how to save the world

photo: CC0, from pixabay

This morning I listened to Dave Snowden and Nora Bateson discussing the nature of change and what does and does not influence it. Most models of change are idealistic, naive and simplistic, and simply don’t anywhere near describe how change actually occurs. Change is, of course, a complex, emergent and evolving phenomenon, and as such it can’t be fully understood or predicted.

Many models of change are predicated on the false belief that people can be motivated to change their beliefs and behaviours if they are provided with better, objective, evidence-based information. There is abundant evidence that that is simply not how people change their beliefs. We believe what we want to believe is true, what our friends and trusted associates believe, and our beliefs are affected far more by emotion and by compelling stories than by arguments and data.

Better models suggest that, while we cannot sustainably coerce or cajole change, we can, as both Daniel Schmachtenberger and Dave Snowden have suggested, catalyze it by improving the quality of people’s interactions with others. Their argument is that it is empathetic interaction, and appreciation of context and feelings underlying the beliefs and actions of others we don’t understand and/or don’t agree with, that is far more likely to shift people’s beliefs and understanding.

A major challenge with that is that when we speak with others, we use different words and assign different meanings to words. Some of us use words and ideas that are essential to the understanding and appreciation of our thoughts, that are simply not in the vocabulary of most others.

In short, our language — the words we use, the meanings we ascribe to them, their emotional content, and the words we don’t have at our disposal or which our language has no words for — largely determines what, and how, we think. This has been heavily debated by linguists for decades, without consensus, and mostly in the absence of compelling evidence for any of their arguments. We’re long overdue for the linguistics equivalent to a David Graeber to come along and undermine all their dogmatic and largely unsupported theories, and advance something completely new that better fits the historical evidence.

Art has been around about three times longer than abstract human languages. So for a million years, before either evolved, we managed, likely much the way most creatures do, to self-organize and thrive without either. Art likely evolved in tandem with human cultures — defined as shared identity, beliefs, aspirations and behaviours among human groups — since art is, in essence, how we express our culture. Later, languages emerged that attempted to express and strengthen our culture more precisely. I’ll leave it up to you whether they actually do so.

So how, and what, would we actually think and believe (and perhaps therefore do), if we did not have language, if we were limited to the use of art to express ourselves?

What intrigues and annoys me about the studies of so-called “prehistoric” languages is the absence of any serious study of non-human languages, as if the entire idea that we learned and evolved language in parallel with other species were preposterous. This is the same anthropocentric arrogance that bedevils much theory of early human evolution in other areas of study. There is also limited study of the likelihood that abstract sign languages may well have predated abstract oral languages. And there’s very little on when the evolution of the human brain (specifically hemispheric entanglement and the breakdown of the bicameral brain) reached the point at which abstract language even became possible.

Much has been made of the fact that all human languages seem very similar, and ascribing that to the fact they mirror the physical structures and processes of the human brain. Much less has been said about the brain’s co-evolution with its development of language; perhaps the humans that developed utterly different languages (like the language of the Pirahã) co-evolved different neural structures, and most of them, for any number of evolutionary reasons, including genocide, have not survived. Perhaps linguistics, like history, is written by the winners of the battles, without reference to the much broader truth.

And for some indigenous languages, metaphor is not at all what it is in Indo-European languages — it is more allusion than analogy or allegory. These languages are kinaesthetic, based on what is happening rather than the subject or object “thingness” of what is happening. As Dan Alford explains: “Indigenous peoples value the dancing over the dancers, believe that processes and interrelationships are more real than the ‘things’ that grow out of them — that the physical is an epiphenomenon of the non-physical, and that cyclical timing is more real than linear time.”

Or as Glenn Aparicio Parry explains: “In the Blackfoot language, there are not nouns or verbs at all as we normally describe them in relation to each other. Instead, linguistic meaning is something similar to events emerging out of a fluid, constantly moving interconnected flux, rather than discrete interactions between subject and object.” This sounds quite close to the radical non-duality message that asserts that there are no separate ‘things’, just “what seems to be happening”.

