Are we in an inevitable situation?
Maybe we are missing something fundamental
Are we solving the wrong problems?
Teach a man to fish
You might think that with our wild advances in technological, scientific, organisational and other areas over the last fifty years we would be way happier and more fulfilled than ever before, experiencing an unprecedented standard of living and good health, with a previously unimaginable amount of leisure time available to us. You might expect that our societies and major systems such as finance and politics would be in an enlightened state of stability, and people would be experiencing extraordinary levels of personal freedom and prosperity, and yet a five minute scan through the news will show that in all cases, we seem to be going backwards. Even taking an unrealistically positive view doesn’t dispel the evidence that something seems to be wrong.
What are we missing? Are we trying to use political and government solutions to solve problems with a root cause that is neither political nor governmental?
What if we are trying to solve the wrong problems?
What if we are trying to solve the symptoms of something?
Meet the Flintstones
We are Cavemen at heart
For hundreds of thousands of generations, we lived in small communities where nothing changed from one generation to the next and as far as people could recount from memories passed down. So, our unconscious machinery has a lot of super-efficient survival and social behaviour centred on tribal membership ‘etched right into the silicon’.
The use of stone tools, as a marker for cooperative hunting is placed at earlier than 3 Million years ago, and looking at the collective bonds in various animal species gives us a good guess at how far back the roots of our own cooperative, ‘team’ behaviour goes.
As hunter gatherers, we lived in small groups of several families, making up perhaps a few dozen people. The transition from this hunter gatherer lifestyle only began with early agriculture, an estimated 12,000 years ago, which then saw our communities settle and grow to something of up to 150 people but seldom more, right until the effects of the industrial revolution had taken root. Beyond this point, within larger cities and towns we would still have our community of something up to around that same number of 150 people. Our reliance upon friends, family and community remained vital to our survival and that of our children. This situation continued into the 20th century when national news, increasing general-literacy, state-run welfare and education, urbanisation and industrialisation, technological advances and changing family structures began to overtake those evolved-in, community-based survival strategies. These changes aren’t necessarily or in-themselves wrong, but while our conscious minds can understand and function well in a modern environment, the base heuristics built into the unconscious mind of the human animal are evolved up to the late Palaeolithic, and not much beyond.
Overtaking Ourselves?
Build your own Ice Age
For more than 3 million years, humanity has been evolving the unconscious mental shortcuts that govern our lives—our heuristics. These are like applications or programs, the patterns of unconscious mental calculation and processing that shape our perception,, our feelings, our speech, thoughts, and actions and reactions. These psychological systems have developed to help us survive and reproduce within the contexts of small, tribal communities, much like those of our Stone Age ancestors.
Yet, in the last 150 years—a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms—our world has undergone a seismic transformation. This period represents just four or five generations, a minuscule fraction of our evolutionary history; yet during this short time, while the external world has changed drastically, our evolved psychology has remained virtually unchanged.
To put this into perspective, imagine walking across North America, from Canada to Mexico, or across the full width of Europe from Portugal to Russia. Using this journey to represent the vast timeline of our evolutionary past; we began to transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture about 1,000 yards or 1 Kilometre from the end of our journey, and those changes to society that came with the 20th century arrived just 400 feet or 120 metres back, with us suddenly encountering general literacy, news corporations, government control of information and education, radio, TV, the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence. The world we have created is capable of changing faster than we are, and it’s already over the hill and running away from us.
We seem to have overtaken ourselves without realising it, and have created an evolutionary challenge to our species on the same scale as an ice age.
