Collapse 101: Climate Denial and the Trauma Response

Our brain has a tremendous affinity for stability.  It desperately wants to believe in an unchanging world, even as the world changes.  In fact, our brain is so obsessed with stability that it constantly convinces itself that the world is barely in flux.  This make-believe stability appears to be fundamental to our feeling of safety, allowing us to “keep calm and carry on”, as they say. 

But even when things are changing fast, we are able to normalise our reality, and make it fit into the same default belief: that even though there is some change, not much has fundamentally shifted.  This bizarre yet universal thinking pattern is a self-protective mechanism which appears to be so robust, it can override our critical thinking and processing, as evidenced by our historical response to disasters: we always wake up too late, even when there has been ample time to prepare.

In fact, most of us will obstinately resist all evidence of change presented to us.  Change is terrifying.  Our fear of the unknown is so overpowering that the search for new and exciting ways to deny reality is something we do easily, and naturally.  Comforting truths are always easy to accept, but uncomfortable ones are denied outright.  Our logic is simply disabled in the face of incomprehensible, inconvenient truths, and this is why denial can instantly corrupt even the sharpest of minds.   

Denial can come with significant benefits.  Finding reassuring lies to cling to in the midst of a collapsing world is like a life raft, helping some people maintain morale in the short term despite the long-term catastrophic repercussions of ignoring a crisis.  Denial of change has been a long-time practice of the ruling classes, who have always seen change as a threat to their economic and political gains.  Given that it is the ruling classes who control the media, undoubtedly they hold all the cards when it comes to manipulation. Crises are never given their true dimension. They will always be either completely denied, or exaggerated so they can be weaponised. Unmolested truth always has a much more difficult time to reach the surface, especially when it is inconvenient.

For many people, denial of the truth is the only way to draw courage.  Ignorance of the truth keeps the fear paralysis at bay.  We have proved time and time again that we would much rather live in complete denial when faced with a difficult situation, than take the difficult decisions which come with accepting truth.  This irrational and risky behaviour has, surprisingly, done wonders for humanity throughout our history, allowing us to ignore danger and take massive, heroic risks we would otherwise never have taken.  Most of these risks paid off for reasons I explain later, and that’s why we are still here.  But they were undeniably stupid risks in the first place.

What is most interesting about denial is that the more alarming the evidence of change becomes, the more likely we are to reject this evidence.  This is particularly true for catastrophic and apocalyptic scenarios, especially ones for which there appears to be no credible survival plan. In the face of a “game over” scenario where we have to e.g. accept civilisational collapse, truth simply does not compute in our brain.  If additionally, there is no previous record of the exact same event having happened in the past, we might as well laugh it off.

Each time we deny uncomfortable truths, it is as if our brain is protecting itself from incoming trauma.  Our body simply does not want to go down the road of extremely painful sensations of shock, panic, helplessness, despair, loss, grief, and dozens of other uncomfortable feelings which are by themselves able to cause trauma, whether a disaster is striking or not.  This bizarre pre-trauma response to the truth is a case for a great proportion of us, even those who publicly claim to “believe” in the climate crisis. There are many “closet deniers” out there who don’t know it themselves that they are.  Once you talk to people more privately and intimately, it becomes apparent. You begin to hear their inner voice as it tries to edit reality, at least to some degree, so that it becomes ever slightly more palatable: “then again Earth’s climate has always changed, so I don’t know, this whole thing could be overblown…” or “I believe in climate change, I just don’t think it will be all that bad really”.   If we cannot handle the truth, we create new, adulterated versions of it.

George is an author, researcher, molecular biologist and food scientist.

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