In this episode, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson talks with Michael Schellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never, why environmental alarmism hurts us all. Throughout this conversation, you may be introduced to an entirely new perspective on environmentalism and climate change. Dr. Peterson and Michael also discuss Michael s recent book on how progressive policies lead to increases in homelessness, inequality, as well as make crime worse. You ll also be hearing Dr. B.P. s thoughts on the only cure to alcoholism, and how personal responsibility might be the most effective way to impact the environment. If you enjoyed this episode please remember to hit subscribe and hit SUBSCRIBE. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. To learn more about our sponsorships and how you can support our efforts to make the world a better place for everyone, visit our sponsorredeem.me/greenbookawesome. We make great products that last longer than three months on average and are more than twice as good as the competition on average. We make the quality of our products is better than any other major brand in the market, and we make them more affordable than they can hope to give you the chance to win a chance to own a piece of their own copy of Green Book Award or a copy of the book they're working on the book that they're reading for you'll get in the next episode of Greenbook Award or they're going to review? We make it all that they'll be working on, too they'll get it in the best of it, they'll know how they'll review it too will they'll hear you'll be able to do it, it's all they'll see in the place they'll have it's best of that will get it, and they'll also get it's chance to help you'll hear it's a good thing, they've got it's good, they're got it all will be it's it's really they'll say it's amazing, it'll really will be that it's that it'll also they'll really have it, you'll also have it will really hear it, that's it, will have it at it's real it's actually it's truly it's them, it really will it really it's also that it will it will also it's not that it really really it really is it really they're it really them, they will really it, really they will it actually they'll it really has it,
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00:00:53.880Welcome to Season 4, Episode 51 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.
00:00:58.240Michaela currently has no voice, so this is Eric Foster, Media Director here at Luminate, to read the intro and the ads.
00:01:05.360In this episode, Dr. Peterson talks with Michael Schellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
00:01:13.360Throughout this conversation, you may be introduced to an entirely new perspective on environmentalism and climate change.
00:01:18.820Jordan and Michael also discuss Michael's recent book on how progressive policies lead to increases in homelessness, inequality, as well as make crime worse.
00:01:28.840You'll also be hearing Dr. Peterson's thoughts on the only cure to alcoholism and how personal responsibility might be the most effective way to impact the environment.
00:01:37.520If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to hit subscribe.
00:02:14.980It was full of stories, so it was fun to read.
00:02:18.300Each chapter is extremely densely packed with information, but embedded in a really compelling micro-narratives that make up a really nice narrative across the whole book.
00:02:27.620It's counterintuitive, it's full of information, it's full of information you wouldn't expect, it's very optimistic in its tone, despite being realistic, it's practical, sensible, it's a hell of a thing to accomplish.
00:02:43.340He's also the author of the forthcoming book, San Francisco.
00:02:48.620He's a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and Green Book Award winner.
00:02:52.520He's also founder and president of Environmental Progress based in Berkeley, California, and I thought today we'd probably center our discussion around this book, Apocalypse Never, although I'd also like to talk a bit about San Francisco.
00:03:07.640So what does it mean that you're a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment, and what's a Green Book Award winner?
00:03:14.640Well, thanks for having me on, Jordan.
00:03:16.360Yeah, those awards were given in 2008 for the first book I did, which was co-authored.
00:03:22.520And it's a book, it was a book called Breakthrough from the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.
00:03:28.460And there's parts of that book I still really agree with.
00:03:31.380One of the themes of my work is that environmentalism is depressing.
00:03:39.980I think that's now being proven quite dramatically with rising levels of anxiety and depression and reports by schoolchildren around the world that they were having nightmares about climate change.
00:03:49.100You may know that half of all people surveyed say that they think climate change could result in the extinction of humankind.
00:03:55.540My views have evolved over the years, but I've always viewed apocalyptic environmentalism as a problem for people that care about saving nature, for people that, for everybody.
00:04:07.120And so those awards came from that prior book.
00:04:11.260Yeah, well, the environmental activism issue is interesting because, at least in part, because it also, it seems to me, interferes with sensible policymaking.
00:04:20.560So it's actually self-defeating in a profound sense.
00:04:24.020I mean, first of all, it gets people hyper-worried about extremely vaguely formulated problems, distracts them from what the prioritized issues might be.
00:04:34.500And, well, it's hard to think clearly about what steps to take to move forward when you're panicking in a vague and unpleasant manner.
00:04:43.740So, and that is, you do not do that in Apocalypse, never.
00:04:46.680That's one of the things I really liked about it was that in each subchapter, you drill down, at least to some degree, to the level of actually, actual implementable policy.
