The animating thesis of this work is that dominant (or official) culture is delusional, unequipped to perceive reality clearly enough to then act intelligently. There is a schizophrenic, or ‘split mind’, relationship between what is known and what is done. The purpose of this work is to contribute to the insight process. Why do we often know one thing and do another? Or, why do we–both as society and as individuals–sometimes fail to act in accordance with that which we know is the better or more sustainable path for our health and well-being?
In addressing this, this work conceptualizes two domains: internal, personal life and external, social life. Both distinct and inseparable, they are irreducible facets of what we call existence. The factors that influence their character naturally play critical roles in determining the quality of existence, everything we know and experience.
The internal sphere is herein called Consciousness and described to entail three main conditions–Knowing, Being, and Doing. Also referred to as Knowledge, Existence, and Action, these conditions are described fundamentally as Uncertainty, Virality, and Volatility. Lama Surya Das, author of Awakening the Buddha Within, identifies ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Why am I?’ as ‘the two existential questions’. To this I add two questions of knowing, ‘What do I know?’ and ‘How do I know?’, and two questions of doing, ‘What am I doing?’ and ‘Where am I going?’. Framed individually here, the same conditions and questions apply collectively.
A lack of knowledge is identified here as Delusion, maladaptions in the aspect of being as Imbalance, and errors in the process of doing as Harm. The antidotes to these illnesses are Clarity, Equanimity, and Integrity. Seeing clearly, being wisely, and acting rightly are significant challenges in the best, most relaxed times. Today, they have grown monumental.
Considering knowledge, the only thing we can be sure of is that we can’t be sure of anything, or Uncertainty. Coming to grips with paradox, with the help of Erich Fromm’s notion of ‘paradoxical logic’, is an important waystone along the path. Existentially, we are ineluctably procreative, destined by our very makeup as living beings to ‘want’ to continue living, consuming resources along the way. The challenge of the 21st century, as faces our species at this unprecedented crux of explosive growth expressed in the fossil record by the change from a stable Holocene era to an apparently unstable Anthropocene, is whether our existence will be typified by the kind of virality that either kills its host or becomes too annoying not to be burned out or by the kind that can embody the wisdom of sustainable, symbiotic living, managing to follow economist Kate Raworth in changing our definition of progress from something to do with growth to ‘coming into dynamic balance.’ That takes Action. What kind? Any answer is volatile. The butterfly effect implies that knowing the total effects of any one cause, the full ends of any chosen means, is impossible. All we can know is that we don’t know what will happen. Best, it would seem, to move humbly and tread lightly.
The external sphere of existence is Society: encompassing the Political realm entailing three main aspects–the Social, the Economic, and the Legal. Everything is relational, interactive, and upon leaving the internal sphere, we confront interactions with the rest of our species and the planet. The Social realm is the place where we engage others, the terms of which are largely pre-determined by social norms. Powering our movements is energy in the form of resources, and the field wherein we distribute them is called Economics. Finally, when there are discrepancies, disagreements, or disjunctions in the terms of social norms or resource distribution, we have a Legal edifice wherein we are meant to appeal to an arbiter that is as impartial as it is possible to be (decentering). How we treat each other, partake of resources, and influence or mediate others’ treatment of and sharing with each other is societal life. Encompassing all of this is the biosphere, whose importance in sustaining life has been overlooked by the animating threads of each aspect of dominant culture throughout the era of Industrial Revolutions.
