Denialists

from the fingers of pal Ouroboros

The Psychology of Denial:

our failure to act against climate change

Link

quote:

In the case of climate change, then, we can intellectually accept the evidence of climate change, but we find it extremely hard to accept our responsibility for a crime of such enormity. Indeed, the most powerful evidence of our denial is the failure to even recognise that there is a moral dimension with identifiable perpetrators and victims. The language of 'climate change', 'global warming', 'human impacts', and 'adaptation' are themselves a form of denial familiar from other forms of human rights abuse; they are scientific euphemisms that suggest that climate change originates in immutable natural forces rather than in a direct causal relationship with moral implications for the perpetrator.

Secondly, we diffuse our responsibility. Cohen writes at length of the 'passive bystander effect' whereby violent crimes can be committed in a crowded street without anyone intervening. Individuals wait for someone else to act and subsume their personal responsibility in the collective responsibility of the group. One notable feature of the bystander effect is that the larger the number of actors the lower the likelihood that any individual person feels capable of taking unilateral action. In times of war and repression, entire communities can become incapacitated. In the case of climate change we are both bystanders and perpetrators, an internal conflict that can only intensify our denial.

Psychoanalytic theory contains valuable pointers to the ways that people may try to resolve these internal conflicts; angrily denying the problem outright (psychotic denial), seeking scapegoats (acting out), indulging in deliberately wasteful behaviour (reaction formation), projecting their anxiety onto some unrelated but containable problem (displacement), or trying to shut out all information (suppression). As the impacts of climate change intensify we can therefore anticipate that people will willingly collude in creating collective mechanisms of denial along these lines.

my reaction:

Of course...then add
- the typical 12 cups of science illiteracy
- 2lbs obstinate dumb (unsifted)
- half a pack of instant Old Time Religion
- 6 tbsp of well-aged manifest destiny
- 260 lb of Limbaugh cheese
- mix thoroughly while pouring in 23 bottles of Beck

Then bake in a FOX oven at high temp for 18 months.
Top with generous amounts of Human Exceptionalism Icing.

Serves up to 30% of the population.

Its an old recipe.