Writing Climate Change (29)
The Fight for the Climate – Psychology & the Individual (the bad stuff)
This is part of a series on writing climate change for fiction
Individual hearts and minds have become one of the key battlefields in the fight for the climate.
What people believe and feel drives what they do. Behaviour changes the world. Narrative is a huge part of this psychological fight. Therefore, you as a writer (like it or not) are participating in the fight for hearts and minds.
Welcome to your field of battle. May your pen be mighty.
People are diverse and complicated, so we’re going break our discussion of psychology up into chunks:
Individual psychology
Group psychology
The psychology of power/powerlessness.
Quirks of the modern world
There’s a lot to cover... and it’s just gonna take as long as it takes.
Today we will focus on individual psychology. The bad parts. We are going to discover why people are struggling to take action. Your job as a writer-who-wants-to-make-a-difference is to get inside people’s heads, and hopefully undo some of that struggling. We’ll look at how individual change happens next time.
COMMON FRAMINGS OF CLIMATE PSYCHOLOGY
Before we get into it, we need to beware of oversimplified psychological explanations. You’ll find a number of common framings of climate psychology out there. They do have some merit, but they are partial explanations at best. At worst they are simply ideological expressions, ungrounded in reality.
Some common framings include:
Information Deficit: If only people knew!
Cognitive Bias: If only human brains weren’t stupid!
Media Bias & Education: If only people weren’t ill-informed and misled!
Emotional Framing: If only people received the message in a more positive/negative way!
Incentives & Selfishness: If only people felt the personal impacts and/or weren’t greedy bastards!
Obviously people need some education and information. Cognitive biases do exist. None of this is wrong per se. These explanations just get repeated a lot in oversimplified ways. You’ll see why this can be a problem soon.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN A WORLD OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Certain subjects you might be expecting to see here are better covered under social psychology or exist due to quirks of our historical moment (stuff like: conspiracy theories, public understanding). Obviously all of these involve individual psychology. If the politics or social dynamics are more important, we’ll look at them another time.
Here we’ll focus on what I feel are the central issues blocking action at an individual level.
The Individual Meets Climate Change
How do I as an individual move from inaction to action on climate change? A few things must happen.
Awareness:
I need to know.
Fossil fuels make the planet heat up. The science is solid. Okay. That’s all I needed to know. Done.
Concern:
I need to know this is bad.
Heating the planet up is the kind of thing that causes mass extinctions. Okay. That sounds pretty bad. Done.
Personal:
I need to connect this to my life.
I use fossil fuels. I live on planet Earth. Okay. This effects me. I need to change. I’ve made the connection. Done.
Action:
I need to know what I can do.
My options range from simple lifestyle adjustments, up to profound shifts in my sense of purpose and identity. Okay. That’s a lot. You know, I can just pick an easy one to start with. Done.
Skill:
I need to be capable of carrying out this action. I need the emotional ability to cope with concepts like “mass extinction”, and the intellectual capacity pick an action that actually works. Wow, that sounds hard.
Okay. I am an adult. I am capable of doing that. Done.
Opportunity:
I need to be able to take this action in the real world. Goddamn it! This world can be so annoying.
Again, I am an adult. I can adapt. Done.
Motivation:
I need to be able to prioritize this action and sustain it. Wow, that’s hard sometimes. I have so many other things to worry about.
But, you know, I am an adult. I can figure that out. Done.
And that’s it.
That is all I have to do.
I am not responsible for saving the world. I just need to be a responsible adult. Climate change doesn’t even need to be in my top ten personal responsibilities. I just need to play my small part.
That’s all.
That’s not so very hard.
The basic points about climate change can be communicated in a five minute conversation. The entry-level actions are easy enough to be done by children. Climate change is old news. An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006. That’s nearly two decades ago. People know. People have the capacity to act.
None of this is difficult? Right?
Obviously something is going wrong.
Blame our Irrational Chimpanzee-Brains?
The most common of commonplace arguments is that the human mind just can’t deal with climate change. That’s what has gone wrong for people.
We are irrational chimpanzees.
