Psychological

Roots of the
Climate Crisis
 PSYCHOANALYTIC HORIZONS

Psychoanalysis is unique in being at once a theory and a therapy, a method of critical

thinking and a form of clinical practice. Now in its second century, this fusion of
science and humanism derived from Freud has outlived all predictions of its demise.
Psychoanalytic Horizons evokes the idea of a convergence between realms and the
outer limits of a vision. Books in the series test disciplinary boundaries and will
appeal to scholars and therapists who are passionate not only about the theory of
literature, culture, media and philosophy but also, above all, about the real life of
ideas in the world.

Series Editors
Esther Rashkin, Mari Ruti and Peter L. Rudnytsky

Advisory Board
Salman Akhtar, Doris Brothers, Aleksandar Dimitrijevic, Lewis Kirshner,
Humphrey Morris, Hilary Neroni, Dany Nobus, Lois Oppenheim, Donna Orange,
Peter Redman, Laura Salisbury and Alenka Zupančič

Volumes in the Series

Mourning Freud by Madelon Sprengnether
Does the Internet Have an Unconscious?: Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture
by Clint Burnham
In the Event of Laughter: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Comedy by Alfie Bown
On Dangerous Ground: Freud’s Visual Cultures of the Unconscious
by Diane O’Donoghue
For Want of Ambiguity: Order and Chaos in Art, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience
edited by Ludovica Lumer and Lois Oppenheim
Life Itself Is an Art: The Life and Work of Erich Fromm by Rainer Funk
Born After: Reckoning with the German Past by Angelika Bammer
Critical Theory between Klein and Lacan: A Dialogue by Amy Allen and Mari Ruti
Transferences: The Aesthetics and Poetics of the Therapeutic Relationship
by Maren Scheurer
At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva
by Alice Jardine and edited by Mari Ruti
The Writing Cure by Emma Lieber
The Analyst’s Desire: Ethics in Theory and Clinical Practice by Mitchell Wilson
Our Two-Track Minds: Rehabilitating Freud on Culture by Robert A. Paul
Norman N. Holland: The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Literary Critics
by Jeffrey Berman
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism
and the Culture of Uncare
by Sally Weintrobe
 Psychological
Roots of the
Climate Crisis
Neoliberal Exceptionalism
and the Culture of Uncare

Sally Weintrobe
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in the United States of America 2021

Copyright © Sally Weintrobe, 2021

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Weintrobe, Sally, author.
Title: Psychological roots of the climate crisis : neoliberal exceptionalism and the culture
of uncare / Sally Weintrobe.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: Psychoanalytic horizons | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis
tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps
us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for
example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also in ourselves. Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving
the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological
mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset
believe that they are entitled to have the lion’s share and that they can ‘rearrange’ reality with
magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements. While this book’s
subject is grim, its tone is reflective, ironic, light and at times humorous. It is
free of jargon, and full of examples from history, culture, literature, poetry, everyday life and the
author’s experience as a psychoanalyst, and a professional life that has been dedicated to helping
people to face difficult truths”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020058116 (print) | LCCN 2020058117 (ebook) | ISBN
9781501372872 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501372865 (paperback) | ISBN
9781501372889 (epub) | ISBN 9781501372896 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Climatic changes–Psychological aspects. | Environmental policy–Psychological
aspects. | Neoliberalism. | Exceptionalism. | Empathy. | Political psychology.
Classification: LCC BF353.5.C55 W45 2021 (print) | LCC BF353.5.C55
(ebook) | DDC 155.9/15–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058116
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058117

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-7287-2

PB: 978-1-5013-7286-5
ePDF: 978-1-5013-7289-6
ePUB: 978-1-5013-7288-9

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For Lez
vi
 ‘As I looked out into the night sky across all those
infinite stars it made me realize how unimportant they are.’
Peter Cook, comedian

‘It is very simple. You can only see with the heart.’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
viii
 CONTENTS

List of Figures xii

Introduction 1

Part One Exceptionalism: The psychology explained

1 The conflicted self 9

2 The ordinary exception (contained by care) 15

3 The Exception (in charge and unbound) 19

Part Two Exceptionalism’s rise to power in the

neoliberal age
4 Neoliberal Exceptionalism 33

5 Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan 41

6 Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged 51

7 Globalizing the neoliberal way 57

8 The neoliberal rise to power 61

9 The Earth seen as a globe 65

10 Implementing neoliberal economic policy 73

x CONTENTS

Part Three What contains Exceptionalism

11 Frameworks of care 83

12 The power of love 91

Part Four The culture of uncare

13 Culture and the birth of consumerism 103

14 Neoliberalism’s culture of uncare 111

Part Five How this culture operates

15 New Speak 119

16 The World Bank using New Speak 125

17 Mass media 129

18 Promoting denial 137

19 Advertising 145

20 Political framing 153

21 Blocking tears 161

22 Regression and infantilization 169

Part Six We collude

23 On collusion 177

Part Seven Exceptionalism grows fraud bubbles

24 Case studies: Enron and fund managers 183

25 The corporation 191

 CONTENTS xi

26 Social groups 195

27 Trickledown 201

Part Eight The new caring imagination today

28 Paradigm shift 207

29 Frameworks of care for a sustainable world 215

30 Living on Planet Earth not Planet La La 223

Part Nine The climate bubble is bursting

31 The damage 231

32 Living with our feelings about the climate crisis 235

Part Ten ‘The crazy’: Exceptionalism runs amok

33 ‘The crazy’ in politics 247

34 Noah’s Arkism twenty-first-century style 251

35 We are gods 257

36 The ‘all or nothing-ness’ of having to be the

ideal 263
37 Bad leaders drive the crazy 269

38 The problem of guilt 277

39 Good leaders 285

Conclusion 293

Acknowledgements 300
References 302
Index 318
 LIST OF FIGURES

28.1 The Doughnut 211

28.2 Transgressing both sides of the Doughnut’s

boundaries 212
 Introduction

‘Aaaaarrrggghhh … it’s hard to explain.’

Frankie, aged fourteen, asked what he felt
and thought about the climate crisis.
(HICKMAN, 2019, PP. 49–50)

Frankie is right. The climate crisis is not easy to explain. One reason
is that the subject is too big to think about ‘all in one go’. Another is
that current dominant ‘Western’ culture encourages people to deny
or minimize the problem. Also, when people do show concern, it is
mostly still met by those in power with silence devoid of care.
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis aims to deepen
understanding of the climate crisis. It recognizes and legitimizes
how people are likely to be feeling. To make the subject more
digestible, the book breaks it down into parts, keeps chapters short
and wherever possible stays ‘experience near’ through drawing on
shared examples from ordinary everyday life and culture.

The argument
The book argues that Exceptionalism, a rigid psychological
mindset, is largely responsible for the climate crisis. Exceptions,
people caught up in this mindset, falsely believe they are entitled to:

●● see themselves in idealized terms;

●● have whatever they want (because they are ideal);
●● dispense with moral and practical limits through
­omnipotently ‘rearranging’ reality.
2 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Most of us, unless we are saints, have an inner exception that thinks
like this at times, but our caring part usually manages to rein it in.
Exceptionalism is when Exceptions gain power to set the political
agenda. Exceptionalism, old in human history, has triumphed globally
in the last forty years. We have lived in Exceptionalism’s Golden Age.
The book gradually builds and argues the case that, when thinking
politically and economically, neoliberals are modern-day Exceptions
in the grip of ideology that is suffused with Exceptionalism. The
word ‘neoliberal’ can be off-putting, a dry mouthful, but the book
unpacks what it means and deepens more usual political and
economic perspectives by adding in needed underlying psychology.
As Bertrand Russell said in his Nobel Literature Prize Lecture
in 1950, ‘most current discussions of politics … take insufficient
account of psychology’.1
The focus is not which group holds power, but which part of the
mind, or part of the overall group, holds power. The book seeks to
illuminate the conflicting forces that struggle for power within us
and between us. Is care or uncare in overall charge? When care no
longer has sufficient power to hold uncare in check, the result is
mental deregulation, a potentially highly dangerous situation. Most
people have the potential to become mentally deregulated from care.
The problem, being psychological, lies deeper than party politics
and left right divisions. Nevertheless, currently it is neoliberal
Exceptionalism that is driving mental deregulation and the climate
crisis, and it is the book’s focus. The aim is not ‘neoliberal bashing’
but seeking to understand current psychological forces shaping
policy and affecting the physical and the social climates.

Mental deregulation
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis charts a progressive
deregulation of mind from care during the neoliberal era.
Phase one (1940s to 1970s): Neoliberal ideologues worked to
make their form of Exceptionalism appear ‘as if’ morally acceptable
and palatable.

1
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1950/russell/lecture
 INTRODUCTION 3

Phase two (1980s to the present): Once in power, neoliberal

Exceptions set about promoting a culture of uncare to drive self-
and group-idealization (‘ours is the best and only way; it is “triple
A” rated’). This culture encouraged people to collude with the
neoliberal project. It promoted denial and hid the truth, thereby
generating fraud bubbles inside of which real limits could be
ignored and greed liberated. Neoliberal Exceptions not only grew
the financial bubble that burst in 2008 but they also grew the
climate and environmental bubble, which the book argues is the
largest and most consequential fraud bubble in human history. This
bubble promotes the false belief that any inconvenient costs and
harmful consequences of living in the neoliberal economy can be
discounted or do not exist.
Phase three (the present): The climate bubble is now bursting
as more and more people step out of denial and see the harm that
neoliberal Exceptionalism has caused. People are mounting fierce
opposition. Neoliberal Exceptions, continuing to maintain their
foundational entitlement to ‘be it all and have it all with no inner
conflict’, are showing signs of extreme mental deregulation. People
noticing this have started calling politics ‘the crazy’.

How to read this book

Although the book is written as a story that develops in time, feel
free to begin wherever you like, skip chapters and whole parts, and
work forwards or backwards. Readers will likely already know
more about some pieces of the puzzle than others. The book starts
with explaining Exceptionalism. This is recommended reading at
some point as it helps to make sense of the book’s argument that
Exceptionalism is embedded in neoliberal ideology, its economy
and the culture it spreads. The last part of the book explores some
strands of ‘the crazy’ now emerging.
A note on who is ‘we’: Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis
uses the word ‘we’ a good deal, its meaning depending on the
immediate context. ‘We’ sometimes means all humans, but most
often it means those of us in the global north under the influence
of a neoliberal and largely anglophone culture. The danger with
this ‘we’ is it may appear to distance ‘us’ from people and animals
4 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

suffering and dying at the sharper end of climate devastation

and chaos, especially in the global south. Also, use of this ‘we’
may appear to downplay racial, gender and class differences or
suggest that other cultures matter less. This is far from the book’s
intention.
I have three pieces of advice when thinking about climate. First,
be open to shifts in perspective from small to large scale and from
subjective and personal to more objective and impersonal. Exploring
how you feel in a supermarket wondering what to buy for supper
may deepen your understanding of the climate crisis just as much
if not more than information and analysis from climate scientists.
Second, exercise patience and ‘wait and see’. Give yourself
permission not to feel you have to rush at understanding or at
trying to assemble the bigger picture. We face a real emergency that
requires real action fast, but action with constructive purpose needs
to be contained by understanding. An example is that when writing
one chapter, I started listing the colossal damage the neoliberal
economy has done. I then took a step back and realized I had
become Chicken Little running around wanting to tell the reader
the sky is falling in. I believe I felt uncontained and my ‘thought
action’ was to imagine I could pass my uncontained state on to
the reader and so rid myself of it. Realizing that, I highlighted the
passage and pressed delete. The book does not ignore the damage,
but when its author can take it in and digest it herself, she can
better ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant’, as Emily Dickinson put it (in
Franklin, 1998.)
The tragedy is that climate change was not addressed forty
years ago when it should have been, and this is essentially because
Exceptions who owned the oil industry have controlled the political
process. Facing climate damage now can feel overwhelming. My
third piece of advice is to allow yourself to feel overwhelmed. It is,
in my experience, temporary and one does emerge from it. Only
when insulated inside a bubble of denial can we feel comfortable
about this subject.
One remedy for not feeling too overwhelmed when reading
this book is to turn at any moment to the part ‘The New Caring
Imagination Today’. I hope it will inspire, energize and open up new
ways of seeing. Kumi Naidoo, then head of Greenpeace, described
ruefully the moment when a woman interrupted a talk he gave
on the climate crisis with, ‘Dr. Naidoo, have you heard of Martin
 INTRODUCTION 5

Luther King? He had a dream. You have a nightmare.’2 We need

nightmare and dream to understand what is wrong and to imagine
a better world. Imagining – and seeing evidence of – a better and
sustainable world, and a vibrant creative human spirit, gives us
hope and strength to bear seeing the extent of climate damage and
need for repair.
Neoliberal culture has greatly under-reported care’s work during
the neoliberal age. Today’s new caring imagination is pushing
through a major paradigm shift in the natural and social sciences that
can quip us for twenty-first-century lives that are smarter, cleaner,
safer and kinder. The book describes care’s imagination, plans and
achievements through examples from economics, architecture,
planning and law. In particular, it explores care’s frameworks: the
kind of rules, laws and culture needed to support care and to help
keep uncare in check.
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis raises far more
questions than it answers. I hope that it enables a climate story
to be ‘co-created’ together with the reader. It ends with a plea to
break silence about the climate crisis and to bring it up whenever
possible in social groups, particularly those involving conversations
with children.
Jean-Luc Godard once said: ‘A story should have a beginning,
a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.’3 This
introduction began at our historical moment now, in the middle of
the climate story as the bubble is bursting. Its end is not yet written.
It will be written by all of us, based on how we understand our
world and what actions we take.

2
From a talk given with Bill McKibben in London in 2013 during the 350.org Fossil
Free Europe Tour.
3
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000419/quotes
6
 PART ONE

Exceptionalism:
The psychology
explained
8
 1
The conflicted self

Henry Marsh, a celebrated neurosurgeon, described a gruelling

lengthy operation on a young woman’s brain. A small wrong cut
could kill her or leave her in a coma. He vividly conveyed the anxiety
he had felt, his sense of heavy responsibility, his joy at the work
itself, and his elation and relief when the operation was successful.
On his way home, he called in at a supermarket.

I joined a long queue of people at the check-out. ‘And what did

you do today?’ I felt like asking them, annoyed that an important
neurosurgeon like myself should be kept waiting after such a
triumphant day’s work. But I then thought of how the value of
my work as a doctor is measured solely in the value of other
peoples’ lives, and that included the people in front of me in
the checkout queue. So, I told myself off and resigned myself to
waiting.
(Marsh, 2014, p. 43)

Marsh is touchingly honest and open about an unruly part of

himself. Many of us can identify with him and if not, it may be that
a good conscience is a clear sign of a bad memory, as Mark Twain
once ironically put it. His story reveals the way the self is divided,
with caring and uncaring parts, and it shows open conflict over
which part is to be in charge within the psyche. His caring part won
this particular argument.
The narcissistic part of the self believes it is ideal. This is different
from having ideals (that we want to live up to and occasionally
might even live up to). Being ideal is based on idealizing the self,
inflating it to become a narcissistic ‘big I am’. The ‘big I am’ hates
10 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

anything that dims its glow as the special one, uniquely entitled to
take all it wants and to dispose to others on its terms. It tends to see
others as worshipful audience to its one-person show, there only to
service the ‘big I am’.
Henry Marsh’s proper pride in his work and achievement that
day had been temporarily eclipsed by a ‘big I am’ that felt falsely
prideful and exaggeratedly entitled, and noticing this, he chided
himself (‘I told myself off’). He was back in touch with knowing
that, at the end of the day, he was a person like others; this helped
him resign himself to the frustration of waiting his turn in the
queue.
The conflictual struggle between caring and uncaring parts of the
self is at the heart of great literature down the ages, and all major
religions. Mike Brearley (2018) put it:

Perhaps we need to … recognise a narcissistic self, narrow, two-

dimensional; and also a broader, more generous self, a bigger
self, one that is three-dimensional, a true subject of thoughts
and feelings, a self that knows it does not know itself fully. One
self desires in a possessive and narcissistic way … the other …
is capable of desiring more … reflectively and compassionately,
with less need to control.
(Brearley, 2018, p. 91)

With the caring part in overall charge within the psyche, ‘myself’
can be like Brearley’s ‘true subject of thoughts and feelings’. It
knows it has an uncaring part to struggle with. This ‘myself’, being
broader-minded, is able to look on at the uncaring part. It is a moral
self, concerned with issues of good and bad, and truth and lies in
the self and in the world.
The caring part struggles with the uncaring part over which
will act on life’s stage. I once saw a remarkable and touching TV
programme about Siamese twins, two women in their forties joined
together and not able to be surgically separated. They had worked
out a way of living together such that each could express her
personality. They allowed each other ‘turns’ during which times the
other one would ‘blank’ herself. The film showed one twin playing
the guitar and singing while the other ‘switched off’, and then the
first twin ‘switching off’ to allow her sister to meet with a friend.
This extraordinary example of sisterly love highlighted a plight that
 THE CONFLICTED SELF 11

we all share: how do parts of ourselves with conflicting interests live

with each other? How does each part live a life when by living its
life the other part does not?

Living with the part we say no to

Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, asked the
question, how do we live with the part of us that we do say no to?1
His question has profound implications.
The uncaring part wants freedom to be self-centred and greedy,
while the caring part wants freedom to consider others as well
as self. Having radically different conceptions of freedom and
opposing ethics, values and ways of framing things, how do both
parts reconcile, settle their differences and live together in the same
mind?2
Politics – the exercise of power – lies at the very heart of
psychological life. Which part of the self has the power to say no?
How does that part live with the part it says no to? Williams’s
question applies also to groups and to nations: how do groups live
together with other groups whose values they oppose?
Both the caring and the uncaring parts, in endless conflict, are
real and here to stay. One cannot ‘surgically remove’ either part,
except through wishful thinking. Most of us find this hard to
accept. If only we did not have to face inner conflict, how much
more pleasant and comfortable life would be! A counter-voice may
then pipe up with yes, and how much less meaningful and rich life
would be. Is not facing moral conflict the essence of being human
and humane?
Arguments that humans are either caring or uncaring by nature
are usually based on ideology, with those to the right in politics more
prone to argue we are selfish by nature and those to the left that we

1
In a talk, as I remember it, given to the Applied Section of the British Psychoanalytical
Society, c. 2011.
2
Irma Brenman Pick has paid particular attention to the need for psychoanalysts to
pay simultaneous attention to the needs of narcissistic and reality-seeking parts of
the self (e.g. Brenman Pick, 2018).
12 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

are caring by nature.3 One argument ignores our capacity for love
while the other ignores our capacity for ruthless destructiveness.

How we say no
What matters is how we say no, whether respect and empathy are
shown for the side that loses the argument. To live peaceably, people
do not humiliate the losing side. They make it clear that whatever
the differences, everyone still has a home, a part to play and will
be heard.
Nelson Mandela would say no with respect and empathy on
becoming the first president of post-apartheid South Africa. For
example, the African National Congress (ANC) brought in a law
that recognized eleven official languages, stipulating each person’s
right to be educated in one of them. As part of this change, English
was adopted as the main language of the administration and
Afrikaans, now one of the eleven official languages, was dropped as
the joint official language with English.
During the time of this change, Mandela praised Afrikaans
language, literature and culture. He was saying to Afrikaners, we
are in charge now, but we recognize and respect you, you are part of
this new South Africa and your home is here.4 In his autobiography,
A Long Walk to Freedom (1994) he spoke of the importance of
giving the people we say no to their corner of dignity.
This is essentially what Marsh was doing at the supermarket. He
was aware that a toddler within him in a strop wanted to shout,
‘Everybody out the way. Step aside for the wonderful Henry Marsh.’

3
An example of ideology framing how we view humans is David Loye’s (2007)
argument that Darwin, in The Descent of Man, referred to ‘love’ ninety-five times
and to ‘survival of the fittest’ twice, with an apology that he did not like the term
‘survival of the fittest’. ‘Survival of the fittest’ was popularized for largely ideological
reasons.
4
Mandela had highly effective ways of insisting that he too was valuable and
belonged. He wore the South African rugby team’s shirt and sat beaming and proud
at rugby matches, winning many whites over to accepting that he was ‘one of them’,
underlining racial inclusion in rugby.
 THE CONFLICTED SELF 13

He owned and took responsibility for that part which could then
feel it had a home within him.
Rowan Williams was raising deep issues of whether and how
people can get along and live with each other. Whether we make
progress towards peace and reconciliation within the self, and also
between groups and nations, depends on how the conflictual tug of
war between care and uncare plays out. To preserve the peace and
to make a sustainable settlement with uncare, the caring part has
to find robust ways to say no to it, while recognizing its right to
abode, according it a corner of dignity and giving it respect where
respect is due.
I believe the starting point for building a more caring society
is never forgetting that care and uncare are inherent parts of us
all, and that each seeks expression and dominance over the other;
also remembering that just because care wins a struggle with uncare
one day, it does not mean its way will endure. When the uncaring
part becomes so triumphant and disassociated from the caring part
that it poses a serious threat to life, it is imperative that the caring
part reins in uncare. The struggle with uncare is ongoing. Because
of this, care needs robust frameworks in place, and a culture of
care to support and protect them. This is the book’s fundamental
argument.
Bertrand Russell rightly said that most current discussions of
politics take insufficient account of psychology. I would add that
most discussions of psychology take insufficient account of politics,
given that politics is about the struggle over which part – within the
psyche and within our groups – is dominant and holds the power.
Later, I explore situations where the uncaring part has taken
charge in a rigid way. First however – and to pave the way – I will
stay with Henry Marsh to highlight one bit of his uncaring part: his
inner exception.
14
 2
The ordinary exception
(contained by care)

‘The Great Henry Marsh should not have to wait in this queue,’
thought Marsh’s uncaring self before his caring self talked him
round. This chapter is about the stubborn and wilful bit of the
uncaring self that insists on ‘being an exception’.
An exception is a ‘refusenik’ who clings to these core false
beliefs:

• I am entitled to see myself as ideal.

• I am entitled to have whatever I want.
• I am entitled to use omnipotent (magical) thinking to rid
myself of any moral unease about holding these beliefs.

Each of the false beliefs props up the others, and together they form
a false belief system, sustained by an adamant and unwavering
sense of exaggerated entitlement.
Freud (1916a) thought the wish to be an exception lurks in us
all and we never entirely give up the belief that we deserve special
treatment. We start out as Her or His Majesty the Baby. Reaching
the terrible twos, we demand that the world see things our way (the
tantrum comes when we see, and refuse to accept, that the world
does not obey our commands). We struggle to accept our position
in the family, in the playground and then at work. Later in life many
of us squabble over inheritances. Surely, am I entitled to the biggest
slice of the pie? The pie often stands for parental love. This kind of
‘narcissistic’ entitlement differs radically from ‘lively’ entitlement to
fair treatment and a fair share.
16 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

The exception’s position is ‘I am the centre of the universe;

everything is for me and for my benefit.’ The exception never budges
from this position. Sometimes the refusal to budge is open (‘I’d
rather die in a ditch than give way’). However, this part of the self,
being artful and slippery, may pretend to give way for social ease,
expediency or fear of looking foolish. George Orwell illustrated
this in 1984 through O’Brien, a flat earther, who explained to the
central character Winston,

The sun and the stars go round [the earth]. … [However] we

often find it convenient to assume the earth goes round the
sun. … But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to
produce a dual system of astronomy? … Have you forgotten
doublethink?
(1949, p. 219)

Orwell might well have been describing the strange ‘new normal’
of our times, where people now openly argue that there are facts
and alternative facts, and both can happily co-exist. However,
doublethink is old in human psychology. It is part of disavowal,
a form of denial to be explored later. In states of disavowal we
can hold incompatible beliefs. A particular deal is struck where
the exception says, in effect, I will accept that I am not centre of
the universe on condition that you do not challenge that I am at the
centre, really. With this uneasy compromise, the exception in us just
about tolerates fitting in. Scaled up to the macro level, people in
the Age of Enlightenment may accept being decentred by scientific
knowledge while at the same time believing they hold dominion over
all they survey.
Let us explore the exception’s three false beliefs further:

I am entitled to see myself as ideal

In reality, no one is ideal. This is a false belief based on magical
thinking. In self-idealization, we imagine we have no blemishes. If
only! Self-idealization usually dies down during childhood, often
reappearing at puberty. The marvellous cartoonist Jules Feiffer
sympathetically satirized the teenage mind with a story of a girl
 THE ORDINARY EXCEPTION (CONTAINED BY CARE) 17

who saw a tiny pimple on her face as being the size of a suppurating
volcano (Feiffer, 2006). For suffering teenagers, only the perfect
unblemished state will do.

I am entitled to idealized provision

Falsely believing we are perfect and special, it must follow that we
are entitled to idealized provision. This fans an avaricious form of
greed where the focus is narrowed right down1 to what’s in this for
ME, the ‘big I am’? The whole world starts to be eyed up as an asset
to be stripped, only there to aggrandize the self.
The great detective writer Josephine Tey captured the essence
of narcissistic entitlement to idealized provision in a conversation
between Chief Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard and his young
assistant Tad. Grant, calling it vanity, said to Tad,

When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires
itself in mirrors. … But that is merely personal conceit. Real
Vanity says, “I must have this because I am me.”
(Tey, 1952, p. 153)

At the heart of being an exception is the attitude: ‘I must have

this. Why? Because I am me. No other reason needed! It’s obvious.’
‘I want that, so I’ll have it’ applies not only to material possessions
but also to others’ attributes. The other’s desired qualities now
apparently belong to the self. One example is to imagine we did
it all ourselves, forgetting that we had considerable help. That can
protect against feeling envy.

I am entitled to use magical thinking to

maintain the belief I am ideal
The exception in us thinks, ‘being special, I am entitled to magically
disappear all difficulty and inner discomfort’. This is like Cinderella

1
See Brenman (1985), ‘Cruelty and Narrowmindedness’.
18 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

feeling entitled to a mental Fairy Godmother who waves a wand

and transforms her self-view from kitchen maid into belle of the
ball. I will expand on the subject of feeling entitled to use magical
thinking in the next chapter.
Freud (1916a) explored being an exception in a paper on
Richard III – not the historical Richard, but Shakespeare’s account
of the hunchback king. Freud suggested deep down we identify
with Richard because,

We all demand reparation for early wounds to our narcissism,

our self-love. Why did not Nature give us the golden curls of
Balder or the strength of Siegfried or the lofty brow of genius
or the noble profile of aristocracy? Why were we born in a
middle-class home instead of in a royal palace? We could carry
off beauty and distinction quite as well as any of those whom we
are now obliged to envy for these qualities.

Some of us are better than others at accepting our real position and
mourning the loss of our idealized self with its idealized entitlements
– it was always an illusion, after all – but Freud was drawing
attention to how difficult this mourning can be. The exception in
us does not ‘do’ mourning or ‘do’ facing loss. It feels entitled to be
exempt from difficult psychic work like this, and entitled to find
‘quick fix solutions’ based on magical thinking instead.
Taking seriously that there is an exception in us can sharpen our
understanding of what Freud meant by reality. Reality is a contested
idea and different disciplines (philosophy, natural sciences) approach
it somewhat differently. Freud essentially saw reality as that which,
by being there, stands in the way of, impedes, disrupts, our wishful
phantasy (see Freud, 1911). Reality in this sense is anathema to the
exception with his or her false belief system.
 3
The Exception (in charge
and unbound)

Most people’s caring self is strong enough to hold their inner

exception in check. I now introduce the situation where the
exception takes overall charge within the psyche. The Exception
(upper case E to signal this power shift) now holds title, meaning it
has the power to enforce its exaggerated entitlement to

●● see itself as ideal

●● have whatever power and possessions it craves
●● not feel morally troubled about this.

My first example of a full-blown Exception is the psychoanalyst

Karl Abraham’s (1935) account of Amenhotep IV, an Egyptian boy
king who lived over 3,000 years ago.1 While it would be nonsense
and bad manners to claim we can analyse the psyche of someone
who lived thousands of years ago, Abraham’s account is valuable
as he shone a particularly clear light on psychological processes
involved when ‘e’ morphs to be ‘E’.
In Abraham’s account, Amenhotep IV, an orphaned boy king,
came to believe he was the Sun God Re. Many ancient rulers

1
I have accepted Abraham’s account of the historical Amenhotep IV while aware I
am not in a position to evaluate this in the light of classical scholarship. My reasons
for choosing this example are (a) to make the point that Exceptionalism is as old
as human history and (b) because Abraham’s account of what is psychologically
involved in omnipotent thinking is, in my view, particularly clear and very applicable
to modern examples.
20 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

believed they were deities, but Amenhotep IV carried things further.

He ordered all signs of his real father’s life to be erased from the
kingdom. He banned worship of the god his father had worshipped,
and he ordered a new god, Re, to be worshipped instead. First, he
erected statues to Re, then he announced he was the son of Re and
then he claimed that he was the god Re. As Re, he was the source of
all radiance, light and warmth in his kingdom.
Here we see self-idealization, and Abraham argued that it
involves these steps:

●● take a real other

●● divide it into parts (e.g. into good/bad)
●● idealize each part (good becomes perfect and bad becomes
terrible, that is, perfectly bad)
●● imaginatively be one of the idealized parts.

The argument is Amenhotep IV took the good parts of his father and
idealized them to be a god. He then believed (through identification)
he was that god.
This is an example of what in psychology is given the fancy
label ‘omnipotent identification’. Ordinary identification is, for
example, growing up to be like good admired parts of a parent.
The thinking is, in time, you can be like the parent you admire and
envy. Omnipotent identification is different. Here the child falsely
believes he or she is the parent, right now – moreover, usually not
the actual parent but a very idealized one.
In omnipotent identification, Amenhotep IV is the father that he
has already idealized and transformed into a god. Later I will argue
(Chapter 37) certain leaders stimulate omnipotent identification to
win our votes; that when for example Trump repeatedly said, ‘I am
your voice’ this was an invitation to be Trump, right now, in the
moment. He was stimulating omnipotent identification with all its
dividing into ‘perfect and powerful like me’ and ‘very bad like those
hombres we will lock up’ that this entails.2

2
Eli Zaretsky (2018), in a piece called ‘The Mass Psychology of Trumpism’, brought
in Adorno’s work on the rise of fascism in Germany to make the point that the issue
is not just omnipotent identification with the leader: it is that this kind of leader ‘has
to resemble the follower and appear as his “enlargement”’. ‘The leader “completes”
the follower’s self-image… The consistent derogation of Trump in the New York
Times or on MSNBC … is counterproductive when it comes to breaking down the
 THE EXCEPTION (IN CHARGE AND UNBOUND) 21

Returning to Amenhotep IV, to maintain the phantasy he would

have had to obliterate any awareness that he ever had real parents.
The greatest threat to self-idealization is knowing there are things
we do not control and that we have needs we cannot meet ourselves.
The Exception may feel virulent hatred for the needy part of the self
and for needy others.
Amenhotep IV was an orphaned boy who lost his parents when
young. Might acknowledging his need of real parents have put him
in touch with his fragility and the trauma of his loss? We cannot
know. Self-idealization can happen for all sorts of reasons, one of
which is protection against feeling abandoned and/or traumatized.3
This is a theme we will return to.
The aim here is not to attempt to ‘psychoanalyse’ an historical
figure (this was not Abraham’s aim either). It is to introduce and
begin to explore the state of mind at the heart of this book’s
argument. Abraham clearly outlined the stages needed for self-
idealization. To repeat them:

●● take a real other

●● divide it into parts (e.g. into good/bad)
●● idealize each part (e.g. into perfect/terrible)
●● imagine you can be the idealized part you identify with.

Exceptions tend to see themselves as either very superior and

blameless or very bad and blameworthy. That way they can
maintain the belief they are special and not ordinary. Exceptions
are never ordinary!
Exceptions tend to create fetishes. A fetish is a person, idea or
thing idealized in such a way it is now a glamourized attractor.
An example might be Amenhotep IV treating his own body as
a fetish to be worshipped: no longer an ordinary human body
but a god’s golden body. With fetishization, the fetish attracts and
what is real is made to seem drab and uninteresting. This mental

Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on their leader as an attack on
them. “The fascist leader’s startling symptoms of inferiority”, Adorno wrote, “his
resemblance to ham actors and asocial psychopaths”, facilitates the identification,
which is the basis of the ideal.’ This theme is explored later in Chapter 38.
3
It is well-recognized by those who study the mind that people who are abandoned
and unloved are particularly prone to self-idealization.
22 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

state can leave a person feeling ashamed of being ordinary and

ashamed of valuing a truthful unglamourized picture.

Omnipotent ‘quick fix’ thinking4

The Exception feels entitled to use omnipotent thinking. Phantasies
that underpin omnipotent thinking are of being ‘omni-potent’,
or all-powerful, with godlike powers to ‘create’ reality. Here, it is
worth pointing out that the mental powers of the person caught
up with omnipotent thinking apparently far exceed the powers
of established deities. For example, it took God six whole days to
create the world. Omnipotent thinking can mentally rustle up an
imagined world in the blink of an eye at warp speed. God had to
rest on the seventh day whereas the phantasy here is that creating
and maintaining idealized world views are effortless.
Keeping up the delusion that one is supremely perfect to the
point of being a god with godlike powers only seems effortless. In
fact, it involves ongoing hard psychic work. One has to construct
a fake reality, mentally destroy evidence and keep attacking the
reality-based part of the mind that sees the fakery.
Mental health professionals are advised not to offer diagnoses of
individuals they have not personally treated.5 I agree with this, but
I cannot resist giving Donald Trump’s debacle over inauguration
figures as a potential example of omnipotent thinking. Of course,
we cannot know whether Trump believed his own propaganda,
but supposing he did, the omnipotence might work as follows: his
would be the biggest crowd ever for an incoming US president.

4
A large psychoanalytic literature is devoted to exploring omnipotent thinking,
including Rosenfeld (1971) on destructive narcissism, Bion (1957) on the struggle
between the psychotic and non-psychotic parts of the self with the psychotic part
eschewing experience, Steiner (1993) on psychic retreats, work on disassociation in
traumatic states, and so on.
5
This is known as the Goldwater Rule. Ultra-right winger Barry Goldwater failed
in his attempt at the US presidency in 1964. Goldwater’s personality was dissected
at the time by many psychiatrists who cautioned he was mentally unfit to be
commander-in-chief. He sued and was awarded damages, leading to the Goldwater
Rule which states it is prohibited for mental health professionals to offer clinical
opinions on individuals they have not seen and assessed in person.
 THE EXCEPTION (IN CHARGE AND UNBOUND) 23

Proceeding omnipotently ‘as if’ that were true meant that when
faced with evidence to the contrary, he had to destroy that evidence.
He did so by vilifying the press and calling their real news fake and
his fake news real.
Amenhotep IV as described by Abraham presumably chose this
path too. To create himself as a god and then to rule ‘as if’ he was a
god entailed scrubbing out all signs to the contrary. We may recall
Amenhotep is thought to have ordered to be destroyed all evidence
that he had ever had a real father.
The difference between ordinary wishful thinking and omnipotent
thinking is that anyone might wish for, even feel entitled to, a big
crowd at their party. However, if their wish does not come true,
most people accept reality (with only their inner exception refusing
to), gradually mourn their idealized self and realize their sense
of entitlement was exaggerated. Exceptions, by contrast, cling to
their idealized world and never properly face any facts that dim
their shine. They do this by rearranging the facts with omnipotent
thinking. A ‘quick fix’ is applied to restore the idealized picture.
‘Trouble in paradise? I’ll “quick fix” it. Paradise restore. All sorted.
Strike a high five with myself! I can now continue to:

●● see myself as ideal

●● have whatever I want
●● not feel morally troubled by this’

The price is to live in a bubble-like psychic retreat from reality.6

Exceptions do see the reality, but with eyes that are beady,
vigilant and essentially paranoid. Their aim is primarily to protect
themselves from having their ‘entitlements’ diminished.7 They tend
to view damage differently to the ordinary person. The damage they
particularly care about is damage to the idealized status they feel
entitled to, and their omnipotent ‘solutions’ are in essence ‘quick

6
John Steiner (1993) put forward the idea of a psychic retreat from reality. This is
a protected bubble-like area created within the mind that protects against different
forms of anxiety. Mentally speaking, the Exception is in a particular kind of psychic
retreat.
7
Naomi Klein (2014) observed that the oil industry is far more in touch with the true
picture of warming than most people. However, this is not to solve the problem of
warming, but to protect their profits.
24 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

fix’ repairs to restore things as perfect. Apparently. Here are some

everyday examples of omnipotent thinking to show how nimble
and protean it can be:
Projection: this involves the phantasy you can, for instance,
successfully remove a troublesome part of yourself or your group
by attributing it to another person or group.8 For example, ‘I see
I am bad, I project my badness onto the other, they are bad and
I am perfect again. High five with myself. Aren’t I clever!’ This is
irrational thinking.
Setting targets: setting a target to fix a problem you caused may
be an omnipotent ‘quick fix’ repair. Examples abound in current
politics: by such and such a date, carbon emissions will be reduced;
waiting lists shortened; tower blocks will have better fire safety
systems to prevent another Grenfell Tower disaster.9 We will be
the greenest government in world history,10 see how we support
the National Health Service, see how much we care for the poor.
When the Covid-19 pandemic strikes, we will have millions of
tests available. By the way, we are not funding infrastructure to
support these targets. If you ask us point blank about funding, we
will say either the money is not there or the money is there, if only
the agencies would make proper use of it. The agencies are to blame
(projection). And we will not be in office when it all unravels. If we
are still in office, we will brutally bury real evidence.

8
Saner people usually find good homes for their projections, for example, a saner
mean person will choose a person who is actually mean to project their own meanness
onto. Madder people are more indiscriminate, so that in an extreme case they could
project their meanness onto a lamp post. But, in both cases, an omnipotent ‘as if’
quick fix for guilt is involved.
9
In 2017, a fire broke out in the twenty-four-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in
London causing seventy-two deaths with over seventy people injured. An official
Public Enquiry reported in 2019 that the central reason why the fire spread so rapidly
was that the exterior cladding did not comply with building regulations. The fire had
spread up the building’s exterior due to the building’s cladding, external insulation
and the air gap between. Phase 2 of the Enquiry is yet to consider further causes,
but it is widely thought that progressive weakening of local government oversight
within an ideological culture that treats oversight as unnecessary ‘red tape’ led to a
blind eye being turned to the inflammatory properties of the cheaper cladding used.
10
Paul Hoggett (2012) wrote on target setting as a form of disavowal of climate
change.
 THE EXCEPTION (IN CHARGE AND UNBOUND) 25

Many politicians have ‘dealt with’ the climate crisis in just this
sort of way. For example, Teresa May announced in June 2019
during her final days as prime minister that the British Government
would achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050 (far too late if we
listen to climate scientists11). Days later, the UK government made
it harder for people to afford to switch to solar energy (Ambrose,
2019). ‘Quick fix’ thinking only pretends to solve problems. In
reality it leaves them to others to suffer and to address.
Outsourcing the damage: finding omnipotent ‘solutions’ goes
together with outsourcing. An example was Larry Summers, then
president of the World Bank, saying in 1991 in a leaked confidential
memo: ‘Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be
encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least
Developed Countries?’ (quoted in Arestis, 1992). When the memo
was exposed, Summers said he was only joking. However, ‘dirty’
industries did migrate to the third world, facilitated by the World
Bank.12
Another example of outsourcing is economist John Roemer’s
exposure of current economic models in which future generations
are allocated none of the earth’s resources (Roemer, 2013). Yes, you
read that right. I said none. All is claimed for the present generation.13
Roemer and his team at Yale University are developing models with
more caring assumptions in mind.
Disassociation: this works by severing connections with the
part of us that cares, and severing connections with people we
would ordinarily care about and respect. Disassociation underpins
dehumanizing prejudice. As a ‘quick fix’ for the climate emergency,

11
Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the University of
Manchester, stated in 2019 that ‘[to] meet its Paris obligations the UK must
achieve zero-carbon energy by around 2035; that’s “real-zero” not “net-zero”. This
requires an immediate programme of deep cuts in energy emissions rising rapidly
to over 10 per cent p.a’. https://kevinanderson.info/blog/brief-response-to-the-uk-
governments-net-zero-proposal
12
Decision making that outsources cost and suffering to others has long been called
moral hazard. The 2008 subprime mortgage debacle is an example.
13
When economist Nicholas Stern wrote the Stern Review – which he has now
acknowledged did not take the problem of climate change seriously enough – he
used an economic model that gave inadequate entitlement to future generations
(Stern, 2006).
26 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

it enables us imaginatively to relocate those to bear the suffering to

places ‘far way’ or ‘in the future’. Out of sight they are less likely to
trouble the conscience. This has by now led to the crazy situation
where it is those who are closest – the children – who will suffer the
consequences of ignoring global heating.
Nursing grievance: a perhaps less obvious form of the omnipotent
‘quick fix’ is nursing grievance. ‘Having noticed a flaw or something
missing in my paradise, I will rail and rail until things are established
as ideal again. In reality, because nothing is ever perfect, there is
endless food for nursing my grievance. I just have to spot the next
imperfection.’14
People caught up in grievance are essentially not interested in
working problems through with others, solving them, letting go
and moving on. Instead, they want their idealized world back
again, and while busy nursing the grievance they can even believe
in an illusory way that it is back again or it soon will be. As if. Miss
Havisham, in Dickens’s Great Expectations, trapped in her faded
dusty wedding gown, nursing grievance against the groom who
abandoned her all those years ago, is a marvellous example. All that
counts is resurrecting the wished-for idealized world. Nursing the
grievance restores the false belief that it could still exist. From the
inside, this is a world filled with rage and false promise. From
the outside it can be seen to be deadly, vengeful, frozen in time
and full of nostalgia. Behind the wish to restore paradise is terrible
negativity that effectively blocks mourning and change.

Living in Wonderland
Omnipotent thinking in all these different forms reconfigures the
mental landscape, rearranges the mental furniture, places people
(and other species) closer or further apart, distorts ordinary logical
relations, resizes problems or airbrushes them out altogether. All
in the service of proceeding ‘as if’. Alice growing and shrinking in
her Wonderland brilliantly conveys this. For instance, when the ‘big

I outlined the logic behind this form of thinking in a paper on grievance and
14

entitlement (Weintrobe, 2004).

 THE EXCEPTION (IN CHARGE AND UNBOUND) 27

I am’ swells in size, the reality-based caring part of the self may
shrink to insignificance in one’s conscious experience.
Omnipotent thinking has the power to rescale problems in the
imagination so that they appear tiny when in reality they are large
(minimization), or to make an abnormal problem seem as if normal
(normalization). It can relocate people who are close to us in the
landscape of our imagination to being apparently far away from
us (creating ‘distanced others’ through disassociation). It can divide
our mental landscapes into separate regions, for instance into ‘my
entitled in-crowd’ and ‘the outed crowd’. Omnipotent thinking can
bar a troubling thought from conscious awareness by making that
thought taboo.

Constructive uses of omnipotence

Not all omnipotent thinking is destructive and corrupting. For
example, it can keep us going when conditions are bleak by helping
us proceed ‘as if’ things are not quite as bad as we currently know
or fear they are. For instance, Daniel Barenboim said about the
situation in Gaza,

We don’t have the luxury of indulging in pessimism. It only

makes it worse. We have to continue and when we don’t believe
we have to make believe and eventually we can make way.15

Some omnipotent people bite off more than they can chew and
can be tiring to be around, but their ‘as if’ approach can also lead
them to be high achievers. Omnipotent people may construct ‘as
if’ fake worlds to live in as a way of staving off trauma or mental
breakdown. Omnipotent thinking can be used for serious underlying
reasons, as therapists who treat people in its grip well know.
It can help us follow a plan and survive (think of soldiers in battle
who need to disassociate to kill and endure). Indeed, it requires
some capacity to disassociate to have a life, as Auden’s wonderful
poem about the fall of Icarus shows:

Newsnight, BBC 2, 18 August 2014.

15
28 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

‘The Old Masters … understood

(Suffering’s) human position …
In Breughel’s Icarus … (the) ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on’. (Auden, 1940)

Some disassociation is needed to sail calmly on. When care holds

sufficient power in the psychic economy, the human mind is self-
regulating. It screens us from being overwhelmed by the suffering of
others but forces our attention back to that suffering if we become
too disassociated from it; it protects us from too much guilt, shame
and anxiety but it prods us with these very feelings when we stop
caring. Our caring part regulates our moral sense so that we do not
slip into a cold climate of unconcern.16
The Exception actively deregulates the mind thus damaging the
mind’s regulating function. It boosts the omnipotent idea we can
be free of the pangs of conscience and it weakens the caring part
of the self that takes these pangs seriously. When Exceptions start
to sound shameless, it is usually a sign that mental deregulation is
fairly advanced.
Phantasy is powerful, and it impacts the world in real ways.
When Exceptions take charge, the impacts can be very far-reaching.
History’s lesson is that when Exceptions take over, the result is
often ruin.17

Forms of Exceptionalism
An enduring human tendency, Exceptionalism has surfaced
throughout history. It involves a controlling colonizing form of
entitlement to see everything as ‘ours’, and everyone as bending to

16
T. S. Eliot had said in Burnt Norton, The Four Quartets, that humankind cannot
bear very much reality, but Saul Bellow in his Nobel Literature Prize acceptance
speech importantly added that humankind cannot bear too little reality either.
17
Jared Diamond (2005) argued that one reason a civilization fails is a deficit of
morals. This is a feature of Exceptions who believe they are entitled not to have to
wrestle with moral issues.
 THE EXCEPTION (IN CHARGE AND UNBOUND) 29

our will and our viewpoint. It is embedded in the Judeo/Christian

ethic that man holds dominion over all he surveys (with man here
excluding women).
Exceptionalism took on new force, scope and energy from the
mid-eighteenth century with industrialization and colonialism.
Industrialization encouraged a view of workers and nature as ‘raw
materials’ to exploit, while slavery and colonialism bred a belief in
superiority over other races and cultures.18
Exceptionalism takes different national forms, each with its own
current agenda and variant of nostalgia for bygone glory days. For
example, British Exceptionalism holds that the sun never sets on
empire. These nostalgias are often stoked at times when change and
loss are threatened. Exceptions strenuously avoid ever having to
face loss and give their ‘entitlements’ away.
This book is about modern-day globalized Exceptionalism, its
rise to power and its rein during the neoliberal era. Ours is the
Golden Age of Exceptionalism.19 Neoliberal Exceptions crossed
their Rubicon in the 1980s and they have been steadily consolidating
their power ever since. The most disturbing consequence is that
omnipotent thinking has soared. By 2003, an aide to Karl Rove (an
influential member of George W. Bush’s inner policy circle) would
feel emboldened to say, ‘We are an empire. We create reality and
the reality-based community is left to study what we do’ (quoted
in Suskind, 2004).20 This was acute social commentary about rising
triumphalism suffused with omnipotent thinking. At that time, it
could still only be said ‘off stage’, as general culture would not have
supported such a blazon attitude of ‘two fingers up’ to reality. By
2000, Putin had taken charge in the new aggressively deregulated
Russia. Surkov, his chief strategist, toasted Putin with the words:
‘To the deification of power. To us becoming gods’.21 That was

18
Donna Orange (2017) discusses colonialism in conjunction with the climate crisis.
19
Giovanni Arrighi (2005) described the 1990s as the belle époque of America’s
global hegemony.
20
The full quotation, often attributed to Karl Rove, refers to the reality-based
community as a thing of the past: ‘The reality-based community believes that solutions
emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality. … that’s not the way the world
really works anymore. We are an empire now and … we create our own reality.’
21
Quoted from The Puppet Master, a BBC Radio 4 programme on Surkov by Gabriel
Gatehouse in 2019.
30 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

also ‘off stage’. By 2017, the White House would openly sanction
‘alternative facts’.
That the trend towards ever greater entitlement to use
omnipotent thinking emerged under capitalism – some say by now
in a gangster form22 – should leave no one on the left complacent.
They are vulnerable to becoming Exceptions too. With authoritarian
communism came marked disassociation from care and marked
omnipotent thinking. Vaclav Havel (1986) called his collection
of essays about life under communism, Living in Truth. His point
was he was living in a regime that attacked truth and was prey to
omnipotent ‘quick fix’ thinking. He cautioned that the West was
vulnerable to such a regime.

The terms ‘gangster’, ‘mafia’ and ‘crony capitalism’ are all now in common use.
22
 PART TWO

Exceptionalism’s
rise to power in
the neoliberal
age
32
 4
Neoliberal Exceptionalism

Neoliberalism is a challenging subject – a dry mouthful, not so

easy to define but vital to understand if we are to make any sense
of the climate crisis. Indeed, many commentators hold it to be
largely responsible for many of our current economic, social and
environmental problems. Neoliberalism, a deregulated form of
capitalism, gained ascendancy in the early 1980s on the election of
Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the
UK. My focus in this part will be on the underlying Exceptionalism
driving neoliberal ways of thinking.
Soon after Thatcher came to power, I saw an advert on a hoarding
in London showing a big white cloud against a blue sky with the
caption, ‘THIS IS NOT A CLOUD. THIS IS THE START OF A
£MULTIMILLION INDUSTRY’. In retrospect, I think this was the
moment I registered – with visceral apprehension – that we had
entered a new political era.
I sensed something incipiently megalomaniac in this advert’s
pomp of tone and the false certainty in its message, ‘THIS IS NOT
THIS. THIS IS THAT because we say so’. Was I perhaps taking
the advert too seriously? It could be seen as funny, clever and
sophisticated, seemingly drawing on Monty Python-esque humour
typified by British comedian John Cleese as hotelier Basil Fawlty
in the TV sitcom Fawlty Towers declaiming, ‘Madam, THIS IS
NOT A RAT. THIS IS CHEESE in a basket’. Perhaps we giggle –
faintly hysterically – at Cleese as we sense he is on the verge of a
breakdown.
The advert’s potential humour was lost on me. Instead, it left
me anxious and affronted. It seemed to me to be saying you should
train your eye to discount anything that stands in the way of money
34 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

and self-interest. It both stimulated and legitimized greed, and I

think part of my anxiety was the seductiveness of its siren call that
you can rid yourself of moral conflict by using omnipotent thinking.
Just redefine what is real.
The conflict here was between wanting a personal dividend and
knowing that privatization of assets like public utilities would have
a generally destructive effect. I held a common view at the time that
Thatcher was selling off the family silver. London’s water would
be owned by Thames Water, which decades later would be owned
by the asset-stripping Australian Bank McQuarry. It has been
repeatedly fined for illegally pumping raw sewage into the River
Thames (Carrington, 2017a). Perhaps it considers it is cheaper
to pump the sewage and pay the fines than to spend money on
infrastructure to fix the problem. In a full-blown neoliberal business
mindset, a cloud is not a cloud, a river is not a river and a person is
not a person. Only money has value.
That moment in Camden Town was my meeting with neoliberal
ideology and its culture, both of which would transform the world
over the next forty years. The central part of this book goes into
how neoliberal culture (advertising, media, government propaganda
and group pressure) shifted the moral compass by relentlessly
encouraging people’s ordinary exception. It has profoundly changed
how many people see the world.

Neoliberalism
One term, ‘neoliberalism’, describes an ideology, a form of economics
and a mindset. I believe understanding the mindset makes it easier
to understand both the ideology and the economics. The mindset
is essentially Exceptionalist. Neoliberal Capitalist Exceptionalism
came to power in the 1980s. By the 1990s it was blooming and by
now its growth is out of control.
Its journey to power was greatly enabled by two developments
in the 1940s. First, neoliberal ideologues began to write treatises to
make Exceptionalism appear morally acceptable. Their arguments
are explored in the next two chapters. Second, a command structure
was established at Bretton Woods in the aftermath of the Second
World War that would serve neoliberal Exceptions well when they
 NEOLIBERAL EXCEPTIONALISM 35

eventually gained office. The Bretton Woods Agreement was signed

in 1944 by all the allies (except Russia). Loans would be offered
to help economies exhausted and depleted by war to recover.1 The
Bank of Reconstruction and Development (which later became the
World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were
established. America dictated the terms of the agreement,2 insisted
on having superior voting rights and that the heads of the IMF and
the Bank of Reconstruction and Development be Americans with
both institutions to be based in Washington. That made it possible
for business, political and banking policy to be forged by a tightly
knit small group of people interconnected by social as well as
business ties, many of whom shifted career from politics to business
and back again in what has become known as the ‘revolving door’
policy.3
The Bretton Woods Agreement effectively ceded the United
States power to shape the direction in which economies would
develop around the world.4 It established the United States as
world leader and it enabled the spread of what has been called The
American Way of Life. Despite many changes, developments and
shifts in power over the decades that followed,5 America remained
at the helm of global financial and economic policy direction.6 A
command structure with potential global reach was put in place
at Bretton Woods that would later prove vital for the success of
the neoliberals’ globalizing economic project. The World Bank and
the IMF would tie loans to conditions favourable to the expansion

1
The Bretton Woods Agreement was designed to foster peace by avoiding the ‘beggar
thy neighbour’ policy after the First World War that had nearly destroyed the
Germany economy, and, it was widely believed, contributed to the Second World
War.
2
Against some British opposition at the time, Keynes the UK negotiator had many
points of disagreement with White the US negotiator (see Frieden, 2017).
3
See, for instance, Owen Jones (2014).
4
America dominated how the agreement at Bretton Woods was framed, emerging
with the greatest number of voting rights, thus making it the major player in
reconstruction and economic policy direction after the war.
5
Such as the collapse of the dollar as a reverse currency, new financial markets and
rules emerging, the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the financial collapse
of 2008 and China gaining ascendancy on the world stage.
6
Only in 2012 did the rules change to allow a non-American to head up the World
Bank (Jim Yong Kim of South Korea).
36 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

of unbridled capitalism7 and by the 1990s this had become the

norm. The policy of ‘accept help on condition you also allow us to
influence your political process and way of doing business’ is now
the template in a globalized world.
It would take over thirty years for neoliberals to take charge
of the global command structure established at Bretton Woods.
Roosevelt’s New Deal had led to wealth redistribution in the United
States and after the war Britain established a Welfare State to tackle
what Beveridge8 had described as the Five Giant Evils holding back
social progress: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The
Welfare State would provide a national health service free for all,
family allowance, sickness and unemployment benefit, and social
housing for those in need. Full employment was the aim.
In the post-war era left and right had reached a form of consensus,
and a culture of greater care for the many was so strong that even
under Eisenhower’s pro-business Republican administration, the
top marginal income tax rate remained at a historic high of 91 per
cent.
Right up to the 1970s, neoliberals had largely been viewed
as outriders and right-wing extremists by both right and left in
politics. William Buckley, Conservative and darling of the American
right, endorsed Whittaker Chambers’s excoriating review of
neoliberal (libertarian9) ideologue Ayn Rand’s ‘dictatorial tone …
of overriding arrogance … [and her] … inflexibly self-righteous
stance’ (Chambers, 1957). From the left, Michael Foot, leader of

7
Many loans and debt repayment deals granted by the World Bank to the third
world were tied to economic requirements, and with the rise of capitalism in its
neoliberal form in the 1990s this became the norm. For example, the World Bank
tied school fees for students in Ghana to a loan; demanded that Tanzania privatize
its water system; made telecom privatization a condition of aid for Hurricane Mitch;
demanded labour ‘flexibility’ in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami;
pushed for eliminating food subsidies in post-invasion Iraq. Loans are also often
linked to providing infrastructure to enable Western companies to carry out their
business more effectively (see Klein, 2016).
8
Beveridge, a British economist and liberal politician, was a progressive social
reformer. His 1942 report Social Insurance and Allied Services (known as the
Beveridge Report) served as the basis for the post-Second World War welfare state
put in place by the Labour Government elected in 1945.
9
Libertarians are similar to neoliberals. Discussion of their differences is beyond this
book’s scope.
 NEOLIBERAL EXCEPTIONALISM 37

the British Labour Party in the early 1980s, referred to neoliberal

ideologue Friedrich Hayek as ‘the mad professor’.10
To gain influence and whittle away political and cultural
opposition, neoliberal Exceptions in the post-war years planned
a stealth attack. Charles Koch, industrialist and arch neoliberal,
explained with unusual candour that ‘to avoid undesirable criticism,
how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely
advertised’ (quoted in McKibben, 2019). Put simply, if people saw
clearly what neoliberals were really up to, they would object. They
might also register alarm as I had when I saw the cloud advert.
British journalist George Monbiot (2016) noted that the
‘anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded’. With a humorous
eye, I pictured neoliberal Exceptions as like Count Dracula,
shunning daylight and ensuring they cast no reflection in the mirror.
A hilarious scene from Roman Polanski’s film Dance of the Vampires
shows the Count in an unguarded moment inadvertently exposing
a large fang as he smiles widely with self-satisfaction. Startled, he
shoves his fang back in behind his upper lip. His true nature must
never be seen. It must not be noticed that he is a blood sucker.
Neoliberals infiltrated universities and set up policy think tanks,
mostly keeping the identity of their funders secret and obfuscating
their true intentions.11 An example of obfuscation is neoliberal
James Buchanan (see Chapter 5) naming his new department of
economics at the University of Virginia the Thomas Jefferson Centre.
Buchanan in fact promoted ideas that would most likely have led
Jefferson to ‘turn in his grave’. Here were neoliberal ideologues
exploiting Jefferson’s name and corrupting his reputation to lend
themselves legitimacy. JEFFERSON IS NOT JEFFERSON. HE IS
WHAT WE MAKE HIM TO BE.
Neoliberal Exceptions’ think tanks would be given bland
respectable names such as the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute,
Centre for Policy Studies and Adam Smith Institute. They steadily
drip-fed neoliberal ideology to politicians and journalists. Their real
function, as we will see, has been to maintain the ‘entitlements’ of
Exceptions. The Heritage Foundation, heavily funded by oil barons
Charles and David Koch, supports denial of climate change because

Mentioned in https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/114510
10

Monbiot (2016) noted their ‘anonymities and confusions’.

11
38 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

taking global warming seriously would interfere with their profits.

The Carthage Foundation, set up by oil baron Scaife, might more
accurately be called The Trojan Horse Foundation. Its chief aim
has been to fund the undermining of science when scientific results
get in the way of profits. Up to the present, the covert influence
of wealthy Exceptions, their think tanks, lobbyists and electoral
campaign funding has been so extensive that by now the influence
is widely recognized to have had a stranglehold on the political
process.
The term ‘neoliberalism’ is most commonly used to describe the
current economic system, one with global reach, and here too it
would prove difficult to get the true facts about how this system
works. Monbiot referred to ‘the namelessness and placelessness
of modern capitalism [as]: the franchise model which ensures that
workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered
through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that
even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax
arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products
no one understands’.
Exceptions who drove globalization forwards in the 1980s
were captivated by an ideology that whispered, ‘Cut regulation,
cut ties to reality and cut concern. That is the way to maintain
our entitlements.’ They took sheers to human, material and legal
obstacles to profit. Naomi Klein (2014) emphasized the extractive,
scooping out, quality of the neoliberal mindset in her discussion
of overburden, the term ‘mining companies’ used to describe ‘the
waste earth that covers a mineral deposit’. Klein commented, when
visiting polluted landscapes left by tar sand extraction in Canada,
that overburden12

includes forests, fertile soil, rocks, clay … the life that gets in the
way of money. … it wasn’t just the dense and beautiful Boreal
forest that was ‘overburden’ to these companies. We are all
overburden. This is the world that deregulated capitalism has
created, one in which anyone and anything can find themselves
discarded, chewed up, tossed on the slagheap.

