(re)motivate people in favor of ecology

Human nature is complex.

And as long as the current psychological science will choose to only take into account the emerged part of the narcissistic iceberg, the most obvious cases, thus the least good performers, we won’t be able to face collectively this simple fact: you can’t talk the same way to empathetic people or motivate them or educate them, as you’d better do it with narcissistic personalities.
We just don’t tick the boxes the same way.

It is just my personal humble opinion and extensive experience that a large majority of psychology professionals are narcissists anyway.

Also logical.
As professions with an instant superiority aura and access to fragile people attract sociopaths as hair attract louse.
If we acknowledge this fact for priests, we might as well face it for doctors in general (born there, seen that) and psychologists in particular.
Of course, there are in the lot some empathetic people with a vocation, and I was fortunate enough to meet some of them, but the vocation has to be pretty strong, indeed, to counterbalance a daily dose of human misery.

And you’d agree, I hope, that the narcissistic psychologists have no interest at all in helping us identify them and all the motivation in hell to have us think that narcissism is an epiphenomenon limited to pathological obvious cases.
Right…

Whatever the proportion of people with empathy in a country, there is this historical constant: you can’t force people to do good.

We can, with laws and the presence of a police force, more or less prevent them from doing bad things.
Which is already a good thing.
But we can’t impose on people to do good deeds.

It is this unwritten social rule that has inevitably transformed any utopia in dystopia.

The communist utopia for example, built on the concept that we would happily munch on our State owned grassy patch, sharing everything, freed from the constraints of personal propriety, hasn’t seem to go far.
And this, in spite of its enforcement on restive humans, with millions of deaths and re-education in mental institutions.

Therefore, when I see the current media frenzy to force us onboard the ecological boat, I’m not surprised people go as far as denying the GLOBAL warming facts.
Global, my conspiracy theorist friend, meaning that when it’s snowing quite a lot more in your garden, it’s because the North Pole is currently melting on your doorstep, and that is not GLOBALLY a good thing.

But right now, to have us act in favour of our common planet, we are being terrorized on a daily basis.

And it’s just reminiscent of the apocalyptic guy in the Middle-age, wanting us to drop on our collective knees to beg a vengeful god for forgiveness…
Not useful in the slightest.

As far as I know, this kind of discourse has never motivated anyone to act calmly in favour of a common sensible good and has, more often than not, thrown people on the two following possible paths: the first one being despair and inertia, possibly suicide, because if the situation is hopeless, ipso facto, you have no hope to hold onto, and you may as well look for a hole to die in.
The other path is the one on which you rebel, choosing wilfully to not believe in the dire future you are being served, in order to continue to enjoy a present with a lot of plastic in in.
A mix of the two attitudes could be a desperate attempt to enjoy your life to the fullest of its fuel energized capacity while you still can.
But in neither of these options will the targeted human be induced to frenetically recycle.

Terror, in so far as it’s not with immediate cause and solutions (the ship is drowning, let’s go to the lifeboats), has never, as far as I know, generated any positive group reaction.
And in this particular drowning case, we can’t really talk of “group action” as it’s more a “dog eat dog” situation where individuals happen to go the same way. And stepping on their neighbour to reach safety can hardly be seen as a positive.

Only the force of hope can motivate us to do good.

Whereas the climate propaganda, to have us take the ecological threat seriously drowns us under tons of guilt.
To incite us plebs, whose power is to be the most numerous, to take on the charge of ecological evolution.

As if we weren’t already the ones to take it on the chin…

A majority of us have already a hard time to challenge a time schedule filled to the brim with having to work AND raise kids AND take care of every possible logistics around the house and the clock, but – of course! – we are the ones who should take this additional charge on.
And when it’s nice to learn that even Marie Kondo has given up on a clutter free perfect existence, one would feel remiss in not reminding the masses that she was already mixing nicely her work and her domestic chores into one entity, thus lightening her schedule a great deal and that her means, which are not what everyone can rely on, were of the kind that can allow quite a lot of domestic help…

In the meantime, firms are obviously aware that their clients, which are also their employees, are exploited to the maximum allowed by any country’s laws and are flirting with burn-out on a daily basis.
Because to maximize profit, they know they should sell us everything they can as plastic wrapped-over, throw-able, one-use only products.
Have something fixed takes time and energy. So does washing a non-wrapped apple.

