This morning, I joined the crowd of concerned environmentalists on DotEarth, and lamented with them on the outcome of the Bali talks. And declared,
Talk is nice. My concern is what can I do as a citizen, to become a part of the solution. Here are my resolutions:
1) to continue to explore the psychology of green in my blog
2) to try my best to green my life
3) to join a green business venture, hopefully in the next few weeks
4) to act as a responsible citizen and make sure the right person gets elected as our next President
5) to explore ways that I can spur green initiatives in my immediate community
6) to channel the anger, frustration, I feel as a result of these talks, productively, into positive actions.
What are you all choosing to do on a personal, concrete level?
Later in the day, I decided to go to the gym with Prad. Charlotte saw me grab my car keys. “You are not taking your bike?” Prad offered to ride with me if I wanted to. No, it was too cold, and I just wanted to get to the gym, fast. We drove.
What happened? Why such a discordance between what I know to be the right action, and what I end up doing? I have become obsessed with understanding what goes on in my brain during those split seconds, when I decide to not follow my green conscience. Several times before, I have tried to revisit similar moments, to grasp the thoughts, the feelings, that trigger such behavior. I am convinced, if I can reach down far enough, I will retrieve valuable insights, that will help get to the roots of the behavior. If I can nail down the cause, it may be easier to figure out some solutions.
Back to the gym moment. I was tired with a slight cold. The idea of going out in the damp weather, and of spending a half hour biking, did not feel good. Compared with the comfort of our warm car, the bike did not come close. In that moment, all I could think of was, cold versus warm, hard work versus easy ride. I did not feel so good. I wanted warm and comfort. A curtain came down between my green conscience, my morning discourse, and the reality of my present physical need.
I surprised myself with the strength of my response to Charlotte and Prad. ‘No way, I am riding my bike. I am tired and it’s cold.’ Never mind that I was going to the gym to exercise. My heart was set on swimming, not biking. Still, if I had enough energy to swim, I probably could have biked. It is just that I was thinking exercise equal gym. To exercise I needed to go to the gym. Although I was tired, I am very disciplined about exercising every day, and I was willing to make that effort. In my mind, going to the gym, was in the transportation category, not the exercise file. Transportation meant, I was going to naturally choose the option that was most efficient time wise, and comfortable.
Now, why was I willing to make the effort to exercise (swim) although I was not feeling so good, but not to bike instead of driving? The answer is, I consider exercise a direct personal benefit to my health and my well being. Biking instead of driving, because of environmental concerns, does not affect me directly. (that’s assuming I maintain earlier ‘logic’ of biking not as an exercise form, but as mode of transportation). Its benefit gets diluted both in time and space. The big pot problem again. When I exercise, I feel an immediate personal benefit. When I consider acting from my green conscience, it falls in the higher category of ‘I and many other enlightened people know it’s the right thing to do, but it is not part yet of the commonly accepted set of ethical behaviors’. Where I get in trouble is with that latter part. The lack of collective consciousness in the green category, and the resulting lack of environmental laws and best practices, give me license to err.
Am I that selfish of a person that I never do anything for the greater good? Actually, there are many instances when I can act selflessly. My maternal instinct makes sure I always put my children’s interests before my own. I find great pleasure in mentoring my Little Sister. For seven years, I spent my time helping people as a profession. In the green category even, I now make sure that I bring my recyclable bags to the grocery store. I try not to flush. I have diminished my shopping significantly. I only heat the house very selectively. I always turn off the lights. I take the train whenever I go to the city. . . My laziness with biking is one of the last fortresses of my unconscious, not so green self, and a window into the ways most of the civilized world behaves. Here is what I saw:
- We are creatures of the flesh. Trapped in our physical body, and at the mercy of our basic needs for physical comfort, pleasure, and immediate gratification. Without the external reinforcement from state or spiritual laws, these primal needs take precedence over our conscience.
- We are lemmings. We look around and tend to emulate others’ behaviors.
- We are self-centered. Our priorities start with getting our personal needs met first. Needs for security, personal health, financial security, comfort, safety, education, etc. Environmental concerns are at the bottom of the pile.
- We are products of our culture. In America that means capitalism, money, greed, consumerism, extremes, convenience, industrialization, technology, cars, invincibility, man over nature.
- We are creatures of habits. Our thoughts and behaviors are set in certain ways. To unset them requires tremendous energy and outside forces.
- We are inherently lazy. Given the choice, we will most often pick the easiest, most convenient alternative.
