Work That Doesn’t Work, and Work That Does


cartoon by the late New Yorker cartoonist Robert Weber, one of the few cartoonists who worked mostly with charcoal

Every year we hear about workplace surveys that say that most employees are “satisfied” with their jobs, which would, I think, suggest more that they can’t imagine finding better work, than that they like the work they are doing.

We also hear about “quiet quitting”, and complaints that minimum wage jobs are going begging. Employers would like us to believe that that’s because most people are lazy, but if you actually speak to people doing these jobs, it’s quite clear that no one, especially if they have a family, can afford to live on a minimum wage job (or even two minimum wage jobs) with today’s costs of housing, health care, transportation, and other essential expenses that are increasing at twice the rate of the minimum wage and “average” wages.

The truth is that our economy is stretched so tight that there is a huge and growing chasm between what workers need to live even a basically comfortable life, and what dysfunctional corporations desperate to keep profits growing to avoid collapse of their stock prices, can afford to pay them. This is what collapse looks like.

In a recent article, Aurélien explores what this means for the poor beleaguered employee who is spending more than half of their waking hours, for a lifetime, working at, or commuting to and from, a Bullshit Job.

This means accepting, and coming to grips with these terrible realities:

  • Employers cannot afford to pay them a decent salary, or give them a decent real-inflation-level salary increase, or give them basic essential employee benefits, or any job security, or the possibility of a decent promotion, or the promise of a pension.
  • The level of trust in workplaces is so low that employers dare not let their employees “work at home” or away from supervision, and increasingly use technology to actively disempower employees from providing customers with what they reasonably want and need, for fear that will adversely affect profits.
  • Governments, which are mostly now technically bankrupt due to a combination of incompetence, mismanagement, dysfunctional bureaucracy (due to being too big and too centralized), wild overspending on the military and “security”, and obscene tax cuts for the rich and powerful, are trying furiously to reduce and even eliminate essential social services and citizen-protecting regulations to fend off actual bankruptcy. In the process they are aggravating the challenges workers are having trying to make ends meet in their tedious, underpaid Bullshit Jobs.
  • Corporations (which were actually, as Indrajit Samarajiva has explained, the first form of AI, and remain its most insidious form) are perversely driven by their mandates and charters to try to weaken and replace governments and public services, and to see both their customers (“whiny and litigious”) and their employees (“outsource and offshore”) as loathsome impediments to their profitability and smooth function, and to treat them accordingly.

The fact that anyone is “satisfied” with this state of affairs should be cause for alarm. But that is where we seemingly are.


How corporations’ implicit psychopathy plays out, from my earlier post

Like me, Aurélien is not proffering solutions to this worsening situation. It is up to us, he suggests, to use what power we have to make the best of it. This entails, he says, taking charge of our own work lives, and getting out of the rut of not seeing any alternative to our current daily work drudgery.

What brings joy at work is not, he says, “success”, but rather the satisfaction of knowing that what you do is important — that it matters to, and is appreciated by, customers and co-workers (ie that it’s not really a Bullshit Job), that you have some control over it, and that you know that you and your co-workers are doing good work for the customer, the community, the society, and/or the world as a whole.

Aurélien writes:

I suppose nothing could be more foreign to our present culture than the idea that in life we have a series of free choices, and we are responsible for them and their consequences. In a world where everyone is a victim and no-one is responsible for anything, that’s almost literally heresy. But we then have to ask how practically useful to us, in reality, is today’s ethic of complaint, and futile appeals to “rights.” Does it actually help us to survive and retain our sanity, working in an organisation that hates us? Does it make us happier? I think the answer is obvious.

He goes on to explain how we try to retain our sanity in a brutal workplace, by reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Gabor Maté’s arguments about our fundamental human need for authenticity — our capacity to be honest with ourselves and other about what we believe and want and do, and sometimes what we have to demand:

A very senior official in my organisation once gently explained to me why the extravagant promises of a glittering career made to me when I was younger were now inoperative. ‘Your problem’ he said, not unkindly, ‘is that you’re not perceived as being sufficiently dedicated to the management priorities of the organisation.’ Now as it happened, I was involved in other things than management priorities at the time, and didn’t think about them very much, and rarely if ever said anything about them. Nonetheless, I said, look, I’m a professional, and I do what the organisation wants, including its management practices. Ah, came the reply: but that’s not enough, we need your full-hearted commitment. At that point, I knew it was time to think of going, because once you confuse a bureaucratic organisation with a church or a political party, you’re in deep trouble.

He’s speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I sense a lot of readers will be nodding with recognition of their own situations in dead-end jobs that demand(ed) more from them than they could ever give back.

“Doing a good job” in the face of this, and in the face of dysfunctional organizations, “is an act of resistance” — of defiance even, he asserts.

The large proviso here, of course, is that you foreswear formal protests and open confrontation, and that you care only about the final outcome, not the degree to which your ego is polished thereby. Sometimes there may be no alternative to letting important people with their own large egos make stupid decisions, but there are always ways of quietly unpicking those decisions later, in silence and anonymity.

I think this is brilliantly perceptive, and it resonates strongly with my own experiences through nearly 40 years of exhausting, perplexing, exasperating work. I learned to accept that achieving the right outcome often required letting my boss take the credit for my efforts and insights. I learned to listen to my customers and co-workers and peers, even when I knew that acting on their behalf and against the stated interests or policies of my employer, might be a career-limiting move. It was the right thing to do. I always knew how to do my job better than those ‘superiors’ I had to explain my actions to, who mostly never found out just what I did or how important it really was.

So here’s a toast to everyone dedicated to “doing a good job”, by ignoring all the career advice you received in those cheesy, self-important airport bookstore self-help books, and in spite of the fact everything is falling apart all around us.

It matters, it makes a difference, and it is appreciated in ways you will probably never know. And you probably have more control over your work and your work life than you think, including, if it comes to that, the power to resign. Life’s too long, and too short, to spend so much of it doing work that you’re merely “satisfied” with.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves, Working Smarter | 5 Comments

The Weather Under the Weather

This is #26 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.


“Under the Umbrella”, by Midjourney AI; not my prompt

“My poetry took its voice from the rain.” — Pablo Neruda

“The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.” — Helen Garner

Here on the Canadian west coast, we’re having the usual winter weather: The last 10 days have been rainy, and the next 10 are expected to be likewise. Most people, like most creatures apparently, don’t like rain much, and tend to scatter for cover when it rains (notable animal exceptions being elephants and deer).

So this month’s ‘cultural anthropology’ has been paying attention to who is out in the rain. My research has required almost daily trips to the local café to see who’s out and about — my sacrifice for science!

My first observation was that umbrellas are much commoner here in Asian-culture-inspired Coquitlam than in predominantly Anglo areas of Vancouver. The Japanese, I’ve learned, lead the world in use of umbrellas. When I asked people who didn’t use them, why they didn’t, the main answer was that it requires use of one hand all the time. So if you’re carrying bags or walking the dog, or in an insecure area, you need both hands, so umbrellas are suboptimal. Why hasn’t anyone invented an umbrella that doesn’t need hand-holding?

Mind you, since almost all ‘serious’ raincoats continue to use toxic, polluting ‘forever’ chemicals like PFAS, PFC and PVC, you’re not doing any favours using them instead. And more natural solutions like oiled silk, beeswax, waxed canvas and oilskin all have their problems (they can’t be washed, for a start).

In the café, most of the older customers have umbrellas, while most of the younger customers have hooded jackets, and are wet. Whether that’s obliviousness or stubbornness is your guess. Young wild creatures apparently like the rain better than their parents, so maybe we’re the same. But then wild creatures mostly have hair or fur that can be shaken to dry themselves quickly. I was surprised to learn that most animals have evolved the capacity to shake their bodies after getting wet — at precisely the optimal frequency to expel water fastest. (Yes, someone has actually measured these frequencies.) If you’ve ever been owned by a dog, you will know how effective this shaking is — for the dog.

