The Things That We Call Love

Posted on January 5, 2023 by Dave Pollard

I‘ve been using the chart above for many years, and it’s evolved somewhat, but what it’s basically saying is:

  1. Everything we call love is a conditioned chemical response to sensory stimuli.
  2. Nature, in order to propagate the species effectively, hooks us into “falling in love”, deploying a cocktail of powerful chemicals that stimulate us to become emotionally and sexually attracted to the other person. Then, to settle us down for the longer haul, she substitutes endorphins for the more powerful chemicals.
  3. Emotional love and sexual attraction are prompted by different chemicals, and can often occur independently. Women, for whatever reason, usually seem better able than men to appreciate the difference, and not conflate or confuse the two.
  4. Other forms of love — our aesthetic love for a work of art, our sensory love of a tropical beach or a forest in the moonlight, and our intellectual love of an idea, model or theory — almost assuredly have concomitant chemical prompters, but nobody seems to know what they are.

Wild creatures seem prone to the same biologically-conditioned chemical prompts for emotional and sexual attraction as humans, but their emotional attraction is simpler (and probably much healthier) than humans’, drawing on what appear to be almost universal caring and nurturing instincts, and universal biophilia (feelings of love towards all forms of life).

In humans, while we are reacting to the same chemical prompts, our cultural conditioning massively complicates our emotional responses by:

  • taking our love-interest’s reciprocal interest in us (or its lack) personally, as if it had something to do with our behaviour or character or appearance, rather than being an irresistible chemical response
  • expecting love to fulfil our need or longing for ‘completeness’ and what seems to be missing from our lives
  • telling a story about our love, and what it ‘means’

So, when it comes to sexual attraction, and our animal instincts to care for and nurture others, and our innate biophilia, we, and our feelings of love, are, I think, no different from those of many other creatures.

But beyond that, humans seem to feel a need, a longing, a yearning, to fill an empty space within them, to reconnect in a way that, I suspect, other creatures have no need to do. So when we fall in love, and get some brief inkling of what it is like to be really alive, without the false veil of self and separation from everything else, we expect and want that love to fill that empty space “forever after”.

That is an enormous burden to place on a relationship, and on another person, and it is no surprise that sudden, profound feelings of love are so often followed, sooner or later, by feelings of disappointment. For us, sexual attraction and our innate caring and nurturing and biophilia are, somehow, never quite enough (unless we have been conditioned to set our expectations very low).

With the chemicals triggered by falling in love, the sense of self and separation can temporarily diminish, bringing about a fleeting freedom from our enduring feelings of incompleteness (only to roar back if there is jealousy or if the feelings are unrequited).

In a domesticated creature, if there is a lack of healthy attachment (eg if an animal is taken from its mother too soon), or if the creature lacks a sense of autonomy, it might have human-like feelings of neediness, dependence and anxiety, but I’d question whether that’s really love.

With wild creatures (and also when, in a human, there is no sense of self and separation), this neediness and longing appear to be absent, so that biological conditioning (sexual attraction and the caring/nurturing and biophilia instincts) prevail, and cultural conditioning plays a much smaller role.

My sense, then, is that ‘needy’ love, even when two people are able to fill each other’s needs, is rather unhealthy. If our brains weren’t too large for our own good, conjuring up an illusory sense of self, separation and control over ourselves (including control over when and who we love), would we all be like wild creatures, simply and un-judgementally playing out our biological conditioning? Would we then be free of all the anxiety, jealousy, envy, shame and other negative feelings, and the enormous expectations and demands we place on those we love to fill that horrible empty space of incompleteness that we so often carry with us most of our lives?

What I see, sadly, in so many fraught human relationships, is conditional love, and it is conditional upon receiving something from the one(s) we love. Whereas in wild creatures what I see instead (and this is of course only a guess) is unconditional love — love that is free of expectations, judgements, and demands. Love that accepts everyone and everything exactly as it is, as the only way it could possibly be.

When there have been glimpses here when my ‘self’ disappeared, it was this amazing, unconditional love that was seen.

Or at least, that’s how it appeared. But maybe that’s just what this old, idealistic, bewildered, romantic fool — tired of everything seeming so much harder than it instinctively should be, than it needs to be — wants to believe.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

What Do We All Care About?

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Dave Pollard


a repurposed cartoon from two years ago, original artist unknown; thanks to John Whiting for the link

As 2023 began, Paul Heft and I, along with some of Paul’s friends, were exchanging links and emails on a series of end-of-year reflections on the social, political and economic state of the world. (More on that in a later post.)

One of the links was to an article by one-named writer Aurélien entitled The Year’s Midnight, on the author’s Substack blog Trying to Understand the World.

It laments the “kind of numb hopelessness” that seems to characterize so many of us across the social, political and economic spectra, “the abandonment of even the possibility of hope… It’s not the fear that things will never get better, but rather the certainty that they will inevitably get worse.”

Distinguishing this state from similar periods and situations of despair in past, Aurélien explains:

We are dealing with the immense and still poorly understood psychological and spiritual consequences of forty years of Liberal Nihilism: … We are degenerating into isolated, alienated individuals, with no relations except economic ones, no society, no common points of reference, no hope and no future.

This is the natural result of the thorough-going application of an ideology which has no moral compass except short-term financial efficiency and total personal autonomy, and so as a result, we have lost not only the ability to manage and plan at the level of the community and the state, but even the awareness that such a thing might be necessary.

The author goes on to say that at the very time we have lost faith and trust in each other and in our public institutions, we have replaced it with a faith in what Jacques Ellul called “la technique” — technology, technical solutions and other standardized processes and systems (today that would include AI) — to solve almost all of our problems. As John Gray has explained, “la technique” has always created far more problems than it has solved. Aurélien says that now “there are no shared alternative frameworks within which a different and better future could even be imagined”, so protests are merely negative, incoherent, devoid of any shared vision or direction forward, not even revolution (“People cannot fight for something they cannot conceptualise.”)

