While this show is always about the emotional side of climate change and climate politics, we don’t only talk about “coping” with burnout and despair, or building “resilience” to keep up the good fight amid terrible news. In this episode, we consider how our deepest motives and identities shape our work out in the world. We examine the scripts that constrain our imagination and movements, the wisdoms and wounds we inherit, and the ways that our collective political moment reflects our inner attachments and possibilities.
This is the domain of “depth psychology,” and applying this lens to climate activism is activist Anthea Lawson, author of The Entangled Activist: Learning to Recognise the Master's Tools, and just out, How Not To Save the World: Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone. At the heart of our chat is a deep inquiry about how and why we must disentangle ourselves from the systems we most want to change.
Shownotes:
- Lawson’s website
- Lawson’s Substack (includes mailing list signup for book info etc)
- Lawson’s LinkedIn and Insta
- Lawson’s new book, How Not to Save the World, and previous book, The Entangled Activist
- Jon Alexander’s work on “citizens”
- Donella Meadows’ work on leverage points to change a system
- Joanna Macy’s “Work that Reconnects” model of change
TRANSCRIPT:
Anthea Lawson: You know, as stuff gets real we're going to need everyone. We cannot have this polarizing distinction between activist and not activist.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Welcome to "Climate Magic," a show where we explore the messy human side of climate politics. We ask, "What if our hearts and minds are the most radical leverage points at our disposal? How do our human emotions and mindsets and cognitive biases and wounds shape climate policy?"
I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and a professor of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. On "Climate Magic" I invite experts, spiritual leaders, researchers, neuroscientists, educators, and activists to help me distill digestible applicable ways to help you tap your own climate magic.
As you know, this show is about the emotions side of climate change and climate politics. But it's not just about coping or building resilience to avoid burn out and keep up the good fight. It's also about the deep examination of our motives and identities which shape our work in the world. It's about the stories we live in, the ideologies and wisdoms and wounds we inherit. And the ways that politics reflect our worldviews, mindsets, cognitive biases, and human needs.
This is what depth psychology can offer and my guest today is an expert in this work. Anthea Lawson is an activist and campaigner who researches the connections between our inner lives and the world we create together. But she didn't start with depth psychology. She started with campaigning and activism. Over two decades she campaigned to shut down tax havens and stop banks feeling corruption and ecological destruction. She launched an award winning campaign for transparency over who owns companies which has been taken up by many other organizations and resulted in changes to the law in dozens of countries. She worked on the successful campaigns for over 100 countries for an arms trade treaty which she mentions in our interview the U.S has tragically backed out of of course. And for the international ban on cluster bombs she worked for Global Witness, Amnesty International, and many other campaign groups. She has dug up parliament square in gorilla gardening efforts and has been arrested with Extinction Rebellion.
Most of our conversation today is about her 2021 book "The Entangled Activist: Learning to Recognize the Master's Tools." But we also get in to some of her new book coming out "How Not to Save the World: Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone." This was a powerful and deep conversation for me.
The punchline is that examining our inner wounds, wisdoms, motives, and stories is not negotiable. It's not about opting out of external so-called real work in the world just to focus on our inner lives. It's not spiritual bypass as they call it or naval gazing. It's not just about privilege, although privilege offers its own invitations too. The way that we show up to save the world often can do harm and perpetuate the systems we're trying to change. So if we want to fix a system we need to see how it works through us and comes out in the work that we do.
This is what Anthea means by being entangled. So are you ready to hear some of that transmitted wisdom about how to disentangle ourselves from the systems we need to change? Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Anthea.
Anthea Lawson: Thank you very much. And thanks for running a podcast that, you know, looks in to these big issues. It's really important stuff.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Well, you had a long history that I had described already in the intro of campaigning and activism and being deep in it. You went from doing that kind of work in to thinking about, writing about, the inner life of activism. And I kind of want to pick apart all those words. What is even the inner life? What even is activism? You do a great job describing those complexities in this book, but maybe before we even go there a little bit of some story as to how you went from that profound sort of strident out there on the streets campaigning work to this kind of inner life deep deep sort of scholarly and existential exploration of why that matters so much in the work we're doing for climate.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. I think I've done a few steps actually. So I'd probably characterize it like I start -- you know, when I first turned to protesting in my early 20s I was out on the streets. And this was late '90s, turn of the century. There were lots of protests going on against the World Bank and IMF, you know these big international organizations' involvement in developing countries. And extracting huge debt payments from them effectively impoverishing those countries.
And there was a lot of protests going on. And then I had a decision to make as to whether I was going to carry on being a journalist and reporting on business news which is really not what I wanted to do. Or trying to do something about these things I was out in the streets about. But I took the version that was not quite so shouty and I went and did research and policy advocacy for a long time. So I was using my journalism skills to do investigations in to the arms trade for five years.
Pretty depressing stuff, but it needs doing. I only lasted five years. And then in to the financial sector and its facilitation of corruption and the impoverishment of entire nations partly via the tax haven system which allows the rich -- and we're seeing the consequences now everywhere -- it allows the rich to not contribute to the countries they're living in. So that's multinationals not to pay. Moving profits through tax havens and so on.
Anyway so I was doing investigations into those and what's called policy campaigning which is where you, you know -- you get to know people in power. You get to know civil servants. You cultivate contact among lawmakers. You try and get laws changed. Sometimes we manage that.
And, you know, that does work up to a point, but I was just having all these questions. It's, there wasn't a sort of ___ moment where I thought, "Oh, I've got to do something else." It was this slowly building pressure of is this sufficient. It's necessary, but is it sufficient? And some of that was coming from within what I was doing. It was an observation that we were using many strategies and sometimes indulging in behaviors that were precisely those of the systems we wanted to change.
