Ro Randall is a retired psychoanalyst with decades of extremely useful contributions to social movements (and latterly the climate movement) under her belt. For more, see links at the foot of this interview.
Sparked by a recent listen to a really good “Bridging the Carbon Gap” podcast interview she did a few years back with some young Americans, I sent her a few questions by email. The full text, unedited, is below.
What do you think is going on with the pretence that climate change isn’t happening – in the United States banning the phrase (along with many others) and in the UK with the Conservative Party saying it would repeal the Climate Change Act. Is this people just denying grim realities that would overwhelm them? What can psychoanalysis tell us about this, and where it might end?
I think there are three things worth bearing in mind here: bad faith actors, failures of leadership and the psychological state which psychoanalysis calls disavowal, a form of denial which is extremely common.
Top of my list is the existence of bad faith actors: very powerful people and organisations who have no interest in doing anything at all about the climate crisis who have been working hard to subvert, slow and prevent action. They have deep pockets and huge influence. I’m talking about fossil fuel interests and their think tanks, bankers and other representatives of big capital for example. These people can see that really tackling the climate crisis means adopting a very different economic model. This is anathema to their short-term planning horizons and their pursuit of profit and growth at any cost. They refuse to imagine that the systems they are part of might come to an end or might change. Some of these people passively obstruct change, but many are more active and are gaining ground as politics in many of the so-called ‘advanced economies’ shifts rightwards, seeking scapegoats for the ills of a disintegrating society.
Second is the way that these destructive influences have increasingly captured the ear of governments and this means that there is a lack of leadership on the climate crisis. When political leaders fail to embrace the definite, difficult actions which the climate crisis demands and fail to produce compelling narratives about why they are essential, people who are themselves in states of disavowal find one side of that conflict – that there is possibly nothing really the matter – comfortably confirmed.
Disavowal is the third factor I think we should consider. Disavowal is the psychoanalytic term for a form of denial where you hold two contradictory positions at the same time, keeping them safely separated in different compartments of the mind. On the one hand you know that the climate is changing, that it is desperately dangerous and that everyone’s lives need to change in order to deal with it. On the other hand, you also wish to carry on with life as usual. You don’t want to have to engage politically, you don’t want to give up the comforts of your accustomed lifestyle and – if you let yourself dwell on the other side of this dilemma – you are justifiably terrified. Conflict between the two parts of the disavowal dilemma means that many people are only too willing to take comfort from leaders who either pay weak lip service to the crisis or worse, deny outright that action is necessary.
In the UK we have seen XR and JSO, avatars of hope to some, basically crash and burn. What went wrong? What could have been done differently to get people participating in – or thinking of participating in these groups – to be more accepting of the idea that this was always going to be a marathon, not a sprint where the problem would be largely “solved” by 2025?
The demise of any political group is painful and demoralising for its members as well as for the wider movement and I’m sure that they themselves have spent a lot of time chewing over how to think about their work and analysing what they might have done differently, as well as feeling bitter or angry about the lack of wider public support and the relentless attacks from the political establishment. The two organisations are also not exactly the same. Although JSO grew out of XR its activities always seemed to be more focused and more cleverly executed. And you can see from the XR website that its viewpoints have evolved somewhat from the first heady days of 2018. The points I make below are purely about a possible psychological dimension to XR’s difficulties and I don’t want to minimise the real political difficulties that all climate action groups face.
From a psychological point of view, one thing stood out to me when XR arrived on the scene and strikes me still. XR had an interesting mix of age groups. As well as young people drawn into politics for the first time, there were many people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. Some of these had undoubtedly been involved in other strands of the climate movement and some of them in other strands of Non-Violent Direct Action, but many of those I met were completely new to any kind of climate action. Although they had known about climate change for years they had not felt the need to do anything about it, either personally or politically, at work or in their community: the knowledge had been split off, isolated in a separate part of their mind. They had, in other words been in thrall, for decades, to the defence of disavowal that I talk about above. People offered me various reasons for this inaction, most of which I found unconvincing: “I didn’t know,” “They didn’t say it was so serious,” “There wasn’t anything to be involved in,” I would be told. Climate change has been on the political agenda since the 1980s and surveys in the 2005 – 8 period found very high levels of both public awareness and public concern about climate change so it was unlikely that these people hadn’t known. I was reminded of someone with a serious alcohol problem who maintains that knowledge of its dangers was unavailable to them, or that no organisation existed that could help. Although such claims can be easily challenged, amongst a group of people who feel the same way, challenge is unlikely.
