Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 03/08/2009 8:39:15 AM PDT by Leisler
A few months ago, for a joke, I set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder’. It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 42 members. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics.
The idea that ‘climate change denial’ is a psychological disorder – the product of a spiteful, wilful or simply in-built neural inability to face up to the catastrophe of global warming – is becoming more and more popular amongst green-leaning activists and academics. And nothing better sums up the elitism and authoritarianism of the environmentalist lobby than its psychologisation of dissent. The labelling of any criticism of the politics of global warming, first as ‘denial’, and now as evidence of mass psychological instability, is an attempt to write off all critics and sceptics as deranged, and to lay the ground for inevitable authoritarian solutions to the problem of climate change. Historically, only the most illiberal and misanthropic regimes have treated disagreement and debate as signs of mental ill-health.
This weekend, the University of West England is hosting a major conference on climate change denial. Strikingly, it’s being organised by the university’s Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. It will be a gathering of those from the top of society – ‘psychotherapists, social researchers, climate change activists, eco-psychologists’ – who will analyse those at the bottom of society, as if we were so many flitting, irrational amoeba under an eco-microscope. The organisers say the conference will explore how ‘denial’ is a product of both ‘addiction and consumption’ and is the ‘consequence of living in a perverse culture which encourages collusion, complacency and irresponsibility’ (1). It is a testament to the dumbed-down, debate-phobic nature of the modern academy that a conference is being held not to explore ideas – to interrogate, analyse and fight over them – but to tag them as perverse.
Leading green writers have welcomed the West England get-together to study the denying masses. One eco-columnist says the conference might generate ideas for dealing with those who are ‘pathologically’ opposed to the environmental movement (pathology, according to my OED, is the study of ‘morbid or abnormal mental or moral conditions’) (2). Environmentalists recognise the inherent elitism of saying that, while they brave few can see things clearly, the rest of us are somehow disordered (greens are the ‘watchful ones amongst the slaves’, according to one environmentalist writer); yet they seem unashamed. The eco-columnist says this weekend’s conference will be useful because where ‘mainstream politics now largely “gets” environmentalism’, there is still a sceptical mass, ‘a baying and growing crowd, largely consisting of people resistant to the prospect of ever having to alter their lifestyles’. Apparently this crowd ‘gathers to hurl invective’ at environmentalist ideas, such as recycling and low-energy lightbulbs (3).
In a sense, this vision of elite, brainy environmentalists on one side and a baying, insult-hurling crowd on the other speaks, however accidentally and however crudely, to an underlying truth: environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes keen to control people’s behaviour and curb our excessive lifestyles, and it rubs many ‘ordinary people’ up the wrong way. Of course much of the public goes along with the environmentalist ethos, bowing to the central idea that mankind is destructive and observing such rituals as sorting their rubbish, but they do so half-heartedly, recognising that, fundamentally, greens’ anti-consumerist, anti-reproduction, anti-travel arguments run counter to their own personal aspirations. Yet rather than recognise this frequently hidden divide between the green elite and the ‘baying crowd’ as one built on differences of opinion, on clashing aspirations, even on rational assessments by sections of the public that recycling is a waste of time, increasingly environmentalists pathologise it, turning it into evidence of their wisdom in contrast to the public’s mental instability.
University departments, serious authors, think-tanks and radical activists are embracing the ‘psychological disorder’ view of climate change scepticism. At Columbia University in New York, the Global Roundtable on Public Attitudes to Climate Change studies the ‘completely baffling’ response of the public to the threat of climate change, exploring why the public has been ‘so slow to act’ despite the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. Apparently, our slack response is partly a result of our brain’s inability to assess ‘pallid statistical information’ in the face of fear (4). The Ecologist magazine also talks about the ‘psychology of climate change denial’ and says the majority of people (excluding those ‘handfuls of people who have already decided to stop being passive bystanders’: the green elite again) have responded to warnings of global warming by sinking into ‘self-deception and mass denial’ (5). An online magazine called Climate Change Denial is dedicated to analysing the public’s ‘weird and disturbed’ response to climate change (6).
John Naish, the celebrated author of the anti-consumerism treatise Enough!, says our consumerist behaviour, with its promise of ‘ecological disaster’, ultimately springs from the fact that we’re all using the ‘wrong brain’. Our culture, all those flashy ads and temptations to buy, buy, buy and be fat and happy, is aimed at stimulating our ‘primordial instinct’, our ‘reptilian brain, which is responsible for arousal, basic life functions and sex’, says Naish. It neglects and makes lazy our ‘neocortex, the intelligent brain we evolved in the Pleicestocene era’. In short, we’re behaving like animals rather than intelligent beings; indeed, says Naish, our consumer culture is sending us ‘knuckle-dragging into ecological disaster’ (7). In a less hysterical and monkey-obsessed fashion, Al Gore, the king of climate change activism, says the media are warping people’s minds and actively encouraging thoughtlessness and climate change denial, giving rise to a public response to ecological disaster that is not ‘modulated by logic, reason or reflective thought’ (8).