00:04:56.280So you start with a story about this group and, no, I should ask you first, who are you exactly to write such a book?
00:05:01.720Like, why do you know this, and why should people listen to you?
00:05:22.800First, I quit my PhD program in the 1990s because the program had become too postmodern and abstruse.
00:05:29.020The first big essay I wrote was called The Death of Environmentalism.
00:05:32.620And then I mentioned the book Breakthrough.
00:05:34.860I mean, you may find interesting that, you know, my father is a very humanistic psychologist in the same tradition of work that you are in, or I see us in.
00:05:43.120And I knew that environmentalism was making me depressed, like climate change was depressing me.
00:05:50.500And that, and so one of the famous lines from The Death of Environmentalism, which was an essay in 2004, was Martin Luther King didn't give the I Have a Nightmare speech.
00:06:01.060And we wrote that because I was reading, I would read books about the civil rights movement, and I would feel inspired by these stories of heroic overcoming.
00:06:09.540And then I would read books by Bill McKibben and other environmentalists, and I would feel depressed.
00:06:14.940And I thought, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating to make positive social change.
00:06:20.780Yeah, you kind of wonder, you kind of wonder, too, and this is since we're talking about psychological issues, is that it's possible, too, that that kind of apocalyptic thinking is much more difficult for people to escape when they are, in fact, depressed.
00:06:35.960And so it's very difficult to separate out political beliefs from, let's say, emotional state.
00:06:43.480And so, so that's an interesting issue in and of itself.
00:06:47.600You know, people might object, well, you know, the crisis is so gloomy, if you're a realist, that of course you're depressed.
00:06:55.120And it should be the case, because, you know, look how depressing the facts are.
00:07:00.080But that strikes me as, well, it kind of puts the cart before the horse in some sense.
00:07:05.880It's like, are you sure the crisis is of that proportion?
00:07:08.760And then are you sure that depressing people is precisely the way to go about it?
00:07:12.820And then last thing there may be is, I couldn't shake the suspicion, especially in relationship to environmentalism, that it's contaminated quite badly with, like, historical shame and guilt and a certain kind of profound anti-humanism.
00:07:31.520You know, I've heard environmentalists say something like, well, the planet would be better off, as if it was a being in some sense, if there were no people on it.
00:07:40.620It's like, yeah, well, I'm not so sure I trust people who say things like that and then don't notice.
00:07:49.560Yeah, I mean, one of the things I stumbled across, I mean, at the end of the apocalypse, never in the False Gods for Lost Souls chapter, I talk about how I myself was depressed at a period when I was drawn towards apocalyptic environmentalism.
00:08:02.440So I think there's an interesting question of, is apocalyptic environmentalism depressing, or are depressed people attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism, or both, of course.
00:08:12.760I stumbled across the work of Aaron Beck, who, you know, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the founders, and I was struck that the three structures of depressed people that he identified, I'm a terrible person, the world is a terrible place, and the future is bleak, that that's the exact same three structures of the every environmental narrative.
00:08:35.680So every environmental narrative is that humans are terrible, cancer on the planet, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the future is nigh, you know, the end is nigh.
00:08:46.140Yeah, well, so that's a very interesting observation, especially in relationship to your comments about school children, and so perhaps driving those three axioms home, you know, emphatically and forcefully isn't the wisest thing to be doing to young children, and the fact of that overlap with depressive thinking.
00:09:05.700I mean, Beck's no small figure in the history of psychological thinking, he's also extraordinarily practical, as is cognitive behavioral therapy, and it also, as a, what would you say, as a psychological philosophy, or as a branch of medicine even, one of the things the cognitive behaviorists are really, really good at, and I did this in my clinical practice, is to take those vague depressive apprehensions, and then break them down into micro-problems that can actually be addressed,
00:09:34.980and that's much less, and that's much less depressing. It's like, well, exactly why is the future so depressing as far as you're concerned? Like, in some detail, not vague.
00:09:45.280Look, if you're going to run away from something because it hurts and it's dangerous, it doesn't really matter if you have a vague conception of it, right? But if you're going to face it and confront it and solve it, let's say, then you can't be vague about it, and that's also good for your mental health.
00:10:01.200That approach orientation is directly linked biochemically and neurophysiologically to positive emotion, so the process of decomposing these terrible abstract problems into solvable micro-problems actually facilitates positive emotion and suppresses anxiety.
00:10:18.320And so it is very interesting overlap there, and it's worth thinking about.
00:10:21.880Look, I viewed writing, I viewed Apocalypse Never as cognitive behavioral therapy, both for myself and for other people, and in fact, the highest praise I received from people is people who told me that they were very depressed about the environment, and then they read Apocalypse Never, and they felt much better.