So for example in that policy advocacy thing where we put information in front of a policy maker and say, "Okay. Here's the information you need to do this thing." You know, and of course you're building contacts. You're not just -- it's not coming cold. But fundamentally you're requiring -- you're relying on that person being a sort of rational active who's going to act in the way that you want. You know? Like it's assuming that we're only our logical thought processes.
These are exactly the same logics that our economic system runs on. You know, neoclassical economics runs on the principle that, you know, we're independent economic actors who make these economic decisions purely based on profit and our economic good. No. We don't. We have relationships and we have preferences and we have values and we have all sorts of things. You know, so there was that. There was also this, you know, this is uncomfortable for people who are trying to do good to look at. I can only characterize it as human rights defenders treating each other badly. You know, here we are moralizing about how we are to treat other people and some of these organizations are, you know, like something else to work in. You know. And, you know, there's you can very casually say, "Oh yes. You know, you're dealing with trauma so there's lots of secondary trauma going on." You know, that's all true. That is all true.
But I was getting curious about it. So that was building up. But it was around the time that I said, "Okay. I'm not going to be like working full time running teams of people doing this investigating and lobbying." And I want to go and think more deeply about what's going on here. It was around that time that the -- well, these -- it happened on both sides of the Atlantic. Trump's first election, 2016, and we have the Brexit vote in the U.K which, you know, just from a U.K perspective felt absolutely devastating as this voluntary giving away of our rights. Extraordinary.
But there was so much behind it and so much going on and that seemed -- those votes seemed like the real illustration that this technocratic -- it's quite -- you know, it's definitely liberal, but it's also quite neoliberal. This is the way that neoliberalism, you know the dominant mode of governance for the last few decades, the marketization of everything -- so technocratic fixes. You know, the loss of socialism as a legitimate alternative. And the demonizing of it as a legitimate alternative. You know, this idea that you can actually run things from the center, you know, about which we now have so many questions from every direction.
So that was all coming in to question. So it was throwing our methods in to question. So, you know, that was -- I took that as like the opportunity. Not opportunity. The motivation and incentive to start looking deeper in to what's going on under the surface both in our own motivations and our own assumptions and in the people that we're trying to influence and persuade.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Can you do that deep dive a little bit? I mean you have it beautifully described in your book and I could quote from your book for it, but could you yourself kind of do that, draw that line? It's sort of a Donella Meadows, the sort of famous environmental economist systems thinker guru Donella Meadows you cite in your book. And I'll make sure I put her work in the show notes as well, but this kind of the stuff that we're seeing on the surface thing. Right? Like the neoliberalism, the marketization of everything. Everything kind of going this direction that these two big votes that happened in 2016 more or less really were like the bellwether for. Oh, we're in a different mode right now. These things are reflections of something really profoundly different shifting. Draw that line between what those expressions that we're seeing on the surface, what they reflect about something much deeper going on.
You bring in depth psychology. You bring in all kinds of stuff to say, "Okay. What's at the root of this?" And why is it that getting to the root of all that seemed to be a place you wanted to turn your attention?
Anthea Lawson: You know, there are obviously lots of very material explanations for what was going on. You know, if we're looking at those two votes there were some very material explanations. Right? You know, neoliberalism has been eating itself and that was the point when it became clear because it was the people who it had been eating first who were angry enough to, you know, take those other options in a way of saying, "Right. Okay. We get our own back now. We do something else."
To go in to psychology it's funny. It can be painted as an avoidance of the material. They get separated in our culture. I think western culture profoundly separates them. And I think -- I think the practice of psychology whether it's of academic sort of research psychology or whether it's, you know, the depth psychology that gets practiced in, you know, psychoanalytic consulting rooms I think they haven't helped with that because they've kept themselves separately.
You know, psychoanalysis famously has, you know, been unwilling to look at the contextual reasons why a person might be extremely distressed. Right? We live in a world full of oppression, crazy hierarchies turned in to a political system, and the suffering caused from all of that. You know, whether it's class or race or gender or all three or, you know, all the intersecting variants of how that works.
And, you know, a system of psychoanalysis which says, you know, "Let's talk about your parents," you know, like that obviously has its limits. You know, and latterly, you know, there have been many in the last few decades that have been like various strands which have brought more of it in with what -- we can go into that because that leads us into ecopsychology as well.
But I want to look at the psychology specifically with activism. I want to look at the psychology together as part -- you know, as part of the system of what's going on. And that's, you know -- I want to -- in all the thinking I'm doing, and this is true of the new book as well which we'll come to, like I want to try and bring together these aspects of reality that have been -- that have been artificially separated.
And I think there's, you know -- so there's obviously something in the dominant culture which keeps our inner lives separate. You know, and that felt -- you know, there was lots that was good about that at the enlightenment. Right? We got -- you know, we got religion out of politics. That's a good thing. It's trying to get back in. You know, we stopped burning witches. These things are good, but I think we've got a, you know, such a weird expression. It is. Why do we say it? I've thrown the baby out with the bath water. Who would do that? But, you know, I don't know what other one we've got for it. Like have we gone too far in creating a public realm that doesn't explicitly take account of our inner lives?
