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For the past several years, my work has focused on how the subject incorporates aspects of the sociopolitical environment into the unconscious in manifold ways that affect intrapsychic and intersubjective experience (Hollander, 1991, 1992, 1996a, 1996b, , 2006a, 2006b, 2008). I have been especially interested in individual and group experience of destructiveness and the various ways human beings disavow the threat that results from their aggressivity to protect themselves from paranoid-schizoid anxieties. I have examined this dynamic in the context of terrifying political situations, such as repressive military dictatorships in Latin America or the post-9/11 culture of fear in the US (Hollander, , 2004b). In extreme social situations, perpetrators shore up their power through ideological principles that justify their aggression. They also employ psychological defenses that permit them to avoid knowing about the truth of their destructive attacks on others. The rest of the population struggles to avoid feelings of helplessness in the face of the threatening practices of those in power. They protect themselves in part by disavowing what they know. In so doing, they become a bystander population to the perpetrators' destructiveness and wind up reinforcing existing policies and institutions (; Hollander, 2004a).
I have been struck by how similar dynamics are at work in an even more alarming context, namely human destructiveness toward nature. In this paper I want to discuss the alliance between not knowing and destructiveness related to the growing ecological crisis. It seems to me that the difference between fantasy and reality collapses in the face of threats to the survivability of humanity and the earth itself. In spite of all evidentiary-based knowledge, many decision-makers and citizens alike cannot tolerate knowing about this fact or they oscillate between knowing or sort of knowing and not knowing at all. This dilemma suggests a need to review how we got to this