The Empire of the Most Easily Triggered

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In How to Be Free I argue that neurosis is the norm for humans. By this I mean that we have an insecurity about our own worth which makes us especially prone to negative emotions. As a result our ego - our conscious thinking self - is preoccupied with self-defence - we are ego-embattled. Our rigidly defensive personality can be conceived of as our character armour (to take a concept from the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich). It is a protection against threats from without - the criticism of others - and within - any potentially disorienting emotion, such as fear, anger or grief, or impulse, such as sexual lust, which we keep repressed.

The more embattled the individual, the more important it is to maintain strict control over their own psychology, and this may be paralleled with an impulse to control the social world around them. So I expressed the view in my book that this need might explain oppressive rule, with those who are most insecure about their own worth feeling the need to rise to the top of the hierarchy and impose discipline on the masses. That may be a bit over-simplistic, as competent leadership can also bring people to the top of a hierarchy. Not all leaders are tyrants. It may, however, go some way to explaining the motivation behind tyranny. After all, the life of a tyrant can be a harsh and unpleasant one, and so a fear-based need may explain the surrendering of opportunities for care-free enjoyment.

At the moment we are faced with a different kind of authoritarianism - the decentralised authoritarianism which arises from Critical Social Justice Theory and its mob-enforced political correctness. It is no coincidence that the tertiary institutions where this new dogma was born also popularised the “safe space” and the “trigger warning”. Insecurity is the driving force behind this form of authoritarianism as well.

In some ways this could be seen as a reverse of the phenomena which Critical Social Justice Theory is ostensibly aimed at addressing.

While racism may have originated in tribal conflicts and sexism in friction resulting from the division of labour between nurturers and group protectors, it becomes ever more severe through a process of negative feedback as individuals become more and more insecure. These responses rigidified into armouring. The insecure individual dehumanises, silences and attacks those he has already exploited or mistreated in some way, because they are to him the outer mirror of that quiet voice inside which tells him he is doing wrong. Of course there can be other aspects of the phenomena arising from something like repressed sexuality which causes him to see members of another race as sexually dangerous or to see women’s sexuality as a threat.

The insecurity which arises from Critical Social Justice Theory is different, but it can lead to a similar kind of fear-based oppression.

What we need to be aware of is the inability to tolerate difference, in this case difference of opinion. The secure individual may view another individual’s difference of opinion on some key question as a challenge, but they will not interpret it as a personal attack.

I think what has happened with Critical Social Justice Theory is that it provides a false explanatory structure for the world. A sound explanatory structure will have a healing effect on the traumatic wounds an individual may be carrying. It will make the individual more courageous and less resentful. It will give them a way of understanding any bad treatment they have experience in life as something which doesn’t reflect badly on them as an individual and direct them toward a positive strategy to addressing the injustices they find in the world around them now. It will make them more tolerant of differing opinions and better able to engage in productive discourse with those who hold them.

But Critical Social Justice Theory is a poor explanatory structure which feeds on the wounds of the traumatised individual, encouraging feelings of resentment and directing them against anything, such as reason and evidence, which might undermine that explanatory structure. It encourages confirmation bias.

Just as racists and sexists are easily triggered, and thus have tried to maintain control over society in order to keep their fears or guilts at bay, so those who have a very poor explanatory structure as their only strategy to live with whatever wounds they are carrying - and the anxiety which arises from them - will end up trying to exercise control over any social manifestation of the realities this explanatory structure is in denial of.

I keep coming back to Biblical concepts, even though I’m not a believer in the supernatural.

To me the Kingdom of Heaven is the society which would arise if our insecurity about our own worth were healed. It is the absence of the control impulse. Love is open, honest, spontaneous and generous communication. It is a process which brings us together naturally when we give up trying to control each other. Reason and evidence provide the grounding for this as they are the way in which we discover our collective reality.

Critical Social Justice Theory is an attack on love and reason. Thus I identify it with the Anti-Christ, that which falsely claims to be solving the world’s problems but actually is anti-The Kingdom of God.

We are told, in the Bible, that there will be a final conflict before the arrival of the Kingdom of God, that there will be a Judgement Day and many will be thrown into The Lake of Fire.

If you are caught up in a false explanatory structure which is your strategy for holding all your psychological pain at bay and you are telling yourself that you are the good guy fighting for a better world, it is going to be very painful to be confronted with the truth that you are on the side of destruction and have been deceived. All the pain rushes back in and with no defence. Perhaps that is what is meant by being thrown into The Lake of Fire.

But if that is true, the good news is that it isn’t eternal. The Kingdom of Heaven still lies on the other side of that agony, because love is the sea that refuses no river. All that is needed is to stop fighting against it.

Is Objective Truth Possible?

Surely we are all in denial about something. That's why our social world is so divisive. Partial truths warring against other partial truths. If only some deity would come along and force us to see where we are full of shit. As an unbeliever, perhaps I'm suffering from Apocalypse envy, but sometimes I wish the world could just be blasted with a thunderstorm of incontrovertible truth that would put us all on the same page.

