I am watching the final episode of Andor, where the resistance leaders are reluctant to take the info about the death star seriously.
As I was watching it, my thoughts told me this is unrealistic, far-fetched, and written just to create tension.
The source has been reliable in the past. People have died for the info. Creating a super-weapon is just what the Empire would do. If there is just the tiniest possibility it’s true, they need to take it very seriously. It doesn’t cost much to take it seriously and seek to gather more info and do something about it. And it wouldn’t take away from what they would do anyway. It fits right into what they need to do no matter what.
So why reject the info? It seems too illogical to be realistic.
Then I remembered this world. A world where climate change is still debated and not taken seriously, even if… (a) The science is clear. (b) It’s a subset of a far more serious issue, global ecological overshoot, which we know is happening. (c) It doesn’t change what we need to do. We need to create a civilization with a much smaller ecological footprint, that’s not in ecological overshoot, and that is regenerative as a whole and in the details.
The resistance leaders in Andor rejecting the info seems illogical, childish, and unrealistic.
And yet, it’s exactly what we see in the world today when it comes to climate change and global ecological overshoot.
I should add something about why they reject the info. In Andor, they reject it because it comes from someone they don’t particularly like. They allow their own dislikes to override a more rational decision. That too is what we see in this world. Some of those who reject climate change – and don’t take ecological overshoot seriously – do so because they don’t like the ones who traditionally have taken it seriously. They don’t want to be associated with (the ones they see as) hippies and liberals. They hold onto an identity that doesn’t allow it.
Of course, that too is very human, a trauma response typical of our domination culture, and misguided, childish, and irrational.