There is an urgent need to catalyse intersectional ecologies of care all over the world, and to expose and oppose the internalised ableism that is holding our societies hostage. The endless chains of trauma must be broken.
Internalised ableism
The two deepest subterranean – i.e. subconscious – ideological roots of modern industrialised society are (a) internalised ableism and (b) ubiquitous cognitive dissonance across all aspects of life.
Internalised ableism manifests in a refusal to fully acknowledge human cognitive limits, and in the misguided and unfounded belief in continuous technological progress powered by human ingenuity and human created technologies, including so-called artificially intelligent systems.
Cognitive dissonance surfaces whenever human emotional limits are reached. The catch is that those humans who are capable of considering themselves to be culturally well adjusted have a capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance that seems nearly unlimited from an Autistic perspective.
At scale, in the social realm, the combination of internalised ableism and a large capacity for maintaining cognitive dissonance over extended periods – to the extent that bodily symptoms of chronic dis-ease and stress are ignored and for the most part not associated with cognitive dissonance, is the substrate that perpetuates the paradigmatic inertia of a sick society.
The most dangerous characteristic of a sick society is the normalisation of social power gradients and the aggregate human and non-human harm caused by widespread addiction to various forms of social power across all spheres of life.
The following commentary on the poly-crisis from Chris Hedges, Peter C Downey & Paul Ehrlich comes to mind.
Autistic people are routinely marginalised when they expose social power games and the myth of meritocracy. Pathologisation of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people is best understood as the push back from a sick society with cultural norms and expectations that are disconnected from our evolutionary heritage and from the local ecosystems that we are part of.
This article contains many references and examples that expose the “normality” of internalised ableism and cognitive dissonance.
Human cognitive limits
Becoming conscious of human cognitive limits and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to avoid the fate of earlier civilisations, and to embark on a path of radical energy descent.
It is only once we have understood the extent of internalised ableism within modern industrialised societies that we can begin to comprehend human cognitive limits and the extent to which we are surrounded by anthropocentric hubris.
If we care to look, we can easily find highly concerning examples of human cognitive limits in all the large institutions that define the modern industrialised way of life that is characterised by addictions to consumerism and competitive social games.
The living planet is far more adaptive and creative than any human, far beyond what any of us can understand. No human institution is “in control”. Furthermore, a multitude of waste products of the modern industrialised way of life are having a direct and non-negligible effect on human cognitive abilities and performance.
A good example of a source of self-inflicted cognitive impairment that is widely ignored is the continuous rise in CO2 levels, and the elevated CO2 levels that billions of people are regularly exposed to in indoor environments. The normalisation of spending many hours in crowded offices, classrooms, and other indoor spaces with elevated CO2 levels has led to a significant decline in human cognitive performance. A few quotes from the referenced article, which is only gaining in importance with every year:
… carbon dioxide (CO2) has a direct and negative impact on human cognition and decision-making. These impacts have been observed at CO2 levels that most Americans — and their children — are routinely exposed to today inside classrooms, offices, homes, planes, and cars.
… Significantly, the Harvard study confirms the findings of a little-publicized 2012 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) study, “Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance.”
That study found “statistically significant and meaningful reductions in decision-making performance” in test subjects as CO2 levels rose from a baseline of 600 parts per million (ppm) to 1000 ppm and 2500 ppm… They found that, on average, a typical participant’s cognitive scores dropped 21 percent with a 400 ppm increase in CO2. Here are their astonishing findings for four of the nine cognitive functions scored in a double-blind test of the impact of elevated CO2 levels: The researchers explain, “The largest effects were seen for Crisis Response, Information Usage, and Strategy, all of which are indicators of higher level cognitive function and decision-making.” The entire article is a must-read as is the LBNL-SUNY study.
… All of this new research is consistent with — and actually helps explain — literally dozens of studies in the past two decades that find low to moderate levels of CO2 have a negative impact on productivity, learning, and test scores.
… in recent decades, outdoor CO2 levels have risen sharply, to a global average of 400 ppm. Moreover, measured outdoor CO2 levels in major cities from Phoenix to Rome can be many tens of ppm higher — up to 100 ppm or more — than the global average. That’s because CO2 “domes” form over many cities primarily due to CO2 emissions from traffic and local weather conditions.
