Thinking of ourselves as pegs tethered by rubber bands to the peg-board of Life helps explain our resistance to scientific evidence and attraction to emotion-driven narratives. The Pegs & Rubber Band model serves the See Through Network in its climate mission to speed up carbon drawdown by helping the inactive become active – might it work for you?

This article describes the Peg-Board and Rubber Band theory of change, designed to help understand and overcome cognitive rigidity in those who are unmoved by climate science.

The Peg-board

Picture an infinite peg-board.

Row after row of peg-holes, converging on the horizon, in every direction. 

That’s Life.

Our Peg

When we’re born, we become pegs inserted into this infinitely vast matrix. 

When we die, we’re removed. 

In between, we may move to different holes in the peg-board as we live out our lives.

The Rubber Bands

Whether we move, how far, and how fast, is determined by rubber bands. 

Rubber bands tether us, like tent-ropes, to our hole. 

Each rubber band is connected not to the ground, but to other pegs around us. 

My peg is held in place by my unique combination of elastic guy-ropes, you by yours. 

Each other peg tugs our peg towards them, and vice versa. They pull us, we pull them.

So long as these tensions cancel each other out, we stay in our peg-board hole. 

When one rubber band prevails, we jump a hole or more in its direction, until we reach a new equilibrium.

Colours

Both rubber bands and pegs come in different sizes, colours and thicknesses

Pink rubber bands, for family and friend relationships, are particularly strong. 

Even infant pegs are held in place by various other types of coloured bands, each with an infinitely different range of shades. 

• Black for money ties. 
• Brown for legal bonds. 
• Shades of puce for shared religion. 
• Blue for common languages. 
• Gold for cultural connections. 
• Yellow for xenophobia. 
• Purple for musical taste.
• etc.

The combination and strength of these rubber bands may change over our lifetimes, but our peg is always the central post in our unique cat’s cradle.

People Pegs

Some of the other pegs are other people. 

When we’re first inserted in life’s peg-board, they’re the only ones we’re aware of: mother, father, siblings.

As babies, our main attachments are to people pegs. Pink rubber bands connecting us to family and friends tend to be the most powerful forces holding our pegs in place, and often remain strong until we die. 

Indeed, as we age, pink rubber bands that have thinned can regain their strength. Family ties can become as strong to an invalid grandparent as their infant grandchild.

Entity Pegs

There are also non-human pegs, like churches, businesses, ideologies or cultures. Their rubber bands, though thick, are invisible to babies, and sometimes to adults. 

As we grow older, these entity-pegs can become more visible, though many of us die without ever being aware of them. 

Huge entity pegs exert huge force on huge numbers of people, though in different ways depending on the other rubber bands they’re competing with. The tension a Catholic exerts on the Vatican can appear negligible, like our gravitational pull on Earth, but exists nonetheless.. 

Entity pegs can appear immutable, but also have lifespans. Religions, ideologies, scientific theories, multinationals, superhero franchises all arrived on the peg-board at some point, and will disappear at some future point. 

Norse God rubber bands exert little influence these days. Pop bands that dominate teenage years can disappear into obscurity. Languages we were fluent in as young children can be entirely forgotten.

Culture, language and ideologies pegs can outlive us, or come and go in the course of our own lifetimes.

At any given point in our lives, however, other pegs, whether human or entity, exert their own forces on us individually, via the thickness of the rubber bands connecting us to them.

Moving position

Most of the time, the competing tensions in our personal cat’s cradle cancel each other out. 

If nothing changes, we remain in our hole. 

Not moving means our view of the rest of the peg-board changes little. The less we move, the less likely we are to discover new rubber band connections.

For the incurious, deprived or isolated, entire lives can come and go without moving a single hole in the matrix. 

People with what behavioural psychologists call ‘cognitive rigidity’ created their own limitations on movement.

Most of us, however, move a few holes over the course of our lives, even if we don’t stray too far, and are amenable to new rubber bands, if they appear attractive.

We move when new tensions are created by new rubber bands, or existing tensions are released as old rubber bands thin or disappear. Both change the forces acting on our peg. 

When the new combination of rubber bands overcomes the inertia created by our peg-hole, we move position. 

It’s just physics.

Speed of change

During our time on Life’s peg-board, even a series of short hops to neighbouring holes can leave us a long way from where we started.

Loss of religious faith, getting richer or poorer, shifting migration patterns, can occur over years or decades.

Sometimes, a sudden realignment of rubber band tensions can fling us across the peg-board in great leaps, like ‘punctuated equilibrium’ or mass extinctions in evolution.

In our personal peg-spans, great leaps can be triggered by religious conversion, moving from a village to a city, gaining a child, losing a parent, being caught up in a war, or reading a climate science article. 

All these can add or sever powerful rubber bands in an instant, whisking our peg unimaginable distances, until we land in a new hole in unexpected and unfamiliar territory.

Simple/complex shifts

The addition or removal of a single rubber band can move pegs on their own. 

Single rubber band shifts tend to be quite noticeable. These rubber bands – war, death, birth, conversion etc – are unmissably massive, and come in bright colours.

More often, our pegs are moved shorter distances by a complex interaction of many other rubber bands. The more rubber bands, the less obvious their connection can be to the movement.

Single event rubber band catastrophes, like a flash floor, wildfire, drone attack, or pandemic, can fling you and all your neighbours in the same direction. 