21st century software, Palaeolithic hardware
Getting lost in a sci-fi world
Standing at some point, way back at the dawn of conscious humans, a more evolved observer from elsewhere in the multiverse might note that: ‘Those creatures are destined, by virtue of their nature and emerging consciousness, to create technologies, sciences, modes of living and social trends that will end up changing so fast that they will overtake the innate ability of their species to adapt successfully through the evolution of their base psychology, leading to an inevitable crisis or failure of their civilisation, through the corruption of power on the one hand, and a susceptibility to delusions on the other; both being combinations of silent, powerful, evolved-in heuristic biases; all of which are completely healthy, normal mental patterns .. for Palaeolithic, Tribal Hunter-Gatherers.
The horse we rode up on
Stepping outside of your human-nature for a moment
We must recognise that, one generation of technological advancement, will create multiple new possibilities, leading to multiple further developments in a parabolic curve of capability, rocketing us as these stone-age beings, through steam-power into the world of space travel and artificial intelligence within four or five human generations. So whether it was us, or some other species that got here first, the basic animal, as a set of survival and procreation traits, should be viewed as the ‘horse we rode up on’. It was a necessity to get here, as an awareness, in this realm.
The movies ‘Tron’, the Matrix and Avatar all capture the concept of inhabiting a body that is alive within its environment. So like gaining the inherent capabilities according to the form, we too can recognise that we are inhabiting these human suits, animal nature and all, to reach this point in this world. Like the NPC’s ‘waking up’ mid-game.
Virtual Reality playground
Our unconscious renders our reality, according to what we believe
We find ourselves here, using our puny, single-threaded conscious mind under the illusion that it is the whole mind, not noticing that most of the things we do, from walking to regulating our circulation are all just silently taken care of by our comparatively colossal and all-powerful, massively multi-threaded unconscious ‘machinery’, and that a proportion of that machinery is also employed as our unconscious mind.
How colossal? It is estimated that in terms of information being processed, the unconscious is around 275,000 times as powerful as the conscious mind. To give that some perspective, its the difference between the power of a Saturn V Apollo mission rocket, and a ride-on lawn mower, or if you prefer; Spacex’s Starship and small city-car.
What we perceive as direct reality is really a virtual-reality playground for our awareness, rendered or projected in our heads by the unconscious mind as a tiny, selected and filtered proportion of the total sensory information received. We can all notice this, through the ‘cocktail party effect’, when through the hubbub of a crowded room, from the dozens of other conversations, your unconscious will have filtered every audible word and phrase, finding a ‘within-tolerance match’ and then alerting you through ‘noticing’, that someone has just said your name.
All of this means that we are perceiving and reacting to the world through a system that evolved to give Palaeolithic, tribal, hunter-gatherers the maximum chances of seeing their grandchildren, their DNA’s DNA, succeeding, in the material, technological, and social world of their time.. Not ours.
Bullshit and the multimedia tornado
Information de foie gras
Background processing of this unfiltered, raw data provides outputs in the form of emotions, feelings, hunches, intuitions and so on. These motivational forces direct our conscious thought, our speech, our reactions, our actions and our perception itself. The nature of its operation is heuristic, meaning extreme speed and efficiency; but these are achieved by having no checks and balances, no double-entry book keeping so to speak, and so it can hold completely incorrect and even opposing ‘truths’ as knowledge, making it highly susceptible to self-conflict, to those ‘eddy-currents’ of cyclic thoughts and feelings and self-sustaining bullshit which hold us back by reinforcing fixed patterns of unconscious and conscious thought until the neural networks required for variability have been optimised out, making it fast, efficient, but no longer adaptive; a structure that must be, with some discomfort and effort, ‘rewired’ to incorporate previously missing or incorrect data, if it is to change in some respect. Skilled or effective management or manipulation of this unconscious system is how we can unwittingly absorb, as truth, as belief, as ‘knowledge’: political spin, advertising, gaslighting, and whatever bullshit we believe we must believe to be accepted by those we want to be accepted by. An absolutely critical survival skill evolved for functional tribal cohesion and social order, but a complete liability in today’s fast-moving multimedia tornado of information. Unless we become aware of it, that is.
Hitting the glass
Has our model reached its limits?