So back to the speculative question of what (and how) we might think in the absence of abstract language. My hypothesis would be: not much. There is not much need to think, especially about abstractions, in a natural, uncrowded environment. It was only when we began to live in crowded “civilized” conditions characterized by constant scarcity and precarity, that there would have been a need for formal language, for instruction, for hierarchy, for codified laws (and law enforcement), and for ‘organized’ wars, for a human-made “order” of things.

When I watch the crows outside my window each day, it is absolutely clear that they have a sophisticated language, but it is a perceptual one, not a conceptual one. It doesn’t require, most of the time, much thought at all. It entails social greetings, exchange of information about dangers and about food. Despite their raucous chattiness, much of their information-sharing and communication appears to be kinaesthetic rather than verbal: Playful and mate-attracting activities, allopreening, staging and roosting together, and food-sharing. Yet they are capable of remarkable problem-solving, either when they have to be, or when it seems like fun. They can make tools, but they rarely do, because there’s no need to.

So my theory about the languages of human cultures in times and places of low-stress and abundance would be:

1. They wouldn’t need abstract languages, so they wouldn’t evolve them.
2. They wouldn’t think much, because they wouldn’t need to.
3. Their mental lives would be perceptually rich rather than conceptually rich. That would probably use up just as much brain power, but their brains would evolve very differently, around perceiving and paying attention and appreciating and artistic expression, rather than thinking and conceiving and judging.
4. Their emotional lives would be as rich and varied as ours, but they wouldn’t cling to their emotional reactions as fiercely as we do. They wouldn’t take things personally because their culture would be, as most wild creatures’ cultures apparently are, collective. They might not even conceive themselves to be individuals, since that conception seemingly requires training and reinforcement.
5. They would probably fare poorly if invaded by a highly-stressed human culture that had evolved more the way our modern culture has. Kind of like our cousins the bonobos, perhaps, which are now facing extinction.

In summary, I wonder if modern human thought, highly abstract, highly individualistic, mostly conceptual rather than perceptual, where everything is taken personally, and where fear, especially of one’s death, is omnipresent, is an aberration of an unhealthy, stressed species, a very unnatural way of being. Not an evolutionary pinnacle, but a self-defeating evolutionary dead end.

I wonder if the enormous similarities in our modern human languages and behaviours are due not to anything inherent in the human brain, but to the fact that we have eradicated all humans who did not share modern humans’ terrifying sense of scarcity and fear of death, which we have, since the dawn of abstract language, acted out through relentless, brutal competitiveness and violence against the rest of the natural world.

Robert Sapolsky would probably have something to say about that.

photo of Noam Chomsky by McMaster University

“The first casualty of war is truth.” — anonymous

The 21st century, since the inauspicious events of 2001, has thus far been a century of unending and expanding wars. Many of them have been military — Palestine, Chechnya, the CAR, Libya, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Syria, Yemen, Turkey, Ukraine, Georgia, Congo, Chad, Somalia, Ethiopia, Tunisia. Egypt, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, India, Bangladesh, Colombia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Angola, Bolivia, Senegal, Mexico, Philippines, Niger, Nepal, Laos, Papua, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Indonesia, Moldova, Kenya, Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Russia, Armenia, Tajikistan, Algeria, Venezuela, Cameroon, Mozambique, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, Timor Leste, Comores, Peru, Ivory Coast, Bahrain, Ghana, Morocco, and I’m sure I’m missing a bunch.

And, of course, there is the ongoing “war on terror” and the “war on drugs”, which are arguably smokescreens to enable unlimited attacks on sovereign nations, and accompanying “intelligence” subterfuge, without justification or provocation.

That does not include political and economic interference, including sieges and government overthrows orchestrated or supported by foreign nations in about a dozen Latin American nations and an even larger number of African and Asian ones.

But perhaps equally-important in this century are the non-military wars battling for the “hearts and minds” of citizens — fights over votes, seats, laws, ideologies and tax dollars rather than land. 

It is hard to deny, for example, that the US is engaged in a so-far-non-military civil war between neofascist elements, largely in the south and central states, on the one hand, and believers in real democracy on the other. The former, after decades of losing the propaganda war they blame on “liberal media”, have basically given up on the democratic process and are now seizing power by disenfranchising voters and exploiting the many anti-democratic holes in the US legal and electoral processes, including stacking courts with ideological extremists, gerrymandering, filibustering, empowering vigilantes and bounty hunters, and a host of other tactics.

