Believing is Seeing

I keep reading about the new understanding that people only allow in (to their lives, their minds, their outlooks, their consciousness) that which doesn't confront or contradict their belief system.

It's a sort of psychic safety mechanism against cognitive dissonance, and it is making it very difficult to educate those who don't understand — and don't want to understand — the climate change crisis. 

I experienced a funny incident the other day that not only proved this theory in myself, but also proved that believing is seeing. (So many people think the opposite is true, that seeing is believing.) 

I woke up early to get to a special event at work much earlier than usual. In the early morning darkness, I bid a silent goodbye to the shadowy lump in the bed next to me that was my husband and snuck down the stairs to get ready. I turned on several lights downstairs (including in the hallway and the bathroom, both near the guestroom) and as time passed and I had to quicken my pace, I started turning on more and more lights and making more and more noise — popping in and out of the guestroom to gather up items I'd put there the night before. 

Just before I left, I noticed that the dog had followed me downstairs and was snuggled up on the guestroom bed. When I went to pick her up to carry her back to the bedroom so she could snuggle with her "dad" instead, I tripped over a glass on the floor and noticed that my hubby had left his reading glasses and some writing paper scattered about as well. As I was making this racket, the dog climbed higher in the bed towards the pillows.

It wasn't until I leaned down to pick her up that my husband moved and scared the you-know-what out of me! I screamed, "What are you doing here? I saw you up in the bed, next to me."

"No," he responded, "I couldn't sleep but I didn't want to disturb you. So I snuck down here in the middle of the night to do some work, and then I fell asleep."

I'm sure he'd managed to fall back to sleep before I was even out the front door — but I didn't leave until I'd tiptoed up the stairs again to check out that bulge in my bed. Sure enough, it was just the way the blankets were heaped that looked like a human being sleeping there. Climate change is real after all ... I mean, that wasn't my beloved in the bed next to me in the morning, but because it's what I believed I saw when I got up in the very early dawn light, I just couldn't see him in the guestroom bed, even with all the lights on and the dog on top of him!

So folks, that's just one little personal anecdote, but I think I'm going to start diverting my attention and efforts to building coalitions with people and organizations and politicians already doing the good work to safeguard the future. I have a feeling the others just won't be able to see the climate change emergency until something happens to wake them up to its ravages.

You CAN Handle the Truth!

You know what? We're in a no-analogue Catch-22. Psychologists tell us not to tell people the full truth about the climate change emergency because they won't be able to handle it and will shut down and not do anything. But if we don't tell people the full truth, they're not going to do anything anyway! I've recently asked readers and friends for advice on how to handle this conundrum. Below is some of the feedback I've received, and then I'll give you my new take on all of this.

Unknown shared this: "I say go ahead and tell the whole truth, don't sugar coat it. You'll get people more scared, but maybe a little fear is what we need -- along with a heaping dose of reality. People are still WAY too self-absorbed, or worried about which celebrity is divorcing who, or which sports team scored higher than another. They need to realize that none of that matters at all, that their world is crumbling around them and they're too blind (or busy watching television) to see it."

So, truth as wake up call! That resonates with me. Unknown finishes with "So bring it on, sister!"

My online friend, David Wilson, concurs with the age-old adage "The truth will set you free." He also brings up an excellent point, told through this anecdote:

"Back in the days of Simon Charlie's Festival of the Sun, there were always people showing up and taking too much of the wrong thing ... bikers on tequila, kids on shrooms, acid, whatever ... and you know, my learning then, which has not changed much over the years, was and is that people get through their freak-outs if someone will just invest the time and energy to talk to them, calmly, openly, compassionately, in a way that lets them know you are not going to up and leave them stranded there."

So I can't just plop the full truth on the table and walk away. I know there's always someone who asks, "What can I do?" as if they haven't been awake for the past 20 years. "Create political will" is not the first thing I'm going to suggest to people like that. But there will have to be hand-holding and hugs. After all, I've been dealing with this bad news for years now. The general public has not. (More on that here.) 

