Tackling climate change: why intention matters

This year, I have written and published a book called “A future as one: everything is fine, it’s all going according to plan”.

In this book, I discuss the difficult problem of climate change, ecoanxiety, and what to do about it. One thing I mention, in passing, in the book, is that the major problem we are facing today is not our actions but the motivations and intentions behind them.

In the following article, I will present to you several thought experiments that illustrate why doing the same thing with different intentions yields different results.

Black plague

Imagine two people living in 15th century Europe. The black plague hits and people are dying all around them.

The first person is a firm believer in God, monotheism, heaven and hell, and even though she is afraid to die, she clings on to her monotheist beliefs. She notices that some people are somehow less prone to manifesting the symptoms of the plague and so she enquires what might be the difference. She sees that they practice more frequent bodily hygiene, washing more frequently. She then infers that it must be because a priest has somehow blessed the water, which allows these people to wash away their sins, and escape the black plague, which surely is a punishment from God. She then asks the priest to bless some water and proceeds to wash herself with it.

The second person is starting to question his beliefs in monotheism. She is interested in the discourse of some of the first doctors, who discuss the concept of “diseases” and propose novel ways to tackle them, such as via “medicines”. She takes up their advice of maintaining a high level of bodily hygiene, washing frequently. However she understands that the water she washes must be “pure”, and also that water can become contaminated by the disease.

For a random observer, these two persons might be observed to carry out the same action: washing their bodies more frequently. But to a careful observer, there are major differences. The first person relies on an external authority to “purify” the water via religious means. But unbeknownst to her, this might actually increase the chances of contaminating the water, since the priest may carry on his cross, germs of the disease. Furthermore, the first person isn’t as careful in changing the water, since once the water is “blessed”, then surely, it is and remains “pure”.

This thought experiment is meant to illustrate the importance of the paradigm through which one interacts with reality, and which motives his/her actions. Faced with the same problem, very similar actions, motivated by different paradigms or worldviews, can lead to radically different outcomes.

Study

Imagine two students studying for a test. They are of roughly equal IQ, and have equal intellectual capabilities. The first student, however, is very positive and optimistic about his ability to study, and believes in his success. The second student is pessimistic and is permanently stressed that he/she might fail the exam. They each have 24 hours before the exam to study for the test. Which one of these students will fare better?

The first student is much more likely to do well. Given his positive attitude, his/her brain will be in a state which is much more conducive to learn new material. The second student will likely fail, as he/she will have the hardest time to concentrate on studying. His/her brain will constantly have to fend off negative “self-talk” such as: “it’s pointless” or “you’ll never make it in time”, or “it’s too much to learn” etc.

This second thought experiment illustrates the importance of one’s mindset. Doing the same exact action, from a positive or negative mindset, will yield very different results.

Climate activism

Now combine the two thought experiments above. Imagine a climate activist who is operating from a strictly materialist paradigm, with a negative mindset. The actions he/she engages in will be tainted by these two parameters. There are millions of highly technical scientific reports that are basically saying: “we’re already fucked, given our current level of pollution, we’re headed towards a 3°C+ scenario”. This only exacerbates the activists’ mindset, which is clearly pessimistic and negative.

On the other side of the spectrum, imagine a climate activist who has transcended the strict materialist paradigm, realizing that, as Barbara Marx Hubbard has proposed, humanity is experiencing the “birth pains” of being born as a global collective organism. Via this novel paradigm, which actions will this climate activist choose to engage in?

The first person might join the “extinction rebellion” movement and stop cars on the highway, putting his/her life at risk, animated by an energy of pure desperation. The second person will rather join a “regeneration” movement, getting together with like-minded people, and engage in building a new world, a new way of functioning, without worrying about having to first “kill” the old one.

Conclusion

What this article is meant to underline, is that intentions matter. They are related to the placebo effect or the observable influence of the mind over the body, in the medical field. The mere fact of believing that a sugar pill is a powerful new medicine creates healing effects, even if there are no chemical or physical links between the ingestion of the sugar pill, and the effects.

The belief in certain paradigms of worldviews may actually be detrimental to the end result one seeks to achieve.

In the “black plague” thought experiment, it is clear that strictly believing in God and monotheism does not help in protecting oneself from the plague. On the contrary, many would sink into fatalism, since what can one do against God? If God unleashed the black plague to punish people for their sins, if this is finally the apocalypse, then all that one can do is to pray and put his fate in God’s hands.

In a similar way, nowadays, people who remain stuck in a purely materialist worldview are at risk of falling into fatalism: “it’s too late, there is scientific consensus that we’re heading for a 3°C+ planet, and there is nothing we can do about it”. The law of “cause and effect” becomes the new source of fatalism, the new “God” against whom nothing can be done, except acts of desperation and anger like stopping cars on the highway or breaking windows of major banks, or oil corporations.

Shifting one’s worldview, in this sense, might be critical. It might not necessarily completely change one’s course of action, but it will change the intentions and the mindset, arguably leading to much better results.