12
Klein included unions, environmentalists, indigenous people, democracy itself as
all ‘overburden’.
 NEOLIBERAL EXCEPTIONALISM 39

Exceptions see as ‘overburden’ anyone or anything acting as a

barrier to their ‘entitlements’: THIS IS NOT A CLOUD comes to
mean ‘everything about a cloud that does not relate to profit is
overburden’. This brutal viewpoint was exposed with the tragic fire
at Grenfell Tower in London. Cheaper cladding13 meant less money
spent, and the people living in the flats were classed as ‘overburden’.
Tenants had voiced safety concerns long before the fire, but people
classed as overburden are neither listened to nor considered in any
genuine way.14
One reason it is not easy to get a clear picture of neoliberalism
and its effects is that it portrays itself in such glowing idealized
terms. This fits with feeling entitled to see oneself as ideal.
Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang has robustly challenged the
neoliberal claim that free-market economics is the only economics
that works. In 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism
(Chang, 2016), he systematically debunked neoliberals’ claims, in
effect de-idealizing their self-portraits. For example, neoliberals
say wealth trickles down, but the neoliberal economy has led to
wealth trickling up not down. French economist Thomas Picketty
(2014) exposed in detail the widening gap in wealth between a tiny
few and the many in the neoliberal age. At a psychological level, it
is not difficult to see why an Exception would promote, and also
perhaps himself believe in, the trickledown effect: remember the
self-idealizing Egyptian boy king, Amenhotep IV, who saw himself
as full of golden radiance, warming all in his kingdom? Neoliberal
Exceptions have portrayed themselves in similar terms as superior
wealth creators, their wealth trickling down to all below them.
The non-idealized picture is that during the neoliberal age
damage to people and planet soared (see Chapter 34). Pope Francis
put it that we are turning our planet into a pile of filth.15 Exceptions
present their idealizations as innocuous and normalized when in
reality idealization not held in check has the potential to be truly

13
See footnote 17 for a fuller description of cladding. It is used to insulate the outside
of tower blocks.
14
As of 2020, only omnipotent quick fixes have been offered (such as we will pay
to re-clad all unsafe tower blocks across the land; well, when it comes to it, we will
not pay).
15
In his 2015 encyclical on climate change, Laudato si (https://laudatosi.com/watch).
40 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

destructive, indeed deadly. Currently, we face the prospect of ecocide

unless neoliberal Exceptions are ousted from power.
They have felt entitled not to experience guilt about the damage
they cause, because they believe they can rid themselves of guilt
through omnipotent thinking. However, guilt can tend to accumulate
when damage is not actually addressed. I will return to guilt later
(see Chapter 38). I raise it here to suggest it may add further clarity
to William Davies’s (2016) fascinating and illuminating account of
neoliberalism. He saw it as an evolving process which he broke
down into three successive stages that he named the combative, the
normalizing and the punitive.
Combative phase (1980s): neoliberals aggressively deregulated
markets and attacked existing cultures of care.
Normalizing phase (1990s): “‘horizons of political hope …
(were) … delimited to a single political-economic system’ that
reduced all value to monetized value”.
Punitive phase (post 2008): after the global financial crash,
austerity measures were widely imposed that were increasingly
punitive, humiliating and downright cruel.
One omnipotent ‘solution’ to rising guilt can be ascending to
greater arrogance and moral certainty by demonizing and punishing
the very group one has exploited and hurt.
The next chapter explores the ideology that sought to justify
neoliberal Exceptionalism and make it seem socially acceptable.
Beforehand, however, it is worth repeating that the current upsurge
of Exceptionalism occurring under capitalism should leave no one
on the left complacent. The Stalinist form was parodied by Orwell
in Animal Farm (1945). The pigs stood up on their hind hocks and
lauded it over the other animals, replacing their slogan ‘Four legs
good, two legs bad’ with ‘Two legs good, four legs bad’. ‘THIS
IS NOT THIS. THIS IS THAT’, they declared, as it suited them.
Exceptionalism, when unchallenged, tends to Authoritarianism.
 5
Friedrich Hayek and James
Buchanan

This chapter explores underlying Exceptionalism in ideas put forward

by Friedrich Hayek and James Buchanan, two prominent neoliberal
thinkers. First, a disclaimer: neoliberal ideology is on the couch here,
not its proponents. I agree with the Goldwater Rule,1 which states it
is prohibited for mental health professionals to offer clinical opinions
on individuals they have not seen and assessed in person.
While Hayek and Buchanan had slightly different adversaries,
agendas and nostalgias, each supported Exceptionalism in the
moneyed class, chiefly by attempting to provide it with ideological
justification. This proved highly useful to neoliberals in a post-
Second World War culture that considered Exceptionalism morally
beyond the pale.2

Friedrich Hayek
Hayek’s3 The Road to Serfdom4 (1944) is a classic neoliberal text in
which he argued that unrestricted freedom to compete is the lynchpin

1
See Chapter 3, footnote 13.
2
Jane Mayer (2016) described the battle of ideas that would enable them ‘to
transform themselves into “the respected “other side” of a two-sided debate”’. The
key word here is ‘respected’.
3
Hayek, an Austrian economist, founded what is known as the Austrian School. He
held positions at various centres including a professorship at the London School of
Economics.
4
When Hayek said his aim in writing this book was political, I believe he meant
political in the sense that he was offering a warning: accept my analysis or you will
end up as serfs without any freedom.
42 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

of a successful economy. Hayek thought in a money economy people

buy and sell to each other on the basis of competitive self-interest,
supply and demand. The economy ‘[guides] … all the individual
decisions. … It enables entrepreneurs … to adjust their activities to
follow those of their fellows. The important point here is that the
price system will fulfil this function only if competition prevails’
(my italics).
Competitiveness drives people and competitiveness must not be
held in check or the economy will falter. Issues of morality somehow
seem beside the point in this way of seeing. The way Hayek argued
this position would make him the darling of the right-wing and a
hero to politicians like Thatcher.
Hayek (1945) had raised a question he called the knowledge
problem. This is that no one could know enough to understand
the overall working of the economy and no one could have the
big picture. Individuals only have knowledge of a small part of
the economy, from their perspective (as workers, bosses, suppliers,
customers and so on). This essentially did not matter, as each knew
enough for the economy to function.
Hayek called his model a ‘price system under competition’
and argued that for it to work it needed to be free of government
planning and financial regulation. Forward planning oversimplified
and falsely claimed to know what the future would bring;
regulation stifled competition and, applied retrospectively, could
not keep on top of emerging problems. Government regulation and
state planning knocked the economy out of its natural rhythm and
self-righting balance. Not only did government officials not know
enough to plan successfully, they also protected their own interests.
Bruce Caudwell, a Hayek scholar writing for the Heritage
Foundation (a prominent neoliberal think tank), admiringly
described this way of arguing as Hayek’s ‘one-two punch’.5 First
punch: we do not have the knowledge to intervene effectively in an
economy; second punch: even if we did, the result would still be bad
policy as government officials tend to be venal and self-interested.6

5
https://www.heritage.org/report/ten-mostly-hayekian-insights-trying-economic-
times
6
An example of ‘punch one’ (government intervention is bad) given by contemporary
neoliberals is the Bush Administration handing General Motors a $6 billion bailout
in 2008. GM’s credit arm took the money and promptly offered interest-free
subprime loans. Neoliberals argue that all the bailout achieved was making it easier
for people with bad credit to buy a car.
 FRIEDRICH HAYEK AND JAMES BUCHANAN 43

Hayek was master at presenting a bit of the truth as the whole

truth. It is true that governments cannot know enough to foresee
all possible consequences and that some of their interventions
make matters worse. It is also true that many government officials
feather their own nests. To believe otherwise is naïve. However, it
does not follow that all government intervention of all kinds is bad.
That fails to distinguish between different sorts of problems and
different sorts of interventions, crudely lumping them all together
and applying a ‘one medicine cures all ailments’ approach.
It is true we cannot know the future with absolute certainty
which makes planning difficult. The coronavirus has made this
glaringly obvious. However, scientists by the 1980s clearly saw the
future that awaited us if we fetishized short-term profit: it would
ultimately lead to our current climate mess.
Hayek offered non-interference by government as the only
remedy. He failed to consider that other remedies might come from
learning from experience and taking the issue of human greed
seriously. That would require financial services to be regulated and
corruption in government tackled more effectively.
The doctrine of government non-interference was in any case
disingenuous. The aim was not to get rid of government but to
change government to act more for the few and less for the many.
That still required regulation. It was caring government acting to
keep Exceptionalism contained that was under attack.
Hayek argued against ‘collectivism’ which he contrasted with
‘individualism’. He defined collectivism as ‘that sort of planning
which is necessary to realise any given distributive ideals’ (my
italics). Put simply, he was against government taking from the few
and distributing what they took to the many, in the name of any
ideal. Hayek was writing in the 1940s when collectivism had indeed
stifled individualism in Russia, and it might seem he was arguing
specifically against communist ideas of redistribution. His position,
however, was far more radical. He was against any encroachment on
individual entitlement. This meant he was against welfare provision
under capitalism too. Both Roosevelt’s and Clement Attlee’s
UK governments would have fallen under Hayek’s definition of
collectivism, as both involved some distribution of wealth.
Hayek made a capitalist system that supported higher taxes
appear as if tarred with the same brush as discredited Soviet-style
communism. Neoliberal Exceptions would start to use ‘government
regulation bad, free market good’ as a mantra whenever regulation
44 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

stood in the way of their profits. Hayek had said so. Actually,
though Hayek said so, it was with provisos that would be swept
away by future neoliberals who championed his ideas.7 They would
feel emboldened to state that economics had its own immutable
laws and that issues of moral philosophy were beyond its scope.
This, of course, suited their purpose.
Hayek’s style of arguing – state a part truth and lump different
things together as though they were the same – has proved so
helpful to neoliberals that by now social democratic capitalist
countries like Denmark are frequently dismissed as ‘socialist’.
Communist, socialist, social democratic? All the same BAD thing.
This would spread to mainstream Western culture. A recent
example is a conversation between Oprah Winfrey and a Danish
woman discussing the finding that Danish people rank happiest in
the world.8

Oprah: I know your country is a democratic country, but it’s a

democratic country with a lot of socialist views. Correct?
Danish woman: Well, you might think so. … We think of it as
being civilized; that you take care of your old and your sick.
And you make sure that people get well educated.

The idea that governments who take care of the old and the
sick are suspect through association with ‘evil communism’ owes a
lot to Hayek. By 2020, Trump had ramped up this propaganda to
include US Democrats.
Hayek thought government’s role should be limited to providing
security (police and army) and very basic services. Earlier on, he
had thought it should also provide a basic safety net for people too.
Hayek did believe that for a competitive economy to be effective, a
legal framework was vital in order to prevent fraud and deception.
He thought his system was fair as each individual in it could
compete and try to win.

7
Hayek, for instance, argued that a basic social framework was vital for his type of
economy to flourish. He raised concerns about what could happen in a free-market
economy such as the rise of monopolies that would distort it. Nonetheless while he
raised these provisos he never really addressed them adequately.
8
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/3/4/1746440/-Oprah-got-perfect-response-
from-Danish-woman-on-their-social-welfare-state?detail=emaildkre
 FRIEDRICH HAYEK AND JAMES BUCHANAN 45

Hayek’s theory offers a view of society that only thrives ‘if’: if

the competitive playing field is level, if the law protects all equally,
if people actually are as he says they are. It begins to be apparent
that his ‘society’ is an idealized theoretical organism not suited to
real-world conditions. In the real world, people and politics do not
look like his description of them.
A deep division lay at the heart of Hayek’s way of seeing human
beings. Put them in government, he said, and they would be self-
serving, greedy and bad, especially the left wingers. Set them free to
compete in the marketplace and their self-interest was admirable.
His ideas helped justify preserving the exaggerated entitlements of
free-market Exceptions. His method was to delegitimize government
whenever it acted to restrain them and hold them accountable. The
idea was not to dismantle government but rather to transform it so
it would support economic Exceptions.
Hayek presented people as with no caring qualities, simply
designed to compete. Another half-truth. He expunged morality
not only from economic theory, but from human beings too. He
comes across as not much interested in people. They tend to appear
as straw (wo)men or as drained of vitality and complexity in his
account. At one level this lack of interest in people as people is
unsurprising as his theoretical focus placed moral judgement,
human psychology and human struggles outside the boundary of a
domain he had carved out as economic theory. However, this itself
is an oversimplification. It is not possible to divorce economics from
the complexity of what it is to be human with both caring and
uncaring qualities. James Baldwin (1989) put it that ‘morality –
when one looks beneath the word – is to do with how people treat
each other’ (p. 214), and this applies in trade perhaps more than
in any other area. It is also not possible to divorce economics from
issues of democracy. Democracy is meant to be government of the
people, by the people, for the people. It is meant to deliver what
people want and vote for, and this is different to what an economic
theory distilled in a culture-free petri glass says they should want
so that an idealized notion of the economy can ‘work’. Hayek had
started out rightly cautioning against omniscient oversimplification,
but he himself oversimplifies; not only that, but in my view, he then
idealizes his own model.
There is more to humans than the drive to compete. They suffer
conflict and they suffer pain and in Hayek’s model their pain is
46 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

an irrelevance. Some people have suffered greatly as a consequence

of the free market and when that market is idealized their pain is
simply not heard.
The howls of pain Hayekian economics would lead to in the real
world would not be heard by neoliberals in power whose attention
was on how elegant their model is and how everything must be
sacrificed to allow it to operate unimpeded. If the economy failed,
this was because Hayekian economics were not being pursued fully
enough. If only all regulation was out of the way. This mindset
precludes learning from experience. When things go wrong, the
lesson is not that ideas need revising and reality needs mapping
more closely; the illusory conclusion is that if only the idealized
model had been applied fully and perfectly, things would not have
gone wrong. It is a self-sealed closed system that promotes deafness.
When Milton Friedman set about testing Hayek’s economic
model under real conditions in the 1970s the only places it could
be realistically applied were countries in Latin America run by
dictators.9 I will return to Friedman’s influence in Chapter 9.

James Buchanan
James Buchanan, a right-wing libertarian and professor of
economics at the University of Virginia between 1956 and 1968,
was the chief architect of ‘Public Choice Theory’.
Buchanan’s stated aim was to break ‘the powerful grip that
collectivist ideology already had on the minds of intellectuals’.
Central to collectivist ideology is the idea that powerful corporations
need constraining by ‘countervailing power’, a concept put forward
by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith (1952). Government was
a strong potential source of countervailing power, so were strong
trades union movements.10
Public Choice Theory offered neoliberals strategies to weaken
government’s power to regulate corporations and, also, to help

9
Such as Chile and Argentina (see Klein, 2007).
10
Organized workers could also act as countervailing power: ‘There is a gradient of
power running against labour in capitalist societies unless unions act to pull it back’
(Coates, 2000, p. 103).
 FRIEDRICH HAYEK AND JAMES BUCHANAN 47

corporations raid the public sector for profit. Public choice theorists
argued, for instance, that government-run public services (including
social security, healthcare, education, prisons and the running of
government itself) were failing badly and only a series of radical
reforms could save them. The actual agenda was to privatize public
services while at the same time stripping government of power
and also stripping people of power and choice to decide what was
important to them.
Buchanan’s ideas appealed to right-wing libertarian billionaires
like the Koch Brothers11 as he offered a programme, with clear steps,
of how to gain control of politics.12 The historian Nancy MacLean
(2017) detailed how Buchanan and fellow neoliberal libertarians
attacked the power of central government and placed themselves
beyond accountability to the state.
She revealed correspondence in which Buchanan had argued
for the need to break trust in government. The period between the
1950s and 1970s was an age when, as MacLean noted, ‘put simply,
most Americans then trusted their government’ (p. 46). According
to Buchanan, people should not look to government with any
expectation or hope to be guided.
The issue of breaking trust goes further. An ideology that insists
that people act solely out of self-interest undermines peoples’
basic trust in themselves, in each other and in social institutions. It
promotes cynicism, apathy and despair.
Hayek had raised the spectre of bad government, but Buchanan
argued the case even more vigorously. It could be said that he
usefully debunked idealization of government’s role as nobly
carrying out voters’ wishes. However, this would be to ignore the
fact that his agenda was essentially subversive. ‘Our purpose was
indeed subversive,’ he insisted (MacLean, 2017, p. 45). Like Hayek,
he would use part truth as whole truth. A fuller truth would include
that Buchanan’s attacks on government were aligned with breaking
its power to interfere in any way with the interests of the wealthy.

11
David Koch argued that Ronald Reagan was a hypocrite who represented ‘no
change whatsoever from Jimmy Carter and the Democrats’ Confessor, 2014).
12
Monbiot (2017) noted that ‘Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman
… as “sellouts”, as they sought to improve the efficiency of government rather than
destroy it altogether. But Buchanan took it all the way.’
48 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Buchanan argued for setting rules, not just policy. Once the rules
were set your way, the game would be played your way. Setting
the rules was discussed in The Calculus of Consent (1962), written
with Gordon Tullock. One rule was that there must be unanimous
agreement before any redistribution of wealth is allowed.
Louise Halper (1993), writing for the Cornell Journal of Law,
unpicked line by line the assumptions in this uncompromising
position. In practice, she argued, it protects the status quo: ‘The
status quo cannot be changed without unanimous consent no
matter how the status quo came to exist’ (my italics).13
Halper made a penetrating point in saying that the implication
is ‘that one ha[s] a property right to an unchanging world’. Her
way of putting it goes to the heart of what Exceptionalist thinking
involves. True Exceptions have a deep sense of owning the world
they omnipotently construct and control. In what is effectively a
psychic retreat from reality, they need never suffer loss, all their
entitlements are preserved forever, no opposition exists and no
conflicts should arise that trouble them. The clocks are stopped.
Time that positions and limits us all and reminds us of transience
is no longer real. One suspects it is this obliteration of real, ticking,
time – and, with it, obliteration of a historical perspective in which
one is obliged to face loss and to change – that is behind arguing for
preserving entitlements pertaining right now.
Buchanan’s mission was to preserve the entitlements of the
moneyed class in perpetuity. That meant making structural changes
permanently to disable democratic challenge. He thought that
Reagan did not go far enough to abolish resistance to neoliberal
ideas.14 He wanted to create institutions that would constitutionally
protect property rights in perpetuity, in effect protecting the right
to a world without any change in or loss of status or possessions.

13
Halper argues that, ‘Perhaps in response to criticism that he institutionalizes the
status quo, Buchanan has given multiple accounts of the creation of the state, which
conflict as to whether property, market, or state is prior. In his 1962 work, Calculus
of Consent, and again in his 1974 work, The Limits of Liberty, Buchanan indicated
that possession predated both market and state.’
14
‘I assess the Reagan presidency as one of failed opportunity to secure the structural
changes that might have been within the realms of the politically possible.’ Buchanan
(1989), p. 14.
 FRIEDRICH HAYEK AND JAMES BUCHANAN 49

Under neoliberalism, international trade agreements like TTIP

(Transatlantic Trade and Investor Partnership) and TPP (Transpacific
Partnership) would have clauses that stated that if governments
pass laws that interfere with corporations’ profits, even profits that
might be made in the future, corporations are entitled to sue for
compensation. The logic here is that if, for instance, a government
wants to introduce plain packaging on cigarette packages as
a public health measure, the tobacco companies can sue the
government for loss of profits. The rationale comes straight from
Buchanan’s model: every last person – aka the corporations – must
agree, and the mechanism to get them to agree is ensuring they will
suffer no loss.
Halper argued back in 1993 that Buchanan’s model would be
bound to ‘enhance rather than diminish … inequality’, and this has
come to pass. George Monbiot (2017) put the situation starkly:
‘Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity,
pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. … The
choice we face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy.
You cannot have both.’
MacLean’s central argument in Democracy in Chains is that
neoliberalism (which she referred to mostly as libertarianism)
is inherently incompatible with democracy and is better suited
to oligarchy. Her book charted how neoliberals like Buchanan
undermined democracy during the neoliberal age.
Buchanan’s vision of ensuring that the battle is won in perpetuity
is riddled with Exceptionalist thinking: we are entitled not to have
the trouble of fighting our political corner. The wish was to create
a utopian ‘employers’ paradise’ as Irenee Dupont of the Dupont
Motor Company put it (MacLean, 2017, p. 46). It was businessmen
like du Pont whom Roosevelt had labelled ‘economic royalists’.
Hayek and Buchanan had slightly different agendas and
nostalgias. Buchanan’s agenda was to mount a slow piecemeal
series of attacks on government power. His chosen nostalgia seems
to have been for the time before the American Civil War, when
the entitlements of racist white southern plantation owners were
not yet overridden by federal government.15 With both thinkers is

For flesh on the bones of this argument, see Halper (1993).

15
50 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

revealed the Exception’s yearning to have loss magically reversed.

The wishful phantasy here appears to be of return to an idealized
time before the loss of any entitlements – that time of ruling supreme,
entitled to be it all, have it all and suffer no inner discomfort: a sort
of retrospective Eden finally reclaimed.
 6
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand earned her place in the neoliberal hall of fame by insisting
that selfishness is admirable.1 This proved useful to neoliberals
seeking to justify their Exceptionalism. She argued business leaders
are good and those who think business leaders owe society anything
at all are bad. The ‘bad’ included Left-Liberals, New Dealers,
Welfare Statists, organized workers and ‘One Worlders’ (people
who believe in universal human rights).
Rand’s devotees would come in time to rule the Western world.
Alan Greenspan, chair of the US Federal Reserve for nineteen years,
was an ardent Rand admirer and he attended her funeral in 1982.
Reagan and Thatcher were great fans and Trump’s cabinet has been
filled with a revolving door of Randians.2 Her ideas are now part of
mainstream political thinking (see Freedland, 2017).
In Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand expressed her views through
three characters, all wealthy businessmen. The novel gives a vivid
picture of how Exceptions think. Hank Rearden, standing trial
for breaking a government regulation, enters no plea and states
that only violent force used against him, or incarceration, will
hold him back from doing whatever he wants to do. He says, ‘I
earn [my profit]. … I refuse to apologize for my success – I refuse
to apologize for my money. If this is evil … let the public destroy
me. … The public good be damned, I will have no part of it! …

1
A defence of selfishness can also be found in her other main novel The Fountainhead
(1968) and in Rand’s writing and talks on ‘Objectivism’.
2
Including Mike Pompeo, Rex Tillerson and Trump himself. Paul Ryan admires
Rand too, distancing himself only from her stance on religion (Rand was an atheist).
52 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

The crowd burst into applause.’ Rearden is found guilty of breaking

the regulation, but only ordered to pay a token $5,000.
Rand, adept at merging political propaganda with fiction,3
portrayed Rearden in glamourized terms as ‘a tall grey figure …
[who] … belonged in the sternly luxurious office of a rich
corporation … his bearing came from a civilised era and clashed
with the place around him’.
Rand made exploitative treatment and unaccountability seem
moral and superiority seem a virtue. However, note the stark black
and white contrasts. Rearden is ‘civilized’, the court ‘uncivilized’;
business man is ‘good’, federal court is ‘bad’; good businessmen
are neoliberal like Rearden while bad businessmen support the
government. In the political world of 1957 good businessmen were
FDR’s economic royalists.
You are fully entitled to be Exceptions, she was telling the business
class. Francisco d’Anconia, a second hero in Atlas Shrugged, says,
‘The real maker of wealth, … the highest type of human being
[is] the self-made man the American industrialist …. Moochers
… claim your product by tears … looters … take it from you by
force’. ‘Workers contribute only “the muscular effort of unthinking
brutes”’. A third businessman hero John Galt argues that to accept
owing anyone anything is to sanction evil.
The idealized stereotype in Atlas Shrugged is the entrepreneur,
who apparently creates wealth by himself, solely with his mind.
John Galt, in a speech that goes on and on, eulogizes the mind. It is a
mind stripped of all emotion.4 Feelings are demonized and felt only
by unthinking brutes. Galt describes them as ‘shyster feelings’. The
message is: do not let thinking be affected by feelings like concern,
guilt or shame. Feelings are like crooked people, out to steal and
deceive. Guilt inhibits your proper estimation of yourself as a
superior being. John Galt says, ‘The industrialists, the conquerors
of matter, had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that
theirs was the glory.’

3
Whittaker Chambers (1957) would describe this as ‘dodging into fiction’: ‘The
mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your
reading it as political reality. This, she is saying in effect, is how things really are.’
4
Rand would elaborate this in her writings on what she called ‘Objectivism’.
 AYN RAND’S ATLAS SHRUGGED 53

Whittaker Chambers (1957) in a review of Atlas Shrugged

published in the conservative National Review put it, ‘The author
deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. …
everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any
of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and
perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly.’
Rand, advocate of emotionless reason,5 nonetheless stirs up
considerable hatred and resentment in this novel. The world
she paints is stark, loveless, paranoid and devoid of generosity.
Entrepreneurs suspiciously hate workers and workers enviously
hate entrepreneurs (except for those workers who idolize their
bosses). Entrepreneurs have no needs or dependencies, with all
neediness located in the hated workers.
A more balanced view is that workers need entrepreneurs
and managers need workers. All work and create together. The
political issue is over relative entitlements and remunerations.
Hank Rearden’s position is clear on this: ‘Do I wish to pay my
workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not.’ Rand’s
novel serves as propaganda for preserving the entitlements of the
wealthy. To give up any part of your profit is evil. This ‘quick fix’
legitimizes greed, absolves from guilt, and feeds superiority and
triumph.
Exceptions easily convince themselves that they are the source
of everything, have no dependencies and are the ones who keep
everything going. Because of this, they can easily feel ‘put upon’,
unappreciated and resentful. ‘I’m sick and tired of looking after
everyone,’ a patient said to me. ‘Everyone wants a piece of me. I’m
worn out.’ I thought she was in the grip of her inner exception.
Eventually, I said I thought she felt she had to do all the work in
the session today, even feeding me with all these words to satisfy
my greedy curiosity, and this was leaving her feeling drained. My
patient said my interpretation had brought her relief.
I saw her state of mind as similar to Amenhotep IV believing
he was the Sun God Re. He must have felt weary believing he had
to light the whole world each day and fill everyone up with his
self-created rays of warm sunshine. (Can we perhaps also hear the

5
As part of ‘Objectivism’.
54 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

similarity with Rand’s idea that industrialists provide everything for

a mooching, looting, leeching, working class who steal from them
and drain all their creativity?)
My patient had come to her session saying in effect that she
wanted to go on strike from having to look after everyone. In Atlas
Shrugged, John Galt no longer wanted to carry the world on his
shoulders; he believed he provided so much, only to be called selfish
and greedy for his trouble. Galt’s ‘solution’ was to leave society,
along with like-minded entrepreneurs, for a mountain retreat.
‘Let’s see how the workers manage without us!’ was the resentful
sentiment.
Exceptions are prone to paranoid survival anxieties and we can see
these anxieties in Rand’s characters. John Galt put it thus, ‘first they
come for your esteem and then your possessions’. True Exceptions
see workers who want a higher wage or environmentalists who
want to curb harmful industrial practices, or civil society that wants
to support social welfare as enemies wanting to suck them dry, even
kill them. Rearden saw moochers and leechers as ‘creatures who
wanted to survive at the price of my blood’. The trio of business-
men in Atlas Shrugged makes it clear they will fight to the death
anyone who infringes on their ‘entitlements’. This paranoid view
will be further explored in Chapter 34 on Exceptions’ flight/fight
phantasies about the climate crisis.
Jane Mayer (2016) in Dark Money: The Hidden History of
the Billionaires behind the Rise of the Radical Right highlighted
paranoia behind neoliberals’ thinking. John MacArthur (2016)
in a review of Dark Money in the right-wing-leaning magazine
The Spectator found this the strongest part of Mayer’s argument.
‘[She] … reports on the pathos of the right-wing billionaire class,
for there is something almost pitiful about its paranoia. In their
view of the world, the Kochs and their fellow rich – most of whom
inherited large amounts of family money – are constantly hounded
and beleaguered by “envious leftists” working on behalf of the
undeserving poor.’
Another reason why Exceptions may be prone to paranoia is
they may omnipotently ‘deal with’ any guilt at taking more than
their fair share by mentally constructing a category of denigrated
‘leechers and moochers’. Their own bad behaviour can now be
projected onto the ‘leechers and moochers’. This may stir further
 AYN RAND’S ATLAS SHRUGGED 55

paranoid anxieties that the demonized ‘other’ will actually retaliate.6

Exceptions may then redouble their efforts to self-idealize and
demonize to shore up their defences, increasing their disassociation
from reality and from empathy towards the other.
I felt harangued and bludgeoned by the length, outrage, vilification
and extreme divisions into good and evil in Atlas Shrugged. Rand
offers herself as a kind of bully minder, her message being ‘if you
want to be more of an exception, if your inner exception feels stifled
(and whose does not?), get behind me and I will “muscle argue” a
way through for us both!’ However, the real bullying action of her
prose – its propaganda function – was to provoke a shift in what is
called the ‘Overton Window’ (named after Joseph Overton7). The
Overton Window is the range of political ideas that the mainstream
currently finds acceptable. In the 1950s, the views of neoliberal
ideologues like Rand lay far outside the Window. Rand’s writing
and speeches helped make demonizing the poor, the needy and
organized workers8 gradually become mainstream.
Trump acts in a similar way to Rand, saying the outrageous
and then clawing it back somewhat and so does Boris Johnson in
the UK. In that way what was deemed outrageous is now on the
political map and the Window has shifted. This is straight from
Rand’s play book.
Rand rightly raised as a problem that selfishness is usually seen
as only bad. However, she recast selfishness as only good. The more
selfish the better, in her view. This gross oversimplification helped
her create the impression that only looking after number one is

6
The British Kleinian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein is largely responsible for
elaborating the idea of anxiety that persecutes. Projection can tend to increase
persecutory anxiety.
7
Joseph Overton was vice-president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy,
a right-wing think tank. He argued that for any political issue, the range of
acceptable positions is narrower than that of possible positions. Owen Jones, in
The Establishment (2014), described outriders who ‘(float) ideas or policies that
a politician would not dare mention. In doing so, they shift the Window. Even if a
politician meets the outrider’s concept halfway, what is seen as moderate has shifted’
(p. 45).
8
In Atlas Shrugged, Rand posits two main kinds of worker: subversives to be despised
and those who stick loyally by company bosses, the latter to be admired.
56 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

good. Later, we will see Thatcher employ the same tactic with her
mantra ‘there is no such thing as society’.
The last three chapters have explored Exceptionalism in right-
wing neoliberal ideology. It can of course arise in left-wing politics
too. Chambers (1957) had cautioned that ‘neither Right nor
Left … has a monopoly of such (oversimplifying) dreamers, though
the horrors in their nightmares wear radically different masks and
labels’.
 7
Globalizing the neoliberal
way

Globalization mostly refers to the economic transformation that

occurred after the neoliberal ascendancy in the 1980s, but it also
describes vastly greater interconnectivity between people and the
spread of a more monolithic consumerist culture across the globe,
loosely known as ‘the American way of life’.
In the globalized economy, goods from across the world became
cheaper and more accessible for those who had means. A young
middle-class mother (or father) could now feed their baby a meal
prepared of avocado from South Africa pureed with banana from
Honduras, followed by a puree of lamb from New Zealand,
broccoli from the UK and sweet potato from the United States, then
segments of tangerine from Turkey and mango from India. One-
click shopping on the internet could bring the whole world to the
front door.1
In 2014 Benjamin Carle, a French journalist, decided to buy
and to own products made only in France (see Willsher, 2014). He
gave away everything made elsewhere – 95.5 per cent of what he
owned – and was photographed sitting in his underpants on a chair
in his virtually bare living room. Carle called himself a ‘child of
globalization’.

1
The middle classes in India, China and elsewhere are now joining in with
consumerism.
58 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

However, we are children of neoliberal globalization, not

globalization as such. Globalization, important for trade, problem
solving and growing interconnectivity, need not have happened the
neoliberal way, despite neoliberal culture’s insistence that its way
is ‘the only way’. A deregulated ‘free’ market economy brought
material and sensual benefits and increased opportunities for
travel, exploration and learning for many. However, those who
built this economy were in thrall to an ideology that encouraged
them to disassociate themselves from care, ignore real limits
and boundaries, and abhor any idea they were indebted. In this
state of mind, they could discount true costs. Why look after the
environment or consider the position of people and of animals
when all exist solely to profit from? They could also dispense with
gratitude. When acknowledging need is abhorred and everything
is taken for granted, no gratitude and indebtedness are felt.
Ecological and social debt2 would not appear on balance sheets in
the neoliberal economy. People could demand ever cheaper goods
without truthfully factoring in all the costs. Later I explore how this
mindset grew the climate fraud bubble.

‘Logistics’
In the 1990s sleek new-styled lorries appeared on UK highways,
their sides blank except for logos that often included the word
‘logistics’ (e.g. ‘Logistic Solutions’). They gradually replaced old-
style lorries that showed the manufacturer’s name and a picture of
the product.
I offer these lorries with their ‘Logistics’ logos as a metaphor
for the free-market global economy taking hold by the 1990s and
suggest that drivers of this economy required ‘logistic solutions’ to
two main problems: how to organize production to maximize profit
and how to hide this plan from ordinary people as most would
disapprove of it if they saw it clearly. Neoliberal ‘logistics’ included
moving production to where costs were lowest, and promoting a
culture to make the harm this caused seem acceptable.

2
The concept of ecological debt – what we owe to nature – was put forwards by the
economist Andrew Simms (2005).
 GLOBALIZING THE NEOLIBERAL WAY 59

I remember missing the old-style lorries. It was easy to see what

they were doing on the road, whereas the new lorries with their
‘logistics’ logos were more mysterious, inviting a curiosity they
left unsatisfied. At one level, ‘logistics’ was an apt logo, as the
new globalized economy was complex and streamlined, involving
component parts manufactured in scattered places that needed
to be transported to be assembled, and ‘logistics’ was a succinct
description of this complex activity.
In the new economy carrots grown in Devon England could be
flown to one country in Europe to be peeled and chopped up, then
flown to another to be packaged as part of a stir-fry pack, then
transported back to be sold in the supermarket next to the field they
were grown in, now mixed with other chopped vegetables. Complex
logistics were involved, conceived by a mindset disassociated from
any adverse effects on people or planet or problems that would
ensue if the supply chain broke down.3
Factories were moved to countries with the lowest environmental
protections, employing workers willing to accept the lowest wages.
If it was cheaper to fly vegetables from one country to another to peel
and chop them, so be it. Never mind the human and environmental
cost. Aviation fuel was kept low in the new global economy.4 By
applying neoliberal logistics, a humble home-grown carrot’s carbon
footprint would be ramped up. We would be unaware of the carrot
or its history as it sped past us to the supermarket in a streamlined
silver truck. It would give us no food for thought.
Neoliberal logistics would come to include how to hide
the evidence of fraud, suffering, environmental damage and
squandering. Taxes were avoided and profits hidden in offshore
accounts;5 workers and animals were maltreated;6 unsavoury ‘by-
products’ were hidden in processed food;7 palm oil producers

3
The fragility and short termism involved in these supply chains would become
plainer to see during the corona virus pandemic in 2020.
4
Aviation fuel has been historically and is currently undertaxed, according to
economists from the IMF and the World Bank compared to other forms of transport.
Airlines on international flights pay no fuel duty and VAT is zero rated (Aviation
Environment Federation report: https://www.aef.org.uk/issues/economics/taxation).
5
See, for example, on tax havens, Harding (2016).
6
See, for example, Solotaroff (2013).
7
See, for example, Jamie Oliver (2005) discussing ‘turkey twizzlers’, which he said
had only 30 per cent turkey in them.
60 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

hacked down rainforests8 and large fishing fleets hoovered up fish

and threw ‘discard’ back in the sea.9
During the neoliberal era, investigative journalists would find it
increasingly hard to uncover the truth about all of this. We now
tend to get our information from whistle-blowers or undercover
reporters with hidden video cameras who lie their way into facilities
from factories to distribution depots to privatized for-profit care
homes, to find out what is actually going on behind the closed
doors.10 We live in a culture that sees this secrecy and obfuscation
as usual and expectable, just the way things are.
‘Logistics’ has included maintaining an idealized picture of the
neoliberal global economy while hiding its ugly side, chiefly hiding
that it causes damage and suffering, erodes democracy, brings
instability and is unsustainable. Perhaps its worst legacy is that
it erodes trust and belief in goodness and truthfulness by making
increasing corruption and fraud seem normal, usual and expectable.
I believe most ordinary people are aware of what I have described,
even if they keep their awareness to the corners of the mind.
However, they may not have appreciated the scale of problems that
came with the new economy. This in my view is where neoliberal
‘logistics’ has operated most ‘effectively’. ‘Logistics’ has included
knowing how to persuade people to collude with the uncare at
the heart of the neoliberal economy without quite consciously
realizing they are colluding. ‘Logistics’ has involved psychologically
engineering things such that a corporate aim to keep us in the dark
could mate with the part of us that has not wanted to see. The
central part of this book is about the culture neoliberals put in place
to foster this collusion.

8
Scientific American reported in 2008 that palm oil production was the largest cause
of deforestation in Indonesia and other equatorial countries with dwindling expanses
of tropical rainforest (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/harvesting-palm-
oil-and-rainforests).
9
For a picture of fish discards globally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discards.
10
On work conditions at Amazon warehouses, see Godlewski (2018). On factory
conditions, see the summary by Brian Merchant (2017a) about his book The One
Device (2017b), on conditions within Foxconn, the plant that manufactures Apple
products, in which in 2010 unhappy workers started killing themselves; Chris
Merriman (2014) reported that, two years later, workers’ conditions remained dire.
On care homes, see Gordon (2016).
 8
The neoliberal rise to power

What propelled neoliberals to power in the 1980s?1 Earlier,

they had generally been widely thought too extreme to be taken
seriously. Common reasons offered are two oil crises and that major
economies were failing to deliver sufficient growth by the 1970s.2
Naomi Klein (2014) linked the neoliberal surge with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, arguing it had acted as a brake on capitalism. She
reflected that at the very point when capitalism needed reining in
(primarily because of awareness of global heating) it surged ahead,
portraying itself as ‘the only way’.
Also relevant to the neoliberal surge was Milton Friedman’s
economic experiment in Latin America.3 Friedman and his ‘Chicago
School’ saw Latin America as a testing ground for neoliberal
economic theory.4 Military dictators in Chile and Argentina staged
coupes d’état in the 1970s.5 Pinochet in Chile and the generals
in Argentina, both of whom had imposed neoliberal free-market
economies through fear and violence (remember the football

1
Thatcher came to power in 1979 and Reagan in 1981.
2
See, for example, Streeck (2016).
3
Milton Friedman, an economist, and head of school at Chicago University, was an
admirer of Hayek.
4
Friedman had considerable covert backing from the US government to encourage
the spread of neoliberal free-market ideas in Latin America before the coupes. This
was US strategic planning to forestall the rise of what was called the development
model in South America. It was seen as a threat to capitalism.
5
Pinochet in Chile and the generals in Argentina had overturned the more egalitarian,
governments of Allende and Peron.
62 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

stadia in Chile and the ‘disappearances’ of political opponents

in Argentina?), did so with Friedman’s economic guidance and
steerage and with American backing.6
The neoliberal free-market model, no longer just theory, had
now been applied in reality and this may have helped ‘normalize’
neoliberal ideas and make them more mainstream and acceptable.
When Hayek urged Margaret Thatcher to apply the Chilean model
in the UK, she told him the culture in the UK would not support
it back then. She would see it as her chief aim to influence British
culture to be more accepting of neoliberal framing and economic
policy (see Chapter 26).
Returning to ‘stalled growth’ as a reason for the neoliberal
surge, economists commonly refer to the thirty-year period after
the Second World War as Capitalism’s Golden Age, a time when
GDP grew, unevenly across different countries but nevertheless
in an upward curve. By the 1970s growth had stalled and some
‘stagflation’7 had occurred.
Economists from different schools who poured over post-war
growth figures noticed disparities. Countries like Japan, Germany
and Sweden had surged ahead, while the United States and the UK
had performed less well. Why? One argument was that capitalism
works better when deeply embedded in a system of government
regulation and planning, adequate social welfare, and cultures of
respect such that different power groups can forge ways to work
together. Japan, Germany and Sweden were – in their different
ways – more of this kind.8 The United States and the UK were more
openly competitive. Neoliberals pitched the opposite argument that
government regulation and intervention were precisely what had
led to the stall in growth. Marxist economists argued that capitalism

6
For a detailed description of this, see Klein (2007, chapter 3). Friedman’s
interventions were so wrenching ‘they could not “be imposed without … military
force and political terror”’ (Gunder Frank, 1976, quoted by Klein, 2007, p. 84).
7
Stagflation is where the inflation rate is high, the economic growth rate slows
and unemployment remains high. It presents a dilemma for economic policy, since
actions intended to lower inflation may raise unemployment.
8
This was called the trust model of capitalism (see Coates, 2000).
 THE NEOLIBERAL RISE TO POWER 63

itself was inherently flawed and unworkable, inevitably leading to

boom and bust cycles.9
Streeck argued that slowed growth led the neoliberal revolution
because it heightened ‘distributional conflict’, meaning that with
less to share around there was greater determination by the wealthy
to preserve ‘entitlements’. With slowed growth also came increasing
vilification of workers. Coates noted, ‘Public Choice theorists
(neoliberals) had it that shameless workers, through wanting
more and more, upset the balance in the 1970s.’10 So long as there
had been economic growth, both sides were more likely to work
together and to compromise.
The stall in growth had led to greater economic insecurity and
uncertainty for employers and employees alike, and neoliberals
would capitalize on this insecurity to push unpopular measures
through. Naomi Klein’s (2007) The Shock Doctrine analysed how
neoliberals make use of moments of greater insecurity or crises to
push forward unpalatable agendas that in more settled times would
be rejected.11
Also dawning by the 1980s was awareness that endless growth
on a finite planet is an ‘as if’ phantasy, and that there is a planetary
pie to share with those living now and in the future. In the next
chapter, I argue that the underlying sense of shock this awareness
of limits caused may have been one of the reasons that propelled
neoliberals to power.

9
‘OECD capitalism has been on a crisis trajectory since the 1970s, the historical
turning point being the abandonment of the postwar settlement by capital in
response to a global profit squeeze. Subsequently, three crises followed one another:
the global inflation of the 1970s, the explosion of public debt in the 1980s, and
rapidly rising private indebtedness in the subsequent decade, resulting in the collapse
of financial markets in 2008. This sequence was, by and large, the same for all major
capitalist countries, whose economies have never nearly been in equilibrium since
the end of postwar growth’ (Streeck, 2016).
10
Streeck had another account: that ‘profit dependents (neoliberals) betrayed the post
war settlement because they found it too costly’.
11
Trump’s push to abandon near all environmental protection measures in the early
months of the corona virus pandemic in 2020 is an example.
64
 9
The Earth seen as a globe

This chapter hopes to add further psychological perspective to

the question how did neoliberals manage to gain power in two
major democracies (United States1 and UK) in the 1980s? While a
multidisciplinary approach is needed for such a question, I believe
psychology can add to understanding.
The 1980s was the decade when people – I suggest particularly
those influenced by Western consumerist culture (see Chapter 13)
– began to realize in a radically new way that the earth has limits.
They were faced with the ‘No of Nature’, as climate psychologist
Ro Randall (2009) had put it. To appreciate the shock the 1980s
caused, I now explore phantasies about the earth, especially about
her being a globe.
Neil MacGregor (2012), former director of the British Museum,
has argued that it is hard now to appreciate how astounding it
was for people four hundred years ago to realize that the earth is
a globe.2 His argument is that in the late 1500s the English were
absorbing the impact of Francis Drake sailing round the world (da
Gama before him). The globe could now be crossed by a single
ship ‘passing round the world’, as Drake put it. The first book of
maps was published in 1570. Called the Theatre of the Lands of
the World,3 it was meant for armchair dreamers and adventurers

1
By the 1970s, the World Bank and the CIA were already applying neoliberal policies.
For example, Milton Friedman’s assistance to General Pinochet in Chile.
2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2c3M11xtCSSx9G5ntRlstcj/
transcript-shakespeares-restless-world-programme-1
3
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, by Abraham Ortelius, is considered to be the first true
modern atlas. It was originally printed in Antwerp.
66 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

not navigators, and it radically transformed the earth of the

imagination.
MacGregor’s enquiry was into how knowing the earth is a globe
might have led Shakespeare’s generation to rethink every aspect of
their existence. Reformation, dislocation and scientific discovery
were shaking up existing assumptions. MacGregor asked can we
now recover the sense of exhilaration and shock caused by a new
conception of the earth? Shakespeare’s plays in one sense can be
seen as the News, delivered by a poet. A young Londoner seeing
A Midsummer Nights’ Dream at Shakespeare’s new theatre, called
The Globe, would hear Oberon and Puck musing: ‘We the globe
can compass soon, swifter than the wandering moon4’ … ‘I’ll put a
girdle around the earth in forty minutes.’5 As MacGregor pointed
out, it took Drake years to circumnavigate the earth. Putting a
girdle round her was the imaginative act of ‘globalizing’ her.
MacGregor noted that in A Comedy of Errors, Dromio compares
a plump kitchen maid to a globe, and outrageously, misogynistically
and racistly mines her various parts. ‘She’s spherical, like a globe. I
could find countries in her. On what part of her body stands Ireland?
Marry sir, in her buttocks. I found it out by the bogs. … Where
America, the Indies? Oh sir, upon on her nose, or embellished with
rubies, carbuncles, sapphires.’6 Evident in this condensed quote is
excited avaricious greed unleashed by the new knowledge that the
earth is a globe: ‘The earth is now more accessible than ever before.
She is our possession, our servant, to be looted, plundered and
mined.’ And, indeed, the earth would be ruthlessly looted, plundered
and mined over the centuries that followed of industrialization and
colonization.
Four hundred years later came another pivotal and unsettling
moment. In 1968, when the first (hu)manned spaceship circled the
moon, NASA sent back film footage that would change perceptions
of the earth forever. For the first time, people could literally see the
earth as a whole – a globe in the dark vastness of space. Those born
later may not appreciate the extent to which the pictures of the
earth taken from space shocked and unsettled many people who

4
IV: ii, 81–4.
5
II: i, 160–1.
6
III: ii, 125–47.
 THE EARTH SEEN AS A GLOBE 67

saw them in the 1960s. It brought home in a new-felt way what

they already knew intellectually: that the earth is a small planet
with finite resources. Teeming with life, its protective breathable
atmosphere is just seven and a half miles high.7 I remember the
shock of realizing that was roughly the distance to my brother’s
house across London. I had somehow imagined the atmosphere as
vast.
Seeing earth from space promoted questions like is there life out
there or is the solar system barren and lifeless? Are we alone in
the universe? If we extinguish human life on earth do we not also
extinguish thought itself? Questions like this were deeply unsettling.
The 1960s also saw the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent
Spring (1962), which led to a greater awareness that we are
polluting the earth with harmful toxic chemicals (her focus was on
DDT). The environmental movement as we now know it was born,
and advances in computers and technology led to an explosion
of scientific knowledge about the earth and new understandings
emerged that interconnecting planetary systems support life on
earth. Earth was emerging more clearly as an entity quite separate
from our desires and omnipotent wishes.
However disturbing were the 1960s, the 1980s provided an even
greater shock. In 1988, James Hansen reported to the US Congress
that climate change is human caused, mostly the result of burning
fossil fuels.8 Many scientists already knew this, but now it became
general public knowledge. I suggest that humanity is still reeling
from the impact and implications of this news.
Its main import was that humanity was tasked with growing up
psychologically. That meant seeing clearly – without denial – that
the earth has limits and that we do not possess and control her. This
would have profound ramifications for governance, economics,
culture and the human imagination, as well as the fossil fuel
industry. It raised questions about the meaning of human progress.

7
The troposphere extends roughly 7.5 miles upwards from the surface of the earth.
Nearly all atmospheric water vapour or moisture is found in the troposphere. It is
the layer where most of Earth’s weather takes place and it contains roughly 80 per
cent of the mass of the Earth’s atmosphere.
8
In June 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the US Congress that
the planet is heating because we are burning so much fossil fuel and hence emitting
so much carbon dioxide (see, for example, Hansen, 2009).
68 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Is progress just increasing material prosperity? If so, at what cost,

for whom and for how long? Endless growth on a finite planet is not
possible unless one thinks differently about growth. Conventional
measures of growth were in narrow terms such as GDP, with the
received wisdom that an economy must grow to be successful.
Might new measures be well-being, greater scope for creativity
and increased concern? The shift in consciousness taking place in
the 1980s would be profoundly unsettling. It had never been part
of Enlightenment thinking that people could feel so unsettled by
science or would start to question so radically what progress meant.
The 1980s faced humanity with the task of collective mourning
and working through our idealizations. Only an idealized earth
constructed by omnipotent thinking has no limits, is endlessly
bountiful and is able to absorb all our waste products, however
toxic. As the psychoanalyst John Keene (2012) put it, such an earth
is like a phantasized ‘breast/toilet mother’ who endlessly provides,
absorbs and cleans up.
In many ways the shift now required was comparable to the
shift in view a small child undergoes when realizing that Mummy
is a person in her own right and not just there for her or his
gratification. In ordinary development this leads the child to greater
awareness that she or he shares Mummy and is part of a family.
In a de-idealized picture of Mummy, she is still bountiful, big and
mysterious, but she is no longer seen as indestructible. Rather, it
is recognized she can be tired and that she cannot satisfy infinite
wishes and demands.
The analogy between how we might see and treat Earth and
Mother when very young is only useful up to a point. The earth is
staggeringly complex, with interconnecting large systems we barely
understand. Where I suggest the analogy does hold is that letting
go of an idealized picture of mother involves mourning, and that
involves working through denial, rage and grief before coming to any
sort of acceptance. De-idealizing the earth also involves mourning.
In addition, it is frightening, saddening and guilt-inducing to think
one’s mother might be damaged, and I suggest we may feel similarly
about seeing the earth as fragile and damaged. Did we cause the
damage? How responsible are we? I remember once seeing a child
yell at her mother, ‘I hate you. I wish you were dead!’ She fled from
the room in tears, only for her face to reappear round the door with
 THE EARTH SEEN AS A GLOBE 69

a most worried expression that eased when she saw Mummy was
alright and Mummy’s emotional climate system was intact.
Just as children are tasked with growing up, so is humanity
now tasked with growing up and I suggest this first hit people in a
major way in the 1980s. The task of growing up involved mourning
illusory exaggerated entitlement, not easy anyway and especially
after four hundred years of colonialism and industrialization had
boosted it, especially in those who benefited most. Exaggerated
entitlement was deeply embedded in Western culture and supported
by philosophical and religious ideas of men holding dominion.
Looked at psychologically, the caring and uncaring parts of
people were bound to react differently to the shocking news that
the earth has limits. The caring part would be concerned and
spurred to address damage already done, where possible. It would
work to find new, less damaging, ways of living. It would soul-
search its assumptions and it would undertake the painful work of
mourning its illusions. It would ask what will happen if limits are
not respected, and it would feel realistic anxiety at the prospect.
Over the past forty years reality-based thinking has been
extensively applied to the issue of limits. Climate scientists modelled
what would happen if the earth’s red lines were crossed. Human
scientists asked what if human red lines are crossed? People have
limits too, and they react in predictable ways when traumatized
(see Chapter 32). A world with limits – whether the external world
or the inner psychic world – was being more fully imagined, and
ramifications for all disciplines began to be explored (economics,
history, psychology, politics, cultural studies). I go into this
renaissance in creative thinking in the part on the new imagination.
The issue was not just the need to switch from a carbon-based
economy, but to rebalance in a way that would put the caring
reality-based part more robustly in charge of politics.
The lesson of the 1980s was that to survive we must fit in with
nature and respect her limits. Over the next few decades scientists
would gear up to achieve a sustainable world where limits are
respected. To achieve that world, our penchant for omnipotent
thinking would have to be successfully challenged. Omnipotence
always finds spurious means to bypass limits and consequences.
Neoliberal Exceptions drew a different conclusion when faced
with limits which I will parody as follows:
70 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

We are not going to temper our economic model to respect

earth’s limits. We are not going to rein ourselves in. Seeing the
earth from space for the first time has excited our greed. With our
sophisticated technology, the whole world can now be our oyster.
We must free up trade and encourage people to see the world as
a giant shopping mall. That will fill our coffers. Let earth be the
great idealized breast we can suck from and discharge all our
waste into, without a thought for her state.

Ailton Krenak (2017), an Amerindian community leader from

Brazil, offered this radical challenge,

‘If we looked from another place in the sky we would take a

completely different photograph of the planet. Who knows if,
when Yuri Gagarin said “the Earth is blue”, he made an ideal
portrait of that moment for this humanity that we think we
are. … It is as if we had made a photoshop in the collective
planetary memory … It is like stopping in a comfortable,
pleasant, memory of ourselves, for example, in the lap of our
mother breastfeeding: a mother who is abundant, prosperous,
loving, caring, feeding us forever.
One day she moves and takes the breast out of our mouth.
Then, we take a drool, take a look around, complain because we
don’t see the mother’s breast, don’t see that maternal organism
feeding our whole life, and we start to tremble, to think that
this isn’t really the best of all worlds, that the world is ending
and we are going to fall somewhere. But we are not going to fall
anywhere, what the mother did was to turn around to get some
sun, but as we were so used to it, we wanted to breastfeed more.’9

Krenak’s ‘drool’ captures Exceptions’ response to seeing reality.

The real unidealized picture is glimpsed at dimly, darkly, through a
drool, then gums clamp on the idealized breast/nipple again and the
work of mourning is postponed. The economy will be globalized
and as much grabbed as possible in the short time remaining.10

9
Translated by Maria-Luisa Gastal.
10
The oil industry was aware of climate change by the early 1980s and accurately
predicted its devastating effects (see Lubben, 2019; Ramey, 2019).
 THE EARTH SEEN AS A GLOBE 71

Exceptions would have wanted to kick back to restore a nostalgia-

filled status quo ante. Therapists see this sort of backlash in patients
when facing limits in the clinical situation, and it operates at the
group and political level too.
Before rushing to judgement, I suggest it is as well to remember
that we all have an inner exception, and that mourning our idealized
pictures of ourselves and the idealized provision to which we feel
entitled is perhaps the hardest kind of mourning there is. The
struggle to face our omnipotence is ongoing. The issue is staying
with the struggle.
The 1980s was an experiential moment with the potential to
lead humanity to re-evaluate history and mourn idealization and
exaggerated entitlement; accept others are entitled too; feel guilt,
sorrow and greater awareness of dependency; feel gratitude and
the wish to repair; promote the psychic growth and expansion of
perspective and imagination that come with facing reality; push for
greater social justice.
Did neoliberal Exceptions capitalize on just how shocked many
people felt by the news coming from science that, to survive,
humankind must now cut cloth to suit reality?11 I believe the
underlying sense of unsettlement, uncertainty and shock people
faced in the 1980s has been underestimated. Neoliberals offered to
spare people the pain of facing that shock by offering them ‘as if’
ways forward.
Exceptions may have been able to push their uncaring project
ahead more vigorously in the 1980s precisely because greater care
and concern about the earth had been mobilized. Knowledge from
science had, disturbingly, challenged a cherished false belief that
people have all the time in the world to evolve towards taking
greater responsibility for the earth and for each other. In reality, the
mantra ‘make us better but please not yet!’ no longer held. As the
next part shows, neoliberals in power also used culture to encourage
a collusive pact with the ordinary exception within most of us at the
very time people felt unsettled and shocked at the prospect of change.

‘Trumpism’s only chance at political survival is to handicap Earth’s odds of

11

survival. Trump leverages tribal resentment against an emerging manifest common

destiny, a true universalism that recognizes that we all share the same vulnerable
planet. He stokes an enraged refusal of limits, even as those limits are recognized’
(Grandin, 2018).
72
 10
Implementing neoliberal
economic policy

During the 1980s and 1990s corporations began to move1 production

to places across the world where workers would accept low wages
and environmental protections were weak. Industries moved base,
first labour-intensive industries such as textile factories, next the
assembly stages of manufacturing such as car parts assemblies,
then consumer electronics and then financial services in the 1990s.2
Corporations were entitled, after all, to maximize profit and they
were now enabled to do so by neoliberal governments.
The ideal scenario for neoliberal Exceptions (Dupont’s
‘employers’ paradise’) is market-driven politics.3 However, the
danger is a drift towards totalitarianism. Mussolini had astutely
observed, ‘Fascism is when you cannot slide a cigarette paper
between business and government.’4 During the neoliberal era the

1
Market-driven politics of course existed long before the 1980s. Dickens’s Hard
Times addressed the same issues (along with environmental pollution) in the
nineteenth century.
2
For a good description of how this unfolded, see Leys (2001).
3
See Bernstein (1960), p. 144.
4
Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile wrote the entry for fascism in the Encyclopedia
Italiana that said: ‘Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because
it is a merger of state and corporate power’; Mussolini, however, affixed his name to
the entry, and claimed credit for it (quoted in Hartmann, 2015). The quotation by
Mussolini about the cigarette paper is, according to Wikipedia, cited by many but
hard to attribute accurately.
74 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

separation between business and government, vital to maintain

democracy, became progressively eroded. Here are just two
examples of business driving government, with both sides in the
grip of Exceptionalism.

