Predicaments and trauma response.

I was pleased to chat to our friend Darren Sleven who is a professional musician TrongateRumRiots and also trainee mental health professional about personal and societal mental health. Our mid-week chat in Symposium Cafe in Turriff over coffee, bagels and for me some tiffin started with a opening question of how does our mental health get affected and what can we do about. From there we explored the interconnectedness to trauma and how it disassociation us from community and nature. How reconnecting the bonds can be a powerful medication for wellness for us and the planet.  As we talked we investigate what he has learnt about maintaining and improving your mental health, his experiences of trauma, its effects, how to identify triggers and ways he recommends for dealing with the consequences. We discuss how interwove human health is with the environment, non human worlds, including AI and our wider cultural interactions. We delve into the deeper meaning of what humans consciousness evolved from and how it is to be human in a time where climate change, ecological destruction could cause western society as we know it to breakdown. How this and other conscious and unconscious understanding of being human and traumas are affecting how we respond to these and other issues.

This little blog is merely a recounting and summary of our conversation instead of dictum due of the meandering nature of which its took. I have taken the liberty of adding to the conversation by add my own thoughts and knowledge. The conversation as they tend to do so found its way about various topics but also off on tangential ways and the writing below is as best I can do right now to capture it. I have tried to maintain a stream off narrative but as you will notice there are segments where issues we raised are just added because to leave them one side would feel disingenuous to the thoughts that the conversation took.

It is presented in 2 parts.  First the discussion about the human predicament and the second presents a case for ways to investigate our capacity to cope…. There are no certainties and solutions in either essay but simply educated musings, thought points, questions and a few practical techniques in the second part for you to explore with yourself, the people and world around you.

Biography: Darren and I met thanks to our wives chatted while attending a Land Workers Alliance https://landworkersalliance.org.uk/ course on the Black Isle last year and found out we live just down the road from each other.  As we were very new to the area then and they had stayed here for a few years already, we crowbar ourselves into their lives. Darren being Scottish gentleman but originally from somewhere called Glasgow and Sinead from the Emerald Isles but had studied and worked in Scotland for many years. We thought they might have a few top tips to survive the wilds of Aberdeenshire.  We honestly didn’t just hitch ourselves onto them because of that but because they are also they are lovely, fascinating people and we share much of the same joys and values. These include growing our own food, eating home made produce, loving being outside, doing up old cottages (it not a shared joy but its a fact of life that connects us), caring for our environment and are working in areas that are related to human and planetary well-being. Darren’s wife Sinead is the co-ordinator for the Gaia Foundation https://gaiafoundation.org/  in Scotland and is also the Seed Sovereignty Program Lead. https://www.seedsovereignty.info/category/scotland/

Understanding how the human brain works or better described in respect of cognitive function, as what goes on in your head, is an ever expanding library of question and answers. With 40,000 registered neuroscientists world wide daily looking into the system of brain activity, cognition, memory, sleep, disease, etc it is clear the book is not written on this subject and with handsome degree off hubris I say probably won’t be ever. We have a grasp of the technical science of brain development, chemicals, neurones, fluids needed to support, how changes to the structure either by accident, illness, age or abuse, change its operational capacity but less do we comprehend how wider social influences like nutrition, multi-generational cultural trauma can and do change the ability of our brain to react to stimulus and produce satisfactory responses.  The kind of responses that enable the human to succeed in an act and produce the outcome it truly needs to obtain and become fully human.  For example there is a fundamental understanding now that the left and right side of the brain does not just control the opposite side of the body and that we have a places in a both sides that process and store information but that theses two hemispheres interpret, process then store information in very different ways. Also how slowly the dominance of the left side over millennia has changed how we interact with each other and the creatures, flora, fauna, oceans, sky and rocks that we rely on to flourish.

With what affects our relationship with each other, that being human and non human, is the premise for this writing and not strictly how the brain functions. It is furthermore import to focus on one area in-particular, that being how trauma affects. Specifically that not being intrinsic trauma but extrinsic trauma. Trauma that a person has experienced in their life due to cultural, social, personal experiences.  To be more profound, how our emotional response to experiences in life change our feelings, behaviours and physical wellbeing.

