Interest never lies. Karl Marx’s old rule of thumb is indispensable in judging the driving forces of individuals and groups. But if one takes a closer look, it is often more complicated.

There are at least three phenomena that mess up the picture for homo economicus. People can misunderstand their real interest, out of ignorance or under the influence of clever PR. People can define their interest in unexpectedly complicated ways. They sometimes have an altruistic side that neither Marx nor Darwin managed to explain.

All democratic politics revolves around these phenomena, mainly the first two. On the basic level, it is always about conflicting interests. The poor want resources reallocated, the rich want to be exempt from taxes. Organised interests, like trade unions or employers, by definition want to appropriate privileges at the cost of others.

On the next level, which is more interesting, it is about how people view the three phenomena above. To take the example of Sweden: If you emphasise the first factor, that the broad middle class has chosen to have the highest tax burden in the world because, in your view, this misunderstanding deceives people into believing it is in their favour, then you probably vote to the right.

If you emphasise the second factor, that social cohesion via the welfare system produces a more humane society albeit at the cost of reduced dynamism, then you probably vote to the left.

So the way people vote says something not just about what interest they have. Above all, it says something about what their view of reality is, what mental outlook they have.

If you want to mess with Marx and highlight the wonderful humaneness of humankind, then you emphasis the third factor, altruism. Individuals who act against their own superficial interest are really trustworthy, civilised and fascinating.

The issue of climate change, which has been so hotly debated in recent years, has provided us with new insights into almost everything, from geology and ecology to psychology, media logic and political economy. Rarely has a single problem linked everything to our physical environment in such a thought-provoking way.

Interest does not lie when it comes to the issue of climate change. Quite predictably, people have taken positions on the problem of greenhouse gases so that directors of electricity-intensive industries deny the scientific connections while people who were already critical of capitalism are rushing in the opposite direction.

So far, at the basic level, the greenhouse effect is largely a political Rorschach test. Individuals who favour a redistribution of wealth and have few means tend to see an existential threat in the issue of climate change, whereas stockholders and SUV drivers with frequent flyer miles on Singapore Airlines take the question less seriously.

In the extremes, the situation is the opposite. Really poor people have no room to worry about the weather in a hundred years. On the other hand, real wealth, not just economic but also spiritual and social wealth, is often forced to take long-term responsibility.

Countries with explosive economies, electricity production from coal and a penchant for large cars and steaks – like the US and China – oppose binding agreements on emissions. Egalitarian-oriented countries that are blessed with fossil-free electricity – like Sweden – are pushing in the opposite direction.

Oil-producing countries without other sources of income – like in the Arab world – deny the problem of carbon dioxide as fervently as many of their Christian customers. Corrupt African regimes that have never shown the slightest environmental concern use the threat of climate change resulting from the lifestyle of the industrial world as a pretext for more aid, as the memory of colonialism fades.

People know where the interested parties are, at the individual, organisational and national level. But as with the policy of redistributing wealth, the issue of climate change has dimensions that are more complicated than that. It attracts archetypes that show us who we are, and where we are headed.

It is hardly possible to distinguish the scientific truth from the cultural view of reality and the ideological garb of interest politics, and perhaps not even desirable. If climate change is in fact anthropogenic, caused by humanity, then we represent both the problem and the solution.

We are, at the same time, perpetrators and victims, with nature serving as a neutral arena in which life will tick on just fine in new forms even if the temperature were to rise six degrees. We are not the only things that would disappear. From this perspective, we are not discussing an external climate, but rather an internal, psychological climate.

What distinguishes humans from animals is the ability to consciously plan the future, making moral calculations and imagining how one’s own actions today will affect others tomorrow.

The great environmental threats are a test of our ability to live in harmony with nature. We stopped doing that two million years ago.

There has never been biological harmony. Life is destructive. Humankind’s natural conditions are to live on the edge of starvation for at most 35 years, hunted by predators and plagued by insects. What is natural is to see every other infant die, often together with the mother trying to give birth.

When we succeeded in elevating ourselves above these conditions, we became cultural beings. Only children and fools would want to go back. Thus far, there is no contradiction between ecology, humanism and economic growth. There are simply more or less adroit or awkward ways to resolve the problems of survival.

Carl Gustav Jung’s ideas about inherited patterns of thought, about the shifting between the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious and the conscious, say as much about the issue of climate change as the findings of the UN panel of researchers.

In Jungian psychology, the Shadow constitutes the evil and the undesirable in humans. A related archetype, cherished especially by our modern popular culture, is that of humans as an undesirable disturbance in creation.

The big-screen mega hit of 2010, James Cameron’s Avatar, bears witness to this myth. Whereas the blue aliens have sensual contact with every living thing, the human race is symbolised by a bomb-happy military and profit-hungry business executives.

Civilisation is a bulldozer. In contrast, nature centres on the great mother Tree of Souls, with its airborne seeds which are “pure spirits”, and wondrous trees that connect every living being to Eywa, the spark of life and the source of considerateness.

There is not much to be said about eleven-year-old girls falling for this fantasy; it is My Little Pony but on another planet. But when the film earns a billion dollars in two weeks, and adults the world over stagger out of the cinema darkness crying about the wretchedness of humans, there is reason to wonder.

The three-dimensional Avatar has surpassed Titanic as the most profitable move in history, undoubtedly an ironic result of an epic arrangement with profit seekers. We have seen and heard this story many times before, but never with such extravagant film sets. Disney has told the tale in films like The Lion King and Pocahontas. Every other nature programme on televisions and thousands of books, with James Lovelock’s Gaia leading the way, have drummed in the idea of humankind’s ecological fall from grace.

