Hopium Addiction: A 12-Step Program

The reviews are in.  Smoking hopium is bad for your health.  One of the biggest illusions of the environmental movement today is nurturing next-year miracles: stubbornly hoping that somewhere, sometime, there are specific cognitive triggers that will awaken this civilisation to climate and ecological devastation.  There is an almost dogmatic conviction among some environmentalists that, once climate impacts become life-threatening (as if they haven’t already), surely a crucial cognitive threshold will be reached which will act much like a magic switch, tipping consumatronic zombies into concerned citizens almost overnight.  Some even believe that “humanity will come together”, driven by a sudden irresistible urge to save the world.  I’m sorry to have to destroy that hopeful dream, but it is just a dream. 

Activism must work realistically, not idealistically.  Most of all, it cannot be delusional. I won’t say names, but there are big-name environmental activists in the frontlines at the moment who have not learned from history.  They believe that there is an awakening tipping point in people, a hidden compassion for humanity and the planet which is waiting to become unlocked, triggered into action.  According to them, people will discover a new-found care for their children and the ecology of this planet suddenly, once “the shit really hits the fan”.  Well, this has failed to materialise even though we are covered in shit from head to toe already. 

Yet these big personalities continue talking about hope.  They are either this much gullible or play the “hope” card just so they can stay relevant within a deluded civilisation hungry for “positive” conversations that suggest ways by which the economy can continue to grow, “progress”, build and destroy.  By keeping themselves in the mainstream hopium conversation, these “environmentalists” cleverly avoid becoming discarded altogether by the media as “doomers”.  You know who you are. 

This civilisation sees no point in talking to doomers.  Why give the stage to someone who will just tell you the bitter truth?

This obsession with hope is a leftover from the corporatocracy’s work environments, where employees have to always be “positive” and smile to their clients, or they will be shown the door.  The “sustainability industry” is dominated by the most generic imagery of a healthy, greening Earth used for corporate logos and marketing communications, just as the planet chokes on the fumes of Business As Usual.  This disgusting hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance and toxic positivity of the so-called sustainability business world has unfortunately infiltrated environmental movements. 

What the “hopeful” environmentalists are in fact experiencing is a cognitive short circuit of their own: in the same way that climate denialists do not want to admit that the Earth is burning, many environmentalists do not want to admit that they cannot convert all others into action.  The attachment to false hope is a psychological self-care response which lacks the pragmatism any activist movement needs in order to move forward.  Some activists have made it their life’s work to bang on a door that will never open – a familiar mistake.

I do know where these passionate environmentalists are coming from, and I feel their intense pain, dedication, and forced hope.  But I do need to bring them down to Earth.  Not because I’d love to see the end of the world and I want them to lay down their arms and sit back. Quite the contrary.  It is because we need to have this conversation so that we can up our game.  We have reached almost 100% failure in the environmental movement, and it is important to take stock of where we go from here, if this fight has any “hope” of being a realistic one. 

As an environmentalist myself I spent a considerable amount of time over the years absolutely frustrated with society, wondering what the magical cognitive threshold for “activism” may be, until it became a never-ending holy grail for my writing.  I dissected the issue of climate denial from multiple angles:  evolutionary biology, cognitive anthropology, the psychology of the trauma response, political ecology, capitalist economics, the list goes on.  I even came up with novel terms to describe our world and the cognitive limitations of the human mind, in order to make my peace with all the inaction I saw around me.  Sometimes I was so frustrated with humanity that I even became hateful of myself and others, for the extinction crimes and ecological fraud that humans have perpetrated.

But in the end, I reached a point of compassion for the human condition and reached my own cognitive compromise: to accept the things that I cannot change about humans.  And while one might expect that this would mean activism would be over for me, in fact this was when it all became more real, more exciting, more ruthlessly ferocious, more meaningful than ever.  Because I was finally living in the real world, which goes like this:

Most people out there simply don’t give a shit. They are not me, and they are not you. (Re-read this 3 times until it sinks in)

As simple as this truth sounds, it is a truth which terrifies environmentalists, as they falsely think it will destroy the holy grail of awakening they are after.  But it is also a truth which they really struggle to connect with cognitively, exactly because they themselves care immensely about the fate of the planet.  They cannot imagine that other humans could actually be so senseless and self-destructive.  Nevertheless, it is important to be grounded in realism.

When people ask me what type of books I write, I don’t say “environmentalism”, as I believe this is too narrow. Because the problems of this world are not about what we have done to it, but about something much bigger and closer to home: how our brain works.  My answer to the original question is “I write books about human self-destruction”.  Oh god, here’s another one of those “doomer” types. 

But us doomers have actually cracked the code of sincere, introspective environmentalism, long before others.  We are still here, we haven’t killed ourselves as everyone expected, and we always hit it right where it hurts:  we expose the psychopaths, the narcissists, and the ignoramuses of this world, whoever they may be: rich or poor, male, female or seven-fingered, rather than simplistically look for villains and narratives which will make our crusade appear easier.  The truth is we are all villains.  Human nature is self-destructive, and unless we understand our own nature we will be looking for good guys and bad guys, black sheep to blame, and holy grails to unearth.  There are thousands of solutions to the climate crisis.  The problem is not the solutions but our self-destructive human nature which prevents us from implementing them.  This is the holy grail we need to crack, our understanding of the nature of our consciousness. And this has been the mission which I set for myself as an author years ago. 

This type of broad thinking about human consciousness may actually be the smart activism we need today.  Sometimes you need to realise that you will never change the way people think, but you can still change the way that they behave.  You may not be able to make them believe in a revolution, but you may still be able to recruit them into it.  Successful revolutions usually involve people from all walks of life, each of them revolting for entirely different reasons which are completely personal.  It is the leaders who own the broad strategy and ideology of the revolution, the higher purpose.  If these leaders are charismatic enough, they will be able to unite and recruit all these different people with multiple different personal stakes and agendas under their higher purpose of saving the planet.  That’s how it’s done, and this is what we must learn from the fascists, who do this trick with their eyes closed.  Unless we play their game, they will always have one up on us. We need to start getting smart.

There are people who do care, and chances are that if you’re reading this you are one of them.  Find the people in your circle who are like you, but don’t create your own safe little echo chamber.  Remember that others are very different from you, with different sensitivities and areas of focus.  Be collaborative.  Be pragmatic. Get to know your target audience.  It doesn’t make you any less genuine to have a strategy.  And begin to accept doomers into your life, as they are the most pragmatic yet passionate at the same time, and they are people of unbelievable courage: they have reconciled their rational and emotional world, survived the processing of those feelings, survived the stigma and isolation received from the world, and yet here they are still: able to draw a line in the sand and continue their activism despite knowing what they know, before anyone else did.  A doomer is not someone who wants to see the end of the world.  It is someone who tells you that the end is closer than you think, and shit needs to get done, now.  And there is a big difference between the two.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons

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