Why Is The Climate Debate Such A Mess? - Charles Eisenstein | Modern Wisdom Podcast 382

Charles Eisenstein is a public speaker and author specialising in the ecology movement. The climate debate is chaos. Activists and skeptics can't talk to each other and for every article suggesting one point of view there's another refuting it. People are either malicious world-killers or useful idiot dupes. Expect to learn why the climate change debate is so difficult to navigate, why it's supposedly impossible to find an impartial climate scientist, Charles' suggestions for how to navigate this conversation while not losing your mind and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Check out Charles' Substack - https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/ Follow Charles on Twitter - https://twitter.com/ceisenstein Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #climatechange #ecology #climateskepticism - 00:00 Intro 02:31 Understanding the Climate Debate 10:44 ‘Human Racism’ in Activism 15:58 What Sceptics Are Getting Wrong 25:00 Dealing with Uncertainty 32:49 Profiting from the Climate Debate 41:06 How to Improve Climate Discourse 52:56 Where to Find Charles - To support me on Patreon (thank you): http://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  When you think that you are saving the world, you become a fundamentalist because that's the most important thing and it's worth sacrificing everything else. People who adopt that, okay, we're saving the world. You, because you're not with us, you are a threat to the world, to the planet itself. So people who believe that, they emanate the stink of self-righteousness that just turns other people off.

• 0:25Chris Williamson?

  Charles Eisenstein, welcome to the show.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Happy to be here, Chris.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  Right, so I wanted to get you on because recently I had a discussion around climate with Patrick Moore, who is the ex-president of Greenpeace. And as a part of that, it really got me thinking about the state of the climate debate at the moment. Seeing the way that the comments kicked off, seeing how it makes people sort of very viscerally involved. And what it kind of taught me was the climate debate is mostly fucked. Like, it's mostly just a mess. And I think that it's obvious a lot of people have tied their colors to particular flagpoles, that this is something which is very, very tribal in a way that I don't think climate should be. And obviously, I've seen this, right?

• 1:13Chris Williamson?

  I've watched people get crazy about climate and glue their breasts to the street and lock down motorways in the UK and throw pig's blood on people coming out of Canada Goose stores. But I'd never been as close to the conversation as I have been with this. And I wanted to get someone on. I mean, even this man, so I tweeted out saying, I want to get an impartial climate scientist on. Any suggestions? Most of the suggestions from people were impartial climate scientists don't exist, no one that does that. Someone said that by using the word impartial, you're already adding, you're already trying to put some sort of a spin on it. We should just be bothered about the data. I'm like,

• 1:58Chris Williamson?

  hang on a second, that's what impartial means. Like, I'm so.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, like, if you call it impartial, then you're going to get criticized for.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Uh, suggesting that there are even two viable sides to be had.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. There's some sort of narrative and counter narrative, which anyone that can't see that there is. So I was just like, look, I need to get somebody on that I can just thrash this out with and can kind of help me understand the state of the climate debate at the moment. So, um, yeah, give me a hand.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Yep. Well, what I'm going to say is true in pretty much any polarized debate, which is that the key to unlocking it lies in the questions neither side is asking and the secret assumptions that both sides share. So they get stuck in a debate that is defined by the terms of the debate and, and not what they're not looking at. So in the term, in, in the case of climate, you have one side that says, uh, because of, uh, carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, we're at the,

• 3:12Speaker 00

  at or past multiple tipping points that are going to cause runaway global warming and the end of civilization as we know it, or worse. That's what one side essentially says, and there's some that are more alarmist than others. And the other side basically says, no, uh, carbon dioxide really isn't a problem. The warming, if there is any, it's not runaway and there's nothing to worry about as far as the environment goes because global warming is not an issue. Okay. What both sides agree on is that the conversation, the primary environmental conversation is about carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  So I wrote a book about this topic, uh, called Climate, A New Story. And what I came to in the research.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  And in the meditation and in the uh whatever legal and illegal investigations I did into the nature of life. Um what I came to is that the planet Earth is alive. Its organs are things like soil, water, uh forests, wetlands, uh species, fish, whales. Every ecosystem, every species is an organ of a living being. Therefore, if we continue to cut down the forests, overfish the oceans, develop the wetlands, drain the swamps, destroy the soil, et cetera, et cetera, poison the water.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Then it doesn't matter if we cut emissions to zero because Earth will still die a death of a million cuts. Because it would be like if you had, like suppose you had a runaway temperature. And it was because your organs are all getting eaten alive by a some, you know, by a flesh eating bacteria. And you're like, oh, man, temperature's rising, better take some, you know, medicine to reduce my temperature. It's like, no, your, your organs are, are being destroyed. So what I came to is that where our attention as environmentalists needs to go