And so, you know -- so we have all these -- all these forms of kind of counter cultural thought that are trying to like find better ways to, you know, propose better ways of running things. You know, instead of having, you know, extractive linear economic systems that just like consume natural resources and create waste, you know, we should have circular economies and all these things. There are lots of people thinking about systems to run things. Lots and lots of systems thinking which is great, but not all of it takes account of the systems within us. Right? Each of us is a system. We have our intrapersonal system. We are not singular personalities. We are multiple. And then there's relationship. There's the relationships between us. The interpersonal. At every scale these are all systems too. And so I wanted to try and bring that in to it. Sorry. That was a slightly long answer to your question.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: No. I love it. You've brought in this really important premise before we can even move on in the conversation that the personal is political. The political is personal. And in your book you do a great job describing about how yes and no that's true. But that this is the initial kind of gambit of your work is to say, "What's happening out there in the world and what's happening in our inner lives are separated for really unfortunate --" You know, to very unfortunate outcomes. And very much have undermined not just society at large, but they fuel the capitalist eating of itself. And it also undermines the activism that would resist it.
So that's really where you come in, where you enter in your book, is the sort of critique of how activism is replicating the very same systems that it's trying to challenge. And that a deep dive in to the inner motivations of our inner lives is really necessary.
And so that's sort of where your book takes off from there. You have a -- I think of sometimes people often dismiss inner work as self help or like you just said, you know, "Tell us about your parents." You know, which is not unimportant, but it sort of misses out on this big political cultural context, as you point out beautifully.
And I'm sort of curious, you know, what is your argument for why emotions are so important for fixing the problems that we see in the world as activists? Or even if you want to spend some time talking about how you define activist because I think a lot of listeners might say, "Oh. I'm not an activist. Or maybe this episode about activism isn't about me." But you do a beautiful job talking about, you know, how we even come up with these binaries and activists and not activists. So maybe you want to start there.
Anthea Lawson: So I am counting activism as anything that people are doing as an intervention to try and make things better at any scale and in any way. The problem with the term, and I don't know if this is slightly different in the U.S, I think there may be specific, you know, British nuances to this, over here it really gets used as a very specific kind of change making intervention which is kind of the direct action or the kind of loud protest version. You know, those are part of it.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I think it's very similar here. Yeah. Yeah.
Anthea Lawson: There's a much wider movement ecology than that. You know, I love that phrase movement ecology. It's like it sort of evokes this idea that there are many, many, many niches for loads of different kinds of things. And some of it might just be conversations in your neighborhood. Some of it might be speaking up at the school gate. Some of it might be just naming what's going on. Some of it might be getting together with people in your community and saying, "Right. You know, the river is flooding more frequently now. You know, what are we going to do about this?"
I am counting everything as activism. But yeah. It comes with this baggage. So, you know, it's sometimes easier to talk about change making. You know, there's a guy called Jon Alexander, a writer in the U.K. He wrote a book called "Citizens." And he's done a great one on this because he's just like, you know, why -- he's a former ad man. You know, he used to work in advertising. He's "Oh. I'm sick of talking to people as consumers." He had his __ moment. He's like let's talk about citizens.
But I quite like using that citizens framing instead of activists actually because I think as the -- you know, as stuff gets real, it is getting real, it's getting very real in the U.S. It's already happening. And, you know, it's getting real in several directions here. We're going to need everyone. We cannot have this polarizing distinction between activist and not activist. What makes it more difficult is the right wing media which in this country is like there's more of it than there is the other side or, you know, even the BBC which is supposed to be kind of a sort of central kind of anchor is really not. There's been a lot of demonization of activism. It's a classic culture war trope. It's a classic wedge to make, you know, like ordinary people feel suspicious of those who are already taking action when actually they agree with the same issues. It's like oh yeah. Look at those weird activists over there. So all that baggage comes in when you use that word.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Thank you. Yeah. I really wanted you to say those things. So yay. I as a teacher of environmental studies students I am very aware of the baggage because even they -- you think they want to be change makers and they come in with all of this aversion to activism because they want to be taken seriously. You know? They want to be taken seriously. And they want to be taken seriously because they want to make change. Right? And that to me is a kind of activism. Right? To your point about the way you've just defined it.
But I find it so interesting how that's like nope not that. And then a couple of seasons, you know, there's always sort of a small percentage who are absolutely claiming the mantle, you know. But there's a wide range of that. And I find the term itself to be so interesting when I look out at my classroom. You know? Who are they and what do they -- what do they feel about that?
Just for the sake of the listener in one place in your book you define activism as “the constant task of trying to mitigate against the worst of what we humans are capable of while orienting ourselves to the flourishing of the best.” And I just really love that. That definition feels like yeah. Who wouldn't want to sign up for that?
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. Yes, but Joanna Macy, the late systems thinker, amazing woman who has helped a lot of us, there's a pile of her books on the shelf behind me, she had it in three pillars. She called it the great turning, what we've got to do. So she had holding option -- holding actions which is like, you know, stop the bad stuff. And then creating the new. And then the third one was the psychospiritual underpinning. Like the mindsets that need to shift. You know.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. And I would say she probably didn't mean to put it in any particular order. So if anyone's listening and has never heard of that before, she was sort of all -- you know, sort of which camp are you mostly in. Or maybe you want a little bit of all three and there's no particular chronological order in which this needs to happen.
And some people really feel they align with the breaking down of existing systems and some people really feel aligned with the building of or at least cultivating the conditions for building of the new. And some people really align with making sure that we're all well equipped internally to make sure we're doing it well. And, you know, the sort of anxiety about feeling like you need to do it all or despair about how there's not enough. And if any one of those things is happening it gets for me at least a little bit alleviated when I think, "Oh. I just have faith that there are people in each of those buckets doing the work they do."
