Month: October 2019

The Kernel:  The dissonance in Climate Crisis is often a result of a threat that produces responses initially justifiable to ourselves but unjustifiable to others. As social creatures, we usually frame risk through group norms. And when we do that, we avoid taking the longer path of further investment of time and resources in procuring situation-specific data. This avoidance bypasses the risk of potentially preventing us from responding to threats in a timely and appropriate way.

When our initial response and our group response are at odds with each other, we resolve this difference using one or several of three ways. This resolving allows us to eventually reframe our initial reaction to fit both the group’s response as well as a new one for ourselves. Even though this helps us remain consistent with the group norm (and finally to ourselves), it also produces inaction towards Climate Crisis.
Continue reading “Blog 6: Part 2, The Psychology of Dissonance”

The Kernel: Our minds have in-built strategies to maintain self-states. When faced with a threat to the consistency of these self-states, we marginalize this threat through Retreat, Ritualism, and Rebellion. This way, we minimize –or in some cases eliminate– the dissonance which ironically is a result of giving legitimacy to both our self-states and the new evidence that simultaneously threatens them. As such, we delegitimize Climate Crisis through selective perceptions, distortions, self-rationalizations, and two-track thinking. This de-legitimacy allows us to delay the cost of social trauma, as well as collateral damage to self-states, by adopting Climate Inaction that is more diffused, and that has a delayed effect. The effects of this inaction is less disruptive than responding to Climate Action, a response that is disruptive because it is an acute, direct, and immediate impact. As a result, we stay in the herd and enjoy all the engendered status quo benefits while casting aside as far as possible the thought of the impending cliff of Climate Crisis.

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The Kernel: Doom is the hangover from having experienced the loss of vulnerability. As such, Doom is often an euphemism that points to an empty psychological reservoir of this loss. Consequentially, when we abandon ourselves from the abandonment of what we need (core needs), we also vacate the planet from what it needs. Only then can we see Climate Crisis is an allegory for we cannot give to the world when (and what) we haven’t given to ourselves.

Continue reading “Blog 4: Doom. Or rather doom that points to an abandoned place within.”