Strategist & educator on social change, focused on Deep Adaptation to societal breakdown
Let’s tell the moodsplainers they’re wrong and then get back to work
As we reel from the impacts of strange weather and the news of unprecedented ocean temperatures around the world, the moodsplainers are out in force. They tell us we are right to be anxious but wrong to not believe that our way of life can be saved. In our favourite news outlets, they tell us that it is both morally and practically important to stay positive, stem panic and bypass despair. They warn us not to abandon fairytales of change and salvation. If might be OK if they wanted to live in a self-protective bubble of delusion. But in their public advocacy, they’re dangerously suppressing necessary dialogue that might help us all to reduce harm in this era of societal disruption and collapse.
The moodsplainers tell us that people ‘give up’ when they believe it’s ‘too late’. That is a gross generalisation which is flawed on a number of levels. Firstly, it is too late for what exactly? Realists know that it’s too late to try to maintain the privileges of the experts, journalists and policy makers who are telling us to stay hopeful. Anyone who looks beyond the adverts for a green transition, to review the scholarship on GDP growth, energy sources, and carbon emissions, knows that modern societies cannot continue to consume the resources nor the energy they do at present (see Chapter 3 of my book Breaking Together). Anyone who looks beyond the overly-conservative and under-estimating IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) knows that the current degree of manmade global heating is exerting major damage and has a momentum of its own (see Chapter 5 of my book Breaking Together). Just because it is too late for industrial consumer societies to continue to thrive, or to be seen as a model for everyone, does not mean it is too late to try to save as much of nature and humanity as possible.
One of the chief ‘moodsplainers’ is the famous author Rebecca Solnit. When her ‘doom-shaming’ was challenged on her Facebook page, she defended her position with the claim that scientists tell her it’s not too late (presumably for our modern societies). She referenced the climatologist Michael Mann as evidence for her claim (see the screenshot). Known to be a prolific author, he was in good company when declaring in 2009 that if emissions did not peak by 2020 and consistently decline, then humanity would be in for the roughest of rides, in a situation where various feedbacks would likely amplify changes. As you may already know, emissions went up last year. But the 2023 version of Professor Mann appears to have forgotten his past assessment. Clearly, hope springs eternal. Especially if wishful thinking is a non-negotiable aspect of one’s identity, worldview and status. The suggestion by Solnit that all scientists agree must ignore the hundreds of scientists and scholars who have publicly disagreed that it is not too late to transition to a sustainable form of our current societies, including leading climatologists Professor Gesa Weyhenmeyer and Professor Will Steffen.
The second basic flaw of moodsplaining is the assumption that to believe it is too late for some outcomes means that people ‘give up’ on positive social action. Unfortunately, many of the past psychological studies on our agency on climate assume us to be merely consumers, not politically engaged citizens. So they ask questions like whether we will recycle more if we think it will save the planet. However, as someone with decades working in corporate sustainability, I know that such framing hasn’t worked. Rather, it undermines our awareness of the environmental situation being a political challenge.
And as it is a political challenge, we can look at how people are being radicalised to act differently in their whole lives. After my paper on climate change went viral in 2018, a big part of my next two years was talking with psychologists and reading the relevant psychology research. That got me invited to keynote at conferences of the psychology peak bodies around the world, and to publish in peer-reviewed psychology journals. I learned that research finds how so-called “catastrophic imaginaries” are powerful motivators whereas optimism can be demotivating on environmental issues. So when the new head of the IPCC, Jim Skea, tells the media that “we should not despair and fall into a state of shock” if global temperatures increase to 1.5C, it is likely he does not know what he is talking about, psychologically-speaking, and is simply expressing his own proclivities.
If senior-ranking climatologists don’t want to read psychology, they could just walk into the street and talk to activists. Starting in 2018, the climate campaign group Extinction Rebellion (XR) made climate an issue of public awareness which led to many local governments declaring climate emergencies. This major boost to environmental activism in the West was inspired by views that top-ranking climatologists are dismissing as ‘doomism.’ Indeed, the founders of XR had the expectation that catastrophic impacts are underway and will get worse. Few of the top climatologists have been engaged in this wave of activism, yet many denigrate the views of activists. You have probably seen some version of the illogical claim that “doomism breeds apathy and inactivism, and there are far too many doomers in Extinction Rebellion and other activist groups.” It wasn’t named the optimist’s incremental change rebellion, was it? Even XR’s critics have a better appreciation of activist motivations than the armchair anti-doomers. When trying to claim that such activism is a form of extremism that the British government should crack down on, guess who was the academic the Policy Exchange think tank cited the most for ideas motivating Extinction Rebellion? Yes, that’s me, the guy that GQ magazine called the “doomer-in-chief”. That was in an article that Facebook then filtered from view, like they have done with so much doomster content since 2020 – a global form of censorship and public manipulation I will discuss further in a moment.
Some of the scientists that engaged XR after it became famous have been useful to the movement. However, many of them tried to water down its message, and re-install a wishful narrative of a managed transition to a safe climate. The consequences for XR’s communications have not always been ideal.
