Psychology – Page 2 – a sibilant intake of breath

Our entry into Lyra’s world

I have long considered the opening chapter of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass to be a masterful lesson in worldbuilding in speculative fiction. He does a magnificent job of introducing a subtly different alternative world, without ever relying on crude exposition or just telling the reader that some things are different and what they are. The biggest obvious difference with our world — that the people in hers have daemons — is revealed unobtrusively and naturally from the perspective of characters who consider it normal. We learn everything crucial about Lyra’s bond with Pantalaimon just from the character of their conversation in this short timespan.

Yesterday, during a discussion with ChatGPT about Lyra Bellaqua and Sherlock Holmes, I had the assisted realization that what the chapter also achieves, even more importantly, is to establish Lyra’s character through the same method of compelling and unobtrusive narrative storytelling. When we meet her, she is conniving to sneak in to the exclusive Retiring Room for Jordan College scholars, which is forbidden to her, driven by her consuming curiosity about what happens there. Right away, we see that she is inquisitive and bold, willing to defy the rules to learn, and unwilling to defer to stuffy authority. Then, when she observes the Master’s attempt to poison Lord Asriel’s wine, her choice is to intervene: revealing the fundamental moral framework that drives her. Even at a risk to herself, she will make a substantial effort to save someone else, as later revealed at a much grander scale with her Bolvangar rescue.

It is said that all speculative fiction is really a commentary on the present, and Pullman’s is sharp and relevant. The Golden Compass reveals the monstrosities that emerge from the unchecked power of the heartless, and presents selfless individual moral courage as a response. Comfortable and exclusionary systems of power which are free from outside oversight drift into seeing right and wrong in terms of their self-interest, if they even persist with thinking about morality at all. Lyra reminds us that, while it is never safe, we always have the choice to resist and to assert a standard of morality based on respect for the individual and repugnance at their exploitation and sacrifice for outside agendas. The arc of that demonstration all begins with the insight into her mind provided by that opening chapter, and that’s why it stands out as some of the strongest worldbuilding in fiction.

Nuclear risks briefing

Along with the existential risk to humanity posed by unmitigated climate change, I have been seriously learning about and working on the threat from nuclear weapons for over 20 years.

I have written an introduction to nuclear weapon risks for ordinary people, meant to help democratize and de-mystify the key information.

The topic is incredibly timely and pertinent. A global nuclear arms race is ongoing, and the US and Canada are contemplating a massively increased commitment to the destabilizing technology of ballistic missile defence. If citizens and states could just comprehend that nuclear weapons endanger them instead of making them safe, perhaps we could deflect onto a different course. Total and immediate nuclear weapon abolition is implausible, but much could be done to make the situation safer and avoid the needless expenditure of trillions on weapons that will (in the best case) never be used.

Nuclear powers could recognize that history shows it only really takes a handful of bombs (minimal credible deterrence) to avert opportunistic attempts from enemies at decapitating attacks. States could limit themselves to the most survivable weapons, particularly avoiding those which are widely deployed where they could be stolen. They could keep warheads separate from delivery devices, to reduce the risk of accidental or unauthorized use. They could collectively renounce missile defences as useless against nuclear weapons. They could even share technologies and practices to make nuclear weapons safer, including designs less likely to detonate in fires and explosions, and which credibly cannot be used by anyone who steals them. Citizens could develop an understanding that nuclear weapons are shameful to possess, not impressive.

Even in academia and the media, everything associated with nuclear weapons tends to be treated as a priesthood where only the initiated, employed by the security state, are empowered to comment. One simple thing the briefing gets across is that all this information is sitting in library books. In a world so acutely threatened by nuclear weapons, people need the basic knowledge that allows them to think critically.

P.S. Since getting people to read the risk briefing has been so hard, my Rivals simulation is meant to repackage the key information about proliferation into a more accessible and interactive form.

The environmental movement and young people’s rage

During my childhood, I remember a book circulating around the house called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth.

It included activities like putting a milk carton underneath a dripping tap to measure the rate at which it was dripping, and leaving elastic bands stretched and exposed outside to supposedly measure air pollution.

Much later, I realized how fucked up the implications of the book and its genre are.

The buried premise is that the Earth needs “saving” — which is horrifying and terrifying. The book takes it for granted that the one life-sustaining planet known in the universe is imperiled by human activity. If something needs saving and doesn’t get it, that means it dies or gets destroyed. The book comes right out and takes for granted that all known life is at risk unless humanity changes its conduct and attitudes and that this won’t happen through the existing political, economic, and legal systems.

The next implication is that the appropriate resolution to this, at least in part, depends on kids. It’s up to kids to save the Earth. Furthermore, they need to do it through some sort of resistance to or reform of the political and economic systems which embody and sustain the ecological crisis.

So not only does the book imply that it is the responsibility of kids to save all the life in the universe, but it goes on to give them a series of trivialities as action items: find a way to avoid wasting a carton of water, check the pH of a local stream… It sets up a colossal threat, then gives some arts-and-crafts activities and low-impact personal lifestyle changes as the solutions available.

