The context behind this article is the climate crisis, the dangers of climate tipping points and the breaching of planetary boundaries, which put our civilisation at grave risk. Since any reader who has read past that sentence is quite likely to accept the existence of such risks and not blithely try to debate the science, it would be a good point here to highlight how we humans at least in the western world still have great subconscious faith in the society and culture that we see around us every day. The latest discoveries in evolutionary psychology and modern neuroscience explain a lot about the predicament humanity finds itself in.
Before analysing it too deeply, our economy seems so resilient, so robust and so unlikely to collapse. We have faith in it and choose everyday how to earn money, spend money and live our lives. Then comes the cognitive dissonance with the rational recognition that actually, the forecasts are very bad and we need to change our approach fast in ways that most of us really don’t want to. So we are stuck on this runaway train, driven by our subconscious beliefs that were instilled by the current cultural narrative.
However we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves. We are in good company. Sir David Attenborough, the UK’s harbinger of Life on Earth’s doom, Mr Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General who warns of Global Boiling, Prof. Johan Rockström, the Dr Doom of climatology, and Prof. Steve Keen, the Dr Doom of economics are all stuck with the same cognitive dissonance.
Belief Systems
Regardless of religion, our personal belief systems are complex but above all, here in the west, we believe in our society so much that we keep doing what we know we shouldn’t. For 60 millennia, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Nature moulded us for survival in the wild. We moved out from the savannas of Africa, conquered the world and become an intensely linguistic, strategic, imaginative, social species with a gift for story-telling.
This story-telling wasn’t just for camp fire entertainment, it helped us come to terms with being intelligent beings in an incomprehensible world. It became a key cultural tool that binds our social groups. We have the Bible stories, the Dreamtime myths of aboriginal Australians, the nationalist myths of modern states and many others. We create stories in our culture, embed them in our dominating emotional brains, and they trump most rational considerations in our decision-making.
While we as individuals are able to sit down, read, absorb and judge the climate crisis, to imagine strategies to deal with it and wonderful futures beyond, we are at a loss when it comes to translating these thoughts into the social change that will make it happen. The first stories we believe won’t allow it. The rules of the mind dictate what is happening here.
We all know how this works. We reach a logical conclusion, about the climate crisis for instance, but our resolve to do what is necessary crumbles when it comes to the decisive step if it runs contrary to our culture, our economic narrative, our “social contract” or perceived social mores – simply put, what family, friends and everyone else is doing.
The 20% of our thinking mind which is so remarkable (the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex) is unfortunately weak and slow in comparison with the 80% that keeps us alive. Much of this 80% of strong, fast, survival-honed thinking is in many ways seriously inappropriate in the modern world. As the entomologist Karl von Frisch said when talking about societies: “The ant is a collectively intelligent and individually stupid animal; man is the opposite.”
In the last 10,000 years, we delivered the agricultural, the industrial and then the digital revolution, plunging ourselves into a brave new world without giving ourselves the chance to adapt psychologically or culturally to the fact that we are now able to utterly destroy ourselves and our civilisation. We urgently need to create a story for surviving this new era, and it must be one which everyone wants to listen to.
The new story – a new cultural and economic narrative – needs to revolve around how society can get out of this crisis, to replace the stories that aren’t working, that don’t help us escape our situation. We can deliberately create these stories, in fact we do all the time: the populist narratives of the recent conservative UK government, Doomerism, Stubborn Optimism, to name a few nascent stories that jostle for dominance and widespread belief.
The Economic Narrative for the Climate Crisis
The stories that are important in the climate crisis are the ones that describe how our society, politics and economy function. It really doesn’t matter what our creation myths are, or our philosophies, or our histories. What is important is what influences the way we live our everyday lives and do our everyday business, because this all adds up to the global impact we have on the physical world. These are the economic stories we believe in, and we believe in them even if we have no clue about economics or think we believe the opposite. They are our society’s cultural and economic myths, stories that colour our everyday decisions, whether we are aware of it or not.
Even when we disagree politically with the overarching narrative, it still defines how we think and reach decisions, limiting how far from norm we are prepared to go, reining in many options as radical or counter-cultural if the idea lies too far from the “middle ground” as defined by the narrative. This is the “Overton Window”.
Looking back over the last 100 years reveals the dominant economic stories that have been culturally accepted, and show how we arrived where we are today. Psychology and culture demand that there is only one dominant story in the public mind at one time. These stories enjoy or enjoyed full public acceptance in their prime. Their followers enjoy media confirmation, academic consensus and a democratic majority.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
Here is a brief recap of the last hundred years in economics.
The disorder of the Great Crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression and the demise of the Roaring Twenties, ushered in a whole new story in the public mind. In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes told his story of how governments should play an active role in their countries’ economies, instead of just letting the free market reign. The story gained full-blown adoption and served well in WW2 and the post-war construction period.
