it's coal or renewables, we want more people to be able to do more. Whatever the energy is, we have to build roads for people to get to work, find the material to make the suits and dresses and shoes and ties and whatever, get the material to build what we need, etc, etc, all down the line. All of that has to come from somewhere.

We want renewables to act like non-renewable energy. The only way to do that is to harness it, which requires more extraction from somewhere.

That's why we have zoos, or national parks, etc. Our activity comes at the expense of other things. Which is true with any form of life. A zebra has to die so a lion can live. If a zebra gets away, a lion might die. That's how it works, and we're no different. We're just more successful at it than most.

[kristopher]

24. There was no value in your comment to start with...

..now there is even less.

Suggest you get a sandwich sign and find yourself a nice safe street corner where you can share your ravings with a broader slice of the public.

[hunter]

14. You assume jobs are a good thing?

Most are not, and are furthermore bad for both the natural and human environment.

Promoting birth control, especially in places with exploding populations, that's good. Relocating people threatened by rising seas, recycling the materials of their cities, and restoring wetlands ahead of catastrophic events, that's a good thing. Teaching people how to live satisfying lives with minimal environmental impacts, that's a good thing.

But maybe things like automobiles are intrinsically bad, and we ought to quit making them entirely and rework and add to the existing structures of our cities in such ways that nobody needs or wants automobiles to go about their daily activities.

Maybe things like electric grids are bad. Maybe things like frozen food in the grocery store are bad.

I don't know the answer, and I can't even convince people in my own house to live a minimalist lifestyle (or myself sometimes), but the reality is that if you are participating in the existing economy, if you are "productive" by the current economic definition, especially as a first world U.S.A. consumer, than you are doing very serious permanent damage to the earth's natural environment.

Maybe we should pay people not to work in exchange for living some simple lifestyle with very low environmental impacts.

Whatever we do, the only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels. There's no real mechanism for doing that in this society. If I don't buy gasoline, someone else surely will. Or they'll buy a giant urban assault vehicle and a house in a rural area, commuting back and forth to work in the city. Here in California they're building desalinization plants powered by fracked gas, the fracking contaminating groundwater elsewhere, so development can continue here. It's madness.

[kristopher]

15. "the only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels"

Wow, you are as profound as ever.

If we were in kindergarten.

[hunter]

16. You can't see it, that's the problem.

Everyone insists their own hard work is a good, positive thing, and they call it "success" in this economic system, and they assume that their own hard work makes the world a better place. That's simply not true.

As a side note, kindergarten teachers have profoundly important jobs in progressive societies. All their kids have great potential.

And then most will grow up and "make a living" buying and selling and manufacturing stuff that's extremely damaging to the natural environment of this planet.

Madness.

Closer to home, we've got dogs and a compost heap, so sometimes I teasingly ask my wife, "Why do we need a refrigerator?"

Our refrigerator is probably the biggest power hog in the house. I've lived without a refrigerator for long periods, both as a kid, and as an adult.

My wife's not buying it. She's even got her eye on one of those new super-efficient models with the freezer on the bottom. So I do continue to exist as a "consumer" in this society, one who even at times buys frozen vegetables rather than making a meal of whatever happens to be on sale at the farmers market.

[kristopher]

17. maybe...

but I'm betting my background in cultural anthropology allows me to recognize when someone is pursuing a healthy state of simplicity as opposed to being disconnected from the reality of the world they live in. You console yourself with the thought that you have greater insight than others, and that's fine. But you might also consider the possibility that there is a point behind those who tell you your heavily tautological reasoning demonstrates that withdrawal is a sign of something else entirely.

[snagglepuss]

4. This just doesn't explain the avoidence of environmental issues

but also the phenomena of tea baggers (hard right), religious extremists of all stripes as well as the dynamics of victims in abusive relationships. Back in the 90s PBS ran lectures by a popular psychologist (name escapes me. perhaps Bradshaw) who always referred to families as "systems".


Truly insightful read.


K & R

[GliderGuider]

5. Exactly so.

A lot of the times we've wondered "Why the hell do people DO that?" are explained by this.

If I still thought there was any chance that changing public perceptions would help to address the clusterfuck, I'd change my messaging immediately!

