how to save the world

image by Layers on Pixabay (this is the same image Tim used to illustrate his post)

I‘ve mentioned before that I battled severe depression and then debilitating anxiety for much of my life. Over the past decade or two, the symptoms have dissipated, and I can now hardly remember how difficult it was dealing with it.

I don’t think I had anything to do with this recovery. I think my body chemistry just changed over time, and the Noonday Demon just kind of left the premises as that happened. Perhaps it’s like the kidney stones I suffered in my middle years, which I no longer have to deal with either.

I grew up in a culture that viewed depression as a kind of moral weakness. My mother suffered from it more than I did, but it just wasn’t discussed. “Just really tired” or “Just not feeling well” were the code-words. Just total denial that it might be a form of mental illness.

So I just kept denying it, even when it interfered with my work. Even when I was zoned out on Paxil, or recovering from taking it. I don’t think anyone ever knew, until I realized it myself just twenty years ago.

The latest article by Tim Watkins describes his experience both as a patient and as a care provider/advocate in Britain’s NHS, a system which, like all of the western health-care systems, is in a state of increasing collapse. The health care systems never really accommodated mental illnesses anyway, and now they simply can’t afford to.

Tim explains that our health systems (like many of our systems) are designed only to respond to problems and immediate needs as they arise. There is neither the will nor the capacity to have these systems actually prevent illness and other health problems — that is not rewarded by these systems. Tim identifies some programs and projects that do prevent physical or mental illness, but they mostly operate outside the health care system. Even health and medical charities, he explains, are now so dependent on governments and pharma corporations that they dare not challenge the dysfunction of these systems*.

When the billions spent touting SSRIs were revealed to have been a complete con job by Big Pharma, creating far more misery than they resolved, Tim explains, the profession and industry jumped into the arms of the CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) preachers, and they have been absurdly overselling this dubious form of faith healing ever since. Tim says it’s wrong to call CBT a scam (though he acknowledges other professionals do), and notes:

It falsely promised – and often overstated its results – to cure people in a matter of weeks. And it could be delivered by cheaper, non-graduate therapists for a fraction of the cost of traditional psychology…  The problem… is that CBT was sold … as a kind of miracle cure… which it could never be. Mental illness is simply too complex for any one intervention to work for everyone. Indeed, for every intervention it was easy enough to find recipients who claimed to be made worse by it. So that, in the end treatments became a kind of “suck it and see” process, where the best one could say was if it helps keep doing it, and if it doesn’t, then stop.

This is, of course, the same process that is used to justify giving patients placebos. Except CBT is a lot more expensive than sugar pills.

When Tim looked to find treatments and therapies that actually worked, his researched revealed that only one thing really did: a relationship with someone who “dropped the act and had related to the depressed person as one human to another”, and he discovered that the best people to create such relationships were people who had suffered from depression themselves.

Our modern mental health crisis, Tim says, has been exacerbated by the end of reliable lifetime work and the security it provides, as corporations in our overextended economy automate, outsource, cut back and offshore most of their labour in the interest of profits. Loss of a job often leads to relationships breaking up, financial crises, homelessness, and, inevitably, mental health crises. He quotes one GP as saying “its like we’re busy pulling drowning people out of the river, but nobody is looking upstream to see why they are falling in.” Stress — the fear of not being able to care for yourself, your family and your loved ones — is the precipitator of so much disease.

This is entirely consistent with what Richard Lewontin asserted in The Triple Helix: that the actual causes of major diseases in much of the world are not viruses and bacteria, but overwork, stress and malnourishment, which render us vulnerable to these ubiquitous germs. And, Richard added:

Sulfites, deforested mountainsides, and non-degradable waste dumps are not the causes of degradation of the conditions of human life, they are only its agencies. The cause is the narrow rationality of an anarchic scheme of production that was developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism.

Our health care systems are helpless to deal with the overwhelming and ever-increasing flood of illnesses caused principally by the collapse of our dysfunctional economic systems. Our health care systems are, as a result, headed for collapse themselves.

This collapse starts with the introduction of two-tier health care that favours the rich (the only ones who can still afford to pay for decent health care), and then descends to triage systems (if you’re too sick, or not sick enough, they won’t treat you), and eventually complete exclusions (in some countries pharmaceuticals, therapy of all kinds, and dentistry are not covered by health plans because they’re just too expensive for the system to afford). The complete collapse of the NHS in this decade was predicted a generation ago, Tim notes, and it’s right on schedule.

