Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The Denial Thing

It's been suggested of late that in order for people to be motivated to respond to The Long Emergency (the convergence of global crises such as climate change and peak oil), "it's time to stop blaring dire warnings about the perils... and, instead, start enthusiastically proclaiming solutions." In other words, people are tired of bad news and want to hear the upside.

But, as John McGrath says in a Gristmill post, "I hate to break it to anybody who hasn't been paying attention, but things aren't good, and they're not getting better. Things are bad, and they're getting worse. When the UN releases reports saying 'humanity's survival is at stake,' things are ****ing bleak. I don't see why the green movement should respond to that kind of news by putting on a happy face, or by trying to sidestep the issue. "

He continues: "The core of any advocacy has to be a clear-eyed appraisal of what we're doing. That includes, in this case, the extent of the damage humanity is doing to the earth and to our future. Anyone who says we should downplay that, or sidestep it, is saying we should lie to the public, loudly and consistently, about the most important issue facing us today."

McGrath has a point. Part of what has gotten us to this place of converging global crises (which, after all, has been created by the way we live) is denial. We don't look, and if we don't look we do not see, and if we do not see and know we will not be sufficiently motivated to change course.

Looking and seeing deeply, and formulating incisive actions based on reality is a usually very challenging and uncomfortable process. These days, where that process leads is to the inevitable realization that our demand for solutions is based on false hope and ill-informed idealism. We have unleashed such great and devastating changes in our world that there are no solutions for them. That is, what we are faced with in The Long Emergency is not a problem to be solved, but a long-term consequence of our own actions to which we must now adapt. The frantic effort to develop solutions, then, keeps us from facing the obvious: We must radically change the way we live on the planet. And we must do it quickly.

Next week, a handful of people are planning to sit together for three days to consider all this together. Inspired by Tim Bennett's and Sally Erickson's extraordinary film, "What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire," and the dialogues they've led with audiences around the country, we invited them to come to Boulder to facilitate a "Summit for Leaders, Catalysts, Activists, Therapists, Educators and Facilitators" in the relocalization/transition/sustainability movements.

We sent out invitations to about 120 people, many of them out-of-towners, with this explanation:

We are being called together in this Summit to open up new pathways of response to the imminent Long Emergency of rapidly-converging global crises. Our intention is that in the company of peers we will go deeper than we have ever gone before to break the bonds of denial and inertia, to challenge ourselves to discover what is most urgently needed, and to propel ourselves into unprecedented levels of action and effectiveness.

What we envision is this: Together, we will allow ourselves to more completely face our collective situation—the painful realities and implications of resource depletion, global warming, economic chaos, species extinction, and population overshoot—rooting out the last of our denial, owning our complicity in contributing to this devastating dilemma. We will allow all our guilt, shame, fear and grief to come up to the surface where we can feel them, acknowledge them and process them out in the open with compassion and wisdom. We will get down to the bedrock of our humanity, connecting with our deepest inner resources, where we can begin to see more clearly what must be done and specifically what we must do at this crucial moment in human evolution—and find the direction, inspiration and courage that will enable us to move forward. Then with new clarity we will make sustainable commitments to ourselves, to each other, to our communities, and to the greater community of life on the planet.
I am delighted to report that so far about thirty people are joining our entire staff to share this experience. I think we have an opportunity to create a breakthrough together for relocalization everywhere. I'll do my best to write about this event, what we learn and what the outcomes are.

It'll be a rigorous weekend. Sally has insisted that the process will take three full days, and the schedule on Friday and Saturday is daunting: from 9:00 a.m. to 10: p.m. Sunday is only a little less so, 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Some people of course squawked about the schedule. In response, Sally wrote:


"This is a rare opportunity. We are talking about the end of life as we know it. We are talking about wanting to create a major shift for each of us personally and for the gathered group, and perhaps for 'the movement,' putting our lives on hold in order to enter into a mystical state with one another for the sake of ourselves, our children, the planet. We are encrusted, all of us, in shells of a culture that will need to be shed. That takes time. We are up to a really big thing here. We need to dive in wholeheartedly."
When she says "mystical state," she's not talking about some "altered state" of consciousness or religious experience. What she's referring to is the opportunity to look and see and know together. That's something that happens very rarely in our lives, and it's what is needed now. Later, she clarified:


"With some kind of grace we will sit and listen to one another and perhaps become vulnerable enough to drop our personas and care deeply for each other. That's what I'll hold out for."
That's what I'm holding out for, too.

Perhaps you'd like to join us for this very intense weekend. If so, please send us an email.

I'll close this somewhat rambling post with something from Joanna Macy, in her very important book, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World.