• 5:30Speaker 00

  is to the, the sacred, living nature of this planet. And to devote our care into protecting and healing all that's been damaged. Which is a completely different emphasis than the standard narrative of climate change. And I could say way more about it, but I don't want to like, you know, talk for a whole hour. So maybe it's a starting point.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think when we're talking about the specifics like that, so Patrick specifically seems to have really positioned himself to be a count, a counter voice to each individual thing. So whether it be sea rising or reductions of the size of the ice caps or deforestation in the Amazon or the number of Animals that are going extinct. His argument essentially was that, look, we have far more degrees of freedom with this than we think, that deforestation and reforestation are occurring at similar times, that increases in CO2 are allowing reforestation to occur in arid areas because there's more CO2 for plants to live in and so on and so forth, which I'm sure are arguments that you're familiar with. And there was this one comment, man, out of,

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  I think it's 150,000 hours that that episode's been watched in a couple of weeks and a lot of comments. But one of the ones that popped up, one of the, one of the team sent to me and they said, when I hear someone, someone that explains the climate change, it sounds comprehensible. When I hear someone that explains that climate change is not real, it also sounds comprehensible. I really don't know what to think about this topic anymore. And to be honest, like, that's where I am. That's my position.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I came to that too. When I, like, very few climate activists spend any time deeply investigating the work of the climate skeptics. And when, when I did that, I'm like, you know, like, some issues, I'm like, okay, I could refute this, but on other issues, I'm like, you know, they really have a point here. And what I came to is that it is really dangerous for environmentalists to hitch their wagon to the global warming horse. Because what if that horse gets tired? As this guy Patrick Moore is saying, you know, like, maybe the ice caps aren't actually melting. I mean, like, I remember, like, they were predicting that, that Arctic would be ice free by 2015, you know, like, that

• 7:56Speaker 00

  didn't happen. Like, what if, what if, what if the skeptics are right? And we've hitched our wagon, like, of fracking, pipelines, like, all this, all these stuff, we've said, we can't do that anymore because climate change. Well, what if, you know, that runs out of steam? What I came to is like, I don't actually care if it's causing climate change. I still want oil exploration in the Inner Niger Delta, which is displacing millions of people and destroying pristine wetlands and making oil spills that are like endangering children. And like, I still want that to stop.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  I still have, like, have you seen the tar sands excavation photos in Canada? You know, like, these beautiful forests turn into this, this hellscape of like pits, you know, and, and dead trees, you know, and pollution like, I want that to stop. I want the earth to be beautiful. It doesn't, and, and I think that environmentalism used to be about that. In the sixties, it wasn't save the whales because if we don't bad, things are going to happen to us. It was save the whales because they are magnificent beings. Environmentalism fundamentally has to be motivated by love.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  Love of what?

• 9:20Speaker 00

  Love of life. Love of this earth, love of not just the Amazon, but of like the forest behind your house, of the place where you grew up, of the animals that you interact with. Not because they have some instrumental utility and, and that we should navigate according to some complicated self-interest calculation. That's not why we're here as human beings. We're not here to maximize our rational self-interest.

• 9:52Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it's being motivated by at the moment from the environmentalist side?

• 9:58Speaker 00

  I think it is actually motivated by love. But the rhetoric is about fear. The rhetoric is about force. It's about, for example, let's pressure and force people to change. Let's force the corporations to change. But like, and I'm not saying that, that, you know, we should just always ask nicely for change, but we have to understand that pretty much every human being on some level cares about this world and cares about the beings on it, not because of some threat to themselves, to their profits and so forth. Environmentalism has to return to that. Otherwise, we're going to be in a war.

• 10:43Chris Williamson?

  I think that's what turned me off from a lot of the environmentalist movement was this inherent sort of sense that I was a bad guy if I drove my car, or I was a bad guy if I wasn't going vegan, or I was a bad guy if I didn't use recyclable plastics or something. Alex Epstein calls it human racism. And that's a really, really good term for it. This sort of self hatred of humanity on the whole, that the planet would be beautiful and perfect without us here, and that we're this sort of scourge on the earth. And it's wrong. I'm going to try and list all the ways that I think it's wrong.

• 11:27Chris Williamson?

