Our headlines continue to engulf BP with our passionate blame. But increasingly, after we turn the page, another story begins to coalesce: BP as the genius of Big Oil’s future: it has been BP’s pioneering fieldwork in capping the busted Macondo well that has shaped Big Oil’s billion dollar emergency response plan for the Obama Administration— and its hope to have the drilling moratorium lifted.

Up in the Arctic, the leasing of fields and new well drilling continue: with BP the industry’s star pupil, having found through its errors and corrections, what the rest of the class needs to know so that drilling might continue, marginally wiser in the sphere of industrial safety, or as a spokesman for Cairn Oil recently put it, with “belt and braces”.

Selective attention is what we choose to pay attention to: and currently, that is our own desire to mete punishment and blame to BP. Management needs to understand “why” if it is to contain that spill. My current hypothesis is that as consumers, we wish NOT TO SEE: we don’t want to know the messiness, corruption, damage, and plain ugliness that supplies our needs. And like Oz, outed from behind the curtain by Toto, BP’s terrible Gulf accident disturbs us because we now see something that we have chosen not to see in order that our lives proceed without disruption.

We blame BP because it has disturbed our willed ignorance. It has challenged the world we have selected to see.

Unfortunately, next to this, given human behavior, environmental catastrophe is just collateral damage.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Surfing the Oily Waves of Information: Parsing BP
• » The Psychological Challenge of QE

• BROWSE / IN Emotion Management Reflective Practice selective attention
• « DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
• » Aporia: On knowing. On not knowing.

• RELATED / YOU MIGHT FIND THESE INTERESTING
• No related posts