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Healing – Resisting internalised ableism

In the Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic (WEIRD) world we live in what philosopher Guy Debord attempted to describe as The Society of the Spectacle. The reality presented to us via the media and public social media has been engineered to fit the exacting standards of Homo Economicus®. All the people alive today in Westernised countries, i.e. all the people in WEIRD countries and in the countries aspiring to WEIRD standards, have been born into The WEIRD Spectacle of internalised ableism. 

Internalised ableism

The less WEIRD a country, the lower the fidelity of The Spectacle, and the more there is still some room for life beyond The Spectacle. I have lived all my life in The Spectacle, in the ruins of the WEIRD empire. I also call it the WEIRDT empire: Western Educated Industrialised Rich Democratic Theatre. Everything in this theatre is about perception – there is very little substance or connection to the biophysical and ecological context outside the theatre.

The institutions of the WEIRDT empire pretend that all aspects of life can be categorised and understood in terms of normality – by the hump of the bell curve.

But the living planet does not conform to anthropocentric normality, it is chaotic, it is beautifully and awesomely diverse. Like many neurodivergent people, I am highly sensitised to the language people use, in particular to the semantic possibility space that is created and bounded by the use of specific terms and by the conscious avoidance of other terms. In WEIRD politics the language of economic growth and war dominates. Growth economics is a euphemism for neocolonialism, genocide, and ecocide. Only 100 years ago, barely anyone was writing about the “need” for “economic growth”.

The most deadly wars today are economic wars. Social inequalities, in particular unequal access to high quality healthcare and lack of access to healthy ways of life result in a rise in chronic diseases, a several-fold increase in the risks of global pandemics, and in the premature death of millions.

My Autistic mind compels me to reduce cognitive dissonance. If I leave cognitive dissonance to fester, it promptly generates migraines or other symptoms of physical disease. Via my work, usually in the transdisciplinary context of small groups of people with complementary domain specific expertise, I have learned to ask clarifying questions and to ask for examples, and zero in on potential misunderstandings and ambiguities. This co-creates bridges of shared understanding across discipline and domain boundaries, which are essential for anyone who attempts to do anything that (re)connects us to Gaia, i.e. to the sacred living world beyond The WEIRD Spectacle. 

I was fortunate to have been exposed to the foundations of logic, i.e. the foundations of philosophy, and then studied mathematical thinking tools for four years before becoming exposed to the commercial world of The Spectacle.

Indoctrination

By the time I was born, the anthropocentric WEIRD Spectacle manifested in terms of neocolonialism. It is fascinating to look back and reflect on how effective the indoctrination is. I grew up as a WEIRD alien, immersed in less WEIRD cultures within the ruins of the British Empire. This left cracks in my WEIRD indoctrination, and later it helped me to put my education to good use in terms of critical thinking tools and habits.

George Orwell had a somewhat similar background to mine in an earlier time. The above biographical clip is worthwhile listening to – ignore the embedded cringe-inducing commercial promotion. The conclusion is directly relevant to our times.

Once we appreciate that even our “educated” Western scientific worldview is not free from ideological bias, we can develop a better conceptual model of how individual and collective human belief systems and related bodies of knowledge evolve. It is helpful to distinguish the following categories of beliefs and related knowledge:

  1. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are intimately familiar with. Such beliefs may be affected by paradigmatic bias and the quality or bias inherent in the supporting evidence. We need to be cognisant of corresponding blind spots in our understanding of the world when applying such beliefs in our reasoning. Only a small minority of our beliefs fall into this category.
  2. Beliefs based on scientific theories backed by empirical evidence that we are not intimately familiar with. Such beliefs may be affected by paradigmatic bias and the quality or bias inherent in the supporting evidence. We have no idea of the potential blind spots in our understanding of the world when applying such beliefs in our reasoning. In the few cases where the theories have been developed by trusted friends and colleagues within our personal competency network, we can decide to rely on their understanding of the limits of applicability and potential blind spots. If we are “educated”, a sizeable minority of our beliefs fall into this category.
  3. Beliefs based on personal experiences and observations. We know that no human can maintain more than 150 relationships with other people, and that all our assumptions about the lives and needs of humans are based on the very small set of people that we relate to. For those who identify as autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category. By definition, we don’t understand all the people that we “don’t relate to”. Thus, making any decisions that potentially affect the lives of many hundred to several billion people without explicit consent of all those potentially affected (a daily occurrence in government institutions and corporations), must be considered the pinnacle of human ignorance.
  4. Beliefs that represent explicit social agreements between specific people regarding communication and collaboration. Such agreements can be verbal or in writing, and they only scale up to the limited numbers of relationships that we can maintain. As needed we can jointly update these agreements to reflect evolving needs or constraints in the wider ecology we are embedded in. For those who identify as Autistic, a significant number of beliefs held fall into this category, especially agreements with family members, friends, and colleagues. In hierarchically structured societies, agreements such as laws issued by regional or national authorities apply to large groups of people, and by necessity have been developed with limited input from those who are affected. Such agreements invariably cause untold harm that for the most part remains invisible to the authorities. Humans did not evolve to live in hierarchically structured super-human scale societies and pretending that we can maintain such structures without causing untold harm is a form of anthropocentric hubris.
  5. Beliefs based on what others have told us and what we have been encouraged to believe by parents, teachers, and friends, … and politicians and advertisers, including beliefs that we have absorbed from our social environment subconsciously, i.e. beliefs for which we can’t recall the origin. For those who do not identify as Autistic, the majority of beliefs held may fall into this category.

All categories of human beliefs are associated with some level of uncertainty regarding the validity and applicability to a specific context at hand. A belief in the universally competitive nature of humans clearly falls into the fifth category. When beliefs related to neoliberal ideology are reflected in laws (category 4. above), they are internalised as cultural norms by large parts of the population, and when the externalities of hyper-competitive profit maximising behaviour hit with full force, Homo Economicus® has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I was employed for 13 years before I could no longer bear to be part of The Spectacle of the corporate world, which is an Orwellian world of social perception management. The Spectacle is not survivable for sensitive neurodivergent people who are unable to maintain “quasi unlimited” levels of cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis.

WEIRD indoctrination and enculturation in cruelty and violence goes very deep. I remember being taught at home and in school in the 1970s that animals can’t have “thoughts”, and that any feelings or consciousness they may have are not in any way comparable to human lived experiences. This was taught to us as “science” in biology classes. To top it off, in middle school we learned how to dissect dead frogs and we were given live laboratory mice to conduct experiments with. It tells us something about so-called WEIRD “normality” that such experiences remain etched into our memories, and that we can’t ever unsee or unlearn them. 

Deep down we know we are part of Gaia. This is why we enjoy immersing ourselves in the natural world. This is why we are able to build mutual trust with non-human animals, including wild animals. Living beings recognise each other as being part of the sacred cycle of life. We know that each living being enjoys being alive and enjoys exploring the world. Of course as humans we most deeply relate to animals that are roughly human scale – it is at that scale that we can communicate, and, if we take the time, build genuine relationships across species, from domesticated animals to wild birds, octopuses, fish, and mammals of all kinds. 

When animals eat other animals, it is only to cover their basic survival needs. Humans have the same inhibitions. We evolved to know intuitively that all lives and all our relationships are sacred. The human capacity for culture and spoken language evolved on top of this biological backdrop. This is something that to this day is not part of the WEIRD indoctrination system – because it clashes with the WEIRD neocolonial narrative of technological progress. 

The WEIRD indoctrination system makes sure that all children are indoctrinated in Homo Economicus® from a very young age, before we learn anything substantial about Gaia and the living world. This is possibly the most cruel, dehumanising, and life denying part of WEIRD cultures. 

