How our cognitive defence mechanisms are condemning us to death
By Sebastien Carew-Reid / Deep Green Resistance Australia
Most rational people with even a basic understanding of the scientific process will acknowledge that something is seriously wrong. From climate change and the mass extinction of species, to factory farming and the global violations of human rights, the symptoms should be obvious to anyone brave enough to look. Most will also concede that another few decades of “business as usual” would condemn us to a horrifyingly apocalyptic future.
So considering how adverse to pain, misery and death we all are – and rightly so – these realisations should be providing us with sufficient motivation to bring our collision course with chaos to a swift and permanent halt by any means necessary. Unfortunately this is obviously not the case. In fact, not only are our current environmental movements failing to prevent the accelerating rate of destruction, but upon closer inspection it becomes evident that business is, indeed, continuing as usual. So what’s going on? We have the facts, the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence, and the powerful tools of reason and logic at our disposal – implementing an effective and permanent strategy to save the planet should be the easy part.
Our first problem is that the majority of our current solutions and strategies aren’t addressing or even recognising the root cause of our problems – industrial civilization. If the root cause of a problem isn’t targeted, all efforts are obviously doomed to remain ineffective and temporary solutions at best.
Our second problem is that our persistent failures to acknowledge and implement the only realistic solution available to us lie beyond the reach of reason and logic, deeply embedded in our animal brains. We are, after all, fallible biological creatures, slaves to the natural selection processes that crafted our survival behaviours over millions of years. In this case, the intricate, protective mechanisms of self-deception are to blame. The reality that our way of life requires systematic destruction and death to exist – and therefor needs to be dismantled – is simply too much for us to cope with, and stress hormones trigger a fundamental biological response to restore peace of mind at any cost. The result? We cling to the soothing false hopes that “green” technologies, altering personal consumption habits, or the right political party will somehow save the day.
Writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen likens this deep aversion to life without industrial civilization to the symptoms of an addiction. “We have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it…A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war – or even acknowledge that it’s going on – is that we materially benefit from this war’s plunder. I’m really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet.”
Coming to terms with these realities is deeply traumatic and destabilizing. FMRI studies have shown that this kind of cognitive distress activates the same areas of the brain that light up when we are being physically hurt: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. In one study these regions were activated when people experienced social rejection from peers. In another study these same regions were activated in people looking at photographs of former romantic partners they had recently broken up with. Researchers in Italy found that even witnessing the social pain of another individual activated similar pain responses through empathy.
Our innate aversions to pain of any kind will fuel heroic efforts to minimise it. But to avoid mental anguish in a world where unpleasant realities are ubiquitous, we will inevitably spend a great deal of our lives actively censoring and altering the input of information we encounter. At the first sign that our worldviews and beliefs are being threatened, our mental “immune systems” get to work restoring cognitive comfort by changing the facts and biasing the logic, bringing us peace of mind at a severe cost.
Evolutionary theorist and Harvard professor Robert Trivers explores the science behind these firmly embedded defence mechanisms in his book Deceit and Self-Deception, pointing out that “this is way beyond simple computational error, the problems of subsampling from larger samples, or valid systems of logic that occasionally go awry. This is self-deception, a series of biasing procedures that affect every aspect of information acquisition and analysis. It is systematic deformation of the truth at each stage of the psychological process.” To put it bluntly: we manipulate the truth in order to reduce personal responsibility and validate inaction, condemning our responses to remain inappropriate and ineffective. Trivers points out that “the psychological immune system works not by fixing what makes us unhappy but by putting it in context, rationalizing it, minimizing it, and lying about it…Self-deception traps us in the system, offering at best temporary gains while failing to address real problems.”
When confronted with the very real problem of the environmental collapse our culture is causing, a great deal of self-deception and denial is required to justify inaction and simultaneously preserve a self-image that is ethically sound. In these situations we fall victim to the extensively documented self-deceptive processes of confirmation bias: our tendency to interpret any new information as validation for one’s existing beliefs or theories. In one example, researchers at The University of Michigan and Georgia State University found that when people holding beliefs based on misinformation were presented with corrected facts, not only did they rarely change their minds, but were prone to becoming even more convinced by their faulty views.
We don’t have to look far to see real world examples of this. Every time you encounter someone smoking a cigarette, you are witnessing real-time self-deception mechanisms in action. You simply cannot enjoy an activity while being conscious of the severe harm it is doing to your body, so the decision to continue smoking needs to be rationalized with the deluded justifications we are all familiar with: “I’m just a social smoker,” “I’ll quit before it’s too late,” “those things won’t happen to me.” The same deluded justifications are occurring with climate change deniers, “green” technology advocates, and anyone clinging to the hope that industrial civilization is somehow redeemable to avoid giving up their cosy, bloodstained lifestyles.
