The More You Look, The Less You See: Regaining our Subjective Identity
A look into our cultural narrative and its effects on our society.
It seems as though we’ve reached the breaking point; the political arena has become a battleground between shrinking ideological islands adrift a growing sea of information, all the while each struggles to stay afloat amidst a raging storm of rapid change. The rise of populism is rupturing traditional parties from the inside out, spewing political shrapnel at the very fabric of the United States Democracy and threatening to plunge them into a constitutional crisis. The incessant rise of enmity between differing factions in America risks kick starting a domino effect of hostility and protectionism throughout the world at large. In an age of such remarkable physical connectedness, why is it that we are so emotionally disconnected? Clearly, our current dialogue is not working. It is apparent that we need a new conversation that initiates discussion on a broader context; one that synthesizes ideals from all across the spectrum and forms a unified vision for the future. So what exactly should this context be?
There are many avenues that we can look at but I want to start broadly by surveying our cultural narrative and attempting to understand how it has contributed to the way we envision the world and consequently the way we envision ourselves. The worldview that we co-create as a society is a foundational driver of our fundamental beliefs and perspectives which forms the lens through which we view the world. This lens is a filter for the thoughts we have, the plans we make and the actions we take. Therefore, our worldview is in an integral driver of our day-to-day choices as individuals, which makes it an integral determinant of the fate of our society. So what exactly is this cultural narrative, how did it develop, and in what ways has it contributed to our current situation?
Humans have constantly struggled to find balance between the tug of war of the mind and the heart — of reason and emotion. As a species with a highly developed brain, we are able to analyze and interpret our world to extremely sophisticated heights. We have come to view our intelligence as the holy grail of biological evolution. This level of thinking steered the ancient greeks — the founders of western civilization — to emphasize the importance of rational thought over emotional reasoning. Along the way, our notion of consciousness and intellect also became entangled. They became somewhat synonymous. This led our predecessors to view the conscious natural world as a hierarchy with humans at the top, due to our intellectual capacity. From this came the notion that “nature is ours to wrest our due” — that nature exists to serve us. All the while, a plethora of ancient philosophers and thinkers were developing and honing the scientific objective worldview: the apex of rational thought. Following Newton and the creation of classical physics, the idea that all in the universe could be known and mastered — the pythagorean dream of a ‘theory of everything’ — came to dominate our worldview. Our animated gods turned into inanimate laws. We became disenchanted by the world and our sense of magic was lost. The mind had won out over the heart, intuition and spirituality defeated by objective rationalism.
After the tremendous and at times tumultuous reign of religion, the scientific method had finally entered the spotlight. Our new worldview that formed alongside the rise of the scientific method promised reason over intuition, logic over creativity, and objective truth over subjective faith. This revolution of thinking shattered traditional religious doctrines, kickstarted humanity into an era of enlightenment and propelled us into modernity. I am in awe of the amazing and wonderous things that we have accomplished as a result of the scientific method. But I believe that along this journey to material enlightenment, we have lost sight of our humanity.
Amid the march into modernity we evolved to overemphasize the concrete, objective reality. Stuart Kauffman, in his book Humanity in a Creative Universe, coins this cultural perspective as “reductive materialism”, highlighting how this narrative reduces a vastly creative universe to a set of material structures with no subjective nature. The catch-22 of an objective worldview like our own is that while it is helpful for disassociating our feelings and beliefs from our understanding of the truth, it also neglects the importance of these altogether. On the same note, it also depreciates all ideas that are not perceivable and magnifies the importance of only that which can be observed and measured. This is imperative for generating evidence-backed solutions. Yet on the other side of the coin, it can lead to an imbalance in our lives by undermining the importance of subjective, experiential education. Our obsession to explain all things with scientific law and to pursue the pythagorean dream of a theory of everything has stifled our creative and intuitive nature by deflating our image of the universe to an inanimate, machine-like material world.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not a science skeptic. I just think that our over-rational and scientific culture undervalues our feelings and beliefs and compels people to suppress their emotions, creating alienated identities that are forcibly seperated from the self, resulting in mental, emotional and personality issues. It also punishes the use of intuition and subjective insight in our study of the universe by regarding it as meaningless, not credible, and at times, even delusional. Of course, it is natural to neglect the world of thought, belief and feeling in the study of science. They are by definition hard to decipher due to their immaterial nature. But they are by no means less real, and we should therefore not neglect to study them.
