If weíre going to try to save the world and stuff, we need to stay well, and loose. Grief and sorrow for the suffering of Gaia are perfectly understandable, and thereís no point denying what we feel or what we know, but getting angry and worked up (like I do too often) is just a waste of time and energy, and can make you sick. So here, from various people who are much better at it than I am, are twenty Let-Self-Change ways to become more resilient. The first ten are physical techniques, the second ten social; Iíve indicated what works for me (WWFM) for the first fifteen, while the last five Iíve made really limited progress on:

1. Pay Attention to Your Body: Listen to it, and it will tell you what you need, and what you need to do. We’re all different, so don’t pay much heed to conventional wisdom and popular cures. WWFM: My watch beeps lightly once an hour, and that’s my cue to pay attention to how I feel, how I’m standing or sitting (badly, too often), what I’m ignoring (my thirst, most often).
2. Exercise: It doesnít much matter what kind — anything that will make you sweat for at least 30 minutes at least 3 times a week will do. Our bodies were not built to be inactive, and working out is a great stress-buster. WWFM: Running in the back yard beside the forest, with PucPuc, who’s back after six weeks’ hibernation.
3. Eat Properly: The right foods, lots of variety, balance, micro-nutrient rich, not too much, etc. Whatever works for you. Some people swear by fasting, but not me. WWFM: vegetarian foods, especially nuts, beans, and berries and other fruits.
4. Drink Lots of the Right Stuff: Break the sweetened beverage habit, including processed ‘juices’ that have more sugar than juice. Here’s a great guide to what to drink.  WWFM: tea, smoothies (just fruit and ice).
5. Get Your Endorphins Flowing: But choose healthy ways to do so (sex, dark chocolate, exercise, laughter, crying, light, beauty, the company of animals and babies, play, music), not the unhealthy ways (masochism, sleep deprivation, sugar). WWFM: all of the above healthy ways.
6. Rediscover Natural Posture: This comes from paying attention to your body, and is revealed not only how you stand and sit, but how you walk, sleep, run, and stretch. Yoga works for most people, and physiotherapy can help undo past damage. WWFM: standing all day at my desk, with appropriate footwear, cushioning, stretching and moving around.
7. Reconnect With Nature, Your Senses and Your Instincts: Become a part of Gaia, and share the joy of all-life-on-Earth. This reconnection can prevent you from taking everything personally, especially responsibility for everything wrong with the world. Do exercises to practice focusing and strengthening your senses and trusting your instincts. WWFM: birdwatching.
8. Find Relaxation Techniques That Work: Meditation does it for some, but not me, at least so far. Massage is a great alternative, including shower massage and the hot tub. WWFM: Focused thinking on some problem or possible article while I’m moving (running, driving, on the train).
9. Perk Up Your Appearance: There’s a lot to be said for looking good as a way of feeling good, as long as you don’t make yourself sick (or broke) doing it. It can help you like yourself more, and also get you a little more attention and appreciation, which we all need. Animals groom each other, which has the double benefit of improving appearance and connection. WWFM: OK, I confess: I can’t pass a mirror without looking at myself, and smiling: I like what I see.
10. Get Lots of Rest: We all need restful sleep, but we also need some time just to unwind and do nothing, to rest our minds. WWFM: 8 hours’ sleep a night. And, even though Chelsea is no longer around to keep me company, sitting at the top of the hill in the back yard, night or day, just watching, listening, smelling, tasting, feeling, and nothing more.
11. Company: Surround yourself with loving people and animals and love them back. Look for new companions to love. It’s impossible to love too many. Network deeply. Reach out and touch those you care for and let them touch you. Be utterly honest with your company, but don’t be needy: Take only what’s given freely. WWFM: my readers, although I really don’t know why you put up with me!
12. Get Past Regrets For What is Done: There is nothing more tragic than wasting your life thinking of what might have been. WWFM: I try to focus mostly on the present (‘in the moment’) and a bit on the future (what’s coming up that’s fun, organizing social events).
13. Give Yourself Time and Space: Try to avoid stressful people and situations, and to stay away from crowds (who aggregate in deceptively lonely places). Make time to do things that are important and not urgent, to reflect, to get things in order and put things in perspective. WWFM: My new contract job: low-stress, fixed hours, caring people. And walking in wilderness, and in the neighbourhood after it rains.
14. Think for Yourself: I’ve said enough about this lately. Try to be nobody but yourself, and donít be afraid to be different. Stop competing with other people, especially on their terms. WWFM: With my ego and wild imagination, this has never been a problem.
15. Avoid Bad News That is Not Actionable: Turn it off, it is incessant and will only make you feel worse, and helpless. WWFM: I donít read newspapers or watch TV news. Instead, I rely on you, dear readers, to filter and tell me what I need to know that is actionable. Exception: I read the local community paper, because it’s about things I can influence.

