Aren’t We All Climate Change Hypocrites? (Spiral Dynamics Explains Why)

It’s time to face the music. Many of us say we care about the environment we live in these days. We are, after all, more self-aware than before when we knew nothing about how we might be destroying our world.

However, we don’t always follow through with appropriate action to match our concerns.

For many years, even knowing about the effects of our actions (personally and through industry) we still continued to talk the talk rather than necessarily walk the walk.

We often think of others to blame. It’s us or them, but really we are all contributing towards climate change. It’s us AND them in truth.

Why We All Need To Take Responsibility For Our Actions (Or Lack Of)

Many still expect to live in nice mod-con apartments, consume like there’s no tomorrow, often unaware or unashamed in how they use products like make-up for their face, peroxide on their hair, or tech gadgets in their hands that not only harm the environment but give big tech companies their profit margins (and an excuse to produce more to sell in this constant cycle).

While we have recycling boxes at the ready, and are more conscious with how often we leave lights on, even having energy saving apps that automate things, we often don’t know enough about what goes into what we are consuming.

We tend not to think about the masses of landfills out there with wasted plastics from computer hardware (that don’t break down), or how make-up is often produced via slave labour sources in dirty environments. We just see things in shops or online, fall for the advertising and marketing ploys, and buy them.

Why? Companies have spent millions to understand human behavior and to subtly manipulate us into buying into their products or services. They play on human weaknesses – our need for dopamine rushes and validation (shopping therapy and peer pressure).

While all this goes on, you have the rich elite talking about how they will pledge their billions to the environment (only after they have made their billions exploiting the very same environment from money we handed over to them).

Then there’s governments who red tape any progress and make it seemingly almost impossible for the little guy to do anything other than join in protests and movements that at first spread awareness, but not long after just lead into frustrations boiling over as it’s evident that just shouting about something isn’t enough to truly change something on a much larger scale.

You then have the celebrities joining this ‘green thinking’ movement bandwagon who don’t even see their own hypocrisy in being so selfish-minded for their own egotistical gains most of their life, flying across the world to promote this or that product range, and being part of the rise of the very toxic mindset that is leading people to think they have to be popular or an influencer to be ‘something’ in this world or to make their ‘opinion’ seem like fact.

Some are simply jumping on the green thinking bandwagon as a popular trend to give rise to their constant need for fame or fortune, and for as long as we have manipulation overpowering ethical desires then the problems will remain.

Is Climate Change Really The Issue? It’s Deeper Than That.

So, are we all just f*cked? There’s a lot of apparent hypocrisy going on. Many wanting to see things change whilst still hiding behind red tape, capitalism (that treats humans as commodities), influencer statuses, or expectations of a comfortable existence.

It points to the problem being larger than climate change itself. It’s our divided globalized mentality that is at a hypocritical crossroads. There’s far too many cooks wanting different things whilst posing as wanting the same.

The bigger problem has been blindly staring us in the mirror for a long time, it’s this modern rush to seek to be popular, the popularity era we live in today. You see, companies will sell what we are prepared to buy.

If we are so hellbent on wanting ‘more’, more stuff, more status, more followers, more comfort, then we are simply inviting companies to exploit that. We are also inviting this social media-led rise of ‘influencers’.

If we think we are only important or valuable in this world if we are popular rather than competent then we simply invite this kind of desperate and fake behaviour of doing anything to reach the top.

You already see it with fake news and clickbait articles all over the place today. A title just to draw people in, to then just lie to them. You have the illusory truth effect where if something is repeated enough times then people will eventually take it as fact as our brain stops fighting or questioning it.

While it is hard to impossible to change what the ‘elite few at the top do’ what we can do is show them a better way to appeal to us, the consumer. That power is in our hands.

This isn’t done by protests either. They generally don’t lead to the type of action that goes anywhere. All we can do is educate ourselves on the difference we want to make in our world and to be more mindful about what we consume and what we want to consume.

There’s many people who are starting to do that already which is great, but there’s also still many who get drawn into the paradigm of seeking to be popular and therefore consuming into things, falling to peer pressure and so on.

That buck can stop with this celebrity culture though. If they are so adamant that their platforms mean something then they can do the right thing and ‘influence’ in the right ethical way. However, the world would be entirely better off if we were ‘idolising’ competence in this world rather than entertainment.