  It's wrong because psychologically, that is not the way to get people to buy into your argument. If you truly want to actually get change, if you want people to agree with your position, you cannot, no one's ever been shamed into like willful compliance and support of a cause. They might begrudgingly support a cause, but they're not going to do it because they want to. They're just going to think, fucking hell, Lisa down the street in a furry coat isn't going to shut up if I don't make sure that my blue bins are out at night to recycle all of my cans. I think it's a bad idea because it polarizes the conversation. It means that you can't ever have a, how would you say, there's no

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  way to discuss this in a well-meaning, good faith, delicate manner. It's always got to be louder and bigger and more militant. And I think that that's what's causing this, or that's at least part of what's causing this divide. You have people going, well, hang on a second, you're telling me, you're telling me that I'm some sort of a bad guy? Fuck you. I'm not a bad guy. And it just rolls down the hill from there, man. The slinky starts moving.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  Like, part of the "save the world" narrative, which, like, that's already a red flag for me. There's an awful lot of been harm, a lot of harm that's been done historically by people who are trying to save the world. Like, do you know what the last big "save the world" campaign was? No. That was fully grounded in almost universally-accepted science? No. It was eugenics. Brilliant. The big threat to humanity was genetic degradation, and the solution was to sterilize the unfit.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  And, you know, most scientists, most doctors, and most educated people believed in that. And we saw what, you know, the result play out in the first half of the 20th century. And that's not, I'm not trying to equate, you know, climate change activism with fascism or anything like that. But it's just like, when you think that you are saving the world, you become a fundamentalist, because that's the most important thing, and it's worth sacrificing everything else to that god. Another problem with it, in addition to what you mentioned, is that people who adopt that, "Okay, we're saving the world,

• 13:59Speaker 00

  you, because you're not with us, you are a threat to the, to the world, to the planet itself." So, so people who believe that, they emanate the stink of self-righteousness that just turns other people off. And as far as, because like, on some level, you know that you are not a bad guy. I mean, assuming that you're not, you know, like, a full-blown psychopath or whatever, like...

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Your heart knows the truth that you care about life. And when somebody is telling you that you are bad, or believes that you're bad, you're going to reject them as not a carrier of truth. Same thing for humanity as a whole. Like, yeah, I'm well familiar with this narrative that human beings are a plague on the planet. And I think, so are you saying that we are nature's big mistake? That the gifts that make us human are worthless? That would make us an exception to every other species on Earth.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Every species on Earth has unique characteristics that enhance the resiliency and the robustness of the ecosystem and that propel evolution to a new step. Are humans an exception to that? Are we just the evil beings that are in the way of beauty and life? Or is it that we have not yet applied the gifts that make us human toward their true purpose as a civilization? And what is that? It's to contribute to the furtherance of life and beauty on Earth, to make the world even more alive and more beautiful.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  What do you think the climate skeptics movement is getting wrong?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  The big thing is that there is no problem. There is no environmental problem. A lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not only do they level what I think is a, at least an arguable... It's not like a crazy critique of global warming, but then they tend to lump in every other environmental problem and say environmentalism is just a way to facilitate a socialist takeover and so on and so forth. Like... I mean, I my with my own two eyes, I've seen. I mean, just like, you know, like, there's a debate, is there insect apocalypse or not?

• 16:42Speaker 00

  You know, like, there's all these studies about the rapid decline of insect numbers, insect biomass.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Eighty percent in a lot of places. And I'm like, yeah, you know, when I was a kid and we went for trips, the windshield would get covered with bug splatter. And now, like, on a long trip, there's like two or three bugs, maybe. Something has changed.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  My, my, my brother lives on a farm.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  There, the, the, there's some streams that, you know, come down from the mountain. And in the summer, they often go dry. There's like, you know, kind of a muddy puddle here and there. He was walking the farm with an old timer who grew up there. And he said, yeah, back in the forties, these streams were so full that you could not cross without wading boots all summer. So something is like, and even the stuff about, about reforestation and stuff, like, for, like, the number of the, the, the land area of virgin forests is shrinking and the land area under tree plantations is growing. Biofuels plantations is growing. You can call those a forest,

• 17:55Speaker 00

  but they're a lot less alive than if you've ever been in a, in a old growth forest. And I mean, you can feel the forest looking at you, like, there's a spirit there. This is the kind of perception we have to tap into if we're going to live on a different way on earth and in relation to earth. So, so, yeah, the skeptics, what they're not seeing is simply the sacredness and the, the, the importance

• 18:24Speaker 00

  of life.

