 Joe Bageant makes the point in Deer Hunting With Jesus that the working class of the US (and perhaps of the world) are largely driven by fear. In explaining how and what they think he makes clear what it is they are afraid of:
In Lakoff’s terms, these fears explain the conservative worldview pretty well. If you’re driven by fear, and these are things you fear, the ’strict father’ approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes makes a lot of sense:
That got me thinking about the rest of us. If we’re not part of the working/poor/uneducated class, what class do we belong to? Joe defines “working class” as those people who have no power/control over their jobs: what they do, when they do it, at what price, and how vulnerable they are to layoffs not connected to their work performance. The rest of us, other than the tiny elite of super-rich and super-powerful, he calls the “catering” class — because they cater/pander to the elite in return for a higher level of wealth and control than the “working” class receives. So I guess that means that I (and I suspect the majority of readers of this blog) are members of the catering/affluent/educated class, most of whom, in Lakoff terms, are liberal-progressives with the ‘nurturing parent’ approach to living, to raising a family, and to voting that Lakoff describes:
Are we, too, driven to this worldview and these approaches to living by our fears? I’d like to believe we are less driven by fear than those in the working/poor/uneducated class, but I’m not so sure. In one sense, we have more control over our lives and more assets to protect ourselves with, and more marketable talents. But perhaps because we have more, we have more to lose, so we are equally driven by fears. What are those fears? Having not done the kind of research that Joe has, I can only speak for myself, but I have a sense that my fears are pretty common among those I know. My recent period of self-reflection has made me a bit more aware of what my fears are, and they are:
Those are the things I am afraid of, anyway. I suspect my fellow educated liberal-progressives will protest that they don’t fear most of these things, but my observations suggest most of us do. Or maybe I’m just judging my peers by myself. What do you think? Joe talks about the “class war” that’s brewing in the US and, perhaps, everywhere. I think these different fears explain much of the basis for this “war”. It’s not so much we hate each other, as much as that we don’t know each other, we fear (and are driven by) completely different things (and each class to some extent epitomizes the things the other fears), and hence we can’t communicate with each other. And we don’t socialize between these classes enough to begin to understand the divide and start to bridge the gap. The chart above, that I explained in my Fire & Ice article, shows (in bold) the qualities that are increasingly prevalent among Americans, especially the young (who are, mostly, children of the growing working class). My sense is that working class fears drive the propensities in the right quadrants, while the catering class fears drive the propensities in the left quadrants. What’s more, I think the disappearance of the US middle class (and consequent growth of the working class) explains why the ‘median’ profile of Americans is now in the lower right quadrant, and moving lower and further right, while the ‘median’ profile of Europeans, where the middle ‘catering’ class is faring somewhat better, is still in the centre-left. And, for those who, in wondering why with all my new-found self-knowledge and opportunity to do anything I want to do, what’s holding me back, whatI’m afraid of — now you know. Category: Our Culture
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April 29, 2008
What Are You Afraid Of?