The pill of Homo Economicus® is sweetened by punishing children with rewards for compliance. In this way children learn to collaborate only to compete. 

“Pay for merit, pay for what you get, reward performance. Sounds great, can’t be done. Unfortunately it can not be done, on short range. After 10 years perhaps, 20 years, yes. The effect is devastating. People must have something to show, something to count. In other words, the merit system nourishes short-term performance. It annihilates long-term planning. It annihilates teamwork. People can not work together. To get promotion you’ve got to get ahead. By working with a team, you help other people. You may help yourself equally, but you don’t get ahead by being equal, you get ahead by being ahead. Produce something more, have more to show, more to count. Teamwork means work together, hear everybody’s ideas, fill in for other people’s weaknesses, acknowledge their strengths. Work together. This is impossible under the merit rating / review of performance system. People are afraid. They are in fear. They work in fear. They can not contribute to the company as they would wish to contribute. This holds at all levels. But there is something worse than all of that. When the annual ratings are given out, people are bitter. They can not understand why they are not rated high. And there is a good reason not to understand. Because I could show you with a bit of time that it is purely a lottery.”

W Edwards Deming (1984)

If we learn about Homo Economicus® before we are encouraged to listen deeply to our intuition, and before we learn about Gaia and collaborative ecological niche construction within and between species, then we are primed to view any other narrative that deviates from or that contradicts Homo Economicus® with suspicion. In the commercial digital world of Homo Economicus®, where the very means of communication have been seized by corporations, and where universities have become dependent on corporate funding, it has become easy to sideline the growing body of scientific evidence that contradicts Homo Economicus®. 

Since we are immersed in information overload, evidence such as what we know about the innate collaborative inclinations and sense of fairness of human toddlers and about the pivotal role of highly egalitarian societies in the evolution of the human capacity for language and culture does not even need to be hidden. It is completely sufficient for algorithms and institutions to deprioritise such evidence.

I am learning that not only have humans lived in highly egalitarian human scale bands for most of 300,000 years, but also that such bands maintained ongoing collaborative and dynamically evolving relationships with other bands across large bioregions, routinely coming together for omni-directional learning. Amongst other things such gatherings also allowed new groups to form. Apparently it was common for families or individuals to join another group. Important to note the absence of a hierarchical super-structure between groups, and the dynamism of ongoing relationships between groups.

All of this fits well with my own experience with egalitarian human scale worker coops, and with the interest from other small groups of neurodivergent and disabled people in adopting a similar model, including ongoing collaboration between groups.

We still have access to all our innate collaborative capabilities. If we care to listen to our guts, hearts, and minds, we can (re)learn everything we need for co-creating ecologies of care beyond the human.

The ripples of collaborative niche construction and intersectional solidarity are spreading. More and more small cosmo-local bands of marginalised people are coming together to catalyse intersectional solidarity.

Actually, the WEIRD empire is not in control. Gaia has a perfect 10,000 year track record of clamping down on anthropocentric empire building attempts, making room for new forms of life to emerge from the compost heap. She is probably asking herself in some planetary language that is beyond human comprehensibility: Can this species recover from cultural cancer? Data from climate science and biodiversity research gives us a glimpse of Gaia’s language.

Healthy human scale cultural development

At least some of the developmental patterns of cells and organs within insects seem to translate to the developmental stages and metamorphosis of healthy human cultures. The world of insect metamorphosis is amazing. The big cycle of life within Gaia is fractal, very similar phenomena reoccur at very different scale and in different contexts. In this case patterns at level of cells and organs within a metamorphosing insect seem to reoccur at the level of human scale cultural development.

The more I learn about this topic and weave it together with anthropological evidence, and with experiences from worker coops of neurodivergent and otherwise disabled people, the more I get the impression that Homo Economicus® relates to a cancer that has arrested the development of human cultural organisms at the larval stage, resulting in a perpetual production of growth hormones. 

