One very interesting thing about the internet is that you get to see a profound aspect of human behavior in action. Often, people who are not in many ways stupid, simply cannot be made to consider questions in the light of (even very simplistic) reason! We see this literally all the time, and I believe it is a kind of mental dissociation. I also believe that it may be THE PROBLEM!
Clearly a lot of people dissociate when confronted with facts that don't fit their pre-conditioned pre-conceptions, and when you think about the full ramifications of this it could well explain the entire mess we are in as human beings.
I believe that this is the case, and I've been trying to communicate it for years. (But when I do, I find that people generally dissociate!) Their eyes glaze over. They just won't go there.
Nevertheless, when one thinks about it this just explains so much in terms of why so many people cannot be brought to reason! I believe our psyches (that is to say most of us) are fractured through the trauma of what we optimistically call socialization. When you look at the way (particularly boys) are socialized, it is clearly a process designed either consciously or subconsciously, and I believe the latter, to break their psyches - to separate them from their more empathetic, creative, and intuitive selves - to break them, to render them un-whole. And there are strong reasons for this embedded in Darwinian survival.
Our almost universally accepted patterns of socialization in modern society are actually very primitive, rooted in survival of the fittest, and they are traumatizing. This is the proverbial elephant in the living room. It is simply amazing that we have evolved to both participate in this process, and at the same time blind ourselves to its paramount importance, generally speaking even to its very existence. This is mass dissociation. Though we may see the terrible results, in situations such as those at Columbine, we stil block out their meaning and implications.
We are acting-out ancient patterns of behavior that have become largely instinctive. So to many, reason and critical thinking are a direct challenge to both their instinctual and conditioned behavior - in short to their entire understanding and means of dealing with the world. Is it any wonder then that they react violently and fearfully when challenged to change?
Aside from all the unnecessary cruelty and suffering this process produces, these ancient behaviors (exemplified most clearly by what is allowed or even condoned to go on, on our playgrounds) aren't up to the challenge of producing people sufficiently evolved to handle modern technological society.
The great struggle we now see taking place isn't one of the left-wing against the right-wing. It can be seen more clearly as growing pains - as our struggle to rise to the occasion where advanced society is concerned - of whether we can evolve into the role that our tremendous technological capability demands we evolve to fill.
Whether it was a good idea to promote technology to the point that only an advanced consciousness can wield it is an open question. But our future (if we are have one) will be determined by whether (as many people see, or can can sense) we are able to rapidly evolve in our essential beings. That cannot be done unless we examine this hidden question of our socialization. Our future must be determined by a renewed understanding of what Socrates told us us 2,500 years ago. "Know thyself!"
Every major forward thrust in Western civilization and thought has been derived from a renewed examination of the remarkable realizations of the ancient Greeks, and we have gone too far to turn back now. It was Socratic realization of the supreme importance of self-knowledge that lay at the heart of Greek understanding, and of those subsequent advances in civilization. In our era, if we are so inclined we could travel farther, faster down this road of self-understanding, due to advances in modern science. Yet it is self-knowledge itself, not science or technology severed from it, that is our only means to salvation.
A growing understanding of the ways our primitive patterns of socialization are preventing us from entering our own as a species truly capable of stewarding life on earth, is the first step on that journey. In this new, conflicted era, we must strive in every way to understand, with all possible honesty and objectivity, what we are as human beings in all our complexity - in order to avoid a self-fulfilling prophesy of destruction.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2020 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
