The whole world is in your hands…

Your mind, your world...

We are currently enduring a global financial crisis. A crisis, it must be said, borne largely on the wings of corruption, mismanagement, incompetence and greed. The psychological dimensions of such malevolent activity are strikingly obvious. I am perhaps not the only person who gets the feeling that once the dust has settled from all this financial turmoil (in, say, a year or two) that it will be “business as usual” and the same old greedy pricks will be running the show and sucking the life out of economies to fund their private jets, trophy-wives, super-yachts and mansions in up-state New York and the Bahamas.

It’s of course possible that things will change. The only real way to change such a significant thing is for a profound change in psychology, that is – an intense rewiring of the the social values and aspirations of so many, many people. Greed is no longer good and it needs to be, perhaps, somewhat demonised in the popular mind and through popular culture. People need to realise that accumulating commodity and monetary wealth never has and never will give them that sense of existential security that all of the garish advertising and hypnotic imagery claims to be their birth-right.

Financial catastrophe is of course not the only arena in which fundamental psychological re-organisation and re-attribution of priorities and aspirations is required. Climate change is something which will need more than just a few technological or policy wonders to fix. It is likely that a very fundamental change in many of the ways in which people of many cultures perceive themselves, their relationship with the world and their relationship with others will need to occur. The paradigm of thought we live in, and to which the developing world is so rapidly aspiring, is one which celebrates individualism and the accumulation of wealth and the motley paraphernalia of consumer culture.

That the development of a particular type of psychological and existential self has occurred pari passu capitalism, pop-culture and consumer-ideology is (to me) unquestionable. That this self (an entity not as innate as many may choose at first to believe) requires radical rewiring and psychological reconfiguration for us to be able to make the kinds of changes to our material world which we need to be able to survive climate change and to avert distant-future climate change is apparent. I don’t know if people will be able to do it. There has been little or no discussion of it.