Anthea Lawson: That's right. Now you had a question that I need to come back to though because there was one before the activism one. Can you just remind me? It was about like why the emotion is important. Was that right?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. I mean sort of what I think I'm getting at I'll be a little bit more specific to drill down on it, but I do think that there's the sort of -- you're not framing it as optional to do this work. You're making a case that we have to do this work. Right? It's not just for the people who happen to like emotions and the people who don't really like emotions and are still stuck in some sort of enlightenment dualistic thinking, don't have to go there.
You're sort of saying, "No. No. We all got to go there." And examine how our inner lives are shaping not just the work we do, but how we do the work with each other. And I just wanted you to maybe unpack a little bit about why emotions, why our inner lives and our emotional lives, are so key to doing -- to making sure that we're orienting ourselves best to the flourishing of life.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. So I --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: To go to your definition again.
Anthea Lawson: I think of it as -- well, how I think about this changes, but how I'm thinking about it at the moment is, you know, without -- what I came in to campaigning thinking that it was is, you know, this strategic question of like you identify the target and thing that you want to happen. And then it's like what messages are going to work. So the message is, you know, like -- all the attention is crafting the message.
Organizations that, you know, are professional change making organizations, you know, campaign groups, you know, spend years like working out their messages, getting the message right on what's going to land. And it was only latterly like, you know, for a long time success was getting a good message out or at least measuring opportunities in which you got your message out. Oh, we got on that news bulletin. You know, we got this many people following us on social media and seeing our message. We were leaving out both ends of the message.
So for me like the attention to what's going on with emotions is in two places. It's at the place where the message is landing. It's like what do you know about who you want to hear this. Who is it that you want to hear this? And what's going on for them? You know, like if you -- if you adopt a protest mode, you know, the way that you would shout in the street, you know in a march, if you adopt the protest mode when you're trying to persuade somebody in your community, you know, is screaming at them actually, you know, like the mode that's going to land? Anyone who's been in a relationship of any kind or has a family knows that that doesn't work.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. It happened in my car this morning. Yeah.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. Yeah. Like we're both raising kids. Like that's going down all the time. And yet isn't it remarkable how much -- like I'm taking the activist stereotype now, but there's been a lot of it. How much like screaming at people goes on? Like it's --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Not just a stereotype. It's the dominant mode of communicating now.
Anthea Lawson: It is really, really interesting. Now, you know, anger is really important. Like you can't dismiss anger because also then you can, you know -- if you're to dismiss anger, you know, this is not a manifesto for cuddly change making and, you know, only doing it -- someone accused me of wanting to get the knitting out the other day. You know, like it's not that.
Anger is a really important motivator. I am furious at the vengeful old men who have so much power and are destroying so much life. That is my motivation. They should not be in charge. It is an unhealthy culture that puts vengeful old men in charge. You can hear it in my voice. I am furious. But while the full force of your feeling is great for motivation the full force of your feeling is not a communication strategy. That's the problem. We've got confused, I think. So that's half of it. That's like how it lands.
And there's a whole load of stuff we can talk about there. Now it's interesting because I think, you know, this is your area because I think climate psychology is on to this. Belatedly, but on to it in a way that many other issues it's not. And I think the enormity that the hyper objectness, the massiveness of climate, means that's there. And there was obviously some precursor work in the ecopsychology, you know, from the '90s that developed from, you know -- we can perhaps talk about that if you want to go that way. But other areas not so much. Now the other end of the message pipeline. So that's where your message is landing. Now the message is coming from us.
So this is where -- this is why it gets really interesting because we're kind of like motivated to start. It is when we're trying to do good it is quite hard to look at our own stuff and the possibility that we might not be good because we've got ourselves up on this moral high horse with our anger. Again some of that is understandable and it's part of it. It's part of the process of politicization. You know, whatever form of oppression you've grown up with learning to see what's going on. Your anger is the -- it's the spectacles. It helps you to see it.
None of that is -- none of that is being dismissed. But we then become like we're good and they're bad. Now that might be true. We are up against some people who are doing terrible, terrible, terrible things. All of that is true. This is really complex. But that sense that we are good puts up a sort of -- well, choose your metaphor. You put a cape around yourself, a sort of invincibility cape, or I sometimes think of it as a shield. And it stops us looking at some of the other stuff that we do.
And so this is what my new book's about. I'm suggesting that there is a -- I'm calling it a save the world script. And I'm suggesting that that script is quite prevalent. It runs unconsciously. Quite a lot of it is in human psychology. It's quite instinctive to our tribal nature. You know, a lot of the things that we do are sort of a script. You know, so wanting to be good, that's about fitting in. Wanting to be pure. That's another bit. We can go in to all the details of this. You know, that's also about our groupishness. And then there are some aspects of it, of this script, that are more cultural and social, although they interact with psychology. I think they're profoundly psychosocial.
And those bits of the script say things like, "I'm going to save people and I know better than you." And they are rooted in class and empire and racial hierarchy. There's a whole load of stuff in there. But that primary one, the reason I put one, I'm setting out the script in this - in "How Not to Save the World" the reason I'm setting it out with good at the beginning is if we can't acknowledge the possibility that we are human like everyone else, we will mess stuff up, if we can't do that, if we've done this -- again it's a split. It's a binary polarization thing. For those listening I'm like gesturing with my hands away from each other, you know, where we then occupy all the good and they occupy all the bad. You know? Like that's -- that's not real. And I think -- I think the reason this feels -- it's so counter cultural to say this. It feels so -- it is difficult to talk about it from within activism in inverted commas. Yeah. We find it really hard to -- we find it really hard to do that.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. There's no force out there in the world telling us we've got to do that before we can be effective. You know, we have to opt in to that.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. That's right. And I think it does this. I think it has an effect on, you know, when -- when, you know, you see -- I don't want to speculate about your students. I have no idea if this is why they're reluctant to identify as activists or change makers. But a lot of people I've met and one of my motivations for writing in this area they absolutely agree with all of the areas that activists are campaigning on. You know, they're completely aligned in views.