Hence Liberal Nihilism, and hopelessness that anything can be done that can even prevent things from getting inexorably worse. Jacques’ hope was that one “shared alternative framework” that might emerge and galvanize the population across the spectra of despair was anarcho-syndicalism (local autonomous structures, replacing collapsing systems that relied on centralized “techniques”). So the first step might be “a Great Defection, as people turn their backs on a state system that does nothing for them”, and instead moving towards systems based on local collective action and mutual aid.

Paul Heft asked me if there might be some other “shared alternative framework” that might apply across the spectra of despair — something that everyone from socialists to ultraconservatives to nationalists to libertarians might agree on as something worth fighting for, trying out, learning to build, community by community from scratch.

My sense is that any such framework would have to stand above much of the moralizing, angry, negative rhetoric that passes for political discussion these days. The worst framework we could choose, I think, would be something like “social justice” — the current ubiquitous weasel phrase in what were once progressive circles. Whatever it might once have meant, it has now, I believe, come to mean “the things I believe to be right and fair”. And so, if your set of things you believe to be right and fair differ utterly from mine, we can both defend our agendas as striving for “social justice”. But we’re not going to get anywhere.

Whatever we come up with as an alternative framework has to rise above that, and has to be positive and forward-looking, not bitter about past “injustices” and preoccupied with reparation and grievance. That’s a tall order. A society that feels it has no Future is inevitably going to be fixated on the Past, on grieving instead of building adaptability, and on how we have differed instead of what we believe and care about in common.

We also have to get above jargon, and terms that are laden with connotative baggage, blame-y, and overly simplistic. So while “climate justice” is no better than “social justice”, one possibility for an alternative framework might be:

A clean, safe, livable world, for all, now and for the future.

This does not, and cannot, require some kind of grand global social or spiritual awakening. It says nothing about how we got to this point of despair, or who is to blame for it, or who has suffered or is suffering more than others. It is, as much as I think is possible, morally agnostic. It is what, I think, had they a voice, most living creatures would specify as the minimum requirement for the kind of comfortable life that was their birthright before human civilization began crowding them out. Of course the terms “safe” and “livable” need to be defined, but I don’t think achieving a consensus on them should be terribly difficult.

From that vision, our priorities for all social, political and economic actions and decisions would, I think, flow quite obviously. Dealing not only with the precarity of gross inequality and climate collapse, but with the multiple broader crises of global ecological collapse and economic collapse, would command most of our attention and decision-making.

I have no idea whether we could get anywhere, particularly at any scale, starting from this vision and framework. Certainly it would be massively difficult, and more likely to find purchase in some local cultures than others. And the framework almost certainly needs some tweaking, though we should take care not to burden it impossibly with the rectification of past grievances or with social, political, or economic ideology of any kind.

But I see no other way past the dead-end of Liberal Nihilism.

I know lots of people who believe that any kind of systematic, large scale “walking away” from the established order will be met with violence and oppression by the rich and powerful, and they may be right, but I’m not so sure. Systems collapse around the edges, and then the collapse slowly, and then more quickly seeps through and undermines the rest, so that those defending the system are often caught unawares. The key will be when it becomes easier, and more compelling, to walk away and start supporting the creation of something new, than to continue to defend and suffer the miseries of the collapsing system.

My sense is that, for a lot of people, that time isn’t that far off.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Alternate Reality

Posted on December 26, 2022 by Dave Pollard

As I wake up this morning, the view out the window (above) doesn’t look auspicious for thoughtful meandering outdoors. So I decide to do my regular month-end “reflective walk” on the treadmill in the apartment’s gym.

There are now lots of amazing 4k (UHD) walking tour videos of just about every place on the planet, so I queue up some of them (Bali, Bhutan, Japan, Açores, Morocco, South Africa) ready to imagine myself in those places as I walk. As usual, I make up stories of people and places and subjects for discussion to accompany my imaginings.

(I do this with movies too — I just turn off the sound and create my own soundtrack, plot and character development as I watch. In my experience it’s usually far more interesting than the scripted soundtrack, and I can include myself in the plot so it becomes almost immersive. And so with the walking tours.)

I imagine who I might be walking with and what we might say about what we are seeing. If stories are all we are, we might as well make our story as interesting and engaging as possible, no?

As I’ve come to realize the utter unreality of the story of the separate self — the prison we construct for ourselves and live in all our lives — my story has increasingly diverged from the official narrative I created in early childhood and have curated, and been conditioned to believe to be true, all my life.

The old ‘story of me’ has never really served me well. So call it escapism, or just escaping, but the invention of radically alternative stories to the one I’ve contrived and reluctantly lived in all my life, is an enormously enjoyable form of play.

And my sense is it’s no more a fiction than the story of me I used to take so seriously.


screen shot from 8K World’s Bali video

So, in this alternative story, inspired by the video, I’m walking along a hilly path in Bali, chatting with a local woman, our guide, and two European tourists I’ve met since my arrival here. We’re talking about free will, about loss, about what it means to be wild.

I stop and recite, apparently from memory, the late Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Balinese woman, who is named Ni Luh, though that is not her real name, points at a flower growing by the side of the path. Karel, one of my new friends here, says “Plumeria”. Mette, my second new friend, says “Frangipani”.

Ni Luh smiles and motions us to look closer. “It doesn’t answer to any name,” she says. “What is it saying to you?”

We lean closer, to look and then to smell, and then go to answer the question. Ni Luh signals — a ‘shush’ motion. “Don’t tell us; what it’s saying to you is unique to you. What’s important is to listen, to pay attention. As the birds do, as the insects do.”

She goes on: “Its rich scent plays a trick on the moths that fertilize it. It promises nectar, but unlike most flowers it has none. My uncle says it just plays at being a flower, and the moths don’t mind. In my grandmother’s culture, it represents female sexuality, something she says almost all human cultures repress and suppress — our animal nature, our goddess nature…  It’s all about chemistry, you know — we have no choice but to let our ‘soft animal body’ love what it loves.”

