Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.


December 27, 2011

Links for the Month: December 27, 2011

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 21:39

Cartoon by Terry Mosher (Aislin) in the Montreal Gazette

It’s been a particularly dispiriting month for those of us doing the grim duty of chronicling civilization’s collapse. I had hoped that when the unsustainability of our economic and political systems became obvious, those with wealth and power would take their money and run, rather than fight an unwinnable battle. But it’s becoming clear that denial among the 1% is strong, and they’re willing to do just about anything to hold on to power, including waging an all-out war against the citizens who gave them that power. Some evidence of what they’ve done recently, and the consequences:

As long as we cling to the foolish belief that these systems can be ‘reformed’, or that with the right ‘leaders’ the systems can be made to work, we will waste time that could be spent learning and practising community-building, and planning, acquiring and developing the new relocalized competencies, processes, resources and infrastructures needed to sustain ourselves when the current systems crumble. What will it take before we understand that sustainable ways of living must be local, rooted in place and adaptive to the unique situation of each place, and that they simply do not scale without becoming unresponsive, ineffective, bloated with useless bureaucracy, and utterly corrupt?

We have seen this ‘failure to scale’ now in ideologies across the political spectrum: Communism, capitalism, mixed-economy socialism, libertarianism — none of these economic systems scales without becoming dysfunctional. I have long been a believer in the mixed-economy model used in Scandinavia and (though it is currently being dismantled by governing corporatists) in Canada. I know a lot of bright, passionate, well-intentioned people who work in the ‘public sector’ in fields like social welfare, education and health, and even they admit the systems they work in are dysfunctional, and the money and energy spent on them are largely wasted and ineffective at achieving the goals these services are intended to provide.

The users of these services — notably the physically and mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, the sick, and students — often don’t know what they need or want, and have been so dumbed down by (and become so dependent on) these systems that they can’t begin to partner competently with service providers to make the provision of these services even marginally effective. Most people simply don’t know how to prevent, self-diagnose or self-treat illnesses, how to learn, how to make a living for themselves, or how to self-manage any aspect of their lives in even the most basic ways. As long as these systems depend on massive, centralized, standardized bureaucracies catering to incapacitiated, dependent ‘clients’, there is no hope for them. We need to let go of these systems, and our belief in them, and start the hard work of learning how to prepare for, and adapt to, full-on collapse and the crises that will accompany it.

photo ridiculing Fox News’ allegation that the new Muppet Movie is left-wing propaganda

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Occupy Space, Cooperatively: Shareable.net talks about the need for a permanent, vibrant physical space for the Occupy movement in each community. I think this is absolutely essential. We can’t learn the process of building community when we’re constantly dealing with evictions from politicians and police. If we create community space in each community for this purpose, not only will the movement be more effective, the creation of the space as a cooperative will be a great exercise in learning how to create local coop enterprises. And it will give us practice in facilitating large and small groups, in creating a vision of the world we want and intend to create, in making decisions and achieving consensus and in resolving conflicts. Thanks to Tree for the links.

Practical Post-Scarcity: Open Source Ecology identifies and teaches how to build, maintain and use 50 essential machines that can be made from local materials, and which allow construction and manufacture of many of the structures and products needed for self-sustained communities, fuelled by local renewable energy sources. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link. An interesting contrast to Hexayurts, the simple, cheap buildings proposed by Vinay Gupta and popular among Dark Mountain’s members.

A Kinder Gentler Revolution: Thanks in part to the Occupy movement, there has been a resurgent interest in the importance of compassion and generosity in achieving change. Ripples of kindness, caring, thoughtfulness. Helping people save their homes. Thanks to Tree for the links. And for more on the deeper meaning behind Occupy, check out Tom Atlee‘s blog.

Cash Out Time: Ilargi at TAE says it’s time to start taking some of your money out of the banking system and keeping it in cash.

China Collapsing?: Paul Krugman sees signs that the fragile, critical economy and social fabric of China is disintegrating.

Economic Re-Set: Jim Kunstler foresees the collapse of the European economy and a possible disruption to next year’s US elections as a result. He describes the coming economic meltdown as not being a depression, but rather a “re-set”.

LIVING BETTER

Free Food: Todmorden, UK has now achieved substantial food security, growing (and giving away) all its own vegetables. Thanks to Tree for the link. Meanwhile, Stan Goff at Feral Garden calls for “a million gardens” as the first stage of achieving local food self-sufficiency, an act of emancipation from the agribusiness industry. Thanks to Paul Heft and Anthony Dias for that link.

