How can ‘Conservatives’ own Environmentalists?

July 12, 2021

Believe it or not, this is a real question from someone.

“Owning” is a weird term. I gather, from the way it is generally used, it means completely destroying the arguments and existence of the people you are opposing. It seems a violently anti-civic position and hence an anti-real-conservative position.

But let us assume it can mean winning over the other side…. in which case it is easy.

Conservatives could show they are more concerned about conserving the environment than they are concerned about conserving corporate profits.

They could openly wonder whether environmental and climate science might be correct enough for us to accept it in general.

They could ask whether humans can keep destroying the global ecology (or God’s creation, if you prefer) forever with no consequences.

They could wonder whether burning fossil fuels at the rate we are doing is necessary or helpful to conservation.

They could think about opposing new drilling sites for oil, new mines for coal, new gas fields, especially new extreme sites like coal tar, deep ocean drilling etc, and ask people to make do with what we already have. This would mean that some companies might have to change, which could make it awkward, but sometimes you have to stand up for what its right.

They could wonder if leaving environmentalism to the market has worked well enough over the last 30 years, and wonder whether, if it works in some cases, which are those cases and why.

They could wonder if markets better at producing upheaval than they are at producing conservation?

They could propose constructive solutions that they know are likely to be acceptable to the population in general and plausible. Not, for example, massive upgrades of nuclear power, or carbon capture and storage, which sadly are enormously expensive, seem to take a long time to set up, and if they have disasters have maximal disasters.

They could wonder why the environmental solutions my conservative government is promoting include: tree clearance; koala destruction; removing more water from almost dead rivers; more coal power and more methane power; more money for carbon capture; while opposing emissions targets and renewable energy targets and pretending the Great Barrier Reef is not in decline. This does not seem like environmentalism of any sort whatsoever.

Conservatives could decide that while it is difficult to be virtuous and go first, the developed world, including the US, the UK and Australia, should go first, because it is the right thing to do, and sets an example. If a group of countries won’t do it, then you have to stand up for the right thing anyway, rather than mutter about losing advantage, or it being unfair.

So all Conservatives have to do, is to take environmentalism seriously as a conservative task, engage in dialogue with other people, and there you are… We might even get something done.

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The right and imperialism

July 6, 2021

Any discussion of this question should probably consider why countries and organisations are imperialistic, and the relationship between this and right wing politics.

Right wing politics

Lets assume that there are four dominant varieties of right wing politics in the modern world… [This may get expanded later, like most of these blogs, this is a work in progress]

  1. Nationalist
  2. Pro-capitalist, pro-corporatist,
  3. Theocratic, And
  4. Militaristic

Obviously, organisations and countries can appear to be a combination of some, or all, of these varieties, and they are not completely exclusive to the ‘right’, but they are extremely common in the right. All of these varieties of right wing politics tend to be imperialistic.

Nationalists can be imperialistic because they:

  • consider they are better and stronger than others
  • consequently others are inferior and deserve to be ruled by them,
  • they need more land to support their population,
  • they need cheap, or slave, labor,
  • they want to protect the homeland from everyone who is envious of their superiority and wants to bring them down
  • they need to rescue their ‘own’ people who live in another country from that country, and bring them into the national fold.
  • Imperialism becomes a continuation of successful national politics

Pro-corporate rulers can be imperialistic because:

  • they want guaranteed markets for their corporations,
  • they want guaranteed resources for their corporations,
  • they want cheap labor or production for their corporations,
  • they want to protect or control their corporations’ trade routes,
  • they want to protect their corporations’ private property in other places,
  • they wish to extend regulations which benefit corporations over people throughout the world,
  • they see themselves as rugged individualists, and hence better than other people,
  • like nationalists, they like proving how superior they are.
  • Imperialism is seen as a continuation of successful trade

Theocrats can imperialistic because:

  • they have the true religion and other people must share in it to be saved,
  • it is sinful if they don’t make sure other countries have the true religion,
  • to make sure its the true religion they have to control that religion,
  • they are really virtuous, or more virtuous than other corrupt places, because they have the true religion, and that will be decisive in any struggle,
  • they are better than other people,
  • God is on their side, so they will be victorious in the long run.
  • Imperialism is seen as a temporary and necessary part of obedience to God, spreading his word, and bringing about his will. It is, ultimately, a source of good. etc.

Militarists are imperialistic

  • because the point of a military is to have wars, to compete with others in matters of arms, etc.

Now there may exist some right wing governments who think that extending power is dangerous, and that they have no business interfering with other people, but these people are rare and they are usually happy to interfere with the lives of their own people to make them virtuous, and that interference is easy to extend to others elsewhere as a matter of national pride.

We can also note that most of these forms of politics tend to be authoritarian.

Nationalist because some one has to represent the nation and tell others what that is, suppress those who disagree and reinforce whatever they approve in the nation’s hierarchies. Nations tend to be identified with ‘kinship’ and race, so they devote a fair amount of energy making sure that non-kin and non true-race people are kept down.

Pro-corporate tends to be authoritarian because they have to enforce property laws, massively unequal incomes and privileges, force people to work for others, and defend the hierarchy and crony capitalism that evolves. They also have to defend whatever makes money that serves them. So they can support companies that corrupt, or destroy the whole system, as is illustrated by the current support for fossil fuel companies and attacks on IT companies. They may also need support for the trade wars which support certain companies profits.

Theocrats are authoritarian because they have to enforce the word of God, or the conventions which have grown around God’s laws, they need to stop other religions and ideas taking off and seducing the innocent and, because some people are considered to be particularly expert or holy, the religious hierarchies need enforcing against sinners.

Militarism just comes with authoritarianism.

The ‘Left’

There are also ‘Liberals’, may tend to try and build alliances through promoting their own political and economic systems in other countries, but this is often hard to distinguish from imperialism as far as the ‘victims’ are concerned – their world and culture is being changed to resemble that of another another place, often without consultation, especially consultation with the less powerful.

Left wing workers paradises may also be authoritarian and imperialistic to protect themselves against the rest of the world (as when facing the war against the Soviets after WW1), and to extend the supposed virtues of their system outwards to others to stop the challenge against them – this usually helps confirm any dictatorial tendencies they have.

So most of the common forms of government have imperialistic tendencies. All organisations which need to suppress opposition to survive, tend to become authoritarian or imperialistic, whatever their primary reason for being. This imperialism is magnified because common forms of government in the world today are competitive with other governments.

The End of Western Imperialism?

Given this, the most likely end for imperialism is to be defeated by another rising set of imperial powers.

This option in the contemporary world is made more likely because of the exhaustion of US power, and economy, in a pointless set of imperialistic wars started under GW Bush probably for reasons of nationalism (“New American Century”), Pro-corporatism (protecting US oil interests), Theocracy (Bringing Armageddon and the new godly world closer) and Militarism (we have the best and most expensive military in the world, and have to show it off).

There is some evidence (see Naomi Klein) that there was no plan for the aftermath of conquest of Iraq because the Bush admin hoped that with no government and no regulation the libertarian free market paradise would emerge and be a showplace for the world. If this was intended, it obviously did not happen.

Collapse is the fate of most imperialisms:

  • It is harder to hold onto territorial gains than to destroy those powers holding territory, especially with modern weaponry
  • The expense of conquest eventually becomes greater than the gains
  • Supply lines and back up gets exhausted, stretched or becomes too expensive
  • Information becomes more distorted as it passes up the chain of command, and nobody knows what is really going on
  • The conquerors get fed up of the effort of maintaining conquest and the cost in lives loses popularity back home
  • Without massive local support, conquerors can find themselves in an endless guerilla war
  • The harder the conquerors impose their order, the easier it is to see as imposed, annoying and incompetent
  • The wider the front or border, and the more expanded the empire, the more enemies it encounters or generates and the fewer resources it has to fight them all

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Nazis and Socialists

June 30, 2021

Introduction

I often encounter people who say the Nazis were socialists. It seems a standard part of current day rightist theory. supporters of the proposition don’t generally present much evidence beyond the name Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist, German Workers Party), this implies that they will then tell me that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea shows how bad democracy is.

Historically, the party did grow out of Anton Drexler’s Deutsche Arbeiterpartei which seems to have been both authoritarian and anti-capitalist, blaming Jewish people for the problems of capitalism, but after Hitler essentially took over (the original party lasted just over a year) any focus on the rights of German workers declined considerably, although Otto and Gregor Strasser did tie the nationalism to socialist rhetoric, perhaps to drag workers away from communism. In 1926 at the Bamberg Conference Hitler denounced the remaining socialist-inclined members as “communists” and ruled out land expropriations and popular decision-making or consultation. Otto Strasser either broke away from the Nazis in 1930 after Hitler allied with the German aristocratic and corporate elite, or he was pushed, or both. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor, through Conservative support, he soon had Gregor Strasser murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. In the 1930s the Nazis openly told business that democracy and business were incompatible, and received about two million Reichsmarks in funding from big industrialists as a result. Hitler was also financed and supported by American Corporations and the British Aristocracy because of his anti-communism and the fact he was not socialist.

Hitler was a fan of Henry Ford, and vice versa, probably because of their shared anti-Semitism. In July 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Henry Ford helped lead the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II. Ford had a car company in Germany, helped provide war material for the Nazis, and may have used Nazi provided slave labour.