The more alarming readings of our situation can mean that people are understandably shocked and despairing. That is natural – the situation we find ourselves in is truly awful, sad and scary. But with the right help from our friends and colleagues, and often some insight from any one of a range of spiritual traditions, we can find new ways to live meaningful livesin a new context. In Chapter 12 of my book, I profile a range of people who have allowed their acceptance of future or unfolding societal collapse to transform them. Some have become activists, some have become permaculture farmers, some have become spiritual teachers, some have become community leaders, some have become innovators of local exchange and local currency systems. Others have redoubled their efforts to defend beautiful environments and their local peoples from destructive exploitation from corporations serving global markets. I describe their bold, kind and creative efforts as demonstrating a new ‘doomster way’ to responding positively to our predicament.
The ‘doomster way’ is naturally rebellious and radical. Which means we pose a threat to the establishment. Which is why they are responding with moodsplaining, telling us we should believe in the system – technology, enterprise, capital, charismatic leaders, and so on. That is how ‘stubborn optimism’ can become functional in ongoing oppression. The worst instance of this approach is when they pathologise the youth for having a more honest assessment of the situation. To believe that the experts and elites need to fix the emotions of young people by providing more positive stories seems to me to be an arrogant form of ‘experiential avoidance’ on the part of adults, and even a form of psychological child abuse. Instead, young people need us adults to grow up and meet them in a far more honest way. To hold the possibility that young people are closer to the truth than many adults, and explore what the options are from such an outlook.
Another unseemly tactic of moodsplainers is to cite their concern for the poor to claim a moral high-ground. For instance, Solnit complained about “defeatism among the comfortable in the Global North, while people in frontline communities continue to fight like hell for survival.” Conversely, people in frontline communities have criticised the stories of a sustainability transition that are promoted in Western media to comfort their audiences. Kenya climate activist, scholar and agroforester Dr Nyambura Mbau argues “The millions of people being uprooted by climate change do not benefit from the ‘stubborn optimism’ of environmental elites. Instead, they will be better served by the stubborn realism of the experts and activists now brave enough to call for urgent degrowth in rich countries and fair adaptation everywhere.” Solnit’s claim is not unusual, with the same argument made to slur people like me over the last few years, even in publications like the New Internationalist (which then retracted and apologised). If people are busy thinking and communicating like white saviours, then they can overlook what is being said and done by the independent activists and scholars from across the Global South.
It would be a rather shallow understanding of the human condition to think that we only act for the good of others if we definitely know it will succeed. Instead, we can inquire into what we believe to be right, and act on that. Moodsplainers like to talk about hope as a wonderful value. Yet many ancient wisdoms see hope as an affliction. In my recent talk to a cultural festival in Amsterdam, I cited the Buddha saying that there are three kinds of people in the world. There is one that is hopeful, another who is hopeless, and another who has done away with hope, to instead focus on being fully attentive, kind and wise in the present situation.
Moodsplaining involves eloquent practitioners who have the necessary funding and connections to be heard often through mainstream media. You can tell that theirs is a professional comms operation, as they don’t provide their reader with any names of the people, initiatives, or concepts that they criticise. That means their readers can’t easily find out more for themselves.
The commercial interests behind moodsplaining are important to recognise. There is now a huge faction of capital that wants to limit the environmental agenda to promoting renewable energy, nuclear power, and electrical products like cars. There is also a huge professional sector ‘climate users’ who are driven to have a successful career with a green sheen. They are joined by a wider ‘sustainable development’ sectors of hundreds of thousands of professionals who are now compulsively lying to each other to ignore the data from the UN on what’s really happening.
It is extremely worrying for democracy and good governance, globally, that the moodsplainers are now backed up by the censorship teams in the bigtech companies, who shadow ban content on climate that doesn’t align with the capitalist-friendly ecomodern view of the future. For years, their climate ‘factchecking’ outfits don’t even bother to reply to internationally renowned climatologists who criticise their shadow banning activities. Thus, the general public is left misinformed, less radical, and more compliant for incumbent power.
As Rebecca Solnit is associated with the term mansplaining, I was inspired to start using the term moodsplaining. That is partly because there is a clear parallel. Women don’t like being assumed to not know what men often tell them. Similarly, most of the people who are being told to cheer up by Rebecca and her colleagues have heard all of their explanations and exhortations before, and know them to be redundant. Now we have a term for the practice, we can critique it more clearly. So here goes:
Moodsplaining is the practice of telling us how we should feel for the good of ourselves and society. It may arise when people are anxious about feeling anxious, and want certain ideas and people to be discredited so that they might feel less anxious. Like all ‘experiential avoidance’, where people suppress and deny their emotions, this can lead to illogical ideas as well as angry and hateful attitudes. An industry of moodsplainers is funded by companies, foundations and NGOs who want the public to feel calm enough not to rebel and disrupt the systems that are causing catastrophic damage to our living home. They want us to believe that technology, top experts and elites will sort things out, so that we keep on working, shopping, borrowing and saving, while tolerating losing our quality of life, our freedoms and our power.
