The Healing Process

................................................................................................................................................................................


[...] life cannot tolerate a standstill [...]

[C.G. Jung]
Psychological Types (CW 6, 1991), p. 479

................................................................................................................................................................................

There is pattern when it comes to things like Fracking protests. It goes like this:

When this new thing is announced - in this instance Fracking - there are those who are against it. They protest its arrival, in a bid to prevent it from happening. It is key that they get it at its inception, before it becomes assimilated and generally accepted as part of the landscape. This is a tipping point, or so it seems. Things could go either way. Once it is established it will be much harder, if not impossible, to uproot.

And so there is initial protest. This protest is reported in the press and provokes a peak of interest from the general mass of people. Some make up their minds, some remain undecided; some don't care either way.

The masses tolerate this disruption because it is a novelty. But soon the novelty wears off and the issue overstays its welcome. 'Soon' being the operative word, because the contemporary attention span is at an all time low.

After time the issue becomes at best an annoyance, and at worst forgotten about. At this point the issue falls off the radar and the protest becomes a battle that can't be won.

Why is this?

The body can only tolerate tension for so long. Protest is tension, a stalling voice that says 'maybe we shouldn't go in this direction.' But a direction must be taken, and sooner rather than later.

Tension will be tolerated at first. There is a grace period, albeit limited. But then a verdict must be reached. An ongoing protest is like an open wound. The body wants to heal and to go about its everyday business.

In this sense, all that a corporation like Cuadrilla need do is play a waiting game. They simply wait for the issue to go out of fashion. Weather the initial storm of public interest, whilst playing on the defensive. Sit back and block the opposition.

In time, the inevitable process of normalisation - the disappation of tension - will win the battle for them.

From being initially receptive to those voices of protest, the culture begins to grow weary of them. Counter arguments surface, if only to help get the issue off the table and close up the wound. By this point the mass of people are looking for this voice, for the first opportunity - the first convincing excuse - to dismiss the issue and get back to business as normal. In the end, the voice of protest is discredited. A lot of fuss about nothing. 

The wound closes. Life goes on.


................................................................................................................................................................................


Related posts:-
Tension
Still Waters
Status Quo 
Do Not Disturb
Negative Capability
Escaping Uncertainty 

Live Forever

Limitless                                   -                      Limited

The idea that science advances one funeral at a time implies that some/most/all of us are incapable of deep change. We become attached to certain ways of thinking - or rationalise our temperamental biases - like drowning men clinging to debris, and are unable to loosen our grip.

But all ways of thinking are missing something, and over time their vulnerabilities will be exposed. We must be able to adapt to changing circumstances, to update old systems with new.

Were we to live forever then science (and humanity in general) would no longer advance at all, unless we develop our ability to change and adapt over time. So hand in hand with an unlimited lifespan, must come the widespread ability to alter our deep epistemology - to forsake whatever biases we may have, and move with the times.

Evolution is now the responsibility of the individual, rather than the genes.

People will often point to an increased life-span as a sign that our age is an advanced one. It is something we can be proud of. We don't die of this, that and the other. We have nice long lives. 

But what this view does not take stock of is the fact that the way we experience time may have changed.

Things go much faster now, faster than they ever have. We live in an accelerated culture that trades in surface level-snippets. We constantly remark to each other how the years seem to be flying by. "Where did the time go?" And so we seek more of it. Not realising the answer does not lie in more time.

It lies in experiencing time differently. In slowing down.

If we had more time we would inevitably fill it with more stuff. Things would get even faster. More time would become normalised, in the same way that 'more money' becomes normal for the still-unhappy millionaire. How long will it take us to learn the most simple of lessons? That happiness does not lie in accruing more things, more time?

The proverbial caveman who could expect to live to 35 probably experienced a life every bit as long as ours, if not longer. Experience being the crucial word. How did the caveman spend his days and how did this affect his experience of time?

The years don't matter. It is how we experience them.

And it is largely culture that shapes this experience.

In this sense, the insect that only lives for a day - how we pity the wretched thing - undoubtedly experiences a life as long as ours.

Every lifespan is normalised - becomes normal for the creature living it. Culture bends and shifts to accomodate these changes. If we lived longer we would tell different stories. Those born into longer lives would think them every bit as short as ours. Because to them, that span of time - long as it may seem to us - would be totally normal.

How long is long enough? When will we ever be content?

To strive for a longer lifespan for the species is a fool's errand, one of many. It finds its kin in the search for the 'smallest thing' at CERN. All folly springs from the same root; that is, a fundamental lack of wisdom and maturity.

Maturity counts among its virtues the ability to say enough is enough. Here I shall build my home and be content. It does not endlessly seek novelty in the vain hope that happiness lies just around the corner; in the answers that the smallest thing brings; in the contentment of a longer life. It knows that happiness lies in the here and now; in today, not tomorrow. In this hour right here, not at the weekend, or that holiday we have planned in the summer.

We suggest that modern man’s obsession with longevity, and with maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process. 

The “mid-life crisis” also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in having children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.

[Ted Kaczynski]

Industrial Society and its Future, 74

An Ancient Greek legend (presupposed by the Iliad) tells how his mother put before Achilles the choice of whether he wanted a long life, or a short life full of deeds and fame, and how he chose the second. 

[Oswald Spengler]

Man and Technics, p. 29

Related posts:-

Lines and Circles
The Earth's the Limit
Masters of the Universe
The Tyranny of Novelty 
Familiar Territory

Get Real

Broadly speaking, people can be put into two camps:

1. Realists/pragmatists
2. Idealists

Between these two extremes everyone falls. Some of us tend toward one side more than the other.

Our society is one that suits pragmatists. It is imbalanced in favour of this mode of thinking.

It is like a lens placed atop a colour-wheel, that shows some colours as they are whilst distorting or obscuring others.

It mainly consists of lots of short journeys from A to B. Take this to there. And don't ask too many questions. It has a strong current and it likes to flow. It is extremely hostile to things that threaten to disrupt this flow.

Thus, it likes those with the short-view. Those that can get on with things, do the tasks that need doing. Those that can get their head down (and so avoid seeing the bigger picture).

It prefers idealism to be kept to the realms of fiction, where it can do no real harm.

There is no place for idealists within day-to-day life. They are made to feel useless, their value ignored or ridiculed. They are called 'dreamers', a label that in a bygone era may have been taken as high-praise. They are a spare part; awkward, troublesome.

Yet pragmatists and idealist alike are a vital part of the whole organism, each with their role to play in the larger balance.

Inasmuch as they are opposites the two must always battle each other, and through this conflict a balance is struck. This is how it has been throughout the ages. But these days the battle is rigged, and the contest vastly one-sided.

Idealists are ridiculed for their lack of 'realism', a bizarre criticism akin to criticizing white for its lack of black, light for its lack of dark. Light may be annoying when we are trying to sleep - but it is vital when we trying to grow crops. Both have their place: it is context that defines their value.

We have lost the context - the right environment - for everyday idealism.

We shoehorn everyone into a small space - one unwisely biased toward pragmatists - and vilify those that struggle to fit.

The ongoing refrain of our society is "get real": in other words, abandon your idealism and run the other way.

For the sake of our collective health - health, of course, being a matter of balance - this voice must be matched with another: one that soars high and dares to dream.

................................................................................................................................................................................

The elders do not see the details, they see the overall picture. If the overall pattern is good, the hardship of the details does not matter.

[Maildoma Patrice Somé]
Of Water and the Spirit, p. 311

................................................................................................................................................................................

We are all deprived; we are all disappointed; and therefore we are all, in some sense, idealists.

The need to link the real and ideal is a perpetual tension, never resolved so long as life persists, but always productive of new, attempted solutions.

[Anthony Storr]
The Dynamics of Creation, p.237

................................................................................................................................................................................


'Orange MEME' (Spiral Dynamics)

ORANGE embraces values and beliefs that stress materialism over spiritualism, pragmatism over principle, and short-range victories over longer term guarantees. There is a desire to get on with life and not bog down in quandaries of absolutism or picky, picky, picky theology.

[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.251


................................................................................................................................................................................
 
Related posts:-
The Colour Wheel
You ought to be more like me 
The Right Match 
The Devil is in the Details (and God is in the Generalities)
Life Support 
Small Mind/Large Mind
Part of a System
Know Your Place 
Beggars and Choosers 

One to One

[...] I find this law of one to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and bad.

You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not have one new and hearty word.

Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone.

In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own.

Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.

[Ralph Waldo Emerson]
'Friendship', Self-Reliance and other essays, pg 46

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
Small Scale/Large Scale 
The Right Match