“To be conscious in our world today is to be aware of vast suffering and unprecedented peril… The feelings that assail us now cannot be equated with ancient dreads of mortality… Their source lies less in concerns for the personal self than in apprehensions of collective suffering - of what happens to our own and other species, to the legacy of our ancestors, to unborn generations, and to the living body of Earth… That pain is the price of consciousness in a threatening and suffering world. It is not only natural, it is an absolutely necessary component of our collective healing. As in all organisms, pain has a purpose: it is a warning signal, designed to trigger remedial action. The problem, therefore, lies not with our pain for the world, but in our repression of it.”

5 comments:

Aidan Ashe said...

Michael,
Thanks so much for the link to ecoyear and the endorsement on your site.

Here are my thoughts on the question of emphasizing the "danger" facing us, vs. the "opportunity". For those of you who don't want to read a long post, here is the answer: I think we should ask questions more than we should preach.

My thoughts stem from my experience as a doctor, a peace activist, and a personal coach. In medicine, it appears that studies show (for whatever they are worth) that people are more energized to take action when the positive is emphasized. So, smokers are apparently paralyzed by photos of cancerous lungs, but they are given hope by reports of how food will taste better to them, they will have more energy, and save money if they quit.

In the peace movement, it also appeared that people were paralyzed by descriptions of nuclear winter and annihilation, and obsessively counting how many thousands of nuclear weapons the Soviets and Americans were pointing at each other. Instead, we talked about money from arms becoming available for peaceful activities, and about how fun it is to connect with people from other countries (and how much more unlikely we are to support bombing a country where we know lots of people personally).

In personal coaching, motivation is believed to be generated by making sure a person connects to his or her core values. So we ask people to remember a time when they were deeply happy - what was going on there? How can they re-create this in their daily lives?

So I have no trouble focusing my website on the positive. Community is fun and deeply satisfying. Locally grown, fresh, vibrant vegetables will taste better and make you healthier, in your body and in your mind, especially as you most likely share pretty universal human values of needing connection to a place. If you find a way to have these foods conveniently appear in your life on a weekly basis, they will quickly edge out apples from New Zealand and asparagus from Peru. The work of "re-localizing" Boulder will also naturally result in less driving, less polluting, especially if we make that a focus.

Finally, from the medical community again comes another theory of motivation. It teaches that when people are on the fence about something, emphasizing one side will naturally cause them to focus on the other side. So a smoker who is reminded that cigarette smoking causes cancer will say "But my neighbor's grandfather's friend smoked a pack a day until he was 87!!". On the other hand if you say "What is it you like about smoking?" they are extremely likely to answer "Well, it helps me relax - although of course I worry about the cancer risk - maybe I should quit this year..." The key is to ask the question with genuine lack of judgement - imagine an astronaut asking extraterrestrials about, say, why they paint their toes purple.

So we can ask people "What is it you value the most about modern life - driving everywhere, eating whatever you want, living in big houses?' Let's see what folks answer. My bet is they will start talking about how tomatoes don't taste anything like they used to, and what with peak oil coming, we'll have to rediscover the bicycle - and that could be fun!

Susan M.B. Sullivan said...

Michael,

Being able to help bring people along is probably the most important thing we can learn right now. Thanks for handling this topic on your blog.


In the book "Fostering Social Change", the idea of danger vs. opportunity is discussed. Basically, messages of what we could lose are more effective than messages of what we could win. I know that's counterintuitive, but that's what the research says.But, when faced with a threatening message, people either respond by problem-solving coping or emotional coping. Problem-solving is when peope do everything in their power to respond appropriately. The trick is getting them to see they have power, and emphasizing solutions and hope can help do that. We have been doing the opposite in our communications while meaning well, and we have triggered the opposite reaction for many. That is to say, we have moved people to deny, be afraid and paralyzed, and shut down.

In earlier decades doom and gloom messages were used in environmental education for kids in Eastern Europe. But, instead of turning into environmentalists, they turned into fatalists and pessimists. You can see that in the kids forum posts on global warming. We need to help people know how to respond, and scaring the bejesus out of them without giving them somewhere to go with it won't do it.

Susan M.B. Sullivan said...

Michael,
Thanks for the post on such an important topic. Learning how to bring people along is probably the most important thing we can do right now.

In the book "Fostering Sustainable Behavior", deciding the emphasis between "danger" and "opportunity" is treated. Research shows that emphasis of loss is more motivating to people than emphasizing opportunity. This is counterintuitive, but works. However, in order to work, threatening messages must help people respond in a problem solving way. People only have two options-fight or flight. Fight is when they solve problems and are empowered to believe they can make a difference, with others. Flight is when they deny the danger, resist, become paralyzed, etc. Our challenge is to help them see what they can do and help them do it, along with doing it ourselves. This finding has a long history in environmental education research. I'm not saying don't tell people the truth, I'm saying help them to deal with it by showing what they can do.