00:10:37.320And so I think you have to do both things, like, as you pointed out, cognitive behavioral therapy require his, you know, Beck's therapy was, you have to be very concrete about why you're a good person, why the world is a good place, and why the future is bright.
00:10:51.340You have to be very specific about it.
00:10:53.240It has to be very, it has to be evidence-based.
00:11:00.120Oh, that's so interesting, because I wouldn't have, I certainly didn't get that sense reading the book, you know, that it, although you could also,
00:11:07.320although, illuminating the fact that the problems that beset us globally and individually are actually actionable and aren't so dismal when you look at them in detail, and are also complex in weirdly interesting ways,
00:11:23.020it's not surprising that has positive psychological consequences.
00:11:26.660I mean, I certainly was pleased, for example, by your discussion of plastics.
00:11:31.040You know, I've been following the work of this Dutch kid, I don't remember his name, but he's built this gadget for gathering plastic, which is quite cool,
00:11:40.080and, and I didn't know that the evidence for the decomposition of plastics was as robust as you describe in the book,
00:11:50.400That's, that's, that's, that's a positive thing to see, and I saw many examples of that in the book, that, that things aren't as bad as we think.
00:11:58.720So let's go through that, let's start, you start talking about this group, I think it's a UK group, Extinction Rebellion,
00:12:04.580and I kind of see them in some sense as the forerunners of where we might go if we regard the impending climate catastrophe
00:12:12.380as a doom and gloom laden existential crisis.
00:12:16.360It's like, man, half the people on the planet are going to die, no solution is too drastic.
00:12:24.320Okay, so that's Extinction Rebellion in some sense, so maybe you could tell the story about that.
00:12:29.420I was going to say, they say, no, no solution is too drastic, unless it's nuclear energy, in which case they're against it,
00:12:35.940or in case it's fracking, in which case they're against that too.
00:12:39.460And I get at that right away, which is that why are the people who are the most apocalyptic,
00:12:43.120the most dead set against the things that have reduced carbon emissions, natural gas and nuclear,
00:12:49.520by far the two things that have reduced carbon emissions the most,
00:12:52.000instead they're in favor of things that don't work, adding a lot of unreliable renewables onto your grid,
00:12:58.820making electricity expensive, making societies less resilient to climate change.
00:13:04.480Those are all high priorities for the apocalyptic environmental movement.
00:13:53.040I think that as Europe's power has faded, they've become more demanding to take control of the
00:13:58.060international economy in the name of climate change.
00:14:00.920And then the third chapter kind of says, you know, those are both important motivations,
00:14:04.640but there's something else going on, which is that apocalyptic environmentalism is clearly a religious movement.
00:14:10.320Everything about it, the guilt, the original sin, the apocalypse, the obsession with food,
00:14:20.520you know, various things about it are clearly a religion, and I'm hardly the first to make that observation.
00:14:25.960I document, in fact, there's actually good empirical work documenting that.
00:14:28.980And so I see the, you know, rising secularization, what Nietzsche called the death of God,
00:14:35.020and the nihilistic vacuum that would be created in its wake as really the underlying engine for apocalyptic environmentalism.
00:14:42.360It's a way to give meaning to the world.
00:14:46.180So, you know, I'm writing a new book, which is going to be called We Who Wrestle with God.
00:14:50.800And it, obviously, we're thinking along the same lines, and for some of the same reasons,
00:14:57.840in that there's this adage in the New Testament that warns people that they should deliver unto God that which is God,
00:15:06.340and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.
00:15:08.140And, of course, on that statement is built the notion that separation of church and state is actually appropriate.
00:15:14.000But I also think that's true psychologically, and this is part of the problem I have with the new atheist movement,
00:15:19.120or that if you don't have a domain that's sacred and rituals and to deal,
00:15:27.080and some understanding that there are deepest values, and that's the domain of the sacred, whether you like it or not,
00:15:33.300you obliterate that in the name of rationality, and all that happens is that things that are Caesar's now become contaminated with the religious,
00:16:03.940And I came back to my Christianity in writing Apocalypse Never, but it was also, I also became convinced that by Jonathan Haidt and others that having faith was rational.
00:16:18.440So, you know, that it's actually psychologically healthy to have a faith.
00:16:22.100And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith, and that unlocked the,
00:16:30.080I couldn't finish Apocalypse Never actually until I had done that.
00:16:32.780No, I wouldn't have guessed that again from reading the book, because that isn't obvious, just as the psychological issue wasn't obvious.
00:16:41.040And I think that's a really good thing, by the way.
00:16:43.040That should all be implicit in the book rather than explicit.
00:16:46.240It makes for a better, a less cluttered book, let's say.