As far as I know, Hitler never seems to have been interested in supporting worker power, or redistribution of wealth to the general populace. The Nazi critique of capitalism seems to have been largely confined to criticism of international bankers (ie a code term for Jews). Inequalities in property ownership were supported and sanctified.

So we can say that even if the Nazis once had been socialists they were not before or after they got into power.  

What did the Nazis promote?

Lets look at what the Nazis were. They were:

Nationalists

Making Germany great again. Germany first. Germans are the master race etc…

Racists

Comes with the Nationalism and the master race stuff. Everyone who they defined as non-German or non-Aryan, was inferior no matter how long they had been living in Germany.

Inferior races, at best, deserved to be slaves under the control of the white Christian German people. Inferior races had no rights, they could be shot and detained at whim.

The “jewish threat” gave them internal people to hate and blame for anything that went wrong, gave them a scapegoat to produce unity, and provided an excuse for theoretical inaccuracy.

Authoritarian and Hierarchical

The Fuehrer was top of the heap. Everyone should honour and obey him. His immediate circle came next. All of life was a chain of competitive authority. Zealous obedience was a key to success. Of course non-Germans and inferior races where at the bottom of the chain, and of little value except as labour. If they could not labour then death was the reward.

Hierarchy was officially, about race, ability and heroism.

Having a hierarchy means people need to have an easy way to identify those inferior to them, so they don’t get mistaken for those inferiors and can attack them.

Nazis abolished Trade Unions as these were incompatible with Party Authority, and likely to be socialist and disrupt corporate power.

Statist

The Reich/State was the Nation, and the Nation the State – and the State was a hierarchy of obedience. The Fuehrer and the State should master everything. People should serve the State, not the State the people. State is unified by race. Self-governance by those lower down, was not acceptable. Autonomous non-government zones where not acceptable.

It is true that Hitler did not believe in rule by corporations, but he did protect them.

Ideological

Education exists to promote “Aryan values” whatever they are. The values were said to be under threat by degenerates, and foreigners, and such people must be silenced as much as possible. Education was to aim at producing people for the workforce, the military and the party. Any university person who disagreed with these values, or this position, was to be removed as a marxist or as non-Aryan. Obviously Jews should not teach – Heidegger, for example, got rid of Jewish lecturers. Aryan students should spy on their teachers and report those who deviated. Only Aryan research which supported the official ideology was to be allowed. No research which openly checked on the accuracy of party policy, economics, authority, hierarchy, racism etc. was acceptable – it was to be denounced.

Heroes

Heroism was important. This involved self-sacrifice for the Fuehrer. It involved perpetual struggle against those who would undermine the Fuehrer. It involved leaping into combat with degenerates without thinking. It meant fighting for the Reich and one’s fellow fighters without question. It meant group loyalty. You should never be disloyal to the party. Disloyal people should be punished. Heroism was also about the survival of the fittest, most talented etc. Strangely it often involved official denials that they had engaged in the violence they promoted.

Cultivation of heroism, in this case, leads to the unheroic being despised and open for slaughter.

Militarist

Another consequence of Nationalism, and the implied inferiority of others. The Germans where the supreme fighting force in the world. They were only defeated by betrayal. All Aryan men should contribute to the military effort. All other Nations where inferior and deserved to be conquered, to provide land and resources for German heroes. Military combat was the supreme expression of heroism.

There is no evidence that Hitler espoused anti-colonial policies, other than in an attempt to conquer the colonies of his enemies. He certainly did not support self-determination and independence for people Germans conquered.

Sexist

This was reinforced by the militarism. Women exist to please men, to be obedient to men, and to produce more soldiers and breeders for the Reich. That’s it.

Corporate

German corporations where the backbone of the German State. They should produce the resources and equipment needed by the State, when the State commanded. As long as corporations realised their place they were given authority, and slave labour. No workers rights or unions were to disrupt production or wealth extraction, so corporations were relatively happy.

Mystical

The Fuehrer was close to God or Spirit, mysterious and inspired with an understanding beyond that of mortal men. If you could not understand him that was to be expected, but you should should still obey. Germany was dominant because of its spirit and its fate. Many Germans seemed to find Hitler a source of religious and mystical comfort. They had a special relationship with him, even if they had never met.

Aryan Christianity was the official religion (with as much relationship to real Christianity as evangelical prosperity preachers), although the elites may have had their own rituals. They found it easy to accommodate with most Churches, who helped support them as they represented authority, and the choice of God.

“The völkisch-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.”

Mein Kampf p.562.

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. 

Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1942). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922 – August 1939. Vol. 1

Propagandists

They lied about the forces against them, to build support. They did not like people checking their ‘truths’. They repeated slogans endlessly to give them the certainty of truth. They made ‘agreements’ for as long as it was convenient. This may have been a mistake as it gave Russia and the UK time to prepare for the inevitable war. Deniability was high. You may have had to divine what the Fuehrer wanted and give it to him, especially if it could be disreputable.

The truth of any statement was a matter of how much it supported the Party, Reich and triumph etc….

For what it is worth the U.S. Office of Strategic Services claimed:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend

Of course Nazis are unlikely to claim that they lie.

Support

Nazis were supported by many conservatives in Germany, and by many Republicans and US corporations (even after it was made illegal to trade with them), because they were not communist or socialist, and recognised property hierarchy. This helped keep the US out of the war and gave the Nazis freedom to strike.

Conclusion

Non of these features of Nazism has any necessary connection to socialism, unless you define socialism in a very odd way so as to try and make the connection ‘true’.

.

Appendix Some extra remarks

The ideologies and theories of communism and fascism are completely different as a little research in reading the original materials should show you.

Communism aspires to the withering away of the state, the birth of people power, and relative economic equality under the control of the workers. It begins by attacking the power of bosses, plutocrats, aristocracies, established churches, and bureaucrats. Its contradictory failing, is that after the revolution it needs a strong State to demolish the previous social arrangements and to defend the revolution against attack. This has always been the point of fracture between communitarian anarchists and communists.

Previously powerful and wealthy people, often have their money offshore and keep trying to undermine progress, while other states which fear revolution attack it, just as the US, Australia and the UK fought against the Soviets after the revolution, or just like Cuba has been attacked and isolated ever since the revolution, even though they initially tried to ally with the US.

Given this, the people who come to control the State then have no real inclination to give up their power and make the new state vulnerable, so the revolution never comes to fruition, even if it could.

Without fail, given this kind of situation, dictators have always arisen, even though the fundamental aim of communism was to remove authoritarian aristocrats, monarchs or plutocrats.

On the other hand, fascists aim to establish an authoritarian nationalism. Dictatorship is part of the scheme from the beginning. Usually the would-be dictator is the focus of the party, the policies of the party are whatever the leader says, the leader is proclaimed to be a genius with an indissolvable tie to the people. The only issues are how to apply the leader’s wishes, and how to purge the party of those who still cling to ideas of democracy, worker’s revolution, or fairness.

The Dictator and the party are usually supported by some of the existing power elites, such as the aristocracy or the corporate wealth elites – often, ironically, as a bulwark against communism. As they are nationalists, usually aiming to restore the nation’s greatness in the eyes of the world, and to restore discipline and obedience amongst the people, they are often supported by conservatives. Eventually the aristocracy, corporate sector and conservatives find they have supported an effective, as opposed to bumbling, dictatorship and have to go along with it to keep their positions. However, capitalists almost never find collaborating with a force that helps them make money a problem.

To keep its momentum, fascism depends on finding an internal enemy, which is not that powerful but which can be pretended to be powerful: whether it be people they can call communists, jews, blacks, academics, gays, liberals etc. This enables fascism to justify its policies, excuse its failures, and give its people something to hate and distinguish themselves from. As a result, fascism tends towards racism, incarceration or mass murder as a normal process, although it always pretends not to, as people are generally just not hard enough to want to murder whole classes of other people. Without a created enemy, it withers. The enemy gives it legitimacy when the leader challenges election results, or ignores elections altogether, as the enemy is duplicitous by definition. Constant denunciation of the enemy helps get its supporters angry and motivated – it liberates violence and a sense enemies are being defeated.

Eventually, finding internal enemies leads to finding external enemies and the use of warfare to keep the people together. Fascism tends to be militaristic in orientation: it likes uniforms, parades and mass rallies to build unity amongst the favored, and strike fear into the unfavored. This is part of its building discipline, order and lack of empathy towards victims. Initially, warfare also means more money for large parts of the corporate world, so it helps to keep corporate support.

So they are quite different in approach and hopes, even if the result is similar.

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Wage Labour in Capitalism

June 27, 2021

The Capitalist view of wage labour

The ideology is simple. In an imaginary free market, both employer and employee only ever sign voluntary agreements. There is never any differential of power or need, and the market always values labour and skills at exactly the right value, or the contract would not be signed by either party, who are perfectly free to turn the contract down.

No contract, no matter how exploitative, can in this sense be defined as unfair or exploitative – because it is ‘voluntary’.

In neoliberalism, the same kind of argument is used to try and persuade people that everything they do in a free market is voluntary; from being homeless, having no access to education, not being able to afford medical treatment, to having to risk covid to earn an income.

In reality this is a largely motivated delusion. It suits employers and helps make them virtuous almost no matter what they do.

Objections to the Capitalist view

Self-sufficient Labour?

The capitalist argument about employment contracts might approach truth where the worker has a guaranteed source of food and shelter independent of their labour for an employer. But in capitalist societies this is exceedingly rare. Indeed capitalists have historically tried to stop that situation of freedom from arising, especially in colonial societies because they have repeatedly found that people will not submit to work for hire if they can avoid it. People’s apparent reluctance to hire out their labour and skills, if they don’t have to, is important to acknowledge.