Demographically, the crowd in the café looks younger today than it does on drier days. On the way over here I watched three dogs taking their people for walks in the downpour. They seemed ambivalent: the smells more intense, perhaps, but the sounds of rain a distraction for the smaller, warier pups, and the rain itself unpleasant on and in the eyes. Still, they looked much happier than the (umbrella-less) people they were walking.

There is a bit of a ritual in the café on heavy-rain days: First you must secure a table (harder to come by on rainy days), preferably by putting your wettest items on an empty table and chair to discourage others from trying to take it. The umbrella must be shaken outside before you come in, futile as that is on a day like today, so as not to sprinkle customers inside or make the floor even more slippery than it is. Then you put your coffee order in, and then you wipe down your table, which is inevitably still wet from the previous customer’s belongings.

For those (about half of the customers) with laptops or tablets, there is the usual fruitless casting around for an unused electrical outlet, followed by a sigh, and then the setting up of the equipment, which, here at least, seems to involve custom-made folding brackets and stands for tablets, phones and hard-copy materials. They don’t call it your ‘third place’ for nothing.

It would appear that puffer jackets are very much in style here. Even geezers are wearing them. They promise warmth, light weight, and dryness, but caveat emptor — almost none of them are vegan, and most contain PFAS. And the better-made ones suggest you hand-wash them in cold water with a special non-detergent cleaner, to avoid damaging the down, destroying its water-resistance, and reducing its thermal properties. And few of them are actually waterproof. What price fashion?

My next observation today is that there seems to be a point at about age 30 when people switch from backpacks to shoulder bags. The former almost all look badly worn and seem to have obligatory ‘designer’ labels on the outside, like underwear. I will never understand this. The latter are apparently always black, the designers apparently more than content to remain anonymous.

There are some women, usually middle-aged or older, who carry a kind of large structured handbag instead, kinda like an old-fashioned sewing or knitting basket. These seem enormously roomy: I watched a woman take at least 30 items out of her bag at the café, and it still looked full. The only drawback I could see is that these bags all seem to be hideously gaudy, as if you sewed it or knitted it yourself, perhaps. Still, they have possibilities. Whoever’s working on inventing a hands-free umbrella might take inspiration from these carry-alls.

You don’t want to be seen pulling your laptop out of a tote-bag, however. Too flimsy, like an accident waiting to happen. Too easy for your laptop to fall out of and crash spectacularly to the café floor. And if it’s a branded department store tote, be prepared to have the socially conscious roll their eyes at your choice of bag, as it’s most likely advertising a chain they would never shop in, for various political, social, ecological and/or economic reasons.

Cultural anthropology is one of the shadier forms of voyeurism, and if you think you’re being subtle, you can rest assured you’re not. People know that you’re looking at them in the café even if they have their back constantly to you. They just know. You’re not fooling anyone with your spreadsheet on your Mac open in front of you. This eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head skill is something women apparently learn quite young, for their own defence. The quality of their radar is directly proportional to the age, unattractiveness and/or creepiness of the voyeur, and for perfectly good reasons. Some but not most men seem to have this same radar, but for different (and, um, sometimes ickier?) reasons.

I have learned to be discreet — staring is just rude, even in the interest of science — but I don’t pretend I am not glancing around the room looking for something interesting or amusing to write about on my month-end blog post. If someone catches me looking at them, I nod and acknowledge their attention, and then gently look away.

Since I recently caught myself smiling in the mirror of my apartment elevator, I no longer smile at strangers unless they smile at me first. For some reason, my self-initiated smiles just look disturbing, like grimaces, while those that are in response to others’ smiles seem natural and genuine. Not enough practice I guess, during all those long years of anxiety and depression.

When CoVid-19 ‘ended’, I was briefly astonished at the number of strangers who smiled at me on the street, apparently because, for the first time in years, they could see my whole face, and over the duration of the pandemic my expressions had seemingly become less guarded and perhaps more natural, thanks to the mask. Sadly, that tendency seems to have ended. Now, when strangers smile at me, it’s usually older women, and mostly when I have a bouquet of flowers in my hands.

So now I have to learn to smile all over again. I’ll let you know how that goes.

The rain has intensified outside, and I’ve taken a table that lets me see the people outside as well as here in the café. I have my list of favourite rain songs playing through my earphones.

One of the things my cultural anthropology has taught me is that most people, in their relationships of every kind — with family, friends, co-workers — are looking for attention, appreciation, and reassurance. I have my theories about why this is so, mostly arrived at from reading Gabor Maté on the importance of secure attachment and authenticity in early childhood. But at any rate it seems males tend to want more attention, while women tend to want more appreciation. Makes perfect sense, and not just for human animals.

And that is what is playing out in the café. There’s a man talking to a woman at one table, and he’s adamant about something while she seems disinterested or distracted. His answer, it seems, is to talk louder. I laugh into my latte.

I’ve written before about conversations where the man is talking, incessantly, mistaking the constant nods from the woman he is talking to (or more accurately talking at) for agreement and encouragement to continue talking, when her nods merely mean “yes I hear you and understand what you’re saying”, rather than agreement or encouragement, and she’s not responding only because she’s waiting for the insensate clod to STFU so she can get a word in. This was playing out yesterday at the corner table, where the woman was shrinking into the large comfy chair she was sitting in, as if wishing it could envelop her and whisk her away.


cartoon by the world’s most observant male, Will McPhail

At another table, two men, both working on their second large mugs of coffee, are engaged in what looks like an epic battle for airtime and oxygen. They keep interrupting each other, and it’s not to finish each other’s sentences. Their hand movements punctuate the conversation like visual carets, looking for a space in the conversation to add something before it’s lost, or em-dashes, separating thoughts without having to stop for a period and allowing the other guy to take control of the conversation again. It’s about getting rather than paying attention, not about comprehension, and the reassurance they’re both getting is from the sound of their own voices, not the confirmation of the other.

I gather all this despite the fact they are not speaking English. I may be reading it wrong. But I doubt it. Our cultures aren’t that different.

The next day, I watch two older women talking, one of whom has one of the hideously coloured but impossibly spacious ‘knitting baskets’ by her feet. Their nods are slower; they’re appreciating and reassuring, not just trying to keep up. There are actual pauses in the conversation during which they both just reflect and drink their coffees. Impossibly long pauses. But then I note that their hands and eyes and bodies are still talking with each other — an upturned palm, a shrug, a smile, a raised eyebrow, that ‘hmm’ expression where you scrunch your lips over to one side —”Not sure what to say”. It looks as if they are warming each other, without even having to say a word.

I have so much to learn about the art of conversation.

As they leave, one of the women slides a stack of papers and books, along with her tablet and stand, into her knitting basket (I am sure it has room in it for the entire Canadian Archives), while the other, impressively, wipes and busses the table and slides their chairs back under it. She’s worked in the biz, for sure.

A few minutes later a young man arrives, looking very wet (hooded puffer, no umbrella), and as if he’s looking for someone, or has lost something. He sits at the vacated table looking nervous. He looks at his watch, and his phone.

A few minutes later a well-dressed young woman arrives, looking immaculate (umbrella, not a hair out of place), and looks uncertainly over at the recently-arrived guy, who now has slumped down in his chair, his legs stretched out, arms crossed. She goes over to his table and they talk. Blind date? Nope, they clearly know each other a bit by the way she lowers her shoulders to hug him. He doesn’t sit up straight until after she’s done so. Reunion after a disagreement or long separation? I don’t think so. There’s a certain formality to their body language. Second date, perhaps.