Mette nods: “Yes. If only we could all accept that. None of it is about us, who ‘we’ are. None of it is personal, volitional, but we seem obsessed with taking everything personally. It’s tragic.”

Ni Luh smiles: “Just a warning though. If you see a woman with one of these flowers in her hair, pay close attention to where she’s from and which ear she wears it over.”

I look up from the treadmill. The snow is blowing in little eddies around the walkway outside. There’s a fog rolling in as the temperature rises. It looks unreal outside, the endless blobs of white and grey, like a poorly-done painting, with insufficient attention to the source and intensity of light. The story in my head, and on the screen, and in my feet, walking swiftly and carefully along the deep green path, seems more real than the world ‘outside’.

The four of us resume walking along the path, in silence, gradually moving toward lower ground, toward the beach. I am trying to pay more attention, with all my senses. But I don’t know how to do that — I’m unpracticed, my senses are overwhelming me, and my thoughts — judgements, assessments, meaning-making — are getting in the way. I almost lose my balance; Ni Luh senses it and grabs me to prevent me falling off the path.

I stumble on the treadmill. In the mirror of the gym, one of the guys working out looks over at me, hearing the noise.

A moment later Karel says: “I’ve been thinking about something, and I’m wondering if the rest of you have any thoughts about it… It seems to me, on the one hand, that the human species doesn’t like change much, fighting it at every turn. But on the other hand, our species doesn’t seem to notice change happening very well, especially if it’s gradual. I recently read something I wrote ten years ago, and as I read it I thought ‘Who is this person who wrote this?’ I’ve changed so much, but until I get a reality check like that, I seem to believe I haven’t changed at all. So I’m wondering: Is our aversion to change and our obliviousness to change related?”

Mette replied: “Well, I’d say that our aversion to change is rooted in fear of the unknown and the uncontrollable. Our obliviousness to gradual change is more likely due to the fact that our sense of time as a continuity of real things is illusory — we are not who we were ten years ago, so it’s not surprising that we don’t remember what it was like to be us ‘then’. It may not even be a bad thing to not remember. So I’d say they’re both true, but not related.”

At this point, I jump in: “Though if time is illusory, then so is change, which seems to happen ‘over’ time, so our fear of and resistance to change is a fear of something that doesn’t actually exist. My sense is that that fear is entirely conditioned, just like a lot of other human behaviours whose logic doesn’t bear close scrutiny. But I agree on our obliviousness to change. Our sense of self and continuity is reinvented every moment, and we’re not who we were ten minutes ago, let alone ten years.”

Karel: “But what about cats? They hate change — of home, of mealtimes, of everything. I’d say that for them, fear of change is instinctive. Maybe for us too.”

Me: “Well, maybe. But consider feral cats, that don’t have a home as such. And consider cats that get fed at completely random, but adequate times, or have a full bowl of dry food they can eat any time. I’d guess that we condition cats to fear change, the same way we condition each other.”

I suddenly realize that I am speaking out loud, and I look around the gym to see if anyone has noticed. The gym is empty.

Ni Luh shakes her head: “As Mette says, what’s wrong with just accepting that that’s just how things are. Observing and accepting that humans, and cats, seem averse to change, and that humans seem not to notice changes that happen gradually, like the boiling frogs? Why does there have to be a reason for everything?”

I laugh out loud at the delightfully recursive nature of this last, rhetorical question.

Ni Luh is pointing out another plant with wildly profuse pink flowers. I recognize it from Kaua’i trips as Bougainvillea. Again we are invited to look closer. “These flowers also play a trick to get attention from pollinators. The flower is actually that tiny white bloom inside. That profusion of colour is really a specialized kind of very thin leaf. That’s why they’re called paperflowers.”

I am startled as the video suddenly ends — we didn’t even get to the beach! I look at the display on the treadmill and realize I’ve walked further than I’d intended. I turn the machine off with a sigh. I’m sweating, and in a moment I will have to navigate the bleak, freezing outdoor walkway back to the main apartment building.

As I’m wiping down the machine, a woman I hadn’t noticed before comes up to me and says: “Nice impromptu poetry reading earlier — Mary Oliver, right? Not used to getting a dose of culture while working out in the gym.”

I blush, stutter and nod. So much for paying attention.

And then, as she turns and leaves the gym, I notice that she has a hair clip above her ear, in the shape of a Plumeria flower. Is it by her right ear or her left? I am watching her departing reflection in a double wall of mirrors in the gym. Which wall is reflecting the truth? I cannot tell.

And what’s more, in this infinity of images, I am nowhere to be seen.

Posted in Creative Works, Month-End Reflections | 3 Comments

The 40 Missing Minutes

Posted on December 24, 2022 by Dave Pollard


propofol molecular structure, per wikipedia, CC0

Last week I went to the hospital for a colonoscopy. I was given a general anaesthetic called Propofol, a relatively new (1990) drug that has received a lot of publicity, and is in wide-spread (human and veterinary) use everywhere on the planet. Although there are always risks with anaesthetics (notably drop in blood pressure and slowing of breathing), it takes effect very quickly (no more “counting down”), and recovery is also extremely fast, leaving patients often feeling “well rested” rather than the groggy feeling of other anaesthetics. But there’s a suggestion that the well-rested feeling is illusory, as the sleep it induces is “not a clean, clear sleep“. It also suppresses memory recall.

Surprisingly, although it requires expert care to administer it properly, any doctor can obtain and administer it. It was allegedly administered by Michael Jackson’s private physician as a sleep aid, purportedly leading to Michael’s death.

The anaesthetic serves a number of functions essential for surgery — not only sedation but also numbing of sensation and muscle relaxation (temporary paralysis).

It is also an essential part of the process used in Canada for medically assisted death. And it’s been used extensively on CoVid-19 patients in ICUs who require ventilators.

In Europe and the UK it is illegal to export the drug to the US, because some states there have it on their list of drugs used for executions.

