Climate Inside: Outside

With the university school year coming to a close, I am becoming free to think about longer term projects instead of just the day to day reactions to the news.  Eventually this summer I plan on trying three.  One is fairly simple: to more consciously savor the presidency of Barack Obama (which perhaps I am about to explain a little more in another post.)  Second is simple to describe but will take some long time to accomplish: I've recently finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis in Washington trilogy for the third time, and I am more convinced than ever of its importance.  So I am going to go through it again, chapter by chapter, on this blog.

Third is a project I've been thinking about for so long (and promising from time to time) that I worry it's gone stale, but I'm going to start it here anyway.  The overarching title is "Climate Inside" and it's about the influence of our psyches on the world outside--on how we perceive it and act on those perceptions.  It's nub concerns the Climate Crisis, and it's inspiration is the question of why we are so crazy to deny its reality, and let it threaten civilization and life on earth as we know it.

So I begin Climate Inside with a post or two about the Outside.  This one is a kind of disclaimer or caveat.  By concentrating on the climate inside, I certainly don't mean all our troubles are in our own heads.  We do have a given world that can be hostile, and we do have powerful enemies (though they also have troubles in their own heads which may be causing our troubles in the world.)  But every animal must know what in its world threatens its existence.

Of those sources of harm I want to name a few "outside" threats that do major harm by manipulating us "inside."  This is a chief weapon these days.  The enemies I focus on are huge beyond easy understanding.  The first is Big Oil, or more generally the fossil fuel megaindustries, and their related and mutally dependent huge industries.  They exercise inhuman and irrational control over our economy, government at every level, media and our lives, as well as directly on the air, water, soil and ecology we absolutely depend on for life, as civilizations and humanity as we know it. They're sucking us dry and making us pay for it.

What they can't control directly with money and influence peddling, they go after by financing disinformation and psychological warfare, from all the techniques of distortion refined from the not so long ago yet still forgotten efforts of Big Tobacco to convince people that smoking is a right, that science is divided on whether smoking is harmful, that banning smoking is tantamount to a government plot to end our freedom, etc.

  Big Oil's efforts are even bigger, and have adapted to the times (so they employ not only at least one U.S. Senator and probably a lot more, with powerful tentacles apparently still controlling the Dept. of Energy, and all the scientists they turn, but cadres of vicious saps who specialize in comments on blogs and letters to the editor that muddy the waters, derail constructive discussions and turn people off on reading about what Big Oil doesn't want you to read or care about.)

Big Insurance is another major enemy outside, that gets what it wants partly through influencing and manipulating inside.  Insurance is an amazing industry these days.  Not so long ago it at least seemed like a legitimate and even a noble business.  People paid into it, and people who needed the help their insurance promised, got that help.  But Big Insurance realized that if it could restrict its business to taking in money and sharply reduce the part of it that was giving out money, it could create the perfect business: all income.  Huge amounts of money to become even Bigger.

Big Insurance has been doing that with life insurance to some degree lately but it's big success is in health insurance.  Insuring only people when they don't need medical care is apparently their goal, and they were pretty much there until the Obama health insurance reform debate resulted in an attempt to redress the balance, if not exactly to guarantee health care.  But even this is too much for Big Insurance, and so they as well continue to use the Big Tobacco techniques, and have convinced thousands if not millions of people that putting health insurance in financial reach for almost everyone, and making sure that this insurance actually pays for medical care, is a government attack on their freedom.

Between these objective enemies and the public good is the media, and some would put it--the so-called MSM, the Beltway Media--on that enemies list.  There does seem to be some combination of unintelligent and reflexive reporting, toadying and weakness, and serving corporate self-interest that distorts, devalues and ignores what's most important about what's going on.  But among the reasons we know this is: other media reporting.

That makes the psychology of others as well as of ourselves important in understanding how we are manipulated, and otherwise how we get things wrong.  So for example our social selves--so powerful these days in these whirlwinds of information and the addicting attempt to stay in the group conversation through social media, through bits that "go viral" one day and disappear totally the next.  Or the more conventional--but no less visible--effects of being part of the group we want to be part of, of not doing anything to get tossed out or ignored.  It's not just agreeing with what everybody says, but agreeing with what they talk about and how they talk about it.

President Obama spoke on a video message circulated before his town meeting at Facebook hq, asking people to participate online.  He asked that they "take time out from friending and defriending each other" to participate.  It occurs to me that this is good advice for the Beltway media.  They might take time out from friending and defriending each other, as well as their cherished powerful sources and friends, to exercise some perspective on what might really be important to report.