Jivan Vatayan
The assumption that we easily and simply change our minds and rationally respond to the oncoming die-off also fails to take into account the most recent findings about human awareness as posited by neuroscientists.
In a February 19, 2002 article in the New York Times Sandra Blakeslee summarizes some of their conclusions.
She says that much of our “behavior rel(ies) on brain circuits that evolved to help animals assess rewards important to their survival, like food and sex.”
“And, in a finding that astonishes many people, (scientists) found that the brain systems that detect and evaluate such rewards generally operate outside of conscious awareness.” “In navigating the world and deciding what is rewarding, humans are closer to zombies than sentient beings much of the time.” “The findings, which are gaining wide adherence among neuroscientists, challenge the notion that people always make conscious choices about what they want and how to obtain it. In fact, the neuroscientists say, much of what happens in the brain goes on outside of conscious awareness.” “Dr. Montague estimates that 90 percent of what people do every day is carried out by this kind of automatic, unconscious system that evolved to help creatures survive.”
More ever, the routines that appear to be running in the human subconscious are mediated by releases of a neuro-chemical reward “dopamine”. It appears to be “a dopamine rush” that motivates us to subconsciously evaluate information and our possible actions.
“Scientists believe that this midbrain dopamine system is constantly making predictions about what to expect in terms of rewards.”
It is beginning to look as if “normal” awareness resembles a state more and more like that which we once labeled with the word trance! And this trance tends to also engage in socially sanctioned “rackets” to further reduce awareness.
Dennis R. Wier Director of The Trance Institute in Bruetten, Switzerland describes the various trances of normality.
“A person has the potential to be in a normal trance as soon as their attention is limited. Ordinary concentration, when the mind is focused on a specific problem or thought, sets one of the conditions for a normal trance to occur. Intense pleasure, when the mind is engaged in joyful or exciting repetitive activity, sets a condition for trance and may, for many people, become a trance. When one is daydreaming, with no specific direction of the thoughts, with a certain repetition of thoughts, one is in a normal trance. The general characteristic of these normal trance states seems to be that thoughts repeat and there is a limiting of attention.”
“It may seem bizarre to advocate the development of more intense trances and limited awareness and more impoverished realities as a global solution to social ills, yet, with drug addiction, religions and television isn’t that precisely what seems to be happening? Let’s understand what it is we are really doing! In America, where more than 95% of the homes have television and the daily average time spent in front of a television is in excess of five hours, people may believe themselves to be informed, but their realities are impoverished.”
It is our schema that set up a world of habitual subconscious routines (which we internally reward with dopamine), which create a barrier to change.
Mr. Weir hints at the difficulty of breaking the consensual trance.
“Socially or economically reinforced habits such as shaking hands, smoking cigarettes, having sex in the missionary position, wearing clothes when in society, answering the telephone when it rings, flushing the toilet after it is used, coming home after work and turning the TV on, all represent habits that are socially or economically supported in most countries of this world. Often the individual effort needed to break such trances is more than is possible to do. Such social habits or trances represent deep trances with trance force components and secondary order constructive trance generating loops.
To break such trances increases the awareness of individual chaos, uncertainty, and pain. The sense of chaos, or fear, uncertainty and pain is the reaction that is caused by attempting to change or modify the trance force.
One must be quite courageous to attempt to modify a trance force. In addition, the trance analysis needed to break a trance is often a complicated and difficult undertaking. There is also no guarantee that even if the underlying trance generating loops were known it would be possible to break the trance easily.”
Mr. Weir claims that “Addiction can be better understood if we think of it not merely as “substance abuse,” or performance addiction, but as a form of an impoverished reality that is maintained by a trance. Limited awareness, tunnel vision, the special characteristic that identifies a dysfunctional, impoverished reality, also identifies a type of trance state that may be also a characteristic of all addictions.
It is estimated that over 95% of the American population have one or more “addictions.” Such addictions include drug and alcohol addictions (now termed “substance abuse” to include cocaine, psychedelics, caffeine, nicotine, as well as alcohol, sugar, chocolate and junk-food), TV addiction, work-related addictions, sex and love addictions, food related addictions, computer addictions and other behavioral or performance addictions.
While pathological trances are not at all desirable, most people nearly all of the time are either in a pathological trance or are engaged in trying to get others into trance.”
The escape from uncomfortable realities (into a socially-sanctioned trance) is a major theme of human awareness. Our cultures are largely devoted to escaping problems and stress through denial, addictions, and entertainments. Even the foundation of our egos can be seen as doors of compensation wherein we limit awareness to a trance-like theme concerning a reaction to fear, feelings of inadequacy or our yearnings for love.
Richard Slaughter president of the World Futures Studies Federation talks about the neurotic paradox and our escapist culture – in an interview for the New Scientist.
The fact is that people mostly operate on a very short time frame that they are not really aware of. And it seems that there is a dialectical relationship between foresight and experience. People won’t change their modus operandi if they only suspect it might be off. They have to know it from harsh experience.
Our culture is a culture of false solutions. Media, sport, drugs, commercial sex, speed, extreme sports are all sold to people to help them escape, to make things bearable for people who find life really tough and difficult. These false solutions never work. Erich Fromm wrote a book called To Have Or To Be?, where the “having” mode is constantly in need of support and sustenance, whereas the “being” mode, which comes from a more Eastern approach– meditative, connected, calm, centred–can dispense with all that. But the money people see the “being” mode as threatening. And it is–to them. Commercial interest is profoundly implicated in our alienated, chaotic world–and it continues to peddle false solutions.
Interviewer: But that’s the essence of capitalism?