An occasional side-effect of the drug is priapism.

I went into the procedure last week curious about whether I would have any sense of time passing, of dreams, or of memories, when I awoke — all part of my larger curiosity about the nature of time (an illusion constructed in the brain in the attempt to categorize and ‘make sense’ of sensation?) and ‘consciousness’ (a misinterpretation of the brain’s categorizations of its sensations as ‘real’ subject-object separation?).

It was, I have to say, a non-event. One second I was looking at the monitor that I’d clipped onto my index finger, and the next I was listening to what two people outside my curtained-off area were saying. There was no sense of having lost ‘consciousness’, or regaining it — it felt as if I’d been fully awake the entire time, and that nothing had happened. There was no sense of any time passing between the index finger moment (which was in the colonoscopy operating area) and the listening-to-voices moment (which was back in the prep area where my clothes had been left, a short trolley/gurney ride away).

It was as if the two moments occurred as a continuum, with nothing in between, with my brain transitioning from the finger-thought to the voices-thought, and trying to make sense of it. And immediately thereafter, the nurse came in and told me to get dressed, and that my friend David was there to drive me home (thanks David!). I felt rested, energized, and sprang out of the bed, dressed and left.

But forty minutes had elapsed, according to the clock, and presumably in the perception of the people working in the hospital. Forty minutes with no apparent transition, no nodding off or waking up, no continuity, or discontinuity.

For forty minutes, there was simply no me. The body I have always presumed to inhabit did perfectly well without me, though I’m sure the staff were watching and would have taken steps if this old body signalled it needed assistance. This body didn’t ‘miss’ me at all.

We believe what we want to believe, of course, and perhaps my sense that this body was telling me, in its own quiet way, that it didn’t need ‘me’, this presumer-of-consciousness — not ever, not at all, thank you — is overstating the lesson. But wow, it sure felt that way. It sure feels that way.

This body, in the past hour (if time were real) has gone and made tea and a snack, turned on the fireplace, written some things on a ‘to do’ list, all while its fingers hunt-and-pecked its way through this blog post. This body’s brain is trying to make sense of all this. It’s trying to make or tinker with a model of reality that is ‘good enough’ to explain what happened, and when and where and how and why it happened. ‘I’ am full of theories on the matter.

And of course, as ‘I’ present these theories, ‘I’ take credit for all these mental calculations. Worse, I have the gall to suggest those calculations are worthless after-the-fact rationalizations of what this body was going to do anyway. I am sure the body, if it had a ‘mind’ of its own, would suggest that perhaps ‘I’ should just STFU about all of this then.

Though I doubt very much that ‘I’ would listen.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Dreaming of Another World

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Dave Pollard


drawing by Michael Leunig

Oh, to live in a world in which our instincts tell us that all wars and all acts of violence are unwise and deplorable, a world in which we immediately and relentlessly strive to end them, without blame, and without taking sides.

A world in which the obvious need for global collaboration and cooperation to tackle the staggering crises of our times, means that we bring about an immediate and sustained global ceasefire, and take steps to eliminate all weapons of mass destruction and immiseration.

A world in which embargoes, land and financial theft, occupations, sanctions, blockades, covert actions to overthrow elected governments, and asset ‘freezes’ are all recognized as acts of war as deplorable as military acts, and prohibited by universal agreement.

A world in which fomenting or supporting war, hatred, fear and violence is so anathema to the ethos of citizens that any political group and any media agency that engages in such behaviour immediately loses all its support and collapses unmourned and unnoticed.

A world in which the very ideas of “nuclear deterrence”, “mutually assured destruction” and “preemptive strikes” are considered so preposterous as to be not even worth talking about.

A world in which our history lessons teach us the atrocity and barbarity of all wars, and the truth about wars: that they are never an answer for anything, and never have ‘winners’.

A world in which we celebrate solstice as a universal holiday of peace, and look back in dismay at the millennia of waste and destruction our culture of conquest, hate, fear, death and diminishment of “others” has wreaked upon this little blue planet.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Creative Works, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

The YouTube Power Law, and My Favourite Subscriptions

Posted on December 17, 2022 by Dave Pollard

When blogs were new and all the rage, Clay Shirky published something called the “Power Law” that said the popularity of blogs followed an exponential “power curve” that looked like a curved hockey stick — Y=mXb. That meant that 1% of the blogs got over 80% of the views, and most blogs were in the ‘long tail’ that got almost no views. The same curve seems to apply to twitter followers, Substack and Medium platforms, and music streaming service ‘plays’.

That means that, like professional athletes, a handful of musicians (or more likely their agents) are making obscene amounts of money, while the vast majority of musicians are starving. (It doesn’t have to be that way; little-known musicians could get more per play, and famous ones less per play, but that would require a little imagination on the part of the industry.)

So I’m not surprised that the same power law applies when it comes to YouTube. A very small proportion of content providers may be able to make a living just posting new content; the vast majority of providers will never see more than a handful of views.

The table above shows the 15 YouTube video channels I subscribe to, and the average number of views per video for each. As you can see, it’s a power law — I had to use a logarithmic scale because otherwise half of the bars would be invisible. The top and bottom bars are averages of a number of content providers in that category; the rest are single channels (easy to find on YouTube if you google them, should you want to check them out).

They’re an eclectic mix, but what they have in common is solid production values, and no really lame videos. Most of the providers have a great sense of humour. And all of them use the medium well — without the video they just wouldn’t be the same. And despite the 1000-fold differences in popularity, I am just about equally inclined to watch a new video on any of these channels.

Do you have a favourite YouTube channel? Is there one that you find so compelling that you pretty much watch it as soon as the notification comes in?

And how about best-kept secrets — a channel producing really good videos that almost no one subscribes to?