… The places where most people work and live — CO2 concentrations are considerably higher than outdoors. CO2 levels indoors that are 200 ppm to 400 ppm higher than outdoors are commonplace — not surprising since the design standard for CO2 levels in most buildings is 1000 ppm. In addition, that differential increases when more people are crammed into a space and when the ventilation is not adequate. As the Harvard researchers point out, in recent decades, buildings have become more tightly sealed, and there has been less exchange of inside air with fresh outside air.
… “In surveys of elementary school classrooms in California and Texas, average CO2 concentrations were above 1,000 ppm, a substantial proportion exceeded 2,000 ppm, and in 21% of Texas classrooms peak CO2 concentration exceeded 3,000 ppm.”
… Interestingly, the authors of all of these studies — the direct CO2 studies and the CO2-as-a-proxy-for-ventilation studies — are generally public health researchers focused on indoor environmental quality (IEQ). As a result, their published work does not examine the implications these findings have for climate policy.
… But the implications for climate policy are stark. We are at 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 today outdoors globally — and tens of ppm higher in many major cities. We are rising at a rate of 2+ ppm a year, a rate that is accelerating. Significantly, we do not know the threshold at which CO2 levels begin to measurably impact human cognition.
… Loftness, who oversaw the GSA study, explained that CMU’s analysis showed that “humans are pretty good sensors of high CO2 levels.” Occupant perception of indoor air quality drops sharply as CO2 levels rise from 600 to 750 ppm. She is familiar with the recent work showing a direct link between CO2 and human cognition. She said of the original LBNL-SUNY study, “a seminal piece of work and a great research team.” She considers the Harvard study “an absolutely important study.” Loftness draws two key conclusions from these studies, her own work, and the vast database of scientific literature she has surveyed.
First, the immediate public health message is to increase ventilation and the use of outside air in buildings. And second: We have to do everything we can to keep outdoor CO2 levels below 600 ppm because something serious starts happening then.
No wonder AI is being sold as the “solution” to all our problems.
Human emotional limits
Growing levels of social inequality correlate with a rise in mental health issues throughout the population. The root cause may well relate to the formation of increasingly absurd group identities and associated signals of social status that make it acceptable to exclude the less fortunate.
From evolutionary biology we know that in-group competition has negative group survival value. Humans are using a diverse range of external and visible coping mechanisms for dealing with perceived, anticipated, or experienced lack of safety. The combination of early childhood experiences and individual neurology determines which coping mechanisms come into play in specific situations.
Additionally, the increasingly tangible effects of extreme weather events and ecological collapse are pushing more and more humans towards emotional limits.
However, emotional states such as depression and emotions such as grief have a purpose, they have evolved to force us to reflect deeply on our values, to shed internalised ableism, and to remind us of our capacities for mutual aid and creative collaboration.
The constraints of language and framing
Language and framing play critical roles for maintaining and breaking paradigmatic cultural inertia. A few examples illustrate how the frames of modern industrialised society perpetuate paradigmatic inertia:
- The institutional linguistic gymnastics to maintain / get back to busyness as usual in the era of pandemics permeate all aspects of life, including public health communication.
- International “trade agreements” – better understood as corporate rights agreements. This is the story of global economic warfare, how colonialism seamlessly morphed into neo-colonialism, and how corporate rights consistently over-power human rights in international trade.
- Modern taboos – Yanis Varoufakis reminds us how the institutional landscape has engineered a frame in which Julian Assange’s release sets the precedent for further restrictions on journalism.
Perhaps less well recognised is the way in which the science of biology is affected by modern cultural framing.
Many biologists seem to be unaware of the impact of framing on their thinking. Our understanding of evolutionary processes – including the evolution of non-human cultures, is still very limited.
A few pointers:
- Evolution Evolving: The Developmental Origins of Adaptation and Biodiversity – a new account of the central role developmental processes play in evolution.
- A somatic genetic clock for clonal species – The somatic genetic clock is applicable to any multicellular clonal species where the number of founder cells is small, opening novel research avenues to study longevity and, hence, demography and population dynamics of clonal species.
- African elephants address one another with individually specific calls – The first evidence for a non-human species individually addressing conspecifics without imitating the receiver.
Framing evolutionary processes in terms of collaborative niche construction instead of competition remains an under-explored topic. The motivation for collaborative framing is grounded in what we are learning about ecosystems and what we know about the collaborative tendencies of human babies, for example the research by Michael Tomasello on The Origins of Human Collaboration.
