To be wrong

“What if everything you knew was wrong?”

Way back in the late 2000s, I began blogging on an independent website called Zaadz, later bought up and destroyed by the rapacious maw of the Gaia corporation. When still operational, they had a daily writing prompt and, on one occasion, it was the above question. I answered it as a serious inquiry (and I had another stab at it later on). But, at the time, in looking around at the responses of others, it became apparent that it was impossible for most people to even imagine this kind of a scenario or allow it into their mind.

Basically, such a level of skeptical doubt and contemplation requires an extreme degree of the personality trait ‘openness to experience’ (FFM). This specifically includes tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, and cognitive dissonance (i.e., low need for certainty and closure), as related to what artists and the literati like to call negative capability.

The problem for most people in the modern world is that we are under stress that is severe and chronic, systemic and cumulative. Many of us are near constantly exhausted, depleted, and overwhelmed by life, pushed to or beyond our limits. As research shows, that shuts down ‘openness’ and hence everything that goes with it, such as need for cognition along with intellectual curiosity and intellectual humility.

If ‘openness’ is really low, a question like the one above would simply be incomprehensible and uninteresting or else felt as an existential threat to identity and the social order. Many of the relatively more liberal-minded could at least think about the posed inquiry, but even most of them are significantly compromised in a society like this. They would less likely have the fuller cognitive complexity, cognitive flexibility, and perspective shifting to entertain radically challenging answers to the question.

A strong expression of ‘openness’ is a rare hothouse flower at present in the United States. It’s like trying to swim back to shore against the pull of a rip tide or rip current.

This feeds into our demoralizing sense of being stuck. It’s been said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. If so, that is only true because of a collective lack of ‘openness’. It forces us into an oppressive condition of ideological realism, a hopeless state of fatalism. There seems to be no way out of the prison, in the minds of an increasing number of people, other than overthrowing or killing the guards and blowing it up.

That is why a significant portion voted for Donald Trump, as the same people often said they would’ve voted for Bernie Sanders. Anyone who offers them a way out (or merely pretends to) will be supported, no matter the means of escape (even if only into fantasy). What Trump proposed was that he’d throw a grenade into the bunker of power (The Fantasy of Creative Destruction); and, in a way, he kept his promise, if he also destroyed so much that was good and worthy in the process.

MAGA and DOGE is a greater blow to the American Empire than was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entirety of World War II. Ironically, the present ongoing dismantling and dysfunction may have cleared the stage to allow more people, if mostly Trump’s opponents and detractors, to embrace radical imagination. It’s why socialism is suddenly on the table again, with someone like Zohran Mamdani able to win a major election.

A poly-crisis and a meta-crisis

Some of it may only be out of desperation. When everything seems to be failing or else in the process of intentional destruction, when the personal stakes are high and the consequences harsh, people can become more willing to consider and try something else, anything else. It’s a public mood that hasn’t been seen in generations.

Authoritarian pseudo-centrism, propagandistic false equivalency, and malignant lesser evilism is dead and buried.

Whatever comes next, good or bad, will be entirely new. The problem is there are too few with enough ‘openness’ to help guide us through the wreckage and pitfalls, to shine a light on future possibilities and visions. Like Trump with populists and the GOP, Bernie Sanders (and AOC, etc) too has ended up always herding leftists strays and stragglers back into the fold of DNC corporatism and Zionism where any leftist promise is neutralized (Anti-Zionism, Like Anti-Fascism, is the Dividing Line of Our Age).

Such co-optation and recuperation needs to end, and it seems most Americans are coming around to realizing that is the case. The purpose of our thought experiment here, though, is not mainly political. We are considering ideology on a larger battleground.

My thoughts at present are closer to a more recent piece of mine (A Paradigm Shift of Paradigm Shifts). We are in the middle of a replication crisis across nearly every major field of research, development, and application. To put it simply, the beginning question isn’t rhetorical. We are literally facing a situation of mass ignorance, including among supposed experts and other authority figures, where we’re unsure that we actually know what we think we know.

Many perceived reputable and foundational studies that have upheld conventional views, standard practices, and established protocols for decades or generations, once retested, have been challenged or disproven in part or whole. Simply put, a surprising percentage don’t replicate.

We are teetering on a precipice. The replication crisis is just one of numerous uncertainties and catastrophes looming on the horizon. It’s not only a general meta-crisis as we are also, specifically, in an identity crisis, civilizational crisis, and existential crisis. But to be fair, it’s happened before (The Crisis of Identity). If total destruction isn’t inevitable, the world as we know it might collapse, whatever may or may not follow afterwards.