Humans have understood intuitively that the mind and body are not separate but it can be said that from the enlightenment, either by consequence or design, there has been a significant fracturing of this innate knowledge. Arguably, before this the groundwork for change was created some 10,000 years ago, during the start of agriculture when the process of division of humanity from understanding our need to be in balance with the earth systems found a foothold. Just as the planet began to have a stable climate, and was giving us a chance to begin building fixed communities we started to building psychological barriers, and breaking conscious and unconscious bridges. Humans did this as we developed the wanting to exert control over the elements. To do this efficiently meant we needed a story about our power, our authority to be above the wild, the beasts and the primates as we latterly ‘civilised’ ourselves. This story we evoked caused a separation between what we had know with our whole being and what our thinking mind now accepts as truth. One effect for example of breaking these connections was we forgot that our emotional state was an intimate part of the immune system and by not maintaining this, we caused the collapse between that state of experience and consequence.

As humans strayed from our previous well trod path of being in harmony with the planet, part of its story and not as we came to believe its lead character. From now on, in this hero’s detoured journey we needed to carry a new and much more heavied story to give us a meaning to sate our emotions about what we were doing.  This story had to denuded the emotional resonance humans had become accustomed to giving life's experiences while living in that complexity of nature and community. This allowed the consequences of our new actions to have a foretold, purposeful and legitimate meaning. Giving us each an explanation and reason to evict our minds and bodies out of our previous fertile non dualistic state of being and into a new entity of individuality and primo takers.

The creation of a mind and body dualism that mirrored our separation from nature cast us ever further cognitively adrift from the reality of how to live on this planet.  Eventually to the extent that today we no longer consider a need to live within in the symbiotic rhythms of the earths ecosystems that we evolved out of, or even feel the need to have a healthy planet that fundamentally nurture us. This is because as a culture we are enacting a story where humans are the pinnacle of creation. Where earth was made for us, a human life-support system, a machine designed to produce and enable human life to thrive. So the world was made for humans to conquer and rule, and under this rule it was meant to become paradise. This clearly has to be followed by a ‘but’. It has always been followed by a but. This is because a certain subset of humans always perceived that the world was far short of the paradise it was meant to be. The world was made for them to conquer and rule, but his conquest turned out to be more destructive than anticipated.

Dualisms story and its creation has now being going on for such a long time and from so many ambient influences that it is our certainty. Our knowledge to create this is assembled from talking to your parents, cartoons we watch, textbooks, teachers, news broadcasts, movies, novels, sermons, plays, newspapers, and all the rest. We all know our myth but we don’t even think of it as even being such a thing. It is just how humans are and the world is. Embedded in this myth is also the explain away section, this is our mental ‘get out of jail card’ and gives us all kinds of opportunities. In it we see ourselves as flawed and fallible creature, that’s why we have made and will continue to make a mess of things. Including destroying forests, going to war, using up precious resources, causing the extinction of other species, control production, overconsumption of food, starve others, cage and kill, etc etc etc….there is something fundamentally wrong with us, is what we have come to believe, instead of acknowledging we are doing something wrong.

Our cultures voice which has been in our ear since the day of our birth and has given us this explanation of how things came to be this way. We have become so accustomed to its pervasive dynamism, our innate knowledge of the law of life has been succeeded, into the realms of conquer of the wild and not kin. Our consequence explainer story has stilled our alarm to the destruction. This story has satisfied us or better put, pacified us. Certain in our story of rights and failures, we have even found a comfort in that latter acceptance. Knowing something will become terminal can provide a level of comfort more than the uncertainty of this otherwise world full of ruptures, even though it could be a better one. We have found safety in this state of destruction and with the current psychological pressure we are under in this critical conjuncture in history, the idea of comfort in something being held in certainty, thus safe, even if it is something that is doomed, it is seemingly better to be maintained.

The problem of accepting knowledge and certainty as one that leads to another, has helped get us into this predicament. We are certain we have 2 hands, we walk out of doors and not jump out of windows to leave a room, this is accepted as certain because if we didn’t then life would be unliveable. Where as knowledge of things requires that knowledge to be tested, we need to offer proof, test that hypnosis by gathering multiple sources of information. The problem we have now is we are living in a series of inculcated certainties that we think have been proven by knowledge but have not. We live an ontologisation of the world based on human manufactured certainties that fall outside the law of life.