Fracking in the UK
The first example concerns George Osborne, British chancellor in
2014, who sent an internal confidential leaked memo to cabinet
ministers.5 The memo was about fracking, the problem being that
drilling had not yet begun in Lancashire because so many locals
vehemently opposed fracking and Lancashire County Council had
turned down the company Cuadrilla’s application to frack. In the
memo, Osborne urged government departments to implement
Cuadrilla’s ‘asks’, two being that Cuadrilla’s lorries be allowed to
use land owned by the Ministry of Defence and that government
officials try to influence the local council to support fracking. Here
we can see government directly implementing the agenda of a
private company, using taxpayers’ money to lobby on its behalf and
making public resources available to it.
Osborne’s memo said, ‘I would ask that you make it a personal
priority to ensure [Cuadrilla’s “asks”] are implemented within the
agreed timetable.’ When the local council continued to refuse to
grant permission to frack, the government changed the law so it
could override the council, thereby undermining the democratic
process.6
It could be argued that a main function of government is to
support business and this government had plainly stated that it was
pro fracking. Was it not simply using its power to get things done?
However, this view ignores the dangers posed by a state of mind

5
The memo was leaked to the environmental group Friends of the Earth (see
Carrington, 2015).
6
Vaughan (2016).
 IMPLEMENTING NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC POLICY 75

feeling ‘entitled’ to override obstacles.7 It easily turns to impatience

and to bullying.8

Brexit
In April 2018, the Initiative for Free Trade (IFT), a think tank formed
in 20179 to deliver a hard Brexit, posted a glossy brochure on its
website and then swiftly removed it, but not before it had been
picked up and made public by Greenpeace.10 The IFT’s brochure
flagged up that ten right-wing neoliberal think tanks, from the UK
and from the United States, would be holding shadow talks11 to
shape trade negotiations after Brexit; to produce ‘a blueprint that
is looked upon favourably by both governments’ that could serve
as something ‘to work towards in the actual US-UK FTA (free trade
agreement) negotiations’. Angus MacNeil, chair of the International
Trade Select Committee (a UK government ‘oversight’ committee),
said these shadow trade talks risked handing the British Department
for International Trade an ‘off the shelf agenda’.
Big business was not just lobbying the UK government but
directly writing the policy for post-Brexit. The IFT brochure stated

7
For example, Tim Ratcliffe, listed top of the UK’s ‘rich list’ in 2018, who owns
INEOS, a £60 billion chemicals and energy (including fracking) corporation, has
consistently attacked EU environmental regulations and pushed for a hard Brexit
that would see them waived (see Pooler, 2019).
8
The main refrain from Boris Johnson during his bid to get his hard Brexit deal
through the British Parliament was that the British public was fed up and frustrated
with the Brexit process. Get it done! The people are sick of waiting! Might this
have involved some projection and amplification of frustration? Exceptionalism is
a mindset that can find it very hard to wait. Why should Exceptions be bound by
time’s restraint?
9
Run by Conservative Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan.
10
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/02/17/hard-brexit-think-tank-accidentally-
published-plans-us-uk-shadow-trade-talks/
11
The ten think tanks are the AEI, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute, Heritage
Foundation and Contemporary Enterprise Institute (United States); Institute of
Economic Affairs, Legatum Institute, Adam Smith Institute, Policy Exchange and
Civitas (UK).
76 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

that government officials would be invited to attend the shadow

talks but would not participate. Their presence was to ensure ‘the
respective administrations feel some involvement in and ownership
of the process’.
I read that sentence several times. It must appear ‘as if’
governments would be negotiating a post-Brexit US-UK free trade
agreement, but in actuality that agreement would have already been
formulated by extreme neoliberal think tanks funded by and acting
for large corporations. The process would work more smoothly if
government officials at least thought they were part of things, even
if they were not. It would not do to insult them too far. Having UK
and US government officials at the shadow talks would also ‘lend
greater weight to our endeavour’. Government does not matter in
the process, but it must seem to matter.
The IFT’s brochure exposed the way government officials were
to be used to make the talks appear legitimate. This accords with
Exceptionalism: Exceptions never cede power and must be in charge
at all times. Did the IFT after a first flush of exhibitionistic triumph12
perhaps see that its brochure revealed underlying contempt for
government? Is that why it hastily removed the brochure from its
website?
The plan was to ‘butter up’ willing government officials and also
offer them help. In reality the job of hard Brexiteer politicians has
not been easy. They have had to push through unpopular proposals
on behalf of the big corporations, fight opposition to the proposals,
sell a trade deal to a public that would not want it if they saw
clearly that it involved lowering European standards. They have
had to convince not only the public, but other members of their
own government and ward off opposition parties.13 Government
officials who took on this role had their work cut out and the IFT
recognized the toughness of their job to get measures through come

12
The IFT’s brochure’s cover picture shows shining new container ships ready to
sail over a sun kissed horizon. The impression is endless growth is possible and a
beautiful thing.
13
UK shadow Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner commented on the brochure: ‘This
looks like another attempt by the IFT to legitimise what is an overtly political
agenda by using a government department to sanction their work with right-wing
think tanks overseas. There is far too cosy a relationship between some of these
organisations and senior Cabinet figures’.
 IMPLEMENTING NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC POLICY 77

what may. When Boris Johnson later said as prime minister that he
would deliver Brexit on time, he meant by Brexit a withdrawal deal
that safeguarded the IFT’s blueprint.
British Trade Secretary Liam Fox had helped launch the IFT in
September 2017. At the launch, Fox said his department would be
‘a very, very willing partner in your great and wonderful quest’.
Boris Johnson, then British Foreign Secretary, had also spoken at
the IFT’s launch, which was held at the Foreign Office, flouting
government rules of impartiality.
Greenpeace noted, ‘The tactic of drafting model legislation and
ensuring buy-in from government along the way has long been used
by US libertarian groups.’14
The IFT’s intension to help politicians win the argument comes
across most clearly in the brochure’s section on how to deal with
the ‘chlorinated chicken’ problem. To understand the ‘chlorinated
chicken’ problem, we need to factor in that by 2018 neoliberal
Exceptionalism was deeply etched into official US trade policy.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) is
the body that develops and recommends US trade policy to the US
president. Currently, the USTR wants to scrap a host of EU rules
on food safety, chemicals, animal welfare and the environment. As
Ben Chapman noted in The Independent (2018), ‘The totemic issue
of chlorine-washed chickens … [is] … a simple way of saying that
US farmers treat animals, dead or alive, in ways EU officials, and
the British public, don’t like. … The USTR’s report clearly shows
that the US is unlikely to budge on issues of animal welfare or food
safety.’
One objective of the IFT’s brochure was to ‘publicly rehearse
some of the most potentially controversial elements of a US-UK
Free Trade Agreement’. It said it would:

●● tackle issues like food standards (‘chlorinated chickens’ are

directly referred to in the brochure)
●● put these issues at the centre of the final draft
●● not shy away from engaging with the media on these issues.

14
‘The Heritage Foundation (funded by the Koch Brothers) said that 64 per cent of
the 344 policy recommendations it made in its “Mandate for Leadership” document
had been adopted by the Trump administration.’
78 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

The IFT would invite selected journalists to the talks. It would

presumably then mount a media campaign through commissioning
op-ed pieces in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. The way this
works is that a neoliberal think tank makes a statement, then finds
journalists to write a piece that quotes the statement admiringly. A
politician then quotes the piece and the think tank’s statement slips
more readily into the mainstream.
The main way that neoliberals planned to address the
‘chlorinated chicken’ problem was to sow doubt on established
scientific findings. Their rationale is people will not be so bothered
about chemicals in their food – chemicals that the EU bans – if they
can be persuaded the science is in doubt. Denying science is now
the US government’s official approach regarding trade. The USTR
states, ‘The United States remains concerned about a number of
measures the EU maintains.’ These measures ‘unnecessarily restrict
trade without furthering their safety objectives because they are not
based on scientific principles’.15
However, EU restrictions are based on the consensus of
scientific evidence. Attacks on ‘inconvenient science’, not new in
the neoliberal age, skyrocketed with Trump’s administration which
attacked science and truth with runaway zeal.
The IFT’s shadow talks did take place, and articles did begin
to appear supporting US agribusiness and saying that European
regulations on food safety are not based on sound scientific
evidence.16

15
Chapman (2018), writing about the USTR, noted, ‘Few industries are left untouched.
The USTR rails against the burden of EU food labelling as well as restrictions on
cosmetics and pesticides. It bemoans the fact that accreditation bodies for product
standards must be public and non-profit, when private American firms could do the
job. It complains about the widely recognized CE safety mark, so expect that to go.
On chemicals, the EU’s regulations impose “extensive registration, testing and data
requirements on all chemicals manufactured or imported into the EU in quantities
greater than a metric ton”; The USTR argues that some requirements are overly
onerous or “simply unnecessary”.’
16
For example, ‘The EU’s unbalanced Precautionary Principle has hindered the
application of evidence-based practice, with regulations used to protect domestic
producers based on unsupported assertions of risk rather than reflecting the scientific
consensus’ (Policy Exchange, 2017, p. 7). Policy Exchange is a right-wing think tank.
 IMPLEMENTING NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC POLICY 79

During the neoliberal age it became more and more difficult

to find space to fit a cigarette paper between business and
government. The gap progressively narrowed, with the Trump
administration wanting it closed. Trump appointed executives of
large corporations to head up the very government departments
that might curtail them.
80
 PART THREE

What contains
Exceptionalism
82
 11
Frameworks of care

Only with care robustly in charge can Exceptionalism be kept in

check. Being caring is not just part of individual and group character.
Particular social conditions strengthen our caring side, something
sociologists have long understood. The sociologist Michael Rustin
(2001, p. 6) asked, ‘In what containing social environments can
human beings tolerate recognition of … each other’s states of mind,
desires, needs and sufferings?’ (my italics). In this chapter, I call
these containing social environments frameworks of care.
As an example I will give shortly shows, a containing social
environment helps groups cooperate, with cooperation being part
of care. The current view is that cooperating is basic to our species.
Michael Tomasello (2009) analysed biological, ecological, cultural
and psychological aspects of cooperativeness and concluded
that as a species we have ‘ultra-cooperative tendencies. … To an
unprecedented degree, homo sapiens are adapted for acting and
thinking cooperatively in cultural groups’ (pp. xiv–xv). A major
book by Joseph Henrich (2017), The Secret of Our Success, backed
Tomasello’s conclusion. Henrich argued that it is essentially our
capacity to cooperate in cultural groups that has driven human
evolution. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that we feel a
natural sense of obligation to others,1 which underpins cooperation.
Michael Sandel (2012) sees our cooperativeness as an expression of
shared moral values and has written on the way these have been
eroded in the current era.

1
For a discussion of Levinas on obligation, see Orange (2017). Levinas’s obligation
can be thought of as extending to the landscape too as something loved.
84 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

An example of care boosted by a

containing social environment
Before the coronavirus restrictions, a man in a wheelchair and his
carer were on a very crowded London bus, in the area set aside
for users of wheelchairs and buggies. A young father pushed his
way onto the bus at the side exit, his small baby asleep in a buggy
bulging with shopping. The wheelchair user’s carer called out
there was no room. The young father, looking furious, insisted his
baby was asleep, he couldn’t be expected to fold up the buggy and
why shouldn’t his baby’s needs come first? By now everyone was
looking on. Next, an old man made his way down the aisle. There
was nowhere to sit and nowhere to store his shopping trolley. The
old man and the young father were now blocking the aisle and
preventing people who were getting on from moving down the bus.
The man in the wheelchair called out to the young father, ‘tight
spot you’re in, mate. What shall we do?’ He asked his carer to
move him more tightly into the space. The young father calmed
down straight away. It was as if he had just noticed that the man
in the wheelchair was a person who also had needs. He looked
shamefaced, and said, ‘thanks, but I can easily get the next bus’, but
by this time the carer was helping the father engineer his buggy into
the tight space. The baby was still asleep. While this was happening,
a man vacated his seat, lifted the old man’s shopping trolley into the
air, a woman offered the old man her seat, the old man took it and
sat down and the man put his trolley on the empty seat next to him.
Everyone shuffled round to readjust themselves in the remaining
space. The bus set off.
Behaviour like this is ordinary, normal and daily. People
spontaneously cohered into a group that worked together to
solve a problem in an empathic caring way. However, a group’s
natural tendency to cooperate is not enough to ensure the outcome
is caring. Some groups cooperate to unravel social cohesion and
connectedness. More on that later.
Frameworks of care are needed to help people cooperate in caring
ways. This bus displayed two rules, one that wheelchair users had
priority over buggies and the other that seats at the front were for
the elderly and those less able to stand. These two rules are examples
of frameworks of care. Both encourage peoples’ more tolerant side
 FRAMEWORKS OF CARE 85

and help them contain frustration and aggression. Having his needs
protected would presumably have helped the man in the wheelchair
to feel generous to the young father and his baby. Wheelchair user
Will Pike, paralysed from the waist down in the terror attacks on
Mumbai in 2008, put the importance of frameworks of care simply
and powerfully thus:
‘The whole “yes I can” notion exists within a framework of “if”.
If I am accommodated, if I’m allowed to have integrity, if I’m given
the space to have dignity … then yes, actually I can. I can engage.’2
Frameworks of care help people be civil to each other in the
sense meant by the sociologist Adam Lent (2008): taking the other
into account.3 In the ‘bus’ example the two frameworks of care
are likely to have activated people’s natural group intelligence. In
Rustin’s words, these frameworks helped to provide containing
social environments where people could tolerate recognizing the
truth and thus each other’s states of mind, desires, needs and
sufferings.
A framework of care treats people as individuals with rights
and with responsibilities. Under its influence, people are in a better
position to see that everyone has needs and shifting states of mind,
can feel overwhelmed at times, knows suffering and can be at the
mercy of luck and fate. We could be in a wheelchair after having
had our legs blown off in a random terror attack; we could be
carers, struggling with shopping, or old and frail. It is only when
we know we all share this common ground that we face conflict
between our desires and the desires of the other person. The young
father on the bus looked decidedly guilty and ashamed at suddenly
seeing his behaviour in context.
A framework of care needs constant defending. Just the previous
week a bus driver had decided in favour of a buggy and had not
allowed a wheelchair user onto the bus. The bus company had

2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1YIQFYEgGs. Will Pike made a video in 2016
showing the need for ramps in cafes to allow access for wheelchair users (https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjvYZ2jvvp8).
3
For Lent, civility meant far more than politeness. ‘Civility is based on an individual’s
willingness to moderate or accept some constraint on their own desires in order
to protect the well-being of others’. Lent argued we were facing a crisis of civility,
resulting from people no longer being willing to moderate individual desire to
protect others’ well-being.
86 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

supported his decision, and this had led to bad publicity for the
bus company in the press.4 At stake was upholding a framework
of care.
We depend on frameworks of care to an extraordinary degree
for our emotional well-being, safety and a stable civil society. Some
frameworks (like laws) are consciously and deliberately put in place
while others (like parental care) may operate spontaneously. Some
(like Henry Marsh’s inner moral code – see Chapter 2) are flexibly
applied in the moment, while others are more permanently in place.
We may not be consciously aware of these frameworks, and we
often take them for granted. Sometimes we only notice them when
they start to break down, and then we may belatedly appreciate
just how important they were in holding the social fabric together.
Noticing a new framework of care, we may wonder just how we
tolerated the situation before. For example, if future frameworks of
care bring our carbon emissions right down, no doubt people will
look back with horror at the carbon age that caused such damage.
All frameworks of care function to help us maintain vital links
with the part of us that cares. They empower our caring side, ensure
it is in charge and that being more caring is the lived reality.

Frameworks of uncare
Frameworks of uncare, by contrast, encourage us to choose the less
caring path. As a white child living under apartheid in South Africa,
I went to school by bus. The rule was that black South Africans
were only allowed to sit at the back, and only then if whites had not
taken those seats. For me to offer up my seat and be an ordinary,
decent, caring child showing respect for my black elders was illegal.
Under the aegis of a framework of uncare a group cooperates to
protect ‘entitlement’ and claimed privilege. The division here, as the
sociologist Norbert Elias (1994) put it, is between the ‘haves’ and
the ‘must not haves’.
Exceptionalism must drive frameworks of uncare and attack
frameworks of care because it stems from notions of superior

4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-48188270
 FRAMEWORKS OF CARE 87

entitlement. While a framework of care helps a group see itself as

a whole inclusive entity and encourages the group to resist and
undo social hierarchies and divisiveness, a framework of uncare
fractures and divides the group and encourages disassociation from
the group ‘othered’, which is now seen as not mattering, beyond the
horizon of the in-group’s concern and even subhuman.
Trump relentlessly redefined who is ‘American’ and his
accepted in-group became increasingly white and male. Under his
administration we saw increasing indifference to the suffering of
‘othered’ excluded ones. Even children were to have no power to
arouse feelings of shared human connection, as revealed in Trump’s
policy of separating refugees from their children at the border.
Melania Trump visited the children at a detention camp wearing
a Zara jacket with ‘I really don’t care. Do U?’5 emblazoned on the
back. Dear reader, make of that what you will in her case, but it
does convey disassociation from care encouraged by a framework
of uncare. Any irony intended by the words on the jacket was lost
through the context of its wearing.

The mind’s containing function

Frameworks of care indicate the presence of a containing mind.
I now explore what containment means.6 The argument is a bit
circular here, as essentially being containing is being caring and
being caring is usually containing. However, understanding more
about containment can deepen understanding of what it means
to care.
It is not so easy to define or convey containment as it has different
meanings and it can also operate at an unconscious level. That said,
we do know that a containing person or group

5
See https://www.change.org/p/cafe-nero-american-apparel-stop-segregating-disabled-
people/u/17902343?tk=3MJj7nxAd6VKFRXC-kFSzVt1NB7fSh2d4gh3CiiRvBY&
utm_source=petition_update&utm_medium=email
6
The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion wrote seminal papers on containment, and
his ideas have been taken up and expanded on by other psychoanalysts largely in the
Kleinian tradition. Cogitations (Bion, 1991) provides perhaps the clearest summary
of his evolving ideas on containment, or, more properly ‘container-contained’.
88 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

●● tries to understand what it feels like to be in the other’s

shoes
●● puts a stop to any destructive excesses

These two kinds of containment (empathy and restraint) usually

work together, helping us experience our feelings more fully, while
protecting us from behaving in excessively greedy, aggressive or
generally destructive ways.

Clinical examples of containment

Here are some brief examples of containment from the consulting
room.
A patient of mine, a man who had been violent in the past, once
threatened me with violence. I halted the sessions and found a room
in a staffed clinic with a panic button. We met there for sessions for
a month before returning to my consulting room. Later my patient
said this move considerably reduced his panic that his violence
would get out of control. Understanding provided by words was
not enough to contain this man who needed a social environment
that could physically restrain him.
Another patient once refused to leave at the end of his session.
Why should he? He never had enough of my time. I just didn’t care
about him! He sat up on the couch, folded his arms and glared at
me. I realized he meant business, also that I had another patient
arriving in ten minutes. I repeated that it was time to stop, saying
if he would not leave, I would have to. I left the room and he left
very soon after.
A containing framework of care becomes a meaningless lifeless
rule without empathic understanding. This patient’s mother, a single
parent, had returned to full-time work when he was one-week-old
leaving him to baby minders. This was the first time he had allowed
himself to know how much he needed me, and how deprived and
enraged with me he felt for leaving him. It had taken months of
analysis before he could tolerate having these feelings. The analytic
time rule as part of an overall framework of care provided him with
a containing social environment – a safe space – in which to work
through his furious feelings in the present with me, but if I had just
 FRAMEWORKS OF CARE 89

applied the time rule without being sensitive to why he might want
more of me then, I believe it would have made matters worse for
him.
Feeling contained also helps us not to feel too overwhelmed. An
example is a young woman who came to see me because she started
bursting into tears at work for no ‘work’ reason she could think of.
Fearing she would never stop crying and would be fired from her
job, she hid in the toilet at work to cry. Her mother had died when
she was a baby. As I came to know her better, I thought her difficulty
was with containing the feelings of an abandoned baby in her and it
was a positive sign that she was in touch with the abandoned baby,
crying uncontrollably as babies cry. Understanding that helped her
contain her baby feelings and also her underlying distress that she
may not be able to mother a baby, especially its crying. She had been
thinking about wanting a baby when she started crying at work.
I suggest these examples illustrate how two strands of containment
– understanding and restraining – work together. Containment can
never be ideal as it is provided by real people in a real world. To be
effective, it needs to be good enough overall.
To have a mind and a conscience (to mind) we must feel
sufficiently contained. Here I return to Michael Rustin’s question:
‘In what containing social environments can human beings tolerate
recognition of the truth and of each other’s states of mind, desires,
needs and sufferings?’
Frameworks of care exist at all levels, from international, national
and local laws, to social mores, to parental understanding and
restraint, to our inner moral code. Good enough parenting is often
a person’s first experience in life of a framework of care, as good
enough parents show empathy, place firm limits on Exceptionalism
in their children and screen them from realities too much for them
to bear at their age.7
Ordinarily children will identify with their parents’ containing
function and install it as their own inner framework of care – not a
carbon copy, but with their capacity for mindfulness influenced by

7
Freud (1923, p. 27) said the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego. We understand
frameworks of care in bodily ways. For instance, we feel held by a pair of arms. We
can be physically held back – contained – from hurting each other. Breaking the law
leads to bodily incarceration and the habeas corpus rule attests to the primacy of
bodily restraint.
90 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

their parents’ mindfulness. However, parental containment comes

already embedded in layers within layers of society’s frameworks
of care, all of them containing structures. Parents are less likely
to contain their children when social and political frameworks of
care are weakened by government. An example to be explored later
(see Chapter 19) is the effect on parental authority when Reagan
reversed legislation and allowing advertising to children.
The examples here of frameworks of care range from small to
large, individual to societal, with all performing the same vital
containing function. I believe in the neoliberal age many have taken
existing frameworks of care too much for granted, have not fought
hard enough to keep and protect them, and have allowed them to
be weakened or to morph into being ‘virtual’ not real frameworks,
there in name only. People have too readily colluded with the false
idea that giving up each single framework would not make much
difference, not really. They paid insufficient attention to how the
frameworks interact with each other and that dismantling one key
framework can have major knock-on effects on others.
In the part on the new imagination, I explore the kind of
frameworks we need to address the serious problems humanity
now faces, many – of course not all – bequeathed us by our current
economic system. People across all disciplines from economics to
town planning are working creatively on these frameworks. It is
heartening that they are designed not just to contain uncare but to
enable us to take better care. They recognize our profound need to
be caring as well as to be cared about.
In summary: our capacity to love others is greatly helped if we
ourselves feel genuinely loved. Markers of feeling loved are our
inclusion as part of the group, being treated with empathy and
respect, being helped to bear reality and to be inclusive towards
others and being stopped when our behaviour gets out of hand,
also – I elaborate on this later – being thought about in ways that
genuinely factor in our long-term stability, welfare and viability.
Love is expressed through establishing and maintaining frameworks
of care that leave us feeling contained.
Michael Rustin’s had asked, ‘In what containing social
environments can human beings tolerate … other’s states of mind,
desires, needs and sufferings?’ An additional question is how do we
come to better tolerate recognition of our own states of mind? The
next chapter explores this.
 12
The power of love

A man I know, hearing I was writing about care, said, ‘I dislike

the word: “caring, caring and sharing, care in the community”. His
mouth puckered with distaste. Someone from the publishing world
advised, “Don’t have the word care in your book title. It won’t sell
if you do.” John Humphrys, the former front person for BBC Radio
4’s Today programme, said about “Thought for the Day”, its short
religious slot,

How many times have you said to yourself, “Dear God, we’ve
got to cut a really fascinating programme short because we’re
now going to hear somebody tell us that Jesus was really nice,
and the world could be a better place if we all … ” You know …
Oh God.’1

My reply as an atheist to Humphrys is the world would be a

much better place if we took more care. In today’s mainstream
culture, to display a social conscience is to risk being called a left
or green luvvie, a ‘carer and sharer’ type, a snowflake, tree hugger,
shawls and sandals person, an unrealistic dreamer, part of the green
blob, a weak sissy and a ‘virtue signaller’.
To care is to risk being ‘feminized’ in a derogatory way, as if the
female is the weak half of the species! David Cameron, when he was
British prime minister, described environmental frameworks of care
as ‘green crap’.2 More recently things are taking a nastier turn with

1
Radio Times, 30 October 2017.
2
When seeking votes, Cameron had presented himself as an environmentalist who
hugged huskies.
92 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

environmental protestors starting to be called ‘eco-terrorists’ (see

Chapter 37). This should not surprise, as genuine care can inspire
terror in Exceptions as it seriously threatens their ‘entitlements’.
Shakespeare’s simple image from Macbeth of care as a knitted,
ravelled, sleeve3 invites a picture of our caring part working to
knit in and pick up any dropped runaway stitches to maintain the
social fabric. Genuine care is the garment worn by humankind’s
self-respecting caring part, or ‘ordinary man well dressed’ in the
poet George Herbert’s marvellous phrase.4 However, it seems that
people in general often find care a boring country cousin next
to uncare. We are drawn to Mr Hyde’s wicked exploits, not Dr
Jekyll’s experimental attempts at virtue; we find Lucifer the most
fascinating of God’s angels. Most people love a bit of gossip which
usually entails revelling in the badness of others. Part of uncare’s
pull is it stirs excitement, sensation and outrage. Judith Butler
(1997) called uncaring speech designed to insult, wound and
inflame ‘excitable speech’ and Trump daily used excitable speech to
stay in the headlines. In The Art of the Deal (1987), he explained his
technique: ‘Most reporters, I find, … [look] … for the sensational
angle. … That may have worked to my advantage.’5
Being caring is hard work. It involves staying with difficult
feelings, and it can leave us careworn and burdened. One form of
hard work is to explore a problem from different sides, adopting
an ‘on the one hand’, ‘on the other hand’ approach. Take the issue,
can we trust someone who claims to care about us? On the one
hand, we may feel natural scepticism; what is he up to and what
might he be hiding? What’s in it for him? On the other hand, care,
generous by nature, wants to give people benefit of the doubt. Part
of care’s hard work is repair. For example, care has to work to
repair its generosity to avoid becoming hardened and cynical when
it is repetitively let down.
The New Testament of the Bible translates ‘caritas’ (care in Latin)
as ‘charity’ in the King James’s version and ‘love’ in newer English
versions. A priest I met said she thought in today’s culture neither

3
II: ii, 38.
4
In his poem ‘Prayer’: Herbert (2007).
5
See Chapter 38 herein, which explores the way Trump offers pseudo-containment
as well as stirring sensation.
 THE POWER OF LOVE 93

charity nor love adequately captures the meaning of caritas. Charity

now tends to mean donating money and love romantic or parental
love. Care, as ‘caritas’, has a broader meaning. Care loves to take
care and it cannot be monetized.
‘Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up … rejoiceth in the truth …
beareth all things … And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these
three; but the greatest of these is charity,’ 1 Corinthians. 13, King
James’ version.
Care suffereth long … beareth all things … (and) abideth. This
definition might involve some idealization – can we really bear all
things?6 – but it does highlight care’s strength and endurance. Care
punches heavier than its weight.7 Most people are touched by care;
they recognize it, remember it and value it above rubies.
Care is not puffed up. We refer to ourselves as human, by which
we mean humane or caring. To be human also means to recognize
we are flawed and not ideal, as when we say, ‘we are only human’.
Our caring part is not self-idealizing.
Care is kind. Kindness is an important, often underrated part of
care. A kind person is friendly and helpful in small tangible ways
that can make all the difference. Their kindness touches one directly
and it can lighten a load. Kindness stems from empathy and the
humbleness to realize it could be I in the other person’s shoes. A
lack of harsh blaming judgement is also key to kindness.
Melanie Klein (1959) talked of some children’s friendliness and
helpfulness as, in effect, a form of care. Children can knit family life
together and generally improve the atmosphere. She said friendly
helpful people affect even those who may lack these qualities,

For [they] arouse in them a picture of what they themselves might

have become or perhaps still might become. Such personalities
give … some hopefulness about the world in general and greater
trust in goodness.

6
The psychoanalyst and philosopher Jonathan Lear argued we should not assume all
things are bearable. He was discussing the pain of facing transience. ‘And might there
be room to think about failures of imagination – as well as imagination as a human
excellence – when it comes to living with transience?’ (Lear, 2018).
7
An example is the environmental organization Greenpeace.
94 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Friendliness and helpfulness are part of being cooperative,

another aspect of care, and naturally friendly people can enhance
cooperativeness already there in people.
Care envieth not. Exceptions naturally envy others as, being self-
idealizing, they must be it all and have it all. However, I do not quite
agree that care envieth not, as our caring part may also feel envy but
manage to contain the feeling so it does not turn destructive. Not
so easy for many of us.
Care rejoices in truth. Care needs truth to act for the good but
care also loves truth – not the fool’s gold of THE truth, but the
sense of having taken in and better understood a situation, as best
one can.
I would add that care is greedy. Being greedy is usually taken
to mean being selfish, but some greed can be self-affirming.8 The
way small babies put everything into their mouths and frankly
stare at one, wide-eyed, leaning forwards and ready to smile and
engage conveys care’s inherent greedy curiosity, openness and sense
of fun. We know that some of this behaviour in babies is inbuilt
and aids survival; we know more mature care is a developmental
achievement; but the way babies look at us also conveys the nascent
caring part’s basic primary greedy wish to engage. And, adults can
say, ‘I want to eat you up I love you so.’
G.K. Chesterton called reality ‘strange strong meat’.9 To me
his phrase wonderfully conveys our appetite for reality, our
ambivalence towards it and our caring part’s ‘on the one hand/on
the other hand’ reflectiveness about reality. We seek out reality, get
our teeth stuck into it, and then can find it strange, hard to chew
and often emotionally disturbing.
Some of us are more naturally caring than others, but our
capacity to care usually (not always) blossoms when we ourselves
feel cared for. A small boy I know expressed this in a letter to his
grandfather in which he wrote out a list of the reasons why he loved
him. The letter began, ‘Dear Granddad, I love you because: 1. You
love me.’

8
Erich Fromm (1941) emphasized the antithesis between selfishness and self-love.
9
‘If the mind is sufficient to itself, it is insufficient for itself. For this feeding upon
fact is itself, as an organ it has an object which is objective; this eating of the strange
strong meat of reality’ (Chesterton, 1933).
 THE POWER OF LOVE 95

A prominent current theory of mind (‘mentalization’)10

argues that having a mind depends on our being thought about
by someone with a mind, who minds. To mind means to care in
ordinary language, for example, child minders are child carers, we
mind when harm is done, mind the baby, mind the gap, don’t mind
me.11 Rephrasing the small boy’s letter, we might say, I have a mind
and can mind because you, my carer, have a mind and can love me.
Jonathan Lear in Love and Its Place in Nature (1990) argued
that psychoanalytic theory gives us glimpses of a truly radical
understanding of love. In Lear’s view (he argues it is Freud’s), love
is the principle that organizes life itself. Love promotes the ‘I’, the
emergent individual who can structure and organize experience
and differentiate herself from the world inside and outside herself.
Here is a quotation from Lear to convey love’s radical action and
potential:

For me to develop into a good-enough person, there must be

enough goodness running through the world: it is this which I
internalise and used to constitute myself. … However much I
have grown, a good-enough world is calling out to me to respond
by growing in depth and structure. One of the deeper meanings
of the idea of accepting responsibility is to recognise that I am,
by my nature, a response to love. Individuation is my response to
love. It too is a manifestation of love. Love thus tends toward the
creating of being for whom a response – that is, individuation –
is a fundamental issue.

Lear, basing his ideas on Donald Winnicott’s ‘good-enough

mother and environment’,12 argued that free individuals are born

10
Put forward by Peter Fonagy and Mary Target (1998).
11
The historian Ruth Leys (2017) has argued that today’s culture tends to de-
legitimatize and ‘disappear’ the concept of mind and along with it subjective inner
experience. Nowadays we are mostly told we have brains not minds. It is easier to
think of oneself as a moral agent with a mind than with a brain. A mind minds and
a brain functions.
12
The good-enough object is Winnicott’s term for the quality of mothering provided
by a real mother. He explains, ‘The best a real woman can do with an infant is to
be sensitively good enough at the beginning so that illusion is made possible to the
infant at the start that this good enough mother is “the good breast” [Klein’s good
object]’ (Winnicott, 1987, p. 38).
96 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

(psychically emerge) out of a good-enough loving environment.

Winnicott’s good enough mother is not a perfect mother, as she
is a real not imaginary woman (or carer). However, the level of
care she must exercise to show ordinary maternal devotion, and
the environment she must provide to facilitate her baby’s mental
development, must be good enough to help the baby initially preserve
the illusion that she (the baby) omnipotently conjures up the breast,
the feed, the good experience, as and when she needs it. With this
solid foundation, imbibed as it were along with the milk, the baby
then can face disillusionment, also with the help of the good-enough
mother and parents. Theoretical speculation like this is based on
what is called the ‘clinical baby’13; in other words, it is based on
detailed study of children and adults undergoing psychotherapy.
What happens in the mind of a baby can of course only be inferred.
Lear and Winnicott argued that to develop human potential
it is important to be cared for in a good-enough world. Melanie
Klein (1940) put forward an allied but not identical concept of
the ‘good object’14 needed for love to flourish. Klein’s good object
is a psychic construction, a figure that is pre-ambivalently good,
somewhat idealized and approaching ideal, and having it shores up
our capacity to love, to feel alive, to take delight in the world and
to face the bad. It helps us to manage the unbearable and to know
good from bad and right from wrong. I would add that a good
object enables us to feel entitled15 to be alive, to be loved and to
express our love.
Here is a personal example of a good object as I understand it:
I remember a day in my childhood when, following torrential rain,
the sun came out and the world looked extraordinarily beautiful,
as though it was washed new. I think this memory stays with me
because I was in nature on a ‘perfect day’ and also because I was
walking with my grandmother who loved me, just she and I, hand
in hand. Remembering this walk puts me in touch with a feeling I
associate with having a good object. The scene is rather idealized,

13
Elizabeth Spillius (1994) put forwards the concept of the clinical baby.
14
The ‘very bad’ mother is the depriving, horrendous or damaged mother who
leaves the baby to scream. In this archaic way of experiencing, the bad mother is
experienced as a presence, not the good mother when absent.
15
See Murray (1964), Weintrobe (2004).
 THE POWER OF LOVE 97

but the feeling is of being securely loved in a good world that

nurtures me with its beauty and from that position being at home
with myself.
The good object is one of those concepts – like love itself – that
are bigger than our capacity to understand it. ‘Good objects’ can
be based on parents, children, teachers, leaders, writers, friends,
heroes, even concepts; mine include nature and other species,
especially encountering their wildness and otherness. A good object
as a constructed imago is not quite the same as a memory. It is
that which connects us with feeling loved, with our capacity to love
and with feeling alive. It energizes our will and our entitlement to
care in Lear’s sense of striving to mind and to have a mind. The
psychoanalyst Hanna Segal said the good object keeps a little flame
burning in the face of an anti-mind approach.16
Theorists disagree17 about whether the good object is built
up of experience or is a primary human potential. Some patients
in analysis clearly did not have much love yet they understand
intuitively what a good object is and they search for one and can
use one, while other patients perhaps better loved in reality resist
connecting with good objects and are destructive towards them.
Sometimes we may find and then lose a good object in the way
the moon is covered over by a cloud. When that happens, we cannot
just ‘make’ the good object reappear at will, and its absence can be
cause for feeling flat, low, lacking energy and even melancholic.
Psychoanalysts argue that good objects help with mourning. The
loss of an actual loved person, or part of loved nature, may well be
accompanied by the mourner’s phantasies of having lost the inner
psychic good object as well. The mourner’s painful and difficult
task, then, is to find or refind the good inner object so that with its
help he or she can mourn the actual loss.18 An example is that as the
environmental and climate crisis advances, I find mourning animals,

16
Personal communication to Hanna Segal’s grandson Joel, told by Joel at her funeral.
17
Ron Baker (1993) thought the psychoanalyst could be a new good object for the
patient. Melanie Klein (1940) thought good objects are ultimately based on the
original good internal objects, the parents. Betty Joseph (1985) thought the analyst
as good object is not an entirely new good object but gains strength from the original
re-found internal good objects.
18
For discussions of the role of the good object in mourning, see Melanie Klein
(1940) and Eric Brenman (2006).
98 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

landscapes and normal weather very hard. I can feel either flat or
completely overwhelmed seeing mass death of animals, landscapes
degraded and weather weirding to the point that it feels uncanny,
‘unheimlich’, no longer somewhere I feel at home. I need to be in
touch with my fierce love of nature (my good object) to mourn
losing parts of nature in reality.
The psychotherapist Elisha Davar interviewed refugees19 and
found that what made the difference between coping and not coping,
psychological health and depression, hopefulness and despair, was
not the degree of trauma and difficulty they had suffered, but their
capacity to stay true to a good object. He theorized about the good
object from the way some refugees talked of feeling sustained and
hopeful when they remembered loved mothers, parents or relatives.
My argument is that frameworks of care can function as good
objects and that includes governmental frameworks of care. The
National Health Service (NHS) is one for most British people and
my impression is that National Monuments like Yellowstone and
Yosemite are good objects for most Americans. The fact they exist
is a potent sign that government cares.
Trump undermined American National Monuments and
British politicians are currently destroying the ethos of the NHS
by gradually privatizing it for profit. They abandoned the legal
duty of care in 2012.20 However, they know they must tread very
carefully and, by stealth, must obfuscate their intentions and never
openly disrespect the NHS as it lives on as a loved good object in
the British psyche.21
Government does not just provide this or that ‘service’ when
it provides a framework of care. It offers itself as a good object
providing a good-enough caring environment. The issue is people
feeling sufficiently cared about to be able to think in a rational way
and not to regress mentally. Mindfulness itself may well be at stake.
It is a strong claim that attacks on frameworks of care are
attacks on the psyche of a nation. To explain, I need to return to

19
Personal communication.
20
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 removed responsibility for the health of
citizens from the Secretary of State for Heath, which the post had carried since the
inception of the NHS in 1948.
21
Even if it appears increasingly as a Potemkin village. With post-2008 austerity, UK
governments have progressively hollowed out funding for the NHS while describing
it as thriving.
 THE POWER OF LOVE 99

the image of care’s sleeve. I suggest what keeps it ravelled up is a

sense of strong lively entitlement to be loved, to love and to belong.
Entitlement to be loved is primary, a basic part of being and feeling
alive and being human, rooted in the sense of entitlement to a good
object and entitlement to a good enough provider; and if these are
not available in reality, the entitlement is to search for and fight
for them. When government attacks frameworks of care, it sends a
message that government thinks people, animals, ideals, ideas, life
itself do not matter.
People also feel entitled to express their love. Current democracies
offer little opportunity to have a voice about the things that actually
matter. The Ecuadorian biologist and environmentalist Esperanza
Martinez made this point in a talk she gave in 2014. ‘From time
to time we go through the charade of supposedly participating in
decision making. We vote for a candidate that most times disappoints
us. But we are not invited to participate in the real decision making.
That is about whether we drill for oil in Alaska, whether we frack,
whether we poison our water with fracking. These are the real
decisions, and we are not participating in making them. … These
decisions we have been marginalised from.’22
Martinez was saying a mature democracy matures its citizens,
helps them to express their love and reach their human potential
which is mindfulness. Real democracy helps them take proper care
and helps them face the conflicts and losses this entails.
Real democracy is anathema for Exceptions. To protect their
perceived entitlements, they must undermine frameworks of care,
leaving people feeling less loved and less able to exercise their love –
also, not entitled and increasingly unsafe. At the very point in
history when the imperative was to greatly extend frameworks of
care, particularly those protecting the environment and crucially our
climate system, the great unravelling of care began. Throughout the
neoliberal age frameworks of care have been steadily dismantled to
suit large corporations, particularly the oil industry. My argument
is this is an attack on a people’s good objects and on the psyche of
nations.

22
Book launch of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi
Klein held at the New School in New York 20 September 2014. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=DVgwmO8RYX0
100
 PART FOUR

The culture of
uncare
102
 13
Culture and the birth of
consumerism

Culture is the water we swim in, and we sometimes only notice

its presence after we have stepped out of the water. For example,
a colleague of mine, who moved from London to Stockholm in
1990, told me he realized he had become more anti-taxation under
Thatcher. He said it had taken being in a different culture to notice
that.
Culture has many meanings, and indeed the social historian
Raymond Williams (1958) called it one of the most complicated
words in the language. My focus is on culture in the sense my
colleague noticed it: a powerful influencer of how people think, put
in place by those in power in order to shift and shape values.
Culture can assume an almost bodily presence in the inner life
of the mind and the group. For example, an old man told me that
when he was a small boy, before the age of TV, his family would
treat the radiogram like a member of the family and all sit round it
in the evenings, he with his ear pressed up against it.
This part, and the next, is on neoliberalism’s culture of uncare. I
focus on mass media, political framing, advertising and promptings
we receive from our social groups to think in certain ways.
Neoliberal culture uses a sophisticated understanding of depth
psychology to influence people. It grew out of already existing
consumer culture, which it would shape to suit the needs of the
neoliberal economy. To make sense of neoliberal culture, we need
to start with consumer culture.
104 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

That developed early in the twentieth century alongside the

new mass production techniques parodied by Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times. With products now rolling off production lines,
the issue, particularly in the United States, was how to boost sales.
Manufacturers turned for help to advertisers, who in turn used
ideas from the new field of psychoanalysis, in particular Freud’s
profound understanding that people can find phantasy1 sustaining
and nourishing even when it has no rational basis. People may be in
the grip of false beliefs without being fully consciously aware that
they are, and these beliefs can affect their identity and change the
world.
Freud took ideas already part of human common (ordinarily
held) sense and forged them into a theory of mind that was deeply
unsettling for those who viewed man as purely rational. Freud can
tend to be seen as suggesting man is instead irrational, but his view
was different: humankind struggles between the rational and the
irrational, between love and hatred of reality.2
That Freud’s ideas proved so important and useful for the large
corporations is largely due to the influence of Edward Bernays, his
nephew who had settled in America. Freud in no way endorsed his
nephew’s use (or more properly misuse) of psychanalytic theory.
Using insights from psychoanalysis, Bernays founded Public
Relations, transformed advertising and later on played an important
role in forming Public Policy.
Here is just one example of the way Bernays and his co-workers
boosted sales.3 It sheds light for me on the perennial question how
deliberate and conscious is a regime’s attempt to influence people
through the culture it promotes? This was deliberate and fully
conscious.
George Hill, president of the American Tobacco Corporation,
came to Bernays for help with how to persuade women to take up
smoking. That would double the market. Bernays’s wily advertising

1
Fantasy when spelled phantasy signals that it includes elements people are not
consciously aware of.
2
As outlined for instance in Freud (1911).
3
The discussion of Bernays’s technique and the example of smoking is given in Curtis
(2002).
 CULTURE AND THE BIRTH OF CONSUMERISM 105

strategy4 was to persuade a group of young society women to sit

on top of a float at that year’s Easter Parade and all light cigarettes
and smoke them in full view of the public. He arranged for this to
appear in the press as ‘group of girls puff at cigarettes as gesture
of “freedom”’. The arranged spectacle encouraged associations
between the Statue of Liberty, her torch, female emancipation
and male power. He invited ordinary women to identify with and
follow elite women, and he took the sting out of an act of social
rebellion (for women to smoke was taboo at the time) by framing
the spectacle as in concert with American values: lighting the
Liberty Torch. He appealed to women’s subjective sense of lively
entitlement to freedom, now awakened, given legitimacy and –
importantly – reshaped and manipulated. He radically changed
the culture of smoking and made a lot of money for the American
tobacco industry.
Bernays had made smoking by women socially acceptable and
had transformed it from inhaling and puffing into a symbolic
act: women who smoked were more powerful and independent.
Apparently.
Bernays had tapped into women’s desire for more power and
into their suffering at not being free and having little power in a
patriarchal world, and he used these to manipulate women, offering
them a seductive ‘quick fix’ – smoke a cigarette – but now with all
the associations Bernays had attached to that act. With this ‘quick
fix’ women could enter an ‘as if free’ world in which they could
forget they had little power, worked in a shop and that society
women had more to spend than they did; forget envy of men and
envy of the wealthy stoked by chronic unfairness in society; forget
that only struggle in the real world could change all this; forget
that if they engaged in that struggle they could well face conflicts at
home, at work and within themselves.
By inhaling and applying omnipotent thinking they could
inhabit an ‘as if’ world in which they apparently achieved their goal
of ‘freedom’ instantly. The ‘freedom’ they actually achieved was
freedom from facing inner emotional reality and external reality.

4
Bernays turned to New York psychoanalyst A.A. Brill for help with this problem and
Brill suggested he find a way to associate cigarettes with the male penis representing
male sexual power.
106 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Cigarettes are deeply addictive physically, but all products used as

part of a ‘quick fix’ are essentially addictive as they are props in
maintaining an idealized wishful view and, in that view, nothing is
ever enough so more is always craved.
Bernays, like Cinderella’s prince, was saying this glass slipper is
your key to enter my crafted fairy-tale kingdom, where your status
can be instantly changed from kitchen girl to queen. Make sure that
yours is the foot that fits the shoe. Then you can live the American
dream. This is the anti-mind approach, as in order to maintain the
illusion, real experience must constantly be expunged from self-
awareness. Bernays’s perverse (by which I mean truth bending)
strategy was actively to encourage people to abandon thinking and
inhabit an ‘as if’ world of false beliefs.
This new powerful form of hidden persuasion involved ‘setting
free’ the uncaring wishful part of the self while subtly drawing the
caring reality-based part into a collusion, thus weakening it through
corrupting it. I suggest the most dangerous form of disavowal is
the kind that says this kind of persuasion and corruption will not
affect me. When an entire culture swings to consumerism, it takes a
certain arrogance to suppose one will not be drawn into the culture.
It takes constant struggle not to be pulled into the culture’s perverse
framing. Consumerism essentially involves encouraging people to
consume, devour, take over, over-run, the caring reality-based self
through a gradual process of corrupting what things truly mean.
America, Land of the Free, was fundamentally transforming
the meaning of freedom. American corporations quickly saw
the commercial advantage of manipulating peoples’ beliefs and
daydreams. Paul Mazur, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman
Brothers in the 1930s, said, ‘People must be trained to desire, to
want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.
We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must
overshadow his needs. A change has come over our democracy. It
is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s importance to
his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer’
(1927).5
Mazur’s essential point was clear: people must be trained to
become insatiable.

5
Mazur quoted in Lubin (2013).
 CULTURE AND THE BIRTH OF CONSUMERISM 107

Bernays created many of the manipulative techniques of mass

consumer persuasion that we now live with, such as product
placement in movies.6 Hollywood stars now lit up cigarettes as well
as the heavens.
As Adam Curtis (2002) explained, ‘Irrelevant objects could
become powerful symbols of how you wanted to be seen by others …
That was Bernays’s contribution.’ Curtis credited Bernays with
contributing in a major way to the ‘start of the all-consuming self,
which has come to dominate our world today’. Bernays’s thinking
and rationale will be seen in chapters in this part, particularly the
chapter on advertising. We will see phantasy’s tremendous power
to provide ‘as if’ satisfactions, and that when phantasy guides
behaviour, phantasy changes the world.

People as happiness machines

Consumerism became the central motor of American life. J. Edgar
Hoover told a group of advertisers and PR men, ‘You have …
transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines,
machines which have become the key to economic progress.’7
A new idea of how to run a democracy was emerging. The
consuming self was at its centre; this self was to be happy, placid
and docile; it made a capitalist economy work and it created short-
term stability for the markets and in social relations. Stewart Ewen,
an historian of Public Relations, argued that ‘democracy was turned
into a palliative, giving people some kind of feel good medication
that would respond to an immediate pain and an immediate
yearning, but would not alter the objective circumstances one iota’
(1976).
After the crash on Wall Street, Roosevelt had attempted with
his New Deal to restore a functioning democracy (for white people
at any rate) and an active citizenry. He believed it was important
to appeal to, relate to and give a home to peoples’ rational caring

6
Bernays linked his clients’ products with celebrities who were also his clients. He
pioneered product placement in movies, and he employed psychologists to say
products were good for you, pretending they were independent studies.
7
Quoted by Curtis (2002).
108 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

part8 and to curtail the influence on them of the corporations. He

brought back Government as a powerful and effective curtailer of
Big Business and as a protector of peoples’ rights.
After the Second World War, the corporations9 turned again to
Bernays to help subvert the idea of Good Government. Bernays’s
strategy was to find ways to divorce the public from Government
and to marry it to Big Business. He portrayed American capitalism
as ‘someone’ to relate to, a friendly giant enabling the American
dream.10 He drove the message that Big Business made America
great and really paid attention to people in a way that government
did not. Business gave people just what they wanted when they
wanted it.
‘Freedom’ meant siding with business and not having to feel
limited by reality constraints. ‘Government’ that opposed this view
was portrayed as an interfering interloper.
Business was the idealized parent who spoils the child with the
equivalent of ‘don’t worry darling, you don’t have to eat greens if
you don’t want to. Have more cake, have anything you want from
the array of low nutrition foods I offer you. You choose. Your whim
is your command and I will obey.’ The sleight of hand here is there
is little real individual freedom to dream one’s own dreams and
develop one’s own mind.
Good government was the annoying parent who says, ‘Eat
your greens. You may not like them, but you need them to grow.’
Greens in this context is knowledge about the real world that feeds
thinking. Good government helps people think about reality, not
regress to a phantasy world in which they are special and exempt
from reality constraints.
Hanna Segal (1991)11 argued that the caring part of the self
constantly tests phantasies against reality. For example, take the

8
As part of this appeal, he supported the idea of opinion polling.
9
In the shape of the National Association of Manufacturers (membership included
all the big US corporations).
10
For example, Bernays spread this message at the New York World Fair in 1939
(see Curtis, 2002).
11
In this paper, Segal distinguished between ‘as if’ and ‘what if’ thinking. The latter
seeks to test the phantasy against reality by asking what if the fantasy were true. The
former ignores reality and proceeds as if the fantasy were true.
 CULTURE AND THE BIRTH OF CONSUMERISM 109

phantasy, ‘I can feel worth it just by buying L’Oreal hair products.’

If we take reality into account, we quickly realize the phantasy is
a false belief. All the hair washing in the world does not change
feeling not worth it in a society that devalues women.12 Segal
argued the uncaring part of the self turns its back on reality testing
and proceeds instead ‘as if’ the phantasy were true.
The new way to ‘run’ a democracy was to attack reality testing
and stimulate ‘as if’ thinking. Bernays believed that treating people
as consumers not citizens was the key to controlling people in a
democracy and key to keeping the corporations in power. Adam
Curtis noted, ‘People have no decision-making power within this
environment.’
One might ask where is the harm in boosting the attractions of
an ‘as if’ world? After all, people regularly use phantasy to escape
from reality. Why should a culture not use this fact about people
to boost the economic base? The economy offers people material
goods, and the culture offers people a form of escape and even
potentially greater social stability in the short term. In a mental
bubble, people can preserve the illusion they no longer have to suffer
frustration, envy and resentment. What’s not to like? The problem
is the consumerist bubble damages social systems, the environment
and the mind itself, as when drawn into an ‘as if’ world people do
not fully see the damage or count the cost.
The picture I have just painted of consumerist culture’s effects
may seem dour, bleak and overdrawn. Can a culture really use and
corrupt people to this extent and can the effects really be serious?
I would argue yes, but that care is also resilient, replenishing and
enduring. If that were not true, why would a regime need to spend
trillions funding a culture to keep undermining our caring part and
boosting wishful phantasy?
When people see they have been manipulated, and see the
cumulative damage this has caused in and outside the self, they
may then feel unloved, not valued, angry and alone – also, guilty
when they realize they went along with consumerist framing and

12
Many young women have suffered symptoms of clinical depression, the main
symptom of which is feeling not worth it. A UK government-funded study has found
that 24 per cent of fourteen-year-old girls have depression. Their symptoms include
feeling miserable, tired, lonely and hating themselves (see Campbell, 2017).
110 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

shamed at realizing they allowed themselves to be duped. Adam

Curtis called the twentieth century the century of the self, by which
he meant the all-consuming self. Ruth Leys (2000) prophesized the
twenty-first century will be the century of the traumatized self. I
suggest the traumatized self includes a self that is trying to cope
with mounting, cumulative, damage to the world and to the self that
resulted from the upsurge in omnipotent thinking that consumerism
encouraged.
 14
Neoliberalism’s culture
of uncare

Neoliberals who took power in the 1980s inherited cultures already

consumerist, particularly in America. They would encourage
consumerism and influence social values to further their economic
agenda. Chapter 23 goes in detail into how Thatcher achieved her
ambition to change existing British cultural values. It was the chief
reason she came into government, she declared.1
In 1988, Reagan gave consumerism a huge boost when he
vetoed Congress from restricting advertising to children.2 Young
unformed minds had been protected by law in the United States
from too much targeting by advertisers. Susan Linn (2004) exposed
the increasingly predatory practices of advertisers that followed
Reagan’s deregulation in her book Consuming Kids.
With a single act, Reagan unleashed a new, far more aggressive,
wave of consumerism. Advertisers rushed to shape and define
children’s identity, including gender identity, prematurely
sexualizing children’s self-view, particularly that of preteen girls.
This met with initial sharp resistance in the UK, and when in
2010 the giant retailer Primark started selling padded bikini bras
to preteen girls as young as seven, Mumsnet, an online forum
for mothers, objected so vigorously that they were withdrawn.3

1
‘The object is to change the soul’ (Margaret Thatcher, 1981); see also Albertson and
Stepney (2020).
2
See Molotsky (1988).
3
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265859/Primark-condemned-selling-
padded-bikinis-7-year-olds.html
112 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

However, the objection did little to stem the rising trend to

sexualize prepubertal girls through advertising.
Advertisers could now directly manipulate children into
believing they were especially entitled, and this worked against
good parenting which aims gradually to disillusion children of their
self-idealizing tendencies.4 Those children, now grown, grew up in
a culture that encouraged them to believe they could achieve feeling
special through consumption and that drew them into a consumerist
‘as if’ bubble in which reality could be more easily denied.
During the neoliberal age branding increased and through social
media people began to market themselves as brands. Naomi Klein
(2002) (in particular with her book No Logo on branding and its
ramifications) and others charted this development.
The new deregulated global economy would widen the gap in
wealth between rich and poor, invest less in social infrastructure
and freely pollute while ignoring the environment. The biggest
problem neoliberals faced from the outset was that people would
mind taking part in an economy as destructive in its effects as
this. People would not want to be constantly re-minded that they
were implicated in uncaring production methods every time they
went shopping. Any economy imposes on people a logic of living.
This economy, being high on carbon and low on caring, would
bring shoppers new dilemmas: do I buy those flown in fresh
vegetables with a high carbon price tag? Do I eat that chicken
knowing it likely spent a miserable life in an automated animal
feedlot operation (neoliberalism’s word for a factory farm)? Do
I buy that book online from a company that employs people on
zero hours’ contracts? What do I do when nearly every product
I see comes in a plastic container or is wrapped in plastic film
because that is cheaper and more convenient for manufacturers
and distributors?
In the early days of the neoliberal economy, we saw wave after
wave of moral objection to the new way of living it entailed. I
remember the Women’s Institute (WI) in the UK campaigning
against newly appearing non-recyclable plastic packaging.
WI women were furious. They unwrapped their shopping at the

Linn (2004) recorded how psychologists were employed to research how best to nag
4

mothers into giving in and buying the item craved for.

 NEOLIBERALISM’S CULTURE OF UNCARE 113

check-out tills and left the packaging on the belt, causing queues to
build up.5 Like many such protests, this one petered out.
Moral objection to fitting in with an economic order was nothing
new. The psychotherapist and climate psychologist Ro Randall
(2012) had put this as ‘tasting the slavery in your sugar’. What was
new was peoples’ sense that real progress made – towards universal
human rights, a greater sense of obligation to others and greater
appreciation that the environment needed protecting – was being
aggressively reversed.
Zygmunt Bauman (2017)6 put the problem succinctly when he
said the ‘logic of living’ under neoliberalism conflicted with peoples’
basic moral sense. Bauman had drawn attention to the fact that
people mind when forced to live in ways that cause damage.
For the new deregulated economy to flourish, neoliberals now
in power needed people to cooperate, and, for that, existing moral
values would need to be deregulated. One argument has it that
people are basically uncaring and selfish and so do not mind living
in a more uncaring economy. What gives the lie to this argument is
that neoliberals heavily spent on a culture (including advertising,
mass media and promoting general group culture) to deregulate the
culture of greater care that they had inherited. They spent because
they had to, their problem being that people do care.
The ‘person specification’ for the kind of people needed to service
the neoliberal economy was that they should:

●● see themselves as special and ideal, without even particularly

realizing this shift in perspective;
●● feel entitled to buy whatever they could afford (and not
­afford by using credit);
●● see the world as a cross between the Garden of Eden and a
vast shopping mall;
●● feel entitled to be spared difficult feelings (like loss, anxiety
and guilt);
●● feel entitled to be spared inconvenience;
●● define self-worth largely through attachment to products;

5
In 2006, the UK Women’s Institute organized a national day against excess
packaging.
6
A participant on Vetenskapens varld lot 23, aired 23 September 2013 on svt (Swedish
public broadcasting channel) (http:/www.svtplay.se/video/1480596/del-23).
114 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

●● be less concerned about their fellows and the state of the

environment;
●● see themselves as ideal providers to their immediate family
and friends;
●● idealize the new global economy;
●● airbrush out its damaging side;
●● believe things could stay the same;
●● believe neoliberalism is the only way.

While in a relatively untroubled, ‘as if’, tranquil state, people

would be miles from seeing that this very state was the result of
psychological warfare being waged on their minds. The war plan
was (and still is) relentlessly to boost the ordinary exception in
people, so that it becomes the dominant part that leads when it
comes to spending.
Neoliberals who would have us believe that people are just
competitive do not believe their own propaganda. When faced
with how to influence people through ‘soft power’, they see
people as they are: conflicted, with a caring and an uncaring part.
Deregulating the morals of a nation to achieve their ‘person spec’
would require a two-pronged approach: boost the uncaring part
that wants to override limits and undermine the caring part that
says no to that.
In the next part we will see in detail, with examples, how
neoliberal culture waged psychological warfare on mindfulness.
This essentially anti-mind culture introduced a new official language
(New Speak) to boost Exceptionalism; it talked up the virtues of
shameless conspicuous consumption; it sanctioned omnipotent ‘as
if’ thinking by promoting extensive disavowal of the damage the
neoliberal economy was doing. As neoliberalism’s damaging effects
rose, it worked harder than ever to hide and obscure the damage.
Mass media ignored the damage, advertising ‘greened’ it and the
science community that told us about it started to be discredited
and vilified. Neoliberal culture infantilized and regressed people,
encouraging them to be less mature and less responsible than
they are capable of being; it seduced them into believing they
could continue with business as usual. It used every trick in the
psychological toolkit to persuade us we need not change when
only change will prevent systems’ collapse. It drew society into a
collective psychosis that people are now starting to wake up from.
 NEOLIBERALISM’S CULTURE OF UNCARE 115

In the neoliberal economy, people inevitably felt increasingly

insecure about housing, job security and whether they were worth
it. With the climate crisis left unattended, they also felt increasing
anxiety about survival. In chapters to follow we will see culture
working to ‘manage’ these feelings of insecurity by offering ‘as if’
forms of fake security. Like the big bad wolf, neoliberal culture
worked to persuade us we should move out of the brick house,
built on real experience and real thinking, into a straw house, built
on omnipotent thinking. The straw house, the culture argued, is the
strong, stable, safe house. As if.
Egged on by neoliberal culture, we entered the age of ‘selfiedom’,
which is a good description for ‘Being an Exception’. People
colluded, but collusion is a dance, and culture led the way. Human
scientists called the new ‘selfiedom’ ‘instrumental’ (Crompton and
Kasser, 2009; Darnton and Kirk, 2011; Kasser, 2002), one of ‘market
orientation’ (Fromm, 1956), ‘consumerist’ (Alexander, 2014;
Bauman, 2007a; Hamilton, 2003; Klein, 2002), ‘extractive’ (Klein,
2014), ‘narcissistic’ (Lasch, 1991), one of ‘arrogant entitlement’
(Weintrobe, 2010), ‘perverse’ (Hoggett, 2012; Long, 2008) and
involving ‘manic triumphalism’ (Segal, 2006). John Keene’s (2012)
description, already mentioned, belongs with this grouping. He had
likened the mindset to seeing Mother Earth as an idealized breast/
toilet figure there solely to provide super-sized portions and absorb
all our waste. Each of these theorists was highlighting a different
aspect of being an Exception.
Ex-CIA Chief Michael Hayden had called the whistle blower
Edward Snowden a traitor because he revealed not leaks but the
plumbing (Miller, 2013). The next part on neoliberal culture reveals
the psychology behind mainstream modern culture’s attack on care
at the level of the plumbing. It explores how it manipulates our
ordinary psychology to keep us distanced from our caring part. It
looks in detail at how neoliberal mass media, advertising, political
framing and group culture collectively have worked to undermine
our social conscience.
Taking seriously that neoliberal culture is attacking our will
to care about each other is not easy. It requires being open to the
idea that culture can influence us without our awareness, and it
challenges our belief that, while others may be affected by culture,
we are far too smart and savvy. It means tolerating uncertainty,
muddle and doubt and seeing our collusion.
116 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

The picture I will paint of current culture’s effects may seem

overdrawn. Can a culture really use and corrupt people to this
extent and can the effects really be so serious? I argue yes, but
that care is also resilient, replenishing and enduring. If that were
not true, why would a regime need to keep funding a culture to
undermine our caring part?
 PART FIVE

How this culture

operates
118
 15
New Speak

My three-year-old grandson greeted the tube train with, ‘Hello

train’. ‘Hello train’, I joined in. We boarded, the train set off and an
announcer said, ‘This is an (x) service terminating at (y). Customers
who have just joined the train will find … ’
I thought, one can say hello to a train but not to a service. I
thought of this ‘service’ ‘terminating’ at the end of its journey, and I
envisaged the train being literally ‘terminated’ and exploding. I held
in giggles. My point is serious. My grandson was relating, in his age
appropriate way,1 to trains as trains, his thinking appearing as yet
unaffected by dominant current culture.
We used to be passengers on trains, travellers on journeys, readers
of books, pupils at school, patients in hospital, lovers of nature and
citizens of countries. These words started disappearing from official
public discourse in the UK in the 1990s.
Neoliberal cultural framing reduces all our diverse relationships
to just one relationship, that of user-used. Words we need to take in
and experience reality either disappear or lose their fuller meaning
in this discourse. Consider, ‘This is an (x) service terminating at (y).
Customers who have just joined the train … ’ The word ‘train’ does
surface at the end, but its ‘trainness’ has lost legitimacy by being in
the ‘user-used’ framework.
When we lose our words, we are potentially drawn into being
more ‘experience lite’. In Newspeak, described in George Orwell’s
dystopian novel 1984, we become ‘Unpersons’ with no ‘Ownspeak’.