I find this entire line of thought (much of which comes out of behavioural economics) somewhat tiresome. Yes, they make a few good points. But no, they’re largely missing the point.
The problem is largely elsewhere.
For the sake of demonstration, we’ll go through one example. Consider the acronym PAIN. It’s both true, and misleading. PAIN stands for:
Personal
Abrupt
Immoral
Now
When all four conditions are met we can’t help but pay attention. This is true. If a cannibal serial killer chases me with a knife, I am going to run. That’s an imminent fast moving personal threat, and a moral outrage too.
Now, according to some just-so storytelling, our chimpanzee brains evolved to handle PAIN threats best because something-something and eaten by a tiger. This is false, because that’s not how science works, but okay whatever.
I will accept the conclusion however: unlike the serial killer or a tiger, I can survive ignoring climate change. This is true.
Therefore, according to PAIN, people make it from Awareness, to Concern, and then fall over at Personal. Climate change just isn’t personal. Or fast. Like a tiger with a knife.
Climate is psychologically distant.
Therefore my chimpanzee-brain just doesn’t know how to pay attention. Apparently.
On the surface PAIN seems to be pointing us to an issue with fundamental human nature. When we dig deeper, the bigger issue turns out to be elsewhere – in politics.
(surprise!)
Here’s the thing: psychological distance is in your head.
Our notions of “personal” and “here and now” are fluid. Climate change cannot be inherently distant because psychological distance is not inherent to objects. Distance is a relationship between you and the object. Maybe you do have a distant relationship to that object. The question is, why?
Seriously.
Why?
The idea that climate change is anti-PAIN is a political framing – one that was never true, and is currently collapsing.
Personal: climate wont effect you, because you’re old and you live in a rich country.
Abrupt: Don’t listen to that stuff about tipping points. Shhhh!
Immoral: Never mind the oil companies. Climate... just happened?
Now: Oh no... this is for the distant future. Distant! Definitely not happening now.
So... yeah.
Bla bla bla.
If the PAIN idea was true, then the arrival of climate disasters should be kick starting dramatic action. It isn’t. People’s houses are literally on fire now. Many people are hoping just a few more disasters will magically flip a switch in people’s heads.
Yeah, nah.
Mass death and destruction surprisingly hasn’t changed anything fundamental, rather disasters seems to be merely one piece of a slow growing awareness that climate is changing now – which it always was (the idea climate change is only for the distant future has more to do with misinformation, and might be a form of emotional management – something we’ll get to soon). If you already care about climate, then having your house burn down makes you care more. If you don’t already care about climate, then you simply haven’t gone through those steps necessary to connect fire risk to climate in the first place. Fires just happen in your world. Hence disasters don’t change your mind.
Consider the COVID pandemic. A wave of mass death swept the world, ticking almost every PAIN criteria possible. We had an entire movement of people who denied the event was even happening, even as they themselves died. That movement was itself a reflection of our politics more than anything strictly psychological. Rather, things like pandemics and climate change are just sufficiently abstract and invisible that (if you want to) they can get subjected to political spin.
In contrast, consider just how many things people obsess over that do not trigger PAIN at all. Society handles plenty of such issues just fine. Effective climate action has never required anyone to panic like they’re being mauled by a tiger.
A trivial example of something much more profound (that actually explains what’s going wrong)
Version 1:
I am on a ferry travelling between islands. The trip is long and dull. Out of boredom I fiddle with my keys.
Oh crap!
The keys slip out of my fingers, and tumble down a vent on the ship’s deck. Getting down on my hands and knees I can just see my keys in the dark and grime.
Bugger!
I try squeezing my fingers through the vent. Too narrow. I try lifting the vent off. Too solid. I spot a crew member. “My keys!” I shout. They come over, and I explain. We laugh, and they return with a screwdriver. A few minutes later my keys are saved.
Version 2:
...Oh crap!
The keys slip out of my fingers, and tumble down the side of the ship. My keys splash down into the Pacific Ocean.
Bugger!