Yep, Will McPhail again. The guy’s just brilliant. 

They’re fun to watch. Improv has nothing on these two. He’s sitting up straight now, and apparently trying to be charming. She’s doing her best not to let on that he isn’t. They are studying each other with their eyes, but in completely different ways. He’s looking at her body, but trying to not look too obvious. (“I’m appreciating you — what do you want?”). She is seemingly trying to figure out what he wants from her. I would have added ”…other than that…”, but the world is changing — some women today, it seems, aren’t averse to a purely physical relationship, if they can only find that one guy in a thousand who can actually pull that off, those rare few that don’t come laden with baggage and performance anxiety.

The performance playing out is, it seems to me, as transactional as if they were bargaining over an appropriate price for fruit hidden in an opaque container.

They’re both reasonably good-looking, but she knows it while his body language suggests he probably doesn’t — it’s awkward. She’s leaning forward, but not in the classic deference-attentiveness pose. She’s studying him. I imagine her trying to decide if he’s worth the investment. He’s leaning backwards, and it’s hard to say whether he’s trying to look nonchalant, or if he’s intimidated.

The conversation is mostly small-talk, but this woman is smart — she has a copy of Melissa Febos’ gut-wrenching, eye-opening memoir Girlhood on the table beside her coffee mug. I recognize it by the bright, fragmented cover, with the title sliding down into oblivion. She took this book out deliberately. Is it a statement? I wonder. Is she trying to get him to comment on it, or ask her about it?

The lilt of the conversation shifts to a familiar cadence that makes me sigh. She is asking him questions. Questions about him. He is answering, at length, and then, it seems, waiting for the next question. He does not seem to be asking her any questions about herself, or about anything for that matter. He does most of the talking. He has her attention, which, I am guessing, is what he wants. If she is getting his appreciation, other than for her appearance, non-verbally, it doesn’t show. Does it matter to her? Has she given up expecting it?

They are acting out their conditioning, and this is what the script called for. It may have been their second date. And then, I realize, to my dismay, that they may have been married for years. Same script.

Perhaps there is no such thing as improv.

A few minutes later, he looks at his watch, and they get up to leave. I’m not going to get to see the next scene in this drama. She slides Melissa’s tour de force into her bag. He does not appear to have noticed it. He takes her hand. She doesn’t resist. With only one hand free, she does not try to open her umbrella as she leaves the café.

They do not bus their table, which is wet, mostly on his side.

…..

The rain has slowed, and my matcha is done. I clean up a bit, slide my chair under its table, say goodnight to the barista, and head out, looking up at the sky. Eyes suddenly drenched, I open my umbrella. When I get home, I locate my copy of Girlhood, and it doesn’t take me long to find the passage I’m looking for:

The self becomes a collaboration with other people, a series of fantasies that lead to “the armour of an alienating identity.” Have you seen a suit of armour? There are so many pieces. Here is where a strange man named me. Here is where the girls stared. Here is the school report card. The plates clink and move together like one. The self underneath is invisible to others.

We are completely alone inside ourselves.

That night I dream of happy people, people without baggage, drenched cats, little girls and joyful puppies running through puddles. And meeting a bookstore clerk whose favourite books speak the same, dark, endlessly amazed language as mine. In the dream, she sees the books I am buying, and the fact I am carrying an umbrella, and she smiles, wordlessly, and, finally, I am free to smile back.

Posted in Month-End Reflections, Our Culture / Ourselves | 9 Comments

Coping With Trauma

… in which Dave reveals some unhappy and mostly politically unacceptable truths about our having no free will, and about aspects of Christian moralistic evangelism that permeate our western ways of thinking about ‘good and evil’, ‘healing’, and trauma.

In my last post, I tried to identify what I see as the dangers of labels that equate our behaviours (what we do) with our identity (who we are).

In this article, I’m going to try to address a (very popular, and well-intentioned) human process that I think is at best useless, and at worst damaging, that often starts with labeling. And I will try to explain why I believe this process has arisen and why I cannot suggest a more fruitful process to replace it. This useless process might be called the Submission-Repentance-Atonement process. It often has the following components:

  1. The accuser describes a misbehaviour that has caused them suffering and their belief about why they think the accused did it (often including labeling), and the suffering it caused. The accused must just listen, and is exhorted not to deny or be defensive about the accusation.
  2. The accused is now required to accept and acknowledge their guilt and responsibility for the crime and the suffering it caused (often including accepting the label that has been slapped on them). And to demonstrate remorse, shame, apology, repentance and contrition for their action.
  3. The accuser and accused then agree upon punishments, compensatory atonement actions, ‘self-improvement’ programs, and in some cases actions that will hopefully prevent recurrence of the ‘crime’.

This S-R-A process has its roots, I think, in western evangelical religions, and has been exercised in everything from witch trials and prison ‘redemption’ programs to the modern cults of ‘reprogramming’ and CBT. Many ’12-step’ programs follow the same process but substitute a self-labeling and an appeal to a ‘higher power’ for help, for the first of the above three stages. It is no accident, I think, that many of the terms used in this process are biblical. All that’s missing is the Latin mea culpas and self-flagellation.

Acknowledge your sins, prostrate yourself, surrender, accept the label as who you are, and let your guilt and shame crack you open because (to use the nauseating Leonard Cohen cliché) “that’s how the light gets in”. Praise the Lord, let the healing begin!

Underlying all of this is the assumption that you have (or can have) complete free will and control over your behaviour (with the help of the ‘higher power’). If you believe, as I do, that our behaviour is entirely conditioned by our biology and our culture, given the circumstances of the moment, this entire process immediately looks preposterous — just magical thinking.

When someone harms another person out of hatred or fear of what they ‘represent’ (labels again), then what is happening, IMO, is an acting out of trauma. That’s not to excuse that behaviour; it’s just an explanation.

The hatred and fear that has been conditioned in the perpetrator/’criminal’ throughout their life is, I would think, almost always unconscious — it can’t be simply blamed on one traumatic incident. The hatred and fear is a symptom of the conditioning and the trauma. You can sometimes ‘treat’ a symptom, but you can’t ‘heal’ a symptom. And treating the symptom doesn’t heal you from the ‘disease’.

This all comes back, I think, to the whole evangelical/moral issue of ‘good vs evil’, which I just don’t believe in. It’s not as simple as taking a self-improvement course and realizing that your past behaviours or beliefs were ‘bad’ and vowing to do ‘better’ in future. Many of the arguments for ‘reparations’ and for ‘truth and reconciliation’* approaches are fraught with this (IMO faulty) western evangelical moralistic thinking. That’s not to say these approaches are without merit, just that the way they are (usually) couched as issues of morality (or “social justice” to use the currently fashionable term) is, I think, seriously flawed.

And I’m not saying that we can or should use trauma as an ‘excuse’ for past atrocities. It’s an explanation for them, not an excuse. Recognizing it as that doesn’t diminish the trauma that that conditioned behaviour led to. It just acknowledges that admitting you were ‘wrong’ and vowing to do ‘better’ is an inherently moralistic process (one that presumes you have free will and control over your behaviour, for a start).

While an S-R-A process might (if all parties share the same cultural and moral beliefs) make the ‘victims’ of those atrocities feel (temporarily) better, it fundamentally shoves the whole issue of identifying the underlying cause under the rug, rather than dealing with it or even acknowledging it. And the underlying cause, no matter what the moralizers might say, is almost never “I was/we were bad/wrong/evil/insane”. So IMO the entire S-R-A process, by failing to acknowledge and address the lifelong conditioning and underlying trauma behind the ‘crime’, can never offer more than a short-term placebo ‘healing’, either to the ‘perpetrators’ or the ‘victims’.

