Society 2.0

I have a dream, or the germination of a great idea.

I am not the first person to have this dream; many before me have had it, but the political will has been absent; and it is absent because the profundity of this dream takes at the very least a sizable minority to make it real.

One of the things that frustrates scientifically oriented, philosophically sophisticated people is the way we educate our youth. There are simple, indisputable facts which emerge when the mind becomes "more aware"; aware of what, you naturally wonder? Of the minds own existence, I think. Mental maturity is what I'm referring to. For example, many religious people are fanatics, radicals and "fundamentalists". What is meant when we say this? Fundamentally speaking, although probably not acknowledged by most people who use this language: it is impossible, and therefore illegitimate, to claim absolute knowledge; within this categorical assertion exists the fact that any belief system that claims "revelation" as its source, must, fundamentally, under any critical analysis, be deemed 'conventional', which is to say, it emerges just as any other belief system does.

When you look at contemporary science it is absolutely clear and obvious to any judicious student that evolutionary forces have shaped human bodies and human minds. This - in that it is empirical and therefore "evident to all" - is vital knowledge: and yet there exists a force within contemporary politics that treats evolution as 'merely an opinion'; similar to and even epistemologically inferior to, creationism: that is, the ridiculous nonsensical childish notion that the Biblical creation narrative is literally true - and not, as understood by damn near every student of comparative religion, an expression of mankinds propensity for metaphor in explaining it's existential condition as a creature with the capacity to "know that it knows".

Metaphors have their purpose and in saying this I am not trying to belittle what the Bible was able to do; I am also including ALL mythological texts which form the backbone of the worlds great religions. What I am saying is that it represented the views of people thousands of years ago; views that were germinated in a specific culture; with a specific knowledge pool. And what ultimately emerged from these various traditions was an epistemological NARCISSISM; a perspective of the world that forgot the "condition of ignorance" from which all explanatory thought originates, and truly believed in the categories it POSITED; the act of creation, of building an arbitrary (though personally meaningful) metaphysics was forgotten. And today, millennia later, we are dealing with an epistemological narcissism with Christian conservatives who refuse to accept empirical evidence for how life originated and evolves; ignores evidence from developmental psychology, relational psychoanalysis, neuroscience and dynamics systems theory that completely undermines their outdated, arbitrary worldview; and exposes it for the naive farce that it was.

What emerges from an objective analysis of the various religious texts is that their forgers were entirely ignorant of the larger picture: and this is the world we live in today. Our categories of knowledge involve not just what exists in our own culture, but ALL cultures; as a believer in the Bible, you are forced to play mind games with yourself; unconsciously of course, evolutionary forces which influence cognition and the range of attention keep you focused on your "cognitive truth" - and by doing so dissociates important information about the nature of reality. This is what were seeing: if we simply apply the insights and discoveries of psychology over the last 50 years, we can explain Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists (amongst other fundamentalists, such as "free market" fundamentalists who truly trust their own beliefs about the "hidden hand") as individuals still hampered in their own cognitive development by an ancient and severely rigid belief system which from their youth they have come to treat as "sacred"; when something is seen as sacred, to go outside what is sanctioned and legal, in other words, to question and critically analyze what is "sacred" feels utterly wrong and unbearably painful. As self research shows, when someone tries to convince someone of something his self cannot find meaning in, it is incoherent; biased beforehand by the brains affective centers as "untrue" - and untrue not because they are not objectively valid; but untrue because the self has become intertwined with its beliefs; to challenge the belief is to simultaneously disturb the coherency of the self; the body and brain is therefore highly protective against beliefs/views that threaten the affective (emotional) stability of the organism; because for evolution, the MIND-SELF is ruled by the same evolutionary precepts that rule the body: survivability.

In other words, conservative political views are unequivocally atavistic - and I am saying this as someone who once identified himself as an orthodox conservative. So what changed?

My self. Lost in the political dialogue is the intrapersonal forces which shape our thinking and feeling. Attachment research in particular has proved essential to how we think about how we should go about fixing our societies. But wait! No doubt, if you are one of these conservatives I am pejoratively speaking about, I've already lost you, haven't I? Long ago, you dissociated; now you feel the 'tension' - if you're still reading - of my current narrative. This is precisely my point! Our thinking is structurally connected; we are not in any way shape of form "rational actors"; we are SOCIAL first, and this point is proven by the fact that I lost you - as George Lakoffs research shows - we think in stereotyped categories; and we think in this way because SOCIAL existence is conflated with PERSONAL existence; the myth that we are "singular selves", if not paid attention to, leads to profoundly narcissistic delusions and thus a rigging of our political system. On the other hand, if we pay attention to dynamic systems theory and the fact of our non-linear dependence upon one another, the conservative myth of "self made man" can be deconstructed and seen for the bullshit narcissistic self-congratulations that it is.

EVERYTHING is social. For people alive today, and for whatever "station" you find yourself in society, thank you forebearers; thank the people you formed relationships with in your life; and mostly, thank Fate: because it is sheer luck and nothing more that you became the self that you are.

Our society is severely traumatized - and since we are so "outer focused" we overlook how that is. In fact, the outer external focus is itself evidence of the traumatic dissociation: to look inwards is not only 'not interesting' to the attention, but it is disturbing; it makes us "anxious" because by turning the attention inwards towards the minds own thinking and feeling exposes us to the dissociative structure of it all; the mind dissociated what was traumatic because it interfered with "successful" adaptive functioning. And when I say "adaptive" and successful, it appears that I am speaking of the individual. The paradox is, even though evolution operates on the individual, the fact is, dynamics work both "upwards" and "Downwards"; from the level of instinctive awareness evolutionary forces (environmental stressors) shape the developing personality. But with maturation a higher cortical capacity emerges which enables dissociation from "acts of mind"; a popular expression for this ability is "mindfulness", which is the ability to analyze and relate with ones own experiences without judgement or identification. From this vantage point, the self can attain a greater level of lucidity. And from this perspective, it can bear witness to the larger dynamics which operate between people.

Why is this important? Why should you care? Society 1.0, although a fabulous wealth generator, is leading us too civilizational suicide. In terms of what I've written above, you could say that the people who "own the most" have the biggest "selves"; they are the ones most narcissistically anchored to the dynamics of the present system, and, as such, will not be able to objectively assess the disaster that they're helping to create.

Evolutionary forces which operate unconsciously, are like Daniel Kahnemans "system 1"; they operate from single level psychology; the concerns are with the myopic facts of the individual: his physical needs and emotional-self needs. This level is thoroughly selfish.

Yet, here we are, a species that has conquered the earth. A mismatch. Were conquering the earth using unbridled system 1 instincts, but we've reached global proportions. An individualistic psychology does not mesh well when it reaches such power within a global system. In other words, survival mandates that we "upgrade" our awareness; that we pay attention to the system dynamics that operate between people - the social forces forces that shape our individual psychologies. Only when we do that, will we be equipped to properly address the juggernaut of climate change. Barring mental transformation, we our dooming ourselves and future generations to worlds of suffering. To increasingly hotter days and the stress and emotional fragility that brings; and possibly to a belated "geoengineering response", which will turn our bright and blue skies - which are so intricately felt within our psychologies in metaphorical ways -  into milky white skies, the visual effect of seeding the stratosphere with suphides. And the emotional effect of that, again, is nightmarish.

Will we just mindlessly walk into that nightmare as we listen to our crappy pop trash, talk video games, anime and cosplay? Or will we mature ourselves out of this by implementing changes at the educational level - to move out of the defunct "industrial model" of social organization into the ecological model, where relationships are acknowledged as the most relevant factor in how we understand individual realities?

I hope that we can transition out of this "world" and into society 2.0. But it will take a lot of mindfulness.