Tim’s approach, which he pursued for years as a mental health care advocate, was a combination of public awareness (notably training everyone possible in Mental Health First Aid, in order to increase society-wide capacity instead of relying solely on exhausted professionals), and self-management (equipping those struggling with mental health issues, and their families and loved ones, to be able to care for themselves as much as possible, as public health care systems collapse).

CBT is absolutely not the key to either element in this approach, he says:

CBT itself… was founded on a wrong observation. Its originators came to believe that “the thought gives rise to the feeling,” and that if a negative thought were swapped for a positive one, a negative emotion or physical feeling would turn into a positive one.

It’s hard to believe that this psychobabble version of “wishful thinking” would ever be considered seriously as a form of therapy, but here we are. What Tim explains is that there is a three-part vicious cycle in mental illness: Not only do negative thoughts and negative feelings reinforce each other, but they manifest in unhealthy physical symptoms as well. It’s not “all in your head” — it’s in your DNA, your hormonal system, your nervous system, and your whole body.

To that point, what Tim says is not inconsistent with scientists’ increasing awareness that we have no free will, and that, as I have recently been trying to convey, we have no “self” that actually has any power to do anything anyway. Our self is just the brain’s dreamt-up rationalization engine to try to make sense after the fact of the actions that the complicity of all the creatures that we call ‘our’ body are already doing. “We”, our selves, have no say in it at all. CBT, which berates you for not taking responsibility and not being able to magically erase your mental illness by “changing your thinking” about it, is, in this context, a brutally cruel treatment that is not only inherently ineffective, it is almost inevitably going to make the patient feel worse because they’re “not doing it right” or “not trying hard enough”.

It’s at this point in Tim’s essay, when he goes into more detail about what he means by “self-management”, that I start to get a bit dubious about his program. After lambasting CBT for not being the right approach (“The last thing someone already in the grip of depression needs is to be set up for failure”), he goes on to say:

What works is to allow people to become aware … of their thoughts, emotions, physical feelings, and behaviours. As this opens up the possibility of change. During the time that I taught self-management courses, I found that as participants became more self-aware, they would find their own way to the changes which best suited them. One person, for example, would choose to improve their diet, while another would become more physically active. All that was required was some basic knowledge about how to do this.

Hmm. I know what he means. I used to suffer from an anxiety-related affliction called road rage. It was only when I learned (thanks to some very smart and very patient women) to become aware that my anger was dysfunctional, that my conditioned response to others’ dangerous driving changed. Now, that initial burst of anger/fear is quickly discharged instead of consuming me for hours, as it once did. These smart women reconditioned me to behave differently. They did it at a time when I was already becoming more self-aware of other dysfunctional behaviours, so I was ripe for reconditioning, but still. Having no free will does not mean your conditioned behaviours cannot be changed.

So I can see what Tim is getting at, saying self-awareness is the key. But I would argue that while self-awareness (or lack of it) can be a by-product of our (re-)conditioning, it is not self-awareness that gives us agency to change. We change when, and only when, our conditioning changes. It is not ‘our’ doing.

Of course, things like changing your diet and doing more exercise are almost always good habits to pursue, and are likely to make you more physically and mentally healthy. But you’re only going to change your diet or exercise if such a change is already consistent with your (biological and cultural) conditioning. And you’re quite likely, if the change isn’t totally consistent with your conditioning, to fall back to your previously conditioned diet and to give up exercising. This isn’t a matter of self-awareness or lack of self-control. It’s not a matter of “choosing” changes that best suit us. It’s just what our conditioning, unmediated by ‘us’, has led to.

‘I’ switched to a much healthier diet, and undertook a rigorous exercise routine, because it was totally consistent with my conditioning up to the point I (gradually, and haltingly) made these changes. I was given some knowledge, in each case, that made the changes easier and more pleasant, and that, one could argue, ‘tipped me over’. But that knowledge would have had no impact had I not already been conditioned to be amenable to making such a change. In fact, had I received that knowledge ten years earlier, it would have made no change to my behaviour whatsoever. And if I had received that knowledge back when I lived in the shadow of the Noonday Demon, well, it wouldn’t even have registered.

The healthier diet and exercise weren’t ‘my’ doing at all. They were the inevitable expressions of my conditioning given the circumstances of the moment when the change happened, and the changing circumstances and different conditioning that have occurred ever since. This is what ‘my body’ apparently does now. ‘I’ have no say in it.