And in other cases, rather than offering some temporary placebo effect, the retelling of the story and circumstances that led to the suffering and trauma might actually re-trigger the trauma, making everything worse — the opposite of ‘healing’.

I think this is true both in the case of personal ‘crimes’ and in the case of collective acting out of lifelong conditioning and trauma — such as redlining, vigilante actions, wars and other larger-scale atrocities.

So, for example, I would argue that while Israel’s government and military is committing genocide in Palestine, it is not doing so ‘because’ Israelis are morally “bad”. It is committing genocide because its government and people have been conditioned for generations to hate and fear (insert many labels of ‘Others’ here), and have had instilled in them, over centuries, horrific levels of trauma that they are now acting out. That’s not to condone or condemn this genocide, which would suggest the perpetrators have a real choice over their behaviour, which they do not. It’s not an apology. It’s an explanation.

And, I believe, we have all suffered trauma, and are living with trauma, though some much more so than others.

So if S-R-A approaches to dealing with ‘crimes’, both personal and collective, don’t work, what might we do instead to actually ‘heal’ from the suffering and trauma that they both stem from and lead to?

You won’t like my answer.

I’m not really convinced that trauma is something that we can ‘consciously’ (ie using any deliberate process) ‘heal’ from — it either gets better with time as we move on and forget, or it doesn’t. And my sense is that, in humans at least, it usually doesn’t. Hence the hatreds and fears that have endured for centuries.

There may well be value in listening to stories of oppression, suffering, and trauma (even/especially if we may have personally contributed to them), but not for purposes of ‘resolution’ or ‘healing’. The value of such listening is to explore how, if it is possible at all, the circumstances that gave rise to that harm might be prevented from recurring. In other words, what can be done to reduce the likelihood of future suffering and trauma occurring as a result of our collective conditioned behaviours?

And my unhappy answer to that question, in most cases, is — nothing.

To some extent, being aware of the causal relationship between our conditioning, suffering, and trauma might be helpful in preventing recurrence — ask anyone who’s finally escaped the clutches of a serial abuser. But whether ‘being aware’ of the loop of trauma can actually help you ‘heal’ is another matter entirely. The awareness of our lack of free will over our conditioned behaviour, and how it plays out no matter how we think it ‘should’ and no matter what we think we ‘should’ do, might actually make us feel more hopeless.

I know that’s an unpopular position for a supposed progressive to take, but that’s where I’m at.


* Here’s an interesting quote from a study of the failures of the Truth & Reconciliation commission (TRC) approach in Sierra Leone:

Sierra Leone’s TRC, like South Africa’s, valorized a particular kind of memory practice: “truth telling,” the public recounting of memories of violence. This valorization, however, is based on problematic assumptions about the purportedly universal benefits of verbally remembering violence. Ideas concerning the conciliatory and therapeutic efficacy of truth telling are the product of a Western culture of memory deriving from North American and European historical processes. Nations, however, do not have psyches that can be healed. Nor can it be assumed that truth telling is healing on a personal level: truth commissions do not constitute therapy. [Instead, historically in Sierra Leone culture,] social forgetting is a cornerstone of established processes of reintegration and healing.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

On the Dangers of Labels


image by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

Fascist. Terrorist. Racist. Any other —ist. Addict. TERF. Anti-Semite. These are labels — nouns — we apply to others, that essentially equate their (often merely alleged or assumed) beliefs, situations, and behaviours with their identities. In some cases we slap on these labels based simply on what we have judged someone ‘must’ believe by virtue of their seeming disagreement with us (eg “You must love Putin then, you —ist!”).

So for example, if you embrace the idea that women should be able to hold and attend events that are closed to people with penises or beards, ergo you are a TERF. You ‘have to’ hate Trans people. Or if you are a white person who has faced relatively little struggle in your personal life, ergo you are a racist. You ‘must’ hate BIPOCs, at least subliminally. You’re just not ‘aware’ of it.

Or if you believe that oppression must be resisted, even with violence if that is necessary, and you express that sentiment by demonstrating and waving a revolutionary flag, ergo you are a terrorist. You ‘must’ hate “our freedoms”, and “hate democracy”.

You are a [insert morally judgemental label here] and therefore we are morally justified in attacking you, punishing you, imprisoning you, even killing you.

And you wear this label for life, regardless of what you said or did or did not say or do, or any possible or nuanced reason why you might have said or done it. We, the accusers, are cop, judge, jury and executioner all in one. And, of course, it is assumed that you did this “of your own free will”, and are hence morally responsible for your beliefs, circumstances, statements and actions. You will be cancelled, you f*ing —ist!”

One of the main problems with such labeling is that if you reject the label, you can be accused of being (guiltily) defensive or in denial. The label thus becomes an ad hominem attack that offers little or no opportunity for rebuttal — hence its appeal to sociopaths and vested interest groups. Prove to me you are not what I say you are. That you are not this label I have attached to you. Which is of course, impossible.

We are living today, IMO, at least in the west, in a society with an obsessive fetish with identity. Perhaps this stems from our general sense of impotence, helplessness, hopelessness — Since there’s essentially nothing we can actually do to improve our situation, we focus instead on who we are, how we self-identify. And on who you (ie you this ‘Other’ we don’t particularly know or like) are, based on the convenient and irrefutable labels at hand. And then we will smugly assert that, by writing critical things about you and Others, and labelling you, blaming you, we are actually doing something.

We do this to ourselves, as well, this equating of our beliefs, situation, behaviours and activities, with who we are. A failure. Victim. Addict (again). “Hi, I’m Jo and I am an addict.” “That’s OK, Jo, with God’s guidance and mercy and your complete surrender to His  and Our will we will rebuild you in 12 steps into a real human again. We’re glad to hear you acknowledge that you are the problem.”

Identity politics, it seems to me, is principally about labeling and self-labeling, mostly divorced from the reality of what we and others actually do or don’t do. It’s an absurd oversimplification to ‘identify’ yourself as anything, but that seems to be where we’ve gotten to. Yet we are not our beliefs, situations, preferences, behaviours and activities (almost all of which are conditioned in us and/or completely outside our control in any case).

This nonsense has now become institutionalized due to the seemingly relentless pressure by identity fanatics to force us all into self-identifying boxes. So now we get government surveys asking us “Do you identify as…” [list of ethnicities; list of genders; list of sexual preferences]. There is no opting out, no “I do not identify as any of these” at the end of the list. WTF? You must identify yourself.  What’s next in muddling demographic information with personal preferences? “Do you identify as… 15-19 years of age, 20-24 years of age…”?

And god (and his 12-step program) help you if you decline to list your ‘preferred pronouns’ — How in the world will others be able to ‘identify’ you when they speak to you, or about you? (Maybe by your name?) My latest answer when asked for my ‘preferred pronouns’ was to answer “tā” — that’s the Mandarin word that stands for he/him/she/her/and it. No other words needed. No preferences. No complications. No offence. And, if you’re British, it can also stand for “thank you”.

If you’re in public life (Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, JK Rowling), getting the ‘wrong’ label slapped on you can end your career, or bring you death threats. If you’re a journalist not toeing the party line, or a protester in the streets, the ‘wrong’ label can get you killed. Even if you’re just an average Jo, the ‘wrong’ label by the wrong person can cost you your job, your freedom, your family, your friends, or your life’s savings. There are many ways of ‘canceling’ you.

