Mother Nature Is Not So Maternal Anymore

 

            Nature has played a very important role in the discussions presented in this column.  Nature is the foundational source of the organic stimuli for which human nervous systems were built. Most of the time, it presents stimuli within the range that we can most easily absorb.  These stimuli are neither too abrasive, too overwhelming nor too low-key or frictionless.  In other words, nature becomes the source of our physical and emotional grounding.  This positive side of nature acts as a template for human interaction and, in particular, human bonding.  Without at least some aspects of nature in our daily living environment, human society would fall apart.  This is distinct from all the animal, vegetable and mineral products that nature provides humans.  But what is important to think about is that nature, as commonly viewed, is not simply a source of things to consume, but rather a whole enveloping ambiance to absorb.  Many of us appreciate this distinction when we take our walks in the park or our trips to the country.  We become reconnected to ourselves, feel at one with ourselves.  Chicago, my home town, has the motto of Urbs In Hortus (City in a Garden) because most residential streets have patches of grass and trees between the streets and sidewalks as well as lawns between the sidewalks and homes.  Boulevards have greenery and trees on median strips.  And apart from the big parks, there are a lot of small parks strategically located throughout the city.  This is all wonderful, and it is nature at its tamest and most accessible.

            But nature doesn’t always behave so nicely.  Nowadays, nature is creating a whole series of new twists to the wild unruly behavior that frequently made humans feel so fragile and perishable in the days before modern technology came into its own.  Climate change is multiplying and exacerbating the natural catastrophes that drove people to modern technology as a vehicle for rising above the perishability of nature.  Except that our interventions to control nature have begun to have the opposite effect.  The effects of technology have so disrupted nature that our relationship to nature is, in a strange way, beginning to look as powerless as before the creation of modern technology.  All the heat waves with the resulting wild fires, the proliferation of hurricanes and tornadoes, the increase in earthquakes due to fracking, the breakup of traditional weather patterns in different regions of the world, the rising water levels of the oceans that threaten to swallow up coastal communities as well as islands.  The earth is definitely not what it used to be as a result of the increasing use of fossil fuels.  And even were we to switch now to solar, wind and biomass for the majority of our energy needs, the earth would not suddenly return back to “normal”.

            And then there is the problem of the pandemic, which has been so disruptive.  The pandemic is not so much the result of a misplaced attempt to control nature as it is an attempt interact with nature in inappropriate ways.  HIV supposedly entered the world of humans as a result of a human-chimpanzee sexual liaison in Africa.  By the same token, Covid 19 entered the world of humans as a result of the consumption of wild animal meat in China.  Meat from bats or meat from an animal like a civet or pangolin that had been kept close to the bats.  I know that the theory has been questioned by many since it was first proposed.  But many other pandemics have been started by human contact with animals, so it seems to me that at some point, humans went to bat caves in China.  And why would they go if it wasn’t for the potential meat.

            So humans destroy nature as a result of the mediation of technology.  And then they try to commune with nature in inappropriate ways as a desperate attempt to try to gain some pockets of  extreme organic stimulation and thus feel more vibrantly alive.  Except that the organic stimuli that they target are stimuli that they are unable to properly absorb because of the microbes involved.  And in the case of Covid 19, this then leads to withdrawing even more from many aspects of the world of primary experience into the increasingly mediated world of Zoom.

            So we are now at the point where we are confronted with two distinct worlds of experience: a technological world which is increasingly bland, sterile and numbing and a natural world which, because of climate change and pandemics, is becoming increasingly dangerous.  And people become more inclined to rely on the technological world, because of the surface safety that it offers.  And less inclined to rely on the natural world, which should be the main source of grounding in human lives, but which instead has been gradually moving to swallow people up.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow 

How Trump And The Republicans Influence Their Followers

            Pollsters and pundits are beating their heads against the wall trying to figure out how they got it so wrong in their predictions for American elections.  Nobody thought that the presidential race was going to be so close.  Everybody thought it was going to be a blowout for Biden.  And as for the Congressional races, rather than picking up seats in the House of Representatives, the Democrats actually lost seats.  Finally, rather than picking up perhaps five or six seats in the Senate, as the experts had predicted would happen, the Democrats have picked up just one.  Yes, there is the possibility of more seats from the runoff elections in Georgia.  But, by now, the Democrats should have been able to develop a comfortable lead in senate seats.  It didn’t materialize.

