Berlin Hero

Combatting the psychology of mass delusion

Berlin Hero

I watched an amazing German movie tonight, Der Held vom Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. The Hero of Frederick Street Train Station, or Berlin Hero, is about the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – 1989 to 2019. A video store attendant by the name of Micha is contacted by a journalist with a story about his role in enabling about 150 East Germans to escape to the West in 1984. The story is that the guy was a railway worker who switched the rails so a train was able to cross the Spree River into freedom in West Berlin. This movie served as quite a difficult parable for me about issues in climate change, and that is the focus of this post. Don’t read it if you don’t want to know how the movie ends.

The Emperor Napoleon is paraphrased at the end of the movie, with a famous line, that history is the lies we agree on. This is a theme that has been widely discussed regarding the history of the Eastern Bloc under the Russians, but it is something with wide ongoing relevance. It relates to Paul Simon’s famous line ‘a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.’

In the movie, the journalist interviews Micha after reading his Stasi file, and ends up publishing a smash hit article and book presenting him as a great freedom fighter, a hero inspired by Nelson Mandela. That ends up leading to a romance between Micha and one of the freed passengers, a TV appearance, advertising deal, meeting with the Bundespresident, and invitation to be guest speaker at the Bundesrat – the German federal parliament – at the event marking the thirtieth anniversary. Complicating all this, Misha had explained to the journalist after the article came out that he made stuff up in exchange for money, and they agreed to hush it up.

Everyone wants it to be a true story, because it touches so many emotional and political buttons, but it is all lies. As people delve into the facts, an ex-Stasi apparatchik explains that Micha had smashed a switch after misunderstanding orders, with no idea that would allow the train to cross the river. By the way, I travelled back and forth over that bridge when I visited Berlin in 2022, and I have a bit of German, enough to follow the movie along with the subtitles, so had an interest apart from its parable about the psychology of mass delusion. There is a commemorative section of the Berlin Wall next to the bridge, with each panel painted by a different artist. Here is a film I made of it.

His new girlfriend slaps him and drives off from their romantic picnic when Micha goes all gooey and vulnerable and confesses to her, rudely puncturing her fantasy of Micha as hero, which had been enough for her to imagine a relationship, even though she is a top prosecutor and he is a bum. He gets to the Bundesrat only to be told he has been replaced as speaker, after he intends to replace his crafted fantasy speech with the truth. At the urinal he gets told his wife had been installed by the Stasi to inform on him after the train episode, brutally popping the balloon of his identity. He wanders outside and gets into an altercation with police and is arrested. A beautiful irony in the movie is that the politicians recruit some bumbling ex-Stasi operatives to spy on Misha, illustrating that the old ways die hard. How the mighty are fallen.

How does this relate to climate change? Our world is beset by vast clashing climate mythologies, both equally false, equally emotional, and equally dangerous. On the one side, deniers insist that climate change is a hoax. On the other side, decarbonistas insist that cutting emissions could slow warming. These rival story-complexes reflect what people want to believe, mixing fact, fantasy, hope and interests.

My own view is that the missing middle in this war of giants is the fact that unless we reverse the 2% darkening that has happened to our planet this century we face certain economic collapse. I fully recognise carbon science, but see the need to present the albedo story, the need to restore lost sunlight reflection, as the main crucial problem. I have experimented with telling conservative audiences that nothing we do about carbon can make a difference to heat, as a highly simplified way to inject albedo into their awareness, based on playing to their political sympathies. Unfortunately their inoculation against objectivity is so intense that the very mention of climate change inspires immediate hysteria.

This week I read a stupid article in The Australian newspaper supporting the conservative campaign to abandon emission reduction as a climate policy. My approach, which it seems is too complicated for this audience, is to endorse this campaign on the tactical basis that it might get people to recognise that if we can’t stop warming by cutting emissions we should look for other ways to do so.

So I commented on the article as follows: “The trouble with the net zero debate is the failure to take climate seriously. Nothing anyone does about carbon can slow global warming, which actually is a security problem. That means the only way to stabilise the climate is international cooperation to govern and deploy solar geoengineering.” This is obviously a highly simplified statement, given that eventually carbon has to be managed, but I was interested to see the reaction.

There were two responses to my comment. Note that the first response received 26 reader likes, while my comment received none.

First response: “there is no climate change happening. It’s got cooler in the last 50 years. The oceans haven’t risen due to melting ice caps no matter how many tipping points were passed. 97% of CO2 is natural and it’s heavier than air so can’t be in the upper atmosphere heating the planet. The only security threat is destroying our energy grid and economy by creating mountains of toxic renewable waste.” 26 likes

Second Response: “The trouble with Net Zero is that it is unnecessary anyway. The planet is not catastrophically heating. Not that there is any sound evidence that CO2 is the culprit at all. The current Lower Troposphere temperature, measured by the NASA/NOAA satellites (which are the only long-term reliable system), is lower than the peak that occurred in 1998. We are well into the decline of Solar Cycle 25, with 2030 promising severe chills and the only rational and evidence based climate science positing a Grand Solar Minimum akin to the Little Ice Age in the ensuing decades. If we go full tilt in restoring our coal and gas fired power generation, with nuclear in the future, we might just survive what is coming. Wind and solar are never going to provide the reliable needs for the future.” 16 likes

For those outside the echo chamber paywall of conservative media, the insanity of these responses is readily apparent. The astounding indifference to the truth illustrates the thickness of the emotive carapace and the elaborate conspiratorial mythology that now justifies denial of basic climate science.

But unfortunately, climate activists are just as bad, farcically seeking to ban discussion of sunlight reflection on the futile basis that this might assist their campaign to demolish the whole fossil economy. There is simply no prospect of this campaign succeeding, for a combination of technical and political reasons.

Getting back to the movie, the parable is that attractive lies can readily outcompete facts, if only for a time. The psychology of delusion is hardwired into human neurology. Discussing this endemic problem is essential to overcoming it.

Robert Tulip