Similar activities are occurring in many other countries, notably in eastern Europe, where neofascist governments now control many former Soviet bloc (and now NATO-member) states.

But possibly the most effective way to win and retain political power through seizing the hearts and minds of citizens, is through a mix of propaganda, mis- and disinformation, and censorship. This is especially true now, living with a ubiquitous and unceasing firehose of often-conflicting information, and exploitative for-profit “social” media controlled by a handful of dimwitted and unstable western oligarchs.

Military “intelligence” agencies have always been masters at propaganda and disinformation — it’s an essential tool in their arsenal. But with the massively-increased budgets given to the military, “intelligence” services, and “security” apparatus organizations (both domestic and international in their authority) in this century, and the exponential computing power that that puts in their hands, they can now do a much more effective job of controlling, directing, distorting, and suppressing information and debate than they ever could before.

During times of relative peace, we tend to ignore this massive accrual of power and influence because it is not used in ways that we think make much of a difference in our lives. But in times of war — military, civil, informational, or ideological — it can now make all the difference between ‘victory’ and ‘defeat’.

If you are a regular reader you know that I am not a believer in “good vs evil”. I don’t think those that can now wield this power are deliberately trying to get us to support monstrous misadventures or extremism. I think we’re all doing our best, including making use of power in ways we think will benefit and sustain our citizens.

Very few people describe themselves as extremists — and those labelled as such tend to insist that they’re just doing what they think is best, and that that’s not extremist at all. I am sure many of the American neofascists, for example, honestly believe that a permanent Christian theocracy run mostly by designated white males with “family values” would be a better system of governance than we have now, and that it would solve many of the social problems they perceive the current system has produced. They are of course wrong, but they are not IMO “evil”.

Anger, rage and hostility, in my experience, are almost always masks for fear, grief and shame. Fear of loss (of rights, freedoms, opportunity, autonomy, property, beliefs), fear of oppression, fear of suffering, fear of imprisonment and restriction, fear of the future. Grief over what has seemingly been lost or squandered. Grief over loved-ones’ suffering. Shame of incapacity, of failure, of ridicule. And it is this anger, rage and hostility, I think, that underlies most of our ever-present wars — military, civil, informational, and ideological. It is not an accident, I think, that almost all the war ‘leaders’ are males seemingly acting out their fear, grief and shame in military, political, economic and ideological “battles”.

Just to be clear about definitions:

• Propaganda is information (accurate, distorted or invented) that is deliberately worded in such as way as to provoke an extreme or wildly inappropriate emotional response.
• Misinformation is information that is incorrect, incomplete, biased or misleading.
• Disinformation is intentional misinformation. Lying about, withholding, skewing, obfuscating or misconstruing what is reported for a purpose.
  
• Censorship is suppressing information or opinions, usually selectively. That can include self-censorship.

So what we’re dealing with now, I think, is a collision between two phenomena:

• (1) Our growing cynicism about what is true, thanks to the firehose of information (much of which is propaganda, mis- or dis-information, or censored), leaving us unsure what to believe, and
• (2) Our propensity to believe what we want to believe, what ‘fits’ with our prior understanding of the world, how it works, what we wish to be true, and what we believe to be ‘right’.

The consequence of this collision is what Hank Green calls a toxic mix of outrage and helplessness (or hopelessness).

If you’ve ever been moved to attend a protest, my guess is you’ve tasted that mix, and were driven to act on it. And if you’ve never attended a protest (or haven’t in a long time) I’m guessing that you’ve also tasted that mix, but felt sufficiently hopeless about it that you didn’t act on it.