So what are we to make of this?  What is the cause of the fairly decent showing by Trump and the Republicans in the elections?  On one level, we can say that, even though he lost, some seventy million voters remained loyal to Trump.  And what generated his support?  Here we get into the idea that I have proposed that Trump is a wild free-floating figure who shocks people out of the incredible numbness they feel living in modern technological society and the experiential vacuum that it creates.  And as for the Republicans in Congress, they make people feel abrasively alive by a policy and philosophy that is very punishing to the average workers. These, on one level, rather than being focused defined discrete causes are very subtle seemingly infinite vacuumized causes.  The vacuum leads to wild and abrasive reactions from Trump and the Republicans which lead to strong support from the Republican masses.  These are just not the kinds of causes you can point your finger at and say “This is it!”

But the modern world is almost exclusively concerned with finding defined discrete causes for everything that they can.  And this is, of course, the result of the fact that people today rely on science, technology, math and logic as the only principal sources of truth.  And data, formulas, and logical statements are the main meaningful units of truth today.

            As I have stated previously, there are at least two other meaningful categories of causes to consider.  There are blurry flowing blendable continual causes that are very difficult to pin down in terms of when and why they start.  When exactly and why do two people fall in love?  When and why does a riot start?  Why do some performers become very popular and others not so much?  The responses would be very ambiguous.

            Finally, there are the infinite vacuumized causes generated by the vacuum of space that underlies everything in the universe and, in particular, the experiential vacuum that people experience a lot in modern technological society.  This is the most subtle category of cause of all, which is why I spend so much time focusing on it in this column.

            The reason so many people spend time today on puzzles – whether crossword puzzles, Sudoku, or jigsaw puzzles or watch television shows like “Jeopardy” or “Wheel of Fortune” is that they all reduce life to the first kind of causality.  Life becomes a defined discrete problem to be solved.  And this is the way we gain control over it.  A straight line series of steps or points on a pathway to a solution.

            The flowing blendable continual paths of causality are too blurry to be controlled in the same way.  No wonder most people in modern technological society try to diminish their importance.  The best way to deal with these paths of causality is to flow with them, to commune with them, to experience them and feel more vibrantly alive because of them.  Trying to control this kind of causal pathway is impossible.  They are not susceptible to logic or science.

            Finally, there are the infinite vacuumized causal pathways which have led to all the strong psychopathology we see in modern humans.  Just as in a physical vacuum where there is a random distribution of atoms, so a vacuumized numb mind leads to randomized pathological behavior, which is intended to shock a person back to life and out of the vacuum.  On the one hand, the vacuum can lead a person into a life of stillness, numbness, even psychological paralysis.  On the other hand, it can lead to abrasive, aggressive destructive action.  Many of these destructive actions can be found among Trump supporters who are definitely trying to shock the American society by refusing to admit defeat.

            Yes, I know some people will point out positive vacuum causal pathways like a vacuum that is conducive to being involved in certain activities like meditation, yoga, pot and some other drugs.  But none of these activities is conducive to an active engagement with life.  Instead, they lead to a passive fatalistic mediated approach to a life that frequently also becomes increasingly engaged in screen reality.  Not the kind of approach conducive to making and preserving strong organic imprints and building a personal surrogate immortality in preparation for death.  In truth, with the pervasiveness of modern screen reality, living a rich vibrant life is difficult indeed.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

 

               

Trying To Absorb That Which Keeps Us Human

            One of the major points that has been brought up repeatedly in this column since its inception is that modern technological living environments create configurations of stimuli that are difficult for humans to absorb.  These configurations of stimuli can have elements that are both understimulating and overstimulating.  They are the foundation for vacuum and tension-pocket living environments.  These environments are the major sources of sensory distortion for humans in today’s world.  They are environments that don’t produce the organic stimuli that humans normally need to survive and thrive.

