Climate, technology and chaos Blog

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.

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.

Let’s be clear I am not an Aboriginal person. I’m not inducted into culture. I have received no training from any Elders. I don’t even know how common something like Dadirri is in Aboriginal culture in general. What I’m saying may be complete rubbish.

However, it still seems to be important to say it, even if you just take it as based on my experience alone. However if you think, or know, I’m wrong then you are welcome to say so in the comments, so we all can learn.

Fear of hostile others

It would seem plausible that it would be difficult to practice Dadirri with people who you fear deny your right to exist.

This probably happens for Aboriginal people much of the time.

You, and others, could feel threatened, even when the threat is low, because of your expectations of threat or of rejection.

It would happen if Democrats, Republicans and Trump supporters sat together. It could happen if people gathered around climate change, mining, or ecological destruction.

On many occasions, at least in my experience, although people may abuse each other in general as abstractions, or in particular online, or if they are showing loyalty to others, they are not that comfortable doing it in person. On the whole, if they don’t feel threatened, most (not all) people are happy to be peaceable. There will be those who panic at seeing this peacefulness and who will try and stop it, and there will be those whose power or wealth depends on mutual hatred, and they too will try and stop it, and there are those who get bored or frightened if there is no confrontation. But peace and listening could be possible. Even if you appear to achieve nothing, by being there you might have started a process of change.

Sitting with those you feel may be hostile, may not be the first thing you want to do. Try something easier.

Knowing what you will hear

Perhaps the greatest impediments to real listening is thinking you know what you will hear, or only wanting to hear a limited range of things.

You may only want to hear peace, when peace is not the only thing being felt. You might want calm when it is dangerous. You may want to hear appreciation of yourself, when there is suspicion. You may think you know the solutions and how to proceed, and only hear agreement or disagreement. You may interpret others as saying what they are not intending to say. You may only hear what you intend to say, without hearing how it might sound to others.

You may feel sensations, and run away from them, rather than accept them.

The point is welcoming acceptance of anything. Not rushing to comment, not rushing to interrupt, not rushing to praise or blame. Not rushing to solutions, or to getting the whole process over with. This does not mean acquiescing to suppression, to keep peace, but it may mean recognising what is happening. Dadirri takes as long as it takes. Nothing else is more important.

Respect for all beings, is a good start.

Demanding agreement

You may want agreement. Agreement is nice. It may not happen. While you are demanding or requesting agreement, or aiming for agreement, it can be difficult to hear others who disagree.

Disagreement may need to be heard. You may learn from it. Those disagreeing may perceive something you don’t perceive.

There is no need for agreement Now. Agreement may result when you stop needing it to be there.

If people disagree, they may do different things. That is their right. It is also part of the variety of life and existence. It is not unnatural. You may still be working together, in different ways.

Listen to nature

Whatever you might think, wherever you are there is nature. In a city there are insects, and bacteria and other humans, and probably weeds, trees and some birds. There will be noises. Even in solitary confinement, in a totally antiseptic room, there is yourself, and the sounds your body produces, and you are part of nature.

Start with listening. Again not assuming you know what you will hear. Listen without interpretation, or demands. If ‘nothing happens’ then that is what happens. Listen to your feelings, your body sensations, listen to the images and imaginings that arise, they may have something to say (although you do not have to agree with them, you can listen to them); be receptive to what is. Welcome what makes itself available. Do not push it, or try to make it change. It is to be welcomed, and accepted, despite discomfort. It will probably flow to some other feeling, if it is attended to and left alone, or not pushed or pushed away. If its too strong, then apologise and move on, if you can.

Whatever gets in the way of you accepting what is and how it flows, can also be accepted and listened to.

Dadirri could never stop. There is always more.

Even this may not be easy, but it might be where you start.

Very little that is worthwhile, does not seem hard at the beginning.