The daily doom scroll invokes this mix every time we look at it. We may be tempted just to turn it all off, to throw out the useful information ‘baby’ with the misinformation ‘bathwater’. But for most of us, we can’t. We are driven to know what’s happening in the world, to make sense of it. So we’re sucked back in. Then what happens is:

1. The triage test: We do triage on the firehose. We scroll past ‘news’ and ‘information’ that is neither urgent nor important to us. For each of us, that’s different. For me, celebrity news doesn’t pass muster. But if you’re part of a circle that eats up that stuff, you’re going to consider it important.
2. The smell test: For the stuff that passes the triage test, we make a preliminary judgement about what it means. That includes an assessment of its veracity, completeness and possible bias, and how it ‘fits’ with what we already believed.
3. Corroboration and/or challenge: If it seems suspect, we will likely read other sources, or talk with or message people we trust to get their take on it, or simply dismiss it as untrue. And if other people seek our take on it, that might also influence our own. Some of us will also challenge anything that seems too ‘pat’, too simple, and think about or seek other perspectives on it.
4. Conflict: In some cases, there will be enormous tension between what we believe, and what the people we trust (friends, or respected writers or experts) believe. Or there will be enormous tension between what we had believed and what this new information now leads us to believe is actually true. For example, suppose you read something that suggests that the US/NATO have been systematically working for decades to provoke unrest, anxiety, and ultimately regime change in Russia, or you read something that suggests that the vaccines for CoVid-19 are actually dangerous for your children. If you and your friends have always been wary of Russia’s government, or if you and your friends have been tireless proponents of universal vaccination, this is going to be more than uncomfortable. Misinformation about the pandemic, and about elections and wars, has destroyed friendships and marriages and driven some into conspiracy cults.
5. Resolution: Sometimes the most compelling resolution is to throw up your hands and admit you don’t know what to believe. But this is usually an untenable situation, because then you’re paralyzed. You have to decide whether to wear a mask or not, to get a vaccine or not, to agree “It’s all evil deranged Putin’s fault”, or to suggest it’s more complex than that. These are hugely difficult decisions that most of us would rather not be forced to make. But we will make them, and the consequences regardless will be significant, maybe even life-changing.

The goal of propaganda and censorship (and of cults) is to squelch dissenting views so that everyone marches to the same beat, and so that steps 3-5 of the above information-processing process are entirely avoided. We kind of like that — no one wants to be paralyzed by conflicting information or views, and no one wants to risk a friendship or shatter a long-held belief, all because of ‘rogue’ information that we just can’t deny. And you can kind of see the logic for propaganda during an actual war involving your own citizens. Scary, tragic, but perhaps understandable.

So that brings me to my questions about this subject, which probably have no answers, but which I think we ignore at our peril:

1. Have the media ever been other than sources of propaganda? Given the dependence of the media on government graces to give them “exclusives” and “inside” information, isn’t it inevitable that they will self-censor, or suppress, information that is not flattering to the government, or their corporate sponsors? Who then can we trust to tell us what’s really going on in the government and corporate back-rooms?
2. The media and citizens all fell hook, line and sinker for the utterly false narrative for the Iraq War, and there have never been prosecutions or even apologies for the lies. Now the government is acknowledging that some of the information it is giving the media about the Ukraine War is likewise deliberately false. All western governments, and almost all citizens, have accepted the simplistic narrative of the Ukraine War. Is it just human nature that we get played by these deliberate falsehoods? Is it in our best interests, at least in times of “war”? What would it take to prevent us all from falling for and repeating propaganda, mis- and disinformation when it’s so carefully and cleverly orchestrated?
3. Social media, facing accusations of propagating mis- and disinformation and propaganda, have responded by tagging, “demoting” (so that no one sees it on their feed), and even censoring information that, using rather simplistic and arbitrary criteria, they’ve decided are potentially mis- or disinformation or propaganda. Given the harms that come from censorship and suppression of information that may later turn out to have been important truths, versus the harms of not censoring information that leads to actions that cause illness, injury, violence or death, who should be trying to strike that balance, and how can they do it better than the social media giants’ amateur censors?
4. What are the ‘signs’ that indicate that media outlets are censoring or self-censoring alternative points of view even when they have credible evidence behind them? We need to know this so that we can at least flag these media for their biases. Who would be the best independent group to assess these biases? For example, the censorship of the views of Noam Chomsky since 2000, because of his ‘contrary’ positions on the CIA, NATO and Palestine, has been quite obvious. It would be useful to have the NYT flagged as one of the media organizations that have used their censorship power to suppress a lot of useful information on these subjects. Likewise, the suppression of alternative views by and about Julian Assange seems to me a travesty in a country with a supposedly free press, something we should all be aware of when we read the publications that suppress this information.
5. How might we deal with the tacit censorship in the media that stems from their failure to report inconvenient truths about major wars and other events of global significance (eg Yemen, Ethiopia, the burning-alive of Russians in Crimea). Is there some way to find and track the important stories that the mainstream media are deliberately suppressing?
6. Are we as a species inherently prone to being misled, conned, manipulated, played? Why? What is the evolutionary advantage of vulnerability to propaganda and misinformation?
7. How much worse will this situation get if we continue to rely on “the market”, and incompetent tech corporations and governments, to solve it? Will situations like the Jan 6 insurrection, and other acts of mass violence, become more and more routine as we get more and more manipulated by propaganda and mis- and disinformation and censorship? What if anything can be done to prevent that happening?