Working for bosses, only possibly becomes voluntary where workers can survive without having to work for others. An aim of capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism, seems to be to make workers precarious, with as little support and independence as possible, so that they do have to work for bosses. This inability for most people to control their own labour is one of the primary causes of lack of responsibility, lack of self-reliance, lack of care, and what Marx called ‘alienation’.

Suppression of connections across hierarchy

This worker ‘precarity’ is reinforced if there is no other kind of relationship between worker and boss, other than the contractual relationship – no friendships, no obligations of wealth, no protections. That is, there is no mutual obligation on the bosses’ part to support workers in hard times. Conservatives like GK Chesterton were, as a result, often nostalgic for feudalism, where lords did have obligations towards their workers. This, fundamental human obligation to each other, is something which is usually suppressed in capitalism and reduced to contracts. When capitalists talk about mutual obligation, it nearly always means the obligation of the poorer person to the richer person (in return for an income, or even potential income, no matter how small). In Neoliberalism, any ties between non-related, non-elite, people are a potential impediment to the market.

This suppression of human ties and mutuality, is a break up of community responsibility and another cause of lack of responsibility, lack of self-reliance, lack of care, and what Marx called ‘alienation’. Max Weber seems to argue that Protestantism tended to make this breakage of connection much easier, because in extreme Protestantism you had no responsibility to others, and all that counted was your own salvation, which was won by faith not by charity.

Capitalist team-ups

Employers in a town (or country if they are big enough) can team-up to decide wage ranges. As Adam Smith wrote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

There is no reason to assume they will not keep this agreement between themselves unless, perhaps, there is a labour shortage and they get desperate for workers. If there is a labour shortage in an area, workers elsewhere then have to decide whether it is worth losing contact with their friends and support networks, and familiarity with the local system to get a job which may not last more than a week or two, or run the risk that enough workers have also moved and turned up to compete to run wages down again.

Most, perhaps not all but certainly most, employers have more capital than workers, enough to borrow money anyway. That is why they can employ people. So they have more power, and more ability to hold out. So they tend to win in negotiations, unless workers can organise. At the least workers who try and organise to get decent wages or conditions will be blamed, through the capitalist media, for any problems that arise. The bigger the corporation the more power it normally has. Smaller businesses are much more desperate, and find organised labour much harder to deal with.

Fundamental liberty?

All this appears to mean that the fundamental capitalist social relation is between boss and worker. It requires that the worker obeys and submits to the boss in exchange for survival. That is capitalist liberty, and some libertarians argue that people should be free to sign contracts of slavery, presumably if they are desperate enough to work for nothing but food and shelter. Remember, in capitalism, no wage work contract can be exploitative if the winner can say you did not have to sign it. In general, your only choice is between who to submit to, if you manage to change, or get, other work.

Socialists usually require that it be relatively easy to obtain unemployment benefits so people can survive unemployment, and get some power of choice over who they decide to sign up with – a basic provision for liberty. Capitalists usually oppose this, just as they oppose workers organising and striking, to get better wages and conditions, but don’t actively business people organising to suppress wages, or support their own power and influence. In practice, pro-capitalists usually do not object strongly to tax payer subsidies for business, even if not needed, even if the companies were corrupt and stupid, and even if it interferes with the market. This has been demonstrated over and over again; recently from the 2007-8 financial crisis to Covid.

Socialists also try to encourage workers (and everyone else in a low power position) to self organise, to balance out the power differences, but these workers’ organisations always run the risk of selling out to big business if the members are not actively involved and resistant to such sell outs, and media demands for such sell outs. On the other hand, capitalism rarely encourages democracy or self-governance for everyone. It pretends we are like it should be (individuals without ties beyond our families), just as it encourages deep hierarchies and inequalities to avoid the possibility of challenge to wealth and profit.

Connections

Because some employers are much, much, wealthier than workers, they tend to have better political and economic connections, so they have much more influence over regulations and the use of state violence. They buy the regulations which make it easier to protect their property and lifestyles from workers who get fed up with the system. They make it harder for workers to organise. They control the media so they largely control the workforce’s ideas about the world. They make the system of exploitation part of every day life, and enforced by the rules, the law and people’s understanding. It is hard for workers to challenge this ‘everydayness’, with their own experience and interests. There is, nowadays, little in the way of media which is not tied to capitalist forms of organisation, and which can give people non-capitalist ideas – especially not Fox, Breitbart or OANN etc.

Workers and working conditions

Workers are a cost on business, so the general (not everyone but general) business drive is to get as much out of them for as little as possible in expense, to get maximum profit. Hence the urge for cheap dangerous working conditions, hence workplace injuries, insecure work and so on. Capitalists usually try to deskill, or AI, work as much as possible so they can hire anyone for any job, which results in a race to the bottom for wages as well as higher profit. Conservative Adam Smith famously argued that repetitive, cheap labour destroys the moral, intellectual and other ‘human’ capacity of workers – but that, apparently, is a consequence of profit and so cannot be challenged. It may also render workers less capable of figuring out what the contracts they are signing actually mean for their lives, which further benefits employers.

As a result, capitalists generally support cutting back workplace inspections and health regulations as it is a supposedly unnecessary interference in business. Again this is capitalist liberty. Just as it is capitalist liberty for pollution to be dumped on poor areas of town without cost to them – it helps increase profit. Anything which restricts profit is an interference with the market.

Your contract to work in murderous, exhausting conditions, is still fair by capitalist definition, even if you did not know about those conditions in advance. Socialists tend to want more equity in working conditions, and ensure (as best as possible) that people are not incapacitated or poisoned by work.

Hierarchy and the value of labour

This downwards pressure on wages and conditions is not always the case. People higher up the capitalist hierarchy such as high level executives, usually have enough power to be able to transfer some of the savings brought about by cheapening most people’s labour to increase the value of their own labour, and give themselves class luxuries even when these luxuries are a cost on business. Conservative David Hume argued, the value given to labour is a function of the labourer’s power as much as, if not more than, the value of what they contribute.

If such high up people lose a position through company failure or their own incompetence, they are likely to have enough money to hold out for a while, rather than have to rush to the meat packing works for income, and they probably have good elite social networks that they can use to ensure they get another well paid job of roughly the same level. So they are much more immune than the average worker to precarious conditions.

Marxism – to some extent

The Marxist argument is that capitalism is inherently exploitative, as workers have to produce more value than they get paid for, otherwise business could not make a profit. In other words, capitalist business needs to steal some of the fundamental human resource of labour from workers to be viable. This is not because bosses are inherently malicious (even though capitalism may encourage selfish malice and promote sociopaths who feel no obligations to others), but because it is what the system demands from them. They cannot act in any other way. In capitalism, labour is essentially extracted by violence, and the property and capital which results from this theft or extortion is then protected by the State.

Capitalism requires a State. There has never been a form of capitalism which has existed without a State, and it is rare for the wealth elites not to be dominant in that State, making sure the legislation and arrangements help preserve their power from challenge

This Marxist argument, it strikes me, is not entirely fair. The employer risks capital and their own labour and that risk could require some kind of return to make it worthwhile. If the employer does not succeed in making profit then (assuming they were not wealthy to begin with, with the right connections), they risk having to sell their own labour and becoming a worker themselves and being subject to the exploitation that other workers face. With that risk it is no wonder that employers are prone to authoritarianism, to cheating and malice, whatever their intentions otherwise. Hence the permanent presence of class warfare, directed from employers downwards towards people who have to seek employment to survive….

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Information disorder

June 19, 2021

Complexity is one driver for information disorder and confusion. Complex systems, such as social systems (politics, economics, information) or ecological systems, or weather systems, are so complex they are impossible to describe with complete accuracy, so it is hard to test theories about them. They are often impossible to observe in total, and it is hard to interact with them, or the interactions are so continuous that it is hard to tell what actions have what effects. This is pretty standard for human life – we develop unconsciousness along with consciousness – the theories that allow us to understand the world, may also hide it from us. Humans attempt to establish continuity and order, but sometimes change is happening anyway, and the order they try to establish no longer works and the world bights back, in the same kind of way that personal unconsciousness may produce symptoms that demand attention, and may distract us from our real problems.

It is normal to be confused, but still retain some kind of insight. However, in the modern world there is so much information, that it is even harder to navigate towards information that is correct, and the prime driver for the spread of information is rarely accuracy. It is whether:

  • It appeals to people’s emotional bias – it gets you angry with the right people. Confirms how you feel etc.
  • It confirms your identity as ‘whatever’ (White male Christian; Left activist; Australia etc), and confirms that whoever you define as the “other people” are lesser beings in some way. Empirically, it seems that political identity is the number one factor here in the contemporary world.
  • It reinforces your existing world view, or stretches it in an acceptable direction.


On top of that we have the following problems.