            Yet obviously humans have found some ways to somehow adjust to this sensory distortion.  Adjust but not totally adapt.  How does a mammalian human being totally adapt to the tension –pocket noises and fumes of a modern factory or the experiential vacuum created by all the different devices involved with screen reality.  The only way of totally adapting would be to become a machine oneself.  A robot or an android or a cyborg.  Then one could more fully interact with the other machines and the computers, and the Internet of Things and the 3-D printers and the augmented and virtual realities and all the other available manifestations of modern technology.  It would be like immersed with like.

            But humans are too mammalian to be able to fully absorb mechanical and digital stimuli.  They feel the presence of these mechanical and digital stimuli without fully absorbing them.  These mechanical and digital stimuli – defined discrete stimuli – leave impersonal marks on people’s minds rather than leaving organic imprints.  As a result they can create either non-enduring memories or overwhelming traumas but no easily absorbable coherent memories that can be useful for creating personal surrogate immortalities in preparation for death.

            So it is practically impossible for humans to fully adapt to the sensory distortion created by the mechanical and digital stimuli that come from modern technological living environments.  The key problem here is the lack of capacity to absorb and assimilate these technologically-based stimuli.  To absorb something is to introject it but with an implication of doing it in a more intimate tactile way.  Yet, as has been discussed before, touch is one of the senses the importance of which is diminished in the configurations of stimuli created in modern technological fields of experience.  Which is why absorption as a metaphor for touch is such a difficult process to carry out today.

            And with a dearth of organic experience to be able to absorb, it becomes very difficult to construct meaningful life narratives that carry a person from the beginning to the end of his life.  Because a person is not simply where he is at a given point in time but rather the whole flow of experiences he has absorbed from his birth to his present day.  And this includes both the organic imprints of experiences he has received from others as well as the organic imprints that he himself has created.  Without the flow of these organic imprints, a person becomes, to a great extent, the sum of a series of disconnected isolated impersonal events.  And so the person becomes a series of chopped-up life situations to which he has adjusted, not fully adapted, on his life path.  But without an organic temporal flow, there is no coherence in his sense of self.  And a person without a coherent sense of self is a person who is well on his way to becoming a robot.  And to avoid this outcome, this is why it is important for a person to be able to properly absorb the life situations to which he is exposed.  Which is why it is important that a person be able to literally and metaphorically touch that with which he comes into contact.

            To simply adjust to sensory distortion is not enough if one wants to be able to lead a healthy functional life.  Adjust in this case means giving up so much of that which makes a person essentially human.  Granted that we all, nevertheless, have to deal with modern technological environments to some extent in order to survive today.  It is the world in which we live.  But, at least, in those moments of time we can call our own, we don’t have to voluntarily always utilize modern technology for recreation.  During Covid, we will use Zoom to communicate with others.  But we can also have primary experiences with people with whom we choose to form a bubble.  We can engage in hobbies and avocations.  We can do exercise, take walks in parks.  We don’t have to sit glued to a screen reality.  In other words, we can find experiences that we can fully absorb as humans, rather than simply adjust to.  We can try to find those life situations to which we can fully adapt to.

            Now it is important to realize that many of us have spent so much time adjusting to modern technology that we have paradoxically lost our capacity to fully absorb the organic stimuli that our mammalian natures were meant to absorb.  The best metaphor I can think of for dealing with this situation is to think of how scuba divers have to come to the surface slowly so as not to create any major medical problems like the bends.  People who have been very separated from organic stimuli for a long time have to reintroduce it into their lives gradually so as not to be overwhelmed by it.  It took a period of time for these people to become separated from their mammalian natures; it will take time to reconnect with them.

            But eventually, it is very important that we can find life situations where we can fully absorb what we encounter, if we want to stay psychologically healthy.  Humans aren’t meant to be robots or cyborgs or androids or even avatars.  And trying to adjust to life situations where they have to behave like technologically-based non-humans creates psychopathology that is detrimental not only to individuals, but within the larger picture of things, to groups, communities, nations and all of humanity as well.

(c) 2020 Laurence Mesirow 

The New Normal Won’t Be Very Normal

            The main question on everyone’s mind today is when will things return to the way that they were before the pandemic.  When will things return to “normal”?   Okay, not everybody is asking this question.  Many people are realistic enough to understand that the pandemic has changed some things irrevocably.  But still there is the hope that someday we will have vaccines that afford us enough protection that we don’t always have to wear masks, or socially distance.  That we can go to restaurants, doctors’ appointments, parties and gatherings of all sorts, without being constantly afraid of this awful virus.  And we can go to schools and offices without fear of getting terribly sick.

