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weird is an acronym and it stands for Western educated industrialized Rich Democratic countries countries like Norway and Germany and France and the United Kingdom and America one of the
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core things about weird is that it's not just that they're like people in weird countries and they have these characteristics and there are people in other countries and they have these other characteristics is that if you look at psychological characteristics as like a bell curve there are some characteristics
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that people in weird countries not only have differently than the other ones but they have like at the far end of the bell curve they are the most that thing of any humans we can measure and they're the most weird one of the core ways that
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we're weird is that we think we have a self and by that I mean we think we have a fixed set of attributes that are internal and that will be the best reliable predictor of how we behave other people in other cultures do not think this and that suggests that our
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sense of self is largely culturally constructed hello and welcome to Planet critical the podcast for a world in crisis my name is Rachel Donald I'm a climate corruption journalist and your host every week I interview experts who
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are battling to save our planet my guests are scientists politicians academics journalists and activists they explain the complexities of the energy economic political and cultural crises
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we face today revealing what's really going on and what they think needs to be done these are the stories of the big picture go to planet critic.com to learn more And subscribe my guest this week is
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Sarah Stein lubrano Sarah is a writer content strategist learning designer and researcher at Oxford University her work focuses on the role of emotion in political communication and specifically
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on cognitive dissonance how is it that we know that climate science and politicians are still expanding the hydrocarbon industry and generally making decisions that are not at all aligned with a sustainable future well Sarah explains that the problem is
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actually our sense of self in Western culture believing that it is fixed that it is permanent that it is unchanging and the sense of alleged security that that gives is why it's very difficult for us to change our minds and why our
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brain would actually rather generate rational excuses to explain behavior that goes against what we know to be true rather than going through the more difficult process of examining ourselves changing how we behave how we think and
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therefore who we are this is such a fascinating conversation Sarah explains how this is particularly a western problem that weird countries create individuals who exhibit rather extreme sets of behaviors she offers other ways
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of understanding the self from neurop philosophy the relationship between our sense of self and death and how that impacts our politics the ways that we can speak to people that invite them to change their own minds in nonjudgmental
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ways and finally the importance of social infrastructure how by changing the infrastructure with which we live our lives we can give people access to different groups and to different actions and these are also two of the
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most effective ways of updating what we think about the world and therefore changing our Behavior I hope you all enjoy the episode if you do please share it far and wide and if you're loving the show become a patron on patreon or
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support Planet Critical with a paid subscription at Planet critic.com by signing up you'll get the planet critical newsletter inspired by each episode delivered straight to your inbox every week you'll also have access to
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the wonderful Planet critical community who are full of inspiring thoughts ideas critiques and determination the links are in the description box below I'm so grateful to everyone who chooses to support the project I'm a vehement
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believer in adree and Open Access content so Planet critical wouldn't exist without the direct support of the amazing Community thank you so much to all of you who believe in Planet critical and keep the project going
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every week Sarah thank you so much for joining me on planet critical it's a pleasure to have you on the show thank you for having me my first question is why is the world in crisis well I uh I have almost three
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degrees in social science um I'm about to finish my PhD with any luck and I so you know the answer oh yeah for sure definitely um and I guess I must
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say that having heard many arguments about this I am profoundly um convinced by a sort of marxian response which is the world is in crisis cuz our economic system is full of contradictions and
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obviously the most clear one when it comes to your podcast is that we are using resources that we cannot replenish on this Earth in a way that will lead to
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not only uh the eventual economic uh downturn of that exact system but also obviously like life on planet Earth coming to a at least very
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unpleasant uh New Order h so that that's my short answer yeah I have a longer answer about why human psychology like permits this yes please the long answer the long answer so the
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long answer is that I think our minds uh this is not just I think in my research I see that our minds are extremely they are navigational tools let's say um for getting us through the
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world and in order to do that they need to make sense of the world and they need to make sense of the role of the individual or at least semi-individual self in that world so they're always looking for you know a
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story or a map or a set of possible next actions and in doing so they require some kind of consistency and con congruency let's say
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um and they if they can't find it they fake it and that means that our our understanding of the world is often shaped as much by our internal need for consistency as sort of like the external reality um and so what I study
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specifically is a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance which is a discomfort that people appear to feel when they notice a contradiction between two or more of their own beliefs or actions um if you've ever like known
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smoking is bad for you but grabbed a cigarette out a party and justify it to yourself in some way like congratulations that's your cognitive dissonance and then you probably found a cute rationalization to explain why this inconsistency is actually consistent
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because oh well it's good for me to have friends so I'm going to go out smoke with them or you know smokers are classically always saying that it's good for their weight as though the effects of the smoking wasn't worse on their health than any weight thing you know um
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that's a rationalization the other thing that dissonance seems to do to people because it's uncomfortable and they want to resolve it as quickly as possible is that they choose which sources to give credit to or wait to uh in order to
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maintain their worldview often so that's how we basically filter all news on Twitter you know like if somebody I really trust does something on Twitter I count it in my worldview and usually they're saying something that I already agree with and if I see a new source say
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something that says something different I often will decit that Source in my mind and say that's might be true though they're kind of over the top Arn um and all of this is just to maintain our sense that we kind of know what's up in