  • Information stays around without much in the way of ties to its refutation, so its easy to find discredited information without any awareness of it being discredited.
  • Information can be appealing because it is partially true [For example: Right voters often seem to think they have been abandoned by the elites which is possibly true. Left voters think corporations have too much power and are trying to crush them or kill them, which is also possibly true.]
  • Status tends to be tied up with ‘knowledge’ so higher status people tend not to admit when they are wrong, and they fight to hide their wrongness or attack those who insist they are wrong. Other people try to gain status by not being wrong. [Quick experiment: how often do you like the idea of being wrong in public…. add to that the idea that others who have proved you wrong are dancing in triumph. If that causes you any discomfort, then you have demonstrated the point….]
  • Whole organisations can go down the path of delusion, because of peoples’ fear of what will happen should they deny the organisation’s ‘truth’ – they can be expelled, loose their power, loose their income loose their friends etc. as well as feel the discomfort of being ‘wrong’ in public. They will eventually agree with the falsity, or behave as if they do, and persecute others who do not agree with that falsity.
  • The people at the top of an organisation can be fed whatever it is those beneath them think they want to hear, irrespective of reality, and this then lurches the organisation in a particular direction.
  • People can be instructed to seek for information that does not exist, and punished if they don’t find it, so they do find something…. or they make stuff up to satisfy those higher up. They may come to a point where their whole status and being is tied up in defending this nothing, against challenge, and punishing those who think it is nothing.
  • Much media exists for the simple purpose of maintaining power by spreading interpretations and propaganda that benefit “their side”.
  • This propaganda media is usually marked by opinion masquerading as news, shouting, name-calling, rousing of passions to help guide people’s thinking (generating emotional bias), confirming your virtue for siding with them, convincing you that their elite have the same interests as you, branding the other side as evil, and telling you that the identity you have is under challenge.
  • This set-up stops people from wondering what the “other side” thinks, because the other side is evil, inferior and dangerous to self-image etc.
  • This has the advantage of keeping people’s eyes on this propaganda media, which allows more advertising profit, which also may destroy less biased media which does not raise passions to persuade people of things.
  • The disbelievers are held to believe what they believe because they are biased and evil (and even conspiring against you), and you believe what you believe because you are smart, virtuous, practical etc….
  • Often those who follow propaganda media, officially do not believe it, so if it is shown to be false, they can declare “all media lies” so they can go back to following the lies they believe, and fake their status – they were not taken in, even though nothing shifts.
  • Anyone can be fooled, especially those who think they cannot be fooled. This is the basis of the best cons. People think they are smart enough not to trust a particular politician, but they accept that his policies are what they think he says they are, and that he has implemented them, and has not deceived them.
  • Everyone sees patterns in random events, faces in the sky, landscapes in ink splashes etc. Indeed it is hard not to. These patterns may prove nothing. Q followers have great pattern detection and are encouraged to detect particular patterns and ignore others which might be more relevant, such as the failure of Q predictions. Encouragement of pattern detection is rarely connected with pattern evaluation, and testing. The issue is whether the patterns noted are real or useful, or lead them to fantasy and delusion, and isolation from anyone who doubts the patterns.
  • Because destructive power often tends to depend on false information, there are campaigns to discredit those people who actually have studied particular subjects for a long time to reinforce the idea that disbelievers in the others are virtuous. Even agreement between people who have studied the subject for a long time becomes evidence of conspiracy, not of the likelihood of what they are arguing.
  • Anyone with a youtube channel can claim to have as much of the truth as those who study the subject, provided they say what you want to hear.
  • With conflicting information and too much information, people tend to judge information by the information given by those they trust, who will share political, identity and other propaganda biases. This trust, and identification, forms an information group, that filters out information which does not express group biases. In other words what you accept (or even hear of) tends to become more limited, and that restricts information even more intensely.
  • Because the social dynamics of information encourages to think/feel that information is a matter of status and identity, they tend to think that because they are competent in some fields they are competent in all fields, but they are actually depending on their information group for competence, not their own abilities
  • Eventually everything collapses, because hardly anyone has any relationship to reality, just to their information hallucinations…


Fact checking and education may not help, because these actions are already framed politically and in terms of identity. If you don’t hear the results you want to hear, then it is easy to conclude the fact checkers and educators are biased, evil and part of the conspiracy against you.

Social information processing can be seen as a form of ‘defense mechanism’. Rather than admitting the world is complex and hard to understand, and that it is difficult to find adequate information to allow the definitive solving of complex problems, people defend the hard limits of their egos, by defending against (or denying) these difficulties. We pretend information and understanding is simple, that problems are simple (we only need more of what we have defined as good), and that confusion is generated by evil others (perhaps in a conspiracy), and by stupidity of others. If we shout at the others we are doing something useful. If we suppress something, we are doing so for general benefit. We are good sensible people. We understand everything important. Life is not the meaningless chaos, despair and threat, which it would be if we were wrong. We have found solid ground rather than shifting uncertainty.

This is unreal. Understanding is frequently provisional and difficult, and we are inevitably often wrong. We often look stupid because we believed something which turned out to be false. It is only an ongoing problem if we persist with that falsity. That is reality, and that is what we have to admit and deal with, and its hard.

However, the tendency to see information conspiracies to protect and make sense of what you believe, does not mean there are no information conspiracies at all… 🙂

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The idea the Right is logical, and the Left emotional?

June 6, 2021

Do many people primarily think logically, rather than emotionally?

Readers may remember David Hume’s comment to the effect that reason is the slave of the passions. I suspect he may be right. In other words, we think to justify our feelings, or express our feelings, and that intensifies those feelings and makes the ideas and thinking seem even more real and confirmed.

Furthermore, logic is not a guarantor of truth. If the axioms your logic is based upon are incorrect, then no amount of logic will give you a correct answer or working political policy. Garbage in, Garbage out is a common computer programmer saying, and it seems true.

People probably accept the axioms they make deductions from, because those axioms are emotionally appealing, or help make the world make sense in a way that does not challenge them too much. If so, there is no real distinction between logic and emotion; the logic is being directed by the emotions.

How often do people seriously check whether their axioms are in fact true? Not often as far as I can tell.

As a general principle, I suspect humans cannot often deduce reality logically from axioms; not just because our axioms are probably wrong, but because reality is too complex. You have to discover reality, and that requires more than just logical deduction, it requires exploration, encounter with the world, and testing.

So my guess is that few people are rational and non-emotionally biased. On top of all this, I have not noticed that people of a right wing persuasion are particularly logical and not swayed by their emotions in general.

For example, most rightwing media I have seen or read, involves a lot of shouting, abuse, heavy sarcasm, put-downs, incoherence, contradiction and a dedicated cultivation of anger and hostility towards the opposition. There is much assertion of what appears incorrect common sense or, in other words, what is taken as obviously true often seems improbable to me, and rarely has it been tested adequately to say it is true. There is, more or less, no play to real reason, or exploration. It seems to be primarily about asserting that “We” are good, and that “The Enemy” (those who disagree with us) is evil. The same is true of many rightwing politicians and intellectuals.

I’ve also noticed, that people on the right tend to be very sensitive to left wing abuse of them, and don’t even notice the perennial haze of hostility in their own media. I presume something similar happens on the left, although its not as obvious to me.

As a result I would tend to hypothesize that people notice the emotional bias of those *not* on their side with greater ease than they notice the emotions of those on their own side, perhaps because they share those emotions, and emotional biases.

Another thing that suggests it is hard to think unemotionally or unbiasedly, is the difficulty of doing science.

While science is based on common thinking and exploratory methods, it seems uncommon as a practice. It does not flourish in many cultures for long, away from day to say survival issues.

Science is about checking up your ideas to see if they are correct. Pretty basic, you might think, but this habit appears unusual. Most people seem to search for confirmation of their ideas, not to explore where their ideas do not work.

Science also regularly involves other people checking your ideas to see if they are false, without that much hostility. It involves making predictions and changing ideas if those predictions do not come true. This seems very unusual. Outside of science we seek ways of explaining why our predictions do not work, and why we are still right despite those failures, and more to the point, we then do not test those explanations. If we have a persuasive idea outside of science, it often appears that we keep running with it, even as disasters seem to pile up, rather than exploring if it is correct….

While the ideas that Einstein deduced which led to Relativity theory where logical, it was the fact that they worked in the world, and passed tests, that made them significant, not the fact they were logical.

Nowadays, in politics, if scientists generally agree on something we don’t like, we just assume we know better than they do. Sometimes we might be right, but it is not an assumption that we should have much faith in because it probably comes from emotions, such as fear of “what if the science is right?”

My bet is that if anyone thinks they are arguing entirely from reason on a social issue (in particular), they are probably being swayed by propaganda, emotion and bad thinking.

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Populism and Nationalism

June 5, 2021

What is ‘Populism’?

Populism has nothing to do with popularity. You can have popular movements which are not populist.

Populism differs across the world, but as far as I can see it starts as a movement which pretends to be for the people, but ends up being for the bosses; either established bosses or for an authoritarian party and its leader.

While populist leaders promise the people power and wealth, they act to increase the power and wealth of the established, or themselves, quite ruthlessly. For example, Donald Trump recognised the crisis of the American Wage earner, and gave tax cuts to the wealthy (including himself), cut back services to the wage earners and subsidised large corporations.

In order to distract the people from this sleight of hand, populists conduct culture wars.