            Now the virus has created greater hardship for some people than others.  Yet everyone on the planet has been adversely affected to some extent.  But, for some people, like many of the members of my entrepreneurial group, it has primarily provided an opportunity to segue into new forms of screen reality.  If they had their way, business meetings, doctors’ appointments and many other forms of human encounters would all be conducted from now on with Zoom.  So much more efficient in the use of people’s time.  So much cleaner and crisper as a form of human experience.  All the boundaries between people are neatly laid out.  These members eagerly look forward to creating a new normal rather than returning to the old normal.  There doesn’t seem to be that much hardship for them in physically isolating from other people as long as they have Zoom.

            But, for some people, there are two levels of hardship connected to Covid.  There is having to be physically isolated from other people.  And there is also having to use Zoom as the only way of staying connected to these people from where they are physically isolated.  For these people, it means immersing themselves in two different levels of numbness. 

On the other hand, one might almost say that for the modern technocrat, the pandemic has been a blessing in disguise.  It is forcing people to use new levels of technological mediation and to integrate this mediation as a part of their daily lives.  Whether or not on some level, it proves to be a hardship for them.

            And yes, hardship does not have to be something that is gratingly painful like extreme poverty, surviving a natural catastrophe like a wildfire or hurricane, or working on a chain gang.  These may be examples of more traditional organic forms of hardship.  But in today’s modern technological world, discomfort and even a kind of numb pain can paradoxically come from a loss of opportunity to have readily available external world sensation.  There is, in other words, a hardship that comes from the encompassing numbness of the experiential vacuum.

            So the excessive isolation that is resulting from the Covid pandemic and that is leading to an increasing use of Zoom for human communication is leading to a totally different kind of hardship from that which we normally would consider hardship.  And the use of Zoom, which is a form of screen reality that is increasingly replacing external world reality, is leading to the loss of use of stereoscopic vision, of smell, of taste, and, very importantly, of touch.  This means that Zoom is transforming our field of experience into a sensation-poor living environment.  If this is the new normal, the loss of these more intimate immediate forms of sensation will create a hardship from a loss of sensory connection and grounding.  And over time, the loss of opportunity to be stimulated along these more intimate immediate sensory pathways, will lead to difficulty in absorbing these overlooked stimuli even if and when they should present themselves.

            When we think of a normal situation, we think of a situation where there is a stability created by a balance of forces or stimuli.  But for the majority of people who use Zoom regularly today, there is not going to be a stability in the balance of stimuli.  The new normal is going to create emotional and behavioral abnormalities.

            Now as I have said in the past, using Zoom during the pandemic is better than total visual isolation from one another.  I am just worried about what will happen assuming the pandemic subsides.  Will technocrats like the people I know from my entrepreneur group push in making Zoom a dominating vehicle for communication between people?  Will “normal” people feel overwhelmed by in-person interaction with other people?  Such people will be caught between two kinds of hardship.  On the one hand, they will continue to feel the pain caused by the numbness from too much exposure to the screen reality of Zoom.  On the other hand, they will feel the pain caused by a sense of being overwhelmed by the primary experience stimuli of external world reality when they become more accessible again after the Covid pandemic subsides.

            The opened-up field of experience will thus create a two-part disjunction for people.  It will create a state of being for people that will be anything but normal in the sense of stabilizing or grounding.  In this sense, we can say that the new normal won’t be very normal at all.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow 

The Third Component Of Emotional Disturbance

            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

 

 

 

 

  

The Importance Of Pain In Human Survival

 