For a moment I stare blankly at the waves. My hands are tight gripped on the railing. My shoulders slump. I go back inside, visit the vending machine, buy chocolate, collapse onto a chair. A TV is playing a kids movie about animated insects. I try not to think about what just happened.
There’s nothing I can do.
Threat & Coping Strategies
Climate change is a threat. Slow moving, impersonal, and yet obviously bad nonetheless.
Threats wake people up. Threats make people pay attention. People don’t like being harmed. People don’t like losing their keys.
And...
Once people know about the threat...
You can shut up.
The horror and the loss ceases to be the important thing. We get it. Climate change is bad.
When faced by a threat people can engage in one of two different coping strategies:
Problem-focused Coping
Emotion-focused Coping
What we want is the problem solving. You see a problem. You say, “I need to fix that!” You get up. You get out. You find a method that works. Done.
What we don’t want is only negative forms of emotion-focused coping. Shut-down. Freeze. Screaming. Avoidance. Binge-eating junk food.
The decider between these two strategies is your sense of control. Can you fish your keys out of that vent? Yes. Can you fish your keys out of the Pacific Ocean? No.
Climate change feels like the Pacific Ocean.
What do you expect me to do?
A silly example, to demonstrate why screaming at people to just change might not work.
Version 1:
Sally is a baker at Buns-R-Us. Currently she is standing around doing nothing. Her boss, Mitch, comes in and notices this distinct absence of baking by his employee.
Mitch looks at Sally’s workspace. Perhaps she needs more flour? Mitch goes to supply room and hauls out a bag of flour. He dumps the bag in front of Sally.
She looks at the bag, and does nothing.
“Come on!” hisses Mitch beneath his breath. He goes and grabs another bag of flour. Sally just rolls her eyes. How much flour does she need? He grabs yet more flour. Sally is now watching cat videos on her phone.
Finally Mitch snaps. “What is wrong with you? Why aren’t you doing anything? If you don’t get to work now this business will go bankrupt! I’ll fire you! Small children will go hungry!”
Sally shrugs. “I’m waiting for the mixer,” she says, pointing across the room. “It’s in use.”
Version 2:
Sally is walking down Main Street, going shopping for clothes. The clothes she’s purchased aren’t exactly sustainable choices. An activist called Mitch is standing on the street corner with some information flyers. He notices.
Mitch has been looking at people like Sally for years, and he is appalled. He hands Sally an information flyer about how everyone is going to die because of climate change. Fast fashion is a pet peeve of his. So wasteful!
Sally looks at the flyer, and shrugs.
“Come on!” hisses Mitch beneath his breath. He launches into a speech, “Civilisation is going to collapse!” Sally rolls her eyes. He can’t stand climate deniers. Mitch raises his voice. “If we don’t take action now...” Sally is checking a message on her phone.
Mitch snaps. “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? Are you just going to stand there doing nothing while the world burns?”
Sally shrugs.
Barriers to Action
Here’s a few recommended climate actions I’m not doing because they are impossible:
Using a regional public train system which doesn’t exist.
Only buying sustainable products which I can’t afford.
Reducing my consumption below starvation levels.
Switching the house I don’t own from gas to electricity.
Divesting the stocks I don’t own in the companies I’ve never heard of.
Petitioning the government over obscure bits of legislation I don’t understand.
Organizing mass demonstrations when I barely have the energy to cook dinner.
These things don’t work for me. You will have your own list. Everyone has their list.
These impossible things involve resources, opportunities, and skills I lack. They involve going against my habits and inclinations. They involve starting up entirely new ways of living. They ask me self-sacrificially fight the whole world. I can’t do that. I won’t do that.
Here’s a few recommended climate actions I am doing because they are possible:
Riding a bike everywhere, because I already had one, was already in the habit, and it’s cheap and easy given the alternatives, plus the exercise does me good.
Growing vegetables, because that was already part of my upbringing, I enjoy it, and it saves money.
Writing this for you to read, because it draws on my pre-existing skills, and for me this is worthwhile for its own sake (even if no one reads it).
These things work for me. You will have your own list. Everyone has their list.
