Is There Power In How We Think About Things?

So, the good news is that if we re-define our cultural norms, re-tell the stories that make up the reality we follow, then humanity’s behaviors actually can change to conform to the new stories.

Image by Benjamin Balazs from Pixabay

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.

—William  James ( 1842–1910)

Because of human actions—and inaction—our planet appears to be on a collision course with disaster.

We long ago passed a human population number that could be sustained without intensive use of gasoline and oil, so we’re burning up a 300-million-year-old  fossilized-plant resource in order to feed the 8 billion humans currently riding spaceship Earth. Many more may starve, even more than are starving today. And almost nothing is being done by governments to offset this very real possibility.

But what can we do? We recycle, eat vegetarian foods, drive gas-efficient cars, and feel as though we’re doing something useful, but it remains a fact that a panhandling  Bowery wino in New York City has access to greater wealth in a month than most citizens of the world’s population will ever see in a year. And even that “poverty-level” rate of resource consumption is something the planet cannot sustain without our burning up carbon fuel sources that will be exhausted within a generation or two.

Most people probably believe there is nothing they can do to help lessen the burden. But they are mistaken: there are indeed powerful, meaningful things we can do.

Perhaps it’s too late (by at least six decades, according to many experts) to avoid all of the damage: the death of billions of humans and further extensive destruction of much of the planet’s environment through war, natural resource exploitation, and industrial pollution.

Earth is now afire with war; famines are erupting as you read these words, and overpopulation has soared to the point where, in many of the bigger cities of the Third World, street children are hunted with high-powered  rifles by “hunting clubs” of middle- and upper-class young men and off-duty police (I met a member of one in Bogota, Colombia in the late 1990s), and in the Philippines President Dutarte’s government was actually paying vigilantes to murder drug users.

Some speculate that we are witnessing the last days of the American/European empire, much as the Romans watched their empire crumble 1,600 years ago.

But it is also true that we can plant the seeds of a positive and hopeful world where future generations, our children and theirs, will live—the beginning of the next civilization, the post-oil era.

We hold their future in our hands. But what to do?

There’s power in how we think about things

When you walk or drive down a city street, what you are seeing all around you are manifestations of thoughts. Every building began as an idea in somebody’s mind.

Someone acquired the land. Someone designed the  house. Someone had  the  idea to  organize people together to build the house, either to make money or to live in it. The trees you see were planted for shade in the yard, on the sidewalk, along the street. The pavement that we accept as a “natural” part of our landscape was conceptualized, designed, engineered, installed, and is maintained via thought.

Thoughts create our physical reality, and they also create our larger reality. During ancient times, when there was an electrical storm, people perceived the thunder and lightning as the voice of a powerful deity.

If somebody got hit by lightning, that proved to others that the person had committed some crime or displeased the deity. When the thunder rumbled loudly nearby, people knelt to the ground and cried out their prayers.

They knew, when they saw the awesome streaks of light across the sky, that they were seeing the finger of their god writing messages or expressing an opinion. Today thunder and lightning are seen and heard as the discharge of electrical energy between ions in the air and the oppositely charged ground.

If somebody is struck by lightning, it is either due to their own stupidity (standing on the golf course with a club in the air) or just bad luck. If the storm is severe, we take cover out of fear of a dangerous natural phenomenon, rather than a wrathful god.

The same event creates a completely different feeling, thought, and behavior in the people who observe it today. The point is, the experience of reality is different, and what makes it different is thought.

A few years ago, I spoke at a conference sponsored by Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After the presentation, my wife, Louise, and I went for a walk through the Old City, down through the Arab Quarter where most of the tourist shops are.

It was a Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, but not being Islamic, we doubted this would affect our sightseeing and shopping. It being a very hot May day, Louise was wearing a comfortable pair of walking shorts. As we moved through the streets, one shopkeeper came out of his store and started shouting at Louise, calling her a “Western pig,” a “whore,” and a “blasphemer.” “Don’t you know it’s a holy day, you bitch?” he screamed. “You have no right to show your legs!”

I mention this culture clash because the shopkeeper’s reality was that a woman (who, in Islam, has a different social status than women in most Western cultures) was flagrantly breaking the law.

Louise’s reality held that it was a hot day in a tourist center and  she was dressed comfortably in  conservative shorts, according to Western standards, and being harassed for it.

My reality told me that a man was displaying bad manners and disrespect for my culture and religion, for women in general, and for another human being in particular, by shouting instead of quietly coming up to us and presenting his case.

We were all correct.

And so now all of humanity is presented with a dizzying set of conflicting realities. What we choose to do about them will determine our future as a species. Consider these various ideas different people might have about life:

•  “We need electricity to be comfortable and maintain our way of life,” or “Producing electricity with fossil fuel is pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to global warming and extremely destructive weather patterns.”

•  “Being able to drive where and when we want to at a low cost is freedom,” or “Americans’  driving habits are feeding the destruction of the planet.”

•  “All of nature is here to serve the needs of humankind,” or “Humans are no more or less important to the planet than any other life-form.”

These ideas are grounded in the stories—the myths of our culture, our paradigms, our beliefs—that form the core of what we tell ourselves is “reality.” Stories, in this context, are anything we add to our original experience that alters what we think is going on, or changes how we think about things.

Since so much of what we call reality is subjective, there are few “right” or “wrong” stories; instead there are “useful” and “not useful” stories, depending on what culture you belong to, and depending on your status in your culture. Depending on your relationship to the natural world and your vision of the future.

Increasingly, the stories we’ve been telling ourselves for centuries are now moving from the “useful” to the “not useful” category. An example of such a story is the biblical order to have as many children as possible. In the days of Noah and Abraham, the tribe with the largest number of young men to create an army was usually the tribe that survived.

“Be fruitful and multiply” was a formula for cultural survival, even though in nearly all cases it then led to “and when you run out of resources and living space, kill off your neighbor and take theirs.”

We’ve rationalized  this over the years by saying that this conquering and dominating lifestyle  has brought us so many “good things”: television, visiting the moon, modern appliances, the eradication of many diseases.

I remember in high school a recruiter for the U.S. Army came in and gave a pitch for the armed forces to our tenth-grade  class. “Most of the really important advances in our civilization, from the development of rockets to the discovery of antibiotics, were caused by the necessities  of war,” he said, providing another feel-good rationalization for the periodic mass murder of humans. War is good: it leads to progress and lifestyle upgrades.

Back when the planet had only a few million people on it (the world hit a population of 1 billion during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson), a person could probably have built a case for the value of huge families, growing populations, and the conquest of nearby (or distant) lands. It might have been of questionable morality, but it could have been defended by the norms of a culture that had survival and growth as its primary goals and had not yet hit the limits of nature.

Now, however, such stories imperil the very culture from which they’re derived. Over a billion Catholics and over a billion Muslims are both still acting out this story, and the results for the planet are increasingly clear by wild overpopulation in Catholic South and Central America and the Muslim areas of the Middle East and southern Asia.

The ancient Greeks changed the world and established the foundations of Western Civilization with the idea of integrating democracy and the ownership of enslaved people. In fact, every time a culture has been transformed, since or before then and for better or worse, it’s been because of an idea, an insight, a new understanding of how things are, and of what is possible.

Ideas preceded  every revolution, every war, every transformation,  and every invention.

So, the good news is that if we re-define our cultural norms, re-tell the stories that make up the reality we follow, then humanity’s behaviors actually can change to conform to the new stories. It starts with us!

PS. You can find a much more extensive discussion of these concepts in my book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.