Yet most people are still going about their lives as if it will go on on forever, as if the ship will be righted at the last moment before sinking. Allowing existential doubt into consciousness is too scary.

Knowledge of knowledge, or lack thereof

It’s an interesting situation. And though dire, maybe not as hopeless as we think. Answers are within our reach, if we’d reach out to grasp them.

We do have enough knowledge — along with wealth, resources, expertise, and human potential — to solve numerous problems and remedy diverse harms, to save the world and create a utopia (or eutopia and protopia) for the entirety of global humanity. It’s true that our ignorance of the universe and everything in it is vast beyond what our knowledge will ever be, since ignorance (or rather potential knowledge) is infinite. But we have enough working knowledge to know how to improve things on a basic level that, at a human scale, could be transformative.

Our only limitation is our own psyches, specifically the conditions that suppress ‘openness’. Ironically, the very problems that could be solved by enough people with high ‘openness’ are the same problems that close down the human mind and constrains human behavior; hence, unleashing conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and dark triad or tetrad (Machiavellianism, narcissism, & psychopathy; + sadism). And the right-wing elites understand this and so never let off on the pressure of stress-induced and fear-riled manipulation, forcing us into a state of endless anxiety and alienation.

The ruling elite are playing a game of chicken as they hit the gas pedal to launch us full speed at a cliff edge. They’re betting that the rest of us will blink rather than wrestle the steering wheel out of their hands. Our aspiring overlords are deranged and destructive, not only to others but also to themselves.

These elite, like most people in the world today, are severely compromised. They too lack the cognitive abilities to understand the world and what they’re doing, maybe to a greater degree than any other elite in modern Western history or maybe all of world history. They’re merely clever monkeys who got their paws on some levers of power and now are jerking them around with amused and manic glee. They’ve convinced themselves they’re visionary geniuses; but so far, as inept chaos agents, they’ve only accomplished not-so-controlled demolition.

We can’t last much longer at this pace.

So, the problem is twofold. First, we really do lack knowledge to a tremendous degree. Future humans, if we are to survive as a species and a civilization, will look back upon our present crude and primitive brutality with amazement. They won’t be able to understand how we lasted as long as we did or why we allowed it to go on.

Then, second, it’s not only the knowledge that we know we lack or even don’t know we lack but also, more importantly, the knowledge we think we know yet don’t. We know neither the limitations of our knowledge nor the extent of our ignorance. Too often, we’re confident and cavalier where we should be cautious, and we’re dismissive and defensive where we need to be open to new information, theories, hypotheses, and avenues of research.

But most of the funding, drawn from the profits of capitalism, is funneled back into further studying the certainties and convictions, further confirming the biases and beliefs of conventional ‘wisdom’, much of it being false at best. Good money gets thrown after bad, in an endless attempt to maintain the system and the establishment.

We have the most well-backed ignorance of any generation. Most humans in the past were content with blind faith, whereas we moderns deny our faith is faith. In many cases, we’ve been spending generations of effort and trillions of dollars on red herrings that keep us misdirected and preoccupied. For stability, a known falsehood is safer than an unknown truth.

The example of allopathic medicine

That pointless waste and diversion is seen, for example, with research on cancer and Alzheimer’s that have gone down many blind alleys (genetic mutations, brain plaque, etc), if that’s finally beginning to change with younger generations of researchers proposing new hypotheses and protocols.

Part of the difficulty is that most of the focus has been on diagnosing patterns of symptoms, putting a label on them to create a false sense of certainty, and then treating those symptoms to ameliorate anxiety, but often in the process conflating an effect with the cause. Much of healthcare is simply the placebo effect, subject-expectancy effect, and Pygmalion effect.

It creates an illusion that, under the sway of official authority, causes us to sometimes be interpellated into symptom relief or sometimes even measurable improvements. We want to be the good patient who heals and so our body tries its best to conform to expectations or maybe assuage the doctor’s ego. For example, many medications work well when first introduced on the market — and heavily advertised in the U.S. — but lose their efficacy over time.

