The Will Not to Believe…
We humans are great at not believing what we don´t want to believe. There are none so blind as those that will not see, nor none so deaf as those that will not hear. During World War II, there was much evidence that Hitler was systematically exterminating the Jews of Europe. This evidence reached the eyes and ears of the leadership of the both England and the United States years before our soldiers actually entered the concentration camps, and brought the truth before the world press. It was not believed. The will not to believe runs strong in humanity. Even today, fifty years after Hitler killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, there are many living humans that still deny this crime ever took place. The truth is especially hard to believe if it requires that we take action – if it requires that we change. If humanity is to have a future, we must take action – we must change. If humanity is to have a future, we must believe the truth.
William R. Catton wrote:
Humans, said Edmund Burke, … are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Abundant evidence suggests industrial civilization must be “downsized” to curb damage to the ecosphere by the “technosphere.” Trends behind this prospect include prodigious population growth, urbanization, cultural dependence upon ravenous use of fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources. consequent air pollution, and global climate change. Despite prolonged Cold War distraction and entrenched faith that technology could always enlarge carrying capacity, these trends were well publicized. But there remain eminent writers who persist in denying that human carrying capacity (Earth’s maximum sustainable human load) has now been or ever will be exceeded. Denials of ecological limits resemble anosognosia (inability of stroke patients to recognize their paralysis). Some denial literature resembles their confabulations (elaborately unreal stories concocted as rationalizations). Denial by opponents of human ecology seems to be a way of coping with an insufferable contradiction between past convictions and present circumstances, a defense against intolerable anomalous information.
