What? Well, I was just thinking about how people deal with habits and addictions when either may have both pleasurable and self-destructive consequences. Some folks may be victims of another’s categorization, or of their own. Of course, categorization is a linguistic mechanization that is closely involved with both framing the world for many purposes, and also for dehumanizing other groups of humans—sometimes referred to as ‘othering.’
Categorization itself objectifies the phenomena to which it applies. And objectification of humans sets them apart from “Us” as “Others,”—that is, not one of us—eliminating affinity and therefore empathy and implicitly or explicitly framing them as other than human and therefore not subject to treatment under any code of ethical or moral conduct toward them. To define someone as an other is to create the basis for dehumanizing them.
We can observe othering everywhere, from football games to differential service in restaurants, to murder and more. Othering is implicit in labeling anyone who protests an unjustified political policy as a “terrorist.” It is central to defining the humanity of a Palestinian or Israeli, or a Ukrainian in Russian-occupied Crimea, a Uyghur in China, and of course Black folks in the US, out of existence. Banning books or excising facts about slavery and Jim Crow practices from textbooks will not change that.
Awhile back I read a lot about habits and their many positive and negative effects. Some habits produce a lot of efficiency, especially when they are the extension of valuable skills. But then, we are all familiar with ‘bad habits,’ many of which are addictions, despite motivation often too strong to break. So, are all bad habits addictions, or just habits that we or someone else practice unconsciously or out of spite and are unwilling to abandon?
Conceptual Habits and the Worlds they Inhabit
We all live in worlds of conceptual imaginaries, that is, imagined entities that often arise out of the ideas that we carry, but were long since formed by others and passed on as the culture of our group. In the failure to think critically—as in “what does that really mean, and why should I believe it anyway?—we can unconsciously carry prejudicial thoughts that have no justification in either experience, facts, or practice.
Or, we may even assert a right “to believe whatever I want.” As Forest Gump famously said in the 1994 movie of that name, “Stupid is as Stupid does.” In groups, false beliefs can survive in spite of the evidence or even the harm they may do, because social validation overrides facts quite frequently when ‘group think’ is involved.
But beliefs are conceptual habits and they can become addictions, so they don’t just go away when confronted by stark realities that contradict them. How many smokers do you know who understand that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, want to quit, yet keep on smoking while rationalizing their behavior in some way? Old habits die hard; racism is a prime example. Declarations to the contrary do not fly. It is too easy to conceptualize your own behavior as good, even when it is bad. How can thousands of people characterize a violent attack on the nation’s capital as a “peaceful protest” when the direct evidence of the violence is so clear that juries convicted many of their violent crimes? Political addiction to categorical imaginaries about “them” and “us.”
Flaws in the Corporate Categorical Imaginaries
Now, we all grew up amidst the industrial-consumer beliefs and assumptions about the world that some call modernism. Commerce and industry are as much a given fact in the cultural world of modernity as are forests or deserts, maybe more so. It is the world given to us by ‘our elders,’ who have shaped the culture through controlling the mass media for decades from their position as financial-corporate elites. It takes an extra dose of skepticism and a load of verified facts about the Earth System in which we live, to come to any other framing of the world than that which is taken for granted by almost everyone around us—industrial modernism.
Of course, there are chinks in that armor. Nevertheless, we are sent to battle ill-trained and ill-equipped. We are trained to enter a ‘job market’ that fails to approximate the ideal of “Work hard, get good grades, and you will succeed at a far greater level than your parents did.” Yet, we struggle in an economy approaching the end of its imaginary perpetual growth, taken for granted by almost every economist and politician. Economists cling to the belief that our economy will continue to grow by invention and innovation endlessly in a finite world, because they know if subconsciously, that without growth it will either fall apart or have to be entirely reinvented. By keeping attention on individual achievement as the driver of progress, than economists and the politicians they serve, can keep claiming that they are the answer to faltering economic growth, if only for a little while longer.
Overcoming Categorical Constraints on Human Wellbeing
Unfortunately, it may require the further arrival of catastrophic tipping points in the destabilization of the entire Earth System, now well underway, to ‘bring people to their senses’ in relation to the complete dependence of political-economic systems and societies themselves.
Many of the catastrophic consequences of the heating of the planet due to industrial economies, lag behind the causes by decades. The obvious example is the melting of glaciers and Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets and the subsequent rise of sea level above the elevations of many of the world’s great cities. It is a gradual process, although it is accelerating more and more, especially in relation to ‘feedback effects,’ those exponential speed-ups due to heating, for example, causing melting of tundra, which releases massive amounts of methane, which causes more heating. That is happening right now, and nothing is being done to slow down that process, no less stop it. The ecological damage and the release of carbon into the atmosphere is continuing and even increasing, even after decades of talk, false promise, and pompous statements of concern emanating from governments and corporations.
The remedy for all this, of course, is not only extremely difficult to achieve because the ‘powers that be’ in the world’s industrial-consumer societies keep grabbing short-term profits and power, leaving it to future generations to do what they have made nearly impossible. The evidence for the failure of governments and corporations—in collusion with one another—to take the initiative is now overwhelming. In combination with growing direct evidence of catastrophic failures in both political economies and ecosystems will result in popular movements for radical change.
Too little too late? We shall see. In any case, the only way to mitigate the impending collapse of both societies and the world’s ecosystems is to radically overcome the categorical constraints on rational action that our culture has imposed on our thinking. Only by recognizing the evidence and framing our situation in terms of concepts that fit the greatest predicament humanity has ever faced can we formulate the extreme action we need to take to transform the way humans live in the only home we will ever have, the Earth System—Gaia.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 