On the need to understand the problems

Just like the climate crisis, threats to democracy cannot be addressed effectively without understanding them clearly.

I’m planning to kick off this thoughtsletter with a series of posts in which I will argue that the present situation with Trumpism in the US and Putin’s war in Europe presents an existential threat to democracy and the free world as a whole.

That of course does not make the climate crisis less severe, and the threats to democracy must not be allowed to make us even more distracted than we already are from addressing the problems of greenhouse gases and their effects on earth’s climate system. Quite on the contrary, I believe that neither of these two problem areas can really be addressed successfully without also addressing the other. Seriously committed and strategic actions are needed in both areas, while appropriately understanding and addressing the interconnectedness of the political and diplomatic obstacles to solving the problems.

The political opposition to what must be done in the area of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and working towards creating a sustainable economy includes not only those who deny the problem outright. There are also many who simply have other, more short-term prioritites. That may to a significant extent be related to the moral failure of not seeking to understand the matter with sufficient clarity. There are no valid excuses anymore for not knowing enough to understand the need for drastic action to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Priorizing short-term objectives over that is now really inexcusable, it’s a kind of serious climate crime to excessively enjoy life today at the expense of future generations.

I believe that what I have just described in regard to the problem of greenhouse gases has significant parallels in the threats to democracy and the free world as a whole, which result from Trumpism in the US and Putin’s war in Europe. The difference being that in regard to the threats to democracy, much less has been written yet with a goal of creating clarity in regard to what precisely the dangers are.

The process for solving any complex problem must start with understanding the problem.

This is doubly true in the context of democratic political processes for problems that require political action and where there are well-paid political agents who seek to push things in the direction of ensuring that any political action that might be taken will be ineffective. In the context of the climate crisis, the influence of the lobbyists of fossil fuel interests is by now well-understood. Similar phenomena exist is the context of the threats to democracy, for example in the form of obvious and not-so-obvious forms of Russian propaganda and in the form of the various hate narratives of far-right populists.

If we don’t really understand the problems and if we don’t learn to focus on what is really relevant to solving them, most of our capacity to pay attention will be absorbed by noise. And if the general public is distracted and confused in regard to what may need to be done, the necessary political will for taking decisive action cannot arise.

For example, US president Trump is an extreme egotist for whom one of his primary priorities seems to be that he himself is seen as important. On the basis of this, I would predict that as long as Putin’s war against Ukraine continues to be be seen as important and continues to be in the news, Trump will continue to do just enough so that he will be seen as a seemingly-important part of those news cycles. This generates lots of media noise that has nothing to do with any path to actually solving the problems.

Therefore, let’s seek to understand the problems well enough so that we will know what is just noise, and so that we can focus on what truly matters.