Living
environments have an enormous influence on the way that human beings live. In more traditional living environments the
influence has been even more acute. International
trade was not such a determining factor in the kinds of products that were used
and consumed. The foods that were eaten,
the clothes that were worn, the tools that were used, the structures that
provided shelter, the vehicles that provided transport were mostly derived from
local materials and animals and plants.
And these local entities were very effective in helping people to
survive in the particular ecosystems in which they found themselves.
Nowadays,
although some allowance is made for climate and culture, people in most parts
of the world tend to consume much more similar products. Modern technology has lifted people above the
local ecosystem which used to provide people their grounding. The grounding was not only a physical
grounding, but a psychological grounding as well. And although nature could create some
catastrophic situations and events for them – situations and events that could
result in traumatic experiences – living in and around nature could also
provide psychological healing for people.
After the catastrophe, nature restores itself and, insofar as people
work to restore their own damaged connections to nature, in the process, they tend
to restore themselves psychologically.
Because the connections are seldom totally broken for traditional
people. Traditional people, in such
situations, usually remain a part of the ecosystem in which they live. And this natural ecosystem remains a template
for traditional human interaction.
Sometimes, traditional people may hate one another, they may go to war
with one another, but somehow they don’t seem to lose their organic connection
to one another.
Perhaps
it’s because most traditional people, being more grounded in nature, are
automatically more grounded in each other.
Their collective sense of self is more developed, and their individual
sense of self is less so. The grounding
of nature is a template that allows people to deep-bond with one another. And to form a collective sense of self that
is much greater than the sum of the individual senses of self. The strength of this collective sense of self
lies in the flowing blendable continual stimuli, the organic stimuli that flow
through the collective and give the collective coherence. These stimuli help to cushion a person against
the damaging effects of trauma.
In
contrast, in modern technological society, people are structurally separated
from the grounding in nature. Physically
and psychologically, they live in an experiential vacuum filed with tension
pockets of free floating figures. In
such an environment, people become isolated from one another. In an environment filled with random defined
discrete stimuli, people have to develop senses of self with strong definition
in order to survive. These people are
subject to two kinds of overlapping psychological danger. Assaults from free-floating figures
(conflicts with people including family and friends, abrasive experiences with
environmental tension pockets: noisy modern machinery, crowded modern urban
areas, etc.) on the one hand, and pure numbness from the experiential vacuum on
the other. Freudian psychoanalysis
started the focus on the traumas experienced by free-floating human figures –
disruptive events that, with a vacuum backdrop, are not allowed to be easily
reabsorbed in the person’s mind.
Instead, these events replay over and over again and affect the person
in a lot of different pathological ways.
Isolated defined discrete senses of self are more brittle and therefore
open to more cracks. Now such a sense of
self does have the advantage of being more free to act on the basis of
individual volition. However, the
problem is that that individual volition may not always be able to protect the
person.
And numbness generated by
the frictionless mediated technological backdrop in the field of experience can
create pathological effects independent of the traumas from the tension pockets
of figures. Numbness can cause people to
sink inside themselves with depression and anxiety, on the one hand, or it can
cause people to strike out with abrasive actions in the external world in order
to feel more alive. It can be drug
addiction or other addictions, suicide, mass murders or other crimes of
numbness. It doesn’t matter that these
abrasive actions are, in the long run, destructive to the person committing
them. For these people, the intensity of
the experience before and during the self-destruction is worth it.
Traditional
psychotherapy has been built on the assumption that one can treat a patient, to
a great extent, independent of the larger physical living environment in which
he lives. But, as has been indicated,
the larger living environment can play a very important role in terms of how
the sense of self is shaped and in terms of how negative emotional situations
and events are processed. There is no
question but that negative emotional situations and events are magnified in an
experiential vacuum, against a vacuum backdrop.
One
last thought. The main reason the
Islamic terrorists give themselves, their lives, so easily to their cause
through suicide is that they have such a strong collective sense of self as a
result of centuries of traditional living close to nature. If they die, their families, their
communities, their cause lives on. Even
the Saudi hijackers of the 911 attack may have been modern on the surface, but
they came from a culture that moved into the modern technological world very
quickly as a result of sudden oil wealth, which means that under that modern
veneer, there was still a very strong traditional collective sense of
self. And finally, according to Islam,
the souls of terrorists continue to live on in a very vibrant palpable
immediate paradise. Jihad suicide simply
means to pass from one state of life to another. And the second one is so much better to them.
© 2020 Laurence Mesirow
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