Has the World Gone Mad? : A Comparison With My Own Experience of Insanity

Photo by grechka

How often do we ask ourselves : “Has the world gone mad?”

I wonder if there is something to be learned about some forms of social behaviour that we see in the world around us from my personal experience of mental breakdown.

First an irreconcilable conflict became apparent within the conceptual framework through which I was living my life. Order broke down.

Much that had been repressed by that, now shattered, conceptual framework, came to the surface.

Desperate for escape, my mind built utopian dreams out of the wreckage. They had to be true, because the alternative was unthinkable. But they never could persist, because they were mad fantasies that had no basis in the ground of real life.

As the fantasies evaporated I was left in the barren desert of despair. No wonder I had clung so desperately to the illusions. Here I was confronted with personal responsibility in its most extreme form. What if all the problems of the world were somehow my fault? This was a contrary form of madness, but perhaps a doorway to sanity.

Perhaps this terrible doorway is there within all of us. The most terrible place we never want to go.

Human society is a system playing itself out - action and reaction, in an intricately woven web. Information, knowledge, wisdom.. can bring some order to the system by bringing commonalities to the thought processes of individuals or communities and integrating them with practical realities they face, allowing their problem-solving actions to bear fruit. Lies, on the other hand, whether we tell them to ourselves or to each other, sow disorder in the system, leading to conflict and, very often, violence.

Chaos theory tells us that the most infinitesimal changes in a system will, over a long enough time period, change the entire system. So change in any of us, could be the change which determines the difference between triumph and disaster for the human race as a whole. That terrible doorway is that realisation.

That doesn’t mean we know what to do. And self-consciousness about our own actions tends to impede our effectiveness at even helping ourselves. Ultimately, we have to somehow open up and surrender to some kind of intuitive process. That is what lies on the other side of the terrible doorway - the awareness that we can’t force improvement in the social system, but that we can be a conduit for something helpful to flow into that system and help to manifest the orderliness which will benefit all.

When we see our fellows caught up in mad frantic utopian dreams or mob behaviour or judgement of others, perhaps we can see behind their behaviour a fear of that desert of despair and that terrible doorway that lies there. But that realm is only terrible if we go there alone, unguided and without hope.

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.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 15

His Psychosis

Presumably being well-nurtured would make it easier for values of cooperativeness to be imprinted on the blank slate of a child’s uncritical acceptance, because frustration would not have yet built up in such a way as to lead to rebelliousness against this programming.

But eventually life does provide frustrations to the growing individual. If Griffith tried to hang on to his “good innocent little boy” persona, then the source of frustration would be two-fold - that others didn’t behave according to these principles, and that his own frustrations, including anger at others for not behaving cooperatively, threatened to undermine his own ability to be cooperative himself.

These kinds of insecurities would require the adoption of a form of character armour, so the “good innocent little boy” became his increasingly rigid embattled perception of himself. It was how he would prove himself.

This persona needed to be maintained by self-nurturing - remaining close to nature, for instance. If it were really the genetic basis of the human individual, as he would come to believe, it would be far less fragile than that. You might block out your genetic orientation mentally, but it would be much stronger, and any time the mind lost its strength it would return to that orientation.

When our psyche becomes split - when we hang onto one aspect of ourselves in such a way that it requires us to repress all that is contrary to that aspect, e.g. cling to cooperativeness by repressing feelings of anger, those contrary feelings will only tend to build up more strongly in the subconscious.

So “good little innocent boy” Griffith gradually became more troubled by the aggressive and uncooperative behaviour of those around him, because their aggressiveness and lack of cooperation resonated with his own repressed aggressive feelings and resentment towards his cooperativeness-demanding character armour.

And the “good little innocent boy” isn’t sexual, so Griffith became increasingly troubled by other people’s sexual behaviour and felt the need to repress his own sexual feelings in order to hang onto that persona. Thus he came to view sex as essentially an “attack on innocence”, because other people’s sexual behaviour resonated with his repressed sexual desires which threatened to undermine his “good little innocent boy” persona.

Eventually, if he were to live in the world, and not hide himself away in a monastery somewhere, he had to seek some kind of reconciliation between the extreme idealism of his character armour and the contrary tendencies which he saw all around him and felt within him.

He built a theory, but it was a biased theory intended to normalise his position. He took his own position as the normal inborn condition of all humans and tried to work out why everyone else had diverged from that.