1
My grandson’s thinking was still animistic as is young children’s thinking. Living
beings, machines and objects were still all ‘subjects’ to relate to.
120 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Neoliberal culture’s official language fosters a mindset where

people focus more and more on themselves as only consumers and
the whole world as only there to service us in the here and now.
Colin Leys (2001) linked the emergence of ‘user-used’ language in
the UK to neoliberal privatization in the 1980s, which he thought
led to a commercial penetration of what he called the ‘life-world’ (p.
54). ‘Official terminology had been changed to encourage the shift
from a “producer” to a “consumer” culture: “customer” replaced
passenger; “client” replaced “patient”.’2 He thought this shift in
language was driven by ‘the importance all politicians attached to
the interests of corporations’ (p. 56).

New Speak
New Speak (in homage to George Orwell’s Newspeak) is neoliberal
culture’s official language. Orwell’s Newspeak was developed by the
Oceania regime ‘to make all other modes of thought impossible’. ‘A
heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable.’ I see my having
imagined the tube train literally ‘terminating’ at its journey’s end as
a heretical thought. I believe I was preserving independence from
current culture through debunking it. However, I suggest this only
works up to a point. Stepping off a tube train with the announcer’s
description of me as a customer still in my ears, I thought, annoyed,
‘I’m a passenger. I’m a passenger.’ I was fighting for my words, my
identity, my experience and my freedom to relate on my terms, not
terms set by the culture. But, was I not also starting to sound a bit
like Jack Lemmon in the final scene of Some Like It Hot? Taking
off his wig he says in exasperation to his oblivious suitor, ‘I’m a boy,
I’m a boy!’
It is not easy to resist a culture, and I know how often I become
drawn into the ‘user-used’ frame of mind. One major cost is being
drawn into being more ‘experience lite’. When open to reality
through experience, we see objects in the world as separate from
and independent of us. That expands our sense of inner identity. A

2
People took the hint and (encouraged by lawyers) began suing the state; litigation
against doctors, hospitals and the police, for example, increased dramatically (Leys,
2000, pp. 53–4).
 NEW SPEAK 121

souvenir of the Eiffel Tower represents an inner world of cascading

experience and puts us in touch with a multitude of part selves.
We were travellers, gourmets, lovers, friends, walkers, shoppers and
so on. As Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes.3 We require
words for all the objects of our experience and words for all the
different roles we play; without words for the specificity of our
experience, experience itself becomes impoverished and so do our
relationships.
Orwell made the point that we need words that conjure fresh not
stale pictures of reality, and he stressed that having detailed pictures
brings us closer to our experience of reality as present, as unfolding
in time and as involving us and affecting us.
New Speak’s ‘user-used’ framing draws us to see ourselves – now
just consumers – as part of a mass, a glob, whose only activity is
consumption. It classifies all objects as being just one generic object,
the consumed. With just the user-used vocabulary of New Speak
to call upon, we are more likely to view that souvenir of the Eiffel
Tower as a sign of our having consumed Paris, which can now be
ticked off the list of 100 things to do before we die.
The thinking caring part of the self is weakened when the dominant
culture strikes out the very words care needs for all the things in
the world and all the diverse parts of the self. While these words
may not be actually lost, without official cultural sanction they may
count for less and carry less affective weight in our thinking.

Attacks on grammar
Neoliberal New Speak strips down sentences to having just one
subject (consumer), one verb (consumes) and one object (service)
and it strips grammar of past and future tenses. Consuming is
present tense. William Faulkner (1929) brilliantly conveyed this
dropping away of time’s framing function in his description of what
happens to our experience of time when we are hungry. Suddenly
‘12 o’clock’ becomes ‘lunch o’clock’. The problem is that when
thinking in New Speak it is always ‘lunch o’clock’. Awareness

3
From Song of Myself: ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ (Part 51).
122 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

of time brings awareness that there are limits, and when busy
consuming in New Speak mode, this awareness starts to fade.
Care, which differentiates, separates, individuates, faces conflict,
is broad-minded and is aware of time, is stripped of its words and
granted no voice and no place at this table of consumables. Care
has been silenced and greed boosted, its crude regressive mental
action sanctioned by neoliberal culture’s official language. Melanie
Klein’s description of greed as ‘scooping out’ vividly conveys the
aggressive, stripping, routing, quality of New Speak.4
Care reminds us of what is lost and damaged when greed is
allowed to take over. Care feels the loss as real and it mourns. When
just a consumer, existing in a timeless present, a different logic holds
sway, that of the exception for whom loss is not real, cause and
effect are not apparent and individual agency and responsibility are
not owned. In this perpetual present tense, one has dispensed with
the need to have a story in which one holds any responsibility.
When thinking in New Speak, I dim the lights on my caring
part and brighten my picture of myself as a consumer. I no longer
struggle between the part of me that cares and my uncaring part.
Most importantly, I dispense with gratitude. We feel no gratitude
towards a ‘service’, as its only reason for being there is for our
gratification. We do not care what happens to it afterwards. We feel
no gratitude towards an earth presented to us (these days mostly
online) as a vast shopping mall with all its wares on display, its
existence solely for our convenience. One click, and its mine. When
in user-used mode, we more readily side-line, disappear, descriptions
of the world such as ‘fundamental home’, ‘ultimate provider’, ‘loved
object’, ‘supporter of life itself’. We are drawn mentally into The
Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh’s (2017) description of our
mental state. He said, ‘We have come to see ourselves as lords and
masters of the earth, entitled to plunder her at will. … We have
forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth; that we breathe
her air and receive life from her waters.’
New Speak encourages us to be psychopathic, and the problem
is we are all, if we scratch deep enough, a bit psychopathic. It is

4
Klein used the image of ‘scooping out’ in several of her papers. For example, ‘greed
aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast’
(1957, p. 181).
 NEW SPEAK 123

part of our ordinary uncaring side. Here we have a culture that, for
commercial ends, encourages that bit of us rather than helping us to
contain it. It encourages squandering of resources.

Have a nice day

The social rule involved with ‘have a nice day’ is do not, please,
actually tell me how you are. Is this just a variant of being polite,
considerate and not burdensome? After all, the old joke has it, ‘I
asked him how he was, and he went and told me!’ My argument is
‘have a nice day’ is part of New Speak.
Werner Peters (1996) gives ‘have a nice day’ as part of American
‘talk culture’, but I suggest it can also mean, ‘join in with group
culture and go along with idealizing the view’. This is more
innocuous when a person is aware of playing the social game. It
becomes concerning when the idealizing view becomes so ever-
present that it eclipses and invalidates genuine experience. When
that happens, people may prefer to listen to an inner voice that
says, ‘you’re entitled to a nice day. You deserve it.’ This is our old
friend the exception within us cooing to us and now endorsed by
the dominant culture. I found it interesting that in my local area this
salutation mostly vanished during the Covid-19 pandemic. Was it
perhaps thought too insensitive?
Have a nice day is not just salutation, but hints at direction, all
very nicely and pleasantly put. It does not convey a wish that your
day be good (as in ‘good day’). Good and nice are not from the
same register. Rather, it suggests we join a more superficial register
in which we can be (apparently) without discomfort, inner conflict
and troubling experience. Behind the friendliness of ‘have a nice
day’ is coercive cultural framing. Step out of the framing, and one
can feel wrong footing and rejecting of the person offering one a
nice day.
‘Have a nice day’ provides the mood music for being more
‘experience lite’. It strips us of a richer register of inner moods to call
upon, moods that reflect our hugely varied experience. For instance,
we cannot grieve while having a nice day, nor can we face conflict,
nor can we so easily be responsible citizens in today’s world. The
experience-lite world is a comfortable convenient world in which
124 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

to live as an un-conflicted consumer. The worst of it – to me at any

rate – is the idea I would want my experience to be ‘nice’.5
There is a not nice side to New Speak. Neoliberal Exceptions
promote it so they can profit from us more effectively. I suggest
most people would feel upset to realize they are so uncared for.
Might they then use the social injunction to ‘have a nice day’ as an
antidepressant? A culture that is experience-lite may be a signal of an
inner devastation, one where the caring, experiencing, individuating
part has become overwhelmed and demoralized.
Peters cautioned, ‘The temptation to really believe that something
that sounds so good is real is a permanent aspect of the American
society’ (p. 75). He thought what keeps delusion at bay is having
a democratic structure in the background (real, mind-bending,
Orwellian Newspeak depends on an authoritarian regime), and
also a capacity for self-irony and reflection (which I would see as
an internal democratic regime). Peters diagnosed American society
as democratic, but he was writing before Trump and the fake news
era.
When a culture actively attacks our reality sense, when it strips
away the words that we need to keep us experience near, when it
drowns out our varied moods with a bright artificial mood, when
it repeatedly suggests to us there is no other way, our contact with
reality may be steadily undermined. We are drawn to embrace an
unreal ‘as if’ world, and to repudiate our caring thoughtful side that
resists this. In these circumstances, a drift towards totalitarianism is
more likely. By totalitarianism I mean not just government making
holding a different point of view a crime, but opposition within the
self being drowned out.
A culture that works to uncare us achieves its effects bit, by bit,
by bit. The destructiveness of ‘slow violence’ may not be noticed
as each attack on our caring part is small and may therefore seem
insignificant, breeding complacency. Rob Nixon’s (2011) important
and profound concept of ‘slow violence’ will be returned to many
times as this book’s story unfolds.

5
Hannah Arendt (1963) made the point that ‘adherence to conventional, standardized
codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting
us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events
and facts make by virtue of their existence.’
 16
The World Bank using
New Speak

Franco Moretti and Dominique Pestre (2015) analysed how the

language used by the World Bank changed during globalization.
They called the World Bank’s new language ‘Bankspeak’.1 Bankspeak
is part of neoliberalism’s New Speak (see Chapter 15). It is highly
abstract and it distorts time by referring to a continual present in
which things are ongoing but are never actually accomplished or
completed. The result is no one is responsible for anything. That,
argue Moretti and Pestre, is the point of Bankspeak. It makes it
harder to think about malpractice. Here are Moretti and Pestre,
‘One (passage) from 1958, on the Congo’s present transport
system, was full of rivers, farms, markets, railways, ports, minerals,
cities … It couldn’t have been clearer. The second passage from 2008
is different. Here it is: “Levelling the playing field on global issues.
Countries in the region are emerging as key players on issues of
global concern and the Bank’s role has been to support their efforts
by partnering through innovative platforms for an enlightened
dialogue and action on the ground”.’
Moretti and Pestre note: ‘The Bank stresses the importance
of what it is saying – key, global, innovative, enlightened – but
its words are hopelessly opaque.’ They analysed in detail how
Bankspeak creates opacity. Abstract nouns replace concrete nouns

1
Bankspeak in homage to Orwell’s Newspeak.
126 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

and words increasingly end with ‘ion’, ‘tion’ and so on (Orwell,

1946, had discussed this kind of obfuscation, giving ‘pacification’
and ‘rectification’ as euphemisms for violence as examples).2 As
Moretti and Pestre point out, in Bankspeak, actions and processes
have nothing to do with any actual human participants who have
agency and who carry responsibility:

‘Pollution, soil erosion, land degradation, deforestation and

deterioration of the urban environment’ … the absence of
social actors is striking. All these ominous reports and no one is
responsible. … In front of the word one can no longer see – one
can no longer even imagine – a concrete subject engaged in a
decision.

The use of abstract nouns, formed by time-freezing verbs,

constrains thinking. Bankspeak operates ‘not with arguments but
with the unspoken “fact” of a repetitive grammatical pattern. …
Each new policy is the only policy.’
Bankspeak ‘disappeared’ the word ‘disagree’ altogether. Moretti
and Pestre note that ‘disagree’ did not appear in a single report of
the World Bank, while the word disagreement appeared just twice
in seventy years. They suggest, ‘It is an example of the formula
Margaret Thatcher made famous, “there is no alternative”.’
Bankspeak is one of the ways that power directs our eyes to what
it wants us to see and away from what it does not want us to see.
Orwell said with this kind of obfuscating talk ‘a mass of … words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering
up all the details’.3 The main function of Bankspeak is to hide the
inevitable environmental and social damage that accrued when
neoliberal Exceptions were in charge. And, the fact that Bankspeak
needed to emerge is that people can think and do care. Otherwise,
the Bank could plainly have said, we moved our factories to save
on wages, we cut down rainforests for profit; understanding the
consequences makes no difference to our behaviour.

2
This turns verbs that describe actions and processes into abstract nouns.
3
‘Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible’ (Orwell,
1946, p. 166).
 THE WORLD BANK USING NEW SPEAK 127

Transforming ‘either … or’ into ‘and …

and’
With the World Bank’s lending policies inspired by neoliberal
economics, by the 1990s serious concern had been raised about
the harm the Bank was doing to people and to nature. Moretti and
Pestre go into how the Bank neutralized these concerns with an
omnipotent grammatical ‘quick fix’: it simply replaced ‘either …
or’ with ‘and … and’. With Bankspeak one can bypass the rules of
logic. Apparently. The Bank could now present itself as caring and
green and as maximizing profit. Bankspeak had ‘resolved’ conflict
between these two incompatibles by replacing the word ‘or’ with
the word ‘and’. ‘Or’ may be a tiny word, but it makes rational
thinking possible as it establishes limits and thus prevents greedy
cravings from overrunning the mind.
‘Disappearing’ conflict through omnipotent thinking enables
people to cause harm and present themselves as moral (and believe
that they are). Suspending the rules of logic is a deep attack on
thinking.
When ‘either … or’ is magically switched to ‘and … and’ one can:
pursue infinite growth and be on a finite planet; issue mortgages to
people who cannot repay them and avoid a banking crash; rape
the natural world and fill it with rubbish and have it still paradisal;
get rid of pesky fire regulations and keep people safe; ignore
peoples’ real concerns and have them not mind about that. The
only important thing is I am an Exception, entitled to be it all, have
it all and to use omnipotent thinking to restore my world as perfect,
for me. The terrifying thing is that those currently holding power on
the world stage are in the grip of an ideology shot through with this
kind of regressive omnipotent thinking.
Strike out the word ‘or’ from language and from thinking, and
you generate a fraud bubble, and all fraud bubbles must burst. I
explore them in Chapter 22.
A big issue raised by the financial crash in 2008 is how did people
not know the crash was coming. Bankspeak is one element that makes
it harder to know, as it encourages a whole group to be in denial. I
explore further what holds groups in a state of denial in Chapter 24.
‘Bankspeak’ gives voice to the regressed infantile phantasy that
the ‘big I am’ can eat up the whole world and still have her there,
128 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

unchanged and undamaged. To live in a wishful bubble of this kind,

one needs actively to obliterate one’s experience, because experience
tells one repeatedly it is not possible in reality to eat a cake and to
still have it.
Oscar Wilde (1893) succinctly stated the basic either/or conflict
by raising it to tragic irony in his farce Lady Windermere’s Fan,
which includes the lines, ‘In this world there are only two tragedies.
One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it. The
last is much the worst. The last is a real tragedy.’
The issue is either humanity faces limitation and consequences
and feels the tragic loss of hubris that entails, or humanity is overrun
by Exceptionalism. The real tragedy is that if neoliberal Exceptions
get what they want it will mean suicide for humanity.
 17
Mass media

This chapter argues that one aim of mass media in the neoliberal
age has been to construct an ‘as if’ world to protect and promote
consumerism. News is selectively screened out that reveals that
neoliberal economic policies damage the environment and cause
human suffering. Here are two examples from hundreds I could
have chosen.

Forest fires
During June 2015 massive fires started across Indonesia, spewing
CO2 into the atmosphere1 and a choking haze that reached as far
as Malaysia and Singapore. In early September six Indonesian
provinces declared a state of emergency;2 by the end of September in
Kalimantan, air pollution reached the highest level ever recorded,3
parts of the Philippines were covered in thick smog and in Malaysia,

Based on a talk by I gave at the London Metropolitan University Centre for Research
into Media, Identity and Culture (MiC), 18 November 2014: Climate Change
and the Media: How to Move beyond Alarmism and Denial (in discussion with
journalists Anne Karpf, John Vidal and James Painter).
1
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/10/15/how-
indonesias-staggering-fires-are-making-global-warming-worse/
2
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/26/indonesias-fires-crime-against-
humanity-hundreds-of-thousands-suffer
3
http://www.wri.org/blog/2015/09/indonesian-fires-create-‘hazardous’-levels-air-
pollution-singapore
130 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

1.5 million children were kept home from school. Over 22,000
soldiers were deployed to fight the flames.4 By October, Southern
Vietnam, 1,000 miles away, was enveloped in thick, choking smog
that lasted for days. The Indonesian government readied warships
to rescue residents trapped in the haze;5 air pollution was classed
as hazardous. Millions of hectares of rainforest, peat land and
other areas had been reduced to ash. Some 500,000 people were
confirmed to be suffering from respiratory illnesses (Lamb, 2015)
and the world’s remaining wild orangutans were under threat.
There was very little coverage indeed of these fires in the
mainstream Western press. George Monbiot, writing in October
2015, said, ‘I’ve often wondered how the media would respond
when eco-apocalypse struck. … What I did not expect was that
they would ignore it.’ Monbiot’s ‘piece’ was headlined, ‘Indonesia Is
Burning. So Why Is the World Looking Away?’ The short answer is
because the press directs our attention elsewhere.
The fires in Indonesia were not an accident of nature. They
happened largely because of destruction of forests for palm oil and
soy, with large corporations such as Johnson and Johnson, PepsiCo,
Colgate-Palmolive, Burger King and others heavily implicated.6
The media has been until very recently mostly silent about the
alarming rate at which forests are being chopped down,7 alarming
because it signals a rampantly greedy economic system now out of
control. Forests provide habitat and perform the vital function of
absorbing CO2. They are the earth’s lungs. Chopping them down
given the current level of carbon emissions is like deliberately
setting out to destroy a sick patient’s immune system.
One of Extinction Rebellion’s demands of the press in late 2018
was TELL THE TRUTH about ecocidal practices like these. I would
add, educate us. Tell us that wood from mature forests is currently
found in toilet paper (Wolfson, 2019). Only Exceptions need pristine

4
https://indonesiaburning.com
5
http://news.mongabay.com/2015/10/indonesia-readies-shelter-ships-as-haze-last-
resort-after-evacuateus-hits-twitter/
6
Online petition to the CEOs of Johnson and Johnson, PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive
and other companies that use palm oil. https://www.greenpeace.org.au/news/
greenpeace-demands-rainforest-protection-at-the-australian-headquarters-of-
colgate-palmolive-johnson-johnson-and-pepsico/
7
There has been greater coverage of forest fires in the Amazon under Bolsonaro, but
still the overall picture of deliberate deforestation across Eastern Europe and other
countries is being under reported.
 MASS MEDIA 131

paper for the royal bottom and never mind the consequences. An
Extinction Rebellion event held outside the BBC in central London
in 2019 called out, ‘Stop lying to us and help us instead to manage
how the truth leaves us feeling.’

Global warming
On 15 March 2016, Steve Connor, science editor for The
Independent newspaper,8 wrote a piece headlined,

‘Climate Change: February Was Hottest Month on Record as

“Exceptional” Nasa Figures Show Global Warming Surge’

On that day, the BBC website in its roundup of news from the
British press did not mention this news and chose for its humorous
trawl of ‘Eye-catching headlines’:

‘Elderly Frozen Out by Speedy Ice Cream Vans

MPs Order, Order, Order £1.2m Worth of Alcohol
Bishop: I Feel Sorry for Judas, He’s Had a Lousy Press’

Well before the age of Trump it was clear that the main aim of
the press and mainstream media was not to inform us about real
events but to create an ‘as if’ virtual reality so as to keep in place a
collective bubble of disavowal about the terrible effects the global
economy is having on the world. Neoliberal media does not screen
out all disturbing upsetting stories. Indeed, it reports shocking news
daily, while selectively screening to lessen felt disturbance about
the effects of the current global economy. Opening a newspaper
now, one sees a carefully managed scenario to achieve this. This
is journalism generating a fraudulent bubble to hide damage.
Journalist Patrick Chalmers (2013) made a powerful case for this
in his book Fraudcast News, about the degeneration of mainstream
broadcasting into ‘fraudcasting’.9

8
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-global-warming-nasa-
february-hottest-month-on-record-a6930981.html
9
Indeed, James Hansen has argued that the recent Paris agreement on climate change
is an instance of fraudcasting (see Milman, 2015).
132 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Mainstream media encourages people to stay in the bubble that

enables them to carry on as usual ‘as if’ environmental devastation
had barely occurred. The framing of what is considered news
promotes, broadly speaking, division into ‘privileged us’ and
‘sacrificed them’, fracturing concern along racial lines. The main
message sent is that people in the global south do not count.
Part of maintaining the bubble is ensuring that people do not
join the dots: forest fires? Rapacious corporations? Climate change?
Economics? My lifestyle? Too complicated for me. Leave that to the
experts.
With such scant news about climate events in the global south,
most people will not be aware of them. However, they will be
aware, probably subliminally, of how little attention is paid to the
global south in general in reporting, and this in itself promotes
racism: apparently, black lives in the global south do not matter.
Rob Nixon (2011) gave a blistering account of how people in the
global south are discounted in his brilliant book Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor. A small section of the media
does draw our attention to climate reality, fleetingly, but its effect
then is like the faint flash that appears in our peripheral field of
vision during an eye test – certainly not on a scale to trigger our
felt concern.
The issue is not just that we naturally tend to care more about
those close to us. This is active framing by the media. If we see it
as just the way of the world, we fail to register the true scale of
the bubble and the true scale of problems being created. We have
perhaps become immured to just how odd it is to be told that one
of the attention-grabbing headlines on 15 March 2016 was old-age
pensioners could not buy their ice cream from Mr. Whippy. What
is odd has been normalized. What is huge has been minimized. At
this point, it could well be argued I lack a sense of humour – the
daily headline trawl by the BBC is designed to be funny and quirky.
However, perhaps the joke could be better appreciated if the big
picture of an extractive economy’s violence was being adequately
addressed. Instead, global heating is recast as a hot summer’s day
– yippee – and its problems recast to difficulties of getting our ice
creams.
Current news has progressively morphed into info-tainment,
with news broadcasts now called ‘shows’. This makes thinking
about what constitutes news more difficult, especially grim news. It
 MASS MEDIA 133

renders thinking vaguer and less able to be reflective and critical. It

takes the emotional sting out of violence and destructiveness. News
that global warming has surged and that pensioners can’t get to the
ice cream van in time causes mental confusion at best; at worst it
breeds cut-off cruelty.
It is hard to keep abreast of how rapidly the climate crisis is now
advancing. During 2018, temperatures were similar in Spain and
in the Arctic Circle, an unprecedented situation (Watts, 2018). The
deep ice in the Antarctic had cracked.10 By July 2019, forests in the
Arctic were on fire.11 A group of climate psychologists I belong to
(the Climate Psychology Alliance12) complained to the BBC, along
with other groups, for its failure adequately to link the heat wave
with climate and to explain what was happening to the public. The
BBC wrote back rejecting the complaint with arguments we found
steeped in denial of how serious the situation is.
The BBC is breaking trust by misinforming and actively
misleading the public over climate change.13 The BBC is under
pressure, having been relentlessly attacked by the British neoliberal
establishment over the past decade, but it is fast losing its solid
global reputation for balance in reporting.
In 2019, the BBC did give more information about the climate
crisis, but overall the message remained business as usual. On day
two of the Extinction Rebellion occupation in April 2019 which
was reported by the BBC, the anchorman on PM, a BBC Radio 4
daily news programme, categorically stated that carbon emissions
are not going to be reduced. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ he said. This
may be his opinion, but he stated it as fact. He had ceased to be a
news reporter and had morphed into a US-styled opinionated news
jock.
In 2009, Nick Davies wrote a book about distortion and
propaganda in the global media. He pointed out that omission is
the most powerful source of distortion. The forest fires, poisonous
pesticides, low wages, true cost of rising carbon emissions, plastic

10
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/sciencefair/2017/06/01/massive-iceberg-break-
off-antarctica-crack-expands-11-miles/102385980/
11
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-49125391
12
https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org
13
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/sep/07/bbc-we-get-climate-
change-coverage-wrong-too-often
134 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

in the oceans, harm to sea life, factory farming practices and sheer
waste that accompanies our cafe breakfast have been mostly omitted
from the mainstream press. The global economy has been presented
to those with means as idealized provider. Through systematic
omission, the media has kept the ugliness of the global economy’s
way of doing business out of the picture.
The rise of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire14 has led to a
decrease in fact checking and an increase in uniformity of headline
framing across the press, corruption of the category news with
opinion pieces, trivia and celebrity stories as news. The general
result has been an environment in which less and less respect was
paid to serious journalism.

Taking the US government to court

In 2015, a group of young people filed a lawsuit against the US
government and various petroleum institutes and associations15 on
behalf of future generations. Their lawsuit claimed,

our government has caused or substantially contributed to the

present (climate) emergency. … such federal actions infringe
upon the fundamental guarantees of the 5th Amendment,
including the rights to life, liberty, property, and equal protection
of the law. … federal officials have been aware for decades of
the major risks even as they approved or underwrote fossil fuel
project after project without CO2 controls. … the Court should
immediately order the government to develop and implement a
climate recovery plan.16

14
One reason for this, discussed by Davies (2009), is that widespread staff cutbacks
made during the Murdoch era led to editors increasingly relying on opinion as
cheaper than news based on fact.
15
The American Petroleum Institute, National Association of Manufacturers, and the
American Fuels and Petrochemical Association.
16
For information about this ongoing trial, see https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/
juliana-v-us
 MASS MEDIA 135

In response, the US government and its co-defendants argued

to dismiss the case. However, in April 2016, the District Court
in Oregon denied their request for dismissal on the grounds that
the American Constitution clearly recognizes the entitlements of
future generations. The case, still ongoing, is not being reported
across the mainstream news. Reporting it would presumably raise
deep disquiet in people. The group to be sacrificed is children and
grandchildren, those whom people feel closest to. Having this
implication exposed in the media would no doubt generate feelings
of guilt and moral confusion in people. It would challenge the
short-term hedonism that enables happy consumption without care
for tomorrow. From a neoliberal perspective, it becomes obvious
that this court’s decision should be kept out of the news.
Mass media has hidden what we are losing and has minimized
the need for change. It has filled our minds with a highly selected set
of pictures, sowed doubt, instilled pleasant mood music, distracted
us and generally made thinking about the real world we are living
in more difficult. It has offered us rationales to help us collude and
stay in the bubble.
Media on its own cannot sustain such a short-sighted bubble.
That requires different branches of culture to act in concert, people
to collude and social group pressure to normalize denial.
136
 18
Promoting denial

Ignore what’s really happening and you’ll feel a lot better.

David Mitchell (2016)

Read this chapter only if you want to go into the nitty gritty of
how denial of climate change works. The first point about denial
is that to deny something we must first have seen it. Denial is not
ignorance. The second point is denial often has a payoff; as David
Mitchell humorously explained, it can alleviate mental discomfort.

Negation and disavowal

Psychological denial takes two main forms, negation and disavowal.1
Negation is negativizing a thing; saying what is true is not true.
Disavowal says it is true, but that does not matter. Disavowal solves
problems in ‘as if’ ways by bending the truth.
Negation can often be the first stage in accepting reality and
mourning. Disavowal can more persistently block acceptance of
reality as it corrupts thinking and is harder to undo. Here is a short

1
Freud (1925) situated negation as part of mourning, accepting loss and representing
the lost object or person within the psyche. ‘For a precondition of the setting up of
reality testing is that objects shall have been lost which once brought real satisfaction’
(p. 238). Freud (1940, p. 273) discussed disavowal as a way to avoid anxiety about
loss.
138 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

example of disavowal: the climate is changing but what of it? It

has always been changing, scientists who say climate change is a
problem are unreliable and/or corrupt and, in any case, a changed
climate could be a good thing.
Disavowal works by finding any way to minimize feeling
disturbed by a disturbing reality. Saying climate change is a good
thing as it will enable us to grow new kinds of food like pineapples
in the UK overlooks all the suffering, the growing instability in the
climate system and all the other adverse effects of warming such
as coral bleaching in the oceans, climate refugees, and people and
animals dying as a result of heat, fires, flooding and drought. It blots
out the whole context by dangling one attractive feature – a UK-
grown pineapple – in front of us.
Disavowal is artful at convincing us that the real picture need
not trouble and concern us. Exceptions frequently use disavowal as
a magic wand to wave their problems away, helping them maintain
their entitlement to:

●● be ideal
●● have whatever they want and never give anything up
●● feel no conscious inner disturbance or moral conflict about
this.

It is when people feel entitled to use disavowal that it can become

particularly entrenched.

Denialism
To round out the subject of denial, I need to bring in denialism.
Denialism is an activity funded by various industries to undermine
public confidence in scientific research whenever that research
reveals their products are harmful. Denialists act consciously,
wilfully and knowingly. Eric Conway and Naomi Oreskes (2010)
exposed in detail how denialism works in their seminal book,
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the
Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change. They
showed how denialists sow doubt on the scientific evidence. Philip
Morris knew that smoking is linked with lung cancer while publicly
arguing the link was not proven (Bates and Rowell, 2004; Conway
 PROMOTING DENIAL 139

and Oreskes, 2010); Exxon knew global warming was caused by

fossil fuels while publicly arguing this was not proven (Schwartz,
2018); agrochemical companies fight to stop a ban on nicotinoids
by sowing doubt on the science (Zara, 2013).
I believe people in general are in disavowal about just how
destructive denialism is. The destructiveness has become so
normalized we may think it is ordinary that companies and their
lobbyists sow doubt in this way – it’s just the way business is done,
just one of those things.
Here is an example of how denialism undermines clear thinking
about climate change.

Climate denialism
On the whole, 97 per cent of climate scientists (all the thousands of
physicists, meteorologists, ecologists, oceanographers, geographers,
marine biologists across the world) agree global heating is
exceptionally serious, human caused, due largely to the burning of
fossil fuels and currently accelerating. Denialists characterize the
97 per cent as a race apart and all in a vast conspiracy together to
give the public a false picture of reality.
Denialists understand that people rely on respected authorities to
help them make sense of the world, and that scientists are respected
authorities. Without an authoritative body to trust, people do not
know what to think about global heating or whether to take it
seriously. The big picture is built up by thousands of scientists
working together and pooling their findings. Climate scientists –
or any other scientists – should not be idealized. There is error in
the system, peer review can be a fraught process, human bias is a
distorting factor and what we understand will change as science
develops. All this should not shake basic trust in science or respect
for scientists. Why would it? And why would we stop respecting
scientists just because the data they bring us are disturbing? This is
hardly the first time in the history of science that scientific data have
disturbed our pictures of the world and threatened vested interests.2

2
Copernicus and Darwin are examples; also, when Einstein first put forward his
theory of relativity it was dismissed as ‘Jewish science’ (see Hamilton, 2012).
140 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Denialism works because different branches of culture support it.

The sociologist Stanley Cohen, who wrote the classic book on denial
States of Denial (2000), pointed out that ‘denialism is expressed in
a learned, shared public language; the activities of claim makers
… are organized, planned, intentional and … ideological’ (2012,
p. 76). His particular focus was on implicatory denial, meaning
denying one is responsible or in any way to blame.
An article by George Will in 2016 shows denialism promoting
psychological denial (both negation and disavowal). Will writes,
‘the debate is settled,’ says Obama. ‘Climate change is a fact.’
Indeed. The epithet ‘climate change deniers’, obviously coined to
stigmatize sceptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to
obscure something obvious: of course the climate is changing; it
never is not changing – neither before nor after the Medieval Warm
Period (end of the ninth century to the thirteenth century) and the
Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by
fossil fuels. Today, debatable questions include: to what extent is
human activity contributing to climate change? Are climate change
models, many of which have generated projections refuted by events,
suddenly reliable enough to predict the trajectory of change? Is
change necessarily ominous because today’s climate is necessarily
optimum? Are the costs, in money expended and freedom curtailed,
of combating climate change less than the cost of adapting
to it?’
Will claims that climate scientists attack scepticism in science
and are mistaken with their models, that global heating might not
be such a bad thing, that climate has changed in the past irrespective
of fossil fuel usage, that it is debatable whether human activity
contributes to heating. He concludes: Do we really want to spend
money to reduce carbon emissions when we could adapt instead?
Also, saying that denialists encourage denial or are themselves in
denial stigmatizes them in a very unpleasant way (equivalent to
calling them Holocaust deniers).
The reality is that climate deniers are far more likely to be
politically motivated than climate scientists. Human-caused global
warming is not debatable (as George Will says it is). Some climate
models have failed accurately to predict the rate and patterning
of warming, but on the whole scientists have greatly under- not
overestimated the rate of warming (see Oreskes, Oppenheimer and
Jamieson, 2019).
 PROMOTING DENIAL 141

No wonder people are confused and doubtful about climate

science. This is what Oreskes and Conway meant when they said
doubt is the denialists’ product.
Denialism promotes negation (it’s not true) and disavowal
(it’s true but it does not matter). George Will’s piece in the
Washington Post says the link between heating and fossil fuels is
not well established (negation, as the link is well established and
uncontroversial in science) and that global heating might not be a
bad thing (disavowal as the results are dire); also, we should adapt
to it not reduce carbon emissions (disavowal by accepting heating
is happening while minimizing its destructive effects).
His piece, full of contradictions, is like wide-net fishing or bottom
dredging that aims to catch everything in a net of denial. And, it
effectively conveys its message, which is there is no need for change.
Contrast this with actually taking in the destructiveness and
wanting to address it in real ways. Usually that comes with sadness
and heaviness, not the lightness and triumph that tend to accompany
a ‘quick fix’.
Paul Hoggett (2012) argued that disavowal of climate change
is best understood at a cultural not an individual level. Denialists
have generated an atmosphere within climate science that the social
psychologist Dan Kahan and colleagues (2012) have termed toxic.
Fossil fuel companies have funded politicians’ campaigns on the
understanding that they support climate denialism. This has led to
a situation where, as Clive Hamilton (2012) noted, in the United
States one can predict a person’s attitude to global heating if one
knows their attitude to same-sex marriage, abortion and gun
control.
People need good reliable authority figures, and I suggest it is
traumatic not to know where to turn for reliable information. Later
I argue the public also colluded with the denialists to rid themselves
of feeling conflict. However, unless one appreciates the sheer scale
of denialists’ efforts to cast good science as bad science, one cannot
grasp the big picture of how climate change denial in the general
public operates.
Denialists have sown doubt on climate and earth science,
ridiculed the scientists, infiltrated academia and cultural institutions
to make themselves appear as good authority figures, funded
adverts in the United States that portray climate scientists as mass
murderers (Hickman, 2012), contradicted climate science’s findings
142 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

with vitriol on media outlets like Fox News (Nye, 2017) and
generally operated according to the principle that something said
often enough, loudly enough and insistently enough will stick. The
oil industry has funded the denialists on a massive scale.
An unintended consequence has been to undermine the authority
of all science. When one limb of science (climate science) is attacked,
the whole body of science is mutilated, as is respect for expert
opinion. This adds to a climate in which politicians can deride
targeted experts at will.
Most people do not have the time to check every article they
read. And, denialists can make life harder for anyone who does
challenge them. Indeed, scientists challenging the denialism have
been vilified, received death threats and their careers have suffered.3

The Precautionary Principle

To appreciate why denialism has taken such a hold, particularly
in the United States, it is important to factor in the Precautionary
Principle,4 a legal framework very roughly based on ‘better safe than
sorry’. It requires a company to demonstrate that products that may
cause significant harm are safe. European and US law take, broadly
speaking, different approaches to the Precautionary Principle. The
EU is more likely to apply it5 whereas the United States is more
likely to give producers the go ahead and put the onus on consumer
groups to prove a product is harmful.6 This gives denialists their

3
For detail about this, see the Union of Concerned Scientists’ website (https://www.
ucsusa.org).
4
For a comprehensive account of the Precautionary Principle, see EEA (2013).
5
In many areas such as chemical additives and genetic modification of crops.
6
The current wrangle over whether nicotinoids is harming bee colonies shows what
is at stake: the precautionary principle argues, ‘look before you leap. With a third
of the world’s food crops depending on a healthy bee population for pollination,
you prove to us, Monsanto, that your product is safe. This is not something we
can afford to get wrong.’ In the United States, Monsanto is putting its full financial
weight into funding denialism of the science and attacking bee scientists. That courts
in the EU have not at the time of writing buckled to corporate pressure on this issue
is due largely to their upholding the precautionary principle. Loewenberg (2003)
argued that ‘The United States was once a leader in precautionary legislation. The
Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, both enacted in the 1970’s with bipartisan
 PROMOTING DENIAL 143

opening. They arrive with a raft of corporate lawyers who sow

doubt on scientific evidence that shows harm.

Denialism under Trump

Under Trump, attacks on scientists and scientific evidence became
openly bellicose and vicious.7 However, a well-known climate
denialist, James Delingpole, writing for Breitbart News, said this
as far back as 2014 about those who challenge climate denialism,

This is total war. They realise that even if you don’t. Face it,
we’re fighting a bunch of eco Nazis, here. They are corrupt,
mendacious, bullying, fascistic, misanthropic, greedy, totalitarian
and rotten to the very core. And personally, every now and again,
I like to remind the scum-sucking slime balls of this fact. … I love
being called a “Denier”.

In the same year (2014) I heard Delingpole debate climate change

with Martin Kirk, then Head of Strategy for Oxfam UK. The debate
was held in a tent at the Wilderness Music and Arts Festival in front
of a ‘gentile’ audience. Here Delingpole, I thought chameleon like,
offered denialism that was measured, artful and ‘respectful’.
I end this chapter with a caveat about negation (no it’s not
happening). I had suggested when short-lived and transient (which
it very often is) negation can help us to face reality bit by bit.
However, when negation becomes suffused with entitlement to be
special and to be ‘free’ of all reality restraints, it can be frankly
psychotic. When Trump says that climate change is not happening
(negation), this is not negation in its benign form. It appears as
entrenched entitlement to negate reality. The ultimate tragedy
will be if denial and denialism keep the oil rigs pumping just long
enough to make planet Earth uninhabitable.

support, explicitly allow regulators to act in the face of uncertain findings. But in
the Reagan era, precautionary regulation was seen as an enemy of the free market.’
See also Weiner and Rogers (2002), who argue the picture is more nuanced and no
black-and-white comparisons can be made between the EU and America about the
Precautionary Principle.
7
Examples are Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency and Zinke at the
Department of the Interior.
144
 19
Advertising

In this chapter, I explore two adverts arguing that both help to

obscure the reality of rising carbon emissions, corruption and
environmental damage.

An advert for Volkswagen

The VW emissions scandal dubbed ‘Dieselgate’ broke in 2015
when it was discovered VW had deliberately fixed their diesel cars
to cheat carbon and nitrous oxide emissions tests. They were not
the only car company to have cheated in this way. An article in
the Financial Times by Guy Chazan in 2016 revealed in detail the
ways the German Government colluded with VW’s cheating. Later
(Chapter 27), I go into the way that organized cover-ups always
involve, indeed require, collusion.
Soon after the scandal broke, VW announced it would offer
compensation to drivers in North America and its US CEO Michael
Horn said, ‘We sincerely hope you see this as a first step toward
restoring your invaluable trust.’1 In the light of VW’s subsequent
actions, this reminded me of vintage British comedian Hughie
Green’s by-line, ‘And I mean that very sincerely, folks.’
Rather than Volkswagen mending its ways, it went on successfully
to lobby to remove key parts of Europe’s forthcoming auto

1
http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/11/15/9739960/volkswagen-
apologizes-with-full-page-ad-in-dozens-of-newspapers
146 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

emissions tests and to relax EU air pollution standards,2 prompting

twenty cities including Paris to mount legal challenges. While from
2017 new cars have had to pass a test designed to check emissions
under real traffic conditions, a major investigation3 revealed that
many of the big manufacturers continued to introduce new models
with real driving emissions stats many times higher than those they
published. VW and Shell would lobby to block the EU from pushing
for cleaner electric cars (Neslen, 2016).
Advertisers face a Herculean task when they accept a brief from
VW. In addition to building brand identity, they must detoxify
brand VW and idealize the world of fossil fuels. They rise to the
challenge with a sophisticated understanding of human psychology.

Then, now, always, I’ll be your home

An advert made in 2016 for VW4 (a year after the Dieselgate
scandal broke) shows two old-style VW cars on the road with a
boy in the back of each. They smile as they pass. Next, the boys are
grown up, each with his own VW and his own family. The two pass
each other at life’s important moments. The advert closes with, VW.
Then, now, always. A male voice croons softly in the background,
I’ll be your home.
First, the slogan Then, now, always sends the message that fossil
fuels and the motor car are here to stay. The tone is reassuring. This
works to soothe away realistic anxiety: in reality, either humanity
will rapidly transition away from fossil fuels or climate instability
will make living conditions impossible.

2
VW argued against requiring special, high-speed tests for cars designed to be
driven fast. VW which owns the Porsche, Lamborghini and Audi brands is a leading
producer of fast cars. It also argued against measuring the significant pollution
released when an engine is started but hasn’t yet warmed up. ‘Such topics must be
deleted,’ a Volkswagen executive wrote in an email to the European Commission, the
European Union’s executive branch.
3
By Greenpeace (https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/03/02/diesel-cars-emissions-
tests-rde-nox-eu-standards-companies). Also, Gabbatiss (2018) quotes a study by
the consumer organization Which? that corroborates Greenpeace’s findings.
4
https://www.tvadsongs.uk/vw-advert-song-2016-singer-volkswagen-commercial-
home/.
 ADVERTISING 147

Then, now, always infantilizes the viewer by treating reality as

a fairy story in which the human family lives happily ever after
into the future in the world of fossil fuels. In reality because of
fossil fuels we are the first and only generation not able to imagine
our genes enduring into the future with any sense of security. The
soothing idealizing slogan Then, now, always aims to bleach the
horror from this picture.
Then, now, always conjures up a trusted reliable figure that will
never, ever, let you down and always be there for you. But VW did let
its customers down when it lied to them about its cars’ emissions.5 It
knowingly caused and is causing people to die6 and in a just world
VW would be held criminally to account. The advertiser’s technique
here is to turn truth on its head (an unstable world is a stable world;
untrustworthiness is trustworthiness) and to present an idealized
version of the false picture.
Having worked to assuage anxiety and detoxify the brand, the
advert turns to building brand loyalty. Here, the car speaks directly
to the viewer with the soft seductive song, ‘I’ll be your home’. The
promise is that in this car-home on wheels, you can feel at home.
Home means psychic home, and psychically we feel at home (or
do not) in many different ways: in our skin, as part of a social
group, in our identity, our family, in nature and in a safe physical
world. I suggest the subtext here is if you want to feel secure with
the significant others in your life (other men, women and your
children), choose this car. If you want to feel comfortable in your
identity as a man (the two men in the advert are a bit competitive),
choose this car. If you want to feel secure in this culture, choose this
car. This is the dominant culture, then, now, always. If you buck the
culture, you will feel less secure and may also feel unmanned. If you
want to feel more in control of nature and the elements, choose this

5
They are not the only car company to do so.
6
Carrington (2017b) reports that ‘Researchers have created the first global inventory
of the emissions … by cars and trucks on the road, over and above the legal limits
which are monitored by lab-based tests. … This led to at least 38,000 premature
deaths due to heart and lung disease and strokes. Most of the deaths are in Europe,
where highly polluting cars are the main culprit, and in China and India, where dirty
trucks cause most of the damage. The work also shows that, even if diesel cars did
meet emissions limits, there would still be 70,000 early deaths per year.’
148 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

car: in this home-on-wheels you are sealed off from the external
world and see it only through a window.
The car offers itself as home, the object of our deepest attachment
and sense of belonging. It also offers itself as a possession. We attach
ourselves to possessions too, and this advert plays on this fact about
us to maximum effect. The climate psychologist Ro Randall has
written about how we come to see objects in our world as part
of our identity, as extensions of us (Randall and Brown, 2015). I
suggest the VW advert hooks into men’s deep desires to be better
competitors, lovers, husbands and fathers. When a car comes to be
seen as an indispensable part of these layers of identity, the advert
has ‘worked’.
To stay within Then, now, always framing is to be (falsely)
reassured. To break with it is potentially to feel threatened at the
level of masculine identity. Can one still be a man and all that means
without one’s VW and the fossil fuel to drive it?
Then, now, always stimulates the phantasy that time stands still.
It works against people understanding that we may have had petrol
and diesel cars then, we may still have them now, but we urgently
need to end the fossil fuel age if there is to be any hope of always.
‘Freeze-framing’ time interferes with our understanding this, and
it blocks the hard work of mourning our relationship with petrol
and all that signifies. Then, now, always keeps us stuck in denial, an
early stage in mourning. The advert feeds exaggerated entitlement
to conditions that do not change no matter how much damage our
collective actions cause. It corrupts people’s thinking.
Advertisers have had to keep adjusting their message as the
climate system visibly unravels around us. A TV commercial in
2019 for the Audi Q5 Progress had as its by-line, ‘Confidence in
chaos’.7

Here comes the summer

A neoliberal economy squanders resources and this next advert
boosts a sense of entitlement to squander.

7
www.ispot.tv
 ADVERTISING 149

Two young boys create a virtual football stadium in their back

garden by covering the fence on all three sides with pictures printed
on A4 paper, each representing a tiny section of a football crowd
in a stadium. They carefully cut a hole for a bird’s nest and we see
a chick peeking its head through the hole. Next, we see one boy
skidding across the grass on his knees in triumph, a big grin on
his face, having scored a goal to the imagined cheers of the crowd.
Mum watches the boys through the kitchen window, amused, proud
and relieved. Here comes the summer. Beautifully cheap paper.
This TV advert for Kodak Inkjet paper8 is at one level charming
and fun, showing kids at their creative best, speaking to the
familiar problem of what to do in the long summer holidays. I
could be seen as a killjoy for raising problems about it. It is one of
a countless number of adverts I could have chosen to illustrate the
way advertising promotes an exaggerated sense of entitlement to
what we want when we want it and that there is no cost to this.
This advert really brought home to me that we are teaching our
children to assume the world is there just for their taking and their
pleasure. I first saw it on children’s TV. The reality is that the world
is being rapidly denuded of its forests which is accelerating global
heating, and we are watching species go extinct for lack of habitat.
We are now embedded within such a ‘use once and throwaway’
culture that the behaviour in this advert appears normal and
unproblematic.
The advert portrays the world as an idealized provider, and it
works against understanding the true picture. This is that a rapidly
rising global population means we can no longer carry on as though
resources are endless and there are no limits. We can no longer
afford to turn a blind eye to manufacturing processes that make
this paper ‘beautifully cheap’. It may be cheap for this mum but
only because the true costs are not factored in.
The issue yet again is the need for humanity to move on and
mourn the phantasy we can live in a way that is unsustainable –
also, to confront a culture that promotes such unhelpful values.
The danger is the next generation will not even have a yardstick to
compare their entitled outlook with.

8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve-tdduTbdA
150 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Does this advert not promote ingratitude in children? Exaggerated

entitlement and gratitude do not mix, as when we feel entitled, we
believe we take what we want as our right. We do not feel indebted.
Ecological debt, currently not found on neoliberal balance sheets,
is what we owe to nature, and breeding entitlement in children
distances them from awareness of their indebtedness to nature.
It could be argued that the advert does address love of nature and
gratitude towards nature. Look at the care the boys take to ensure
the baby bird is safe in its nest – indeed they give it a ring seat at
their game. Here I suggest the narrative plays on and reinforces a
central phantasy of our culture, which is we do not need to give
anything up: we can love nature and damage nature at the same
time without consequences. This underlying message blocks the
need to struggle with choice and to mourn.
The advert promotes a false craving that must then be thwarted
if we return to a saner way of living. If our children get used to
thinking squandering is normal and acceptable, then any cutback
faces them with having to give things up. Without such unreal
expectations, they would not have needed to adjust.
The advert seduces by offering Kodak Inkjet as mum’s ‘special
helper’ and is subversive of parental authority by encouraging
parents to squander resources. Again, the issues this advert throws
up cannot be taken in isolation from other parts of neoliberalism’s
culture of uncare, with newspapers and general culture also
promoting exaggerated entitlement and hiding the damage. We
now live in a throwaway culture, so why mind about this advert in
particular when millions of paper cups are thrown away each day
and so on.
The Kodak advert is mild in its aimed mental effects when
compared with much advertising to children these days. I do not
have space to include a proper discussion of this, and my instinct
is too much detail would in any case be overwhelming. Current
advertising to children regularly overwhelms their relatively
unformed capacity to think, and it does so to shape their desires
and turn them into model consumers.
Susan Long (2008) has argued that a perverse culture begets
further perversion (more on her ideas in Chapter 24). Undermining
the framework of care that held in check advertising to children
has had untold knock-on effects. It has even been suggested that
one effect may have been that in 2003 the American Psychological
 ADVERTISING 151

Association altered the wording of part of its ethical code.9 Was

this because too many psychologists were aiding the advertising
industry?
As Jon Alexander pointed out in 2014, ‘We have too much
advertising, and it is promoting deeply unhelpful values.’10
Advertisers make adverts that are clever, funny and charming. In
neoliberalism’s culture of uncare their undoubted creativity is being
channelled to boost Exceptionalism and undermine the part of us
that cares.

9
Specifically, the 1992 Ethical Principles of the APA included one entitled ‘Social
Responsibility’, which stated that psychologists should apply and make public their
knowledge of psychology in order to contribute to human welfare. In 2003, the
APA removed this clause and the whole of the social responsibility section. See Linn
(2004, p. 23) who speculated on whether this was because so many psychologists
were working for industry and in advertising.
10
http://jerichochambers.com/guest-article-an-open-letter-to-sir-martin-sorrell/
152
 20
Political framing

By its very nature, (propaganda) excludes contradiction

and discussion …
the opposing faction must become negligible,
or in any case cease to be vocal.
JACQUES ELLUL (1973, P. 11)

Margaret Thatcher made it clear her aim was to change cultural

values. She put it thus: ‘I came to office with one deliberate intent:
to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society – from
a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation.’1
One can read this as her fervent, sincerely held, belief that Britain
was in moral decay and she was offering the right medicine like a no-
nonsense nurse. My argument is she used propaganda as soft power
to shape the new homo economicus required for neoliberalism to
succeed.
Propaganda homes in on real anxieties. At a time of greater
economic uncertainty (the late 1970s) Thatcher urged people to look
out for number one, underpinning Hayek’s narrow view of people
as competing individuals. She talked up and greatly exaggerated the
problem of sponging and system abuse, as did Ronald Reagan in
the United States. Both were furthering Ayn Rand’s divisive framing
(remember her lurid description of workers as leechers, moochers

Speech to Small Business Bureau Conference, 8 February 1984 (http://www.

1

margaretthatcher.org/document/105617).
154 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

and cannibals). Thatcher conflated needing a government that cares

with passivity and weakness, thereby making having needs and
needing care seem shameful. She conflated feeling entitled to be
cared for with being a sponger.
The British Welfare State established after the Second World War
is widely thought to have flowered in response to the horrors of
the Second World War.2,3 Returning soldiers felt a lively sense of
entitlement to be cared for and to care, a feeling no doubt born
of their struggle, at great personal sacrifice, to uphold caring ideals
against fascism and their understanding of war’s destructiveness.4
Back home, they voted in a government that would protect a more
mindful and sustainable political framework.5
The Welfare State was designed to provide free healthcare for
all from cradle to grave and free education for all from primary
through to university level and beyond. For those in need, it
provided state benefits, social housing and care services. Postwar
Britain, while still riven with class and racial inequality, was
designed to not let citizens starve or be homeless, and the state also
fostered intellectual, emotional and cultural growth in its citizens.
The Welfare State did operate – in basic fashion – to ensure its
citizens fared well.
The Welfare State was not set up to issue handouts to people too
passive to ‘do it themselves’; nor were people who needed assistance
seen as shameful and battening on the state. The Welfare State was
a mutual contract between a mature people and the government
it elected to protect and serve the people. This was anathema for
neoliberal Exceptions now come to power.

2
See for instance Timmins (1995), who argued that combat and civil defence work
brought the different classes together and welded social cohesion (p. 34).
3
The United States had also tilted towards greater care after the Second World War.
4
Freud, during the First World War, had said it, ‘shattered our pride in the
achievements of our civilization … robbed us of so much that we had loved, and
showed us the fragility of much that we had considered stable’ (1916b, p. 307).
5
International bodies such as the United Nations and the Geneva Convention against
War were founded. The Bretton Woods agreement sought to ensure countries,
including the losing side, would get help for reconstruction, thus not making the
same mistake as after the First World War when crippling economic conditions were
imposed on Germany.
 POLITICAL FRAMING 155

The Iron Lady

Thatcher as the ‘Iron Lady’ would provide a template for a larger
than life person with no dependency needs and ruthless resolve.
The ‘Iron Lady’ expressed more than Thatcher’s personality. It
was honed performance, part of propaganda. The actor Lawrence
Olivier would give her voice coaching to soften her tone when it
became too strident (Dunbar, 2011).
Part Lady Macbeth screwing her courage to the place, part dulcet-
toned, part seeming to be like a large grey battleship, she steamed
ahead and was not for turning. Her message was if you wanted
to succeed in the new economy, you would do well to emulate
her and ditch your caring part, or at least keep it, like a shameful
inadequate relative, out of sight and out of mind. She introduced a
more bullying culture, beginning with her own cabinet. Those who
opposed her views were ‘wets’ and given marching orders.6
Thatcher’s message that the lady is not for turning would serve
as prologue to neoliberalism’s central message which was there is
no other way. Ellul (1973) in a brilliant far-reaching analysis of
left and right propaganda drew attention to how it works across a
wide range of platforms to stifle opposing voices and different ways
of seeing. It promotes an authoritarian cast of mind, intolerant of
opposition. In this way, Ellul argued, propaganda tends to destroy
the human conscience, as for conscience to operate, inner dissent
must be respectfully heard.
I believe Thatcher’s deepest, most spoiling attack on peoples’
loving caring part is revealed in a joke she once made about the
Good Samaritan. Thatcher recast the parable thus: ‘No one would
remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he
had money as well’.7 Some truth here, and it is pithy and funny, but
her words rob the poor of their potential to care, and feed smugness
in the better off. The capacity to love is not in the gift of only those
with money.
Thatcher made bad look good and good look bad in far more
subtle ways than had Ayn Rand, whom she admired. To her credit,
Thatcher thought rewards should go to those who tried hard, not

6
This was called purging the ‘wets’ in an article in The Times on 15 September 1981.
7
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/margaret_thatcher.html
156 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

to those born with a silver spoon, but her underlying aim was not
primarily to recognize and support talent and hard work across all
classes. It seems instead to have been to tear a nation’s picture of
itself into the morally worthy and the morally inferior, with those in
the ‘morally worthy’ group actually more shameless, less prone to
conscious guilt, and more willing to forget, devalue or treat cruelly
those it cast aside. To achieve what amounted to a drift towards
greater immorality in society, she needed not just to boost self-
interest but to undermine existing frameworks of care.
Thatcher set about privatizing publicly owned utilities, leading
her critics to accuse her of selling off the family silver.8 The Welfare
State saw public utilities as part of the commons, not as a source of
profit for individuals. We know what followed: rising energy and
utility bills and an overcrowded inadequate transport system that
treated people in a way that left them furious and without adequate
redress. Thatcher did not attempt to privatize government itself,
being too much part of the culture of her day. That would come later.
Her idea that state ‘interference’ was morally bad for people’s
development concealed an agenda to weaken the Welfare State.
In practice, Thatcher and the other architects of the new global
economy were not against state interference when it protected
corporations’ financial interests, and it is a myth that they were
against state planning.
Her famous (or infamous) statement, ‘There is no such thing as
Society’9 was made in an interview with Woman’s Own magazine
in 1987. It caused widespread outrage, as it was seen as attacking
the idea that people care about others in society, not just themselves
and their families.
Later she said she had been misunderstood:10 ‘I went on to
say: … It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then to look
after our neighbour. My meaning … was that society was not an
abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed
it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and

8
Harold Macmillan had likened Margaret Thatcher’s privatization policy to selling
off the family silver (Winder, 1986).
9
http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/there-is-no-such-thing-as-society
10
In the second volume of her autobiography in 1993.
 POLITICAL FRAMING 157

voluntary associations.’ This argument perhaps looks convincing.

Do we not care the most for our own families and close loved ones?
Thatcher followed Hayek in viewing individual personal choice as
central. However, dropping the concept of society risks dropping
obligation and responsibility to the wider group.
It also risks undermining the idea there is one global pie to share
with all those living now and in the future. By the 1980s, the reality
of planetary limits was beginning to sink in for many, and so was
a sense of moral obligation to expand our conception of society to
include the global community.11 It was at this historical moment
that Thatcher drove her assault on the idea of society, cultivating
instead narrow mindedness, self-centredness and short-termism.
Trump would carry this way of seeing to new extremities.
Society’s relevance for neoliberals gearing up for their new
economy was as spoke in their wheel. Thatcher’s rhetoric helped
fashion the more psychologically disinhibited, morally deregulated,
consumer now needed: ‘self-interest is natural. There is no such thing
as society so there is no need to feel guilty, ashamed or anxious about
greed. Because I am better (remember I pulled myself up by my own
bootstraps), I deserve more than others anyway. I have no need of
social care – indeed it would be shameful to acknowledge I have any
needs. Really when one looks at things the right way up, “they” –
those who need benefits – are taking what is rightfully mine.
Nonetheless I may choose to help them out with some charity as I
am a worthy person.’
The idea the poor and the vulnerable were stealing from the
rich would be promoted even more vigorously in the United States
than in Britain. It is a classic ambit of neoliberal ideologues. Ronald
Reagan’s rhetoric was of the ‘welfare queen’, a racialized account of
the black woman with her bastard children stealing money from the
state and out of people’s pockets. This set the stage for retrenchment
of aid to families headed by single women.12

11
‘Real cosmopolitanism is not a privilege; it is an obligation. … It belongs to anyone
who cares about global justice, about the environment, about the alleviation of strife
and carnage beyond our immediate national borders’ (Kwame Anthony Appiah,
2016 Reith Lecture).
12
http://womensenews.org/2004/06/time-bury-reagans-legacy-women/
158 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Reagan’s argument dated back to debates around ‘Negro

loaferism’,13 grounded in the notion of the ‘undeserving poor’. This
was America’s version of the ‘lazy blacks are not entitled’ racism I
grew up with in apartheid South Africa.
Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty had turned into a War on the
Poor with racist14 sexist arguments used to remove public assistance
from the poorest Americans. The rhetoric chipped away these social
programmes and altered Americans’ perceptions about the role of
government.
Jeremi Suri15 commented, ‘I think … [the delegitimization
of welfare] … is the most enduring victory of the conservative
movement. … The language about race now runs under the surface,
rather than being stated outright, but still helps to dismantle War
on Poverty programs.’
By the ‘noughties’ – the first decade of the twenty-first century –
Fox News was shooting out the polarizing message that poverty is
a function of character not economic condition. Here are some of
their sound bites: ‘The moocher class … freeloaders … give me a
cell phone, pay my rent … bail outs from cradle to grave … sucking
off the nipple of the government.’16
Under neoliberalism the poor grew poorer and the rich grew
richer. Demonizing the poor (including those who had lost their jobs
to cheap labour abroad) and idealizing the rich made neoliberalism
seem more morally palatable.17 It was also bound to feed triumph:
‘See how we solve our moral problems with omnipotent “quick fix”
thinking!’
Thatcher’s lasting legacy was to instill the idea, ‘do not expect
government to care for you and yours’. We have, over the last forty

13
http://religionandpolitics.org/2015/01/20/the-politics-of-poverty-and-
race/#sthash.nVSNxFnv.dpuf
14
Annelise Orleck (2011), professor of history at Dartmouth University, pointed
out, ‘Reagan really ingeniously pairs [the conservative argument about welfare
government dysfunction] with the continued backlash against civil rights.’
15
Suri quoted in Volsky (2014). Even Clinton’s Department of Health and Human
Services Secretary, Donna E. Shalala, fully embraced the ‘Welfare Queen’ argument
in a comment that stigmatized single mothers, telling Newsweek, ‘I don’t like to
put this in moral terms, but I do believe that having children out of wedlock is just
wrong.’ Chastity training for single mothers was introduced and funded.
16
The idea that poverty is a function of character is not new, of course.
17
Owen Jones (2011) charted the demonization of the poor in the UK.
 POLITICAL FRAMING 159

odd years, come gradually to realize our current political leaders

may leave us to die if our living conflicts with profit. We are now far
less prone to idealize government and leaders and are more realist,
but it is not normal and not tolerable to have our leaders not care
if we, our children and indeed the human race (and other species)
have a viable future, and we should not be lulled into thinking it is
normal and tolerable.
Those of us who were adults in the 1980s witnessed the shift
towards greater, openly triumphant, avarice that for me was flagged
by that advert for water privatization, ‘THIS IS NOT A CLOUD’
(Chapter 3). We were watching the steady erosion of a culture of
care. This is not to idealize that culture of care, but to remember
and mark its vital features.
Thatcher’s propaganda and actions served to weaken the
psychologically containing function of the state as a more
benevolent figure in the background with people’s basic welfare at
heart. This was my view of the state at the time. In many ways it
was idealized,18 but it did nevertheless represent real aspects of the
Welfare State as I experienced it.
Absorbing her hectoring tone, the nation internalized a new
powerful inner voice to contend with, one that de-legitimized
having a social conscience, promoted the false belief we should ‘do
it all ourselves’ (as if we could) and sent the message we would
come a cropper if we could not.
Thatcher ‘softened up’ the British public to express their inner
exception more openly. ‘Softening up’ implies brutality, and her
propaganda was brutal. Most people are not stupid. Deep down no
doubt many never forgot their real dependencies, but could see that
if they did not join in with and make their way in this new culture,
they might fall off the wire with the safety net now less secure.
Jumping forward to 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic, to
what extent might the initial panic buying of food and toilet paper
have been driven by peoples’ underlying realistic anxiety about
their progressive abandonment by caring government? Along
with heightened anxiety about death, might the pandemic have

18
It relied on not factoring in exploitation in the colonies and third world, for
instance. Our safety and social provision were at the expense of others’ lack of safety.
160 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

raised more primitive baby-like anxieties expressing themselves

in thoughts like, who will feed me and clean my bottom? This
of course is speculation. Interestingly, the pandemic did mobilize
greater concern for others among many ordinary people, giving the
lie to the idea that everyone is out for herself or himself.
 21
Blocking tears

The future is not what it used to be!

