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There has been much talk of the need to love each other and to love the environment, but
the real need on Earth has been to love the dark side of ourselves.
The truth is that focusing on the environment was a way of avoiding the real issue of ‘self’.
It was a way of relieving yourself of the issue of the human condition through finding
a cause that made you feel good about yourself. It was a way of escaping the unbearable issue
of the human condition. Great quote from TIME magazine editor Richard Stengel recognised
this when he wrote that ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free
issue’. Yes, environmentalism, as it has been practiced,
has been a way to make humans feel good, feel ‘guilt-free’, rather than a way to repair
the world, because actually repairing the world required that we confront and repair
ourselves. As I have said, there has been much talk of
the need to love each other and to love the environment, but the real need on Earth has
been to love the dark side of ourselves, to find reconciling and redeeming understanding
of that–to explain the psychological origins of our deeply distressed condition and by
so doing heal our troubled souls and set ourselves free.