• 18:25Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that's interesting there, that Venn diagram, that crossover between being skeptical about this and then it being a globalist socialist takeover, or whatever it might be. I was driving through Newcastle city center and there was a anti-vaccine protest. I'm not sure if it was for children, but I don't think it's being mandated for children in the UK anyway. So anyway, anti-vaccine protesters I'm going past. And it was on September 11th. On the same day. So I'm driving past and it was traffic everywhere because the police are everywhere. So I'm sat and these people have got megaphones and they're shouting out and they've got the banners saying no vaccines and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh, cool. Like, this is interesting. You don't really see it quite so much in the UK. I know

• 19:10Chris Williamson?

  that America, you guys love a, love a protest, but in the UK, we've got a bit fewer of them. And then the lady came on the, on the megaphone and said, right, we are now going to have a one minute's silence for the victims of the September 11th inside job. And I was like, oh, this is a vaccine thing that, and you've also, like, the streams have been crossed here, and you've decided for some reason that because the vaccine, like, there's a big bunch of people here that hear for anti-vaccines, but also believe that September 11th is an inside job. These two things aren't linked. Like, whether September 11th is an inside job, or whether

• 19:55Chris Williamson?

  the vaccine mandate is you trying to have a globalist totalitarian takeover. But there was a lot of people that did that. And I think that you see particular personalities get drawn towards certain movements, because it's seductive in one form or another. And yes, I think that it leads to people having distilled blind spots, right? You become incredibly conscious of certain things and incredibly blind to others.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think one thing going on there is, I speak of it in terms of the, the disintegration of the, the story, or even the mythology that helps us make sense of the world, that, that tells us what things mean, that tells us what's real, tells us who we are, how to live. These stories are breaking down because they're not working anymore. So, so for example, somebody who once pretty much believed the dominant narratives about, you know, like, how to be healthy, for example, you go to the doctor and the doctor fixes you and science is progressing

• 21:06Speaker 00

  and people are getting healthier and healthier and they can fix more and more things, you know, and then- You get some autoimmune condition, for example, that was extremely rare 50 years ago, and the doctor can't fix it. And then maybe you go to an alternative healer eventually, when you get desperate, and they can fix it. You're like, okay, what I've been told is not true. What else am I being told? That, you know, might also not be true. So there's this creeping radicalism. And it's quite normal, almost, to flip from everything they're telling us is true

• 21:48Speaker 00

  to nothing they are telling us is true. Everything is a conspiracy. Everything is a hoax. Everything's a lie. And people go down the rabbit hole. I mean, 9/11 truther, I mean, that's not actually that far. You know, that's, I mean, you know, there are people out there who believe the moon landings were faked, who believe the Earth is flat, who believe nuclear weapons are hoaxes. And, you know, that Sandy Hook school shooting was fake. And like, all these things. And, you know, like, people,

• 22:31Speaker 00

  it's so comforting to have a story of everything, a totalizing narrative that tells you, that gives you the illusion of control in the world, that gives you an illusion of certainty, that tells you, here's your place, here's how to live. Like, that's comforting. So when that is stripped away, when that crumbles, people often jump to another totalizing narrative, which could be a cult. You know, it could be like they join a cult or a radical political movement or QAnon or something like that. And really, where we have to go is into the place of being comfortable with not knowing.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Maybe some things we're being told by the authorities are true and some aren't. Maybe the vaccines are much more dangerous and less effective than we're told. Yet they're not a diabolical plot by reptilian aliens to cull the sheep. You know, like that place of uncertainty is uncomfortable for a lot of people. And it applies to the climate debate, too. Like, what if the biosphere is becoming increasingly deranged and unstable? And there isn't one thing that we can use to explain it all. That's called fundamentalism.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  I call it carbon fundamentalism, the one thing. And if we could only, it's so, so comfortable to have one thing that's the enemy and the key to all your problems.

• 24:10Speaker 00

  It's, that's why, in a way, like, the virus, like the coronavirus, was a relief. Because here we have declining health, all of these ambient anxieties and fears. And here's something you can be afraid of. Here's something you can control. It's an identifiable pathogen. So we can, you know, lockdown, quarantine, distance, et cetera, et cetera. And now I'm safe. So with the degradation of the biosphere, it's the same thing. It's, it's, it's painful to, to watch, watch it happen. Oh, and here's one thing, an enemy. Let's find an enemy and attack the enemy.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  That is a pattern of action that civilization, as we know it, is quite familiar with. Like, yeah.

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  Has there ever been a time in history where humans have been able to deal with uncertainty effectively in that way and reach Aristotle's virtuous mean?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Well, I think that the way that humans learn to deal with uncertainty is by going through it. You know, it's an initiation and it's a growth process. You inhabit one certainty, one story, one self.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  And it works for a while. Eventually, it becomes no longer hospitable. Like you grow out of it. You become something that no longer fits into that story.

• 25:51Chris Williamson?