JEAN VENABLES (2013, P. 45)1

Current culture regularly segues us away from feeling sad about

the state the environment is in. My first example concerns species’
extinction.

The passenger pigeon

The radio presenter selects a programme about the passenger
pigeon for BBC Radio 4’s Pick of the Week:2
‘In the mid-19th century the passenger pigeon was the most
populous bird on the planet. Within one generation they were all
gone, extinct. … Wildlife filmmaker John Aitcheson … was very
understandably keen to see the remains of (Martha) the last ever
passenger pigeon: “I’ve been left now with Martha the passenger
pigeon … It’s a very moving thing to be with the last of a species. …
(silence). Extinction is a terrible thing.”
Back to the presenter:

1
Said at the Planet under Pressure Conference. 2012. http://www.igbp.net/events/
event/planetunderpressurenewknowledgetowardssolutions.5.1b8ae20512db692f
2a6800015489.html
2
Broadcast on 15 March 2015.
162 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

“Heart-breaking stuff, but [picking up in lightness and speed]

apparently through cutting edge genetic science it may be possible
to restore the passenger pigeon. Let’s hope so. It’s astonishing
the things that some people want to preserve. In Inconspicuous
Consumption, Sarah Cuddon [a Radio 4 producer] examined a
variety of picture frames and what people put inside them.”’
The BBC is sensitive to the needs of its audience and not everyone
will want to think about extinction at that moment. However,
we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of species,3 and
this bigger subject inevitably looms in the background. To take
extinction seriously, at this point in history, is to open oneself to
heartbreak.
The presenter does address the heartbreak, but rather than leave
it there, perhaps making a linking remark to current extinctions
and a bridging remark to indicate he is now moving to something
more light-hearted, he brings in an omnipotent false belief that all
may be magically restored so that nothing is lost and there is no
need to grieve. He does not explicitly say nothing will be lost, but
he implies it and his bright light tone is not conducive to sadness.
It is glib, and it requires false certainty, to imagine that members
of any species can be re-created and left in a physical environment.
To do what precisely? Be there to satisfy our craving to see them?
How will they know how to relate to each other? We now have the
first glimpses from evolutionary biology and ethology of the true
complexity of the social worlds of birds and animals.4 And, where
will all these resurrected birds and animals live, with their habitats
being progressively destroyed?
The presenter transitions from heartbreak to a fun story (Sarah
Cuddon’s programme on picture frames) with what looks on the
surface to be a charming and witty use of condensation. Having just
talked of how over-consumption led to extinction of one species, he
features a piece entitled ‘Inconspicuous Consumption’ about ‘things
that some people want to preserve’. He says, ‘it’s astonishing that
people want to preserve things, like picture frames.’ I hear this as his
light-hearted commentary on the people Sarah Cuddon’s programme

3
See, for example, Ceballos et al. (2015); Dell’Amore (2014).
4
See, for example, texts such as that of de Waal (2009), who argues for a radical re-
evaluation of our view of animals, their capacities and sensibilities.
 BLOCKING TEARS 163

is about, and a backdoor judgement on John Aitcheson’s sadness at

one extinct species.
Waving a magic wand goes with denigrating those who stick
with reality. Here an impression is fostered through a double
layering of meaning that wand waving ‘quick fixers’ are cutting-
edge and exciting, and that people are passé who point out that
possible future DNA reconstruction will not solve the problem
of extinction. They are party poopers, perhaps up for extinction
themselves, astonishing in their wish to preserve and look after
things rather than move swiftly and brightly on.
These reflections are absolutely not about the radio presenter as
individual, but about a media culture that promotes virtual reality
and does not support us in facing actual reality. We are led to believe
that it is the virtual world that is cutting-edge and the fashionable
‘in-place’ to be.
The cruelty goes largely unrecognized: hey presto, look how
we restored everything in an instant. Aren’t we humans clever! We
have the power to raise the dead. We do not have to suffer or feel
concerned or responsible. But this is not repair in the real world.
Rather, an idealized view of the world has been restored in which
there is no loss, no downside and no one suffers. Apparently. It is the
cut-off-ness from the real suffering that is cruel and that promotes
cruel behaviour.
Neoliberal culture does not relate empathically to sadness we
feel about the state of the world, but it is alert to any signs of our
sadness so it can find ways to nip them in the bud. Too much grief
would threaten to disrupt global business as usual. Care is under
attack here, as to feel grief about the state of our world is to care
about it.5
The present culture acts like a person who sidles up and whispers,
‘Don’t cry. I have good news. Your loved one has not died after all.
That was just a rumour. They will be back.’ This is what we most
want to hear, but it does us great disservice to be told this as it keeps
us in a limbo land of illusion and it promotes passivity. When we
can face our grief, we often find we have more constructive energy

5
‘“To care” derives from OE cearian … grief, sorrow, akin to syn OS kara … a
lament … OHG karron, to cry … Doric garus … voice … EIr gair, a (loud) laugh,
a many-voiced clamor … The IE … to cry (out), is clearly echoic’ (Partridge, 1958).
164 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

to move on and act in the real world, a world that now looks
different in the light of our loss.

Scientists cry
In 2015, Dahr Jamail6 interviewed climate scientists and discovered
that many were feeling highly distressed by their findings.7 A strong
theme was feeling not listened to. Optimism vied with pessimism
and bouts of despair and many reported anger and grief.
The feelings they reported fit recognized stages of mourning.8
Freud9 had described mourning loss as involving stages of denial,
anger, grief, working through and acceptance. He saw mourning as
the psychic emotional work undertaken to accept reality.
Jamail (2016) referred to Kübler-Ross’s five stages of mourning:
denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (Kübler-Ross
and Kessler, 2005). They rightly pointed out that these stages ‘were
never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. …
there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives’ (p. 7).
Mourning is a forwards and backwards affair. We may move
from denial to grief, to denial, to anger. We may get stuck at any
of these way stages. My argument is that the current dominant
culture of uncare acts to interfere with the mourning process to try
to prevent it progressing forwards to grief and acceptance of reality.
Jamail (2016) rightly argued that the climate scientists’ feelings
are no different from any ordinary person’s who truly takes in the
damage and the suffering as the climate crisis unfolds. He thought,
‘The practice of scientists sharing their feelings runs contrary to
the dominant consumer capitalist culture of the West, which guards

6
See Macy and Brown (2014). See also interview by Dahr Jamail with Joanna Macy
http://www.truthout.org/news/item/28702-mourning-our-planet-climate-scientists-
share-their-grieving-process
7
Randall and Hoggett (2018), interviewing climate scientists, found they, like the
rest of us, evolve social defences to protect themselves against finding their subject
matter too overwhelming.
8
Others, such as Macy and Brown (2014) and Randall (2009) have also looked at
our grief about environmental damage as part of a process of mourning.
9
Freud (1917) discussed the mourning process and how mourning can become stuck
in states of melancholia.
 BLOCKING TEARS 165

against – and attempts to divert attention from – the prospect of

people getting in touch with feelings provoked by witnessing the
wholesale destruction of the planet.’
Joanna Macy has also pointed out that it is not in the interest of
multinational corporations, or governments and media that serve
them ‘for us to stop and become aware of our profound anguish
with the way things are’.10
My argument is that the main aim of neoliberal culture is ensuring
the mourning process never reaches grief, and it pursues this aim
with military precision in its war on care. Neoliberal Exceptions are
destroying the natural world and they know that will only be halted
if people care sufficiently at a feeling level.
The Extinction Rebellion regularly provides spaces at its events
for grieving. By contrast, neoliberal culture works to shift the
narrative back to blaming and denial and to keep it stuck there.

Is it only women who cry?

Roger Harrabin, senior environment analyst at the BBC, wrote
an article in The Guardian about his interview with Daniela
Schmidt, professor of paleobiology at Bristol University. His article
was unusual in openly raising the issue of our feelings about
environmental damage and doing so in a way that gave grief
legitimacy. Harrabin noted, ‘As the professor spoke about the future
of the oceans for Radio 4’s World Tonight I noticed the tears in
her eyes. “Stop recording now,” she said. “I can’t be crying on the
radio. It’s demeaning to women scientists, especially after Tim Hunt
[a scientist who had not long before made a sexist remark about
women scientists getting emotional in the lab].”11 I argued that the
audience would be moved by her commitment, and the interview
continued with tears flowing. “I love the oceans,” she said. “I feel

10
https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/on-staying-sane-in-a-suicidal-culture
11
Sir Tim Hunt – who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for discovering protein molecules
that control the division of cells – was giving a toast at a lunch where he raised a
glass to tell his stunned hosts: ‘Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three
things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love
with you and – when you criticise them – they cry’ (The Independent, 10 June 2015).
166 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

passionately about what we are doing to them and I’m worried that
they will be irreversibly damaged”’12 (Harrabin, 2015).
The culture of uncare too easily treats feelings as ‘women’s
stuff’. Harrabin also noted that climate scientists may avoid
declaring themselves as passionate about the environment to avoid
being labelled ‘environmentalists’, by now a culturally loaded and
degraded term.13
Many Guardian readers posted comments on Harrabin’s article.
They included:

‘If we don’t weep for the future of our beloved planet … then
we haven’t really grasped what it is to be a human animal in this
world’. ‘Isn’t the better question why aren’t we all weeping over
climate change?’ ‘If a scientist cries, that tells me far more about
the scale and severity of a situation than any words they could
possibly use.’

The ‘stages’ model of mourning is not

adequate
A ‘stages’ model of mourning applies to individuals who mourn and
while we do mourn as individuals, our understanding of mourning
needs to extend to collective mourning and the sorts of cultural
frameworks of care we need to support and help us collectively to
bear our feelings.
The existing ‘stages’ model is less adequate now with the new
anxieties we face about future survival. We are the first generation
to have to live with such dreadful, ongoing, uncertainty about the
future of everything.14 In Chapter 32, I argue climate inaction has

12
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-33370591/irreversible-
change-to-sea-life-from-co2
13
See, for example, Libby Purves (2019). She sharply criticizes environmentalists
and environmentalism, with David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg particularly
signalled out for attack.
14
This includes of course the ongoing danger of nuclear war and pandemics.
 BLOCKING TEARS 167

led to such a pile up of damage that our grief is now likely to feel
more overwhelming, less bearable and at times even unbearable.

We mourn our illusions too

In coming to terms with climate reality, we also grieve the loss of
cherished illusions. Indeed, mourning our rosy pictures and our
exaggerated sense of entitlement can be the most painful kind of
mourning there is. Ro Randall (2012) wrote a beautiful article
on this kind of mourning. She took as her starting point our deep
dependency on the natural world and the profound debt we owe to
nature. Economist Andrew Simms (2005) called this our ecological
debt, and Randall pointed out this indebtedness does not appear on
any current balance sheets. She looked at how truly appreciating
ecological debt would involve mourning the illusion that we are
somehow special.
168
 22
Regression and
infantilization

Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalyst and group analyst, argued, ‘It

is possible for a society to be organised in such a way that the
majority of its members are psychiatrically disinherited’ (1948).
He called this disinheritance ‘spiritual drift’.1 David Armstrong
(2014b) pointed out, ‘What [Bion] seems to have in mind is the way
in which … a society … can restrict the scope for the development
of man’s political appetite’. Bion (1948) had said, ‘We … have to
bear in mind the … system … which has allowed him to progress
along a path of progressive limitation, without awareness that he
was in fact doing so.’
Bion was discussing systems that restrict peoples’ political
appetite. People may be actively restricted within all sorts of
organizations. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer (2012) writing
in the Journal of Management Studies put forward the idea of
functional stupidity. They said, organizations can severely restrict
cognitive capacity and promote functional stupidity which ‘refers
to … a refusal to use intellectual capacities in other than myopic
ways’.
One example of a regressive culture was described by the
anthropologist and psychoanalyst Elizabeth Menzies Lyth (1988).
She was consulted by a hospital on how to address low morale

Bion was writing on problems soldiers had in fitting in back home after the Second
1

World War.
170 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

among student nurses. Staff had broken down the nurse’s role into
many small tasks, and had each task performed by a different nurse.
The result was patients were not being nursed as ‘whole people’.
Menzies Lyth hypothesized this work plan was not so much to
boost efficiency as to protect nurses from anxiety. It ‘helped’ them
stay emotionally distant from their patients.
Menzies Lyth reported that new student nurses ‘felt unsettled,
indeed almost assaulted by being deprived of the opportunity to
be responsible’ (p. 456). Not yet habituated within this hospital’s
culture, the students could see the culture and feel its impacts more
clearly than nurses already there. The students rightly felt robbed of
their entitlement to care and their entitlement to expect that work
would promote not stunt their growth as people.
Menzies Lyth said, ‘[This] social defense system … [forced]
the individual to a maturational level below that achieved before
entering’ (p. 459). David Armstrong (2014) summarized the
situation she described as, ‘[It was] as if … the implicit message is
“regress or leave”.’
Mainstream neoliberal culture regresses us, but we have very
little option to leave. Also, we may not clearly see the effects of
culture on us because we are already in it and habituated to it. It is
not easy to find a way to understand a culture’s influence. Menzies
Lyth offered this advice:

Try … [looking at the culture2] … as though you were a stranger.

Look and listen. You may be surprised and shocked by what you
discover. Think for yourself. … The simple answer ‘Think!’ is a
difficult one. The more so, since it may mean prising yourself out
of depression and discouragement first and finding somewhere a
ray of hope to sustain you. … Start slowly, and do it gradually. …
Small successes will give you the courage to go on.

Her point was that thinking about a culture’s effects requires taking
one’s feelings into account; also, that it can leave us downhearted,

2
Menzies Lyth was addressing nurses and encouraging them to see their nursing unit
with the eyes of a stranger. However, I think her description well fits the difficulty
of understanding any established social culture we can find ourselves immersed in.
 REGRESSION AND INFANTILIZATION 171

perhaps in the way the proverbial fish’s first awareness of water

might be as a stiff current to swim against.
It is not easy to accept the argument that neoliberal culture holds
back our mental development and stunts our human potential,
promoting a drift towards immaturity, even psychopathy. Even
more difficult is realizing one has been affected by the culture: far
easier to think that culture affects other people and we are clever
enough and far-sighted enough to be immune.

At the bus stop

Here is an example of my struggle to see the effects on me of a
mainstream culture that mostly disavows the climate crisis and
boosts the exception in us all.
I was standing at the bus stop, having decided not to drive to
fetch the grandchildren from school so as to reduce my carbon
emissions. It was raining, cold and windy, and standing there I
thought grumpily, ‘I wish I’d just taken my car! I will next time!’
Next, I imagined my small grandchildren, now grownup, standing
right next to me. I was in a bit of bad weather and they were in
extreme weather because of climate change. I could hear my
entitled belief I should not have to face any inconvenience at all. I
felt ashamed, embarrassed and much less of a person than I feel I
can be.
I believe I had emerged from a layer of disavowal. In disavowal,
I could imaginatively locate my grandchildren far enough away to
avoid feeling touched by them. I could know but not really know,
with empathy and feeling, what climate change means for people
now and in the future. In that vivid moment at the bus stop, my
grandchildren were back close to me, where they belong. I had
spliced together my present world and their future world, each
with its weather conditions. That way, we could meet eye to eye, we
could all hear my petulance, and my concern, guilt and shame could
be activated. What did you do in the great warming, granny? Well,
I didn’t want to be inconvenienced.
Some people say the reason climate change is hard to think
about is we cannot see into the future. No doubt feeling physical
discomfort at the bus stop did help me to better imagine their
172 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

discomfort. But I do not agree that future problems are hard to

imagine and think about. My blind spot was specifically about the
effects on them of climate change. It was in this regard that I had
rearranged my mental landscape such that they were out of my
inner sight. I do try to imagine other aspects of their future lives.
I find the more I think about disavowal, the more peculiar it
appears to me. I think a lot about the climate crisis. I study models
of what is predicted to happen if we do not ditch fossil fuels fast.
I had taken the bus that day because I am aware I have my own
individual carbon footprint and that carbon I am responsible for
will stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years. I have thought
about the effects of climate change on my grandchildren. However,
somehow, this was with the true climate impact on them bleached
out. I had not really tried to picture how they might be feeling and
managing in extreme weather.
Disavowal is layered like an onion. Even my thinking about
climate change as something in the future involved disavowal.
My bus stop example is from 2014, when I already knew climate
change was an urgent, current problem, not a future one, and it was
killing people and animals. By 2021, things are so much worse, just
as the climate scientists predicted they would be.
At the bus stop, I had seen more clearly the petulant, entitled,
resentful part of myself that said to my concerned part, ‘Sure, I’ll
go along with your carbon reduction actions, but only if I’m not
actually inconvenienced.’ Here, we can see the exception with her
stubborn entitlement to be the privileged princess without a pea
in her mattress. I suggest the pea here is not so much the literal
discomfort of being at the bus stop in wind and rain. Who wants
that? I suggest the pea is my moral discomfort. With disavowal I
could stay comfortably numb,3 my grandchildren and their fate
split off. My exception had eclipsed the person in me who knows
carbon is real stuff.
My experience at the bus stop helped me untangle what I felt I
did, and did not, recognize as me. I do have a petulant exaggeratedly
entitled side and I do recognize this person as me. However, the
entitled brat at the bus stop also appeared alien to me, and I thought,

3
The words are the title of a song by Pink Floyd.
 REGRESSION AND INFANTILIZATION 173

‘Who is this person? How did I come to think like this? This is not
me.’ I felt ashamed.
I believe I had managed spontaneously to separate out two
separate strands of my identity that had been merged. The first
strand was the exception in me and the second strand was an
exception shaped by the dominant culture. Returning for a moment
to the example of the nurses, imagine a nurse suddenly noticing that
she was feeling cut off from her patients as people and thinking this
is not how I really am, want to be and can be as a nurse. What has
happened to me? Is my work culture encouraging me to be cut off?
I suggest the equivalent in my situation was me recognizing my
culture relentlessly boosts my selfishness and any psychopathic and
infantile tendencies in me that it can lay hands on. My psychopathic
tendencies are my willingness to have my grandiosity appealed
to and my tendencies to disassociate and to find ways to avoid
responsibility for damage I cause. My infantility is self-centredness,
intolerance of frustration and seeking cognitive ‘blissonance’ not
dissonance.
In Chapter 13, I brought in Jonathan Lear’s view of love as a
principle that pushes one to individuate and find mental structure
and form. Here, I believe I had followed love’s principle, which
was to separate out parts of myself (a caring and noncaring part)
and to separate myself from my culture’s implanted version of
me. I could now see that I was in conflict with a brattish part of
myself and in conflict with my culture. It so assiduously boosts
and crafts the shape of that brat that by now she has an identity of
her own.
Neoliberal culture pressures us to merge these various parts rather
than separate them out. It is in this sense that I mean it regresses
us. It appeals to the real exception in me: ‘You are absolutely right.
You should not have to wait, be inconvenienced! You really are at
the centre of the world and the world really is there to service you
and make things pleasant for you.’ It might be more accurate to say
culture works to submerge voices that counter this argument, to
push them off the stage.
At the bus stop I believe I repaired a loving, caring link with
my grandchildren. I had reversed mental distancing and brought
them back close to me where they belong. This is the sort of mental
reengineering and repair work that I think is required to combat the
effects of a culture working to break our links with our caring part.
174 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Actively breaking loving links to avoid mental pain is a human

defence mechanism that can usefully protect us from being too
emotionally overwhelmed. My point is that current culture
encourages the breaking of caring links and boosts mental distancing
daily. In this way it encourages us to live at a level below that which
we are capable of.
We are more familiar with ways in which women, racially
stigmatized groups and minority groups may be infantilized,
and the terrible effects this can have on them. We are perhaps
less familiar with the idea that a culture can infantilize a whole
people. My argument is that neoliberal drivers of culture do see our
potential which they then find ways to stifle in order to make us
more ‘contented’ and more compliant as consumers.
Present culture’s pressure to regress is selective, not across the
board. It encourages us to fit in, conform and to work hard, but
it discourages us from having a social conscience. I do not believe
most of us actually do, deep down, give up our bedrock caring
social ideals in favour of current cultural values. I think there is a
level where we act ‘as if’ we have. And, in the current ‘as if’ culture,
we may then find it easier to fully embrace, inhabit and believe in
the ‘as if’ world shaped by propaganda; to merge with it, because
it is less painful than a world in which we face how little regard is
truly paid to us4 and how insufficient is our regard for others.

4
In a paper in 2012a, I raise the issue that our governments, in hock to big business,
are letting us know of their lack of concern about whether we live or die. We do hear
this message deep down and it is traumatic.
 PART SIX

We collude
176
 23
On collusion

Neoliberal culture is expert at inviting collusion to abandon truth,

and it does so mainly with two kinds of bait. One kind excites
our inner exception and the other corrupts our caring part. That
said, collusion only works when we actually take the bait. To mix
metaphors, it takes two to tango. When colluding, we override the
inner voice of reason and conscience. At the time this may not be
fully conscious, and understanding that one has been colluding can
feel like emerging from mist or fog to suddenly see things more
clearly. Collusion is rife in relationships and falling into collusion is
unavoidable at times. What matters is learning from the experience
so that one has a better chance of not colluding the next time.
The previous part explored how the present culture of uncare
invites collusion (e.g. Chapter 19 analysed how two advertisements
‘work’). The next example highlights factors that might make people
more susceptible and vulnerable to colluding and abandoning their
better judgement.

Lilya 4 Ever
Lilya is a fictional girl, the central character in Lucas Moodysson’s
film Lilya 4 Ever. Spoiler alert: the film is a sensitive and harrowing
account of how Lilya, a young teenaged girl from Eastern Europe,
is seduced by handsome trickster-boy Andrei. Andrei proposes
marriage and life in the West, but his aim is to sex traffic her. He
sweet-talks her into going on ahead to Sweden where she is taken
from the airport to a flat, locked up and forced into prostitution.
178 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Lilya 4 Ever is fiction, but Moodysson based his film on talking

with women who were actually trafficked. ‘Mein Herz Brennt’ (my
heart burns) are the words of the film’s opening track by German
rock band Rammstein. Moodysson said the music expressed his
own rage and anger at suffering in the world.
Andrei offers Lilya the false promise of a glittering new life
(advertisers often use the same ploy). Moodysson’s brilliance is in
the way he explores what sorts of circumstances and predisposing
psychological factors might make an ordinary girl like Lilya start
out resisting Andrei and then begin colluding with his lies.
Lilya’s birthday is on the same day as Britney Spears’s and a friend
tells her, ‘you could have been Britney Spears’. I see Moodysson’s
point here as being that our chances in life are mostly dictated by
luck and circumstance.
When Lilya’s mother threatens to abandon her, she tells her
mother, ‘I won’t make it without you.’ When Lilya’s mother finally
does abandon her, we see Lilya praying to God ‘not to lead me into
temptation’. One senses that for Lilya temptation is giving into the
seductive lure of ‘feeling special’, which for Lilya is omnipotently
identifying with Britney Spears and imagining she can, like Britney,
live a charmed life in the West.
The film gradually reveals that ‘making it’ means being able
to stay in the real world. Lilya is saying that to live in the real
world she needs love. We watch her struggle to keep going without
love. We see her rage. She tears up her photo of her mother, but
then sticks the pieces back together. When a letter arrives from her
mother saying she is not returning, Lilya burns the photo.
It is at this point that Lilya takes up and colludes with Andrei.
She disregards her suspicions of him and she allows herself to be
pulled into a destructive identification with an idealized ‘Britney
Spears’: Lilya will live with handsome prince Andrei in a castle in
the West.
A small flame is a central image in the film and this to me represents
Lilya’s sense of life, care, goodness and tenacity. It drives her to carve
her name ‘Lilya 4 Ever’ into a park bench. It causes her to stick her
mother’s photo back together in an attempt to resurrect her sense of
a real mother who has shown her some love as well as abandoning
her. It is clear she knows what a mother’s love and care are. The
flame to me represents the capacity to keep alive one’s feeling of
being loveable and one’s ability to love, even when not loved.
 ON COLLUSION 179

Neoliberal Exceptionalism exploits, and its culture will invite

collusion in the exploited and in the exploiters. The latter, who more
directly benefit from neoliberal exploitation, will tend to collude to
maintain and protect their privilege. Will Davies (2016) described
how politicians on the centre left (Democrats in the United States
and Labour in the UK) colluded with neoliberalism when they won
power in the 1990s by imagining they could successfully advance the
agendas of the corporations and spend on social programmes. The
reality was that either government tackled wholesale exploitation
by the very wealthy through tighter regulation, higher taxes and
a clamp down on tax havens, or they sold out the majority who
had voted them in. Democrats and Labour chose, broadly speaking,
to collude with business. Examples are Bill Clinton abolishing the
Glass-Steagall Act that helped regulate the banks and George Brown
directing the UK’s Financial Services Authority to maintain only a
‘light touch’ on financial regulation. Both measures helped create
the financial bubble that crashed in 2008 with such devastating
effects.
To what extent might the relative inability of the left and centre
even now to withstand neoliberal onslaughts and messaging in
part be because they have not sufficiently faced and processed their
collusion with neoliberalism when they were in power?
Colluding with Exceptionalism for the sake of a quiet life is rife
in life and in politics, especially when neoliberal culture repeatedly
tells us we are entitled to a quiet easy life and entitled to be spared
moral qualms. We deserve a quiet life because we are special. John
Steiner (2012), when talking of a perverse culture’s efforts to draw
us to collude and to disavow reality, put it that perhaps the best we
can do is to see we have succumbed to perverse arguments.
In summary:

●● Collusion is common in relationships.

●● Collusion draws people into attacking care and into
­covering up the attack.
●● Collusion homes in on real parts of people.
●● People are very often not consciously aware they are
­colluding.
●● However, they usually have moments of clear conscious
awareness that they are caught up in wrongdoing.
●● Seeing one is colluding is usually painful.
180 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

●● Breaking free of collusion can be anxiety provoking but also

liberating, enabling a broader perspective.

Collusion is the glue keeping people stuck in disavowal about

the damage neoliberal Exceptions have done. People are starting to
break with collusion (see the part on the caring imagination), which
frees them to grieve for the damage and to fight to stop further
damage. Extinction Rebellion, school children on strike for climate
and the recent protest that Black Lives Matter are not willing to
collude with neoliberalism’s fracturing framing, laws, values and
arguments. They are telling government we are not interested in
what you say, only in what you do. We are not up for persuasion by
perverse arguments. We will not collude.
It requires humility to recognize one has colluded. It is not
edifying to see one was played on to give up one’s intelligence, sense
of reality, sense of the obvious and caring ideals; also, it attacks
one’s pride to find one has been taken for a ride and is corruptible.
The next part explores the way collusion can lead to fraud bubbles
in which large numbers of people are played on to persuade them
to cover up truth.
 PART SEVEN

Exceptionalism
grows fraud
bubbles
182
 24
Case studies: Enron and
fund managers

For fifteen thousand years fraud and short-sighted thinking

has never, ever worked. Not once. How the hell did we all
forget that?1
MARK BAUM. THE BIG SHORT

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, noticing a

financial bubble forming, commented in 2007, ‘Markets are weird
things because they react to how people behave and sometimes
people are a little screwy.’2 It would be more accurate to say that
fraud bubbles are seeded when greed is officially licensed and
caution is overthrown, and when that happens people are likely to
go a little screwy. They forget that because bubbles are based on
distorting reality, they never ‘work’ (except for very short term).
This was Mark Baum’s point in The Big Short, a film based on
Michael Lewis’s (2010) stunning expose of greed-driven myopic
thinking that led to the financial crash in 2008.

Enron
Enron, the utilities company that crashed in 2001, is a classic
example of a fraud bubble and its effects on people. In 2000,

1
https://www.raindance.org/scripts/the_big_short.pdf p116
2
Greenspan speaking to Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show (cited by
Perlberg, 2013).
184 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Enron was riding high. It claimed revenues of nearly $111 billion,

its offices stunned with their opulence and its share price was
up. By the end of 2001, Enron had gone bankrupt in spectacular
fashion, its reported financial condition hiding institutionalized,
systematic, planned, accounting fraud. Enron executives and board
members knew about the fraud3 but kept investors in the dark.
They collectively made $1.1 billion by selling Enron stock between
October 1998 and November 2001 (see Wayne, 2002).
For a fraud bubble to float, a company or organization must
be legitimized by respected authority. The financial establishment
had declared Enron a success and a cool place to work in the new
millennium. The company must also appear as morally worthy.
Enron endowed a prize to ‘recognize outstanding individuals for
their contributions to public service’ with recipients including
Michael Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela.4 Enron was apparently
in a position to judge worthiness in a man like Mandela.
Psycho-social scientist Susan Long (2008) argued business
malpractice at Enron5 was part of an organized structure that
she called the perverse structure. We tend to think of perversion
as sexual perversion, but Long meant perversion as perverting the
truth.
Long listed five key dimensions of a perverse structure:

●● Individual pleasure is pursued at the expense of others.

●● Others are only seen as a means to an end.
●● A culture of disavowal prevails in which reality is simultane-
ously accepted and denied.
●● These dimensions are normalized.
●● There is widespread collusion with the deviant practices.

Her dimensions tally with Exceptionalism. I would add that self-

idealization is key to maintaining a fraud bubble. The more the in-
group sees itself as superior, morally virtuous, desirable, strong, stable,

3
For instance, creating offshore accounts in which to hide losses (see Long, 2008).
4
The Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. For an account of Enron’s demise
see Beachler and Shevory (2014).
5
Long’s data also included the company Long Term Capital Management.
 CASE STUDIES: ENRON AND FUND MANAGERS 185

‘cool’ and ‘modern’, the more the bubble lifts off like a hovercraft
powered by triumph over, and contempt for, those left behind.
Fraud bubbles are collective psychic retreats from reality, but
sub-groups within them will have different perspectives. Ordinary
investors in Enron were actively misled while chief executives saw
the real picture, and sold their shares in time while concealing the
truth. Despite this it appears that they too were increasingly in
denial that a crash must follow. This contradiction is explicable if
we take seriously that Exceptions avoid facing loss – not just loss
of money but of self-esteem and infallibility. They could believe the
bubble would hold even as they planned how best to profit when it
burst. People inside a fraud bubble are indeed a bit screwy.

The banking crisis

Long’s research was published in 2008, the year the banking
system collapsed because of mortgage fraud in the United States.
Her dimensions applied there too. Bankers believed subprime
mortgages were solid while knowing people could not afford to
repay them (disavowal). They knowingly made a commission on
each subprime mortgage deal. Collusion was rife, encouraged by
credit rating agencies propping up a false reality by fraudulently
handing out triple A ratings to subprime mortgage packages that
had been packaged and repackaged, each time making the product
a bit more toxic.6
Ordinary Americans colluded by turning a blind eye to the reality
that they could not afford to repay their loans. They had colluded
with prevailing group culture and allowed their inner exception to
triumph over their common sense. Bankers referred to them in private
as ‘muppets’ and ‘peasants’.7 Rising triumph at getting away with
fraud tends to go with denigrating those defrauded. Did people in
part collude by disavowing just how much they were being exploited

6
https://truthout.org/articles/the-indisputable-role-of-credit-ratings-agencies-in-the-
2008-collapse-and-why-nothing-has-changed/
7
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2119198/Goldman-Sachs-
search-internal-emails-reference-muppet-clients-whistleblower-claim.html
186 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

and denigrated? Disavowal can defend against abject feelings of

being unwanted, despised and used (see the previous chapter).

Masters of the universe

Owen Jones (2014) noted that by 2008 bankers and traders had
‘come to believe themselves indestructible. … the City [was] full
of leering and testosterone. … euphoria … swept the City when
Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson slashed the top rate of income
tax from 60 to 40 per cent in 1987. “There was this outright greed,
a feeling of dislocation from the rest of the world.”’
Exceptionalism expands triumphantly within fraud bubbles it
seeds. The bubble inflates as people start to feel increasingly superior,
entitled, exempt and indestructible. Jones’s portraits show traders
becoming increasingly disinhibited as care’s regulatory frameworks
were unravelled. Let the wild rumpus begin!
Jones called the mindset of those in the bubble ‘I’m worth it’, the
catch phrase of the L’Oreal adverts.8 ‘I’m worth it’ in this context
essentially meant, ‘I’m not part of a despised group being screwed. I
am one of the “screwers”, exempt from scrutiny and accountability
because “I’m worth it”.’ Sexism and homophobia were rampant in
this triumphalist culture.
Tuckett and Taffler (2011; see also Tuckett, 2011) had
interviewed traders in the dot-com bubble with similar results to
Jones. Arrogance was in free flow, with one trader confessing he
felt like a sexy master of the universe. Some older traders said it felt
like a fight between fathers and sons. Young dot-com traders felt
they were supernovas and those who tried to restrain them were
increasingly held in contempt.
In a ‘stud’ culture, being and having the biggest become all. The
craving is more for a phallus than large male sexual organ. A phallus
is a phantasy object that, like a magic wand, enables omnipotent
thinking and feeds a sense of power. It can magically create and
repair self-esteem, achieve greater ‘bigness without limit’ and ‘quick
fix’ all problems. People in possession of ‘it’ swell in triumph and

8
For use of the L’Oreal catch phrase, see Weintrobe (2010).
 CASE STUDIES: ENRON AND FUND MANAGERS 187

start to see themselves as indestructible – until midnight, that is.

There is always a reality-based corner of the mind that knows a
crash must follow.
Beneath the fraudulent view (I am the biggest stud, can fix
everything and am worth every penny) lies a truer, altogether
more human, picture. Prof. Laura Empson of London’s Cass
Business School interviewed CEOs of top professional and financial
institutions in 2018 and identified a type she called insecure
overachievers.9 Capable, ambitious and paid eye-watering amounts,
they are driven by a sense of inadequacy and are vulnerable to
mental health problems, even suffering breakdowns. Tuckett in
Minding the Markets (2011) had discussed anxiety felt by traders
who knew their success was probably due more to luck than their
apparent omniscience.10

Fetishes
Tuckett suggested traders were pursuing what he called fantastic
objects, which I suggest is another way of describing a fetish. A
fetish is something – a person, thing or idea – glamourized to
become an erotized attractor. To be a fetish, a thing must be heavily
idealized and one must be irresistibly drawn to it.11
The fetish can transform guilt (over loss of caring values) into
gilt. My pay packet is glowingly large; this flaky mortgage is triple
A rated; the mortgage market never fails; sure Trump is a problem,
but hey look how the stock market is booming; technology will
save the day; we really are strong and stable. These mantras can
avoid anxiety and help to step into the bright sunshine of manic
triumphant thinking. Aren’t we clever!

9
In Insecure Overachievers, BBC Radio 4, 24 September 2018.
10
The truth of this is borne out by the recent shift to use computer algorithms and
ultra-fast cables to make decisions about buying and selling shares. These are seen as
more reliable than flawed human decision-making.
11
Strictly speaking, a fetish is what turns a fetishist on sexually. He (it is usually a he)
needs sight of his self-chosen fetish object (a shoe, a piece of leather, the edge of a
petticoat and so on) in order to feel sexual arousal. Freud (1927) thought the fetish
was essentially a mental diversion created to cover over acute anxiety about loss. The
fetish kept reality at bay.
188 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Creating a fetish makes fake seem attractive and real seem drab.
In thrall to a fetishized picture, the group becomes increasingly deaf
to reason and gives itself up to a sort of mindless glazed excitement.
In Greenspan’s words, the group goes a bit screwy.
When Exceptionalism takes hold in an organization, and its
culture glamourizes fraud and ‘deals with’ anxiety by encouraging
fetishization, what tends to go unnoticed is just how dangerous the
situation is. It is dangerous because the part of the self (and the
group) that does see the fraud and the harm is now cast as drab, a
party pooper. Care loses its power to attract and to engage, and can
thus be more easily swept aside.
Currently the picture appears to be mixed. Neoliberal
Exceptionalism is heading towards increasing mindlessness (see
the part on ‘the crazy’), but many are no longer colluding with its
culture. Even CEOs are now willing to say publicly they are not
the turbo charged, idealized, alpha male icons they are cracked up
to be but are suffering considerable insecurity and mental stress in
the workplace. Human beings working within perverse structures
are kicking back and saying the rewards are not worth the human
price required:12 this, in a context where awareness is growing that
neoliberalism is manifestly failing. Some of those benefitting the
most want out. Christobal Young (2018) reported that a majority
of millionaires consulted (67 per cent) said it would be fairer if they
paid more tax.13

Risk
In the build-up to the financial crash, we were repeatedly told there
was a one in six chance the economy would collapse. Risk was
fetishized as an exciting revolver in a game of Russian roulette.

12
Elizabeth Cotton in a project based at Middlesex University called Surviving
Work has extensively explored the experience of working within neoliberal culture
for people of all economic levels, highlighting precarity, fear and the feeling
that all workers including leaders’ humanity is downgraded. https://blogs.lse.
ac.uk/businessreview/2016/09/05/how-can-you-maintain-your-sanity-in-a-toxic-
workplace/
13
Following Warren Buffett’s lead, a group calling itself Patriotic Millionaires is
calling for the rich to pay more tax. Young (2018, p. 7) argued this counters tribalism
in the Republican Party that has low taxes as its basic creed.
 CASE STUDIES: ENRON AND FUND MANAGERS 189

Squeeze eyes tight-shut, pull the trigger, and hey presto, I beat the
odds and triumphed over all my anxiety and guilt, and if the bullet
was in that chamber, I deserved punishment. As underlying guilt rises
about cumulative damage, people may start to feel, paradoxically,
guiltless and at the same time unforgiveable, leading to underlying
hopelessness, even latent suicidality (explored further in Chapter
38). A rational risk assessment would have been that it was a near
certainty that the economy would collapse.
Inside the bubbles that neoliberal Exceptionalism spawns,
people go a bit screwy. This is not because people just are screwy
as Greenspan had suggested (thereby presumably absolving
himself of any responsibility and guilt for the crash), but because
Exceptionalism when unchecked and unregulated increasingly
screws people and drives them screwy.

The climate bubble

The harm the financial bubble of 2008 caused pales into
insignificance when compared with the scale of the damage the
climate bubble will lead to. This too is a fraud bubble, seeded by
using false accounting to justify stealing the future (and increasingly
the present) from people and from animals. The climate bubble is
bursting right now, and in parts to follow I explore how people are
struggling to cope with this – also, what sorts of repairs are needed,
especially to the psyche.
The effects of global heating have so far been considerable
weirding in the physical climate. ‘Weirding’ is the experience of when
conditions start to tip out of balance and become unpredictable,
chaotic even uncanny or unheimlich, Freud’s (1919) word for
experiences where the safe and familiar (heimlich, or homely)
becomes unfamiliar and threatening. Weirding of the social climate
is also underway and will be explored in the part on ‘the crazy’.

Prejudice
Before leaving the subject of fraud bubbles, it is worth pointing out
that prejudice is clear in all the fraud bubbles just mentioned, with
loan seekers dismissively called ‘muppets’ and glaring sexism and
190 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

homophobia. Racism is particularly clear with the climate bubble,

as brown-skinned people in the global south, so far suffering
greater climate effects, are being systematically discounted. Trump,
his supporters and his ilk are blatantly racist. In his view, African
countries are ‘shit-hole’ countries anyway.
Scratch the surface of Exceptionalism and prejudice is always
revealed. Indeed, Exceptionalism is founded on prejudice, as
prejudice is a central way the Exception maintains ‘entitlement’ to
privilege. Prejudice relies on omnipotent thinking. It acts to make
exploiting others appear ‘as if’ morally tolerable. It largely works
through stereotyping and denigrating the exploited group (its
members are stripped of individuality and personhood and then more
easily looked down on). This ‘helps’ the Exception with his central
dilemma which is that he feels entitled to exploit people and he feels
entitled to see himself as ideally good and worthy. Complex, minute,
ongoing, mental acts of disassociation (splitting) enable people to
‘manage’ this conflict. It can lead to extraordinary situations such as
a white woman employing a black woman to feed, hug and change
the nappies of her baby, while at the same time not allowing her to
eat from the same plates or use her lavatory. In this example, even
feelings of disgust, mobilized to support prejudice, become subject to
minute splitting. The particular splitting needed to maintain racism,
sexism and classism will be different in each case.
Prejudice also helps mask another truth which is that we need
the very people we can also be looking down on. Covid-19 exposed
the degree to which workers and carers are taken for granted and
not paid enough, and it exposed the underlying racism built into a
by now grossly unfair disposal of resources. The pandemic made
many people more aware that they live insulated in a bubble of
privilege. Suddenly more vulnerable, fragile and conscious of their
needs, they felt more grateful to all the people they may keep,
mostly unconsciously, outside their bubble of everyday concern.
They thanked postal and rubbish workers at the doorstep, clapped
workers and carers, understood in a deeper way how key they all
are and became more aware that institutionalized racism preserves
their privilege. The pandemic caused many people to undo some of
their prejudiced splitting, feel more connected with and concerned
about the people who help them and challenged by the very privilege
they take for granted when in a bubble.
 25
The corporation

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished or souls

to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.
EDWARD, FIRST BARON THURLOW (1731–1806)1

Joel Bakan (2004) argued that because the prime legal duty of those
running corporations is to shareholders, corporations are legally
obliged to behave like psychopaths. Put another way, corporate law
gives people legal steerage to act like Exceptions. Board members
may think, ‘this decision will increase profit but cause harm. Well,
the law says I must put profit first. No conflict!’
Bakan argued that on the whole profitability was still the main
driver even when a corporation started to act more ethically and
sustainably. It feared losing custom if, for instance, it faced a Twitter
storm with 200,000 online protestors demanding it mend it ways.
This area is rife with ingenuine promises of changes that reverse
when the moral spotlight shifts elsewhere.
The combined actions of today’s global corporations from
oil to pharma to chemicals, pesticides, plastics, fishing, logging
and agribusiness have catapulted humanity into the Age of the
Anthropocene and the Sixth Great Extinction.
Oil executives have known for decades that their product is
largely responsible for climate change. They accurately predicted
what would unfold as climate chaos bites, making them responsible

1
Said during the impeachment of the East India Company’s Director General Warren
Hastings Quoted in The Anarchy (Dalrymple, 2019), which exposes the sheer scale
of the violence perpetrated by the East India Company in establishing itself.
192 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

for present and future deaths in numbers that will dwarf the
Holocaust and other genocides. Perhaps Necrocene is a more apt
depiction of our age than Anthropocene.
The question how they live with themselves, one that has exercised
brilliant thinkers like Hannah Arendt, has no easy answers.2 CEOs
do tend to score higher on psychopathy scales,3 but rather than
labelling and demonizing we could attempt to understand why it
is that they go along with legal framing that facilitates damage and
harm. Neoliberal culture undoubtedly plays its role by promoting
disavowal. That these CEOs operate in groups also provides a
partial answer and the next chapter is on why groups are so effective
at enforcing particular values.
One ‘quick fix’ to ease the conscience is radical fracturing of
identity such that ‘myself at work’ is an entirely different person to
‘myself in the rest of my life with friends, family and community’.4
‘Myself at work’ often involves further fracturing of the self and
projecting unwanted parts, including onto the corporation itself:
‘It is not really I who makes immoral decisions and behaves like
a psychopath. It’s the powerful corporation/organisation I serve.’
The corporation now appears as a figure one relates to, needs for
survival (job, prestige and so on) and feels powerless to influence.
It provides, and it can shoulder one’s guilt, leading to complex,
morally confused, feelings that one owes loyalty to the corporation.
A love-hate relationship can develop with the corporation. Today’s
corporation can appear like Frankenstein’s monster, created by
humans but also perceived as being separate from them. Renata
Tyszczuk (2017), discussing the climate emergency, made the point
that the trouble with Dr Frankenstein was not that he made a
monster, but that he took no responsibility for it.

2
Arendt (1963) explored the mind and motivation of Eichmann who stood trial in
Israel for genocide after the Second World War. See Hannah Arendt (1963). See also
her work on the authoritarian mind (Arendt, 1968).
3
For example, see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-
psychopaths-australian-study-finds/ Babiak and Hare (2006) offer a comprehensive
look at how psychopaths operate in the workplace. They note that many psychopaths
have skills that make it hard to recognize their psychopathy: they ‘read people’
quickly, are good communicators and are skilled at ‘impression management’.
4
A literary example of this type of splitting is Wemmick in Great Expectations by
Charles Dickens. At work, he is hard-nosed and focused on ‘portable property’ while
at home he tenderly takes care of his ‘Aged Parent’.
 THE CORPORATION 193

Bakan described the corporation in a dual way,5 as composed

of people and as being an entity in its own right. Is it the entity
that behaves like a psychopath or is it the people who comprise the
entity? Clearly the answer is both.
At this point, my argument may well become more personally
burdensome. The problems caused by today’s corporations involve
all of us, not just CEOs. It is one thing to blame a legal entity, or
a group of CEOs, or the neoliberal establishment for the heart-
breaking damage we see to our planet and the social fabric. We
can say angrily, like Hardy to Laurel, just look at the mess you’ve
gotten us into! The problem is that many of us are by now in this
mess together. Many of us have split our identity in just the sort of
disassociated way I have outlined.
We, our friends and relatives, may work for corporations or be
paid by clients who work for corporations. Corporations produce
most of the products we find in stores. Do we buy them? For
instance, the label on the back of Verdone, a common weed killer
on sale at supermarkets, says in the small print:

Do not empty into drains. … Toxic to aquatic organisms. Take

for disposal to a waste disposal centre. May cause long term
adverse effects in the aquatic environment. Dangerous for the
environment.

Verdone contains MCPA known to be toxic and to have now

entered water supplies. One drop can contaminate an Olympic-
sized pool.6 An Australian government website7 gives advice to
farmers on how to dispose of left-over herbicides and pesticides
containing MCPA, glyphosates or nicotinoids. Instructions border

5
The theory of the corporation as a dual entity goes back to the medieval doctrine of
the ‘king’s two bodies’ detailed by Ernst Kantorowicz (1985).
6
A map published in the Irish Farmers’ Journal showed pesticide contamination
of water schemes county by county in 2015. Sampled for Irish Water by the
Environmental Protection Agency, polluted schemes had more than doubled from
the previous year, with the highest rate in Co Mayo. Two-thirds of sixty-one schemes
held MCPA. As Irish Water has been telling farmers, just one drop can contaminate
an Olympic-sized pool.
7
http://www.health.gov.au/internet/publications/publishing.nsf/Content/ohp-
enhealth-manual-atsi-cnt-l~ohp-enhealth-manual-atsi-cnt-l-ch5~ohp-enhealth-
manual-atsi-cnt-l-ch5.11
194 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

on the farcical. A cartoon shows a farmer dressed in thigh high

wellies with rubber gloves on that reach past his elbows, wearing a
Second World War-looking gas mask digging a hole in a field. The
instruction is: make sure there are no places nearby where humans
meet, or low-lying water will accumulate. Dig a pit 50 cm deep,
cover the bottom with hydrated lime, pour the unwanted pesticide
into the hole and cover with soil. The instruction for disposing of
the containers is: rinse out with water at least three times, remove
all lids, bury in isolated area away from water supplies. Break glass
containers before disposal. Punch holes in plastic containers so they
cannot be used to carry water. Punch holes in metal containers and
then crush them to make them unusable. Never burn them as the
gas they give off is poisonous. Never burn any plant treated with
these chemicals.
It is an understatement to say that today’s herbicides and pesticides
are produced within a corporate legal framework designed to block
taking consequences seriously.
Labels on products for sale clearly state they are dangerous for
the environment. Presumably the label is to protect the manufacturer
from court action: not our fault as we told you clearly. Do we
believe that even if we take the container to the local dump it will
be safely disposed of? There is nothing in this story to reassure us.
Current corporate law provides a legal framework of uncare
that reduces humanity to the equivalent of children trapped in a
dysfunctional family with parents who do not care and who set
inadequate rules to contain excessive entitlement and aggression.
A young woman speaking at a climate protest demonstration
in October 2018 said that for a long time it had been beyond her
comprehension that government could head life towards extinction.
She had not really believed it possible, but now she did believe it.
It is traumatic to take in that current governments, by supporting
unregulated corporations at this critical time in history, are siding
with death, not life. One way to try to minimize the trauma is falsely
to believe, as this young woman had, that this cannot be happening.
In the next part, I explore psychological problems people face when
they understand that it is happening. First, I will look at the pressure
that groups can put on us to avoid this truth.
 26
Social groups

Robert J. Lifton (2014) distinguished between awareness and ‘formed

awareness’ of climate change. Formed awareness is knowing that
we bear some responsibility too. In this chapter, I argue that one
unconscious aim of social groups as part of neoliberal culture is to
block ‘formed awareness’ from developing. Here are two examples.
A dinner party group: a friend who writes and campaigns on
climate change1 described a dinner party with friends. One couple
said they were planning to retire and fly weekly between London
and a European city where they had just bought an apartment.
The group welcomed this news. Next, a man mentioned a chronic
shortage of a luxury food item grown in this European country. A
woman said she was now paying more for it. She went on to say
high winds were making flying more difficult these days. People
then complained about recent increased turbulence when flying on
holiday.2 On a recent flight somone’s plane was forced to land in
another city because of high winds. The subject then switched to
a major artist’s new exhibition. My friend, silent so far, joined in
with discussing the artist. He commented to me that the group had
been discussing effects of climate change without once mentioning
it by name.

Based on a talk I gave to the Centre for the Advancement of Psychoanalytic Studies
26 May 2017. Institute of Psychoanalysis, London.
1
I have stripped this example of detail and context to preserve confidentiality.
2
By 2015, airline pilots were noticing the increase in air turbulence. http://www.
theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/climate-change-costing-airlines-millions-
of-dollars-in-extra-fuel-and-flying-time
196 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

My imaginary group: I avoid buying air freighted fresh vegetables

to reduce my carbon footprint. That night it was late, I was tired,
and people were coming to dinner. In the supermarket, nothing
grown locally suited my plans and, exasperated, I bought flown
in veg. At the checkout I suddenly imagined certain of my friends
saying to me, ‘Of course you bought them, Sally. We all would have
done.’ These friends judged my shopping choice normal and any
guilt I felt about the carbon abnormal.

‘Normalizing’ the threat

I suggest these groups, one at a dinner table and the other in my
mind, may both have been acting to block formed awareness.3 First,
both effectively vetoed thinking directly about the climate problem.
My friend at the dinner party told me he had felt paralysed and
unable to bring up the subject. My imagined group insistently
silenced my concern: buying higher carbon vegetables was the right
and obvious way.
Second, both groups ‘normalized’ the climate crisis. Normalization
is a form of disavowal that minimizes difficulty. It makes what is
strange, uncertain, threatening and/or odd appear to seem usual,
manageable and normal. Both groups minimized the climate threat
by recasting its effects as ‘inconvenience with flying’ and ‘hassles
with shopping’. The groups were familiar with these, and most
people in Western culture love talking and complaining about them.
Thinking seriously about climate would likely stir primitive survival
anxieties and guilt at leading a high carbon lifestyle.
Third, only the inner exception is granted a voice. It says the big
issue is not climate change but that we should not be inconvenienced.
Governor Rick Scott of Florida insisted that employees of the
state’s Department of Environmental Protection refer to sea level
rise as ‘inconvenient coastal flooding’ (Lund, 2015). Similarities
between Governor Scott’s diktat and the dinner party group are:
a serious problem, our carbon emissions, cannot be named and
can only be admitted under the heading ‘something is causing me

3
Randall and Hoggett (2018) have called this a socially constructed silence.
 SOCIAL GROUPS 197

increased inconvenience’. With the problem ‘normalized’, attention

can then be directed to how to carry on as usual despite the
inconvenience. My inner group ‘normalized’ the situation by egging
me on with: ‘Of course you bought the veg, Sally. We all would
have. You faced inconvenience. This was a shopping hassle. Don’t
start imagining it’s your job to save the world!’
The normalization supports underlying Exceptionalism that
maintains privilege. It bleaches anxiety and moral angst from
awareness that my/our high carbon lifestyle is causing untold harm.
It prevents ‘beginning awareness’ of this from gelling into ‘formed
awareness’ in Robert J. Lifton’s sense. The group normalizes to
protect its members from feeling morally challenged.
Collusion is required for silencing and normalization. For
example, I believe my inner exception turned to an imaginary group
of its choosing, namely friends who do regularly buy flown in fresh
produce and might in reality say (or think) what they did. My inner
exception did not turn for support to other friends of mine who are
more carbon aware and troubled. They might have said, ‘Let it go
and keep trying.’ That would have recognized my guilt and helped
me bear it.
It is difficult to challenge a group ‘normalizing’ to preserve its
privilege and sense of narcissistic entitlement. Such a group thinks
well of itself and likes to feel comfortable. To say that flying and
overconsumption add to climate instability and crop failures,
and cause others to suffer is potentially to throw a grenade into
a carefully constructed group defence. Part of being an Exception
is entitlement to exploit and harm others and have them carry the
burdens of that exploitation.
A group busily normalizing, if challenged, is likely to act rapidly
to restore its threatened self-esteem. It may deflect the threat, or
attack, or both. Deflection involves erecting a psychic shield to keep
the other out (changing the subject, formal empty agreement, hand
wringing and upset that signals ‘stop this right now. It’s too upsetting
to think about. Really, I am in total despair about the climate, but
what can I do? I do care’; also, rapid blame shifting that may involve
bits of truth: ‘The problem is structural; it’s government’). Attack
is treating anyone who exposes the underlying issue as deviant or
a whistle blower. Deviants are side lined while whistle blowers are
often put under moral scrutiny (‘is s/he quite sane and normal,
being holier than thou, virtue signalling?’) and may be ejected.
198 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Climate psychologist and psychotherapist Ro Randall raised that

groups can be cruel to people who speak up about climate change.
Her experience comes from having run groups where people discuss
how to reduce their carbon footprint (see Randall and Brown,
2015). They may describe, for example, hearing work colleagues
just audibly say at the coffee machine, ‘Here comes Barbara. Best
stop talking about flying girls.’4 I have experienced this sort of
situation and know how isolating and stinging it can feel.
People need a safe climate and safety in their groups, not either
one or the other. Without safety in the group, the group may start
to resemble a gang that bullies, offering ‘protection’ only if people
keep up the disavowal.5
Robin DiAngelo (2018) explored the way in which ‘white
fragility’, part of white privilege, can actually be a form of bullying.
Her subject is racism, especially among white people who do not
see themselves as racist. I suggest essentially the same dynamics can
operate when it comes to challenging ‘carbon’ and ‘environmental’
privilege. Climate scientists tear their hair out about how best to
tell people about climate without upsetting and terrifying them.
However, a group intent on maintaining privilege and on being
Exceptions can be subtly coercive in unconsciously arranging to
be spared any anxiety and upset. ‘Those feelings are for climate
scientists and ‘climateers’ to suffer, not us.’6 I return to this issue
when exploring eco-anxiety (Chapter 32).7

4
Ro Randall, personal communication.
5
For a discussion on mafia type gangs operating within the psyche, see Rosenfeld
(1971).
6
‘Climateer’ was a word used to disparage those concerned about climate change
in the BBC TV drama series (1920) I Can Destroy You, written and directed by
Michaela Coel.
7
I am indebted to Lifton (1982) for his concept of normalizing destructiveness. This
enriches an understanding of disavowal. I discussed the issue of blocking visual
images of damage in a talk to architects in 2013 (https://vimeo.com/78805269).
My subject was how difficult it is for architects to visualize the damage without
disavowal when having to take into account the projections by climate scientists of
levels of damage with different rates of global warming.
 SOCIAL GROUPS 199

Keep the party going

Group disavowal can operate like a DJ who shifts a group’s mood
from anxiety, pain of loss, guilt and perhaps confusion, to being
caught up with blandness, excitement, even triumph.
One might well argue that a main task of a group at a dinner
party is to encourage conviviality and keep the atmosphere light.
However, it is the climate crisis that is most consistently kept outside
the door. Other serious topics can be raised.

Noah’s Arkism
The woman at the dinner party who said she was willing to
pay extra for the luxury food item embodies a growing attitude
towards the future in current culture: ‘I and my in-group can afford
to ignore the growing climate crisis. We have the money to pay
extra for food. We will tough it out.’ Noah’s Arkism necessarily
presupposes a sacrificed group of ‘othered’ people, those without
the means to climb aboard the boat. Dreaded dependencies can
then be psychologically off-loaded onto these others who are to be
left to their fate.8 Chapter 34 goes into Arkism.

Projection by groups
A left leaning, politically aware, social group might use projection
to disavow the climate crisis in ways I now outline. The reader can
judge whether my picture is plausible.
This group knows that climate change is largely human caused.
It believes deep down that it is immoral to abandon one’s children
and grandchildren to a frightening future. It is not willing to quip,
like Groucho Marx, ‘what did the future ever do for me’? It does not
really believe techno fixes or geo-engineered solutions will work.