 

Posted in How the World Really Works, Using Weblogs and Technology | 2 Comments

Landscapes of Silence

Posted on December 16, 2022 by Dave Pollard


image from the cover of Landscapes of Silence

Over the years I’ve given away more than a dozen copies of English anthropologist Hugh Brody’s 2002 book The Other Side of Eden. The book articulates the vast difference between indigenous (etym. = ‘born into and part of’) and colonial/dominating ‘civilized’ cultures, and how, worldwide, indigenous cultures have adapted themselves to their land and environment rather than exercising ‘dominion’ over it. It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

This year, a full 20 years hence, Hugh has published his next book, Landscapes of Silence, which, other than the fact that it’s also about anthropology, could hardly be more different from his earlier work. It is more memoir than study, and tells the story of a much humbled and much radicalized writer.

Like his previous books, it contains some remarkable insights and is almost impossible to put down. But rather than a plethora of observations about how indigenous cultures live differently from those in dominant cultures, it focuses on a few critical messages we’d all be wise to listen to — really listen to — and take to heart.

The book is about how dominant cultures silence indigenous ones in many ways — misrepresenting and appropriating their stories, relating their history solely from the dominant culture’s viewpoint, stealing and dispossessing them of their land, dislocating them, and subverting and even banning their languages. And it’s about how the trauma of both types of cultures is masked by a ghastly self-imposed silence about our cultures’ real stories.

After writing The Other Side of Eden, and revisiting the peoples of Nunavut and Iqaluit in the ‘Canadian’ eastern arctic, Hugh realized that he’d missed a huge part of the story of these peoples. He’d asked them to tell him stories of ‘indigenous wisdom’, rather than inviting them to tell him the stories that were really important to them. On his return visit, rather than a welcome letter, he was given a list of all the people in their communities who had committed suicide since his previous visit. It was a long list.

He wanted to correct this mistake, but after writing thousands of pages for a follow-up book, he realized “It’s not the right of some white colonial visitor to write about the psyches and lives of indigenous peoples.”

Instead, he started to write about his own story, as a second-generation English Jew, and discovered “the infinite well of grief” that stemmed from his mother’s fierce silence about the Holocaust that had wiped out most of his family in the 1940s in Austria — a silence she had imposed to try to protect him and his siblings from its horror, and her own guilt as an ex-pat survivor. Even after the war, in the English high schools Hugh attended, the Holocaust was never mentioned.

Hugh takes pains often to point out he is in no way equating the European Holocaust with the colonial violence and genocide still being inflicted on indigenous peoples all over the world. They are different stories. But what they have in common is that they are shrouded in silence, and an inability and unwillingness of most of those in dominant and colonial cultures, and even many ‘survivors’ of abuse, to just listen, without judgement or interruption, to these stories.

So Hugh spent more time in the north, without any agenda or book project in mind, learning Inuktitut and inviting everyone in the communities he visited to tell their stories — whatever stories they wanted to tell. And the stories they wanted to tell were about the abuse they had all suffered at the hands of those from the dominant, colonial culture. Implicit in this was a demand to ask those in the dominant culture: Why are you allowing this to happen? These were not stories about indigenous cultures; they were stories about the dominant culture.

He learned that indigenous stories are fundamentally different from the stories we learn to tell in the dominant, colonial, Euro-American culture.

  • Indigenous stories are always personal, direct experiences, never second-hand, never hearsay, never “what I learned” summations.
  • Indigenous stories are precise, factual, complete and unhesitant. They are never interrupted with questions or interjections.
  • Indigenous stories are direct, and flow in time order. They are not crafted for effect. They are told to inform, not to influence or manipulate.

(This reminded me of First Nations writer Thomas King’s assertion “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” And about Cynthia Kurtz’ assertion that in working with complex systems, the stories that are collected to assess the situation must all be direct personal experiences, never second-hand).

Hugh discovered that the Inuit people he spoke with lamented that, due to the horrible struggle to adapt and make do within the constraints of the dominant culture (loss of their land, rights, and ways of making a living, dislocation from their homes, pressure on their kids to learn English, loss of their language and of their culture of listening, etc) they had no time to “just be, to belong to the land” that was their home. And it was obvious that that massive dislocation has contributed to the mental illness and suicide epidemics there.

Hugh writes: “The breaking of listening is the breaking of well-being. You can’t be loved if you are not heard.”

He also talks about his time as a youth on a kibbutz, a “socialist utopia” in Israel, and the realization that this utopia was part of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine and its apartheid project — Israel’s “landscape of silence”.

Hugh stresses that this “breaking of listening” profoundly affects the cognitive development of children, so much so that young Inuit no longer listen to the stories of their elders and communities, so the landscape of silence grows ever broader and deeper. I wondered, as I read, whether this is actually a global phenomenon, and has been for generations, in all of our cultures.

The injustice and abuse by the dominant culture comes, Hugh says, from ignorance and not from malice, and he asserts that the indigenous people he has met share that sentiment. Colonialism is based on settler culture that takes for granted that colonized people are less than fully human, and that the land belongs to the colonizers, not the colonized. This needs to be “unlearned”, and that starts with unlearning and relearning how we hear and listen to stories. The stories of residential schools are not indigenous peoples’ stories, they are the colonists’ stories. Real stories emerge out of the silence, the silence of the natural world, the silence of the space between thoughts, when we just pay attention, and listen.

If you’re not ready to pick up or download a copy of Landscapes of Silence, here’s one more provocation: In a recent Long Table podcast at the Upstart & Crow bookstore in Vancouver, Hugh talked about the book and how his worldview has utterly changed over the past 20 years. It’s an hour long, but very well done and you can speed it up to 2x and it’s still very intelligible.

We all live in landscapes of silence. Do you know what yours are?

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Landscapes of Silence

Is ‘Consciousness’ an Autoimmune Disease?

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Dave Pollard

Dave’s craziest idea yet. More radical non-duality non-sense.


Dilbert, by Scott Adams

Especially in more affluent nations, there is an epidemic of autoimmune diseases sweeping the globe. These diseases, of which there are over 100, now affect 10% of the population in some countries. They all have one thing in common: The body’s immune system, which evolved to fight infections, begins to fight and destroy healthy cells, tissues and organs. There is no known cause and no cure for any of these diseases. They are often triggered by chronic physical or psychological stress.

