Climate Change and the Terror Management Theory

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The anxiety about the future is experienced in the present. The behaviors that are needed to change the future are behaviours we act out in the present because most of our feelings about the future are negative. So the only way for us to behave appropriately in the present is to go through a grieving process and develop ways of managing drama. And so this is the main place where the behavior change breaks down. It evokes fear, anxiety, shame, grief, pain, et cetera. S you have these kinds of a very emotionally intense and painful kinds of experiences. We need psychological mechanisms to manage that anxiety and terror. This is the place where the work needs to be done.

Our guest in this episode is Joe Brewer, Executive Director at the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution. Joe is a complexity researcher, cognitive scientist, and evangelist for regenerative culture design. We invited him onto the show because we felt that our ideas about adult development, rites of passage, and overcoming the chasm of nihilism strongly resonated with his thinking and work on cultural evolution. This interview turned out to be very dense and we talked about complex subjects, so we divided the episode in two parts.

In Part 1 we talk about what kind of education we need in order to prepare for an evolutionary transition, why even intellectuals can’t wrap their heads around climate change, and the importance of the grieving process for psychological and spiritual growth.

Complete show notes with links: http://www.futurethinkers.org/90

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