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BOOK REVIEW : The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art by Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon

This isn’t an easy book to review. Parts of it strike a strong chord with me. It deals with the central dilemma of human life : how do we awake from the nightmare of history? But it is easy to get lost in it’s jungle of abstract concepts. “The function of virtual actualization is to take over the de-actualized and reversed elements and forces, released from the event’s actualization, in order to virtualize and actualize them on the plane of immanence.” Does this mean something? Or is it just a gobbledegook word salad? I have to give the author the benefit of the doubt. When I do feel that I know what he is saying it is often something deeply insightful and important. Sometimes you have to have had an experience in order to know what the words someone else uses to point to it are referring to. The subject here is really altered states of consciousness. So I’m willing to believe that the abstract concepts he introduces us to in the book and the framework within which he places them could come to take on a practical value if I were to have more experience of the processes of spiritual death and rebirth he’s talking about. As it is my experience of the collapse of dogmatic beliefs and of becoming through creative activity enable me to identify strongly with what he has to say when he uses more concrete examples.

Part of my problem grappling with the book may be my desire for Ben-Aharon to be talking about things I can believe in. Is he talking about us forming literal ethereal bodies or is this a metaphor for placing emphasis on our ability to experience ourselves as a part of the process of life which extends well beyond our physical body? I have to just take what I can from the book. I may be wrong about that other world not existing, but there’s no sense being gullible. As it is I view the spiritual simply as the realm of relationship as apprehended by human emotions. If I experience relationship with another person in a way which makes me feel something, then that is a spiritual experience. If I get a sense of wonder when I look at the stars at night then that is an experience of relationship to the universe itself. I just don’t see the spiritual as something which has an existence independent of the body.

How can we find hope in our profoundly dysfunctional social world? Our way of life is placing ever greater pressure on our ecological support systems. At a time when personal responsibility and cooperation for the common good are most needed, we are becoming ever more polarised and prone to blaming others. You don’t have to be religious to feel that this is the end of days.

To the degree that I can find hope, I find it in the overlap of big ideas, especially where those ideas seem to be carving out a deeper riverbed into which otherwise divergent streams may flow.

“Rudolph Steiner predicted that the new Christ Event would penetrate and transform all earthly and cosmic matter, life, consciousness and evolution.” So says the blurb on the back of this book. And Ben-Aharon begins his book with a quote from Jesus : “For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other.” Luke 17:24. But this is not a religious book, at least in any conventional sense. It’s references to religious texts are brief and used on the basis of their ability to give a useful way to conceive of something demonstrably real.

The Christian gospels predict a time of great crisis when an apocalyptic event (the revelation of previously hidden knowledge) would, after at first throwing the world into great tribulation, usher in the “Kingdom of Heaven”, i.e. a new way of being for the human race in which the old conflicts and hierarchies would disappear. The mighty would fall, the meek would inherit the earth, and we would all be united by love, all emotional suffering washed away.

I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in the supernatural. But just such a metamorphosis seems both possible and necessary to me. We certainly have tremendous potential which we see in our technological advances, so why would it be impossible that we would find a way to heal the wounds which make us so dysfunctional socially?

The essence of the first chapter ‘The Event in Science’ is that the old reductionist mechanistic approach to science, and especially evolution, has been found insufficient and that a systems view which acknowledges that everything exists as part of a field of complex interrelationships opens up awareness of the development of matter and life as a creative process. I’ve read similar material before (Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which I read recently, is cited with regard to changes in our concept of cognition.) On the one hand, I found this chapter easier to understand, because so much of it is less abstract than what comes later, but, on the other hand, I don’t have enough knowledge of science to assess whether any conclusions it draws are too bold for the supporting evidence.

Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon

The second chapter ‘The Event in History’ presents perhaps the most useful concept in the book, that of “the reversal”. Why, when we took the great ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood and attempted to use them as the basis for revolutionary social transformation, did we end up reversing them into their opposites? In Communism the ideal expressed in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov - “All of us are guilty for everything and before everybody, and I am more than the others.”  - was reversed to become : “All of you are guilty for everything and for everybody and I am more innocent than all the others.” In Naziism the ideals of Goethe - “spiritual-moral sacrifice of the lower ‘ego’ in order to become the higher ‘Self’” was reversed so that the higher self was sacrificed to preserve the lower. In both cases the result was a descent into mass slaughter.

For some it may be controversial that Capitalism as it has played out is seen by Ben-Aharon as the third great reversal. “As masters of the world by destination and capacity, first the British Empire, and now the American, could and should have used their given power and fantastic creative physical abilities, to create affluence for humanity as a whole... George Bataille…says that the problem of the world economy, ruled by the US, is what you do with 'excess' of economic prosperity as such. Production as a goal in itself can only become as social disease, a real social cancer, because it will not annihilate itself through free giving, leading to monstrous accumulations, untold riches and power in the hands of very few, and also to necessary cycles that will destroy this excess.” I’m no expert on economics, but in thinking about this it occurred to me that the supermarket is perhaps a useful example of the pros and cons of free market Capitalism as it currently manifests in the world. The supermarket gives us access to a wide choice of consumer products at relatively inexpensive prices, but a high proportion of the food on offer ends up being thrown out. Apparently, in the U.S. a third of all food produced is thrown away. And yet there are people who don’t have enough to eat. This reversal may not have been as immediately disastrous as Communism and Naziism/Fascism (though bloody wars are sometimes fought to protect market interests and the selling of weapons to dictators is part of that market), but we don’t know how sustainable it is. We need it to work better or we need something which will work better.

Ben-Aharon identifies transhumanism - the idea that we can use technology to make ourselves immortal - as another reversal which is on the horizon. Mystics have always had “intimations of immorality” through the temporary surrender of their ego in the face of the whole of which we are a part. To seek immortality of the ego by uploading yourself onto a computer (even if such a thing were possible) represents the ultimate rejection of the impermanence which is our soul, our participation in an ever-changing universe. As Ben-Aharon points out, this is “infinite egotism” and would have devastating social consequences.

