Eco-anxiety: Salvation Through Terror

Tell me about it! My wife buys the whole narrative. She has been known to dissolve into tears at the thought of the fate of our grandchildren.

From The European Conservative

By Javier Benegas

Awareness of a hypothetical climate apocalypse is causing more and more individuals to fall into grief and despair, suffer panic attacks, and give up their life projects.

The American Psychological Association (APA) does not yet consider it a pathology per se, although it is affecting more and more people; but it has already provided a definition: “Fear that can occur chronically from environmental cataclysm or from observing the seemingly irrevocable impact of climate change.” This is ‘eco-anxiety,’ a psychological condition related to the climate emergency.

Awareness of a hypothetical climate apocalypse is reportedly causing more and more individuals to fall into grief and despair, suffer panic attacks, and give up life projects, such as having children, because they see the planet’s overpopulation and a high quality of life as incompatible. And “if adults are extraordinarily worried, children are terrified,” warns Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg.

To address this condition, in addition to recommending that politicians, media, and activists should stop incessantly trumpeting that we are on the brink of extinction, it would make sense to recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to eco-anxious people, in order to re-establish the balance between their perceptions and reality. However, many experts seem to believe that the problem lies not with the eco-afflicted but with the indolence of those who are immune to climate terror.

In their opinion, this indolent attitude, in addition to being an added stressor for eco-anxiety sufferers, is due to a phenomenon called ‘psychological distance,’ which prevents the subject from becoming aware of the danger. Therefore, those who need therapy would be those immune to panic, because their immunity would not be due to a considered judgement that is insusceptible to catastrophism, but to a lack of judgement. As for the eco-anxious, if anything, they would need support to face the inexorable reality, not to perceive it correctly, because they are already partakers of the revealed truth.

How to qualify this inverted approach, where healing is not about healing the sick but making the healthy sick? To save the planet, it seems, it is not enough to demonise capitalism and renounce economic growth, with all the dire consequences that this entails; it is also necessary to make people feel sick in their souls.

Almost every day, terrifying stories are published and disseminated about how climate change will alter our living conditions, threatening food security, causing floods, droughts, and all kinds of natural disasters—a process whose medium and short term horizon is economic and social collapse. Reversing this process, we are told, requires a radical awareness; that is, it requires that people have a continuous perception of being threatened, that they feel insecurity, fear, and even panic about the future. Saving the planet therefore requires exhausting people, making them feel really sick. Whoever does not suffer from eco-anxiety will become a threat to collective survival, a defective piece in the machinery of salvation.

This will not sound familiar to young people, but it is reminiscent of Soviet policy, which always treated non-conformity with communism as a mental illness amenable to ‘treatment’ in special psychiatric hospitals. In this respect, Nikita Khrushchev left no room for doubt about how the Soviet regime dealt with dissent: “Crime implies a deviation from generally approved norms of behaviour, and often its cause is mental disorder … It is obvious that the mental state of people who call for opposition to communism is not normal.” Today, the way of approaching dissent with the discourse of climate emergency seems to be essentially the same.

The psychiatrist tells us that people anticipate what they fear more than what will actually happen. This means that fear tends to distort our perception of reality. However, it would seem that too many social psychologists are more determined to support the fears of the eco-anxious, to give them meaning, than to help them to free themselves from them. But why?

Perhaps some light will be shed by what happened in 2011 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Jonathan Haidt spoke to professors, students, and postdocs in social psychology. But before he began his address, Haidt asked the audience to state their political orientation by a show of hands. First, he asked who considered themselves progressive. Hundreds of hands emerged from the room, about 80 percent of the capacity. He then asked for moderates to do the same, and 20 hands went up. Then came the libertarians—12 hands. Finally, the conservatives—three hands. Social psychology, Haidt concluded, had an obvious problem: a lack of political diversity. And this was dangerous.

Waging political battles through science or the so-called social sciences must be seen in the same way as any other conflict of interests, in that the scientist, the social psychologist, or sociologist aspires to be both a source of scientific information and an advocate of a certain position. Research work and value judgements, or moral considerations, are distinct tasks that one and the same person cannot perform simultaneously. Doing so will only add to the confusion inherent in complex and contentious debates. Worse, it will unethically misrepresent personal values as if they were scientific information.

This explains why much of the public is unaware that for every 500,000 deaths caused by heat, cold causes 4.5 million deaths (nine times more). Or that livestock farming has become a legitimate target for the saviours of the planet, when in fact it contributes a derisory 3.9 percent of greenhouse gas emissions to global warming. Or that deaths from natural disasters are reported to be on the rise, when the global annual death rate from natural disasters has fallen by 99 per cent since the 1920s. Or to deliberately ignore the fact that mortality from a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, is conditioned by the level of economic development, not by climate change. If the hurricane hits a poor and underdeveloped region, the dead may number in the hundreds of thousands, but if it is a prosperous and developed region, the chances are that there will be no fatalities at all.

I could fill pages and pages with references that tell us that the temperature of the planet is indeed rising but that we are not heading for the apocalypse. In fact, the temperature is rising less than expected, which is why, among other ‘strategic’ reasons, the term ‘global warming’ is being replaced by ‘climate emergency.’

This does not mean that we should not act to gradually ensure a balance between progress and the environment, which we have been doing for some time now; but we must approach it through economic development, technology, and, above all, resourcefulness, which are the best tools at our disposal—the ones that have brought us this far safe and sound. We cannot create such a balance by feeding a catastrophism that exudes a suspicious ideological and mercantilist aroma, and which, in addition to killing flies with cannons (with unsustainable costs and pathetic results), is making us sick with fear. And fear, as Edmund Burke warned, is the most ignorant, the most injurious, and the cruelest of counsellors.