Of course, my bitterness about this arises from the decades of utter betrayal toward young people which have characterized my life. Given the choice between perks today and not wrecking the Earth, all our leaders choose the former with lip service to the latter. Young people have grown up in a world where they expect catastrophe, and understand that their leaders prefer that outcome to changing the self-serving status quo.

I was part of that youth movement at least from my experiences with LIFE in the mid-1990s until the fossil fuel divestment movement at universities after 2012, and saw how it was systematically patronized, treated in bad faith, and ignored by those who set policy. Adults told kids that it was up to them to save the world, then knowingly and purposefully undermined those efforts in order to protect their own interests, all while portraying themselves as sage decision-makers moderating the unreasonable requests of radical activists. This process is ongoing.

This dynamic has produced a great deal of apathy and political disengagement, but I think there is also an underlying rage arising from young people understanding that they have been put in lifelong peril by a society which systematically disregards their interests — to say nothing about how the prospects for their potential children have been ravaged. It is hard to guess how that rage will manifest, but it seems very implausible that it will be through the sort of long-sighted planetwide cooperation which provides the only path to curtailing the climate crisis.

Processing mortality

Even though it wasn’t my life at risk, the experience of my brother Sasha’s stoke and brain surgery has had a profound and lasting effect on me.

I feel like the last few years have been a waterfall of grief. I learned about Peter Russell and John Godfrey’s grave illnesses shortly before their deaths and funerals. I have gone through the loss of my relationship with Katrina, as well as an initiative which I hoped would finally give me a functional platform to fight climate change from.

In the lead-up to Peter and John’s funerals, I spent large amounts of time pre-grieving: deliberately working through, naming, and experiencing the feelings, so I might be able to avoid being overwhelmed when the time for dignity and gratitude came at the celebrations of their lives. I was doing much the same in Victoria (along with fervently, atheistically praying for his welfare): emotionally working through every possible outcome, steeling and reinforcing myself for whatever might come.

In the time since I returned to Toronto, I have still felt seized with these feelings and questions. In part, the experience underscored how I am now definitively past any sort of preparation or training stage in my life. There is no escape from dealing with life at its most serious, and from deciding how to use it in furtherance of one’s values and goals. Figuring out how to cope with a world where some beloved things are gone forever and where all others are threatened is a substantial challenge if you refuse to fall back on feel-good rationalizations or unjustified optimism.

Life is fragile and subject to arbitrary and abrupt revocation. It is also a realm where a person can be easily dominated by those who feel entitled to control them. Coping with and making sense of life, with all of its limitations and confusions and conflicts, remains an ongoing effort.

The day after the surgery — and following a practice that Sasha taught me — I walked from the hospital to Thetis Lake and walked around the water under the cover of ancient trees. The feeling of relief and gratitude was overwhelming, but I was surprised by the realization that this would also have been the right thing to do if the worst had happened: to thank the land from a position of agony and gratitude for the gift that had been my remarkable brother.

Not doing well

I don’t like the practice of answering people’s questions with the response I guess they most want to hear. Lately, with people who I know to a certain degree, if they ask, I have just been saying that I am not doing well, and if they follow up provide a brief explanation of how multilateralism and evidence-based policy are collapsing while the world commits itself to climate chaos.

I tend to get two fallacious responses.

The first is the inductive fallacy: bad things have happened before (Black Death, WWI, etc) and people and civilization have endured, therefore we will endure whatever climate change brings as well. In terms of logic, this is an obviously weak argument. If a man is playing Russian Roulette and manages to pull the trigger once without getting shot, that doesn’t prove that trigger-pulling is nothing to worry about. Furthermore, there are excellent reasons to think the world is more dangerous now than at the times of the Black Death or WWI. It wouldn’t take too many nuclear strikes against cities to produce a nuclear winter which would essentially kill us all.

The other is motivated reasoning: you need to have hope. This approach basically rejects the value of knowledge and thinking, or at least the idea that hypotheses should be tested against logic and evidence. Deciding how you want to feel in advance, and then seeking out beliefs that reinforce the feeling, is a recipe for ending up totally deluded about the world. Someone who decides what they think based on how they want to feel loses the connection which a skeptical mind maintains with the empirical world. Instead, they become like transcendentalist gurus who only care about how the world seems inside their own mind. They are no longer able to help anybody, except perhaps to become as disconnected and useless as they are.

I know people who ask how you are doing seldom want an honest answer. It’s a social cue to come back with a light and social answer. At the same time, I am utterly terrified about how the population normalizes and ignores the dismal signs of just how much trouble humanity is in. The mechanisms that let people cope and maintain a tolerable emotional bubble around themselves seem thoroughly interconnected with the mechanisms which are letting us destroy the future because we don’t want to think about scary things, or give any consideration to the interests of others when we choose what to do for ourselves.