00:16:49.940I wanted, yeah, I mean, some of my best allies, Stephen Pinker, Michael Shermer, are in the New Atheist Movement,
00:17:01.540And Steve also blurbed my new book, San Francisco.
00:17:05.080And so San Francisco, and then I'm doing a third book afterwards.
00:17:07.300And all three books are basically about the threats to civilization from within,
00:17:14.000and that they're, and they all conclude, San Francisco looks at the religious,
00:17:18.300religious, the secular religion of compassion, and how it's gone completely crazy to basically result in greater victimization in the name of rescuing victims.
00:17:30.380And so I'm definitely after, I think we're after the same big prey here, which is, you know,
00:17:37.100the threats to civilization are coming from the most civilized members of society who are also the most secular members of,
00:17:45.680or they think they're the most secular members of society, and they're projecting their needs for,
00:20:43.220So, and this is also in my new book, which is why are the main advocates for action on the issue opposed to the obvious solutions,
00:20:54.400the solutions that have worked, that have proven to work?
00:20:57.340And so, yes, for sure, because their motivation is to destroy the whole system.
00:21:01.260They view the system as the cause of the problem, and they view anything that distracts attention from destroying what they view as an evil system,
00:21:10.100as in some ways participating in the system.
00:21:14.200Yeah, I've seen that sort of thinking really destroy people, too.
00:21:17.420Like, I've seen people literally take their own lives because they thought that way.
00:21:21.940They felt they were so corrupt that any ambitious achievement whatsoever in the service of this evil structure was ethically forbidden.
00:21:31.740And so, it's kind of, it's like the ultimate in pessimistic, nihilistic Buddhism.
00:21:36.180And it's also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does, in fact, characterize clinical depression.
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00:26:27.600I mean, one of the things, I talk about how Greta Thunberg, the Swedish youth climate activist, condemned nuclear power as dangerous, unnecessary, and too expensive.
00:26:38.440Well, since when does she care about too expensive?
00:26:40.480I mean, she's demanding basically that we, you know, grind economic growth to a halt in order to reduce carbon emissions.
00:26:48.620You know, she condemns basically any modest progress as inadequate, and yet she comes out against the source of power, the zero carbon source of power that provides 40% of the electricity in her own country.
00:27:01.020When our allies in Germany have been speaking out to stop Germany from shutting down its last six nuclear reactors, reached out to her to get her to say something, she wouldn't do it.
00:27:11.360So the problem is solving the problem gets in the way of the alarmism.
00:27:15.340The alarmism isn't just, I think journalists and others misunderstand the alarmism.
00:27:20.720They think it's a tactic to achieve some end.
00:27:23.100And so one of the things I would get from journalists is they would say, come on, Michael, don't you think that it's important to exaggerate climate change a little bit in order to get action?
00:27:31.840Well, first of all, there's no evidence that exaggerating the problem gets more action.
00:27:41.560No lying, especially about something important.
00:27:44.640I mean, it's notable that it comes from journalists who have become propagandists, effectively.
00:27:49.160And so the alarmism is the goal, like the goal is the alarmism.
00:27:54.200Yeah, well, it, okay, so let's, let's, okay, so let's dig down here in a little bit.
00:27:59.220So part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant, what he described and predicted was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest unifying value.
00:28:11.980Okay, so it's become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value, and we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value.
00:28:24.260And there has to be something at the top to unite us.
00:28:26.820Now, it isn't obvious what should be at the top.
00:28:28.740In fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images.
00:28:33.720We're not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it.
00:28:37.440And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top.
00:28:42.500Now, let's say it dies because it's God, and it got too abstract.
00:28:46.200Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, said that that happened many times in our history, that the top value got so abstract it got disembodied, and people didn't know what it was anymore, how to act it out, or what it meant, and so it floated away.
00:28:57.880And then collapse into competing, competing claims about what should be the highest value.
00:29:04.460Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion.
00:29:10.760Well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value?
00:29:13.360Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about.
00:29:16.540I think there's some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value, perhaps.
00:29:22.260There's truth and beauty, many other issues.
00:29:25.120Okay, so the highest value collapse, we're not united anymore.
00:29:28.620Well, then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be.
00:29:32.220And since it's about the highest value now, now I have an idea, it's saving the environment, that's the highest value.
00:29:38.920Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal.
00:29:45.300And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance.
00:29:51.380And so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either.
00:29:55.620And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have.
00:29:58.820Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that's a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement.
00:30:05.200So, because you're just not going to solve both of those problems at the same time.
00:30:09.180You want to dispense with capitalism, invent an entire new economic system, and save the planet.
00:30:14.820Part of the problem is that they're not actually sincere about it.