Now we get to the five things I don’t do well, though it’s not for lack of trying.

16. Learn What Gets to You and Self-Manage: This is different for each of us. For me itís people who are willfully ignorant, unthinking, dishonest, insensitive, unfair, unreasonable, or abuse power. I admire people who can catch themselves before they get angry; I can’t.
17. Do Little, Personal, Generous Things: Things that make the world just a little better, every day. These acts pay huge dividends. I need to do more of them.
18. Learn Self-Sufficiency: Learning to do things for yourself, like growing a thriving garden, making your own clothes, fixing your house and car. Being less helpless is good for your mental health as well as your pocketbook and your freedom from wage slavery. As my recent rant about my roof, my modem, and my insurance made clear, I have a long way to go here. 
19. Intend: A genuine intention to Let-Self-Change leads to the first small step, which leads to all the others, which leads to accomplishment and exhilaration. Just begin.
20. Give Yourself a Break: No one is in control. No one can save the world. I know you’re doing your best, against all kinds of obstacles. Give yourself some credit for what you’ve done, what you’ve learned, how you’ve made the world so much better for those you love and have loved.

Postscript for Those With Animal Companions: You’ve probably heard about the tens of millions of cans and pouches of dog and cat food recalled for possible poison contents, by the latest act of negligence by the food oligopoly, this time by a little-known Canadian-registered company (US-owned) that apparently sells the same crap to all the major oligopoly players in North America from Iams to Walmart No-name. So much for consumer choice. For a list of all 88 brands potentially affected, go here. This company has a record of rocky financial performance and has been implicated in animal cruelty in testing. Their entire website except the recall notice has suddenly disappeared; even the Google cache seems to have been wiped. Although it’s no longer possible to research, it would appear that the Canadian registration is a tax-dodge to exploit the now-canceled income trust loophole in Canadian tax regulations. The poisoning coincides with the use of a new (presumably cheaper) supplier of the grain filler that makes up most of what is sold as ‘premium’ pet food. Time to do your research and spare your pet the same toxic processed food oligopoly sludge you’re trying to wean yourself off. (Asyou can see, I’m still struggling with point 16 above.)

- ee cummings

My article on Monday, Nobody But Yourself, was one of the worst articles I’ve ever written, not only because, in cluttering it with tangential arguments, I failed to articulate the point I was trying to make, but because, in the process, I made two outrageously dumb statements* that totally undermined my credibility. So rather than trying to clean up that mess, I’m going to start again from scratch, because this is important.
 .     .     .     .     .
Humans are, and always have been, inherently social creatures. This is evolutionary, but it isn’t all about survival. It’s about surviving being worth it. Social behaviour is about joy, about learning, about the value of shared experience. Those things make you want to survive. And if you want to, you will. So Darwin has a hand in this, but mostly indirectly.

Because we are social, we enter into tacit social contracts with others. These contracts entail giving something and getting something, mostly in a win-win proposition (or one party wouldn’t agree to the contract). What we get are some pretty important things:

• appreciation/love (for who we are and what we do)
• attention
• understanding (a mutual reward)
• desired actions from others
• the ’1+1=3′ benefits of collaborative action (accomplishing things no one can do alone)

In evolutionary terms these advantages have evolved into needs: We can no longer live without them, because they are now part of what defines us as a species, so that those who lack them tend to select themselves out of the gene pool. We have developed an insatiable appetite for these things, and we have invented tools that allow us to get more of them.

The most notable of these is language, which we evolved to allow us to be more precise in giving instruction and in communicating what we mean (and perhaps what we feel, though that’s debatable). As a consequence of these inventions, and practice at using them, what has emerged is shared patterns of behaviour and activities, what we call culture. And because culture is social ‘software‘, it can evolve much more quickly than the hard-wired ‘hardware‘ parts of what makes us us ñ our bodies, our emotions and our instincts. And because they can evolve much more quickly, when it suits their purpose, they do.

So we now live in a world where we are trying to employ 21st century social software while we remain trapped in bodies that are largely prehistoric ñ they evolve very slowly, and haven’t changed much in tens of thousands of years. One obvious consequence of this is the physical and emotional illness that comes from our visceral reaction to stress: What used to be an evolutionary advantage (the ability to move very fast and strike very hard when you’re about to be eaten by something bigger than you) has become an evolutionary handicap, a worse-than-useless vestige of our prehistoric past.