Emerging from a state of disavowal is an incredibly painful business. It involves looking back and questioning how you have lived your life, acknowledging the way you have – consciously or unconsciously – parcelled difficult conflicts up for your own convenience and ease of mind. Guilt and shame play a big part: guilt that you didn’t act politically when you could have done, guilt that you continued living a high carbon lifestyle because it suited you, shame at what your complicity says about the kind of person you might be. It’s perhaps not surprising that few people wanted to go down this road but in addition XR itself offered some easy ways of making sure that it was a road that was easy to miss. XR offered a lot of different ways of defending yourself against the pain of emerging from disavowal.
Firstly there was a focus on urgency that led to an atmosphere of manic activity. My impression was that it was hard to find space to question the goals, strategy and tactics that the leadership offered and that reflection, when it came, did not involve questioning the direction of the organisation and the type of actions chosen. Building coalitions and engaging with a wider public both seemed to take a back seat in the face of this urgency. Manic activity is a powerful way of avoiding emotions like guilt and shame but when the manic phase ends the descent into depression and inaction can be fast and overwhelming. I met many people whose initial euphoric engagement with XR tailed off into depression and hopelessness.
Secondly, XR kicked off with a powerful narrative that every previous initiative on climate change had been useless. This went as far as blaming organisations like Greenpeace for lack of progress on climate goals. Blame, shame and guilt were thus projected outwards and did not need to be faced internally. Many of those I met were unaware of the roads protests, climate camp or the anti-fracking groups and seemed not to believe that anyone had ever used NVDA before. Young people often feel like this, finding their elders useless and struggling to believe that they were ever politically active, but most of the people who offered me these views were long past their youth. There was thus a refusal to learn from others’ experience, while at the same time – in their focus on long-ago political groups like the American civil rights movement and the suffragettes – claiming that this was exactly what they were doing. The focus on imprisonment as something which would trigger government action was also curious: most NVDA organisations work hard to keep their members out of prison, if at all possible, in order that they can continue the work. The creation of martyrs has rarely been an overt goal. Psychologically it is hard not to see this as an unconscious desire for punishment for unexpressed guilt and shame about previous inaction.
Finally, in addition to these specifically psychological factors, the few protests that I attended often had an unclear focus and communication to the public seemed poor. Demonstrators were not engaging in conversation with passers-by while the protests themselves, which frequently involved stopping traffic, seemed focused on disruption to the public rather than specifically to fossil fuel interests, government or other powerful players. Alienation from a wider public thus happened rapidly and it was easy for government to get support for vicious crackdowns on all forms of protest. Add to all this the effects of the pandemic and it is perhaps not surprising that the movement struggled. JSO’s protests seemed more carefully targeted and although they were a smaller organisation, they may have been more successful in the long run.
Without wanting to be glib, at a species-level we seem to be in the same state as a previously healthy person who had blotted out that everything dies, and is now beginning to be confronted with signs of their own vulnerability and even mortality. What sorts of symptoms – compensations, magical thinking, denial, projection etc – might we see in the coming years in the UK?
I think it’s important to think about who ‘we’ are in this question. In a society riven by inequality and systems of dominance there is never a universal ‘we’. We are never really all in something together, just as we are never all following the same psychological path. Although there are undoubtedly people who are caught up in the dynamics you suggest it is important to recognise that in extreme situations most people actually respond with empathy, kindness and cooperation, stepping in to help each other and share resources in a common goal of survival. Rather than fix on the negatives of magical thinking, denial and projection we may do better to focus on how to build systems of sharing and kindness and cooperation.
In your magnificent climate change novel “Transgression” [reviewed here] the central character, Clara, is about 19 in 2009. So she’d now be 35. What is she doing now? Did she find a way to reconcile with her friend Ruby, who was much less convinced of the need for – and efficacy of – climate action?
Thanks for calling it magnificent! I’ve just started writing a sequel to “Transgression”, set in 2065 – 70, when Clara is in her late seventies and the world has changed dramatically. I won’t say anything more yet and I’m not even sure if I will manage to complete it – so many other things seem to get in the way of the concentrated space needed to write.
Anything else you want to say? (recommended viewing, reading, whatever)
There’s a film Climate in therapy, directed by Nathan Gross of I am Greta fame, which I hope may get some UK screenings soon. It’s about a group of climate scientists taking part in two days of group therapy to help them cope with the pain of being constantly in contact with the reality of what is happening and you can see a trailer at Climate in Therapy I think it would be particularly useful for climate scientists who often don’t find good spaces to talk about the impact their work has on them personally.
And the book I’m currently enjoying reading is Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, a challenge to the Hobbesian idea of individual self-interest and violence via a fascinating dive into what archaeology and anthropology can tell us about the realities of societal collapse in the past and how this might help us view the future.
This is one of many interviews Ro has kindly done.
2013 interview
2020 interview
2021