But they don't want to do it because they don't want to be like that because I think they - I think they sort of see through it. I think some people kind of adopt the script and they're in it. And I think it also works in its inverse to keep people away. So when people are like, "Well, I can't put myself in this morally righteous position because that makes me feel really uncomfortable," or "I know I'm not pure" or, you know, the purity works in, "Well, goodness. I flew somewhere on holiday last summer. So I shouldn't speak out about the climate."
You know, it gives us ideas like that, that, you know, we can't, you know, not helped by the fact of, you know, news editors constantly hassling activists about how they got to the protest which is very [inaudible] and has been going on for decades.
But anyway, you know, like that's all part of it. And it keeps people away. So I think some of that -- some of this behavior that -- it's not behavior. It's a mindset. It's a way we show up. That's how I think of it. Some of this way that we show up when we're using -- operating from this unconscious script, I think it's keeping people away and I think it's stopping us building some of the bridges that we could hopefully build. You know, including in our communities to, you know -- to put together the resistance we need to what's going on.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. So you've touched on a lot of things I want to follow up on, threads or key emotions that play a big part in your book. Righteousness. Purity. And it's kind of secondary emotion, disgust. You bring in those kinds of things. Anger for sure. You talk about anger being a mask emotion. And so yeah. I'm not sure which one you want to start with, but I love that you introduce us to both anger and righteousness as big themes of your answer there.
And I'd love to ask questions about both. I'm going to go to the righteousness. I know that that is inspiring your new book about being a -- you know, stop saving the world and a savior complex and the sort of examining our inner needs to be good and pure, for example.
You just you talk about righteousness in the "Entangled Activist" as a kind of inner authoritarian in all of us. And you can sort of witness this in people's stridency, for example, that the anger comes out in a stridency that might be morally righteous, but isn't as you just pointed out necessarily always a great strategy. You talk about trying to achieve what you call the heightened place where you can see this in yourself in kind of a meta way. You know, like, "Oh, I'm watching myself do this thing." And that righteousness is a desire to be certain. Being certain is a way of feeling safe and protecting ourselves and so that then leads to this deeper psychology of, "Okay. What in us needs to feel safe? Why don't we feel safe?"
And the trauma that we might be bringing to the work we're doing in the world and all the desperate needs that we have that are unfulfilled that might be expressing themselves in these political ways. So this is me excavating your argument, you know. Righteousness. Often too the antidote to some of that stuff I want to acknowledge too here is, you know, everything that you've written about in your book as being kind of the problem with the ways that we're entangled with the systems that we're trying to defeat.
Oftentimes we're coming -- that critique often comes very much strongly from indigenous perspectives or often critiquing a sort of separateness, the enlightenment, dualistic thought that's at the root of all this stuff. But I do want to sort of dwell on righteousness here. You have a beautiful quote that says, "As long as we continue to insist that the system, whatever is out there, is what needs changing we turn away from seeing the perceptions that we still share with the people who run it, that we are above nature, that rational analysis is the only tool we need, that control is the answer, and that anything we can do has simple cause and effect."
And this gives -- this is a beautiful quote, I think, that illustrates what -- how is it that we're entangled? And where we get that righteousness. And I'm sort of I'd be interested just to have you unpack a little bit about righteousness because I'm guessing I know I feel a lot of righteousness. And when I hang around with my peeps we all feel a lot of righteousness. And there's righteousness in my classroom. There's righteousness on the media everywhere we go. There's a performative dimension to it that sort of will to control, will to power, that makes everybody follow us if we proclaim all this righteousness. But so what is the seduction of righteousness about? And what do we do about it?
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. I mean I think we can break it down. This is where I'm finding this script idea quite helpful because it helps to kind of break it down a bit. Like some of it is the feeling morally superior.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. That does make me feel comfortable actually. I do really like feeling morally superior.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. Sure. It feels great. You know, I really noticed that I sometimes, you know, especially when I'm just like, you know, chattering on social media and, you know, talking about this and I notice how in my view how much easier it looks for my friends who are just doing pure straight campaigning by which I mean just going on about how awful everything is and what needs to change. And I'm like that's an easier voice to adopt than what I'm trying.
Now I've taken on a particularly difficult task because I'm trying to talk about the meta level of this and it is always hard talking about. I'm talking about something that's abstract basically. Like it's an abstraction from the issues. So yeah. Of course I'm jealous and, you know, perhaps -- you know, I also enjoy just getting out and campaigning which I also do every week. But to do this there's an in between stage there which is to do the campaigning with just a little edge of awareness. I don't think it takes a huge change.
So it's interesting. The new book, I wrote it really as a -- so this is "How Not to Save the World." I wrote it as a sequel to "The Entangled Activist" precisely because I wanted almost as soon as I finished -- as soon as I finished it and started talking about it I was like, "Right. There's more here." Although I sort of I hinted at some mindsets, you know, which would be useful in -- well, okay. So we -- so what? You know, "The Entangled Activist" is saying, "Look. Can we just at least acknowledge that we are entangled in the problem?" You know, it's counter cultural to activist culture to say, you know, "We might be part of the mess." But what happens if we do that? And I hinted at that. But what I really wanted to do next was go and talk to some experienced campaigners and change makers, people who don't even define themselves as activists at all necessarily, and ask them how they're dealing with it.