I have been trying to make sense of why I feel so intensely unhappy now, especially when in numerous ways life was a lot worse while I was in the PhD program. The closest thing to answer is that before I felt like there were worthwhile things to try to achieve in the world, but I was just being blocked from taking part effectively in them by nearby obstacles and barriers. Now I feel like I have no idea whatsoever of what to do to try to dodge the planetary calamity ahead. With the climate change activist movement distracted and disempowered, I also feel uniquely alone.

Nice thoughts are not an obligation

You don’t have to think nice.

Instead of teaching you to think EI [emotionally immature] parents teach you to judge your thoughts. EI parents always turn thinking into a moral issue. They will attack their child’s open, honest thoughts if they feel threatened. By acting wounded, insulted, or appalled, EI parents make it clear that you are only good when your thoughts are nice.

It’s crucial to realize that you don’t have to think nice. There are no thought police, thank goodness, and you have the absolute right to think anything that occurs to you. Your original thoughts are a big part of your individuality and are necessary to solve problems with creative thinking.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 8: “Making Room for Your Own Mind”

Fiction, versus reality’s lack of resolution

In all the time while I have been concerned, and later terrified, about climate change and the future of life on Earth, I still had the narrative convention of fiction influencing my expectations: the emergence of a big problem will imperil and inspire a group of people to find solutions and eventually the people threatened by the problem will accept if not embrace the solutions. A tolerable norm is disrupted and then restored because people have the ability to perceive and reason, and the willingness and virtue to act appropriately when they see what’s wrong.

Now, I feel acutely confronted by what a bad model for human reactions this is. It seems to me now that we almost never want to understand problems or their real causes; we almost always prefer an easy answer and somebody to blame. The narrative arc of ‘problem emerges, people understand problem, people solve problem’ has a real-world equivalent more like ‘problems emerge but people usually miss or misunderstand them, and where they do perceive problems to exist they interpret them using stories where the most important purpose is to justify and protect the powerful’.

If the history happening around us were a movie, it might be one that I’d want to walk out of, between the unsatisfying plot and the unsympathetic actors. Somehow the future has come to feel more like a sentence than a promise: something which will need to be endured, watching everything good that humankind has achieved getting eroded and destroyed, and in which having the ability to understand and name what is happening just leads to those around you punishing and rejecting you by reflex.

Interior, not interpersonal

Thought is an interior experience, not an interpersonal event. Thoughts innocently arise from our instincts for survival, security, and pleasure and are involuntary. They are the personal raw materials of the mind and, as such, are neither good nor bad. However, emotionally immature people judge your thinking to make sure you stay aligned with their beliefs.

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It’s hard to be clear on your own position if you know your opinion could lead to your being reviled. Because EI parents need to feel like they are right about everything, they make you feel rejected if your thinking doesn’t match theirs. As an adult it’s self-defeating to accept others’ opinions instead of consulting your own mind. But EI parents teach you to do just that: they act like you’re being rebellious or selfish if you don’t consider them first in every step of your thought process. EI parents see free thought as disloyal. For EI parents everything is about how important, respected, and in control they feel. So, what happens if you have your own thoughts and opinions? They see you as disloyal. To the ‘all or nothing’ EIP’s mind, your differing opinion means you couldn’t possibly love or respect them, therefore you may have learned to hide your most honest thoughts from your thin-skinned EI parents.

No anger! No sadness!

You minimize your feelings and shut yourself down. Emotionally immature parents often react as though your emotions are too extreme: as though there were something wrong with you for having a heartfelt reaction. They thus teach you to downplay your feelings because they are uncomfortable with these strong emotions. They convince you that many of your emotions are unwarranted or excessive.

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Their overall message to her was: don’t feel. Whatever Maya experienced, she always got the message that it was too much. Mild emotional arousal was all her parents considered acceptable. To avoid embarrassment, Maya learned to disconnect from her strongest emotions, whether positive or negative. This resulted in chronic depression as an adult. “I think they wanted me to be happy,” Maya told me, “but in a very shallow ‘let’s not get too deep’ kind of way.” Maya recalled that her parents accepted her happiness only about tangible outer-world things they approved of, such as Christmas gifts, new clothes, or a good report card. Maya hid her true reactions because her parents often judged her feelings as excessive, weak, or oversensitive. Because of their rejection, Maya began to minimize and hide her feelings from herself too. She gradually lost her emotional freedom: her right to feel whatever she felt.

Boundary-rejecting parents

They don’t respect your boundaries or individuality. Emotionally immature parents don’t really understand the point of boundaries. They think boundaries imply rejection, meaning you don’t care enough about them to give them free access to your life. This is why they act incredulous, offended, or hurt if you ask them to respect your privacy. They feel loved only when you let them interrupt you any time. EI parents seek dominant and privileged roles in which they don’t have to respect others’ boundaries. EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it. Family and roles are sacrosanct to them and they don’t understand why you should want space or an individual identity apart from them. They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values. You are their child and therefore belong to them. Even when you’re grown they expect you to remain their compliant child or, if you insist on your own life, at least always follow their advice.

Gibson, Lindsay C. Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy. New Harbinger Publications, 2019. Chapter 2.