It can also, I think, cost you your sanity, whether you’re the labeler or the ‘labelee’, and whether it’s a public incident or a private disagreement. When you get fixated on someone based on how you’ve labeled them, or on how they’ve labeled you, rather than focusing on the very specific (and probably complex and misunderstood) action and circumstances that led to the labeling, it can drive you mad. The labeler accuses the ‘labelee’. The ‘labelee’ disputes or denies the label, and is infuriated, and — guess what? — labels back. Down the rabbit hole.

And, always bubbling under the surface, there is the trauma that drives our propensity to label in the first place — what we fear, or hate. We think that labeling it will help get it straight, clear, out in the open, or keep it under control, but it almost always makes things worse.

There is of course no cure for our labeling mania, which is not a new phenomenon, though our dumbed-down discourse and facile ‘social’ (actually antisocial) media seem to be feeding it. And there’s no cure for identity politics in general. They are symptoms of our fearful, angry times.

I’ve gone back over a bunch of my blog posts and, yes, there are a lot of labels in there. And in almost no case did those labels add anything useful, or solve anything, or even make me feel better. They just reflected my own fear, or hatred, or sense of helplessness, or trauma, or perhaps my ignorance. And perhaps they vindicated or articulated others’ fear and hatred, stirred up their sense of righteous indignation when they read them. Toxic fuels, our labels.

I rest my case.


(As implied above, I think our propensity to use labels to identify people stems from our conditioning, and very often from our trauma — things that I believe we have no control over. And I’ve also implied in my previous writing my growing sense that trauma, tragically, cannot really be ‘healed’. The implications of that for a civilization in the accelerating stage of collapse are pretty dark. I’ve started writing a follow-up to this article about all that, but it may be too dismal and hopeless to share.)

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 10 Comments

Links of the Month: January 2024


cartoon by the extraordinary Will McPhail

I love Will McPhail’s work. The mole in this cartoon could represent any of the ‘sides’ or actors in any of the current wars. Of course there are atrocities, and it’s tempting to take sides, or to write off both ‘sides’ as bad actors. But there is always IMO a reason for behaviours, even atrocities, and they are almost never because the perpetrator is ‘pure evil’ or ‘insane’. We are playing out our collective trauma, accumulated, intensified, and kept alive by propaganda, by proxy wars and genocides. We need not condone or condemn it. An atrocity is an atrocity. Trying to understand the horrific trauma and the resultant conditioning that underlies it is, I believe, important. Not to excuse it. Not to pass judgement on it. Just to understand it.

Because, as this trauma plays out, distracting us from the existential crises facing our collapsing systems and our global civilization, and increasing the destruction and damage that has largely precipitated that collapse, the pace of collapse is rapidly increasing, and the risk of a ‘nuclear’ acceleration of that collapse looms ever larger. And the people with the most power to at least decelerate this collapse, are, as a consequence of their own trauma and conditioning, not even trying to understand.

One day we will see all this, and wish we could have done otherwise.

(Thanks as usual to John Whiting for many of the links below.)


COLLAPSE WATCH


so much for limiting global warming to 1.5º…


… and the warming of our oceans is even worse. These charts are both from NOAA as noted.

But it looks good on paper: Tim Morgan explains, again, why ‘renewable’ energy can’t help us, and how ‘financialization’ distorting economic indicators is masking the economic collapse we’re now facing.

Hey I thought hydro power was ‘renewable’: Turns out the ongoing BC drought is reducing the ‘yield’ of hydro dams (perhaps permanently), requiring the import of expensive fossil fuels to make up the difference.

And 2B climate refugees to follow: NPR recaps the pressure cooker at the US’ southern border, and in the streets as more and more immigrants swell the homeless numbers, and as Biden expands border wall construction. This can’t end well. And Canada’s population is soaring, entirely as a result of immigration; conservatives here want it stopped. We don’t deal with the underlying predicaments; we just keep on trying to treat the symptoms.

And the governments and ‘experts’ remain clueless and incompetent: “Something must be done, now”, we keep hearing, as more and more charts like the ones above keep appearing. But it’s starting to dawn on more and more people that nothing is being, or will be, done.


LIVING BETTER


I was quite astonished by this chart from Statista, that shows US users’ time spent/day on various ‘social media’ sites. It seems pretty clear that (1) most people now go online for entertainment, not (mis-)information, (2) more and more people are finding X and FB to be annoyances (“I have to go on FB every day to wish people happy birthday or they’ll feel I’m snubbing them”), and (3) if you exclude ‘idle time’ usage spent while riding in cars, on public transit and in restaurants from the numbers above, Farcebook and X, which do absolutely nothing well, would seem to be pretty much finished. Yay!

More democracy than you might think: In an article from 2020, the Davids of The Dawn of Everything fame argue that the ‘west’ (ie Europeans) didn’t invent democracy, and that it has been around and worked just fine in many cultures throughout the world since there have been cultures.

How to reduce opioid poisonings: How about prescribing more clean opioids?

Tā, thank you very much: A six-second solution to the nonsense about ‘preferred pronouns’.

Hank Green is not optimistic: But he is understanding, and forgiving, and believes we all are, and that we are doing OK under the circumstances.

Barbara Lee is still anti-war: The California congresswoman, opposed to all of the US’ 21st-century wars, continues the good fight. (Paywalled.) Thanks to Gerry Gras for the link.

…and in the good news: Jezebel is back.


POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


Mohammed El-Kurd created this Bullshit Bingo card for the Israeli government’s defence of its genocide of Palestinians at The Hague, and marked the terms he heard in just 20 minutes of their ‘testimony’; from his post on X.

Bringing it all back home: So, let’s bring in enough immigrants that we seem compassionate. But no, we can’t afford to spend money helping them find work and housing here. So they end up abandoned and ignored in hopeless, crime-ridden ghettos. And we wonder why no one’s happy.

About the Resistance movement in the Middle East: A series of hard-to-read (and a bit strident) but important in-depth articles by Indrajit Samarajiva about how the genocide in Palestine is galvanizing resistance across the Middle East:

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes:

Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

  • FAIR defends embattled university leaders from, and castigates the NYT and other mainstream media for false charges of antisemitism (thanks to Gerry Gras for the link)

Exemplary Tales of Incompetence: Short takes:


FUN AND INSPIRATION


a redwing blackbird protects its territory from a barn owl; photo taken in Florida by Neo Morpheus for the Macaulay Library

Gravity is not a force. Huh?: Sabine explains what tht means. Fascinating, counter-intuitive, and slightly mind-blowing.

Words to avoid in 2024: Lake Superior state U. releases its annual cringe-worthy list of new words we wish we’d never heard. Wait for it. Sadly, most of the 2023 and earlier years’ lists ‘banned’ words are still (over-)used.

All By Myself no more: Critics analyze Rachmaninoff’s little-known fourth piano concerto and argue it’s his best.

Writing music like John Williams: Nahre Sol explores the reasons why the film score writer is so popular.

Got it on the first take: Japan’s First Take is a brilliant series of (hundreds of) unembellished in-studio performances by (mostly) Japanese pop artists. You can really get a sense of the vocal nuance and harmonies in the music from these. Examples: XG’s Shooting Star and Winter Without You.

Remix!: American indie musician Iniko put together a little a cappella rap called Jericho, and then shopped it to musicians of various genres to remix it, with some amazing results. The song is very controversial (there’s a subreddit just for haters), but I’m guessing much of that is because of its swagger (it would have attracted less attention if it came from a male rapper). My favourite remix is a Haitian kompa version with DJ Inno and DJ Chad.

For fans of Radical Non-Duality: A particularly good interview with Kenneth Madden.

That just won’t fly: I wasn’t aware that Indrajit Samarajiva (see links to his other work in earlier section above) is something of an engineering expert, and has written extensively about the design failures of the 737 MAX and what they have wrought. It’s a good case study, he says, in how and why the US got to the point they can no longer manufacture anything competently. Competence — the capacity to produce a high quality, safe product — is apparently not profitable anymore.

