Kari Marie Norgaard Quote

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This state of affairs brings to mind the work of historical psychologist Robert J. Lifton. Lifton’s research on Hiroshima survivors describes people in states of shock, unable to respond rationally to the world around them. He calls this condition “psychic numbing.” Following his initial studies in Japan, much of Lifton’s work has been devoted to describing the effect of nuclear weapons on human psychology, particularly for Americans (see, for example, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial). Out of this project, Lifton describes people today as living in an “age of numbing” due to their awareness of the possibility of extinction (from the presence of both nuclear weapons and the capacity for environmental degradation). In this usage, numbing comes not from a traumatic event, but from a crisis of meaning. Lifton says that all of us who live in the nuclear age experience some degree of psychic numbing. We know that our lives can end at any moment, yet we live as though we do not know this. Lifton calls this condition the “absurdity of the double life.” We live with “the knowledge on the one hand that we, each of us, could be consumed in a moment together with everyone and everything we have touched or loved, and on the other our tendency to go about business as usual – continue with our routines as though no such threat existed.” According to Lifton, the absurdity of the double life profoundly affects our thinking, feeling, identity, sense of empowerment, political imagination, and morality. He writes, “If at any moment nothing might matter, who is to say that nothing matters now?”

– Kari Marie Norgaard, Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life



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