I heard philosopher A C Grayling quoted this weekend as saying that our current breakdown in trust in politics and capitalism 1.0 is “as if there is no longer any interchange between Bank and Monument.”
What he means by this London Underground analogy is that the link between society/the citizen and that of ‘the system’, or corporate-consumer-capitalism, has broken down. Of course this is just what we are saying in Citizen Renaissance (see for instance this on Trust) but its fascinating how many people are saying the same thing in slightly different ways.
Another interesting piece by Grayling in the New Scientist in February discussed the need to learn from commercial marketing and to find a new language for framing and communicating climate change. Grayling discusses MIT risk-perception specialist John Sterman and his idea of communicating not about ‘climate change’ but ‘the bathtub effect’. Like the Greenhouse Effect, it has a ring to it. And the way it uses the analogy of a bath with the taps running twice as fast as the bath can drain to describe the way we are overpowering the planets atmospheric balance is I think clever.
We badly need a new way to get through to people just how serious climate change is. As George Lakoff and Drew Westen illustrate so well, facts bounce off bullet-proof ‘frames’ no matter how many you fire off. Most people put ‘green’ and ‘environmentalist’ into a part of their brain which says ‘thats not me’ and so those who communicate about such issues will continue to be perceived as a fringe, special-interest obsessed out-group.
So I am going to think about using and promoting the ‘bathtub effect’ as well as other frames such as security, stability, safety, quality-of-life etc in the hope that we can engage and empower the citizens. Only then will politicians have the guts to do their job and reframe markets and norms to ensure we transition rapidly to a sustainable way of living.