Thus, the big pharma has to constantly pump out new hyped-up drugs. That indicates much of their efficacy was never objectively real in the first place or at least was never solely and fully attributable to the medication itself. They’re placebos, at least partly

Heck, a placebo isn’t required. Research has found that simply going to a doctor’s appointment, even when the doctor takes no medical action at all, will tend to leave the patient feeling better about whatever ails them. That is to say, to put it colloquially, a significant part of modern medicine is faith healing, hence the importance of good bedside manner. That isn’t to wave healthcare away as having no value, but it does once again demonstrate how little we understand.

Obviously, beyond simple and straightforward issues, this kind of confidence game can only go so far in dealing with real world problems.

For many major diseases, similar to large-scale and convoluted messes in society, we still don’t know the fundamental causes. Typically, the potentially most fruitful research is being ignored because it doesn’t fit into the hegemonic paradigm, not to mention it usually being difficult and expensive with rare promises of it leading to a profitable product that can be quickly marketed for a guaranteed return on investment.

Considers Dr. Dale Bredesen’s protocol for Alzheimer’s that is based on the premise that there is no single disease (hence, why a cure has been so elusive), rather overlapping patterns of symptoms involving various systems that are being affected by diverse causes: toxicity, nutritional deficiencies, metabolic disorder, mitochondrial dysfunction, etc. So, the treatment is multi-factorial and personalized, but almost no one wants to offer funding for a larger study. The majority of research grants go to studies that are limited to single factors.

That is why allopathic medicine primarily involves either a chemical pill or invasive procedure used in a targeted fashion, usually where separate specialists are treating each health issue as if it were unrelated to all the rest other than concern about drug interactions. Whereas functional medicine looks at the whole body as an integrated system of systems, all operating within larger conditions and environments requiring the doctor to holistically consider the patient’s lifestyle, diet, living situation, workplace, social stressors, relationships, etc.

The inadequacy of the former is that, in people’s lives, there is no such thing as controlling everything but one isolated factor, symptom, or issue. This is why standard research doesn’t always translate well or else only applies partly and inconsistently. Much of healthcare is throwing darts. The doctor tries one thing after another to see what might happen, in the hope that something will eventually show benefit, if also side effects at the same time.

We’re good at dealing with single symptoms or single physiological mechanisms, sometimes with amazing results. The problem is that, when you change one thing, it pushes and pulls numerous other systems with complicated and cascading webs of effects. This is how patients end up with long lists of drugs where many of them are treating the side effects of the others.

The doctor is often working blind or else with only the capacity to get glimpses into this or that, but doing so might require more expensive tests than insurance will pay for or the patient can afford. Even then, trying to put all the pieces together to make sense of it might be a near impossible task. It’s similar to reverse engineering, the attempt to figure out what was a piece of technology and what it did by looking at the scattered parts found after an explosion.

Reductionism and capitalist realism

What reductionism doesn’t acknowledge is that the whole is greater than the parts. There might be no way to get back to a comprehension of the whole merely going by the parts, no matter how many parts one has. Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. The only way to get to the whole is to start with the whole.

Falling short in this fashion is not only intrinsic to medicine but the whole scientific model that has dominated for centuries. It’s been about an atomistic and analytical approach where one tiny factor and causal mechanism is isolated. Without a doubt, the knowledge gained can be literally powerful (e.g., atomic bomb). Though this has some merit in advancing science, the largest and worst problems we’re facing aren’t amenable to such a limited strategy (e.g., anthropocene).

This leaves us in a state of utter cluelessness about the complex systems within systems and their vast number of dynamically and interactively moving parts (e.g., biosphere). Sadly, our obsession with individual bodies, isolated from the social sphere and separate from environments, has caused us to ignore individuals in actual practice of medicine where everyone is put into cookie cutter diagnoses and treatment protocols, largely because of the capitalist demands of bureaucratic healthcare systems and insurance companies.

Obviously, the failure with this approach is that, though it sometimes can be narrowly effective, it rarely promotes and re-establishes full physical health and flourishing, either for the individual or society, much less for the environment. It’s the difference between treating millions of lead-poisoned children and cleaning up the lead in the environment and preventing the lead pollution in the first place. It targets particular areas or individuals, but often with many potential side effects and long-term consequences or simply leaving the cause of the problem unresolved.

Most modern medicine is a blunt instrument, while what really need is multifactorial interventions, often at the level of public health or other governmental policies, programs, and practices. We need to flexibly combine the large-scale with the individualized, but at present we don’t typically get either. Instead, we end up with a muddled compromise that only has the benefit of increasing profits.

This is how the U.S. has ended up with one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world that gets far worse outcomes than countries with universal healthcare.