So it is entirely possible that pointing something out to someone suffering from depression (or any mental or physical illness, for that matter) can, if it’s consistent with their other conditioning, and if the circumstances of the moment are right, lead to that person being reconditioned, at least temporarily, to behave in a way that is more conducive to good health. And quite often what is pointed out will be about, or will bring about, some new self-awareness, at least temporarily. But our behaviour is the consequence of all of our biological and cultural conditioning given all of the circumstances that affect us over our lives, a nearly-infinite number of variables over which ‘we’ have no control.

A year after a patient began a ‘self-management’ program and acquired the ‘self-awareness’ that purportedly led them to change their diet, given all of the other conditioning and all the other circumstances that affected their conditioning over that year and all the years preceding it, how much of an impact did that ‘self-awareness’ have on the diet they’re following then? Or, rather, was that self-awareness activity just the inevitable result of all the conditioning that led up to it, given the circumstances of each moment? Including the circumstances of meeting Tim and being introduced to the concepts of his program at just the right time it happened to fit with all the patient’s other conditioning?

A butterfly flapping its wings can indeed, under the right circumstances, be the ‘deciding’ factor that produces a tornado several weeks later in another part of the world. So we should not be reticent to flap away, if there’s even a small chance it might make someone feel better. No harm in trying.

And the placebo effect can be very real, and very powerful. At least for a while.

I am convinced that we have no free will, no agency, no control or self-control. Still, as I’ve often heard in non-duality circles: religion, spirituality, meditation and other kinds of ‘therapy’ can serve to “make the prison of the self more comfortable”, and what could possibly be wrong with that? (Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.)

…..

Tim concludes with a statement of where we stand now: essentially, systems in collapse, everything slowly (or quickly) falling apart (our health care systems in particular), and more and more of us (young people especially) facing a hopeless and depressing future. It’s clear that we’re facing a great reckoning, and our dependence on all our modern civilization’s systems — not just health care but also education, business and jobs, agriculture, transportation, trade and the rest of our economic systems, and our political and social systems — makes us extremely vulnerable to chaos and irrational behaviours as those systems fail us.

We’re going to have to relearn to do locally, inexpensively, humbly, and pragmatically, almost everything we now rely on others in these big systems to do for us. Including mostly looking after our own physical and mental health, mostly through preventative measures. We’re going to make a lot of mistakes. Our recent conditioning has not prepared us at all well for such a challenge.

Tim tells an interesting story about his experience in Emergency Preparedness in the UK that parallels mine when I worked briefly for a Canadian health ministry:

The two medical professions given highest priority were vets and nurses. Vets, because the health of the remaining livestock would be critical, and nurses because any injury which couldn’t be patched up or which wouldn’t heal on its own would be a death sentence, so there would be no point wasting resources treating it.

This is what we’re looking at as collapse accelerates and the Long Emergency deepens. An epidemic of anomie and depression isn’t going to help matters. But we’ll flap away, and do our best, the only thing we can possibly do. We’re certainly not ready for this, but the conditioning that has brought us to this point of accelerating collapse also kept us alive through some pretty horrific catastrophes earlier in our evolution. We might just surprise the more-than-human world with our capacity to be reconditioned, in the ashes of collapse, centuries or millennia from now, in a way that actually works for all life on the planet.

* The paradox that charities can become inadvertently captive to the systems and perpetrators that gave rise to the problems the charities were created to confront in the first place, is not limited to health care — the same applies for example to many environmental organizations that now depend on the next industry or government outrage to rail against, without which they’d quickly fade from the news headlines (since they can’t and don’t do anything except protest) and their funding would dry up. Ain’t capitalism wonderful?

Screen cap from a brilliant mashup of the top pop songs of 2008 by Dj Earworm that kinda touches on the subject of this post.

In Robert Sapolsky’s 2017 book Behave (before he took on the subject of free will in Determined) he writes about habituation:

Once, hunter-gatherers might chance upon honey from a beehive and thus briefly satisfy a hardwired food craving. And now we have hundreds of carefully designed commercial foods that supply a burst of sensation unmatched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation, also offered numerous subtle, hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine release a thousandfold higher than anything stimulated in our old drug-free world.

An emptiness comes from this combination of over-the-top nonnatural sources of reward and the inevitability of habituation; this is because unnaturally strong explosions of synthetic experience and sensation and pleasure evoke unnaturally strong degrees of habituation. This has two consequences. First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity.

