Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate to participate in discussions about climate change threats and environmental issues with people across private, public, governmental, and research sectors. Whether at an island retreat in Puget Sound, a corporate conference at a resort or in the halls of our esteemed universities, the same questions get asked: How can we get people to care more? How do we motivate people? What’s it going to take?

What if these are the wrong questions to be asking?

Let’s consider this question by first reconsidering the context.

Environmental issues can generate huge anxieties that make them hard for many people to contemplate. Climate change in particular taps into all sorts of cognitive dissonances and feelings of guilt, leaving many people feeling overwhelmed about their role in the problem and solution. This anxiety is often managed through an array of brilliant (usually unconscious) strategies, often both privately and socially, that help us avoid pain, discomfort and conflicts.

Assuming we can agree on these things, the questions we should be asking are: How can our well-established insights into loss and cognitive dissonance guide new approaches to reaching people? How can our understanding of the way anxiety impacts our psyche and conduct inform the way we engage, message and campaign for a more sustainable future?

Psychology and sustainability may seem like strange bedfellows but more than 100 years of psychoanalytic research reveals a lot about how people use unconscious processes to manage anxiety. If I am feeling rather down about the prognosis of our planet, I like to ask myself: “What would a good therapist do?” Does a therapist berate the patient for being scared, reticent or a bit stuck? Does a therapist offer cash incentives for changing behaviors? (I hope not.) One of the first things a (good) therapist does is create what’s called a sense of safety and containment. They can do this by acknowledging their patient’s conflict, suffering and struggle, by helping the patient feel “seen”. Then – and only then – do they form an alliance with the patient to work together in a collaborative, participatory way towards change.

How this translates into engaging people more widely and creatively can be surprising. For starters, acknowledging that people use unconscious strategies for managing anxiety changes the ways we consider (and research) how people think and feel about our world. Analysis needs to go beneath the surface to explore where people feel stuck in conflict and anxious. Second, a psychoanalytic paradigm asks not whether people care or not but focuses onwhere care may exist but may not have permission to be expressed.

This approach can infuse our engagement work, whether in research or strategy, with a mood of curiosity as opposed to frustration and irritation at how wasteful, greedy and short-sighted societies can be. And this mood of curiosity and inquiry can lead us into some unexpected behavior change strategies – particularly through conversation.

The power of conversation may be the most profound insight we can gain from those on the frontlines of the therapeutic professions. Conversation changes people. As Rosemary Randall’s development of Carbon Conversations demonstrates, it’s very simple – if we want people to change, we have to listen to them. Humans are designed to learn, be changed and process information in the act of conversing. In this context, engagement can move beyond the creation of “Green Teams” and champions, into a far more dynamic evolution that creates contexts for creative participation. This means letting go of some control and being open to seeing what emerges when we invite people to contribute (a concept usefully offered by British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott) and exercise their agency.

What all of this amounts to is a radical reframe, a shift from a focus on motivating, persuading, cajoling and gamifying to inviting, enabling, facilitating and supporting. This is about giving people permission to care. As deeply social beings, we need some permission, we need to feel safe. Now, more than any other time, we need to start practicing a new form of engagement that presumes there is more care than can be contained – it just needs some help being channeled.

This article originally appeared on Climate Access.

Image Credit: Mark Stevens via Flickr

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This is part three in a series on bad arguments in the Canadian public sphere. The aim of this series is to take a closer look at the soft-serve reasoning employed by public leaders in order to see how they are unconvincing and even harmful to open discourse. Get caught up with part one concerning topic laundering and part two on reductio-ad-villainum. 

The present piece is about ‘carrying a concealed motive.’

Carrying a concealed motive: this species of bad argument hides the goals it wishes to achieve and presents other insincere objectives that are more palatable to the public. It consists of the refusal to be forthcoming about the intentions behind an argument, as though that were immaterial to the debate.

Canadians as a whole frequently have difficulty admitting that they want something – we keep our eyes on the last honey-cruller at the office party and when it’s offered to us we say ‘Oh no, you go ahead and have it’ and a little bit of us dies as the last glazed morsel irrevocably vanishes. In political debate, however, it’s necessary to be clear about what we want in a piece of legislation and how we stand to gain by its passage. 

In politics every decision has some motivation behind it – seeking some benefit or avoiding some detriment. The intention behind a proposal is a genuine and important ground on which to evaluate it. A politician might put forward a well thought out piece of legislation but if it involves a conflict of interest it can and should be struck down. Indeed the ‘conflict of interest’ is one of the most heinous forms of scandal because it involves a betrayal of the public trust. It is crucial to an open and democratic society that the public is aware to what ends its leaders are arguing. 

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Consider the Ethical Oil Institute, a not-for-profit registered by Ezra Levant with Calgary lawyer Thomas Ross. The Ethical Oil Institute runs advertisements about Iran’s human rights record in the hopes of gaining political support for tar sands projects in Alberta where human rights are supposedly respected.

Ezra Levant is a private citizen, free (within reason) to pursue his own chosen ends and to express himself.

He is also someone who has been successfully sued for libel several times and is currently under investigation for hate crimes after his racist comments concerning Romani immigrants to Canada. Whatever Ezra Levant’s and the Ethical Oil Institute's reasons are for promoting tar sands ventures (I assume financial gain and political influence), we can be quite certain that they have little to do with championing human rights. 

Carrying a concealed motive ultimately consists of just saying something in order to get what you want. The motive-concealer has already decided on the end result, they just have to pick the most sympathetic reason to get people go along with it.

Carrying a concealed motive invariably involves a form of hypocrisy. It is not a crime to be a hypocrite but we would do well to not take what hypocrites say very seriously, not without first investigating what they get out of arguing a certain point and what they stand to gain if they get their way. 

Hiding one’s motivations is a form of dishonesty that is inimical to open debate. What holds an open discourse together, what makes it productive, is the sincerity of its participants.

When private citizens try to influence us and our leaders while concealing their motives, we cannot fire them from their lobbying jobs or bring them before a tribunal. But we do not have to be convinced by them – we can make their advertisement spending and their rhetoric pointless by seeing through them.

We need only ask: what do you stand to gain? Establishing a motive is a crucial step in any investigation.

In the face of political insincerity I advocate for scepticism above cynicism. A little scepticism goes a long way in promoting rationality and honesty in the public discourse.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Ethical Oil Ad.

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