After flying human evolution into the plate glass window of our accomplishments. We are collectively sitting on the floor, bruised and bleeding, not understanding what just happened, and blaming each other for what does seem to be the outcome of our mental systems failing to evolve as fast as the world we are creating. We got ourselves here as a species, but we don’t seem to realise what that means.
You won’t notice until it has already happened
Is the history of the 20th and 21st centuries showing us something about ourselves ?
The key to escaping this situation, is to stop looking at symptomatic outcomes, the actions and ideologies of others and so on, and treating them as the cause, and see that: as those creatures who are guaranteed, to reach that crossroads where the curve of our technological capabilities cuts through the line of our capacity to adapt automatically, we will already be experiencing the effects when we realise that it has happened, reeling from the consequences, as we run out of ideas.
Thinking about our timeline this way shows that, without being fatalistic, there is an inevitability to our position.
Trying to see the outside from the inside
Fostering collective self-reflection
Describing our position as inevitable is not to absolve anyone who has done wrong, but rather to provide a way of seeing things differently. The man-made horrors of our history are only possible because we are capable of rationalising them, and we are only capable of that because we mistake the output of our complex automated systems for logical, free will.
If we look at the major wrongs in our human history, and for a moment, consider them as symptoms of something, and start asking ourselves what that something might be, we can perhaps see the exit. Our problem is that our perception, our feelings and thoughts, while quite real at a subjective level, are very much the products of the experiences, exposure to true and false information; the conditioning of our lives this far. Invisibly embedded into ones character, we are viscerally attached to the resultant identities, matters of ‘life-or-death’ importance and so on. Nothing seems to force us to hold on to a false idea in the face of empirical evidence as highly as our deep-rooted drive to uphold the values, and ideas of the ‘tribe’ we have attached ourselves to; whether we realise that or not.
Whether nationality, religion, politics or some other ‘thing’ that can matter to us at an emotional level, we all have those tribal encodings transparently and silently dictating our perceptions and our felt reactions to a given situation. Subjectively speaking; perception is reality, and if something we believe distorts our reality, then our reactions and their supporting rationale perform the same shift, in order to keep things cohesive. This will see us ‘following orders’ that should never be followed, and becoming lost in destructive and polarising delusions, often with an adopted, unverified rationale for our own viewpoints and an agreed-upon ‘other’ to treat as the cause of various perceived injustices and problems.
Planet of The Apes
We need to see our human nature as it is
Our human nature is both brilliant and terrible. As individuals we are capable of the most unbelievable acts of genius, love, and self sacrifice and at the same time, as a species, we are capable of the most brutal, and sadistic acts against other people over matters of a material or hierarchical nature, differences of opinion, attitude, culture, or religion, or simply which side of a border they were born on. If the beliefs of your community are incompatible with with the beliefs of another, then you should politely stay out of each-other’s business. No culture is necessarily good or bad, but failure to acknowledge and account for dangerous incompatibilities can be seen when our behaviour tends towards that of murderous territorial chimpanzees, rather than intelligent beings. Like the Kipling poem says: ‘East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet’. An observation on the part of our evolved nature that we fail to understand at our peril.
Runaway house party
Are we waiting for someone to save us?
There are plenty of theories in circulation, regarding the dawning of a new age, biblical events, a new world order, and even the return of alien overlords from another planet or dimension. If we consider our history over the last 300 years, and looking at the conflicts and crises of the 21st century so far; the thought of some divine, higher or more advanced power returning, like parents arriving home to break up a runaway teenagers’ house party, could easily look like salvation to many people.
What if nobody is coming to save us?
Assume they are not. Now what?
Maybe the fulfilment of some prophesy of a spiritual, cataclysmic or rapturous event is just around the corner. Maybe a visit from the Annunaki, or some other more advanced beings, or the return or arrival of a Saviour or Prophet is just what we need. But focussing on that feels like waiting for, or perhaps even willing the boat to capsize, just so that we can be rescued. And so, despite the comfort that these ideas might bring, and bearing in mind that whatever we believe; we don’t know that they are not correct; we might still use their existence to ask ourselves what it is that we need rescuing from. Is it us?
