At The Edge

Climate Psychology, Chaos and Betrayal

Introduction

The process of writing this article was continually disrupted by Nellie, a twelve-week old puppy, who does not recognise the boundaries between games and work, playful and serious, chaos and order. It was both a disruption and an education offering possibilities of flow, improvisation and windows of tolerance.

My original writing intention has parallels. Having been enraptured by the creative possibilities for radical thought within systems and chaos theory, I studied family systems for three years in the early 1980’s. Then, as a psychotherapist, working systemically with couples and groups using the Milan approach of neutrality and circularity, I came to miss the intensity and drama of feelings. The Milan process was wonderfully containing. The circularity brought a hypnotic holding and its neutrality avoided polarising conflicts – both good for disturbed family systems. And, it seemed like a balanced homeostasis was an implicit goal, where the disruption of intense feelings was regarded as necessarily destructive.

Like in schools where containment is the central pillar that disallows disruptions this does not recognise the learning potential of many disturbances. By making the intense feeling of betrayal an important ingredient in this article, I aim to remedy and perhaps disrupt the abstraction of systemic thinking.

As the recent climate psychology book’s subtitle, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’(Phoenix 2022) makes clear, the climate crisis is not an abstraction, a technical problem waiting for a higher cognitive solution or even for managing uncertainty. It is an emotional threshold that involves dismay, bewilderment, disgust, fury and despair at governments’ collusion with the oil industry along with anxiety, grief, anguish, anger, remorse and shame at our own complicity with the widespread destruction of the earth’s ecosystems.

Following the stability of the Holocene and the rise of industrial consumer societies come the terrifying elemental ruptures to the planetary biosphere and near catastrophic instability in human culture. Whether or not the term ‘Anthropocene’ is a valid name for our present crisis, normal service can not be presumed. The shift to unpredictable, nonlinear interlocking complexity is more than a self-centred culture can manage. The scary, disorienting failures of transport, food security, economy alongside extreme weather of fire, flood and storms could be recognised as harbingers of the end of human dominance.

Paralleling with individual and group identity crises, the human privilege to exploit earth’s resources is leading to potential ecocide. It is an existential rite of passage where our human predicament is intensely entangled with that of our planet.

This article aims to explore what happens at the threshold moment if apparent catastrophe is lived rather than avoided. This risky engagement is a vital aspect of rites of passage. Learning to enter edges of chaos and turning to face the fear, can allow the release of extraordinary energies and deeply significant learning. I shall be exploring edges of chaos from a variety of perspectives at the margins of systemic thought, that are tipping points within human culture.

Chaos

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Frederik Nietzsche^[1]

Social comments such as “the Metropolitan Police^[2] are systemically racist” exemplify common use of the idea of ‘systems’. The social understanding of ‘Chaos’ is still unfolding. There are many uses of the term chaos - going from the mess of a child’s bedroom or Laura Kuenssberg’s recent BBC tv series ‘State of Chaos’, to the apparent disorder of a writer’s desk or a painter’s studio, which if “tidied” would destroy a subtle order. Weather patterns are an exemplar. They seem chaotic despite increasingly sophisticated models of prediction. Small fluctuations in weather systems can lead through positive feedback loops to huge differences as with the ‘butterfly effect’ - the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny but critical changes in the weather so through the domino effect of positive feedback loops precipitate a storm.

The edge of chaos marks a transition space in many dynamical systems that cross the boundary between order and disorder. It is a curious place, such as in Alice in Wonderland, that occupies the liminal space between a well ordered dynamic and a chaotic one. Lewis Carroll’s dream-like saga that drew on his mathematical and logician’s background, explores what happens when we fall down that magical rabbit hole. This rabbit hole has come to symbolise logic-defying journeys either distracting dead-ends or into strange wonder-lands.

Nobel prize winning chemist, Prigogine explored how living systems defied the deterministic rules of thermodynamics. He suggested a narrow path between predictable, linear, ordered systems and random ones that were entirely chaotic. Between these two is a third possibility, ‘dissipative systems’ that draw energy and information from the environment to create their own order. In equilibrium, dissipation leads to loss of order whereas open systems use dissipative structures to create new levels of order. Our planet is one such dissipative system that operates far from equilibrium. This is what alerted James Lovelock^[3] to exploring the earth as self-regulating entity - a characteristic of living systems.

In the earlier quotation from Nietzsche, he was warning that future generations will not know anything of this inner chaos out of which such unexpected wonders as a dancing star can emerge. He foretold the suppressive dangers of too much order.

In a workshop exploring personal and professional edges, I invited participants to locate themselves imaginally at what they felt was this edge signified for them by placing a rope on the floor. The issue was not whether they would actually step over or not but an evocative experience of being at the edge.

What was this

The scariness of touching this edge, of allowing the disorientation, the not-knowing, bewilderment and startling potency are pertinent to our collective planetary poly-crisis.