The labelling of those who question certain scientific ideas or green ways of life as ‘deniers’, ‘addicts’ and ‘reptiles’ with a ‘baffling’ inability to understand The Science and act accordingly has a deeply censorious bent. If ‘climate change denial’ is a form of mass denial and self-deception, a fundamentally psychological disorder, then there is no need to engage in a meaningful public debate; instead people just need to be treated. Thus the Ecologist says ‘denial cannot simply be countered with information’; indeed there is apparently ‘plentiful historical evidence that increased information may even intensify denial’ (9). The respected British think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, goes so far as to insist that ‘the task of climate change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”’ (10). This is the logical conclusion to treating disagreement as ‘denial’ and dissent as a ‘disorder’: no debate, no real information, just an insidious demand to change The Culture in order to relax the wrong side of our brains or to inject us with a new commonsensical outlook.
The psychologisation of climate change denial – even the very use of that term: denial – reveals how utterly aloof and cut off are the environmental elitists from mass society. They cannot comprehend, indeed are ‘baffled’ by, our everyday behaviour, our desire to have families, our resistance to hectoring, our dream of being wealthier, better travelled, our hopes of living life to the full. For them, such behaviour is irresponsible and it runs counter to the ‘extraordinary information’ provided by scientists. They seriously expect people to make life decisions on the basis of pie charts and graphs drawn up in laboratories in Switzerland, rather than on the basis of what they and their families need and, yes, what they want. That the green lobby is so perturbed by our failure to act in accordance with scientific findings shows the extent to which, for them, The Science is a new gospel truth and religious-style guide to life, and anyone who disobeys it is a sinner, heretic or deranged individual, a moral leper of the twenty-first century.
Psychologising dissent, and refusing to recognise, much less engage with, the substance of people’s disagreements – their political objections, their rational criticisms, their desire to do things differently – is the hallmark of authoritarian regimes. In the Soviet Union, outspoken critics of the ruling party were frequently tagged as mentally disordered and faced, as one Soviet dissident described it, ‘political exile to mental institutions’ (11). There they would be treated with narcotics, tranquillisers and even electric shock therapy. In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien, the torturer in Room 101, offers to cure our hero Winston Smith of his anti-party thinking. ‘You are mentally deranged!’ he tells him. Today the word ‘Orwellian’ is massively overused, to describe everything from fingerprint library cards to supermarket loyalty cards, but treating your dissenters as deranged? That really is Orwellian, and we should declare permanent war against it.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his website here. His satire on the green movement - Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas - is published by Hodder & Stoughton in October. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)
I have 0bama Revulsion Syndrome...
Study away, but don’t get too close....I bite. Can’t help myself—it’s part of my disorder-—surely you soft-hearted liberals will understand and cut me some slack just as you do any other “victim”, right?
Must be part of my disorder that this doesn't make sense.
Everything is a disorder to them.
Look at pictures of Soviet streets. They’re clean (no Starbucks cups to toss). There are few cars but stolid public transportation. There are few cluttery billboards, very little non-official signage.
It’s the enviro’s dream.
I have it too. Let's pray that it becomes a pandemic.
I’m going in the other direction. True believers have Narcissistic personality disorder: “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.”
It is the epitome of hubris to believe that humans can change the climate. Also environmentalism as it is practiced by this group is a rich man’s sport. Many of the most vocal adherants are extremely wealthy and not affected by the added costs Carbon Taxes and strict policy will inflict on the rest of us. They lack empathy.
Do it yourself frontal lobotomy kits for $99.95.
Guaranteed or your money back, if you remember.
I believe there are a certain number among us who have a psychological and emotional need for grand causes to give their lives meaning. Many actually use the phrase: “make a difference” and a few even: “save the world”. Some have these urges in context and do good and practical work. Others are mostly emotion driven and attach themselves to the most grandiose, world saving causes they can find.
No cause satisfies the emotion driven world savers quite like the global warming scam. It’s definitely a religion for many, and is perfect for the misty eyed lefty looking for meaning in his or her life.
5.56mm
I agree with you.
However, those who believe as you said quoted above, are mistaken.
Taken to it's end, I believe this AGW folly manifested as economy killing carbon taxes will kill the economy AND the fortunes of those who think they are immune.
When the economy fully tanks, the stock market is at zero, and the dollar is worth nothing, all the material wealth they have will wither to that which they can defend directly. A bank vault full of gold in Switzerland will not help them as they are holed up in a house in NY or California.
The elite had better wake up. If they get what they want, the collapse will be total. Then they will NOT get what they want.
Hunger and disease are the great equalizers.
does part of your pathology include triggerfinger syndrome? mine does. libs need to stay far far away... :)
(feminist MIT lefty in green t-shirt. At one time MIT was known for power plants, stuff like that. Now it's back to the past stuff.)
So-called “environmentalists” would have been first in line to support Hitler’s Blud and Boden movement and helped Himmler with his “Solutions for the Eastern Territories.”
Modern Druid Priest class, living off the labor of the ‘unclean’.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.