[snagglepuss]

8. Check this out. "New information rarely ever changes anyone's thinking,

let alone behavior. Information can come in the form of a million sticky notes stuck to your skull, altering nothing underneath. The way to make change deeply and lastingly is to take on a new identity...On finding a new identity people can become willing almost overnight in their lives to be a bigger person than they realize they can be."


This is from "A God That Could Be Real" by Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher of science, a lawyer and lifelong atheist, married to astrophysicist James Primack with whom she wrote two books about the "social and political context of her husband's work on dark matter and dark energy".

I got the book after hearing a truly phenomenal interview about her going into a a recovery program and how surprised she was about the effectiveness of imagining her higher power.

I've only leafed through the book but having always read your posts with great interest, I believe that you may find this book extremely interesting.

From the cover:

Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about god...dismantling common assumptions about omniscient and omnipotent god that created the universe...she finds something worthy of the name god in the the new science of emergence: just as the a complex ant hill emerges form the collective behavior of individually clueless ants, ....god is a emergent phenomena that arises in each individual.

This god did not create the universe ---it created the meaning of the universe. It's not universal, it's planetary.

It can't change the world but it helps us change the world. A god that could be real is what humanity needs to inspire us to collectively cooperate to protect our warming planet....

[GliderGuider]

10. Beliefs are very fact-resistant. Not just religious beliefs but social beliefs in general.

I understand what the author of your book is saying about having to take on a new identity in order to effect deep personal change. It's exactly what I've done over the last three years, across large portions of my belief system.

[lindysalsagal]

13. I'd love to know more about your identity change

How? Why? How did your family and friends take it? Are you convinced it was the right move?

Powerful stuff.

[GliderGuider]

22. The Cliff's Notes of a transformation

Last edited Thu Aug 27, 2015, 08:47 PM - Edit history (4)

I’m 64 years old. I come from an ultra-liberal, socialist, scientific, atheist family in Canada. My father was a research biochemist and my mother a physicist.

Up until 2003 I was a total technophile. That year I discovered climate change, Peak Oil and a wide range of other imminent and unfolding ecological calamities. As a result I developed an obsessive conviction that global civilization is facing an imminent and stupendous crash, with the potential to wipe out modernity along with much of the human race.

I chewed on this belief so hard over the next four years that I became almost suicidal. In order to rescue myself from the despair, in 2007 I decided to find out what the word "sacred" meant to me as a third-generation atheist. It was the beginning of a classic Joseph Campbell journey. I spent the next half-dozen years exploring a variety of Eastern spiritual traditions, especially various forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufi and Advaita.

Along the way I also became interested in the unconscious roots of human behaviour that got us into this pickle. I expanded my exploration into evolutionary psychology, cybernetics, complex systems and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. From this I've come to see the evolved human "ability to believe" and our propensity to mistake our beliefs for reality as being the keys to understanding what's going on with our behaviour towards the planet, the biosphere and especially each other.

As a result of this work I now hold two well-developed worldviews simultaneously.

One view is materialist. It's the framework I use to explain the outside world to myself. In this view, matter, energy and the laws of physics reign supreme. Physical and cultural evolution is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. Free will is virtually non-existent, while human sociocultural behaviour is shaped mainly by our environment, our evolutionary history and the requirements of maintaining the ever-growing "heat engine" of civilization. In this view, the global disaster I initially perceived is quite alive and well, and will happen no matter what we do at this point.

My other worldview is idealist. It frames my inner world. The foundation for it is primarily the non-dualist realization of the illusion of the self, a realization that happened a couple of years ago during my exploration of Advaita Vedanta. In this view all there is, is consciousness. The apparent physical universe and all it contains are manifestations arising within consciousness. Obviously, since there is no "real" physical world in this framework, the notion of a collapse is irrelevant.

In daily life I no longer take my thoughts (or the thoughts of others) very seriously. In line with the teachings of Buddhism I tend to focus on the moment, especially the perception of flow and change. I try to re-examine my beliefs continually, and discard as many of them as I can find. This has included discarding my previous scientism as well as my atheism and all the spiritual concepts I have encountered in my journey (nirvana, enlightenment, Oneness, all god-concepts etc.) In their place, I try to substitute nothing, using the model of Pyrrhonian skepticism. At the same time I'm deeply skeptical that anyone can live without beliefs of any sort. Obviously I (if there is such a thing) am a work in progress, much more a verb more than a noun.