And so I've been collecting antidotes to the script, as I see it, from people and asking them precisely how they deal with these things. Divided up under these headings of like I'm good, I'm pure, I know better than you. And so I think righteousness covers a few of these. It certainly covers the feeling that I'm good, you know, and putting this sort of moral halo on. There's also within righteousness I think this question about knowing better comes in. And I think there's a real thing about this in a number of forms of activism which is, you know -- the politics of knowing better, you know, are very complex. A whole load of stuff is in it. So because part of it encompasses these four questions about lived experience and who speaks. And should people who don't have lived experience, you know, should they speak up on issues where they don't have it? How do you act in solidarity with people who do? Those kind of questions.
That's one part of it, but that's not really the bit of knowing better, as I look at it, that comes under righteousness. There's another form of knowing better which is where you basically you're sort of flaunting your knowledge and your knowing better and basically shaming people who don't know. And loads of that goes on. Absolutely loads. And like that doesn't help. It's really obvious when talking about it it doesn't help. I don't even need to say it doesn't help. And yet it goes on. And this is why I'm interested then in looking at what's going on under the surface.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yes. Power struggles. These power struggles.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah because we're doing these things that logically we could look at from the outside and say, "Oh yeah. Well, I wouldn't like it if someone did that to me. I don't like being made to feel bad or small because I don't happen to know the colonial history of, you know, that aspect of our culture." You know, which is often what comes up in the British context. You know, or "Do you not know that that company's involved in that environmental thing?" You know, there's a thing with some forms of activism where one kind of collects knowledge and wields it. Now the problem with kind of knowledge based righteousness is it leads to a really big strategic problem which is it feeds back in to this idea that we're -- we assume therefore if our knowledge is so important, if we're holding it so close to us and we're valuing it so much, we think that it's enough just to give it to other people. And we forget that we've actually got to do the hard yards of organizing. You know? We've just got to, you know, make sure it gets in to the right hands of like either people need to see it on social media or it needs to get in to the hands of the power holders.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Educated. Yeah. And educated.
Anthea Lawson: We're going to, you know, disperse. We're going to -- I hate the word disseminate. Anyway, you know, we've got to get to the information out there. No. We've got to organize. We've got to have -- and by organize I mean conversations.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I -- one of the things I loved about your offering in the book about that is like you said it's the easy thing to do and you said earlier something about the campaigners, you know, on social media just complaining about all the bad villains out there, all the bad things going on. And that is sort of like -- the water we're swimming in is about all this terrible stuff and all the evil doers and all the bad people and all the terrible policies that are happening. And woe is us. Woe is us. Woe is us.
And of course it's all bad and I'm not denying that it's not bad, but that you describe it as kind of the easier path to do that and that the harder path is actually this -- using those things as a mirror to figure out how we're implicated.
And so that's -- so I really love that. That is an invitation that is -- that looks to the emotional and the personal and the intimate in a way that's much, much, much more than just being about self help or coping with negative emotions or whatever. It's political, deeply political.
Anthea Lawson: That's right, but I think it's interesting thinking about this with you now because "The Entangled Activist" I was writing it in 2020 and it came out in 2021. Yeah. 2019 I started writing it. And so --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Formative time. A historical moment, one could say.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. "How Not to Save the World" I was writing in 2024 and it's coming out in 2026. And we are further down the path [inaudible] very dangerous futures.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Yeah.
Anthea Lawson: Entanglement's speeding up. And so I feel like I'm now even clearer than I was, and I think I'm much more explicit in "How Not to Save the World." How important it is to be doing this not just because it's a good thing to do and it's an end in itself which, you know, as humans it is. You know.
You know, a bit of personal growth and like becoming wiser and more whole and more aware of our multiplicity, you know, like I love all that. Great. But, you know, it's not a nice to have nor is it like a retreat to, you know, the therapy room or like the meditation cushion because like fascism is happening and violence is happening and destruction of the environment is happening and we've got to get organized.
And it is not inevitable that the worst things will continue to happen. It is not. There is so much resistance already happening. There is so much more that could happen. At any moment things can turn, you know, for the better. Resistance can increase. Right? And so I feel -- I feel very motivated actually like to get really clear on why like looking at our own stuff is like completely an inevitable like tied up bit.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Well, you're offering -- it's at the root of all the things. So if we want to -- you know, I always use this metaphor that, you know, you can be pulling babies out of a river or you could go upstream and make the person throwing the babies in the river stop. Right? That's kind of systems theory. Right? Like what's the sort of like, you know, core root, root, root thing of the thing? And of course Donella Meadows and indigenous perspectives and you in your book are saying, "Okay. Let's focus on the core thing from which all of these things are growing." And so it offers that. It's also profoundly empowering. Right? I think it, you know -- when I think of out thereness, the out thereness of the problem, I often just go, "Oh. I can't touch that. It's over there." Right?