Cultural pressure: There are a handful of reasons that incentivize individuals or the groups of them that make up societies to act outside of what is in line with their best interests, or even desired action, and not all of them are delusional. Kate Manne shows, in Entitled, how the ‘power of social scripts’ can make acting rightly very difficult for individuals. In Adults in the Room, Yanis Varoufakis uses the metaphor of a ‘super black box’ to describe the way in which institutional structures can often hinder the people who inhabit them from acting in ways most aligned with what wisdom might decree. Still, evoked through both the patriarchal assumptions Manne laments and the market fundamentalism stymying Varoufakis, Erich Fromm posits in The Art of Loving that the prominent psycho-social challenge of our culture is that it rewards narcissism. Narcissism, the self-oriented inclination that is the (debunked) animating thesis of free-market capitalism, produces alienation, which George Monbiot identifies in Out of the Wreckage as ‘the point on which our crises converge’. For our highly social species, alienation produces, among other things, stress, anxiety and disease. One of our worst punishments is solitary confinement, which many argue violates altogether the UN Convention Against Torture, of which the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners rejects the prolonged (more than 15 days) use, and under conditions of which it is ‘not uncommon for prisoners…to develop symptoms of psychosis, including delusions, hallucinations and paranoia.’ Less often perceived is the implications of the above: our global culture, with all analysis typified by Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality, produces relations–whether of gender, race, intra-national, financial, intimate, social, or legal–that tend to separate rather than unify. (This is despite the lingual propaganda of freedom, things like ‘free-trade’ agreements which Monbiot clarifies as _____.) In doing so, we produce conditions for the development of psychosis and delusion for both individuals and the collective.
Psychiatry recognizes two attributes of the schizophrenic mind, psychosis and delusion, as:
“Psychosis refers to a set of symptoms characterized by a loss of touch with reality due to a disruption in the way that the brain processes information. When someone experiences a psychotic episode, the person’s thoughts and perceptions are disturbed, and the individual may have difficulty understanding what is real and what is not. Delusions are fixed false beliefs held despite clear or reasonable evidence that they are not true. Persecutory (or paranoid) delusions, when a person believes they are being harmed or harassed by another person or group, are the most common.”
Deep of the bowels of the age of pseudo-liberal modernity, our information collecting processes, our methods, both collective and individual, for understanding ‘what is real and what is not’ are very evidently laboring under the weight of a paradigmatic explosion in quantity of information and little correspondent change in its quality. Riven with physical and psychological pollution, this militaristo-industrial era of fake news, the deep state, q, climate denialism, ethical capitalism, and anti-intellectualism sees a backlash foment against the unfulfilled, unfulfilling, and unfulfillable promises of the capitalist rising tide. Sea levels rise instead with too many holes in our boat. Shorn of clean air and clear vision, an asphyxiated populace inhale whatever they can; ripe pickings for the attention-harvesting industries that represent our most recent arena of unregulated wild west-style resource colonization. With no incentive but profit, most often in ad-form, we are sold garbage while our very selves are sold to bidders bidding on a consciousness that has no price. The result is the plethora of contemporary worldviews held as ‘fixed false beliefs held despite clear or reasonable evidence.’ Meanwhile, persecutory delusions are the calling card of separationist-fueled anti-immigration sentiment that is likely to intensify as deprivation-forced migrations continue to escalate.
If modernity is correctly characterized by ‘split mind’, then it follows that re-unification is the pathway to healing. The veracity of this thesis will be explored across our four forums; inner cognitive consciousness, and outer socio-politic of social, economic, and legal. Cognitive illusion–aside from being the animating thesis of the world’s only primary religion (Buddhism) that doesn’t ask you to trust blindly in what someone else says is the word of a god, a central feature of another (Hinduism), and the experiential implication of the range of psychoactive substances which are among the instigators of some of our most prescient insight–is everywhere. George Monbiot, among many others, addresses it socio-politically, “If alienation is the point on which our crises converge, belonging is the means by which we can address them.” From an economic point of view, ever-increasing market fundamentalism has dominated resource allocation for the better part of two-hundred years. One of many who have elucidated its mechanisms is William Greider, who dedicated an eight-hundred page tome, Secrets of the Temple, in 1987 to the gradual and eventual triumph of money at the Federal Reserve, exploring some of the institutional causes of the proliferation of financial deregulation and the early-onset of the winnowing of the middle class that has by now become commonplace. Legally speaking, ‘leading authority on housing policy’ Richard Rothstein joined a burgeoning cohort of those advocating for social justice with The Color of Law, his mapping of America’s history with red-lining.