Longer-term complex catastrophes, like climate change, have far more complex outcomes. 

Populist politician pegs favour primary-coloured rubber bands offering simple solutions (usually involving blaming foreigners) to complex problems. 

Such rubber bands are attractive and effective at connecting with large numbers of people, even if they can’t solve the issues they claim to address, because the real impetus is not culture wars or miscegeny, but climate change.

As proof, in any discussion about migrants, asylum-seekers or refugees, try prefacing these words with the word ‘climate’, and measure the tension.

Nuanced shades vs primary colours

Like Disney characters, emotion-driven rubber bands often come in primary colours. 

Simplicity and boldness is designed to be part of their appeal, even if the bright exteriors conceal darker shades beneath.

Pegs that profit from the status quo can also pay for a wide variety of specially-made rubber bands in a wide variety of subtle shades, concealing a black core of money.

Climate scientists, tugged by thick Science rubber bands, are expert nuance-spotters and core-exposers. So are climate journalists.

These nuances are hard to spot for non-experts, especially for those attached to conspiracy theory rubber bands pulling in the opposite direction to Science. 

Climate denier-funded rubber bands can make it hard to perceive the difference between a regular storm and a human-induced climate change weather event.

Gradual or sudden, simple or complex, the addition of new rubber bands and/or the removal of others, the subtle thickening or thinning of existing bands, can all shift an individual’s  status quo.

Concealed or camouflaged rubber bands

Pegs for climate-change-induced Storms, Drought, and Migration, are easily mistaken for older, familiar pre-industrial pegs. 

The difference in colour shade between a regular flood and a climate-change-induced one is subtle, visible only under careful examination in the right light. 

In rubber-band physics, perception and perspective usually exert more force than logic. Anti-vax pegs can pull us even as family and friends die from preventable diseases, severing thick pink rubber bands.

By the same token, the greater the pull of science-based rubber bands, the stronger their attraction is on our direction of travel and actions. 

This is the big rubber-band battle of our age. The Big Oil super-peg, and their captured Business, Government and Media pegs, pay armies of top rubber-band designers to pull us away from climate science.

Rubber bands pulling us towards ‘windmills kill birds’, ‘EVs create more emissions than they save’, or ‘heat pumps create noise pollution’ pegs might have a green veneer, concealing the dark black money core.

Their attractive colours camouflage their true nature. Climate science pegs call such disguised rubber bands ‘misinformation’ or disinformation’. Anti-science pegs label science rubber bands ‘Fake News’.

Status quo advantage

The holes in which we sit create a certain amount of friction themselves.

It takes more tension to move us to another position than it does to keep us in place.

Moving a peg from a climate inaction hole to a climate action hole requires a stronger rubber band than the ones holding it in place.

In a world where most pegs occupy Unwilling Inactivist holes (i.e. they accept the science and reality of human-induced climate change, but feel powerless to do anything about it), the forces of climate inaction hold the advantage.

Any climate inaction rubber band, whether it comes in denial, distraction or despair varieties,  just needs to apply enough force to keep us in our holes.

Inducing pegs to move from climate inaction to climate action requires more pull.

Volition

Rubber bands exert force on our pegs whether or not we’re aware of them.

If you’re born into an area of the matrix where everyone, say, believes in the Roman, Greek, Nordic or Hindu pantheons of Gods, you may never even know that not believing in them is an option.

We also mistake one type of rubber band for another. An ethnic rubber band may look like a religious one, and vice versa. 

What we’re convinced is a scientific rubber band may, unbeknownst to us, be a cultural one. This was the case for the Vatican, pulled by the forces to tradition, to resist Galileo’s science-based observation that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not vice versa. 

The Vatican rubber band prevailed on that occasion, landing Galileo in prison. It took 359 years for the rubber band of heresy to weaken to the point that a Pope reversed their condemnation.

Presumably the 29 Popes who upheld the condemnation between 1633 and 1992 did so out of conviction, meaning their tradition rubber bands outpulled their scientific ones.

This issue of volition – how aware we are of our cat’s cradle of competing forces – complicates the degree to which we can choose to attach or sever rubber bands, when we feel the urge to jump to a more attractive hole. Philosophers have long debated what constitutes free will. Neuroscientists now tackle the same question. 

• We can be passive, happy in our fixed position, leaving any new rubber band connections to fate: a new job, a stranger on a bus, a death in the family, a wildfire engulfing our home.
• We can actively seek new pegs to connect to: read a book, attend a meeting, subscribe to a podcast, volunteer at the weekend.

Whether we’re happy to leave our cat’s cradle of rubber bands to Fate, or avidly seek to construct our own, we can still be moved.

Types

There are different kinds of rubber bands. 

Some are principally made of money, like the dark black rubber bands linking us to our employers, funders or investors.

Others are mainly love, like the deep pink bands connecting us to family and friends.

Some are largely law, like the nut-brown rubber bands tugging us away from competuing urges to jaywalk, embezzle, commit bigamy or murder.

But a key component in every rubber band is Story. 

Stories are our oldest tokens of transaction, and remain the strongest. 

Priests, demagogues, con artists, politicians, advertisers and activists all know stories’ pulling power. 

A really strong story doesn’t even need to be mixed with money, love or law. It can move large numbers of pegs great distances.

Including from climate inaction, to climate action.

***

To experience how the See Through Network applies Peg & Rubber Band theory to climate activism, email: volunteer@seethroughnews.org