8
Klein (2014) wrote eloquently on abandoning others to their fate by establishing
‘zones of sacrifice’.
200 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

That is too far-fetched. This group uses projection to maintain the

bubble of disavowal. Greed and immorality are projected onto
bankers, large corporations and the 1 per cent. That bankers and
corporations have been greedy and irresponsible is an entirely
separate issue to their being used for projection. In fact, projection
works best when the group selected accurately fits the bill.
This group also projects positive caring qualities. For instance, it
may project its social conscience onto organizations like Greenpeace.
Greenpeace mounts ad campaigns showing polar bears on melting
icecaps, but the last thing a group projecting its conscience onto
Greenpeace wants is to have its conscience re-stirred. In projective
mode, it is for Greenpeace to do the work of thinking about the
climate crisis, especially the difficult emotional work.
This group, being irrational, may also project its irrationality. It
can say, look how dangerous Trump’s position on climate is; how
irrational. We are not crazy. We know perfectly well climate change
is real and very serious. At the same time this group can live in a
mental bubble acting as though the crisis is not real and serious.
Projecting a mixture of uncaring qualities (greed, special
entitlement, self-idealization, irrationality and adherence to
privilege) and caring ones (concern, social conscience and a capacity
to think rationally) keeps the group in disavowal and impoverishes
the group’s capacity to think rationally about what sort of change
it will support, given that change is now unavoidable.
 27
Trickledown

One unconscious task of social groups as part of neoliberal culture

has been to undermine climate science and respect for climate
scientists. Here are two examples:

I met a scientist on the train

Climate change was raised at a social gathering in 2017. Immediately,
a woman said she met a scientist on a train who knew all about
climate change (it emerged he was a cell biologist). He told her there
was nothing to worry about, and that greatly reassured her. Her
reasoning seemed quite acceptable to the group. It was apparently
normal and unremarkable that a highly educated woman would
pit the views of a stranger on a train against 97 per cent of climate
scientists worldwide.

Show me the one study

A man described a work colleague who dismissed the body of
climate science with ‘show me the one report that will prove to me
with absolute certainty that this global warming thing is happening’.
Since this study would never and could never appear (it is not how
science works), he could stay in a bubble. The man telling this story
kept repeating that if his colleague had reasoned like this about
any other subject, his work mates would have ‘laughed him out of
court’. Instead, they went along with him.
202 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

In these two examples, ‘as if’ arguments are used to dismiss

science and scientists. The bubble keeps afloat only because the
group supports perverse thinking and creates a hostile environment
for anyone challenging it.

The civil servant and the government

minister
A UK civil servant working for a minister who had publicly
rubbished climate science said, ‘We take the science seriously, but
it is only one factor. Other important interests and interest groups
often pull in a different direction to the science.’ Her argument was
of the kind, ‘99 per cent of scientists tell us the earth is round not
flat and of course I accept what they say. It is important; so too is
the fact that my minister is a flat earther, as are the majority in his
political party and their donors. Weighing all this, my considered
view is that the earth is flat.’ She seemed very secure in her way
of arguing. It came across as being entirely unproblematic to her,
indeed as usual and normal. She was in effect saying scientists can
be ignored and the laws of physics are negotiable.
Dan Kahan at Yale has cogently argued that the way we view
scientific evidence about climate change is swayed by group pressure
(e.g. Kahan et al., 2012). Giving way to group pressure to disavow
reality is nothing new historically. What is new is that if disavowal
wins now, life on earth as we know it is predicted to end soon. The
bubble of disavowal must burst, but the danger is it will burst too
late to avoid catastrophic climate change and societal collapse.
We should never underestimate the tenacity with which
Exceptions work to keep a fraud bubble going for as long as
possible. Currently, the climate bubble is bursting partly because
damage is now visible. The social climate in certain groups is shifting
towards rationality. Surveys show a steady rise in the number of
people taking climate science and the climate crisis seriously. Most
importantly, the group taboo on talking about the crisis is lifting
and neoliberal Exceptionalism’s radically unequal structuring has
recently been laid barer by the coronavirus.
However, Exceptions continue to create a hostile environment
for truth. One small example from 2019 is a question chosen by
 TRICKLEDOWN 203

the BBC for its weekly programme Question Time which debates
important issues of the day. The press that week had extensively
covered Extinction Rebellion’s peaceful occupation of sites in
central London. The question chosen for BBC’s Question Time
was roughly (from memory), ‘Does Extinction Rebellion have the
right to block roads in central London and cause disruption?’ Note
the framing. The editors could have chosen the question, ‘What
disruptions will occur if we do nothing about the climate crisis?’
A cartoon called ‘Tipping Point’ by Ingram Pinn appeared in
the Financial Times (FT) in 2019 during the Extinction Rebellion1
showing planet earth, with tanks and guns pushing from one side
and peaceful protestors waving Extinction Rebellion flags pushing
from the other side, both groups engaged in an elemental struggle
over the earth and its future. How to read the cartoon? Great
that the FT was reporting on the Extinction Rebellion and on the
seriousness of climate change? Great that it showed the power of
ordinary people to hold back and reverse such a destructive surge in
omnipotent thinking? Ominous that it showed what neoliberalism
will resort to if it feels its power is threatened? Reassuring for FT
readers who want to appear to support Extinction Rebellion but
prefer to go along with the status quo: yes, we get it, but aren’t the
forces against dealing with the crisis just too great? Reassuring for
Exceptions: we have tanks and power?
The real struggle is over truth and scientific evidence. The cartoon
captured the attempt to push truth sayers onto the back foot and
unseat them. Saving humanity now requires respecting scientists.
In the next part I argue, with examples, that the caring imagination
needed to realize a better future that is viable, liveable and based on
science is already substantially formed and it rises magnificently to
the challenges of our time.

1
https://www.ft.com/content/80f3c5aa-6110-11e9-a27a-fdd51850994c
204
 PART EIGHT

The new caring

imagination
today
206
 28
Paradigm shift

Seismic shifts are occurring in sections of the human climate, with

caring values gaining ground and a paradigm shift underway in
science. Both these developments are part of care’s new imagination
forming. This chapter explores examples from architecture and
economics of people thinking in a new paradigm, one that views
life as composed of complex interconnecting systems.

Architecture
In 2015 Sue Roaf, professor of urban design, opened an international
conference organized by Sheffield University’s Department of
Architecture1 with a talk on sustainable architecture. ‘20th century
architecture’ is passé, she said. It plonks down high-energy glass
boxes without regard for locality, ecology, social conditions or
climate reality. Dubai is a good example.
The conference was interdisciplinary, one tell-tale sign of the
new caring imagination at work. This imagination is naturally
interdisciplinary as its focus is on life systems (physical, social and
psychological) that all interconnect.2

1
‘Architecture and Resilience on the Human Scale’ organized by the Department of
Architecture at Sheffield University, 2015 (see Roaf, 2019).
2
Recently there has been a call for a new Nobel Prize in Interdisciplinary Science to
legitimize this understanding. See, for instance, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/
The-disciplinary-interdisciplinary-impact-of-Nobel-Prize-winning-discoveries-a_
fig1_328671380
208 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

At one workshop, I found myself with planners and architects

discussing an iron ore mining town just inside the Arctic Circle. The
town had to be relocated due to subsidence from iron ore extraction
and increased flooding from Arctic melt due to global heating.
The discussion was technical3 but much more: what about
the carbon implications, the town’s long-term future, how would
the town’s people manage the move psychologically, what about the
effects of the move on local fauna? This last question temporarily
silenced everyone. It seemed the group had ‘disappeared’ other
species from their consideration. They then discussed that
reindeer are already congregating in disused mine shafts to escape
mosquitoes now present because of rising temperatures. While it
seemed not much was known about the animals in the locale, at least
considering their position was back in the plan. They acknowledged
the need to consult more widely.
The new imagination is co-produced – the product of different
perspectives and expertise. It promotes connection and linking not
dividing and ranking. Always under construction, its perspective
can be lost. To explore this, I now make a short detour to bring in
Bruno Latour.
Latour (2017) recently argued that we currently see the earth
as a whole series of different imaginary conceptual planets, each
one having its own gravitational pull on us. What might be called
‘Planet Life’ is earth as conceived by today’s new caring imagination,
with ‘Planet La La’ the Exception’s conception of earth (my terms,
not Latour’s). Planet La La is what Sue Roaf was calling passé and
twentieth century. It cannot help us build for a liveable viable future.
Latour draws our attention to the pull on us of different ways
of seeing. On Planet Life, we see with eyes of care, meaning seeing
that stable earth systems entail limits and our actions have long-
term consequences. I thought the planning group was struggling
to inhabit Planet Life and to not be pulled to Planet La La. This
struggle needs to be ongoing if we are to resist the false belief that,
‘born again’, we have transcended uncaring ways of seeing. Today’s
insights can be swept away or become tomorrow’s disengaged
mantras.

3
The session was not written up and this is from memory.
 PARADIGM SHIFT 209

Planet La La-type thinking draws us towards dividing and

ranking, which is more difficult to resist when in a culture of
uncare. For example, ranking other species as inferior is heavily
socially reinforced in ‘Western’ culture. The expression of outrage,
‘I was treated like an animal!’, is accepted and normalized by most
social groups. It places animals at the bottom of a pile and makes
disregarding their position appear as if natural when we know from
other cultures that disregarding animals is culturally determined.4
This framework of uncare can make it more likely that the position
of wild animals will be forgotten in the planning process. It can
also lead to local knowledge and experience of animals’ ways and
needs being left unexplored. Ranking makes us seem to ourselves so
all-knowing and superior and undoing ranking is painful, facing us
with what we do not know and what we have lost.

Economics
To live on Planet Life in the twenty-first century, economists must
challenge omnipotent thinking and accept there are limits to growth.
Mainstream economics still fudges the fundamental issue which is
that you cannot have endless growth on a finite planet without
eventual system depletion, overload and instability. Exceptions are
psychologically driven always to insist on fudging that issue. An
increasing number of students of economics are demanding to be
taught the New Economics5 which decouples growth from purely
monetary indices, broadens growth to include ‘well-being’ and
thinks in the new paradigm.
Donella Meadows and colleagues’ in Limits to Growth (1972)
had challenged ‘endless growth’ economics.6 This was a profound

4
As just one example, San hunters in Southern Africa feel close to animals they kill
for food and afford them a high level of respect.
5
The students’ revolt is described in Raworth (2017).
6
Meadows et al. (1972) had investigated five major growth trends of global concern:
accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition,
depletion of non-renewable resources and a deteriorating environment.
210 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

break with Planet La La-type economic thinking. It stated a sane

economics must include and be constrained by limits imposed by
reality.
The economist Herman Daly (1996, p. 49) offered a simple
diagram with a square (economics) inside a circle (planetary
ecosystem). He pointed out. ‘[It] could not be more fundamental,
more elementary, or more irreconcilable. … once you draw the
boundary of the environment outside the economy, you have said
that the economy cannot expand forever’ (pp. 6–7). Daly described
showing this diagram to Larry Summers, the World Bank’s chief
economist. Summers’ reply was immediate and definitive: ‘That’s
not the right way to look at it.’7 If Summers conceded that economic
growth had limits, he would break with Exceptionalism that insists
there are no limits to exaggerated entitlement.
Naomi Klein (2014) put the problem as follows: ‘What the
climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use
of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse
is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be
changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.’
The fight is over whether we struggle to see reality as it is, or we
make up our own version of reality by using omnipotent thinking.
Planet La La thinking chooses the latter lens.

The doughnut
Economist Kate Raworth gave us the image of a doughnut to help
us move beyond economic growth imperatives8 and to think in the
new paradigm. This doughnut is American style with a hole in the
middle.

7
During a Q&A session Daly had with Summers at a seminar on Donella Meadows’
ideas.
8
Raworth (2017) takes neither a straightforwardly pro nor anti position on economic
growth. Her view is nuanced.
 PARADIGM SHIFT 211

FIGURE 28.1 The Doughnut.

Raworth describes the doughnut as a twenty-first-century

compass. The outer circle of her doughnut represents planetary
limits and the inner circle social limits. Between its social foundation
of well-being9 and ecological ceiling10 of planetary pressure lies

9
The social foundation comprises twelve dimensions derived from the social priorities
specified in the United Nation’s 2015 Sustainable Development Goals.
10
The ecological ceiling comprises the nine planetary boundaries proposed by an
international group of Earth-system scientists led by Johan Rockström and Will
Steffen.
212 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

the safe and just space for humanity. She sees respecting limits as
absolutely fundamental if we are to protect life. Raworth includes
all the interconnected systems that support life: physical, social and
psychic. She broadens the idea of limits to include all the Nos of
Nature.11 For Raworth, there are limits to what our planet’s life
support systems can absorb and limits to what people can stand.
When life systems become overburdened, they become unstable and
this is true at the planetary level and at the social level.12 A safe
space to live lies between the doughnut’s two rings.
Here is Raworth’s depiction of the current state of the doughnut.

FIGURE 28.2 Transgressing both sides of the Doughnut’s boundaries.

11
Randall (2009) coined the phrase the No of Nature.
12
Naomi Klein had argued transgressing limits leads to systems being ‘overburdened’
(e.g. Klein, 2013).
 PARADIGM SHIFT 213

Ignoring boundaries has led to Earth’s physical life support

systems being in overshoot and to people being faced with too
much to bear.
While the findings summarized by Raworth’s current doughnut
are grim, on a positive note the doughnut does show amazing
progress in our understanding of boundaried life systems. Showing
this with one simple image distils the work of thousands of natural
and human scientists to understand life and the containing limits
needed to protect life. Picturing this awe-inspiring collective work
put me in mind of a flock of birds taking off. The caring imagination
operating in a new paradigm has indeed taken off.

What is an ecosystem?
Raworth’s doughnut shows earth as an ecosystem. In neoliberal
culture ‘eco’ tends to convey ‘green’ ‘environment’ ‘over there’
and this can set up resistance to grasping that we are part of an
ecosystem, not apart from it. An ecosystem supports life and our
lives too. It is the living, interacting interdependent community of
life forms in a physical environment.
When we embrace the new imagination, we radically rethink
what ‘environment’ means13; it now includes physical, social and
inner psychic environments. Each requires frameworks of care and
sustainable life depends on stability in them all.

Thinking in the new paradigm

Raworth invites us to ‘enter the doughnut’, by which I take her to
mean to see with care informed by science in charge; see nature as
physical nature and human nature and see that both kinds of nature
have red lines that must be respected and not crossed; appreciate the

13
As a psychoanalyst I know the difficulty this can cause well, as too many of my
colleagues still see the environment as something physical, ‘out there’, and beyond
the theoretical scope of psychoanalysis!
214 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

damage and the instability that occur when nature’s boundaries are
not respected; see how vital it is to put in place effective frameworks
of care to help life flourish and to contain human destructiveness.
Entering the doughnut requires expanding identity from entitled
consumer, to citizen, to being part of a wider whole that includes
all life forms. It requires expanding one’s sense of home from local
patch to seeing our planet as home. Language helps here, if we
think about it. Earth has always meant both the ground under our
feet and our planet. The issue is which gravitational pull are we
under? Neoliberal culture’s pull towards Planet La La or the new
imagination’s pull towards Planet Earth? A personal example of
this struggle is my realizing that when I make an environmentally
destructive decision, I need to scale up my tiny action to see the
effect of millions of us all making the same decision. I believe more
and more people are now mentally scaling up to think globally
when they act locally. An example is that more and more people
are now refusing to use single-use plastic bottles as they see the
collective harm.
Architects Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu (2019) made
in my view a beautiful observation that highlights the way systems
thinking reaches right up to the macro and right down to the micro
level:

The transformation needs to take place on the [macro] scale …

[to] … the microscale of each individual, each subjectivity.
(p. 265)
 29
Frameworks of care for a
sustainable world

Humanity’s key task now is to put in place frameworks of care. My

first example of one is a law to criminalize ecocide.

Ecocide law
International barrister Polly Higgins (2015), who tragically died of
cancer in 2019, spent her professional life working to have ecocide
recognized by the International Criminal Court as an atrocity crime
(to be added to crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide
and crimes of aggression). She argued, ‘We live in an age where
the consequences of dangerous industrial activity are long-term,
transboundary and can be felt on the other side of the world. …
Ecocide … is the missing international crime of our time.’ Criminal
law is needed to contain ecocide because verbal agreements are not
enforceable. For example, International Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) climate accords are not legally binding. ‘Hurricanes will not
wait whilst we endlessly vacillate over agreements which cannot be
enforced.’1
Her argument gains considerable force when we consider
that despite the IPCC climate accords setting the limit for global
warming not to cross 1.5 degrees, carbon emissions have continued

1
https://www.earth-law.org/climatecrime_pr/
216 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

to rise. The IPCC points out that even one-degree rise has massive
impacts on human and animal life.2 One prediction from climate
science is that we will reach a 1.5 degree rise in 2025, just four years
from now.3
An ecocide law would help focus minds on the enormity of
damage done. It would make those with ‘superior responsibility’
(governments and CEOs of large corporations) legally accountable
for having caused the damage. One effect ought to be banks being
less willing to lend to companies clearly breaking the law and
channelling lending to sustainable projects.
An ecocide law, effectively implemented, would provide a much-
needed framework to help people think proportionately about
who is responsible for the damage. Named CEOs would be held
criminally responsible, and significantly harming the earth would
be a crime. Having that framework should help ordinary people
consider their own degree of responsibility.
Outlawing ecocide would make it clear to people that their lives,
and life itself, matter to government, and that government will fight
for life. We have come to an extraordinary pass when people take
it as usual that the future of life itself does not figure in decision
making.4 Protecting the earth legally would help restore faith in
leadership and give a boost to peoples’ moral part, helping to
improve mental health generally. It would also perforce help restore
racial justice.
Higgins argued that the earth needs a good lawyer, but society
also needs a good lawyer, and laws in place to keep it civil and
stable. Effective regulation contains people. Ongoing life on our
planet depends on our building containing social environments for
all. My second example is the attempt to build such an environment
in Copenhagen.

2
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
3
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/06/met-office-global-
warming-could-exceed-1-point-5-c-in-five-years
4
UK government’s response to a petition on ecocide was to say, ‘The Government
neither recognises the term ecocide nor does it intend to suggest the concept a
criminal offence.’ https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/263605
 FRAMEWORKS OF CARE FOR A SUSTAINABLE WORLD 217

Copenhagen’s chief architect

In 2012, the UN rated Denmark the happiest place in the world.5
Michael Booth (2014) argued that the ‘Nordic Miracle’ is due to a
combination of lower working hours, longer holidays, benefits of
up to 90 per cent of previous wages for up to two years, absence of
poverty, free education and healthcare, all supported by the highest
taxation in the world. Direct and indirect taxation ranged from
58 per cent to 72 per cent. To put this in perspective, long before
the neoliberal era, Roosevelt had argued high tax for the wealthy is
the price needed for democracy to hold.
Copenhagen is particularly known for its enlivening, friendly
atmosphere. Perhaps less well known is that town planners in the
background actively work to foster that atmosphere. Tina Saaby,6
Copenhagen’s chief city architect, said in 2015 with deceptive
simplicity that its city planners put human beings first. I understand
her to have meant they provided containing frameworks of care.
Saaby explained that Copenhagen’s planners encourage people to
connect by maximizing opportunities for them to make eye contact.
For example, its planning department would consider whether a
new building design allowed ground level eye contact between
those inside and outside. As Saaby put it, people are less likely to
pee on a wall if they can make eye contact with people on the other
side of that wall. Planners also encouraged people to connect by
maximizing public space that has free access. Gated communities
and privatization of public spaces are discouraged, helping people
to feel included and part of society.
Gardens replaced concrete where possible, helping people connect
with nature. Bike lanes were privileged, leaving the air cleaner to
breathe and reducing carbon emissions. New pedestrian walkways
were wider on the sunny side, the thinking that Denmark has limited
sunshine, people are happier and have more fun in sunshine, so why
not direct their feet to the sunny side? New building projects began
with consulting local people, but this was also top-down planning.

5
With Finland in second place, Norway in third, Sweden in seventh and the UK in
forty-first.
6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxW8dAIN2mE
218 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

A caring imagination applies a sophisticated understanding

of human psychology to support people’s capacity to care and
cooperate with those around them. It recognizes that people get
together in all kinds of ways for all sorts of reasons, ranging from
work to fun to sex to fighting. It views people as having basic
conflicts of interest, and considers there is more chance of working
these through if people are encouraged to meet, eye to eye, on
common ground.
Anna Minton (2012) charted an opposite trend in the UK
where there is growing privatization of social space. With
increasing inequality and austerity measures, the pressure is to
create environments where the more privileged group can avoid
visible signs of poverty. Out of sight, out of mind. That fits with
Exceptions’ felt entitlement to be spared discomforting feelings.
There are growing signs of this trend in London, my home city:
spikes appear on pavements to stop ‘rough’ sleepers;7 beggars and
homeless people are sent to outer boroughs on the quiet;8 there
is greater physical separation of rich and poor; and where they
do share space in new blocks of flats, some now have separate
‘poor doors’ and ‘poor play areas’ for those allocated affordable
housing.9 The result is gated communities gradually forming not
just in neighbourhoods but within minds.
London is too old, culturally vibrant and complex to be simply
defined by these trends, and many Londoners are fighting hard to
resist them. However, in a gated community, we are more likely
to lose empathy for those outside. If we see very few solar panels
on buildings, it is harder to imagine a world based on renewables.
If we are surrounded by concrete, we may lose touch with nature
and that may impact our mental health. Research has shown
that, for instance, children who play on asphalt not grass show
higher rates of attention deficit disorder.10 Preserving all these vital

7
https://www.channel4.com/news/londons-anti-homeless-spikes-criticised
8
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/14/london-councils-trying-to-
force-homeless-families-outside-the-capital
9
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2707478/Outrage-poor-doors-afordable-
housing-tenants-banned-using-swanky-entrance-halls-apartment-blocks.html.
10
Malone and Tranter (2003) found that children playing on asphalt had play that was
more interrupted and they played in shorter segments than children playing on grass
or soil. Taylor, Kuo and Sullivan (2001) found that children exhibit fewer symptoms
of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) after spending time in green surroundings.
 FRAMEWORKS OF CARE FOR A SUSTAINABLE WORLD 219

(life-giving) links and connections is what Saaby meant by planning

and building with humans in mind. For Saaby it means preserving
vital (life-giving) links and connections and restoring broken links
with care.
Saint Kjeld’s Kvarter was Copenhagen’s first climate-resilient
neighbourhood. In Taasinge Square they dug up 80 per cent of the
concrete to enable better water drainage from rain and in the earth
liberated they built gardens and social spaces. This raises the human
spirit.
Building climate resilience, for architects like Saaby (and there
are many of them), fundamentally means building resilience in
the human climate. A resilient human climate is where people feel
cared for, and entitled to be cared for and to care. My next example
concerns a community where resilience was at a low ebb and needed
rebuilding.

The Dublin fire department

In 2008, Kilbarrack fire station in Dublin lost 50 per cent of its
staff to redundancies. Morale was low, firemen were undervalued
and the fire station was neglected. It had not been repainted in forty
years. In this situation Neil MacCabe, a young fireman, put forward
a Green Plan for Kilbarrack to create a more sustainable way of
living. He asked his fellow fire fighters initially to invest in the fire
station with their own money as stakeholders.11 Their investment
would be returned through money the plan would save. It worked.
Energy: firefighters installed new thermodynamic collector
panels, gas-condensing boilers and LED lighting.
Water: they began to measure water use and used motion sensor
taps to reduce the flow to urinals and showerheads. They built a
wastewater treatment centre and used the treated water to put
out fires.

11
McCabe said, ‘instead of asking for money I came up with the Green plan and
it was agreed that money we saved by reducing our energy consumption and
carbon emissions would be ring-fenced for improvements to the station’ (http://
citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/tag/neil-mccabe).
220 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Waste: to lessen energy waste, they employed local carpenters to

make airtight windows and doors from sustainably sourced Irish
wood. This boosted local employment.
Biodiversity: they built insect habitats and gardens. Retired
members of the community, including retired firemen, came into
the fire station as maintenance men and gardeners.
Transport: they trialled fuel from used cooking oil garnered from
the whole fire service.
Community role: historically seen as protectors, these firefighters
expanded their role to offer themselves as protectors of an
ecosystem. ‘Before and after’ photos show wasteland transformed
into gardens and vegetable allotments, groups of local children
visiting on biodiversity days and fire fighters keeping bees.
Their refurb went far deeper than the building. The Green Plan
empowered a way of living that put care of nature, people and
other species first. What a contrast to a world in which people’s
efforts go unrecorded, their love of nature is not acknowledged,
built environments are often neglected and ugly, people are treated
without respect and feel thrown onto the scrap heap, the goodness
and creativity in them not recognized?
Taking care of nature and providing a beautiful built environment
have powerful effects on people. In a TED talk in 2002, Bill
Strickland demonstrated that poor underachieving teenagers in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, started to flower academically when
taught in a building designed to be beautiful.12
With neoliberal Exceptions still in overall charge, projects to
build frameworks of care remain vulnerable. Polly Higgins at the
time of her death in 2019 still had not found the one nation state
to champion a crime of ecocide (although by July 2020 President
Macron of France was arguing that ecocide law is needed).13 Tina
Saaby and her team have the support of Copenhagen’s mayor. Bill
Strickland raised money for his school from large corporations, but
they would be unlikely to support the idea of quality education for
all, paid for through taxation. In our current political world, all
too often these projects flower or wither in interstices and vacant

12
https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_strickland_rebuilding_a_neighborhood_with_
beauty_dignity_hope?language=en
13
See Liv Rowland (2020).
 FRAMEWORKS OF CARE FOR A SUSTAINABLE WORLD 221

lots, dependent on grace, favour and often the expedient needs of

those who hold power. Regime and system change are required for
frameworks of care to be secure and effective.

The Green New Deal

Implementing a Green New Deal nationally could boost pride
and feeling valued, especially for workers in deprived areas. They
could spearhead the new energy transformation so badly needed.
In 2019, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democratic Congress woman,
sponsored House Resolution 109, calling on the US Federal
Government to recognize its duty to implement a Green New Deal
with goals to

●● achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions

●● establish millions of high-wage jobs and ensuring economic
security for all
●● invest in infrastructure and industry
●● secure clean air and water, climate and community resilien-
cy, healthy food, access to nature and a sustainable environ-
ment for all
●● promote justice and equality.

The resolution calls for accomplishing these goals through a ten-

year national mobilization effort. In 2019 that would have first
required unseating Trump, the then incumbent, from power.
222
 30
Living on Planet Earth not
Planet La La

I have a dream: That humanity will … learn to live

sustainably within the limits of our finite world.
DAVID WASDELL (2013)

I think my dreams were not big enough. I was looking for

equality, not transformation. … We are all linked, not ranked.
GLORIA STEINEM (BBC RADIO 4, 2016)1

I return to Kumi Naidoo’s story about the woman in the audience

who admonished him for talking nightmare not dream about
climate change (see page 4). We need to keep both hopeful dreams
and nightmare scenarios in mind if we are to build a world that
can support life and is sustainable. We also need the strength and
the will that come from having a strong sense of entitlement to life.

Lively entitlement
The psychoanalyst John Murray (1964)2 distinguished between
three kinds of entitlement: (i) the lively kind felt by the caring

1
Said by Steinem on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, 20 March 2016.
2
Entitlement studies took off in earnest in the 1960s in the United States, spurred on
by struggles for racial equality and human rights.
224 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

self, (ii) the narcissistic kind the exception feels and (iii) non-
entitlement. Non-entitlement, an abject state, is when Exceptions
win the struggle with care so decisively that the caring part of the
self feels non-entitled to a life worth living in its terms.
Lively entitlement is currently surging and can be seen powering
Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, Me Too and Extinction Rebellion.
While each of these movements is born from specific pain and has
its own unique history of struggle, all of them insist that people are
entitled to life and to a life worth living. Black Lives Matter insists,
we want to breathe. Extinction Rebellion insists, we want to live.
Extinction Rebellion’s founding declaration was ‘we act on behalf
of life’.3
Hanna Segal (1993) argued that life naturally rebels against
death, giving as an example the way in which someone attempting
suicide by drowning must push himself down under the water
with violent force if he is successfully to resist his life force that
instinctively pushes him up to reach air.4 The slogan Extinction
Rebellion expresses for me precisely life’s rebellion against neoliberal
Exceptions’ policies that lead inexorably to death and ultimately to
extinction. During the neoliberal period people – particularly black
people – suffered loss of entitlement to the physical basics of life:
breathable air, clean water, a stable climate and uncontaminated
soil.5 They were treated as though each assault on life was to be
borne uncomplainingly and they should accept their non-entitled
status.

3
Extinction Rebellion at a rally outside the British Parliament in 2018 began with
the staggering fact that in the last fifty years 60 per cent of all wild animals on our
planet have been lost.
4
Segal (1993) quoted from Martin Eden by Jack London. At the moment Eden lifts
himself up against his pull to drown himself, he thinks, this is the will to live. The
thought is accompanied by a sneer. Segal’s subject was hatred and contempt for the
part that wants to live.
5
Diesel pollution, known to kill people, is at illegal levels (https://www.theguardian.
com/cities/2017/apr/13/death-of-diesel-wonder-fuel-new-asbestos). Plastic has
been found in the faeces of 100 per cent of UK people tested, including children
(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/22/microplastics-found-
in-human-stools-for-the-first-time). Monsanto has just been successfully sued for
causing a man’s cancer with its pesticide glyphosate (https://www.theguardian.com/
business/2019/may/13/monsanto-cancer-trial-bayer-roundup-couple).
 LIVING ON PLANET EARTH NOT PLANET LA LA 225

Black Lives Matter was born of intolerable racist violence against

black people, Idle No More of intolerable racist violence against
indigenous communities, particularly in North America and Me
Too of intolerable misogynist violence against women. The specific
incidents that have sparked mass protest (such as the murder of
George Floyd by police through preventing him from breathing)
represented moments when people recognized human boundaries
had clearly been breached – this was now just too much to bear,
enough now! – and came out fighting to insist on dismantling
frameworks of uncare and establish frameworks of care (examples
being the call to reduce funding a massively overfunded aggressively
militarized police force in the United States and to break down
racial fracturing by actually discussing slavery, colonialism and
statuary that to this day celebrate both).
These movements champion respecting, connecting with and
protecting human dignity and human life. Entitlement to life also
empowered March 4 Our Lives, the movement started by school
children after the Parkland school shooting in March 2018. They
refused to be the US gun lobby’s zone of sacrifice. Greta Thunberg’s
protest outside the Swedish Parliament about inaction on climate
change inspired thousands of schoolkids to strike for climate. The
young understand they are neoliberalism’s zone of sacrifice and
they are fighting for life and for their lives. If Gaia had a voice, no
doubt she would join the rebellion!
Indigenous people have been at forefront in the fight to protect
life. Idle No More was declared in response to the fossil fuel industry
despoiling and poisoning indigenous people’s lands and water with
tar sands extraction in Canada and by running the Exxon pipeline
through indigenous lands in the United States. Idle No More by
saying ‘we will protect the land that sustains life’ countermands
neoliberal framing that tells us we need feel no responsibility for the
state nature is in. Care feels its responsibilities.
We are witnessing a coming together – a de-fragmenting – of
different social groups now reaching out to each other and forging
links and common understanding. This is what care does: it works
to undo divisive fracturing and splitting and it promotes links.
The Trades Union movement is beginning better to grasp the need
for a transformative politics. There is growing understanding that
implementing a Green New Deal will create jobs and restore lost
pride by helping power nations with renewables. New stories, new
226 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

jobs, new identities, renewed energy, this time on the side of life,
not death.
Gloria Steinem made in my view a profoundly important point
in saying: ‘I think my dreams were not big enough. I was looking
for equality, not transformation. … We are all linked, not ranked.’
Dreams of greater power and greater equality are not in themselves
necessarily transformational dreams. What is transformative is when
care’s imagination, powered by lively entitlement, recognizes what
is intolerable to the human spirit and demands a power shift that
places care in charge. With such a power shift, divisive hierarchical
ranking and splitting are lessened and greater connectivity – and
equality – is possible.
The new protest movements, building from their specific histories,
acting for those who came before as well as those to come, are
demanding a profound break with Exceptionalism and its fracturing
divisions. People are beginning to dream a common dream of a
world that can protect life for all and help life to flourish for all. Real
transformation is being demanded6 and fought for. People put their
lives on the line to demand change by demonstrating in support of
Black Lives Matter during the corona pandemic, risking contracting
the virus and exposing themselves to increasingly violent policing.
It is often said that we need change as though all the work
required lies ahead. This part has argued change is already
happening. A caring imagination is already planning intelligently
for a sustainable world.

It can be done
In December 2013, I attended a remarkable two-day conference
at the Royal Society in London organized by the Tyndall Centre
for Climate Research.7 Climate scientists, experts in transport,
shipping and energy, economists, lawyers, journalists, psychologists
and more, from the UK and from around the world by video link,

6
As argued by the many social transformation movements emerging such as The
Leap (https://theleap.org), Transition (https://transitionnetwork.org) and so on.
7
https://tyndall.ac.uk/radical-emissions-reduction-conference-videos-now-online
 LIVING ON PLANET EARTH NOT PLANET LA LA 227

all said the same thing: we can achieve the carbon reductions we
need to avert climate catastrophe. We already have the technical
know-how and the means. It must be done right now. This is how
it can be done.
It was energizing to see one expert after another talk about
what has been and can be done, not what is wrong. What shone
through was peoples’ powerful sense of lively entitlement to a
sustainable future; also, a way of thinking that started with a true
picture of environmental problems we face, built from that, took
responsibility for the problem, was open to real change (in society
and in the self) and had civility at its heart. Furthermore, a form
of humble courage that could envision the future but not in a false
way that was ‘all seeing’ and ‘all knowing’. Against a background of
grim seriousness, a caring imagination had taken charge and, with
that, hope asserted itself.
As I heard the solutions being put forward, I realized deep down
I had believed it was not technologically possible to transition to
renewable energy. Where had this false belief come from? I believe
I had fallen victim to a culture of uncare that does not report
conferences like Radical Emission Reduction Conference (RERC)
in the press and drums into us that only an oil-based economy can
‘keep the lights on’. This false belief was shortly to be exploded,
partly because the price of solar came down. Sustainable energy
was not a utopian dream. It was achievable.8
Despite the oil industry opposing every move towards a fossil
free world, the collective imagination was rapidly shifting and
developing. Imagine the rate of progress possible if those planning
for renewable energy were supported, funded and valued. Instead,
they largely work against the cultural grain in a current political
climate hostile to them, one that largely ignores their findings and
turns its back on their solutions.

8
The economist Nicholas Stern in 2013, speaking at the launch of James Painter’s
book Climate Change in the Media, said he saw this shift reflected in the mood of
delegates at the IPCC climate talks in Paris in 2015. Unlike at the Copenhagen talks
in 2009, delegates at Paris could imagine a world powered by renewables. Moreover,
they saw this new world as cleaner and smarter. This no doubt had empowered their
insistence on an agreement to limit temperature rise to 1.5 not 2 degrees Celsius.
228 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

I found myself picturing the speakers at RERC as advisors to a

future government that was serious about building a sustainable
infrastructure and economy. RERC energized me, making me aware
the essential problems are not technological but political, cultural
and psychological. A current danger is we collectively succumb to
the next false belief which is a sustainable world cannot be achieved
because we lack psychological appetite for such a world and lack
political will to fight for it. I believe this may well be neoliberalism’s
latest form of ‘it can’t be done’, as usual, designed to sap lively
entitlement and willpower. Despite being undermined by ‘it can’t be
done’, lively entitlement is currently surging.
 PART NINE

The climate
bubble is
bursting
230
 31
The damage

The next two chapters focus on how people may feel as they emerge
from the climate bubble and start to take in the true state the planet
is in. The oceans are acidifying1 and choked with plastics,2 soil is
depleted because of monocrop agribusiness and its heavy use of
fertilizers and pesticides,3 forests (the lungs of the planet absorbing
CO2 emissions) are being chopped down at a staggering and
accelerating rate.4 Insects are in serious decline,5 one knock-on effect
being that birds are dying.6 Birds are also dying because of losing
habitat and being poisoned by pesticides.7 During the neoliberal
era alone 60 per cent of animals have disappeared,8 bee colonies
are collapsing because of pesticides9 and air is increasingly unfit to

1
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/oceans/critical-issues-ocean-
acidification/
2
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/plastic-pollution/
3
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/12/third-of-earths-soil-
acutely-degraded-due-to-agriculture-study
4
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2018/jun/27/one-
football-pitch-of-forest-lost-every-second-in-2017-data-reveals
5
https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/environment/2019/02/why-insect-
populations-are-plummeting-and-why-it-matters https://www.washingtonpost.com/
gdpr-consent/?destination=%2fscience%2f2018%2f10%2f15%2fhyperalarming-
study-shows-massive-insect-loss%2f%3f
6
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-
numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature
7
https://www.birdlife.org/europe-and-central-asia/news/meet-pesticides-silent-bird-
killers-protect-our-crops
8
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-
animals-since-1970-major-report-finds
9
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/neonicotinoid-pesticides-slowly-killing-bees
232 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

breathe.10 We have left the temperate climate of the Holocene and

entered the unstable conditions of the Anthropocene.11 There is no
return from that. Arctic ice that holds in methane, a particularly
dangerous greenhouse gas, is melting.12 Global heating’s effects are
now visible and obvious everywhere, above ground, below ground,
in the atmosphere and in the sea.

My inner storm
I already knew most of this when I attended an international
conference in Greece in June of 201813 where senior scientists
working on global heating, pesticides, fertilizers, GMFs (genetically
modified foods), chemicals and pharmaceuticals presented their
research over three days into damage that large corporations are
causing. The picture that emerged was that regulation is now
becoming so weak and the resulting damage so extensive that the
situation is in serious danger of spiralling out of control. Several
details stand out for me from the talks. A recently retired senior
official from REACH, the European Chemicals Protection Agency,
said that chemicals in everyday products are now proliferating at
such a rate they cannot keep track of them, nor do they know the
effect many of them have when they interact with other chemicals.14
One paper described that a chemical now routinely added to dog
shampoo is poisoning water supplies, leading to the potential
for conflict between water and chemical companies.15 Chemicals
known as pathogens and hormone disruptors are being added to
household products.16 The public’s wish for ever more pampering
products is catered for with the dangers not disclosed.

10
https://www.who.int/health-topics/air-pollution#tab=tab_1
11
To grasp the shocking reality that we have left the Holocene and its stability, see
Hamilton (2017).
12
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2785/unexpected-future-boost-of-methane-possible-
from-arctic-permafrost/
13
International Conference, ‘The Dramatic Changes on the Planet and the Hellenic
Roots of Ecological Ethics’, University of Patras, 2018.
14
Unpublished verbal report given at the conference.
15
https://www.dogsnaturallymagazine.com/20-ingredients-dont-want-dogs-
shampoo/
16
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/9-ways-avoid-hormone-disrupting-chemicals
 THE DAMAGE 233

The conference, held at the University of Patras in Greece, was

free and open to the public, but very few people from outside came.
The scientists were largely talking to each other. Listening to them
left me in a state of shock and grief, and at the end of each day on
returning to the hotel I would run into the sea to try to unwind and
calm down.
Despite feeling flooded psychologically, I felt privileged to attend
this conference and came home with a greater understanding of the
degree to which we (our bodies, the air we breathe, the soil) are being
progressively poisoned and, also, that the corporations responsible
are out of control. One senior scientist from a prestigious university
in the United States commented at the end of one gruelling day that
he felt there was an accelerating juggernaut at the end of this tunnel,
not light. He gave a mirthless laugh. Despite that, he was up with
the rest into the night drafting a resolution for government on ways
to address the damage.
Concerned scientists are fighting for the Precautionary Principle
and the Early Warning Principle in the face of huge opposition from
corporations.17 They are working to protect conditions for life to
endure. We hear very little indeed about these unsung heroes from
everyday news sources.
Also revealed at the conference was the huge disparity in
environmental standards between first and third world countries.
It was heart breaking to see children in India playing in an area
thick with visible asbestos powder.18 Rob Nixon (2011) exposed
industry’s extreme indifference to life in his ground-breaking
book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. The
Patras conference brought home to me just how expendable life is
everywhere on the planet for the large corporations. I in no way
mean to diminish the far greater suffering of those in the ‘global
south’ in making this point.
Reports of harm to human health are now seeping into the
mainstream media, for instance, chemicals in ‘slime’ found to be
hormone disruptors.19 Think of all the preteen girls in the West

17
For information about this fight, see Union of Concerned Scientists (https://www.
ucsusa.org).
18
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/asbestos-still-around-still-
deadly/articleshow/64335603.cms
19
https://wyrk.com/warning-do-not-let-your-kids-play-with-this-homemade-slime/
234 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

playing with ‘slime’, their latest craze. There are regular reports
now of air pollution killing people and plastic in the oceans found
in the bodies of marine animals and fish. Major UK papers have
reported studies that found 100 per cent of people sampled had
plastic in their faeces. This included babies.20 Plastic has even been
found in drops of rain.21 Routinely left out of these media reports is
how hearing all this leaves people feeling. It is as though the reports
are written to be read by machines and zombies, not humans.
The news from the conference was much harder to absorb than I
had allowed for. I was considerably buoyed by being part of a group
of scientists with a common vision, but nonetheless I was trying to
keep an overwhelming sense of grief at bay. I have been trying to
process my grief at seeing damage of such proportions ever since.
Four months after the conference, the IPCC issued an emergency
bulletin on climate (October 2018). In response, many people
stepped up climate activism as they battled with feeling tired and
overwhelmed. Then, I watched a video of Greta Thunberg talking
about climate. Her words and perspective were deeply energizing
for me, I think largely because she presents a caring imagination so
little damaged by her world and her culture. I wondered if in part
she alleviated my sense of guilt. I have contributed to damaging her
world, but her spirit is intact; indeed, it is stronger than mine. If a
child can look at her world and stay calm, so can I, and I believe
so can we all. Thunberg’s attention is on repair not blame. Because
she does not collude, she sees the obvious – it is remarkable how
few people in today’s culture do – and concludes, there is a terrible
problem. We bear responsibility. We must act right now to do our
best to fix it.

20
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-health-microplastics/microplastics-turning-up-in-
human-stool-idUKKCN1VN23O
21
https://theweek.com/speedreads/858748/scientists-find-plastic-colorado-raindrops
 32
Living with our feelings
about the climate crisis

The climate bubble is bursting now. Omnipotent thinking could

only deflect awareness of the damage for a while. The tragedy with
this bubble is that the culture of uncare kept it afloat long enough
for the damage to be staggering. More and more people are seeing
that now.
Very broadly speaking, people are reacting to climate reality in
two main ways, trying to either avoid it or accept it (and most
probably struggling between the two). I explore avoidant responses
later in the part ‘The Crazy’. This chapter concerns the sorts of
feelings we may expect if we do accept climate reality. A friend
recently said to me, the reality can feel unbearable. I agreed. She
continued that she must try to bear it or she will lose her sanity. I
feel the same. How do we face climate reality, work it through and
keep reasonably sane? Of course, this is not a ‘one-off’ effort but an
ongoing process.
First, I believe it helps to appreciate that we face not one, not a
few, but a whole series of shocks, the first being that the climate and
environmental news is itself shocking.
Then, it can feel like a shocking assault to experience the very
feelings that group denial protected you from. Shame and guilt may
suddenly loom large. A further shock is realizing more clearly that
most current leaders are heading us to ecocide. Surely, they cannot
be that collectively crazy. Seeing that they are is very shocking. A
further shock involves the collapse of our own omnipotence. That
tasks us with having radically to re-evaluate our sense of ourselves.
236 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

We see we are vulnerable, dependent, unprotected and fragile when

we thought we were invincible. Death suddenly feels closer and more
real. We see how easily seducible we are, how prey to colluding with
corrupt forces. We see we were duped and we allowed ourselves be
duped. That feels shocking too.
At the same time, it is deeply replenishing to emerge from a
collective psychic retreat from reality to see the true picture. It puts
us in touch with our lively entitlement to conditions that support
life and make life sustainable – conditions we have steadily been
losing. It leads us to re-evaluate what makes life worth living, and it
helps us make genuine repairs wherever we can. This rebuilds trust.
Stepping out of the climate bubble enables us to see strength and
beauty in the interconnected systems that support life, see fragility
in those systems and recognize the imperative to respect their limits
in the way we live our lives.

Eco-anxiety
I believe it helps stay sane to talk with friends and colleagues about
how we are feeling; it helps us recognize that some of what we are
feeling may be widely shared by others. One common feeling is anxiety.
These days I read as much environmental news as possible but not
before writing or sleeping as it is too disturbing and anxious-making.
I am not alone.1 Many people are reporting ‘eco-anxiety’ (Lehtonen
and Välimäki, 2012) which, unless crippling, is on the side of life;
it is care’s alarm call to face reality and to act in the face of danger.
As David Wallace-Wells (2019) pointed out, we need to be
feeling more anxious and indeed scared. However, having the one
term does not help us separate out different kinds of eco-anxiety.
For instance, anxiety about what will happen if we do not change
is different to anxiety about what will happen if we do change.2

1
Liv Grant who worked on David Attenborough’s film Climate Change the Facts
found, ‘My nights became ones of sleeplessness. … I cannot stop thinking about (it)’.
2
Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research made the point at the
Radical Emission Reduction Conference in 2015 that change and loss are here now
regardless of whether we act to reduce emissions or not. The difference will be what
sort of change. https://tyndall.ac.uk/radical-emissions-reduction-conference-videos-
now-online
 OUR FEELINGS ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS 237

Eco-futility and eco-grief

We can feel paralysed by futility when we feel governments do not
care about our fate with climate change. Lertzman (2015) argued
that indifference (she called it apathy) about climate change might
well be a sign people care too much about it not too little, with
apathy potentially a sign of environmental melancholia. She backed
this with research that revealed people in states of frozen grief about
damage to landscapes they love. Francis Weller (2015)3 described
how being able to grieve environmental losses is like crossing a
frontier that can open up the rest of our lives.

Solastalgia
‘Solastalgia’ is Glenn Albrecht’s (Albrecht et al., 2007)4 term
for melancholic distress specifically caused by detrimental
environmental change. In 2015, the medical journal The Lancet
included solastalgia as part of the impact of climate change on
human health and well-being.5

3
Steffi Bednarek (2018) writes on what would it be like to include the quality of
our relationship to the natural world in our assessments and our notions of trauma,
attachment and fixed gestalts? What is our profession’s contribution to transforming
the deep intergenerational disconnection from the other-than-human world?
4
‘As opposed to nostalgia – the melancholia or homesickness experienced by
individuals when separated from a loved home – solastalgia is the distress that is
produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly
connected to their home environment’. Solastalgia, a neologism coined by Albrecht,
is a combination of the Latin word solacium (comfort) and the Greek root –algia
(pain), which he defined as ‘the pain experienced when there is recognition that the
place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault… a form of
homesickness one gets when one is still at “home”’ (Albrecht et al., 2007).
5
The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change monitors effects of climate
change on the health of the next generations. Their latest report was published in
2019 (https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(19)32596–6.
pdf#articleInformation).
238 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Eco-shame
Shame and guilt can be particularly acute when emerging from
a collective psychic retreat. The bubble was designed precisely to
keep these feelings out. When I heard about the vast number of
animals who died in the Australian bush fires, I felt flooded by a
deep sense of shame to be a member of my own species. It helps to
talk about these feelings in supportive groups. I will leave eco-guilt
to Chapter 38.

Eco-rage
Rage is often part of care’s response to learning the truth about
environmental destructiveness. For example, I felt smouldering rage
in 2017 on reading that Exxon had signed a deal worth $10 billion
with the state-owned Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (Sabic) to
build the world’s largest plastics facility on the Texas coast. The
mainstream press had highlighted that Trump danced a sword
dance with the Saudis, not the deal that preceded it.6
I think what so enraged me was discovering the press had
offered people a floor show, not the truth. It seemed to me that oil
companies were dancing in triumph and contempt over peoples’
worldwide efforts to address the plastics problem.
While rage can be healthy it can also be part of a trauma
reaction, in which case it is more likely to be loveless and tending
towards hate acts, repetitive destructive grievance and identifying
with the traumatizers, which is why we need to pay close attention
to whether we are traumatized.

6
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/26/worlds-largest-plastics-
plant-rings-alarm-bells-on-texas-coast
 OUR FEELINGS ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS 239

Climate trauma
Trauma, involving life-threatening shocks,7 can overwhelm and
disrupt the mind’s capacity to think.8 We know individuals, groups
and entire people can suffer trauma; it can trigger earlier buried
traumas, be cumulative and its effects can be felt across generations;9
also, people can identify with their traumatizers.10 Traumatized
people may simultaneously find remembering, forgetting and
preserving identity difficult.
Zhiwa Woodbury (2019) has argued that climate trauma is a
‘higher-order category of trauma … Our only chance of addressing
climate trauma is first acknowledging it.’ Taking in current climate
reality can traumatize, but I suggest not all our disassociation about
climate is necessarily because of trauma, and trauma can become
a label applied so generally that it may hamper looking in a more
fine-grained way at what might actually be happening.11
Trauma is hard to think about precisely because trauma can
overwhelm the capacity to think. People struggle with feeling over-
and underwhelmed by the traumatizing event, finding it hard to
judge whom is to blame with any sense of proportion and veering
from attributing too much blame to too little.12 Also, when ‘eco-
trauma’ is applied as a catch phrase by the media (along with ‘eco-
anxiety’), this may distance us from the awfulness of what many
of us are currently feeling about the climate crisis: oh, that’s ‘eco-

7
The American Psychiatric Association (ASA) classes trauma as a stress disorder,
requiring ‘actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence’. The ASA
includes trauma experienced or directly witnessed.
8
Harold Levine (2019), in a paper on trauma, describes thinking as the capacity
to represent our experiences and link them to other experiences in meaningful,
feelingful, narratives. It is this capacity that trauma disrupts.
9
Haydee Faimberg (2005) gives a comprehensive account of the intergenerational
transmission of trauma, particularly the transmission of narcissistic traits.
10
See Anna Freud (1936) for a discussion of her concept of identification with the
aggressor.
11
Levine (2019) noted trauma is used in an over-inclusive way to refer to a noxious
cause; the resulting acute internal state of being injured helpless, terrified or
overwhelmed; the immediate damage inflicted; longer range sequelae produced by
these earlier stages.
12
Reported by colleagues working with victims of trauma, including victims of
sexual abuse (personal communications).
240 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

trauma’. Pinned that one down! Despite all these difficulties, it is

important we stay alert to signs we are feeling traumatized by news
of accelerating environmental and social instability.

PTSD
I have found studying trauma in soldiers helpful when thinking
about potential climate trauma. One form is PTSD (post-traumatic
stress disorder), when one’s sense of safety has been traumatically
shattered. One may constantly relive the trauma in the present,
feeling danger may strike again at any moment. This is called ‘hyper-
arousal’. Many PTSD sufferers eventually convert ‘hyper-arousal’
into ‘hyper-constriction’, where all emotion, even pleasure, is toned
down and experiences are avoided that might evoke feelings of threat.
Is my restricting climate news to certain times of the day hyper-
constriction? To what extent are many of us hyper-vigilantly on the
lookout for climate news and using hyper-constriction to shut it
out? This could be a trauma reaction, but it may also be a healthy
way to protect our hearts and minds from overwhelm.
Pre-traumatic stress disorder is trauma that soldiers suffer
in prolonged situations of helpless anticipation of a future
traumatizing event. The psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren sees our
stress at anticipating impending climate breakdown as a form of
pre-traumatic stress disorder.
Climate breakdown does feel close now. Each of us will have our
own fearful scenarios, also potentially shaped by trauma’s tendency
to reignite earlier traumas.
This point is worth underscoring, particularly in the time of
Covid-19. Living with the threat the virus poses is itself likely to be
traumatic, reigniting earlier traumas, with trauma about the climate
crisis now alongside the trauma of the virus and of impending
economic collapse. On the first night of lockdown, a four-year-old
girl I know dreamed all the teachers at her nursery school fell down.
I suggest this dream image vividly expresses fears of collapse that
many of us now share: collapse of containment, safety, stability and
supplies.
Jem Bendell (2018) has painted vivid pictures of climate
breakdown to help cut through what he calls ‘collapse denial’.
 OUR FEELINGS ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS 241

Obsessive preoccupation with Covid (understandable as this is) may

lead to us yet again ignoring the climate crisis. Climate needs to be
forefront in peoples’ minds right now while planning recovery from
Covid-19 if we are to stem the damage. ‘Teachers all fall down’ is a
potent image for any leadership that ignores this.
It is not easy to know how best to tell people about the climate
emergency without upsetting, even traumatizing, them, but I firmly
believe we need to tell the truth in a caring way, relating to how
people might be feeling. This is no different to the way we would
wish to tell anyone bad news.

Moral injury
I now turn to moral injury, another form of climate and ecological
trauma. Moral injury is the violation of ‘what’s right’.13 Studying
stories of morally injured soldiers reveals a pattern of betrayal by
leadership that idealized the view and hid the truth, that devalued
life and that lied; it reveals the helplessness of feeling caught up
in a vast machine that prevents one from acting with care and
conscience; the collapse of one’s inner ideals; feeling one’s own
experience and sense of reality is brushed aside and does not count;
guilt at one’s actions within this framework.
This could be a description of what many people now report
feeling about life in a neoliberal global economy that structures how
they live daily life in ways that often conflict with their ordinary
human decency and poses them with endless moral dilemmas (see
page 112 for detail).
Experiencing moral injury is a sign of mental health, not
disorder. It means one’s conscience is alive. Fred Alford (2016)
noted, ‘It would be careless, in the literal sense of being uncaring,
not to recognize [moral injury’s] presence among us all. Some more
than others, but everywhere.’ He said, ‘Moral injury occurs when
command is casual about killing.’ Many people now see just how
casual many current political leaders are about their lives, their
children’s lives and life itself. Part of moral recovery is realizing that

Moral injury became more prevalent during the post 9/11 Gulf Wars.
13
242 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

faith in leadership has been misplaced and demanding good enough

leaders.
Covid-19 exposed already existing cruel disparities between the
‘haves’ and the ‘must not haves’, and exposed casualness about
numbers of deaths. It would be surprising if this did not lead to
increased moral injury, particularly in people with greater privilege.
Primo Levi wrote that finding oneself powerless to help others
is traumatic in itself and Judith Herman, who studied survivors of
trauma, argued social action served as ‘the strongest antidote to
traumatic experience’ (p. 214). It created ‘an alliance with others
based on cooperation and shared purpose’ (1992, p. 207) and gave
‘protection against terror and despair’.
Staunching and repairing moral injury involve facing remorse,
seeking forgiveness, gaining new understanding of one’s individual
culpability, and being able to place that in a wider shared and
historical context. It is in these ways that shattered ideals can be
rebuilt and ‘what’s right’ re-found amid the scars. US Army veteran
Wesley Clark Junior led a ceremony at Standing Rock in which army
vets asked Native Americans for forgiveness: ‘We didn’t respect you,
we polluted your Earth, we’ve hurt you in so many ways, but we’ve
come to say that we are sorry. We are at your service and we beg for
your forgiveness.’14
The vets were seeking to repair their own, but also their nation’s,
shattered ideals. They shouldered responsibility for trauma caused
right down the generations by their predecessors in the US military.
I believe to break with Exceptionalism, a mindset that has held such
sway historically not just in our era, a collective effort of working
through grief, remorse and shouldering historical responsibility is

14
Wesley Clark Jr. said, ‘Many of us, me particularly, are from the units that have
hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We
signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted
the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. When we took still more
land and then we took your children and then we tried to make your language and
we tried to eliminate your language that God gave you, and the Creator gave you.
We didn’t respect you, we polluted your Earth, we’ve hurt you in so many ways
but we’ve come to say that we are sorry. We are at your service and we beg for
your forgiveness.’ Chief Leonard Crow Dog accepted the apology and said, ‘we do
not own the land, the land owns us.’ https://www.huffpost.com/entry/forgiveness-
ceremony-unites-veterans-and-natives-at-standing-rock-casino_n_5845cdbbe4b055
b31398b199
 OUR FEELINGS ABOUT THE CLIMATE CRISIS 243

required. It involves physically and also psychically dismantling

frameworks of uncare that have so fractured and divided groups.
And, it matters greatly that this is undertaken in a spirit of
forgiveness of self and others.
It is not easy to ask forgiveness of the earth for polluting and
plundering her as the earth is silent. Indigenous American wisdom
is to treat the earth as a mother whom we honour and respect. That
way we might be able more easily to talk to earth and feel heard.
During an Extinction Rebellion event in London in 2019 a large
group of us in my local area lay down on the pavement while a bell
tolled for the earth. With my face pressed to the ground I felt close
to earth and that if I cried, she would receive my tears.15
The tragedy is that the climate bubble allowed such damage to
accrue that facing climate reality now can feel unbearable. I do know
from experience that trying to bear it, at times feeling overwhelmed,
helps me better contain my distress and soften my rage. I find I am
more reflective and sadder knowing I too profited from ignoring
nature’s limits and colluded with the culture that worked to uncare
me and us.16

You Call It Eco Trauma

Mia Nelson is one of the winners of a challenge set by the Poetry
Society in the UK for young poets to describe their feelings about

15
In 2015, Arkan Lushwala said, ‘It is very important, very necessary at this time
that we humans return to a child-mother relationship… By talking to [Mother
Earth], by being with her, by giving thanks to her. By crying to her when we need
her nourishment. As long as we learn again and practice again, [to have] a good
relationship with Mother Earth, there is hope that we may continue being here.’
I found this interesting in the light of my spontaneous experience of crying on the
ground and feeling earth was receiving my tears (https://blog.pachamama.org/
author-arkan-lushwala-shares-indigenous-wisdom-the-earth-is-our-mother).
16
For those familiar with the psychoanalytic concepts of the paranoid-schizoid and
depressive positions, Irma Brenman Pick recently observed (personal communication)
that perhaps we need to formulate a new position, the tragic position, alongside the
depressive position. We need to find ways collectively to work the tragic position
through.
244 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

the climate crisis.17 Her poem, called You Call It Eco Trauma,
contains these lines,

I call it waking up in the middle of the night

In a cold sweat and knowing your mother
Is being killed in the next room,
But not being able to move.

Nelson’s poem speaks to me of young people struggling to bear

irreparable damage. The mother she describes surely stands for
earth and the killing for ecocide, but might it not also stand for
mother, other, parents, anyone in the wider group who does not
hear children’s cries?
In my experience children are often more in touch with climate
reality than the adults in their world. They know they are the
generation who have to live in the world adults bequeath to them, a
world in which they are still allotted so little entitlement.
I suggest Mia Nelson’s poem speaks of a kind of deafness that
allows one group to leave all the suffering to another group. I heard
a child say, ‘Mummy, school told us today the world is about to
end. Is that true?’ Her parent answered, ‘Of course it’s not true.’ But
that bald answer, while strictly true, abandoned the child. I know
of other parents who support their children, for example, to raise
money for Greenpeace, but refuse to reduce their emissions, despite
their children directly asking them to.
Joshua Casteel, a conscientious objector from Bush Junior’s Iraq
War said, ‘We must be profoundly concerned about the decisions
each of us must make in times of great inconvenience.’18 Times of
great inconvenience are when acting morally has real consequences
and brings real inconvenience, even danger. We, as the last group of
people who can fight to address global warming, live at a time of
great inconvenience.