After 50 years, Keynesian economics hit problems in the 1970s with the Oil Crisis as the post-war boom faded, and inflation and unemployment increased. The disorder created fertile ground for economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism, which criticised the collectivising tendency of the powerful state and how it crushed freedom, individualism and opportunity. So government was rolled back, free enterprise unleashed and the neoliberal story became dominant. Since 1979, profit has been the arbiter of all logic, price the only indicator of value, and markets the only diviner of price. Individualism and competition ruled. It has been adopted now in the UK across the political spectrum. If it started off as a right-wing idea, it is now accepted by the mainstream left.
Then came the financial crisis and great recession of 2007 / 2008 resulting from neoliberal deregulation. We have obscene levels of waste, extreme levels of consumerism, the degradation of nature wherever people set foot, the loss of prime farmland soils, forests, fish stocks, clean air and water, and the arrival of the climate and biodiversity crisis. Our current narrative offers no solutions to the issues. The fossil fuel industry plans more growth, the carbon markets are not fit for purpose, new technology is too little, too late and governments and citizens see no clear routes to halting the crisis. Science has advanced to the point where the damage and the dangers can be quantified, but as yet, neoliberalism is still in full force. No new story comes close to threatening it.
If we want to come to grips with the destruction of our “Goldilocks” climate and the natural world, we have to tell a new story about the economy, and accelerate its adoption. A new story can change everything, if it appeals to a wide range of people across the political spectrum, if it appeals to people’s needs and desires. It should be simple and grounded in reality.
Neoliberalism is not forever
One of the reasons why neoliberalism is such a resilient story is that its biggest beneficiaries and advocates only have one measure of progress: money. Neoliberal advocates have no need to argue amongst each other on this because individual property, ownership and wealth is all that is at stake and on that they are all agreed.
Meanwhile, the majority who want something more come from many different backgrounds and have many different wants and needs. There is little apparent common ground and the concept of a common enemy is obscured behind the neoliberal narrative. A new story must inspire the majority to think outside of their silos, see common ground and face up to the common enemy together.
One of the big sub-plots of the old story of neoliberalism is the Tragedy of the Commons. In the new story, the commons are not a tragedy. Small and well-delineated commons, e.g. resources like land, energy or fresh water, can be owned by the local community, and larger global commons can be managed by transparent and fair economic mechanisms, such as the carbon accounts mechanism that EcoCore advocates for.
The most effective economic and legal mechanisms operate at a deep level in the system at a high level of control. Robust mechanisms for full ecological footprint management in business will work far better than vulnerable regulations and voluntary involvement.
To make this a convincing new story, it should also tell how circular economies and a realistic post-crash economic approach can demystify how our economy works. It should tell of the use of better-defined, clearer moral values rather than money as the sole arbiter of value. It should describe the importance of humanity, altruism and co-operation across society rather than the belief that markets and competition are the sole mechanism of interaction. It must also incorporate politics, and show how we can move from mainly representative politics to participatory politics – something that is really not encouraged by the old neoliberal narrative.
Social media algorithms to generate advertising revenue unfairly boost the worst information, allow bad actors play to our base instincts to promote themselves and undermine our values. Such business models must be thrown out with the old neoliberal narrative. The challenge will be to exploit such platforms to promote the new story without allowing it to unravel.
A New Economic Story
A broad majority has to like the new story or it won’t succeed, especially in the time available to dodge the major planetary risks that our treatment of the climate has created. There are other stories out there already, and their adherents must be persuaded about the new story just as much as the current neoliberal believers.
The world could swing back from neoliberalism to Keynesianism, but the world has been there, done that and found it wanting. There is a substantial proportion of the population with living memory of that.
There could be a full-blown revolution where capitalism with all of its excesses is banned. Such a story only makes sense to a small minority though, and can we move fast enough to create a whole new solution from the ground up that is good enough to meet all of our challenges? As Noam Chomsky emphasises, we don’t have time*. We need to end neoliberalism, but capitalism offers a lot that is useful.
We are already creating new economic mechanisms that allow the “externalities” of neoliberal thinking to be internalised. The Tragedy of the Commons is from the old story, and the structures of modern capitalism can be adapted to remove built-in unsustainable and undesirable effects. Such new economic mechanisms work not just with respect to financial value, but also with respect to equitability, community and environment. We can start with CO2 pollution and then expand to deal with more challenges, like rare earth metals, fresh water, or forests.
We have to put the ideas out there where people will hear them, where they will coalesce to form the new story. Those on the alert for something new will find it and the cognitive dissonance that the old narrative creates will compel others to shift across. Despite that, there is no underestimating the neoliberal story and the struggle that we have to overcome the enemy within: our neoliberal compatriots who insist on keeping the story the same, because they think they have more to lose and have no concerns about or no perception of the destruction it is causing to 8 billion ordinary people’s capacity to thrive.
In that light, EcoCore is looking to accelerate its awareness raising program through fundraising and collaborations. If you can help us address the challenge, please get in touch at fundraising@ecocore.org
* Prof Noam Chomsky, 2020. Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin Interviewed by David Roberts about their new book, “Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal”
