The environmental crisis, and the destruction it’s bringing, are part of life now. How do we adapt to that? Where do we find role models for adapting?
We’ve all seen heroes in movies. What qualities do they have that help them succeed at their goals, and that we admire? What can we learn from them that we can use in our own lives?
ACT I
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[112 bpm]
The environmental crisis is part of life now. Carbon dioxide has risen to levels it’s only reached a few times in the history of our planet, and that it’s never reached before in the history of our species.
Whatever is about to start happening to the climate, no one has ever seen it before.
Also, whenever carbon dioxide levels have risen this far before, they took about 100,000 years to return to what they were previously. The oldest fossils of behaviorally modern humans are only 50,000 years old.
So whatever is about to start happening, it might stay that way forever as far as the human race is concerned.
That’s what Courage, Not Hope means.
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Extreme weather events are going to hit us harder and more frequently. Weather disasters are going to kill people every year. We’re always going to be somewhere in the process of recovering from them.
This is going to be a big step backward for us in many ways. Inevitable destructive events happening worldwide on a regular basis might be like World War II that never ends.
The choices we’re going to get in the matter are how we’re going to meet the challenges, and what ways we can find to keep moving forward on the things we care about most in spite of them.
So let’s talk about something that artists have made us all very familiar with for as long as people have been telling stories.
Heroism.
ACT II
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How do you tell the difference between the heroes in a movie and the bystanders? (Not counting the fact that the heroes are the stars of the movie.)
What do the heroes do when they’re on screen that’s different from what the bystanders do?
Heroes make big decisions that move the story forward. That’s why they’re also known as protagonists.
Bystander characters make decisions that move their own stories forward, but the movie isn’t about their stories.
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All movies have protagonists. Most movies have some type of heroes.
They might not be heroes in the conventional sense.
They might be anti-heroes, meaning they have good qualities and bad qualities.
Maybe even to the point that you can’t tell if they’re going to be heroes or not.
They might start out as bystanders.
They might start out as villains but turn out to be heroes.
They might even be villains in a conventional sense, but the plot and themes of the movie make them fit the hero role anyway.
You can stretch the hero role in any direction. The one thing you can’t escape is the defining characteristic of a hero.
Heroes take decisive actions to achieve their goals. At some critical point in the movie at least once, the hero makes a big decision. He or she takes a big risk to try to make the story end in a way they feel to be positive and that the audience generally agrees with.
ACT III
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Now we can look at the story structure of movies for some more clues.
Every interesting fictional story has the same underlying plot line: Someone makes a decision and produces a result.
That one universal plot line stays interesting to us because that’s the essence of what it means to be a human. Or even an animal.
Think back to the multicellular life form that evolved the first brain cell.
Our brains, and those of ants and worms, take in information, process it, and react to it. That means the plot of every movie is a reinterpretation of the story of how intelligence evolved in the first place. The movie and theatre industries, and much of the publishing industry, are built upon our profound collective feeling that people making decisions is important.
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Now think about your favorite movie.
There’s no way for me to use any one movie as an example, because there is no one movie that everyone has seen. But that doesn’t matter. Because every movie uses the same basic outline. So think about your favorite movie.
You got it?
How does the movie begin?
It might start at the beginning of the story. Or the movie might start with a scene from later in the story, and then jump back to the beginning of the story. Either way, somewhere in the beginning of the movie, you see the beginning of the story.
What are the heroes doing in the beginning of the story? And what else is happening in the beginning of the story?
In the beginning of the story you see what normal life is like for the heroes, and for the people around them.
If the movie starts with ordinary people in the present day, it’s easy for the filmmakers to show you what normal life looks like. If it’s a historic, futuristic, or fantasy movie it’s more work.
However it happens, when the exciting things in the movie start happening, the reason you feel they’re exciting is because you can feel how big of a change they are from normal life in the world of the story.
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How do you get to know the heroes in the movie?
Two things have to happen.
At some point you see a scene that shows their distinctive abilities, skills, or other qualities.
You also see scenes that show the heroes living their normal lives.
The scene that highlights their distinctive qualities is probably one of the most interesting parts of their normal lives, but it’s still part of normal life for them.
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How long is your movie?
Now think about what happens in the story about a quarter of the way through the run time.
Something unexpected happens to the heroes. One way or another, that unexpected thing sets events in motion that turn into the main plot line of the movie. The main plot line is the main conflict in the story.
Why do the heroes care about this unexpected event? Either it threatens to make something happen that the heroes don’t want, or it looks to them like a great opportunity to get something they really want. So they have to react to it, either to try to prevent the unwanted outcome, or to try to get their desired outcome. That makes them take the first step away from normal life.
The heroes try to solve a problem, and they probably win some small victories. But somehow the problem turns out to be bigger than they realize. So something else happens, and they have to react to that. The situation keeps changing, and the heroes keep reacting to it.
Now you see the main plot of the movie starting to unfold. The heroes are getting caught up in the events of the story.
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For the second quarter of the movie the heroes keep winning small victories but keep getting pulled into bigger problems. Whatever the conflict in the story is, it keeps getting more important. But it still seems like it won’t be that bad for the heroes if they don’t overcome the problem.
Then, about halfway through the movie, something happens to the heroes that catches them up in the events of the story so much that they can’t escape from the conflict anymore.
That’s when they find out that someone they love is going to die unless they stop it. Or if it’s a comedy, something horrible, but that’s still kind of funny, is going to happen, like they’re going to lose their house and have to move in with their annoying relatives permanently.
Now the only way they can reach a good outcome is to prevail in the events that are affecting them. Now they start dealing with the conflict differently, because it’s affecting them differently.
Now they’re 100% committed to it. So that’s what they do for the third quarter of the movie.