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the world who we are in it that we're an agent for good and that we have action possibilities in the future available to us which seems really important and that makes sense because our brain needs to be thinking about that all the time just to get us through the day hi interesting
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this is so timely because I mean the cognitive dissonance um that we're seeing in the world let alone sort of current geopolitical movements but in with regards to the climate crisis uh
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you know these agreements being made at cop and then expanding fossil fuel production and consumption um and a lot of activists are sort of and scientists are just screaming and saying how how could it be possible um and you're
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saying this this is how it's possible that there I would assume existing worldw view is that the economy can continue growing and that we need to do that that that is the priority and that some tech will probably come along and
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and figure out the fossil fuel conundrum at some future date yeah I think that's roughly right I mean again because I'm a a grumpy Marxist by profession um I I would say I think that the economic
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system has a logic of its own that individual humans struggle to counter I don't want to say we can't counter it but I do think without very
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uh very powerful economic Alternatives it's difficult right in the same way that you know you may hate your job but you are still going to it because you don't have other good options and I think a lot of the people in this world
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are that have any any control you know people who are let's say investing money still in fossil fuels just think well this is all I can do in this system now I obviously don't agree with that but I do think the power of the current economic system is strong and yeah then
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I I think the way they rationalize that to themselves rather than saying this is distressing and I've done something harmful is they come up with a a clever way of bringing it across to themselves you know like ah well I'm I'm doing both
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later we'll do this other thing I'm fine because I've both helped the shareholders and later I suppose we'll have some cool carbon sucking robots which we can't develop without
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the money from expanding the hydrocarbon industry right no some genius will come up with it Rachel it'll be fine um yeah yeah I think that's right I think it that's why it's psychologically possible a lot of the time for people to
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kind of conceptually care about climate change but actually organize their life a different way because they can come up with clever rationalizations to put away any discomfort that generates I think flying is another
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really good example of that right I think it's my biggest cognitive dissonance in a lot of ways in terms of the the moral you know structure of it which is that I really care about this thing and I'm death's flying places and it's
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absolutely irrational yeah I had a real Moment of clarity flying once um when I was am I going to say this on the show yeah I'm going to say it on the show I was coming back from iasa like
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immediately because I had to because I had to go to a conference and I'd taken shms to like integrate my iasa message um and then gotten on a plane so I was just I was just high on shrooms on
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this plane essentially and was weeping throughout the flight weeping and weeping and weeping because I felt this sense of like real um panic and sadness that I
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was engaging in a suicidal activity because I I know how harmful flying is I know um the longer that we stick to this maximum of like oh it's just my flight it's just one flight like my emotions don't really count like that's the same
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cognitive dissonance um which is expanding this this industry and that I was participating in it and being on mushrooms at that moment really managed to like cut through and it was cut through the cognitive
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dissonance and I was terrified on the flight that's super interesting because actually there's some good reasons to think mushrooms would prevent you from doing clever rationalizations basically
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um because one of the main triggers for dissonance and with dissonance in particular the need to immediately sort of get rid of that discomfort is the sense of self so the sense that like you
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Rachel are one person who must be consistent and have internally good qualities and have new good action possibilities available to her um and when you when we when we when when
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cognitive dissonance is measured I wouldn't say we because I'm not a lab scientist nor any other sort of direct researcher on this topic I am a eus which means I read all the literature and try to think about what it means
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um yeah the sense of self is a huge trigger and of course um many psychedelics kind of destabilize helpfully and occasionally unhelpfully the sense of self and they kind of allow us to see for a complicated series of
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reasons that we don't fully have self we're like making it up as we go along so it's it's very likely that if you hadn't been on those drugs you would have maybe uh had less profound sadness
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about climate change on that plane um now I'm not suggesting everyone should do iasa but uh you know it's an interesting part okay great perfect someone on the show should say it and the other one can sort
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of Nod yeah the academic I'll con caveat I think what's so interesting about what psychedelics can reveal to you um and lots of other experiences as well is that as you're saying your sense of self is not fixed
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because in the west we really do seem to have this like obsession with the self and we do believe that I am a self and I have a self and it is like inherent and you know some people think it's like Eternal as well so you need your star
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sign obviously and also like maybe your IQ and also social media profile right because yourself is real and definitely not a construct yeah let me let me I'll
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explain why uh as someone who reads a lot about psychology I don't think we have a self and we are probably also not a self um which sounds really wild but there are two two ways of thinking about
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this and I think they're both helpful um so one is that in the last 20 years or so some psychologists have started doing um kind of checks to see whether the
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findings that we find all the time in social psychology and cognitive science in the labs of usually North American universities with undergraduates like track with anyone
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else's psychology in the world and look lots of things do track you know I mean we there has been a big replication crisis in Psychology but there are things that are true right that that keep being true people feel disgust they
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feel anger they feel love you know uh you can measure these weirdly in a lab Etc but um they're also a kind of core group of findings that don't track when you look at people who do not live in what are called weird countries so weird
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is an acronym and it stands for Western educated industrialized Rich Democratic countries countries like Norway and Germany and France and the United Kingdom and you know whatever um and and
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America one of the core things about weird is that it's not just that they're like people in weird countries and they have these characteristics and there people in other countries and they have these other characteristics is that if you look at psychological characteristics as like a bell
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curve there are some characteristics that people in weird countries not only have differently than the other ones but they have like at the far end of the bell curve they are the most that thing of any humans we can measure and they're