17
See https://www.google.co.uk/?client=safari&channel=mac_bm
18
Giving testimony at the Truth Commission on Conscience in War, 25 May 2010
(https://youtu.be/HvCEfPGQJQE)
 PART TEN

‘The crazy’:
Exceptionalism
runs amok
246
 33
‘The crazy’ in politics

People have started referring to politics as ‘the crazy’, meaning out

of touch with reality. This part argues that ‘the crazy’ is an inevitable
result of decades of neoliberal deregulation from care.
As well as now contending with climate, corona and economic
crises, a new form of Exceptionalism is here to contend with, one
involving full-blown megalomania. While ‘old-style’ Exceptionalism
hides its true face with denial and obfuscation and pretends to be
moral and sane for expediency, ‘new-style’ Exceptionalism believes
it has finally attained the impossible, which is being ideal.1 New
Exceptionalism openly portrays itself as godlike, with godlike
omnipotent powers. It is unashamed to appear odd and crazy, as it
defines what is ‘normal’, ‘usual’, ‘acceptable’ and sane.
Yascha Mounk (2019) analysing recent dictatorships noted,
‘It has been a good decade for dictatorship … [and] … a terrible
decade for democracy.’ Dictators acting like New Exceptions have
risen up like atolls in the sea, and people are invoking Yeats’ poem
The Second Coming (1920) to give shape to their anxieties about
this regressive turn, especially the line, ‘things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold’. People are feeling terribly unsafe. Yeats evoked a

1
Bauman (2007b, p. 96) described this difference in discussing a statement by Oscar
Wilde on utopia that ends with ‘Progress is the realisation of utopia’. Bauman notes,
‘With the benefit of hindsight, one is inclined to correct the sentence. … progress was
a chase after utopias rather than their realisation. Utopias played the role of dummy
rabbit – ferociously pursued but never caught by racing dogs. … Realities declared
to be “realisations” of utopias were more often than not found to be ugly caricatures
of dreams, and not the dreamt of paradise.’
248 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

‘rough beast’ in his poem. In my reading, his rough beast conveys

dark desire finally liberated and wanting to smash containment to
smithereens. Its action is regressive, aggressive and fragmenting.
Many people now – with good reason – fear descent to barbarism
and violence. Chapters 36 and 38 explore Exceptionalism in this
newly emerging form.
Craziness is an inevitable part of things and part of us; so is
dark destructive desire, which is why both need firm containment
so that ‘the centre’ (mindfulness and democracy)2 can hold. A
group supported by the Columbus Trust3 who studied in great
detail for over two decades what led to the descent to barbarism
during the Second World War drew these important conclusions:
to understand how states of extreme disassociation and brutalism
can arise we must include psychology; not ahistorical psychology
offering timeless apparent ‘truths’, but psychology that embeds
itself in history and situational context and that factors in the way
mindsets are heavily influenced by current ideology and also by
groups under the sway of powerful phantasies. The key lesson from
this research is that when leaders gain (also through generating)
enough mass support to divide the group into ‘us’ and ‘them’
and start to define ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in ways that idealize ‘us’ and
demonize and exclude ‘them’, barbarism beckons. Repetitive acts
of fracturing and redefining the in-group was underway during and
indeed characterized the age of Trump.
In this last part I try to unravel some strands of ‘the crazy’,
perhaps like a fox using its nose to try to identify different scents
that make up the social weather. One difficulty is that ‘the crazy’
in some sections of politics is speeding up and trying to study it
can feel like glimpsing into the coaches of a train accelerating as it
flashes by. It requires containing a sense of dread that slow violence
will transform to rapid collapse.

2
The centre is often used to mean a centre point between left-wing and right-wing
politics, as configured today. This is not the sense in which I mean centre.
3
Funded by David Astor, editor of the Observer newspaper, the Columbus Trust
supported the work of a group of scholars, including Norman Cohn (1975), into
the history, culture and psychology of anti-Semitism, Aryan mythology, racism and
genocide.
 ‘THE CRAZY’ IN POLITICS 249

Part of the existential dread we now live with is akin to awaiting

the arrival of a new baby and wondering what sort of baby it will
be; Yeats’s rough beast slouching with ‘gaze blank and pitiless’, or
humans taking stock, growing up and accepting they must fit in
with and respect the real world and each other to survive.
250
 34
Noah’s Arkism twenty-first-
century style

In the biblical story, God sees mankind as wicked, meaning violent

and full of corrupt thinking, all except Noah the one good just man.
God drowns all life in a great flood and saves only Noah, his family
and representatives of animal species. All board an Ark that Noah
has built according to detailed instructions from God.
The artist Ellen O’Grady (2005) recounted a childhood memory
of how when her Sunday School teacher held up a picture of the
Ark in verdant landscape after the flood waters receded, Joel, the
boy sitting beside her, suddenly yelled, ‘where are all the bodies of
the people and the animals that died in the flood?’
The psychoanalyst Donald Moss (2019), musing on this, noted,
‘The narrative of this punitive cleansing by water yields only
survivors … the earth’s entire fauna, all coupled, erotically charged,
each pair ready to procreate, to go forth and multiply, and re-fill
the Earth with its original animal abundance. Where are the dead
bodies, Joel wonders. … How can it happen that we readily receive
and casually transmit a narrative containing … this unexplained
hole in its centre, this massive negative hallucination? … How
can we think in the … absence of those bodies, in the midst of the
cataclysmic trauma of “climate change”?’1

1
The problem of relating to the bodies is not new. In 1729, Jonathan Swift had used
stinging satire to ‘bring the bodies to mind’ in A Modest Proposal, suggesting the
problem of poverty in Ireland could be solved by selling babies of the poor to the
rich as food.
252 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Judeo-Christianity’s foundational – one might say ‘born again’

– redemptive moment involves idealization and division. Noah
is ideally perfect and ideally good, and all the others are ideally
corrupted and irredeemably bad, and this may help explain the
negative hallucination: the drowned are not worth consideration
as they deserved their fate. It is not clear what punishable crimes
the animals committed,2 but in a mindset in which man apparently
holds dominion over all the animals, this issue can be more easily
fudged. What is clear is that the earth is restored to Noah as
cornucopia with nothing missing.
Arkism3 is bailing out the self and the group at the expense
of the other, but it also entails thinking like an exception: ‘I am
entitled to be saved and entitled to have the world as I want it
saved for me. I, uniquely and personally, and my group, will face
no real loss.’ Arkism is always a tendency, a potential regressive
point of drift, in the human psyche. However, with the climate
bubble now bursting, arkism is manifestly on the rise. I suggest it
is being driven by underlying anxiety that life, home and world are
no longer safe, and leaders are not acting to address the climate
crisis. A Green New Deal would reduce the anxiety and is a vital
mental health measure.
This chapter explores some arkist phantasies now emerging, their
content likely influenced by economic position. In all the examples,
the suffering and the bodies are excised.
1. ‘Being middle class, my economic position will save me. I will
spend more on food and install air conditioning. Problem solved.’
This is not just adapting to survive physically. An ‘arkist’ state
of mind is omnipotently created and it disassociates from the fate
of others. Voila! I extruded the climate problem from my life. I can
carry on the same.
2. ‘Being mega-wealthy, I can move to New Zealand. In the
longer term, humans will develop the technology to move to Mars.
Not all humans obviously, but alpha types like me.’

2
On the fate of animals, see Adam’s lines to Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667):
‘Man hath his daily work of body or mind/Appointed, which declares his Dignity,/
And the regard of Heav’n on all his ways;/While other animals unactive range,/And
of thir doing God takes no account’ (IV.618–22).
3
See Weintrobe (2019); on climate change denial, see Weintrobe (2018).
 NOAH’S ARKISM TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY STYLE 253

I suggest the thinking is

Earth is ruined and doomed, no longer the paradise I deserve, so

it’s time to leave. The best next place to live is probably Mars,
a pristine planet. I am not crazy. I know Mars is not liveable.
Our next task is to put money into space research and make it
liveable. For now, I will buy one property upstate, so climate
instability will hit me and mine less hard in the shorter term, and
another property in New Zealand for when it hits very hard. I
know it must. I had better get my skates on, as others have the
same idea and prices will soon rise.
My key psychological task now is to build better protection
against any inner emotional climate turbulence and instability.
What if I feel sad to see Earth ruined? No, bury that thought.
The future is a bright shiny place. No grieving there. I must be
even more machine like, bright, smart and only optimistic. On
my Ark I can finally leave all the difficulty of being human – the
mess, conflict, damage, guilt, infirmity, inadequacy and dreaded
dependency on nature for life itself – behind. What a relief. I am
a new type of human, the alpha type, and we alphas are now
poised to take over, aided by machines and high tech. Isn’t life
fun? Alpha humans will in time be able to conquer the limits of
death, time and deep space. Betas and the rest will be superfluous.
Earth can be their graveyard.
I am excited to live at a time when people can finally shake off the
limitations of being human. I glow in triumph, and, in that state,
I despise those left behind. Chiefly, I despise my own animal-ness,
humanity and the part of me that cared. It was starting to become
unendurably tormenting. Thank goodness I finally ditched it.

In 2018, tech expert Douglas Rushkoff met with five hedge fund
managers who asked him for the low down on the latest in technology.
They primarily wanted to know whether technology could help them
escape ‘the event’, which, as Rushkoff explained, ‘was their euphemism
for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion,
unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down’.
Rushkoff noted, they ‘were preparing for a digital future that …
[transcended] … the human condition altogether’ (Rushkoff, 2019).
The mega wealthy are buying real estate in areas at home more
resilient to climate damage and in New Zealand. Sales of luxury
254 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

survival bunkers are soaring.4 Arkism is currently surfacing in the

0.1 per cent. It may even be fanning the recent excited craze to travel
to Mars.5 Curiosity leads us to explore other planets, but might the
current Mars craze include excitement as a defence against survival
anxieties?
3. ‘I am poor, I suffered under austerity and deep down I am
worried about climate instability, but at least I am white and
Christian. “Strong man” leaders have promised to save me by
allowing me a place on their Ark. The price of my passage is loyalty
to the leader and accepting the leader’s redefinition of who is “us”
(to be saved) and who is “them” (to be sacrificed and kicked off the
ark if they try to climb aboard).’
This omnipotently constructed phantasy involves another sort
of Ark built according to detailed instructions given by leaders who
offering a pseudo safe space based on lies. For instance, Britain as
an island Ark, with all wicked undesirable people kept out after
Brexit through strict immigration laws. The United States as a castle
Ark with a stout wall to keep out all brown-skinned ‘bad people’.6

4
The main topic of conversation between Rushkoff and the hedge fund managers
was how to manage security inside their bunkers after the ‘event’ (Rushkoff, 2019).
Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Company, says 2016 sales for
their custom high-end underground bunkers grew 700 per cent compared to 2015,
while overall sales have grown 300 per cent since the November US presidential
election alone. The bunkers are designed to withstand a nuclear strike and come
equipped with power systems, water purification systems, blast valves and Nuclear-
Biological-Chemical (NBC) air filtration. Most include food supplies for a year or
more, and many have hydroponic gardens to supplement the rations. The developers
also work to create well-rounded communities with a range of skills necessary for
long-term survival, from doctors to teachers. One of those shelters, Vivos xPoint,
is near the Black Hills of South Dakota, and consists of 575 military bunkers that
served as an Army Munitions Depot until 1967. The aim is to convert it into a
facility to accommodate 5,000 people.
5
NASA is currently planning new human missions to the moon with the aim of
learning skills and developing technology to enable a future human landing on Mars
(Tom Green, BBC News, 24 December 2018: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-
environment-46364179).
6
Including an estimated 100,000 climate refugees from Guatemala, presumably
to be eclipsed from view on the other side of the wall. https://www.nbcnews.com/
politics/immigration/trump-admin-ignored-its-own-evidence-climate-change-s-
impact-n1056381
 NOAH’S ARKISM TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY STYLE 255

Europe as an Ark with wire fences to keep out climate refugees.

Brazil as a ‘macho’ Ark.
The ‘strong man’ leader invites omnipotent identification with
his invitation to ‘be me. No one messes with me and gets away with
it. I embody your coarser, meaner, more brutish tendencies. I am not
ashamed to flaunt them and you will need them in these harsher
times’. Chapter 37 explores this sort of fake containment further.
Arkism can offer protection against unbearable feelings, and as
such it is an age-old defence and an indispensable part of maintaining
privilege. The thinking is ‘by constructing an impregnable Ark I can
keep all the suffering in them (the drowned) and away from me (the
saved). That way I feel much more comfortable. I do not notice that
when I board this Ark, I throw overboard the caring reality-seeking
part of myself’.
Ruthlessness to varying degrees is required to sustain arkism. The
unconscious phantasy is of being on a weaponized survival craft.
Deflection of any inner trouble may be so instant and reflexive that
the ruthlessness is not recognized. For example, I doubt that the
person who asked me in 2018 ‘Now that climate scientists finally
know that global warming is real, are they feeling sad about it?’
would recognize ruthlessness in deflecting all her knowing and
feeling onto the climate scientists.
4. A sinister form of arkism currently on the rise expresses itself
with thoughts like ‘mass death is a good idea as it would lower
the global population which is already far too high’. The arkism
here involves the phantasy that paradise will be restored for a few
entitled ones. Scratch phantasies like this and racism, preconfigured
along colonialist lines, is soon revealed. The bad unworthy dirty
menacing heathen brown-skinned peoples of Africa, Asia and the
Middle East have been designated as the ones to die, with the
suffering and significance of each and all the deaths cancelled out in
a negative hallucination.7 This arkist phantasy is sustained by what
is a psychotic belief that everything can be ‘perfect’ again: global
warming reversed, environmental damage undone and paradisal
conditions restored. This is the airbrushed idealized picture of the
world after the flood now made real. Voila! An omnipotent ‘quick

7
This position is being called ‘eco-fascism’.
256 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

fix’ repair achieved, but the schoolboy Joel’s question remains.

What about the bodies?
The Exception is an Arkist at heart. He is on a voyage whose
destination is paradise, meaning the place where one has achieved
being and having the ideal. Apparently. He may not even notice the
bodies in any feeling way. He may greet the bursting of the climate
bubble with: ‘Earth is now a damaged planet, but not everywhere
is affected. Warming means we can finally drill for oil in the Arctic.
Before the drilling fouls it up it would be a wonderful place for our
next adventure holiday. A pristine landscape and no tourists there
yet, thank god!’
It does not, apparently, trouble the Exception that Exceptions
like him caused the ice to melt (a consequence of rising CO2 in our
era).
Arkism surfacing in current leaders trickles downwards. One
manifestation in my view is that there is little public outpouring of
grief that species are going extinct. Of course, this is managed by a
mainstream press that mostly does not tell us that 60 per cent of all
wild animals have been lost in just the last fifty years. Nonetheless
the fate of animals is part of the current negative hallucination. It
does not tend to come up in social conversations. I had the thought
that maybe when wild animals become extinct, they will simply
carry on as existing in our imagination or as cuddly toys (like the
dinosaurs). It is likely that people do feel grief about the animals
and are counting the bodies, but this part of them is not on the Ark.
5. In one version of the biblical story now surfacing, only white
males will be allowed onto the ark together with their wives
(perhaps a mistress or two as well?) and only animals that can be
eaten, shot for sport and pets. All other animals can go extinct. Who
cares? Animals were never worthy of our respect and love as we are
superior to them. Think what a thrill it would be, what kudos it
would bring, to be the one who shot the last remaining member of
one of the ‘big five’ species.
Arkism may have ‘worked’ when the financial bubble burst in
2008 in the sense that bankers were bailed out and mostly returned
to conditions even more favourable to their operating as self-
idealizing Exceptions. However, Arkism as a viable response to the
climate crisis is delusional thinking. It is part of the rising crazy.
 35
We are gods

To the deification of power. To us becoming gods1

VLADISLAV SURKOV, PUTIN’S CHIEF STRATEGIST, TOASTING PUTIN IN 2000

An extensively deregulated mind, in a mood of triumph, dreams

of endless limitless expansion: ‘The economy will grow forever;
alongside that, we will be ever grander, richer, more powerful
and more self-satisfied. Nothing can stop us.’ Unchecked, this can
morph into ‘we are gods with god-like omnipotent powers to drive
through reality’s limits’.
Certain political leaders now openly say they are gods who can
overcome limits. Boris Johnson compared himself to the Incredible
Hulk2 while Trump suggested he tackle a hurricane with a nuclear
weapon.3 These leaders, acting like modern-day comic-strip
superheroes, apparently have potent magic powers to rival those
of Greek gods. They also have supernatural strength. Putin on
horseback with his torso naked resembles a satyr, Boris Johnson
was photographed in charge of a huge bull and Brazil’s Bolsonaro
said he had a weak moment when he sired a daughter after three
sons.4 Are these leaders joking, posturing for political gain or in

1
Gabriel Gatehouse pointed out the word for power in Russian also means those in
power. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0005h7c
2
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/09/26/boris-johnson-compared-
himself-hulk-thats-big-clue-about-uk-politics
3
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/donald-trump-suggests-
nuking-hurricanes-to-stop-them-hitting-america-report
4
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/world/americas/brazil-president-jair-
bolsonaro-quotes.html.
258 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

the grip of ideology-driven megalomania? All three? Leaders who

self-disclose as omnipotent gods are prone to say, ‘it’s a joke, silly’.
Patients struggling to keep incipient megalomania battened
down may offer confusing alternating ‘reversible gestalt’ images
of themselves as megalomaniac and normal: now you glimpse
the megalomania, now you do not; the situation is serious, no it’s
not. Clinical experience teaches to take this sort of situation very
seriously. For example, a patient, Mr B, followed a session like this
by losing control and driving his car through a red traffic light.
Thankfully no one was injured and between us we managed to
contain the situation.
When our politicians openly tell us that they have supernatural
powers and that they are only joking, we would be wise not to
accept their self-evaluations. The danger in the political sphere is of
leaders acting crazy while believing they are only joking, insisting
they are in total control while in danger of losing control.5
The Brazilian dictator Bolsonaro is master at presenting
advanced Exceptionalism (hubris and impunity to the law) as mere
joke. ‘I used to be called Captain Chainsaw, now I am Nero, setting
the Amazon aflame’, he chided in 2019 in response to criticism
concerning the devastating fires in the Amazon.6 He presented these
images of himself, scoffed at them and his accusers, while pursuing
accelerating slash and burn in the real world.
An influential strand of the evangelical right acting largely
behind the scenes in politics is currently feeding leaders’ hubris and
omnipotence by spreading the idea certain leaders are chosen for
power by god. Once chosen, it does not matter whether they are
democratic or authoritarian, peace loving or brutal. Who are we to
question god’s purpose in selecting them for power? Our sole job
is to support them. This corrupts and radically subverts the basic
Christian message of love and it destroys democracy. Voting is of
little relevance if god chooses our leaders. Peoples’ judgement of
leaders as good or bad no longer matters.
Doug Coe, head of an evangelical grouping called The Family,
argued that bonding with and loyalty to such chosen leaders are

5
Hanna Segal (personal communication) argued that those in the grip of megalomania,
while very controlling, live in danger of losing control.
6
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/world/americas/brazil-president-jair-
bolsonaro-quotes.html
 WE ARE GODS 259

vital and supersede other bonds and loyalties. This is the kind of
support dictators and mafia bosses demand of their followers.
The reversible gestalt image may apply here too: when challenged,
these new evangelicals claim to be simply ‘For Jesus. Nothing else.’7
Corrupting influence reverses to pure innocence.
Jeff Sharlet (2008)8 had already exposed the sheer scale of this
influence in The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart
of American Power. To what extent was this linked with Trump
describing himself as chosen by god? We cannot know, and Trump
said it in a jokey way, but we do know that encouragement to
hubris in leaders and blind obedience in followers are being heavily
funded by corporate interests.9
Chapter 3 introduced Amenhotep IV, the Egyptian boy king
who thought he was the Sun God. He ordered signs he had human
origins destroyed. Currently we see leaders attacking human care in
the world and in themselves. Under attack are mindfulness, qualities
of care (demonized as ‘feminine’) and truth. Disassociation in these
leaders is on the rise.
Psychological study teaches us that the Exception tends to become
icier and more incapable of mourning as he progressively cuts links
with real others who nourish and are needed. For example, what
possible gratitude and love can exist for a mother and for Earth in a
mindset that despises the feminine and sees the Earth as something
just to exploit? How could this mindset hear Greta Thunberg when,
looking angry and tearful, she said how dare world leaders sacrifice
her generation because so obsessed with money and the fairy tale
of endless economic growth? Trump tweeted in response, ‘She
seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and
wonderful future. So nice to see!’ Is this crazy or is it actively and

7
The Family is behind the very public display of the Annual Prayer Breakfast. Prayer
Breakfasts are now held around the world, attended by successive US presidents
and funded by those in charge of corporations with deep pockets (such as oil and
agribusiness).
8
The book’s themes are also revealed in the docu-movie The Family on Netflix.
9
Steve Bannon has worked with a Christian Foundation in Italy that, together with
the populist Salvini, spread the message that Pope Francis does not represent the
true Pope. Presumably god would not have chosen a pope who takes the climate
emergency seriously (Bradley, 2019). Bolsonaro has heavily criticized Brazilian
catholic bishops concerned about the fires in the Amazon for not being the right sort
of Catholics (Phillips, 2019).
260 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

sadistically goading one’s opponents and playing to one’s base? Is

that crazy? Also, and crucially, how can we resist being drawn in by
becoming goaded and maddened ourselves?
One of the effects of unravelling care’s frameworks through
the slow violence of cutting more and more links with care and
connectedness is that sadism – that terrible tendency that lurks
within us – becomes liberated and given greater licence. Donald
Campbell and Rob Hale (2017), experts on suicidal states of mind,
have argued in the clinical sphere that one sign of a presuicidal
state is raised levels of unaddressed aggression and sadism, and to
hope to avert suicide it is important not to underplay or ignore
the sadism. It needs taking up and addressing. Sadism in current
politics is on the rise. Keith Kahn-Harris (2018) called these sadistic
trends dark desire and argued we prefer to deny its presence within
us. Chapter 37 on bad leaders explores how they goad and inflame
sadistic cruel trends in people for political advantage.

Slash and burn under Trump

Googling, ‘TRUMP WITHDRAWS FROM’ in July 2018, the
following headed the list:

Trump withdraws from Paris

Trump withdraws from UNESCO
Trump withdraws from Iran Deal
Trump withdraws from UN Human Rights Council.10

The trend continued. The recent intensification of attacks on

international agreements designed to contain damage and limit
aggression cannot just be seen as attributable to individual leaders
like Trump, their style as leaders and the piggyback effect on those
they empower. Individual leaders clearly influence history, but so
do ideological, economic and psychological forces at play. During

10
Nikki Halley, Trump appointed US Ambassador to the UN, described the UN
Human Rights Council as, ‘a cesspool of political bias’ and ‘a hypocritical and self-
serving organisation’ (Reported on 20 June 2018 in The Jurist).
 WE ARE GODS 261

neoliberalism’s hegemony, these forces all pushed for deregulation

meaning reregulation away from care. To succeed and stay in
power, neoliberals had to weaken and fracture care’s countervailing
power, and their success could well have opened up political space
for leaders to emerge who want finally to ‘destroy’ all impediments
to hubristic power and ambition and to drive through all red lights.
After just eighteen months in power, Trump’s new administration
had repealed seventy-six environmental protections (forty-
six successfully, the rest facing legal challenge).11 In summary:
regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions reversed; US
national parks (America’s protected ‘National Monuments’)
progressively opened up to drilling and mining; air, water and
ground quality controls scrapped; chemicals and pesticides
previously banned as too hazardous now sanctioned; protecting
wild animals and endangered species a thing of the past (Bullinger,
2018); requirements to collect data on certain noxious emissions
dropped. The scientific data record was censored, attacks on
climate scientists were intensified (with many losing their jobs) and
openly referring to climate change was prohibited. Trump’s attacks
on environmental protections increased,12 while the EPA effectively
declared all scientific environmental research findings inadmissible
and its director argued to defund the EPA. No red traffic lights
allowed! Exceptionalism now ran amok in advanced triumph mode.

We are the best ever, therefore entitled to have what we want,

drive a tank through limits and not face consequences. We mount
an omnipotent ‘quick fix’: damage is ‘dealt with’ by no longer
measuring it, banning people from talking about it and depriving
them of the words and concepts they need to think about it. See
how quickly we ‘solved’ the problem! Aren’t we clever?

11
According to an analysis in the New York Times, based on research from Harvard
Law School’s Environmental Regulation Rollback Tracker, Columbia Law School’s
Climate Tracker and other sources (Popvoch et al., 2018).
12
For example, in 2019 his administration announced plans to let the oil industry
off from having to report and fix methane leaks in pipelines. Methane traps about
eighty-four times as much heat as CO2.
262 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Might survival anxiety also lie beneath this triumph and be driving
these savage sadistic attacks? The next chapter explores acute
survival anxieties that Exceptions can feel.
When the Trump administration overturned frameworks of
care, it declared, in effect, that people had no entitlement to a safe
environment, protected places of wilderness, clean air to breathe
and water to drink, information to enable them to think clearly, a
future and life itself. They had no entitlement to feel safe. The New
York Times in assessing the global public health impact of Trump’s
deregulatory moves gave a chilling estimate of the number of
deaths likely to result.13 It is likely a gross underestimate. The NYT
called Trump’s attacks on care’s frameworks ‘rollbacks’. I call them
savage attacks on care. People who imagine they are ‘rolling back’
regulations are in danger of being lulled into a kind of idealized
nostalgia that Zygmunt Bauman (2017) called ‘retrotopia’. When
we unquestioningly go along with the imagery and framing of a
word like ‘rollback’, we may be more likely to bleach the violence
out of these attacks on frameworks of care.

‘All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could lead to at least
13

80,000 extra deaths per decade and cause respiratory problems for more than one
million people’, according to the New York Times (Popvoch et al., 2018).
 36
The ‘all or nothing-ness’ of
having to be the ideal

Whereas we may wish to be ideal, it is delusional to believe we are

ideal. Mr C, in analysis with me, admitted one day that deep down,
really, he thought he was perfect. He said, ‘You seem to think I want
to be perfect. You don’t get it. I believe I am perfect.’ I thought this
was insight not bragging. He could now see his idealized self.
Earlier on, seeing any imperfection in himself would leave him
feeling horribly, bodily, anxious, as though he was falling into an
abyss, into abject shame and that he was dirt, rubbish. He had
once brought a dream in which he is living at the top of a high-rise
building, but he wants to come down to ground level. The problem
is he can find no way down other than by jumping from the top,
which will kill him. He feels trapped and acutely anxious in his
high rise. I understood his dream as his dawning understanding
that a ‘high-rise’ ‘perfect’ part of him felt it faced mortal danger if
he climbed down and saw himself as ordinarily human. I suggest
my patient’s dream reveals the all or nothing-ness of having to ‘be
the ideal’.
At ground level, more grounded, he could see he was not ideal
(not even ideally bad), and that his ‘self-idealizing’ part damaged his
relationships. When he ‘felt perfect’, he was cut off and valued no
one, including himself.
For the true Exception to cede any entitlement can,
psychologically, feel a catastrophe. Beneath a surface impression
of calm and confidence, the Exception is likely to be anxiously
on the lookout for anything that might threaten him with loss (of
entitlement to status, possessions, power).
264 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

He also tends to be paranoid, with paranoia the idea someone

is out to get you and attack you. We may think of paranoia as
irrational, but that is over simple. The Exception’s paranoia can
be rational and irrational: hyper vigilant in its rational paranoia,
keeping a close eye on the real picture so it can protect its
entitlements, and irrational when it uses omnipotent thinking to
ward off perceived threats.
Exceptions may also struggle with guilt, despite a surface
impression of being guilt free. Very broadly speaking there are
two kinds of guilt. The caring part of the self feels sad, remorseful
and heart sore when tugged by a guilty conscience. It takes its
responsibilities seriously and it tries to put things right in real ways.
The Exception is more likely to experience guilty feelings as attacks
signalling that it is not ideal and therefore it must be very bad
indeed. Guilt in this mindset easily persecutes and can trigger the
impulse to want to escape from insight. When Exceptions see they
have polluted paradise they may tend to want to flee, especially flee
from guilt. This theme is explored further in Chapter 38.
Shame can be particularly hard to endure as well. In this state
if one is not wholly admirable in others’ eyes, one is cringingly
shameful, and may acutely fear rejection. Again, these states can
tend to be either-or with little in between.

Neoliberal Exceptions confronting the

climate and environmental crisis
Most people find it difficult to evaluate themselves realistically,
acknowledge responsibility for things that go wrong and admit their
mistakes, but Exceptions are particularly ill-equipped for all these.
When taken to task, they may well retreat to self-righteousness and
become more walled in and cut off. In today’s political world we
see leaders walk away from the problems they have been part of
creating with no apparent sense of guilt or responsibility and with
their hubris and self-righteousness only seeming to have risen. We
see increasing disassociation that manifests itself in such deafness to
opposing points of view that people start to mutter, ‘what planet are
you living on?’ in response. The sense of no longer even sharing the
same world is part of ‘the crazy’ that people have noticed.
 ‘ALL OR NOTHING-NESS’ 265

I offer a photograph of New York during Hurricane Sandy as a

metaphor for this rising disassociation. It shows the Goldman Sachs
building lit up at night, shining like a phallic beacon, with the rest
of the city in total darkness as the hurricane raged.1 In preparation
for Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had ordered mandatory
evacuation of Zone A in New York City. Goldman Sachs chose to
ignore the evacuation and instead activated a ‘Business Continuity
Plan’.2
The metaphorical Goldman Sachs building is apparently strong
enough to withstand any external buffeting and stable enough to
keep the inside temperature steady. It resembles the Exception who
believes, and wants us to believe, it is immune from external trouble
and from internal angst. However, this psychological picture, based
on narcissistic overvaluation, is fake. It does not fit with countless
clinical studies of narcissism that rather show Exceptions to be
inherently unstable and emotionally labile.
While it could be argued that the Goldman Sachs organization
should be lauded for braving the storm, the photo also highlights
disassociation in a mindset that focuses only on business as usual.
It is as though everyone affected by the hurricane has been moved
into a blind spot, the darkened-out area of the photo, expunged
from consideration and to be left abandoned in the gloom. All that
matters for the Exception is winning and losing, with losing not an
option.
One sign of rising disassociation in politics is when negotiation
and ordinary to and fro in political debate no longer exist. Here are
some examples:
The former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis described
meeting with EU Finance Ministers during 2015 to renegotiate
Greece’s debt: ‘You put forward an argument … and you’re just
faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you
say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung
the Swedish national anthem’ (quoted by Davies, 2016). The issue

1
In fact, it was the poor in the suburbs of New Jersey who bore the brunt of the
damage and disruption (https://www.thedailybeast.com/after-storm-whos-got-the-
real-power-look-for-backup-generators).
2
https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-open-for-business-during-hurricane-
sandy-2012-10
266 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

here is not whether one agrees with Greece’s creditors or with

Varoufakis. It is that human laws of parley have been wiped out,
excepted.
British Chancellor Philip Hammond in 2018 handed out £3
billion in subsidies to the oil industry just one week after the IPCC
declared a state of real emergency on climate. Hammond simply
ignored climate in his budget.3
Trump said the fires in California in late 2018 were caused by
gross mismanagement of forests. He offered this cure: ‘We’ve got
to take care of the … floors of the forest. The President of Finland
[said] they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning [their forest
floor].’
Sauli Niinisto, president of Finland, denied he had said any such
thing. Finns took to Twitter. Pyry Luminen tweeted a photo of
herself with her hoover in the forest with, ‘An ordinary day in the
forest’.4 The real issue was Trump cancelling climate science. Bad
lazy Californians caused the problem. We will fix it. Don’t worry
folks.5
This reminded me of a comedy sketch involving passengers on
a plane. The captain abruptly announces over the intercom, ‘Good
afternoon. I want to tell you there is absolutely nothing to worry
about.’ People start to look very worried indeed. By September
2020, with forest fires raging out of control in California and
Oregon, false claims that antifascists had deliberately started them
were being spread online by supporters of Trump.
Politicians caught up in Exceptionalism like to portray themselves
as calm, strong and stable. The reality is that with their sense of
entitlement increasingly not held in check, they are more vulnerable
to running amok and to narcissistic rage. Increasing numbers of
people now see behind self-idealizing leadership. In the UK, many
laughed when Teresa May described her neoliberal government as
‘Strong and Stable’. Many put their heads in their hands and felt
afraid when Trump promised to ‘Make America Great’ again while
bragging he was a very stable genius.

3
https://www.carbonbrief.org/budget-2018-key-climate-energy-annoucements
4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-46256296
5
See Robert Mackey (2020) in a piece for The Intercept entitled, ‘Oregon Police Beg
Public to Stop Calling in False Reports Blaming ANTIFA for Wild Fires’.
 ‘ALL OR NOTHING-NESS’ 267

The self-assured neoliberal imagination has increasingly revealed

itself to be not equipped to deal with problems it causes. It is neither
designed for nor fit for that purpose. Those of us who still believe
we can trust and rely on political leaders who espouse the ideology
that inspires this imagination are living on cloud cuckoo land which
in terms of today’s realities is Planet La La, not Planet Earth.
268
 37
Bad leaders drive the crazy

Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent

spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the
jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of
catastrophe. … One thought alone preoccupies the
submerged mind of Empire:
how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.
J.M. COETZEE, WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS (1980, PP. 133–4)

The neoliberal empire, ruled by fossil fuel interests, is under

increasing threat. With 41 per cent of the world’s population now
under twenty-four many are demanding regime change. In the
United States 70 per cent of millennials said in a YouGov poll in
2019 that they would prefer socialism to capitalism as they think it
would take better care of them.1 More people are demanding truth
and want to play their part in forging genuine democracy;2 many

1
Some 70 per cent of US millennials (aged between twenty-three and thirty-eight
in 2019) said in a recent poll they would prefer socialism to capitalism as they
think it would take better care of them. The poll was taken by YouGov and paid
for by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC), which surveyed
2,100 people about their views of capitalism and the US economic system, socialism
and inequality in the United States. https://www.axios.com/millennials-vote-
socialism-capitalism-decline-60c8a6aa-5353-45c4-9191-2de1808dc661.html?utm_
source=twitter&utm_medium=twsocialshare&utm_campaign=organic
2
Extinction Rebellion for example has asked for Citizens’ Assemblies to discuss the
climate crisis and to suggest to governments ways forward. Ref: (see Horton, 2019).
270 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

are desperate to feel safer in a world increasingly unsafe because of

global heating. ‘Climate emergency’ entered the dictionary in 2019
after its use had leapt 100-fold in one year.3
To remain in power, the neoliberal empire needs now to be
more manipulative and more brutal; indeed, Naomi Klein (2019)
named its current emerging phase as one of ‘climate barbarism’.
Reality-based thinking must be attacked more aggressively, and
autocracy must replace democracy. Ron Britton (1989) described
a patient in psychoanalysis one day saying to him, ‘stop that
fucking thinking!’4 This would seem to be the aim of a new more
brutish form of neoliberalism clinging to power in an unfolding
climate, Covid, economic and environmental crisis.
The submerged mind of empire presumably reasons something
like this: ‘With damage we caused now more visible and obvious,
people are increasingly realising our way is morally bankrupt
and leads to climate chaos and societal collapse. We thought
it would be easy to hobble care, but peoples’ caring side is
proving a stubborn nuisance. As the damage rises, and with the
publication of the latest IPCC report saying we have one decade
to get carbon emissions right down, more and more people are
protesting loudly. Some members of the Establishment now
openly support Extinction Rebellion!5 Our rule is under threat
from an ever-growing list of people: official opposition parties,
environmentalists, snowflakes, scientists, journalists, sections of
the public, people in corporate jobs they wish they could escape
from; even school children are now going on strike calling for
rapid change and rapid action on climate. Veganism is on the
rise! Where will it end? With enemies all around us now, we must
change tactics if we are to survive.’

3
Oxford Dictionaries declared ‘climate emergency’ the word of 2019, saying usage
had increased 100-fold in the space of twelve months. They said it demonstrated a
‘greater immediacy’ in the way we talk about the climate.
4
Britton argued, ‘where illusion reigns supreme, curiosity is felt to spell disaster’. His
patient had felt threatened by too much reality-based thinking.
5
For example, Rowan Williams, the previous head of the Church of England.
 BAD LEADERS DRIVE THE CRAZY 271

Breaking with Democracy’s frameworks

of care
To keep control, the neoliberal Empire began increasingly to flout
the law. Giorgio Agamben (2005) studied leaders who started
riding roughshod over the law, creating what he called a ‘state
of exception’. This is law seen, but flouted and broken. Agamben
denoted it law.
Two examples analysed by Agamben were Hitler during
the 1930s and George W. Bush in 2001 after 9/11. Bush flouted
international agreements, legalized torture and sanctioned arrest
without charge. It might be argued these were legitimate temporary
emergency measures; however, the state of law that Bush created
would stay roughly in place (with some reversals by Obama), and
it spread to other countries. Laws protecting human rights would
be increasingly flouted.6 Edward Snowden (2019) observed twenty
years later, ‘I realised that the post-9/11 world was a world of
exceptions.’
law in the new millennium would rely on increased securitization,
militarization of police and illegal surveillance made possible by new
digital technologies.7 Attacks on journalists and scientists increased
and the definition of a terrorist gradually became broadened until
it eventually began to risk including anyone disagreeing with
power’s viewpoint, agenda and interests. The drift was towards
authoritarianism.
Any person’s inner exception, by nature a refusenik, would love
to declare law and not have to follow rules. An example of someone
enacting this seems to be British Prime Minister Boris Johnson as
a schoolboy, judging from a letter sent by Michael Hammond, his
House Master at Eton, to Boris’s father. Hammond said, ‘I honestly

6
Examples are increased extrajudicial killings (such as drone attacks) and increased
illegal surveillance (such as exposed by Edward Snowden).
7
Such as data gathering by platforms like Facebook and its manipulation, a subject
thoroughly explored by Zuboff (2019).
272 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

think he regards it as churlish of us not to regard him as an

exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that
binds everyone else.’8
Agamben meant by law rulers flouting the established legal
system. Exceptions will want to flout anything that interferes with
or threatens loss of their ‘entitlement’. This could be government
decree, cultural or parental authority, the laws of physics and
logic, the reality of having needs and a body, the reality of death,
basic dependencies, ties of attachment and love, the reality of what
human beings can and cannot bear to suffer without imploding or
exploding. The Exception will naturally seek to create reality for
any reality they find obstructive. This is omnipotence in action.
Neoliberal Exceptions have sought to create law in this extended
sense through slow violence throughout the whole of their era.
Now that the harm they have caused is glaringly obvious to many
more people, leaving them feeling abandoned, angry, affronted
and anxious, neoliberal Exceptions are turning to aggressively
undermining people’s capacity to think and to see the harm.9 At the
same time, they are having to deal with the potential humiliation
of being exposed not as Superior leaders but as Emperors with
no Clothes presiding over the failure and fall of American
Exceptionalism.10 The mixture is a toxic dangerous brew. When
leaders feel potentially shamed and blamed, they may more easily
become inflamed and vengeful and may ascend to arrogance.
I explore this subject in Chapter 38.
Joel Whitebook (2017) identified the increasingly widespread
and aggressive attacks on thinking as ‘Trumpism’, which he saw
as a seemingly intentional attack on people’s relation to reality.

8
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-49935693/rory-stewart-reads-boris-
johnson-s-school-report-to-resign-from-tory-party
9
Misha Glenny (2020) explored in detail different strategies many of the current
‘Iron Men’ dictators used to win the popular vote. One common strategy was
identifying ways people felt not valued and respected, creating a largely fictitious
enemy to blame for this, and then using aggressive targeting and messaging on social
media platforms – Facebook in particular – to bombard people with this narrative.
10
Wade Davis (2020) has discussed the fall of American Exceptionalism, which
he argues has been greatly exacerbated by how the unfolding covid crisis is being
handled. He stresses the humiliation involved for US citizens when recognizing that
their country is now widely perceived across the world as a failed state.
 BAD LEADERS DRIVE THE CRAZY 273

‘Trumpism’ is a strand of ‘the crazy’ that emerged particularly

during the second decade of the new millennium as more people
understood the true costs of a neoliberal economy, and understood
that they have to pay the cost. Whitebook argued that ‘Trumpism’
bore a striking resemblance to clinical situations where clinicians
felt ‘confusion, which is typically accompanied by a distinct form
of anxiety’. He noted seasoned clinicians consider taking this
confusion and anxiety as ‘at the very least … a systematic – and it
seems likely intentional – attack on our relation to reality’.
Whitebook linked attacks on mind with strategies first emerging
in Putin’s Russia in the late 1990s, under the guidance of Vladislav
Surkov, Putin’s chief advisor (it was Surkov who toasted Putin in
2000 with, ‘to us becoming gods’). Surkov has used state-controlled
media to craft fake political events deliberately designed to confuse
people. The Russian Federation, widely recognized as an oligarchy,
would be portrayed as democratic one minute and not the next,
spreading fear and confusion to help Putin stay in power. Surkov’s
methods were explored in detail by Peter Pomerantsev (2011).
Subsequently operatives like Steve Bannon in the United States and
Dominic Cummings in the UK would mount assaults on people’s
sense of reality.
One form the assaults take is offering people spurious safety and
pseudo containment of their anxieties. Just one example (there are
many to choose from) was Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s
campaign manager, saying he used what he called ‘loss aversion’
techniques when he ran the Vote Leave (Europe) campaign in
2016.11 He revealed he had deliberately sought to channel peoples’
upset at the financial crash in 2008 by deflecting blame. Blame for
loss of living standards suffered because of austerity was deflected
from bankers to immigrants,12 with the false promise that living
standards could be restored by keeping the immigrants out. Britain
would be great again: an omnipotent ‘quick fix’ offering pseudo
containment.
Increasing attacks on peoples’ relation to reality, aggressively
hammered home on social media platforms like Facebook, are

11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDbRxH9Kiy4
12
The Vote Leave campaign crafted messages falsely claiming Turkey was about to
join the EU and millions of Turkish immigrants would flood into the UK.
274 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

being mounted in the context of rising survival anxieties on all sides.

Empire wants to survive, and people want to survive the destructive
effects of Empire. Empire appears to want to drive people mad and
to madden them by weakening their reality sense and by promoting
more extreme disassociation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That instils
fear at being one of ‘them’ and it fractures the capacity to contain
feelings like hatred and anxiety which are then more likely to spill
into destructive action.
Examples have been: whip up hatred of immigrants to divert
attention from the rising problem of climate refugees. When climate
change brings food and water insecurity, no doubt that will be
blamed on immigrants too. Another tactic was to scotch any party
that sought to implement a Green New Deal and to stir up hatred
towards any politician interested in putting a Green New Deal
in place. People would become so obsessed and overheated with
hatred for these politicians that they forgot why a Green New Deal
is vital. That was the intention.
Operatives like Cummings, Bannon and Surkov work in the wings
to aid leaders declaring law in major democracies. This makes sense
if we consider that real democracy becomes too much of a threat to
oil-based business as the climate bubble bursts. Exceptions are now
fighting for a survival that cannot actually be secured through fight
in any rational sense, except in the very short term. As the climate
emergency bites, we see increasing securitization and outbreaks
of state violence. The international rules-based community, now
perceived as ‘the enemy’, comes increasingly under attack. There is
to be no cooperation, no consensus and no action to mitigate climate
change. Mitch McConnell, when US Senate majority leader,13 calling
himself the Grim Reaper, promised to kill any climate bill that
reached the US Senate. Climate protestors started to be labelled eco-
terrorists and eco-fascists, and politicians putting forward a Green
New Deal came under relentless often personal attack. Democracy,

13
The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC run by Sen. McConnell’s former Chief of
Staff, received a total of $3,500,000 ($2,500,000 in 2016 and $1,000,000 in 2017)
via Access Industries and a subsidiary. Len Blavatnik is a Russian oligarch with US
and UK citizenship who owns Access Industries and donated to Sen. McConnell’s
2016 Senate campaign vehicles. These links led McConnel to be called ‘Moscow
Mitch’.
 BAD LEADERS DRIVE THE CRAZY 275

now too much of a threat for Exceptions’ way of life, needed to be

undone. In 2019 Putin said publicly that democracy was passé14
and Trump’s actions during 2020 showed escalating law.
I began this chapter with this quote from Waiting for the
Barbarians, by J.M. Coetzee: ‘One thought alone preoccupies
the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die,
how to prolong its era.’ His novel is set in a frontier town of an
unnamed empire, and features two protagonists, the Administrator
and Colonel Joll, a soulless sadist whom Empire has sent to take
over command. Joll’s methods are brutal and the administrator
understands that a mad virulent vision has taken over. Poignantly
he reflects, ‘I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy,
he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow. Two sides of
imperial rule, no more, no less.’ Coetzee brilliantly cautions against
locating ‘the problem’ solely with the other side. That absolves us
from the pain of seeing the extent of our complicity in a situation
we may condemn while continuing to benefit from materially. It
also challenges us with what choices we make now.

Putin said liberal democracy is now obsolete, in an interview with the Financial
14

Times, 28 June 2019.

276
 38
The problem of guilt

Man is less moral than he thinks he is and more

moral than he realises.
FREUD (1923, P. 52)

This chapter explores guilt about contributing to climate breakdown.

Guilt is unpleasant, even thinking about it, so you may feel inclined
to skip this chapter, but my advice is to stay with it and stay with
any trouble it may bring. My argument will take some turns, and I
ask to you to bear with me.
Christopher Hering (1994 wrote a paper about ‘the alien’, a form
of ruthlessness1 that ‘does not know any concern or mercy; it is
devoid of any scruples or conflicts’. The alien is the ruthless way the
Exception overrides his inner concern to preserve felt entitlements
and privilege. Hering argued it is vital to keep recognizing that the
alien is also part of us. A simple example is when I blame the oil
industry for global warming (which I do), I need to remember that
I too can override my concern to make ‘entitled consumer’ choices.
Remembering that tempers how I view the oil industry. It tethers
me to the problem, and I believe it tempers my anger, making it less
heated and excited.
Because climate was not acted on back in the 1980s, some
damage is now irreparable. Arthur Hyatt Williams, a psychoanalyst
who worked therapeutically with convicted murderers in prison,

It is one much studied in psychoanalysis. Eric Brenman (1985) called it narrow-

1

minded and cruel.

278 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

observed that facing the irreparable is much more difficult than

facing damage we can repair; indeed, it can be so difficult for
murderers that they may obliterate knowing that the person they
murdered mattered or even ever existed (personal communication).
John Steiner (1990b)2 wrote a paper on Sophocles’s Oedipus at
Colonus that to me beautifully illustrates difficulties with facing
guilt when the damage is irreparable. His way of seeing the play’s
story highlights difficulties that some patients in analysis have
with managing their guilt. If we remember, Sophocles’s earlier
play Oedipus Rex concerns Oedipus’s search to discover the
cause of pollution in Thebes. Oedipus learns that he is the cause:

2
Steiner’s (1990b) analysis, drawing largely from an unpublished text by Vellacott
(1978), (see also Vellacott, 1971) primarily focuses on the character of Oedipus in
Oedipus at Colonus. Steiner’s interest is in exploring how unbearable truths may
be defended against. The general context is (largely) British Kleinian theoretical
work on pathological defensive organizations (see, e.g. Steiner’s 1990a paper on
pathological organizations as obstacles to mourning; also, Bion’s (1958) paper
on the subject of arrogance which Bion argues is a position of false pride and
stupidity that can defend against the unbearable. Rudnytsky (1987) in his seminal
book Freud and Oedipus draws together the three plays by Sophocles (Oedipus
the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone) to put forwards the concept of the
Oedipus Cycle, which I take to describe the catastrophe that occurs in the mind
with patricide and incestuous breaking of boundaries. With Rudnytsky’s account of
the Oedipus Cycle – central to psychoanalysis, literature and culture and speaking
to the human condition – it becomes possible to see the depth of the tragedy at
a psychological level. The person has suffered trauma, category confusion, cannot
order the generations in time and struggles to use thinking to represent reality. The
trauma is necessarily intergenerational. Steiner’s analysis, while it may not give
sufficient weight to other perspectives (such as that Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus
is under the sacred protection of the gods – see Rudnytsky), does allow for some
possible theoretical integration with work such as Bion’s on the subject of arrogance.
Steiner is talking about adopting manic triumph and cold superiority as a defence.
His focus is on unbearable guilt whereas Rudnytsky’s is more on traumatic mental
sequalae of breaking the incest taboo. Bion had said that the presence of arrogance
is often found with a psychological catastrophe having occurred: thinking is no
longer possible as there is no containing presence necessary for thought. Steiner’s
(1990b) paper speaks to the importance of having a good object that survives to help
work the trauma through, arguing that Oedipus ascended to a position of arrogance
after his mother committed suicide. Before leaving a long footnote, I must add that
Winnicott (1969) also talked of the vital necessity for the object to survive. Both
Winnicott and Steiner were arguing that the support of a good object is needed to be
able to stay with what is unbearable.
 THE PROBLEM OF GUILT 279

he transgressed human law by murdering his father and marrying

his mother thereby committing incest. At first, he seeks the truth,
struggling with disavowal along the way3 and he then blinds himself
on seeing the truth by stabbing his eyes. Oedipus at Colonus tells
the story of what happens next to Oedipus. Steiner’s argument is
that he ascends to arrogance and the moral high ground. Steiner
was exploring how the mind can retreat from truth to omnipotence
when guilt becomes too great to bear and when it is felt there is no
forgiveness. It was after his mother Jocasta had committed suicide
that Oedipus put out his sight and his insight.
Clearly not everyone bears equal responsibility for the climate
crisis, but can we bear to think about our contribution? That
requires being able to think proportionately and to own our own
alien ruthlessness, but with compassion. Our inner exception will
find it hard to acknowledge any guilt and it is likely to get huffy and
self-righteous when thinking about our personal emissions or our
lack of action on climate.
When we try to assess who is to blame and how much to blame,
unless we keep recognizing our own inner exception, we will likely
head towards terrible social trouble. Barack Obama recently put
his finger on the sort of trouble when he cautioned the ‘woke’
generation not to see blame as belonging entirely elsewhere and
thinking all that is needed is to point the finger at it.4 It leads to
paralysing inaction that we have no time for now, and it can hook
up with sadistic impulses. Most of us struggle with these impulses,
and when they are sanctioned and then whipped up by social media
the result is toxic and dangerous.
Chapter 32 explored moral injury, the sense one has taken part in
something that felt morally wrong, and in that chapter, I described
some of my moral anguish over my inner alien. The feeling is of
having damaged what I love. My focus here is on the Exception
who feels it should be exempt from any suffering and remembering
that this exception is also part of me and of most of us.
In Chapter 30, I argued we vitally need a law of ecocide to
provide an overarching framework in which we can assess how

3
This is argued by Steiner (1985).
4
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/us/politics/obama-woke-cancel-culture.html
280 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

culpable ordinary individuals are for the climate tragedy. A law of

ecocide would hold individual major corporate players to account
and it would curb violence against the earth, itself an act of repair. It
would also repair climate science’s damaged reputation, as ecocide
can only be prosecuted in an atmosphere in which scientific evidence
is respected.
The climate crisis was predicted back in the 1980s with remarkable
accuracy by ‘Carbon Major’ companies like Exxon Mobil who put
serious money into concealing what they knew would come to
pass if action was not taken. Currently evidence is being presented
in the Hague to establish the viability of prosecuting a case of
ecocide against Exxon. While ecocide law is not yet established in
international law,5 legal challenges are being mounted, for example,
New York City is prosecuting Exxon Mobil for fraud6 and US States
are prosecuting ‘Carbon Majors’ for defrauding communities, and
are seeking compensation for climate damage caused.7
Many chief executives of major polluting corporations and the
politicians who support them know their commercial practices lead
to the collapse of ecosystems and to mass death.8 It is harder today
for them to argue for scattered responsibility (it was the corporation
not I, it was shareholder value, not I, and so on9). People by now
can see the extent of the damage more clearly and more people are
pressing for a law of ecocide to hold individual named CEOs and
government officials criminally to account.10 Compensation is also
being demanded to try to fix the damage.

5
The small island state of Vanuatu has now put forward Ecocide Law into the UN as
the fifth crime. It needs a two-thirds majority vote. https://www.climateliabilitynews.
org/2019/12/06/ecocide-international-criminal-court-vanuatu/
6
New York City is prosecuting Exxon, the charge being Exxon defrauded its
shareholders and the public by knowingly misleading them about the impacts of
fossil fuels on climate. This charge does not include causing global hearing.
7
See Jason Mark (2020).
8
Just as tobacco companies were aware of the link between smoking and cancer (see
Oreskes and Conway, 2010).
9
See Irma Brenman Pick (2012) for a discussion of ‘Not I’ the phrase taken from
Samuel Beckett’s play of that name.
10
The term ‘ecocide’ has very recently started appearing in the press. Pope Francis
has referred to ecocide, calling on the international community to recognize ecocide
as a ‘fifth category of crime against peace’. https://www.americamagazine.org/
faith/2019/11/15/pope-francis-catechism-will-be-updated-define-ecological-sins
 THE PROBLEM OF GUILT 281

The charge is:

●● killing life support systems

●● sowing denialism.

Denialism (see Chapter 18) is a murderous assault on sanity. It

aims to disable the capacity to think logically and clearly, especially
about time. We have very little, if any, time left to decarbonize (a
decade at best, if we are lucky, according to the IPCC), but in ‘the
crazy’ promoted by denialism we apparently have plenty of time.
To join in with that is to be mad and to resist joining in can feel
maddening.
A law of ecocide would help to frame issues of who is guilty and
how guilty, and if applied it should – alongside other measures –
help to stop Exceptionalism from running amok. Roughly speaking,
CEOs of certain large corporations and government officials who
assist them are on the ‘wanted’ list. While within this legal framing
consumers bear no responsibility for the damage, by now most
people are aware that the more material goods you consume the
higher is your individual carbon footprint and that people in the
global south consume far less and are suffering far more.11
However, being held guilty and responsible is not the same as
experiencing guilt, which is my subject. Full-blown Exceptions
often appear untroubled by guilt and even psychopathic. Do they
even suffer guilt, you may ask? To explore this question, I will take
a detour to look at the nature of anxiety, starting by outlining a
psychoanalytic approach, which Irma Brenman Pick (2018) likened
to having to pay attention to the needs of two babies at once.
Picture two parts of the self, the caring part and the uncaring part
that includes the inner exception. Each part experiences anxiety, but
about different things. The psychoanalyst needs to pay attention to
the needs of both ‘babies’, as each has pressing claims, and each vies
for attention. This leads the analyst to shift perspective back and
forth, and one often hears analysts saying when discussing their
work, ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’.

See Randall and Brown (2015) for detail on the correlation between income and
11

carbon emissions.
282 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

Our caring part feels anxious that we have damaged the earth.
It also feels heart sore. How did we get caught up in consumerism
turned rampant? Will our children and future generations forgive
us? What can we do now to try to put things right? Our inner
exception also feels anxious. Climate reality is now bearing down
on us. The threat is we will have to fit in, something – let’s face it
– people down the generations have resisted! Why should we have
to? All this talk about Extinction Rebellion? It is we Exceptions
who are facing extinction. This is unthinkable. Also, if I am not
ideal, what am I? Terrible? People are now accusing us of terrible
crimes. It’s time to escape and fight back! We are not surrender
monkeys. We will not give way.
The Exception’s anxiety tends to be shaped by black-and-
white, all-or-nothing, do-or-die apocalyptic thinking (see previous
chapter). Actually, what is required for a way forward is not that
the inner exception be abolished. This is not possible anyway as
human wishful omnipotence and hostility to reality are bedrock to
our species. What is required is a rebalancing so that the exception
is a part of psychic life but does not rule psychic life. That means
Exceptions who gained so much power in this era losing power.
I return to the question raised in Chapter 2, how do we live with
the part we morally say no to? A partial answer is that we keep
recognizing our inner alien. We keep paying it attention and hearing
its point of view, even if we must say no to it.
This is the general context in which I explore feelings of guilt
at the colossal damage Exceptionalism has caused in this era. The
Exception is likely to experience any guilt as a threat and, given its
self-idealizing tendency, as a grave assault on its sense of identity.
Because the Exception tends to see the caring part as an enemy
accuser, it seeks to extrude that part and so, tragically, it is then
bereft of the very compassion it needs to work through its problems
with guilt. Rather, it is likely to be prey to harsh inner accusing
voices that say if you are not the best you must be the worst. Shame
on you!
The caring part is likely to be heart sore and to feel morally
injured. It too feels guilty, but its guilt is more directed towards
making repairs. Facing irreparable damage is likely to lay it
particularly low. With troubles of its own, the caring part also needs
to pay attention to the uncaring part – to hold that ‘baby’ close and
in mind.
 THE PROBLEM OF GUILT 283

In practice, this can play out in the following sort of way: I see
the extent of the damage the neoliberal economy has done. I see
I played a part and I feel guilt and shame. How do I work that
through? If I can hold both ‘babies’ in mind, my chance is better.
When I feel laid low and feel it’s all hopeless, my caring part can
experience that hopelessness, can grieve for what has been lost and
can also pick itself up and say it was not all my fault and anyway
there are things I can do now to help. No time to lose. My caring
part also has another task which is to look after and pay attention
to my inner exception. It will not be faring well. It wants to rise
above the problem so it can escape feeling a kind of apocalyptic
despair. It is hard work to have to remember this ‘baby’ and to
process its troubles too. It is a tragedy to realize how much scope I
have given it over the years, but even that was predominantly not
my fault. Very few of us can be unscathed by a dominant culture
of uncare. To survive our task now is to work to transform it to a
culture of care. My inner exception promised me a fair weather rose
garden. It never said that the price would be very stormy emotional
weather indeed if I ever challenged its power over me.
I have been impressed with Extinction Rebellion for providing
spaces for discussing feelings and for grieving at its events. It helps
greatly to be able to grieve and work through guilt collectively.
This chapter has aimed to show some of what care needs to help it
not feel too overwhelmed by its task at our moment in history. It
would never have had to face a task like this, if Exceptions had not
been allowed to take such control and cause such damage, but here
we all are. When I feel overwhelmed – and I do at times, as many
people do – I realize the feeling will subside. I also realize repair
work starts with repairing one’s own mind and heart and that work
is ongoing.
John Steiner highlighted how arrogance and self-righteousness
can rise in the face of seeing our culpability. This response is
essentially stupid, and that in itself is painful to see, if we are able
to gain enough distance and perspective to see it. The film The
Big Short, about the financial crash, links stupidity, cupidity and
arrogance in snatches of conversation between traders:

The system [is] … fuelled by stupidity.

That’s not stupidity. That’s fraud. It’s possible we’re in a
completely fraudulent system.
284 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

They (the bankers) are not stupid. They just don’t care.
I don’t get it. Why are (the bankers) confessing?
They’re not confessing. They’re bragging.12

Wilfred Bion (1958) in a paper on arrogance said that when he

encountered it with patients clinically, he invariably found references
to stupidity close by, together with a failure to contain.

https://www.raindance.org/scripts/the_big_short.pdf
12
 39
Good leaders

In this chapter I explore some of the psychological qualities required

to be a good leader. People who have these qualities are often
perceived as being of ‘good character’. My aim is not to suggest
that citizens leave it up to good national leaders to effect the wide
scale changes now so urgently needed. Rather, I argue we need good
leadership to help us undo – or at least to repair where we can –
the effects on us of the culture of uncare and to work to build a
culture of care. This leadership needs to be asserted and exercised
nationally, within our groups and within ourselves as individuals.
Good leaders contain people1 by:

●● taking in how they are feeling in an empathic way;

●● giving people scope to be socially responsible and caring;
●● restraining people when their uncaring part gets out of
hand.