- We are not rational beings. The way we derive our thoughts is often circuitous, and leads to behaviors that fly in the face of reason.
Next, is how can we take into account these seven characteristics of human nature, and formulate winning behavioral change strategies for a greener planet. Plenty of material for another article. . .
La Marguerite 
An interesting post, so interesting that my response became article length, as you can see here. In short, I don’t think that humans are inherently lazy and selfish; I think it’s simply that we’re alienated from the work of our hands and other people, we’re forced to do work which doesn’t fulfill us, and interact in false and distancing ways with others, and we’re naturally averse to that.
Given the work most people do, saying that because they don’t like that work they’re lazy is like saying that whe some girl half-drunk at a party has some sleazy guy paw her and doesn’t like it, she’s frigid.
Thanks Kyle. Great article you wrote back. So many interesting thoughts. I don’t disagree with your assessment of why people got to be the way they are, for the most part. And I do maintain that most people will choose the easy out when it comes to daily stuff. . . And that we have to take that into account.
Well, I don’t think it’s just a matter of “the easy out” for daily stuff. It’s not actually easier to (say) be in the middle of making a salad, then dash out to the supermarket to buy a dressing – compared to making it yourself. It’s not easier to have ten hours a week of your paid work taken up with paying for your car to drive you to work over two hours a week than it is to just bike. It’s not easier to work out hard at the gym than it would be to just bike to the gym and then bike home 😉
It’s more a matter of culture, habits, being lemmings – those three things you mentioned which I’d sum up as “custom”.
I mean, sometimes it’s just plain laziness, sure. A few weeks back I was having a social afternoon with some friends. We went to buy takeout but the shops were closed, so we went to the supermarket and bought some food. We went to the counter, and I paid. As we walked out, I said to one of the guys, “Here you go, I paid for it, you carry it.”
He replied, “Couldn’t it be the other way around?”
“That was $10. You’ll pay me $10 to carry 4 kg over 300 metres?”
“Yes.”
“Alright, then, give me the cash.”
He did, and that was an easy tenner for me.
Now obviously this guy earns heaps more than me, and thus because his efforts get him so much money, he values money less than effort. He’s rich and lazy.
Probably not by coincidence with this laziness, this is a guy who takes forty minute showers, and whose response to climate change, fossil fuel depletion and so on is, “we pay taxes, the government will sort it out before there’s any trouble.”
That’s someone no-one’s ever going to reach. It’s what we were discussing a while back with “laggards”, people who are the last to adopt some new product or innovation.
But most people aren’t like that. It’s not a matter of their rationally adding things up to see which will require the least effort – they’re just used to doing things in a certain way. They’re accustomed to it, it’s their custom.
Customs change, and surprisingly quickly. Consider for example Sweden, who under the Kyoto Protocol was allowed to increase its emissions 4% by 2012 on 1990 levels; now at the end of 2007 they’ve in fact reduced emissions by 9%, while over the same period growing their economy by 44% in real terms, as recently reported in the IHT (remember that the next time some idiot tells you that reducing emissions will destroy the economy).
Customs change – sometiems for the good, sometimes bad – and the way to change them is to keep at it yourself. A change of customs across a whole society is in a real sense a revolution. Really very little is being asked of us in this revolution we’re attempting. Civil rights activists lost their jobs and got lynched, all we have to worry about is some yuppies looking at us funny as we trundle along on our pushbikes.
The revolution in that time was begun by common people changing their customs. As with Cuba in their food-growing, so too with the US federal government and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s – once the people changed their customs, the government reluctantly followed. I do think you (Marguerite) focus a bit too much on the power of government to effect change. Most commonly the country was changing anyway and governments just finalise the change, they put the icing on the cake and light the candle. The mixing and baking gets done by the people.
I think perhaps I have more faith than you in the power of a human being to change the world around them and their lives by a conscious effort. I don’t mean some communist nonsense about the whole population spontaneously awaking in brotherly love and co-operation, overthrowing their oppressors. I mean the simple and humble acts of every day that really define what our society is about, the way we speak to one another, how we get and eat our food, how we travel from one place to another.
This to me is the essence of a lot we’ve been discussing, this alienation. “Well, what does it matter what I do anyway? Nobody else will change.” Those are the words of a person who’s alienated from the work of their own hands and from society in general. To not be able to see and feel that connection is alienation. It’s a very sad and lonely place to be.