The inadequacy of this over-objective ideology can be seen throughout our society. In our medical sector, the philosophical notion of Materialism, which suggests that we are merely ‘witnessing minds’, dominates the system. All of our ailments are seen as little more than physical afflictions, and so our medicines are rarely more than pharmaceuticals. But often our physical ailments are only the symptom, not the problem. Sometimes our physical ailments arise because of a chronic, more subjective ailment, not the other way around. Yet our system largely neglects to consider any sort of affects from existential or cultural narratives on an individual, and instead perpetuates complacent and often crushing sentiments such as “it’s all in your head”, or “it’s just your genetics”. The reduction of our humanity to inanimate machines has created an inadequate understanding of the human condition and an inadequate treatment process, and as a result, an unparalleled level of chronic illnesses.
In our education system, we teach students incredibly detailed objective phenomena such as the inner workings of a plant cell and how to perform algebraic equations, yet we have neglected to properly educate students on basic information such as healthy nutrition and lifestyle techniques, or how to listen to and understand the subjective cues our bodies tell us. We have created seasoned professionals but amateur human beings who understand more about the periodic table than they do about their own feelings.
In the economy, the pursuit of happiness has been reduced to materialism which has created a toxic and unsustainable consumerist culture. The ticket to happiness is seen as, by and large, nothing more than bigger, better, and more stuff. Our advertisements and media sources are dominated by impeccable fashion models, ludicrous toys and outlandish venues. The ticket to ‘finding yourself’ is viewed as though the true ‘you’ is a tangible thing lying half way around the world, hiding under a rock or something. The modern liberal notion of individualism, which venerates a divine uniqueness in each individual, encourages the expression of this uniqueness through our material possessions, which unfortunately has morphed individualism into one of the driving forces of consumerism. The pursuit of happiness and self-identity has increasingly become an outwardly focused journey, rather than an inwardly focused one. The irony is that the further you look into the world, the farther away from yourself you become.
Furthermore, our efficient economy has created increasingly menial jobs that are so specialized that they are extraordinarily mind numbing. This is enough to drive any person into mild insanity. Our human brains developed on the plains of the African savannah, where one day we had to build a shelter, the next we needed to hunt prey as a team, and the next we had to forage for food or cook meat. All the while we had to study the environment and the motion of the stars to predict ecological patterns and plan accordingly. This provided us with a healthy amount of novelty in our daily lives that kept us entertained. Today, many of us have to work not only longer days than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but spend our days doing the exact same thing, day in and day out. Millenials struggle in the workforce not because they are lazy, but because they have nothing to motivate or inspire them, beyond the prospect of more and more toys. Since survival is not really a problem for most westerners, they are left unfulfilled by an immature and materialistic economy. I believe these factors, among other things, has led our current generation into an epidemic of existential crises.
In the wake of an overly objective and materialistic world, you can see the growing desire for new and holistic answers: the surging popularity of eastern philosophical practices such as yoga and mindfulness; the growing apprehension towards pharmacology and the rising popularity of alternative medicine; the push to decriminalize marijuana; the influx of buddhist culture in your local mall or fair; the growing desire — and also just ability — to travel and experience foreign cultures; the push to decrease the objectification of women; the movement to end stigma around mental health; the transition into postmodernism (at its heart, postmodernism is represents a general distrust of traditional grand theories and ideologies). What were once nonconformist groups that existed on the fringes of our society are increasingly expanding to encompass our mainstream culture. All of these detectable trends are part of a broader, more subjective movement: the desire for a more complete understanding of the human experience beyond the concrete, material reality that has come to dominate our psyche.
Despite burgeoning interest, these desires are not being met. There are not enough platforms that enable people to explore these avenues. Many people are looking for more answers, but are looking in the same places and as a consequence are just running around in circles. The most obvious example of this lies in hipster culture, where attempting to be apart from mainstream has become the new mainstream. This “up is down and down is up” paradox is an example of people going around in circles yet coming to no new conclusions. It’s just the recycling of old ideas and trends, repackaged to fit our technocratic society and stapled with a rebranded ideological meaning. The fact that our mainstream culture is increasingly a backlash against mainstream culture signifies that their is something deeply amiss in our current narrative.
