Preaching the End of the World - Chris Cornell
Call me now it's alright
It's just the end of the world
You need a friend in the world
'cause you can't hide
So call and I'll get right back
If your intentions are pure
I'm seeking a friend for the end of the world.
I came across a video a few years ago of an exercise in a college classroom by Charisse Nixon, a professor of psychology at Penn State Bahrend College in Pennsylvania. In the video, professor Nixon passed out sheets of paper to her students telling them it was a routine exercise.
The task she gave them was one of anagrams - or words whose letters could be rearranged to form other words. She played a bit of a trick on her students. Half the class got papers with the following words from which to make anagrams:
Tea
Lemon
Cinerama
You can see that the words can be rearranged to form eat (or ate), melon, and American.
The other half of the class were given the following three words:
Whirl
Slapstick
Cinerama.
Processor Nixon asked her students to do the anagrams one at a time. In the video you can see the students with the second set of words look around the room in mild panic as they see the other half of the class easily solve the anagrams they were given, while they struggle to make an anagram out of whirl - which is impossible.
Professor Nixon asked them to move on the second word. Again those with the first list quickly and easily solved their puzzle, and the second group again squirmed in their seats with the impossible “slapstick”.
By this point the second group was experiencing “learned helplessness” so that when they were given the word “cinerama”, which can be turned into “American,” most of them had given up.
I repeated this exercise a few days ago when I spoke at the De-School conference in Chicago. The results were largely the same. The half of the room that received the impossible first two words, had nearly given up by the third word. Only one of a dozen people with the impossible first two words raised their hand to show that they had found the correct anagram for cinerama. The group that had been given the impossible task had largely given up by the time they got to the third word. Everyone on the other side of the room (who had the list of words that could be solved) solved all three anagrams.
Learned Helplessness
The phenomena of leaned helplessness applies beyond the classroom of course.
Learned helplessness is a psychological phenomenon where individuals, after repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative situations, come to believe they are unable to influence or escape those situations, even when they have the ability to do so.
Many of us are experiencing learned helplessness today in the phase of climate breakdown and overshoot that threaten us with a collapse of our civilization.
On the individual basis, overcoming learned helplessness involves practicing learned hopefulness. This means one focuses on positive outcomes, controlling what they can. Someone can gradually introduce controllable, positive experiences that allow them to take a sense of agency in their actions. On the individual level this can include things like cognitive behavioral therapy.
But how do you overcome the collective learned helplessness that comes with societal and civilization collapse? You can’t take control of something as big as climate change or overshoot as an individual. So learned helplessness seems like a reasonable reaction to the current situation.
But there is a way out of collective learned helplessness.
Seeking a friend … at the end of the world.
Two recent studies highlight how our own perceptions misinterpret how helpless we are. The first came out earlier this year, and found that about 89% majority of the world’s people want stronger action to fight the climate crisis but feel they are trapped in a self-fulfilling “spiral of silence” because they mistakenly believe they are in a minority.
The data comes from a global survey that interviewed 130,000 people across 125 countries. The survey shows that people get trapped between an existential fear of other people's opinions in the present and an existential fear about the future. Most people want to act but feel alone, will feel the will be judged, feel powerless, and don’t realize most people feel the same way
The second paper - The Hidden Business Majority - found the same kind of results among businesses in the UK. In this case however, those that crafted the survey were asking about post-growth principles. The survey found that 409 businesspeople in UK largely supported post growth ideas. The survey results were as follows:
86% support post-growth principles
53% believe their peers do
90% believe business should follow Doughnut Economics
80% say it is challenging to get business to play a more active role in environmental problems.
When the world is running down, you make the best of what’s still around.
Some form of collapse is coming. We have ignored too many flashing warnings, and the environmental damage is too far gone to turn things around on any kind of rapid timescale. Our climate will get hotter, the weather will get worse, there will be more famine, less water, less security, and just living life will become more challenging year by year.
Nearly everyone wants action on climate and overshoot, but they generally believe that they are alone. In that commonality, we can build community, which is a way out of feeling of helplessness. As the challenges mount ahead of us, we will have no choice but to build community in order to survive. We will need each other’s help. Others will need your help.
Part of the reason we have reached this point is that we haven’t valued community. A world that has put the growth of the global economy over the collective wellbeing of humanity does not adequately value community and so has lost it.
Dealing with the consequences of these actions will cause us to rediscover community out of necessity. That price didn’t need to be paid. But it was.
Hello, I know there’s someone out there
Who can understand
And who's feeling the same way as me
I'm twenty-four and I've got everything to live for
But I know now that it wasn't meant to be
'cause all has been lost and all has been won
And there's nothing left for us to save
But now I know that I don't want to be alone today
So if you find that you've been feeling just the same.
Call me now it's alright
It's just the end of the world
You need a friend in the world
'cause you can't hide
So call and I'll get right back
If your intentions are pure
I'm seeking a friend for the end of the world.