We understand almost nothing about our body’s immune system response, which is staggeringly complex and varied. We do know that autoimmune diseases are relatively rare or unknown in many poor countries.

One hypothesis for why this might be so is that in poor countries the immune system is regularly ‘exercised’ by being exposed to many more diseases, and hence ‘learns’ to deal appropriately with many different types of bacteria, viruses and infections. We do know that with some serious infections (like the avian ‘flu’ virus that caused the horrific 1918 pandemic) it is hyper-activity of the immune system, so-called ‘cytokine storms’, that killed most of the pandemic’s victims, not infection by the virus itself. So it’s possible that the epidemic of autoimmune diseases might be caused at least in part by an ‘ignorant’ immune system, that never learned to do its vitally important job because, ‘thanks’ to modern medicine’s protections (and massive overuse of antibiotics and other toxic chemicals and sterilizers in our medicines and foods, and keeping babies away from peanut butter, pet dander and other allergens), it never got to practice differentiating what is healthy for our bodies from what is dangerous to them.

That’s just a theory of course. But when we observe how the nation’s poorest nations have had inexplicable orders-of-magnitude lower levels of death from CoVid-19, even when carefully adjusting for reporting capability, it’s tantalizing to consider that we might have unintentionally dumbed down our own immune systems to the point that they are now actually sickening and killing us in large numbers.

The obvious metaphor is the musculoskeletal and circulatory systems of sedentary people, which atrophy and clog and result in endless ailments and injuries due to lack of proper exercise. Our body can’t learn to keep us healthy if it doesn’t have the chance to practice doing so.

If that idea isn’t radical enough, that got me thinking about the fact that those rare humans who have no sense of self and separation function perfectly well but seem to have much lower levels of anxiety, hostility to others, guilt and shame than the rest of us.

What if, at least metaphorically, the evolution (which seems unique to humans) of a ‘conscious’ (and arguably useless) sense of self-awareness and separation might actually underlie almost all human psychological suffering and mental illness? In other words, is our evolved ‘consciousness’, instead of being an evolutionary breakthrough, actually a kind of autoimmune disease? Has it made us uselessly, needlessly and endlessly hypervigilant, to the point we overreact to everything in a desperate attempt to control what is actually not within our control, and what needs no control?

It’s an imperfect metaphor, of course: We need our body’s immune system, without which we’d quickly succumb to infections and die. We don’t need our sense of consciousness and our sense of being separate and apart from everything else and in control of ‘our’ decisions. But we think we do. We cannot imagine what it is like to be without any sense of there being anyone separate. We cannot imagine not even attempting to control these bodies we seem to inhabit. We have no choice but to be hypervigilant, utterly preoccupied with protecting and ‘doing right’ by these bodies we feel it is our absolute and endless responsibility to look after.

That’s got to be crazy-making, especially when all our efforts seem so often in vain, when things don’t go the way they ‘should’, when the stresses and threats seem endless, and when we are sure that the final result of all that frenzied effort is… death.

(Have you ever had a disease with a really high fever, when despite everything else going on inside and outside your body there’s this strange sense of calm, a sense that it’s OK that you’re not quite yourself, ready to deal with every problem that might arise, that everything will be OK even though you can’t deal with it right now? Is this a glimpse, a hint, of what it’s like to be unburdened of this disease of relentless hypervigilance, free from needing to be in control, ready for anything?)

An autoimmune disease is when our bodies mistakenly damage and kill what is perfectly healthy, in the effort to ward off an invasive threat that actually isn’t real. What if our ‘minds’ do the same thing, in the form and name of ‘consciousness’? And what if the result is all human psychological suffering? And what if how that suffering manifests (in acts of war, feelings of hatred, anxiety, grief, shame, guilt etc) is all just completely unnecessary fighting against a non-existent enemy? What if we are, indeed, just one, just this?

Posted in Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will | 7 Comments

Links of the Month: December 2022

Posted on December 11, 2022 by Dave Pollard


New Yorker cartoon by Paul Noth

I’ve had several people tell me they can no longer bear to read the politics and economics and ‘collapse watch’ sections of these links posts — they find them too infuriating and depressing. They’re also largely unactionable news. So why post them at all? Mainly because I find it useful to remind myself how we are all just products of our conditioning, and that even the most level-headed and ‘reasonable’ among us can be conditioned to believe and to do almost anything.

As I start to understand how people’s conditioning can lead them to believe absurd things and to commit atrocious acts, and therefore why they believe and do these things, I can at least be philosophical about where all this is taking us. I don’t believe civilization’s collapse is avoidable (that’s my conditioning), but I do get some comfort from understanding collapse’s inevitability. That is why I am a chronicler, I suppose, and not an activist. Not that I have any choice.

COLLAPSE WATCH


source: Report On Critical Raw Materials For The EU May 2014, via Geological Survey of Finland, which concludes: “Global reserves are not large enough to supply enough metals to build the renewable non-fossil fuels industrial system.” Via Richard Heinberg’s Museletter 

Oil & gas industry carbon emissions 3x higher than industry admits: Satellites reveal most industries are conveniently underestimating their CO2e emissions.  Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

Exponential math tells the story: Doubling resource extraction, doubling industrial production, doubling waste, halving the time left before total collapse. As usual, Richard’s entire Museletter is worth a read.

Climate scientists still spout ‘there’s still time’ rhetoric, letting the rest of us live in denial: Only by acknowledging the inevitability of ecological and climate collapse can we genuinely start preparing for it. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

LIVING BETTER


electric scooter, commercial model, 1901

Protesters using a blank poster to tell their story: The blank protest sign says it all: “You know what’s wrong. You know why we can’t say it in public”. When you get to fill in the blank, how can you disagree?