No where is this more obvious than in America’s most recent political election. Let’s try to break it down. So, the cultural hegemony of reductive materialism has led to a nation that has disregarded their emotional well-being at the expense of material success. This chronic suppression of emotions leads to a lack of awareness of one’s self and an inability to control one’s own feelings. The stigma around mental health makes people shameful of their suppressed emotions, only making them suppress them even more, leading to the marginalization of their own feelings and the creation of a seperate beast altogether. Literally. People create a beast out of their suppressed emotions and become fearful of themselves. Combine this with the quickening pace of life and the rising amount of distractions that disconnect people from their own bodies and you end up with a society that is unable to cope with their stress. What’s more, an over-materialistic culture has created a veracious consumer economy that requires excessive amounts of stimulating, non-reusable products and services to continue circulating through the economy, creating a cancerous lifestyle that requires consistent GDP growth in order to maintain happiness. It is no secret that the average westernized lifestyle cannot and will not last forever in its current form. Nor is it much of a secret that this westernized lifestyle is at the expense of people suffering from structural poverty half way around the world. This triggers an underground tension and even shame to begin bubbling below the surface of a perfectionist facade. Here this tension sits, slowly simmering along with a cacophony of other suppressed emotions. As this unease continues to percolate, a looming foreboding begins to grip the population, causing anxious eyes to turn to the political sector in search of answers to their problems. As individuals, they will likely look for more direct solutions in areas such as the medical sector, but as described above, this will likely only prolong and dampen their unease rather than solve it.
Note earlier that emotional suppression causes people to become disillusioned from their identity or even fearful of it. This is important because without an awareness of or willingness to confront the internal nature of their unease, a population under intense levels of stress will begin to project their problems onto the external world. They will search for tangible excuses in their environment in order to rationalize their fears, such as scapegoating Russia, China, Mexico, Islam, etc. On the streets, the incessant march of equality movements, and overseas, the continual collapse of order in Iraq and Syria deepen the divide between the afraid and the oppressed, leading to political unrest. Now all eyes are on the political sector. Meanwhile, the political sector is still relying on antiquated methods that strain under the pressure of globalization, climate change, refugee crises, and a transitory postmodern economy that becomes more fluid — and therefore more insecure — with each passing year. Inevitably, the population becomes frustrated with the stubbornness of leaders and institutions that cling on to outdated methods that are bottlenecked by their reductive materialistic worldview. Increasingly, agitation foments into terror. Still in search of a tangible threat, this anger and fear becomes directed at each other, and the fighting escalates to the point that peoples’ very identity feels threatened, at which point they enter emotional lockdown, eliciting total irrationality. For those that are lost in this vicious circle, all of this undoubtedly fosters cynicism towards our present culture of science and reason which has created a system that has failed to empathize with their feelings. This leads to a disregard of evidence and reason and an eruption of suppressed emotions. It is in this state of unrest that people become vulnerable to a political figure who 1) promises to shake up the status quo, 2) responds to their emotions rather than their reason, making them feel understood, and 3) provides easy and tangible scapegoats to their fears.
This is all just a thought experiment, and I have no evidence to back up these claims. Yet evidence or not, this problem deserves attention through a new lens.
I think that it is important to note that by suppressing the undesirable or unprovable parts of our humanity we are only giving them power by relinquishing our understanding of these feelings, thereby enabling our imaginations to create exotic and twisted fantasies about each other which breed and reproduce like wildfire, making us fearful of our emotions. In so doing we allow our emotions to control us rather than taking control of our emotions. By marginalizing our subjective humanity as individuals and as a society, we have not gotten rid of our unwanted feelings, rather we have merely lost control of them by surrendering our understanding of them. Not only has this happened on an individual level, but on an international level, it has alienated religious groups and is the gasoline that is fuelling the flame of extremist groups such as ISIS. We are the Yin to their Yang; by subjugating and discrediting our subjective humanity, we have polarized the ideological arena, exaggerated the power of the antagonist, and created the conditions that have fostered the growth of the very thing we are afraid of. I know there are internal factors at play as well, but the relationship between our hegemonous culture and the rise of Islamic extremism is undeniable. This is not to say that radical Islam is not a true threat, but if we wish to make peace, not war, we must be willing to look ourselves in the mirror and admit our own faults, just as we would ask of our adversaries. Rather than disregarding our emotions and trying to disengage them from our identities, it is imperative that we learn to confront our emotions and understand them in order to harness their power for good, rather than creating an enemy out of ourselves, and ultimately an enemy out of eachother.