  • They pretend minor philosophies are inherently corrupting will lead to social collapse (especially if they identify the believers in these minor philosophies as being opposed to them);
  • They pretend there is some kind of devious and evil infiltration from outside, which is allied with a relatively powerless minority;
  • They pretend social minorities are subversive criminals who are incredibly powerful;
  • They pretend that the nation’s ‘race,’ biology or ‘blood’ is particularly significant, and sets one group of people with the right race against others with the wrong race;
  • The pretend the country is being overrun by immigrants or refugees;
  • They pretend to support tradition, while ripping tradition down – especially any tradition which hinders their power;
  • They pretend to support real Religion against terrible or Satanic enemies, or against heresies and behaviour which will draw down the wrath of God;
  • Real religion is religion which supports them;
  • They misdirect claiming that only they are standing against the forces of oppression while boosting those forces of oppression;
  • They can pretend to be for free markets, because that means that they can support the victors in the existing markets and stop people interfering with the freedom of those bosses who have succeeded;
  • They lie repeatedly because they think that whatever gives them more power is true;
  • Lying allows them to be flexible and always generate a persuasive answer. Falsity is quicker than truth which takes research, and this leaves their opposition stumbling;
  • Because they are wedded to lies, they try to suppress all those who disagree, no matter how little;
  • Obedience and virtue is shown by how much rubbish the follower can swallow;
  • The leader of a populist party is often the face of the party, the point of the party and the party autocrat. The leader is the one who sees the party’s Truth through his (or more rarely her) special insight;
  • Populists purge the party of those who openly disagree with the leader to show the consequences of thinking for yourself or attempting to follow the truth;
  • Populists in power often attempt to purge the media, or suppress hostile coverage as being biased; and
  • Populists never have to listen to anyone else, because those who are not aligned with them are inferior.

Populists apparently need to manufacture enemies out of nothing, so that they can look to be good, and they can use the fury they whip up in their followers – angry people don’t always think well, and are more likely to go along with them.

The secret of populism is that its leaders think that the people are fools, or sheep, who need to be led to the paradise of total obedience and uniformity.

Populists eventually fail, because

  • No one tells the leader, or the upper echelons of the party, the truth because they know what will happen to them;
  • You can only ignore the truth for a relatively short period of time, before it bites back fiercely; especially if there is a real crisis you wish to ignore – such as the ecological crisis.

Nationalism

Nationalism is not about love of one’s home, or homeland – it appears most people feel love for their home, to some extent.

Nationalism has historically been used to produce conformity or a sense of belonging “as long as you are like us”. In the US, nationalism seems to be used to support capitalist exploitation as representing American values and American supremacy. Nationalism is used to obliterate recognition of class difference (as the recognition that classes do not always have the same interests is a usual part of the left orientation) and by obliterating that recognition aims to help the triumph of the capitalist class by reducing opposition to the power of that class. It tries to tell the inside-people they are more important than everyone else in the world, simply because of the place of their birth. People are told they can ignore oppression by their bosses and masters, because they are ‘American’ or ‘French’ or ‘Chinese’ and special – they are part of a crowd. Nationalism often makes one ‘race’ dominant and suppresses all others because, even if they have lived there for hundreds of years, those others are not ‘really’ part of the Nation – they are considered natural victims, primitives, or enemies. Nationalism often leads to war, to demonstrate that the idea of national supremacy is justified, and because of the need of the nation’s leaders to fuse people into one through a hardship they can blame on others.

Nationalism is particularly dangerous when we have to fight global problems such as ecological catastrophe or economic dominance and failure, as it factions the world. You need co-operation between states, as well as state rivalry.

One reason we have probably failed so dismally with respect to climate change, is this sense that States are just rivals, and that they are not going to co-operate but seek their own national benefit alone.

It is probably sensible to recognise that States are rivals who need to work together, more than they need short term victory.

Conclusion

Populism often uses nationalism, because it provides an easily triggered sense of group identity, which can then be set against other identities, and build a sense of us or them, which pushes people to identify with the leader.

Nationalism and populism, often seem to be forces of oppression which, in the modern world attempt, to enforce capitalist domination and destruction.

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Psychology and Climate Suppression 3

May 20, 2021

Why is this important?

Useful suppression

First let us recognise that sometimes emotional suppression is needed. If you are locking yourself to a gate or facing a heavily armed row of riot police, you may need to suppress some of your fear about what will happen to you. This strategic suppression is different from long term or habitual suppression, as it can recognise (rather than deny) the existence of the fear, but just not act upon it.

The harms of suppression

Emotions are part of you, if you suppress them you are suppressing your full self and its capacities.

Emotions are a great motivator. If you suppress awareness of them, you can lose motivation to act, and you can loose the ability to sublimate them. Love of the earth and distress at the harm it suffers, for example, can motivate a person to attempt to protect the earth, or at least to reduce the harm they do.

Suppressing emotions almost necessarily leads to suppression of parts of your awareness of a situation. It can limit what you know. You may steer away from other people and areas that resonate to produce pain and upset. Lack of awareness creates an unconscious dynamic, that may tend to produce bite-back, and disruption of your daily life. Your emotions may be telling you something useful that should not be ignored.

Suppressing emotions takes time and energy away from action and interaction. You use up energy, focus and time keeping your muscles tight, distracting yourself, condemning others morally, insisting on your righteousness, being manically active and distracted etc…

Suppressing emotions can leave you caught between collapse and rigidity. Again, the attempt to relieve pain by suppression can remove capacity to act fully and responsively.

Suppression looses you an awareness of processes you share with others, and which can be used to build closeness, trust and action. By not facing or discussing emotions you render them individual rather than social. You retreat from others rather than bond together. Your miserable experiences seems to become your individual problem, not a collective problem. Perhaps you even fear upsetting people if you talk about how you feel about climate, and are therefore helping to promote a social repression of awareness, or you just act as if those who talk about climate emotions are somehow inferior, or not really engaging with the reality of the topic, and that helps shut the whole discussion down.

Being aware of modes of suppression, also helps us to realise how anti-climate propaganda media invokes these common modes of suppression around climate for political effect. It mocks those who are concerned, it claims they are impractical idiots, who want to send us back to the caves. This aggression makes it hard for people in both ingroup and outgroup to express their concern or distress as they know what will happen to them. It tries to displace its audiences fears and anger about the disruption of their lives by climate change, onto those who would do something about this disruption. It implies that you would be left alone and untroubled, if you left things to the market, or acted to further suppress awareness of the problems. If you look at popular right wing discussions, they are full of emotion and evocation of emotion (primarily anger and superiority), and they work politically in the short term, although the repression will become more disruptive the longer it is ignored. They encourage people to find the truth that already agrees with their emotions. The audience and ingroup are active and resistant to change. These audience members may fear loss, but the loss is not associated with the changing climate. Suppression of energy seeks an outlet, and proto-fascism, and social myth (massive numbers of Satanic pedophiles in high places), is one such outlet which in the long run will not help those who support it.

Suggestions

Awareness of emotions is a first step. Sharing your distress, confusion, ignorance, or whatever you discover, with those you trust outside your own family. This will be slow and awkward because it is not something most of us are familiar with, especially if you are male, but it probably has to happen. This produces what some people call ‘climate conversations’, in which the focus is shifted, temporarily, away from finding solutions and acting, into something more contemplative, more building of connection. Hopefully it will build awareness of more general connections to the world. We live in interactive networks with the world, perhaps the conversations can extend to attention to the non-human world and how we fit in with that.

Gain more neutral appreciation of the techniques of preventing, or ameliorating, climate change. Perfection is not possible, but that does not mean we should go along with the impossible, highly unlikely or desperate. We don’t have to know everything to act, we learn through doing.

Empathy with the earth. Just allowing yourself to relate to the world. You don’t need much nature, just a bit – a weed bursting through the pavement. What is it you want to save? Probably not modern life as such. Would you rather have lions, elephants, sharks and kangaroos or TV dinners (I’m told that term is now archaic)?

On this blog I’ve repeatedly suggested the importance of quiet listening to other people and to the world, as a way of relating to complex systems and coming to have a feel for them. Active listening involves accepting the other as they are, not trying to change them. This relieves the need to be a performer in possession of the perfect dogma. You don’t have to know what is coming next, or have all the answers, or avoid change, to move forward, or to be at peace in life. To listen to others with care, you may also have to listen yourself with care and attention and recover your repressed; learn to let feelings be.

There is a recurrent insistence in Depth Psychology, that sometimes to often unpleasant symptoms or feelings are trying to get our attention, or distract our attention. In other words, they are pointing at, or away from, something we should take account of. Deep listening may be one way of getting access to this hidden awareness, as may looking at dreams. It may help to tell each other dreams, and see what happens – but please do not interpret someone else’s dreams, your interpretation may well be correct if you had had that dream, but not for them, and premature interpretation can shut down exploration. With enough sharing, personal dreams can become a group dreams.

Compassion for others, even with those you disagree with. They may be wrong, but most of them are not evil, and will be trying to find their way through their own social and reality maze. But if you are angry with them, just accept it, you don’t have to act on it, or display it.

There are two, known and related, processes the ‘Pygmalion effect‘ and the ‘Golem effect‘. Basically if you treat people as if they are intelligent, capable and kind and foster their abilities, most of them will become more intelligent, capable and kind, if you treat them as stupid thugs, that is what many of them will become (at least in relation to you). We become who we are through interaction with others. So treat people well, even in opposition.

Having pleasure in your actions. Your actions have to reinforce your desire to participate, and attract others.

Once you have regained some of your emotional being then you can begin the process of sublimation, of using that energy being aware of what you are doing. There are no instructions…. For Jung, for example, sublimation is not really a matter of will power but a somewhat mysterious and unpredictable result of learning to ‘assimilate’ and work with the creativity of unconscious processes which, in turn, leads to personal transformation. For the purposes of these posts, the term ‘unconscious processes’ can include the workings of the non-human world, which are likewise creative and part of our lives, and which ‘rebel,’ or disrupt us, if we attempt to suppress them or direct them in inappropriate ways.

