An accident of birth placed me into a family with economic security. Early in life, my parents divorced and I grew up spending my childhood in two worlds. One was a world where money and its associated trappings were in abundant supply, and the other in a world where it was not. I was a member of both communities, and in many ways, neither.
The disparity between those two worlds shaped who I am and how I view the world around me. I have spent most of my 66 years trying to reconcile the difference between those worlds. Mostly, I have chosen to live in communities where “lack” was the dominant paradigm. My work life has been amongst people who are considered “working class,” or “blue collar.” But that placement has been a matter of choice, driven largely by the deep awareness that the connections and human to human interactions felt deeper, more “real,” than those that I experienced among humans who lived in a world of financial abundance.
In my effort to reconcile the two worlds, I have read the works of Chuck Collins, David Korten, David Graeber, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Jill Bolte Taylor, and many others. As a Registered Nurse I studied crisis intervention, neurophysiology, and psychology. For decades I have been on the boards of organizations championing the cause of economic justice.
I am presently engaged with a group of people who, like me, have economic advantage. The following is a piece which I composed as a letter to the members of that group shortly after the COVID19 Pandemic began.
Can We Step Out Of The Myth?
The current situation with COVID19 is shaking things up. We are getting a chance to see with clarity the consequences of some of our collective long-standing beliefs and social priorities.
For a very long time, humans around the planet have engaged in "productivity" which seems not to be directed at meeting real basic (and universal) human needs. The things that feed our humanity and truly bring us joy and pleasure are deeply ingrained in our DNA. Advances in the understanding of neuropsychology and a host of other scientific pursuits have made it pretty clear that "normal, healthy" humans are predominantly curious, playful, and most importantly, loving beings. If we are not under threat (real or imagined) we are hard-wired to be kind to one another. In fact the three greatest triggers for endorphin release in our brains are sex, chocolate, and being kind!
Yet we have created social systems which are deeply rooted in pshychopathology. We were taught, and then re-teach the concept that other humans are out to get us, and that in order to survive we must build walls (both tangible and figurative) to protect ourselves from the hostile "other." Over time, we have collectively "evolved" to spending a vast amount of our "productive" energy on this self protection. If we are living in a dangerous world where everyone else is out to get us, this makes a certain amount of sense. But that perception, the belief that "others" want to harm us, flies in the face of what we know scientifically to be real and true.
On an individual level, each of us can, with a bit of introspection, come to a pretty short list of what we really hold as essential components of our well being: adequate nutrition, adequate shelter, an opportunity to express our curiosity and creativity, feeling affirmation and love from others, and feeling love FOR others, and the opportunity to be sexual. There's not a lot else. How is it then, that when we step beyond our individual state and move into the collective, we have chosen to build "communities" which endeavor to do a whole bunch of stuff that has absolutely NOTHING to do with meeting those basic needs, but has everything to do with responding to the fear that those needs might not be met. The only reason that I can think of is the "herd" effect has taken hold of us.
Neurophysiologists have discovered that the chemicals which create the physical sensations of emotion are released predominantly by our hypothalamus. We have also learned that in addition to muscle tissue, there is a tremendous amount of gray matter (brain tissue) located in the heart. The heart functions both as a resonator and an antenna (receiving energy). There is a bi-directional connection between our hypothalamus and the heart, so when the hypothalamus triggers the cascade which results in the chemical release which creates our felt experience, our heart radiates that energy... and when the heart receives energy from the outside it feeds back to the hypothalamus which in turn triggers the chemical cascade.
Our thinking brain (the left side) is forever trying to create a narrative which explains our felt sensation. If we are feeling fear, our brain will concoct a story to explain the sensation, and that story will reinforce the felt sensation which in turn will strengthen the sensation causing us to delve more deeply into the story... and a cycle is off and running. While we are in that cycle, our hearts are radiating our sensation, and another heart can pick up on the message and then the brain attached to that heart goes into the same feedback loop, and the fear energy builds. The end result is that if I tell myself a story and frighten myself, the chemistry of the process inevitably means that my fear will spread. This is useful if I, alone, observe a saber toothed tiger creeping towards my tribe. I don't have to go through an explanation to each member of my tribe to get them up and running... My fear sensation spreads rapidly, and all of the physical traits of fear (elevated, heart rate, respiratory function, hearing and sight acuity, increased muscle tone, slowed digestion) kick into action throughout the tribe. The thing is, if I have a dream that there is a tiger, and wake up trembling, the sensation spreads just as easily even if the tiger was truly only in my thoughts. The spread can only be stopped by a compelling counter narrative: someone observing that I must have been having a dream and that there is no tiger!