That’s not to say entertainment doesn’t have a place, but it certainly isn’t qualified to lead the way in such important issues as the wellbeing of our planet. The fact is, our planet will be absolutely fine when we are gone, it is us that are the problem. A brief, but vast, change in air quality when the world was in lockdown around March 2020 showed this.

The air quality around the world was breathable, very breathable. Only once lockdowns stopped did the air quality quickly turn sour again, especially in places around China and India.

The larger problem is in the education of people and businesses, seeing how they can still make profits but not impact the environment so badly, and in how it is us (humans) whose mentality is causing the problem, and it is only us who can change that.

A best place to start is with this popularity era world we live in. Instead of people growing up wanting to be famous or have this and that, we need younger people growing up wanting to solve problems.

When we have enough people seeking that as the road to success in life, then our human development increases, we have more brains working out the solutions we need, more people being aware of what is fake news and what isn’t.

If competency-led people are the ‘influencers’ in our society rather than people just taking selfies of themselves then our world will be better for it in the future.

Hold On, We Aren’t There Yet. Change Takes Time.

If only it was that simple hey, but the fact remains that we currently have a large wall of influence in the way.

For every person who tries to make a positive change there will be someone who is trying to find a way to exploit it or spread it as fake news. There will be people pretending they care when they don’t. And there will be people who do care but who still can’t resist the newest gadget or commodity. There will be people buying into coins to get rich quick, and not caring about investing in companies who are trying to add value, instead just trying to profit for their own easy life and ego boost.

There’s hypocrisy all over the shop now, and there will be afterward.

It’s hard to know who is really in and who is just pretending they care simply to massage their own ego. Having influencer status as such a desired trait in our modern world tells you the answer, unfortunately. The mindset isn’t going to go away soon, we are heavily in this toxic popularity era.

The fact is, for all the celebs thinking their platforms count as a voice today, and for all the elites suddenly jumping in on the ethical concerns they claim they cared about all along, the proof will be in the pudding, in how they actively change their own behaviors.

Can you imagine some of the rich and famous dropping their glorified position to actually get on the frontline and help out the world that has been so good to them?

People bark on about how the governments hold the power in decisions, and while they do certainly play a big role, it’s often the elites and the famous who are in the positions of real power and influence today.

When they become unified in a cause for our planet, over their own ego, then we have a chance for change to take place. If they are simply using it as a source for more exposure because it is a trending subject that helps them sell or gain followers then we don’t.

Yet, ego is hard to eradicate. It’s stubborn and it controls people’s decisions in life. Yet, to lose our own ego is exactly what needs to happen for our planet to reap future benefits, rather than further future damage.

Without ego leading the way then people see something bigger than themselves and only then can truly collective individualist change (real change) happen.

To get there takes time though, and requires patience, plus and an understanding of human behavioral values (enter spiral dynamics). But before that, we should consider why it was necessary to be hypocritical towards eventual progress.

Wait A Minute. Maybe We Had To Be Hypocritical?

Imagine a world that isn’t beating itself up, where we are living as sustainably as we were in the past?

Would we learn the lessons we are learning now? Of course not.

We would likely still be heading in the same direction, or a similar one. Humans seek to survive and then thrive. It was only a matter of time until we innovated the technology we did. It comes in the face of competition, yu guessed it, to survive.

We were pretty primal creatures compared to today, yet we have always had a hard-wired need to survive established within us. We are generally creatures of habit. From our hunter-gatherer times to present-day living, we seek to conserve energy where we can until our survival might be at risk. If we act like a dinosaur then we only get left behind, so we do adapt when we absolutely have to.

We therefore seek to create and innovate and as technology advanced, so did opportunities to develop more, to then consume more, feel more comfortable, to sell more and convince people they need something to feel comfortable (and therefore increase their feeling of safety and survival).

Only, we didn’t envision what having all these things would do to our environment. We are naturally creative problem-solvers but we are also creatures of habit who are somewhat blind to our actions until they come apparent (as it’s more comfortable to not think of consequences, plus we didn’t develop self-awareness until more recently).

So we, in a sense, had to be hypocritical to see what we were doing wrong. We had to create, consume, create and consume until we saw the effects of what we were doing.

Even if some forward-thinkers were telling us what dangers lied ahead, the majority of people wouldn’t have the foresight to see it and would prefer to make their life as comfortable as possible (even if it inevitably led towards bigger issues to deal with after).

