How to ensure that nations slide ever further into selfishness, and ever further to the right.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th June 2014

Any political movement that fails to understand two basic psychological traits will, before long, fizzle out. The first is Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Coined by the biologist Daniel Pauly, it originally described our relationship to ecosystems(1), but it’s just as relevant to politics. We perceive the circumstances of our youth as normal and unexceptional – however sparse or cruel they may be. By this means, over the generations, we adjust to almost any degree of deprivation or oppression, imagining it to be natural and immutable.

The second is the Values Ratchet (also known as policy feedback). If, for example, your country has a public health system which ensures that everyone who needs treatment receives it without payment, it helps instil the belief that it is normal to care for strangers, and abnormal and wrong to neglect them(2,3). If you live in a country where people are left to die, this embeds the idea that you have no responsibility towards the poor and weak. The existence of these traits is supported by a vast body of experimental and observational research, of which Labour and the US Democrats appear determined to know nothing.

We are not born with our core values: they are strongly shaped by our social environment. These values can be placed on a spectrum between extrinsic and intrinsic. People towards the intrinsic end have high levels of self-acceptance, strong bonds of intimacy and a powerful desire to help other people. People at the other end are drawn to external signifiers, such as fame, financial success, image and attractiveness(4). They seek praise and rewards from others.

Research across 70 countries suggests that intrinsic values are strongly associated with an understanding of others, tolerance, appreciation, cooperation and empathy(5,6,7). Those with strong extrinsic values tend to have lower empathy, a stronger attraction towards power, hierarchy and inequality, greater prejudice towards outsiders and less concern for global justice and the natural world(8,9). These clusters exist in opposition to each other: as one set of values strengthens, the other weakens(10,11).

People at the extrinsic end tend to report higher levels of stress, anxiety, anger, envy, dissatisfaction and depression than those at the intrinsic end of the spectrum(12,13,14). Societies in which extrinsic goals are widely adopted are more unequal and uncooperative than those with deep intrinsic values. In one experiment, people with strong extrinsic values who were given a resource to share soon exhausted it (unlike a group with strong intrinsic values), as they all sought to take more than their due(15).

As extrinsic values are strongly associated with conservative politics, it’s in the interests of conservative parties and conservative media to cultivate these values. There are three basic methods. The first is to generate a sense of threat. Experiments reported in the journal Motivation and Emotion suggest that when people feel threatened or insecure they gravitate towards extrinsic goals(16). Perceived dangers – such as the threat of crime, terrorism, deficits, inflation or immigration – trigger a short-term survival response, in which you protect your own interests and forget other people’s.

The second method is the creation of new frames, structures of thought through which we perceive the world. For example, if tax is repeatedly cast as a burden, and less tax is described as relief, people come to see taxation as a bad thing that must be remedied(17). The third method is to invoke the Values Ratchet: when you change the way society works, our values shift in response. Privatisation, marketisation, austerity for the poor, inequality: they all shift baselines, alter the social cues we receive and generate insecurity and a sense of threat.

Margaret Thatcher’s political genius arose from her instinctive understanding of these traits, long before they were described by psychologists and cognitive linguists: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”(18) But Labour and the Democrats no longer have objects, only methods. Their political philosophy is simply stated: if at first you don’t succeed, flinch, flinch and flinch again. They seem to believe that if they simply fall into line with prevailing values, people will vote for them by default. But those values and baselines keep shifting, and what seemed intolerable before becomes unremarkable today. Instead of challenging the new values, these parties keep adjusting. This is why they always look like their opponents, with a five-year lag.

There is no better political passion killer than Labour’s Zero-Based Review(19). Its cover is Tory blue. So are the contents. It promises to sustain the coalition’s programme of cuts and even threatens to apply them to the health service(20). But, though it treats the deficit as a threat that must be countered at any cost, it says not a word about plugging the gap with innovative measures such as a Robin Hood tax on financial transactions, a land value tax, a progressively-banded council tax or a windfall tax on extreme wealth. Nor does it mention tax avoidance and evasion. The poor must bear the pain through spending cuts, sustaining a cruel and wildly unequal social settlement.

