25.03.2026
I remember very well my first day at the Swiss Philosophy Olympiad final, in 2022: I arrived at the Bern station, very excited and a bit nervous. Luckily, everyone seemed very friendly from the start, and we rather quickly started philosophizing around the dinner table. Most of the Swiss German (and English) I could hear sounded completely undecipherable, which together with my shivering shyness, resulted in me remaining silent for the whole evening. I tried to hold onto the words I could understand, and at some point in the middle of the conversation, a movie was mentioned: Don’t Look Up. I remember being very intrigued: what in this movie could be that fascinated a handful of philosophers?
A dinner table at the Philosophy Olympiad.
For those of you who might have never heard of Don’t Look Up before, no need to look it up: I will start with a brief summary of the storyline. Two famous astrophysicists, Kate Dibiasky and Randall Mindy, find out about a comet that is supposed to collide the Earth in the span of the next six months. Of course, Kate and Randall freak out about the tragic news, but the whole world around them (their families and friends, the media, the US president) seems to take it extremely lightly.
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What’s striking in the movie: the dissonance between the status of our fellow protagonists, and the way they are viewed by the rest of the world. Indeed, Kate and Randall are scientists: by definition, they spend their life searching for knowledge about a specific topic (namely here, space). Arguably, they own knowledge about the upcoming catastrophe, and are the main agents to own this knowledge.
However, as soon as they openly express their worry and anxiety (which is, to say the least, understandable given the state of affairs), they are perceived as absolute lunatics and ridiculous conspiracists by the media and the figures of power. These antagonists actively refuse to both recognize and pass on the reality and seriousness of the situation.
About the author: Mathys Douma is a former participant of the Mathematics and Philosophy Olympiads. Besides his math studies, he enjoys taking part in different movements fighting for climate and social justice.
The gap lies precisely at the interface between these two agents, between science and its communication. Knowledge is deprived from being accessed.
We have on the one hand scientists, who own knowledge, and on the other hand social agents, who own the control over this knowledge: they have the power to distort it, obstructing the access to proven, scientific facts.
Furthermore, this observation meets the other meaning of looking up, namely, getting informed and checking sources. In that sense, “don’t look up” means “don’t dare to search for knowledge”, which can be understood as a slap in the face to the Enlightenment’s motto “Sapere Aude”.
As one may expect, the message that the movie conveys extends beyond its apocalyptical storyline: this phenomenon is more than relevant today, at a time when powerful governors, social media and Big Tech companies exert tremendous control over the distribution of information, including scientific knowledge. In the words of the professor Shoshana Zuboff, “the question is who knows that information, who decides who knows, who decides who decides who knows? (...) [I]t’s the surveillance capitalist giants. They hold the answers to all of these questions. Though we never elected them to govern.”
What's up there?
This control of knowledge by powerful entities inevitably asks us a further question: how does it impact the individual and collective responsibilities of a population?
It is clear that such control is motivated by specific interests: the comfort of inaction, as well as the need to avoid scaring people, to gain trust and to keep a certain level of docility. Inevitably, it results in what we could call a collective denial and misinformation of the population with respect to a (quite literally) burning topic.
As you might have guessed, the connection to climate responsibility and justice is made very clear by the movie. The denial of a deadly comet certainly resonates with the climate change denial of political figures who need no introduction. And at the same time, most of the specialists of the subject agree that action must be taken.
In the article The Greatest Danger, the eco-philospher Joanna Macy argues that letting go of this denial, both on the level of the governments and the individual, constitutes the first essential step of climate responsibility.
“Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to permanent war, none is so great as this deadening of our response. For psychic numbing impedes our capacity to process and respond to information. The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more crucial uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.
(...)
Acknowledging despair, on the other hand, involves nothing more mysterious than telling the truth about what we see and know and feel is happening to our world. (...), truth-telling is like oxygen. It enlivens and returns us to health and vigor.”
Yet this can turn out to be challenging, for climate change generates a lot of different reactions, from anxiety to anger, powerlessness or indifference. How can one account for the necessity of action in spite of these reactions, when inaction serves interests of power and is comfortable on an individual scale?
Philosophy Olympiad volunteers, looking up.
We can try to find answers in the figures that “look up”. These are, like Joanna Macy, the thinkers and the political activists advocating for climate justice. Those who, through their writings, speeches or actions, fight for a change of direction.
One of the most famous of these figures might be the climate activist Greta Thunberg, with her numerous participations in protests as well as in diplomatic meetings. “Our house is on fire”, as she famously said at the World Economic Forum in 2019.
One can observe that, through her interventions, Thunberg aims to gather people together, and highlight the collective nature of the problem. If short-term individual freedoms can be reinforced through inaction, it seems crucial to remind the urgency of the situation, as well as its inevitable and critical consequences for everyone.
Annual theme “Look up!”: Who do we look up to? What do we see, when we look up — maybe using a telescope at the new Astronomy Olympiad? Just as a ship can use the stars to navigate, role models can help us find our path. In 2026 we meet inspiring people and those inspired by them. We present talent promotion practices worth looking up to. And we gaze at the sky. Subscribe to the newsletter or follow us on Instagram so you don’t miss anything!
The attempts to address climate responsibility still seem very challenging to implement on a global level. Climate change reality remains a complex, sensitive and taboo subject, which moreover fails to be accurately passed on to individuals and societies. Yet for now, the most we can do is fight against collective denial and censorship. For, as Macy writes in The Greatest Danger, “in letting go of our old defenses, we find truer community”.
And I think that this “truer community”, focused on our role as human beings on the Earth, can give us both strength and meaning in our fights. Whether it starts in books or works of art, in a protest on the streets, or at a dinner table in Bern.
A dinner table at the Philosophy Olympiad.
