Sometimes, it is very hard to understand certain minds, well, almost impossible. But there are clues. Psychology and psychiatry have certainly built a vast storehouse of knowledge about how people think about how they behave and how the way they live relates to others. But there is so much more, which is why we have social psychology. But it also answers just part of the puzzle too.
Regarding the guy I shall not name but is known to precisely fit the medical definition of a narcissistic sociopath, why do his many acolytes see him as the savior of the “free world,’ as he pursues his autocratic attempt to demolish democracy? Why do so many people ignore or deny the vast accumulation of facts, carefully recorded by highly trained scientists, which clearly portend great global climate/ecological chaos in the very near future?
How much of what people say, do they believe? Despite the American ideology of pure individualism, thought, language, behavior, and even emotion, are largely the product of who people interact with and how they mutually build their social world. Our relations with others, and who we attribute authority to are far more powerful in determining what we believe than the confirmed facts some scientist blandly recites in an academic journal or even in testimony before Congress.
Is It Real?
Sometimes it is hard to separate psychiatry and physics from politics. What are the really big issues, both nationally and globally today? Well, it depends on who you ask. ‘Saving Democracy,’ has been a big one, especially since the global rise of authoritarian regimes, primarily in Europe, the U.S., and the rest of the industrialized world. Change and chaos are clearly accelerating, which adds to the confusion.
On top of that, artificial intelligence (AI) is surging like no other fad, as people seem to keep seeking some new technology or ideology to ‘save us.’ But, save us from what? I would suggest that what so many seek is to escape a world out of balance. Yet we seek balance in our real world by looking toward artificial intellectual tools, in this case, tools that can easily be used to not only create more imbalance but also manipulate and control our consciousness of our world, but our behavior too. Without doubt, some technical applications of AI, such as medical diagnoses offer great promise. But there is so much more involved.
I spend a lot of time ‘online,’ or I would not be able to access all the information and ideas I can draw upon so quickly to write these little essays you find here, in my newsletter, and on my new Substack platform, “Illusions Transformed.” One thing that has stood out lately is the fact that on almost every platform I visit, the system tries to entice me to utilize its “AI Assistant,” by whatever cute name it is given. The simplest email, it assumes, should be mediated by the AI assistant, as if you did not really know what you want to say to a friend, a colleague, or a politician.
Under such conditions, that is, if you fall for such “assistance,” can you be real? Think about how intrusive and insulting it is when you start to read a .pdf file an associate sends to you for review and Adobe intrudes with a pop-up suggestion-window that encourages you to have the ‘assistant’ summarize its content for you.
Aren’t we independent American individualists supposed to think for ourselves? Am I being picky here? I think not. This is just one of thousands of ways that the oligarchs of Silicone Valley attempt to increase their already overbearing control of our access to information, of the way we think, the way we make decisions, and the way we behave.
What Do We Expect?
The brilliant physician and psychiatrist, Gabor Maté’s book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022) builds on the insights found in his previous books, such as In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, and points to how the damaging elements of our modern “toxic culture” are normalized to the extent that they severely damage our health. Dr. Maté’s analysis shows how by normalizing the modern diseases that are now resulting in declining lifespans for the populations of industrialized nations, we come to expect a whole range of maladies as normal, when in fact the physical and mental components of our toxic culture causes them.
What most of us have been trained to see as normal is fundamentally abnormal when seen from the perspective that recognizes the deep embeddedness of humanity in Nature, not as some separate overseer of the world. We are in the world, not over it, despite the narrative of the industrial-consumer culture that puts the global political-economy and its need for extractive, ecosystem-destroying growth above the wellbeing of people and planet.
Earth-Bound Reality
The narrative of the industrial-consumer political economy claims that humanity’s purpose is to dominate nature, and to subordinate people to its purpose of accumulating and ‘creating’ capital in an endless cycle of debt-based investment and profit taking. The only way out of this terminal cycle of perpetual illusion heading for a crash, is to take control of the economy and transform it to serve the wellbeing of both humans and planet. Despite the Muskovite madness of expanding delusional techno-bro domination to Mars, the primary mission of humanity must focus on a transition out of the terminal status of the industrial age into a condition where we can build ecological communities that work in harmony with the rest of Nature.
There is no easy way out. We are Earth-bound; that is our nature. The task ahead is immense; the alternative is civilizational collapse brought on by an artificial culture. We are members of the Earth System and that alone is the reality that offers us the opportunity to re-integrate with our own nature, in order to achieve our own true destiny.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 