Remember people will not be helped by an overwhelmingly negative view of the future, yet they don’t need to be deceived. In complex systems even small actions can have large effects, especially if they are taken up. Every action which contributes to reduction of ecological destruction is worth performing. Anyone can pick plastic out of a river, or off the street. Many people can choose to spend money on making a better future, or on products which are ‘greener,’ such as putting solar on their rooves if they can afford it. They can write to people in power, they can vote, or otherwise participate in politics. Alone these actions may not achieve much, but if others start emulating them, then awareness can keep on building up and produce real change – it may also encourage further change in the person doing the action as they gain confidence. Doing something repeatedly without apparent effect may have beneficial long term consequences. Doing something ‘true’ always helps adaptation. The point is that we (plural) become who we are through interaction in a situation, and the situation, or the world, becomes what it is because of those interactions. No action is too small as long as it is repeated, and it has some effect.

Because we live in complex systems, it is normal for actions not to have exactly the result we intend. This is not your fault, not a reason for attacking yourself (although if you do attack yourself, accept it and let it pass rather than keep it up), but it is an opportunity to learn, and to remember all actions and policies are experiments. We learn to do better by doing and modifying as we learn.

Finally, we can embrace Climate Generosity where we don’t wait for people to act, but we team together to give things to others who might want them, to help energy (or other) transitions, such as giving and organising solar panels for community buildings, or helping to organise bulk buys. This helps build action and community, and appears to give people a sense that they are doing something. The chance could be high that others, seeing it happen, will join in. It also makes it clearer where the obstructions are, and what can be done to avoid or change those obstructions. This can be a form of communal learning.

Successful local action may be needed before we can get political parties to really support a movement against climate change, because they know they have a local base and don’t have to be quite so respectful of institutionalised destruction..

Conclusion

Lets be clear here. Being aware of emotions and techniques of suppression, does not mean that we do not need good clear analyses of what is happening. One of the themes of these blogs is that what a person thinks and understands about the situation influences what they feel and how they act; if they are fed lies then they will feel as those lies direct, and face the consequences of that. However, we need to engage with what we feel in order to act, in order to translate our knowledge that something needs to be done urgently, into action, rather than trying to go along with general indifference, or blaming other people.

It also is a call for something I do badly, and that is to write engagingly with full acknowledgement of the range of human experience and psychology, so as to involve people with their whole beings. In academia people tend to write drily, using what they usually call ‘reason’, and criticise and reject those who don’t. Or they may acknowledge subjectivity, but write in such a way that only the already initiated can understand what they are saying. Academic work is useful, but it probably will not save the world, because of the dry and deadening traditions that have grown around it, and because it tends to speak to only a few parts of human social being. In that way what academics do may be complicit with the suppression that leads to lack of action, even though that work is vital.

The point here is not to retreat, but to recognise emotional life, recognise the suppression, analyse the suppression, treat it seriously, work it out in our lives and through our interaction with others, so that people together (and individually) can act effectively with their full natures. If we know we are frightened, then maybe we can not just avoid that fear, but act to reduce that fear, and start acting as full human beings to imagine and make the new society we need.

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Psychology, Climate & Suppression 2

May 19, 2021

After the previous post, we now look, in more detail at how some modes of suppression might work. The point is to become more aware of how we might be suppressing our selves, to keep the destruction going.

Suppression in Action

Denial

Denial is usually part of a social world view, or ‘common sense’: emotions are irrelevant, the world can’t end, there is too little CO2 to have a major effect, CO2 is totally natural, humans can’t destroy the Earth (probably true, but irrelevant), powerful businesses know what they are doing and would not destroy themselves, scientists are deluded or political, renewables will be chosen by the market and stop the problem, and so on.

Contemporary denial is usually based in politics, in which fear or dissatisfaction is projected onto others. It is not my side that is promoting destruction, it is everyone else. People may claim that the Australian Labor Party really has had all its climate policies undermined by (a relatively tiny and powerless number of) irresponsible Greens who would prefer a Coalition government, rather than entertain the idea that the ALP has continually undermined itself, and its own climate action policies, and is largely incoherent, and often unenthusiastic about action when it has had the opportunity. The ALP could be said to be an organisation undergoing post-traumatic stress. It has taken what it thought were rational steps and been stymied at every turn.

Distraction

The most common form of distraction in neoliberal society is work. Work can be endless, work has demands, deadlines, restructures, endless form-filling, crises, new tasks. It can leave people too exhausted to feel worried about climate change, or to do anything about it. Even going part time may well not solve these problems, as work fills in the spaces.

Modes of leisure can also be distractions: sport, shopping, collecting, going out to eat etc. They also demand money which keeps people at work. Children can be a distraction, as you help them with homework, drive them to tutoring or sports groups, or whatever. The point is to leave you with no time for reflection or action. For poorer people getting food on the table, paying the bills, keeping the house, keeping the job, surviving the neighbourhood etc. may also act as distractions from global as opposed to personal problems. Neoliberal society resists providing people with the leisure to feel what they feel and to act as necessary. These distractions tend to keep people away from self-motivated collaborative groups such as political or climate organisations (perhaps sports or gambling clubs are acceptable) or to keep people at the familial or individual level rather than the collective and collaborative.

There are rare exceptions the the loose group around “QAnon” seems to have been composed of Americans who rightly felt something was desperately wrong, and who did lots of work trying to work out the back ground to Q’s enigmatic statements and promises. They did collaborate with each other in these inquiries, but we can suggest that the collaboration was a distraction from the real problems they faced under the neoliberal regime and under Trump. It did not help them solve those problems, but kept them looking in the wrong direction, and the misinformation split out into the worlds of those who were not involved.

It can be a distraction to focus on climate change as if it were the only problem, when we are dealing with massive ecological destruction, pollution and poisoning, of which climate change is only one symptom. Ocean death is going to be far worse for the planet and the food supply, and much harder to come back from. If we focus on climate change, then focus on replacement of fossil fuel generated electricity by renewables can also form a mode of distraction, even if it is essential. The statistics may look reassuring, but in terms of total energy usage they can be very small. And in terms of total greenhouse gas emissions reduction they can be even smaller.

Displacement/Projection

This is when we select a group or people and take them as being the obvious source of our anger or decide they represent our denied vices. Climate displacement is usually political. Our ingroup is good, and we only don’t have good results from our action because of the obstruction of others. News can also leave you permanently depressed, or angry, with an ability to focus your anger on the enemy. Things like the Murdoch Empire, particularly SkyNews in Australia and Fox in the US, spend most of their time raising anger, mockery, hysteria and abuse. There is little attempt at non-personal analysis, it is primarily about projecting rage onto a victim. You might be angry with your economic situation, blame the left, blame university professors or vaguely compassionate movie stars rather than bosses, business and bought politicians (who are also doing what they apparently have to, to survive in the system). With this kind of focus you can be assured that climate change is simply another plot to take more freedom and ability to look after yourself (your abilities already lowered by neoliberal economics) and blame someone who is less of a neoliberal. It can seem that doing something about climate and eco-destruction would make things even worse for you, and this justifies the anger.

Yes sometimes the ‘other side’ can be harmful, and can be blocking constructive change. The question is whether it is more useful to do something to use the anger and prevent their action or lessen its consequences, or to keep on being angry and blaming as distraction.

Moral Certainty

Moral certainty can feed into projection. We just keep condemning the others, secure in our moral superiority, without having to act, or to feel what is disrupting us. If one is morally certain, then one can suppress awareness of harm. If in a complex system you cannot predict the exact results of actions, then moral certainty allows you to discount what is actually happening. People can be easily sacrificed for the greater good, which creates more opposition and more despair and sense of those others being outsiders – they won’t do what is necessary.

It has taken a while, but perhaps people are now starting to realise that opposition to solar and windfarms may not just be reactionary or immoral but might have a basis in people’s experience of development (as well as being manipulated by people hostile to the idea of climate change). Moral certainty that one is on the right side may cause a person to overlook the Coalition’s corruption and tendency to only apply the market when it concerns people they don’t like, while ignoring market forces or discipline and giving massive subsidies and tax breaks to people they do like, or think essential. The best example being the gas lead recovery, and tax payer funding of uneconomic gas pipelines and gas energy stations. Likewise people may ignore the incoherence of the ALP, because they are certain they must deliver eventually, or they are better than nothing.

Fighting and name-calling other people online, can be based in destructive moral certainty, as well manifesting a form of projection, and acting as a distraction from more gentle persuasion, or applied community action. It also helps maintain the barriers between groups, and reduces the danger of mutual collaboration.

Religion (as a subsection of moral certainty)

Lets be up front, religion does not have to be an obstruction to climate action. Many religious groups encourage active compassion and understanding for humans and non-humans; they can hold that God’s creation should be respected and not destroyed, and that the duty of God’s people is to steward the Earth for their descendants and everyone else. They can look at the Earth and see that it is wondrously made, and very good, and desire to show their love and respect to God by protecting it from human attack.

However, there are those who say Earth can only be destroyed by God’s will, so there is no point objecting to destruction, that they being true worshippers will be saved, or that God has promised not to destroy His followers, so climate is of no concern to them, and there are those who go along with the idea that the market and profit are the next goods after God himself. Such people run the risk of dogmatic assertion, allying with crooks who promise them some of their requirements and generally ignoring science as it is not godly.