And patients who have just received a terminal diagnosis don't jump into action -- they have to digest the news and grieve a bit first. Then, however, according to my husband-the-doctor, they are ready to jump into action, to do whatever it takes to change their prognosis or prepare for the end.

My husband-the-doctor and I have had many conversations about the psychology of climate change communication. There is just a small handful of psychologists who have driven the don't-tell-the-truth-about-climate-change agenda here in North America (and in the UK, too, I think). We suspect these psychologists weren't alive before World War II, so they haven't witnessed how the people in our culture can rally together when necessary. Nor have they worked in medicine to witness the courage of people who discover they are terminally ill. 

It's not that people (in our culture/society -- it's frustrating when psychologists talk about "people" as though they mean the whole human species when their research has dealt only with Americans; and even there, check out the Yale study Global Warming’s Six Americas) can't handle the truth. It's that people need someone -- their doctor, a Winston Churchill, their president or prime minister, a Climate Reality Project leader, ahem -- to be there for them once they've absorbed the truth.

Furthermore, the truth does need to be the full truth (for example, the history of the denial machine) so that cognitive dissonance doesn't set in. You know, "the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change." In other words, if people finally come to see the urgency of what really needs to happen in the world but still don't see their leaders taking action, that's going to mess with their minds unless they understand all the forces at work to keep us embroiled (pun intended!) in the fossil fuel economy.

And finally, here's my epiphany for the week (keeping in mind that sometimes my epiphanies are things I figured out long ago and then forgot about ;-). When "common knowledge" says that people can't handle the full truth about the climate change emergency, that they'll shut down and become immobilized, there are quite likely two flaws in that thinking. 

First, it's quite possible that the researchers (including the armchair variety) who tell us this are simply projecting their own fears and attitudes onto the rest of us. 

Second, that view of the human spirit forgets that we've really only been taking people to the door to peer in. 

We haven't yet been taking people right in, inviting them to sit down, and introducing them to the emergency in a way that allows them to calmly get to know it.  

We haven't yet asked them to feel deeply the plight of others in more climate-change-vulnerable regions of the world -- or their own country.  

We haven't yet put a box of tissues on the table next to them and encouraged them to cry their pain or sing a song of lament (the lost art in our society of passionately expressing our grief or sorrow) that will surely bubble up once this new knowledge is deeply understood -- and felt.  

And we haven't yet urged the perfectly natural anger that parents will feel once they realize their children's future is literally at risk because we're not willing to make the switch to cleaner, safer, healthier, more peaceful and more equitable perpetual energy technologies. 

So no, unlike Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, we do not have the right to tell our fellow citizens that they can't handle the truth. We've never given them the chance.

An Epiphany? This Work is a Spiritual Duty

I had an epiphany recently. I'm still struggling to put it into words that do it justice, so I'll just tell the story.

The news on the climate change front is getting worse and worse. People who don't follow the research probably won't (and don't want to) know this, although the more mainstream media are covering the release of these reports more and more. (I guess the news is finally too serious to ignore.) And no, F!x News is not a mainstream news source.*

As someone who stays fairly up to date on the climate change emergency and who works with children, I experience almost constant angst and dissonance. Why aren't their parents and grandparents outraged at the international inaction? What more could I be doing? How should I be helping to prepare these kids for their certainly uncertain future? And why am I putting myself through this pain (of knowing what I don't want to know, of doing what I'd rather not be doing) when the evidence is increasingly overwhelming that we're heading over the climate change cliff and still no one is putting the brakes on!?

I was battling myself almost daily: Why are you doing this? Why don't you just relax? Why aren't you having more fun? Why don't you take more time for yourself? Why don't you allow yourself to do other things and forget about this climate change stuff? (It didn't help that friends kept encouraging me to see the positive things that are happening, to lighten up, to not guilt trip people — even though it's myself that I've been guilt tripping.)