I find myself thinking of times I instructed on Army courses. You’d be taking people for a run, and someone would fall down.
“Are you injured?”
“No, but it hurts.”
“Let me check. Move this way, that – nope, you’re not injured. Now get up.”
“But it hurts.”
“You can do it. Now get up.”
“But it hurts!”
“Get the fuck up! I haven’t given you permission to die yet!”
They get up and run, and do not finish last.
“That was well done, I’m impressed. Next tiem you won’t have to fall down.”
People often have greater potential, physical, mental, emotional and social, than they’re aware of. They think they can’t do it but they can. True respect for one another means recognising and encouraging this potential in others, sometimes by kind words, sometimes by harsh words.
This was seen in many ways on Army courses. People would do things they thought they couldn’t do, befriend people they’d never have given a second glance at in civilian life, and help as part of a team people they didn’t even like. They developed their physical, mental, emotional and social potential.
Now, that is not to recommend military training for everyone – mostly it was stupid pointless shit. But it is to say that people’s potential is often greater than you expect it to be. People are alienated from the work of their hands, from other people, and most of all from themselves. They don’t see their own potential, they don’t realise their own strength.
So it’s not really a matter of people taking easy outs, but rather that they’ve customs of doing things in certain ways, even if those ways are self-destructive (like driving a mile to get takeout every day) or even actually overall more effort than better things would be (like working overtime to pay for a car rather than biking). Most people aren’t conscious of these things, they’re alienated from themselves and society and don’t realise the potential of either.
In a moment, I’ll post some more Fromm 😉
Fromm in The Sane SocietyM:
“It is surprising that the view of man’s natural laziness can still be held by psychologists and laymen alike, when so many observable facts contradict it. laziness, far from being normal, is a symptom of mental pathology. In fact, one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing wht to do with oneself and one’s life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend hs energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
“Let us look at children: they are never lazy; given the slightest encouragement, or even without it, they are busy playing, asking questions, inventing stories, without any incentive except the [pleasure of the activity itself. In the field of psychopathology we find that the person who has no interest in doing anything is seriously sick and is far from exhibiting the normal state of human nature.[…]
“Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the widespread belief in man’s innate laziness. The main reason lies in the fact that aienated work is boring and unsatisfactory; that a great deal of tension and hostility is engendered, which leads to an aversion against the work one is doing and everything connected with it. As a result, we find a longing for laziness and for “doing nothing” to be the ideal of many people. Thus, people feel that their laziness is the “natural” state of mind, rather than the symptom of a pathological condition of life, the result of meaningless and alienated work. […]
“Dissatisfaction, apathy, boredom, lack of joy and happiness, a sense of fuitility and a vague feeling that life is meaningless, are the unavoidable results of this situation.[…]
“Most of us assume that the kind of work current in our societym namely, alienated work, is the only kind there is, hence that aversion to work is natural, hence that money and prestige and power are the only incentives for work. If we would use our imagination just a little bit, we could collect a good deal of evidence from our own lives, from observing children, from a number of situations which we can hardly fail to encounter, to convince us that we long to spend our energy on something meaningful, that we feel refreshed if we can do so, and that we are quite wiling to accept rational authority if what we are doing makes sense.”
[Later Fromm talks about an experiment in work arrangements and productivity, in relation to the idea that “someone has to be bored by their work, because some work is inevitably boring”]
“[…] the social aspect of the work had change, and caused a change in the attitude of the workers. They were informed of the experiment, and of the several steps in it; their suggestions were listened to and often followed, and what is perhaps the most important point, they were aware of participating in a meaningful and interesting experiment, which was important not only to themselves, but to the workers of the whole factory. […]
“As soon as this alienation was decreased to a certain extent by having the worker participate in something that was meaningful to him [sic], and in which he had a voice, his whole psychological reaction to the work changed, although technically he was still doing the same kind of work.”
*********************************
COMMENT: We see here what I’ve been saying, that laziness is not actually inherent to people. It’s just that we’re averse to alienating work. What we do must have some meaning for us.
That meaning comes in society. That’s the reason, I think, people like you and I have blogs. When you’re biking along or trying to find what’s draining that extra 1kWh of power in your house, it can seem a bit pointless in itself. So you find a higher meaning in it, both in having other bloggers praise your efforts and ask about them (you getting meaning from them) and in spreading your ideas (them getting meaning from you, which in turn gives you meaning back). Like the women in the experiment in their factory, the meaning comes not from the work itself (they were just making telephone coils, after all) but from the society involved in that work.