His battle to transcend selfish tendencies is evident throughout his theory. “Love-indoctrination” overcame the horribly competitive nature of other animals. What is “indoctrination” but learned alienation? In just such a way, the “good little innocent boy” persona Griffith has nurtured in himself alienates him from acknowledging the selfish impulses which lie beneath it.

Of course going down this path has made Griffith angry, egocentric and alienated, so when he looks into the mirror of the world he sees his own face staring back at him. And he rails against what he terms “pseudo-idealism” because his own idealism is “pseudo”, i.e a cultivated form of egotism. He also identifies now strongly with the right wing, because their embattled state, in a world in which their selfishness is causing great suffering and endangering the planet, resonates with his own.

In his first book Free : The End of the Human Condition, 1988, Griffith predicted, about its reception : “We will suspect it to be an expression of some form of disguised psychosis and will see its authority, its sense of conviction, as offensive arrogance.” Now we can see that that is what it was. The truth does carry its own authority, but that authority is intrinsic and does not need to be accompanied by big claims and promises.

The “Human Condition” Personified

Griffith says we set out seeking understanding of the human condition. In adolescence we resign ourselves to the fact that we are not going to achieve it. We adopt a false front and become angry, egocentric, selfish and alienated. Alienated in that we block out and angrily deny any truth which criticises us.

Griffith set off to find understanding of the human condition. He was unable to, because to do so he would have had to be able to confront the fact that the social phenomenon of idealism, which has no basis in our genes, was at the heart of the problem. He would have had to confront the fact that the idealism expressed by those he admired and the idealism he had been in the habit of expressing, was the source of all the manifestations of brutality and cruelty which troubled him. This is the central insight of any holistic systems view of the problem of good and evil, as Oscar Wilde acknowledged when he said : “It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.”

Trying to reconcile his “extreme idealism” with “reality” he came up with an evasive explanation for the human condition, one which tried to reconcile the two by providing an appeasing excuse for the “non-ideal”, a “defence for humanity”.

This theory became central to his character armour. In his state of increasing insecurity about his own worth it became his way to prove himself. He became increasingly aggressive and egotistical about the way that he tried to push it on the world. And became more and more alienated, placing more and more effort into collecting bits of quotes from famous thinkers to reinforce the blocks that prevented him from truthful thinking.

All of this is evident in his projections. It is humanity which suffers from a “psychosis”. It is humanity which is “evasive”. He thinks that simply thinking about how the conscious mind works would be enough to quickly lead us to think : “‘Well, if I’m so cleverly insightful why can’t I manage my life in a way that is not so mean and indifferent to others; indeed, why, if I am such a brilliantly intelligent person, am I such a destructively selfish, angry, egocentric, competitive and aggressive monster?’” But is it not possible that this is what his subconscious mind is saying about himself? “What if my theory is wrong? What if my behaviour in support of that false theory has, in truth, been destructively, selfishly, angrily, egocentrically, competitive, aggressive and monstrous behaviour”?

He says that our attitude to the truth is : “‘I don’t believe the criticism is deserved, and in any case it’s too unbearable to accept, so I will never tolerate any insinuation that I am a bad person.’” But hasn’t that been his embattled response to criticism of his work or behaviour?

Griffith is not a bad person. He lacks insight into his own madness. The road to his Hell has been paved with good intensions.

An holistic systems view of the universe sees that everything unfolds in the only way that it can. Thus any judgement of individuals as “good” or “evil” is inappropriate. Griffith has done something which had to be done. Just as Jesus is reputed to have taken the sins of the world onto himself, Griffith has absorbed all of the destructive poison of idealism into himself, so that, by his downfall, he can forever end humanity’s contamination by that poison. In William Blake’s philosophy Satan was the Accuser (the accuser of sin), i.e. idealism. So Griffith, in this metaphorical sense, is possessed by “Satan”. And his battle to have his ideas accepted is “Satan’s” last stand.

But, as I say, nobody is evil. Evil resides in destructive ideas which “possess” us. In time, Griffith’s “demons” will be cast out, both to his relief and the relief of us all.

