Wednesday, 29 June 2016

How on Earth do we cool things down?

THIS HUFFINGTON POST ARTICLE ON INFLAMMATORY DISEASES seems like a metaphor for the increasing strife we are witnessing on our planet. Wherever you look, at every level, things appear to be becoming more toxic, more inflamed and deranged. Lost in a hot fog of emotion, members of the collective human family are failing to recognise one another and finding any old excuse to fall out - like the immune system attacking the very body of which it is an integral part.
"We are facing an epidemic of allergic (60 million people), asthmatic (30 million people) and autoimmune disorders (24 million people). Autoimmune diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, celiac disease, thyroid disease, and the many other hard-to-classify syndromes in the 21st century. These are all autoimmune conditions, and at their root they are connected by one central biochemical process: A runaway immune response also known as systemic inflammation that results in your body attacking its own tissues.
Not forgetting depression, also an inflammatory condition, which, at ~350 million people, may eclipse these other problems even when they are added together. And reductionist thinking is not the answer: 
Something more expansive is needed if we are to see what we are really dealing with.

Illustration of The Blind Men and The Elephant from A Thousand and One Nights
The stress caused by emotionally toxic environments - those in which it is difficult or impossible to meet innate human emotional needs - is, unsurprisingly, hardly touched on because the organising ideas necessary to perceive things in this way, at this level, are not yet present in the writer's mind. 

But stress for this reason is, maybe, the major factor, and its effects seem to go well beyond individual physical ailments to affect the entire human organism. 

New ways of seeing that help us make sense of what is happening, and cool the emotional temperature on planet Earth, have never been more necessary.

Monday, 27 June 2016

Reflections on the UK's EU referendum

The saddest thing about the EU referendum is how it has divided, and continues to divide, the people of the United Kingdom. To vote you needed to pick a side, and if you picked a side you risked alienating yourself from huge numbers of others - including old friends, colleagues, neighbours - who thought differently about what the best thing to do might be. The fact is that nobody really knew what the best thing to do would be. You can only really know this if you know what the consequences of an action will be, and we live in a world where making predictions based on yesterday’s weather just doesn't seem to work very well any more (if, indeed, it ever did). All any of us had to go on was opinions and hunches justified by varying amounts of variable quality information.

Possibly the most important vote of our lifetimes?

So here we all are on the flip-side of “possibly the most important vote of our lifetimes” and a small majority have decided we should leave the European Union: 17.4 vs 16.1 million people. The emotionality and ‘informational overload’ leading up to this decision caused immense stress and confusion for many. The obsolete ‘us’ vs ‘them’ (in-group vs out-group) survival instinct highlighted in this article about why we feel antipathy towards refugees has been provided with ideal conditions for its activation. It’s still raging, and finding a myriad of different ways of expressing itself - none of them very helpful.

The entire debate over the referendum was polluted by a need to polarise voters because of the very nature of the black and white decision they were facing, and all sorts of tactics were used that increased the emotion in an effort to herd sufficient numbers of human beings in the direction deemed correct by the argument makers. Passions were deliberately, and not so deliberately (because so many of the people involved know no better), stoked by all concerned.

A difficult choice for emotional brains

The ‘vote leave’ campaign may have been fractionally more successful because, with its “take back control” message, it tapped into our innate need for autonomy and control, which is frustrated by bureaucracy, rules and red tape. On the other hand, the remain campaign seemed to emphasise how leaving would, in a multitude of ways, make us all less safe and secure. Both sides seemed to have an intuitive grasp of what really matters to human beings (we are motivated by anything that promises to meet our innate needs) but, unfortunately, people were forced to choose between increasing their sense of autonomy whilst (potentially) becoming less secure, or maintaining their sense of security at the price of their sense of control. Neither option was wholly appealing hence, perhaps, the close margin. (It would have been extremely interesting to add an Emotional Needs Audit to the referendum so the results could have been correlated with how well participants felt their emotional needs are currently being met. But this opportunity was lost because it would never have occurred to the organisers - our rulers are still too ignorant of what really drives, and is important to, human beings.)

In the wake of the referendum result the emotional brain is clearly having a field day as people argue, blame, resign and make all sorts of binary, final decisions that, viewed from a cooler perspective, seem both unnecessary and unhelpful. (Further evidence, if more were needed, that high emotional arousal causes us to lose access to our higher human faculties and renders us functionally stupid.) Because this seems like an ideal time for sticking together, and sticking with it - not for more fighting and abandoning of ships.

Charting a way forward

There are big questions now facing the UK such as: What do we do next? How do we move forward? How might we stick together in order to work things out and avoid further wasteful conflict? Ideological, party politics is divisive. Is it (like the us-vs-them instinct previously referred to) an anachronism that we need to dump if we are to discover a viable way of running our country, especially now that we have increased scope for taking responsibility and making our own decisions? Do the conditions in post-Brexit UK increase the necessity, and provide an opportunity, for us to take the next step in our political evolution? If so what might that look like?

It’s clear to most people that our politicians have lost their way. If you asked most of them what the purpose of politics is (and assuming, by some miracle, that they answered honestly) one feels that they would say something like:
"If we are in power the purpose of politics is to remain in power. If we are not in power the purpose of politics is to get into power."
Beyond this it is doubtful that they would have anything useful, or coherent, to contribute. Money and power are the priorities. Everything is subservient to these considerations.

The good news is that Human Givens Charter provides a simple blueprint for how to govern a country in a way that could unify the warring clans and work better for all concerned. In summary, imagine a country where the agreed purpose of politics was:
"To run things in such a way that people and businesses can thrive."
Rates of mental illness would be used to measure how well any government was doing vis-a-vis this purpose. Healthy GDP (whatever this means when such a large slice of it is apparently 'consumer spend') and profit in general would be a byproduct of creating an environment in which more and more people get their innate needs met, gain access to their innate resources, become more stable, intelligent and creative - rather than the (in itself meaningless) raison d'etre.