             I know I have spent a lot of time in my column talking about the importance of organic stimuli in our lives and how the gradual erosion of our natural and traditional living environments has led to a diminution of organic stimuli.  I have frequently described these stimuli as flowing blendable continual stimuli that are like waves on the ocean or like the shifting shapes in a lava lamp.  These are the stimuli that move us to bond and to merge and to rejuvenate ourselves.  They are positive pleasurable stimuli.  However, not all situations in life are positive and pleasurable.  When we get sick or hurt ourselves, and particularly as we age, we experience more organic stimuli on the discomfort, ache and pain spectrum.  These stimuli have a greater component of defined discrete stimuli: sharp stimuli that literally or metaphorically tend to hit us, pinch us or sting us.  They warn us that we are dealing with dangers of a smaller or larger nature that have to be dealt with so that we don’t deteriorate and so that our capacity to survive is not affected.  Actually, many of these negative organic stimuli can be found in the areas of hard physical labor or more primitive living conditions.  The discomfort involved in a hard nasty and brutish life.   It is precisely this discomfort and the vulnerability to the negative aspects of nature – negative climate events, disease and wild animals among other things – that pushed people to protect themselves against nature with technological innovation.  Centuries of innovation have led to the successful use of technology and technology-created living environments to mediate between humans and nature, and, in the process to protect people against the negative aspects of nature.

            Now, although technologically-created products are diminishing discomfort, aches and pain in terms of people’s health, negative organic stimuli are still present to some extent in dealing with the external world.  However, in the areas of labor and living conditions, there have been improvements.  Certainly, the creators and controllers of the technology, the people who live in modern technological society, are living with fewer discomforts, aches and pains in their external world reality.  Now because modern technology makes more and more of life not only mediated but also frictionless, it tends to put people in experiential vacuums.  As the use of modern technology grows, so does the presence of these experiential vacuums, and so does the numbness that people experience.  So the opposite of pain is not always pleasure.  Sometimes, it is numbness.

            And sometimes the numbness prevents people from experiencing pain that they need to experience to prevent them from experiencing a greater pain later on.  Sometimes, people have to inoculate themselves with little pains to learn how to ward off big pains later on.  As modern technology leads us to live in more and more levels of mediated experience, we protect ourselves from the primary experience of pain (and frequently of pleasure too).  And as we go on living in our nice safe-on-the-surface numbness, we become increasingly incapable of picking up signs of the potential build-up of future big painful situations.  How long has it taken people to confront the reality of climate change?  And for those who have confronted it and accepted it, how long has it taken these people to realize that their lives may have to change significantly, if the human race is going to be able to survive the effects of climate change?  People are going to have to experience more pain now than they would have had to experience, if they had perceived the potentially devastating effects of climate change earlier.  But they were too numb to pick up on the signals before.  And the only reason some people are acknowledging climate change now is because some really painful experiences are occurring like the increased intensity of California wildfires and the increased frequency of Gulf Coast hurricanes.  But even here, many people and, in particular, many people in power all over the world, continue to live in deep numbness with regard to the increasing effects of climate change.  They are people who have prospered under the protective mediating umbrella of modern technology and they feel that they are capable of keeping real external world pain at arm’s length.

            A similar situation can be said to apply to the Covid pandemic in which we are living.  There had been warnings of a big pandemic coming for some time.  But we had refused to acknowledge it and to properly prepare for it.  And even after having been infected with Covid, Trump, and Bolsinaro still refuse to take the pandemic seriously.  And, as a result, the U.S. and Brazil have among the highest infection rates in the world.

            To many people, the mediation of modern technology gives them a sense that nature is always controllable and repressable.  These people have no preparation in their own lives for the unleashed pain that nature can cause.  Never having been put into the position where they had to manage significant amounts of external world pain and discomfort on a regular basis, when the pain of climate change or a pandemic comes along, they start living in denial.  They are unable to absorb the pain of these crises in a manageable way.  This is why, for instance, there are so many people who walk around today without masks and demonstrate their denial by saying that masks are limitations on their freedom.  Particularly in the affluent protected frictionless mediated United States.  Hopefully, there will still be enough people that are sensitive to pain and who can help us to deal effectively with both of these crises.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow

 

The Erasure Of Work From The Human Narrative

 

            The other day I attended a zoom meeting of the Chicago Ethical Humanist Circle, where the guest speaker was a man who specialized in sustainable investments for a very large asset manager from the U.K.  The company for which he worked went out of its way to invest in companies that took moral stands on climate change, racism, sexism and other salient moral issues of modern life.  I asked him what was his and the company’s position on automation and the resulting loss of jobs and he sort of waffled and said, in effect, there were people on both sides of the issue.  However, he also said he did understand my concern.  Then someone else in the meeting said automation was inevitable, and that the United States should focus on giving every one of its citizens a basic salary of $30,000 a year.  This reminded me of Spain’s recent decision to give its citizens a guaranteed monthly salary of the equivalent of $1,145.  It speaks to the idea that has been floated of a universal basic income.