  What I'm thinking, what I'm thinking is that for a long time, it was religion. For an awful long time, the single narrative that we had that explained everything that we were able to put our faith in was that faith itself, God, higher purpose, whatever the ideology was, that would carry us through. And fuck, man, like if I don't hear, if I, if I try and have a conversation about some of the challenges that we're facing in the modern era, that doesn't come back to, should we have just not got rid of religion?

• 26:20Chris Williamson?

  It's, it continues to come up, whether it's identity politics, whether it's politics and extremism, whether it's the climate debate. I think that people struggle to be in uncertainty. I think it's inherently uncomfortable for humans. And I think that previously we could outsource this sense of uncertainty because if we feel uncertainty, there is something solid that we can wrap ourselves around, and that's religion. And now,

• 26:44Chris Williamson?

  what is there to hold on to? You've got to make your own meaning. You've got to find your own purpose. Religion's out the window, man.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Well, what happened was religion was replaced by a new religion called science. Science is a religion. And I'm not saying that it's just a religion or that religion is bad. But it's a religion. It rests on metaphysical principles that are taken for granted, such as everything that is real can be quantified and measured, such as variables can be controlled, such as experiments are in theory repeatable.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  That they don't depend on the attitude of the experimenter and the place and time where he is. Um, that there's an objective world outside of ourselves. Like, these, these are a few of the metaphysical assumptions of science. And then you have a priesthood that speaks in their own special language. You have, um, uh, true believers, you have heretics who get excommunicated when they lose their funding. You have a long training ordeal called graduate school to initiate you into the priesthood. Uh, you have a system for indoctrinating the youth. I mean, the whole thing, it, it tells you how the world began, like a religion does. Tells you the nature of a human being. The whole thing is religion.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  And it has provided that certainty that you were talking about for a long time. But now it is breaking down. It's breaking down because the paradise that it promised has not come to pass. Like, we were, this is 2021, man. That, like, you're, maybe you're a little younger than me, but when I was a kid, even the year 2000 was like this impossibly futuristic paradise. You know, 2021, I mean, we were supposed to be like, you know, gods by now. But instead, life has gotten worse. People are, for example, less healthy than they were 50 years ago. Life expectancy is plateauing and starting to decline in the UK and the United States.

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  Is that really true?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, life expectancy rose in the first half of the 20th century. It rose by 26 years in the US. In the second half of the 20th century, it rose by maybe six years.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  And now it's, it's plateaued and even before COVID, it was starting to decline. So, and, and we didn't, like, another promise was we were going to engineer all poverty and crime out of existence. Political science was going to give us a perfect government. I mean, it didn't happen. So we're losing faith in science and people are having experiences that don't fit into science, that science says are impossible.

• 29:34Chris Williamson?

  So this is even more uncertainty.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so basically, we are facing a religious crisis right now, just like the one that, that, that the West faced, you know, 300 years ago. In the transition from Christianity to science, we're facing another one right now. It's profoundly disorienting.

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  I suppose an interesting thing is that with science, you can have, in the same way as you can have multiple interpretations of scripture or use different translations, the same data can be interpreted by two different people to reach completely opposite conclusions. So when we're talking about the CO2 parts per million, and Patrick was talking about it's the Milankovich cycle on this 80,000 year tilt of the way that Jupiter affects the axis of the Earth's tilt and wobble and blah, blah, and you're like, that sounds plausible. That sounds like it might be true. And then if you sit and listen to a Greta Thunberg or an Extinction Rebellion person for a little while, one of the karma less unhinged ones, and you're like, well, that sounds plausible. Like, I know that we make more carbon dioxide.

• 30:38Chris Williamson?

  I know that my car puts out fumes out the back of it. I don't really know too much, but you think, you go, okay, so you've got sort of two. It's the same world. Everyone's inhabiting the same world and somehow coming to completely opposite conclusions about it whilst relying on the thing that's supposed to be independent, the science.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, like these scientists, in a way that, like another way that they're like priests, is that they perform these divination rituals using their sanctified instruments, their microscopes, their computers, and it's like consulting an oracle, and then they come and tell the public what the future is going to be. And now, like you're saying, there's basically a schism. And some of the priests are telling us one thing, and a minority of them are telling us something else. And yeah, how do you know what to believe? You can go and look at the data yourself and make your own interpretations, but if even

• 31:34Speaker 00

  PhDs are vehemently disagreeing on the interpretation of it, and even more today, even on the validity of the data itself, because it's like, well, that data's been adjusted, you know, and the more that science is politicized and woven into political narratives that are weaponized to defeat the other side, the less reliable data is. Because if your goal is to defeat the other side, then... It's totally justified to change the data or to be very hostile to data that doesn't fit your narrative and subject it to intense scrutiny, but if it does fit your narrative,

