Boiling Frogs

That's our future, so I'm told; we'll all be boiling frogs. We're just not built to react to gradual changes before it's too late; we only react when the threat is immediate.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

I think we all know about the fable of the boiling frog. The story goes like this: if you put a frog in water that's already boiling, it will jump out immediately. But if you put that same frog in water that's a nice comfortable temperature and turn the heat up slightly, it will just float there and let itself be boiled with a proverbial smile on its face; the frog's survival instincts are geared towards detecting sudden changes. And so it seems to be with us, humans.

This story is used in many debates, usually as a metaphor about, or an argument against creeping normality; the way a major change can be accepted as a normal situation if it happens slowly through unnoticeable increments of change. The boiling frog is used by libertarians to explain why we, in their opinion, blindly accept the slow erosion of civil rights, and by psychiatrists to explain how people get stuck in abusive relationships. It could be argued that slowly but surely, over the past decades, the global neoliberal economy has eroded everything that stood between democracy and plutocracy, that slowly but surely we've let capitalism fail again.

The boiling frog was used also by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth, to warn humanity about the slow but certain advent of climate disasters due to climate change. One one hand, this may have been the most effective and justifiable use of the metaphor yet, because we're literally talking about the planet heating up, and our inability as inhabitants of the planet to come together to start solving the problem. On the other hand however, I have a strong objection against the use of this metaphor; it reduces the problem to the level of the individual, as is always the case in the neoliberal mindset. YOU are the frog and YOU need to take action... Generally speaking though, the story is true; we humans, as individuals and as a collective, only take action when the threat is imminent, which is why each war is preceded by a propagandist brainwash-campaign to, for example, demonize those who live on top of "our" oil.

I hope we'll soon start acting like real frogs; the story about the boiling frog is a fable, it's not true. Real frogs will jump out of the heating bath as soon as the temperature gets uncomfortable. Frogs are ectotherms; they don't have an internal control mechanism for regulating their body temperature, like we warm-blooded animals do, which makes them wholly dependent on the environment... And so are we, even if we're warm-blooded mammals. It's time to recognize that the water of our socioeconomic environment is heating up, time to jump over to another pool of thought that's less polarized, less heated and less complacent. Perpetual growth and radical individualization have slowly heated up the neoliberal waters of western society, and we can clearly see the boiling-points of fascism and climate change approaching. Time to take political, grassroots and individual action.

"We cannot solve our problems using the same thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein

_{An Inconvenient Truth (FROG ANALOGY)}

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