Profiling public figures honestly: Lyz explains how to research and produce useful profiles of people in power.

Why Michael Moore out-predicts the pollsters: He listens to young and women voters. Thanks to John Whiting for the link and the one that follows.

Vienna models how to solve the housing crisis: Quality, subsidized public housing forces down private industry price-gouging.

… and Houston, of all places, follows suit: Same answer: Government initiatives create an abundance of affordable homes; problem solved.

Disillusioning: That, says Caitlin Johnstone, is the real job of the journalist.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


Dilbert, by Scott Adams

The case for peace in Ukraine: Naked Capitalism outlines the eight reasons for all sides to pursue an immediate ceasefire and peace talks.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for several of these links):

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

CoVid-19 Corner: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


Dave Coverly’s Speed Bump

The Wyrd Sisters get a MMIWG remake: The awesome Kim Baryluk a cappella song Warrior, sung by two Newfoundland women’s choirs with First Nations drummer (thanks to David Cousins for the correction on the origin of the choirs).

The fraud of “exit option democracy”: “If you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave?” But, of course, it’s not that simple. Unless you actually do leave. Maybe they only want us to believe it’s that difficult. Thanks to Euan Semple for the link.

Lyz’s hilarious Blue Check Carnival experience: The lighter side of the Twitter debacle, showing what a good spoof can produce. Also check out Indrajit Samarajiva’s post for more great parodies.

When it hurts to ask: A fascinating look into the psychology of giving and receiving, and why we hesitate to ask for what we want or need. Thanks to the Naked Capitalist for the link.

Is nuclear power that dangerous?: In a two-part video, Sabine Hossenfelder compares the dangers of nuclear energy to those of other forms of energy and other chemical dangers. and then goes on to discuss the problem of nuclear waste. She’s not a particular fan of nukes (“They certainly won’t solve the energy crisis”) but she says we have much greater dangers and risks that need focusing on. To my surprise, I was, at least for now, persuaded. It is possible to change your beliefs, even at my old age.

How electron microscopes work: A close-up look at the intricacies of trying to see individual atoms using electron microscopes.

The musical Rogers family: Canada’s legendary folk family has produced some astonishing music. Here’s Stan doing Three Fishers, based on a poem written in 1851. And son Nathan doing what should be Canada’s national anthem, Northwest Passage.

Vancouver tramcar trip, 1907: Using new digitizing techniques to sharpen the image and adding false colour and sound, a trip down the main streets of Vancouver 115 years ago comes to life.

Flying squirrels: A look into how these (not really) flying creatures manage their amazing long-distance leaps.

Best books of the year: And the year wouldn’t be complete without a look at Maria Popova’s favourite books of 2022. Thanks to Euan for the link.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


Victor Gillam, “The White Man’s Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling),” originally published in Judge magazine, April 1, 1899. Source: The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. (Via) and Via)

From Indrajit Samarajiva on Euro-Americans’ lecturing to the world on ‘human rights’:

If you want to coup, sanction, or overthrow any governments, start with your own, the greatest human rights violators in the world. If you have an opinion about human rights in some other country, understand that you’re not standing in solidarity with us. You’re a useful idiot for your corporate media, just a patsy in the capital colonialism that goes on and on. So please spare us the lectures about human rights. It’s just the latest idea y’all use to dehumanize us and take our stuff, and feel good about yourself. You should feel like I feel. Sick to your stomachs.

From Alice Walker, Don’t Despair:

Real change is personal. The change within ourselves expressed in our willingness to hear, and have patience with, the “other.” Together we move forward. Anger, the pointing of fingers, the wishing that everyone had done exactly as you did, none of that will help relieve our pain. We are here now. In this scary, and to some quite new and never imagined place. What do we do with our fear? Do we turn on others, or toward others? Do we share our awakening, or only our despair?

From Kay Ryan, from Flamingo Watching:

A CERTAIN KIND OF EDEN

It seems like you could, but you can’t go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It’s all too deep for that.
You’ve overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you’re given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Democracy Without Elections

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Dave Pollard

“We can’t rely on anything anymore. Our economic and political systems seem hopelessly corrupt and broken, beyond repair. We can’t trust what the media are telling us anymore. And now AI is creating articles and pictures and videos that look totally real and authentic but are totally fake. Capitalism doesn’t work except for the ultra-rich. Democracy doesn’t work at all. But we have nothing to replace them with.”

That was the state of the world a friend was relating to me during a recent walk. At the time I just nodded. It does seem to me as if the current systems that are falling apart are the only ones we know, and we’re utterly lost when they fail.

But that’s not entirely true. At least on a small scale, there are lots of alternative economic and political systems that work rather well. There’s a tendency, I think, to look at our local systems as inherently dysfunctional, and perhaps even worse than ‘higher’-level political systems — cities that no longer work because no one can afford to live in them with the salaries employers can afford to pay, and local politics that is often corrupted (frequently by developers), and too often borders on incompetence.

But there are other local groups that are employing gift economy, wealth-sharing, consensus, citizens’ assemblies and other effective, responsive and functional economic and political systems to get things done that our larger, now-almost-totally-dysfunctional systems have never done well.

How far might we be able to go with a truly democratic (ie balancing the collective interests of all citizens) system that does not have elected officials, or even elections, at all?

Let’s start at the local, municipal level. Decisions need to be made on local zoning and land use, infrastructure maintenance, parks and recreation, new developments and redevelopments, community health care, housing, environmental protection, arts and cultural amenities, and lots of other issues.

At present, those decisions are actually made by an uneasy coalition of municipal elected officials, local government workers, private corporations that own the land and supply most of the labour and expertise for new development and redevelopment projects, and ‘higher’ levels of government that have legal and vested interests in local projects (and often provide much of the funding for them).

Most of these decisions are reactive rather than proactive; local municipalities have very little control over the major social, political and economic forces at work in their communities, so they mostly respond, yes or no, to proposals that come to them. Local politicians are often novices, often overwhelmed, out of their depth, exhausted and risk-averse, and so they are strongly inclined to say ‘yes’ to traditional ‘safe’ proposals and ‘no’ to unorthodox ones.