• 32:17Speaker 00

  you just welcome that. I mean, we see this happening in all the COVID, the vaccine conversations as well. So, so how do you know? How can you choose? It's, it's in a way like if you're honest with yourself today, there's no choice but to be uncertain.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's what that message, that's what that comment said, man. When I hear someone that explains the climate change, it sounds comprehensible. When I hear someone that explains that climate change is not real, it also sounds comprehensible. I really don't know what to think on this topic anymore. Dude, I had to get this story up for you. John Stossel, do you know who John Stossel is? Dude with the mustache, like a American reporter journalist, he dude. John Stossel sues Facebook alleging defamation of a fact check label seeks at least $2 million. Former TV journalist John Stossel is demanding at least $2 million in damages from Facebook in a lawsuit he filed against the social media giant alleging the company defamed him by appending fact checking labels to two videos he posted about climate change. In a statement to Variety, Facebook spokesperson says, "We believe this case is

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously against the allegations." Blah, blah, blah. In one video, government fueled fires about 2020 wildfires in California. Fact checking partners falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made on the basis that flagged the flag content was misleading and missing context so that viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement. Blah, blah, blah, back and forth. And you think, right, okay, not only now is it useful politically to further a particular cause, one side of the aisle or another, or an agenda, or to get people to feel one way to create this sort of ambient sense of outrage or anxiety or whatever, individuals.

• 33:55Chris Williamson?

  Now, profiting from this, you have individual people, I'm going to be the climate scientist that's going to be, you know, Patrick Moore, for all that he may or may not have good intentions, he's trying to sell some books, like he's trying to sell books. And for as long as you're trying to sell books, you do not have the purest intentions at heart, because there are perverse incentives there. The incentives are for you to come up with something which is maybe a bit more bombastic, maybe a little bit more exciting than it would have been. And that John Stossel thing as well, like it's on the side of Facebook to appear impartial. It's on the side of John Stossel to try and battle back and use it to get more clout and then to get money out of them.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I tend not to attribute people's militant opinions too much to wanting to make money. I think like there's psychological forces that are at work that are more powerful, like wanting to belong, wanting to seek approval from, you know, a certain segment of the population, at least, taking sides. Taking sides is psychologically satisfying, because now you belong, now you are accepted, now you have external allies that tell you that you are good, because

• 35:19Speaker 00

  you're on team good in the war on evil. And at a time when the stories that help us create an identity through participation in a common goal are breaking down, people are having an identity crisis, and therefore they gravitate toward partisan political and other opinions. Does that make sense?

• 35:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, because we used to have a unifying story of civilization. It didn't include everybody, but it was a pretty broad unifying story.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  Everybody that you knew.

• 35:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, it was of ascent, it was of progress. And you know, you're an ambitious young man. Well, here's what to do. You become a rocket scientist, you become a doctor, you become even a lawyer. Cause you become a functioning, productive member of society. And you are part of this glorious ascent of humanity toward this, you know, amazing future. Like that infused life with meaning and we don't have that anymore. And people are just grasping, struggling to make life mean something.

• 36:30Chris Williamson?

  How much do you think, I keep hearing problems of the modern era attributed to the fact that this is the first generation who hasn't done better than their parents. And I definitely think that there's a sense of that going on. If you hear the sort of language that Agatha Thunberg uses, where she talks about you are destroying our future. You older people, people who had it great, who've raped Mother Earth for all that she is worth and so on and so forth. And then we are paying the price and you're not going to be here, but we are, and it's our job to fix it. It feels like that's an element as well, that as we're talking about,

• 37:13Chris Williamson?

  perhaps some of the promises of technology and science starting to top out, or at least slow down. That's causing, the deceleration is being felt by people and they're going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on a second. Something's wrong, maybe we need to try and kickstart this star again.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the irony.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  The irony is that, that, well, for one thing, that, you know, all of this ecological destruction hasn't actually worked. You know, I mean, if it, if it were making us happier and happier, maybe you could justify it. But it's not even doing that.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  And the irony is that our happiness, fulfillment, joy, thriving is actually readily available and it doesn't depend on more technology, more resource consumption or anything like that. I don't know if you've travelled a lot, but if you have, like, where do you find the happiest people? Are they in London? Are they in Tokyo? Are they in New York? Or are they in, you know, the Gambia?