Derek Sivers’ Co-op Business Model: From the founder of CD Baby: You already have something that people need. Find out what that is and share it with everyone that needs it. If it takes effort to do so, charge a little so you can keep on sharing it. Thanks to Kate Michi Ettinger for the link.

Pro-Vegetarian Ad Campaign: Toronto transit riders get the message. Note: video contains disturbing scenes. Thanks to Prad for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Enough of that in my opening remarks this month.

cartoon by David Sipress in the New Yorker

FUN AND INSPIRATION

A Letter to Yourself at Age 16: What would you say to your 16 year old self, if you knew then what you know now? Thanks to Nick Smith for the link and the one that follows.

Why Humans Had to Invent Time: Without it, we would be stuck in the present. Fascinating set of experiments to demonstrate this.

How to Avoid Occupy Eviction: How Occupy Melbourne prevented the tents from being dismantled. Priceless. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

What’s It All About ALF: Steve Best provides a compelling and compassionate portrait of the animal liberation movement.

Who: Amazing hi-res slow-motion video of owl landing. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Feminist Sci-Fi: Liz Henry tells you what to read to put a different perspective in your reading.

Aaron Hobson’s Google Street View collection: An amazing, haunting collection of uncomposed photos from the Google Street View van. Thanks to Sam Mills for the link.

Dan Gilbert: On what makes us happy (not what you’d expect). And on how our failure to understand what will/won’t make us happy in the future leads us to make bad decisions (and to indecision).

Robert Sapolski: On how we mishandle stress. And on what makes our minds work differently, we think, from other creatures’. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the links.

Movin’ On Up: Fascinating study of the exodus of blacks from SF to the exurbs, and how they were disproportionately hit by the housing/foreclosure crisis. Sometimes charts and statistics do help you understand. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

Edible Education 101: Atlantic offers the entire Michael Pollan lecture series in sustainable food production online. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Hallelujah Chorus for Corporations: Corporations are people too. Thanks to 3Es Newsletter for the link.

I’m Going to Go Back There Some Day: Gonzo (Dave Goelz) sings the best Muppet song ever, penned by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

From Maia Duerr: “Every dollar you spend is a statement about the kind of world you want”. (original author unknown)

From Derek Sivers’ book Anything You Want (advice for entrepreneurs):

Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
Never do anything just for the money. The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.
Just answer the calls for help.
Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.
Starting with no money is an advantage. You don’t need money to start helping people.
You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business.
Don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing.

From WS Merwin:

THE NEW SONG

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

December 20, 2011

Collapse! The Game: Early Draft

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 15:33

Some of you are aware that I have been working on a cooperative board game called Collapse! designed to help people learn and practice grassroots community-building and preparing locally for the various crises that may precede civilization’s collapse. I’ve finally got a first outline draft of the game, and decided to share it with the world before I go any further. Here are the rules and some images of the game equipment that I have developed thus far, along with a list of what I still have to do to complete the game’s development. You can download larger PDF versions of the illustrations on this Google Doc. I welcome your comments.

—–

Collapse! The Game

DRAFT 1.0

Purpose of the Game: To enable those concerned about coping with emerging economic, energy and ecological crises to learn about and practice, through game simulation, building resilient and sustainable communities.

Game Objective: The players work cooperatively to build a new self-sufficient, resilient community, and prepare for and deal with various 21st century crises as they impact the community. The effectiveness of their efforts is reflected by changes in the community’s Well-Being Index (WBI). The game continues until the WBI either falls below the ‘unsustainable’ threshold (game is lost) or rises above the ‘exemplary’ threshold (game is won).