Although Prigogine’s brilliant insight opened a door to radical perspectives in science and new ways of seeing, thinking and being in the world, the abstract language misses something. A colleague wrote to me:

From wild order to human order: in making one small impermasculpture I have learned an enormous lesson of my own purpose.

On the sodden ground a bunch of seemingly chaotically tumbled feathers lay in disarray. I picked them up one by one and placed them in a wheel, quills facing inward and the wet strung-out feathers facing outward. On them in the centre I placed a bright lichen and a softly rotten acorn; too old to germinate, it too lost its chance of life and is slowly returning to the land.

By making order from seeming disorder, I could have missed the truth of the story: what is wild is not chaos. What is wild is the REAL truth that my impermasculpture is pretending at. By touching the artistic I opened to the message of the feathers and the true meaning of my life. Who is trying to tame this wildness in me?

Such a significant question: Who is trying to tame this wildness in me?

The simple answer is that we are; those of us who live in domesticated, safe, fenced, walled houses. And this is because it is the custom in our culture. As Rilke^[4] says:

Even the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in our interpreted world

In adapting to a domesticated world, have we betrayed a wilder more attuned way of being in the world? To speak out exposing the lies inherent in our privileged Global North, for instance of infinite growth on a finite planet, is to begin the redeem that betrayal.

In social and interpersonal narratives, betrayal is often evoked by the one feeling at the effect of a betrayal – an abandoned victim. There are many contexts for betrayal including romantic love, war, group belonging and loyalty. Key to all these is that a trust is broken whether that be an amorous entanglement, a national allegiance, or an implicit bond. All of these were evoked by Greta Thunberg in her address to the UN Climate Action summit in New York (2019):

“You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this”.

Similarly, psychotherapist and researcher Caroline Hickman states that climate anxiety is not just distress about environmental problems. It is also coupled with despair, disillusionment and betrayal by people in power failing to act. She elaborates^[5],

“It’s older generations failing to do the right thing by younger generations, and that is felt as a form of betrayal and abandonment. Some of the young people that I’m working with are suicidal because of this betrayal. Not because of environmental problems, but because they feel so devastated by being horrendously abandoned by people in power who are supposed to take care of us.”

Hickman explains that this betrayal can cause moral injury. It erodes trust in social structures which are supposed to give shelter and care. This parallels what Sally Weintrobe has entitled the ‘Culture of Uncare’^[6]that is characterised by “the narcissistic, perverse, consumerist, extractive, entitled, arrogant, psychopathic, instrumental and manically triumphant culture”. This is a more systemic perspective in which it is not individuals or groups who are to blame but a cultural complex to which we have all been exposed and to which we all contribute.

This deeper sense of betrayal, beyond personal abandonment and rejection, takes us to the human-planet relationship. We (at least those in the Global North) have broken a primal trust with the earth mother whose generous life-giving powers have supported and sustained human life. Far from gratitude, those embedded within the industrial complex have plundered her riches as if in an envious attack that would rather destroy than respect.

The recent attack on the long-admired Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall is a sad example of this envious attack. It is reminiscent of the tale of Erysichthon, a vain and boastful man who paid little attention to what other people said even less to the gods. He insists on cutting down an oak that is sacred to Demeter, even when it bleeds red blood. A terrible hunger is visited on him. Demeter’s curse was that no matter how much he ate, it will never be enough. He ended up consuming his own body.

Feeding on our own body is another metaphor for our consuming society. Erysichthon is in the grip of this all-pervading consumer complex. He sacrifices all that was precious to him, such as his daughter. Through underestimating the power of the cultural complexes that grip us, we may be in danger of consuming the very foundation through which we live.

I claimed in the introduction that the tragic ruptures to our planetary ecosystems are catastrophic openings to renewed life in our interpreted world. Climate chaos offers an uneasy paradox characteristic of transitional space and liminal states. Liminal states bring high degrees of anxiety because these are essentially unknowable and uncontrollable. And it is this very vulnerability that makes them potentially creative and transformative, which is why they have been used in rites of passage and initiation rituals.

According to Winnicott^[7] transitional space is a paradox. It is a hypothetical area that is both real and illusory. “The potential space between baby and mother, between child and family, between individual and society or the world, depends on experience which leads to trust. It can be looked upon as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.”

The space between has potent aliveness which we can’t know or predict ahead of time. It is a pregnant void that might be experienced as a vulnerable one. The caterpillar dissolving into a cellular soup in order to transform into a butterfly, is only possible because of the containment afforded by the cocoon. This cocoon is a proto-womb that allows transitional states with high potential levels of disorder and the potential for creative transformation. It is the means through which small deviations can be amplified and new potentials nurtured.

Our planet is such a cocoon that has fostered life through its many forms including human.