These possible things involve resources, opportunities, and skills I already have access to. They involve following my habits and inclinations. They offer me bonus side benefits and enjoyment. I was already doing some of these. Building on these behaviours is easy.
Here’s a few recommended climate actions I could do, and may or may not in future:
Get a climate focused job. Will I even get the chance? The government has just plunged the entire sector into an austerity meltdown (again). Given what I’ve experienced of this world already, is it even worth it?
Get involved with a community group. Will this actually work for me? Do I even believe in what they do?
Focus more on local and/or national politics. This takes a lot of effort. Are the results worth the effort?
These things might work for me. I don’t know. You will have your own list. Everyone has their list.
A lot of these maybes require extra effort. They demand spending some time thinking and experimenting. Those are big life changes.
Meanwhile daily life just muddles on. We have our habits, our routines, the things we take for granted. Breaking free of habit can take effort, introspection, and disruption. Trying to create a brand new set of behaviours for yourself from scratch is hard and typically fails. We should not be surprised that people just go with the flow, and do the easy thing. People will do what works for their life.
So then...
Why don’t people do more?
We spent so much time looking at the political, institutional, and economic forces for a reason. Those structural forces are tipping the balance for all our lists. I cannot create a public transport system on my own, nor summon climate jobs out of thin air.
This is where understanding the world solely in terms of individuals breaks down. When we look at group psychology we’ll see how even admitting the seriousness of climate change is firmly on the Impossible list for many people. Individuals exist in context.
Down here at the individual level, people get stuck.
Many people are looking at their lists – impossible, maybe, possible – and deciding that nothing they can do matters. For them, climate change is the Pacific Ocean.
There’s nothing you can do.
Emotion Management
When people can’t act, what you get are strategies of emotional management.
Forget billionaire funded climate denial. This is everyday self-inflicted denial. This is denial at an emotional level. We know. We wish we didn’t. Climate change is too big, too terrifying, too impossible. Emotionally, we can’t handle knowing.
So we take the easy way out.
Climate change gets put in emotional quarantine. My everyday life is over here. Happy and normal. Climate exists way over there, along with AIDs and nuclear weapons. The two shall never meet.
Instead of real action, we shall engage in substitute actions to create an illusion of control, while trying to squash the emotions we can’t handle.
A few strategies of emotional denial include:
Irony and Humour: I guess we’ll just be on tropical vacation all year round! Ha! Ha? Cool and normal?
Knowing the Facts: I understand so much. I have control... over the information. I feel an overwhelming compulsion to know more, so I feel more control... over the information.
Controlling Exposure: If I never read anything ever again, then it’s like it doesn’t exist. Right?
Shifting Attention: Hey, that kid’s movie looks pretty cool. Is that a talking butterfly?
Finding Anchors: If we return to our traditional family values the world will be less chaotic, right? Just give me one thing I can hold on to!
Rationalizing: I’m sure someone else will do something, and I’m too small to matter anyway, and it’s not a big deal, and maybe doesn’t exist, and we can adapt, and really it’s the President/Koch brother’s/God’s fault not mine, plus the Chinese/Americans/Russians are way worse than us, and ultimately everyone needs to change so I’m just waiting for everyone.
Apathy & Cynicism: What’s the point? If I can’t do anything then why even think about this. It’s all bullshit anyway. We’re all going to die anyway. Who cares? Do I look like I care? Huh? Huh? Punk!
Extreme Stress and Your Coming Mental Breakdown
People avoid climate change because the subject is stressful. We can see this stress as existing on a spectrum.
At the mild end people feel uncomfortable. They engage in some emotional management. At the extreme end people become traumatized. They collapse into serious ill health.
Here’s the thing.
Both the mild and the extreme end of the spectrum involves avoidance and denial. The extreme end is also fundamentally a problem of feeling powerless.
Some Side Notes and Nuance:
The word “trauma” can get used fairly loosely. When I use the word “trauma” I am talking about the extreme case.