If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.

In last year’s book on free will, he circles back to this tragedy, lamenting that since we have no free will, there is no way to escape this cycle of habituation. We cannot “train ourselves” to want less, when the dopamine and other chemicals in our bodies is driving us to want more. So now we have 8 billion humans always wanting more than what they have, which is a recipe for both economic and ecological disaster.

This is not a matter of greed. What we think about our behaviour is simply the brain’s rationalization for what we have done after the fact. We want what we want — or more accurately, the trillions of creatures that make up what we call ‘us’ are conditioned by trillions of other creatures, and the by the circumstances of the moment (which might eg include the presence of a large chocolate bar in front of us), and the aggregate result of all that conditioning determines what the complicity of creatures we collectively call ‘us’ will actually do.

That conditioning might include the recent memory of someone we care about warning us that eating so much chocolate is not good for our health, or of a recent cardiac arrest partially caused by poor diet, such that we might get a dopamine hit from congratulating ourselves on resisting the chocolate. But ultimately there is no decision about whether or not ‘we’ eat the chocolate. It is already determined by an unfathomable number of conditioning events over which ‘we’ have no control. ‘We’ can only try to (and claim to) ‘make sense’ of the action after the fact.

And in fact, there isn’t even a ‘we’, a coherent ‘self’ making or rationalizing these actions, these apparent ‘decisions’. ‘We’ are just a construct of the brain, furiously and helplessly trying to make sense of everything, as our brains’ constituent creatures have been conditioned to do.

So Robert has effectively dealt a double blow to the idea that “if only we all” do x, collapse (or genocide, or WW3, or any other terrible outcome) might be averted. There is no ‘we’ to do x, and whatever the 8 billion complicities of creatures do is already determined, and no amount of ‘ifs’ and ‘shoulds’ will make an iota of difference. All these magical solutions to the predicaments we face are just wishful thinking, opinions with no more value than the babbling of a baby. They are just conditioned attempts to make ourselves feel better, or to make others feel better (or, perhaps, to make others feel worse), by provoking a shot of dopamine, adrenaline, or other chemicals that increase or reduce our sensations of pleasure or pain.

And of course, we’re suckers for these provocations, whether they be comforting magic solutions (new tech, new ideas, new products, new projects, new explanations) or ‘facts’ to induce righteous indignation or outrage. The food industry, the propaganda industry, the marketing industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the advertising and PR and ‘management’ industries are all essentially in the dopamine business — trying to condition the complicity of creatures you imagine to be ‘you’ to buy more of what they’re ‘selling’, to get more dopamine. And all those apparent people in those industries are doing that because that’s what they (the complicities of creatures they call their selves) have been conditioned to do.

It’s all happening without ‘us’.

What insane evolutionary logic produced creatures that always want more? Robert’s story about the honey explains it. If there’s a scarcity of something, there’s an evolutionary advantage to providing a dopamine hit to the creature that finds it, to take it while they can. That’s why we crave the chocolate, even though there’s no longer a scarcity of it. We crave what is scarce, because we are rewarded with a hit of dopamine whenever we even just anticipate getting more of it.

And now we live in a world of actual or artificially-created scarcity of just about everything. The above-noted industries create the scarcity (eg tickets to see Taylor Swift), and then sell us their products at prices that reflect that scarcity. That’s what they are conditioned to do. And with 8 billion humans, it’s not hard to create a scarcity; there’s already never enough to go around, and soaring inequality is making that situation worse. (That obscene inequality is likewise the aggregate result of all our conditioning.) Every news item on the doom-scroll creates a scarcity of secure feelings, and a scarcity of knowledge of ‘what to do’, and the industries above would be only too happy to fill that scarcity — just vote for Genocide Joe, or Der Drumpf, or take this pill, or buy this AR-15, or wear this brand of clothes, or eat/drink/smoke this, and you’ll feel better.

Until you want more. And you will want more.

That’s the other insidious part of habituation. When you get x amount of something, over and over, it no longer gives you the same dopamine hit. Now you need 2x of it to get the same feeling. Bigger house, fancier car, bigger meals, bigger gun, more exclusive clothes, more power and wealth, more social media righteous indignation and outrage, more, more, more!, and oh, “make it a double”. Why does this happen?