Capitalism is perfectly unsustainable and everyone knows it at some level. But that knowledge is repressed. There are massive interests keeping this system going, despite the cost. I don’t know how long it is going to take for us to learn that but we have to learn it. I don’t believe in revolution, I just believe we are in an extremely dicey situation.
from Adbusters # 30 page 37:
We have swallowed whole a new grand narrative, which is an alternative to a spiritual narrative. It’s the narrative of never-ending-growth and technological progress. David Orr, chair of the Environmental Studies program at Oberlin College, believes that future generations will look back on our obsession with perpetual economic growth and find it pathological. He thinks entire societies can be judges “insane,” and that we need an “ecological enlightenment,” a “worldwide ecological perestroika” to highlight our collective insanity and denial thereof.
Paraphrased from “Culture Jam” by Kelle Lasn:
“Why are we so docile and obedient? Is it because there isn’t anything to fight for? Hardly. There never has been more at stake. The fate of the planet hangs in the balance. Never in human history has so much defiance been needed from so many. Under the (trance induction of modern culture) we deny our anger and sit tight. Powerlessness, disconnection and shame rule.
It is the loneliest kind of rage there is.”
From “Paradise for Sale – A Parable of Nature” McDaniel and Gowdy –
Our world civilization and its global economy are based on beliefs incompatible with enduring habitation of the Earth: that everything has been put on Earth for our use, that “resources” not used to meet our needs are wasted and “resources” are unlimited, that rewards must be related to economic production, that people are exclusively selfish and acquisitive, that scarcity and inequality are natural conditions, and that the biosphere is a subset of the economy.
Trance as denial
From “The Problem of Denial” by William R. Catton, Jr.
By thinking of denial as a defense against intolerable anomalous information, we come back to the classic assertion by Paul Sears that ecology “if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind, would … endanger the assumptions and practices accepted by modern societies….”
Ecological understanding of nature’s limits and man’s place in nature contradicts deeply entrenched cultural expectations of endless material progress. This fact has been expressed repeatedly by assorted writers who came to it from various directions.
From: “The Psychology of Denial” in the Ecologist 11/2001 By George Marshall
In his book, “States of Denial, Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering”, Stanley Cohen argues that the capacity to deny a level of awareness is the normal state of affairs. He argues that ‘far from being pushed into accepting reality, people have to be dragged out of reality’. According to Cohen’s definition, denial involves a fundamental paradox – that in order to deny something it is necessary at some level to recognize its existence and its moral implications. It is, he says, a state of simultaneous’ knowing and not-knowing’. We can expect widespread denial when the enormity and nature of the problem are so unprecedented that people have no cultural mechanisms for accepting them. In “Beyond Judgment”, Primo Levi, seeking to explain the refusal of many European Jews to recognize their impending extermination, quotes an old German adage: ‘Things whose existence is not morally possible cannot exist.”
The mind continues to search for a way to somehow handle intolerable information. We end up handling it by moving it aside, repressing and denying it.
There are innumerable rationales that the unconscious mind employs for the great lack of engagement in response the eco-catastrophe.
One rationale (a second order trance-loop) is that it is a fait accompli, and therefore there is no reason to even listen, or take to heart the severity of the problem, or one’s complicity in creating it.
Here George Marshall lists the most common “unconscious” strategies we use to maintain The Trance.
Psychoanalytic theory contains valuable pointers to the ways that people may try to resolve these internal conflicts. These are: angrily denying the problem outright (psychotic denial), seeking scapegoats (acting out), indulging in deliberately wasteful behavior (reaction formation), projecting their anxiety onto some unrelated but containable problem (displacement, or trying to shut out all information (suppression). As the impacts of (the human impact on ecosystems) intensify, we can therefore anticipate that people will willingly collude in creating collective mechanisms of denial along these lines.
One conclusion is that denial cannot simply be countered with information. Indeed, there is plentiful historical evidence that increased information may even intensify the denial. The significance of this cannot be over emphasized.
A second conclusion is that the lack of visible public response is part of the self-justifying loop that creates the passive bystander effect. ‘Surely’, people reason, ‘if it really is that serious, someone would be doing something.’ The Herald article failed to inspire me to activity because I saw no evidence that anyone in wider society was paying any attention. Thirteen years later, we have vastly greater information with scarcely any more public action. The bystander loop has only tightened.
The dysfunctional (dysergy) reward system (“the Machine”) of culture is structured both in the technic of the cultural system and in the schema (Trance) of human awareness. As such it appears as normal. That is why even if people realize that the normality of culture is ecocidal nothing significant can seem to be done.
The cultural momentum of dysergy, with its blanket of conditioning, denial and its dysfunctional reward system is an overwhelming force not only to realize, but even more so to challenge.
This compels one to go to sleep in the trance that “normal is really okay” and try to give a good optimistic spin on how to fit into the cultural reward system. It is realized that to challenge the cultural reward system too deeply antagonizes the sleeping denier in everyone. It is also realized that there is basically little or no solid support system to get off the addictive wagon and experiment with something really different.
The most powerful place for change is in the rules of the game (the schema). Donella Meadows calls this “the mindset of which the goals, rules, feedback structures arise”.
That inner work is not only about changing the goals and values of the system but it is about investigating and changing our dysfunctional perceptions about “reality”.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if our whole being – our spirituality and politics and the energy of meditation focused on just such a potential?
Our prospect for co-operating with the natural world depends upon living a life that responds to the way ecosystems work. To do so it is necessary to break out of the self-limiting prison of the legacy of our culturally and genetically entranced view of the Earth.
We must break the trance!