So how do we reverse the reversal? Only through opening to “a new form and level of consciousness and being.” It has to come from autonomous individuals who can perceive potentials and act to bring them about in the social world. This is the opposite of a universalising system. Rather it is the individual who is universalised in the process of creation and actualisation of potential.

This leads to the chapters on philosophy and art. Ben-Aharon sees developments in modern philosophy, specifically postmodernism, as opening the way for this new way of thinking and sees art as the arena in which we explore spiritual transformations of being. This is where things get complicated. It probably doesn’t help that I’m not well-informed about post-modern philosophy.

I have heard Jordan Peterson rail against post-modern philosophy, in a way which made me curious to find out more. Sometimes denial lies behind anger, so one shouldn’t take vociferous condemnation at face value without more closely examining what is being condemned. On the other hand, post-modern philosophy is a big topic to explore and, so far, I haven’t found the time to do more than watch a couple of YouTube videos. But what I find fascinating is that Ben-Aharon sees the tools of post-modern philosophy, from people like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as crucial to the fulfilment of the promises of the Judea-Christian religions. We need techniques to break free of the old dualities and dogmas and open up the possibility to see things in a new light. Perhaps it could be seen, not as a denial that truth exists, as some critics claim, but a strategy for opening the space necessary for the holistic truth to arrive. Like Field of Dreams - “Build it and he will come.” For Ben-Aharon the aim is not to destroy Western civilisation but to arrive at a realisation of  “…the other in me as the primal, unconditional responsibility for the earth and all her children.” A point at which we can reverse the Cain mindset and finally say : “Yes, I will become my brother’s keeper!”

How can we reconcile this view of Foucault, Derrida, et al, as layers of the foundation for the “Kingdom of Heaven” with the social phenomena to which their ideas seem to have given rise - the dogmatic, repressive and judgemental political philosophy we refer to as “political correctness” and the narcissistic egotism which often goes with it. Peterson isn’t wrong in his criticism of this trend, but can we blame it on the philosophers? Isn’t this another case of reversal? What is presented as a path for the individual will become its opposite if we universalise it, if we try to force it onto the world. To try to overthrow the hierarchies of our own mind in order to set free our consciousness and our imagination is not at all the same thing as going to war against the social hierarchies around us and trying to overthrow them.

BOOK REVIEW : Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was an anthropologist amongst many other things. His central project was the application of systems theory or cybernetics (defined by Norbert Weiner in 1948 as “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”) to the fields of anthropology, psychology, history and ecology. This collection of academic papers and public lectures presents his thinking over the period from 1935 until 1971. The title is a description of his aim. Just as ecology is the study of the interrelationship between living things in natural systems in search of an understanding of what allows those systems to persist as healthy functioning wholes, Bateson is operating according to the belief that the problems of society and the functioning of the natural world can only be understood by achieving “an ecology of mind” in which ideas fit together in an integrated system.

Some of the papers in this book make for challenging reading. Bateson is asking us to consider a different framework for viewing the world, to think outside the box. The box being our deeply ingrained misperceptions about the world. Living things, including ourselves, are systems which exist within larger systems. These systems are interconnected wholes within which all parts are in dynamic relationship with each other. Nothing can truly be understood out of context, and no change in the system can occur without change to the whole system. 

I found some of the abstract concepts to which Bateson introduced me a little hard to wrap my head around at times, but it is worth the effort. This book left me wondering why systems theory, particularly as Bateson applies it to learning and communication, is not taught in high school. Surely being able to understand how we think and communicate and the principles which determine our relationships with others are crucial to our ability to successfully manage life. 

But there is a reason why concepts so useful are not widely appreciated. They would represent a revolution, because faulty thinking goes to the very roots of our society. A mass breakout of sanity in the populations of the world would shake every aspect of our culture and economic activity to the very core. It would be the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of an adventure into the unknown.

Part I : Metalogues

“A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject,” Bateson explains. These are conversations between himself and his young daughter which playfully examine important ideas. One which I found particularly thought provoking was “What is an instinct?” in which Bateson points out that concepts like “instinct” and “gravity” are “explanatory principles” - “…an hypothesis tries to explain something but an explanatory principle — like ‘gravity’ or ‘instinct’ — really explains nothing. It’s a sort of conventional agreement between scientists to stop trying to explain things at a certain point.”

Part II : Form and Pattern in Anthropology

Bateson did research on indigenous cultures in New Guinea and Bali, the latter work in collaboration with his wife Margaret Mead. From these studies he identified the phenomena of “schismogenesis” in contact between different cultures, a phenomena which also applies to relationships between individuals. 

This is a kind of negative feedback loop in which the behaviour of one individual or group toward another elicits the kind of response from the second which elicits more of the same from the first. Schismogenesis can take a symmetrical form - in which each individual or group has similar aims and are competing with each other - or a complimentary form in which there is a relationship of difference between the two, such as dominance and submission or exhibitionism and spectatorship. 

A simple example is an arms race. One country builds some nuclear weapons, so another country builds some so there is a deterrent against the first country using theirs against them. The first country views this as threatening, so they build more of their own, and so on. The negative feedback leads to a world endangered by a plethora of nuclear weapons. 