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Dude, happiest, happiest people that I ever met were in a town called Pai, which is the most northern town in Thailand. And I volunteered at a elephant sanctuary and reforestation site for a while. And this town's got a lot, its main street is a large dirt road and all of the others are small dirt roads. And I rock up and I'm on a moped for the first time and got small swim shorts on and I'm going around washing these elephants and helping people dig holes in the ground. And it was just pure bliss. And it sounds so new age and hippie and kind of unsustainable. It sounds like it's the sort of thing that by its very nature is a holiday. You go, well, I don't know, man, like, what are we

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  doing things in, what's life in service of? If it's not pure fulfillment and joy in the moment, how much are we overcomplicating the situ, the ends now have repurposed the means to a point where you're like, well, everything's, everything's been turned upside down. Those are the happiest people I ever saw. People in a, a city that you have to travel for four hours on a road that's literally called vomit, vomit motorway because it's got so many bends that people throw up, tourists throw up in the van on the way there. They were the happiest people I ever met.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and if, and their, you know, GDP per capita is probably very low. Their, the BTUs of energy that they consume per capita are very low.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  A place like that is a ripe target for what's called economic development.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  And when those people stop engaging in their traditional livelihoods, stop producing their own food and cooking for each other and building their own houses and doing all that stuff in a gift economy, and begin purchasing things and working for global corporations, their GDP goes up and in the statistics it looks like their quality of life has improved. And their resource consumption goes up too. So really, to take it back to climate change and stuff, I mean, really what this whole thing is about is the question, how to be human? And we are, as a species, or at least as a civilization, reconsidering that question.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  We're facing the bankruptcy of the answer that we had been pursuing for a long time. And therefore, everything is on the table now. Everything.

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  What was a better step to move forward? When you wrote your book, did you think about some recommendations for a better way to have this discussion?

• 41:16Speaker 00

  I mean, I had a bunch of practical policy recommendations, new priorities, but the animating principle under those priorities is love of life. So I said, first priority is to preserve whatever pristine ecosystems are still here, which is especially the Amazon, the Congo. But even like any small wetlands or like any place that has health in it, we protect it. And the second priority is to restore, regenerate the broken places, especially agricultural soils.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  And then third is to stop dousing the world in poison all the time.

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  What's poison?

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Herbicides, insecticides, toxic waste, radioactive waste, electromagnetic pollution, et cetera, et cetera. I think that is partly what's behind the insect apocalypse. And then fourth priority, and in my mind, it's a distant fourth, is to reduce carbon emissions.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Can't hurt, you know, it's putting like more stress on a system that's already stressed.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  So.

• 42:40Speaker 00

  But as far as like, how do we talk about it?

• 42:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  The, the, the principle is, whatever you say, it comes from a trust in our collective purpose and the purpose of each individual human being, which is to contribute to life and beauty on earth.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  And when I speak to anybody, it could be, you know,

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Exxon Mobil executive. And I'm, I'm standing in the knowing that this person on a deep level cares about life, has places that are special to him, and that on some level wants to serve life, wants to be a force for, for positive change in the world. If I stand strongly in that, then he knows that I'm an ally. He knows that I'm actually on some level on his side, even if I disagree with his opinions, and he'll listen to me. He won't be, like, he, he, people can feel how you see them.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  People have a, have a internal guidance system, like we can sense. And if I'm truly willing to see the best in him, then my words will have power. He'll trust me. He'll know that I'm not just trying to convert him. I'm not trying to convince him. I'm not trying to dominate him to like, fight his evidence and logic with my superior evidence and logic and make him run away with his tail between his legs.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  This is, because what I was saying is,

• 44:34Speaker 00

  the nature of the revolution that we are in right now is in how we understand ourselves to be who we are. Therefore, who we are being. And we have to stand in.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  The new human, which is actually the ancient human also. The new human, which is like, yeah, I am here to give to the world. I'm here to, to, to receive and to give. To be part of evolution, to be part of the planet coming more and more alive. Every stage of evolution has been a coming more alive of the planet. From the first eukaryotic cells to the first multicellular organisms, to plants, to flowering trees, like the, the world got more and more and more alive. That's, that's what life wants. It's to live.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  And we are the latest creation of nature for the same thing. When we stand in that and see each other as that, then we'll, we'll figure out what to do.

• 45:46Chris Williamson?

  The fact that every conversation appears to have the worst possible intentions, if you're on opposite sides of the fence. It's always a presumption that you are coming at this with an agenda or some sort of bad faith or whatever. There doesn't seem to be any benefit of the doubt given to people. There doesn't seem to be any hope or any redemption or any possibility that they may not see the world in the same way that you do. So what do you think's more likely? Like they're convinced by their view, obviously. That's why they hold it. There's very, very few people who actually actively hold a view with which they internally disagree. But almost no one does that. So why do you think the person that sat across from you believes the thing that they do?