We can see that the mythological figure Satan represents idealism, i.e. the accusation of sin. “He” is known as “the father of lies”, and it is because of idealism (that original distinction between “good” and “evil”) that we first began lying. When the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis says that we became ashamed of our nakedness and began wearing clothes, I think this a metaphorical way of saying that we became dishonest, we began telling lies as a way of trying to protect ourselves from the criticism which idealism brought with it. Nakedness is a powerful symbol for honesty. Dishonesty to protect ourselves from criticism was the first kind of character armour. And today, still, what keeps us in our various “closets” is the fear that aspects of our thinking, emotions or behaviour will be exposed to criticism. (Of course idealism would eventually cause us to become afraid of our erotic feelings and part of the process of repression that led to would be the literal wearing of clothes because idealism’s intolerance of our natural bodies and natural sexuality eventually made us ashamed of them.)

We can see in religions that they contain intertwining threads of the “Satanic” (the accusation of sin) and the “Godly” (love and forgiveness). This has been religions great flaw, the reason that it has failed to heal or liberate humanity. The disease has generally been a part of what was offered as a cure.

Read Part 16

Chimpanzees, Typewriters and the Inevitability of Paradise

We are an expression of an unpredictably creative deterministic system which some of us refer to as “the universe" and others refer to as “God".

A system has certain characteristics which are broadly predictable. It is for this reason that we are able to see laws behind natural phenomena and, to some extent, make accurate predictions based on those laws. But the direction of creation is towards greater levels of complexity. This takes place through a process known as “emergence" and this is not predictable the first time that it happens. Something truly new is coming into existence and yet it is still a product of the functioning of an inevitable system. There is no such thing as randomness or chance in a connected universe.

To get an idea of how higher levels of complexity can arise from simple deterministic principles it is worth looking at the example of fractals. These are patterns generated by simple mathematical formulae. When mapped out with computer graphics they reveal wildly complex patterns in which the overall shape is re-iterated on each level :

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On an ever spinning reel

The Windmills of Your Mind (Michel Legrand, Alan Bergman, Marilyn Bergman).

The relationship between our sun and its planets is close enough to a steady state for us to make predictions about where another planet will be in relation to ours at any particular time, but it isn't really a steady state. Scientists tell us that every year the earth moves 15 centimetres farther from the sun. This isn't much, but it shows that the stability of the system is relative not absolute.

Systems theory reveals that the emergence of a new level of complexity occurs through the process of a system becoming destabilised. Systems seek order, and if one kind of order breaks down, then a more complex form of order has to come into existence. This is not an imposed order but an order which arises from the expression of natural laws on a higher level of organisation. Where we see disorder, as we do in our social system, it is because that system is in the transition phase – it is in the inevitable state of breakdown which leads to breakthrough – to emergence into the next level of orderly system.

Another way to think of the relationship between the predictable and unpredictable aspects of creation is to imagine a classroom where a bunch of children are engaged in a creative writing exercise. There are rules about how they can behave. They are not allowed to fly paper planes across the room. They are not allowed to get out of their chairs. They are not allowed to chew gum. So we can make some predictions about how behaviour in the classroom will look based on those rules. But we can't predict that Tommy will write a story about a dragon that likes to eat its own bogies after roasting them in its fire. This story is an instance of emergence. It is an inevitable product of the universal system but we don't have the brain capacity necessary to process all of the information which led to its expression. We can tell that it is an expression of the intersection of the historical dragon myth with the “eat your own bogies" meme popular with little boys, but we could not predict that Tommy would be the point in the system where this particular manifestation of this intersection should be expressed at this particular moment unless we had a complete dynamic map of the social system of which Tommy is a part. All we could do is to make a probabilistic prediction that between 5 and 10 school boys will write an essay about dragons eating their own bogies this year based on the number of school boys who have done so in each of the previous twenty years.

There is a tendency, where we can't understand something, to attribute it to an imaginary being. Primitive peoples who didn't know anything about the geological structure of the earth attributed volcanic eruptions to the anger of the volcano god. Today there are many scientists who carry on this trend by attributing anything they can't predict to a mythological entity called “randomness". Randomness is the concept that something can happen which is not an inevitable manifestation of the system within which it takes place.

Our central symbol for randomness is the throwing of a dice. And it is from the study of dice throwing which we developed the theory of probability. We can't predict what number is going to come up when we throw a dice, but we can predict the likelihood of the spread of numbers which will come up over a large enough sample. While we can't predict the outcome of a single dice throw, that doesn't mean it is not deterministic in its nature and thus theoretically predictable. How the dice lands depends on such factors as its mass, its shape, how hard and in which direction we throw it and the nature of the surface on which it falls. We don't have the ability to measure and assess all of this information with enough accuracy to predict how the dice will fall, but it is theoretically possible.

Evolution is often presented as the result of “random" mutations, rather than a deterministic interaction between members of species and their environment.

In physics, proponents of the theories of quantum mechanics claim that the behaviour of subatomic particles is evidence of randomness because it can't be predicted even though we can detect probable trends. Sounds a bit like our problem with dice. And this was Albert Einstein's attitude to quantum mechanics – “God doesn't play with dice." Einstein, like myself, did not believe in a personal God, but in the pantheistic conception of God as a way of referring to the integrated nature of the creative universal system.

The belief that we live in a probabilistic rather than deterministic universe has led to much absurdity, such as the idea that an infinite number of alternate universes exist parallel to each other and that anything which we can imagine must have happened in at least one of them. This denies the relationships between things. How could there be a universe in which there are people who breath water but in which there is no water? I can imagine that well enough to write down the concept, but it can't exist in reality because it wouldn't work. If we want to understand the universe in which we live we have to understand its connectedness and thus its inevitability. It's no good me asking myself : “What would it have been like if I'd been born in China?" because someone born in China could not be me. I could only have been born at the precise place and time at which I was born, because even the slightest variation, as chaos theory shows us, changes the whole system.

Another expression of the probabilistic world view is the idea that, if you could train an infinite number of chimpanzees to type and then waited an infinite amount of time, one of them would type the complete works of Shakespeare¹. This would not happen. It is a complete misunderstanding of how things come into existence. Shakespeare's plays were an expression of the system which could only occur at the position of the system known as “Shakespeare". No-one else could have written the plays and Shakespeare could not have written Finnegan's Wake or Twilight. They could only be written by James Joyce and Stephanie Meyer respectively. Each is an expression which requires the knowledge and influences unique to those individuals. Even assuming we could teach chimpanzees to type, they would not type keys probabilistically. An infinite number of chimpanzees might all just thump their fingers on the keyboard in a similar way, which would not produce the variety necessary to accidentally produce a novel or play. What would most likely happen is that they would quickly get bored and jam up the typewriter mechanism with their own faeces. The products of one level of complexity cannot be produced by an entity on a lower level of complexity. The same does not apply in reverse. Stephanie Meyer could quite easily jam up a typewriter with her own faeces should she so choose.

What about the concept of “free will"? If we are part of a deterministic system, then does this mean that free will is an illusion? Yes. But we can better understand this when we recognise that it is also an oxymoron. And to understand why we need to look at the nature of freedom.

The best analogy for deterministic freedom is that of a water molecule travelling down a river to the sea. The molecule moves freely. There are no impediments to block its path. But that path is determined by the movement of the other molecules around it in response to the environment of the riverbank which determines the course of the flow. It's behaviour is determined but not determined in the way that a wind-up robot's behaviour is determined by its mechanism.

We human's are capable of acts of will, but these acts are the product of cultural influences which come from outside ourselves. We can't be other than an expression of the system. So what do we mean by will? The will is the active aspect of the ego. The ego is our sense of our self as a discreet entity. It is constructed of our beliefs. When we act on the basis of our beliefs, that is will. But we do not chose our beliefs, they are a crystallisation of prevalent ideas which come together within us in the only way they could. When our beliefs change it is because we have come in contact with other ideas outside of ourselves which have overridden the preceding ones. Of course, in each individual case it is too complex a process to fully break down and analyse and it is always in flux.

At the heart of any act of will is a lack of acceptance of something. There is something with which we do not feel satisfied and so our will drives us to seek to change it. This might be something as simple as washing the dishes or as complex as seeking a cure for cancer. But it is only an act of will if there is resistance. If I want to wash the dishes, then doing so is an act of free expression. But if I'm feeling lazy I have to will myself to do them. And if we are trying to change something in our environment will will only be required if that something is resistant to change, which is more often the case if we are working against the grain so to speak.

The central characteristic of will is the experience of a relative loss of freedom. The thought behind an act of will is the thought that we have to do something - that we have no alternative. The mountaineer must climb the mountain. The boxer must fight the fight. By contrast the state of freedom is like being a guest at a party where we could kiss the hostess, stand on our head or piss in the punchbowl, among many other possibilities. Such behaviour is not goal-orientated in the way that an act of will is, but whatever we do will be an inevitable expression of the universal system in the place we inhabit. So if someone pisses in the punchbowl, blame the perversity of the universe.

We may think that will is necessary in order that anything get done. No good just sitting around accepting everything. But acceptance is the basis for love and love desires to help and to understand. Love can be the basis for discovery and problem solving. In science love would inspire us to find understanding and work with nature to solve our problems, whereas will inspires us to try to solve problems by changing nature without fully understanding it first. It is the wilful approach to science and technology which has led scientists to misinterpret data in order to support their prejudices and has encouraged our technological development to be at the expense of our ecological life-support systems. The alternative, accepting what is and responding to it in the way which comes naturally to us, will lead to better results.

One way to picture our situation is that we are all cast adrift upon a stormy sea, each in a fragile little boat. The boat is our ego and we need it because the sea is so stormy. Were the sea calm we would swim in it happily. The sea on which we are cast adrift is the schizophrenic mind of God. What emerged in the jump from the other primates to humans was mind as we conceive it. Chimpanzees have the ability to reason on a very basic level, but human intelligence is to chimpanzee intelligence as the fractal is to the mathematical formula which leads to it. A period of disorder accompanies emergence. In the case of human intelligence the root of the disorder was a split in perception which led to the concepts of Good and Evil. This acted like a virus splitting our perception of the world and ourselves in such a way that everything became divided into warring factions. But this was a problem which would begin slowly and then increase exponentially up until the present.

In the beginning we experienced ourselves as an expression of the natural system. This was true as a species (expressed in such myths as that of Adam and Eve) and in our individual lives (as an infant we have to learn the difference between “me" and “not me"). We lived in God. But the idea that it is meaningful to split the world into Good and Evil caused a disharmony which alienated us from this sense of connectedness. We were “cast out of the Garden of Eden". With the invention of language our mind became a collective mind in the sense that each of us is like a synapse and words and the concepts which are expressed through their varying combinations are the impulses travelling through those synapses. We have, as Carl Jung discovered, a collective unconscious. We soak up cultural material without even being aware of it and our subconscious associates this material in ways determined by the flow of different trends within the social system. Now, with television and the internet, the subconscious of each individual is more complex than it was in Jung's day, but the deepest trends are the most universal – the patterns which lie at the heart of the complexity – the formula that produced the fractal.

In science fiction we have the idea of alien species with a “hive mind". We have such a mind and always have had, but it is a schizophrenic hive mind, it is perpetually at war with itself. And this is why we need our lifeboats – our egos – to stay afloat in the maelstrom. I once thought that, even in a state of psychological freedom we would still need our ego in order to self-manage, but this isn't true. We don't need to experience ourselves as separate entities in order to do what we need to do. Our body is made up of separate cells each doing what is required for the maintenance of the whole. But this is only possible if our “hive mind" is not divided against itself and thus deranged. As long as that is the case we need our ego to keep afloat. Many of us have been thrown from our boats by the violence of the storms and come face to face with the reality of the divided mind of humanity in a way which caused us to be labelled “insane" by those still safely in their boats and many have been lost at sea, i.e. committed suicide.

The development of the ego is symbolised in the story of Noah and the ark. When it became clear that living on dry land (remaining psychologically connected to the living system) was becoming impossible due to our internally divided state, and that we would thus become separated from that state by the sea of our growing conceptual consciousness, we developed the individual ego. In Noah's Ark were stored all of the complimentary pairings into which our dualistic conciousness had split things – male and female of every animal. In time the complimentary pairings produced by the dualistic split in our consciousness would become warring factions in many instances.

This analogy also appears in the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne :

And Jesus was a sailor

When he walked upon the water

And he spent a long time watching

From his lonely wooden tower

And when he knew for certain

Only drowning men could see him

He said “All men will be sailors then

Until the sea shall free them"

So our egos have been necessary, but the downside is that they separate us from the ability to perceive unfiltered reality. The ego is a structure of distorted beliefs about reality. It is a form of alienation from reality. If we are going to stay in our boat we have to twist our perception of reality in such a way that it doesn't challenge those distorted beliefs. This is why physicists will look at the behaviour of subatomic particles and see something that “proves" the existence of randomness. Because to think down the honest pathway of the inevitable unfolding of all things is to follow a pathway of thought that leads inexorably to the dissolution of one's own ego. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. And, yet, the death of the ego is the way to heaven once we have an understanding, as we now do, which can cure the virus of dualism, reconcile the warring factions and bring peace and sanity to our “hive mind" – the mind of God.

The dissolution of our egos into the mind of God is what was predicted by Jesus was “the Kingdom of Heaven" and “the coming of the Son of Man". The term “Son of Man" acknowledges that the next level of emergence is generated by the one which comes before. So unified humanity is the offspring of divided humanity.

Now before this would occur Jesus prophesied that the shit would really hit the fan. The key concept here is given in the passage which begins at Matthew 24:15 : “So when you see standing in the holy place 'the abomination that causes desolation' spoken of through the prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains... How dreadful it will be in those days for pregnant women and nursing mothers..."

What is “the abomination that causes desolation"? We can see that it is idealism. The original virus which contaminated humanity was the false perception that it is meaningful or beneficial to think of some things as Good and some things as Evil and to use our will to try to compel ourselves to pursue the former and avoid the latter. To be fully wedded to this false perception is to be an idealist.

So what is all this about “the abomination" being put “in the holy place"? Since we can see that an accurate understanding of reality is one which acknowledges the larger whole of which each person or thing is an expression we can see that how truthful something or someone is is dependant on how whole (i.e. undivided) they are and thus the degree to which they can acknowledge their connection to the whole. Our word for this is “holy". We have begun to acknowledge this idea in a non-mystical way with our concepts of “holistic medicine" and “the holistic paradigm for science".

In 1988, an Australian biologist by the name of Jeremy Griffith published a book called Free : The End of the Human Condition – The Biological Reason Why Humans Have Had to Be Individual, Competitive, Egocentric & Aggressive. He said that the book, which he spent 13 years writing, “grew out of my desperate need to reconcile my extreme idealism with reality". He presented it as an holistic understanding of the human condition. Central to his explanation is the concept that our conscience, that part of us which tells us what is good, is part of our genetic programming, and that our competitive, egocentric and aggressive behaviour has been an unavoidable rebellion against the oppressive criticism with which that programming responded to our experiments in the use of our newly found intelligence for self-management. He appears to believe that this “knowledge" will itself bring about a reconciliation of all of the conflicts in the world. The problem is that his “defence for humanity" is no defence because our conscience, for those of us who have one, is a part of our ego. In effect then Griffith's books are an unconscious attempt on his part to will his idealism onto the rest of us by presenting it as liberating holistic knowledge. And they are a brilliant attempt because they contain so many of the ideas which would be needed for a genuine liberating understanding but assembled the wrong way and presented with an emphasis on confronting us about our “non-ideal" behaviour. Of course the number of people who've read Griffith's books, or even heard of him, is limited, but all ideas, especially about really important topics, leak out into general awareness. Many in Australia who never read any of his books would have seen him on daytime television at one stage defending his idea that sex is “an attack on innocence". (from Free : “Men invented sex, as in 'fucking' or destroying, as distinct from the act of procreation. What was being 'fucked' or destroyed was women's innocence.")

Griffith gives his own interpretation of the prophesy in his 2003 book A Species in Denial : “...when Christ was unmasking the lie of pseudo-idealism he used the deadly accurate description offered by the Old Testament prophet Daniel, 'the abomination that causes desolation'." So what does he mean by “pseudo-idealism"? Later in the book he says : “One of the problems to be overcome in introducing these denial-free understandings is that there have been so many 'false prophets' promoting artificial, pseudo forms of ideality that the whole business of bringing ideality to the world has been extremely discredited. These false forms of ideality, such as the New Age Movement, Environmentalism, Feminism, the Politically Correct Deconstructionist Movement, The Peace Movement, are such superficially satisfying forms of idealism to live through that when the real ideality arrives, namely the reconciling understanding of the human condition, people actually prefer the non-confronting, false forms of ideality... These false or pseudo forms of ideality are extremely seductive because they give people relief from the horror of their corrupted state by allowing them to feel good about themselves without having to confront their corrupted state. In a world where people are rapidly becoming more corrupted and in need of relief from their condition, pseudo-idealism has become a plague. In fact it has gained such a foothold that it now threatens to control the world and lead it to a totally non-confronting, truthless state of oblivion. Pseudo-idealism is the 'Antichrist' because it is at base anti-truth, opposed to the truth which Christ so wholly represented." Here we have a classic example of paranoia, a false prophet with an oppressive dishonest dogma seeing those who pursue other approaches to addressing the problems of the world as the ones who are deluded and dangerous – that is, he sees in them a projection of the truth he can't face about himself. A Prophet in Denial would have been a more appropriate title for the book.

Glossy insert used to promote A Species in Denial in Australian newspapers

So idealism dressed up as holism is what Jesus and Daniel where on about when they talked about the “abomination that causes desolation" being “in the holy place". And this was the peak point of the danger and destruction which grew out of that original concept of Good and Evil. But this is how systems work. Everything is inevitable and everything is necessary. Only by having the key problem crystallised into its most potent form could it be studied and the real cure found. But it has been a harsh ride for us all. I included the passage about pregnant women and nursing mothers, because one of Griffith's key beliefs is that babies are born with a genetically coded expectation of finding an ideal world and the protection of their innocence depends on being sheltered from contact with the non-ideal nature of the world. This concept puts a lot of pressure on mothers, but it shouldn't, because it is bullshit. The only idealists in the world are neurotic adults. What children most need is for we adults to stop worrying so much. So this prevalent concept, of which Griffith's expression is simply the most extreme, is itself harmful to the welfare of children. It is the generator of a negative feedback loop which causes depression for both mothers and eventually, when they reach adolescence, their children.

Just as these toxic ideas about Good and Evil have sowed division and conflict, so a clear understanding which heals the split will spread out through the mind of God and our ego boats will inevitably dissolve and free us into the bliss of Heaven on Earth. There is nothing to do but do what comes naturally. Acts of will are no longer useful.

The rise of the “Kingdom of Heaven" is something which will happen both within us and around us as the divisions which have characterised our existence heal. When emergence takes place unexpected patterns are revealed. We wouldn't expect water vapour to form into beautiful snowflakes. In the same way we will witness seemingly miraculous coincidences, a phenomena which Jung labelled synchronicity and described as an “acausal connecting principle". Another example of an acausal connecting principle is gravity. “Ah," you may say, "but gravity causes apples to fall from trees." But it doesn't. Gravity doesn't cause anything to do anything, it only shapes the way in which it does it. The word “cause" is defined as : “A person or thing that gives rise to an action, phenomenon, or condition." Gravity doesn't “give rise" to the fall of the apple, whatever dis-attaches it from the tree does. So synchronicity is like gravity, it doesn't make anything happen and it is invisible, but we will be able to know it by the way that it shapes the healing of humanity.

1For the sake of simplicity I will assume that William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays attributed to him, something which is disputed by some.

The Uselessness of the Concept of Good and Evil

If we take an holistic, i.e. systems, view of human society we have to come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as free will. The individual is only a location within the system where the system's processes are playing out.

We may experience ourselves as individuals with free will struggling against impulses which we feel it would not be right to act upon, but the impulses come from the system and so do the ideas, factual information and beliefs, which cause us to exercise restraint. What is happening if we experience such an internal struggle is that tides which are larger than us are clashing in us. We are the location where this is happening, but we have no control over the process.

In the broad sense of the term the idea that there is such a thing as good and evil is a dualistic concept - that is one which divides phenomena into two opposing forces.

But the distinction between good and evil would only be useful if we had free will and could thus chose good behaviour and avoid evil behaviour. Since we don't have free will, we can't. All of our behaviour, whether constructive or destructive is a product of the wider system of which we are a part and over which we have no control.

From this systems view of humanity, it is precisely the idea that there is such a thing as good and evil which has acted like a virus to generate all of the behaviour we identify as evil.

And, since, all systems try to maintain equilibrium we can see that it is actually the fight against those forms of behaviour we identify as evil which generates that behaviour. If we try to push the system one way it will inevitably push back the other way. It is only acceptance which can bring harmony to the system.

This concept of the idea of good and evil as a virus contaminating the human system is, of course, expressed metaphorically in the story of Adam and Eve being cursed by eating from the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. The only thing is that it wasn't knowledge but a delusional belief.