Silicon Valley goes woo, again: It would seem that the tech gurus (like some collapnsniks) have abandoned the religion of rationalism and are embracing the kind of wonky ‘spirituality’ that gave rise to dangerous woo-woo cults like EST and Landmark Forum a generation ago. Just what we need, some more “magical thinking”. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

The germiest place in your gym: Nope, it’s not the treadmill or the dumbbell, it’s the yoga mat — and the shower.


THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


photo by Cory Doctorow from Flickr; taken in Hungary; CC BY-SA 2.0

From PS Pirro, from Solstice II:

I worked on letting go of my grievances.
From the Latin, gravare, grave, to make heavy.
Sharing a root with grief,
which is everywhere, in multitudes.

Grievance is a burden.
A grudge against the world,
against what is, after all, just what is.
Lay your burden down,
say all the great spiritual teachers.
Right there would be good. By the curb,
where the trash truck can take it away on Wednesday.

Lots of Wednesdays in a year.
Lots of opportunity to let that shit go.

Last month, over Thanksgiving weekend,
I shuffled the Tarot deck, drew the Three of Cups.
An invitation: celebrate with friends and family.
So I took myself on a walk in the woods.

Today it rained,
and the squirrels chased one another across the roof.

Hello friends. It’s been a while.

From John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

From actor Katja Herbers, lamenting all the attention the pop superstar and her new NFL football star beau are attracting:  “I wish Taylor Swift was in love with a climate scientist.”

From Jonathan Franzen‘s 2011 commencement speech:

Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.

BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.

And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.

Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.

And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.

How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.

Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.

And who knows what might happen to you then?


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

No Wonder

There is no thriving
during a time of collapse

but there is lots of joy.

You can find it
in the faces of babies,
the wagging tails of dogs on walks
and the flocks of crows
noisily massing for their nightly migrations.

It’s all about what you perceive,
and what you conceive,
and what you don’t.

This cannot be explained, or learned,
or unlearned, or known.

It is just ‘seen’.

Or it isn’t.


top image: my own photo; bottom image by Midjourney AI, my own prompt; thanks to Siya for the inspiration

Posted in Creative Works | 1 Comment

A Succession of Failures


Trump as Canute, ordering back the waves; my own prompt*

Aurélien has written a series of articles recently on the subject of competence, or, more specifically, its absence in our globalized civilization culture. As many of our political, economic, social, educational, health and other systems teeter, and in an increasing number of cases (and places) collapse, competence naturally becomes harder to come by. It’s hard to keep your wits about you when everything around you is falling apart.

These systems have grown in size and complexity to the point that they can no longer provide what they were designed to provide. And as Jared Diamond, Ronald Wright and others have explained, all civilizations inevitably collapse when they reach this stage. There is no bringing collapsing systems back from the brink, no matter what Hollywood might tell you.

This drop in learning, skill, and experience in positions of authority is coming, Aurélien suggests, at exactly the time we need competence more than ever.

One need only look at what passes for leaders in pivotal positions of power these days to see how bad it’s become. The pathetic quadrumvirate of current leaders of the US Empire show this particularly starkly:

  • We have Blinken, the military leader: “The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.”
  • We have Yellen, the financial leader: “Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss.”
  • We have Nuland, the ‘foreign policy’ leader, organizing reckless, murderous coups all over the world and calling for all-out armageddon-level wars against Russia and China. And saying: “Fuck the EU.”
  • And we have Warmonger-in-Chief Biden: “American leadership is what holds the world together”. Uh huh.

It would be hard to imagine a less competent group of people to have in power. You could pick four people off the streets and put them in power and they would almost certainly be less-awful fuck-ups than this gang of clowns.

I’m not sure Aurélien ‘blames’ anyone or anything for this dearth of competence. There are times when he seems to acknowledge that we’re all doing our best (which is what I, really, honestly, believe, sad to say), and other times when he seems ready to blame the education system, or a powerful-but-unorganized group he calls the Professional-Managerial Caste (PMC), or just character flaws among those in power.

But whether or not anyone is responsible, he says the result is the tendency of those in power, realizing that, perhaps due to widespread incompetence or system sclerosis or system collapse or some combination thereof, they cannot really accomplish anything, to substitute talk for action.

He calls this “performative behaviour”. So, for example, since Bernie Sanders knows he will never be allowed by the Democratic Party establishment to do any of the things he knows needs to be done (like instituting universal free health care, or opposing the Israeli-American genocide in Palestine), he has to settle for expressing his strong opinions on these subjects “in no uncertain terms”.

The Democratic Party establishment is delighted for him to do so. His speeches keep some hopeful leftists in the Democratic tent a little longer, while actually accomplishing nothing whatsoever, least of all affecting government policies and actions.

Devoid of the capacity and competence to actually get anything done (and hence to promise to do something, lest you be called on it later), our ‘leaders’ are content instead to issue what Aurélien calls “statements of what they Are [or Think, or Believe], not what they are [actually] doing or intend to Do”. Or even worse, statements that merely say what or who they are opposed to.

I guess when you never actually do anything, it’s hard to be accused of doing anything wrong. You just stand up there with the flag behind you, and an appropriately culturally diverse group of people smiling at your side, and tell the world what you Believe. (And then have the press corps scribes ready to repeat your statement as truth and ‘action’, in all the major media and through your bots in the social media.)

Whole parties and movements are now merely based on proclamations of what the group believes or how it identifies itself, or what it thinks “needs to be done”, or “must be done”, or “must be opposed” or “must be stopped”. Who is supposed to do it or stop it, and how, is usually left conveniently unstated. Or there’s always the fall-back to the not-so-royal “we”, as in “We all must now…” No actual action is required, other than group gatherings to make the rhetorical proclamations, loudly and righteously, over and over.

As I have said repeatedly: This is what collapse looks like. One can imagine the last leaders of the Roman Empire urging the masses with speeches from the rooftops and ramparts to “Make Rome Great Again!”

In short, what we have seen over the past century, as all of civilization’s systems have become more and more complex and unmanageable, is an unrelenting, uninterrupted, 100-year-long succession of failures in all our systems and institutions. The utter failure of all of the many recent wars engineered by the US Empire to accomplish anything is the obvious example.

The staggering incompetence of our handling of the CoVid-19 pandemic, which we knew was coming, and which nevertheless our broken systems enabled millions of people to die horrible, unnecessary deaths, is just kind of the icing on the incompetence cake. Whether or not the public health systems were already so broken that those millions would have died even if the system leaders were competent, is pretty much a moot point.

There is IMO no one to ‘blame’ for this, and I sense that our absurd and incompetent leaders are now mostly just pretending (even to themselves) that these collapsing systems — overburdened by unsustainable debts, desolated ecosystems, exhausted resources, and insane overpopulation of the species, among other things — can somehow respond to their bidding when they are irreparably broken. Our ‘leaders’ (especially Trump, the epitome of incompetence) are like King Canute, ordering back the waves*.

So now the citizens have largely given up belief that our systems and institutions are incapable of doing anything competently, leading to a nostalgic and deluded view among conservatives that things were better in the rugged individualist old days when it was every man for himself (pioneers), when adults were competent at doing everything needed to survive and thrive (hard-working men in patriarchal families), when good guys fought evil (cowboys, vigilantes), when the responsibility was on you yourself to succeed (rags-to-riches stories), and to heal yourself (religions, self-help), when you learned what you needed from your parents or on the streets, when geniuses single-handedly invented miraculous world-changing technologies (Franklin, Ford). And the same nostalgia prevails among leftists about the dashed promises of progress, innovation, the American Dream, socialism, anarchism, working-class revolution, left-libertarian communitarianism, etc.