We unnoticeably kept having our baseline of meaning of being human draw further away from its origins with each passing epoch. Can we even see that life on this planet from its origins billions of years ago has always been a pluralistic, liberal, inclusive, and most of all a community way of being. If we want to survive our next human iterations it needs to revert and be in reverence to this invisible law of life.  Humans are not alone on this planet, we are part of a community upon which we depend absolutely. Are we starting again after 10,000 years to have that suspicion?  We can if we wish, to see starkly the consequences of breaking the law but we still have our story to explain that away, and now our heads are firmly turned to a new chapter but we must ask ourselves again….How did it come to be this way and now with added, what is the cost?

What we are evolving into is a condensing of our story and its consequences. While our moment on this planet is a mere blip in its deep time, it is our moment so it matters to us, our children and hopefully grandchildren. 95% of human history has seen us in right relationship as egalitarian hunter gathers. 99% of that history was before the industrial revolution where we were intimately involved with nature on a daily basis.  Our neurophysiology developed in that very different time and certain needs and expectations were born out of that. Our consciousness developed in a very particular environment where to scan for predators, look for food, live in small foraging communities were prime. This was at time when there was no false dichotomy and the alchemy of attention was designed to activate something in relation to reciprocity and sharing because that meant our survival within the community. So we are living in a time that our consciousness has not experienced and while we are remarkably adaptable there are certain costs to living as we do now.

Consciousness is unable to take in every bit of phenomena so that means we have to edit out through filters and attentionality. Through this attentionality, which we are able to direct according to the phenomena experienced, allowed the editing out of non relevant information and additionally to function we need a desensitisation response to work in unison.  The problem that inbounds now is we have retained all these neurophysiological and conscious traits in a very new environment, where we are experiencing super stimuli and cognitive overload.

Of relevance to our ecological crisis, due to the confluence of these factors we have inadvertently developed an inattention to nature, a blindness, because it has lost relevance to our everyday lives, particularly if we are in an urban setting. So we just edit it out and we don’t even notice it as a phenomenon. We are constantly rewiring through our neural circuits a particular type of consciousness born our of experience and if nature is not by enlarge featuring, so the circle gets smaller and smaller.  Simply we don’t feel the need to have nature in our lives and because of that result it physically becomes less so. I would even argue we do more and actively seek its minimisation and ask ourselves ‘Why is that area here? What’s the benefit of an area nobody is using?’  Align that with the booming attention economy that pushes us via supra-stimulus to be socially connected and accepted into a social group, our buttons are not just being pushed they have been pushed in and glued down. As such our cognitive processes are evolving into a scroll type consciousness. We are attending information about the natural world like we are scrolling through a particular feed and our circuits doing what they do best by directing their attention to the most pressing phenomena at the expense of others. The intensity and types of information is resulting in a need to desensitise to cope and natures lack of relevance has become part of our survival instinct.  If you are nature connected and tuned into global affairs, you can feel an eco-grief but this desensitisation effect is your sheltering process that allows you to continue to live in this society.

What is or has been done by some humans more than others will reverberates through the next few millennia in ways of influence like no other time in homo sapiens history. We can possibly now see why the gods were so angry at Prometius for giving humans fire….. seems they new we would want to keep burning things and what that would lead to.  Or to be more scientific it would be better said our DNA got us where we are but it will also if we don’t evolve finish us off.

As we combust more to fuel (60% more than we did in the 1990 and in the last 50 years have used more energy resources than in the previous 300,000 years) to power this economic digital age that has now descended upon us and with the advent of the complex algorithms which have meta to AI, our relationship to what we have created and how that creates us has shifted again.  We must recognise our limitations of thought and how our adaptive cognitive abilities can cope in this era. Can we resist the super stimuli of the digital age and what is the cost for and to our attention? If what is being designed and sold to us is so irresistible, is an individual even able to make adapt behaviours and decent choices to connect back with their true self and nature?  With hyper-individualism promoted by neoliberalism now supercharged, how are we going to fare in this system?

