Thread by @SteB777

When I said, I wasn't into climate action campaigning, there was some misunderstanding about what I meant.

Essentially, what I meant, is that if you have to campaign for action, to prevent global catastrophe, and civilization collapse, then there's something serious wrong.
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Once the scientific reality, behind the climate and ecological crisis is conveyed, if our leadership don't get it, there is something seriously wrong with their perception, their thinking, and their grasp of reality.

That's the problem, not arguing harder.
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This is what I mean, when I say, effective problem solving, is all about accepting that the problem exists, and then understanding what the problem is, before you try to solve it.

Or else you end up trying to solve something, which isn't the actual problem.
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If our leadership, and I don't just mean political leadership, but the media, business leadership, all powerful people and groups in society, don't get the scientific warnings, it is their thinking and perception, which is the problem. Not, activists haven't campaigned right.
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Don't get me wrong on this, I have massive respect for climate activists etc, in what they have done, in trying to break through the political and media denial.

I'm talking about trying to negotiate, and lobby people, totally in denial. It doesn't work.
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Take Darwinian, evolution, against creationism. The evidence for Darwinian evolution is massive, and the evidence for creationism, is non-existent. That this debate, is even still a thing, tells us all about entrenched thinking, and the dynamics.
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The style of language logic thinking and reasoning, developed in the West, derived from Ancient Greek philosophy, is deeply problematical, as it allows concrete, immovable thinking, and ideas, which are so convincing, which can be based on total fallacy.
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I've tried to get across, what the core problem is, the reification fallacy, when ideas become more real to people, than the things those ideas are about.

That no one seems to get this, illustrates what the actual problem is. The primacy of ideas.

8/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reificati…

As far as I know, no other culture has ever fallen into the trap of the reification fallacy, where they have built up, huge, apparently concrete, all explaining theories of reality, which are totally false, and baseless.
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In fact, and this illustrates what the problem is, it appears that mp other culture, has seriously tried to explain reality, with words, and language logic.

That this is where it went seriously wrong. Where we gave ideas, that sort of undeserved power.
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Words and ideas are very useful tools, but at the very best, they are crude approximations, of something immensely more complex, than the simplistic explanations, derived from language logic, appear to imply.
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Yes, religion tried to do that a bit, but then all the revealed religions, that operate like this, are fully embedded within the same realm of Western culture, derived from Ancient Greek philosophy.
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Don't get me wrong here, this is not blaming Ancient Greek philosophy, which wasn't all the same. It is the elements of it, which were extracted, and then used (abused) by Western culture to develop this great certainty about the world, which was often fallacious.*
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Indeed, science itself, got bogged down, in the false certainty, until during the Enlightenment, science broke away from what had been natural philosophy, insisting on ideas being tested empirically.

14/royalsociety.org/about-us/who-w…

Without going into detail, science found a way of operating, and working with reality, without the need to assume, that we know everything.

But most of all, by testing the ideas, hypotheses, which science deals with, which other academic fields, still fail to do.
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Science is an imperfect methodology, which maybe misused, but the beauty of it, is that it is largely self-correcting, so over time, mistaken ideas, tend to get weeded out. However, there is a limit to what the scientific method can be used on.
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Some academic fields, like economics, and to an extent psychology, have made themselves quasi-scientific, in appearing to use scientific methodology, when they actually have no core elements of assumption, which can be tested.
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It creates, what I call, the walk around problem, where people, especially those with power, just walk around key scientific evidence about say the climate and ecological crisis, by referring to alternative realities, like economics, which have no empirical basis.
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This is what allows, our leadership i.e. all of it, to totally ignore (walk around) the scientific warnings about how we are destroying our liveable climate regime, natural ecosystems, and the biodiversity ecosystems are composed of.
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From the perspective of physical and ecological reality, everything else, can only exist, within these parameters, when it is consistent with them. The Planetary Boundaries @jrockstrom.

20/stockholmresilience.org/research/plane…

Whereas classical economics, the version of reality, all our leadership prescribes to, and which they put above everything else, has no foundation in physical and ecological reality, which its supposed experts, are largely ignorant of.
@ProfSteveKeen @KevinClimate
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Economics, is based on trading and industrial production, which in the modern form, have only existed for hundreds of years. Which operate, as if natural resources are endless and without limit.
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This is a classic case of the reification fallacy, where the laws of economics, have become far more real to our powerful leadership, than the laws of physics and ecology, which allows our economies, to exist.

They just don't see ecological reality, let alone understand it.
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Campaigning, to get them to acknowledge ecological reality, which sustains us, is not an effective way of overcoming this problem.

Rather, we need to very assertively challenge them, about their total inability to grasp physical and ecological reality.
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We need to expose how, despite all their power, their money and influence, that they fail to grasp, the reality, which keeps people alive, and that is physical and ecological reality, and not the economy, which can only exist, because of that reality.
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* (from 13/) It is this great certainty, the sense of absolute rightness, that facilitated the global colonization, and extractivism of Western culture, recognized by people of the Global South, but not in the Global North i.e. the West themselves.
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