Part of the challenge of our coming (back) together rests in the architecture of structural power and institutional opacity; national sovereignty and mutli-national corporations, incomplete democratization and deregulated monopoly culture, intergenerational trauma and lingering power biases. We may know something at the individual or the salon level, but actuating that knowledge into institutional structure is a different story. Understanding that we’re in iceberg territory is not the same as seeing the iceberg, and seeing it is not the same as figuring out how to show it to the captain. Yanis Varoufakis’ account of Adults in the Room, his six months as Greek Finance Minister, gives us clear insight into the mechanisms spanning the gap between knowing and doing, in the case of his colleagues in the European Union agreeing with his diagnosis that another round of ‘structural adjustment’, or bad loan adoption, would be economic farce merely kicking the can of unpayable debt into a deeper trench somewhere down the road and their smiling insistence that the Greek people must nevertheless add their parasitized bit to the house of cards. The deterioration of the United States to an anocracy, ‘a regime that mixes democratic with authoritarian features’, officially downgraded by the Center for Systemic Peace in 2021, is due both to our incomplete democracy–evinced in the outdated electoral college coroning as president 2 of the last 5 losers of the popular vote–and market fundamentalism, whose delusional parasitism of ‘free’ (markets, trade, and time) creates, as Noam Chomsky reminds us, ‘all kinds of authority.’ Meanwhile, intersectionality and systems theory clarify the legacy of slave-built colonial riches and institutional oppression.
Another part of overcoming our fractures rests in the formation and continued validation of value systems that incentivize limited special interest tunnel-vision; the growth mindset/profit incentive, self-interest theory, and selective history-telling. We have long known that wanton growth out of bounds with ecosystemic limits denotes referral to the oncology ward (Stamets quote) and yet not a day goes by that fears of recession don’t make headlines with nary a mention of the outdatedness of GDP. Forget that poverty itself still exists only by dint of entrenched minority financial wealth. Rational self-interest, though still the animating fulcrum of mainstream economic theory, has long been debunked by dozens of economists. George Monbiot draws on social science to posit that our central animating motivator is ‘benevolence’, the polar opposite of self-interest. We are grappling with an economic system whose animating thesis is turning out to be as wrong as it is possible to be. Meanwhile, a host of re-told histories aim to relocate the focus of the typical winner-tells-all story; Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger devotes itself to exploring the repercussions of the promises of the Enlightenment’s self-interested rationalistic capitalism and the inherent contradictions, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped examines the history of the American project through a unique lens of anti-racism, David’s Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything re-imagines the Enlightenment project from the perspective of a Native American centrality: while concurrently, a host of thinkers set about changing the narrative through examples of specific story-telling; Rebecca Solnit and Kate Manne follow bell hooks and Simone de Beauvoir in looking at the repercussions of patriarchy, Mehrsa Baradaran and Thomas Piketty follow William Greider and Robert Heilbroner in examining the flaws of modern economics and the banking system, and George Monbiot stands near the front of a long line stretching back through Rousseau of social theorists elucidating the contemporary hindrances to true thriving found in our systems of organization. These names are chosen nearly at random, so bright is the awareness with which our wisdom threads twinkle. These names are also unknown to many of us, so loud is the cacophony of our ignorance.
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This work elects to begin the process of being, seeing, and then acting rightly by firstly untangling the threads of our deluded confusion, then moving into what might be called positive knowledge principles, and finally investigating the manner in which those principles, and the seeds they sow, can be nurtured and either inserted into existing societal structures where possible and appropriate or turned into societal edifices in their own right. Along the way, we will use both ideologies and cultural pivot points to elucidate mechanisms of delusion and insight and the arenas (Consciousness and Society) in which they jockey for supremacy. Ideology, or frame of seeing, ranges from the authoritative to the freedom-seeking. Given that an eternal question for consciousness deals with the notion of authority and where to find it, most of the claims exigent on today’s mind about the righteousness of any particular frame can be situated along that continuum. Cultural pivots, meanwhile, are hot-point phenomena emergent from the confluence of forces that engender the unprecedented character of this remarkable age. Mishra calls it the age of liberal modernity: its features include the onset of the 3rd Industrial Revolution(and the attendant propagation of both progress and pollution), a 4th(?) wave of feminist thought (and the consequent backlash of nucleated patriarchal dominance), a 6th extinction (and a concurrent rise of sea level and mental health problems), late-stage capitalism (and the deterioration of social fabrics), and the expansion of climate, economic, and militarism migrants challenging the stability of both places they leave and places they go.