Denial of Reality, Part Two

 

Fields in Pennsylvania

For anyone who missed the original Denial of Reality, I highly recommend reading it now. This psychological phenomenon, combined with another, wetiko, and the Maximum Power Principle, the dark triad and tetrad personality traits, and the human cultural tendency to believe in human supremacy, ingenuity, and the myth of salvation are the control levers behind our behavioral choices that lead to war. Of course, those same things lead to many other behavioral patterns as well. In other words, they are pre-ordained parts, or subsets, of civilization. In fact, most of those items actually came into existence with or after the development of civilization.

It is therefore a logical mistake to think that somehow society will miraculously be able to rid ourselves of these awful traits as long as civilization is allowed to continue. I constantly hear people (such as Nate Hagens) claim that we have agency when in reality, there is no shred of evidence that we can escape the consequences of the symptom predicaments of ecological overshoot that we have instituted through our behavior of technology use. Recently, I have brought up the reality of the pollution loading that we have collectively accomplished (if one wants to call it an accomplishment). Calling it an accomplishment is akin to the same type of ideology of the myths of human progress and human ingenuity. Still, as this article demonstrates, there are no methods of escape. More articles like this one (or even this one!) appear quite regularly, and most people do not understand civilizational inertia nor the lag effect that I outlined in Denial of Reality (link above in first paragraph), which mean that even if we stopped manufacturing all this destruction today, increasing damage will continue to unfold for many years if not decades to come.

Of course, the worst part about all of this is that most of society continues to deny this reality, choosing instead to believe in fantasies, myths, and fairy tales because that is who and what we are as a species. While I have known for quite some time that the denial bug has effectively bitten most people, up until November of last year I didn't realize just how bad it had gotten. That article explains in stark detail what Carl Sagan so famously said here, "You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep-seated need to believe."

What more is there to reveal about our species? I mean, seriously, I could go on and on all day listing all the various evidence for the claims I have made in this blog and elsewhere for over a decade now if I chose to. I could write page after page of material stating specifically everything I have already stated time after time. Would it make any real difference? That might be in the viewer's eyes, perhaps, since some people are very grateful for my articles and they might think differently than I do about it. My thought, however, is that it would make not one shred of difference, in a collective sense. Those who want the truth will seek it and discover it with or without my assistance. Those who deny the truth will continue to do so because that is what they want - reassuring lies instead of inconvenient truths.

So, ultimately, in order to reach acceptance of the predicaments we face, one must also understand that this was always how things were going to turn out. Comprehending that the universe is deterministic and that everything (including us) is interconnected with this reality is required. I have posted this picture before and it renders the truth - that the present couldn't be any different unless the past had been different and since we cannot go back in time to make the past different, today cannot be different either:

Another slightly different version of this picture:

In order for tomorrow to be different from today with regard to overshoot, who and what we are as a species would have to be fundamentally different. This is something that would require something that is physically impossible; dissipative structures do not go backwards, meaning that what has been done cannot be undone. Think back to the pollution loading that we have done - once the genie has been released from the bottle into the environment, there is no putting him/her back into the bottle. I wrote about this last week, where many people have this idea that we will simply plow ahead (possibly with hope?). Surely the Easter Bunny will save us? As if all the previous info regarding our predicament isn't enough, a new issue with regard to pollution loading is knocking on our back door. Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis and it isn't limited to just land plants. 

Think for a moment about all the dangerous and toxic complexities we have brought into existence with nuclear technologies, biological weapons, Artificial Intelligence, and even regular pathogens that today can be fought with antibiotics and/or other treatments provided courtesy of today's technology powered by fossil fuels and the resources those fossil fuels provide. What will happen once the containment provided by today's infrastructure can no longer be powered and/or maintained or breaks down or protective gear (PPE) is no longer widely available? We're already sitting ducks for scenarios such as Chernobyl and Fukushima and countless other man-made disasters. 

About 16 months ago, I wrote about GeoDestinies, and now they are affecting us more than ever and will continue to do so as time moves forward. The ongoing wars and even threats of ones are directly related to resources - or the lack of them. This goes right back to the MPP and wetiko, of course. Add in all the other nasty items I mentioned in the first paragraph and then throw in a healthy dose of manipulation and narrative generation and the results are similar to this article by James Greenberg with this poignant quote:

"The consequences of this war on reality will be devastating. Without climate data, communities will face extreme weather without warning. Farmers will lose their crops without the science to help them adapt. Coastal cities will flood while the government looks away. The next generation of climate scientists will find their research defunded, their expertise ignored, their futures sabotaged by political cynicism.

But here’s the thing about reality: it doesn’t care whether you believe in it. The oceans will keep rising. The storms will keep coming. The wildfires will keep burning, and the heat waves will keep stretching into October. Trump and Musk can purge the data, silence the experts, and dismantle the institutions, but they cannot stop the consequences. They can only make them worse. And when the floods rage, when the air chokes with smoke, when the crops fail and the power grids collapse under the weight of another record-breaking heat wave, the people left suffering will know exactly who to blame."

Sadly, assigning blame rarely helps. Sometimes it does help to get to the root cause of things, although this usually takes a lot of research and time. I spent many years studying climate change long before I knew about overshoot and what causes it. The more I continue learning, the more intractable I discover our predicament is. As a result, I have taken to becoming much quieter so as not to awaken those still asleep at the wheel. The mistake all of us made at one point or another was becoming an activist of one sort or another, thinking that waking folks up and alerting them to the coming storms would help society adapt to this new reality. There's really very little to be done, because society will disappear into tribal communities before dying out altogether. 

Since denial of reality is so powerful, many will choose to believe that they can restore biodiversity and soil and save species and rebel against extinction and all that good stuff. They have a deep-seated need for belief; no amount of evidence will change their minds. Certainly letting them attempt to find out the hard way that it will have little if any effect can't cause any more harm than what is already being done. Plus, this follows the spirit of Living Now. Besides, for many years I believed those narratives myself - things like "every tenth of a degree we shave off of climate change will...blah, blah, blah." For those keeping track, we haven't yet even begun to shave the first tenth of a degree off. Of course, with all the science being silenced here in the US, will we even know?

With that I shall close with a new set of pictures that come to us from Ludington, Michigan!