It is easy to see how relevant an understanding of these kinds of processes is. Marriage breakdown is no doubt generally the result of some form of schismogenesis. Little irritating behaviours which illicit irritating behaviours from the other party which perpetuate the phenomena, gradually escalating until the relationship becomes untenable. 

Or consider relationships between subcultures within our society. The prejudices of one group against another group can inspire retaliatory behaviour which reinforces the prejudice, etc., etc. One need only look at the behaviour of people of opposing political beliefs on the internet to see how this plays out.

Part III : Form and Pathology in Relationship

What particularly attracted me to reading Bateson was his double bind theory of schizophrenia. 

I don’t suffer from this condition myself, but I have experienced a bipolar psychotic breakdown as a result of finding myself in a double bind. A double bind is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. I was in a position where I put all of my faith in someone who insisted on the importance of honesty. Honesty is a strong conscientious principle for me, so I agreed with this. But when I expressed honest criticism of this individual, I was told I was “deluded”. When I pretended to be sorry for what I said, i.e. I lied, I was warmly rewarded. It was important to me to be honest and I wanted to please the person who asked me to be honest, but I had to lie to please him. As a result of this relationship I ended up becoming delusional, being locked up in a mental hospital and becoming so depressed I needed shock therapy. 

So I can relate to Bateson’s accounts of people who end up suffering schizophrenia as a result of demands made of them by a parent giving mixed messages. A mother feels anxious about affectionate contact with the child and backs away from him when he shows natural affection. Unable to face such feelings in herself, she compensates with overt declarations of love. The child doesn’t know what to base his behaviour on - the withdrawal or the pretence of warm feelings. This is a very simplistic description of a situation Bateson analyses in great detail. 

There is a strong connection between what he has to say here and both R. D. Laing’s work on psychosis and the family and Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about the effect that the neuroses of adults have on children. 

Bateson also gives a fascinating explanation for the cryptic verbal communication often exhibited during schizophrenic psychosis. 

Schizophrenia has a genetic basis, and Bateson gives consideration to the implications of this for identifying a predisposition for the “covert” schizophrenia betrayed by the parent and the “overt” schizophrenia which arises in their child.

Part IV : Biology and Evolution

Bateson scolds biologists and boards of education for “empty-headedness” in their battle with Creationists, pointing out that it is important for students to know about the evolution of understanding of evolution in order to properly recognise the problem of explanation it is trying to solve, and there is something to be appreciated in the way that the Book of Genesis framed the question : “Where does order come from?”

“In modern terms, we may say that this is the problem implicit in the Second Law of Thermodynamics: If random events lead to things getting mixed up, by what nonrandom events did things come to be sorted? And what is a ‘random’ event”. 

He also explores the implications of somatic change for evolutionary theory. Somatic change is adaption to an environment. If people go to live at a high altitude, at first they pant to deal with the thin air, but over time their lung capacity increases and breathing becomes easier. 

Can this kind of adaptation end up as a genetic change? 

Lamarck’s theory involving inheritance of acquired characteristics was discarded, but Bateson hypothesises that a random mutation may come after somatic change which gives the organism survival advantage by allowing what had been achieved by greater effort to be achieved without that effort. 

In order to survive an organism’s body has to be flexible to change, so if giraffes’ necks get gradually longer due to beneficial mutations which have survival advantage, their hearts will also have to be pumping more blood. This change in the demands on the heart is a somatic change. But at a later stage another random mutation may increase the size of giraffe hearts, this mutation having survival advantage because it reduces the effort needed and makes the giraffe more flexible to meet other challenges. In this way inheritance of acquired characteristics might appear to occur, even though it is not what is really happening.

In discussing dolphin language, Bateson points out that animal communication is all about relationship. In developing our own language, we humans acquired the ability to talk about specific things, and so our communication with each other about relationship is mostly conveyed by subtext and body language. Dolphins don’t have our body language repertoire, since they don’t have facial expressions or hands, so he surmises that dolphin language is a very complex, sophisticated language of relationship.

PART V : Epistemology and Ecology

Cybernetic explanation, Bateson tells us, is focused not on explaining why something is, but why something else isn’t. Natural selection is a perfect example. It explains the process of change in species by looking at how other outcomes were eliminated as unfit. 

Everything is looked at as potential information. There is redundancy in information to the extent that a message can be conveyed without some of that information being present. For instance if I type “sh*t”, the missing letter doesn’t stop you from knowing what I mean. Information can provide the form of something, redundancy within that form and the restraint that makes it that form and not another. All else “is noise, the only possible source of new patterns.”

How is it that we are an expression of a self-regulating balanced ecological system, and yet we are psychologically out-of-balance and bringers of chaos to that larger system? Bateson re-examines the Adam and Eve myth to see if we can learn something about how the conscious purpose for which we have such an advanced capacity compared to other animals has set us against nature — our own deeper nature and nature as a whole — and how it produces a projection by which we blame either ourselves or the system - “I have sinned” or “God is vengeful.” 

To address this dilemma we need to bring the unconscious into consciousness. Bateson sees art as particularly important in this process. He touches on the use of psychedelics, but with some scepticism. “What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.”

He points out a great error in Darwin’s account of evolution, and that was to present the individuals or their family lines or the subspecies as the units of survival. The unit should actually be thought of as individual plus environment or family line plus environment etc., because those who destroy their environment end up destroying themselves. 

Similarly we can’t understand mind if we see it as contained simply in the brain of the individual. The concept of “mind” has to be flexible according to what we wish to explain. It is the realm of ideas. An idea is “a difference which makes a difference.” The ideas we perceive through our senses are parts of the whole which is our mind at that moment. 