Equipment:

  • The Community Story: This is the background story behind the creation of your community. This reflects the culture of the community, what led it to be created, and the particular advantages and vulnerabilities of the specific place where the community is located. A generic story is provided, but players are encouraged to modify the generic story to better suit the situation of the particular place where they live.
  • The Community Map: This map shows the 13 Aspects of an Effective Community (see illustration 1), and tracks the ‘investment’ of members of the community in (a) infrastructure, (b) resources and (c) acquiring competencies, relevant to each Aspect.
  • The Well-Being Index: The index (WBI – see illustration 2) is initially set to a score of 60 (‘satisfactory’). Events, activities, investments and crises all affect the WBI. The lowest WBI levels shown on the index is 30 (‘unsustainable’); the highest level is 90 (‘exemplary’).
  • The Community Vulnerabilities Matrix and 22 Crisis Tokens: This matrix (see illustration 3) shows the probability (horizontal axis) and potential severity (vertical axis) of 11 different types of crisis that can affect the community. Each crisis has both a ‘mild’ (low severity high probability) and a ‘severe’ (high severity low probability) version. A suggested starting position for the tokens for each version of each crisis is provided, but players are welcome to modify these starting positions to better reflect actual vulnerabilities in their community. The position of crisis tokens on the matrix is affected by various event cards that are drawn during the game; some events will push a crisis ‘over the edge’ at which point players must deal with it as a crisis occurring in the community in real time.
  • Crisis Descriptions: A description of each version of each of the 11 crises is provided, but players are welcome to amend the descriptions to better reflect the situation in their specific community. These descriptions are used to assess the impact of an occurring crisis on each Aspect of the community, and to provide a context for the Strategy Discussion among players on how to address the crisis. Note that crises are not independent — increases and decreases in risks of some crises will automatically increase or decrease the risks of other crises.
  • Infrastructure, Resource and Specialized Competency Cards: Forty cards of each of these three types suggest investments that can be made in specific Aspects of the community. An additional 20 cards describe General Competencies that can be useful in any of the 13 Aspects of the community. Players must decide collaboratively which of these to invest in, which involves risk trade-offs.
  • Event Cards: 120 cards describe various events that are drawn at random and which govern the progress of the game. Some events are beneficial; others are not, and increase the risk of crises occurring. Some events are personal (e.g. they may entail a player losing his/her competencies, or acquiring sudden wealth that can be invested strategically in the community). The event cards include 10 ‘Black Swan’ event cards; suggested ‘Black Swan’ events are provided on these cards, but players are welcome, before the start of the game, to secretly write their own alternative ‘Black Swan’ events which, if these cards are drawn, override the default suggested events. The drawing of an event card represents the passing of 3 months of time in the life of the community.
  • Crisis Impacts Table: Shows the impact of each version of each of the 11 crises on each of the 13 Aspects of the community (see illustration 4). This table is used by the community in assessing its vulnerabilities and deciding what investments of infrastructure, resources and competencies to make in each Aspect.

Play:

  1. Set-up: The players read out, and if desired, amend the Community Story to suit their local community’s situation.
  2. Each player can choose to write one alternative, secret Black Swan event, containing the same information as the Black Swan cards in the deck. They assign it a number from 1 to 10, also secretly. If that Black Swan card is drawn in play, they announce the replacement Black Swan event they have written. (If two players have written a replacement for the same Black Swan event, the event written by the player who is next to draw an event card prevails).
  3. The 140 Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards are shuffled together. Ninety of them are dealt at random to the players, who turn them over so all players can read them. In turn, each player, in consultation with the group, discards one of their cards until only 65 cards remain. Tokens are placed on the respective hexagons of the community map to show which Aspect these 65 ‘investments’ in the community apply to. Players holding General Competency cards must choose and write down which two Aspects they elect to apply those General Competencies to. Depending on the number of General Competencies of the community, the number of initial tokens on the map will vary from 65 to 85, with an average of 75 (about 6 per Aspect).
  4. The Well-Being Index marker is placed at the number corresponding to the number of tokens on the Community Map minus 15 (i.e. approximately 60).
  5. The 22 labelled Crisis Risk tokens are placed on the Community Vulnerabilities Matrix at the initial positions suggested in illustration 3. The community members then discuss whether they wish to adjust these Crisis Risk token positions to better reflect the specific vulnerabilities of their community. Each token can only be moved one space in any direction, with the proviso that when any token is moved, another token must be moved in the opposite direction. For crises moved up or down on the Matrix, make a note on the Crisis Impacts Table — all non-zero Crisis Numbers for that row of the table need to be adjusted up or down by 1 accordingly when a crisis occurs.
  6. The 22 Crisis Descriptions are passed around for players to familiarize themselves with. By consensus, any of the Descriptions can be amended to better reflect the specific situation of the community in which the players live. (The game includes printable electronic versions of the Descriptions, should players want to permanently customize the Descriptions to suit their specific situation).
  7. Now, each player in turn draws an Event card, and follows the instructions thereon. If the Event card drawn results in a Crisis, proceed to step 8 (otherwise go step 9).
  8. When a Crisis occurs, the process is as follows:
    • Refer to the Crisis Impacts Table. For each Aspect of community that is affected by the crisis, compare the investment in (resilience of) that Aspect (total number of tokens on the four hexagons for that Aspect) to the Crisis Number on the Crisis Impacts Table.
    • If the investment is greater than or equal to the Crisis Number, remove one token (which one to remove is determined by consensus) from that Aspect of the Community Map, and have the player with that investment discard it (it goes back to the pile that may be drawn again in future turns); reduce the WBI by one point.
    • If the investment is less than the Crisis Number, an emergency meeting of the community is convened:
      • The Crisis Description card is read out. The various (but inadequate number of) investments in Infrastructure, Resources and Competencies for that Aspect are read out. The group now collectively discusses what their Strategy might be to deal with this crisis if it occurred with this level of severity in their community. This requires honesty, debate and imagination.
      • After this discussion, by consensus (unanimous agreement, though players may ‘stand aside’ if they are not in agreement but don’t feel strongly enough to ‘block’ consensus), the community assesses the adequacy of its in-the-moment Strategy. They can choose to remove any number of tokens from one to all of the tokens in that Aspect, to reflect this consensus on the effectiveness of the crisis strategy. (Note: If there are NO tokens in that Aspect when the crisis occurs, or if the Crisis Number is more than 3 greater than the number of tokens for that Aspect, NO strategy will be adequate and the game is lost, regardless of the community’s overall WBI score.)
      • For each token removed, a corresponding Infrastructure, Resource or Competency card is returned to the discard pile (exception: if it is General Competency card, it is only returned to the discard pile if it has been eliminated from both Aspects where it was applied), and for each token removed WBI is reduced by one point.
      • Continue for all Aspects affected by the crisis. When you are finished, note the Related Crises for this crisis (shown on both the Crisis Description and on the applicable Crisis Risk tokens). For each Related Crisis you must now move the two Crisis Risk tokens either one space right or one space up (decide this by group consensus). If you move the token to the right and this moves it into the orange Crisis Occurs area, you now have another crisis — repeat this entire step for this new crisis. If you move the token up, make a note on the Crisis Impacts Table — all non-zero Crisis Numbers for this row of the table will go up by one when this crisis actually occurs.
  9. The player completes their turn by drawing 2 cards from the unused Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards and selecting one to ‘invest’ their time/energy in, adding a token to the appropriate square of the Community Map and moving the WBI index up by one point accordingly.
  10. Repeat steps 7-9 as applicable for each player in turn until one of the following occurs: (a) WBI rises above 90 to the Exemplary level (game is won — congratulations), or (b) WBI falls below 30 to the Unsustainable level, or there is an inadequate number of tokens to deal with a crisis in point 8 of someone’s turn (game is lost — but you learned a lot about resilience, sustainability, community and consensus, right?)

Work still to be done:

  • Write the 140 Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards (I’m about 1/2 way through this process)
  • Write the Event cards (just beginning this process)
  • Write the generic Community Story and Crisis Descriptions
  • Test the game out with various numbers of players to ensure that the Event cards make the game challenging but not impossible
  • Field test the whole game with people familiar with sustainability, community and resilience, to improve the realism of the stories, vulnerabilities, crises, events, and strategy processes of the game etc.

December 6, 2011

Flattened

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 16:20

This is another post in my ongoing personal exploration of ‘who we (human beings) are’, how we got that way, and how, at the individual level, we might learn to better heal, better adapt, and better prepare ourselves for what’s to come.

I‘m a pretty fearful guy. I spend a lot of time trying to work up the courage and/or energy to do important things, and not much actually voluntarily doing anything important (I’m comfortably retired from paid work, so I am fortunate to not have to do anything).