The world and life were in balance. Then we rumbled into paradise with our soulless civilisation. Avatar is more than good-looking animation, an intergalactic Romeo and Juliette story and a commercial combination of love and war. Avatar is a sermon about nature as good and humans as evil. We must improve and get in touch with our biological roots. Or else. We have to bow before sacred nature in worship, because it is superior to humans.

It is not surprising that the Catholic Church has reacted to this pantheistic hocus pocus. Every now and then, with a gap of a few decades, the pope has a point. This is one of those times. According to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Avatar is empty, simplistic and seductive. “Not much behind the pictures” is one headline. Benedict XVI has sometimes been called “the green pope” because of his environmental commitment, but here he winds up on a collision course, for instance, with Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, who has praised Avatar for its message to protect nature.

The pope must have an environmental interest in line with his conservative philosophy of protecting creation, but he also warns against putting humans and animals on an equal level. The new pantheism, with nature replacing God, is not a way to salvation, according to the Papal See, and that is something that even atheists can endorse.

The Vatican was right in its opposition to Communism in the 20th century. Similarly, the pope is right in his opposition to the neo-paganism that is advancing in the 21st century. It is a question of humanism, of putting humankind at the centre, rather than of religious dogmas or competing for souls.

For many, the religion of ecology has become an atheist substitute for good old-fashioned faith in God. If we do not get back to nature, we are doomed to destruction, according to these storytellers. As a result, we are now in another archetype, the doomsday scenario.

Crime and punishment. As it is in St John’s Book of Revelations, it is in hit films like The Day after Tomorrow and 2012.

The notion of world destruction is found in every culture, which makes it one of the most human things we have. Perhaps it is a question of transferred anxiety over our own inevitable death as individuals. Perhaps it is a question of an inherited realisation of life’s innate destructiveness, or an instinctive understanding of the limited amount of time the Earth will turn.

In any case, the threat of climate change fits perfectly with a story that has already been learnt. We have lived too well for too long. And now to await, literally, the Flood.

The story is so good that a person cannot help but be suspicious. But just because we have heard someone cry wolf before does not have to mean that the wolf is a figment of imagination this time. Quite the opposite – the myths about the punishment of the gods are perhaps the ultimate guide to survival, an ancient, functional warning to change our ways in time because we live unsustainably.

This explains why the issue of climate change is so loaded. It is to all appearances dressed as enlightenment, wrapped in scientific arguments and empirically based predictions, but at the same time plays on obscure archetypes in the collective subconscious.

This contradiction is illustrated by the frontlines in the debate. The people who today go against conventional wisdom and call themselves climate sceptics (apart from being obvious interested parties) are often the same types of characters that a few decades went against the flow and discovered the problem.

Enlightenment borders on conspiracy theory. Critical thinking borders on distrust of authorities.

As changes in the climate accelerate, this pattern will intensify. We do not know exactly what the effects will be of growing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It may be worse or better than we think, but we know that the level will rise.

Without some miraculous technological breakthrough, there is almost nothing to indicate that people will leave coal and oil in the ground. We will have to live with the external question of climate change. But it is the internal question of climate change that will determine our fate.

This involves two battles in the human psyche: enlightenment against ignorance and pluralism against monism. The enlightened attitude is to be influenced by science, plan for the future and show consideration for other people, as well as for future generations. The ignorant attitude is to deny the facts, and live totally in the present, without any consideration for one’s surroundings.

But enlightenment itself is split in two between a dictatorial and democratic impulse. The climate problem is so gigantic that it invites fanatical reactions and methodical solutions. The same people who recently wanted to abolish capitalism in the name of equality now want to abolish it in the name of the environment.

To that extent, the debate on climate change becomes a sublimated struggle over the same old politics. The question here is to keep two complicated issues in one’s head at the same time.

Most people would say that enlightenment and pluralism are positive values, as opposed to superstition and monism, that is, an extremist focus on a single perspective. We have already seen a marriage between environmental commitment and socialism, which is logical insofar as both are based on a critique of the market economy, but illogical insofar as communism never did anything for the environment.

The next step in this ideological evolution may be a marriage between Islamism and environmental commitment. The prohibition against interest on loans, the opposition to capitalism, the culture of consumption, individualism and the open society unite two lines of thought.

The fact that Osama bin Ladin and company have not yet latched on is because they do not embrace enlightenment, so they do not understand the scientific arguments behind the issue of climate change. Other thinkers will make the connection for them.

In late January, the Arabic television station Al-Jazeera in fact obtained a tape in which a person said to be Osama bin Ladin entered the debate on climate change: “All the industrialised countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.” Following this was a tirade against “Bush the son” for the US refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

This perhaps sounds like a fake, but al-Qaeda and similar movements are pragmatic when it comes to methods. They may well take advantage of the ideological opportunity that the issue of climate change offers. Just like with 9/11 and its repercussions, when a wedge was driven through Western society, the climate threat is also driving a wedge.

The elite against the people, class against class, young against old, the US against Europe. If the open society is weakened by internal struggles, its enemies may raise their profile.

Alongside this ideological tug of war, we have a global antagonism between functioning and dysfunctional societies. The Mugabification of international politics was noted in the climate summit meeting in Copenhagen, where poor developing countries advanced positions with moral arguments.

This phenomenon also has two dimensions. On the one hand, shameless attempt by incompetent, thievish regimes to lay the blame on democracies; on the other, legitimate demands for compensation from those paying the environmental price for our consumption feast.

The issue of climate change will thus be loaded with all the key conflicts of our time. We have every reason to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, but not at any cost and not by meeting nature or the fanatics half-way.

The weather will be what will be. It is the drama in our heads that will determine the future of our grandchildren.