But Bateson expresses the view that, just as there is a global ecosystem of which all subsystems and all species and all individuals are a part, so there is a larger Mind of which all of our minds are a part. “This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.”

Part VI : Crisis in the Ecology of Mind

What are the harmful ideas which dominate our culture?

“(a) It’s us against the environment.

 (b) It’s us against other men.

 (c) It’s the individual (or the individual company, or the individual nation) that matters.

 (d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

 (e) We live within an infinitely expanding “frontier.”

 (f) Economic determinism is common sense.

 (g) Technology will do it for us.”

We need to think in terms of flexibility, Bateson insists. New technologies can allow us to support increases in population, but the more we push the limits of the system and the more we depend on such technologies, the less flexibility we have. The same thing applies for individuals, our ability to survive and to thrive depends on our flexibility, the ease with which we can change our thinking and our behaviour in the light of changing realities.

Steps to An Ecology of Mind is a book overflowing with profound thinking about what really matters. I only wish it were less relevant today than it was when it was first published.

BOOK REVIEW : Ethics by Benedict de Spinoza

I didn’t used to know what I was. If I felt that the term “God” could be applied to something real, but didn’t believe in the supernatural, what was I? Not really an atheist or agnostic. But also not a religious believer. Someone suggested the label “pantheist” and when I read the definition it certainly seemed to fit. Later I read that one of the key exponents of pantheism was the Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77). When I read his Wikipedia page I found that his worldview sounded very like my own. Perhaps most importantly, he was a determinist. He didn’t believe in the existence of free will.

The way I put the argument against free will myself is to say that everything is linked by chains of cause and effect which feed back on each other in unthinkably complex ways. Nevertheless, if it were possible to know everything about the past, the future could be predicted. This isn’t possible because it is impossible to know everything about the past. As far as each of us as individuals are concerned, our output, i.e. our behaviour, is determined by our input, i.e. all of the influences which come from outside of us and react with or against each other within us. For some reason, this issue has been very important to me ever since my adolescence when I would argue the point with my mother, who insisted that I was the “captain of my soul”.

Somehow, in my teens I also heard a version of the story of Buridan’s ass (which Spinoza refers to in Book 2 of Ethics). As expressed by French philosopher Jean Buridan, and responded to by Spinoza, it deals with a donkey who is equally hungry and thirsty and positioned equally far from a bale of hay and a bucket of water. In the version I heard he was simply hungry and positioned equally far between two bales of hay. It is a paradox meant to illustrate that determinism is absurd, because, if we simply follow the path of least resistance or the strongest impulse, then, if there is nothing to choose between two courses of action we will be able to chose neither and thus will be paralysed into fatal inaction. The donkey dies of thirst or starvation. I know that I knew this story, because I remember one lunch time at high school screwing up my lunch wrapper and finding myself approximately equidistant between two rubbish bins. “I’m like that donkey,” I said, though I was ultimately able to chose. I was a very strange kid.

Copyright: egal / 123RF Stock Photo

Spinoza sets out to use logic to learn about God, the workings of the mind, the nature of the affects - our emotions and desires, the nature of our bondage to these affects, and how we can liberate ourselves and find blessedness through the intellectual love of God.

I’m not sure how well the logic holds up. Spinoza has a unique way of defining things, for instance, to him, perfection and reality are synonymous. I might tend to think of perfection as an imaginary ideal which cannot be met in reality. But the best thing is to go with him and see where it leads. The overall vision is inspired, and perhaps the formal structure of axioms and propositions along with the unconventional use of terms, can best be conceived less as building blocks for that vision as a technique for breaking the chains of our preconceptions.

Spinoza sticks with the tradition of referring to God as “he” even though it is clear that he is not talking about something with a human personality. For him God and Nature are synonymous. This is “that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.” Thus God is eternal, by definition not having the option of not existing. This may seem weird, perhaps a verbal trick. God is eternal because that is how I’ve defined him. But when I was at school they taught us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So in energy we already accept the existence of something whose definition doesn’t allow for it to cease to exist. We will cease to exist. All matter will cease to exist. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an essence of which the things which cease to exist are made which is eternal. Spinoza likes to use the concept of the triangle as something unchangeable. God is all powerful. He can do everything which can be done. But he can’t make a triangle whose angles don’t add up to two right angles. Perhaps we could conceive of the concept of the triangle as something eternal. Everything which can be aware of the nature of a triangle might cease to exist. All actual physical triangles might cease to exist. But what a triangle is is unchanging and thus eternal.

Some would question the point of identifying God and Nature. If God is not conceived as a personality who created the universe from the outside, and stands in judgement of us, why not simply say there is simply nature and no God? The reason, I think, is that Spinoza’s vision is very much a spiritual one, i.e. one which deals with the realm of immaterial connection. God is a “substance” through which all things are connected, and, to the extent that they are not disturbed by our affects, our thoughts are God’s thoughts. Thus it is that reason can allow us to connect with the eternal and enter into a state of blessedness from which arises naturally the virtuous behaviour which makes loving community possible. We didn’t invent reason. It is an expression of our nature, which each individual may apply to their own situation. The ability to find meaning and coherence is born in us, and is just another manifestation of the meaning and coherence which makes us possible - God within and without.