At the risk of appearing to rationalize my unproductivity, I have a theory for why I am this way: Our culture wants us fearful and (emotionally) flattened. Here’s my thinking:

Back when there were only a few million of our species, we had no real need for culture. When I observe wild creatures, I see them living “in the now”. They will do what is needed to help the flock/herd/group in the moment, and most wild creatures are a lot more generous and altruistic than we might think. What they are not is anxious or fearful about the future, or in thrall to their collective culture. That’s in part because they ‘know’ they have no control over the future, so there is no evolutionary point in them imagining it or worrying about it. Their fears are immediate, and require a quick fight/flight response, after which the anger and/or sorrow they felt when the fear was realized, is discharged, and they return to living joyfully in Now Time. That’s not to say they don’t feel grief at the loss or suffering of a loved one — just that they are not fruitlessly consumed or debilitated by these feelings.

Wild creatures have cultures (read Bernd Heinrich’s works on corvids if you want to learn more about avian cultures), but these cultures are simple emergent properties of the reality of their lives; culture is not necessary to their evolutionary success and does not impose itself on individuals in the group. Wild creatures do what they do because their instinctive, intellectual, sensory and emotional ‘knowledge’ guides them. They may scrap with others in their group, and may not always get what they want, and they are able in the moment to collaborate brilliantly to achieve a shared goal, but ultimately they make their own culturally-unencumbered decisions.

When human populations started to outstrip the carrying capacity of our ecosystems (the reason why we did so is a subject for another essay) it became necessary for our species to ‘settle’, and to create new political, economic and social systems just to survive in unnaturally large numbers and concentrations. Democracy and personal freedoms don’t scale well, especially in situations of horrific and unnatural overcrowding, so as these human systems grew larger they had to become ever-more coercive — we had to be forced to conform, to obey others and cultural “rules”, to “settle” for less than what our wild selves had always been accustomed to, and will always yearn for.

As our human numbers accelerated and soared past a billion, the levels of human violence and oppression have ratcheted up commensurately. So have the numbers physically imprisoned — in jails, ghettos, camps, and (in Gaza for example) even whole nations.

But physical violence and physical constraints have not been enough to keep us in line. To submit more and more of the ever-increasing plague of human numbers to the necessary levels of restraint and suppression of our natural behaviours, psychological violence has been required as well. What I see, all over the world, are two now-endemic forms of psychological violence invoked to keep seven billion people in our culture’s thrall:

  1. the social construction and constant triggering of a new set of crippling fears via learned helplessness, and
  2. the emotional flattening of the human spirit through social prohibitions and inurement.

To inure is “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection” or acculturation. If you are subjected to something long enough and often enough (e.g. spending time in slaughterhouses or jails or emergency wards or factory farms or “old age” homes or street gangs or torture prisons or refugee camps or ghettos or the armed forces or police forces, or living with an abuser, or watching violent “entertainment”) you become habituated to it. You become unable to feel the strong negative emotions and visceral revulsion that you would if this were a rare or brief event. You cannot. You emotionally detach, disengage, dissociate. No one can sustain that intensity of emotion indefinitely. The emotion gets suppressed, turned inward, and eventually the chemical reaction that occurs no longer has the same effect. You become emotionally flattened, numbed.

From the perspective of a massive human culture that is trying to get all seven billion of its members to work hard without anger, grief, outrage, or complaint, such emotional flattening provides a huge evolutionary advantage. If you can be inured to not care, or to not care to know, you can be made to do anything. Or, in the face of continued cultural atrocities, to do nothing.

But there is an even more powerful tool that can be brought to bear to wield control over billions of people — fear. Fear is a natural phenomenon — most creatures have evolved instinctive fears of injury, and of being trapped, and of imminent harm happening to their loved ones, and these instincts have helped them survive.

Humans, however, thanks to our exceptional imaginations and memory and our invention of “Clock” Time, are capable of whole sets of additional fears about things that are either outside our control or are about the future. It doesn’t matter whether we are able to do anything useful with these fears. If they are invoked, we will fear nonetheless — and groups that are able to invoke widespread fear among others can capitalize brilliantly on it. Here are some of the things we humans fear (the taxonomy is mine, and is not intended to be complete or scientific); the ones on the right are those fears our culture has added to our instinctive repertoire, and thence exploited mercilessly and relentlessly to keep us in line:

Fearful and flattened. That’s what our industrial growth culture wants and needs of its members, now that it is a global monoculture strained to its absolute limits. Unless exercised in a culturally-approved way (such as “competitive” sports, wars, or abuse of one’s work or social “subordinates”), or locked away behind closed doors where there is plausible deniability, anger is now met with quick and violent suppression. Peaceful but angry demonstrations are met with heavily-armed stormtroopers. Anyone who even discusses angry resistance to the ecological desolation of our planet, to the theft and pillaging of Earth’s resources for the benefit of a tiny rapacious 1%, or to wars over oil or ideology, is branded a “terrorist” and subject to “disappearance”, extraordinary rendition to torture prisons, and/or indefinite imprisonment.

