Oil Free Flotilla – A Seething Pit of Hypocrisy

Yay, we did it! But wait, my toothbrush was plastic and I ate food from a can... bloody hypocrite.

It was so strange to come home on the 1st of December from the oil free seas flotilla (the backstory is here http://oilfreeseasflotilla.org.nz). I went from being completely embedded in a floating community, a close-knit group depending on each other in a myriad of ways, to one lone individual once again navigating the corridors of steel and glass in Wellington's city streets. I swayed like a drunken tree in the wind, regaining land-legs after nearly three weeks where everything in the whole universe moved a little or a lot, all the time.

Bewildered and thrown back into normality, it was too hard to resist going back through some of the media stories from while we were out there, both to get a sense of how the issue was living in the public imaginiation, and to feel vicariously re-connected with my shipmates.

What most stood out for me, reading some of the comments and discussions, was how lame the key critique of our endeavour was! The point that many people seemed to feel undermined the voyage was the hypocrisy of protesting against deep sea oil exploration while dependent in some shape or form on oil. I felt like writing about this hypocrisy problem, not because I am especially hurt and feel a need to defend the flotilla, but because it seems like an increasingly typical and banal debate in this movement to break up with fossil fuels.

Basically the argument goes like this: "These people are bloody hypocrites protesting against extraction/excessive use of [insert fossil fuel] because they themselves are using [insert oil related item]." Sometimes the speaker is right (yes, the flotilla used some diesel -although our engine died on day 3, so not much!), and sometimes they're wrong, like here:

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: ... I would simply like to note, then, that that flotilla is out there powered by dirty diesel-guzzling engines. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! A supplementary question has been called. Gareth Hughes.

Gareth Hughes: I think the Minister will find that they are yachts.*

heh.

But actually, it doesn't matter at all whether they're right or wrong, it's the petty neh-neh-ness of hypocrisy noting that bothers me. It's a gross, competitive, "I recycle so I'm better than you," trivial, spiteful way to critique. "We all depend on oil products therefore it's hypocritical to oppose them." I challenge that logic.

Yes, I try and limit how much fossil fuels I create cause to be burnt. But I don't do so in order to manipulate how other people perceive me and be somehow more credible as an activist. I do so because I feel like they are hurting the world and I find that hard to forget. My personal consumption of the oil-related products most of us rely on is totally unrelated to my right to oppose deep sea oil, or Bathurst coal, or tar sands. It's a typical symptom of a culture of competitive individualism that we feel this need to critique the personal choices of those who are trying to open up a conversation about where we get our energy from and what we do with it.

No-one has a nice handy perch outside of history from which to birth change - all we can do is work with the conditions, creatively, imaginatively, but not magically out of nowhere, in an untouchable perfect vacuum. If I tried to do that I would a) spend all my time trying to be perfect and have no time for achieving anything and b) be stressed all the time about what people were thinking of me. Life is not meant to be about being a martyr or obsessed with self-denial! It's a fast track to resenting everyone and everything. We need to give ourselves permission to work with what we've got. As an immaculately mustached young guy whose name I've forgotten said in a room I was in recently – "our generation didn't choose these systems. If we did we'd have chosen better ones." We are part of this car-dependent culture, this legacy of domination and greed and emotional repression, we're just doing the best we can with what we inherited, what we were carefully trained into, just like the generation before us. We need to use what we've got to create something different. I'm not making an argument that my fossil fuel use should be judged in relation to what change I create. I'm saying it's unrelated, and no-one else's business but mine. Who cares about me? Engage with the ideas as they appear in your own life! See if something is true for you. Enough with the hypocrisy police.

It seems like behind all vitriolic hypocrisy-accusations is a fear that people are going to be judged by their habits, that my actions are somehow condemning them and their lifestyle, that once again they are going to be found to be not good enough. I can understand that, because a heap of environmentalists are incredibly judgy and use caring about the planet as a disguise for hating humans and playing a subtle game of oneupmanship. And I know very very few humans who don't have some kind of feeling of being not good enough, at some time, in some way. Maybe all the time.

The troubling thing is that I feel like a fear of this hypocrisy police backlash stops a lot of people from becoming really lovingly critical of this mess we're embroiled in, stops them voicing their concerns and ideas and fears. One man interviewed by Campbell Live in Kaikoura said something along the lines of "I'm not sure about deep sea oil, it seems pretty dodgy, but I drive my car every day, so I guess I support it." To me that sounds like he's formed a position based on a concern about being attacked for hypocrisy – and judging from the fb and media comments I've read, that's a valid enough concern. What's the solution? Maybe... don't be a dick?

*copied from the ludicrous petty squabbling that is the parliamentary transcripts, Volume 695, page 14755, Week 60 - Tuesday, 19 November 2013, at http://www.parliament.nz/en-nz/pb/debates/debates/daily/50HansD_20131119/volume-695-week-60-tuesday-19-november-2013

apathy and acceptance

 (how much energy does it take to be asleep?)