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We are a species of storytellers. Narrative is both how we experience the world and the basis for how we respond to it. We experience each moment from our short term memory. Our “experience” is perhaps only a few nanoseconds behind, but mostly what we think is happening right now! actually happened a moment before, and that experience came to our brain which files it in the short term memory and we see it and boom, we are having reality. In the same moment that we are experiencing it, we're running a quick check of our long term memory to see if this has happened before and to help us determine our response (interestingly, occasionally our brain mis-files the moment into our long term memory before putting it into the short term bank, so when we do get it into the short term bank and check the long term bank, the experience is already there... deja vu!!). We build stories to knit together our experience and craft a response which will keep us safe. My eyes see me approaching a cliff, my brain processes the vision, the deep scan recalls a sensation of falling and knits the two experiences together filling in many blanks along the way with information which has been stored in the brain from stories told by others, whose stories were in turn derived from a mix of their own experience and stories told by others... So what we "know" is actually a complex blend of truth and fiction.
For many years, humans were mostly in agreement that the world was flat. A disc with a distinct edge which one could fall off of. EVERYbody thought that this was true, and because it was "true" no-body ventured out across the horizon. Generations of humans self regulated their behavior based upon a myth. I believe that the shared perception that the other is "dangerous" is a similar myth. We were taught it as a truth, and we repeat that teaching. There are ample examples of people doing harm to others, which we use to reinforce the veracity of the myth, and we share those stories with one another to explain our own sensations of fear. The thing is, for NORMAL humans, harming others is only an act in which we engage if we are, ourselves, feeling fear. And if the myth that we are telling ourselves is that we should be afraid, then we are self creating the emotional state from whence behavior which is frightening or dangerous to others becomes possible.
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"Power" is the word that we use to describe our ability to control our own safety from those things that we perceive to be dangerous (essentially anything which triggers our hypothalamus to release the chemical cascade of the fear sensation). Since the sensation of fear is uncomfortable, we attempt to shape a narrative of the sensation which falls within the skill set that we have developed so that we can take action to reduce the perceived threat. That skill set is as much a matter of personal experience as it is learning from the stories of others' experience. The most obvious and visible expression of power is physical violence. And the extreme expression of that is killing another. But there are clearly all sorts of other expressions which, while less immediately obvious, are still a means by which we can control other people's actions to the extent required to reduce our own experience of fear. Money is a socially acceptable tool by which we exert power over one another.
All of us who have self identified has having Advantage are in personal control of resources (money) which vastly exceeds that controlled by most of the other humans with whom we share the planet. We have "benefitted" from the mythology that we ought to be afraid, and that the appropriate response to that fear is to hold power as a means of protecting ourselves from the frightening world out there. But what if the deep root of our fear is based upon a shared story that is not true? What if we were spending our days attempting to gain (or retain) power over something that doesn't exist?
The economic consequences of COVID19 have had a profound impact on the size of my pile of power. My perception of myself has deep roots in my self image as being a generous and giving person. Over the years I have arrived at a somewhat dynamic comfort level around how much of the pile I needed to retain in order to feel safe. As markets tumbled, I blew below that threshold in 4 days. I tried out the self-soothing story "just sit tight... it'll rebound.." for a while. And that worked... sort of. But there was this deep awareness that my ability to support others might be in jeopardy. I was wondering if I might need to limit what I gave. No, wait... I might choose to limit what I gave. What? Me no longer supporting others because I felt afraid? Even though I "know" that the fear is baseless? This has been a source of deep contemplation.
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What if this moment was the opportunity that humans have been needing for centuries to break out of the myth of being afraid of others? What if we were to take the piles of power and act in such a way as to break the cycle? To demonstrate, as so many hundreds and thousands of acts of human kindness around the globe in response to COVID 19 are already doing, that being kind and helping the other feels MUCH better than retaining a pile in service of our fear?
What if changing our long pattern of self protection was rooted in what we now know about how our brains/heart interact and the nature of the transmission of our emotional state amongst others? If I fear the "other" in large part because the "other" fears me, doesn't it make sense that if I shift my efforts from making me feel safe, to making the other feel safe, would not that be the best way to actually create safety? Being kind and helping others is what our DNA wants. Being kind and loving is what we are wired to do. If we do that instead of reinforcing our own sense of fear, then the "other" will be free to step away from their fear and do what is natural to them. What if it were that simple? What if ALL of our collective efforts were directed at taking down the emotional and figurative walls that we have spent centuries constructing, and instead, focused our massive creativity and ingenuity on the task of making our shared space safe and supportive?
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I want to have this conversation with others. I want to learn from others' imaginations and experience. I want to dream, not about how to solve problems, but instead, what things would look like when the problems were solved. Then, work backwards to see which problems are actually worth bothering with at all? It makes little sense to spend time in the cold fussing with your jacket zipper if someone is opening the door to invite you into the warmth! Which of the problems we face fall into that category, but because we're zipper fixers we're damn well gonna keep standing in the cold working the zipper?
Does this conversation interest you? If this were THE moment to be bold and step through fear to something better, would you at least want to explore the possibility?
Bill Creighton is a curious student of being alive, and sorting out the difference between love and fear. When he is not out exploring, he lives with Nina the cat in Freeport, Maine.