Disability
Many with the neurodiversity and disability rights movement are familiar with the social model of disability and with the stigma associated with openly identifying as neurodivergent.
The internalised ableism within our society has multiple detrimental social effects beyond stigma, dehumanising discrimination, and widespread addiction to various forms of social power. For example, Covid continues to cause elevated numbers of hospitalisations, growing numbers of those who suffer from Long Covid, and elevated death rates.
Aotearoa New Zealand currently has more than 1,000 Covid deaths annually according to the published statistics, in spite of high vaccination rates. To put this number in perspective, this is 3 times the number of people that die in traffic accidents in Aotearoa. The risk of dying from Covid is roughly 1/2 the risk of death that motorcyclists expose themselves to voluntarily, but the risk of dying from Covid is largely a matter of public health policy and social norms, and not a matter of personal choice. The odds of acquiring Long Covid and long-term disability are much greater than the risk of dying from Covid, but as pointed out above, in the interest of maintaining paradigmatic inertia, the institutional landscape of the mono-cult has relied on framing to fully “normalise” all risks associated with Covid.
Downplaying the dangers of pandemics like Covid is one of the many consequences of widespread internalised ableism, consistent with the neoliberal framing of cultural evolution in terms of survival of the richest.
Dehumanisation
Once the cult of empire and growth has become hyper-normative, sizeable parts of the population are dehumanised.
The current social operating system amplifies the influence of the opinions and whims of a few people (including algorithms that are designed to act as extensions of these people) by several orders of magnitude. At the same time these people are subject to the same cognitive limits as all humans – if anything they may lack sensitivity and self reflective capacities, not understanding that their influence, amplified to the scale of millions and billions of people invariably causes great harm to large numbers of human and non-human living creatures.
It is a form of collective insanity to allow concentrations of social power.
Within the institutions of a stratified society, the only people who are in a position to change the state of affairs are those few who currently hold positions of highly concentrated social power – but these people are in these positions because they are hopelessly addicted to the most dangerous drug for humans, namely social power.
Rehumanisation
In industrialised societies people don’t understand how Autistic people support each other, love each other, and care for each other in ways that go far beyond the culturally impaired neuronormative imagination.
It is time to remind the so-called “civilised” world about non-pathologising and coherent theories of human ways of being that are integrated into ecologies of care and the evolutionary flows of life in-formation that are being jointly developed within communities of Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people.
Beyond the human
In his excellent book How Forests Think – Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human Eduardo Kohn elaborates how humans are not only part of an ecology of care, capable of nurturing relationships that extend far beyond humans, but he also reveals the fundamental patterns of semiosis and thought that are inherent to all forms of life, at all levels of scale.
The European conceptualisation of the individual human ego is a product of the misguided metaphor of society as a profit generating machine. A shift to ecosystems of human scale groups reduces the spurious complexity needed to support a monoculture, and it retains and even grows adaptive cultural complexity, i.e. the diversity that emerges when the human ecological footprint is aligned with bioregional ecosystem functions. Adaptive complexity saves energy – it is the result of humans engaging in collaborative niche construction as a part of biological ecosystems.
The delusion of control
Authoritarianism
The technocratic approach to “digital governance” across the Anglosphere is a good illustration of how to create an illusion of freedom and democracy by presenting the world beyond the ruins of empire as a “threat”. Here is a good piece of investigative journalism:
I love the closing comment:
South China Morning Post columnist Alex Lo is one to have put the situation into stark relief.
“The West will soon be sharing their citizens’ biometric data,” Lo wrote. “If you already think China’s state surveillance is intrusive and dystopian, you have not yet seen the brave new world that is just over the horizon.”
Human scale ecologies of care
The Permaculture Designer’s Manual that Bill Mollison wrote in 1988 spells out the disease of modernity in very clear and down to earth words – and it offers deep timeless wisdom for co-creating living systems that are conducive to life, i.e. for collaborative niche construction. Bill Mollison wrote in a refreshing and life affirming way, not in any way deterred by the modern insanity he saw around him. From the many astute observations he made about industrialised society, to me it is obvious that Bill Mollison was Autistic. What’s amazing is how much ecological knowledge he was able to curate and pass on to future generations. Much of this he seems to have picked up very early, as a young person, growing up in rural Tasmania, in a richly diverse ecological and partially non-commodified context. A few examples of the down-to-earth principles and guidelines documented by Bill Mollison:
Principle of Cooperation: Cooperation, not competition, is the very basis of existing life systems and of future survival.