Since much of the world follows in the footsteps of the American model, the current situation in America is premonitory of what may come for many other countries. Similar feelings of anxiety are currently being felt across much of the western world, where radical political parties are steadily emerging. The good news is that while our current worldview may be nearing its expiry date, this provides us with a blank slate to reevaluate our world like never before. With the power of our current knowledge and information technologies behind us, together we can lay the foundation of a holistic worldview that reflects all of our humanity, not just part of it. If we make a conscious effort to look at our worldview with fresh eyes, we may just be able to see ourselves in a new light; one that maintains respect for science and reason, yet restores a sense of magic in the world and a magic in ourselves. A worldview that acknowledges the tremendous power of our feelings and our beliefs in becoming anew in the world, and renews hope in our ability to guide them responsibly and augment their power, rather than diminish them.
There is no doubt that the pursuit of science is an extremely effective catalyst for understanding and reinventing the physical world, but without acknowledging our subjectivity as central to our understanding of reality rather than seperate from it, our technologies, our systems, and our economy as a whole will only become more misguided. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that,
“We have guided missiles but misguided men.”
What good does our science do if we allow it to serve our fear, our narcissism, and our selfishness? What good do our technologies do if only to demolish and pollute our home in the name of ever higher Gross Domestic Product?
For the same reason that chronic disease is increasingly prevalent in individuals, we have grown sick as a society. The sickness that our earth suffers from is the same sickness that our society suffers from which is the same sickness that we as individuals suffer from: an imbalance in our collective imagination resulting from fundamentalist ideologies and identities: Capitalism v.s. communism, science (and materialism) v.s. spirituality (and subjectivism), conservatism v.s. liberalism, creativity v.s. logic, masculinity v.s. femininity. Our worldview polarizes our perspective of reality and forces our hand in choosing one or the other, thereby neglecting half of our humanity and creating a stranger out of each other. Overbearing communism failed. Unbridled capitalism is failing. Misconstrued religious faiths are failing. Conservatism v.s. liberalism is failing. Rampant scientism is failing.
We have acknowledged that climate change is the cause of human action (or atleast some of us have). Good, but we have to go deeper. What is the cause of this human action? Humans are molded by their cultural environment, so part of the problem may not even lie within the material world, and therefore may not be entirely solvable by science. Our challenges lie, in part, within the mythic landscape of our imagination. They lie within the stories that we tell ourselves, how these stories govern our behaviours, and how these behaviours form our reality. For example, the narcissistic story that nature is hierarchical and humans are at the top of this hierarchy has created a human-centric system that undervalues the importance of the rest of nature which has enabled a cancerous lifestyle that is harmful to the earth. Even beyond how our behaviours form our reality, there is scientific evidence that concludes that the stories we tell ourselves directly influence our physical reality. An example of this is the placebo effect.
The truth is, we have created a society with amazing knowledge yet little vision — no understanding or awareness of the stories we tell ourselves and how these shape who we are as creative beings in the world. We can continue to create all the technologies and laws we want, but without confronting the fundamental causes behind the problems we are trying to solve, our solutions will forever remain temporary solutions to an increasingly prevalent problem.
We have mastered the material world without mastering our use of it. We have become enlightened to the world around us, and in the mean time blindfolded to ourselves. The words of sociologist and philosopher Max Weber echo,
“Scientific knowledge is a means to an end that tells us nothing about the values that should guide our lives.”
As Joel A. Barker said,
“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. [But] vision with action can change the world.”
So, can we unite our actions behind a vision that serves our humanity? Can we build a culture that fosters and encourages healthy subjective education, and use this as a compass to guide our creative process that comes from our understanding of the objective truth? It is my hope that together we can create a worldview that ackowledges our subjectivity not as separate, but as central to our understanding of the universe. Just as our biochemistry shapes our behaviours, so too do the stories we tell ourselves. With a holistic understanding of both the physical and the imaginative narratives that govern our lives, we can begin to better master the human condition, and as a result, responsibly create ourselves and our world anew. Therefore may we focus less on understanding the world that we inhabit, and more on understanding the world that we are.
Thanks for reading.