As I’ve said previously, it also seems likely that if your religion teaches that the body is a prison or encumbrance, and your true home is another perfect world such as heaven, then there is no point of looking after this material world. It will pass away and life goes on elsewhere.

Splitting

This is where we are caught in our split. We want to rest and get away from work, we want to act and we can’t do both. We want a comfortable life, but we cannot not act or that comfort will be destroyed, and if we act we cannot be comfortable and we risk disruption, and perhaps loss of friendships. We want to look after our children, but if we act we can’t spend time with them, and if we don’t act they may not have a future. This perception of split can be paralysing.

Splitting can also function to separate parts of life, so that they never come together and can be completely separated and inconsistent. For example you want your children to have the best in life, but you continue with environmental destruction as part of your business or politics. Splitting in this sense may be known as ‘compartmentalisation’ or ‘isolation’.

Informational focus and the ingroup

Whole media organisations exist to reassure people that their information is correct and that their understanding of a rapidly fluxing world is satisfactory, while trying to intensify those views and loyalty to those views, by screaming at those who disagree. This is one way these media corporations attempt to capture markets and keep markets. It seems more notable on the pro-corporate, neoliberal and angry right, but it likewise can exist on the more liberal side of things – such as with the common denunciation of rednecks or brain-damaged Trump supporters. Some media essentially have become complete propaganda vehicles, and politicians may encourage people to watch them, to keep them onside and confined.

This kind of media builds it’s veracity by insisting it is the same as its ‘noble’ audience, and that different views belong to outgroups who are inimical to the ingroup, completely ignorant of basic facts and hostile to all that group’s values.

Obviously media can also try to keep onside with political movements. Fox’s attempts to be a news station and not support Trump’s claims of election fraud, only lasted a short time as viewers started to move away because it was not telling them what they wanted to hear. Capitalist media exists to capture audiences, exert political power through shaping people’s ‘understandings’ and to sell advertisements, not to spread truth, or stand for principle.

Much media relies on dogma as it simplifies their audience and who might chose to be their audience. As argued many times on this blog, complexity means that we cannot guarantee the results of our actions and our theories. We cannot have ‘dogmatic’ success. However, the normal response in Western society (and increasingly in global society) is that if a dogma has not delivered the results we would like, we hammer it harder, we persist. We build more coal power stations and increase emissions, for example, while arguing that carbon intensity is decreasing, and hence we are doing good. “Free markets” have not produced widespread liberty, and have not solved the problems of politics, economics or ecology. Likewise negotiations through the UN, have not solved the climate problem, although we often think seem to think negotiations are on the edge of a breakthrough.

This persistence is sometimes useful, because it can take a while for actions to have success, but there comes a time when it seems reasonable to admit the dogma has failed – it may, in keeping with slogan number one (modes of ordering produce modes of disorder) have made the situation worse, no matter how nice it sounds. However, persistence with the dogma may give comfort and meaning and if it acted as a form of cutting off from unpleasantness, hardening the reaction can probably help hold down unpleasant awarenesses (of feeling, and failure) for a while longer.

If people continually never receive adequate information about climate change, or are told that it is doubtful, or that it will hurt them, or that it is a plot by people they have the moral certainty are evil or deceptive, then they will likely not be on board with action. Even if they think climate change is a possibility, it will seem to be being exploited by the outgroup ‘others’.

Again there is a problem that, sometimes, people are deceptive for political purposes. It may not be entirely fantasy.

Fantasy

Many climate fantasies centre upon technologies. John Kerry, US climate envoy is supposed to have said:

you don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things we know we have to achieve…

I am told by scientists… that 50% of the reductions we have to make to get to net zero…. as soon as we can… are going to come from technologies that we don’t yet have. That’s just a reality.

And people who are realistic about this understand that’s part of the challenge. So we have to get there sooner rather than later….

We know how to invent and innovate….

Harrabin. John Kerry, US climate envoy criticised for optimism on clean tech. BBC News 17? May 2021

These fantasy technologies tend to undeveloped, largely imaginary or prohibitively expensive to maintain. Things like Carbon Capture and Storage, Geoengineering, green hydrogen. These usually serve as an excuse for doing very little to nothing; future technologies will save us. People also fantasise about plausible courses: that renewable electricity is enough, that burning trees for fuel is immediately carbon neutral. But there are also fantasies that climate change will always improve agriculture, and intensify crop growth. It also seems that fantasies of terrible futures may not motivate people to avoid them. However, hope can be a fantasy as well. Hope is necessary to get people to move, but it also can be a defense: we can hope that things are going better than they appear to be by themselves.

All futures, to some extent, are fantasies. We have somehow to imagine the future in a way that motivates people forward, rather than just appears to be avoidance of pain, and this is a problem. Most climate messaging is just, “we can keep on living as we are doing if we work hard” and for many people that is just not that attractive.

Life in this current set of social relationships, for many, seems to be falling apart. They have little apparent chance of social mobility, education is too expensive and they do not trust it, promotion is hard to get, housing is hard to afford, wages have largely frozen, jobs are precarious and have no advancement, their kids don’t seem to have a shining future… Maybe, as many of those who supported Trump appeared to have thought, they imagine the system might be improved by being ripped down, or hurried to its doom.

Finally, people tend to fantasise with the information available to them. And very few visions of a prosperous welcoming climate safe future, based on things people already know, are available. They do exist, but have almost no circulation in the West. The usual dismissal is that people who want climate action want us all to live in caves.

Without good fantasies we shall probably not succeed in motivating people to fight for that future, at best we might get grudging acceptance.

The final part of this piece looks at why considering these factors is important.

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Psychology, Climate and Suppression 01

May 19, 2021

The problem

We have had at least 35 years of public awareness of the need for climate action (since at least Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s), and yet the situation has got worse rather than better over that time. While some of this can be explained by reactionary politics aiming at maintaining the power of those who financially benefit from the climate change causing system and who own much of the media, we might wonder at their success. How do they appeal to people in the face of destruction?

Anyone who looks at the data will realise that the situation with climate is desperate and possibly irrevocable. The work that we have to do to stop climate change getting getting really destructive is overwhelming. Some people insist that, because of effect lag, we are already going to break 1.5 degrees [1], [2] even if we stopped emissions completely tomorrow, which nobody will do. Glaciers are melting [3], [4], [5] and this will lead to world wide shortages of drinking water. World wide forest-fires [6] release huge amounts of greenhouse gases, and slow down the re-absorption of carbon dioxide, making the situation worse. That these fires can overlap, makes international collaboration to fight them harder to achieve, so they burn for longer – problems can compound. Some of the signs of irreversible tipping point are present, such as methane bubbling from the ocean depths and the tundras [7] releasing their stored methane.

To be clear the main problem is not climate change, the problem is that this climate change is rapid and unstable, rather than slow with time to adjust.

On top of this we seem to have levels of social collapse and desperation. We have uncontained pandemics throughout the world, with death and long term suffering as significant results, and no reason not to think that future pandemics could not be far worse. The US is still reeling from the effects of Trump, and the Republican party seems to be held captive by him. At the moment, there looks to be either war or slaughter arising in the Middle East, which could extend to the world, as these things often do. Everywhere we look we face significant problems.

Even if we are just tackling the total energy system we are faced with the problem that renewables provide only a very small part of total energy usage, and we have to generate the energy to build and transport massive amounts more than we have, while still keeping the system upright. There is also the problem that much of what is counted as renewable energy is biofuel which releases greenhouse gases at a much faster rate, when burnt, than the gases are absorbed back into new growth, leading to a growth in emissions.

Mainstream political parties generally do not seem able to face up to the task. They either deny there is an urgent problem or behave as if there is no urgent problem, or as if the problems can be solved without upset. In all probability these positions are fantasy.

We do face various social problems in tacking climate change so let’s list them to keep them in mind:

  • The sheer magnitude of the task, and the cost and need for global organisation to deal with it. A proper understanding of this can be overwhelming.
  • The difficulty of conceiving the problem. It is so big, so complex and so difficult to predict, and in human terms it happens slowly over decades, until it is too late and change is likely to accelerate unstoppably. In many cases the data, the figures and assumptions are also difficult to understand without a fair amount of effort and education. It is vague, and possibly overwhelming.
  • The pollution and ecological destruction causing climate change is associated with powerful established business interests, and with generally accepted models of development and social improvement.
  • The almost universal philosophy of neoliberalism, in which the interests of established business and wealth come first, and the companies and individuals associated with those businesses have the wealth and networks which allow them to finance sympathetic politicians, political parties and providers of information that denies, or diminishes, the threats of climate change. Established business and profit become God. And I mean this literally, they become the primary source of all meaning, all value, all morality and all action. Nothing should impinge upon them.
  • The neoliberal workplace is precarious, encourages constant self criticism and self evaluation, and keeps increasing work levels as it dismisses staff. This encourages the sense of being overwhelmed and tired, as well as diminishing pleasure and satisfaction.
  • Neoliberalism also encourages competition, rather than the collaboration we need to deal with the magnitude of the task, and the suspicion that altruism is a fraud. So a person might come to prefer overt frauds, rather than apparently hidden ‘cunning frauds’.
  • The politics of markets, in which markets tend to be regulated and subsidised to favour established interests – in this case the apparent interests of the causers of the problem.
  • The apparent need of capitalist economies and businesses to grow. Growth has not yet, and perhaps never can be, separated from growing extraction of raw materials and hence growing ecological destruction. Destruction is much cheaper than repair, so pro-capitalists will always try and make destruction near costless.
  • Political fractures between countries and a sense of unfairness, that leads countries to want to follow after others rather than take a lead, or reject calls for action as unjust.
  • The growing destruction of ecological cycles keeps magnifying the task – for example deforestation removes a major source of CO2 drawdown, and thus makes climate change worse.