April 27, 2008
Photos from Australia and New Zealand
 Wellington NZ from the cable car Back in Caledon after an amazing three weeks in Australia (Victoria State) and New Zealand (North Island). My photos are here and here. Some suggestions for anyone planning a trip there:
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April 26, 2008
A Terrible and Silent Crisis: The Destruction of the American Working Class
 North American society prides itself on being classless. Almost no one in North America calls him/herself lower-class or upper-class, and people who describe themselves as ‘middle-class’ (a class which really no longer exists in North America) do so hesitantly. Few even describe themselves as ‘working-class’, since that seems to imply it’s a place one resides for life (which is the case, but to acknowledge this fact would put the lie to the myth of social mobility). Despite the Great American (and Canadian) Dream (anyone can be President or Billionaire if they work long and hard at it), your chances of moving up even one quintile in the economic and social order are negligible, and dependent more on luck than intelligence, endeavour or education. My friend Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting With Jesus explains through personal stories his brutal assessment of just how strong the class system in the US really is, why the classes are and always have been at war, and why that plays perfectly into the hands of the right-wing political and economic interests there. These are stories about the people Joe grew up with and calls friends, and to write about their lives so bluntly and candidly is an act of incredible courage and honesty. This is a society where poverty and illness are stigmatized as symptoms of laziness, ignorance and self-neglect, a society built on two-way class vs class fear of the unknown and misunderstood. The principal determinant of one’s class in America, and the hermetic worldview that comes with it, is education. More than anything, Deer Hunting is a plea to those of progressive inclination to meet with their working-class peers, at a grass-roots level, to understand how they live, how they think, and why they think that way, and to find, as hard as it will be to do so, common cause with them against the corporatist exploiters and their right-wing political and religious handmaidens, and common cause for universal health care, quality education for all, a fair pension and a decent wage for a day’s work — the end of the “dead-end social construction that all but guarantees failure”. I’d given away three copies of Joe’s book before I’d ready anything beyond the brilliant introduction — I just knew the people I gave them to needed to read the book more than I did. If you’ve read Lakoff, and kind of understand the huge divide between conservative and liberal worldviews, you have to read Bageant, so you really understand the chasm between the worldviews of the uneducated and educated. When you read Joe’s astonishing stories, all of a sudden what George Lakoff says makes sense. And, just as astonishingly, so does Bush’s 2004 win, and the terrifying prospect that Republican arch-conservatives could be poised to establish a dynasty in the US that will accelerate the Cheney-Bush regime’s project for endless war, bankrupting and dismantling government, and ending the separation of church and state, and which will last until that country’s final, ghastly unraveling occurs (I’m betting that will happen later this century). I picked up my fourth copy of Deer Hunting With Jesus in Australia, which includes a little orientation for Australians not familiar with current US culture. This orientation was probably unnecessary for two reasons: Educated Australians (and Canadians and Europeans) probably know as much about current US culture as their American counterparts. And uneducated people from these countries, I strongly suspect, think much like their US counterparts (though less fanatically) — Joe’s description of uneducated Americans sent shudders up my spine, as I recognized in their stories and attitudes those of many uneducated Canadians I thought I knew, or didn’t care to know (and now understand much better). There is so much wisdom in this book, and it is so important to read to achieve an understanding of the current predicament of the US (and hence of the world), that I would not presume to prÈcis it here. If you read only one book this year, please make it Deer Hunting With Jesus. Some of the key lessons for me:
The bottom line of this vicious cycle is that half of Americans are functionally illiterate, and poor education, poor health care, poor nutrition, corporatist oppression and exploitation are creating a time bomb that, in the short run, vents itself in anger against pontificating liberals they never see and don’t understand, and in the long run could explode into bloody and nationwide violence. These people, living right in our midst but whom we never reach out to, simply don’t have the wherewithal to improve their own lot — “they are too uneducated, too conditioned to the idea that being a consumer is the same thing as being a citizen.” Joe laments the fact that both affluent and poor are now being brought up with neither the capacity nor the need for self-recognition — for discovering who they are as individuals. Instead, they are given a ‘menu’ of lifestyles to choose from, each with its own defining brand names and ensembles. “Adult yokels and urban sophisticates can choose from a preselected array of possible selves based solely on what they like to eat, see, wear, hear and drive.” None of us can, any longer, “make up his or her identity from scratch.” The upper-middle and affluent suburban “catering classes”, those who support the corporatist centre (orange band in my chart above), are more to blame for its excesses than the working class because the catering classes at least have the education and power to see and resist it. When I published this chart a couple of years ago, it never occurred to me, in my liberal affluent comfort, that many or most of those living on the Edge are not at all able to see the centre for what it is, or to have any inkling that they need to pull further away from it, not aspire to become part of it. We are all, Joe argues, prisoners of this corporatist political and economic system, caught, more or less, in its web. “America’s much-ballyhood liberty is largely fictional. Three million of us are [in prisons or on parole]…The rest of us are captives of credit, our jobs, our need for health insurance, or our ceaseless quest for a decent retirement fund.” What’s worse, “You never know you are in prison until you try the door”. And America’s working class in particular has been so systematically dumbed down that they can’t even see the door. America, he says, cannot hope to