Robert’s explanation is that dopamine and other hormones have to do a lot of work in a lot of different contexts, and hence the dopamine reward system needs to constantly rescale to condition as much as possible the optimal responses in the creature. This propensity to (sometimes inappropriately) habituate to different levels of reward is an unfortunate consequence of these limitations in what hormones and neurotransmitters are able to do. What we call “unhealthy addictions” might be characterized as the result of a bug in our conditioning chemistry.

But that’s where we are. This is where our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of each moment of our lives, has taken us. It couldn’t have gone any other way. And the aggregate result is accelerating collapse and the sixth great extinction of life on earth.

Does this mean that humans, and perhaps other animals that come to dominate their ecosystems, will always become rapacious, ruinous destroyers of those ecosystems?

I think the answer to this question is no, for two reasons. First, before habituation to more, more, more, can prove a species’ undoing, it needs to develop the capacity to produce more, more, more. Other mammals and birds can be habituated the same way we have been, as has been shown in lab experiments that have produced addictive, destructive behaviour in many animals. But that always requires that a human unnaturally invoke that behaviour in them, provoking them to do things that would never arise in the wild. Our species appears to be the only one that has developed the capacity to produce enough of anything to become habituated to it. It is doubtful that many wild bears have become so enamoured of a taste of honey that they were rendered addicted and dysfunctional by their appetite for it!

And secondly, I would argue that dysfunctional habituation such as that we modern humans suffer from, requires an entangled brain. Despite the similarities between their brains and ours, our closest cousins the chimps and bonobos lack the capacity for abstraction and the sense of self and separation that would be needed to produce an environment that could habituate their kin and then exploit that habituation for ‘self’-ish gain.

The fact that creatures like whales and corvids have enormous brains relative to their body size, would seem to demonstrate that the marvel, or evolutionary misstep (depending on how you look at it) of an entangled ‘self-conscious’ brain doesn’t necessarily emerge in large-brained creatures, even over millions of years. And I would further argue that the work of Stephen Jay Gould suggests that the emergence of another entangled-brained creature from the evolutionary cauldron is extremely unlikely. As EO Wilson famously put it “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth”; the emergence of a species that always wants more, and is capable of endlessly producing more (until it can’t) seems an unlikely and tragic evolutionary turn.

All of this is perhaps why, when Robert wrote his book about free will, he acknowledged that, despite what he knows to be true, he still almost always behaves as if he does have free will. That’s his, and our, conditioning. We (ie the complicity of creatures we label and imagine to be our coherent selves) have no choice in any of it. We might briefly become aware of the fact that we’re ‘being done’ rather than actually doing anything of our own volition, but that changes nothing. It just makes us, briefly, self-aware of our tragic lot.

This inevitability, this hopelessness, this lack of control, is perhaps more than our new and bewildered species can handle. It’s one thing to be ‘smart’ enough to so spoil your own ecosystems as to have probably doomed most of the planet’s life to extinction. It’s another to also be ‘smart’ enough to know that, due to conditioning, lack of free will, the inevitable mental illness of brain entanglement, and a propensity for habituation, there is absolutely nothing that any or all of us can do to prevent or mitigate that extinction.

No wonder so many humans are struggling with depression. And that’s the topic for my next post, based on a new article by Tim Watkins that probes what happens to a species’ mental health when everything slowly starts falling apart.

Over the past few years, I’ve made some fairly strident statements about the current state of the world as I see it. They include:

• That our global civilization is now in the accelerating stage of inevitable, complete collapse that we will never even partially recover from. It will be a slow collapse, in multiple stages, over centuries, but by the end of this century the way in which the remaining humans (if there are any) will live will be utterly different from how most of us live today.
• That our species, uniquely and for quite conceivable reasons, at some point in our brains’ evolution became mistakenly and terrifyingly convinced of our ‘separateness’ from the rest of life on earth, rendering us emotionally and mentally damaged to the point that much of our behaviour now is a massively-destructive acting out of generations of accumulated trauma steeped in fear and hate.
• That we have no free will, and that our behaviour is totally a function of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the ever-changing and unpredictable circumstances of the moment.

A question that remains foremost in my mind is how our conditioning will compel us, individually and collectively, to respond to collapse. Since our conditioning varies greatly from person to person, our responses will likely vary greatly as well. And the “circumstances of the moment” will be very different at different times and in different places as collapse unfolds and accelerates over the coming decades as well.