This kind of, you know, I'll let people with more power handle that and I'm somehow, you know, acquitted from having to do anything. Off the hook. So the invitation is not only implicating, but empowering, if you want to put it in a positive frame. And I also just love the way that this invites us not to just look at all the bad stuff happening. Right? Like if we are going to do -- unleash more of that resistance that you just talked about, if we're going to find a way to, you know, to turn the switch on and activate that potential energy of resistance that you've just hinted at, there could be more, I think this is where it's at is what it feels like to me anyway. And I also just appreciate that you articulate that so beautifully in your book.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. Thanks. I mean it occurred to me as I was starting to think about this save the world script in "How Not to Save the World" that it works -- it works both ways. Like it works to kind of keep people who are already doing change making on certain tracks of how they show up. But it also works in its inverse to keep people away who might otherwise show up. You know, we already talked about the bit about oh if I feel I've got to be pure, I've got to be good [inaudible] I've got to be pure, well, you know, I drive a diesel car, you know. I can't do that. So but it's not just that. I think the script -- what I've got is the last line of the script and the last chapter is we must save the world now, you know, with now in capital letters.
It's like this enormous urgency to saving. And this is where we're really like deep in to the culture here because I think this is ideas from Christianity in operation here about -- and Protestant Christianity specifically. So it has been really interesting talking to lots of change makers from other religious heritages because that whole thing of saving just it's just not salient in the same way. You know, like, you know, I went to, you know, Sunday school as a kid. But, you know, I don't consider myself like actively Christian now, but I suppose I'm culturally Christian.
But I've become very -- and having studied history as well at university years ago I'm interested in the way that it's still in the culture. And I ended up talking to some theologians about this and they were like, "Yes. No. You're not wrong." Like it's there are all sorts of structures, social structures, in the culture and like ways of thinking that are still deeply religious just with God taken out. So this idea of saving being a thing, you know, rather than service, for example -- I mean there is service in Christianity. Don't get me wrong. Lots of people are doing amazing service and they would think of it like that from their Christianity. But --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Or something like being a good ancestor or something. Very different --
Anthea Lawson: Ways of looking at things. This idea of saving is strong. And then the Protestant idea, you know, which has gone obviously deep in to American culture is like it's about the individual. Protestantism is about your individual relationship with God and then, you know -- and then with the idea of like the elect and grace and all of that it's like, "Am I okay? Am I okay enough?" I must carry all of this on my own. And so -- so with the way I think -- I see the script and this is where it's really worth looking at it because the script working in its inverse that way is saying, "Well, I've literally got to save the whole world or I can't do it."
Now look. Nobody logically thinks that. I'm not saying that is a logical thought process. But that's not what we're talking about here. It feels like the task is saving the world. Not helped by the fact that that's a really helpful kind of, you know -- it's journalese. It's a kind of headline writer's shorthand that always gets used. And people have been saying to me for years, "Oh. You're all set. What are you doing? You're off saving the world. Where are you going next?" And it's a casually used phrase, but I became interested in how often it's used. And so actually what I really want to do is if we can look at the antidotes to the script that I've been, you know, finding for these great people I've been talking with, you know, what if we don't have to save it?
You know, what if we use our lifetime while we're here to live well and find our meaning by contributing in service to what can be done? Which might just be in our community. It feels totally different. And it feels like much more accessible and much more inclusive. And I really like I feel like I prefer that way of thinking about it because I mean honestly I'm using this myself now because otherwise it's too much. Right? I can get -- I can get so completely overwhelmed doom scrolling. You know, like the speed at which the bad stuff's coming is it's intense.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Well, and you're speaking to the real heart of the point of the show which is to sort of find ways to help people crack open or move around or dispel or heal, whatever verb you want to describe it with, their pseudo inefficacy or the sense of "I can't do anything." And why we come to a place where we feel we can't do anything is there's lots and lots of reasons.
There's lots and lots of explanations. And you just described a really great one, that sort of deep kind of like, you know, biblical tradition even without the god stuff. We're swimming in this water of, you know, we've sinned and we've got to get back to the garden and we're not good enough and we've got to do it all in our lifetime and individualistic perspective of it which is deep in the reasons why we might feel it's too much to do so I'm not going to do any of it which is the thing I'm really trying myself to offer for the show of helping people get around that.
So thank you for describing that so beautifully. I want to ask one more question and then turn to, you know, your next book, a little bit, you know, pitching how people can learn more about it and what you're thinking you're trying to do there, although you've described some of that quite a bit. But I confess that by the time I finished your book I agreed with everything in it. Just like I'm saying now. I love it. Love it. Love it. I'm like, "Yes. Amen. Preach."
But I got to say that by the time I got to the end of it I didn't really feel like I had any ground to stand on. I had kind of checked my righteousness. I had checked my anger as not necessarily a great, you know, strategy even if it's, you know, a legitimate feeling. I had really examined my savior complex. I'd really examined, you know, how I bring my unmet needs to the work I'm doing and how it's all really about me, not about the work, you know. I had become aware of my over identification of my identity and sense of self with being good and doing good work, bringing, you know -- thinking about my psychological wounds and how they shape my political convictions.
I -- you get to a point in your book we haven't even talked about at all about living in a particular story about how important this work is and how it has to happen right now and how those evil doers out there need to be resisted. You had me thinking about the role of disgust and my will to control and how they operate in me and how they do damage. So all this stuff. This is where -- this is where I was. Right? By the end of your book I'm like okay.
Not to mention how all of this was attached to my positionality, my whiteness, my privilege, etcetera. So once you're left with all that stuff, right, it's kind of taken away, all those rugs pulled out from underneath you which I think are absolutely essential and we've just talked about how critical they are, they're not optional, what do we -- where do like -- what is -- what is a good enough motivation then? What do I get up in the morning for then? What am I doing? How is not all of it motivated by something that's more about my own stories, my own needs, my own will to control and power? Is anything I do not going to be -- you know, going to be free of that? How can I -- how can I continue in the work? You know what I mean?
