Denying evidence can become routine practice, an advantageous accommodation, and, on an ideological level, a doctrine.
A mental reflex action to avoid those secret desires that we do not owe, can, or want to face.
The paths of denial lead to conspiracy theories (9/11 was planned by the US Government and / or the Jewish lobby), the misinformation of
fake news
or the simple denial of genocides (the Armenian by Turkey , the Holodomor in the case of Russia, or the Holocaust for many).
Denial uses minimization, postponement, or reasoned reasoning. We saw it with the coronavirus, we see it in the face of global warming and we would check it tomorrow if we discover that a comet the size of Everest is heading towards the earth, this argument of the film
Don't Look Above
, by Adam McKay that questions the capacity of democracies to face existential crises as a matter of urgency.
From the abusive omnipotence of
big tech
, to the symbiosis between an infantilized society and the trivialization of the media, McKay parodies the systemic failure of American public life under the responsibility of a character who winks at Donald Trump, even to a future Ivanka Trump. Faced with the gap that separates new technologies from ethical responsibility, the political leadership of the scientific community, the problem is not so much a matter of means, as of the system itself, unable to lock the parties and provide a timely response.
It is advisable not to indulge in the belief that this is an exclusive question of populism and the reactionary right, to do so implies falling into another form of denialism.
The dire management of the climate crisis, allegorized in the film, goes beyond the Trumps on duty - there are the results of Glasgow - and reveals individual and collective failures, private and public, of populists and progressives, liberals and authoritarians : they all fail for similar reasons, not acting in the face of the emergency, postponing, distracting, and giving in to financial and business interests.
This is a denial of good conscience, more insidious and subtle, that of fictitious environmentalism and
greenwashing
: the “great scam” that Lluís Bassets describes in the column
The Great Scam
posted on these pages.
Don't look up
shows the tragic reality in a comic key.
The film uses histrionic humor as a mechanism of empathy to make a bitter truth digestible to a broad and politically transversal audience.
And in view of the results, it has succeeded.
We can breathe easy, we know that in six months no comet will hit the planet.
We also have evidence that far from deactivating the climate trigger, we are intensifying it.
If debunking the deception, point by point, serves to confront the denial, we must remember it.
And again.
@ evabor3
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