Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
Last week, I wrote about the Dobbs decision as an act of psychological warfare. This week, the Court added to the psychological misery by snarling the EPA and alluding to its desire to challenge contraception, same-sex marriage, and other laws.
With this juggernaut of rulings, we can see evidence of the right’s continued strategy to immobilize resistance by inducing paralysis and despair. It’s hard not to succumb to panic, or a feeling of desperate urgency, when so much is toppling, so quickly.
In the current situation, it’s tempting to search for a hero, or an expert, to tell us what to do. I wake up and wonder if there’s an inverse strategy to the one playing out in real time. I want one of those Monty Python scrolls to drop from the sky, full of flourishes and calligraphy, telling me how to reverse it, all at once.
But here’s the thing. As much as I plan to fight, along with everyone else, I’m acutely aware that the fights, the rulings, the shootings that are meant to encourage the rulings—they are operating not only at face value, to rob many of us of our rights, but also at a secondary remove. The rulings, and the fight, are a distraction machine, luring us away from addressing the impending crisis of ecological extinction.
The despair and the paralysis of the current moment are heightened, in part, because there are two enormous struggles happening at the same time. In the first, the battle for civil rights is having to be re-fought, when it hadn’t yet achieved its original aims: to move beyond individual rights and into full social transformation.
As exhausting as it is to have to re-fight for civil rights, it’s even more infuriating to witness the ways that conflict is being leveraged to distract the public from the second struggle: the threats of climate change. (Even the phrase “climate change” is a distraction—as if it’s some kind of weather pattern that came from nowhere—when instead it’s a human-made, ecological disaster.)
There is virtually no one in a position of public power who is willing to take the political hit of even naming the fact that to address the climate, we must address capitalism, and the false belief that an economic model that privileges growth can be sustained on a planet that is finite. What a bittersweet relief for politicians and the mainstream press—they can rail at the opposition, rather than question one of the central organizing structures of the social itself.
The rulings, and the fight, are a distraction machine, luring us away from addressing the impending crisis of ecological extinction.
I’ve been mulling over the larger function of the fury, the violence, the ways the Court is lunging for our collective throats. I know the received wisdom is that the Court is finally executing the right’s “long game.” But this moment doesn’t feel like the apotheosis of a careful strategy. It feels like the way people fight when they’re fighting to the death. Or perhaps fighting as if they were fighting to the death, when what they’re fighting is, actually, a kind of ruse. Death isn’t coming for straight people because of trans rights, or gay marriage. Death isn’t coming for white people, if we have to pay reparations for enslavement. But death is coming if we continue to pretend that the biggest threat to our survival is someone else’s freedom.
Since many people reading this newsletter are in the field of mental health, you’ll recognize that the above political analysis is about the function of displacement as a psychological defense. The intensity of the fight—though ostensibly about individual rights—can also be read as a form of denial.
The greater anxiety about an unknown future—tendrils of which are curling around the present in the form of floods, fires, famine—is generating panic, anxiety, and despair. But that anxiety and panic is being bound up, contained, and compartmentalized, in the U.S. at least, by the focus on the rights-based challenges enacted by the Court.
To be clear, I’m not saying the Court is lurching and swaying around some kind of massive cauldron, like Shakespearean witches, planning a conspiracy. Rather, I’m suggesting that the Court, as one component of the dominant culture, is as ensnared as the rest of us. The justices, bent on enforcing what they call freedom, can’t see the web in which they’re caught. The strands of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy work like a spider’s web—so finely wrought, so mutually reinforcing, so much “the way things are,” that unless we’re directly impacted by their violence, we might not notice they’re there.
The dominant white culture finds it so impossible to imagine a society that doesn't depend on these structures that it can’t acknowledge its erasure, and silencing, of alternative practices, narratives, and possibilities, many of which are occurring outside of, or in direct confrontation with, this particular mode of being. Often, pundits will declare the climate crisis is too difficult to solve, without having asked themselves about the social location, and practices, of the “experts” upon whose opinions they rely.
We’re fighting a battle inside a crisis, to avoid the changes that have to occur, if we want to truly solve the crisis. It’s no wonder we might want people to tell us what to do. It’s no wonder our clients are expressing fury, grief, terror, powerlessness, and disbelief. It’s no wonder they are sometimes asking us what they should do.
One thing we in mental health do know is how to help people address emotional flooding and cognitive overwhelm, because they are the hallmarks of anxiety and trauma. We also know a lot about how denial works, from our knowledge about substance dependence and other addictive disorders.
It is virtually impossible to tolerate the emotional impacts of the climate crisis without having the tools to work with both intergenerational trauma and threat responses. We who have so many ways to address these legacies have a crucial role to play in this moment: we are here, in part, to help people recognize and turn towards these threats, rather than escape into numbing, avoidance, or violence.