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the most weird um and the way that we're particularly weird one of the core ways that that and I'm saying we because you and I are both from weird countries um one of the core ways that we're weird is that we think we have a self and by that I mean we think we have a fixed set of
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attributes that are internal and that will be the best reliable predictor of how we behave and this is uh firstly not true in the sense that actually one of the better predictors of how people behave is their environment a lot of the
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time so you know there are like weird people say that someone steals it's because they're a bad person uh rather than because oh they were in a situation where they really you know suddenly were put there was an opportunity and they had need and you know they're much more
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likely to R an internal explanation for the self uh for the behavior of a person and for the sense of self um and actually that's inaccurate but also it's just a weird fascination of our weird culture right that we think the self is
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there and it's the best and most likely explanation for human behavior um other people in other cultures do not think this and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed um or at least very much so the other
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reason why I'm oh hang on hang on can I pause you can I pause you i' like to talk a little bit more about these non weird countries what what is their relationship to self how does it trans
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like sure I don't yeah transform yeah obviously people still have some sense of self you know when they're operating in the world they have a name they have a individual identity and so on but they are less likely to attribute um there's
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something that in Psychology is called the fundamental attribution error which sounds like a wonderful robot you know error message or something but it just means that um human beings especially
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weird human beings tend to fundamentally attribute human behavior uh to an internal characteristic rather than the circumstances like um if you've been nice to me I will be like ra Rachel's a
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nice person but actually that's usually not the best explanation for why you're being nice to me it's usually like it's beneficial to Rachel to be nice to me or Rachel's in a good mood or Rachel just ate an amazing muffin you know um and Western people have this attribution era
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where they just kind of consistently attribute human behavior to internal fixed characteristics um so people in non-weird countries are much more likely to say like well Rachel just ate an amazing muffin so now she's being really
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nice um and that's actually great because it also means that later if you are in fact mean to me I can now say oh Rachel must be out of muffins we should get her some more muffins um instead of I mean I'm sort of coming up with silly
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explanations because I don't want to get into you know this or that specific thing about you but but the idea is that actually the fundamental attribution error means that often we are less good at solving problems related to human behavior because we think they're just
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unfixable right ra and I think our justice system is a great example of this like we think like ah this person did a crime therefore they are a criminal forever they must go away into a box where their self is kept um their
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broken self yeah yeah so so I would say non-weird cultures would see a lot of individual choices and behaviors as part of an environment rather than like fixed set of characteristics and and also they tend to identify more with groups so
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they're less interested in saying like I'm Rachel and they're more interested in saying like this is my group of friends oh this my cult I imagine as well that makes it those C of cultures a lot more potentially forgiving as well
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given like the trans nature of everything yeah I mean I don't research that but I think you could be right in some cases I think that thing I love about the um so the example oh Rachel's Rachel's being mean to me she must be
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out of muffins we need to get her some more muffins get her some more muffins well exactly isn't it there's like an action there that can be taken to like alleviate the the the problem that can be fixed by being in relationship and where like you know somebody else's
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behavior is also kind of not your responsibility but impacts you and thus how are you going what actions are you going to take to make that situation better yeah which is just so out of um
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it would be very out of the ordinary almost in Western culture apart from in like the most intimate relationships you know like if you're um a woman in a heterosexual relationship having to go at your man
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suddenly at the blue he might bring you a hot water bottle and be like is it that is it because you have cramps yep yeah yeah right I think only really are we are like I used to work at
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the school of life and we would always say that we're good at doing this for children and we're terrible at doing it for anyone else like if a child's like I hate you we're not like this child is a bad child except some bad parents do that actually but usually we're like ah the child didn't have a nap the child
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was someone was mean to it at school the child needs a muffin you know but then we grow up and we like stop doing this imaginative work for the rest of time it's really sad because at some point the Assumption becomes that that child
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who doesn't really know what he wants or what he thinks because he's just a bundle of emotions going through this crazy experience of learning what it is to be in the world at some point has it all figured out and becomes an adult and knows what it is and what it wants and
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what he I think we just collapse I think basically imagination is a lot of work it's a lot of work it's hard thinking is hard and actually uh I have a chapter in my book that I'm writing that's just about how thinking is actually very difficult and painful a lot of the time
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it's a huge expense of effort and I think it is easier to think that Rachel is a mean person than that Rachel is a complicated person who sometimes needs muffin and so uh we we often just get stick with
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the first one basically um and that is unfortunate because it really limits our ability to do stuff but why can't we soas for children in most cases I think firstly actually modeling children is a
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little bit easier right um like we kind of have a list of five things that we think affect children and it's like naps Friends food play you know and so I think it's a little bit less scary for us also like it's not threatening to
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think oh my child didn't take a nap I mean it might be exhausting but it's not uh it doesn't take too much effort but if I had to model why you are being mean to me as my friend as a grownup I could be so many things yeah and it's really
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hard and some of them are kind of scary because they implicate like maybe I did something wrong and you know so I think I think the main reason we can do it for children is that it's not either as exhausting or complicated or scary usually as whatever it needs for us to
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model grown up human beings that would be my gu okay so that transient self becomes a little bit more complex with every year spent on the yeah let's hope so anyway I mean that that said obviously most of the time we do just
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need a nap and some food but um okay so that was the first that's the first reason we maybe shouldn't think about ourselves as self or having a self the second one comes from sort of Neuroscience and philosophy and a
