Why Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber Needs A Men's Circle

The COP28 President's exchange with Mary Robinson shows what happens when the "Strategic Survival Personality" runs the show.

Feb 14, 2024

Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber. Credit: Just Stop Oil.

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“I am the man in charge and it is wrong, ma’am. You need to listen to me, please.” — Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, president of COP28.

Resonant World#68

It’s always painful to watch another man, especially one in a position of global influence, talking down to a woman.

Of course, this isn’t exactly a rare occurrence on the world stage. But there was something uniquely disturbing about seeing this familiar scene play out when the man in question was charged with delivering a deal to preserve a liveable planet.

As the COP28 climate conference opened in the United Arab Emirates late last year, the Guardian published an excerpt from a video of a tense exchange between Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, the oil executive presiding over the talks, and Mary Robinson, a former Irish president, who now chairs the Elders, a global leaders group founded by Nelson Mandela.

Their interaction had taken place two weeks previously, at an online women-led climate conference co-hosted by Robinson, whose 1990 election win made her Ireland’s first female head of state, earning her a place as one of the most consequential women in the country’s 20th century history.

In the clip published by the Guardian, Robinson, 79, who speaks with an air of self-assured matriarchal authority, challenged Al Jaber — a man 29 years her junior — to commit to a “phase-out” of fossil fuels. She then took Al Jaber to task for not showing a sufficient sense of urgency in his pledge to merely “fast-track” climate action — which she said was “not good enough.”

Seemingly angered by Robinson’s attempts to pin him down, Al Jaber, who runs Abu Dhabi’s national oil company, adopted an increasingly confrontational tone, before concluding their interaction by saying: “Stop the pointing of fingers. Stop it.”

Another Lens

The exchange was a big story at the start of the talks because Al Jaber’s comments appeared to contradict the scientific consensus on the need for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels. (It was more complicated than that, as Amy Westervelt has pointed out in her blow-by-blow account of the exchange for Drilled. Amy’s analysis also provides a forensic guide to Al Jaber’s use of timeworn, gendered oil industry talking points to deflect Robinson’s calls for climate action, such as accusing her of being “alarmist,” and claiming that a fossil fuel phase-out would send the world “back into caves”).

As a climate journalist, I can see why the story played the way it did.

But as a student of the impact of individual, collective and inter-generational trauma, I saw the story through another lens: What did this bad-tempered exchange tell us about a certain kind of male reaction to challenge; the harm this can cause; and how men can learn to respond differently?

Because, shameful as it is to admit, I can see a splinter of myself in Al Jaber. I know that when I feel like I’ve failed as a husband or father in some way, then — in a nanosecond, faster than I can interrupt — a shield of anger springs up to protect me from the upwelling of shame that feels too uncomfortable to tolerate. I point the finger and fire out blame because it’s easier than facing the cold, contracted feeling of being wrong in the eyes of people I love.

And I think a similar dynamic was at work in the Al Jaber-Robinson exchange. Rather than meeting Robinson’s challenge from a place of mature, integrated masculine presence, from which he would have had any number of options for handling the situation to his advantage, Al Jaber lost his cool. The PR disaster he thus manufactured for himself was a reminder that however many millions of dollars somebody spends on reputation management (and Al Jaber has spent plenty, as Amy Westervelt; my DeSmog colleague Cartie Werthman and Clean Creatives have reported), it won’t make the blindest bit of difference if they’ve lost contact with their core.

During the just-completed two-year Timeless Wisdom Training in the principles of healing collective trauma, led by Thomas Hübl and his team, I spent many hours practicing tracking my thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations, moment-by-moment, during emotionally charged group processes. As my wife Genevieve will attest, that’s helped me develop my capacity to respond rather than react — meaning I’m less easily triggered than in the past.

But Al Jaber has some work to do.

‘I Am the Man in Charge’

A screenshot from the video of Robinson’s exchange with Al Jaber (who was calling in by phone and not visible on camera).

There’s no substitute for watching the video to appreciate the sheer unpleasantness of the exchange. The following excerpt from the dialogue largely elides the most newsworthy elements from a conventional climate journalism perspective, but I’ve put in bold some of the key phrases that seemed particularly triggering for either party — or represented attempts by one to assert control over the other. Even though this is a partial extract, you can get a pretty good feel for the energy of the call:

