“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”—MT

Around and around we go.

I confess: Sometimes I become disappointed in humanity (myself included). We seem to balance on the razor’s edge between genius and stupidity. I like the first and am depressed by the latter. What is most disturbing of all is the mental attitude of denying looming disasters that have the potential to destroy us all in the seeming interest of a few. I say “seeming” because the few are part of us all and denial lays at the core of this delusion—that some will prosper while the rest of us go the way of all flesh. Granted we have to evaluate and prioritize a substantial number of looming catastrophes at the same time and it’s difficult to remember we’re here to drain the swamp when we’re up to our keisters in alligators. A certain amount of vacillation and indecision are expected. 

That said, some catastrophes have more destructive potential than others, but there are none of greater consequence than one day finding ourselves trying to survive in an environment that won’t support human life. During the cold war, we all eventually came to realize that nobody could win the nuclear arms race. There was too much threat that once begun, a nuclear attack would result in the death of everyone. We even invented the acronym, “MAD” to describe mutually assured destruction. It took some time for us to collectively come to our senses and for awhile we vacillated back and forth between the obvious and the wished for. Denial then, as now, was the enduring culprit. It was at work as well in the early Nazi era when the Jews stayed where they had lived for centuries and refused to face the growing likelihood of the holocaust.

In a New York Times article today, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton addressed the phenomenon of this psychological defense mechanism (denial) as it concerned the nuclear threat and compared it to the environmental threat of today. He said, “With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.” 

It takes some vision and understanding to distinguish between the falling sky predicted by Chicken Little and the probable environmental catastrophe too awful to comprehend. But this is one of those occasions when we must rise above the alligators, because all the while we choose to remain in denial and refuse to act in a timely fashion, the environment continues to get worse. If we don’t soon face the unavoidable emerging consequences, we’ll find ourselves in the situation of the frog who became cooked in ever growing hotter water.