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particularly good book on this is uh Thomas metzinger's the ego tunnel which is his popularized work that that it's written for like Curious normies not normies curious non-academics um rather
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than academics he has a big big academic book but you know I think your podcast listeners probably have better stuff to do mostly um and his point is that actually if you look at well so basically metser had an outof
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body experience which sounds like something that only happens when you take iasa um or whatever but actually it happens for lots of reasons it can happen because you're on anesthesia it can happen because you're falling asleep happens a lot to people are falling
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asleep certain small group of people um and it's basically just that the the brain is actually generating for us our sense of reality it's not uh I think people have this sense that like ah we
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are you know we're just receiving reality passively but if you at Neuroscience that's not what's happening at all the brain is in fact constantly trying to generate what it thinks is happening and then it's receiving input from the world and it's changing that model slightly like we're all in the
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Matrix in the sense that we are generating our sense of reality from a vivid hallucination roughly um and without boring you with all that Neuroscience basically what metzinger
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points out is that the the only thing that could reasonably be pointed to as our self is the actual generated hallucination that we're creating or our window out into the world so we might
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think ah like I'm I'm this is my brain and here's my window into the world and inside my brain is a little man or woman who's sitting there looking out into the world and that's my sense of self that little man or woman but metzinger is pointing out that actually not at all
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there is no one in there nobody is inside the thing that is the self is just this window this generated hallucinatory but like information gathering window out into the world um and that's true both like a neuroscientific level but also in a
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certain sense at a philosophical level which is that we we it is this experience of looking out this particular window that is the closest thing we could identify is specific to
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us really um and and that's interesting because it also means that if we can change if we can change what the window is doing that our self changes too right um there and there isn't any other self
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in there to be changed let's say just lots of complex and information to be fluid yeah like what it means to be Sarah lubrano is fundamentally just that I am experiencing this generated
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sense of the world as it is from this particular perspective and every once in a while some weird blip is going to happen and I'm going to maybe have an out-of- body experience but basically it's it's that right why can that give people a sense of vertigo like why is it why is it
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uncomfortable to understand that our our self is this window well I a couple of different things so firstly uh there's like a good bit of research in in in Psychology about how much we fear death
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and death is often viewed as the the loss of the self right so I think there's a lot and this is true with dissonance theory as well there's a lot of people who figure one of the reasons why dissonance is so hard because it's a revision of the self we ever revise our
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beliefs and it's pointing to contradictions in our self which make it less stable it's just that it feels a little bit like death anytime you notice a contradiction in yourself or a possible loss of self like it triggers the same fear of death possibly um where
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you know we have a sort of self-preservation instinct that gets threatened even by this non-literal death that we experience when we change ourselves um and is that particular to
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weird countries I don't uh I don't 100% no but the attachment to selfhood probably yes at least in the way that we do it I think that's promising though like I always think about the weird literature I think when it first came
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out some psychologists were like oh no because they felt that made their field of research look bad and and certainly there are a lot of things about psych research that have been sloppy and non-replicable and bad and
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like of course we need there's like a whole realm of stuff that needs to happen methodologically in social sciences about pre-registration and P values and constructs and whatever you know that yes but in the long run I
00:25:47
actually think the weird literature is great it's fascinating because it means that we can stop talking about like one one human psychology and start talking about like multiple human psychologies and they have in common and what they don't have in common and how our
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environment affects what might seem like our most fundamental structures in there yeah and also I mean it would seem as well that it opens up a pathway to having a better life like if you can get
00:26:12
over this sort of figurative death by understanding that it is not a death because there was nothing to kill or to die in the first place then you can you can adapt you can you can you can change according to your environment and thus
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be like a better fun part of the ecosystem within which you live you know like everything else yeah I think the self is getting in our way a lot of the time and I know that sounds very Buddhist but you can also get there from
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Neuroscience if you want no I yeah I think so too um and I think got this two different directions I want to take us on so I'm going to flag them both um the second one is going to be embodiment um but I just want to take a little bit of
00:26:51
a detour to Silicon Valley Tech dudes with podcasts um great who are like obsessed with their mortality and spending a huge amount of of money in that part of the world on trying to figure out how to be immortal there was
00:27:04
that guy who was like injecting him or like transfusing his son's his 18-year-old son's blood into him on like a monthly basis or whatever um this obsession with with with with permanence
00:27:17
um with being fixed with with cheating death and that way the self is also getting in the way CU like guys there's like really big Collective problems that we need to be working on like you the planet is on fire and flooding um people
00:27:30
are still living like beow below the extreme poverty line um the pitchforks are coming for you if you don't do something like there's a lot going on maybe you should stop trying to figure out how to freeze yourself because there
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won't be a planet to wake up to yeah yeah right I mean I think in a way one of the ways we could look at all of this huge body of py literature is that in the process of trying to protect what we perceive to be a real self but is
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actually not um lots of other things are lost and one of the main ones is our ability to handle and explore contradictions in our worldview and revise them such that we have a better understanding of the world and therefore
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for example respond to climate change um and and maybe in a way what we're saying is like I can't die I can't afford to die and so maybe the planet has to die instead or you know maybe all these other things have to go wrong so I can
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preserve my sense of self um and that doesn't mean we don't need any sense of self we need a self it's just part of how we navigate the world there has to be somebody that I feel like I am enough to go boil some eggs and call you on the
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phone but um but we might need very different kind of sense of self if we want to be able to navigate the 21st century I mean this seems to be a sense of self that is dedicated to life and then a sense of self that is you know
00:28:47
part of the economy of death to pull a term that jacet Al is started um using that's because isn't it um even though though he was instrumental instrumental in creating the economy of
00:29:01
death I think because if because if life is if life is cyclical in its nature and everything is on the move it's growing or it's decaying nothing is ever plateauing everything is constantly in
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motion you know it's energy life is energy and energy is always you know sort of diffused in in different ways um then having a fixed sense of self that kind of self that gets in the way of
00:29:27
like the collective well-being I.E you know I want to figure out how to make this uh body Immortal I want to figure out how to put my you know Consciousness and a USB stick um then that least
00:29:40
appealing images of life I can imagine exactly well exactly these are all these are all death death images right and if some if something is fixed normally it's dead normally the only fixed state in
00:29:52
life is dead yeah yeah I mean I think there's a lot basically I think there's a lot about our underlying psychological fears about death that is getting in the way of our ability to revise our self and I I don't
00:30:05
do enough cross-cultural research to be sure if there are cultures that handle this better but it seems like there could be for sure right so I guess in a way without becoming a full-on Buddhist on this podcast I think there's
00:30:18
something important there about being able to say you know myself is just this weird window and it's going to be a different window tomorrow and if I notice a contradiction in my worldview uh it's uncomfortable a then that's okay
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now obviously that alone is not enough necessarily to handle dissonance because a lot of dissonance is unconscious or or sort of preconscious stuff but I think at least knowing this logically might help us catch some of our own
00:30:42
contradictions over time God I just thought of another contradiction which would be in the culture as well that is most devoted to a fixed sense of self and we also have like the highest uh divorce rates and often like reason
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cited or like yeah we grew out of each other or we don't want the same thing we're not the same people so it's there like we have these clues in our in our language yeah we know people change but we're also like not ready for it yeah we
00:31:07
know people change um but not the people who have their hands on the levers allegedly sort of making decisions or being driven by sort of economic forces like some things can't change um but things that don't change lead to death
00:31:20
totally and I think that something you and I have talked about before off this podcast is like that uh it's very telling that we don't think politicians should be allowed to change their views right that we're really upset like if if
00:31:32
if even like over something sem semi- minor politicians is actually a revise My Views that's really taboo which is completely nuts yeah um because what you should want is politicians who are at least somewhat um shiftable by new
00:31:45
information cooler ideas uh changes in the world uh 4 hour period to read something right you want you actually want you should want politicians who at least in some ways can change their
00:31:57
minds but we lose our [Â __Â ] when people I don't know if you can swear any podcast you we lose our minds when people when people change their views actually in politics and um of course part of that is because a lot of these view changes are engineered for convenience but we we
00:32:11
should fundamentally have a space for people to change their minds and I think the fact that we don't is because we have this very artificial sense of self and um we want even like political parties and institutions to have self
00:32:22
that never shame which is nut and corporations and I wonder how much as well that has been since um oh I don't know like the fact that a corporation is defined as like a you know as the same legal rights as a person um and then we
00:32:36
expect them to have like values and attitudes and all these kinds of things that are unfixing H sorry unchanging and fixed I wonder as well if you know in these weird countries where probably one thing that runs through them all apart
00:32:48
from the United States but it was a colony of the uh British Empire was this long history of royalty as well and this you know ideology that this P these line
00:32:59
this line of people is has this like God granted gift to to rule over and that sounds pretty fixed you know it's very self-oriented and individual oriented right and like the individual
00:33:12
representing the whole stage and all of this stuff yeah so you can kind of trace it back almost to see I'm not a historian or anything I'm just making this up off the top of my head but like the possible way that we we tied oursel in knots
00:33:25
along the way to to getting here um and the resulting impacts on our culture now I know as well I want to get you to talk about politics and debate um okay just but just before we go there
00:33:37
let's let's go back slightly to embodiment because there was a sentence you said about 10 minutes ago um and it was this the maybe the relationship that I can't remember exactly but something that is closest to our like the sense of
00:33:51
self being the thing that we have that is most real in the world or whatever like that being a problematic kind of concept concept but we have this other thing that is very very real right which
00:34:01
is the body yeah and what we are seeing in um sort of activist networks is that trying to explain to a person what a new way of life could be like is really really difficult but like inviting them
00:34:15
in to live in community for a time or try literally try out a new economic model a new way of engaging like embodying the experience is actually sort of the quickest way to make people realize that a it's feasible and B
00:34:28
they'd quite like it or or not you know um but we do have this like it's not just a meat bucket it's it's this amazing thing that carries us through and allows us to actually engage actually engage with the world rather
00:34:42
than you know interpreting it through through the window and that as well seems to have been sort of vaguely discarded um in weird cultures like or like we have a bad relationship with our body potentially totally I mean the
00:34:55
Millennia of religion which which you know viewed everything that the body did as like sinful essentially like the soul was the Eternal Paradise you know the cartisian dualism problem yep yeah I mean I guess
00:35:08
one thing we could say about this is something I'm very interested in is um what are called action-oriented uh approaches in Psychology and what that basically means is that certain ways of thinking about
00:35:21
psychological issues including dissonance but not only um understand the brain to be fundamentally generating actions um and of course at the at the like most fundamental level it's generating
00:35:32
actions for your body right um one of the ways that one of the ways that this Theory came to be is that sometimes when people have strokes like one of their hands or both of their hands will just start doing tons of random activities on
00:35:45
uh in a way that the person themselves cannot control so yeah you know you'll have a hand and it will start grabbing everything on the table and maybe even seemingly trying to choke the person themselves and um obviously that's horrible because it's it's a pain form
00:35:57
of brain damage but it's as it turns out much of what we learned about the human brain is through brain damage when you see something has been damaged you can figure out what it did in the first place and what it seems like it's pointing to is this idea that what the
00:36:09
brain is often doing is immediately identifying all the possible actions it could be taking in the world and then silencing most of them because obviously you can only do one at a time and many of them are stupid um and it may be for
00:36:22
this reason for example that when you stand on the top of a tall building some small part of your brain is like jump even if you are hopefully not very suicidal it's not necessarily that you deep down have a destructive tendency although we all do um it's that your
00:36:34
brain has identify that that is one action possibility and is like oh oh action possibility um and these are called affordances a lot of the time in literature there are the action
00:36:45
possibilities afforded to us in our given situation um so yeah so our brain is probably thinking by constantly automatically generating action affordances for us and then muting most
00:36:58
of them so we can get through our life and that reason that this matters firstly is that it's deeply connected to our body um but also that I think it's important then to think about whether some of the things we've just talked
00:37:10
about including the self the sense of self itself dissonance are related to these affordances and some people think so so there's an action oriented theory of dissonance which is that we mainly experience the disconfort of dissonance when the contradiction in our world view
00:37:23