Robinson: “I’m not sure what ‘urgent’ means. A fast track is not good enough.”
Al Jaber: “Yeah, yeah, we can, we can always play with words here.”
Al Jaber: “I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and a mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist.”
Al Jaber: “A phase-out of fossil fuel, in my view, is inevitable. It is essential, but we need to be real, serious, and pragmatic about it.”
Robinson: “And your company is investing in a lot more new fossil fuel. And that’s going to hurt women.”
Al Jaber: “Ma’am, you’ve just accused me of something that is not correct.”
Al Jaber: “I am the man in charge and it is wrong, ma’am. You need to listen to me, please. I am sorry. I respect you. And I do not accept any false accusations.”
Al Jaber: “I have not heard you talk to the Norwegians or others the way you talk to us. Time has come. Time has come. Mary, Mary, Mary. Mary, time has come for you to speak.”
Robinson: “I don’t accept that I’m selective. I talk to the Norwegians, I talk to the U. S. The Elders talk to everybody across the board, independently.”
Al Jaber: “Because I’m not a hypocrite. Because I’m not a hypocrite. And I am not a hypocrite. I am not shying away from any facts. I am here talking to you just like I did in China. And I told you exactly, you need to get your facts straight.”
Al Jaber: “I’m sorry to interrupt you [speaking to the moderator]. Mary interrupted me earlier. I’m gonna have to come in now. I don’t think Mary will be able to help solve the climate problem by pointing fingers or contributing to the polarization and the divide that is already happening in the world.”
Al Jaber: “Stop pointing fingers. Show me solutions. Show me what you can do. Show me your own contributions. And I will salute you for it. Stop the pointing of fingers. Stop it.”

‘Toxic Petromasculinity’

Several women friends shared how uncomfortable they’d found it to watch the exchange. It wasn’t just Al Jaber’s tone that was so activating — but also the seeming inability of Robinson and the two other women onscreen to contain his outbursts.

“It was unnerving to watch, not least because all three women just sort of sat there and took the scolding, after which the moderator thanked Al Jaber for a ‘robust, positive exchange,’” Amy Westervelt wrote in her analysis. “I don’t know that any of them trying to match Al Jaber’s aggressive tone would have gone over very well, but man what a missed opportunity to delve into the toxicity of petromasculinity.”

I would also have loved to have watched the three women engage in a frank dissection of “toxic petromasculinity” after Al Jaber logged out of the Zoom room. (Note: Rachel Donald has engaged in just such a conversation with Virginia Tech political scientist Cara Daggett on Planet: Critical).

But I’m also left with the question of whether the toxicity Amy describes is part of something much bigger: one symptom of the accumulated legacy of centuries of unprocessed inter-generational and collective trauma. This burden is now increasingly visible at every scale — from personal interactions, to its external manifestation in the dysfunctional, oppressive systems driving climate breakdown, and other global crises. (Resonant World#6).

After two years of gaining an intimate perspective on how the impact of historical episodes from World War Two and the Holocaust; to slavery and colonialism; Israel-Palestine; and the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes live on inside our bodies, minds, and souls, I’m convinced that collective trauma provides among the most essential — and neglected — explanatory frames for understanding the state the world is in.

Yet the fundamental role of collective trauma in creating and perpetuating the tragedies we see playing out on our news feeds is barely referenced in mainstream political and climate discourse.1

Which is perhaps why watching the Al Jaber-Robinson exchange reminded me of a book that — at least on the surface — would appear to have little to do with COP28.

That book is Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and The Entitlement Illusion, a Psychohistory, by Nick Duffell, a psychotherapist, and I tore through it in late 2022 after being pointed to it by Pier Cross, a coach and podcast host. Whether or not you agree with the book’s arguments or conclusions, it struck me as a rare model of a deeply-researched attempt to understand a country’s political malaise through the lens of early life trauma, and how it may shape the leadership style of powerful men.

‘Calm Down Dear!’

Wounded Leaders opens by recounting an incident that occurred in the UK parliament in April, 2011, less than a year into David Cameron’s premiership.

Cameron was defending his government’s National Health Service reforms by reading a supportive quote from a doctor, when he was heckled by opposition politician Angela Eagle, who’d spotted that he’d altered a minor fact to his advantage.

Cameron immediately attempted to reassert control by telling Eagle:

“Calm down, dear, calm down. Calm down and listen to the doctor!”

Cameron’s remark caused uproar in the chamber, and a political storm.

As Duffell writes:

“This was hardly an event of international significance and yet, in Britain, with the emergence of such unveiled, casual misogyny, it was as if ‘the mirror crack’d.’ Suddenly, the true face of a particular attitude, one that is rather well known on this island but not really mentionable, became visible.”

For Duffell, the “calm down dear” episode was the example par excellence of the “Entitlement Illusion” — the mindset that, in his analysis, governs a large section of the British ruling classes. Those suffering from this condition exhibit a combination of an inflated sense of entitlement and a defensively organised personality style that lacks empathy, struggles with intimacy, and has normalised severe dissociation.

Duffell traces this syndrome to the psychological trauma that many of today’s generation of prominent politicians experienced when — aged as young as seven — they were packed off to Britain’s elite boarding schools. These institutions’ products — including David Cameron (now the UK’s foreign secretary) — still exert a disproportionate influence on public life (not just in Britain, but in the many other countries where political elites were put through UK boarding schools).