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What happens three quarters of the way through the movie?
Now you’ve come to the climax. The heroes’ situation has become so desperate it looks like they’re about to lose in the worst way possible. Now their only way to win is to take a huge risk.
Now it looks like their only chance to save the person they love is to sacrifice themselves, and they can’t even be sure that will work. Or if it’s a comedy, their last chance to keep the horrible thing from happening is to try something completely outlandish, which seems impossible, even compared to all the outlandish things they’ve done in the movie so far.
For the fourth quarter the heroes make their toughest choices of the movie and take the biggest risks.
If the movie has a happy ending, everything works out for the heroes in the end.
If it has a tragic ending, the heroes win the most important part of what they were struggling for, but at a huge cost.
Or if it’s a horror movie, the surprise ending might be that the heroes lose even worse than you thought they could going into the climax.
One way or another, the ending brings together all, or at least most, of the loose ends you were still wondering about.
ACT IV
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All movies have protagonists. But not all movies have villains.
Family or romantic comedies or dramas in particular, sometimes have no major outside threat. In those movies all the main conflicts come from conflicting goals among the protagonists.
In movies that do have villains, what do the villains do? That gives us some more clues about what heroes do.
Villains have one specific quality. Their goals are beneficial to themselves or to something they care about, but are much more harmful to other people.
Maybe they have those goals because they’re greedy, like they’re willing to kill people for money.
Maybe they have those goals because they’re insane.
Maybe they’re misinformed, or they don’t realize the destructive effects they’re having on other people.
Maybe they believe in some kind of idealism that keeps them from noticing the harm they’re causing other people.
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Some villains don’t turn out to be as villainous as they seemed at first. Because the movie isn’t a clearly defined battle between good and evil, but a story about conflicting human variables.
The villain might be caught in a situation where the choices they’re making are the best choices they can make because all their other choices are even worse.
They might be doing something that’s good from their own point of view because it’s beneficial to the people they care about, even though it’s harmful to the heroes.
The heroes and villains might even grow to respect each other in the end because they understand each other, even though they’re still enemies.
Soldiers fighting on opposite sides of a war are a good example of that. Each is serving their country and believes in what they’re fighting for.
More generally, everyone always believes that the choices they make are the best ones. Very few people consider themselves to be evil.
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You might notice some parallels to the environmental crisis here. Everyone who is contributing to the problem sees some benefit in what they’re doing.
Some people don’t believe in climate change at all.
Some people are making money from it.
Some politicians depend on votes from a voter base that doesn’t believe in it.
Even those of us who are trying to help stop climate change still live in societies whose economic systems are contributing to it.
It’s the biggest story ever about conflicting human variables.
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So what does that tell us about how heroes are different from villains?
Heroes start out the movie living their version of a normal life.
Their normal lives might even be in the middle of a big change, like they’re getting married or moving to a new city to start a new job.
Their normal lives might be very different from the audiences’, like they’re superheroes or international spies.
Whatever normal life means for the heroes, it always means one basic thing. Heroes don’t inflict huge amounts of damage on other people arbitrarily.
Heroes’ and bystanders’ normal lives produce patterns of behavior that keep their societies relatively stable.
Then the villains show up.
The villains recognize the stable patterns of behavior of the heroes and bystanders and outsmart them to try to get something they want. They see predictable patterns in what the heroes and bystanders do, and figure out a way to do something none of them are prepared to stop. Maybe it’s something simple, like the villain figures out a way to commit a crime and escape before the police catch him.
Heroes see what the villains are doing, see that there’s something they can do to stop them, and are willing to take the risks that are necessary to stop them. Their main reason for doing that is because they feel that their stable social environment is worth defending against the villains who are trying to exploit it.
Again, the parallels to the environmental crisis are clear. Heroes are willing to do whatever is necessary to stop the villains from destabilizing their social environment, which in this case means the global environment.
ACT V
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Now here’s the big question: Where in the movie do you think we are?
How bad do you believe the problem is? How much you feel we should risk in solving the problem depends on how big you feel the problem is and how much time you believe we have to solve it.
It’s clear that Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion believe we’re 3/4 of the way through the movie. Their mission statements say that we have to take big risks or we’re going to be defeated utterly.
Other people who believe in science believe other things because they see the story differently.
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The climate crisis is being caused by humanity’s effects on the environment. That means the protagonists in this story are the human race in general, not any of us specifically.
If you feel like we can’t possibly be 3/4 of the way through the movie already because you’re 20 so you’re only 1/4 of the way through your natural lifespan, you can believe that the problem is real but it can’t be that bad already. So Extinction Rebellion will seem to you to be overreacting.
At the other end of the spectrum is the boomer problem I talked about. If you’re 70 and you only have 10 years left of your natural lifespan, you can believe in science and feel like the problem can’t be that bad. So again you’ll feel like Extinction Rebellion is overreacting.
To people who don’t believe in climate change because it doesn’t fit with their worldview, environmental activists seem to be the villains. Because we seem to them to be trying to undermine their stable society for our selfish reasons. They’re making that assumption because they’re jumping to the conclusion that just because they can’t understand the problem, no one else can understand it either.
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If you understand what I’ve said about movies, in this episode and the rest of the series, it makes them much more than entertainment. It makes them a great source of insights about people. They show you many different ways people develop ideas and feelings, and make decisions in different situations. Without your having to live through all those situations yourself or getting to know people who have.
If you really want to understand the story of Being Human on Planet Earth, you have to know how to listen to stories and recognize their underlying themes.
Being Human on Planet Earth is the beginning of a story we’re all part of.
Being Heroes on Planet Earth is what we have to do now to bring that story to a good outcome.