What might some of our conditioned responses to collapse be, hampered as we now are by our species’ omnipresent mental illness and trauma?

As things get increasingly dark and hopeless, I think we are witnessing already the most common of these: sinking into depression, retreating into escapism, and simply denying these existential realities. And suicide is not an uncommon conditioned response for creatures in situations of unbearable overcrowding, stress and deprivation, and rates of suicide are soaring. Perhaps Aaron Bushnell is something of a canary in the mineshaft: His conditioning, like ours, drove him to do the only thing he could have done.

Many of us will continue to turn to the plethora of institutions and programs that have arisen in part to try to help us cope with everything falling apart — religions, spirituality, psychology, process-y methodologies and practices, drugs, rehab and anti-addiction programs, and perhaps even philosophy (eg stoicism). Some of them may seem to help for a while, but none of these institutions, programs and ‘therapies’ has a particularly enviable success record, and many of them arguably have done more harm than good to their ‘patients’. I have probably explored most of them, and found them all lacking.

No one can predict, of course, how, as collapse accelerates, we will each act out our conditioning and do the only things we could have possibly done in the circumstances.

All I can offer is my own story, how my own conditioning has led me to a particularly individual, and perhaps rather hopeless and disheartening, response to collapse. Your experience will differ, probably drastically, and none of what follows should be considered in any way as ‘advice’.

For a start, none of my attempts to ‘work on’ or ‘work past’ my trauma have ever helped me at all. In fact, dredging up the memories of the incidents and fears that likely conditioned me to be the way I am, seemingly just worsened the trauma, anxiety and depression. I remain unconvinced that therapies based on reenacting damaging and terrifying past events as a means of putting them behind us, have merit, at least not for me. The evidence is at best dubious and anecdotal. But maybe they help some people, or at least they may help some people believe they are coping better, which is worth something.

I also tried the pharmacological route (paxil — part of a family of now completely discredited drugs from the quack psychiatry toolkit). Never again (though the experience provided me with a number of really funny stories that people seem to like).

What I learned about myself (as has been explained in books like Against Empathy) is that there are situations in which my attempts to engage with situations that trigger past trauma simply render me paralyzed and dysfunctional. This is possibly connected with my body’s and brain’s retreat into severe depression in the face of extreme stress — depression from which I suffered for most of my life, but no longer do.

What I learned is that I just can’t afford to care too much emotionally about circumstances and about others’ suffering, when trying to do so just debilitates me. I learned instead to try to exercise a more “distanced compassion” in those circumstances — being attentive and thoughtful and hopefully helpful, without trying to “personally relate” to the suffering, and hence getting sucked into a downward emotional spiral myself. So now, when I face people suffering from severe distress, I ‘distance’ myself from it, by reminding myself this is their trauma, not mine, and that getting drawn into it is not useful to anyone.

As a result of this, I have on occasion been accused of being emotionally disconnected, disengaged, indifferent, and even dissociative. I have no idea whether those accusations are fair or not. All I know is that this is where my conditioning has taken me, and it seems to have made me, on the whole, more “of service”, less reactive, and more functional, than I used to be, when dealing with the kind of severe distress that we’re going to be facing all the time as collapse deepens.

Such conditioning obviously comes with a cost: I am likely less emotionally sensitive than I used to be, with fewer highs and lows. I do cry more than I used to, but they are tears of joy (often when listening to well-crafted and evocative music), rather than tears of empathy with others’ suffering or loss. I am very rarely depressed anymore (which may be just a biological effect of aging and more balanced hormones; I don’t know). There is less elation, but far more moments of equanimity and peace, which seems to me an excellent trade-off.

Looking back, and then to where my conditioning seems to have brought me to now, I can admit that, perhaps rather unusually, I have never really felt lonely, even in the worst times of trauma, solitude, and depression. I have no idea why.

And I have never really “missed” not having something, or doing something, or being with someone, when I no longer had that pleasure. I know I would enjoy having it again, or doing it again, or being with that person again, but “missing” those things just never comes up, and never really has, my whole life. And likewise, I have never really grieved or mourned the loss of anything or anyone. I cried when my dog died, but that was a purely instinctive, animal reaction, and then it was gone.

Maybe the fact that I have never felt these feelings means I am somewhat emotionally stunted, but if that’s so I think I have always been that way, rather than having become that way as a result of events that have happened, as a result of conditioning, or as a coping strategy. It seems to be more likely what is, and isn’t, in my DNA. I don’t know: In some ways I think I am a bit feral. I don’t think wild animals have these emotions either. And, perhaps like a wild animal, while I have an instinctive and terrible fear of pain, suffering, entrapment, and failure, I have absolutely no fear of dying. I don’t think I ever have.