Swapping home and parents for a regime of competition, hothouse study and constant threat of bullying by unparented peers, boys were forced to develop what Duffell calls a “Strategic Survival Personality”: A mask of self-confidence concealing rigid emotional illiteracy, and intimacy avoidance. This personality style is dedicated to surviving at all costs; often employs attack as the best form of defence, and can crystalise over time into grandiosity, masochism or pathological rebellion — or a “bewildering combination of all three.” The result, Duffell argues, is that Britain is ruled by an elite governed by fear.

“It contributes to the maintenance of a false hierarchy in society that rewards sociopathic qualities while devaluing all that comes from the heart, including authentic inner authority.”

Through portraits of British politicians, Duffell, himself an ex-boarder, shows how this personality style contributes to a politics characterised by bullying, misogyny, short-termism and a refusal to admit mistakes or think for the common good. In short: A centuries-old educational system has furnished us with leaders with precisely the opposite qualities to those the country needs to solve its most pressing challenges.

(Piers and I recorded this conversation about the intersection between his work, collective trauma and the climate crisis back in October 2022):

‘Acting Out’

Though Duffell and Cross specialise in working with men seeking to heal the trauma they experienced at boarding school, that’s by no means the only route to acquiring a Strategic Survival Personality.

We all grow up in family systems, cultures and institutions shaped by their own imprints of trans-generational and collective trauma. To a greater or lesser degree, we must all adapt to survive. And it’s often those with the most entrenched Strategic Survival Personalities who climb the highest, as the cases of countless “wounded leaders” active in public life around the world demonstrate.

But while the Strategic Survival Personality appears confident, it is a fragile shell hiding a frightened child. Here’s Duffell’s assessment of why Cameron resorted to his “calm down dear” comment:

“Looking deeper into these bullying tactics, there lies fear and profound insecurity, a brittleness of character that I have seen many times before. Bullies are scared, and so they adopt scare tactics to prevent the smell of fear from sticking to them. Cameron got scared, and I could clearly see the scared boy in him. In a clinical session I would greet this one — the frightened boy in him — with compassion. But he is not in treatment; he is in power and ‘acting out,’ as we psychotherapists say when someone behaves without recognising what internal conflicts are driving them, what is really stressing them, preferring to sacrifice someone else rather than look inside.”

And that — in a nutshell — is the climate crisis: The net result of crucial decisions made by powerful people who preferred to “sacrifice someone else rather than look inside.”

I’m under no illusions. The leaders with the hardest Strategic Survival Personalities will, almost by definition, be the last to embrace the kind of healing work needed to recover the authentic self buried under the carapace.

But maybe that doesn’t have to matter. Because, as Karen O’Brien, a professor of social science at the University of Oslo, argues in this article published last year in the environmental journal Ambio, we matter more than we think. We may not need to be in formal positions of power to change systems: We can exert a form of “fractal agency” that can shape outcomes in nonlinear, unexpected and unpredictable ways.

As O’Brien et al. write:

“Rather than reserving strategic action for those at the top of political, business, or organizational hierarchies, fractal agency describes a capacity that all people can access and implement, independent of position, degree, role, experience, or authority.”

That’s another way of saying we may be radically underestimating our capacity for rapid social change.

To which I say:

Men, it’s time to get fractal.

Supportive Spaces

As men, we need to be making exponentially more effort to support each other to re-inhabit our authenticity; retire elements of the Strategic Survival Personality that have infiltrated our minds and bodies; and establish a reliable connection to the kind of “inner authority” that doesn’t seek to dominate or humiliate other people, and intuitively knows what is our contribution to make at this time. (Resonant World#35).

We can do this very successfully and rapidly in well-facilitated, safely-held confidential men’s circles.

In my deepening experience, when men come together in these supportive spaces, we can begin to get real with ourselves and each other. In the beautifully precise words of Solea Anani, a fellow graduate of the Timeless Wisdom Training, we can move into “the potency of relational intelligence.”

By serving as mirrors for one another, we can see more clearly where we’re lying to ourselves and people close to us; getting reactive; playing small; avoiding intimacy; and not honoring our values, to name a few common shadow patterns. (I’ve seen how we can help each other transmute these patterns in the men’s group in the Timeless Wisdom Training, and also the men’s work I’ve been co-facilitating with my friend Daniel Simpson). (Resonant World#4) (Resonant World#67).

Over time, the trust and support of other men can gradually, and tenderly, help us address the deficits we experienced growing up, particularly from absent or abusive fathers (and mothers too, for that matter). It’s not always easy work, but it is often joyful.(Resonant World#60).

And, according to the principle of fractal agency, each and every men’s circle we hold will have ripple effects. The more men engage, the faster we can create conditions where attuned relating between men and women — at all scales — becomes the norm. And, in my view, that’s a basic prerequisite for slowing the climate crisis, and finding our way through to a viable — perhaps even resonant — world to come.