Humans need to (re)learn how to stop perpetuating hierarchically structured systems of social control, striving for infinite growth like a cancer. We also need to (re)learn how to reproduce and evolve peacefully, along the lines of what we know about the ongoing lifetime collaborative relationships and some of the amazing conflict resolution strategies practiced within and between hunter gatherer bands. 

The global mono-cult is an empire that has the developmental maturity of a teenager. An individual human that keeps eating like a teenager will become morbidly obese, develop chronic diseases, and end up dying prematurely. 

The Pentagon Wars is the favourite movie of one of my former Autistic colleagues who spent many years in large government departments. This movie, which is based on a true story, is a good illustration of the teenage stage of cultural development in WEIRD societies. Given all the deadly wars that are in progress and that have been stoked for decades, this movie is too painfully close to reality for me to genuinely enjoy.

We need to learn how to deactivate the growth hormone of Homo Economicus®, which is capital constructed as interest-bearing debt. Gaia is showing us all the examples we need for fully rejoining the sacred cycle of life. 

The challenge of deactivating the growth hormone of Homo Economicus® is not a new one. It is an instance of the same Homo Empire® challenge faced by the inmates of the warring states in what is now China over 2,000 years ago. Hence my appreciation for the timeless wisdom embedded in Daoist philosophy.

All indigenous cultures honour Gaia. They all operate on time horizons that span at least 7 generations into the future, and draw on collective knowledge and wisdom that extends at least 7 generations into the past. How does this compare to the WEIRD addiction to quarterly results and infinite growth?

Every human is a uniquely valuable repository of lived experience and insights.

Dialogues are uniquely valuable, they allow us to walk each others minds, and via clarifying questions and other thinking tools, we converge on shared understanding and shared mental models for specific domains or experiences. Linear language is a poor communication tool, but dialogue transforms it into a very powerful communication and collaboration tool. 

Of course dialogues only catalyse shared understanding when we sharing freely and honestly, and it fails miserably as soon as one or both parties have any hidden self-serving agenda – which is the default in the world of Homo Economicus®. This is why I am incapable of buying into the competitive “logic” of markets.

Institutionalised learning disability

Institutionalised social power is the privilege of not needing to learn, it leads to collective stupidity, it is a form of collective learning disability.

Markets invariably generate collective stupidity, because by definition participants have incentives not to share unlimited amounts of information. By definition, unconstrained markets are the anti-thesis of collaborative niche construction.

There are encouraging signs in some less WEIRD, and more communally oriented societies. By WEIRD standards Japan is an economic basket case, with a shrinking and ageing population, and a GDP growth that is probably averaging around zero over the last 20 years. We need to hear more stories from the less WEIRD world to understand what modern life can be like in a context of shrinking economic busyness, shrinking population, and correspondingly shrinking ecological footprint.

Such examples illustrate how the growth hormone of Homo Economicus® can be deactivated. The referenced example also illustrates the significance of small scale autonomous local communal decision making, which is the opposite of the centralised models that still operate in the ruins of the British Empire. There is no need at all for glorious leaders. Acknowledging the extent of the cultural cancer is going to be hard for some people to swallow. Patriotism and professionalism are key ingredients of fascism.

Too many professionals have “only been doing their job” and have been following “orders” or “best practices” for too long, without listening deeply to their innate ethical compass, which has been systematically and thoroughly suppressed by the WEIRD indoctrination system.

Advocating for a “better” command and control hierarchy is no solution, it only sows the seeds for yet another empire building attempt. Collectively we can work towards revoking the social license for maintaining and strengthening life destroying powered-up institutions.

Sensitive Daoist thinkers saw this clearly over 2,000 years ago. The documentaries by British film maker Adam Curtis are also excellent educational resources for those who have the stomach to face the reality of toxic cultural inertia.