I have discarded the oppositional concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, and am expunging the word "should" from my vocabulary. I no longer seek or perpetuate conflict in real life or online.

As a result of all this change my despair and depression are gone. In their place are relaxation, deep calmness, curiosity, a lot of joy and an acceptance of the world around me as it unfolds in all in all its grandeur and horror.

My family doesn't understand me any more, and their reactions vary. My parents are happy that I'm now at peace with myself and the world, and although they don't share many of my views they accept them. My brother-in-law in contemptuous, my sister doesn't really give a fuck. My wife of five years, on the other hand, is on exactly the same wavelength I am, which is the one thing that makes me believe in miracles. I have a few online friends who totally get where I'm coming from, but the reactions of most people range from indifference through incomprehension to revulsion.

Was it the right move for me? Oh fuck yes! Would I recommend it to anyone else? Not a chance. We all have to walk our own paths.

I hope that slakes your thirst!

[lindysalsagal]

23. You just put me in such a good mood! Thank-you!

I hope it didn't take as long to write that as I think it did!

People become hysterical when you disengage from conditoned societal groupthink.

I read posts where various flavors of authoritarianism and conservatism are reactions to fear and insecurity. But society has a vested interest in keeping people afraid and dependent. The ironic thing is that emotional slavery to our attachments are a big cause of our suffering.

I see how wanting things makes me miserable, as do living in the future (wanting) and the past (regret).

Once you wake up to it all you never go back.

I love how science was your start.

I'm afraid we're still going to ruin the planet. Humans seem to be hell-bent on destruction. We never learn.

Thanks so much for sharing!

[GliderGuider]

25. You're welcome! On boards like this we often see others as positions rather than people

Last edited Fri Aug 28, 2015, 08:05 AM - Edit history (1)

That's the reason it's so easy to argue with others online in harsh and uncompromising terms - we often feel it's not a human being on the receiving end, just a position. This misperception also makes it much harder to accommodate normal differences of opinion, even on a board like E&E where our differences of opinion don't make a shred of difference in the real world. What should just be discussions can easily turn into reactive personal defenses of our own self-image by assaulting the self-images of others.

So this is an offering of my own humanity, in the hopes that it may make some small difference.

[lindysalsagal]

27. Thanks. You remind me that there is some hope for the human race.

People will never question their conditioning unless someone offers an alternative perspective. Every little bit helps. Thanks.

[LouisvilleDem]

19. This is especially true of Apocalyptic thinkers

No matter how many times the predictions of Malthusians and Peak Oilers fail to come true, they continue to believe. I wonder what it is that makes them so immune to consistently being wrong. The real irony is that when they read about how new information rarely ever changes anyone's thinking, their only impulse is to see how it applies to other people and not themselves.

[GliderGuider]

20. It's true of everyone. It's how we're wired. nt

[kristopher]

21. I think it is the trend lines on graphs.

Perhaps the sudden turndown line resonates with some physiological event in their lives.

[hunter]

28. The world is a fucking apocalypse if you happen to be the wrong species, say an Orangutan...

... or as a human who pays some smuggler to get you out of Syria who then abandons your dead decomposing body in a trailer at the side of the road.

Somehow people are blind to the mass extinctions that's happening right now, of both animal and plant species, and entire communities of human beings, all their languages, customs, history, traditional stories, if not their lives.

But I guess if you have a smartphone, a new car, and gasoline in the tank, then everything is awesome. Up until the day you or your own loved ones discover it's not.

My personal perspective, my philosophy, my religion is complex. I am both by natural inclination and a lot of formal training an evolutionary biologist or paleontologist. I also love electronics and computers. It's amazing to me that I can divert computers from the recycling stream, computers that at one time I'd have considered supercomputers.

I first signed onto the internet in 1979, and have been here ever since.

