Humankind stands on the brink of another world war. Yet a progressive global newspaper features an article praising the pollyannaish worldview of Steven Pinker. “Human society has become kinder over the course of recorded history. Over the long arc of history, violence — including murder, cruelty and war deaths — has declined.”
Social and psychological progress is a delusion; people haven’t changed; only technology has. Since the beginning of organized mass warfare, which coincides with the emergence of cities about 10,000 years ago, there hasn’t been a single century without war.
The collapse of the Bronze Age, with sophisticated civilizations like Mycenae and Egypt having established trade routes all over the Mediterranean, led to a Dark Age before the Bronze Age emerged.
It’s no coincidence that in the Nuclear Age, humankind is on the cusp of a world war begun by a rogue superpower ostensibly to stop a terroristic theocracy from having the bomb. So what does the present collapse portend?
To address that question, we need to explore the relationship between the individual and society. It’s a very old question that can have no settled answer. In our time however, even trained scientists are succumbing to the cult of the personal.
For example, an American science writer with a PhD in genetics dives in where angels fear to tread and makes the boneheaded proclamation: “Most cosmologists believe there’s no physical flow of events beyond our perception, so when we release ourselves from the cosmic clock all we’re left with is ‘lived time’: our personal, malleable experience of change.”
It stems from the same tired trope that reality is what we personally choose it to be. It’s no wonder the United States has a president who believes the truth is what he says it is, and that he’s entitled to contradict himself in the next breath.
In an obsessively individualistic culture such as American society, where the vast majority of people are thoroughly conditioned into believing in their separate, special existence, there is no relationship between the individual and society. There’s just increasing fragmentation and polarization, for which the divided individual (dividual) sees no connection and feels no responsibility.
In such a culture, it appears futile to explore the deeper question of whether humans can make the leap from our ancient, defunct consciousness based on thought and memory to cosmic consciousness flowing from insight and wholeness. But we aren’t separate individuals, and change has always begun with a few. All the more so perhaps in the digital era.
The world is changing quickly for the worst, so there must be radical change, which means psychological revolution within human consciousness.
As understandable as it is, many people have given up on humanity. Yet self-promoters are still talking about how the human race is progressing even as you can see the deadness behind their eyes. Things have gotten so bad that “witnessing humans acting with kindness triggers experiences of awe, a sense of being in the presence of something vast.” With the bar for awe set so low, it’s no wonder Pixar is able to so easily exploit it.
Yeats prophetically referred to this time in his poem about a world in chaos, “The Second Coming.” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Those on the far right, holding power, terrorize desperate migrants and start needless wars, while those on the far left call for the overthrow of the system. Both disparage individual transformation, which is a completely different thing than non-existent personal transformation.
Unaware people on the right employ reductio ad absurdum by twisting individual transformation to mean “fixing the inner self through meditation is the road to world peace.” While externalizers on the left insist that putting inner work first is “prescribing a monastery when we need a revolution.”
Of course both think in terms of political revolution, which is feared by the right and prescribed by the left. But as the first and longest running experiment in democracy slides deeper every day into tyranny, it’s self-evident that political revolutions are either temporary or regressive, and essentially change nothing.
Spewing AI blather and or boilerplate ideology, both ends of the political spectrum believe “individuals can only cultivate restraint, perspective and restraint in their own minds, but none of that stops a missile, reopens a shipping lane, or deters a state actor from pursuing strategic advantage.”
Leftists are adamant that self-knowing is “retreat from the problem,” while rightists swear that observing the mind is “retreating into a study to contemplate the nature of thought while the world burns.” (It’s amusing that both criticisms use the word “retreat,” when the retreat industry has become a multi-billion dollar business.)
Withdrawing into one’s personal world where reality self-defined is just the other side of the coin of habitually looking outward for solutions.
Not being self-knowing is the escape from reality. People on both the right and the left who first look outward rather than inward refuse responsibility for their own darkness, which only adds to the roots of war and injustice.
The pollyannas proclaim, “Humans are hard-wired to care for and protect each other.” But that’s an even more pernicious lie than the lies that Donald Trump tells. At least with his lies, all but the most ignorant know that he’s lying.
It’s a wrong question to ask, “Can we as a species become more altruistic?” The question is, Can we as undivided individuals bring about a psychological revolution that changes the disastrous course of humanity?
When enough people see that the world is not separate from us and that radical change begins within us, a psychological revolution will ignite and change the disastrous course of man. Our children don’t have to enter another Dark Age after this war is over.
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