This almost universal failure in large scale societies, to me, seems to suggest an answer in what is common to all humans: social-psychology.

Psychology

While this is clearly not an individual problem, or a problem of individuals, the responses of individuals can teach us something. Individual psychology takes place in society, not apart from it. Identity comes from the people one classifies oneself as being like, or belonging with. For example, other people with the same politics, the same religion, the same gender, the same problems, the same ‘class position’.

If a set of problems or threats is general, then they are shared, and the reactions of others to those problems, the culture around those problems, the way groups split around the problems, and the modes of communication and information, will be part of the personal psychology of the problems.

I’m not going to pretend that this argument is more than a hypothesis, and I’ve no idea how to test it, but it seems plausible, and perhaps we cannot get further without confrontation with these problems. The approach taken comes from a minimal application of depth psychology. In this blog I assume that people commonly suppress awareness of threats and misery, and the feelings associated with these threats, especially if they have no idea of how to solve the problems, or if the culture is largely not geared towards the problems, and that this ‘suppression’ (lack of awareness) has consequences.

It is impossible not to be aware of climate change as a threat. Even if you deny it is a threat, you are aware that other people think it is a threat and that they threaten to change your life to solve it. You might even think these people form an all powerful conspiracy, because you keep hearing about it, even if you dismiss it, or people you identify as part of your ingroup dismiss it. You cannot escape.

Normal human reactions to such threats include emotions of fear, despair, depression, desperation, anxiety, anger, overwhelm, loss and so on. These emotions are part of our reality (or of what makes us), but all of which appear unpleasant, particularly in contemporary consumer society. Likewise climate change suggests the death of the familiar ecology, death of society, death of normally satisfactory ways of living, and even personal death or death of loved ones. People who know children may find this potential death particularly difficult not to deny.

Getting rid of the problem

According to depth psychology and its variants, humans have reasonably repetitious ways of getting rid of these problems, through cutting off from reality as a whole. We can call these ways of acting ‘defense mechanisms’ or ‘modes of suppression’ – they are suppressing internal rebels and unpleasantnesses, moving them on as it were. This is an idiosyncratic rather than definitive list, and other cultures may use different methods.

  • Denial/Repression: where we consciously or unconsciously hold our feelings and understandings down. We may think that we don’t need those feelings: they are uncomfortable; we have to get on with life; we cannot wallow in feeling; we have things to do and feelings are a distraction. We might even fear that suicide is the only solution to ending such feelings. With denial a person may repeatedly insist the problem they feel is not real, so everything can go on as normal. We usually seek support in this suppression of feeling and awareness from others, to make it easier and seem more real, as we are all cut off and being cut off is normal. It seems to be the case that this approach uses fixed patterns of muscular tension to hold the feelings down, or to produce painful distractions, so we can forget the emotions. Suppression of feelings leads to suppression of awareness and of the body, and this produces complications in life.
  • Distraction: When a person focuses on some other minor problem or interest instead of the problems or feelings that they are really, and distressingly, facing. It is a mode of avoidance. Manic, if apparently pointless, activity seems common.
  • Displacement and Projection: where we tell ourselves and others that the problem is really something else which is manageable, or it is the fault of others who are inevitably evil and can be denounced. We displace or project our anger or fear on to something else, we can deal with, or that we dislike anyway. Often the projecting is directed upon are those who are culturally and politically legitimated targets of blame, fear or envy, and who are usually fairly harmless or remote, so that it is safe to blame them. The blamed are members of an identifiable out-group. Those people, may be selected (possibly deliberately) as those at fault, by other people we define as being in our identity ingroup, but who may side with the establishment, or their own power. This process is known as ‘scapegoating.’
  • Moral Certainty: usually involves projection and assumes we, and those in our ingroup, know what correct action is. Everyone who disagrees with us is just wrong, and to be blamed, rather than listened to. The scapegoating is morally justified, because the outgroup is morally repugnant, and if they were eliminated life would be better. Uncertainty and compassion are weaknesses if they get in the way of our certainty. We should not feel these feelings. We should suppress what troubles us: that is the way to be fully human. As the pain we feel is the fault of the immoral outgroup, getting rid of that outgroup gets rid of the pain, so we don’t have to feel distressed any more.
  • Informational focus: the information we accept structures what we perceive, and the information we are likely to accept in future. People in contemporary society tend to seek out new information that is likely to match information they have already accepted. Information and understanding can also produce feelings. Dogmatic assertions seem common, as they help bolster the suppression, or the creation of particular feelings.
  • Fantasy: occurs when the posed solutions to problems are completely unrealistic, or depend on the future not being similar to the past in an extremely beneficial manner (unspecified innovation). Again the point is to turn away from confronting the emotional pain.
  • Sublimation: occurs when a person realises the feelings and turns the energy of those feelings into a socially approved or useful action. Of course the action can involve displacement or fantasy, but it is less likely as these people are not necessarily running away from their pain.

Climate as a hyper-process

Before discussing the effects of these modes of suppression I want to briefly digress and discuss climate change in the abstract, which also gives us some idea of why it might easily become a psycho-conceptual problem, even if our responses did not involve unpleasant feelings, which we don’t want to face.

Climate change looks like what Timothy Morton has called a ‘hyper-object’. While using his general argument, I prefer the term ‘hyper-process’, to emphasise that climate change involves process and is precisely not an object.

The term ‘object’ implies the stability which climate change lacks. Climate change is closer to an ongoing, if directional, flux. Emphasising climate change is a process allows also allows easier recognition that humans, as both collectives (with degrees of unity and division), and as individuals, interact with these processes, to produce or inhibit, climate change in largely uncertain and ambiguous ways. Climate reacts to us as collectives. It is not a process disconnected from humans in general, it is Anthropocenic. The fear of climate alteration has the potential to permeate a person, and become part of their supposed inner world, as droughts, storms, flooding, thunder and lightening, ice and sea level rises (to the extent we have either experienced them, or had them presented as part of our story life) are already parts of our conceptual and feeling apparatus.

As a hyper-process, climate change involves a series of interlinked and merging events which are too big for any person, or group of persons, to encounter as a whole. It may be conceivable, but at the same time it escapes complete conception. As many 20th Century thinkers (Jung, Tillich, Voegelin etc) argued, these types of events/perceptions, tend to become ‘symbolic’ and become tied up in existing symbolic systems (which also express the inexpressible). They resist being broken up into discrete parts with discrete labels, in the ways that permanent and manipulable objects do. They overwhelm us – what can we, as an individual, do to alter them? Because of the overwhelm it might also be the case that it makes the shock harder to integrate as the shock has little form or containment.

The magnitude of the threat likewise escapes complete conception, as we have not previously experienced such a threat on a world scale. There are no precedents. As climate change is unprecedented and constantly changing (even if within some boundaries), it is impossible to describe in terms of statistical risk; normal ways of processing and estimating risk, which depend on past experience and statistics, are not remotely adequate for the job. The long fat tails discussed by Taleb and others, come into play all the time.

Likewise, because climate forms a complex system interacting with other complex systems, it is hard (perhaps impossible) to predict with accuracy. We may for example, be able to predict the sea level will rise, but we cannot predict how fast or when it will be noticed in practical terms – even if people living on low lying islands are noticing more problems than previously. Likewise we can predict that strange and destructive weather events will occur in a more exaggerated and frequent fashion, but not when and where they will happen. Likewise it is extremely difficult to tell if a particular wild storm is just a random wild storm or whether it was in anyway conditioned by climate change. This further ‘messes’ with our ability to understand what is happening or deal with it.

Information about hyper-processes not only tends to become symbolic, but tends to be not completely accurate, and is prone to modification as people learn more, and as stated above symbolic forms easily gets caught up in existing symbolic systems or conceptual formats. As a result, of this vagueness and magnitude, the field of information is likely to become political and split by existing political divisions.

When this happens, information functions as strategy – as a persuader and shaper of others’ actions. If there is a cultural ‘complex’ of collective suppression, then the information gets warped by these factors, especially if accurate information is emotionally unpleasant. Humans are likely to try and make the strange and unprecedented conventional and normal, so as to allow conventional politics, power, rebellion and stability to continue. Climate change may even function as a mode of suppression of awareness of general ecological collapse. For example, we may think/hope that generating renewable electricity will be enough.

Resolution of ambiguity, uncertainty and terror, may occur through a guiding faith/principle, identity ingroup loyalties, suppression of ambiguity, suppression of information, suppression of feeling, denunciation of largely irrelevant problems, projection onto outsiders, scapegoating outsiders, moral certainty or fantasy.

Suppression in climate change

Given that climate change is a hyper-process it is also likely that modes of suppression get triggered and become notable. These responses also act as ways of suppressing awareness of complexity or ambiguity – almost by definition because they avoid confronting the terrifying whole.

As societies, ecologies and climate are complex systems, which interact with each other, to make life even more complex. Suppression of awareness of complexity and its problems for human action (just like suppression of other unpleasant realities), will almost certainly have problematic results. Complexity is fundamental, there is no outside to get a clear view from.

So lets look at some of the ways these modes of suppression work in the next post.

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