At the Edge: Climate Psychology, Chaos and Betrayal
https://issuu.com/climatepsychologyalliance/docs/explorations_issue_5_january_2024_web_emailv3_r
This article aims to explore what happens at the threshold moment if apparent catastrophe is lived rather than avoided. This risky engagement is a vital aspect of rites of passage. Learning to enter edges of chaos and turning to face the fear, can allow the release of extraordinary energies and deeply significant learning. I shall be exploring edges of chaos from a variety of perspectives at the margins of systemic thought, that are tipping points within human culture.
In adapting to a domesticated world, have we betrayed a wilder more attuned way of being in the world? To speak out exposing the lies inherent in our privileged Global North, for instance of infinite growth on a finite planet, is to begin the redeem that betrayal.
In social and interpersonal narratives, betrayal is often evoked by the one feeling at the effect of a betrayal – an abandoned victim. There are many contexts for betrayal including romantic love, war, group belonging and loyalty. Key to all these is that a trust is broken whether that be an amorous entanglement, a national allegiance, or an implicit bond. All of these were evoked by Greta Thunberg in her address to the UN Climate Action summit in New York (2019):
“You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this”.
Similarly, psychotherapist and researcher Caroline Hickman states that climate anxiety is not just distress about environmental problems. It is also coupled with despair, disillusionment and betrayal by people in power failing to act. She elaborates,
“It’s older generations failing to do the right thing by younger generations, and that is felt as a form of betrayal and abandonment. Some of the young people that I’m working with are suicidal because of this betrayal. Not because of environmental problems, but because they feel so devastated by being horrendously abandoned by people in power who are supposed to take care of us.”
Hickman explains that this betrayal can cause moral injury. It erodes trust in social structures which are supposed to give shelter and care. This parallels what Sally Weintrobe has entitled the ‘Culture of Uncare’ that is characterised by “the narcissistic, perverse, consumerist, extractive, entitled, arrogant, psychopathic, instrumental and manically triumphant culture”. This is a more systemic perspective in which it is not individuals or groups who are to blame but a cultural complex to which we have all been exposed and to which we all contribute.
This deeper sense of betrayal, beyond personal abandonment and rejection, takes us to the human-planet relationship. We (at least those in the Global North) have broken a primal trust with the earth mother whose generous life-giving powers have supported and sustained human life. Far from gratitude, those embedded within the industrial complex have plundered her riches as if in an envious attack that would rather destroy than respect.
The recent attack on the long-admired Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall is a sad example of this envious attack. It is reminiscent of the tale of Erysichthon, a vain and boastful man who paid little attention to what other people said even less to the gods. He insists on cutting down an oak that is sacred to Demeter, even when it bleeds red blood. A terrible hunger is visited on him. Demeter’s curse was that no matter how much he ate, it will never be enough. He ended up consuming his own body.
Feeding on our own body is another metaphor for our consuming society. Erysichthon is in the grip of this all-pervading consumer complex. He sacrifices all that was precious to him, such as his daughter. Through underestimating the power of the cultural complexes that grip us, we may be in danger of consuming the very foundation through which we live.
I claimed in the introduction that the tragic ruptures to our planetary ecosystems are catastrophic openings to renewed life in our interpreted world. Climate chaos offers an uneasy paradox characteristic of transitional space and liminal states. Liminal states bring high degrees of anxiety because these are essentially unknowable and uncontrollable. And it is this very vulnerability that makes them potentially creative and transformative, which is why they have been used in rites of passage and initiation rituals.
According to Winnicott transitional space is a paradox. It is a hypothetical area that is both real and illusory. “The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world, depends on experience which leads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.”
The space between has potent aliveness which we can’t know or predict ahead of time. It is a pregnant void that might be experienced as a vulnerable one. The caterpillar dissolving into a cellular soup in order to transform into a butterfly, is only possible because of the containment afforded by the cocoon. This cocoon is a proto-womb that allows transitional states with high potential levels of disorder and the potential for creative transformation. It is the means through which small deviations can be amplified and new potentials nurtured.
Our planet is such a cocoon that has fostered life through its many forms including human.