Part of the difficulty the mainstream field of mental health is facing right now is that its techniques and treatment modalities have historically been designed to examine cognitive and emotional states within the individual brain or mind. There are many approaches, traditions, and methods that do explore power, context, structural violence, and oppression. But for now, most professional institutions are not yet acknowledging that though there are clients who are struggling with mental health disorders, there are also many struggling with feeling states and defenses generated not by intra-psychic neuroses, or biochemical imbalances, but instead by real, apparent, non-neurotic threats to our collective autonomy and survival.
What, then, is to be done? If I ended this post by telling you what I thought we should do, I’d be creating a map that depends on the very thinking that got us here. What we need, instead, are tactics to help us move into uncertainty, into unknowing, at the very moment when our psyches are pleading for certainty, and relief.
We’re fighting a battle inside a crisis, to avoid the changes that have to occur, if we want to truly solve the crisis.
This week I started reading the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel’s Less is More. The first section of the book traces the rise of capitalism, arguing that it is not a natural extension of human nature. Instead, it is a system that was constructed and upheld by elites, who for centuries consolidated their wealth and power by forcing the poor to labor and increase their productivity, along with that of the soil.
In order to make capitalism appear inevitable and timeless, he explains, not only did people have to learn to trade their labor for wages, but they had to shift their entire spiritual and philosophical framework. They had to cease seeing themselves as in a reciprocal relationship to the rest of life and instead see themselves as apart from, and at times superior to, a “nature” that was an object, in the eyes of its subject, man.
Hickel argues that capitalism cannot tolerate animism: the idea that the living world is full of spirit, life, and interconnection, and that humans are just one part of a living whole. He writes:
To exploit nature as a “resource” for the sake of human enrichment is morally reprehensible—similar to slavery or even to cannibalism. Instead, you have to enter into a relationship of reciprocity, in the spirit of the gift. You have to give at least as much as you receive.
This logic, which has inherent ecological value, runs directly against the core logic of capitalism, which is to take—and, more importantly, to take more than you give back. In fact, as we will see, this is the basic mechanism of growth.
In this fraught moment of not knowing, one place to start is with Hickel’s idea that the essence of capitalism, and of exploitation, is taking more than you give. And that the antidote to exploitation is reciprocity.
There’s an opening out, rather than a closed certainty, in noticing where we see taking and where we see reciprocity; where we see power over and where we see interconnectedness.
Hickel’s definition of capitalist growth reminds me of Johan Galtung’s definition of structural violence as the limiting of human potential. Galtung asks us to look for, question, and overcome the structures that ensure human potential is trapped, or thwarted, when it should be liberated, exalted, creative.
Hickel widens the sphere of the ask. It’s interesting to consider the impact of centering our focus on human potential, if it comes at the expense of the living whole. In many ways, when I put Galtung and Hickel together, I have to ask myself hard questions. Where do I take more than I give—both as an individual, and as a consequence of my social location, in terms of structures of violence and domination? Where do I resist reciprocity with the living world? What am I willing to give up, so the ecosystem can thrive? How do I view my relationship to power—others, over me; mine, over others?
In this fraught moment of not knowing, one place to start is with Hickel’s idea that the essence of capitalism, and of exploitation, is taking more than you give. And that the antidote to exploitation is reciprocity.
Hickel asks for a gift, as evidence of reciprocity. One place to begin might be to offer the living world the gift of our attention, receiving information from our five senses, and then asking what we can see, what we can learn, from that fullness of our attention. We can think about all the steps, all the natural processes, all the work of the people involved, in growing, transporting, and preparing the food that we eat. We can thank the living world for allowing us to eat, to drink, to breathe, to survive.
We might consider the mycelium networks that connect the trees in the forest to one another, and to the organisms in the soil, as a model for how giving and receiving often occur simultaneously, and abundantly, in ecosystems.
We might set aside time each day, or each week, to step away from our ordinary routines and to instead pause and look for elements of the natural world that are present, but that we are conditioned not to notice. (There’s a lovely chapter in How to do Nothing about the author Jenny Odell’s learning the names of the plants, bodies of water, and animals in her urban neighborhood, and how that forever changed her perspective on place.)
As our attunement to the ways in which we are already in a relationship to the natural world increases, we will be more likely to ask questions about the quality of that relationship. And because reciprocity is based on giving as well as receiving, we can start to relinquish things that matter to us for the sake of the health of the living world. We can use our bodies’ terror and alarm as a cry for action, for restoration of balance. We can take a step forward, without yet knowing where we are headed. We can honor the plants, animals, rivers, and mountains, knowing they are as alive as us—and that this is not a demotion, but in fact, a beautiful release.
“Just tell me what to do”: