No matter which candidate won the U.S. Presidential election, about half the citizens were set to fear the end of the country. Rather than argue about whether each side’s concern is similarly credible, I’ll address a broader question. What, exactly, does a voter/citizen imagine the goal to be, and—given modernity’s transient status—is the goal anything more than unfounded fantasy?
I have difficulty listening to political rhetoric of any stripe, carrying as I do the conviction that the entire modernity project is an incoherent amalgam of stunts that is inherently incompatible with ecological health, and thus fated to self-terminate. Besides offering promises of more houses, more jobs, more money, more material comfort—which only moves us closer toward ecological collapse—the dream being sold is such a self-deluded fantasy as to sound like Santa Claus and Easter Bunnies to my ear. It has a similarly infantilizing effect on the population.
Political dreamers—perhaps especially on the left where I have spent most of my adult life—board many trains of thought with the words: “if only.” If only we had full participation in the democratic process. If only voters were well informed, without misinformation. If only people voted in their economic self-interest and not as cultural warriors. If only people were better-educated. If only the racists, xenophobes, misogynists, and homophobes could be called out and properly shamed either into adopting suitable attitudes (and pronouns?), or else pushed into the margins.
Notice the common theme: if only people were not what they actually are… The subtext is: In a perfect system, people would shape up to be a better fit to our marvelous political creation. The system could realize its intended glory if only the people would get with the program. Basically: for most folks, modernity isn’t the problem. It’s those gall-darned people who have always prevented it from achieving its theoretical potential. It amounts to the elevation of an artificial and elusive ideal over actual living beings.
The right tends to be more suspicious of institutions, bureaucracy, regulations, impositions on personal freedom, and understandably resents the implication—or even overt statements—that it is they who are flawed in relation to a perfectible system. In this respect I find myself, surprisingly, sharing a bit of anti-government sentiment—although different in scope and motivation.
Generally, the left tends to be attracted to egalitarianism: everyone given equal opportunity and privilege. The right is more comfortable with hierarchy, even to the point of authoritarianism—preferring strong leaders (at least perceived/projected as such). Since I hold pre-agricultural cultures in high regard—as they had figured out patterns for long-term sustainable living in ecological reciprocity—I find the egalitarian model of the left to be a better match to small-scale bands of people sharing and working together toward a common goal. It’s just that such ideals are basically impossible to pull off in a world of 8 billion strangers—or even a town of 500. In our original ecological context, such unwieldy collectives were not relevant.
What prevents me from defending political sides any more is that all parties are committed human supremacists. Any political rhetoric, then, sounds like promotion of the Human Reich to me. I don’t blame the parties per se, as they are simply reasonably-accurate reflections of the populace in a culture of modernity: democracy at work. Our entire culture is sick, jeopardizing the health of the entire living world.
But enough about the tortures of having no political home in today’s landscape! I want to turn to the phenomenon of political fantasy, and how that connects to the entire fantasy of modernity.
Shortcut Brains
I have spoken recently about brains and their limitations. Brains are organs evolved and adapted to coordinate actions of an organism for fitness. An aside: fitness does not mean outcompeting all other life, but fitting well into a complex web of life—which is necessary for long-term existence. It is perhaps obvious that brains of increasing neurological complexity are able to construct mental models of increasing complexity. Yet, even the most sophisticated mental models are pared-down representations of inherently messier realities outside the brain. By necessity (and definition?) they are incomplete, and do not have to be even close to perfect in order to confer advantages in an adaptive, probabilistic sense.
Because human mental models are exceptional in the animal kingdom, we’re quite proud of them. We begin to live in our models. We mistake their nifty, tidy designs for the reality they attempt to capture—the classic blunder of treating the map as the territory. That can work fine in many situations, and in a sense is the whole point of a brain: a speedy shortcut-machine that often serves well enough to stand in for reality.
As pointed out in Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, our tendency to “live the model” has become ever-easier to practice, in a self-reinforcing way, having reshaped our environment to conform to our shortcut mental models. We impose a monoculture field hosting tidy rows of grain in place of a complex, biodiverse community; a single, “owned” dwelling and fenced parcel of land in lieu of a whole territory to seasonally explore; dimensional lumber rather than quirky natural trunks and branches; gun-barrel straight roads on grids rather than terrain-conforming, intertwining paths; specialized, narrow jobs instead of broadly general occupation; rigid clocks and calendars to replace more intuitive connection to diurnal and seasonal rhythms.
In fact, Daylight Savings Time is a great example: people complain when the lighting profile of their day abruptly changes, even though the day hasn’t changed perceptibly at all! Ask the squirrels. It’s our artificial overlay of time that suddenly lurched. We’re so hard-tied to our artifice that it becomes the reality—not the sun, moon, and stars. Absurd!
The point is that our culture has a long track record of working to replace natural, complex environments with simpler, artificial ones that better conform to simplified mental models. Rather than stretch our brains to grapple with complexity, we shrink and standardize our environment to coddle and thus nurture our cognitive limitations. In feedback, our cognitive limitations only become more pronounced within our virtual world.
Back to Politics
The same happens in politics, of course. The political frameworks populating modernity are fabrications of the human mind—notional constructs that have no ecological, evolutionary vetting. They reflect the culmination of a 10,000-year trend toward ever-increasing separation from the community of life. Unsurprisingly, these systems have never been perfect in practice. Yet, so many of us hold onto a fantasy of eventual perfection. The arc must bend toward perfection, for the simple reason that the notion is lovely, poetic, and fits comfortably within our meat-brains. And otherwise, what’s the point?
