5.4 We need an enemy we can personify
During World War II, our country came together in common purpose and accomplished great things. We were productive and effective. We beat the German Nazis and the Japanese Empire. We established our nation as a world power, in fact, a superpower.
There are some authors and experts who argue that since we were able to do that back then…
We can certainly follow that model and come together now to fight climate change in an equally effective way.
But there’s a simple reason why making that parallel doesn’t work…
Our war against the Germans and Japanese was tribal.
They were enemy tribes and we know how to come together against tribal enemies. That’s built into our DNA.
But our fight against climate change is not tribal. Because that thing is…
A thing.
It’s a pattern in the larger world of reality. It’s not the kind of enemy our long history as a social group species prepared us for.
We focus on people first. The rest of the world is a distant second. And especially things that are long-term events and hard to see and make tangible.
Maybe if we called the climate George, and gave him a personality and turned him into a character and made him an evil villain, we’d start to take climate change more seriously, and get passionate about it, and pull out all the stops and fight, really fight, to have a future.