While the rich people who have the time, the money and the power to make efforts and show us the way, prove us jet flight after jet flight that they just don’t give a damn.
The Flood can come, their bunker in New-Zealand is waterproof.

Another reason, as it goes, to doubt the severity of our plight, when confronted to such Instagram frivolity.
Until, that is, one remembers that the band, on the Titanic was rumoured to be playing till the bitter frozen end.
Rich sociopathic people tend to gulp-down grapes while Rome is burning.

Well then, may you now ask me, with expectant humid eyes…
If one can’t scare nor pressure one’s neighbour, what can one do to help humanity evolve?
Quite simple, I might answer.
One has to do all the contrary.

The Earth isn’t damned nor doomed, a meteorite isn’t coming our way, and as long as there is life, there is hope.
Indeed, our planet has suffered quite a lot.
But it’s our human nature to be capable of the best as well as the worst and to resign ourselves to give our best only after we have collectively run into the proverbial wall.
Which only can mean that…

The best is yet to come.

Let’s collectively get our heads out of the sand, the sun is still shining and there are solutions.
And there will more of those as time goes by and we are looking for them.

Firms that are the most powerful entities besides governments, are also the more capable of proposing solutions and motivate us to use them.
They just need the financial incentive. And as public opinions are slowly evolving on this, they will.
They also need for the more ecological products to be as easily manufactured as the bad ones. Or for the difference, if any, to be monetarily compensated.

We need for the best products for the Earth to be also the best product for us.
For products without plastic to be cheaper than those with plastic.
For vegetarian food, with low salt, and few additives, to be easy to prepare, besides being obviously better for our health. And substitutes for meat, with proteins and B12, to be cheaper than meat (personal experience, here, a life with B12 is easier…). Also tastier.
Because if an empath like me, crying each and every time she met a truck loaded with pigs going to their after barbecued lives, was not there and then motivated to stop loving meat, it’s a sure sign that guilt enhanced propaganda won’t have any long term effects.

Because when we have to choose between the Earth’s well being in the long run and our wallet or level of stress and tiredness right now, how can the media dare reproach us our priorities?

Companies are the ones who should change their offer.
And to further insure that, laws must intervene, encourage and punish.

Our common responsibility is in how we vote.
And our power is in what we consume.

And it would be nice, once in while, if celebrities and influencers were to show the way.

But when millions of people find it sexier to travel by jet than being stuck in an airport, how can we blame those who travel private?
As my daughter said, rich people should be reminded of the joy there is in cutting queues while looking down their noses at plebs battling for breath in tight-knit throngs.
A path enabling to see without being seen is also an elitist plus.
The caviar, in first class, should be “à volonté”. And it could be a nice idea to invent a vegan one that would be more expensive and would also give a nice skin glow.

Trains must be sexier.
And boats with sails are obviously more beautiful than those with motors. The air around them is fresher and better for the health and life expectancy. Immortality is quite the quest for billionaires and I sometimes wonder if it’s because they signed an earthly pact they aren’t too “hot” to pay for…
Rich people have the luxury of time, nothing better than a sailboat taking its time to cross the Atlantic to rub our nose in this fact.

There is a lot of money to be earned in producing beautiful, ecological, better things.
And the marketing there is also easier than trying to gaslight us, as has been the modern trend, in believing the shit they sell is precisely the shit we always wanted.
What’s not to like?

How are we going to save our planet?
With tree plantings, financial incentives, inventions, evolution and positivism.
And believe me, dear reader, we are going to make it.

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