So we see many new right-wing governments trying to turn back the clock to fictitious past days of glory, order and self-discipline. And the left, unable to sell nostalgia to their slightly-smarter supporters, and devoid of any new answers, is in broad and chaotic, self-blame-y retreat.

This substituting belief and speech for action may be partly due to laziness, or fear of consequences, but mostly I think it’s the awareness that when systems are falling apart, they become dysfunctional and sclerotic to the point it actually becomes impossible to do anything other than what the system in place is already doing. (You know, like launching endless wars, and tinkering with interest rates.) When no one can actually change or fix the system, politicians mostly differentiate themselves on the basis of what they might ideally like to do in accordance with their beliefs, but cannot. Though of course they won’t admit their incapacity, or their incompetence, to their supporters. Hope, anyone?

So now, the game is just playing itself out, with the systems, designed to resist change, so entrenched and inflexible and broken that even with near-universal agreement we cannot do something as simple as reversing the error of Daylight Saving Time.

It’s all coming down, and nothing — not appeal to the Rapture, not nostalgia for the good old days when things were simpler and better, not new technology or better morals or magical humanist thinking — is going to stop it. All we can do is chronicle it and do what we can do to cope as it all falls apart, slowly and then all at once.


* Yes, I’m aware that most scholars believe Canute was actually merely pointing out to his followers the limitations of human, even royal, power, compared to that of nature (God). 

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

The Humanity-as-Cancer Metaphor


source: note that OWID has been accused of misrepresenting some data to support the optimistic “the world is getting better and better” ideologies of their colleagues such as Bill Gates and Steven Pinker

Since I started this blog I’ve often referred to the growth and destructiveness of the human species as analogous to a cancer killing a human body. I was recently asked whether I thought it was a reasonable metaphor.

Of course every metaphor has its limitations, and can be dangerous when the degree of equivalence or parallel is overstated. Some of the writers and students of history and human nature whom I most admire, like John Gray and Ronald Wright, seem to think humans are inherently, biologically, and by our very nature, rapacious and destructive, and uncaring of the rest of life on earth.

I think it’s useful to look at the metaphor through the lens of the Gaia hypothesis and what it really means to be part of a whole-earth organism that perceives (not conceives) of itself as such. My sense is that all forms of life on earth strive ‘unconsciously’, instinctively, and evolutionarily to protect and sustain Gaia, the collective organism — just as the cells in our body, while appearing to be self-serving, are actually in service to the whole body organism.

My take is that it makes no sense evolutionarily for a species like ours to have emerged with qualities that mitigate against the health, balance and stability of the entire earth-organism, and Gaia, after all, has had billions of years to get the experiment of evolution functioning properly and sustainably. If we are indeed analogous to cancer cells, then that suggests to me that there must have been a miscoding somewhere along the way, an evolutionary misstep. I have argued that it might have been the unique entanglement of the human brain’s ‘left’ and ‘right’ processing functions which made us, a few hundred thousand years ago or so, in a word, crazy. Confused, disconnected and misdirected in our behaviour, just like cancer cells.

My sense is that other creatures have not evolved a sense of self and separation, for the simple reason that they don’t need one to thrive, and never have. They therefore do not conceive of any particular danger to ‘themselves’ as ‘individuals’ that must be addressed and overcome. (That’s not to say they don’t have survival instincts, but I’d argue those instincts are not about ‘them’.)

Non-human creatures are, I think, just part of the whole-earth organism, and they would no sooner think that a jaguar eating them was ‘wrong’, than a worn-out cell in the body would think that the autophagy-inducing proteins (ATGs) that recycle such cells and reuse the still-useful parts elsewhere in the body organism, were ‘wrong’ and needed to be fought and defeated.

So if we have in fact become an apparently rapacious and destructive species, I think it’s a combination of that screwed-up wiring of our brains, and the (consequent) endless stresses of modern civilized life, that have made us deranged. Tragic, but not evil.

Looking at the chart above or at the most recent ecological, climate and economic data, it’s hard to be optimistic about whether our species, like a fast-spreading cancer, will indeed ‘kill’ the host body (Gaia) — ie render it unfit for life. Given the diagnoses from credible scientists like Jim Hansen, the prognosis does indeed seem grim. That would seem to make the cancer metaphor even more pertinent, and even prophetic.

I do believe civilization’s near-term collapse is inevitable, and that human population will soon (end of this century at the latest) return to levels close to what prevailed a century ago, and thence to levels a millennium or so from now comparable to our population two millennia ago — and possibly even to our species’ extinction after a few more millennia. Still, I would be surprised if Gaia is unable to find a way to perpetuate life of some kind on this planet. In the 4.5 billion years since life first emerged, there have been many near-extinctions and very close calls, but life has prevailed.

How does that fit with the metaphor? Well, consider the case of spontaneous remission from cancer. Cancer usually results from errors in cell replication creating cells that fail to follow the instructions that ensure they will contribute positively to, and in balance with, the rest of the body’s cells, organs and tissues. The body has immune and other mechanisms whose function is to ‘correct’ those errors in various ways, resulting in the destruction of the cancerous cells and the prevention of new ones from forming.

So, following our metaphor, the ‘spontaneous remission’ of Gaia would not, metaphorically, be the sudden awareness of humans as to our devastating impact on the planet, and radically changing our behaviour and numbers accordingly. Cancers do no ‘cure themselves’.

No, the metaphoric equivalent of spontaneous remission for our planet would be Gaia acting powerfully and urgently to rid the earth-organism of the menace of the cancer destroying it — ie the human species. And, I think it could be argued, that is exactly what she is attempting to do.

It might not be necessary for her to completely eliminate all humans on the planet. A small number in areas where they do not do a lot of damage is manageable. And, especially if she can find a way to eliminate the ones with the entangled brains and leave the more harmless ones without that horrible debilitation, she might even accommodate whole thriving communities of humans that contribute positively to the health of the whole-earth organism, and show that John Gray and Ronald Wright are too harsh in their assessment of humans’ inherent nature.

I think that’s enough on that metaphor.

I could pose another question: In light of all this, who or what actually possesses ‘consciousness’? using a metaphor that would provide a rather unorthodox answer to that question. But I’ll save that for another day.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Interview with Dave on the Reskillience Podcast


I don’t believe we have free will, nor do I believe that our civilization’s accelerating collapse can be prevented or even mitigated. So I no longer provide advice on what people “should do” in the face of collapse. Instead, I just refer to this ‘reminders’ list to try to assess how adaptable I will be as collapse deepens, and hence how useful I am likely to be to the world as that happens. Some people I know have said they found it valuable to compile a similar list for themselves. [Updated Jan.5/24; image by Midjourney AI, my own prompt]

I was recently honoured to be selected to be the first interviewee on a new podcast series called Reskillience, led by Australian permaculturalist Catie Payne. Catie’s an accomplished podcaster (having done a series of over 100 programs on homesteading), and an extraordinarily fine interviewer. This was far and away the easiest interview I’ve ever done.

The series is all about developing useful skills for coping with collapse, and I was chosen based on this article  from last September called How Do We Teach the Critical Skills Needed to Face Collapse?, which was republished by Resilience.

There’s not a lot that regular readers will get from the podcast that you haven’t already heard me say, but if you’re curious to hear what my voice sounds like talking about this for an hour and a quarter (believe me, I’m a better writer than speaker), it was fun to do and you might enjoy it. And by all means check out and subscribe to the rest of Catie’s series; the second program in the series is now up as well.

