Too Much In Our Own Heads

Image by Jeniffer Wai Ting Tan from Pixabay

Over the past fifty years we have seen the explosion of social media, virtual realities, live-streaming, YouTube, online gaming, and ‘virtual’ relationships. That has brought about a great shift of our attention away from what is actually happening here, now, to what is reported, hypothesized, dreamt, reenacted, CGI-invented, and imagined, mostly by others we do not even know. One of the consequences of this is that we are spending the bulk of our waking hours focused on what’s happening inside our heads — our thoughts, our feelings, hopes, memories, fears, needs, anxieties, our grief and our frustrations.

This is not healthy. We now spend most of our lives conceiving, and relatively little perceiving. That’s true at our laptops, in our (increasingly virtual) workplaces, on our phones, and at home. Even when we go outside, we are lost in our own thoughts. We don’t notice what’s outside our heads.

We believe what we see, touch, and hear, which used to be mostly first-hand. Now most of what we ‘see’ is through lenses of screens, the vehicle for which — our attention — is carefully fought over by those who want us to do, buy and believe what they want us to do, buy and believe. Our biggest personal commodity, even more than our spending power, is our attention.

When we see things first-hand, the very act of seeing them is compelling evidence they are true, that they are actually happening. This is how our belief systems have evolved. When we are told things second hand, we rely on them only to the degree to which we trust their source. Where there is mutual trust, that can lead to anything from rapid response to a neighbourhood house fire, to frenzied lynch mobs feeding off each other’s misinformed outrage.

When we are told something by someone we trust, we are inclined to believe stuff without direct, personal evidence. In true communities of trust, this can be a good thing. But humans no longer live in real communities. Trust in anonymous, fragile, porous and ever-changing neighbourhoods and ‘virtual’ communities is easy to destroy and hard to sustain. That’s why military and quasi-military groups use hazing rituals. Likewise cults, religions, fake news sites, and other groups that instil a kind of enforced “us against the world” internal trust through coercion, groupthink, and propaganda. Likewise despots and hate groups that hammer the same points out again and again relentlessly, to the point their adherents start to believe them without evidence. It’s true because we were told it’s true. Why would they all tell us it’s true if it wasn’t?

In our fragile modern replacements for real community we face:

• an ever-growing firehouse of what we are told is ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ ‘true’ information that we must process, and
• a gnawing sense of utter uncertainty and confusion, which confronts our insatiable desire to know the truth, and for that truth to be absolute and unchanging.

And as a result, we are more and more vulnerable to propaganda and groupthink that reassures us that what we believe, and what we want to believe, are actually true. As the trumped-up, carefully manufactured ‘reasons’ for the supposedly ‘righteous’ invasion of Iraq, and for the supposedly ‘pure evil’ invasion of Ukraine, so amply demonstrate, we are all too quick to believe utter nonsense to be true, as long as it meets three criteria:

• It’s what our friends, and those we (kind of) trust, believe to be true; we want reassurance, and we want to be ‘all on the same side’, especially in these days of polarization;
• It requires no real action or commitment from us personally; righteous indignation, alas, makes us feel good — we love rallies and demonstrations with people who agree with us, even if they accomplish nothing; and
• It requires no admission of personal failure or error of judgement (except perhaps in the rarified chambers of fire-and-brimstone churches and twelve-step groups); we do not want to be told that we should have known better, or that we did wrong, or had it wrong — though ask us in twenty years and we might quietly acknowledge that we were misled or misunderstood.

In short, in the absence of evidence, and of any sense of what is reliably true, we don’t know what to believe. And so, in our desperation to know what’s true and to be reassured we believe the right thing, we become incredibly gullible, credulous, and exploitable.

What is it about humans that we’re not willing to admit we don’t know everything we “should”, or that we don’t know what’s true, or that we inadvertently believed something that was incorrect?

Why should we have to have an opinion on how to treat or prevent pandemic diseases, or whether we should get involved in a particular far-away war, or whether a particular law that does not affect us personally is or is not a good one? Why is this our responsibility? The answer is obvious: We do not trust those we appointed to know enough (or to be honest enough) to make sensible decisions on such complex matters in our collective interest. So, we feel, it falls back on us as individuals.

Why is that a problem? As Indi Samarajiva puts it:

The problem here is that this is not your problem. You — the individual — should not have to be an amateur nutritionist, psychologist, [economist, military strategist, peace-broker] and epidemiologist just to survive. You should not be crunching numbers before taking a bite. You should not be reading pre-prints before taking a flight. This data should not be processed at the individual level at all. It should all be processed at the social, cultural, and institutional level.

And when that point is reached, when everything is left up to each of us as our individual responsibility, and the culture abrogates its responsibility to look after its members, you have a failed state. We now have a global cult of individualism, and a world full of failed states. No one trusts anyone anymore, except their own ‘peeps’. This is what a civilization in collapse looks like. We are all, in our own way, timidly starting to walk away from a civilization that we’re dependent upon, but which no longer serves us.

That is not to say that, before everything started to fall apart, we should have trusted those we appointed to make the best possible decisions. Wars, like fistfights, are always a sign of failure to make sensible decisions. The human enterprise, mostly thanks to its technologies, has moved in scale far beyond the capacity of even its sagest leaders to make informed, sensible decisions, let alone carry them out in the massively complex systems that have evolved beyond anyone’s doing or control.

But we individually, and we (some well-meaning subset of earth’s people) collectively, cannot fix it. There is no reason for us to have to join the cult of individualism. There is no reason or need for us to have to know how to deal with the pandemic, government corruption, voter disenfranchisement, climate change, or the proxy war in Ukraine. That doesn’t mean we should trust others to know how to deal with these things. No one knows. These things arose because no one knew how to avoid them or deal with them, and it’s not our job to be the one who does. No matter how we fret about them, these things are going to play out as they play out.

There is of course a risk that civilization’s ongoing collapse could accelerate due to the blowing up of nuclear power plants, or accidental launching of a bomb, or bioterrorism, or a much worse pandemic, or the collapse of the jet stream, or a collision of earth with a comet. We cannot fix any of these things either. Of course we are going to worry about these things even though nothing we can do will make a difference. That’s the nature of our species, apparently, and tragically. Once we know something, or think we do, we can’t un-know it. Once we’ve imagined something, we can’t un-imagine it.

This is what happens when a species comes to live too much in its own head. It departs the real world, with all its perceived wonders, right here, right now, and enters an abstract world of conceived better futures, horrors, imaginings, and possibilities.

And there is no going back. We bought that ticket, and we’ll take that ride. There will be some turbulence, but if we pay attention, really look, right here, right now, at what is happening, we might just notice something astonishing, something that, during all the years since we first thought we knew who we were, we have missed.