The challenge, of course, is that doctor deals with patients who live in a society that is systematically destroying their health on a daily basis: trauma, inequality, poverty, debt, economic desperation, permanent underclass overwork, exhaustion, dependence on simulants and sleep aids, malnourishing food system, manipulative media, and on and on. In the worst situations, it’s all combined as shit life syndrome.

Most often, the doctor can’t or won’t bother to try to change those conditions as it would make them the enemy of the very system they serve and benefit from. They too are trapped in ideological realism that is entrenched in path dependence. Understandably, with learned helplessness as cogs in the machine, the average doctor would rather not think about it because then they’d feel miserable and guilty. No one wants to see themselves as the bad guy, as part of the problem.

There is no profit in researching, promoting, and enacting this other systemic, integralist, and comprehensive understanding. All the institutional incentives, in fact, indoctrinate those working within the system to put their heads down and pretend they don’t see the horror show all around them. So, doctors try their best to patch up their patients, lessen the symptoms, numb the pain, and send them back into the battle to be sacrificed for the greater cause of the elite games of wealth and power.

It’s like the ancient Roman physician working on gladiators who only needed to fix them up enough so that they could later put on a good fight and die in the arena, as the second part of bread and circus. Or think of the vet treating the cow so that it will soon be healthy enough to pass inspection and be turned into meat. Modern medicine doesn’t need to heal us, doesn’t need to help us thrive and flourish, doesn’t need to ensure we live up to our potential. All that’s required is, however suffering and short our lives may be, that we can be good workers for a few decades to keep the profits flowing into the private bank accounts of the capitalist class. But with AI and automatization, most of us might no longer even have that value.

Certainly, the purpose isn’t to save anyone, other than the middle-to-upper classes with the privileges and access to resources. What the hegemonic status quo requires is relatively healthy ruling and managerial elites to keep the system running and to keep the peasants in line.

Costs: externalized and socialized, immeasurable and unknowable

The scale of the problem is vast.

Public health relates to environmentalism, and the latter operates at a global scale (Environment-Caused Deaths: Who is Counting, and Who Counts). Such harms don’t respect national boundaries. But it’s at a local level that it’s immediately and personally experienced. The capitalist class is able to pick healthy environments for themselves and their families while concentrating the sickness and suffering on the exploited, oppressed, and disenfranchised (e.g., offshoring factories in foreign countries with weak regulations, consisting of populations that are mostly poor and brown).

Such externalized costs are a way of punishment and control, a means of disciplining the permanent underclass (Capitalism as Social Control). The costs, though harming all of society, are deemed a worthy investment by the plutocrats and oligarchs so as to maintain their power and privilege (Costs Must Be Paid: Social Darwinism As Public Good). But such ruling elites don’t really have a clue what they’re doing, don’t appreciate the full costs, especially not the extent to which it even harms them (Keith Payne, The Broken Ladder; Christopher Ryan, Civilized to Death; etc).

That is what makes unrecognized and unconscious ignorance so dangerous. Informed rational actors would never create, support, and defend a civilization this insane and self-destructive.

Consider that the greatest known cause of disease and death, about 40%, is pollution (Socialized Medicine & Externalized Costs). Not to mention all the other physical and mental health issues likewise caused or contributed to by it, with the problems incurred being spread unevenly. Living near an unregulated factory pumping out pollution would translate to far higher numbers — 80%? 90%? — of disabilities, diseases, and deaths related to pollution. If we reduced that single factor alone, all the costs of healthcare, sick days, lost pay, disability payments, psychiatric problems, orphaned children, etc would drop like a rock.

It probably would be a reduction of at least trillions of dollars that are presently wasted worldwide every year. The global GDP is over $100 trillion, while a UN report found that almost no major global industry is a net gain for society when environmental costs are included.

Then consider environmental costs are just one portion of costs typically that are overlooked and dismissed. The diverse costs are so numerous and immense that we don’t even know what it all adds up to, especially as most of the costs are being deferred onto ignored populations and future generations. How does one put a price tag on resource loss, mass extinction, ecosystem destruction, ecological collapse, climate change, refugee crises, environmental-caused civil conflicts, resource competition that causes wars, poisoned groundwater, escaped GM crops, and on and on? Not to mention annihilation of indigenous knowledge that might hold answers to present or future problems, diseases, etc.