MIchael Brownlee said...

Hi Myrto,

This is a complex issue, and there are many viewpoints.

For my part, I'm constantly faced with the challenge of how to distinguish between an emergency/crisis and the mere need for change.

My grandfather was told point blank by his doctor that if he didn't quite smoking he was going to die from it. He walked out of the doctor's office, threw his cigarettes away, and never smoked again. But the warning came too late, and he died a few years later of emphysema.

We're facing a real emergency now (The Long Emergency), and motivations are not as important as simply responding. Not everyone can see the emergency, of course, so not everyone will respond appropriately.

For those of us who can see it, we pretty much know what we need to do and we're doing our best. I often use this analogy: If you can see the river is rising, and you know it's going to keep on rising, you don't equivocate but you go down to the levee and start piling up sandbags! That's the kind of situation I think we're facing.

At the same time, there is certainly the need for behavioral change on the part of many people, and that's where the issue of motivation comes in.

But there is another kind of motivation that is often left out of the discussion, which is articulated nicely by Sharon Astyk in "Making the Case for Sacrifice" (http://casaubonsbook.blogspot.com/2008/01/making-case-for-self-sacrifice.html). You might be interested in joining the discussion there.

Unknown said...

Michael,

I am of several minds about this issue.

Part of the problem is that denial serves a psychological purpose similar to blisters on your heel by allowing people to avoid having to deal with disturbing facts or news. It takes a lot of energy to stay in denial especially if many dissonance creating messages are presented to the person in denial.

Now if your goal is to shine a light on those very aspects that the individual is trying desparately to avoid for whatever personal reason you are doing the psychological equivalent of cutting off the relationship limb on which you are sitting.

Opportunities for personal growth tend to arise in the context of caring relationships where persons in denial can discover that others whom they respect see something other than they do. Without a demand that they also see it the same way allows them the freedom to explore their own views without loss of face or submission to social pressure.

On one occasion I put together a placard for a peace rally that went something like this, "What's easier to do: Pay more for Gas or kill a million Iraqis?" And to my surprise a big Lincoln Continental pulls over and the window hums down and a well dress woman driver motions to me to come over and she asks me this question, "Do they really think it's about the oil?" To which I respond, "Whose they?" and she says, "The Iraqis." And I said to her, "Our country uses 20 million barrels of oil every day. We are the ones who think it's about the oil." That response was more than she could handle and she drove away in a huff, shaking her head while accelerating her 2 ton vehicle rapidly.

To this day I regret that I was not able to find a way to nuture that spark of interest despite the fact that she was clearly either in denial about her lifestyle and its consequences or had never made the connection and was ignorant of geopolitical realities. Perhaps the dissonance that caused her to shake her head would fester into a psychic blister that would require her to go into denial on that subject.

But I wonder if instead of being factually correct I had asked her something like, "What do you think it's about?" and then listened carefully to her reply that our interchange might have been less devisive and might even had drawn her into a real dialog about the true causes of the war.

There is a sort of unspoken context for your article and the way I read it is that we have a public relations problem...

On one hand we are in a battle for the minds and hearts of the great unwashed public who have been fed a steady diet of Fox News and info-tainment and are vaguely aware that there is a battle being waged about global warming and maybe if we're lucky peak oil. Our audience members probably have 9 to 5 jobs and a family and like everyone else are trying to stay ahead of the bills, raise their kids, and live a decent life. At the end of the day they crawl into bed and hope they sleep well. And we're trying to communicate with them about urgent matters that require their active participation in political and lifestyle changes that are not trivial. Question is do we give them a message with all the gorey details of corporate corruption, misinformtion and political censorship of scientific studies about climate change or do we simply state that here are 5 things they should do to decrease their carbon footprint without too much background.

My suggestion is that we provide the simple message about decreasing their carbon foot print right up front and then we give them a link to background materials that are tiered so that they can explore the issues as much as they have the time and interest to do so. A website that does this well is the Union of Concerned Scientists. Often times our own pessimism can creep into our communications. Just because we are very familar with a complex situation there is no particular need to have people interested in the environment, climate change or peak oil to have to drink from a fire hose on their initial read.

By the same token we should always provide lists of books and articles and other websites where additional information can be had. We may even want to characterize these additional materials as to their intensity, and style of presentation to give the interested reader some sense of what they are getting into.

Moreover, we should supply them with the clear message that what they do will matter. Otherwise why are we asking them in the first place? Optimism is not dishonest so long as we are asking for action we must somewhere in our thought processes believe that it will have a good outcome.

Even if we believe that there is little hope for a national or international outcome that will be favorable we need to concentrate on our local geography which is the only place we actually have any direct contact with or influence over.