screws up our ability to generate affordances right and actually some of these affordances might not even be about our body like if I uh you know think the patriarchy has been real good to me but then one day I'm sexually
00:37:35
harassed suddenly I am going to experience dissonance probably not only because there's a contradiction but because now I don't know what to do next like should I keep investing in my sort of patriarchal family structure or
00:37:48
actually do I need to go become a feminist activist right um I'm sort of jumping very quickly into quite a complex political thing there but a lot of the political contradictions that we encounter in the world challenge not just our sense of who we are as good
00:38:01
people but also our sense of what on Earth we should be doing next and um the interesting thing about this in is that it seems like by changing our bodily States we can in some way like I don't
00:38:13
want to say hack into our system because that's really Tech bro but for example people seem to experience less painful dissonance when they're lying down and one of the reasons this is probably true should it continue to replicate um is
00:38:25
that it kind of turns off the immediate bit of our brain that's saying we must make a decision now about what we're going to do next and that makes the discomfort of the contradiction that we're noticing a little bit less intense and maybe we can think about it for
00:38:37
longer fascinating so yeah so I think our body we should think about our body as part of our brain basically a lot of people are beginning to understand that this is true our our body is doing some of the brain stuff for us and when we change our body we change what our brain
00:38:48
is doing and if we could be more aware of that as a society it's possible there are more thinking possibilities for us God that is so interesting so much in that so much in that but I mean
00:39:01
especially that that one line of like chall contradictions challenge what we should be doing next because this is because this is really the problem right how do I put
00:39:15
this there are I mean I I have debates with um people quite frequently around this like I think people are quite quick to be like everybody now knows about climate change like yeah I don't know I don't I don't know I don't know everybody now knows about climate change or everybody believes it whatever but
00:39:29
also there's lots of different ways of knowing something right exactly exactly but I would say I you know I certainly encounter a huge percentage of the population that is well aware of climate
00:39:40
change and has like the top three talking points you know um like uh cop emissions uh fossil fuels uh politics um
00:39:52
and are concern are aware are concerned are still living their lives as if they have nothing else to give to the problem um or it will resolve itself even though they can talk about the fact that it's
00:40:05
the problem is not resolving itself I mean I remember um meeting a guy in papini who works for a recruiting company for total energy and he was young you know he was in his late 20s and I was like what are you doing yeah
00:40:17
you're going to have to live through this what he was like and he said well if I don't do it somebody else will and that kind of you know um attitude is something that I see a lot and you know it's the same one that I
00:40:30
have you know occasionally I try and take trains everywhere but occasionally when I do take a plate and I'm like I mean the plane was already running anyway so but this idea of like we can know we can experience the
00:40:42
contradiction and we can still do the thing not just by like repressing our thoughts or not even by sort of deliberately constructing these like amazing rationalizations but just possibly also because we don't know what
00:40:55
to do next we don't know what else to do well exactly like that guy would definitely experience a real challenge to his affordances should he decide it's unacceptable to work for an energy company like that right because then
00:41:08
what does he have to now he's going to retrain or does he maybe even need to do something that actively fixes the thing that he has been contri you know I mean it's really rough um in that sense and
00:41:20
that's part of why I'm I'm writing a book for Bloomsbury um and have an entire chapter just on this idea about action and how like actually a lot of what it means to think is to do and we don't have this
00:41:33
idea very well in Western culture so that's why we think that something like debate we'll get to debate in one second I know debate is a great idea and what we need to do for ideas is just debate them to the ends of the Earth and then we will truly know what we think but actually all the evidence we have about
00:41:45
debate is that it does basically nothing in terms of changing people's minds or letting them think through new ideas um if they are in the debate themselves they like their own ideas more at the end uh if they are't watching it their views are not very changed and this is
00:41:58
true across different countries and yeah um but it does turn out that when you try out new actions in the world your views do change a lot of the time that this is a much more let's say effective way of trying to change your own mind
00:42:12
about something like you want to know if it's possible to I don't know live more sustainably try doing it and you will discover a new opinion about that fact right um hopefully you'll Discover it is possible but regardless you will change
00:42:24
your mind because uh in in most cases when we engage in new actions our beliefs shift more or less in accordance with them and certainly in response to um and so I think one of the things to to bridge between this action thing and
00:42:37
the debate thing that you want to talk about is just that thinking is often this secondary result of doing and if we wanted to have a more thoughtful Society we'd be doing more right oh gosh what a
00:42:48
beautiful line um although I would like to CER and say also maybe if we had a more thoughtful Society part that we just be doing less like I would like doing differently let's say instead of more doing differently yeah like maybe we all need to lie down and have a
00:43:01
little nap um and then we'll think differently but but yeah I think like the idea that we could just in the abstract on our own sitting in our little unused body is come up with new great ideas is pretty fcil and it's more
00:43:13
fcil when it comes to politics and other things probably well on politics I know that your book is being published in 20125 but it is on debate don't talk about politics and what to do instead and it has a whole chapter on why debate
00:43:25
is un helpful Paradigm EXC I mean let's let's get into it um let's build on what you've um already said I mean why how does it relate to the self how is it threatening and what are some forms of
00:43:39
engaging with one another that are more helpful so the first question is why does the baate not really work very well right yeah and yeah there are a couple of different reasons one of them is look basically it's a format that at least most of the time if you change your mind
00:43:51
you're considered to have lost so in a way it's already set up that people are going to be dis incentivized to change their minds secondly when you are stating your views you you listen to yourself and you believe yourself whatever the other person says you're
00:44:03
listening to you and you believe your own views and actually you believe your own views more the more you say them a lot of the time so it's it's an exercise setup to just hear your own point of view again if you're doing the debating
00:44:14
um and thirdly I just think it's again one of the things I'm writing about in my book is that there are two things that do change our minds quite a bit and they're belonging with new groups of people and trying out new actions in the world those things do change our views
00:44:27
quite a lot and debate doesn't involve either of them and online debate involves somehow even less of them so yeah when you look at the psychology research about what happens in debate and the sociology research about what happens in debate there's very little evidence that it's doing
00:44:40
anything to shift our views or even make them more complex usually right okay so possibly even simplifying them yeah right or then reinforcing them let's say keeping them strongly where they were God and when
00:44:53
you think about the fact that the Senate you know Houses of Parliament all of this kind of stuff set up with people on two sides of the aisle shouting at each other as if that is somehow the most effective way to have a conversation um
00:45:06
and I think what's so sad about it is like if to kind of try to try and join dots uh here it's like this this sense of self that we expect these also non- entities to have like political parties
00:45:19
and for people to represent and for that to be fixed um and then to engage in an exercise which actually only perpetrates existing values rather than rather than having collaborative discussion and like
00:45:31
hey what do we want to achieve here like we all seem to be here for the same reason right guys you know we all we all want to help people don't we isn't that why you're in politics you know maybe may maybe