Anthea Lawson: But the thing is that's being - I diagnose you're a human. You know?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: oh Anthea.
Anthea Lawson: How about that? You know, we're really complex beings. And like we're all a muddle of all of that. And that's fine.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And then what? I mean I have to -- I feel like I need to have some sort of like taproot of fuel, you know, not to use a terrible metaphor, but a tap root of energy, of life force, that helps me say, "Okay. I'm going to go do the harder thing, not the easier thing today." You know?
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. I mean I -- for me it's like just -- you know there's this stage of like there's the journey of going through and like, oh yeah, okay, now I see all of that. And it's a bit like, you know -- you know, maybe because I did a lot of therapy when I was younger, you know, like I don't know. Like I'd already, you know, maybe I'd done some of that. I don't know.
For me the motivations are still the same. It's like, you know, as I said, you know, the anger at what's going on and the passionate knowledge that it doesn't have to be like that and that most of us don't want it like that. The vast majority of people, the vast majority of people, want the same thing. We want to live in dignity. We want to do all right work for enough money to live and have a nice time and raise our kids. And for the world not to be polluted. You know? Like people want the same thing. There was some like massive study across like -- how many countries? It was like -- I don't know. It was like more than 100,000 people across loads of countries and, you know, like 89% of people in the world, you know, want governments to take more political action on climate change. We all want the same stuff. You know? Like here we are. We -- that's what we want.
And we're going to live our lives, you know, being active. We don't need to be activists. We don't need to call ourselves that. Being active in our communities in the direction of greater life. All right? I think of it as being in service to life. You know, these absolute idiots who are running things at the moment are not in service to life. And most of us are. So like that's that -- you know, I mean I can't tell you what motivates you. That's like -- my only answer is I can tell you how I've ended up seeing it. And that's enough. Even in the mess, you know, there is -- and then you can take joy in the small bits of life, you know, whether it's kids or a magnolia tree in flower or whatever it is.
You know, that's part of it. You know, I see the -- you know, the job is that we can always make things less bad than they are even, you know -- even when they seem to be on a downhill slope. You know, it can feel really depressing, but there's always, always, always stuff that we can do as long as we're here. That -- I find that motivating. You know, that gives me meaning. That is all right for me to get up basically. And a great deal of it is because I no longer feel I have to have some great big, yeah, like thing that -- I mean yes. Of course I have aims. You know, there are things. Don't get me wrong. There's stuff I would like to see happen and I'm working towards it. You know, in as much as I can as one human. But it's always with other people. You know, that's why it starts with the conversations. So [inaudible] slightly, but yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: No. I love it. I mean I was sort of, you know, yeah. I love that. I'm human and all the rest of us are human and even in saying what I just said my question I realized, "Oh, there's my need to be good." If I have all of these imperfections then maybe I should just go hide under a rock. You know. Like [laughs].
Anthea Lawson: But I think, you know, this is where, you know, the fundamental psychodynamic principle which is that once we are more aware of something, you know, it does -- it does help. It does help us in the process of doing it less, to become aware. You know, like this is how the whole process of psychotherapy [inaudible] engagement works. And it is true that some of it is embodied. You know, this is why the next front is -- we'll have to do a whole other podcast on this. The next frontier of liberation is somatic practices.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: You are dropping a big gambit there.
Anthea Lawson: Yeah. [Inaudible] I'm really sorry for --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Right at the end. Let's go back to the body.
Anthea Lawson: But, you know, it's true. You know, that stuff about how we show up and the way that it -- the way that this stuff comes through in our physical ways of being and how it affects our interactions and what we can do to change that is obviously super interesting.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I am just really delighted to have had this conversation with you. I would love you to share with people about your book coming out and preorder or where they can find it. They want to know more.
Anthea Lawson: Okay. It's called "How Not to Save the World" and the subtitle is "Doing Good Without Annoying Everyone." Which still makes me laugh. The part -- I wanted to call it "How Not to Save the World." And the publisher was like, "We're sticking that subtitle on." And I was like, "Really?" But actually I've really come around to it because it makes people giggle.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: It is. It's really good. Yeah.
Anthea Lawson: And people do know what you're on about. I think it really helps with the people who are not self identified activists because they're like, "Oh yeah. You [inaudible] annoying." Because I do really I have really written this book not - "The Entangled Activist" I was really writing with activists in mind and it's no coincidence that it's usually self identified activists who, you know, send me photos of how many lines they've underlined because it's like, "Oh god. Someone wrote this down." You know, and I'm glad I did it. And I'm glad it's been helpful and people feel seen. That's good. But I really wanted to go a lot wider with this new one. So "How Not to Save the World" is for anyone who is worried about the world and worried about the state of things and wonders what on Earth they can do. And it's full of positive stories, antidotes to this script, that are accessible to anyone.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. I really feel in this next book you're sort of maybe correcting for -- maybe that's not the right word, but speaking now to a wider audience and inviting more people in to say, "Okay. We're not going to use that word activist." We're going to think about anybody who cares about the flourishing of life. What do you want to do and how we unleash your energy because you've just articulated so much of the reason why people just don't do it? You know? People don't lean in because it's just too much and this and that and the other. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for talking with me, Anthea.
Anthea Lawson: Oh. Thank you. Thanks for your interest. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: That was my conversation with Anthea Lawson, author of "The Entangled Activist" and "How Not to Save the World." Show notes can be found at khsu.org. You can find this and other episodes of "Climate Magic" wherever you find your podcasts. And follow "Climate Magic" on Linked In and Instagram. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray and thanks for listening to "Climate Magic."