I mentioned above what we get from the social contract. Other than the risk of losing our physical and emotional health due to stress, what do we risk or give up in this bargain? Cummings would argue, I think, that unless we are extraordinarily diligent and extremely self-aware and self-competent, we give up everything that make us us ñ we give up being nobody-but-ourselves and we become everybody else.

Think about the nature of the social interactions you enter into every day:

• At work, you tie yourself in knots to be appreciated and understood, from dressing like everybody else to very gradually shifting your whole worldview to one that is more compatible with, and easier to communicate with, the worldview of everybody else.
• In your political thinking, you align yourself with the group that comes closer/closest to your own worldview, and you end up defending that party’s worldview, often fiercely, despite not agreeing with or not understanding much of it, because the alternative of the other party’s worldview is even worse: “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”.
• In your family life, you may contort yourself to earn and be considered worthy of the love of the one person you are allowed to love (alas, in our modern culture, polyamory is not tolerated); you may do anything, including trying to make yourself what you are not, to get or keep that love.
• In some subcultures, you are expected to sacrifice yourself for some collective ideal, norm or ritual: To marry someone you despise, to self-immolate if your spouse dies, to mutilate yourself to show you ‘belong’.
• In all your social circles, you’re under enormous pressure to conform to the ‘norms’ of many different peer groups: if you don’t, you risk being bullied in the schoolyard, excommunicated, shunned by your neighbours, and gossiped about behind your back: Just try and get attention and appreciation then.

Dave Snowden quotes Terry Eagleton as saying “you can only defeat an antagonist whose ways of seeing things you can make sense of”. I think the corollary is equally true: there is no point trying to persuade others unless they understand your frame or worldview. The need to make this constant, convulsive accommodation to achieve any kind of mutual understanding places enormous pressure on us to think more and more like everybody else. And the more we think and act like everybody else, the more we become everybody else. Suppress or deny your feelings, conform, do what you’re told, choose Brand A or Brand B (no other brand, and no opting out), look like everyone else, dress like everyone else, talk like everyone else, read and watch and talk about what everyone else reads and watches and talks about.

There have been some remarkable studies of ‘wild’ children, those who have grown up without human social contact. They are generally considered to be mentally and socially ‘retarded’, but they appear to have amazing perceptual and intuitive abilities, and their brains’ neural patterns, not forged by constant exposure to monolithic language, are astonishingly different from ‘civilized’ people’s. They are nobody but themselves.

Perhaps for the first few hours of our lives, we are all nobody but ourselves. After that, I’m not sure our species has ever been anything except everybody else. My anthropological studies would suggest that, at an astonishing pace over the past 30,000 years of civilization culture, we have become less diverse and more homogeneous, in both our thinking and behaviour, and that at an accelerating rate we are becoming more and more everybody else. Indigenous peoples are modestly less monolithic and more tolerant of personal differences of thought and action than civilized people, but they are more like us and everybody else than they are nobody but themselves.

Cummings’ point, and mine, is that it is extremely difficult to be nobody but yourself, but that it is worth it, that we have paid far too high a price for the social contract we have struck, that our poor bodies and emotions and instincts are suffering for it, and that it’s getting worse.

My novel-in-progress The Only Life We Know is about this, and it portrays a world after civilization’s collapse in which every child born is again free to be nobody but themselves, for their lifetime. Perhaps fiction will convey this idea, and its importance, in a more compelling and articulate way than I can in an essay. I just know there is something missing, something lost, something we have given up in civilization’s social bargain, something that we instinctively long for, something worth fighting the hardest battle that any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

That’s what I was trying to say on Monday.

* My first ridiculously dumb statement in Monday’s post was that I don’t really care what readers think of my writing or ideas. The second was that, given the choice between a dialogue on something I’ve written and writing something new, there is no contest. A dialogue in a medium that allows for effective communication between articulate people who have substantial shared context and understanding of each other’s worldview is about as close to intellectual and emotional nirvana as it gets. You’d have to be seriously antisocial toprefer solitary writing to that.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being
can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

- ee cummings

I confess I have not yet read Dawkins’ book The God Delusion (it sits, unopened, in favour of a collection of short stories by Amy Hempel, on my bedside table), though I think I have read more than a book’s worth of discussion about it. I may well write about it once I’ve read it, but in the meantime all the discussion of the book has caused me to think about something much more important, IMO, than the existence of superhumans: Our growing inability to think for ourselves.

The OED defines religion as “human recognition of superhuman controlling power and especially of a personal god entitled to worship and obedience”. Religions (plural) are in fact shared sets of beliefs about the nature of superhumanity and about which form to worship and obey. The word religion means “to bind” or constrain, to tie down.