stop messing up the rest of the world until it solves its own mess. “When social conscience extends no farther than ourselves, our friends, our families then Darfur and secret American prisons abroad are not [perceived to be] a problem”. This book is about the horrific mess that is America in the 21st century, but there is nothing here for those of us living in other countries to be smug about. American culture is being embraced everywhere in the world (and not, for the most part, forced down anyone’s throats). And our cultures already exhibit many of the same qualities and propensities that are so magnified in the US and portrayed in such terrifying light by Joe Bageant. So no matter where in the world you live, please buy several copies of Deer Hunting With Jesus and give them to people who do not understand why George Bush won the US election of 2004. This is important, and Joe has done all the hard work and research for us, in a courageous, personal and awesome portrait of the true nature of the most powerful country on the planet. We need everyone to hear this story, to understand what has been going on under our noses all along, that we never got quite close enough tosee. Category: US Politics
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April 16, 2008
Eat Pray Love
 Image: Sculpture by Bruno Torfs from Sculpture Garden, Marysville, Australia. (posted from Australia) The diary covers three sequential four-month pilgrimmages, to Italy to discover pleasure (Eat), to an Indian ashram to discover spirituality (Pray), and to Bali to discover how to balance the two (Love). More than anything, the voyage is one of self-discovery and self-realization: David and I met because he was performing in a play based on short stories I’d written. He was playing a character I’d invented, which is somewhat telling. In desperate love, it’s always like this, isn’t it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place…
David’s sudden emotional back-stepping probably would’ve been a catastrophe for me even under the best of circumstances, given that I am the planet’s most affectionate life-form (something like a cross between a golden retriever and a barnacle)…I had become addicted to David…It all begins when the object of your adoration bestows upon you a heady, hallucinogenic dose…of thunderous love and roiling excitement…When the drug is withheld, you promptly turn sick, crazy and depleted (not to mention resentful of the dealer who encouraged this addiction in the first place but who now refuses to pony up the good stuff anymore — despite the fact that you know he has it hidden somewhere, goddamn it, because he used to give it to you for free)… [Describing her depression:] When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost…Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore… I have boundary issues with men…I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything…my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog…everything…I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else. Sound like someone you know, or suddenly know now? Ms Gilbert’s tale is a long, terrible, wonderful, personal story, and she is a master raconteur of small anecdotes and incidents with profound meaning: “To find the balance you want,” [the ancient Balinese medicine man] Ketut spoke through his translator, “this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have four legs instead of two. That way you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.”…
When [my sister] Catherine told me about [a neighbour's terrible personal tragedy] I could only say, shocked, “Dear God that family needs grace”. She replied firmly, “That family needs casseroles“, and then proceeded to organize the entire neighbourhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace. She intersperses her self-reflections and anecdotes with perceptive insights into Western culture: “Generally speaking, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure…Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one…Americans don’t really know how to do nothing.” Her description of Italian men’s post-football-game rituals is side-splitting. And she describes Yoga in an astonishing and refreshing way, as grappling with …the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment…Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul yourself away from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that you can seek instead a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with poise.
Faith, she says, is “walking face-first and full speed into the dark”. Our destiny, she asserts, is focusing attention on things we can control and accepting and adapting to those we cannot: “I can decide how I spend my time, who I interact with, who I share my body and life and money and energy with…And most of all, I can choose my thoughts… the same way [I] can select the clothes [I'm] going to wear…If you want to control things in your life…work on the mind…Drop everything else but that…Every time a diminishing thought arises, I repeat the vow. I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.“ She describes her moment of Zen, of communion with God, painstakingly and passionately. Then, as she describes the balance she finds in Bali, she reports with astonishment: “I have so much free time, you could measure it in metric tons”. And finally, in retrospect, she says, of her bliss: What keeps me from dissolving right now into a complete fairy-tale shimmer is this solid truth, a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years — I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue…
I have become…liberated from the farce of pretending to be anyone other than myself. Her journey represents the journey of all of us, to get rid of the gunk that prevents us from being, simply, naturally, ourselves. It is my belief that wild creatures do not need to make this journey. They know who they are, and they live in that “eternal presence” without the need to unlearn and relearn and achieve self-mastery to do so. We have moved out of that world, into our heads, and our “spiritual” journeys are all, to some extent, in search of that way home to that place where we are our authentic selves, where we belong. It takes both great courage and exceptional self-awareness for an author to reveal herself so honestly that the reader can learn from her mistakes and her struggles. For that reason alone this book is a remarkable accomplishment, a profound and purely unselfish autobiography. Forget the self-help books — read this wonderful story and become, by association, a better, more focused, more aware, more directed, moreself-knowing, more sensuous, spiritual and loving person. Category: Being Human
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April 15, 2008
What’s Your ‘Big Question’?