Most of the causes of harm are collective or else privatized with externalized costs, as part of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. We not only get sick because of what the rich do (e.g., factories and farmers dumping chemicals into our public waterways and atmosphere) but then we have to pay the rich to treat our sickness. They get us coming and going, as we’re corralled down the chute of the slaughter house.

At the very least, all of this means the global externalized and socialized costs are greater than the global net GDP, indicating that our apparent civilizational progress is actually an overall decline since its unsustainable and eventually the bill will come due. Some of the consequences could last for hundreds or thousands of years and, in some cases, forever.

Ignorance is magnified by inequality

Yet we’re told we can’t afford universal healthcare, environmental protections, or any other form of public good. That everything that benefits the common people must be cut. That destruction of the natural world is an inevitable price to be paid. But maybe we can’t afford to not improve conditions for all, can’t afford continued indifference and inaction, can’t afford the status quo that brought us to this point of crisis.

Certainly, though our ignorance is immense, we know enough to realize that wisdom tells us to heed the precautionary principle. That is part of the point of contemplating the original question: “What if everything you knew was wrong?” If we took it seriously, we’d act far differently. We need to be humbled. Then we might recognize that most of these costs could be avoided. But none of that is possible under capitalist realism that offers false confidence, a mirage of experts in control.

This constrained worldview applies to everything else as well.

Because of the profit model, most R&D funding simply goes to ascertaining methods to more effectively manipulate the physical and human world, including the psyche: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” said Jeff Hammerbacher, an early employee at Facebook. It’s practical knowledge of a sorts, but it offers nothing in terms of wisdom and value. It doesn’t tell us what we should or shouldn’t do, what are the consequences of what we do or don’t do (Jathan Sadowski, The Mechanic and the Luddite).

As such, we’re able to obtain natural resources and build a vast industrial and technological society. But the Cassandras of the world get little audience and traction, no matter how vast and obvious are the costs, no matter how the evidence piles up. We remain collectively ignorant while awash in more knowledge than has ever before existed.

The techno-optimists simply wave it all away with their grand visions and authoritative posturing. New innovations will magically solve all problems, as it’s claimed. This sense of faith is theological dogma, not a thoughtful assessment and clear-eyed conclusion. These ambitious elites have no interest in the petty concerns of the “reality-based community” because they make their own reality or so they believe. They’re idiots with too much power. But in the power disparity of dominance hierarchies, there is no one in a position to tell them they’re idiots to their faces.

That is the thing. Humans didn’t evolve to be scientific researchers, objective analysts, and rational actors. Nor did we evolve to to live under such freakishly abnormal conditions that disconnect us from reality, that alienate us from one another. Our ability to comprehend the world was shaped under much simpler conditions of evolution.

Maybe that is why, among tech giants, they start sounding rather religious in their prognostications, as a new breed of self-proclaimed prophets. Consider Peter Thiel who talks about the Anti-Christ and AI in a single breath. One gets the sense that he sees himself as a priest-godman who will capture and control these new demiurgic forces and redirect their power toward a grander vision of humanity, if many will have to be sacrificed in the process. In his case, that means techno-feudalism with a daker version of trickle-down.

Nothing about this is scientific and rational. Such people are madmen. But they wield an immensity and extent of power that no human before possessed.

Ruled by animism projected onto social constructions

The supernatural impulse never goes away. It just gets transformed. If we continue on this path… Machines are what we’ll worship in the future. Machines are what we’ll put our faith in to save us. This is naive, of course. It’s hubris. Yet we’re well on our way.

Animism is what we humans fall back on when complexity is too great for our minds.

One can sense that in our having given corporations legal ‘personhood’, to the point they have more rights, privileges, and protections than actual humans. As we once had god-kings and god-emperors, we now have god-corporations. This creeping animism is an undercurrent that we pretend isn’t there because we modern Westerners are supposed to be smarter and more sophisticated than the primitive, backwards cultures of the past.

We treat collective organizations and systems as if they have lives of their own, as if they’re inevitable and outside of our control. They’re greater than us, above and beyond us. We’re told that we have no choice but to relent to their claims and demands, that to reassert our own humanity would be morally wrong because property rights are the only rights that matter, hence property is all that matters, with violence against property being the greatest of crimes (e.g., the FBI designating Earth First as a terrorist group).

Disturbingly, instead of corporations being property, we are moving toward a neo-feudalism where we of the neo-serfdom will be beholden to corporations (Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash). Already, on social media and such, we the commoners are treated as products, not customers. They harvest our data, our attention, etc and then sell it to the highest bidder.