If we want any chance of saving what little remains of the natural world, we will need to put our egos and blind optimism aside, take responsibility, and base our actions on reality. As Jensen writes in “Beyond Hope”: “when we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.”
We need to realise that grief and anger are normal emotions when something we love is being threatened or destroyed. These emotions are trying to speak to us. We need to stop burying them in denial and start listening, because they are telling us that a line has been crossed. They are showing us where the limits are for what is ethically acceptable for one species to do to an entire planet. They are exposing the direction our hearts want us to go in, showing us where action is needed for true peace of mind. We need these emotions to fuel our motivations, our drive to never stop fighting for what we love, to never stop fighting for what is right.
We have the solution, we just need to get to work.
Photo by Randy Laybourne on Unsplash
This is an excellent essay.
Except how do you dismantle *industrial civilization*… being as Tim Garrett said….. is a heat engine.
Thank you for you compliment! Dismantling industrial civilization is a very daunting task, however Deep Green Resistance has studied history and past resistance movements as well as military tactics and strategy manuals, and has come up with a strategy – Decisive Ecological Warfare. If you would like to learn more, you can find a detailed description of the stages of the strategy on the Deep Green Resistance website here: http://deepgreenresistance.org/en/deep-green-resistance-strategy/decisive-ecological-warfare
Sebastien, I’d like to suggest looking at this from a slightly different angle, that it is not so much our “humanness” that is the problem here, but that we are running our much older “reptilian,” preconscious thalmic/amygdula alarm and defense system, and that is keeping our truly incredible “human social nervous system” from running the show, both individually and collectively. The best features of the “social nervous system” includes that it is all about mutuality, social cueing that affects our physiology in positive ways, rewarding us for social behavior that is good for the group, and that it enables us to work proactively together INCLUDING with real vision and long term approach. Medical researcher Stephen Porges began to trace the wiring and operation of this myelinated vagal system in 1994 when he found regulatory signals in the vagus that did NOT work together for good, one being a very old system, older than the stress response, which when activated can be very maladaptive in humans, even leading to death when activated. The other, newer system when activated could put one in the best state of function immediately.
This system, the human social nervous system, began developing with the early mammals. It’s almost as if the serious flaws of the “reptilian” stress response system (like how reactivity of that system can intensify to the point of killing us or others even if real threats don’t exist) demanded the evolution of a system that would actually counteract that reptilian system and reward us for being linked to one another, creating greater safety by creating interpersonal feedbacks for collective safety and ability to work together on everything. It isn’t our capacity for thinking that is flawed, it is specifically that thinking doesn’t work well when coupled with a body that is running stress response hardware rather than the social hardware that supports communication. Then we have exactly the issues you are talking about. The amygdula fight/flight system wasn’t built to work with thought, and imposes its own instantaneous us-them worldview which serves a purpose of attacking what it in this very moment (not later) giving any signals of threat. And since the stress response must identify a threat in order to have a direction to attack, or at least watch for threat, it doesn’t really take anything to become the “them” of the “us-them” dynamic. But it’s only really interested in right now–it has no future sense, the very problem you have discussed. Its path of reducing future threats is merely to increase its reactivity, lower the level of input it needs to react with alarm and “fight”—nothing constructive in nature.
There have been societies which fully express this stable connectedness and shared joy of living that is our rightful heritage of this our “social nervous system.” Part of the gift of Stephen Porges’ work is that it gives us a roadmap of what works for us, how we raise ourselves to our higher functioning and work together. I am deeply sorry I have not done this issue justice in my writing here, not shared enough right now. But the activation of the social n. s. is something you are familiar with. Smiling at someone, seeing a smile, a nice voice, nice conversation (not shrill or yelling/shouting tones—these activate the stress response instead—meeting the evolutionary goals of getting word out to the whole group and mobilizing them for temporary fight/flight). The kind of interactions (or even music on your mp3 player) that makes you feel happy, safe, … this is activity that triggers this human system. I have a terrible time constructing sentences without having music playing in my ears, contraction of the middle ear muscles, which helps us hear human voices, being one of the innervations that signals to my system that I’m in social engagement, and rewards me with good feeling, and hey! –capacity to think better, put my words together in constructive sharing, and write about those real things we must work together on to address.
Thank you so much for your important and insightful writing!
Could you please share the source(s) of the Jensen quotes?
Sure thing!
The first quote was taken from an interview with Derrick:
http://www.derrickjensen.org/2006/08/tearing-down-the-masters-house/
The last Derrick quote was talk from his article “beyond hope”: https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/
Perhaps the author thinks that his final paragraphs provide a clear plan for achieving his desired result. It just sounds like “stop being human” to me.
If we learn that aspects of our “human-ness” are not only causing, but preventing us from stopping widespread destruction, death and suffering, then countering those traits and basing decisions on processes other than our “human-ness” would be a big priority, regardless of what it implies for remaining human. Evolutionarily-endowed response habits and instincts are not automatically excused or ethical just because they maximised survival and reproduction 10,000 years ago. With our increasing knowledge of how these problems are being fueled or ignored, finding ways to activley bypass innate cognitive processes that are to blame when making decisions is exactly what we need to start doing.
Confronting, true and urgent!!
Your missing animal agriculture’s major part in the root cause, and this is an even deeper addiction.
Nothing is missing here. Industrial civilization includes industrial agriculture. We cannot just pick one aspect of it as if that will fix our predicament.
Great article! I came up against this type of confirmation bias when I spoke to some really intelligent people in my social circle about how industrial civilization is killing the planet.
When I say “The solution is to take down the social organizing system known as civilization, ” they say, “Naw, we just need to invest in Green Energy!”
When I name the myriad problems with “green” energy, they inevitably argue that we “need” energy. When I point out that humans have survived for 200,000 years without electricity, and have indeed had it for only 100 years, and that lots of people the world over still don’t have it, they say, “Yeah, but…we just need it.”
They inevitably revert to the logic of a 5-year-old, only a 5-year old would easily see the that if something we are doing is bad for everyone on the planet, we should stop it.
I was beginning to think I was just lousy at persuading people. It is true that living with the knowledge that civilization is killing the planet hurts, if you’re one of the people who accepts the truth. I had to start taking antidepressants just so I could function day-to-day. I don’t mean so I could go back to thinking nothing’s wrong. I mean so that I can actually work effectively in the Aboveground Resistance.
Still, it is really hard to talk about the need to take down civilization when it seems like everyone is against the idea. It takes confidence and bravery, the very things this culture steals from us with its traumas and conditioning.
I was recently shot down by a longtime activist for bringing up the need for people to take down infrastructure. This was just in a casual conversation. Talk about the physical pain of being socially rejected! This person basically sneered at me for bringing up radical ideas because clearly, I didn’t know “how all this activism stuff works”.
The point is that aboveground activism will never work if it doesn’t support an underground willing to take this system apart, byte by byte, kilowatt by kilowatt. Thank you, Sebastien and DGR, for all that you do.
have you read ‘the Watchmen’s rattle’ by rebecca costa? She uses evolutionary biology to analyse why we don’t do anything about climate change, why we can’t even face it. It is interesting. She says that human’s brain evolves very very slowly, but in the modern world events change so quickly, technology gallops, and our brains have not evolved sufficiently to meet the challenge.
Sorry, but the Deep Green Resistance recipe is one for disaster. It ignores some very basic realities. I have discussed these with Derrick before, but he dismisses my critiques despite them being consistent with everything about sustainability, resource limits, regenerative design, natural principles, echoing the thoughts of both Einstein and Bucky Fuller. More importantly, simple reality and risk assessment.
The key flaw in DGR’s militancy is not the long-term view, but the means. DGR assumes peace cannot achieve simplicity, but the better question is how violence does? When has it ever? It rarely results in better than what came before. If we destroy the infrastructure, the systems we have today, we have to recreate a functional society from ruins, which is a waste of time and energy. Then there’s the time it takes to fight and win this war against a technologically superior foe who is very happy to wipe out the poor and the activist. There is a reason protest is now illegal throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world.
But you beat this by starving it, not feeding it bodies. I developed a model for a regenerative future in 2011/12. Shortly after this I came across a Buckminster Fuller quote that perfectly encapsulated my idea that we must opt out of the current paradigm by opting into and building a better one.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – B. Fuller
The current system is utterly dependent on the flow of taxes and growth of the economy. A mere 20% contraction is a depression. Beyond that is deep crisis. All we have to do is stop buying shit, stop having incomes. It is that simple. There is no need to fight their armies when we can fight their dollar dispensers instead.
Save the militancy for claiming Commonses and defending those. Start with creating neighborhood, town, city and bio-regional General Assemblies (or whatever term you like) that will slowly replace existing governance as the system fails. Start with neighborhoods and build the regenerative structures that will allow you to resist: Food, water capture, shelter. As a community, eventually. Be the 1st if you must.
Begin by solving community issues together without gov’t assistance. In time, insist on autonomy, then declare your Commons. There is no static time line for this, and, yes, it will require physical, non-violent resistance, so direct opposition and claiming the Commons need to be prepped by creating those physical structures that prevent gov’t from taking the means of survival. In the short term, work on chamging local food laws, reinstate neighborhood councils, but keep them autonomous.
Learn permaculture, et. al., community-wide and start creating your resilient community.
Etc.