The interview with me is available on Zencastr here, on Apple Podcasts here, and on Spotify podcasts here.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Civilization’s Cycle of Trauma

Lately I’ve been trying to integrate Gabor Maté’s ideas about attachment and authenticity, with my thinking about what I’ve called Civilization Disease — the mental illness that seems, to a lesser or greater extent, to have afflicted all of us living in our now-global industrial civilization. A disease and mental illness which has led to an absurd and unsustainable population of 8 billion humans who have managed to destroy the planet’s carrying capacity for most if not all life, including human life, and immiserate much of both the human and more-than-human population in the process.

For a while, I have been positing that this mental illness is the inevitable result of the (arguably illusory) sense that humans are separate and apart from everything else and have (arguably illusory) ‘selves’ that believe themselves to have free will and be in control of the body they presume to inhabit. After all, when faced with an endless stream of evidence that we have no free will and are not at all in control of what ‘our’ bodies do, that has to be crazy-making. What are ‘we’ about, if not steering this strange bag of bones, cells and organs to do better than it would do without ‘us’?

I’ve made this argument repeatedly, including forwarding a hypothesis (the Entanglement Hypothesis) for how this erroneous belief arose.

But the question is — Can this be reconciled with the theories (most clearly articulated by Richard Lewontin in The Triple Helix) that chronic stress, poverty and overwork are the root causes of most human strife, violence and disease?

The chart above is an attempt to accommodate both Richard’s ideas, and Gabor’s argument about the importance to our psychological health of secure attachment and the ability to be our authentic selves. It’s pretty self-explanatory: The stresses inherent in civilization culture, combined with the effect of past generations’ trauma on our parents, preclude us from getting what we need to be healthy human beings in early childhood. And then as we grow, and are subjected to the accumulated trauma of teachers, bosses, peers and others, and continue to be deprived of the attention, appreciation, and reassurance we all seek, need and believe we deserve, so we end up inheriting that trauma, and its associated sociopathic illnesses, and passing them on to our own children, students, co-workers and colleagues, repeating the cycle.

And then of course we act out that trauma — often in acts of violence, abuse, anger, hatred, depression, fear, anxiety, and war. Humans’ capacity to condition each other, which is essential for our human societies to thrive because we require other humans living with us in community to do so, then becomes weaponized by our trauma. The result: Civilization Disease.

Here’s a more expansive explanation of how that might play out for many humans:

So they grew up with really busy, frazzled parents. Maybe their father was a war survivor. Maybe their mother suffered abuse in childhood or in her marriage. Neither parent had much time for their children, but they did their best.

So the children didn’t really grow up with a sense of close attachment to either of their parents, a sense that they would be loved and cared for no matter what happened, and no matter what they did. So they had to be careful sometimes, about what they did and said. They couldn’t always say what they really felt, either because their parents weren’t there to hear them (physically or mentally), or because they were afraid it would upset them. It was always safer not to upset them, even if that meant lying, or hiding their feelings. Sometimes they were not even entirely sure what they thought or how they felt themselves.

As they grew up, their relationships with their friends, their teachers, and their co-workers seemed a lot like their relationship with their parents — feeling obliged to agree or to do what they were told even when they thought it was wrong. They bottled it up, deciding it was wise not to show fear, anger, or sadness, unless they were with people who they knew agreed that fear, anger, or sadness was appropriate. And then it really came out, although since fear was considered immature they often masked it with a display of anger or righteous indignation, especially when people they cared about shared these feelings.

They weren’t lonely kids, but they did sometimes feel a bit abandoned. Whoever they were with, they never got quite as much personal attention, appreciation, or reassurance as they would have liked, or that they thought was warranted. So they often felt that they weren’t doing as well as they should, or as well as people expected of them. They often didn’t feel like people actually listened to them. They often felt a little lost, confused, unsure of themselves and what they should do, or even what they wanted to do.

Life wasn’t that hard, but they had to stay on their toes. Health issues, financial problems, issues of personal security, work pressures, and other stressors were always coming up, sometimes almost too much to deal with. Nothing was ever quite enough, or quite good enough, and the dangers of sudden losses or reversals of fortune were always in the back of their minds. Most of the times things were OK, but there were times of struggle, failure and suffering that they wouldn’t wish on anyone.

For some reason perhaps they decided they wanted to be parents, teachers, managers, executives. They swore they’d be better at it than their parents, teachers, and bosses. They wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

But 20 years later they wondered whether they’d actually done any better. When they asked, they were always told they had done a good job, at least under the circumstances. But damn, it was a stressful time, and there were hard, painful times, and they couldn’t always be their best selves. Over their lifetimes, the world had become more competitive, more challenging, more precarious. Never enough time for themselves, for thinking and talking things through properly, or for doing the things they knew they could be doing better. Something was missing they couldn’t quite put their finger on…

This is all just a theory of course, no better or worse than any other theory of human behaviour. It works for me because I see no logic or virtue in assigning blame for ‘misbehaviour’, since it suggests our conditioning could have been any different from what it was, and that the outcome could therefore have been different, when IMO it could not. I’m just looking for a plausible explanation for how our promising civilization ended up taking us to where it has, in the accelerating stages of a collapse with severe implications for all life on the planet. And this theory makes as much sense to me as any other.

So, drawing this whole theory together:

  1. I propose that it was the entanglement of the hemispheres of our brains, an evolutionary accident, uniquely in humans, early in our history, that gave rise to the entirely illusory (but very convincing) sense that human individuals are separate from ‘everything-else’ and are possessed of ‘selves’ that are in control of these individuals’ bodies.
  2. This false sense of self and separation was and is inherently traumatizing — we feel that we are capable of, and responsible for, protecting these bodies from every sort of imaginable danger, and directing them to take appropriate actions, when we intuitively ‘know’ and fear that we cannot protect and do not direct them. This terrifying ‘realization’ (which we call ‘consciousness’) has led us to do remarkable, and remarkably destructive, things to try to protect and direct our selves and our world, including the invention of language, and the creation of civilizations and the tools of war. This sense of separation has also ‘disconnected’ us from being what other living creatures simply are — part of the single inseparable organism of all-life-on-earth, always intuitively seeking to sustain the delicate balance of their entire organism (that is their conditioning).
  3. These well-intentioned human civilizations, being inherently fragile, unsustainable, and disconnected (like a cancer) from the rest of the earth-organism of which we are an inseparable and integral apart, have, by trying to self-perpetuate our ‘separateness’, given rise to human societies that are rife with chronic stress, poverty, precarity, violence, and overwork (the gold box in the chart above).
  4. These dysfunctional human societies have, by depriving us of the essential needs for physical and psychological health, produced the endless cycles of trauma and sociopathy illustrated in the chart above.
  5. And the end-product of all that is Civilization Disease, and the next Great Extinction of life on the planet.

The whole thing began with an accident, an experiment with the structure of the brain that turned out to be a serious maladaptation. And now it’s just running its inevitable course, playing out the only way it could.

‘We’, who presume ourselves to be separate and conscious, are just observers of this playing-out, chroniclers of this strange aberration in one species’, and hence the planet’s, evolution. Helpless, and blameless.

Not the ending we would have wanted. But man, quite a show!


PS: An afterthought:

If this theory is plausible, it has one further, very concerning, implication, and that is for our readiness and resilience in dealing with the accelerating collapse of our civilization. Our ability to cope with collapse will depend to a large extent on our mental health as we face each crisis, on our resilience to be able to take each challenge in stride, and on the level of basic competencies (such as the list of nine I identified in my recent article) that we will have to bring to bear to create new, functional, sustainable post-civ societies.

As long as we’re continuing to deal with the cycle of trauma (which is likely to continue as collapse accelerates), our mental health, resilience and community-building competencies are likely to remain poor. That does not bode well for our survival.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments