DON’T LOOK DOWN
We assume that our apartment building won’t collapse. We assume that there will not be tanks in our streets. This is so we can use our energy to get through the day. It amounts to mass psychosis to believe these things won’t happen, though they do. We are tightrope walkers, keeping our balance.
It’s bigger than that. Some things about life are nearly unendurable — war, birth, poverty, suffering, lost love. So we “romanticize” them — that is, we promote mass psychosis, insisting on something that doesn’t exist. War creates heroes, love is the basis of marriage, giving birth is the most wonderful event of motherhood, all mothers are full of love, fathers live for their children and protect them. Poverty can be overcome. Suffering improves ones morality. Losing loved ones can be endured because they go on living, waiting for you in Heaven. All myths.
Human beings are the only animals who can do this because it is done by the frontal lobe of the brain system that makes us human. It is the converse of being able to deny the obvious, like drastic changes in climate. It is summoning up possibility, a part of the cultural dimension of being. Not all humans have access to it, though this won’t be obvious. We call it “believing.” It means constructing a version of reality that seems real, even when evidence must be ignored or there is none.
Mythic narratives like these help to keep order and to hold society together, though there are always dissenters. A major self-deception is that opposing an old painful and stuck mythology is because of “truth” when it actually only a better fantasy. “Truth” may be the biggest fantasy of all.
There was a time when I tried to read the many papers about how specific parts and features of the brain managed to perform this feat of making unreality real, but it became too complicated and I gave it up. Much of the research is too new to be dependable, a practical measure based on results. I just accept that we are able to construct grandiose, even preposterous and morality-free, versions of the world. But there still must be some precursors. Fear, confusion, strong personalities, group cultures, doubt, and probably more, some of them positive. These are what make us reach for the grand mythic visions. Sometimes they are inspired and strong enough to change the world.
So the fantasies of religion are the opiate of the masses that allow the consolidation into institutions. Combining attachment with arousal triggered by surroundings or personalities or stories, people get pulled into religious systems that are punishing or political systems that are self-serving, because they get excited by the ideas. Or a place — a cathedral is sensorily arousing no matter what you think about it. A vast scene of mountains can grip some people with beauty and hope.
Arousal is physically supported by molecules internally generated — adrenaline and so on — and becomes contagious through empathy, the ability through the functioning third vagus nerve that allows faces and voices to replicate what someone else is feeling. An aroused person is arousing, which is why porn works.
Prostitutes (male or female) who got into the business because of being thrown out of abusive homes that taught the skills to survive because of a childhood of learning to handle adult drunks, bad temper, violence and insults. Powerfully motivated by self-preservation, they know that they can use the same strategies on Johns, picking up signs of exploitation and deviation — or even simple need — before really engaging in any act. Well — after securing the money. One can learn a lot from people who have been shut out of the mainstream, but exploit the mainstream quietly when stigma prevents disclosure. Secrecy protects them while they form systems, friendships, and alertness.
People in entertainment that doesn’t involve contact have often developed these skills. Think what Marilyn Monroe must have learned but how little it helped to save her in the end. In those circumstances one must learn a reality that really IS real, so as to go to it when the show is over.
Our human predilection is that major forces in our subconscious or culture are felt to be supernatural, to come to us as divine commands or at least fates, and therefore not to inquire into them for fear of aggravating whatever it is. But once one inquires logically, or even realizes that they are assumptions inherited unexamined, they dissipate.
A dangerous phenomenon comes through violence because it is such a strong arouser, potentially addictive and easily linked to sex and control, which are often combined. Actual war and spontaneous demonstrations can be ignited and enlarged, using cries and songs to entrain people in the issue and drive the actions to more and more destruction, which is in itself arousing.
But great sweeps of “love” and social approval can create positive waves. Actors know that if they imitate an emotion with posture and expression, the act can call up the actual emotion, at least for the moment. When the passionate moment dissipates, as in sexual relationships, the fortunate have already developed friendship and common goals that steady the situation and carry it for many years. This is also true of nations.
If one is trapped in a myth that has gone empty, whether that of a marriage, a church, a vocation, a school, what does one do to keep from despairing? How does one keep from attacking the narrative that is sustaining everyone else?
I only know two strategies and they are not foolproof. The first is tolerance for ambiguity so that a period of “not knowing” is seen through the theories about “going over a threshold” into a protected place/time. Hopefully enough contact with a supporting group or friend and plenty of past experience will crystalize into a new system. The other is the physical grounding of sensory experience, including plenty of muscle action. That is, for instance, long walks. Swimming. Staying healthy.
“Therapy”, as it is practiced today, is in my experience mythic medicine-related narratives, often useless if not mocking attempts to push one back into convention, called “adjusting.” But research with the goal of understanding can be done alone or with help. I trust groups more than high income people with nice offices as depicted sympathetically in video stories. The old version was high status white men but the new one is attractive women, not quite moms, maybe aunties.
For people living on sidewalks, the two paragraphs of advice above are laughable. Therapy requires a certain level of resources, including education. That’s part of the problem. Their narrative often leads to doom. And they know it. Maybe the 12-step program helps.
The dilemma in politics today is finding the grand stories that have not been undercut by our constant exposure to displaced and starving people, by globalization, by intense internal dissent, and by the inevitable schism between the generations. Without it, we just seek arousal and never find empathic agreement.
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This is link is to a good supporting essay.
