The Omelette Paradox: On using fear and urgency As strategies to stop environmental challenges

Abstract

The sense of both urgency and fear has become central to the process of addressing environmental challenges in our age of computers and satellites. The aggregation of different scientific information (numbers, graphs, images) related to environmental crises has framed policy discourses in a very urgency-driven environment. This paper explores how invoking a sense of fear and urgency is a double-edged sword for society as a whole: on one hand, it provokes ‘awareness’, but on the other hand it provides the owner of the ‘existing privileged patterns’ (i.e. the hegemon) with the opportunity to refrain from stepping into a transformative change and providing appropriate ‘response’. Along with contributing to the Anthropocene debate, this paper illustrates this argument by using the example of how the water crisis in Iran calls into question the ‘legitimacy’ of the dominant hegemon actors (engineers and their technocratic mindsets) and how they react in response. This Iranian case shows how a hegemonic power reconfigures itself at the time of crisis by (1) questioning, and criticizing itself to a certain degrees, and then (2) using urgency narratives to push the discussion towards a control-oriented discourse. In other words, taking a (controlled) critical stance towards the very basic values through which it has come to exist would help it to remain as the gatekeeper in defining the ‘most reasonable’ solution at the time of crisis and urgency. The paper adopts the analogy often used by neoconservatives: “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” to explain this paradoxical behaviour. The paper paints a picture that is not limited to Iran but is clearly visible in the general struggles of capitalism with the issue climate change. Show more