We are a thirsty creature and want our desires quenching and we don’t seem to know boundaries. We don’t know when we are satisfied, nor when we have gone to far. We need our story like we need the water to stay alive and while one is certain the other is just our inculcated knowledge. We need to care more for where our stories spring from. We are now at a point in our culture that the information to create our latest stories of dominance, coercion and not cohesion inbounds as much as we want and probably more than we can every hope and need to process. We are in a place where the cognitive overload is not simply overwhelming but is dangerous. The cacophony of information in the form of images, words and noises from around the world is delivered to you via multiple modalities of technological wonderment and can be live-streamed or with you within moments after the event for you to absorb, share, replay and perseverate over.  All inbounds of information are though interpretations of the events, by the nature of the media, agency, modes of deliver and do provide only ever an edited product. Our body is specifically patterned to gather and form meaning out of that information, so is co-edited again through the set up of our basic neural network, thus enabling us to make an appropriate decision, which could be as simple as the ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ responses. Unlike the sense of touch or balance which is processed at the spinal cord level, the information we take in through our eyes and ears in the context aforementioned requires a higher level of crafting into meaning. This is not so simply processed into core responses, but is fact checked via embedded filters which are shaped by your experience in you, your family’s and communities life. These will colour those moments and sometimes your recall thereafter will be significantly shifted. We have a tendency to incorrectly recollect moments as time and the psychological make up of your ‘self’ or perspective in the creation of stories will change memory narratives.

The cognitive melee of information formed into ‘your truth’ is a mash of memory, meaning and will have been processed many times. When this story is then somehow formed, you will produce cognitive and bodily response. This in conscious or unconscious ways results in sometimes lifesaving or completely none helpful and even unhealthy reactions, but what really is an honest memory and how should we describe ‘right story’ in comparison to ‘your truth’. They seem akin in descriptive terms because our story is how we form the meaning of self and our truth of being, putting us hopefully in safe living patterns with other humans and the earth.  The contextual difference is very important to make, as right story is not about objective truth but the metaphors and relations and narratives interconnected communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patters of land and creation. Right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relation with each other and with the land.  So the alternative wrong story, wrong way means unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought. With our culture now defined by a hyperpersonalisation, echo chambers, bubbles, niche groups, our own little tribes etc….there might be a problem finding our right story in our current place then. We have to be wary or more kindly put be aware of the ground that our truth is grown from and who actually is the landlord of that place where our roots of knowing are gathering its nutrients and feeding our fertile, but worryingly now monoculture narratives.

In terms of the cultural affect, we are seeing increasing amounts of what we want to see. This is thanks to algorithms tapping into our left side brain way of attending and processing information. The ‘circle of doom’ of experience that is the end point of this diminishing reciprocal pathway is helping us stay in this culturally barren oubliette. This relays to mean even small differences seem bigger, as there is less common ground or points of connection and community.  If we express our opinion on a one to one or in local assemblies, we are able to see commonalities but if that opinion is performed on a social media platform we only ever see the polarisation that a hyper focused point the individual is projecting, signed off with a few triggering hashtags. The isolationism that this technology allows fosters alienation and entrenches mind sets. Social media is happily pitched us against each other artificially and this is being literally capitalised upon. The issue for humanity is that as a species we cannot survive alone, we are a compendium of other species, we are the embodiment of nature both internally and culturally.

We have a need to communicate, to be in discourse and have always off loaded our minds onto other things from cave paintings on the wall to teach others about the world around and now our reach has extended into AI. Humans ability and need to load aspects of ourselves into the world is a naturalised process but AI experience of collection and distribution is utterly different to ours and we anthropomorphise it at our peril. We need to recognise the absolute difference that being an embodied being is compared to what AI is. Beings that are embodied make very different choices because of the ecosystems and symbioses they are located within and that are within.

How AI learns from our experience is not only disembodied but is inherently limited because it learns from our narrow experience, attainment and production.  Humanities ways of passing on knowledge to AI is only able to done from limited resources of experience that we can then manifest into a product.  While we see AI’s amazing ability to create new information it does this from a disembodied and focused experiential way.  We need to recognise how limited our ways of attaining have become and I like to equate that to a cat walking around a library. A cat doesn’t know about all the information the place holds and only sees it as a place to get warm and use the books as a bed.  Unawareness leads us to define and reproduce humanity experience of being nature in limited ways and thus our new extension of consciousness that AI is, is formed from that. Where this and the culture that social media is coopting will only really be felt in the next few years. A generations psychology being crafted by the attention economy, guided by a partisan AI, we will only really see what forms it will distort us into in the near future. Will we be able emancipate ourselves from whatever being it has lured us to becoming at that stage?

Modalities of comprehension and reaction are evolved by many process but in the simplest way all your brain has done is via a chemical process produce enough energy to create and store memories in ways you consider are foundational, the same as everyone else’s, and this commodification of understanding and memory binds us as a species. The latter is not considered to be correct due to the components of memory creation discussed previously but at the same time completely philosophically true due to truth is what you hold as meaning and part of the production of the ego.