This is our inevitable fate, as long as capitalist realism continues to rule our lives and minds. As Margaret Thatcher put it, there is no alternative (TINA). That is what they want us to believe without question, that we’re trapped without an escape.

Capitalism has come to be treated more real than humans. It’s a hegemonic entity and immortal deity that, presumably, can’t be defied, thwarted, or killed. We have no choice, so we’re told, other than to submit and bow down to the system that stands far above us, that came before us and will continue long after us. That is literally true in the case of some corporations that have continued for generations at this point, something the American Anti-Federalists and other revolutionary radicals warned about based on their direct experience with the British East India Company.

This might be understood as a result of the modern disenchantment and rationalization of everything, as Max Weber argued. It has been denied that the world is alive, that the biosphere is a living system. This took the wind out of traditional religion that, until quite recently, treated nature as divine Creation. It might be filled with demons as well as angels but it was never doubted that it was filled with animate powers, beings, minds, and voices. It wasn’t limited to overtly animistic cultures like indigenous tribes, as it likewise remained a potent worldview among early modern Europeans.

This was the expression of an oral culture. It’s easy to forget that, until the past century, most people in the world were still illiterate or else barely literate (e.g., only able to write their signature and maybe read a simple sign). It’s interesting that we only finally achieved mass literacy at the very moment the literary paradigm had been toppled from its throne by photography, radio, film, and television; as explained by Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, Jeff Jarvis’ Gutenberg Parenthesis, Marshall McLuhan’s global village, and Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality.

Other things likely contributed. One intriguing case in point is the transition in substance usage. Western animism largely disappeared, by the 1800s, when caffeinated beverages and other addictive stimulants finally replaced the traditional gruit ales that were sometimes mildly psychedelic, beyond that of alcohol as depressant (“Yes, tea banished the fairies.”).

The point is that we modern WEIRDos (or MYOPICS) are not normal. And the world we’ve collectively created should not be treated as normative.

Old wine in new wineskins

In any case, the point is that animism is likely the starting point and resting state of the human psyche. It’s the evolutionary norm.

The more deadened the natural world comes to feel, the more its essence is displaced by the human-made world. As with a golem or tulpa (e.g., Pinocchio), we bring a sense of life and vitality to what we fantasize about and focus on. We pour ourselves into what we obsess over. We create the monsters that haunt us and vampirically prey upon our life force, leaving us depleted.*

Animism has never gone away, however much it’s repressed and unappreciated. The repressed, as it’s been said, returns with a vengeance.

In this light, capitalism has become our religion, technology our gods, and the tech oligarchs our priestly class (Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon). While we peons are lost in confusion, our lords and masters tell us they have everything under control. They give us the myth of rational téchnē. But it’s really the rituals and magic of a priesthood.

The rational facade is constantly breaking down and the underlying animistic impulse is forever reasserting itself, whether or not we acknowledge it. In fact, it can operate all the more powerfully to the degree it dwells in the shadows, by remaining obscured and hidden in the unconscious.

In the Bronze Age, no language had a word for ‘religion’.

That is because they perceived nothing separate from or outside their shared and contained ideological worldview. They were at the center of their world. Often referring to themselves as ‘The People’, they took the world they knew as having been made for them, or else that they had been made out of it.

It was comprehensive and totalizing, making sense of every aspect of their world and lives — there were no parts left on the shop floor. When a social system of beliefs, values, and practices gets labeled as something distinct in itself and distinct from all else (e.g., religion), it’s already been weakened and so, to that degree, needs to be enforced from above (e.g., a theocratic priestly class).

That is why religions have been involved in so much mass bloodshed since the Axial Age Revolution. Different than the Bronze Age, later rulers could no longer completely depend on a people who organically conformed and submitted to a communal reality without doubt and question.

Nonetheless, though clearly declining after the Bronze Age collapse (approximately 1177 BCE), there lingered much of the archaic sensibility, identity, and culture: dividualism, animism, bicameral mentality, bundle theory of mind, and 4/5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological). Being a transitional period made the ancient world dynamic. Boundaries were less hardened and rigidified. There was constant conversion between, mixing of, and influence by diverse groups that made different claims on identity and reality.

Everything more easily could shift and become something else. There was still some animistic dirt on the roots. In their reaction, the new and emboldened literary elite (e.g., Plato in Classical Athens) didn’t like that continued vitality of oral culture and so they were constantly trying to stamp it out. But it kept reemerging and resurging, until more fully being strangled into a coma millennia later during modernity.

That ancient syncretism of ideologies and clash of mentalities, with its creative flux (why it’s sometimes called the Axial Age revolution), was eventually replaced by the authoritarianism of religion proper — the new world religions. But that old time religion has been slowly dying out in recent history, generation after generation. Ironically, the weapon of murder was the Protestant reformation with its promotion of mass literacy.

The modern ruling elite have needed a more powerful theurgy of interpellation (i.e., indoctrinated mental capture). What makes both science and capitalism so compelling is that, like the Bronze Age religions (and, if to a lesser degree, the medieval Church), they’re totalizing; hence, why political totalitarianism proper didn’t appear until the 20th century. Even fundamentalists today feel compelled to rationalize their faith with pseudo-scientific Creationism, as did the fascists with eugenics. And of course, televangelism is among the most successful and profitable products on any capitalist market.

One may be an atheist, Christian, Buddhist, or whatever, etc. But no matter the specific group identifiers, significant or superficial, everyone under science and capitalism has no choice in the matter in the claims held over them. It’s a hegemonic ruling paradigm that contains and defines all else. The past century of totalitarianism has been the return of that archaic hunger to be fully immersed, the longing for the lost living divine that once inhabited direct experience (Hunger for Connection; & Music and Dance on the Mind).

This totalitarianism has been so effective and successful that most of us can’t recognize it. And there is a mindless comfort in willfully not recognizing it. This is the blindness of our mass ignorance. It gets mistaken for reality, like a mime who can’t find his way out of an invisible box.

*Side note

Julian Jaynes’ offered a similar explanation about egoic consciousness (i.e., individualism; or, more broadly, what Brian J. McVeigh called the ‘propertied self’). Schizophrenics, with weak egoic boundaries, often have near boundless energy. Jaynes postulated that may have been true of archaic humans (i.e., bicameral mind). It would explain why they were capable of architectural feats through methods forgotten after the Bronze Age collapse.

Maybe it wasn’t only lost knowledge — yet another example of our present ignorance — but also lost energy.

The new psychic structure required more energy usage. It could also explain why we hyper-egoic moderns with our obsessive individualism need constant intake of sugar and stimulants (caffeine, theobromine, nicotine, cocaine, meth, Ritalin, etc), for mere daily functioning, along with depressants (alcohol, l-theanine, opioids, semi-opioids like kratom, etc) to take off the edge from our exhausted and frazzled existence. We’re running on fumes.

The thick, rigid, and highly-controlled boundaries of egoic consciousness are energetically expensive. But it allows for a much more complex society with all its advantages and benefits. There appears to be a correspondence between the intricacy of societal structures and intricacy of the psychological structures. Considering our modern massive nation-states, empires, and geopolitical order, that would suggest an equally impressive socially constructed identity to match it, all of it internalized.

In contrast to modern WEIRD society, take the Old Kingdom of Egypt.

The archaic Egyptian population was relatively small (1.5-2 million; equivalent to present Phoenix AZ, Philadelphia PA, or San Antonio TX), was mostly spread out across small farms in rural areas, had multiple semi-autonomous regions (though technically unified), and had little infrastructure or technology (no paved roads, bridges, cranes, etc). They didn’t even have a large slave class at the time to sacrifice in back-breaking labor.

Instead, the Great Pyramids apparently were built by freely acting farmers in the off-season. Mostly using sheer manual labor, apparently combined with innovative thinking, they quarried and transported — from about 500 miles away — stones that weighed upwards of 80 tons (e.g., above the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza), all of which was amazingly positioned with exacting precision. We literally don’t know how they accomplished this exploit and no one has ever been able to repeat it or come close to it. In any case, the manpower used was immense.

To put it in context, the first crane that could lift 80 tons was the Grove TM 800 built in 1970.

Another point could be added. It’s not only lost technical knowledge and lost access to physiological energy. It seems to represent a loss of an entirely different way of being. Part of modern ideological realism is that it traps us in a narrow sense of self, maybe by design (Enclosure of the Mind; & Containment of Freedom). We built the trap and, after being lured into it, we forgot that it was a trap, something separate from us. It’s ideological realism as Stockholm syndrome.

The familiarity of this ignorant state is comforting to many. Or rather, like a straightjacket, it would be extremely uncomfortable to get out of it. It’s easier and more relaxing to just accept the constraints of one’s conditions and work within them. Being blind doesn’t feel so crippling when one has never known anything else, has never met anyone who could see, and couldn’t even imagine the possibility of sight.

The constraints and the fatigue feel natural. Even if we could escape, we are like the animal confined to a small cage since birth. Most of us have permanently lost our range of motion. The hobbling is built into our very developed self. And it’s hard to miss what you never knew.

Conclusion: What’s next?

Let’s return to the question we began with.

• What if all that we’ve taken as true and real turned out to be some combination of false, misunderstood, inaccurate, partial, uncertain, questionable, confused, illusory, fantastical, delusional, deceptive, contrived, artificial, socially constructed, obfuscatory, mystifying, and alienating?
• Could we, if only momentarily, drop our guard of ideological realism, essentialism, absolutism, and fatalism to allow into consciousness our own doubts, uncertainties, and ignorance, maybe to glimpse beyond the veil of our psychological defenses and ideological groupthink?
• Could we sit naked before our own immediate experience of the world as terra incognito and see it with fresh eyes, to relax into that undefended state of unknowing so as to find out what we might discover, notice, and learn, even to be surprised or fall into awe?

But to my mind, that’s merely the first step. It clears the board to start again. It empties the cup to fill it with something else. To imagine having a false understanding then makes possible imagining a better understanding. It’s a hopeful exercise of radical imagination. Ultimately, it’s a contemplation of human potential.

What if you, humanity, and the world are vastly greater than you were taught and indoctrinated to believe?

Many would see this emphasis of challenging criticality as negative. It goes against the prevailing mythos of Whiggish progressivism and confident utopianism, that the world is continuously improving and progressing in a linear pathway. If with nicer garb, our society is still ruled by an ideology of Manifest Destiny and White Man’s Burden. It’s just now our paternalistic overlords are think tank intellectuals, technocratic politicians, philanthro-capitalists, and big tech broligarchs.

Still, even as we are free to challenge this claim of authority over us and over our imaginations, we don’t have to deny that the arc of history bends toward justice, though that arc may take a winding and halting path. Sometimes the only realistic and meaningful way to have optimism about the future is through pessimism of the present. We must be ruthless in clearing the way for more inspiring possibilities, for greater expressions of human potential.

If this is the best of all possible worlds, then we should abandon all hope. But this being the best it can get is a simplistic conclusion of shallow optimism. It seems unlikely and silly, the mere self-serving rationalization of small minds and corrupt power. It’s time to take on our responsibility as co-creators of the good society we’ve long aspired toward, however often it gets obscured and forgotten.

The challenge is, in order to move in the right direction, we first need to stop going in the wrong direction. We need to pause, take a breath, and look around us so as to reorient ourselves, to reestablish environmental awareness, to assess our situation. Scientifically speaking, that is the purpose of the default mode network, a more open and undirected focus. Think of daydreaming, meditating, or going for a walk in nature. It’s to loosen the grip of egoic consciousness, if but for a moment.

In the modern world, we’re almost always in directed attention and repeatedly drawn into hard fascination, from work to media that leaves us in directed attention fatigue. Driven by stress and anxiety, this results in irritability, impatience, anger, aggression, etc; but also it’s associated with addictive behavior. Basically, we’re always on edge and distracted, and so ever more dependent on substances and activities to calm us down or ramp our minds back up to regain focus, never reaching a point of balance.

There is little left over for involuntary attention, such as soft fascination and a flow state. Yet it’s precisely in this other open and relaxed mentality where our psyches can process more deeply and think divergently, can engender creative and innovative responses (attention restoration theory). Otherwise, we get stuck in ruts.

Fortunately, it’s easy to change this. First off, we need to become aware of the attentional economy and how it’s harming us (Johann Hari, Stolen Focus; Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation; & Marc Berman, Nature and the Mind). Pulling back from distraction and sidestepping addiction, we need to reclaim our own minds, our own personal psychic space. We need to regain our sense of place in the world.

The only way to enter, embrace, and pass through uncertainty is by relaxing into it. We should befriend the darkness, grow accustom to it, and develop our night vision. We might begin to discern the outlines of something else. We might glimpse something in our periphery, something around the next corner. At the edge of what we’ve seen before, on the other side of the dim murkiness, there might be gallery of light. Or an opening onto a vista. Or multiple pathways that leads deeper into the woods.

But we’ll never know if we passively remain in place, mesmerized by the flickering shadows on the wall.