00:30:20.040So they would suggest nature is the highest value.
00:30:22.440But when you say, okay, well, here's what you could do to save nature, fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors for poor countries.
00:30:29.040So they can take the pressure off the forests, which is where the gorillas and the nature is.
00:30:34.260Using oil rather than whale oil to save the whales.
00:30:37.360And using nuclear power and natural gas.
00:30:39.320No, no, they don't want to do any of those things.
00:30:41.060So there is a nihilism there in the sense that the goal is power itself.
00:30:46.640Now, there's also no such thing as nature.
00:31:57.300And it outlines the entire domain of symbolism of the positive feminine.
00:32:01.620And so you do see this religious struggle between those who are now advocates of the positive feminine and detractors of the negative masculine.
00:32:19.220I mean, one of the interesting shifts that's occurred, even in my own career as an environmentalist, is that all of the stuff from like the ecotopia, the utopianism, the green utopianism, the renewal, I mean, the harmony with nature, the kind of we're all going to live in these small, self-sustaining kind of anarchist communities, the Ewok village sort of picture.
00:32:55.380You certainly see with renewables, the picture of renewables is somehow harmonizing us with the natural world.
00:33:00.220But it's nothing like what it was in the 70s.
00:33:02.840Nothing like Earth Day was actually mostly positive.
00:33:05.260I have a lot of criticism of Earth Day, but it was a mostly positive picture.
00:33:09.040So what's striking to me is the disappearance of even that positive picture from apocalyptic environmentalism.
00:33:14.520I wouldn't have predicted that apocalyptic environmentalism could sustain itself with such a single polarity without this much more positive, romantic utopianism, which was really even there.
00:33:27.440It was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but it's somehow gone.
00:33:30.940So you don't get that picture from Greta Thunberg.
00:33:33.420Well, depression, depression can be all consuming, you know, and and and, you know, another thing Jung pointed out very blatantly, he said, well, what's really going to threaten us?
00:33:44.340He wrote about this in the 1950s is unexamined psychic epidemics.
00:33:49.900And he meant psychological epidemics and their effect on the political structure, because he thought, well, we've become the most powerful force on the planet.
00:33:57.260And now our unrecognized psychological, what would you call them?
00:34:14.220You were attracted to just a quick note on that.
00:34:15.820You were attracted to the plastics chapter.
00:34:18.280I don't think I, I didn't quite get there.
00:34:20.240I didn't, my thinking hadn't quite advanced enough, but I kept finding behaviors that seemed very similar to obsessive compulsive disorder, orienting around plastic waste.
00:34:29.700Cases of people who were like, just, they had to go out and clean up the waste.
00:34:37.260You know, it's an obsession where it's like the waste has to be in the right containers.
00:34:41.540And people get very upset when you don't have it on the right containers.
00:34:44.680And this insistence, of course, also, there's something around sustainability as a denial of death.
00:34:49.880You know, I rely on Ernest Becker's great work on the denial of death here, where it's, we got to have sustainability, sustainability creating an immortality project for people.
00:34:59.020And then I show, of course, that the problem is these efforts to recycle plastic waste have completely backfired because we don't, it doesn't make sense economically to recycle plastics.
00:35:09.060You should recycle aluminum paper, tin cans, aluminum cans, but plastics should go in the landfill or be incinerated because they're already a byproduct of petrochemical industry.
00:35:24.020The effort to recycle those plastics meant that because it didn't make sense economically, the recycling companies would ship all of that, all that plastic waste to poor countries where they would end up in the oceans.
00:35:36.620I mean, this is one of the most tragic and almost, I wish I could say tragic comic, but it's like we, it's not just like.
00:35:43.160Now, plastic is really interesting in relationship to OCD.
00:35:46.520You know, I had clients who were particularly obsessive about plastic containers, you know, yogurt containers and that sort of thing.
00:35:52.880Because when you have OCD, and this also often happens to people as they age as well and can't make the difficult decisions about when something is no longer useful, you know, so their house gets cluttered up with things that hypothetically you could use.
00:36:07.440And the one person I'm thinking of, he had great ethical inability.
00:36:14.000He had an inability on ethical grounds to throw out yogurt containers, for example, because while you could use them to store something in your fridge, and there's, so there is an OCD element to that that's interesting.
00:36:24.960It's an orderliness, which is an element of conscientiousness that's gone astray, and that is associated with disgust sensitivity.
00:36:31.680So that's interesting, because you also talked about disgust sensitivity in relationship to vegetarianism, which is also something that nobody has really examined, interestingly enough.
00:36:41.380One of the fun parts of Apocalypse Never is that I had never worked on plastics or meat, and they were totally brand new subjects for me.