            On one level, it sounds great, doesn’t it?  No more hunger and homelessness just because a person is unable to find work.  But contrary to what some conservative Republicans think, not everyone, when given the opportunity, would want to stop working altogether.  And this is because work satisfies other needs besides money.  Most important, it allows people to make and preserve organic imprints on the surfaces of the fields of experience that surround them.  By acting as a vehicle for making imprints, work helps people to feel alive, to feel engaged with the external world.  By acting as a vehicle for preserving imprints, work acts as a means for creating a surrogate immortality and thus prepare for death.  Work may not always be pleasurable, but in the exchange of human effort for payment, it provides satisfaction.  A certain sense of accomplishment.  Of relevance in the cosmos.  Many people who don’t have avocations or hobbies and who don’t enjoy spending a lot of time just having fun, won’t know what to do with themselves if work is eliminated.  They will feel disconnected from the external world in a big way.  In their minds, they will be floating in an experiential vacuum.  They will sink deeper and deeper into numbness.  They will feel themselves in a living death.  Some will literally die from boredom.

            Yes, some people will be able to survive without work.  Some people will be able to immerse themselves in avocations.  Avocations combine some of the elements of work – doing linear projects – with some of the elements of pleasure or, more precisely, fun.  Pleasure is what moves avocation projects forward.  The joy of moving a project forward as a personal organic imprint totally free of considerations of payment.  Payment, of course, is a dominant goal of work.  With avocations, pleasure represents the imprints that are received from an avocation experience.  Work is measured more in terms of a series of imprints made for accomplishment events.  Although an avocation has some of these events, it also includes some pleasure experiences.  An avocation is based on serious projects done out of love.  There are meaningful goals involved in an avocation.  Unfortunately, most people, when they retire, do not get involved with avocations. 

            However, many people, upon retirement, will get involved with hobbies.  Hobbies are activities in some ways similar to avocations, but less serious and less meaningful.  Hobbies do not usually involve making and preserving organic imprints on other people.  For instance, with a hobby, one does not concern oneself quite so much with making craft objects that can evoke pleasure and admiration from other people.  One gets involved, in such circumstances, in making craft objects for the pleasure they give oneself.  For the imprints that an artist receives from what he is doing.

            The last major category of human activity is fun.  In fun, there are no projects to finish.  There are no formal external goals.  Fun is all about receiving pleasurable imprints.  About enjoying oneself more passively and not worrying about accomplishing anything.  A social gathering, a fine meal, a walk by the beach, a street fair, a resort vacation, good sex (when not for procreation).

            As we can see, the four basic categories of human activity go from an almost exclusive focus on making imprints to an exclusive focus on receiving imprints.  From a person being primarily a producer to being primarily a consumer.

            Returning to the original theme, it is one thing if a person can’t work for health or other reasons. Or if a person is in the arts and his work doesn’t draw decent money.  But most other people are going to be floating in an experiential vacuum, if they don’t have some solid work to do.  They’ll go out of their minds from boredom.  And they won’t feel like they are accomplishing anything.  They won’t be able to leave meaningful organic imprints and prepare for death.  And most people simply aren’t self-starters who are capable of creating long-term linear activities that can become the foundations of avocations.  Now most people are capable of generating hobbies where the organic imprints received from the experience of participation are greater than the organic imprints generated by the person in making and preserving accomplishments.  But for most people, hobbies are not going to be enough to lead a meaningful life narrative.  Unfortunately, for those people, there will probably develop a tendency to try and feel alive through different forms of destructive behavior, both towards themselves and towards others.

            The situation is complex.  So I have nothing intrinsically against a universal basic income in human work economies.  This will be particularly helpful for people who have health problems, as a supplement for people who can’t find enough decent-paying work in certain fields, or for people in the arts.  But as a means to allow all people to survive because there is no work available at all, that is a cause for concern.  The vast automation of work activities is not going to be a good thing for the human race.

© 2020 Laurence Mesirow