Perhaps it is, and if that is the case then it might be summed up in the following statement:
Human beings as individuals and groups of all types and sizes, need to be protected against human beings as a species.
Evolution 2.0
Evolution needs to shift from the physical to the mental
Objectively speaking; imagine yourself as a being of higher intelligence observing humanity in a benevolent, non-judgemental and hands-off manner. Perhaps you would see us as going through a necessary journey or process. You might observe that the evolution of the human animal has stopped, and evolution of the human consciousness becomes the subsequent phase of our story. Perhaps this has happened before, and perhaps it has only been predicted, but it does feel as though we are all about to be part of humanity’s ultimate ‘Aha!-moment’.
Master your awareness
The mind is a multi-layered system that needs to be under our control
To become capable of wielding the power of our technological and scientific achievements harmlessly and for the good of all, we would need to become aware of our unlimited capacity for greed, power and other survival instincts, and develop an acute awareness of our susceptibility to delusion, and its mechanisms of reinforcement. Namely, we need to make the mastery of our awareness the most important thing that we can teach. By understanding ourselves systematically, we go from “(Ouch!) I am wrong” which is easy to resist and harder to accept, to “(Ouch!) Here comes the discomfort of getting a bit smarter.” Which does not elicit the same entrenched reaction.
Systematic understanding
You cannot master something if you don’t know what it is
Until we, at the level of general population, become conscious of ourselves systematically, we will remain susceptible to the consequences of being in that position, attributing those consequences to external subjects and forces, including people with different beliefs, and to fate, divine providence and karma. We will remain susceptible to the faulty heuristics that we inherited from family, society and other sources or ‘mis-coded’ through the confusion of trauma, and find ourselves caught in both compatible and incompatible delusions with others, and quite frequently, ourselves.
We don’t need total enlightenment, but thinking about the utility of mathematics might give us a little: In order to split the bill at dinner, two people must have, through training and experience, a matching understanding of the values and functional transforms that make the division of cost possible. Without thinking about it, they will employ unconscious systems that were encoded for the necessary working comprehension, and ability to communicate using the common words and meanings of mathematics.
Applying this principle to the mind we all possess: We need a common, agreed understanding and way of describing the human mind; the conscious with our everyday awareness and the unconscious and its natural, evolved-in heuristic/neural networks of feelings, motivations and reactions, both animal and social. It should be something that you can explain to a five year old, in a way that they can both comprehend and use.
Unknown and unknowable unknowns
Giving the unconscious something to chew on before it eats the furniture
Once upon a time, before scientific discovery and widespread understanding of the discoveries, principles and methods of science, most things were unknown and therefore our minds were structured to handle the metaphysical. This patterning on our perception and thinking served as the interface that locks-in to the sacred, ritual, religion and other means of delivering an unconscious understanding of our mental/emotional systems, and our nature.
Today we stand well inside that world of science, and we are so blinded by the brilliance of our own discoveries, that we seem to now have sufficient hubris, to ignore or diminish the remaining unknowns, and their immediate neighbour, the unknowable.
We don’t need to throw away our advances, but it does seem that we are missing a way to understand our own system and its real-time operation, that can be described and understood easily, using the language of modern thinking in a way that is conceptually accessible to all.
Failure to recognise this, leaves the machinery evolved for metaphysical belief unattended and searching for matters of meaning which will provide it a working load, ready to latch on to anything.
Writer and philosopher, G.K. Chesterton is attributed with the saying:
"When a man ceases to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they become capable of believing anything."
Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, tells us that:
“Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is."
This effect appears to be visible all around us today, and while this is not a call to religion, to not be aware of this situation is what leaves the way open for us to demonstrate these two snippets of wisdom as true.