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For Spinoza, our highest virtue lies in self-preservation and the ability to maximise our capacity for action in the world. This might, at first, seem a selfish philosophy. But, in his vision, the healthily functioning individual finds joy in the joy of others, and thus is motivated to assist them to realise themselves in the same way. If we don’t assume the responsibility to look after our own welfare first, we will be of little use to others. It’s like that sign they have in planes which tells you to put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help anyone else.

What holds us back is our own affects, our reactive emotions and desires. It seems fairly obvious that the best basis from which to solve the problems we find ourselves in is reason. If we acquire knowledge, draw conclusions and base our actions on those conclusions, we are liable to arrive at better results than if we simply act directly on our immediate emotional response to the situation. Of course, there are times when there is no time for thought, such as when confronted with a sudden danger. But, even then, to the degree that we have previously exercised our reason on the possibility that such a thing might happen, we may respond more effectively. One of Spinoza’s more unusual definitions is that he classifies all negative emotions as sadness. Everything reduces to sadness or joy. We experience joy as our power of action is increased through reason. Negative emotions, which drain us of our energy to act or distract us from reason, are sadness, and sadness is evil, precisely because it acts against our competence and our reason. This is an unusual way of looking at things, but, I think, a useful one. What stands in the way of our self-realisation? And what can we do about it?

The key to liberation from enslavement to the affects is to understand what they are and how they function. If I become angry in response to something someone has done, I might just punch them in the nose. That would be to be a slave to my affects. Or I might recognise with my reason that I am angry and that acting directly on that anger will not produce the best result for me in the longer term. The more we learn to stand outside our affects and recognise them for what they are, the less powerful they are.

Something else which aids in this is the concept of determinism. It is a great reliever of suffering and stress. When tragedy befalls us, much of the emotional turmoil revolves around “what if?” questions. What if I’d stayed home that day? What if I’d behaved differently? What if I’d been more careful? But if we accept that whatever happens was always bound to happen, we can accept it more easily and concentrate on repairing the damage. And if we believe in free will, then when someone does something destructive towards us we may tend to be overwhelmed by anger, but if we recognise that they were expressing their current nature over which they had no choice, then we can more easily respond to the situation in a practical way targeted more precisely toward arriving at the best possible outcome. (It is important to recognise that determinism doesn’t mean that a person who behaves destructively can’t change their behaviour, only that their behaviour couldn’t have been otherwise at the time.)

Just because Spinoza was a champion of reason, and a critic of superstition, doesn’t mean that his philosophy is necessarily antagonistic to the moral principles expressed by the great religions. For instance, by his own reasoning, he arrived at a principle which is central to Christianity. “IIIP43 Hate is increased by being returned, but can be destroyed by love.”

AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS - AUGUST 22: City sculpture from bronze of Spinoza on August 22, 2015 in Amsterdam Copyright: frugo / 123RF Stock Photo

The Meaning of Life is Integration

Meaning arises through context and relationship.

The letter “O” doesn’t necessarily mean anything on its own, but when it is placed with three other letters to form the word LOVE meaning arises from the relationship between the letters.

If we disintegrate the word, it loses its meaning.

Thus integration is the path to meaning.

If we anthropomorphised the letters we would say they are cooperating to produce the meaning. So cooperation is the path to meaning.

We discover the meaning of data by integrating it into a coherent framework.

We integrate data through association. We make a distinction between same and different and assess the qualities of that which differs. We look for patterns in the data and seek to draw conclusions by looking for elements of sameness in the larger patterns. By seeing ways in which things are the same, we establish our categories.

The way that we associate data can be affected by the story by which we understand ourselves and guide our actions. We can, consciously or unconsciously be asking ourselves the question : “How does this data fit in to what I already 'know'?” or “How can this data be useful to me?” This tendency will interfere with our ability to associate the data, because we will tend to filter out details which would challenge our current theory or we will ignore what seems useless.

Nature’s thrust is toward the formation of living systems which function as integrated wholes. Her progress can be measured in terms of successful integration. Our body is a success because it has the capacity to operate as a successful harmonious system for as long as a hundred years. It is on this success that the formation of a larger whole, that of human society, rests.

Where there is a flaw in the integration of a natural system, conflict tends to manifest, and there is a fixation on that flaw. Sociality is the route to a larger whole for animal species. Competition for food and/or mating opportunities is generally the flaw, or impasse or “unfinished business”, in this process. Achieving the next stage of organisation means finding a way to integrate food sharing and mating into the cooperative functioning of the group, so that they cease to be a fixation which warps the healthy life of the group and leads to confllct.

The same principle can be applied to political theories and theories of human psychology. They are attempts to achieve a functioning whole conceptually that will improve the functioning of the individual and the social group. Once again, it is at the point of their flaws that fixation and conflict occurs.

You could say there is a survival of the fittest between theories, but the one which survives is not the one whose advocates fight the hardest (the social Darwinist model) but the one which is best adapted, the one which most accurately models reality. 

If we are fighting to have our theory acknowledged then it is not complete. The conflict that it engenders in others is the evidence that it is flawed, that there is something we have as yet failed to integrate into it. When we have arrived at something that goes past theory and can genuinely be called understanding we will know because it is the sea that refuses no river. We will know because it makes us whole - ending our internal conflicts - and spreads its calming and revivifying light throughout all humanity.

Laying Ghosts : Jordan Peterson, Jeremy Griffith and the Denial of Truth

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) - What's he all about? Fucked if I know.

