how to be boiled alive and deny it's happening
i genuinely don't understand climate change deniers.
maaaaaybe i could understand folks who are like "it's happening but we're not the ones doing it". but even then.
it's a puzzle right? what sort of evidence will you accept? you won't believe the testimony of science or measurements because you don't trust the messenger. but will you believe your own eyes?
apparently not.
yikes.
one of the reasons i'm so critical of totalising modernist/enlightenment accounts of human rationality is exactly this. our minds operate (as far as i can tell) in the territories of emotion and narrative. this is a substrate characteristic and it is automatic and structural and cannot effectively be changed. overriding it is possible with training... yet even in realms populated by scholars who should be trained and committed to falsification it's often the case that some or all of the old guard need to literally die before a shift happens.
i suspect the story we've told ourselves about rationality while optimistic (i like this feature of the enlightenment story!) and comforting (this one i don't like so much) is not even close to being true.
identity is much more salient because you'll protect your identity like you protect your life. the stories you tell yourself about yourself are important.
i'm always shocked by how much stuff folks just import wholesale into their identity strata. like... you really want to orient your life around flat earth? or kpop band? or atheismo? really?
(this blog post is just fiddling while the world burns: i hope you enjoyed it!)