Our affinity for perfection is a little bizarre when critically observing the result. Our tendency is to address the growing host of problems (imperfections) with—of all things—more “solutions.” Only, the solutions have the unintended effect of adding to overall kludginess, which introduces new interactions and unforeseen consequences. Fast forward, and the inevitable result is an unwieldy tangle of brain-farts. That’s what modernity boils down to, folks: a motley collection of hair-brained notions divorced from ecological reality—with almost no chance of actually working as well as it was imagined to work when safely ensconced in a stripped-down mental model. The real world always messes up our pristine ideas! The problem must be the universe: certainly not our superior mental concoctions! An apt line from Douglas Adams in Mostly Harmless:
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof [is] to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
The list of complete fools can include people, other animals, plants, microbes, or the universe in general—which can often contrive to wreck best-laid plans. And where might the fault lie?
While on cultural references, in one episode of The Simpsons, a car company wanted Homer—judged to be an extremely typical American—to design the perfect car. It had every conceivable brain-fart feature that popped into Homer’s shiny globe. The result, predictably, was a hideous monstrosity (yet somehow more pleasing than the cyber truck), and a total flop. Now project that image onto modernity.
Of course modernity’s political schemes are not going to work, in the end. Why do so many people think they can, when they never have in all of history, across many experimental instantiations around the globe? Why would anyone think we’re so close, when polarization has never been worse, and a sixth mass extinction is underway as a result of our obsessive solutioneering? I’m not sure we can survive many more solutions. Please stop!
Naïve, to a Human
Having bashed the left’s tendency toward condescension, it’s my turn to commit the same sin on a grand scale. It all seems rather naïve. Whether discussing the political right or the political left, we must keep in mind that the alluring end-point is a complete imagination: a fantasy—something that has never existed. Brains simply are not constructed/evolved to be able to form mental models sufficiently complete and contextualized to conceive an artifice capable of long-term success. That’s because long-term success is inseparably embedded in an ecological context, whose full contours were established via relentless experimentation over inconceivable stretches of time, and will always elude our poor meat-brains.
If anyone is put off by this proclamation that we are incapable of designing a political system that finally “gets it right,” I ask them to prove me wrong. Is it simple faith, or personal hubris (i.e., believing themselves to have the correct answer)? If a matter of faith, well, bless their hearts. If hubris, maybe the appropriate response is: seriously? (Also be sure to check out the Dunning-Kruger effect.)
By characterizing basically every modern political ideology as being naïve, I might be misinterpreted as being egregiously hubristic myself: beyond the pale. Importantly, I am not claiming to have the answers myself. My meat-brain is no better than any other. I am every bit as prone to being naïve. I simply don’t pretend that I am (or that anyone is) capable of imagining a successful political framework to support a grossly unsustainable construct such as modernity—any more than any of us can toss a rock up and have it ignore gravity by power of thought, or refuse to ever die through an act of will.
Foundation
What I do know is that the community of life is far older than humans, that humans are far older than modernity, and that modernity is effectively a massive brain-fart increasingly ignorant-of and divorced-from ecological reality. Today’s political ideologies are products of modernity, in service to its human-supremacist, unsustainable, impossible continuance. It’s all empty.
What I also know is that for hundreds of thousands of years, people adopted various locally-tuned cultural structures that functioned within a complete ecological context, and worked for people as they are—not people as we idealize or wish them to be. What’s the point of enacting a system for imaginary people, then blaming people when it never works? Why prioritize an unrealistic ideology over reality? Don’t let our brains try to design the world. Because we suck at it.
Instead…
The good news in all this is that whatever fraction of your time, energy, or anxiety goes toward politics can be reclaimed for other concerns. This can have a positive effect on your life. It’s part of falling out of love with modernity, and finding love elsewhere—among the people in your life, the local community, and the broader living world. After all, once recognizing that the simple political dream is predicated on modernity’s continuance and perfection, and that it can never happen, then what’s the point?
Some might recoil at the idea of just giving up on politics, imagining something like anarchy in its place. Sure: the characteristically-simplistic mental model is that if 100% of people suddenly disengaged the resulting vacuum would bring mayhem—but come on—we all know that’s not how things happen. Disaffection will creep in gradually, and mostly as today’s indefatigable political warriors die to be replaced by newcomers who just don’t buy into the old ways and dreams. Suitable, local replacements will naturally ease in to displace failing institutions. A fraction of people, like me, can choose to focus on the longer term, and ask what we can do now to help humans succeed once modernity winds itself down. The Department of National Intelligence is not part of that future, so why fret about it, or who runs it (into the ground)? In a sense, the Trump administration might serve to hasten distrust in institutions and result in people having to find their own way—thrown into the deep end to sink or swim. I am conflicted about whether it’s my preferred way to go about it, but because I no longer cling to a fantasy future, I am not as distressed as many in my circle. We have to let go of the wolf’s ear sometime and somehow. There is no “right” way to do it, without some pain somewhere. Pretending otherwise is part of the prevailing fantasy, and I’m ready to grow out of it.
Anyhow, I hope you might also find a more healthy mental state by questioning the degree to which your own political anxieties are rooted in unachievable fantasy. Life can be better without all the claptrap.
