At times I stray away from my trusted circle of friends while online and I end up dealing with the public. What a shock. It is these times when it is confirmed that social media can indeed produce an echo chamber with people that agree with your views. Stepping away from those usual contacts shows me that a lot of people have vastly different, and I would say ‘irrational’, views on the world and how it is run. Climate change (CC) has been the bastion of irrationality for decades now. I still regularly come across people who consider CC a conspiracy of some sort, or a mistake or exaggeration made by the researchers involved. There are just too many independent researchers who have reached the same conclusion over decades to give those retorts any merit.

So my mind naturally wonders to how and why these people hold onto these views. I believe I saw the same effect with the Trump support I saw while living in Knoxville, Tennessee. At the time (and to this day) it was a strongly red state. Conversations about politics, while rare, were typically strongly in favour of Trump. Alternative views stood out in this area. If you were a democrat who didn’t want an argument, it was better to avoid the topic altogether. If  you were someone who felt it was important to get along with your neighbours and colleagues, you had better like Trump. It is this type of effect that explains a lot of irrationality. For a lot of people, the need to be right, the need to know the truth, is secondary to getting along in their community.

It is with this in mind that I find an explanation for those irrational views in a lot of topics. People who are unable to dive into a complicated subject and are surrounded by people who have formed their opinions based on flawed information, are often likely to take those views on themselves. With social media allowing people to form communities of like minded people and with biased media sources feeding in their own inflammatory narrative, polarization is happening more and more. This also explains the stronghold of conspiratorial theories being in rural areas where community ties are all the more important. 

This effect has become very problematic for climate change because the world needs everyone to get on board. We need everyone to be on the same page and as long as those people follow the views of their inner circle, they are going to represent a resistance to action. Case in point, as an external viewer, it makes sense that workers in the primary industries are not ready to change their way of life. Many of them grew up in families who did the same occupation which has always been valued. They work hard and struggle to produce the goods for their community and wider society. Now society turns around and says what they are doing in all part of the problem and they need to just stop. It is truly unrealistic. We, as a society, need to communicate we appreciate what they have contributed and then as a society, we need to compensate these industries in a way that allows them to transition to alternative occupations.

Hindsight is 20/20 and this is the case here. We really should of done things differently in the decades past. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a society where the approach I describe can be expected. Individuals are expected to move within societies laws and regulations. Little regard is given to individual industries unless the needs become dire. So in short, we need societal change. Let’s not hold our breath.