Self-smiting
Failure to understand our systems leaves us free to annihilate ourselves
Religious and other spiritual works tell us to focus on the spirit over the material; what we are, rather than what we do. Instead of taking this as a moralistic set of optional instructions, we might realise that somehow, teachings from out of the mists of time have been warning about what we will do to ourselves, if we underestimate or exclude the unconscious in our calculations, and allow our conscious minds to run away with the ball.
As Karl Jung is quoted:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”
This maxim seems to apply to us collectively, as well as individually.
God doesn’t need to strike us down; we seem to be quite capable of doing it ourselves.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable
Getting physically fit takes effort and we feel the burn. Same with mental fitness…getting there is uncomfortable.
In order for us to upgrade, update or work-around the inherent "host system" of cognitive biases and built-in mental heuristics inherited from our evolutionary past, we first need to become deeply aware of them and comfortable examining them and their reactions closely - even if that process is uncomfortable.
Free won’t
Exercise the free-will of ‘not-doing’ your habits
Maybe you are consciously or unconsciously seeking this information, but will having it change you? If you grasped, at a fundamental level, an awareness of the automated processes running your reactions and spotted yourself about to ‘tread on a rake’, witnessing your own reactions and impulses, firing up loops of pre-loaded feelings and thoughts and attempting to direct your actions, what would you do? Or perhaps like ducking to avoid something unexpected, what would ‘just happen’?.
If you find yourself stepping in, to stop yourself doing, saying or thinking something predictable, and watching the immediate motivation recede like a wave on a beach, you might see that your free will seems to be mostly engaged in not-doing what you are programmed to do.
Thinking of it as ‘free won’t’ might remind us of what is really happening.
Personally and collectively
A society of creatures acts in accordance with the psychology of those creatures. Change the creatures and you’ll change their society. But changing society without changing the creatures? That might take force.
Learning a single, external thing can change you forever. When a fundamental belief about ourselves and our relationship to others and wider reality, is changed through new information that we accept as truth, then our unconscious calculations and the resultant feelings, instincts, urges and impulses will be changed with it. “I used to love/hate (who/whatever), but then I found out that (something that changes the matter) and now I feel the opposite way.”
If one suspends judgement and takes all of the above on face value, consider how that would somewhat change the way that you understand the world, how you react to it, and how you see the problems that we all face or have to work to ignore one way or another.
If we as a general population start to see ourselves in a way that evaporates confusion and lays bare the source of so many of our difficulties both individual and collective, perhaps we can turn things around and row the boat down the stream. Perhaps merrily.
What if it is all inevitable?
Stop solving the wrong problems
Back to where we started: What if the situation we find ourselves in is just an inevitability? If there is truth in this text, then that’s a rather different problem to the ones were are staring at, and maybe it’s not one that anybody’s politics seems likely to get anywhere near, and why would they? Political solutions are mostly just pushing symptoms around and agreeing on who to blame, never daring to look at the cause.
Think about your own complexity, your life-lessons, qualifications and experience. All of this in billions of us, and yet we get to tick a box once every four years. Is that it? Is picking what, to many, is just the least worst option and hoping the best we can offer? Activism? Protests? OK, but it’s still part of the political game of rearranging the symptoms.
One way or another we need to do more than vote to fix things; we need to understand ourselves and the real position we find ourselves in, and begin to talk to each other about it.
It won’t be comfortable, but it’ll be a lot less comfortable if we just keep on going until the boat really does capsize.
It feels almost ironic to consider that we are destined to find ourselves in the position of being behind the curve we have inevitably created, with perhaps the only exit from our own version of hell, being through understanding, knowledge, or, if you prefer, some degree of enlightenment. Like a logically unavoidable destiny.
Imagine for a moment that all of the above is true.
The Buddha is attributed as having said:
"The trouble is, you think you have time."