The experience of the process of production is as much part of how humans understand themselves and the world as is the product.  This formation of humanities original complex understanding that what we see and understand about the world as basically the same is formed from the evolution of communities inherent need to survive.  We do this only when we create meaning together and we come to create this meaning only when we come eligible together.  By establishing same prospectives and the need to hold onto this wider premise of multilateral understanding it gave us a sense of collaboration and a way of maintaining a unity of our human experience or shared objectives in some way. So if this is no longer the process that meaning is being created in, then where does that leave us?

Problems arise when differentiations from our shared experience are then processed though our individual personal and cultural experiences that have been formed without the correct mix of mythos creation built out of right story. This culminates in our sense of safety being affected because of the unilateral sense of understanding that is born out failure to be in collaboration with community and land.

Feelings of safety are a big part of our human sense making. If safeties assurity is corrupted then one of the consequences is a clammer to regain that sense and to do that we slip into a place where exceptionalism of person and communities and latterly whole societies can be formed. These manifestations of exceptionalism lead us into a separation from the relative harmony that multilateral states of cohabitation we existing in.  Once there is friction enough created by the fracturing of these bond of shared interpretation of a world experience, a reaction will eventually evolve into forms of not easily resolved conflict.

Conflict is materialised around the objectives this exceptional mindset those humans gather around.  The importance for their safety over others will be acknowledged to be more than another right to exist in their state. Humans as discussed see themselves as the rightful inheritor of the earth but even in that perceived mental state where an exceptional culture has been formed, there also exist due to deepening exceptionality, some individuals and social groups see themselves at the top of even that tree.

Impact to the psychology of creation of the self is correlated by development of a mental and physical safety network and will be held in close relation to our unconscious fear of death.  The fear of our own mortality is so fundamental to our identity and our choices, but we so desperately find ways to either not think about (but actually unconsciously can’t ignore) and or when it does purvey our conciseness we find ever more elaborate methods to distract us from our body and minds finiteness.

Our need for personal, family, community then national and international safety and security became eventually contrary to that goal. As we blossomed, populations boomed, places inhabited or invaded and we manufactured the unfathomable amount of tools and technical mavelments to fulfil this desire, we transgressed and slipping these ‘surly bonds of earth’ and the law of life that created and maintained its potential to do so. For humans uniqueness we forgo what is requisite for our actual safety as a species. As we strove for certainty and safety and yet due to our fallibilities to create that paradise we dug deeper into the earth and our divine right to do so. Our safety fears effects can be identified ever greater through the generations and we see its effects daily especially when self worth is alined to net worth and the need to secure safety of life though accumulation of earthly resources, fiat and digital currencies, accolades, legacy to name a few is the principle goal.

Our story muzzled us with promises of imaginary economic terms and rational discourse. Those in power prepared us for every eventuality and have set things up by ensuring people never feel safe, we always feel hungry and scared and are ready to sacrifice more valleys, waterfalls, forests and people.  We have bent the earth to our will. As it systems start to pass beyond certain tipping points we are discovering it no longer yields. Perhaps its time we learnt another lesson - That mastery is no longer a fit aspiration.

By announcing this predicament so all can hear we should then be able to yarn, communicate, discuss, debate and come to a new meaning of humanity in community with our home but we struggle to even get that chance as the message is subsumed in the deafening buzz of the age of information, aka the digital age. The power of witnessing associated with being open to such a wide dispersal, intensity of information means we can suffer from what we can call a vicarious trauma.  This form of trauma again brings us out of the right relationship we evolved in.  Our self management systems are ultimately limited and thus responses are a mirror of that and one way we deal with this type of trauma and also with trauma more directly inflicted upon us is to go into a condition of numbing. It is a natural sheltering reaction but this condition of being numb, we could say to shocking information for illustrative purposes but could be seen as just the volume and viscosity of that information, is being cultured. With that there comes an acceleration of the body, persons, groups and all the other lives on earth being cognitively mechanised.  This is enough to create an othering reaction and as part of that process of management of how we interact in this pathology of numbness, and it produces a latent condition of obedience.  This obey conditionalised state brought on by a numbing reaction is seen clearly in how we prepare people for military service to enable them do their duty but it does not summarily mean the trauma then experienced is appropriately codified in our brain and body to allow healthy function during or thereafter the inflicted experience.