The planetary shift we are transiting is precarious. Edges of chaos are vulnerable spaces as well as being potent points of change. The emotional vulnerability is evoked with the uncertainty of the process and lack of safe containment. Climate change vulnerability describes the susceptibility and exposure of ecosystems to climate change. This different use of the concept of ‘vulnerability’ is more a function of the biophysical and social, for instance the capacity of households to cope with drought, than the psychological.

When a containing cocoon is infected by poisonous feelings or fractured, its containing powers are diminished and potential breakthroughs can become destructive ruptures. These edges of chaos can create a cascade of multiple ruptures, for instance the conjunction of rising tides and tsunamis, which triggers radical shifts into unsustainable worlds such as with the horror of the Fukushima nuclear accident. Cascades can also be triggered in human systems such as economic collapses.

What seems pertinent to our present climate crisis is that the human-planet relationship is at a critical phase of ruptures. Chaos theory suggests that at bifurcation points when the system could go two ways; a potentially creative far-from-equilibrium way or a return to the normative.

Just as what is commonly termed the ‘fall’ in the Garden of Eden story is also an account of a ‘rise’ in consciousness through eating the apple, our human betrayal may mark a collective rite of passage. What are the apparent God-given rules embedded in our culture that we must obey? I suggest that these are more emotional complexes than cognitive rules, more bonds of loyalty to unconscious cultural complexes that feel taboo to break. These bonds may be based in rigid traditions and/or collective traumas that do not allow change.

Just as the only way out of that Garden of Eden was through betrayal, the only way through our present planetary crisis may be to break bonds of social belonging. This can feel like treachery to one’s tribe. As James Hillman^[8] writes,

What one longs for is not only to be contained in perfection by another who can never let one down. It goes beyond trust and betrayal by the other in a relationship. What one longs for is a situation where one is protected from one’s OWN treachery and ambivalence, one’s own Eve.

Rather than heroically trying to change the planetary forces unleashed in the Anthropocene, humans, especially those in the Global North would be better attending to their own Eve who might assist them awakening out of delusional blindness.

End Reflections

I am suggesting that human betrayal is the emotional counterpart of an edge of chaos.

Both are inherently unstable and challenging states to tolerate. The complete loss of agency, knowing and control along with feelings of helplessness and abandonment are similar in each. Betrayal brings out an existential aloneness as ties and social duties are forsaken in response to recognising the potential for self-betrayal – of being untrue to the soul. Those who have risked the fury of colleagues when exposing hidden lies, know that cost can be high.

A parallel passage through an edge of chaos requires the courage to forsake the knowing mind and trust the necessity of a creative process without signposts. As historian of science, Thomas Kuhn showed breaking through scientific paradigms can bring censure and isolation to creative scientists. Both types of passage are relevant to the climate crisis. Learning how to bear what feels intolerable is a characteristic of psychological opening to the terrifying reality of our climate crisis.

The emotional work to stay with and be present to the pain and seemingly endless grief is too much for most of us as individuals. We need the support and companionship of a community. But how to be true to oneself and be in relationship? This is where so many idealistic communities wither in disillusionment. It is also where whistle-blowers speak out against their colleagues’ misuse or abuse of power. Whether in the police or healthcare system, they risk reactive attack in rupturing social bonds to align with an inner truth or purpose. Alternatively what is the emotional cost of remaining silent and betraying themselves?

The deafening silence in the denial of the climate crisis has morphed into a subtler diffusion and disavowal of responsibility. Climate is in the headlines but has much changed? Civil disobedience as practised by Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil is one way of betraying a social contract of legal citizenship that prevents exposing the real state of the climate crisis. How a whole culture awakens to its betrayal of the other-than-human on our planet is part of the edge we may be tip-toing around.

The Global North has long lost a trust in earth’s ecosystem to support us. We are supposedly independent having created a separate technical network without pangs of conscience. The industrial revolution was a second betrayal led by an ‘Eve’ who promised unlimited growth. Relinquishing the tempting distractions of consumer life may offer a return to a deeper trust in an ecosystemic biosphere but only in passing through this portal of climate and cultural chaos. To do this requires the emotional resilience to tolerate extreme discomfort and anxiety. Not an easy passage then.

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^[1] Nietzche, F (1883, 1997) Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Wordsworth Editions

^[2] Even if the police misleadingly respond that all police are not racist

^[3] Lovelock, J (2007) The Revenge of Gaia. London: Penguin

^[4] First Duino Elegy, cited in Totton, 2011, p. 51)

^[5] https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20211022-grief-and-hopelessness-young-people-suffering-from-climate-eco-anxiety-demand-action

^[6] The new imagination in the culture of uncare (2015)

^[7] Winnicott, DW (1967) The Location of Cultural Experience. IJP 48: 368-372

^[8] Hillman, James. (1975). Loose Ends: Primary papers in Archetypal Psychology. Washington, D.C.: Spring Publications