In this sense a religion is merely a specific type of culture, culture being a shared pattern of beliefs or activities. We now live in a world with one overwhelmingly dominant Culture, within which a variety of religions and other subcultures exist which quibble among themselves (constantly, and often violently). This Culture and these subcultures can now hardly be escaped ñ there is no place to go to get away from Civilization Culture, its artifacts, its messages ñ to be, as Cummings says, “nobody-but-yourself”.

I find this terrifying. It is what I mean when I describe the modern world as a prison. There is no escaping it. The wardens are always watching you. Your fellow inmates are always correcting you, competing with you, pushing you around, compelling you to be “everybody else”. To stop trying to be nobody-but-yourself. To stop thinking for yourself. To be one with the BorgÖ er, I mean Culture.

I don’t believe in moral judgement, and I don’t view this reality as good or bad. It is just the way things are, and getting more so, as the last vestiges of cultures that differ significantly from Civilization Culture are extinguished, indoctrinated, and absorbed.

Why would this be? Because in the short run it is an evolutionary success. In a world with a natural human population level in balance with all life on Earth, there is room for diverse cultures to have their own space, and for individuals to have enough room and resources to be nobody-but-themselves. By contrast, in our horrifically overcrowded world, survival without constant war demands that we eliminate diversity, to have monoculture. Just as we have replaced permaculture (resilient, natural, self-managing, self-sufficient, abundant, sustainable) with monoculture agriculture (uniform, fragile, high-maintenance, unnatural, catastrophic, but efficient enough to keep many more humans alive, while it lasts), we have largely replaced astonishing indigenous human diversity (resilient, natural, self-managing, self-sufficient, abundant, sustainable) with human monoculture (uniform, fragile, high-maintenance, unnatural, catastrophic, but efficient enough to keep many more humans alive, while it lasts). Monoculture confers short-term evolutionary advantage and so it was probably inevitable. In the long run, it is unsustainable and hence will ultimately and inevitably collapse and be replaced with new diversity. Darwin’s rules.

We have, in addition to all the religions, political subcultures in the form of political parties, either owned by rich and powerful corporatists committed to Civilization Culture, or longing for a taste of power themselves, to perpetrate the variation of Civilization Culture that they believe in. And, in the pursuit of electoral popularity, they will compromise without limit, to the point that all that distinguishes the Tweedledum party from the Tweedledee party is the style and colour of their logos and their rhetoric.

And in addition to the religious and political subcultures we have the economic, social and technological ones. We have those who worship the ‘free market’. We have those who worship size and growth. We have those who pay homage to the latest edicts from the fashion world. Or the latest technology. Or the latest successful business tycoon. Or the latest sports/entertainment idol. We have those who follow their new age gurus and those who are obedient to their Twelve Steps. We have people who seek the promise of eternal life in nano-form, and those who believe technology will bring us salvation. And others who pursue the coming of a global ‘collective consciousness’.

These are all subcultures within the global Civilization Culture. The rich and powerful are delighted to have us endlessly distracted by these subcultures, to believe there are significant differences between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But you can’t jam the culture. Even the majority of the poor and disenfranchised eagerly support the culture, and aspire to ‘succeed’ in it. All the subcultures and the artificial choices and illusory differences between them keep us distracted from realizing that we have become everybody else. They keep us obedient to the larger Civilization Culture, keep us busy, keep us in line. Those in a monoculture must be kept in line. There is no room for anyone who is nobody-but-themselves.

Our Civilization Culture’s subcultures are remarkable not for their differences but for their crushing sameness: Like the ‘choice’ between McDonalds or Burger King, they offer an illusion of freedom to choose. They all tempt you to ‘join’, to sign up for their ‘brand’ of Civilization Culture. To stop thinking for yourself and be everybody else. (Ah, but sir, just look, our brand of everybody else suits you so well!) We have thousands of subcultures, many of them at war with each other (in order to keep the members ‘bound’ together through having a common ‘enemy’). The prosperity of the Tweedledum subculture depends on its unifying enmity for the Tweedledee subculture, and vice versa. The continuation of Civilization Culture depends on us being everybody else, through one subculture or another.

Dawkins takes issue with those who seek a reconciliation between the religious subcultures and the science & technology subcultures. He doesn’t think we should be tolerant of subcultures which preach hate for other subcultures or which question the truths of the science & technology subcultures. Like a preacher or an advertiser or a car salesman, he wants to convert us from one subculture to another. We debate, we fight wars and elections, but its all about which ‘everybody else’ everybody should be.

