Why do we feel ourselves to be powerless? – The psychology of the climate crisis

Apples for trash

There was a Subcarpathian Hungarian folk tale in my textbook at primary school, in which the son of a rich man loaded up two wagons with apples and set off on a journey to find his wife-to-be. He didn’t stop until he had reached the seventh village, where he started to sell his produce in the middle of the market. However, he asked not for money but rubbish for his apples. All the rich girls took him tons of trash and in return received delicious apples, but the boy didn’t like any of them so he continued on his way.

Finally, just one apple remained, the finest and the reddest. This is when the poor girl appeared, with barely any rubbish in the bottom of her basket. The boy was looking for exactly such a wife, they married and lived happily ever after.

However much I wracked my brains, I simply couldn’t work this story out. I was puzzled. As the daughter of a ten-sibling family living in a hamlet in Baranya county, and later on in a farm in Kiskunság without conveniences or rubbish collection, it was strange that what for us was natural was for others of such value. Of course, at that time there was not even a whisper of such things as the ecological footprint, the zero waste movement, and we similarly had not an inkling of the holy trinity of reduce-reuse-recycle. My parents moved from the Budapest downtown to the countryside in order to get back to nature and produce what was needed. My mother learnt all about growing vegetables, kneading bread and the secrets of making preserves and jams from Swabian housewives, my father took care of the animals, while we turned over their fresh hay in the summer heatwaves and in return they gave us fresh milk which we made into cottage cheese, sour cream and cheese. Our life was an exciting adventure but sometimes I longed for the shop which was an unreachable distance by foot from our farm, because there one could get fresh yeast which gave a totally different (and for me much better) tasting bread than the sourdough matured in the summer sun.

Why was there such a high price to pay for paper-wrapped yeast, or the petrol used to get to the shop?

Although we never spoke about it, we received a truly environmentally-conscious upbringing, yet as an adult it still appeared totally natural that the needs of my little family and our convenience should be at the centre of my attention. I personally experienced how easy it is for a person to get swept away by the individualistic social orientation, and how aware one must be in order not constantly to chase after the latest, the biggest, the most modern and the most beautiful.

Proximity and illustration

Despite being aware of the incredible degree to which our lifestyle is polluting our environment, and that change cannot be delayed any more, we still make every effort – with the help of various self-protective mechanisms – to sweep the facts under the carpet. Through denial, we don’t have to face up to the burdensome realization, which also plays into our hands, that the truly serious problems are happening far from us (the melting of the polar icecaps and glaciers, rising sea levels, ever more frequent storms and tornadoes, the extinction of flora and fauna) and, for the moment at least, they do not have a direct impact on us. According to psychology, the fact of proximity basically determines how much the given case moves us emotionally or spurs us into action. As long as the problem is not evident in our immediate environment, then we won’t even lift a finger to help.