Likewise, feelings of debilitating grief, which I think are perfectly normal in our terrible world, have been pathologized and are now treated with large doses of anti-depressants or, failing that, ostracism and/or incarceration or other institutionalization. Our industrial culture teaches us to self-victimize. We are to blame, we are told, for our own unemployment and poverty (due to personal laziness or lack of moral fibre). We are to blame, too, for our own chronic illnesses (due to our poor eating and exercising habits). Suicide is, of course, treated not only as a sign of irresponsibility, but as a crime.

Our culture employs propaganda not only to divert responsibility for our anger and grief to ourselves, but also to keep us fearful. The propaganda machine creates a worldview of danger and scarcity, consuming us with fear of attack, of failure, of loss (especially loss of love), of uncertainty, of not fitting in and “not having enough”. And, of course, of death.

Because of our brain’s vulnerability to these future, unpredictable, easily-exaggerated and unactionable fears, our culture can exploit us by playing on our anxieties — re-triggerable dreads that precede fear and subside when those fears are not realized. Anxieties are conceivable fears. Any fear that can be conceived — terrorists, foreigners, rejection, threats of all kinds — can be blown up and exploited and used to control us and our behaviour, and even to immobilize us.

This cultural immobilization runs deeper than most of us ever realize. People on their death-beds, asked what they most regret in their lives, overwhelmingly cite things they regret not doing rather than things they did, and most of those ‘inactions’ are the result of cultural constraints or personal self-constraints, self-censorship of action, rather than the result of never having the opportunity to do those things. Daniel Gilbert‘s research shows that (thanks to our cultural programming) we have a tendency to overestimate the impact of current and future events and decisions on our future happiness, and this makes us timid and risk-averse in making those decisions, and overly preoccupied with the future instead of our current happiness. And many people’s reaction to Derrick Jensen’s relentless urging of us to act on our instincts in defence of our suffering and dying planet, is resentment at being pushed to do what is culturally-prohibited, rather than anger at the culture that is, with our own complicity, holding us back.

There are two cycles, which I think are unique to our species (or at least to large-brained species), that can be provoked with appropriate propaganda, as shown in the diagram below.

Because our brains create stories (mental representations of what is, was, may be or will be, and of who we are and why we are that way), we can and do constantly ‘re-enact’ situations which caused us pain and suffering — what I call the grief/inurement cycle. We feel the pain, we create a story to explain it, that story is so vivid and memorable that recalling it re-invokes the pain, and so on. We can become incapacitated by such suffering, until enough cycles have passed that we begin to forget these stories and heal. This aids a coercive culture in two ways: through the initial debilitation that prevents us from acting against the perpetrator of the outrage that produced the pain, and through the inurement that comes when we become so desensitized to the outrages, and the pain and suffering, that we begin to accept them as normal, the only way to live.

And then there’s the feedback cycle from anger and sorrow to chronic anxiety, as our brains imagine situations in which the atrocity that caused our pain could recur again and again, to the point this anxiety begins to immobilize us, and makes us pliable to cultural forces that promise to relieve us of or protect us from the things we have learned to fear. As Robert Sapolsky‘s research has shown, this anxiety/fear/pain/anger/grief feedback cycle is an emergent property and unintended consequence of our brain’s exceptional ability to imagine and recall, and the anxiety, especially in situations where events are outside our control, is unhealthy and useless — except to the culture that wants to use it to control us. This cycle also produces “learned helplessness” — the invalid but propaganda-reinforced sense that there is nothing we can do, except hope and trust that our ‘leaders’ can ‘save’ us.