After discussing the reactions of Jordan Peterson and Jeremy Griffith to post-modernism, especially Jacques Derrida and de-constructionism, in a recent Facebook post I went looking for more information on the topic and found this account of Derrida’s approach which tends to back up Griffith’s contention that it is all about “proving” that there is such thing as truth. Of course, if there is no such thing as truth, you can’t prove that there is no such thing as truth. If it is an accurate description of the essence of the approach then I’m still a bit mystified as to how it became so popular. Playing games with words, based around unsupported and illogical contentions, to undermine the usefulness of actually saying anything, doesn’t strike me as something which would lead people to think : “Ah, this is a powerful tool we can use to achieve what we want to achieve.”

Griffith contends that this popularity is due to a need to deny that there is such a thing as truth as a desperate way to evade truths about ourselves which we can’t face. But, on a personal level, he is faced with the fact that most people are not interested in or accepting of his interpretation of them. What he sees as the truth is not what they wish to acknowledge as the truth. If what he expresses is the truth, then he may have a point, but the other interpretation is that it is his biased vision of truth and the indifference and rejection are due to its flaws, especially if those flaws are experienced by other’s as unfounded criticism within the body of what purports to be a defence for them. Instead of going back to the drawing board, there can be a tendency to shout : “You can’t handle the truth!”

I don’t know anyone who lives their life as if there were no such thing as truth or meaning. They may not believe in ultimate truth or ultimate meaning, but they have to base their actions in the world upon the assumption that some things are true and some things are not. If it is neither true nor false that it is raining, how do we know whether to carry an umbrella?

What I can see with Derrida is that he was concerned with texts. The question of truth in a text is not the same as the question of truth in the wider physical world. To what degree is the text trustworthy? But even here nobody I know lives as if there is no truth contained in a text. If the TV guide says that The Simpsons is on at 7.00 PM, that’s when we turn on the television and most of the time it turns out to have been true.

Texts range from car manuals which we tend to trust to fiction which everyone agrees is not literally true (though it may embody universal truths in symbolic form). When it comes to accounts of events in the news media or history texts we have reason to acknowledge that they can never embody objective truth. There is what we could call The Rashomon Phenomena. In Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film we see the same event replayed from the point of view of each of the participants. Each time we see a different story, because the way each of us relates an event is shaped by how it fits into our larger narrative, by our perception of who we are and how the event impacted us.

Then we have the area of beliefs. Beliefs are provisional, even the long standing beliefs expressed in cultural traditions such as religion. They are narratives which we use to bring coherence to our experience, but there is always the possibility of new experience and new data requiring us to update our beliefs.

Post-modernism, at least as it is perceived by its critics, seems to represent a kind of radical skepticism. Not a denial that the TV Guide is useful for finding out when The Simpsons is on, but a resistance to accepting belief systems and accounts of events.

If all belief systems and all accounts of events are viewed as personal bias, there is no reason not to assert that one’s own is as good as anyone else’s. This could lead to complacency about testing one’s own assumptions against contrary evidence which is how we arrive at improved ways of managing our relationship with others and with life itself. And it could lead to the idea that some belief systems, some narratives, are “privileged” because they are those held by members of society who hold more power in an unfair system. This is not an entirely invalid observation, for instance, in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church had the power to crush heresy through violence rather than allow their own worldview to be challenged by critical discourse. And, today, those who have a lot of money to invest in the media can promote ideas which might not survive as well on a level playing field.

Peterson puts forward the pragmatic approach to truth. Truth is what works. if you believe something to be truth, you base your decisions on that belief and if it helps you to more successfully manage the challenges which face you, then that is the only evidence on which we can decide what is true and what is not. This applies to science, too. Our scientific theories are tested by whether they work to predict phenomena and whether, when we make decisions based upon them, the results stand up.

So how do we find some common ground. Perhaps when we are in conflict with someone we can decide not to attempt to force our beliefs upon them, no matter how well supported by evidence they may be, but rather to see if we can find some things we can agree upon. 

My experience of psychosis leads me to believe that, when our beliefs do diverge from that which is supported by direct evidence and from social norms (to the extent that that term is meaningful), they do so for a reason, because there is something we have not been able to integrate. The “normal” ways of understanding one’s place in life are not working, so the mind experiments in ways that may be very erratic, looking for a new way - a new truth which works. To simply say “That’s madness!” and expect the individual to conform, doesn’t work, because they need to go forward, not back.

The way forward is through dialogue, but in this we may need to move beyond the oppositional approach. Those of us who have spent a great deal of time and effort developing the framework with which we interpret the world - and this is true of Peterson and Griffith - will tend to view ourselves as crusaders for our truth. But what is most effective with those who view things differently from ourselves is to draw them out and let them discover for themselves the limitations of their conceptual structure. I’m sure that Peterson is good at this, because he has been a very effective therapist, but media events don’t allow time for this kind of approach.

This is where improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone’s techniques as outlined in his book Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre seem so useful to me. They encourage us to look less at the content of our discourse than at how we are relating to and communicating with the other party. Are we listening to them and responding spontaneously to what they say or are we “blocking” them by negating anything which runs counter to the path we have decided beforehand to follow?

I have a worldview which I express in my book How to Be Free. Unlike Peterson and Griffith, I haven’t put much time or effort into developing it. It is simple and, although I arrived at it through much introspection, I’m not a researcher or academic. I don’t feel motivated to “go to battle” for that worldview. I put it out into the world with a sense of Peterson’s pragmatism. If it is true, it will work. If it gives me insight into what Griffith calls “the human condition” then it will help me to engage with people in meaningful dialogue about the experience of being human in a way from which both of us will benefit, without me needing to feel pressure to persuade them of anything.