At the end of last month, Chris Leslie, Labour’s Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, promised, like George Osborne, that the cuts would be sustained for “decades ahead”(21). He asserted that Labour’s purpose in government would be to “finish that task on which [the Chancellor] has failed”: namely “to eradicate the deficit”. The following day the shadow business secretary, Chuka Umunna, sought to explain why Labour had joined the political arms race on immigration. In doing so, he revealed that his party will be “radical in reforming our economy” in support of “a determinedly pro-business agenda”(22). They appear to believe that success depends on becoming indistinguishable from their opponents.

It’s not quite as mad as the old tactic among some Marxist groups of promoting inequality and injustice in the hope that popular fury would lead to revolution, but it’s not far off. Quite aside from the obvious flaw (what’s the sodding point of voting for a party that offers no substantial change in policy?), it evinces a near-perfect psychological illiteracy. When a party reinforces conservative values and conservative ideas, when it fails clearly to expound any countervailing values, when it refuses to reverse the direction of the Values Ratchet, what outcome does it expect, other than a shift towards conservatism?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Daniel Pauly, 1995. Anecdotes and the Shifting Baseline Syndrome of Fisheries. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 10. 10:430.

2. Stefan Svallfors, 2010 Policy feedback, generational replacement, and attitudes to state intervention: Eastern and Western Germany, 1990-2006, European Political Science Review, 2, 119-135.

3. Tom Crompton, September 2010. Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values. WWF-UK. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf

4. Tim Kasser, November 2011. Values and Human Wellbeing. The Bellagio Initiative. http://www.bellagioinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Bellagio-Kasser.pdf

5. Shalom H. Schwartz, 2006. Basic Human Values: Theory, Measurement, and Applications. Revue Française de Sociologie, 47/4. http://bit.ly/1hL1JFJ

6. Frederick Grouzet et al, 2005. The structure of goal contents across fifteen cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 800-816. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/89/5/800/

7. Tom Crompton, September 2010. Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values. WWF-UK. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf

8. Tim Kasser, November 2011. Values and Human Wellbeing. The Bellagio Initiative. http://www.bellagioinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Bellagio-Kasser.pdf

9. Kennon M. Sheldon and Charles P. Nichols, 2009. Comparing Democrats and Republicans on
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Values. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2009, 39, 3, pp. 589–623.

10. Tim Kasser, November 2011. Values and Human Wellbeing. The Bellagio Initiative. http://www.bellagioinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Bellagio-Kasser.pdf

11. Tom Crompton, September 2010. Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values. WWF-UK. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf

12. Tim Kasser, 2014. Changes in materialism, changes in psychological well-being: Evidence from three longitudinal studies and an intervention experiment. Motivation and Emotion, 38:1–22. doi: 10.1007/s11031-013-9371-4

13. Kennon M. Sheldon and Tim Kasser, 2008. Psychological threat and extrinsic goal striving. Motivation and Emotion, 32:37–45. Doi: 10.1007/s11031-008-9081-5 http://www.selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2008_SheldonKasser_MOEM.pdf

14. Tim Kasser, November 2011. Values and Human Wellbeing. The Bellagio Initiative. http://www.bellagioinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Bellagio-Kasser.pdf

15. Kennon M. Sheldon, and Holly McGregor, 2000. Extrinsic value orientation and the “tragedy of the commons.” Journal of Personality, 68, 383–411. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-6494.00101/abstract;jsessionid=A7F705A627AE58C7814C6AC62749E128.f03t04

16. Kennon M. Sheldon and Tim Kasser, 2008. Psychological threat and extrinsic goal striving. Motivation and Emotion, 32:37–45. Doi: 10.1007/s11031-008-9081-5 http://www.selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2008_SheldonKasser_MOEM.pdf