I don’t have any answers. I just have a dawning sense that the real “artificial intelligence” problem we’re going to have to face in the next decade is coming from “intelligence” agencies, PR firms, pliant media, and military-industrial complex spinmeisters, not robotics firms. In these times of crisis and collapse, this is the last thing we need.

Thanks to Paul Heft for provoking, and helping me think about, this article.

The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia; right click and open in a new tab to view legibly; or view and print the original over four letter-sized pages and paste them together. The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the online version includes links by TillmanR to the wikipedia articles explaining each bias.

What is it that makes some people, and the members of some cultures, more willing and ready to believe what they’re told than others? There’s some indication that we tend to believe the opinions of people we know well and trust the most — even if they’re as ignorant as we are about the facts. At one time (eg Watergate, Clinton) getting caught in a lie irretrievably damaged your credibility, but as propaganda has become more and more widespread, that may no longer be the case.

Opinion polls (themselves highly suspect) suggest that we trust just about all sources of information — politicians, economists, the media, lawyers and doctors and consultants and other “experts” — less and less. In particular, we’re getting increasingly suspicious of what “sources” are not telling us (lies of omission), not just about what they are reporting.

Yet we still seem astonishingly credulous, particularly when it comes to reported events we cannot personally witness because they are happening on the other side of the world (or at least allegedly happening). So we’re more prone to be “played” both by the slick propaganda operations of moneyed and motivated interests, and by conspiracy theorists who exploit our increasing suspicion of “official narratives”. As a result, most of us no longer know what to believe.

I grew up in the 1960s, when the Cold War was raging, the Cuban missile crisis threatened imminent nuclear war, and the McCarthy witch hunts were still in recent memory. I learned to get my news from shortwave radio and the often-raided and censored workers’ news-shops in Winnipeg’s north end. My father was a journalist, so I knew how the system worked (He quietly sheltered Vietnam War conscientious objectors who’d fled the draft). I was bombarded with propaganda from all sides, everything from pro-Apartheid broadcasts from South Africa to broadcasts adulating Mao and his anti-intellectual purge. I listened to the Voice of America and its relentless pro-war, anti-communist harangues that broadcast 24/7 in sixty languages.

I managed, once, back in the day, to wangle an invitation to a press conference held by James Richardson, then Canada’s Minister of Defence, shortly after the US National Guard murdered four unarmed protesters at Kent State, and after the leak of the Pentagon Papers, which today would almost certainly be grounds for the incarceration or “disappearance” of the offending journalists. The Vietnam War was still being escalated. Four million would eventually die in that insane 30-year-long war. After the conclusion of the press conference, I asked the Defence Minister about the government’s policy on dealing with climate change, and particularly about the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, and its prospective impact on the arctic environment. His answer was simple and terse: “Who cares about the permafrost?” He was then hustled away by his handlers before the press heard him raising his voice at me. I tore up my membership in the Liberal Party that day. The next day, his boss, PM Trudeau the Elder, gave a speech about the importance of protecting the environment.

Back then, as now, what I did not know about was as notable as what I did know (or thought I did). Like almost all citizens, I knew nothing about the US involvement in destabilizing and overthrowing a dozen governments in Latin America and at least as many in Asia, the Mideast and Africa. I knew nothing of the Canadian government’s complicity in US wars, surveillance, and propaganda campaigns. I knew nothing about the extent to which corporations, industry groups, foreign political groups, the “intelligence community” (the propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex), and ideological interest groups lobbied, bribed (there really is no other word for it), threatened, wrote legislation and press releases on behalf of, and otherwise corrupted governments and the political process in every country in the world, almost always against the interests of their citizens. I knew nothing about the revolving doors of the military-industrial complex (a term coined by Eisenhower, hardly a lefty, who was fearful of its potential power and influence) between corporations, lobbyists, government bureaucrats, and politicians across the political spectrum.