00:45:42
maybe and also maybe if we put our heads together um we could come up with some more interesting results rather than sort of bashing our heads off of one another and yet there seems to be like
00:45:56
the the main uh barrier from getting there does seem to come back again to this idea of self again and of things being fixed and therefore of things being like trustworthy even though things that just
00:46:09
to say things that are fixed in nature like the things that are not in motion the things that are not changing and not evolving those things are dead there's only one fixed state in nature and it's dead yeah yeah if you're alive
00:46:22
congratulations you're G to keep drifting and so there's something about you know this like I don't know the if we could somehow to pull a term from Jac Itali if we could somehow think about things in the terms of like economy of
00:46:34
life versus economy of death even though he was instrumental in creating the economy of death in Europe still a good phrase still a good phrase this idea like the things that are transforming that are in motion that are in
00:46:46
relationship that are interdependent that's all the economy of life because that is how the world works and said the world rather than the natural world because had picked myself up on that recently there is no binary there um
00:47:01
versus the economy of death that is literally it is things that are fixed it is things that are unchanging and it's things that will not adapt and unfortunately that does seem to be the world that we live in and perhaps that is why is so dependent on like these
00:47:13
mechanical life support machines because it's not it's not alive in any good sense of the word yeah I think that's right I think um the irony maybe to our fear of death
00:47:26
is that we've created a world that mimics it in some way right that is very fixed and that we think is stable and actually is causing a lot of death and so once again we're stuck in a place where we don't want our own self to die but lots of other stuff is dying all the time that's very worrying yeah but as
00:47:38
you said the planet can die that's fine as long as I as long as I'm I'm still here somehow that's fine I'll have my mechanical life support machine on my keeping me alive like come on guys it's
00:47:51
so it's so obvious um what is a way okay so if debate doesn't work and we can come back to the economy of death but I'm conscious of the time if debate doesn't work what is an effective way of speaking to people and inviting them to
00:48:06
into a more fluid brain space yeah so I I've been thinking about this a lot I'm still working on it but I guess um to go back to those two things I mentioned the two things I'm really interested in are the way that engaging in new actions
00:48:19
seems to change people's mind about things and the way belonging in new groups of people changes people's mind about things and there's so many different things that could involve either new activities or belonging in new groups of people right but
00:48:32
um I one of the things I like to think about and like use as a broad term for what we need is infrastructure firstly because I think we need infrastructure in general and I know you've had podcast guests about infrastructure and infrastructure good infrastructure is so
00:48:44
important and it creates these massive shifts that we could never do as like individual moralists and yeah um but also I mean infrastructure both in the literal sense that infrastructure is often the thing that changes where we go
00:48:56
during the day and who we belong with right um and you know that's very important but it also anything that is invisible but subtly shifts the way we behave and infrastructure does this constantly like the way I travel around
00:49:09
in the world is based on London tfl and you know the place I live is based on a complex series of infrastructure Investments that led to the housing market as it is and where my office is and who I see when I go to work is based
00:49:21
on that too and um and so sociologists have come up with this term called social infrastructure and they by this they mean basically pieces of infrastructure that lead to social ties
00:49:34
um and social capital is another word they often use which is complex term or social contact UM and it changes it changes who we belong with and who we talk to and who we know um one of the more famous studies about social
00:49:47
infrastructure showed that in communities that were poor and in Chicago but had some social infrastructure places people could basically be together for relatively cheap or nothing at all like public parks and
00:50:00
basketball you know uh courts and barber shops and whatever those places dealt way better with heat waves and many fewer people died and the reason is simply that they knew each other right so you knew the old guy and you went and checked in on him and you made sure he
00:50:13
had water and you took him to the hospital and whatever um and that's very interesting when it comes to climate change because it suggests that one of the ways that we can be resilient in terms of disasters is building infrastructure that connects people to
00:50:24
their neighbors so they can take care of each other if you don't know the person you never go save them right I mean maybe not but often we don't we don't even know they exist even if we are moral people we're not sure who to check in on yeah but at a broader level it's likely that having social infrastructure
00:50:37
which can often be built in quite subtle ways like it can be built by having parents have a room in the school they can go to and hang out and when they're waiting for their kid to be done with sports or whatever you know and then parents all know each other um I'm very
00:50:49
interested in Social infrastructure because I think well I know that it changes the groups of people people that we feel ourselves to belong with and that in turn can change our point of view about a lot of different things it
00:51:01
leads to the kinds of open-ended conversations that in some cases are a bit like the Deep canvasing conversations that have been shown to change people's views um in the long run about political issues because they are
00:51:12
like long form non-judgmental non- deba um storytelling operations where each person gets to try out what it's like to be the other person while without feeling judged and also it makes us feel like our action matter in that community
00:51:26
that there are people who are going to be changed by them it exposes us to new ideas you know so anyway I'm very very interested in this kind of social infrastructure um and to anything more broadly that helps us belong with new groups of people and try out new
00:51:39
actions excellent I love that I was writing recently about how um a few months ago about how infrastructure can we can think of infrastructure as like the D simulacra that like reveals a new way of being in the world and I love that in terms of social infrastructure a
00:51:52
good Bard reference yeah thank you very much in there my reference you said um it's like the space for like non- debating non-judgmental storytelling and that is
00:52:05
linked to deep canvasing um yeah yeah could you talk about that pleas great so one of the things that I in my PhD research look at is this thing called Deep canvasing which is a a very
00:52:18
strategic form of like interaction developed in large part by people who were advocating for marriage equality they looked at bunch of psychology research including some stuff on cognitive disin and they developed a technique where you go to the person and
00:52:31
you say look what is your view on this and you give them a scale from zero to 10 you know where zero is like no gay people should ever get married or be gay and 10 is yeah great marriage equality um and and then the person would say something and maybe they'd say you know
00:52:44
oh I guess I'm a two I mean I don't really think this is how it should work whatever um and then the Deep caner says oh well can you tell me why you're at two and actually in some cases they say can you tell me why you're at two and
00:52:55
not at zero which is very clever because it means that they're getting the other person to State the reasons they might be in favor of marriage equality a little bit and then they can pull on those reasons right um but in any case
00:53:07
then there's usually a non-judgmental exchange of stories um where you might listen to their stories about why they're hesitant about marriage equality and then you would share your own reasons why you think just you as a person that marriage
00:53:20
equality is a good idea you might talk about your gay friends you might talk about the importance of marriage in your life you might talk about discrimination you might even ask them some sort of empathy building questions like have you ever felt discriminated against and then
00:53:32
usually at the end of the conversation you just ask them again where they stand and these conversations seem to be not only effective in the minute at changing people's mind they'll often come back and say oh actually put me like a five you know or well don't San right people