Maybe up until I quit high school, paving the way for further younger sibling rebellion, my mom might have been classified as religiously insane. I was the weird Jehovahs Witness kid in grade school who didn't stand for the pledge. My mom was originally frontier U.S.A. Catholic, NOT MORMON, who'd dreamed as a child of being a nun until she encountered a leering priest who smoked, drank, and otherwise didn't meet her high standards of Holiness, at which point she took a job in Hollywood for a major Catholic celebrity, an even greater disappointment, and then met my artist dad, got married, and had a mess of kids Catholic style, but still well celebrated by the Witnesses, until they kicked us all out of their church because my mom always says what she thinks and can't stay out of politics, similar to how we had to leave Franco's Spain in the middle of the night. The nice thing about the Quakers is that they could listen respectfully to whatever my mom had to say, her conversations with God, and then move on. Much nicer than the time my mom decided to chew the ass off a Catholic Bishop in public, and the Priest they were talking about mysteriously ended up sent off to Ireland.

I'm married Catholic. I'd returned to my ancestral religion through a side Orthodox door before I met my wife, imagine a David Lynch version of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" where your supposed girlfriend handcuffs a pimp to a urinal and beats the shit out of him until he tells her where her actual true love, another woman, is. Awkward. I was standing outside the door claiming "rough sex" to drunks who had to pee. And then things got worse. I have deep scars.

A few years later, after I'd pulled myself back together living in the backyard shed of crazy Viet Nam War veteran, graduating, training to be a big city public school teacher, I met my wife, and soon we chose to wed. The night before my wedding i was terrified my mom or her mom would make a big scene, but nothing bad happened. We're all one big heretic Catholic family on both sides, complete with LGBT family who are not uncomfortable attending Mass, and may or may not take Communion as the Holy Spirit moves them. My children are 100% Catholic, even though it's obvious by now there's some birth control going on.

Back to the common religion of the U.S.A., ignoring the Ford vs. Chevy sects, I drive a mid 'eighties piece of shit $800 car. I hate cars and they hate me, which is probably why they refuse to die, just to spite me, even when I have a few extra dollars in my pocket. But I do like what my decrepit cars say about me, that i don't give a shit about cars, not my own, not yours.

90% of this modern society, this modern world economy is bullshit. In a hundred thousand years it's all in interesting layer of trash in the geologic record, and life is rediversifying.

I may end up homeless someday, but I've been there before, done that. Maybe I die on the streets. Oh well, could be worse.

But it would bring me great pleasure to witness the end of the automobile and fossil fuel age.

In the short term I'll continue to be astonished that I can buy a brand new supercomputer (a Raspberry Pi 2 in my latest adventure) for $35, and the asthma and crazy medicines I take have very mild side effects (maybe barring the occasional anorgasmia) compared to some of the shit I used to take.

[GliderGuider]

29. Those who cannot see that human activity has already triggered an apocalypse...

...are still asleep. There are fewer of them all the time though, as the noise of the disintegrating world becomes ever harder to shut out.

We each face this realization armed with the lessons we have drawn from the small disintegrations in our personal histories. Thanks for sharing your story, hunter.

[Bigmack]

7. Willful ignorance strikes again! nt

[djean111]

26. The United States just won a lawsuit in the WTO that prevents India from building a huge solar farm,

because the United States felt that India should not be subsidizing the solar farm to such a great extent. So now one country can keep another country from doing something that is good for their people and good for the planet.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027118156

The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday ruled against India over its national solar energy program in a case brought by the U.S. government, sparking outrage from labor and environmental advocates.

As power demands grow in India, the country's government put forth a plan to create 100,000 megawatts of energy from solar cells and modules, and included incentives to domestic manufacturers to use locally-developed equipment.

According to Indian news outlets, the WTO ruled that India had discriminated against American manufacturers by providing such incentives, which violates global trade rules, and struck down those policies—siding with the U.S. government in a case that the Sierra Club said demonstrates the environmentally and economically destructive power of pro-corporate deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

"Today, we have more evidence of how free trade rules threaten the clean energy economy and undermine action to tackle the climate crisis," Ilana Solomon, director of the Sierra Club's Responsible Trade Program, said on Thursday. "The U.S. should be applauding India’s efforts to scale up solar energy—not turning to the WTO to strike the program down."

So - really, there are no "good guys" any more, methinks, just corporate power, and politicians who suck at the corporate teat. For the most part.