I was credulous. I keep learning that I still am credulous, that I allow people I know and trust to convince me of things that are simply wrong. They’re not deliberately lying to me. They’re just as credulous as I am, inadvertently parroting outright misinformation in the genuine belief of its veracity.

So I have reached the point where I only tentatively believe anything, and I am inclined to challenge everything I’m told. I am suspicious of anecdotal “evidence” whose purpose seems most often to undermine the credibility of the greater preponderance of evidence, when that can even be known.

I tend to be least suspicious of reportage that encourages us to believe that the issue is extraordinarily complex, that takes the time to explain the history and context behind the issue in nuanced terms, and which rather than taking sides asserts that everyone is doing what they think is right, that every action is understandable if one makes the effort, that there are no “good guys” or “bad guys”, and that some seemingly-incompatible statements about an issue can both be correct, such as this list from former British Ambassador Craig Murray:

a) The Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegal: Putin is a war criminal.
b) The US led invasion of Iraq was illegal: Blair and Bush are war criminals.

a) Russian troops are looting, raping and shelling civilian areas.
b) Ukraine has [ultra-nationalist, hate-mongering] Nazis entrenched in the military and in government, and commits atrocities against Russians.

a) Zelenskyy is an excellent war leader.
b) Zelenskyy is corrupt, and an oligarch puppet.

a) Russian subjugation of Chechnya was brutal and a disproportionate response to an independence movement.
b) Russian intervention in Syria saved the Middle East from an ISIS controlled jihadist state.

a) Russia is extremely corrupt with a very poor human rights record.
b) Western security service narratives such as “Russiagate” and “Skripals” are highly suspect, politically motivated and unevidenced.

a) The Russian military industrial complex is powerful [and dangerous] in its own [sphere of influence], as is Russian nationalism.
b) NATO expansion is unnecessary, threatening to Russia and benefits nobody but the military industrial complex.

The full article linked above explains in almost excruciating detail why the (a) and (b) statements in this list can both be true, and what that means for the sorry state of our understanding of the world and the dangers of one-sided perspectives, which are almost always rife with mis- and disinformation.

We want things to be simple; I get that. But they’re not. It takes time and energy to tease out the complex truth about what’s happening right now in Syria, in China, in Yemen, in Ethiopia, in Venezuela, in Palestine, in Cuba, in Afghanistan, and in dozens of other countries in economic, social, ecological and political free fall. This is especially true when there are vested interests that don’t want you to know what’s going on. Since most of us have neither the time nor the energy to study them, and to separate the truth from the mountains of propaganda, mis- and disinformation, we are paralyzed into inaction, and ignorance. Or, perhaps worse, we are credulously propelled into buying one simplistic and partisan perspective that plays right into the hands of those who benefit from it.

I was going to make a list of some of the things I was credulous about, at various stages of my life, to my great embarrassment. But the list is rather depressing, and what’s more important, I think, is to understand why I was (and still am) so credulous. Here are some of the reasons I came up with:

1. The deception fit well with what I previously knew (or thought I knew) and was already inclined to believe.
2. The person who deceived me had not, to the best of my knowledge, deceived me before, even unintentionally.
3. The person who deceived me was very passionate (but in an engaging, not an out-of-control way).
4. The person who deceived me was very articulate, and sounded dispassionate — they had no apparent reason to want to deceive me.
5. The person who deceived me clearly honestly believed what they were telling me.
6. The person who deceived me cherry-picked the “evidence” they gave me, or it had already been cherry-picked for them when they learned of it.
7. The deception was not about a subject that was particularly important or urgent to me, so I was less concerned about its veracity than I might otherwise have been.
8. Multiple people, who were not obviously drawing on the same evidence or source, related the same deception to me.
9. I actually participated in deceiving myself by filling in gaps in what the person deceiving me had actually said, in my zeal to make sense of what they had said.
10. I felt it was important to have some position or opinion on the subject, for a variety of reasons, so I was amenable to a possible deception in the absence of other data, evidence or arguments.