Instead of cowardice on climate reality, many people are responding in a very different way, as I mentioned above and describe in my book. They are constituting a people’s environmentalism and what I call a freedom-loving response to collapse (the subtitle of my book). It involves letting go of familiar but failing systems of comfort and security, to begin to find mutually beneficial ways of living with all Life, including each other. Such a freedom-loving response to collapse arises from the knowledge that it was the manipulation of hearts and minds that drove such wholescale destruction, and so liberating our true natures is part of the response.
Given the cumulative failure of myriad forms of past social change strategies to deliver a peaceful, equitable and sustainable world, the cracking of old systems could be regarded as a painful opportunity as well as a crisis. That is a darker hope, but it is also a practical one. As I explained in my first Q&A on the book with Low Impact, my view is that we will be collapsing into communities, and one thing to play for is what we will find in community when it becomes all we have.
When current leaders speak in a superficially confident manner on subjects that they have no psychological or sociological understanding of, they remind us of how unfit most top climatologists are for a role in helping societies make sense of the predicament humanity now faces. Imagine those kids in class who appeared to like maths more than having friends, suddenly being asked how to manage the school in an emergency. Obviously, being a lifelong specialist does not equip you for these difficult times, even if you have been promoted to the top of the tree. Instead, we need new kinds of leadership and communication in this era of collapse. That is a manner of leadership that is the opposite of what is displayed by the moodsplainers. Because we can help each other to grow in that new form of leadership is why I co-teach a course on ‘leading through collapse’. Past iterations of it have been delivered over the last 9 years, with the alumni making significant waves in activism, politics, communities, business, international agencies, and local government. Such leadership can come from anywhere. I predict we will even see corporate executives speaking out against the demonisation of doomsters and calling for a more honest public dialogue – just as hundreds of scholars have done.
But for now, the moodsplainers will dominate a mass media to downplay what 1.5C global warming means for small island states, as well as the multi-breadbasket failures that are likely to occur within a few years of that level of warming, the risk of tipping points beginning to cascade, and the already severe consequences of existing heating levels. Therefore, in order to help you, yes you, spot and then challenge their arguments, I have produced a list of their typical claims and why they can be rejected.
“We can’t know the future of climate change for certain.”
- We certainly know what’s happening already and the trajectory we are already on.
“Scientists are undecided on how bad it will become for societies.”
- Most scientists aren’t trained or incentivised to integrate from outside their specialisms, but hundreds who attempt that are concluding societal collapse is the most likely scenario (or underway).
“Technology is amazing and shouldn’t be underestimated.”
- Technology cannot fix multi-system collapse and it is a form of fearful ‘worldview defence’ to believe in techno-salvation
“The kids are going to change everything.”
- I’ve heard that claim from adults since I was a kid. Unfortunately, protesting teenagers sometimes evolve into salespersons for pseudo-green business projects and even ongoing war.
“People go green when they believe it will make a difference.”
- We are citizens first, not consumers, and despite the neo-liberal experts obsessing over personal consumption, the environmental predicament was, is and always will be a political one, inviting us to act politically in all aspects of our lives once we become aware of the truth.
“We can’t lose hope and undermine people’s commitment.”
- Conversely, our passions are unleashed by recognising the full destructiveness of dominant systems and elites, as evidenced by the last 5 years of radical climate activism by people who woke up to the true nature of our predicament.
“We mustn’t create a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
- Blaming realists for being proven right is idiotic and so reveals a panicked illogical mind that needs help with processing emotions.
“We can’t risk anarchy.”
- Voluntary self-governance will be better than constant manipulation and control, with the latter at fault for the current predicament by enforcing expansionist and consumptive attitudes and behaviours through capitalism.
“We should have more faith in humanity and/or more faith in God.”
- Our faith in humanity and/or the divine, means we trust our freedom to care for each other and nature, once freed from the cowardly and narcissistic officers of the current systems of power (what I describe as Imperial Modernity in my book Breaking Together).
Sometimes my answer to the ‘not too late’ PR professionals is simply ‘Thank God It’s Too Late’ for your avoidance, your nasty attitudes towards realists, and your attempts to reinforce existing power. I even wrote a poem on that, which I invite you to hear at this link.
For years I avoided being too confrontational with the moodsplainers. But this matter is real life with massive implications for all of us, and not just some subject to try and be knowledgeable about in a self-consciously polite way. It is time to start making some choices and living by them. Let’s do good stuff, promote others doing good, but don’t stand aside as people with power continue to deny reality and thereby increase the potential harm.
Let’s tell the moodsplainers they are wrong and then get back to the real work.
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It is nearly a month since I was suspended from Twitter/X without explanation. It might have nothing to do with my criticism of the lie that electric cars are an answer to climate change. But just in case, here is my latest Tesla art piece. The N0T 2L8 image and Chin Up images were produced with Midjourney and bit of post-editing. Please share this post on Twitter, as I can’t. Be sure to tag #NotTooLate.
Climate Action Australia 