Paradigm Shakes

We seem to be stuck in a dangerous and destructive paradigm. Our current approach to climate change is painfully inadequate. Will shifting paradigms be easier if we start with a few small shakes?
Karen O’Brien

Jan 20

Extremes
These are not easy times. It’s hard to watch the news and read the latest climate projections. And it’s painful to experience the reality of extreme climate events and witness so much suffering and loss. It’s even more painful to see the woeful inadequacy of political responses.
We understand the impacts of climate-related disasters. Wildfires. Floods. Droughts. Heat waves. Hurricanes. We know that they will get much worse as the atmosphere continues to warm. Yet we are doing astonishingly little to address the underlying causes.
How did we get here? Weren’t these “extremely extreme” climate events avoidable?
Patterns
I’m experiencing a sense of déjà vu. I worry that I have written about this before. I probably have… It’s just that these questions keep coming up, and the patterns we see are annoyingly repetitive. We are stuck in thought patterns that are leading to dire consequences.
Reflecting on past, present and projected patterns took me back to the IPCC special report on extreme events — the SREX report for short.* The report, published in 2012, drew attention to the risks of extreme events associated with climate change.
The SREX report highlighted the importance of low-regrets measures as starting points for addressing projected trends in exposure and vulnerability to extreme events: “They have the potential to offer benefits now and lay the foundation for addressing projected changes.” They are, in other words, important adaptation strategies.
Low regrets measures are the obvious solutions that fit within current paradigm, and they include:
• early warning systems
• risk communication between decision-makers and local citizens
• sustainable land management (e.g., land use planning; ecosystem management and restoration)
• improvements to health, water supply, sanitation, and irrigation and drainage systems
• climate-proofing of infrastructure
• development and enforcement of building codes
• and of course, better education and awareness
Low-regrets options make perfect sense. Regretfully, we are not implementing them. It’s clear that something is missing.
Opening Minds
I worked on chapter 8 of the IPCC’s SREX Report, Towards a Sustainable and Resilient Future. In the chapter, we talked about the need to move beyond the dominant paradigm by opening our minds to new perspectives. This was one of the key findings in the SREX summary for policymakers:
Progress toward resilient and sustainable development in the context of changing climate extremes can benefit from questioning assumptions and paradigms and stimulating innovation to encourage new patterns of response (medium agreement, robust evidence). Successfully addressing disaster risk, climate change, and other stressors often involves embracing broad participation in strategy development, the capacity to combine multiple perspectives, and contrasting ways of organizing social relations.
The importance of shifting paradigms comes up repeatedly in the recent IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. The report emphasizes that “[t]ransformative change involves questioning the individual and collective paradigms and cultural narratives that perpetuate the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline.” This includes transforming dominant economic and financial paradigms that currently prioritize private interests over nature and social equity. How do we shift these paradigms?
Shakes and Shifts
Quantum social change emphasizes our potential to consciously disrupt habitual patterns and generate new ones. We often talk about shifting paradigms as if they were momentous events that occur in an instant, as in “Eureka! I’ve shifted my paradigm!” This may be true in some cases, but more often it’s a gradual process. In fact, it may be easier to shift entrenched paradigms if we start with small tremors, rather than wait for a dramatic shift.
For me, it took a series of small shakes to shift my thought patterns. My first “paradigm shake” came in 2007, after reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Interpreting it through the lens of climate change, I began to question the logic of striving to be “well-adapted” to dramatic environmental changes, at the same time as we were continuously accelerating the trends.
Writing in 1970, Freire warned of the dangers of adapting to oppressive situations:
The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe.

Awakening individual and collective agency is risky to those who benefit from an unquestioned acceptance of the status quo. Freire points to some of the tools for maintaining power over people, including the use of myths and the discouragement of critical thinking and inquiry. He relates this to the banking concept of education, where knowledge is deposited but never critically assessed:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

As disinformation spreads, fake news and fake images are increasingly deposited in our minds. It’s not surprising that many of us are well-adapted to a fragmented, polarized view of reality. The antidote Freire offers is conscientization, the process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action.
Quantum Shakes
Pedagogy of the Oppressed shook my paradigm and led me to think critically about adaptation in relation to transformation. It also primed me to look at social reality through other lenses. My next paradigm shake occurred when I discovered Alexander Wendt’s work on quantum social theory. Wendt’s auto-critique of his constructivist approach to international relations led me to question how I was thinking about the relationship between individual change, collective change and systems change, including the implications for climate action. This paradigm shake opened me to an ongoing inquiry into what quantum social change means in theory and practice.
In The Social Life of Democracy, Sundar Sarukkai points out that democracy is a mindset. He emphasizes that people in every society are influenced by their cultural beliefs, including their beliefs about the relationship between the “I” and the “we.” His argument is that to understand the nature of democracy, one has to begin with the relationship between the self and the collective.
Quantum social change recognizes that individuals and collectives are entangled through language, meaning, and shared contexts, and that our deepest values and intentions are powerful sources of societal-scale change. As power is increasingly shifting to people who have little regard for climate science, nature conservation, and the well-being of all people and species, I think that our fragmented paradigm could use a quantum shake.
Scaling Ideas
In Think Scale, social entrepreneur Sanjay Purohit points out that “solving for scale is a mindset before it is an action.” He emphasizes that things scale through the sharing of ideas, and he encourages us, amidst the uncertainties that are unfolding around us, to “pause for a moment, reimagine what will work at scale, explore alternatives, and raise the aspiration to move forward on a journey of exponential change.”
I’m ready for the journey of exponential change to a just and sustainable world. The idea that I want to share and scale is that we matter more than we think. On January 20th, I’m going to make the You Matter More than You Think audio book freely available to newsletter subscribers for two weeks. Readers are in turn welcome to share it with people who matter to them.
I hope that sharing these ideas contributes to reflection and action on why paradigms, beliefs, relationships, metaphors, entanglement, consciousness, agency, and fractals matter — and most of all, why you matter. It’s time to both shake and shift a dangerous and destructive paradigm. With love! As Paolo Freire put it, “no reality transforms itself.”

[C]risis simultaneously loosens the stereotypes and provides the
incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift.
— Thomas Kuhn