Then suddenly (that's usually how epiphanies come, right?), not long ago, it hit me, or should I say, it was revealed to me (from the Greek epiphainein "reveal"). I have to do this work because it is my spiritual duty. It's like trying to become illiterate after learning to read. I can't become climate change-illiterate now that I know what's going on. And because I know, I must act. (See? I can't articulate it very well.)

Because I know that my Mother Earth is in trouble, that all the children of the world, of all species, are in trouble, I cannot not act. My membership in the human race means that I have to reach out, I have to do something. As hard as this is, to stop caring would be worse. It would be a betrayal of all that I love. And therefore, in my heart, I know that what I am doing is a spiritual necessity for me.

Here's how Michael Bloch from Green Living Tips.com describes the dissonance:

"So, given the doom and gloom, should we just stop trying to green our lives? Well, we know from a very early age that regardless of what we do, we're going to die anyway, but most of us don't say 'what's the point' and take our lives or just sit around waiting for death to occur. Of course we should still try."

And here's what a new online friend, Michael Murphy of IBI Watch ("Unmasking Ignorance-Based Initiatives") wrote to me just this morning:

"You are clearly disappointed — like me — that efforts to stem climate destabilization have foundered. But you are carrying on, and we have to keep fighting, don't we?"

Yes, we do have to carry on. Because if there's anything worse (for me) than not engaging in this ultimate struggle to begin with, it would be giving up before it's over.

* Hey, did you hear about the psychology study out of Fairfield University in Connecticut (by Linda Henkel and Mark Mattson)? It turns out that reading a statement three times, as opposed to just once, makes people believe that what they read is true. Repeated viewing of a claim creates a "truth effect" or an air of truth to the claim — even when people are explicitly informed that the source of the information was untrustworthy. That explains how F!x News works. And it doesn't depend on the intelligence or media literacy of the viewer/reader, either. So, folks, remember that your world view is shaped by what you allow into your brain space!

p.s. Cartoon used with permission.

Cognitive Dissonance, Diffidence, and Dissidence

Last week on this blog, I called a local climate change denialist a selfish %$#@!. I think the "selfish" epithet is clear enough: an old geezer who refuses to make any dents in his greenhouse gas emissions to benefit the children and all future generations is just plain selfish.

But two friends thought that I was somehow being hypocritical by using the term "bastard." Now, I'd assumed that most of us know, understand and use the second (slang) definition of the word: a vicious, despicable, or thoroughly disliked person.

So I see no hypocrisy, nor any problem, in calling a spade a spade ... especially these days, when so much is riding (future of life on Earth, anyone?) on the compassion we must muster for those more vulnerable to the ravages of the climate change emergency. In my world, to flatly refuse to make even the slightest sacrifice for the sake of the children — and then to splatter that mean-spiritedness all over a newspaper page — makes you a %$#@!. And a selfish one.

*****

My friends' reactions got me thinking about cognitive dissonance: the state of conflict or anxiety that arises from inconsistency between one's beliefs/attitudes and actions, or from holding conflicting ideas at the same time.

For example, these friends know that the world is teetering on the edge of demise. Yet, they couldn't picture themselves calling a selfish %$#@! "a selfish %$#@!" on a blog. "What if a child reads it?" asked one. Um, that matters why? Changes things how? (Hey, if a child reads my blog, he or she is going to know that at least I stick up for the children and their right to a future!)

Anyway, that made me think of a new term. Cognitive diffidence: mental shyness or inability to trust; lack of intellectual self-confidence. Sure, if you hadn't spent a whole day researching and rebutting the denialist's published bullsh!t, you might not feel you have enough evidence to call someone a selfish %$#@!. But I did spend a whole day, so I do have enough evidence!

Then I remembered another friend's recent typo: cognitive dissidence. Pretty good one, eh? I'm coining that phrase as intellectual dissent, or mental protest against official policy. Yeah, that's what I'd like to see! A whole lot more people mentally protesting against national, international and multinational policies that are keeping us on the road to hell. And then, in order to get rid of their cognitive dissonance, people will have to DO SOMETHING about what's going on in the world. With courage instead of cognitive diffidence.

Think about it, 'kay? I might be onto something here!!