 Image: Sculpture by Bruno Torfs from Sculpture Garden, Marysville, Australia. (posted from Australia) Edge magazine and several others have run articles on leading thinkers’ ‘Big Ideas’ — the revelation, the emergent understanding, the ‘aha! moment’ that has most provoked, inspired or changed them. I am not sure I have had any Big Ideas, just a few Miniature Truths. But today we live in an age of such uncertainty, a world where our understanding is so tenuous and constantly evolving, that I think it is more interesting to learn what people’s Big Questions are. Your Big Question is the issue, doubt, problem or struggle that keeps you awake at night because you know you are still a long way from resolving it, and without doing so you cannot achieve your life’s purpose. What interests me are the commonalities, patterns and collective approaches to dealing with these Big Questions. So lately I’ve been asking the people I meet what their Big Question is. I’ve found great similarities between the Big Questions of Canadians, Americans, and now Australians. But surprisingly, I’ve found signifiant differences between the Big Questions of men and women. Men’s seem to be more idealistic and conceptual, women’s more specific, practical and particular. Recently I have been struggling with Big Questions of how to make better use of my time, of whether and how Intentional Communities can work and become models that are replicated, of whether and how I can love many people in ways that are useful and fulfilling to all of us (rather than constantly letting others down), and of how to live simpler. These big questions are, of course, all interrelated: Loving many people requires effective use of time, and is perhaps only possible in communities where they are all constantly close at hand. And living simpler probably also requires living in community. So maybe the underlying Big Question for me is: Where Do I Belong? To what physical place, to what community, to what way of living and making a living? The biggest challenge with such a question is whether it is even possible to answer that personally, individually, intentionally — or whether such awareness, such discovery needs to emerge, evolve, collectively, with that of others, such that we (we the creatures in those places, the humans in search of their belonging, the communities-in-forming, the enterprises waiting to evolve in response to deep unmet needs) together, must discover them? Several of the men I have spoken to recently have identified their Big Question as some variation of: Am I Doing This Right? In other words, is the process they are using to accomplish what they know they are intended to do, the right process, the best way of achieving it? I confess I am much less sure that I know what I am intended to do, so I am not yet ready to acknowledge this as my Big Question. The women I have spoken to recently have mostly said they don’t really have a Big Question, but rather a few or a host of specific, personal questions. What might this reflect: pragmatism, practicality, or resignation, unwarranted modesty? They say that knowing the real question is half way to finding the answer. But if Where Do I Belong? is my Big Question, it leaves me bewilderingly unaware of what the answer might be, or even how to start down the path towards discovering it. Although I’m blogging from Australia on a trip that is half business, half personal, I have no great passion to start searching the world for the answer, as Liz Gilbert does in Eat Pray Love. The number of people I love is substantial, but the number I have discovered who I know I would want to spend the rest of my life living with and making a living with is tiny, and not sufficient for a sustainable community or even a sustainable enterprise. Where does one start to find where one belongs, if it is not looking for the place that is, intuitively and unquestionably, home? And if, from over 2000 people whose company I’ve discovered I enjoy immensely I cannot assemble enough to make a sustainable community, even I could convince them all to come and share my home, or create an enterprise with me? I think what makes discovery of one’s purpose so hard in our modern culture is that there are so many