00:53:44
change their views but also they seem to last so when people went back three months later and ask the same people where they stood on marriage equality and now this is often used for Trans rights and for immigration uh
00:53:55
people's view shift seems to stick and there are probably a couple of different mechanisms at work during this process um one of them is the non-judgment that the more that one can appear non-judgmental about what the other
00:54:07
person has to say the more it is uh possible for their sense of self to shift right because they're not defending their sense of self in the first place um it also means you're not triggering what psychologists call reacs which is where you're saying screw you
00:54:19
don't tell me what to think I'm myself I have a sense of agency you can't make me do anything which is pretty stubbornly in the heads of most people um and also it's letting there be
00:54:31
ambiguity right because it's saying okay from zero to 10 you're somewhere in the middle you're not a zero you're not a 10 and maybe your sense of self isn't that fixed in that way as you might have thought and also the story exchange seems to do a lot and um apparently one
00:54:44
of the reasons is because you can't really argue with someone's story you know if you tell me Sarah this happened to me I mean only truly weird conversations allow for me to say no that didn't happen to you you and so
00:54:56
that seems to do a lot of work as well so there's a lot of things going on in conversations like that but it's really difficult to have a conversation like that without a understanding a little bit about why they work and B having long form periods of time where you
00:55:08
belong with someone else and you're going to have a real deep conversation about something so I'm interested in making spaces where people can have those conversations and are likely to anyway because they're going to be there that is excellent I suppose the next
00:55:20
apart from like door knocking and I I guess this social infrastructure as well of parents you know like quite a homogeneous group but I bet with like a very heterogeneous you know set of people within it um or I just yeah I
00:55:34
just wonder how do we how do we get the people allegedly making decisions and they're not right they're just following um but I'm talking about leaders in the world how
00:55:46
do we get those people into the spaces of social infrastructure to like have a bloody chat about what's going on and get them to figure out that um if if the planet dies their sense of self is also going to die because because they're bodily going to
00:55:59
die gosh I mean I think it's I don't know I what do I think I I think the tricky thing about actual politicians is that they are stuck in a very specific power structure right they have their funders and their donors and their team
00:56:13
and their this and they're that and they are mainly responsible to like polls and funders and so if I were to devise a political strategy I mostly wouldn't start there I think that the world is very actually giving to politicians who
00:56:26
can rarely change their mind and without receiving huge backlash um and it's one of the reasons I'm so committed to researching this stuff is that I think actually what we have to do is first change like average people's mind or
00:56:40
really the small strip of people that are persuadable is truly where the political work is done and the politicians sort of follow from there and to the degree that they don't they probably can't be persuaded by having a long-term conversation because the
00:56:52
reason they're not persuadable is either um that they they actually are happy with the way the world is going or uh that they have to be happy with the way the world is going because that's what's in their financial interests uh so sorry
00:57:05
that's a long form way of saying like I don't know that we can do it by changing the minds of people who are in power I think I don't know might might be a little bit of a Democrat after all despite my Marxist leanings you know I
00:57:16
think we have to change normal people's minds and go from there I don't know I don't know if changing normal people's minds would have an impact on the a direction given just this you know ining desent into fascism I mean I'm very
00:57:29
happy for there to be like a team that goes and just tries to you know make I don't know re suck wake up in a sweat in the middle of the night like that's that's valid work too but I yeah I'm I love that I love the you know like um in
00:57:40
America swats we could call it sweats little SWAT team to like an reishi yeah the sweat swats there's a lot of uh hope in it obviously because the more that we understand our own psychology and our psychology within groups the more that
00:57:52
we can kind of like tuse a tech term P it um but yeah this I think this thing about social infrastructure is so interesting because if you can't get to certain people in order like and those
00:58:04
people are having lots of conversations between them in Echo Chambers and unfortunately whether it's like you know um owners of newspapers and politicians and corporations and lobbyists like those who have totally inequitable
00:58:17
distributions of power they are having conversations that impact the decisions that they make and are further sort of cementing their views which perhaps could be an explanation as to why they keep doubling down on Madness in the face I mean you're right
00:58:29
actually that if we could make politicians belong in different groups that might change their views because that seems to be what humans do they join a new group of people and they shift their views the question is like who are those people that we're going to get you know yeah get them to belong
00:58:42
with I'm not sure yeah yeah they have to yeah which group wants to invite politicians in after this recent Hall yeah it's a good question I'm sure do you know I'm sure there'd be some kind Souls some kind Souls out there that should be politicians that' be willing
00:58:56
to do that work just hang out with them for a while luck and without killing them Sarah this has been so fascinating I we I feel like I could speak to you all day um but I think we've covered I
00:59:11
think we've definitely covered enough to make people go and read up more about your work where should people go actually to find more about your work before the book is I yeah okay so that book won't be out for a bit in fact I think you're the first podcast I've
00:59:23
talked about it on so congratulations exciting uh don't tell my publisher I'm not sure I was supposed to do this it's fine um I actually already have a publication in a book from a small press called perspectiva press the book is called dispatches from a time between
00:59:36
worlds crisis and emergence in metamodernity and it has all these essays and mine is one of them so if you want a little book for your book club there you go and then hopefully in a year and a half there'll be another book
00:59:49
hopefully I can't wait to read it um my final question for you Sarah is who would you like to platform I'm currently working with 25 students uh with my co-host of a course uh whose name is Max
01:00:01
Haven and Max and I are kind of going through a lot of the stuff you and I just talked about on this podcast um with our students who are students is not really the right word for this we're like convening a thing and giving them some readings but also ultimately it's
01:00:14
for them to sort stuff out right um and and the people in this program are being asked to come up with like solutions for the world um and some of them are interested in sort of fighting the far right and some
01:00:28
of them are interested in um you know preventing transphobia or reducing transphobia so I guess rather than give one exact person I would just say that I think I'm really curious what the people in our program are going to do and I
01:00:42
want one of them to come on your podcast once they've done some of it like in a year I yeah I want one of them to they'll have done a little bit of activism and I think it would then be really interesting to see how they used all these slightly abstracted Concepts I
01:00:54
just used but for real and did something real with it because I think that's important and um it's some ways more inspiring than any idea on its own could be what a great idea thank you so much I look forward to it this is such a
01:01:06
pleasure Rachel Sarah thank you so much for your time you too if you want to learn more I've put links to everything in the description box below remember to subscribe to the channel if you're new here and share the episode if you enjoyed it to support the show subscribe
01:01:19
at Planet critical. comom where you can read The Weekly Newsletter inspired by each interview you can also become a planet critical Patron all links are in the description box below as always my deepest thanks to that Community Planet
01:01:31
critical wouldn't exist without your support thank you everyone for listening and for coming on this journey together
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