00:36:49.520And they are the chapters that people have responded most strongly towards, and they were the most fun for me to write.
00:36:55.880You know, and so on the meat chapter, I discovered this paper by these Italian psychologists, who I interviewed, where they said, look, they said, what's going on with vegetarians, not all of them, but a lot of them, is that they view eating meat as the contamination of their bodily purity with the essence of death.
00:37:15.420And I was just like, well, that just, I mean, there you go. I mean, it has it all, right? All the denial of death stuff.
00:37:21.340Well, it is death, too. Those animals die, you know? I mean, it's more than a mere symbolic association, and it's part, again, part of that existential guilt that we all suffer from, too, because our life is based on death.
00:37:32.920I heard a comedian the other day, I don't remember who it was, someone harsh like Bill Burr, probably, who said, you know, I realized the other day that every day something has to die just so I can live, you know?
00:37:45.200And yeah, exactly. And that's a non-trivial, and that's part of the horror of nature that Ernest Becker is actually quite good at detailing.
00:37:52.760And that's a great book, although I think it's profoundly flawed, but it's still a great book.
00:37:58.140I'm curious. I'd love to know how you think it's flawed.
00:38:00.740Because he thought that every reaction to the reality of death was, in some sense, neurotic.
00:38:08.220There was no non-neurotic way of responding, and these hero projects were all failures, in some sense.
00:38:13.760And so he's a real Freudian. Interestingly enough, in the introduction to Becker's book, which I read very carefully, he attempted to bring closure to the psychology of religion.
00:38:25.700So that's what Becker was up to. And he said, you might be, the reader might be surprised that I don't discuss any of Jung's work on alchemy in a book that attempts to bring closure to the psychology of religion.
00:38:37.080But then he says, well, he couldn't understand what Jung was getting at, and just didn't go there.
00:38:42.560And I thought, well, you made a huge mistake, because the solution to the problem that you've so eloquently described is actually in all of that work.
00:38:49.240And that has something to do with, well, it's too complicated to get into.
00:38:53.260But Eric Neumann wrote a book called The Origins and History of Consciousness, which is his other great work, which is a real antidote to Becker.
00:39:00.720And I say that with all due respect, because Becker's book was great.
00:39:03.960So it's really worth knowing about that other book, because it's a pathway out of the darkness.
00:39:09.100And Camille Pellia mentioned to me at one point that she thought that if English literature departments would have followed Neumann, who she was very much aware of,
00:39:18.280instead of Derrida and Foucault, that the whole history of the development of universities in the West would have been altered.
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01:07:31.880But technically, and that's low serotonin.
01:07:34.360That's partly why people hate to have their status challenge.
01:07:37.100Because status, the higher you are in status, the better the serotonin system is at dampening the response to punishment.
01:07:46.100Because it assumes the environment is safer.
01:07:48.480So those are all necessary things to know when you're thinking about your own thinking, you know.
01:07:54.200There seems like there's another part of that depression sequence, which is also like, somehow the world is to blame for me failing to get my wife something for her birthday.
01:08:02.120There's some sort of external, like, well, I should have had a, you know, something you're looking for.
01:08:07.620So the depressed person goes, there's something wrong with the environment.
01:08:11.940Yeah, well, one of the things that also happens in depression is an increase in volatility.
01:08:17.120And volatility is tightly associated with anger.
01:08:19.800And it's underdiagnosed by physicians because depressed people tend only to be volatile to people who are lower than them in the status hierarchy.
01:08:29.340And so they'll be perfectly fine in the doctor's office, but they'll snap at their children or their wives and externalize some of that.
01:09:23.960We've I mean, we have a lot of reasons why.
01:09:26.460But basically, we know that, you know, if one if two countries got rid of the nuclear weapons and then went to war, the first thing they would do is reconstruct their nuclear weapons.
01:09:35.180So then we displaced our or scapegoat our fears of nuclear weapons onto nuclear power plants.
01:09:42.680And so the move they see the pro nuclear, the anti nuclear movement makes this shift in the 70s where they stop trying to I mean, they don't totally stop, but they know they can't get rid of nuclear weapons.
01:09:54.640So they start to try to get rid of nuclear power plants.
01:09:56.700And I thought that was one of the most interesting cases of kind of collective displacement.
01:10:01.800I interviewed folks about it and asked if it was conscious.
01:10:05.400And they everyone said, no, it wasn't like they had a meeting and said, we can't get rid of nuclear weapons.
01:10:09.940So we're gonna get rid of nuclear power plants.
01:10:11.580But I think it's clearly what was going on.
01:10:13.500And I see I now see displacement, which I think we can can call scapegoating, maybe fairly in a lot of different circumstances where people are some of its lack of clarity of thinking, right.