It’s not lazy to not want to do things which are meaningless to you. I don’t object to people who don’t find meaning in this greenish stuff, I object to people who find no meaning in greenish stuff and find meaning in nothing else, either. I don’t like seeing people alienated, and would like to see them connected to society and themselves, as in the Army course example I gave above.
Bringing people together with each-other and themselves gives me a sense of meaning. It’s a hobby of mine 😉
Kyle,
I will be posting your guest post tomorrow.
Good to see someone quoting Erich Fromm here. 🙂
Aw, don’t be too hard on yourself. Being “green” all the time is impossible. We get busy and sometimes just tired.
“We are creatures of the flesh. ”
Yes we are. And we are creatures of habit. If you had to walk everyday to obtain water, you would do it without thinking. If you grew up on a farm in Minnesota, you would get up every day, milk the cows, walk to school in the snow 🙂 – this is my father. He remains strong and productive still. I grew up college educated, not used to physical work, and being out in the elements is a hobby. But I multitask, deal with a far more complex world, and have to adapt to change – that’s the trade-off. It’s conditioning, social, physical, and psychological.
“We are lemmings. We look around and tend to emulate others’ behaviors. ” END QUOTE
Yes, that is why news media, megachurches, and advertising is so effective. It takes a high degree of self-awareness to realise who you are and want to be, and to act on it best you can.
“We are self-centered. Our priorities start with getting our personal needs met first. Needs for security, personal health, financial security, comfort, safety, education, etc. Environmental concerns are at the bottom of the pile.”
Ayup. I would look at environmental concerns, social justice, etc as the top of the pile though 🙂 – I’m thinking Maslow here. One of the things that helps is to simplify our needs. Financial security has gone haywire and I think many people, excepting those truly poor, or near-poor, may find they can live on much less if they re-evaluated their lives. That’s what we did.
“We are products of our culture. In America that means capitalism, money, greed, consumerism, extremes, convenience, industrialization, technology, cars, invincibility, man over nature. ”
END QUOTE
Yep. And our cultures, economy (grow grow grow) and time pressures make us the workingest but by many scales, one of the least happy folks in the world. There is no good alternative to capitalism, but it seems to have gotten way out of hand and corrupt to the core. Car culture – created suburbs– or is it the other way around?
“We are creatures of habits. Our thoughts and behaviors are set in certain ways. To unset them requires tremendous energy and outside forces. ”
END QUOTE
Yes it does. That is why we TiVo TV Shows – to skip commercials. That is why we should mentor children/college kids…. their minds are more receptive as a whole. Although some older folks have come to our classes and I saw a lightbulb go off…perhaps they remembered a simpler time in their lives, before we became frenetic (and rich beyond all measure) as a society.
“We are inherently lazy. Given the choice, we will most often pick the easiest, most convenient alternative. ” END QUOTE
Yes. time pressures, fatigue, incredible workloads are the reason we pick convenience too. I like to think of it as inertia, not laziness :-).
“We are not rational beings. The way we derive our thoughts is often circuitous, and leads to behaviors that fly in the face of reason. ” END QUOTE
Agree. I remember an advertising class I took once. Basically, what they are saying is that we are not selling you lipstick. We are selling beauty, desirability. Most computers work the same, but some name brands have cache. We want to be better, more attractive, prettier, appear wealthier or smarter than our peers.
Thanks for an awesome entry!
Trillium,
I am not being hard on myself, I am just trying to be observant and use my behavior as a way to relate with and understand what is happening in the world.
I agree that they are different ways that people of different ages can be touched. The very young ones are much easier to influence of course, hence the importance of environmental education at school, and at home. The older generation, if they are lucky, may be able to tap into memories when the times were not so frenetic, and nature was still an important part of people’s lives. That’s me. That memory bank is invaluable. That leaves the folks in between, for whom nature is a mystery, and whose lives have been shaped by many of the values who need to combat today.
Meryn,
I’m glad you found Kyle. You two can be the voice for Eric Fromm. . .
[…] 2008 by lamarguerite “Want to bike or drive?‘” Prad was testing my green-ness once more. For a moment, I wavered. The easy way with the car tempting me. And the pressure to get to the gym […]
[…] . . . I call that the ‘sticker effect‘. The other insight deals with the ‘lemmings‘ phenomenon, a behavior I have often observed in myself! Both behavioral tendencies are […]