We don’t seem able to step back from and react critically en masse to the consequences of the perverseness of information technology and the consumer society is having upon us daily. This failure to either prepare ourselves or regulate the flood of experience pushes us towards detrimental emotional and physical reactions. It is throwing our ‘balance’ out and disturbed balance means the body cannot move fast enough or turn sharper than the balance system allows. So we look for safety and we are given perceived safety so we stay where we are.

Most people are impervious to the actual zeitgeist, quite content to live day to day. People live inside their own realities, locked in the prevailing language and power systems of their contemporary moment. Most people think only in terms of the paths and concepts offered within a given era.  With a culture stuck and numbed to positive and negative experience, there is the ability to culturally create levels of enforced productivity and this potential has been seized upon. The need to be a ‘useful person’ is so entrenched in our culture due to the social hierarchal system we are corralled in. Here it is seen and felt that if a person does to not fulfil this imagined contract, they are deemed to be performing an act of self and societal sabotage. This manipulated existence has been crafted into our reality by powerful actors for aeons, it has been done to allow currency, security and power to flow up hill. This has been created by delivering us an encyclopaedia of stories, that while voluminous have been carefully selected to instil a baseline of how or lives should be enacted. Where we are all convinced it is now our concentrated understanding that the places humans need to occupy in the existing system is defined and the only way it can be, thus the only way we could possibly survive. This story has sedimented that narrative of human purpose, interlinking it into the extract, produce and consume economy.  That narrative of purpose is in opposition to the lushness of what our and our next generations existence could be.

Our personal journeys, as we like to think of them, on our way to success is highly fraught due to a lack of recognitions of our societies foundations, on which we teeter towards a culturally recognised level of betterment in this modernity.  In western culture we have a statistically significant narrative association to the belief we are a meritocratic society and the luck of when, where and of who we are born is minimised in the narrative of self.  This mode of pathologically denying the formation of self creation means we are more akin to focus on fixing the individual and not the integrated systems, the commonality. It is hard for us to give ourselves the permission to accept that our place in our world is evolved from systemic connections and the outcomes we produce thereafter are understandable as a result. By having unfulfilled connections of recognition we have heightened our stress responses. Stress responses are inherently designed to be supportive and while disassociation or numbing as previously noted can have its negative effects if maintained beyond a reasonable time reaction it can undeniably have protective qualities to.  It is important to have strategies to come out of the states of numbing and move ourselves to places of safety. Find ways to relax and move out of the fight or flight reactions.

In relation to states of experience and consequence. If we do get the handy lift up of generational and earthly sacrifice to reach the goals we embodied, via this confluence of the sense of self fulfilment, thus the attainment of security it provides, and we achieve the cultured individuality and usefulness paradigm but then do not get the emotional satisfaction we thought that gilded moment would endow on our sense of self making, the consequences can be corrosive. The fissures that maybe formed in the certainty of self identity, created by this specific internalised but culturally architected trauma, has the ability to fragment the whole psychological complex of the self.  Within this context, failure to fulfil your co-opted emotions makes the person feel less capable of gaining the ‘worthiness’, the cultural adoration in that moment and potentially in any future episodes of success.

This is different but has the same result, in a psychological context to ‘learned helplessness’, where failure to succeed in a task orientated situation over and over produces an inability to complete further challenges. Not because they are unsolvable but due a sense of inability to change or control the situation enough to make a difference, we then secumb to the ‘why try’ narrative. Even when there is a solution and a chance to do so. Our current systems magic is that it seems unchangeable, when in fact its power is its ability to subsume, morph and by illusion manifest itself into a culture and way of living that seems to be our modus operandi. Its skill at reflexing to hits to its structure makes it seemingly infallible. Have we then simply accepted a certainty of that perpetual motion of progressive destruction of living systems, ethos and meaning because the inability to challenge its authority is now simply part of our cultural identity?

