Permacrisis: Another example of fear-creating rhetoric?

The word 'permacrisis' has now found its way into general use in Britain and was chosen by Collins Dictionary as its 2022 'Word of the year'. Collins' definition of permacrisis is 'an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events'.

This seems to me to be a typical response to events in the world. Just by creating a word that implies permanent crisis, the creators and perpetuators are using negative thinking and catastrophising the future. The assumption is that there is nothing good in the world.

This plays right into the hands of politicians of any party, as the best way to distract the population is to highlight immediate crises, and evoke the 'Dunkirk spirit' with 'all hands to the pumps'.

We must sacrifice ourselves today to solve tomorrow's problems. It is a neat psychological trick (or rhetoric) used by many politicians to prevent their voters from thinking too much about what is desired and thinking much more about what it is that they don't want.

For example, Adam Garfinkle (2012) suggests that 'Modern society has come to see rhetoric as "a mildly dirty word" because of its association with deception' (p.10-11). A good example of this is rhetoric that relates to the NHS, where politicians constantly talk about supporting the NHS, while it is clear to many that it is being starved of the resources necessary to maintain it.

However, political rhetoric relies heavily on criticism of NHS management, clinical staff and even the public to disguise and deflect the public from what they want – an effective health service.

One doesn't need to read very far to discover the disputes about the nature of the world today, whether it is climate change, the economy, growth, austerity or any of the other words that politicians of various hues use to frighten the population. Permacrisis is just another example of fear-creating rhetoric.

It is rare to see anybody noticing or publicising the significant successes that good science, successful communities and cooperation has brought to the planet. The debate largely depends on whether your glass is of a half full or half empty kind of thinking. It is all about perspective.

Psychologists have focused most of their attention over the last 50 years upon the negative and trying to get rid of it - whether in therapy with the individual or identifying aspects of mental illness through their researches and experiments.

There is a different side to this coin, which is about seeking out success, identifying hopes and building upon what is already working. However, psychological research, particularly in individual therapy, has been hijacked by short-term, problem-solving approaches.

Famously Steven Pinker puts an entirely different viewpoint in The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker wrote that our cognitive biases (and evolution) predispose us to believe we live in violent times —and current press reporting doesn't help. As he puts it, 'If it bleeds, it leads'. Our noticing is all about negativity.

If psychology as a whole wants to make real change in populations and politics, then focusing upon problems and the individual, like neoliberal politics and economies, is inevitably going to fail.

If psychologists really want to make a change, it is time they began to think about what success would look like. What is sustainable in the longer term? The thing that is really going to change the negativity on the planet is not trying to get rid of the problem but trying to determine what success would look like on the micro, meso and macro levels.

There is a thread on LinkedIn that epitomises this problem-focused approach. The discussion is not about how to make progress but a dispute over the way the statistics are collected.

Furthermore, politicians have to change their psychology, no matter how difficult it might be from short-term re-election promises that are invariably abandoned to longer term, sustainable and future focused policies that save people, not money.

Ulrich Beck once said, 'The world has become so complex that the idea of power in which everything is controlled in a centralised way is now erroneous.' The other aspect of psychologists' work is to recognise that centralisation, the grasping of power by individuals is an idea that is long past.

Decentralisation, communities managing themselves, cooperation to create effective infrastructure for the future is essential. As Haslam et al (2011) point out, 'Even more, leadership is not about brute force, raw power, or "incentivization." Indeed, we suggest that such things are indicators and consequences of the failure of leadership.'

The characteristics of good leaders are related to identifying with their followers and influencing others to create motivation towards goals set by groups not by individuals.

Psychology can no longer be predominantly focused upon the individual if it is to have any influence, psychologists and particularly political psychologists are going to have to learn how to win the hearts and minds of communities and develop whole new models that are flexible, able to change with circumstance and constantly identify successful outcomes rather than suppressing the unwanted.

References:

Haslam, S. Alexander; Reicher, Stephen D.; Platow, Michael J. (2011) The New Psychology of Leadership:  Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

This blog represents the views of the individual author, not the views of the Political Psychology Section, or the BPS.