01:10:25.720And that goes along with that depressive tendency is, well, are nuclear power plants linked to nuclear weapons?
01:10:34.720So there's that linkage, you need nuclear power plants to build nuclear weapons.
01:10:38.720And so, you know, and that's all bad, because it's apocalyptic and malevolent, and fair enough.
01:10:43.640But again, you need discrimination in thinking.
01:10:46.780And we're also at a point where we think discrimination is always a bad thing when it all it is, in its positive guise, is the ability to separate out what isn't good from what is good.
01:11:06.980You know, I think there's also, I interviewed a close friend who is not totally convinced of the roles of nuclear.
01:11:17.560And I said, it sounds like part of what you're upset about with nuclear is that nuclear weapons have stabilized relations between nations.
01:11:27.140You know, political scientists call it deterrence, create a peace between nations, not just the US and the Soviet Union, but we now see it with India and Pakistan.
01:11:35.320And that really, that peace was created through a bomb rather than through rationality and brotherly love.
01:11:44.720And she was a very sophisticated person.
01:11:49.100Of course, that's depressing that it was the bomb that achieved peace rather than rationality.
01:11:55.820Well, it's not that depressing because partly, look, I think around 1983, we all made a collective decision that things were good enough so we shouldn't blow ourselves up.
01:12:06.300I think that was lurking under the surface ever since World War II.
01:12:10.560It's like, well, maybe we should just call the whole thing off and burn everything to the ground, you know.
01:12:15.640And you see that, you think, oh, no, that didn't happen.
01:12:18.360It's like, well, these people like Stalin and Hitler, like I really think Hitler's fundamental motivation was to see Europe destroyed and in flames.
01:12:25.960He got exactly what, you know, world domination and utopia for Germany.
01:12:30.780Well, look, there's this psychoanalytic adage.
01:12:34.540If you don't understand the motivation, look at the consequences and infer the motivation.
01:12:38.860Hitler committed suicide in a bunker while Berlin burned and Europe was in flames.
01:12:42.660It's like, yeah, that's pretty much exactly what he was aiming for.
01:14:01.440Now, what happened when the Cold War ends in the late 80s, early 90s.
01:14:05.460It happened a bit because even people like Stellan, who was pretty much as bad as you could get and still be human, didn't blow everything up.
01:14:16.660So, so that is, like, in some sense, there's some non-trivial brotherly love and rationality still operating, even in the most, right, right?
01:14:38.060Yeah, it turns out that these, these lead, when we call, we call, you know, we, everybody, when they get the bomb, when a country gets the bomb, or they're about to get the bomb, one of the things that we say, Americans say, is we say, well, we can't let them get the bomb because they're suicidal.
01:14:51.240If Kim Jong-un gets the bomb in North Korea, well, he'll, he's suicidal.
01:14:55.960Well, that turned out not to be the case.
01:14:57.260You know, so I think that, I think, yes, I think you're absolutely right.
01:15:04.440And, you know, and I would just add to, you know, it was like, when the Cold War ends, and the threat of nuclear war goes to very much lower than what it had been, the people who wanted something to see apocalypse in shifted from nuclear weapons to climate change, that that's when it occurred.
01:15:23.300And it's one of the things that's difficult to prove, but it is notable that climate emerges as the new apocalyptic threat, when the threat of nuclear war declined significantly.
01:15:32.440Yeah, well, there is something deep about that, too.
01:15:35.820I mean, it's not, it's not accidental that the Bible has an apocalyptic book at the end of it.
01:15:43.840It's like this idea that everything could end and that everything could fall apart.
01:15:49.840You have apocalypses in your life all the time, and it's very daunting to think about that.
01:15:55.660It's hard not to fall into a pit while you're thinking about that.
01:15:58.360And so we do have to have a serious discussion about how to protect ourselves against unwarranted apocalyptic thinking.
01:16:06.020That's all playing out, too, with the COVID issue at the moment.
01:16:09.200So human psychological frailties, we have to take them seriously because we're a planetary force.
01:16:16.800Absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, I cite this incredible book by Václav Smil, who's one of Bill Gates' advisors, where he actually does look at the different apocalyptic threats.
01:16:29.500And what he comes up with as the biggest ones, and it changed my mind, too, I think he's right.
01:16:33.460He's like much more worried about asteroids, wars, influenzas, and super volcanoes than climate change when you look at both probability and severity.
01:16:44.840We should take, but I became a much, I'm a big, I would like to see more money going into asteroid collision prevention when you really look at the history of asteroids.
01:16:55.320But yeah, we should also guard against clearly unwarranted apocalyptic thinking.
