When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 6

Fig. 1 Hey! PEOTUS, remember You Are Here

On the popular front inhabited by the masses, whether or not a slice of science is interpreted as an 'exaggeration' or even an 'underestimate' to us, turns out to be, for the most part anyway, an emotional, subconscious feeling masking itself as intellect.

That feeling, to be sure, is produced with the ingredients of various segments of information, however, when that information happens to invade our 'comfort zone', i.e. a number of feelings in a subconscious inner-group of feelings, produced by our 'world view,' we are prone to consider that disturbing information to be an 'exaggeration' or something similar to that.

A word for those who engender the feeling we call 'exaggeration' is the word 'alarmist'.

Those descriptive words vary from place to place, and from person to person, but the deep down-under-the-hood reality is that we are substantially composed of fear circuitry that has a profound influence on what we call consciousness:

A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about

Fig. 2 "Let's spray chemicals in the clouds to stop global warming"

global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival. There is already experimental evidence suggesting that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

(The Technological Stairway To Heaven?). This portion of reality is exacerbated by another portion of reality: some 98% of our cognition is subconscious (The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere).

We see this reality coming to life now in the minds of the president elect and his followers, because of their denialist world views (Hey! PEOTUS, Fig. 1, Fig. 2).

Another world view in play in Port Authorities, cities, counties, and other segments of everyday-reality officialdom, is pragmatism:

"A growing number of public and private entities, including port authorities, are evaluating potential impacts from climate change and are developing procedures to incorporate the financial and other risks into their investment decision making processes.
...
Based on the Port’s location, operational activity, and on planning work conducted to date, SLR is the primary climate change impact which will affect the Port."

(Sea Level Rise Impacts At Ports). Yes, there are many responsible people in the U.S. who govern more responsibly than denialists can (Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 44).

The gist of it is that when fear-based denial renders us unable to analyze a threat with the full power of intellect and knowledge, all we have remaining is emotional "thinking" which we use to run from the problem.

In the U.S.eh? our divided government mirrors the subconscious struggle, within us all, between fear and awareness of reality.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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A panel with various social backgrounds discusses the denial issue:

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