In addition, I used to fall in love frequently, easily and deeply. And often it was with entirely the “wrong” people — a complete mismatch. I was still doing this a decade ago. And then a young woman told me, maybe at exactly the right time in my life to hear it, that I was a fool at heart. That I had fallen in love with who I imagined her to be. And then she told me who she (thought she) really was, and the types of guys she was drawn to fall in love with (and even introduced me to one of them). And she described how awful a romantic relationship between the two of us would almost inevitably be.

And strangely enough, thanks to this wake-up I was instantly “cured”. Ever since then, while I am still inclined to become infatuated (notably with exceptionally intelligent, energetic, curious, creative, imaginative, and strong people) I have never since fallen in love. And I don’t want to fall in love again. I no longer long for that feeling when nothing else matters except that love. Though damn, I remember those feelings. You never forget.

Now, everyone I meet has two ‘personalities’ — the one I can imagine them to be (and I have a pretty vivid and generous imagination), and the person they really are (who I appreciate I will never know and can’t even guess at). It’s really changed how I see people, and the world.

In addition, unlike a lot of people, I don’t particularly enjoy being loved. To me, rather than that being flattering or reassuring, it usually strikes me as a responsibility, something that (being basically lazy) I’ve never liked or wanted (though I have often been told I am one of the most responsible people they’ve met). Maybe it’s my large (hard-won, and then partially-lost) ego, that doesn’t need stroking, that has me preferring to be the lover rather than the loved. And I do still love people, places, wild things, creature comforts, all those ikigai things. I probably love them more than I ever have. But it’s very different from being in love.

As for all that ancient and endlessly-resurfaced trauma, slowly but surely its hold on me seems to have abated, though it hasn’t completely disappeared. Rather than repeatedly delving into how it arose and how it gets triggered, I have just kind of let it go, forgotten it. Kelly the genius psychologist says that I have largely ‘excised’ it, though I think she gives me too much credit. It might be mostly that my memory is not what it used to be, and it was never that good. In Africa, apparently, this is called “social forgetting” and has worked better in some groups dealing with major collective trauma than the “truth and reconciliation” approach of directly confronting it. Whatever works. We have no choice in the matter anyway.

So I guess that’s where my conditioning has taken me. Never lonely, never grieving, never afraid of death, but fearful of pain, of feeling trapped, and of failure — that I suppose is biological conditioning. No longer a fool for love (but more enamoured of simple pleasures), slowly letting go of trauma, rarely depressed, less reactive, and far more equanimous now — that I suppose is cultural conditioning.

How has that conditioning equipped me for facing accelerating collapse, and the very challenging times ahead? Not very well, I fear. The realization of the imminence and inevitability of civilization’s total collapse was easy for me to handle, perhaps because I just don’t seem capable of grief. But I have never handled extreme stress well, so as things worsen and as compounding and increasing crises become the order of the day, my conditioning has not prepared me to handle these things at all well.

How do I think others’ conditioning has equipped them to face all this? I have absolutely no idea. My study of history (and the stories from my grandparents about the Great Depression) suggest that when things get dire, it’s amazing how quickly people will learn and do the things they need to learn and do, physically, to cope with the situation.

But in past crises, people could always look forward to (and imagine) a future when things got better again, and I don’t think we’ll be able to do that this time. When it really sinks in that we’re living in end times for our astonishing civilization culture, I’m not sure our conditioning will allow most people to handle that emotionally at all well. The latest post from Indrajit Samarajiva, perhaps, gives us a clue:

This is where I live… In the land of the dying, where the land itself is dying, and we are but witnesses. Mute or unmute, it makes no great difference now. We are all dying people, in nations dying one way or another, in a world that’s dying too. As my Achchi [grandmother] was holding me she told me clearly that we all have to die. And it’s true. It’s just that ‘all’ means a lot more at this particular hinge in time, when the doors come off. My Achchi, for one, is ready to go. I envy her in that. I’m not ready at all.

But I really have no idea where our conditioning will take us from here. My fascination with chronicling our civilization’s collapse, which I’ve pursued now for over two decades, partly stems from wanting to know the answer to this question.

I’m prepared to be surprised.