A Policy of Responsibility (to relinquish power): The role of beneficial authority is to return function and responsibility to life and to people; if successful, no further authority is needed. The role of successful design is to create a self-managed system.
Policy of Resource Management: A responsible human society bans the use of reseources which permanently reduce yields of sustainable resources, e.g. pollutants, persistent poisons, radiocatives, large areas of concrete and highways, sewers from city to sea.
Principle of Disorder: Any system or organism can accept only that quantity of a resource which can be used productively. Any resource input beyond that point throws the system or organism into disorder; oversupply of a resource is a form of chronic pollution.
Principle of Stability: It is not the number of diverse things in a design that leads to stability, it is the number of beneficial connections between these components.
Types of Niches: Niche in space, or “territory” (nest and forage sites). Niche in time (cycles of opportunity). Niche in space-time (schedules).
Information as a Resource: Information is the critical potential resource. It becomes a resource only when obtained and acted upon.
In our society the fiction of homo economicus manifests itself in the beliefs associated with the language of behaviourism, which exists in multiple dialects, and which has come to permeate and pollute many disciplines in the social sciences:
- Leaders, authorities, managers, superiors, social power gradients
- Leadership, demands, commands
- Management, measurement, control
- Incentives, aversives, punishments
- Business, tasks, busyness
- Standards, norms, benchmarks, unwritten rules
- Conformance, compliance, obedience
The journey towards a healthier relationship with the ecosystems which we are part of starts with the most powerful tool at our disposal, the introduction and consistent use of new language and new semantics.
The delusion of leadership
The failure to acknowledge human cognitive limits not only leads to dangerous addictions to social power and social status symbols, it also leads to extreme levels of contextual ignorance and dangerous levels of perceived cultural superiority.
Life is a highly dynamic system. Reflecting deeply on the relational nature of life allows us to become reacquainted with human emotional limits. As was well understood by Daoist philosophers 2,500 years ago, and as reiterated by Bill Mollison in the foundational permaculture principles, powered-up relationships, including the cult-ivation of leaders are inherently incompatible with healthy ways of being human.
All social power gradients systematically dampen feedback loops, they constitute a collective learning disability. Economists Arjun Jayadev and Samuel Bowles describe the effort needed to maintain social power structures as guard labour. Guard labour is wage labour and other activities that are said to maintain (hence “guard”) a system. Things that are generally characterised as guard labour include: management, guards, military personnel, and prisoners. Guard labour is noteworthy because it captures expenditures based on mistrust and does not produce future value.
Note that the concept of a “flat hierarchy” is an oxymoron. Either you tolerate social power gradients or you don’t.
Along the way of de-powering all relationships, we begin to re-appreciate the limits of human comprehensibility and sense making. The following conversation between Dougald Hine, Bayo Akomolafe, Stephen Jenkinson & Vanessa Andreotti provides a good introduction to life in the compost heap of industrialised civilisation.
Agency at human scale
Available archaeological and anthropological evidence points towards highly egalitarian social norms within human scale (i.e. small) pre-civilised societies. In such societies social norms against wielding power over others would have allowed the unique talents and domain specific knowledge of Autistic people be recognised as valuable contributions.
In a psychologically safe environment at human scale (up to Dunbar’s number of around 150 people) the Autistic inability to maintain hidden agendas becomes a genuine strength that creates a collaborative advantage for the entire group.
Our society faces the unprecedented challenge of making a transition towards significantly different values within a single generation. This is the real challenge, rather than finding our way back to a state of “normal” that only ever worked for a very small minority. Here is a beautiful cosmolocal collection of voices from our friends at Local Futures from all corners of the planet:
The NeurodiVerse Days of Intersectional Solidarity – July 2024
The awesomeness of life lies beyond control. The NeurodiVerse Days of Solidarity offer a rich opportunity for omni-directional learning across cultures and geographies.
There is an urgent need to catalyse intersectional neurodiverse and indigenous ecologies of care all over the world. Neurodivergent, indigenous, and otherwise marginalised people depend on each other in ways that differ from the cultural norm – and that is pathologised in hypernormative societies. The endless chains of trauma must be broken.
The diversity in the way we collectively think about the future shapes the futures that are possible!
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