Why are nice, well-meaning people the biggest threat to our planet?
Especially among younger generations, there's a growing discomfort towards the current socioeconomic model. A lot of people feel unhappy or disconnected from their jobs and lives. But only a tiny number of them are ready to take substantial action. Why? Why change is not happening right now?
My belief is that there's a class of privileged "progressive" people who are (often involuntarily) blocking real change.
They are the ones who run all our major (and minor) institutions, banks, oil companies, state offices, renewable energy consultancies, schools, hospitals... and even universities and NGOs. Nice people who deeply care for their family and are respectful and well meaning towards those less fortunate who are in their immediate surroundings. Highly educated, cosmopolitan, left-wing voting...it's really hard to be confrontational with them.
Their "realistic" arguments make sense under the eyes of the public, in a self-reinforcing spiral of beliefs. The "progressive" changes they propose are well weaved and integrated with the current worldview, whereas the truths and changes us dreamers propose seem too far fetched and simplistic to be taken into consideration.
Often they sympathize with you, they share the same background values, they had a radical soul too, which had been slowly drifting over the years they have been in contact with the reality of their jobs. They started compromising, and little by little they lost their ideals without being aware of it. They think they have recalibrated their positions in order to obtain the maximum positive impact for society.
They think they are on the side of the angels!
Wishful thinking, optimism towards technological solutions to the climate crisis that however do not add up, wrong cultural representations....make them blind on the basic fact that an economy based on exponential growth is going to take us to an ecological catastrophe.
They work over-hours, overspecializing..and progressively locking themselves into a tunnel without exit. They groom the brightest youths to follow their steps and are considered as leaders of change. They have everything to lose in admitting they have been doing the wrong thing for their entire lives.
Could there be a more difficult challenge than awakening these people?
Yet that's something that we -"radical greens" (or maybe I should call us radical humanists..or radical ecologists..) - absolutely must do if we are to win our battle against climate change and social alienation in current society. This is because the false solutions that they weave preserve the current ideology by distracting people from taking deeper action. People would rather believe in comforting lies (technology is going to save us) than an inconvenient truth.
It's frustrating to see the growing incommunicability between an increasingly radical minority and a huge mass of nice, indifferent, distracted people (who are doing nothing else than embracing to different degrees the prepackaged solutions to the crisis put forward by the experts, be it signing petitions, participating to official protests, unplugging their phone chargers from the sockets after use...).
How to link to these nice people? how to be inclusive? How much do we need to compromise? What arguments and techniques should we use to wake them up?
(to be continued...)