Those who presume to be able to tell us how to deal with and ‘overcome’ our fears suggest six broad approaches to doing so. None of them is simple, or else we would all be using it. But the harder approaches (at least, harder for me: your experience may be different) seem to me to offer more effective ways of interrupting the vicious cycle of suffering, grief and inurement, or the vicious cycle of chronic anxiety and learned helplessness. Here’s a table that shows these six broad approaches to dealing with fear, and my personal assessment of their potential efficacy (again, your experience may be different):

Approach Efficacy Risk How Easy/Difficult?
1. Avoid occurrence Low Incapacitation Moderately difficult
2. Discharge Low Addiction Relatively easy
3. Conditioning Maybe Desensitization Difficult
4. Learn & prepare Maybe Self-deception Moderately difficult
5. Accept & let go High Detachment Very difficult
6. Live in the Now High Anomie Very difficult

The first, and obvious, approach is to try to avoid situations that give rise to fear or anxiety in the first place, but I’m learning that this is futile. The more you try to protect yourself, the more vulnerable you become to events and situations you could not avoid, and in the process you can incapacitate yourself to the point you become afraid to do anything.

Another common approach is to try to discharge, through physical means or through conversation therapies or other behavioural techniques, the emotion that the fear gives rise to. Many people believe wild animals do this when they “shake off” their emotion after averting danger. The theory is that this “discharging” cuts off both the grief/inurement cycle and the anxiety/fear/pain/anger/sorrow cycle by preventing the pain from being constantly revisited and reimagined and dwelled upon. But I would argue that we are incapable of having that much control over our memories and imaginations, and that while discharging might provide temporary relief, in the long term it is more likely to lead to addiction to the act of discharging (especially dangerous if that discharging is expressed as violence or unrestrained anger against others), than to any relief from either pain or recurring anxiety.

A newer method of dealing with fears is conditioning. For those with fear of flying, for example, the idea is to have the fearful person experience many safe flying experiences gradually, so that the mental connection between the experience and the feeling of pain is broken, and eventually the anticipation of the experience arouses no anxiety. I know some people for whom this has worked (and others for whom it has not). The danger is that you can end up being desensitized to real risks based on limited experiences. What happens if you are conditioning yourself to overcome fear of flying and your plane has an emergency landing? Trauma, I would think.

A fourth approach is learning and preparation. The more you know about what you can actually do if a fearful situation arises, in theory the less anxious you are likely to be about its potential occurrence. You are, in effect, combating the learned helplessness by giving yourself something (knowledge and experience) that gives you more control over a potential future experience. The danger here is that you may think you have more control than you really have, and that self-deception may lead to underreaction or complacency when the risk is real.

Now we come to the two methods I’ve been working on most recently. I think they’re connected. The idea of “letting go” of our stories about what might happen (our anxieties) to the extent they are beyond our control is extremely difficult, and I appreciate the skepticism of those who assert we can think ourselves out of our pain and anger and sorrow and fear. But our anxieties and fears and stories about things we cannot really know and cannot control is a ‘learned’ behaviour, so it should be something that, with practice and self-awareness and self-knowledge and self-management, can be unlearned.

And the sixth approach, of simply Living in the Now, and rejecting the stories our minds (and our culture) tell us about ourselves and others, and about what is and was and will be (or may be) in the future, before they even become part of our belief system and worldview, seems to me likewise a means of living more naturally, of being more present. I have had moments when I feel fully present, when I am simultaneously very aware (and self-aware) and very relaxed (and hence more competent and resilient in the moment), and in such moments I feel legitimately fearless. I want that feeling to last forever, and sense that this is the way most wild creatures, unencumbered by diabolically imaginative and past- and future-oriented brains, live their whole lives (except when danger is imminent), joyfully, naturally, and arguably more sensibly than we.

So my sense is that this practising of presence, this learning to live in Now Time and to let go what I cannot predict or control, is what I must pursue with increasing energy and commitment. I see it as being part of rediscovering who I really am, this feral, nobody-but-myself, me. And I think this is essential to cultural liberation and hence to the emotional flatness and fearfulness that is so much a part of the “everybody-else” me I have been acting as for so many years.

Maybe this is what we must all learn to do if we want to be able to do the essential work of preparing ourselves, our loved ones and our communities for the terrible crises ahead, when our industrial-growth civilization culture collapses and loosens its well-intentioned hold on the rest of us. Maybe that preparation is nothing more than this learning, this becoming ready to live without dependence on and coercion by culture. So that when it happens, we will know, as liberated, wild creatures, exactly what to do, in the moment.

Our perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps what I am seeing as the dark constraint of and the emotional imprisonment by our culture, is just my own projection, my own neat and convenient story for my own inaction, now. I don’t know. I’ll let you know if I figure it out.

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