• 46:31Chris Williamson?

  Because they see the world in a different way, their convictions are alternate to yours. And yet, there seems to be such... Everyone's so quick to throw bad faith or grifter or shill or whatever terminology you want at the, at the other side. Idiot, willful killer of the, of the world, vegan, stupid people stopping people getting to work in the morning on the motorway. And I think that's, that level of aggression and animus in the conversation.

• 47:11Chris Williamson?

  Is it facilitated by frictionless communication online? Yeah, maybe, probably, probably a bit of it. Is it communicated by fracturing, permitting people to fracture into different and different subgroups and having no grand narrative that holds them together over the top? Yeah, yeah, probably. When you throw all of this together, it kind of doesn't surprise me that this is a challenge that we're facing. And we see it with everything: politics, education, childcare, gender, race, economics, whatever you want, fucking pandemics.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:47Chris Williamson?

  Fractured, frictionless.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it comes again to the crisis in belonging. You know, when you, when you ask, well, why does somebody have the beliefs and convictions that they have? Is it because they made a dispassionate survey of all of the possibilities and applied critical thinking and sifted through all the data? No, usually people believe what is convenient for them to believe. Convenient in what sense? It fits in with other things that they believe. It garners the approval of people around them. It enables them to say that they are a good person. It helps them to belong to a community of other people who hold the same beliefs.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  So people naturally gravitate toward those kinds of beliefs.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  That's one of my favorite sayings is you cannot reason somebody out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into to begin with. So, yeah, this is, I mean, human nature, this is human nature because we are social animals. And, and for thousands of years, the most important thing was the acceptance of the group. In ancient times, the worst punishment wasn't even execution. It was ostracism, banishment, which probably amounted to execution because people were dependent on each other. But, you know, I mean, I've, you know, been subjected to a certain amount of cancelling and denunciation online.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  And man, it hurts. You know what I mean? Like, on a deep level. It's, it's, it's really distressing. And yeah, like, I can grow a thick skin, you know, and, and, but when, when it happens, my instinct is to find my tribe. Find the people who say, oh, yeah, those fuckers are just totally wrong and they're, they're, you know, subhuman in some way, unlike us. I'm like, ah, yeah, my people. And, and I recognize that pattern as very close to the origin of the problem.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  That, that tribalism, that mob mentality, where, where social tension is relieved by turning on some victim. And I better make sure that I'm not that victim. I better, you know, be tight with my folks

• 50:18Speaker 00

  so that I don't get dehumanized and victimized, scapegoated.

• 50:24Chris Williamson?

  The world isn't right and wrong anymore. It's in groups and out groups, all the way down. That's all there is.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Yes. And, and that whole thing, it sounds dark, but that's not all there is to human nature. There's also a transcendent dimension that we are,

• 50:40Speaker 00

  we are being presented with right now as a choice. And it's about, it's about compassion, it's about forgiveness, it's about putting yourself in someone else's shoes, it's about generosity of listening. It's about humility. It's about

• 50:59Speaker 00

  humbling yourself to what's true, even if it might not fit in with your self-image, even if it might mean that you were wrong about something. Because let's face it, everybody, everybody listening to this is probably wrong about something one of their deep convictions.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  If you are, okay? If you are, how are you ever going to know that? When that is so part of your identity? Like, like, if you want the other people, the wrong side, to ever change their mind, then you have to be willing to change your mind, too. Otherwise, if you're not willing, because you just know you're right, you're setting an example of the human being that they're going to conform to, too. They know they're right just as much as you know you're right.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  So what is, and that's not to say like betray what you genuinely know, but it's to look at, okay, the things I believe, how many of them do I know from direct experience? Why do I believe the things that I believe? And what would it be like to not believe them? What would I lose to not believe them? And am I willing to not believe them? Or are those things I would lose too precious that even if I'm wrong, I am not going to let go of this belief? Like, let's get honest with ourselves first.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  Then we have the possibility of actual conversation, rather than the debate or really the shouting match that prevails in public discourse today.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  Perfect place to leave it, man. Thank you so much, Charles Eisenstein, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with what it is that you do, where should they go?

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Um, I have a, my website is kind of in stasis right now, so Substack. I have a blog on Substack that I'm publishing right now.

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  CharlesEisenstein.substack.com?

• 53:13Speaker 00

  I believe so, yes.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  Cool, I'll find it, I'll put it in the show notes below. Charles, thanks so much for today.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Yep, thanks, Chris.