01:17:00.180I mean, you know, the truth of the matter is when you really look at the science of climate change, there isn't, and the IPCC, to its credit, does not include any apocalyptic scenarios.
01:17:09.940There isn't a good scientific scenario for how the world would end from climate change.
01:17:14.560Like, you just have a hard time coming up with one.
01:17:16.460So you should say that again, because that's quite a striking statement.
01:17:20.160In the IPCC reports, there's no apocalyptic vision.
01:17:27.100They don't even say, when they say more people could die from climate change, what they are actually saying is they say, if all else were equal, meaning if you didn't have climate change and you had the same high levels of economic growth.
01:17:43.100But natural disasters have declined over 90% of the last 100 years, they've declined 99% in places like Bangladesh, just through better storm warning systems and storm shelters.
01:17:53.120There is no prediction in the IPCC that more people will die in the future from natural disasters than die today.
01:18:00.660There is no scientific body that has predicted an increase of deaths from natural disasters or an increase of deaths from disease or the other things that people worry about with climate change.
01:18:10.960It's all based on some idea that, yes, in a warmer world, you could get more deaths than you would get if you didn't have any warming at all.
01:18:20.220But that's, first of all, not even an option.
01:18:22.460And it doesn't account for the fact that the additional warming is a byproduct of higher levels of growth, which would...
01:18:27.800Right, which is going to mitigate all of that damage and hopefully have positive environmental consequences.
01:18:33.400And so, okay, so let's tackle another hard question, another hard question.
01:18:36.820So one of the pitfalls, I suppose, of apocalyptic thinking, and this is true perhaps practically as well as psychologically, is the notion of a runaway positive feedback loop.
01:18:49.040And so while the Greenland ice pack melts and then the currents in the oceans change because of that, especially the warming current that keeps England from not being Arctic, that disappears.
01:19:05.140And that happens like in two weeks and the whole damn thing freezes and we're all dead.
01:19:09.340And so, and runaway positive feedback loops do happen.
01:19:12.460That, I mean, that's not inconceivable.
01:19:15.760So how do we know when, how do we deal with that, say, practically and psychologically?
01:19:22.720Well, let's look at the ice, first of all.
01:19:24.480So it's the West Antarctic ice shelf that we worry about or Greenland.
01:19:27.860So when they worry about losing those ice sheets, it's not in two weeks, it's in 700 years to over 1,000 years.
01:19:35.640That's the period in which they're worried about us losing those ice sheets.
01:19:38.900So you're talking about an incredibly long period of time.
01:19:42.040Now, in terms of the Gulf Stream, which is how I initially became apocalyptic about climate change in the late 1990s, was reports that the Gulf Stream would shut down or that you would stop having the warm air being brought from, you know, the warm water and air being brought from the south to the north.
01:20:00.200And that was how I originally got fearful of it.
01:20:02.180Well, the first thing you realize when you read those reports is that to the extent to which there's been changes in the Gulf Stream over history, they've occurred just on their own, like it's just as a natural cycle.
01:20:13.260But there is no evidence that that's being caused by climate change, that we're at some risk of shutting down the Gulf Stream.
01:20:20.440I just debunked it recently, and some of the reporters just, it's like a meme that these reporters will repeat every 10 years or so, and they end up trying to confuse people about it.
01:20:30.760Then I called, so the most recent Tipping Point study published in Nature as an opinion piece must have been 2019.
01:20:38.820I interviewed the lead author of it, and it's just a kind of, a bunch of speculation.
01:20:45.920I mean, this is why IPCC does not include it.
01:20:50.680It's not something that they call science or include in their predictions.
01:20:54.760And I interviewed him about it, he goes, and they had this whole scenario of ice sheets and the Gulf Stream and the Amazon.
01:21:00.660And I was trying to figure out how it would work exactly.
01:21:03.600And then he kind of goes, well, you know, he goes, look, the real problem is that at first they thought that there would be more, that greater warming would bring more rainfall to the Amazon.
01:21:12.140And then the scientists changed their minds, and now they think it'll bring less.
01:21:15.080So you have these so-called feedback loops that we don't even understand which direction much of the time they would go in.
01:21:21.600So, you know, it's not to say that you shouldn't worry.
01:21:25.880I mean, you know, Bjorn has recently...
01:21:27.520Well, okay, so one of the things, one of the things I always told my clinical clients when they were worried about something was,
01:21:33.280well, you're hyper-worried about that, but you're not worried about a bunch of other things.
01:21:38.180Like, you're hyper-worried about taking action, but you're not worried at all about not taking action.
01:21:42.880It's like, well, there might be a disaster lurking there, too.
01:21:46.300It's like there's this notion, an unexamined notion, that there is some safe route.