The planetary shift we are transiting is precarious. Edges of chaos are vulnerable spaces as well as being potent points of change. The emotional vulnerability is evoked with the uncertainty of the process and lack of safe containment. Climate change vulnerability describes the susceptibility and exposure of ecosystems to climate change. This different use of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ is more a function of the biophysical and social, for instance the capacity of households to cope with drought, than the psychological.
When a containing cocoon is infected by poisonous feelings or fractured, its containing powers are diminished and potential breakthroughs can become destructive ruptures. These edges of chaos can create a cascade of multiple ruptures, for instance the conjunction of rising tides and tsunamis, which triggers radical shifts into unsustainable worlds such as with the horror of the Fukushima nuclear accident. Cascades can also be triggered in human systems such as economic collapses.
What seems pertinent to our present climate crisis is that the human-planet relationship is at a critical phase of ruptures. Chaos theory suggests that at bifurcation points when the system could go two ways; a potentially creative far-from-equilibrium way or a return to the normative.
Just as what is commonly termed the ‘fall’ in the Garden of Eden story is also an account of a ‘rise’ in consciousness through eating the apple, our human betrayal may mark a collective rite of passage. What are the apparent God-given rules embedded in our culture that we must obey? I suggest that these are more emotional complexes than cognitive rules, more bonds of loyalty to unconscious cultural complexes that feel taboo to break. These bonds may be based in rigid traditions and/or collective traumas that do not allow change.
Just as the only way out of that Garden of Eden was through betrayal, the only way through our present planetary crisis may be to break bonds of social belonging. This can feel like treachery to one’s tribe. As James Hillman writes,
What one longs for is not only to be contained in perfection by another who can never let one down. It goes beyond trust and betrayal by the other in a relationship. What one longs for is a situation where one is protected from one’s OWN treachery and ambivalence, one’s own Eve.
Rather than heroically trying to change the planetary forces unleashed in the Anthropocene, humans, especially those in the Global North would be better attending to their own Eve who might assist them awakening out of delusional blindness.
End Reflections
I am suggesting that human betrayal is the emotional counterpart of an edge of chaos.
Both are inherently unstable and challenging states to tolerate. The complete loss of agency, knowing and control along with feelings of helplessness and abandonment are similar in each. Betrayal brings out an existential aloneness as ties and social duties are forsaken in response to recognising the potential for self-betrayal – of being untrue to the soul. Those who have risked the fury of colleagues when exposing hidden lies, know that cost can be high.
A parallel passage through an edge of chaos requires the courage to forsake the knowing mind and trust the necessity of a creative process without signposts. As historian of science, Thomas Kuhn showed breaking through scientific paradigms can bring censure and isolation to creative scientists. Both types of passage are relevant to the climate crisis. Learning how to bear what feels intolerable is a characteristic of psychological opening to the terrifying reality of our climate crisis.
The emotional work to stay with and be present to the pain and seemingly endless grief is too much for most of us as individuals. We need the support and companionship of a community. But how to be true to oneself and be in relationship? This is where so many idealistic communities wither in disillusionment. It is also where whistle-blowers speak out against their colleagues’ misuse or abuse of power. Whether in the police or healthcare system, they risk reactive attack in rupturing social bonds to align with an inner truth or purpose. Alternatively what is the emotional cost of remaining silent and betraying themselves?
The deafening silence in the denial of the climate crisis has morphed into a subtler diffusion and disavowal of responsibility. Climate is in the headlines but has much changed? Civil disobedience as practised by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is one way of betraying a social contract of legal citizenship that prevents exposing the real state of the climate crisis. How a whole culture awakens to its betrayal of the other-than-human on our planet is part of the edge we may be tip-toing around.
The Global North has long lost a trust in earth’s ecosystem to support us. We are supposedly independent having created a separate technical network without pangs of conscience. The industrial revolution was a second betrayal led by an ‘Eve’ who promised unlimited growth. Relinquishing the tempting distractions of consumer life may offer a return to a deeper trust in an ecosystemic biosphere but only in passing through this portal of climate and cultural chaos. To do this requires the emotional resilience to tolerate extreme discomfort and anxiety. Not an easy passage then.