By Caitlin Johnstone
September 11, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- Whenever I talk about
the way our species is sliding toward
annihilation via nuclear armageddon or
environmental disaster I always get a few people
saying something along the lines of, “Good,
humans are horrible. The planet will be better
off without us.”
This attitude generally seems to be born of
frustration. People learn about what’s happening
to our world and begin to see how easy it would
be to change course if not for the greed and
megalomania of our rulers, as well as the
obedience of the rank-and-file public and its
credulous acceptance of the propaganda that
keeps them accepting status quo systems, and
they get frustrated. Frustrated with a humanity
that just won’t come to its senses, even with
all the evidence right there to be seen.
That frustration often turns to disgust as
people discover that not only do others fail to
see what they see, but they
actively avoid looking at it even if you
point it out to them. You can lay out the
evidence for the corruption and unsustainability
of status quo politics and the omnicidal,
ecocidal depravity of oligarchic imperialism —
lay it out right under their noses — and they’ll
make up excuses to turn away.
One way of dealing with the psychological
discomfort of this situation is to try and
distance yourself emotionally from the plight of
humanity and say, “Fine, screw it. Let humanity
plunge into dystopia and armageddon. The sooner
it happens, the better. We deserve it.”
And I understand the sentiment, but to me
saying humanity deserves destruction sounds a
lot like saying a drug addict deserves to
overdose.
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A heroin addict isn’t fully in control of
their actions; if they were they would simply
quit, because they know from both public
knowledge and firsthand observation that it’s a
destructive habit. Addiction is described — at
least by anyone whose mind is worth a damn — not
as a personal choice, but as a disease. Just as
would be the case with any other disease,
addiction is a condition over which they do not
have control, because it has taken over their
operating system against their will in some way.
Humanity as a whole is on much the same boat.
We have a condition which makes us behave in a
self-destructive way, and on paper we could
technically all just collectively change course,
even if a few oligarchs and empire managers
tried to stop us. But we don’t, because we’re
not in control.
Those with a substance abuse problem use
because they don’t know how to feel okay without
the substance, and if they ever overcome their
addiction they will eventually discover that
this was because there were unconscious forces
within them which made the experience of sober
life intolerable. Forces like psychological
tendencies born of trauma, deprivation or
dysfunction earlier in life, tendencies which
might manifest as experiences like depression,
anxiety or self-loathing which can become too
difficult to tolerate without their substance of
preference.
Human behavior likewise is driven by
unconscious forces on the collective level, but
instead of early childhood trauma we’re talking
about our entire evolutionary history, as well
as the history of civilization.
It’s a ridiculous situation, if you think
about it. The story of life on this planet has
been about organisms trying to avoid being eaten
long enough to reproduce, and our species
stumbled out of that horrifying predicament with
all the same fear responses and stress hormones
and now all of a sudden you find yourself
sitting in a cubicle with your heart racing as
though you’re running from a saber-toothed tiger
because you overhear Janice from accounting
gossiping about you.
The eat-or-be-eaten dynamic came crashing
headlong through the dawn of a new species with
a rapidly-evolved cerebral cortex and the sudden
capacity for abstract thought, and all that fear
and stress kept marching forward from generation
to generation entangling itself with this added
new element of thought, language and
storytelling. This gave rise to societal
constructs like religion, government, hierarchy
and family power structures, all largely born of
the primitive, fear-based desire to control and
dominate which we carried with us from our
evolutionary ancestors who lived in trees to
hide from predators.
Parents who were traumatized by their parents
passed their trauma on to their own children
because their trauma made them behave in a
traumatized way, and those children passed their
own trauma on to their children too. On top of
this small-scale generational trauma we added
things like wars, slavery, tyranny, colonization
and genocides which traumatized entire
populations, and that trauma would be
passed on from generation to generation as well.
And then we showed up. We, the people who are
currently alive. That’s what we were born into.
That’s the wave we rode in on. And that wave is
still going.
And we wonder why everyone’s so dysfunctional
and self-destructive.
We never really had a chance to build a
healthy world. Our ancestors went from running
away from monsters with sharp fangs to burning
witches and heretics to fighting world wars to
giving birth to us, and that wave of fear and
chaos carried forward right into our own psyches
and into the psyches of everyone else on this
planet without skipping a beat. If you look at
where we came from and how we got here, it’s
amazing we’re even as functional as we are.
And that’s what we’re dealing with here. A
heritage of trauma stretching back into an
unfathomably vast expanse of time, incarnating
in the current form of some eight billion homo
sapiens. If you zoom out and look at the big
picture with this understanding, it’s difficult
to find real guilt anywhere, in anyone. Even in
the most abusive and traumatizing among us.
Certainly it is in our collective interest to
immobilize anyone whose tendencies are
dangerously destructive. And certainly
establishing culpability and accountability for
misdeeds is going to be an important part of
expanding human consciousness and creating a
healthy world, because we have to understand how
and why things are going wrong before we can fix
our problems. But even the most destructive
among us are simply carrying forward the
heritage of trauma which has been reverberating
from generation to generation from the deepest
recesses of prehistoric life.
Think about a mistake you’ve made in the
past. A real bad one, one that makes you cringe
whenever you think about it. You wouldn’t make
that mistake in the same way again, would you?
Of course not, because you now know things you
didn’t know back then. You are conscious now of
things you previously were not. Depending on how
conscious you are now in relation to how
conscious you were then you might repeat similar
mistakes in similar ways, but you wouldn’t
intentionally repeat the exact same error if you
had a do-over. In that small way, your
consciousness has expanded.
That’s all negative human behavior ultimately
is: mistakes that were made due to a lack of
consciousness. A lack of empathy, a lack of
serenity, a lack of information, a lack of
insight, a lack of knowledge that there are
better choices, a lack of perception on what’s
really going on in the world, a lack of clarity
on the ways propaganda manipulates us into
serving the interests of the powerful — these
are all just different kinds of unconsciousness.
Different ways that one can fail to accurately
perceive reality.
In this churning, chaotic tidal wave of
evolutionary trauma that we were all born into,
the only thing we really have any amount of real
control over is whether we mindlessly repeat our
conditioning patterns or start bringing
consciousness to them. But even that is greatly
limited by how much consciousness we have access
to at the time; many people are just barely
treading water psychologically and don’t often
have the space to pause and bring clarity to
their own inner processes. A lot of people are
just stumbling blindly along, and it’s not
ultimately their fault any more than the
blindness of an actual blind person.
So we’re all innocent, in the end. Again, we
must of course push to bring consciousness to
the parts of humanity that have taken a wrong
turn — to the war criminals and plutocrats and
managers of empire, and all other abusers and
the abusive systems which elevate them. But
underneath that fierce burst of light there can
also be a deep compassion and understanding born
of a lucid seeing of how we got here in the
first place.
We’re all ultimately doing the best we can
while riding the momentum of a chain of events
far beyond our control which stretches backward
through time all the way to the Big Bang.
Everyone is playing with a lousy hand which was
dealt to them by the churning tumult of
evolution and history while grappling with the
puzzle of mortality on a tiny blue world of
unfathomable beauty that is hurtling through a
universe that none of us understand.
Let’s be tender with each other.
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
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