As a writer you may wish to portray serious trauma. Think of the character Frank May (and the Indian heat wave) in Ministry for the Future. That is obvious PTSD style trauma. Most people are not traumatized (in a clinical sense) by climate change in this way. However, many people are clearly feeling stressed and powerless. The more extreme that stress gets the more it will resemble clear-cut cases of trauma. If that stress gets bad enough “trauma” does seem the appropriate term.
Also note stress is a response from the person, not a feature of the events themselves. The individual’s ability to cope is what decides if something is stressful (hence why child abuse is so damaging). Most people are not experiencing disaster events. Those that do are not always traumatized. Extreme stress comes in many forms. Concepts like Secondary Trauma are indirect, yet highly stressful.
Climate change is one aspect of people’s lives. We are living in a time when people have many reasons to feel overwhelmed and powerless. Mild to moderate mental illness is also very common. When these people encounter climate change, they are already bringing that baggage with them. The core of their suffering may exist elsewhere, yet be expressed by engaging with an issue like climate change.
As a climate writer you will be choosing to expose yourself to distressing information. You need to be aware of the effect that has on you. Likewise, you need to be aware of the effect sharing this information has on your reader. Most people are encountering climate related stress indirectly via the media – that’s you. Look after yourself and them.
Under the PAIN model, if people experience extreme terror they will spring into action. Under the climate-is-traumatizing model, if people experience extreme terror they will have a mental breakdown.
That breakdown will involve avoidance and denial, precisely because that problem-focused coping is unavailable (largely thanks to structural forces). Therefore only emotional management can be done. In trauma, emotional management involves having your mind fracture. Having your mind fracture will plunge you into anxiety, depression, and addictions.
The traumatic knowledge becomes literally unknowable. Acknowledging the truth is too overwhelming. It requires impossible actions. It cannot be known without destroying the very basis of your life. To survive at all, that truth must be suppressed.
This inner conflict can only be resolved by:
Rediscovering a sense of power, so we move to problem-solving.
Learning the emotional skills to confront that pain, so we can know the full truth.
Constructing a coherent narrative about what has happened, why, and what we can do (something to keep in mind as a storyteller).
Learning to act in new life-affirming ways consistent with the full truth.
Until that happens we’re stuck in the realms of mental illness. We can see this with eco-anxiety, depressed doomers, and anti-natalists who’ve decided all sentient life was a just a bad idea. They have collapsed.
How does that collapse happen?
Climate change is a threat. Threats evoke the threat response system. When you feel powerless these threat responses don’t just go away, they get derailed – they become mental illnesses.
Vigilance: scanning for danger, when blocked becomes anxiety.
Cry for Help: reaching out to others, when blocked becomes dependence or paranoia.
Freeze: stopping and hiding, when blocked becomes a depressive shutdown.
Flight: running away, when blocked becomes avoidance and addictions.
Fight: taking charge, when blocked becomes compulsions and outbursts of rage.
Submission: appeasing the threat, when blocked becomes a depressive collapse.
Recovery: isolation for rest, when blocked becomes depression and social avoidance.
The intended action can never go to completion. Compare this with hunger satisfied by a good meal – the hunger dissipates. Here the threat response can never resolve, instead it remains stuck, festering like gangrene.
On top of these distorted threat responses comes a restriction of awareness. Knowing is too painful, therefore awareness gets shut down.
Lack of Realization:
The knowing of the pain is suppressed (i.e. we don’t “realize” it’s true). In the most extreme case that knowing can be held in fragmented parts of self, locked away behind numbing and amnesia.
Lack of “Personification”:
The ability to experience your life as your own is suppressed. (i.e. We cease to be a person capable of saying, “This is my life. I did that. This is happening to me.”)
Lack of “Presentification”:
The ability to distinguish past, present, and future is impaired. (i.e. This is happening now, because of what happened then, therefore I will need to take that action next.) Think Slaughterhouse-5, and being unstuck in time.
Distorted Sense of Realness:
How real does something feel? This can be too high or too low. The past or future might feel like it’s happening now. Something happening now might feel like it’s just a movie.
Narrowing of Awareness:
All sensation and thought gets numbed out. Nothing makes it in. Therefore nothing can stir up that pain and knowing.
