The Politics of Denial

The severe weather map for today.  The red squares are tornado watch, yellow is severe thunderstorm warning, green is floods, blue high winds, orange is fire weather advisory.

Here in North America, the climate outside has become alarming of late.  Massive tornadoes tore through parts of Oklahoma on Tuesday, with tornadoes or tornado warnings in Texas, Kansas, Minnesota and once again in Joplin, Missouri.  Meteorologists warn that tornadoes are possible on Wednesday in a large area east of these states, with violent weather possible as far east as Pittsburgh and south to near Washington, D.C.

This follows days, weeks and months of extreme weather, from record-breaking snow, rain, wind, heat, flooding, drought and fires, as Bill McKibben recounts in his timely oped piece in the Washington Post, which brilliantly expresses the psychology of denial.  But it is just as important in how it links psychological denial to politics and economics.  For that's a crucial element of all this.  The individual response of denial is being systematically supported, inspired, encouraged and especially exploited, by certain corporate and political interests.

After McKibben's devastating list of weather and climate events it's psychologically necessary to deny --all predicted by climate scientists as evidence of global heating--he ends with this:

" It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies."

That pretty much says it all.  When faced with such immense danger--possibly the end of human civilization but pretty certainly major and uncomfortable changes in ordinary life--it would seem that a self-protective human psychological reaction would be denial.  But in a healthy civilization, we would get over that, realizing how important it is to confront these threatening possibilities and do something about them.  Our leaders would lead us in doing this, and we would support each other in dealing with the psychological impact as well as the social needs.

But the same forces that want to ignore the Climate Crisis because acknowledging it and dealing with it might eventually cut into their extreme profits, are intent on supporting and amplifying this response of denial, to the extent of making it an ideological tenet of political faith.  That support is extensive and well-funded, from the buying of politicians and media, to the scruffy little details, like paying pittances to people to monitor climate- related threads on the Internet and quickly add a denial mantra to the comments.

There are other factors, many with a psychological impact, that links the needs of fossil fuel industries with the comfort zones of much of the American public.  But the manipulation of denial is of major consequence.

 This deliberate amplification and exploitation of denial has been added to the extreme polarization of politics. For it's not just denial that gets into the mix and supported.  It's anger, paranoia, xenophobia, prejudices of all kind--all supported in a seemingly clean and companionable way, but all dependent on some ugly energy from the unconscious.

 But though this denial can be psychological, and coexist with other compatible psychological phenomena, it is also a cynically political position.  This is dramatized especially by the GOPer politicians who once acknowledged the reality of the Climate Crisis and the need for action, and who supported cap-and-trade legislation (itself a GOPer idea.)  But suddenly now Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Tim Palenta, etc. have all adopted denial of it all.  That seems a lot more like political than psychological denial.  Yet it feeds the genuine denial defense mechanism of others.

This exploitation has effectively polluted public discourse, to the extent that full-throated support for confronting the Climate Crisis from anyone is rare.  Even a decade ago, it might have been reasonable to suggest that it might take time for the science to be extensive enough to be really convincing, and that it might take time for people to get used to the idea, and to finally admit to themselves that things had to be done.  And for awhile, it seemed we might be approaching that time.  But the exploitation of denial went into high gear, and here we are.  Decades after we should have begun confronting this, we won't even admit the need to do so.

So it is important for people to understand the psychology of denial and the impact of the climate inside on their thinking and behavior.  But it is also important for people to understand how powerful interests are manipulating them, turning a natural inclination into a fierce self-destructive fixed idea, and involving them in the massively destructive politics of denial.