I don't really write on this blog much, even though as those who know me can attest, I'm not short of things to say. I think it's because I'm a (grudgingly recovering, oft-relapsing) perfectionist and if I can't write something structured and world changing and great that can quite happily be published in my collected essays edition in 2050 without major editing, then I can't do anything at all! Things like that always sound ridiculous when you articulate them, but brains are ridiculous, that's exactly the sort of thought process they get off on (mine, anyway).

Anyway, new policy: short, semi-unintelligible snippet posts with hardly any structure and a total failure to cohere or tell a nicely shapely narrative. Instead of a blog, it will be a beautifully shapeless blob! Or that's my strategy anyway.

So, this blob: something I always want to write about but never feel well enough researched/informed/able to articulate: the difference between acceptance and apathy. This distinction is pretty important to my own life but what makes me want to try and explore it is how often poor old 'acceptance' seems misunderstood.

I remember walking along one day with a friend who was experiminting with illicit buddhism, and I was trying to force him to admit that it was stupid and passive because all the adherents would just meditate away while meanwhile the world would pave paradise and put up a shopping mall. "Everything will be concrete and you won't even CARE!" was the gist of my complaint. He had no good answers and resorted to the wise yet condescending nod technique. This is what I would say to myself if I could timetravel back there and be him:

Me: the problem with 'accepting' is that you won't even care about (for eg) climate change. It sounds like you just want us to sit back and watch the fallout, fuck all the suffering and the victims etc.
Me-time-travelling-inhabiting-my-friend's-body-and-talking-to-myself: nah acceptance is not apathy. To me, acceptance doesn't mean all the things that haven't happened yet - how can you accept them when you don't even know what they'll be? It just means what has already happened and what is happening right now. I wonder if our future obsessed culture creates this determination to think 'accepting' means 'accepting what might happen'.

Me: but change and action come from dissatisfaction with the status quo and it being unfair and stuff
TimetravelMe: I don't reckon 'acceptance' means no motivation. It's not the same as resignation. I can be critical of something but still accept it - it just means I'm not trying to block reality because I can't handle it. If I am angry and hurt about lots of elephants dying or people hurting one another, acceptance doesn't mean I go 'oh well, too hard'. It just means I acknowledge my own reactions. It's the opposite of putting my fingers in my ears and going lalala because it's too much and too scary. So to me that would pave the way for quality action, because I wouldn't be tied to blind reaction.
I guess it does sound weird to say "I accept deep sea oil" - maybe the language is too polluted - but what I mean is that I accept that it is happening right now, I feel concern and grief and anger that people care about money more than this world our home, but I currently feel moved to do everything in my power to stop it. Acceptance to me just means owning my responses and acknowledging that I have no idea how it will all turn out, and feeling my own fear about what might happen. I want to act, effectively, full of life and curiosity, not full of tense determination to make things be 'my way'. I refuse to act from a place of domination - I don't think I can dominate my way into a better world.

And apathy - to me it's a contradictory word because it conjures up both intense stasis, and extreme tense movement. Sort of like when you're lying in bed and you don't want to get up but you really need to and it is anything but relaxing. I totally disagree that apathy is laziness. Apathy is being afraid, losing faith that anyone will listen to you, feeling disempowered, shame, hating yourself, blocking the world or your emotions because they're too much... all of which are bloody exhausting! Apathy is incredibly tiring! It's like being a golf ball all full of stretched rubber bands all the time, working hard to keep a chaotic world under control. Apathy doesn't need abuse, apathy needs agency. To me a core part of apathy is being unable to feel or own your own response to things -perhaps shutting down as a response to overwhelmingness. So you hear the sea level is going to rise? That polar bears are going extinct? A million pieces of tragedy every day? If I can't acknowledge my own reaction to hearing this stuff, feel it in my body, – if that feels like too much, overwhelming– then I have to block it out. Like I do with my library fines ($68.30 last time someone managed to prise my fingers out of ears and shout the amount in).

So we throw more depressing statistics at the apathetic, hoping they'll 'wake up'. Maybe one or two people do, overflowing with grief and anger. My theory is that it doesn't work - because any action is blocked by it being too scary to accept what is going on and our own response to that. Apparently conservative people are more fearful, which in my biased world sounds like a similar response (no I refuse to do referencing – you'll just have to take my word for it). So for me the question becomes - how can I help make it feel more safe to accept the world/ourselves/reality? How can I do that more and more myself? Not apathetically, not resignedly, not passive or with withdrawal – but being ok with what I am and what's going on in me, all the time. And then acting in a fresh way, full of all the energy I'm not wasting filtering myself and the world.

Me: zzzzz

ps I lied I didn't actually conquer perfectionism I just got sick and stuck in bed. All incomprehensibles may be blamed on the fever.