17. Tom Crompton, September 2010. Common Cause: The Case for Working with our Cultural Values. WWF-UK. http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf

18. http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104475

19. http://www.yourbritain.org.uk/uploads/editor/files/Zero_Based_Review.pdf

20. “We will be cutting departmental spending in 2015-16 and not raising it, with no more borrowing to cover day-to-day spending”
“The fundamental principle of the Zero-Based Review is that all spending is in scope and all budgets will be challenged. The review will cover all areas of public spending, including those that have been protected in the current Spending Review such as health”.

21. http://press.labour.org.uk/post/87284550049/long-termism-in-public-finance-speech-by-chris-leslie

22. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/labour-immigration-ukip-farage

The Arizona Geological Survey has released “Earth fissures of central and southern Arizona”, the .kmz file.

For Google Earth users it is a great tool for visualizing earth fissures. The data set includes all mapped fissures – 100s of miles – that have been published as part of the AZGS earth fissure program at http://azgs.az.gov/map_services.shtml That link takes you to their Map and Database services, the Google Earth fissures link is on the left side, third from the top.

Here is a screenshot from Google Earth (black = continuous fissures; red = discontinuous fissures; green = unconfirmed fissures). If you don’t have a copy of Google Earth you can download and install it for free here“. Then just click the link on the AZGS website and the fissures file will automatically open in the Google Earth window.

“This video was edited and compiled from raw footage recorded by a camera equipped radio collar that was put on a female polar bear in the Beaufort Sea during April 2014 by the US Geological Survey.” Quoted from the USGS video release.

Spring and early summer are some of the most active times for ticks. Learn how to recognize ticks, how to avoid tick bites and how to remove a tick from your skin.

The amount of natural gas in storage is far below normal. This could have a significant impact upon winter electricity rates and the availability of natural gas during the winter heating season.

“Scientists working in southern Saskatchewan, Canada have found fossilized plants showing evidence of an ancient wildfire, offering clues about forest ecosystems during the age of dinosaurs.” Quoted from the Christian Science Monitor.

Related: Similar evidence is commonly seen in Carboniferous coal seams.

U.S. News & World Report has a speculative article about using geoengineering to curb Antarctic ice loss and sea level rise.

“In a potential shift in German energy policy, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel is preparing a framework that would let energy companies extract oil and natural gas by the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing.” Quoted from The New York Times.

“Miami scientists scrambled last week to rescue a crop of unusually hardy coral from an unlikely underwater garden at the bottom of one of the world’s busiest shipping channels.” Quoted from the Miami Herald.

“As the probability of an El Niño winter increases, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego researchers are following the climate phenomenon as it develops off Southern California and finding that local readings closely hew to El Niño monitoring taking place at the equator.” Quoted from the Scripps press release.

“In Maryland and the rest of the U.S., mosquito season begins with a new species, a new disease, and new strategies for pest control.” Quoted from the National Geographic article.

“Then on June 6th 1816 weather history was made when snow accumulated across much of England. Snow flurries occurred in the mountains of northeastern PA!”

“Newly analyzed lunar rocks have revealed the first direct evidence of the ancient smashup that created the moon.” Quoted from the National Geographic article.

Labradorite is a feldspar mineral of the plagioclase series. Some specimens exhibit a schiller effect, which is a strong play of iridescent blue, green, red, orange, and yellow colors. Labradorite is so well known for these spectacular displays of color that the phenomenon is known as “labradorescence.”

Mineral hardness picks are pencil-like tools that have points made from materials that match the hardness of minerals in the Mohs Hardness Scale. With them you can easily test the hardness of mineral grains in a rock and test the hardness of small-size specimens. In our opinion they are easier to use than pieces of minerals and allow you to obtain more accurate results. They also do not contaminate your specimen with particles of the hardness mineral.