Peterson talks about the problem of ideological possession. I’ve experienced it. There are times when I’ve absorbed ideas, not been able to integrate them, and found myself, when in an argument with someone of the opposing persuasion, spewing them out as if they had a life of their own and I was not in control. But what supports this happening is an encounter with another entrenched and biased worldview. Peterson’s worldview may be far more nuanced and supported by study of psychological research than that of many who react negatively to him, but it is necessarily partial. 

The ideologies which may possess us are like ghosts. In stories, the ghost represents unfinished business, an entity which cannot be integrated into the conventional order because some truth has not been properly recognised.

So if we find ourselves in conflict with the ideologically possessed it is a copout to blame the ideology which possesses them, as the way to lay the ghost is to look for what that possession tells us about what is missing from our own worldview.

Jesus told us to love our enemies. For those of us who are trying to help spread ameliorating understanding in the world it is worth asking ourselves whether we feel we have enemies or whether we think only in terms of people we have not yet achieved the ability to help. Do we assume the responsibility for our own success or failure or do we tend to externalise that responsibility.

Is Reality Real? - From Plato's Cave to The Matrix

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A philosopher walks into a cinema that is showing a very old soft porn movie.

“This is not reality!” he shouts, pointing at the screen.

Then he casts his fiery glance around the audience with their eyes fixed on the screen.

“You’re just sitting in the dark watching the shadows of dead people pretending to fuck,” he points out.

He starts trying to tell them about the world outside the cinema and what sunshine is like.

The audience members tell him to shut up so they can hear the movie.

He grabs one of them and tries to drag him out of the cinema. The patron puts up a hell of a fight.

Eventually the usher arrives and throws the philosopher out into the street.

This is the essence of Plato’s famous cave analogy from his dialogue The Republic. Since they didn’t have cinemas in 380 BC when Plato was writing he had to resort to talking about people being tied down in a cave while watching the shadows cast on a wall by clay figures being moved back and forth in front of a fire.

What did Plato mean by saying that what we think of as reality is not reality?

Plato believed in a world of ideal forms of which the details of the world we can perceive with our senses are a poor copy. Numbers and geometrical shapes are examples of ideal forms. And he also believed in an ethical ideal which he referred to as the Form of the Good.

So the cave analogy seems to be saying that what we take to be real blinds us to what is ideal.

We could see the cave analogy as a bit of a confidence trick. If the ideal forms exist only in the imagination, maybe we are really outside the cinema living in the real world and he is trying to persuade us to go into the cinema to watch a movie called Ideal Forms (not a bad title for a soft porn flick.)

Sometimes a symbol is so powerful that it transcends the ideology of the person who gives expression to it. I think this is true of the cave analogy.

Plato’s cave helped to inspire the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix. Here it turns out that humans are living in a simulated reality while actually being used as bioenergy batteries by parasitic machines. The hero Neo is given an choice to swallow a red pill which will enable him to see reality or a blue one which will allow him to go back to the illusory world.

Laurence Fishburne from The Matrix

This has provided a powerful metaphor to conspiracy theorists, libertarians, anarchists, and other critics of “the dominant paradigm.” The world is full of red pill pushers.

Is there a sense in which the world we take to be real is not real? Is there a reason such ideas resonate with us?

I think it may be helpful to turn Plato on his head. What keeps us from seeing reality is that we are blinded by abstract forms.

Here is an example. I love the sight of a beautiful woman. Am I really seeing the woman? She is a living organism performing a vast variety of functions. She is an ecosystem within which live a multitude of other living things. She is a conscious entity alive with emotions, memories, thoughts and desires. She was once an egg and a sperm. One day she will be dust. Her beauty blinds me to much of this. Only as I become desensitised to it somewhat do I see more. What am I seeing when I see her beauty? What we call beautiful in a woman is generally that which gives a youthful appearance. When we were young we were free of the bitterness or egotism which blocks love. So beauty is a symbol for love. So I’m blinded to the reality by an idea - the idea of love.

All the time we project and we filter. The world we see around us is a world distorted by our needs. We will see those things which serve to boost our insecure ego and we will block out those which might threaten it.

This is particularly true if we are believers in a dogma. We maintain our belief by concentrating on that which appears to support it and evading that which contradicts it. This is known as confirmation bias.

So how can we leave the cinema and live in the real world?

We need to have a secure ego. The ego is the conscious thinking self. We put down “ego” because our ego is usually insecure and thus embattled and thus a barrier to love and truth. But our conscious thinking self can become secure enough to go wide-eyed and naked in the world.

If we don’t become secure then we may take someone’s red pill only to find that they have led us from one Matrix into another. We may be woken up to how we have been a slave of capitalism only to find ourselves a slave of socialism. We are in the cinema because it makes us feel secure. Unless we learn to provide our own security, the best we will be able to do is to go from a cinema showing one kind of a movie to one showing another.

We cultivate our own security of ego by practicing unconditional self-acceptance. Our insecurity comes from being at war with our self, feeling we need to try to control our thoughts or our emotions. We don’t need to think the right thoughts or feel the right feelings. All of us are a mess of contradictions, but when we allow ourselves to be such without judgement, a deeper and truer integrity gradually forms.

The sunshine which lights the world outside the cinema is love. Love is really being with others, not just with the forms our embattled ego needed to project onto them.

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