people, so many places, so many options and choices. In indigenous communities the choices were limited, but somehow, my instincts tell me, their members were vastly happier. Perhaps I am too demanding of others, and of myself. That’s not uncommon among hopeless idealists. I remain a believer in intentional community and in a polyamorous lifestyle, though I am doubtful either is realistically viable. But I have no Plan B. The one positive is that, more than any time in my adult life, I am open to possibility. The life I am intended to live, and the place where I belong, are out there, waiting to be discovered. Enough about my Big Question. What is yours? What is the issue, doubt, problem or struggle that keeps you awake at night because you know you are still a long way from resolving it, and without doing so you cannot achieve your life’s purpose? Category: Let-Self-Change |
April 10, 2008
What Works and What Doesn’t
 Geoff Brown’s ‘Nancy White style’ Map of Our Conversation with Viv McWaters (Posted from Melbourne) This will be the first of a series of posts distilling ideas from a series of conversations, meetings and conferences I’m involved in during my current visit to Australia. I have been meeting with thought leaders in the areas of facilitation, Open Space, improv, knowledge management, education, cultural anthropology, conversation, sustainability, stories/narrative, social networking, communities of passion, complexity theory and collaboration. I have met Viv McWaters (and Pete), Geoff Brown, Laurie Webb, Shawn Callahan, Michael Sampson, and Michael Nugent (and Trish), and a variety of participants in some of their remarkable projects. Although they have different areas of expertise and experience, the same questions (issues we’re all grappling with) keep emerging in our discussions:
In answer to the first question (what works and what doesn’t in change programs), John Kotter has said there are eight preconditions to ‘leading change’ in organizations. The first and most important are (a) shared sense of urgency and (b) a guiding coalition. My experience has been that real change in organizations rarely occurs by executive fiat. When ordered to do something new, people who aren’t ’sold’ on the idea will tend to comply only to the extent and for as long as they absolutely have to. By contrast, those who are sold on the idea, who are passionate about it, will sustain the change. Likewise, having a guiding coalition of people championing and stewarding a change through will help to achieve immediate compliance, but not necessarily enduring change. Like it or not, people tend to do, in the long run, what they think makes sense, to the extent they are able to do so, rather than what they are told to do. This streak of self-management is inherent in human nature, I think, and generally a good thing, except perhaps in armies, and even then I’m not too sure. So in our discussions to date about what works and what doesn’t, the list of ‘what works’ is looking something like this:
(PS: A possible 13th question, after hearing her name from four different people here in Australia already: Is there anyone in the world Nancy White doesn’t know and hasn’t worked with?) Category: Collaboration |
April 3, 2008
Friday Flashback: He Can’t Hear You Anymore
 Just before Christmas 2004 I wrote an article about homelessness and substance addiction. Not as a national and global disgrace, which it is, but as a metaphor for what civilization has done to us. Our modern ‘homelessness’ is our disconnection from place, from all-life-on-Earth, from living a natural life in a natural environment. Our modern addiction is to consumption and debt. It’s all so understandable, tragic, and intractable. The next time you see a homeless person, or an addict, don’t be frightened, angry, or filled with pathos. You are looking in the mirror. Image of homelessness from the now-defunct Italian blog Moving & Learning . |
Unpopular Beliefs
 One of the challenges of being too far ahead is the push-back you get on some of your ideas and beliefs. My ideas and beliefs tend to fall into three categories:
In the progressive press, news that some people still haven’t accepted Category 1 beliefs is often reported dismissively, derisively, impatiently, even angrily. There is a sense that we’re past that, that we shouldn’t still have to deal with these issues. In the progressive press, there is a lot of debate about Category 2 beliefs. The progressive point of view is advanced, articulated, argued vociferously. Other points of view are presented, in an effort to understand and refute them. You will not find much in the progressive press, or anywhere else, on Category 3 beliefs. These are fringe thoughts, limited to the left-wing and anarcho-press. Some progressives may be sympathetic to these beliefs, but they don’t want to discuss them, be associated with them, have to defend them against the rabid antipathy of the mainstream. Some progressives may be completely unsympathetic to them, and consider them a betrayal, a distraction, ammunition to the other side. I have always believed that things are the way they are for a reason. When I’ve held unpopular beliefs in past, I’ve remained suspicious of them, kept them mostly to myself, thrown them out not as my own but as ’straw man’ ideas to be prodded, exposed, poked full of holes. Perhaps as a result, most of the unpopular beliefs I held as a young man I no longer espouse. Or perhaps it is because it was more important to me to be accepted, popular, everybody-else. If you hold an unpopular belief too vociferously, you can be trampled, brutalized, ostracized, lynched. Just ask anyone who espoused Category 1 or 2 beliefs when they were still Category 3 beliefs. As I get older, I am no longer as concerned with what people think of my beliefs, and I am modestly more competent at defending them, at least with those who are capable of listening. And while some of my youthful unpopular beliefs are no longer things I believe in, I have lots of new Category 3 beliefs, most of which I have aired on this blog at one time or another. The response I have received to my articles about them, and my espousal of these beliefs, has been, for the most part, pretty hostile, and sometimes downright nasty. Sometimes I feel like just keeping them to myself. But then I ask myself: What if I had lived in a previous generation or more conservative country, and I had chosen to keep silent about then-unpopular beliefs that have since become (thanks in part to people who fought for them) Category 1 or 2 beliefs? The four examples of Category 3 beliefs above are the ones I have received the most violent negative response to. Most of the people I know (and Americans in particular, for some reason) seem to abhor the idea that we don’t have a ‘right’ to ‘own’ and use the planet and everything that comes from our resources for human, personal purposes. They believe almost religiously that leadership and hierarchy are essential to a functional society, and that there is an inalienable human right to reproduce as many of our own kind as we choose. There are times when I just shut up about my unpopular beliefs, because to some extent, as Daniel Quinn says, people will only listen to new ideas when they are ready. Arguing with people who are viscerally hostile to what you believe is a waste of time and energy. But there are other times when I cannot remain silent. When I just have to stand up for what I believe in. “If at first an idea isn’t considered absurd”, Einstein said, “there is no hope for it.” Maybe I’m just stubborn. Or maybe I’m relearning to pay attention to and trust my instincts. If you don’t like what I say, that’s fine. I don’t want to argue. But I’munrepentent. My unpopular beliefs’ time is coming. New Yorker cover by Charles E Martin from September 11, 1971 Category: Our Culture
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April 1, 2008
Why, Perhaps, You Are Not Happy
 “I Wonder Who We Are Except In Relation to Others?”, Patti Digh asked, somewhat rhetorically, in a recent IM conversation. No question that we are social creatures, and that we cannot live a healthy life alone. But we are more than just social creatures — we have an identity that is innate, a ’self’ that we are born with. But somehow, this innate self seems to be less and less ‘us’ as the world becomes more crowded, interrelated and complex. And at the same time, we seem, as a species, to be becoming less happy.