Humans cultural clammer for a cresta for adoration is though built on false premises, manufactured for the living generations in late modernities power plays, to propagate wrong stories under the cover of dust kicked up by the mob of capitalist scramble, fighting for shiny fragments of a material cultured moral high ground. The problem with the high ground modernity find its self on, it is created out of the ruins of the living world.   Modernity has always been a post-apocalyptic creation, born out of devastation and destruction of the fabric of the living world and destruction of the weave of culture. Modernity is also antibiotics, anaesthetics, mothers who can almost take for granted that she will survive childbirth and the father, holding their firstborn, who can almost take it for granted that he will live to see this creature grow strong while he grows old. Because modernity is all these things, it is hard to see or to name its post-apocalyptic character. To do so is a kind of blasphemy. The standard answer has been to disregard the devastation, to treat culture as anachronism and to treat the living world as a storehouse of resources for our exploitation. We are coming to the end of this way of treating the world.  Success aspiration is the creator and consequence to a crisis of mastery and of the mythos of progress, expansion and extractive relationship from other around you.   Where your success is deemed to be this accumulation of mastery of control and ownership.  This seeking mastery story is one where we are able to control the world, our bodies, our lives, our emotions and the elements. It seems the planet and our mind is not keen on this goal however and our world building project is meeting its limits. Our strand in the web of life is now denuded as result of expectations of achievement, from where those achievement ideals are born and how those achievements are manifested.

The problems of how we manifest our mental achievements surrounds us but additionally to this is how those achievements have changed our structures to exists on this planet. Humans have shifted to a centralised power, state, thought, identity and have destroyed the importance of complexity of being. By centralising people, be that physically or mentally from their land, means that this uprooted person is more easily colonised by a centralising force. When we are uprooted it is then perfectly understandable response to grasp, seek at or look for the authoritarian figure or patrical god or the monotheistic omnipotence that can guarantee a sense of certainty when it is the only kind of relationship that you have left. The pretence that we can do one thing across the globe is highly damaging for local communities as places have natural boundaries. These limits are being ignored to make lots of money for a few at the expense of the local.

Individualism is very important but we must also absolutely recognise that we are born into total dependency, as we are only alive because we are a compendium of other species and it is mutual dependency that has defined human ethics because always we have been or about to become dependent upon others.  The fruits of our cultural system is utterly hand woven into the worlds ecosystem. The differences between people and places is life giving and vital and general uniformity is a wrong way of being, and imposing the same rules across contexts is a receipt for failure. Our context is always our home, people we bond with, the local and familiar. We must fight against uniformity, decontextualisation and generalisation as it will inevitably causes fractulisation which leads to a deep insecurity, existential angst, where we question ourselves about what am I, where am I, what is the world. We need to rally against reductionist materialism and should recognise that every moral order is a material arrangement and that this has caused a broken bond, because this has been for to long our starting point to understand the world fundamental nature.

What answers can we supposedly garner from this situation. We can always provide wide un-contextualised answers to the digital age, conflicts, ecological and climate degradation which could be boil down to the trite unhelpful remedies of ‘turn it off’, ‘ look away’, ‘you don’t have to watch’ but as a society we are part of a web of meaning, where understanding and interpretations binds us. We sense beyond our body, to what is encapsulating us in this ballistic age of change and upheaval.

There are no answers to the predicaments discussed. It is a predicament and not bunch of problems, as problems have solutions and predicaments don’t. The left side of our brain battles our need for movement as it wants to be reductionist and is so certain of its answers, it wants to complete and finish and gives us the whole before we understand the parts. We don’t find the general by turning our backs on the particular but by going through that particular towards the general. But it has given us all the solutions created from a wrong way of thinking and wrong story. It thinks it is cleverer than the right, which cognitively it is not, but due to us allowing its way of processing our world experience, we have allowed it to take hold and it has done just that. This control has lead to us accepting the status quo, the technical solutions that fit in our current system thinking as certainty and not as mere parts of the problem and process.  Our future is affected by our choices. We don’t actually have a failure to chose but there is a failure of choice and that choice isn’t actually giving us any different function any longer.   We must also see because we have such a profound connection to nature the left side of the brain in its dominant way and the need to close down to certainty and control has reconstituted this as a need to save the environment.  Which we absolutely need to do, as its salvation is our own, but we cannot use the same kind of thinking that got us into this predicament as the way to get us out. So if anybody comes and prescribes a “solution” to the societies issues, the climate crisis, your pain, anxiety etc then I suggest you run in the opposite direction from them.   

So in the next part of this essay I will try to explain ways to create positive change in your particular sense of self to hopefully enable a manifestation of improvement to our greater ecosystem. There is no prescriptions given but just places to explore and ask more questions about.   

See you in the next part hopefully.