Thirtyfive years ago, Gregory Bateson (Anthropologist, Psychologist, Cybernetcist, Stanford educator, one-time husband of Margaret Mead, one of the geniuses of the last century), summed it up like this:
The cybernetic epistemology which I have offered you would suggest a new approach. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a subsystem. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by "God," but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology.
Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.
If you put God outside and set him vis-a-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
If this is your estimate of your relation to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.
If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the prescybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that I don't know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think "Gregory Bateson" is cutting down the tree. I am cutting down the tree. "Myself" is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling "mind."
The whole text of this talk (the kind of thing that has to be read a few times before the full, underlying meaning becomes clear) can be found on my web site, here:
http://www.rawpaint.com/library/bateson/formsubstancedifference.html"Learning to think in the new way" means recognizing that human life and the life of the ecological system are NOT two separate systems; they are interconnected. It is actually more than that: Consciousness is universal, not something that belongs only to me or you or "I" or someone else. We're talking about a completely different epistemology, a different paradigm, one which the Elites throughout all time have worked against by shepherding humankind toward COMPETITION for resources--watever they might be. Only the great sages and mystics saw the truth: We are ALL One Living Being. Without this understanding, we do not simply 'go mad'; we ARE mad. Our epistemology is flawed and the ultimate consequence of that for any species is an inability to adapt to the actual laws that govern all of life.
The bottom line in our age is that the Elites and their global banking concerns and their international corporations cared more for THEIR bottom line than the human consequences of their actions. With REAL leadership, human society could already be well on its way to a renewable energy infrastructure that would make sense within the total ecological system. However,that would have meant a radically DIFFERENT social power structure and the Elites who make the real decisions were too greedy and stupid to understand the inherent flaw within their own thinking. Now they are going to take us over the brink into a global petrochemical resource war.
Even if we were to arrest all these MANIACS for crimes against humanity and publicly behead them on the White House Lawn--precisely what should be done--we would still be faced with the very real possibility of ecological collapse due to overpopulation and a century of increasing reliance on nonrenewable energy.
Make no mistake about it, though, barring complete overheating, the planet is capable of getting rid of human civilization and its toxic side effects. Systems tend toward ballance--and when it gets too far out of whack in one direction, the pendulum inevitably swings back in the other. At times with a vengeance. Right now the rumblings under the Indian Ocean may be a portent of things to come. The seismic activity CURRENTLY being recorded is
unprecidented. Some fear the Adaman Plate itself
may be collapsing.
Either way, hold on to your hat, it is going to be a bumpy ride.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
