I'm still basking in "cool guy" status from telling people that my wife and I attended the legendary Burning Man festival earlier this month. We went because our kids got us tickets for Christmas.
In the scorching sandblasted Nevada desert, we joined about 60,000 other "burners" in a temporary, crazy, do-it-yourself encampment organized around 10 principles.
One of them was "Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value." In that spirit, nothing (except ice, coffee and tickets to the event) was bought or sold during the six-day festival. This wasn't barter. It was a frenzy of generosity to strangers.
What struck me most about Burning Man was the scope of the gifting: huge, ornate, fire-belching sculptures donated to be burned down at the end of the festival; giant tents put up to host all-night parties, some with drinks handed out to whoever showed up; massive light-bedecked "art cars" cruising around throbbing with sound; thousands of people giving out food, water, dancing lessons, hugs, musical performances, bike repairs, tea, margaritas, counselling, massages, lectures, clothing… I came home amazed at how easily we're distracted by the dominant belief that people always act rationally to maximize their self-interest. When you go looking for it, the mainstream gifting economy is actually pretty big. Checking online, I went first to Wikipedia, itself a massive giveaway to strangers, built on millions of hours of time donated by other strangers with no expectation of a personal return. There I was reminded of open source software, Linux, all the freely available academic research, and the tsunami of movies, music and opinions given away online. Sure, there is often a hidden reward of recognition, prestige and social network status for the donors, but they're still giving away mountains of time, energy and creativity. That put a fresh lens on the whole multibillion-dollar volunteer sector, the philanthropy industry, family dinners and myriad other manifestations of everyday gifting.
This got me thinking about what else is going on all around us that we don't see because of our embedded blinkers. Like, say, climate change.
Yale professor Dan Kahan says we filter climate change facts coming at us based on the need to adhere to the values of our own "culture" group. The latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be perceived differently if we identify with an "individualist" culture rather than a "communitarian" one, he says. Individualists tend to minimize the risks of climate change because it points to a larger role for government regulators.
Citing U.S. politicians who have been thrown out of office simply for expressing concern about climate change, Kahan says people weigh the impact of believing facts before they accept them. In an interview in the Guardian, Kahan notes, "The impact of making a mistake relative to your group membership is large [e.g., losing an election]. The cost of making a mistake on the science is zero. So I think that people … are going to predictably form views that connect them to their group." That would explain why a senior pipeline executive I recently interviewed said no one in his circle in Calgary was connecting the recent floods to climate change.
Kahan says the secret to building public support for evidence-based policies is to frame them so they can be received without threatening someone's membership in his or her group. That's why more people are now talking about "future-proofing" instead of "adapting to climate change."
Great leaders aren't afraid to embrace facts that hurt. They also work hard to stretch their personal boundaries to bring unsettling facts into focus. Sometimes it takes a push from our kids to see what's really going on. •