They may of course have some sort of community development plan, crafted by local idealists to depict how they’d like to see the community shift and grow, but such plans are generally honoured more in their breach than in their observance. Not much point having a plan when you lack the power to do much of anything to see it implemented.

Right-wing ‘libertarian’ ideologues point out the deficiencies in such systems, and their answer is to deregulate everything and allow “the market” (ie the ultra-rich top caste who own almost all of the land, assets and corporations) to do whatever they want (the euphemism is “self-regulate”).

The idea that such a system will operate in the interests of the majority of citizens is utterly ludicrous. Louisiana, where this ideology is pretty much a state religion, is a desolated, depleted, giant toxic waste dump of a state, where most of the citizens are dying of neglect, or diseases caused by staggering levels of pollution, poverty and malnutrition, or incarceration, or despair.

So what do we do when our massively-complex utterly-interdependent societies only grow worse when unregulated, but now seem effectively un-regulatable?

We might start with very focused citizens’ assemblies, selected randomly by lot from lists of community members, and empowered to make the most crucial decisions affecting the community. They would need to be properly funded, trained and facilitated, which would require taxing the upper caste to pay for decisions the upper caste may not like. That could pose a challenge right out of the gate.

These assemblies would likely be single-issue focused — eg on local homelessness, on the absence of affordable housing for all, on ecological conservation, protection and preservation, or on quotas on various types of development needed to ensure a healthy, self-reliant community.

Most municipalities today are dealing with a quandary: Developers want expensive ‘prestige’ residential development (large sprawling single-family homes and massive condo towers) because that’s where the profit is. Homeowners go along with this because it keeps their own property values high. But what is really needed is mostly rental housing, mostly modest low-income housing, and enough industrial and other high-end (eg tech) development to employ all the people in the community. And many of the people who appreciate and really want this are people who’d like to live in the community but currently can’t and don’t.

This leaves the local politicians and staff in an impossible situation. They’re beholden to the voters, and to the developers who fund their election campaigns. A citizens’ assembly empowered to balance these conflicting interests may not be beholden, but their sensible recommendations are likely to outrage the current citizens of the community — who may be inclined to distrust ‘tenants’, fear the poor and homeless, and not want industry that actually produces anything of value even when it brings decent-wage jobs (along with pollution, higher density development, and heavy transportation infrastructure), to the area. NIMBY, thank you.

They’ll be outraged no matter how unanimous the citizens’ assembly recommendations are, and no matter how carefully they’re explained. Most citizens have their entire net worth tied up in their homes, and are understandably horrified at the risk of that net worth diminishing. Everyone wants affordable housing (elsewhere please), except those who’ve benefited from it becoming unaffordable. Even those who have embraced citizens’ assemblies (“for fact-finding”) often don’t consider them truly “democratic” and insist that their recommendations be subject to ratification by voters who have not studied and can’t fully appreciate the rationale for the assemblies’ proposals.

So because we live in such a suspicious, low-trust (perhaps with good reason) world, I suspect citizens’ assemblies will only be listened to and acted upon when the issue is sufficiently uncontroversial that the majority will shrug indifferently and ratify it. That’s true for most local issues. If we try to have them make recommendations on subjects currently under the purview of ‘higher’ governments (eg war spending, tax rates, rights of minorities) they’re likely to face even stronger opposition. “Who elected these ‘assemblies’ to make decisions for me?”

Where might they work? Perhaps in lieu of referenda, substituting informed, deliberative consensus for the power and influence of pro- and anti- lobby groups. But again, if the assembly’s recommendations are subject to voter ratification, it will not remove the power of money, lobbying and propaganda from the decision process.

They might also replace what we now call “advisory groups”, which are usually voluntary groups of citizens with an active interest (and often a bias) in a particular subject, that are frequently used as hostages and for cover by politicians in passing or rejecting laws and regulations on that subject, and which are ignored when the group’s biases do not align with the politicians’.

In time, we might at least learn to put more weight on the recommendations of citizens’ assemblies and similar unbiased deliberative bodies, and ask hard questions of politicians who repeatedly ignore their recommendations.

So my sense is that, perhaps ironically, democracy without elections (using citizens’ assemblies and other unbiased group deliberative processes) is unlikely to succeed until we have completely given up on democracy with elections. That will only happen when enough of us cease to be conned by the parties who pretend to listen to us, and cease to think the current political system just needs to be ‘reformed’.

It will only happen when we’re ready to acknowledge that decisions on many issues cannot be entrusted to voters’ binary gut instincts, uninformed politicians, and lobbyists’ adversarial scare-mongering pitches, and when we’re ready to appoint and listen to citizen groups who can explore and have honest dialogues on these issues until they are largely of one mind.

It is actually quite rare for such groups to be unable to arrive at a consensus. It’s fascinating, when humans talk with each other honestly and with an open mind, with skilful facilitators, how quickly and sincerely they can come to agree, even when they were initially disinclined to do so. And it’s dismaying how few of us ever have the opportunity to see how well such a system can work.

I think, at least in some places and on some issues, we will start to appreciate that binary decision-making and current systems of voting are highly undemocratic and no longer serve our interest. Only then are we likely to look seriously for better ways of making the critical decisions that affect our communities, and our world.

Especially once we’ve been a member of an effectively-facilitated citizen deliberative group ourselves, so that can appreciate their truly democratic nature, we just might discover that democracy can work after all.

PS I can’t stress enough how important it is to have good facilitators guiding groups through such difficult processes, and for each of us to learn to be good ‘guerrilla facilitators‘ ourselves. The ‘wisdom of crowds’ can only emerge when our propensity for groupthink, for rushing to judgement, and other cognitive biases, is seen and called out, and as we learn the protocols for effective dialogue — including honing our inquiry and listening skills.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Working Smarter | 1 Comment