Full economic eclipse

In-depth discussions of Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation and Century of the Self should be part of every high school curriculum, and they should be mandatory menu items in the curriculum of medical schools and all other institutions entrusted with any aspect of human wellbeing.

Acknowledging reality is only the first step. Economic eclipse is a product of many decades of WEIRD indoctrination and propaganda. Gaia is nowhere to be seen:

Economic eclipse has been causing untold harm for decades, and it inevitably ends in economic collapse. As we are collectively moving out of full economic eclipse, the beauty of Gaia as well as the delusion of hypernormality is revealed. Sobering up is going to be painful for the addicts who remain in denial.

Capital is not a hand that feeds, it is a drug that kills. Gaia has nurtured and fed humans for 300,000 years.

We need commitment, we need community. We need to create spaces of trust. But for that, there’s tremendous work that we need to be doing. But I don’t think that any of that work will be possible, should we not have that commitment–that commitment that no matter how challenging and tremendously difficult it will be to reckon with these narratives and to dismantle these narratives. Because seeing the horror in the eye of all these narratives that we live by comes with tremendous understanding. It will leave us very fragile, very vulnerable, and most, of course, are not willing to do that, because we don’t feel safe. But if we are able to stand the heat and create these spaces, if we commit to do this kind of work for the benefit of the planet, then we may be able to learn that we can fly.

Yuria Celidwen

This is the voice of Gaia, exposing the life denying doctrine of Homo Economicus®:

We deeply appreciate the wonder of life, and we can clearly see the global mono-cult for what it is. We are fully human. We are alive.

Knowing a bit about all of the above may help you to remain sane, and to see, enjoy, and where possible, nurture the growing cracks in The WEIRD Spectacle. Most importantly, we must acknowledge that we can not regain sobriety alone, in self-isolation, and we can only relearn to be fully human at a scale that is compatible with our biological cognitive and emotional limits, neither at smaller scales, nor at larger scales.

Healing

Healthy cultural organisms do not consist of:

  • Isolated individuals
  • Atomised nuclear families
  • Incomprehensibly complex groups and institutions

The world in reality is a beautifully interconnected world, and it’s interconnected through many many layers. It’s interconnected through consciousness, which is why we are spiritual beings in human form. But the plants outside my window are spiritual beings in plant form. But the plant of the lychee is in lychee form, and the tree of the mango is in mango form. They are just different expressions of one spiritual interconnected consciousness in the world.

I’ve studied quantum theory. We realised that the particles in the world are really not the basic reality. The basic reality is potential and energy, and it’s only when you try and measure it, then it shows up as a particle, or it shows up as a wave, but the reality really is that which connects, the non-separability problem. My PhD thesis was on non-separation, non-locality, and quantum theory. We knew [this] 100 years ago in physics, and yet an obsolete physics of more than 100 years ago is being used to shape and and divide a very interconnected world. So dualism today is not just epistemologically so wrong, it is not just ontologically so wrong, it is spiritually just not the right way to think of the world, but it is now becoming a threat to human life, preventing people from living with each other in diversity with love. And that’s why we have to spread the message of non-dualism, of interconnectedness, of oneness through love, and we have to be the practice...

All cultures had economies but it wasn’t the first organising principle, it was a byproduct of good living… Where did that wealth come from? It was an economy, but it was not an economy of extraction. It was not an economy of domination, it was an economy of living. If you go to the roots of the word economy, economy according to Aristotle is the art of living. Our civilisation has very deep spiritual foundations, and through spirituality you know that the diversity in the world is really different expressions of the same oneness… Let all the beings flourish

– Vandana Shiva

The relational nature of the big cycle of life is obscured as long as long as we attempt to define cultural organisms as groups of people or even groups of living beings beyond the human.

Wherever you are, most of the inmates at the grassroots level are humans trying their very best. Appreciate those who are able to see and attempt to widen the cracks in The WEIRD Spectacle, and tread carefully when confronted with the institutionalised internalised ableism of Homo Economicus®. 

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