If traumatic events keep happening then the stress starts to erode that person’s entire sense of self. Powerlessness and blame can become internalized as self-hatred. Their ability to make decisions crashes. Emotions can no longer be controlled. Relationships can’t be handled. In various ways their life falls to pieces.
So, yeah...
That all gets rather grim.
Again, actual trauma is the extreme case. Not everyone is experiencing actual trauma for climate change.
That said, many people are clearly experiencing aspects of this. Climate change might not be the main factor for them, but clearly the issue has become part of their mix.
The worst may be yet to come.
We are now entering a period of history were climate damages are becoming serious. The more pain and powerlessness climate change inflicts, the more people will drift from that milder emotional management into these harsher realms of actual trauma. Throw in the other stressors from our moment in history – the insecurity, the instability, the sense of betrayal many feel – and you have one hell of a toxic psychological brew.
Projections & Fantasies
This is an issue we’ll likely keep coming back to again. At an individual level, consider how people’s mood influences their beliefs.
Previously we looked at how climate change is a hyper-object, and therefore you can kind of just make up anything you like. People routinely project their internal feelings onto climate change. It’s fairly obvious when this is happening. Feelings become realities.
Do you feel upbeat? Is climate change even real? Who knows! We’ll use space mirrors or something. It’ll be fine.
Are you having a stress-induced mental breakdown? This is the apocalypse! Abandon your hopium you fools! The End is Nigh!
Everyone does this.
CONCLUSION
If you are a petro-billionaire’s spin-doctor, then you want to block action any way you can. Science denial works. So does emotional denial. Therefore people’s inner-worlds have become a political battlefield. Fighting fatalism and despair is fighting for the future.
As awareness of climate catastrophe grows the emotional burden is also growing. The urgency. The sense of threat. The stress. The psychological demands this places on people are large. The only way out of mental collapse is empowerment - large numbers of people engaged in problem-focused coping. That means vision. That means finding strength. That means having options that I can actually do that actually work. That’s a hard battle. People need help with that.
And that’s where you come in.
Sally unlocks the front door with the spare key. What a day. She’s exhausted. Her boss was on her all day, then that jerk on the street corner too. She dumps her shopping on the kitchen table. That was all she could afford. The leaflet is still in her pocket. NO MONEY ON A DEAD PLANET! Sally laughs. Like I have money now?
After reheating some leftovers for dinner (she has no energy to cook), Sally collapses on the couch. By instinct she starts doom-scrolling. Another wildfire. Protestors gluing themselves to a bridge. A boat of refugees drowned. The leaflet sits abandoned, accusing her from the floor - as if the news is her fault. This is all too much.
Sally sets aside the news. Instead she pulls up an audiobook that her friend recommended. She settles down into the cushions, willing herself free from this world. Her finger presses play.
You begin to speak...
WRITING PROMPTS
Take a character you’ve already created. Have them “explain” why climate change exists, in psychological terms (e.g. PAIN). How much does this “explanation” actually reveal who they are.
Have a character walk through the steps from ignorance to action. Do they get stuck? Where? Why? Re-write the scene with them getting stuck or unstuck at different places.
Write a scene where a character confronts horrible climate news (e.g. a disaster). Have them engage in emotion-focused coping. Re-write the scene and have them engage in problem-focused coping. What needs to be different for this switch to occur?
Take two characters and write out their “Impossible”, “Maybe”, and “Possible” lists. How do their lists compare? Have them debate each other over their respective lists.
Take your scene where a character engages in emotion-focused coping. Re-write the scene a few times. Each time use a different strategy of emotional coping (e.g. avoidance, rationalizing, joking).
Take your emotionally-coping character. Plunge them into the abyss of extreme stress and mental breakdown. Why is their life getting so bad? How might they get out?
Take a few different moods (e.g. sad, happy, angry). Write a scene where a character projects this mood onto the realities of climate change. Re-write the scene with a different mood, or bring in a character with a conflicting mood.
Next time, we’ll follow up the depression with the happier subject of behaviour change. Yay!
(although I may take a diversion first, because life is a bit chaotic at the moment)
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