This is so human (as the chart above, which reveals the cognitive failures behind each of the above reasons, illustrates). And it is so human to exploit these failures when deceiving (deliberately or not) other people. We want people to believe what we do. We want people to reinforce our own beliefs. We want to feel knowledgeable, informed.

I am picturing a tribe of very early homo sapiens, living together even before the advent of language that enables us so treacherously to deceive. They are calling and signalling to each other. A member of another tribe has been spotted, they signal, an invader in the tribe’s territory. What will determine what they believe, now, and hence what actions they take? Will it be based on the truth, the evidence, or on their predisposition as to what they are already inclined to believe, or even on some deceit, intentional or not?

Such credulousness seems to have been evolutionarily selected for in our species, and maybe in most species. Leads to faster decision-making, and hence faster, more decisive, less hesitant, less divisive action. I guess that works, in terms of survival.

But at such a cost.

Prisoner-labourers in an African open pit mine (photo by Jean-Claude Coutausse/ CONTACT Press Images, for Amnesty USA).

The title of this post is a quote from the narrator of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. One can live in a paradise, or in a hell-hole, and after a while that just seems to be the way things are, what’s expected, what’s normal. You get used to it.

Old people lament the loss of things from “the old days” or “when I was growing up”. Those “old days” may have been during the Great Depression, or a war, or a famine, but that was what they were used to. Lottery winners and amputees get used to their new lot, and research suggests that a year after it happens, the lottery winners and amputees say they are equally happy with their lives.

I’ve tried to figure this out from a perspective of our conditioning, but conditioned behaviours are all about what we do, and “getting used to” things is about how and what we think and feel, not about what we do.

Wild creatures never seem to get completely used to being imprisoned in cages, zoos, factory farms and other confinement operations. If they’re fortunate enough to taste real freedom, their reaction usually seems to be one of complete and unrestrained joy. That’s probably why the confiners prefer to confine animals before they’ve gotten used to freedom.

Likewise, if a life of slavery is all you’ve ever known, you are probably more inclined to get used to it than if you’ve lived part of your life free. That’s true regardless of the institution of slavery — public or privatized prisons, refugee ‘camps’, work ‘camps’, ‘detention’ centres, ‘special’ boarding schools, for-profit old-age homes, or hopeless, bullshit-job workplaces. For some, freedom can even be scary if they’re not “used to it”.

And then there are those subjected to abuse in the family home, or the workplace. For many, it’s all they’ve ever known, or they’re afraid that if they flee, they’ll be abandoning other family members and pets to even worse cruelty. And for many, there is no safe place to go anyway.

Humans are (probably) uniquely blessed with the capacity to imagine things being very different from how they really are. But our modern western culture has starved us of the need and opportunity to practice imagining, and without exercise, that capacity quickly gets stunted.

When you can’t imagine anything else, you get used to what is, faster.

And our political, social and economic systems are now so huge and complex that we can no longer fathom how or why they are the way they are. It’s not like when you’re ridiculed as the fool of the tribe because you’re not well coordinated or you’re funny-looking or slow to learn things. You can get used to that because you kinda know why it is how it is. And you know the tribe is likely to look after you anyway.

Instead, in our modern complex world, you get used to the unknowability, the seeming arbitrariness, the unfathomability, the everyone-for-themselves-ness, the learned helplessness, and the seeming hopelessness of how things are. Things just happen, and everybody tries to make sense of it (“he’s just pure evil”, “it was a conspiracy by those guys”, “it was the gods’ will”, “we were stupid”, etc) but usually it’s all just a guess, or a lie, or it doesn’t make sense at all. So you wake up anxious, glance through the daily doom-scroll, convince yourself that what they say happened somehow makes sense, and why it might have happened, or why it didn’t and they’re lying, and you get on with your day. You get used to it all, because there is no choice.

If a tribe member were badly misbehaving, the rest of the tribe would take it into their hands to diagnose and remedy the situation, for the collective good. They would have no choice but to act.

