We Here Now series
Dispelling DeNihilism
We humans are neither the strongest nor the swiftest of creatures. Up to now we’ve succeeded by being the most adaptable. But resistance to essential changes is now fatally threatening our very survival. How do we move beyond DeNihilism?
Denying reality has its uses. It enables us to live in defiance of the inevitability of our own demise. Denial defies emotional gravity, the certainty that whatever goes up must eventually come down. Researchers have found that those who deny a certain amount of reality tend to be more optimistic and often more successful than those who view the world without rose-tinted glasses. Those who deny the common wisdom of their time often end up achieving breakthroughs because they didn’t know what they were trying to do was impossible.
But denying the clear evidence of science on matters ranging from climate to covid and refusing to acknowledge our own roles in contributing to the cascading crises resulting from these denials is collective suicide. For a substantial portion of Americans this pattern of denial has merged with both religious faith and political ideology to produce catastrophic thinking and behavior. For them denying reality and embracing bizarre superstitions is the chief explanatory doctrine of our time. This self-sabotaging faith might best be termed denialism, a quasi-religious refusal to face the consequences of our actions. Most destructively of all, denialism fatally disables our ability to adapt to new realities, even when effective solutions are available, and instead doubles down on our extinction.
Why would so many of us choose to turn away from life and one another at just the moment when we most need to embrace them? To be clear, not all of us are doing so. The highly adaptive responses of many scientists, technologists, public officials and citizen activists to the unprecedented challenge of climate change in both technological innovation and scientific research constitutes the most comprehensive collaboration in human history. But that story is not penetrating into the mainstream. Instead, large segments of the population both in the U.S. and the rest of the world are being mainlined with the death-dealing drug of denial. This deliberate dissemination of distrust in science and expertise, incontrovertible facts and lived experience leaves many people paralyzed, terrorized and susceptible to those who falsely promise to provide them with ironclad security in exchange for surrendering the evidence of their own eyes.
For humans as for all creatures life has always been a hazardous affair. Only in the postwar era has consumerism offered the seductive promise of both “insured” security and friction-free convenience. But convenience carries its own costs. It has atrophied our ability to adapt to changing circumstances with resilience and resourcefulness. Many of us have unconsciously adopted a learned helplessness in response to a rapidly accumulating cascade of catastrophes caused by our over-dependence on complicated, unstable systems. As those systems begin to collapse we’re gripped by fear and panic. Lacking the practical skills and collective safety nets to cope with this sudden loss of security, many of us revert to fight-or-flight responses. Instead of drawing together to help one another — our only real security — many clamber over one another on our way to the exits. Instead of flexing we freeze up, making our eventual fall all the more devastating.
A Shared Loss of Faith in the Future
Despite vast differences in our responses to this existential crisis, across all political divides we share a loss of faith in the future. “Without a vision the people perish,” warns Ecclesiastes. As ever more extreme uncertainty imperils our personal and common destinies, many of us no longer believe we’re capable of meeting the moment. In this state of despair we react with anxiety and desperation. Finding these emotions unbearable, many off-load responsibility for dealing with the mess we’ve made to others. They turn to would-be tyrants who promise revenge and cynically channel these raw emotions into blame and rage against “cultural elites” they believe — not without a grain of truth — have long scorned them. Others, including some of those who believe climate change is real and human-caused, turn altogether away from politics, where they feel helpless, and take refuge in personal affairs, the only domain in which they feel any sense of agency.
Denialism gives those who resist change a heroic gloss on their refusal to adapt. Like latter-day Confederates’ defiant allegiance to the “Lost Cause,” their adherence to such myths provides an emotional substitute, a false sense of purpose and solidarity in place of a more adaptive and forward-facing path to a more sustainable future. As calamities multiply end-time prophecies proliferate, generating a strange attraction to death itself as a final release from bondage to the relentless struggles of life on earth. The Rapture, an article of faith fervently held by millions of evangelicals who are a key constituency of resistance, promises personal redemption in the final fury of God’s wrath slaying the heathen unbelievers and sending the elect straight to heaven. Ever more calamitous climate disasters appear to them not as a warning to humanity to change our ways but a fulfillment of God’s promise, hastening their righteous final triumph over evil.
Denialism is self-destructive in itself, but it is increasingly accompanied by the still deeper emotional abyss of nihilism, a loss of faith in enduring values and belief in life’s purpose and meaning. The rejection of organized religion and embrace of secularism in the West since the Sixties was initially seen as a liberating force for many who bridled at the staleness of mainstream denominations. But for many cultural traditionalists, the undermining of the church’s stabilizing role in their lives and the caring networks it provided fatally undermined their sense of security and feeling of belonging to a larger protective community.
Meanwhile, a virus of cynicism has infected much of the U.S. leadership class, especially on the right, from its unprincipled billionaires to its political handmaidens, all motivated by greed, avarice and a raw pursuit of power unfettered by all moral constraints. Under the thumb of the supreme amoralist Donald Trump, Republican politicians have become the party of nihilism, not only devoid of values but systematically destroying them in a no-holds-barred strategy of domination with no larger purpose than revenge.
Their denialism is nothing new. It flows like a poisoned river through generations of racism and an adamant refusal to acknowledge the dark sides of American history in chattel slavery, indigenous genocide, and an endless war against nature. As the country finds itself fiercely divided against itself and being rapidly eclipsed by China’s rising power, some cast about for myths to revive its fading glory. Ironically, their resistance to change is impeding the very transformation that is the only viable path to national renewal.
These nihilists are being countered by a vital global community of pragmatic problem-solvers motivated by a faith in the innate value of life and our indissoluble connection to all living things. In some ways it’s the ultimate collision between what Freud called the two primary impulses of all humans — eros and thanatos, love and death. Both exist in all of us and depending on shifting circumstances one or the other becomes the stronger. Now, as a species confronting the prospect either of its own extinction or an endlessly excruciating future, it has become an epic struggle between our fervent yearning to escape from life’s increasingly unendurable difficulties and our instinctive impulse to survive and thrive again through a new relationship with our fellow humans and nature.
An Abundance of Practical Plans and Effective Solutions
For those of us who believe transformative change is not only possible but imperative and who are actively forging paths towards a more sustainable future, there is an abundance of practical plans and effective technologies to make it happen. Many of the best minds on earth are laser-focused on inventing new technologies and strategies to meet the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. Renewable energy is advancing much more rapidly than we anticipated just a few years ago and “smart money” investors are jumping on board in record numbers. But these positive trends are neither recognized nor well reported in mainstream media and many corporations now speaking the language of climate mitigation are engaging in deceptive greenwashing. Indeed, abetted by a smokescreen of oil industry-generated misinformation, many people believe the transition to a carbon-free energy economy is not only impossible but unnecessary.
Moreover, for several decades now every form of entertainment and news has fed us an unrelenting diet of disaster and dystopia. The only vision most people can now imagine is human extinction, and the rest of creation with it. There’s even a bizarre satisfaction among some that we’re about to get what we deserve: “The world will be better off without us.” Many imagine that this extinction will be quick and relatively painless, like turning out the lights. But it would most assuredly be slow and excruciating, even for those who imagine they can buy their way out of the worst of it by migrating to extraterrestrial sanctuaries or hunkering down in luxurious underground bunkers in former missile silos.
What’s holding us back as societies is not our inventiveness but our fossilized habits of mind. We must now evolve in a historical blink of the eye from our reptilian brain stems to our anterior insular cortex, the seat of our capacity for empathy. We’ll learn to thrive together or suffer unendurable isolation in cascading climatic calamities. The choice is just that simple, though the way through is infinitely complex. It will be a heavy lift given our reflexive fight-flight-freeze responses to an increasingly uncertain future, but the forward edges of cultural and spiritual change are already retraining our minds and hearts to become more conscious and compassionate towards one another. The very fierceness of the resistance to change is itself an indicator of the fear among traditionalists that they are losing the struggle. Younger generations raised in the shadow of calamitous change are demanding a different future. While institutional politics reflects a retrograde trajectory, it is the last sector to change. The transformation of culture and technology is already well underway.
Our premature surrender to our own extinction or strange attraction to it runs contrary to who we humans have been throughout our history. In moments of despair we may tell ourselves there’s no hope but in the crunch we usually adapt to survive. Yet we don’t change our minds and behavior by being condemned for who are and what we currently believe nor by being paralyzed by doom loops of climate apocalypse but by gravitating to a compelling vision and practical path to a more attractive alternative. In turn, those of us who have already been persuaded of the imperative to change could be more persuasive of others if we actually lived by our professed convictions.
Denialism and DeNihilism can best be dispelled by giving those fearful of the future better reasons to trust again. The demagogues whose siren songs stoke fear and terror of the future as a means of driving people into their grasp are desperate to sabotage all initiatives to create viable alternatives and slow the gathering momentum for change. This is a moment for boldness. It’s up to those of us who are ready to adopt a more viable path to create a magnetic field of opportunities that make a more promising future not only practical but irresistible.