Good leaders now face helping people through the triple whammy
of corona, terrible economic hardship and a climate emergency.
Paradoxically, this conjunction may make it easier, not harder, for
leaders to talk to people about the state of the climate.
A vital part of containment, given today’s realities, involves:

●● working to rebuild socially just frameworks of care;

●● addressing the climate and environmental emergency

1
Irma Brenman Pick (1995) put it that good leaders give peoples’ reparative parts
a home.
286 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

The latter requires appreciating how serious the situation now is,
and being willing to act truthfully and in line with the scale of the
problems. That in turn involves being strong enough to withstand
omnipotence2 and its seductive appeal. In today’s political clime
and culture, withstanding omnipotence means seeing through
lulling, normalizing arguments that deaden the mind’s capacity
to think clearly. This takes inner strength, as oil industry-funded
denialism never lets up. With the huge progress recently made
towards accepting climate reality, denialism is currently staging a
savage comeback. Trump led the creation of a hostile environment
for climate facts within US government agencies. The end of 2019
saw attempts to ‘youthwash’ the emerging youth climate strikers
by falsely arguing the oil industry is now turning green.3 Industry-
funded lobbyists took part at the COP25 climate talks in Madrid
in December 2019 (climate protestors were literally locked out of
the talks and, shockingly, scientists were given no official voice4). At
the Madrid summit, targets were watered down from those agreed
at the Paris COP meeting in 2018 and no action was taken.5 The
widely held perception is the talks were set up to fail.
Most climate risk assessments currently on offer appear
untethered to concern. Greta Thunberg unpacked the assessment
that we need to cut our emissions in half in the next ten years in her
speech to the UN summit on climate in 2019:

[This] only gives us a 50 per cent chance of staying below 1.5C

degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions

2
Eric Brenman (personal communication) stressed that standing up to omnipotence
requires strength in the psychoanalyst and in life.
3
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/13/youth-climate-movement-fossil-fuel-
industry/?utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_campaign=53f34e0317-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_
e00a5122d3-53f34e0317-134240653
4
See Peter Carter speaking at COP25 in Madrid in December 2019 on how scientists
were not given an official slot on the programme, a point also made at COP25 by
Greta Thunberg (https://youtu.be/oa13KrOvE2s).
5
They agreed on only weak and watered-down commitments to the drastic cuts in
emissions of greenhouse gases that had been promised. And a decision on regulations
for new international carbon markets was deferred until next year. https://www.
economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/12/15/cop25-the-un-climate-talks-in-
madrid-ends-in-a-sad-splutter
 GOOD LEADERS 287

beyond human control. Maybe 50 per cent is acceptable to you.

But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback
loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or
the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my
children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of
your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So,
a 50 per cent risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have
to live with the consequences. … the world had 420 gigatons
of carbon dioxide left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today
that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes. How
dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual
and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that
remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone in less than eight and
a half years.6

Thunberg was exposing that many current risk assessments have

all the violence and all the betrayal bleached out of them. These
assessments are distinctly odd, as no one in a right mind argues like
this about anything that actually matters. In the clinical situation, a
sign of recovery is when patients who think omnipotently can start
to hear just how odd they sound. This insight is difficult to achieve,
as it requires giving up and mourning entitlement to see the self in
idealized glowing ways.
Greta Thunberg, a good leader, stands up to omnipotent denial
by giving science a voice. At the COP25 Madrid Conference in 2019,
registering the absence of scientists from the official programme she
said, ‘We no longer have time to leave out the science.’
Good leaders also need to help people manage the changes now
needed. My assessment is that this task is not so different in some
respects to the task psychotherapists have in helping people manage
change in general, and here I find the thinking of James Strachey
useful. Strachey (1969) pondered what is it that actually reaches
patients in a way that facilitates change? He was addressing the
issue that people may intellectually understand the need for change
without it necessarily making any difference. Strachey was clear that

6
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-thunbergs-speech-at-
the-u-n-climate-action-summit?t=1576510146754. For her speeches, see Thunberg
(2019).
288 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

insight is not something that can be ‘handed over’ by psychoanalyst

to patient; it is the patient’s own creative transformative moment
when she can clearly see her wishful phantasy as being quite
separate from the reality.
He thought a good interpretation speaks to a ‘point of urgency’,
meaning something pressing to be heard.7 How might this apply
at the political level? I suggest that two linked points of urgency
right now are people, rightly, not feeling valued and people not
feeling safe. One expression of this has been the protest by Black
Lives Matter. It can plausibly be argued that implementing a Green
New Deal would leave most people feeling more valued and safer
by addressing both points of urgency. Social – which must involve
racial – justice and rapidly phasing out carbon are integral to
the Green New Deal.8 Its implementation would lessen survival
anxieties, lessen aggressive and regressive flight/fight responses
triggered by survival anxieties and help rebuild trust in politics.
Indeed, implementing a Green New Deal is a vital mental health
measure.
The situation however is complicated as people have lost trust in
leaders, and they also need considerable help to manage the changes
that a Green New Deal would bring. More on that shortly.
In the current situation, people need to feel listened to and be
taken seriously. Unfortunately, bad leaders have tended to be the
ones to pay people’s anxieties and upset close attention, not to help
them, but to exploit them by whipping them up and offering the
pseudo containment of ‘quick fix’ fake solutions.
The good leader needs to pay close attention to their own wish
for ‘quick fix’ solutions, one of which is to want to short-circuit the
hard work of supporting people through change. Here I am critical
of the environmental and climate movement. Until fairly recently,
with notable exceptions,9 it has told people about climate without

7
Of course, patients also make good interpretations.
8
I put that tentatively as it may well be that climate tipping points cannot now
be avoided. For example, the escape of methane gas from the Barrow Station in
the Arctic is very worrying indeed. It suddenly spiked in 2019 (https://eandt.theiet.
org/content/articles/2019/09/arctic-methane-levels-reach-new-heights-data-shows/).
According to Peter Carter, speaking at COP25, the levels have remained high (https://
youtu.be/oa13KrOvE2s).
9
See in particular authors quoted by the Climate Psychology Alliance (http://www.
climatepsychologyalliance.org).
 GOOD LEADERS 289

adequately relating to how the news might leave them feeling. This
is changing rapidly now.
Culture is shifting, with more people demanding truth and more
people asking for help to manage how they are feeling. ‘Climate
anxiety’ (see Chapter 32) is now openly discussed. However, this
recent cultural shift faces good leaders with how do they relate to
people, many of whom rightly feel terrified about the future, easily
feeling overwhelmed or switching off. One problem now is being
honest that we may have left it too late to avoid tipping points.10 I
am often asked how do we tell climate news? My experience is that
it often helps to tell people that I too feel overwhelmed at times,
I too switch off at times and that there is no easy or ‘tried–and-
trusted’ way to break climate news. Also, pointing out that they
will already most likely have experience of how to break bad news
they can draw on: that it is best to deliver the news with care and
empathy; that we cannot spare people their pain (the idea that we
can is omnipotent), but it usually helps if people feel we are there
for them and appreciate how bad it feels.
Rapid cultural changes towards greater care are now taking
place, and they are being ‘co-created’ by leaders and followers to
the point where it is no longer clear who are the leaders and the
followers. It is not even clear who are the adults in the room, as
much of the time they appear to be children fighting for a future.
Again, I return to Strachey. A ‘mutative interpretation’ (saying
something that reaches a person in a way that radically shifts how
they see something) needs to meet a person where they are right
now. Right now, in the political sphere, many people, especially
young people, are feeling acute anxiety about climate and boiling
anger about social injustice. They are calling out for sane measures
on climate and robust action on social justice. They are pushing
leaders hard to act. In this situation, good leaders in my view must
not only be truthful with people but they must also relate to people
as having feelings and as being faced with all the inner conflicts

10
Climate scientists are more interested in tracking parts per million of greenhouse
gasses like CO2 and methane (eighty-six times more powerful as a greenhouse gas
than CO2) than degrees warming. Atmospheric CO2 is now accelerating, currently
at 412 parts per million; the ice core which goes back 2.2 million years has never
before revealed ppm higher than 300 (Peter Carter at COP25: https://youtu.be/
oa13KrOvE2s).
290 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

that truth throws up. People need considerable support to work

these conflicts through. It does not do in my opinion to explain the
importance of a Green New Deal if missing is sufficient empathy
for how betrayed people felt in the years of austerity and how little
respected they have felt for all the effort that they have put in to
keep society going.11 Giving people’s caring part a home means
taking people’s hurt seriously and also accepting people as active
partners in rebuilding society.
Leaders cannot ‘remove’ or ‘solve’ conflicts and anxieties that
accompany change, but good leaders need to indicate willingness to
be alongside people, offering them support as well as the practical
measures to build a sustainable world that respects limits. They
need to help people in a sympathetic way to rein in their inner
exception and to face outer reality. The inner exception can never be
‘abolished’ from the human collective psyche, but with frameworks
of care it can be much better contained.
A good political leader needs to be willing to take risks. Saying
something that connects people with reality in a deeper way
usually involves some risk and danger. Good leaders will pay
close attention to and speak to the sorts of trouble that truth can
unleash. Naturally peoples’ inner exception will be listening, and
it hears what is said in its own way. As an example, at the Radical
Emission Reduction Conference I attended in 2013 (that argued we
actually can technically transition to a world powered by renewable
energy), several people became emotional during the coffee breaks,
‘off side’ as it were. Rather than feeling more hopeful, one seasoned
environmental campaigner told me he had suddenly started feeling
everything was entirely hopeless. Another candidly said she noticed
herself having the strange reaction of ‘the hell with it all, I’m going
to fly all around the world and visit every place I’ve always want
to. I’ve stopped caring!’ In the event, both these climate activists
continued with their climate work, the first not succumbing to
despair and the second continuing not to fly. I wondered if, with the
reality suddenly biting that a transition away from fossil fuels was

11
Michael Sandel (2020) has explored what he calls the ‘tyranny of merit’: the way
in which rising meritocracy has led to a class of people deemed ‘losers’ who feel
humiliated and enraged with how they have been seen by the meritocratic ‘elite’. His
focus is on understanding the rise of populism.
 GOOD LEADERS 291

feasible, peoples’ hope was strengthened but this also stirred protest
from the inner exception.
A good leader needs to give a home to all these reactions, in
the sense of trying to predict them, understand them and not be
surprised by them. I return to Irma Brenman Pick’s (2018) way of
conveying (see Chapter 38) the kind of thoughtfulness needed as
looking after the needs of two ‘babies’, the caring part and the inner
exception. For leaders to be able to give peoples’ reparative parts a
home, they must try to help people to contain their inner exception
and that involves paying close attention to the kind of anxieties it
will no doubt be feeling.
Needing to change is no guarantee that people will change. For
that to happen people have to want to change and have the will
to change. Many more people do now want to change despite a
relentless culture that continues to work to dull their will to change
towards taking greater care. This is where I believe good leaders
now have the possibility of helping people to make changes. What
leaders say can have greater traction now because it can connect with
our current moment of ‘climate and social urgency’. It is a tragedy
that this point was not reached thirty years ago as so much damage
could have been avoided. It has been criminally irresponsible for
people in power to do everything they could to stop people from
seeing the true situation. Nevertheless, here we are, at this late stage
of the emergency and it is a case of much better late than never.
Good leaders will encourage dialogue about the climate crisis.
People need to be talking about the crisis, working through and
understanding ways they have been influenced by culture in our
era. One small example is a conversation I was recently part of.
Someone said, how terrible that we are supposed to do all this
repair work when the best we can possibly end up with now is an
earth that will still be damaged. Someone replied, yes, it’s terrible
but what is the implication? Do we think only the perfect state is
worth fighting for? Someone else said, the young climate strikers
don’t think like that. They accept earth is damaged and they want
to stop further damage. They are the realists. We oldies who will
soon be dead have the luxury of thinking the damage is too hard to
face, and that the work to repair the world that we damaged is too
hard to undertake.
Another conversation involved someone on the radio asking three
students what they saw as the main problems now facing the UK.
292 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

All three promptly answered the climate emergency. The questioner

ignored this reply and asked what careers were they choosing? One
student replied he saw his career choice as between two sorts of
disruption to his plans, one if he joined the Extinction Rebellion
and the other if he did nothing and contributed to everyone having
to wade through three feet of water each day to get to work. At the
time the north of England had suffered severe flooding. These are
the sort of ordinary conversations I believe need to happen on a big
scale to help us all work through the invidious effects of a culture
of uncare that encouraged us to believe we could be excepted from
facing reality because we are so ideal and special.
 Conclusion

In 2009, the climate thinker and campaigner Mayer Hillman visited

me to ask if psychoanalysis could help with the climate emergency.1
He said there was no time left to delay action. I agreed and then
said people take time. We sat in silence stumped by a situation that
seemed impossible to resolve, both aware that humanity was in
grave danger of waking up to the climate crisis too late to avoid
irreversible tipping points.
Part of the time needed was time to establish new ways of
thinking within the human sciences. Understanding climate change
requires an interdisciplinary approach which still needed forging.
Then, those in the Western, particularly the anglophone, tradition,
had been exposed to the culture of uncare along with everyone else,
which made it harder for them to study a climate bubble of denial
they themselves were inside of.
In 2014, I met Harald Welzer2 who had written Climate Wars
(2006), which so presciently foretold of strife and violence to come
if emissions continued to rise. He told me that when researching his
book, he had encountered a lack of solid academic context in which
to locate his ideas. It was as though he was identifying the contours
of a country as yet granted no space on the academic map. This

1
Hillman, who had written How We Can Save the Planet in 2004, visited me
following a talk I gave in 2009 on a psychoanalytic perspective on climate change
denial (Lionel Monteith Memorial Lecture: Weintrobe, 2010).
2
I met Welzer at a climate policy meeting in November 2014 in Berlin.
294 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

lack of context and validation would also be experienced by other

human scientists working on climate.3
Engagement with climate was also taxing emotionally for those
who took the subject on. Speaking personally, when this author
comes close to the climate crisis, she can find in her hands a melting
iceberg, a small migratory bird caught in a hurricane, a climate
refugee: moments of piercing sadness. Recently she increasingly
finds shame: individual shame and species shame. Her species caused
this crisis. In the space of just fifty years (in large measure) humans
have squandered, polluted and damaged the support systems that
life depends on. Feelings about this require considerable working
through.
The number of human scientists who did face the trouble began
to increase, first gradually,4 then rapidly when the climate bubble
began to burst in 2018 and Extinction Rebellion was declared.5
Their collective response has been to argue that the climate crisis is

3
The country would gradually emerge through theoretical work done on climate and
ecology by social psychologists, eco psychologists, philosophers like Deleuze and
Guattari (discussed by Dodds (2011) and Latour (2017)), and anthologists like de
Castro (2014). This list is very far from inclusive. The Freud Museum in London had
hosted a conference on climate back in 1992, the British Psychoanalytical Society
hosted one in 2010 and the Climate Psychology Alliance now regularly hosts them.
However, very few psychoanalysts would become involved in the climate issue during
the decade 2010–20. My experience has been that many colleagues still fail to see
links between the state of the environment and states of mind. This is now shifting
rapidly and indeed the International Psychoanalytical Association in December 2019
established a Climate Committee to help forge these links. In December 2019 the
American Psychological Society published a policy statement on climate (https://
www.apa.org/news/apa/2019/climate-change-summit). Climate Psychology Alliance,
formed in 2012, pioneered a psycho-social approach to understanding climate. Very
recently its membership has risen sharply (www.climatepsychologyalliance.org). By
the beginning of 2020 new groupings and alliances of human scientists working on
climate were starting to mushroom.
4
Inspired by the work of many groups that include to give a few examples Climate
Psychology Alliance, Common Cause, Climate Outreach, Climate Psychiatry Alliance
and Psychology for a Safe Climate (https://www.climatepsychologyalliance.org http://
commoncause.org https://climateoutreach.org) https://www.climatepsychiatry.org/.
https://www.psychologyforasafeclimate.org/
5
Just one example is the European grouping Psychologists for Future (https://
psychologistsforfuture.org/en/landing-page-en).
 CONCLUSION 295

the critical mental health issue6 and the threat of extinction includes
that of truth and sanity.

Entitlement
In concluding this book, I want to return to and highlight the
importance of understanding more about entitlement. Entitlement
powers our will to act. To act, we first need to feel entitled to act. We
usually think of entitlement in its narcissistic form (people feeling
entitled to act in narcissistic ways at the expense of others), but the
book has explored lively entitlement too. Lively entitlement powers
our will to act for and fight for greater care.
Lively entitlement powers the lively self7 whereas narcissistic
entitlement powers the narcissistic self. Central to lively entitlement
is feeling entitled to give and receive love, have freedom of thought,
be respected for one’s difference, have ownership of one’s body;
central too is entitlement to tell and be told the truth.8 The lively self
knows it has rights and responsibilities and it roughly knows what
is fair and not fair.9 To have its say and to make its mark the lively
self must feel entitled.
The lively self feels entitled to an inner moral compass, a working
conscience, whereas the Exception feels entitled to be exempt
from morality’s burdens. The lively self feels entitled to confront
prejudice and ideas of deserved privilege in the self and the group.
The Exception’s foundational belief is of deserving and therefore
preserving privilege. The lively self feels entitled to seek to link and

6
The Lancet commissioned a report on mental health impacts of climate change
(https://www.thelancet.com/climate-and-health). The WHO has referred to
climate change as a mental health emergency (https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/
handle/10665/329972/WHO-CED-PHE-EPE-19.11-eng.pdf?ua=1). The American
psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren is particularly involved in promoting links between
climate and mental health (see Colino, 2017).
7
The concept of liveliness here falling under the aegis of Freud (1920) description
of the life drive.
8
Also, as Kohut (1984) stressed with his theory of a normal narcissism, people are
entitled at the start of life as babies to a gratifying milieu.
9
See Rayner (1999) on children’s inherent sense of justice and what is fair and is
not fair.
296 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

connect, whereas the Exception feels entitled to break links and to

form hierarchies that dehumanize.10
Viveiros de Castro (2014), an anthropologist from Brazil, called
these sorts of hierarchies the ‘vicious dichotomies of modernity’. De
Castro pointed out that in Amerindian culture, broadly speaking,
animals and humans are all ‘persons’ granted subject status. This
is linking indeed. Perhaps it would take those of us who are
Westernized humans to gaze into the eyes of animals, especially
wild animals, to be confronted with just how much we do not know
or understand. If we take de Castro’s argument full circle, we can
see that ‘we’ in the current Western tradition can end up treating
the animal in ourselves – the ‘I subject person’ who follows its own
animal tracks and does not conform to our imperious demands of
it – with cruel indifference and dismissal.
I believe the most insidious form of attack on the lively self’s
will is the culture of uncare’s seductive message in the background
that we can dispense with any inner moral strife over our daily
treatment of others and of the earth. The reality is that to transition
to a sustainable way of living, people need to treat others more
fairly and to tread lightly on the earth. That entails treating earth
as something loved, and considering earth in every single thing
we do, from the food we choose, to our mode of travel, to how
we relate to our groups about climate, to our choices about what
political actions we take to protect earth. This is what living outside
of Eden means today. We have been persuaded by and have also
colluded with the idea that this mental rebalancing would be far
too much of a tribulation. We have come to believe we are entitled
to be spared the hassle of caring at this detailed level. It is this
that ultimately reduces us to become the butt of Peter Cook’s joke,
‘As I looked out into the night sky across all those infinite stars it
made me realize how unimportant they are.’ It is not that we are
insensible to the climatic, plastic or other environmental problems
that our collective actions cause. It is that we treat the lively self and
its entitlement as unimportant in every brief moment of choice; we
psychically murder the lively self by finding ways to undermine its
willpower. This is the slow violence we daily practise. Climate wars
are fought inside as well as outside us and because the inner wars

de Castro (2014, p. 49).

10
 CONCLUSION 297

happen largely beneath our radar, we may not be sufficiently aware

of this.
Conflict between these two ways of seeing and their entitlement
attitudes appear, fractal like, at all levels of human organization,
from within the psyche to between individuals to between groups.
Entitlement powers a tug of war between two profoundly
different ways of seeing. Narcissistic entitlement aims to pull lively
entitlement right over, so it falls in the mud rendering it abject.11
In a psychic sense, the whole neoliberal project over the past forty
years has been to render lively entitlement sufficiently abject and
powerless that it poses no significant threat.
When attending the Radical Emission Reduction Conference
(RERC) in 2013, I was stunned to realize that a move to renewable
energy was possible, and with existing technology. I realized I had
succumbed to insistent cultural messaging that it was not possible.
There, at RERC, I saw clearly how my sense of entitlement to life
and therefore my sense of hope had been flattened by the culture of
uncare. This was entitlement war in action. It became very clear the
real issue was the human will to change to a sustainable way of living.
Exercising that will involves political struggle but it also
involves resisting omnipotence. It takes strength and willpower to
resist omnipotence which is why neoliberal policies and culture
have specifically sought to undermine the lively entitlement that
empowers that willpower. I believe the culture of uncare’s most
deadly and seductive appeal has been in its implicit suggestion that
people can apparently dispense with inner struggle12: ‘Who wants

11
This abject state has been called one of non-entitlement. I am following the
classification of Kriegman (1989), who referred to non-entitlement as well as
exaggerated (narcissistic) and ‘normal’ (lively) entitlement.
12
Hanna Segal (1993) noted, when commenting on Martin Eden’s suicide by
drowning in Jack London’s (1967) novel of that name, ‘All pain comes from living’.
‘As (Martin) drowns he has a tearing pain in his chest. “The hurt was not death
… It was life—the pangs of life”.’ Segal continued, ‘Sometimes Freud refers to
this rejection of disturbance as the nirvana principle. Originally he thought that
the nirvana principle was part of the pleasure-pain principle since it is a search for
constancy, which he originally thought of as part of the pleasure principle. But later
he equated it with the death instinct – the drive to return to the inorganic, that is
death.’ When Freud saw the horrors of the First World War, he was concerned to
understand how destructive behaviour could be curtailed and civilized behaviour
maintained; he thought to be civilized people had to constrain their destructive
desires and accept limits (Freud, 1930).
298 PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOTS OF THE CLIMATE CRISIS

the pain of feeling alive? That is now so passé.’ Harold Searles

(1972) in a pioneering paper foretold where this ultimately leads:
‘In the pull upon us to become omnipotently free of human conflict,
we are in danger of bringing about our extinction.’
Life involves conflict between love of and hatred of reality. Freud
(1915, p. 139) said hatred of reality is older than love. He was later
corrected by Klein who thought love of reality is just as primary
as hate. I tend to Klein’s view, as it is also the view of a woman
and a mother. However, both views come across to me as rather
essentialist. The argument this book has put forward is that when it
comes to love and hate, it all depends. It depends on social context;
on whether there are frameworks of care that support love and
contain our darker sadistic desire to fracture and cause chaos; to
be punks, or even more chillingly, to see with the blanking eyes
parodied by Peter Cook.
The frameworks of care now needed must include social support
to work through the damage to our environments, our societies and
our minds, and to rebuild lively entitlement so we can make the
transition needed. The issue is whether the Westernized modernist
human mind and imagination can face its next great transformative
decentring. First, we thought the sun revolved around us. Then, we
thought we owned, controlled and dominated the planet. Now we
see we are part of a wider ecosystem whose health depends on our
sharing planet earth with other species, relating to other forms of
cultural life and never forgetting that the logos of life is bigger than
our understanding of it can possibly be; this understanding is what
love strives for. When we berate ourselves for human slowness and
stupidity in addressing climate, it is perhaps wiser to bear in mind
that the transformation is happening and in just forty odd years.
A blink in human history. And it is happening in the face of an
assault on truth and decent values the scale of which the world has
never seen before, by a culture of uncare funded by powerful global
corporations. We would also do well to remember when we are
feeling stupid that the word ‘stupid’ derives from stupefied, struck
dumb with grief.
Crying and grieving for the state of earth can energize our sense
of lively entitlement to repair and protect her. Indeed, we cry when
we feel real loss of what we love. Children are rightly saying the
earth is on fire and their wise prescription is to COOL IT (written on
a banner at a recent school strike for climate). Children are our best
 CONCLUSION 299

source of hope because we love them, and because they are more
realistic than most of us are. While many of us sink into despair
because the environment and the climate system are now damaged,
many children and young people accept the damage more. They are
the realists. They, who will have to live in a damaged world, need
our support to stop further damage and make the world as liveable
as possible. The danger is that unless we break with Exceptionalism
and mourn our exaggerated sense of narcissistic entitlement, we may
pay them lip service with kind words but throw them overboard as
our zone of sacrifice while we carry on with carbon-intensive life
as usual.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With thanks and gratitude to the intellectual leaders writing on

climate who have guided me in writing this book. There are too
many to name individually. We have fabulous intellectual leaders
at the current time, all speaking truth to power, respecting nature’s
limits and fighting for greater care. They give the big picture
proportionately, without denial or catastrophizing. We need a
world where governments choose them as advisors, not lobbyists
from fossil fuels companies.
In particular, thanks and gratitude to the late Polly Higgins who
fought to have the devastation to our natural world recognized as
ecocide; Rob Nixon who expanded how we understand violence
with his idea of ‘slow violence’; Naomi Klein who embedded
climate change within an economic and political framework, Bill
McKibben who tirelessly reminds us that fossil fuels need to stay
in the ground and Pope Francis for his encyclical on climate that
plainly states the issue is acting with sufficient love.
I am grateful to the British Psychoanalytical Society for supporting
and nurturing my development as a psychoanalyst. I have drawn
on ideas from many psychoanalytic writers, in particular (as well
as Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein) Donald Winnicott, Wilfred
Bion, Irma Brenman Pick, Hanna Segal and John Steiner. The
writings of Zygmunt Bauman and Michael Rustin have helped me
to integrate a psychoanalytic perspective with politics and culture.
Thank you to the Climate Psychology Alliance (www.
climatepsychologyalliance.org) and to my fellow members on the
International Psychoanalytic Association’s Climate Committee:
Maria Luisa Gastal, Delaram Habibi-Kohlen, Pushpa Misra,
Davide Rocco, Mary-Anne Smith, Karyn Todes and Lynne Zeavin.
I rely on both these groups for information, analysis, inspiration
and support to bear the news about climate.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 301

Thank you to friends and colleagues who have helped in

different ways with the book’s development: Jan Abram, Adela
Abella, Lenore Abramsky, Jon Alexander, Judith Anderson, Mauro
Van Arken, David Armstrong, Amanda Barrett, Irena Bauman,
Jill Boswell, Mike Brearley, Richard Brouilette, Donald Campbell,
Deborah Coen, Stan Coen, the late Stanley Cohen, the late
Margaret Cormack-Hathorn, Elizabeth Cotton, Tom Crompton,
Lenny Davis, Sarah Deco, Dennis Duncan, Marianna Fourli, Bill
Garvey, Penelope Garvey, Ulrike Grassinger, Prudy Gourguechon,
Stephen Grosz, Clive Hamilton, John Hathorn, Michael Hathorn,
Caroline Hickman, the late Polly Higgins, Mayer Hillman, Paul
Hoggett, Wendy Hollway, Rob Hopkins, Liam Humphreys, Anne
Karpf, Maureen Katz, Gilbert Kliman, Kimberlyn Leary, Luc
Magnenat, Julian Manley, Angela Mauss-Hanke, Bella Mirabella-
Davis, David Morgan, Helen Morgan, Donald Moss, Haaris Naqvi,
Owen Newman, Neni Nicolopoulou-Stamati, Rob Nixon, Terry
Patterson, Kate Pearce, Daniel Pick, Ro Randall, Chris Rapley,
Maria Rhode, Jane Ryan, Chris Robertson, Ben Rometsch, Jonathan
Rowson, Mary-Jayne Rust, Michael Rustin, the late Hanna Segal,
Michael Slevin, Philip Stander, Tree Staunton, Yannis Stavrakakis,
Fionn Stevenson, Adrian Tait, Lisa Thomson, Pat Tomaino, Virginia
Ungar, Candida Yates, Lise van Susteren, Ivan Ward, Harriet Wolfe
and Paul Zeal.
Special thanks for editorial help to Irma Brenman Pick; Paul
Hoggett; Eric and Klara King; Peter Lipman; Sheelagh Neuling; and
Peter Rudnytsky who took such care.
Thank you to wildlife in my local area in London: birds,
blackbirds, foxes, swallows arriving, geese departing and occasional
bats at dusk. You sustain me. Finally, a big thank you to my family.
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 INDEX

Abraham, Karl, Amenhotep IV survival 54, 196, 254, 262,

19–21, 23, 39, 53, 259 274, 288
Adorno, Theodor 20–1 n.2 apocalyptic despair 283
advertising architecture
to children 90, 111, 150 changes in 207–9
as obscuring reality 145–51 sustainable 207
Agamben, Giorgio 271–2 Arendt, Hannah 124 n.5, 192 n.2
aggressor, identification with 239 Armstrong, David 169–70
agribusiness 78, 191, 259 n.7 Arrighi, Giovanni 29 n.19
monocrop 231 ‘as if’ argument(s), dismissing
Aitcheson, John 161, 163 science and scientists 202
Albrecht, Glenn 237 n.4 ‘as if’ culture 174
Alexander, Jon 151 ‘as if’ phantasy 63, 109
Alford, Fred 241 ‘as if’ satisfactions 107
Allende, Salvador 61 ‘as if’ security, fake 115
‘alternative facts’ 16, 30 ‘as if’ state 114
Alvesson, Mats 169 ‘as if’ thinking 109, 114
Amazon, fires in the 130, 258, vs ‘what if’ thinking 108
259 n.9 ‘as if’ virtual reality 131
Amenhotep IV 19–23, 39, 53, 259 ‘as if’ world 105, 109, 124, 129, 174
American dream 106, 108 fake 27
American Exceptionalism 272 of false beliefs 106
American National Monuments 98 ASA. See American Psychiatric
American Psychiatric Association Association
(ASA) 239 n.7 Astor, David, Columbus Trust 248
American ‘talk culture’ 123 n.3
American Tobacco Corporation attack 197
104 Attenborough, David 166 n.13,
Anderson, Kevin 25 n.11, 236 n.2 236 n.1
anxiety(ies) Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
climate 289 218 n.10
persecutory 55 Attlee, Clement 43
primitive 196 Auden, W. H. 27–8
 INDEX 319

austerity, years of 40, 98 n.20, Bolsonaro, Jair 130, 257–8, 259

218, 254, 273, 290 n.9
Australian bush fires 238 Booth, Michael 217
authoritarianism 40, 271 boundaried life systems 213
awareness, formed 195–7 Brearley, Mike 10
breast/toilet mother, phantasized 68
Bakan, Joel 191, 193 Brenman, Eric 97 n.18, 277 n.1,
Baker, Ron 97 n.17 286 n.2
Baldwin, James 45 Brenman Pick, Irma 11 n.2, 17
Bank of Reconstruction and n.1, 243, 280 n.9, 281, 285
Development 35 n.1, 291
banking crisis, 2008 185–7 Bretton Woods Agreement 34–6,
Bankspeak 125–7 154
Bannon, Steve 259 n.9, 273–4 Brexit 75–9, 254
barbarism 248, 270 Brill, A. A. 105 n.4
Barenboim, Daniel 27 British Psychoanalytical Society
Baum, Mark, The Big Short 183, 294 n.3
283 Britton, Ron 270
Bauman, Zygmunt 113, 247 n.1, Brown, George, Prime Minister
262 179
Beckett, Samuel, Not I 280 brutalism 248
Bednarek, Steffi 237 n.3 Buchanan, James 37, 41, 46–50
belief(s), false. See false belief(s) Calculus of Consent 48 n.13
Bellow, Saul 28 The Limits of Liberty 48 n.13
Bendell, Jem 240 ‘Public Choice Theory’ 46
Bernays, Edward 104–9 Buckley, William 36
Beveridge, William, Social Buffett, Warren 188 n.13
Insurance and Allied Bush, George W., President 29,
Services (Beveridge Report) 42, 271
36 Butler, Judith 92
Big Business 108
Bion, Wilfred Cameron, David, Prime Minister 91
on arrogance 278 n.2, 284 Campbell, Donald 260
Cogitations 87 capitalism
container-contained 87 n.6 American 108
containment 87 n.6 trust model of 62 n.8
psychotic and non-psychotic carbon-based economy 69
parts of self 22 n.4 carbon emissions, targets for 24,
spiritual drift 169 86, 130, 133, 140–1, 145,
Black Lives Matter 180, 224–6, 196, 215, 217, 270
288 zero 25
Bloomberg, Michael 265 carbon footprint 59, 172, 196,
bodily ego 89 198, 281
320 INDEX

‘Carbon Major(s)’ 280 Chang, Ha-Joon, 23 Things

care They Don’t Tell You about
culture of 13, 159, 283, 285 Capitalism 39
entitlement to 97 Chaplin, Charlie, Modern Times
framework(s) of 225, 262, 285, 104
290, 298 Chapman, Ben 77, 78 n.15
attacks on 156, 186, 260, Chazan, Guy 145
262 Chesterton, G. K. 94
containing 88 chicken, chlorinated 77–8
containing social CIA 65
environments as 83 Clark, Wesley, Jr 242 n.14
Democracy’s, breaking with classism 190
271–5 Cleese, John 33
environmental 91 climate, environmental crisis and
good objects as 98–9 neoliberal Exceptions 264–7
need for 13, 213 climate anxiety 289
social and political 90 climate bubble 3, 189–90, 252,
structure of 83–90 256, 274, 293–4
for sustainable world bursting 229, 231–44
215–21 climate change, passim
neoliberal deregulation from 247 awareness and formed
and uncare 13 awareness of, distinction
caring imagination 5, 180, 203, between 195
205, 207–8, 213, 218, denial of 37, 137–43
226–7, 234 deniers 140
today 205, 207–21, 223–8 disavowal of 24, 141
caring part of self 9–13, 27–8, mental health impacts of 295
92–4, 108–9, 114–16, n.6
121–4, 281–3, 290–1 climate crisis, feelings about, living
caring society, starting point for with 235–44
building 13 climate denialism 140–3
Carle, Benjamin 57 climateers 198
Carrington, D. 34, 147 n.6 Climate Outreach 294 n.4
Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring 67 climate problem, threat of,
Carter, Peter 286 n.4, 288 n.8, 289 normalization of 196–8
n.10 Climate Psychiatry Alliance 294
Carthage Foundation 38 n.4
Casteel, Joshua 244 Climate Psychology Alliance 133,
Cato Institute 37 288 n.9, 294 n.3
Caudwell, Bruce 42 climate reality, facing,
Chalmers, Patrick, Fraudcast unbearability of 243
News 131 climate science 141–2, 201–2,
Chambers, Whittaker 36, 52–3, 56 216, 266, 280
 INDEX 321

climate scientists 4, 139–41, 172, corporatism, fascism as 73

198, 201, 255 Cotton, Elizabeth 188 n.12
attacks on 261 Covid-19 pandemic 159, 190,
grief of 164–7 202, 226, 247, 285
climate trauma 239–40 ‘crazy’, ‘the’ 3, 188–9
clinical baby 96 n.13 driven by bad leaders 269–75
Clinton, Bill, President 179 Exceptionalism running amok
Coates, D. 62–3 245, 247–9, 251–67,
Coe, Doug, The Family 258–9 269–75, 277–92
Coetzee, J. M., Waiting for the in politics 247–9
Barbarians 269, 275 Cuadrilla 74
Cohen, Stanley, States of Denial Cuddon, Sarah, Inconspicuous
140 Consumption 162
Cohn, Norman 248 n.3 Cummings, Dominic 273–4
collapse denial 240 Curtis, Adam 107–10
collectivism vs individualism 43
collusion 177–80, 185, 197 da Gama, Vasco 65
in culture of uncare 177 Daly, Herman 210
colonialism 29, 69, 225 Darwin, Charles 139 n.2
colonization 66 The Descent of Man 12 n.3
Columbus Trust 248 Davar, Elisha 98
Common Cause 294 n.4 Davies, Nick 133
communism 30, 43–4 Davies, William 40, 179
conflicted self 9–13 Davis, Wade 272
Connor, Steve 131 death instinct 297 n.12
consumerism 57, 111, 129, 282 de Castro, Viveiros 294 n.3, 296
beginnings of, and culture defensive organizations,
103–10 pathological 278 n.2
container-contained 87 deflection 197
containment 240, 248, 273, 285, deforestation 60, 126, 130
288 Delingpole, James 143
clinical examples of 88–90 denial
kinds of 88 group 235
meaning of 87 promoting of 137–43
parental 90 denialism 281, 286
Conway and Oreskes 139, 141, 280 climate 138–43
Merchants of Doubt 138 destructiveness of 139
Cook, Peter 296, 298 under Trump 143
Copernicus, Nicolaus 139 n.2 denialists 138–42
coronavirus pandemic. See Department of Environmental
Covid-19 pandemic Protection, Florida 196
corporation(s) 52, 75, 280 Department for International
as psychopaths 191–4 Trade, British 75
322 INDEX

destructiveness, normalization of, de-idealizing of 68

concept of 198 seen as globe 65–71
Diamond, Jared 28 n.17 East India Company 191 n.1
DiAngelo, Robin 198 eco-anxiety 198, 236
Dickens, Charles ecocide 40, 130, 220, 235, 244
Great Expectations 26, 192 n.4 as atrocity crime 215
Hard Times 73 n.1 law 215–16, 279–81
Dickinson, Emily 4 eco-fascists/eco-fascism 255 n.7,
disassociation 274
from care 30, 87 eco-futility/eco-grief 237
about climate 239 eco-guilt 238
creating ‘distanced others’ ecological debt 58, 167
through 27 economic hardship 285
functioning of 25–6 economics of Planet Life 209–10
from group ‘othered’ 87 economy, carbon-based 69
to ‘manage’ conflict 190 eco-rage 238
in politics 265 eco-shame 238
‘quick fix’ for the climate ecosystem 210, 220, 298
emergency 25–6 definition of 213
from reality 55 earth as 213
as sense of no longer sharing ‘eco-terrorists’ 92, 274
same world 264–5 Eichmann, Adolf 192 n.2
in traumatic states 22 Einstein, Albert 139 n.2
as underpinning dehumanizing Eisenhower, Dwight D., President
prejudice 25 36
between ‘us’ and ‘them’ 274 Eliot, T. S., Burnt Norton 28 n.16
disavowal Ellul, Jacques 153, 155
culture of 184 empathy 12, 55, 89–90, 93, 171,
as form of denial 16 289–90
group 199 as containment 88
normalization as form of 196 Empson, Laura 187
as psychological denial 137–8 Enlightenment 68
states of 16 Age of 16
DNA reconstruction 163 Enron and fund managers 183–90
doublethink 16 entitlement(s), passim
doughnut model 210–13 to care 97, 170
Drake, Francis 65–6 of future generations 135
Dublin fire department 219–21 idealized 18
Dupont, Irenee 49, 73 illusory exaggerated, mourning
Dupont Motor Company 49 69
kinds of 223
Early Warning Principle 233 lively 99, 105, 223–8, 236,
Earth 295–9
 INDEX 323

mourning 287 triumph mode of 261

narcissistic 17, 197, 295, 297, Exceptionalist thinking 48–9
299 excitable speech 92
to privilege 190 existential dread 249
sense of 15, 23, 99, 148–9, Extinction Rebellion 130–1, 133,
154, 167, 223, 266, 297 165, 180, 203, 224, 243,
studies 223 n.2 270, 282–3, 292, 294
environment, good-enough 96 Exxon Mobil 139, 225, 238, 280
environmental damage 231–4
Environmental Protection Agency fact checking 134
(EPA) 261 Faimberg, Haydée 239 n.9
environmentalism/ false belief(s) 26, 71, 104, 159,
environmentalist(s) 38, 54, 208, 227–8
166, 270 ‘as if’ world of 106
European Chemicals Protection exception’s 15–18
Agency (REACH) 232 omnipotent 162
Ewen, Stewart 107 false belief system 15, 18
Exception(s)/Exceptionalism, fascism 154
passim as corporatism 73
acute survival anxieties of 262 Faulkner, William 121
advanced 258 Federal Reserve Bank 183
American 272 Feiffer, Jules 16–17
British 29 fetish(es) 21
capitalist, neoliberal 34 as erotized attractor 187
in charge and unbound 19–30 fetishization 21, 188
forms of 28–30 financial regulation 42, 179
and fraud bubbles 181, Financial Service Authority, UK 179
183–203 financial services 43, 73
free market 45 fires in the Amazon 130, 258, 259
globalized 29 n.9
guilty feelings of 264 Floyd, George, murder of 225
inherent instablility and Foot, Michael 36
emotional lability of 265 forest fires in Indonesia 129–31
megalomania of 247, 258 n.5 formed awareness 195, 196, 197
neoliberal 2–3, 31, 33–40, Fox, Liam 77, 142, 158
179–80, 188–9 fracking 99
and climate and in UK 74–5
environmental crisis frameworks
264–7 of care, see care frameworks of
ordinary 15–18 of uncare, see uncare
paranoia of 264 frameworks of
psychology of 7, 9–13, 15–30 Francis, Pope 259 n.9, 280 n.10
self-idealization of 263 Laudato si 39
324 INDEX

fraud bubble(s) 3, 58, 127, 180 Ghosh, Amitav, The Great

and Exceptionalism 181, Derangement 122
183–203 Glass-Steagall Act 179
fraudcasting 131 Glenny, Misha 272
free trade agreement (FTA) 75–6 global economy, deregulated 112
US-UK 77 global heating/warming 38, 61,
freedom, different conceptions of 11 201, 215, 244, 255, 277
Freud, Anna 239 n.10 denial of 26, 139–41
Freud, Sigmund effects of 189, 208, 232
death instinct 297 n.12 reality of 131–4
disavowal 137 n.1 globalization, neoliberal 57–60
ego as bodily ego 89 Godard, Jean-Luc 5
fetish 187 Goldwater, Barry, ‘Goldwater
hatred of reality 104, 298 Rule’ 22 n.4, 41
heimlich, homely 189 Gorbachev, Michael 184
Her or His Majesty the Baby 15 grammar, attacks on 121–3
life drive 295 n.7 great inconvenience, times of 244
mourning loss 18, 164 n.9 greed, as ‘scooping out’ 122
negation as part of mourning Green New Deal 221, 225, 252,
137 n.1 274, 288, 290
nirvana principle 297 n.12 Greenpeace 4, 75, 77, 200, 244
phantasy 104 Greenspan, Alan 51, 183, 188–9
pleasure principle 297 n.12 Grenfell Tower disaster 24, 39
reality 18 grievance, nursing 26
testing 137 n.1 group denial 235
Shakespeare’s Richard III 18 group disavowal 199
theory of mind of 104 group idealization 3
Friedman, Milton 46, 47 n.12, group projection 199–200
62, 65 guilt, problem of 277–84
Chicago School 61
Fromm, Erich 94 n.8 Hale, Rob 260
FTA. See free trade agreement Halley, Nikki 260 n.10
‘functional stupidity’ 169 hallucination, negative 251–2,
future generations, entitlements 255–6
of 135 Halper, Louise 48–9
Hamilton, Clive 141
Gagarin, Yuri 70 Hammond, Michael 271
Galbraith, John Kenneth 46 Hammond, Philip 266
Gardiner, Barry 76 n.13 Hansen, James 67 n.8, 131 n.9
Geneva Convention against War happiness machines, people as
154 n.5 107–10
genocide 192, 215 Harrabin, Roger 165–6
Gentile, Giovanni 73 n.4 Hastings, Warren 191 n.1
 INDEX 325

‘have a nice day’ 123–4 industrialization 29, 66, 69

Hayek, Friedrich 37, 47, 49, 61–2, INEOS 75
153, 157 inequality, class and racial 154
The Road to Serfdom 41–6 infantilization 169–74
Health and Social Care Act 2012 info-tainment 132
98 n.20 Initiative for Free Trade (IFT)
Henrich, Joseph, The Secret of 75–8
Our Success 83 insecure overachievers 187
Herbert, George 92 International Criminal Court 215
Hering, Christopher 277 International Monetary Fund
Heritage Foundation 37, 42, 77 (IMF) 35, 59
n.14 International Panel on Climate
Herman, Judith 210, 242 Change 215–16, 227 n.8,
Higgins, Polly 215–16, 220 234, 266, 270, 281
Hill, George 104 International Psychoanalytical
Hillman, Mayer, How We Can Association 294
Save the Planet 293 International Trade Select
Hitler, Adolf 271 Committee 75
Hoggett, Paul 24 n.10, 141 IPCC. See International Panel on
homophobia 186, 190 Climate Change
Hoover, J. Edgar 107 irrational thinking 24
Humphrys, John 91
Hunt, Tim 165 n.11 Johnson, Boris, Prime Minister 55,
hyper-constriction 240 75 n.8, 77, 257, 271, 273
Johnson, Lyndon B., President 158
ideal, being, ‘all or nothing-ness’ Jones, Owen 158 n.17, 186
of 263–7 The Establishment 55 n.7
idealized provision, entitlement Joseph, Betty 55, 83, 97 n.17
to 17
idealized self 23, 263 Kahan, Dan 141, 202
loss of 18 Kahn-Harris, Keith 260
idealizing view 123 Keene, John 68, 115
identification 21 King, Martin Luther 4–5
with aggressor 239 Kirk, Martin 143
omnipotent 20, 255 Klein, Melanie 55 n.6, 93–7, 122,
identity, fracturing of 192 298
Idle No More 224–5 Klein, Naomi 23 n.7, 38, 61, 199
IFT. See Initiative for Free Trade n.8, 210, 212 n.12, 270
IMF. See International Monetary No Logo 112
Fund The Shock Doctrine 63
individualism vs collectivism 43 knowledge problem 42
individuation 95 Koch, Charles 37, 54, 77
Indonesia, forest fires in 129–31 Koch, David 37, 54, 77
326 INDEX

Kohut, Heinz 295 n.8 Loye, David 12 n.3

Krenak, Ailton 70 Lushwala, Arkan 243 n.15
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth 164
MacGregor, Neil 65–6
Labour Party, Britain 37 Mackinae Centre for Public Policy
language, user-used 120 55
Latour, Bruno 208, 294 n.3 MacLean, Nancy 47
law 271–5 Democracy in Chains 49
Lawson, Nigel 186 MacNeil, Angus 75
leader(s) Macron, Emmanuel 220
bad 260, 288 Macy, Joanna 164–5
driving ‘the crazy’ 269–75 magical thinking 16–18
good 285–92 omnipotent 15
leadership, self-idealizing 266 Mandela, Nelson 184
Lear, Jonathan 93–7, 173 A Long Walk to Freedom 12
Love and Its Place in Nature 95 n.4
Lehman Brothers 106 manic triumph 115, 187
Lemmon, Jack 120 March 4 Our Lives, Parkland
Lent, Adam 85 school shooting 225
Lertzman, Renee, Environmental Mark Twain 9
Melancholia 237 Marsh, Henry 9–13, 15, 86
Levi, Primo 242 Martinez, Esperanza 99
Levinas, Emmanuel 83 Marx, Groucho 199
Levine, Harold 239 n.8 mass media 103, 113, 115,
Lewis, Michael 183 129–35
Leys, Ruth 73 n.1, 95 n.11, 110 May, Teresa, Prime Minister 25,
life drive 295 n.7 266
life systems, boundaried 212 Mayer, Jane 41 n.2, 293
Lifton, Robert J. 195, 197–8 Dark Money 54
Linn, Susan, Consuming Kids 111 Mazur, Paul 106
lively entitlement 99, 105, 223–8, McConnell, Mitch 274
236, 295–9 McQuarry, Australian Bank 34
logistic solutions 58 Meadows, Donella, Limits to
Logistics 58–60 Growth 209–10
London, Jack, Martin Eden 224 megalomania of Exceptionalism
n.4, 297 n.12 247, 258 n.5
Long, Susan 150, 184 mental deregulation 2–3, 28
loss aversion’ techniques 273 mentalization 95
love Menzies Lyth, Elizabeth 169–70
capacity to 90, 96–7, 155 Me Too 224–5
power of 91–9 Milton, John, Paradise Lost 252
psychoanalytic understanding n.2
of 95 mind, containing function of 87–8
 INDEX 327

mindfulness 89–90, 99, 248, 259 narcissistic entitlement 17, 197,

psychological warfare on 114 295, 297, 299
mindlessness 188 narcissistic part of self 9
Minton, Anna 218 National Aeronautics and Space
Mitchell, David 137 Administration (NASA)
Monbiot, George 37–8, 47, 49, 66–7
130 National Health Service (NHS)
Moodysson, Lucas, Lilya 4 Ever 24, 98
177–80 negation 137, 140–1, 143
moral injury 241–3, 279 as part of mourning 137
moral philosophy 44 as psychological denial 137–8
Moretti, Franco 125–7 negative hallucination 251–2,
Moss, Donald 251 255–6
mother, good-enough 95–6 Nelson, Mia 12, 184
mourning, passim You Call It Eco Trauma
and de-idealizing the earth 68 243–4
illusions 167 neoliberal cultural framing 119
illusory exaggerated neoliberal culture 170–3, 177,
entitlement 69 195, 201, 213–14
lack of capability for 259 collusion with 178–80
loss 97 and disavowal 192
loss of idealized self 18, 71, and mourning 163, 165
287 New Speak 120
and melancholia 164 use of psychology by 103
and negation 137 war on mindfulness 114–15
and negativity 26 neoliberal deregulation from care
pathological organizations as 247
obstacles to 278 n.2 neoliberal economics/economic
role of good object in 97 policies 127, 129
‘stages’ model of 166–7 implementation of 73–9
stages of 164 neoliberal economy 3, 4, 39, 58,
Mounk, Yascha 247 60, 103, 112–15, 148, 273,
MSNBC 20 283
Murdoch, Rupert 134 neoliberal Empire 271
Murray, John 223 neoliberal Exception(s)/
Musk, Elon 253 Exceptionalism, passim
Mussolini, Benito 73 n.4 and climate and environmental
mutative interpretation 289 crisis 264–7
neoliberal globalization 57–60
Naidoo, Kumi 4, 223 neoliberal ideology 3, 34, 37, 41,
narcissism/self-love 18, 94, 265, 56
295 n.8 neoliberalism, passim
destructive 22 brutish form of 270
328 INDEX

culture of uncare of 103, omnipotent thinking

111–16, 150–1 and ‘as if’ world 105
as deregulated form of to bypass limits and
capitalism 33 consequences 69
phases of 40 under capitalism and
rise of, to power 61–3 consumerism 30, 110
neoliberal privatization 120 challenge to 203, 209
New Economics 209 ‘disappearing’ conflict through
New Speak 114, 119–24 127
World Bank using 125–8 examples of 24–6
Newspeak, Orwellian 119–20, Exception’s 22, 127, 264
124–5 Neoliberal 29
Niinisto, Sauli 266 helpful aspects of 27–8
nirvana principle 297 n.12 idealized earth constructed by
Nixon, Rob 124 68
Slow Violence and the as living in wonderland 26–7
Environmentalism of the and moral conflict 34
Poor 132, 233 phantasies underpinning 22
Noah’s Arkism 199 and prejudice 190
twenty-first-century 251–6 psychoanalytic literature on 22
Nordic Miracle 217 ‘quick fix’ 22–6, 158
normalization, as form of rid of guilt through 40
disavowal 196 vs wishful thinking 23
Orange, Donna 29 n.18, 83
Obama, Barack, President 140, Oreskes, Naomi 140–1, 280
271, 279 Merchants of Doubt 138
object Orleck, Annelise 158 n.14
good 95–9, 278 n.2 Orwell, George
inner psychic 97 Animal Farm 40
good-enough 95 1984 16, 119–21, 124–6
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria 221 Osborne, George 74
O’Grady, Ellen 251 outsourcing damage 25
oil companies 238 overachievers, insecure 187
oil industry 4, 23 n.7, 70, 99, 142, ‘overburden’ 38–9
227, 261, 266, 277, 286 Overton, Joseph, ‘Overton
Olivier, Lawrence 155 Window’ 55
omnipotence 22, 71, 235, 258, Oxfam UK 143
272, 279
constructive uses of 27–8 parental containment 90
resisting 297 parents, good-enough 89
withstanding 286 passenger pigeon, extinction of
omnipotent false belief 162 161–2
omnipotent identification 255 pathological organizations 278 n.2
 INDEX 329

Patras conference 233 group 199–200

patricide 278 n.2 protest movements 226
Patriotic Millionaires 188 n.13 psychic retreat(s) 22 n.4, 23 n.6,
Peron, Juan 61 48, 185, 236, 238
persecutory anxiety 55 psychological denial
perverse structure 184 disavowal as 137–8
Pestre, Dominique 125–7 negation as 137–8
Petcou, Constantin 214 Psychologists for Future 294 n.5
Peters, Werner 123–4 Psychology for a Safe Climate 294
Petrescu, Doina 214 n.4
phantasy psychopathic tendencies 173
power of 28 PTSD. See post-traumatic stress
wishful 18, 109, 288 disorder
Picketty, Thomas 39 public utilities, assets like,
Pike, Will 85 privatization of 34
Pinn, Ingram, ‘Tipping Point’ 203 Purves, Libby 166 n.13
Pinochet, Augusto 61 n.1, 65 Putin, Vladimir 29, 257, 273, 275
Planet Earth vs Planet La La
208–10, 214, 223–8, 267 ‘quick-fix’ thinking 141, 192, 261,
Planet Life 208–9 273, 288
pleasure principle 297 n.12 magical 18, 30
Polanski, Roman, Dance of the omnipotent 22–6, 127, 158
Vampires 37
Policy Exchange 78 n.16 racism 132, 158, 190, 198, 255
political framing 103, 115, Radical Emission Reduction
153–60 Conference (RERC) 227–8,
politics 236 n.2, 290, 297
‘the crazy’ in 247–9 Rand, Ayn 36, 153, 155
disassociation in 265 Atlas Shrugged 51–6
Pomerantsev, Peter 273 The Fountainhead 51 n.1
positions, paranoid-schizoid, Randall, Ro 65, 113, 148, 164,
depressive, and tragic 243 167, 198, 212 n.11
n.16 Ratcliffe, Tim 75 n.7
post-traumatic stress disorder Raworth, Kate 209–13
(PTSD) 240–1 REACH. See European Chemicals
power, deification of 29, 257–62 Protection Agency
Precautionary Principle 78, 142–3, Reagan, Ronald, President 33,
233 47–8, 51, 90, 111, 143, 153,
prejudice 189–90, 295 157–8
dehumanizing 25 reality
pre-traumatic stress disorder 240 hatred of 104, 298
primitive anxieties 196 relation to, people’s, attack on
projection(s) 55, 75, 198 272
330 INDEX

reality testing 137 Shakespeare, William 18, 66, 92

attack on 109 A Comedy of Errors 66
regression 169–74 Macbeth 92
RERC. See Radical Emission Richard III 18
Reduction Conference Shalala, Donna E. 158 n.15
restraint, as containment 88 Sharlet, Jeff, The Family 259
retrotopia 262 Simms, Andrew 58 n.2, 167
risk, fetishization of 188 slavery 29, 225
risk assessment 189, 287 slow violence 124, 248, 260, 272,
Roaf, Sue 207–8 296
Roemer, John 25 Snowden, Edward 115, 271
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, social care 157
President 43, 49, 52, 217 social conscience 91, 115, 159,
‘New Deal’ 36, 107 174, 200
Rosenfeld, Herbert 22 social environment, containing
Rove, Karl 29 n.20 83–5, 88–90, 216
Rudnytsky, Peter, Freud and as frameworks of care 83
Oedipus 278 n.2 social groups 5, 103, 195–201,
Rushkoff, Douglas 253–4 209, 225
Russell, Bertrand 2, 13 social injustice 289
Rustin, Michael 83, 85, 89–90 social space, privatization of 218
socially constructed silence 196
Saaby, Tina 217, 219–20 n.3
sadism 260 solar energy 25
Sandel, Michael 83, 290 n.11 solastalgia 237
Scaife, Richard Mellon 38 Sophocles 278
Schmidt, Daniela 165 Oedipus at Colonus 278–9
science Oedipus Rex 278
authority of, undermining of Spicer, André 169
142 Spillius, Elizabeth 96 n.13
inconvenient 78 ‘spiritual drift’ 169
Scott, Rick 196 splitting 190, 192, 225–6
Searles, Harold 298 stagflation 62
Segal, Hanna 97, 108–9, 224, 258 Steinem, Gloria 223, 226
n.5, 297 n.12 Steiner, John 22 n.4, 23 n.6,
self-idealization 3, 184, 256, 282 179–80, 278–9, 283
entitlement to 16–17 Stern, Nicholas, Stern Review 25
leader’s 266 n.13, 227 n.8
stages of 20–1 Strachey, James 287–9
self-idealizing leadership 266 Strickland, Bill 220
‘selfiedom’, characteristics of 115 suicidal states of mind 260
self-love. See narcissism/self-love Summers, Larry 25, 210
sexism 186, 189–90 Suri, Jeremi 158
 INDEX 331

Surkov, Vladislav 29, 257, 273–4 denialism under 143

survival anxieties 54, 196, 254, identification with 20
262, 274, 288 position on climate 200
sustainable world 5, 69, 226, 228, Randianism of 51, 55
290 racism of 190
frameworks of care for 215–21 redefinition of reality by 22,
Swift, Jonathan, A Modest 44, 87, 157, 257, 259
Proposal 251 n.1 slash and burn under 260–2
strand of ‘the crazy’ 273
target setting as form of disavowal Trumpism
of climate change 24–5 as attack on people’s relation
Tey, Josephine, The Singing Sands to reality 273
17 as strand of ‘the crazy’ 273
Thames Water 34 Trump, Melania 87
Thatcher, Margaret, Prime Tuckett, David 186
Minister 62, 126 Minding the Markets 187
and neoliberal Exceptionalism Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of
33–4, 111 Consent 48
and political framing 153–60 Tyndall Centre for Climate
throwaway culture 150 Research 226, 236 n.2
Thunberg, Greta 166 n.13, 225, tyranny of merit 290 n.11
234, 259, 286–7 Tyszczuk, Renata 192
Thurlow, Edward, First Baron 191
Tomasello, Michael 83 uncare, passim
totalitarianism 73, 124 and care 13
Transatlantic Trade and Investor dismantling 225, 243
Partnership (TTIP) 49 frameworks of 86–8, 209
Transpacific Partnership (TPP) 49 legal 194
trauma, intergenerational uncaring part of self 10–13, 109,
transmission of 239 281–2, 285
traumatic states, disassociation uncaring self, as exception 15
in 22 United Nations
traumatized self, century of 110 Climate Action Summit, 2019,
trickledown 39, 201–3 New York 286
triumphalism 29, 115 Climate Change Conference
troposphere 67 COP, 2018, Paris 286
Trump, Donald, President 44, 87, COP25, 2019, Madrid
275, 286 286–9
age of 131, 248 Human Rights Council 260
attack on science 78–79 Sustainable Development
Art of the Deal 92 Goals, 2015 211 n.9
cancellation of climate science United States Trade Representative
by 266, 286 (USTR) 77–8
332 INDEX

‘user-used’ frame of mind 120 Whitebook, Joel 272–3

user-used language 120 Whitman, Walt, Song of Myself
user-used relationship 119–22 121
user-used vocabulary of New WI. See Women’s Institute
Speak 121 Wilde, Oscar 247 n.1
US Federal Reserve 51 Lady Windermere’s Fan 128
US government, lawsuit against Wilderness Music and Arts
134–5 Festival 143
USTR. See United States Trade Will, George 140–1
Representative Williams, Arthur Hyatt 277–8
Williams, Raymond 103
Van Susteren, Lise 240, 295 n.6 Williams, Rowan, Archbishop of
Varoufakis, Yanis 265–6 Canterbury 11, 13, 270 n.5
Venables, Jean 161 Winfrey, Oprah 44
Victims of Communism Memorial Winnicott, Donald 95–6, 278 n.2
Foundation (VOC) 269 n.1 wishful thinking 11
violence, slow 124, 248, 260, 272, vs omnipotent thinking 23
296 Women’s Institute (WI) 112–13
VOC. See Victims of Communism Woodbury, Zhiwa 239
Memorial Foundation World Bank 25, 35–6, 59, 65, 210
Volkswagen, Dieselgate 145–6 using New Speak as Bankspeak
Vote Leave (Europe) 273 125–8

Wallace-Wells, David 236 Yeats, William Butler, The Second

Wasdell, David 223 Coming 247–9
water privatization 159 Young, Christobal 186, 188 n.13
weirding, climate 98, 189
Welfare State 36, 154, 156, 159 Zaretsky, Eli 20 n.2
Weller, Francis 237 zero carbon energy 25
Welzer, Harald, Climate Wars 293 zones of sacrifice 199 n.8
‘what if’ thinking vs ‘as if’
thinking 108