Let me put it in simpler terms. Religions and other subcultures are all forms of groupthink. Groupthink is easy, it is comforting. It enables more people to live in crowded, unpleasant and unnatural conditions, because we have the group, ‘our’ beliefs to fall back on. They explain away everything. They promise a better future in return for suffering, obedience and worship today. They keep us in line and in thrall.

Groupthink, as Cummings was I think trying to tell us, is essentially a form of self-loathing. For some this takes the form of self-prostration or confession or admitting we’re addicted or other forms of self-abasement. But there are newer forms: Screaming hysterically at the mere sight of a celebrity. Doing what you’re told, 9-5 every day, without question. Living in a squalid, over-crowded, unnatural urban or suburban world among neighbours you don’t know or don’t like, without question or complaint. Longing for, and working to ‘earn’, the latest cult artifact that shows you belong to the brand of your ‘choice’. 

I don’t disrespect religions and other subcultures. I empathize with their members, as I empathize with inmates of jails and hospitals and institutions and personal hells, confined as they are in a hollow figment of a real life, never free just to be themselves. We are all in the same boat.

What is now called ‘low self-esteem’ is absolutely essential to the continuation of Civilization Culture. You must believe that others have the inherent right to tell you what to do and how to think. You must believe that the choice between Tweedledum or Tweedledee is your most important decision. You must know your place in the line and the hierarchy. And you must be kept busy enough doing meaningless work, and scared enough about the scarcity lurking just around the corner if you stop, that you never dare think for yourself.

Our planet’s remaining indigenous cultures are based more substantially on respect for and trust in the individual to know what to do, and the freedom to make one’s own decisions. Their cultures respect all life on Earth, and respect their elders and ancestors, but they do not worship them or necessarily even obey them. They have evolved in a way that is antithetic to groupthink because, unlike us, they have had space to accommodate diversity and are not dependent on the constraints of monoculture agriculture. Where there is room for diversity, it’s an evolutionary advantage, since it makes the culture more resilient.

We have learned enough about our world to know, intellectually, emotionally, instinctively, that there are no superhumans, that No One is In Control, and that Civilization Culture, in its headlong race to self-perpetuate and grow without limit, has launched our planet’s sixth Great Extinction. Still, we take turns reassuring ourselves everything will be alright. We have met the enemy and he is us.

There are readers who have claimed that I am religious and that my ‘god’ is nature or Gaia. But while I am in awe of nature’s ability to evolve self-organization for the collective well-being of all life on Earth over millions of years (you have to admit, unless you’re a creationist, that that’s a remarkable achievement), I do not ‘worship’ nature. Nature is merely a remarkable adaptation, though not without its cruelties. It has its rules, and they have evolved to work. Nature just is. It is not a god, or superhuman, or all-powerful, or divine.

I am and probably always will be in thrall to Civilization Culture. I have been fortunate to have had the time and opportunity to step back and study and learn about our world and our history and different cultures. And I’ve acquired a capacity to imagine possibilities very different from the reality in which we live today. As a result, I am very slowly extracting myself from the hold of this culture, by spending time thinking for myself. I am still far from being nobody-but-myself, but I am getting closer. As I get further from the Centre and closer to the Edge of Civilization Culture, its hold on me is weakening.

What freed me most of all was John Gray’s book Straw Dogs, because that book made me realize that we aren’t going to save the world, it’s just not in our nature, and that you cannot change culture (even counter-cultures are really just subcultures that either self-extinguish or become part of the larger Civilization Culture). Ultimately we cannot be what we are not. So despite the title of this blog (which has once again become ironic), I have no desire to sway people to think like me. I’m merely keeping a public journal of my experiment in learning to think for myself, and of my journey to our Civilization’s Edge.

If my writing provokes you to acknowledge that you’re in thrall to Civilization Culture but are making the arduous, life-long journey in the hope that you might just briefly understand what it means not to be everybody else, well then I wish you fare well (or as Eliot said, fare forward), wherever that journey may take you.

Postscript: Thinking about and writing this article has made me realize why I am so impatient with, and tardy in responding to, comments and e-mails about my articles.  I’ve come to realize that I don’t much care what others think of my writing or my ideas. I write to think out loud, to clarify my own thinking and feeling and sensing and instincts. Whenever I’ve written an article espousing the starting of some movement or collective action (and boy is it tempting to do so!) an alarm bell goes off in my head, saying don’t do that. So I’m going to stop worrying about and apologizing for not replying to e-mails and comments. I read them all, I appreciate them all, but giventhe choice between a dialogue on what I’ve written and writing something new, there is no contest.