The reason for our modern unhappiness may be simple: We are not ourselves. Each of us actually has three ’selves’ that are, increasingly, in conflict with each other. ‘You’ are, first of all, a complicity of your body’s organs, evolved by them to protect them from dangers and to help coordinate their actions and movements. Your body, collectively, through chemistry, tells you to do some things in its interest: What to eat, what to feel, who to love and lust for. ‘You’ are, secondly, what is programmed in your DNA, unconscious, instinctive knowledge of how to survive that has evolved over three million years. Your instincts tell you how to respond to situations you don’t have time or mental bandwidth to respond to: When to fight or flee, what is really going on, what makes ’sense’. And, thirdly, ‘you’ are what your culture indoctrinates you to be, in order to be useful to it. Your culture tells you what to believe, what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, who and what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’, how you should live and make a living, and, in a battle with the first ‘you’, what to eat, what to feel, and who to love and lust for. When your physical ‘you’, your instinctive ‘you’ and your cultural ‘you’ are in sync, you are at peace, purposeful, joyful, but when they are in conflict you are stressed, unhappy and, well, conflicted. You are being pulled in three directions at once. And ‘you’ are never in control. After all, you are not yourself. Why would Gaia have evolved us this way, when it seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, even paralysis? Let’s consider two people, the composite ‘yous’ of (a) an indigenous and (b) a modern culture:
U1 learns what to eat, what to feel, who to love and make love with by reconciling what her body tells her to do with what she observes others doing. Individual choice is respected, so any conflicts are resolved quickly and simply in favour of the body’s instructions. In rare cases where the conflict is serious and irreconcilable, when the culture simply cannot accept an individual’s choices, the individual will choose to leave the community, or be forced out. U1’s instincts are finely honed, listened to and trusted. Instinctive judgement is complementary to that of the body and society, and unchallenged. This way of unconflicted living is the way, I think, ‘prehistoric’ humans lived and all non-human creatures live. It is a way of living that has evolved because it works, except in situations of extreme stress: overpopulation, resource scarcity and exhaustion, environmental (habitat) destruction. U2, by contrast, lives in such a state of constant and extreme stress. Her body and instincts cannot adapt themselves to these unnatural scarcities. Her body, in a constant state of trying to cope with stresses that her ‘fight or flight’ responses are no longer adapted to, begins to wear down due to the relentless hyperactivity of stress response chemistry that is, in U1 cultures, only briefly activated. She falls victim to chronic physical and mental diseases unknown in U1 cultures. She is forbidden by a brutal and intrusive, controlling culture to do what her body and instincts tell her to do, and punished severely if she defies that culture, through incarceration, physical abuse, deprivation, theft of her essential needs by the culture, and psychological opprobrium by others in the culture. She begins to hate her body and distrust her instincts. She becomes unhappy and self-loathing, inconsolably conflicted. She becomes chronically physically and mentally ill. This happens because, in cases of extreme stress, Gaia’s solution is to make the society so unhappy it acts, extremely, within itself, to mitigate and eliminate the cause of the stress. In natural societies facing such stress, birth rate plunges, and, in extreme cases, the strongest in the society hoard resources from the rest so at least some will survive the stressful situation. If that isn’t enough, they eat their young. Once the population and resources are again in balance, the stress reactions abate and a U2 culture becomes again a U1 culture. Modern human U2 civilization has now been around for about 30,000 years, and we are taught that this is the only way to live, the only way we have ever lived. We are taught the comforting and outrageous lie that U1 cultures were somehow barbaric and desperate, unhealthy and terrifying and ‘red in tooth and claw’. We have forgotten that U2 states are only supposed to be temporary. Well-intentioned, we have perpetuated this U2 state, and we continue to deny its utter unsustainability. Our third, cultural ‘yous’ have, in the process, become more pervasive, more controlling, more ruthless, and more violent with each passing century. Gaia is now, reluctantly, giving up waiting for us to rectify our own behaviour and is now taking things into her own hands. What is left of our instincts knows that this will not be pleasant, and this knowledge is adding even more to our unbearable stress. So if you are, in your heart, anxious, unhappy, and conflicted, it is not surprising. It is easy to say that we should learn to be self-aware, self-knowing, humble, that we should keep our sense of humour and laugh at the impossibility of resolving these conflicts. That we should pay attention to our bodies and our senses and our instincts and trust them, accommodate them, understand the truths about ourselves that they teach us. We are all so busy struggling with the consequences of these conflicts and stresses that it is hard to get above them, to focus on the causes. As hard as it is to do, we should strive to create the time and space to be at peace with ourselves. To love our conflicted, absurd selves, as they try impossibly to adapt to a situation that is dreadful, ghastly, not long for this world. What our three selves try to get us to do cannot be reconciled, but neither can any of these selves be subverted. So we have to know our selves well enough to resolve the conflicts between them, and to make some courageous, and probably unpopular, decisions. We must learn to define ourselves less in relation to others and more in terms of what makes us uniquely us, if we can rediscover, or discover for the first time, who that is. Not in order to be nobody-but-ourselves — it is far too late for that. Just to be happy. Category: Being Human
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