But if people are apparently behaving badly and you have no power to do anything about it, and no way of reliably knowing what’s behind it and what an appropriate remedial course of action might be, you don’t do anything. You make sense of it as best you can, you grouse or cheer or sign a useless petition accordingly, and you get back to your life, where you can actually, perhaps, do something. When it comes to most of the things that concern and imperil us today, we have no choice but to not act. We get used to that.

This is an insane way to live. It is in many ways indistinguishable from the life of a prisoner, or a slave. We share with prisoners and slaves the incapacity to act. This is the phenomenon the authors of The Dawn of Everything referred to as the loss of the three ‘basic freedoms’ in any society: the freedom to move elsewhere if you’re unhappy; the freedom to disobey if you disagree with what you’re told; and
the freedom to imagine, create and explore other and different ways of living and being.

The thesis of The Dawn of Everything is: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.” 

But could we? I will concede that theoretically it is possible for us to do so. We could suddenly cease the behaviour we’ve mostly gotten used to, which is the antithesis of the three basic freedoms: Stay, obey, and accept that this is the only way to live.

The alternative of walking away, refusing to conform, and exploring other ways to live that do not require “getting used to”, but which are rather natural, healthy ways to live that most human and more-than-human societies have always lived, sounds exciting. Given the accelerating collapse of our civilization, that alternative is probably also inevitable, since we will, within decades, no longer have anywhere to stay, or any viable authority to obey, or any pretence that the way we live now is even possible, let alone the only way to live.

Now I have to confess that I didn’t tell you the narrator’s complete sentence from The Handmaid’s Tale. The full sentence was: “It’s truly amazing what people get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

And there’s the rub. For some of us, there are still quite a few “compensations” for choosing to stay, obey and accept that this is the only way to live. For others, of course, there are no compensations left, or never have been any.

When journalists go to some of the most unliveable places on the planet — like Haiti, or the slums of Lagos, or refugee camps — what they seem to hear from their residents, over and over, is a remarkable hopefulness that they too could, with the right luck and toil and divine guidance, receive the “compensations” they hear about and dream about that supposedly exist in the lands of plenty. So perhaps the Handmaid narrator might have more accurately said: “It’s truly amazing what people get used to, as long as there is at least hope for compensations.”

Lucky the dog kept coming back to his abusive owner, because that life was the only life he knew. It wasn’t as if he got used to it — he’d never known anything else. He had no compensations, and no hope for them.

So what’s our excuse? I wonder if it isn’t damned hope, instilled in us by the mythologists and the priests and the advertisers and the political and corporate con men. It would seem to be a uniquely human affliction, this belief in hope for a better future (or a better afterlife). Maybe if most of the world started to live in the present instead of in the hope-full future, we’d realize that the current compensations are not worth the cost.

Maybe we’d realize that hoping the politicians and the scientists and the business czars will solve the economic crises and the ecological crises is deluded. Maybe we’d realize that buying massively-subsidized electric cars from a moronic megalomanic billionaire in the hope that he’ll invite us to Mars when the SHTF is stupid. Maybe we’d realize that trying to perpetuate our crumbling planet-destroying economy and endless war-mongering a few years longer, in the hope that our children and grandchildren will be able to “fix” it, is criminal and cruel.

But I wouldn’t count on it. Given the choice between getting used to the current situation, no matter how ghastly it gets, or giving up all our compensations and hopes of salvation before total collapse absolutely forces our hand, history tells me we will opt for the former. Perhaps that’s our nature, and our fate. Perhaps we have no choice in the matter, and David Graeber was just telling us a delightful fairy story.

The “boiling frog” story is a myth. Frogs know better than to stay in water that’s dangerous for their health, and will always jump out of that water, no matter how slowly the temperature is raised. Human beings? Not so much. We keep hoping the temperature will somehow magically level off and go back down again.

Is the set of systems we call civilization so massively propelled onward by its own momentum, and so utterly convoluted, that it is impossibly out of control, even with our greatest, collective, concerted efforts? Maybe. Probably. But not certainly. Would most of us prefer to believe that to be certainly true (or, in the case of deniers, utterly false), and/or hope for salvation by some other, easier means that doesn’t entail giving up what they’re used to, including their “compensations”? The last fifty years of history suggests that’s the case.

Better get used to it.