There’s also something more fundamental happening in our (often subconscious) human behavior value systems.

Enter Spiral Dynamics. Hypocrisy Is Actually A Step In The Right Direction.

It may sound contradictory in itself, but with hypocrisy comes an apparent change in thinking. If people were still thinking the same then that would largely be more worrying.

For those of you who understand spiral dynamics already then there are often ‘gamma traps’ and ‘delta surges’ that lead the path to an advanced human behavioral paradigm.

For those who don’t then read this article on ‘how spiral dynamics will help you to understand yourself‘, learn about our human value systems, or read these books on spiral dynamics.

It seems like much of the world (especially in the west) is changing from a predominantly ‘orange’ mindset to a ‘green’ one. In simple terms, this means that people are changing, albeit with friction and fear in that change.

This can lead to hypocrisy along the way, as in spiral dynamics the shift is often from an individual mindset to a collective, and back to individual and so on. With ‘orange’ thinking many were ingrained to think of ‘the good life’. The narcissitic ‘me-first’ attitude and the drive and motivation to find money or status as the crown achievement of this ‘good-life’. This came before people had more self-awareness to see that obtaining those things don’t bring this false mountain-top belief that they would be set for life and happy. Once obtained people realize something is missing, and as the world became more aware of the effects their very actions were having on the planet then they suddenly have a new purpose (often over dramatised to provide value and validation to us humans). This collective green purpose comes in the form of consensus towards seeing to ‘put-the-world-to-right’, largely fueled by social media’s ability to spread messages and knowledge quickly, and we’ve seen over the past decade numerous protests and movements together identity group changes in all sorts of subjects from civil rights to veganism.

The world has grown a conscience, but it grew from a place where conscience wasn’t part of the game. We cared more about our own personal gain (at all costs) to find that ‘good life’, but now we are in a growing worldwide shift towards this ‘good world’ ideology.

The problem is though that even ‘green thinking’ is still ego-focused. This is why we see a lot of people jumping on bandwagons wanting to be seen (even subsciously) as doing the right thing or supporting the right cause, yet at the same time still being embedded in the ‘good life’ mantra of wanting their cake and eating it still.

For example, it took feminism a long hard road to get to the freedoms and liberties it has today. To some women, they are still fighting that fight. Women are not exactly going to say, ‘I don’t need my comfort or my newfound good life’ once they’ve finally got it.

They end up fighting harder for it. That becomes the unavoidable hypocrisy in this paradigm shift towards a more evolved humanity. We have to let go of the one thing that we may have spent such a long time fighting for, our own ego, and to embrace the need of humanity.

This is why this ‘green thinking’ zone is a bit of a safe space at the moment (and as far up the spiral as a collective society can go right now), as it allows people to stand up for their own personal identity (yet it does so in the safety of groups).

To truly advance beyond would be to find individual collectivism, where we don’t band into identity groups to gain consensus for our ego, but to leave our ego behind completely and think about what the world really needs to advance.

Again, you wouldn’t find too many people giving up their comforts that they have fought long for, yet these comforts can actually be the block that is preventing us from doing the things we actually need to help humanity move forward.

So, yes there is indeed a large dose of hypocrisy as we talk about humanitarianism issues and global concerns like climate change, but let’s just hope that people are truly pushing through their paradigms towards a positive forward-minded change, rather than getting embroiled in an internal fight between wanting their cake (good life) and eating it (good world).

The most probable reality is many are trying to adjust their view of the world but they are feeling hypocritical when doing so, and they are so ingrained to fall back to their comfort zone (a paradigm they are more settled in).

It’s like a fish moving to a bigger pond. When a fish is already ‘top fish’ in one pond they are comfortable and safe there, but when they move to a new pond they are ‘nothing fish’ again, and a target for bigger sharks. It makes people feel uncomfortable to accept a change as we are hard wired to survive, so automatically revert back towards what we know, but if the desire is there then in time we can move to a new pond and find our place there.

The alternative is to not swim at all and simply drown, so the fact that people are fighting and trying to move to a new paradigm is actually a good thing in the long run, especially as the stage after in spiral dynamics is the ‘higher-self’ stage of ‘yellow thinking’ – the ego-free, flexible problem-solving thought level that Richly Wills is determined to help people get to.