image by Layers on Pixabay
Last year I wrote about how chronic precarity seems to affect us mentally, and concluded:
Now, thanks largely to our own unintended blunders, 8.1 billion of us are seemingly both at the mercy of chance and at the mercy of others with whom we must share limited and diminishing resources. Not surprising, then, that we’re increasingly angry, distrustful, fearful, anxious, blameful, exclusionary, self-inuring, feeling helpless and hopeless, mentally struggling, and increasingly inclined to hoard what we have. In an age of precarity, that’s how we’re conditioned to feel, and what we’re conditioned to do.
In my series on signs of collapse, I’ve also highlighted how accelerating chaos, and (in the west at least) early stages of civilizational collapse are making us reactive, distrustful, angry, inured to others’ suffering, intolerant, and incapable of attentive listening. That series has also noted that ‘leaders’ in chaotic times increasingly tend to ignore the law and accepted rules of conduct (making that behaviour more ‘permissible’ for everyone else).
In chaotic times, these ‘leaders’ often also provoke overwhelm (maybe deliberately) by doing and saying incoherent things (though for some ‘leaders’ this seems to come naturally), confounding our attempts to make sense of what is happening. We can manage things being bad, as long as we can make sense of them. When things are bad and we can’t make sense of them, and where as a result we feel unsafe, helpless, and out of control, we lose our ability to cope.
In a recent video, neuroscientist Barry Ferns describes what this does to our brains. “The sense that the floor is slightly less solid than it once was”, he says, comes from the distressing and growing realization of the pervading lawlessness and contempt for rules of conduct we all have agreed to abide by. In small communities, he says, we are self-regulating, because we all know what the others are doing. But in vast, massively complex systems, those that have inordinate power can get away with ignoring rules and laws, while others can hide behind facades of anonymity (like corporations and nation-states) to evade both detection and responsibility for their misbehaviour. “Spontaneous norms”, he says, “only work where reputation travels. They stop working the moment the powerful can act without consequence. And power, once unchecked, concentrates.”
The result, he says, is that we now live in a world where we can no longer trust anyone to obey even basic agreed-upon rules (like not launching wars without cause or consultation, like not conducting genocides that target civilians and children, like not committing massive and devastating financial frauds, like not creating abusive oligopolies, like not abusing spouses and family members and desperate children, etc.).
When these kinds of atrocities, committed often right out in the open by the Epstein Class/Patriciate and others, are not only tolerated, but come to be shrugged off as commonplace, just “the way things are”, the effect of this on each one of us is complete disorientation, paralysis, not knowing what to do, what to think, or where to turn.
This is a defining quality of chaos. It is in every sense crazy-making. Like people stampeding towards the exits when a fire erupts or a shooter runs amok. There is neither the time/opportunity nor any value to “thinking things through” because the scaffolding that underlies how we think about and make sense of things has been completely undermined.
In neuroscience terms, Barry explains, what this does in our brains is it increasingly bypasses our prefrontal cortex (the reasoning, long-term planning part of the brain), in favour of our amygdala (the threat-detection and instinctive reaction part of the brain). This specifically occurs when we face chronic stress and the feeling of not being in control of the situation.
Neuroscientists have extensively demonstrated that this chronic state actually shrinks, and lessens the number of neurons and connections in, the prefrontal cortex, and grows and increases the number of neurons and connections in the amygdala. That’s a biological, adaptive response, the one that likely underlies much of the trauma we see in our contemporary civilization. It produces permanent changes in our brains whenever stress ceases to be merely acute, and when that stress evolves instead to be chronic and uncontrollable, leaving us in a permanent state of fear, dread, and uncertainty, feeling disoriented, unsafe, out of control, and helpless. Know that feeling?
In this situation, authoritarians who promise simple, aggressive solutions to reduce these feelings can capitalize on our mental impairment to seize power, and they can retain that power by keeping the population disoriented, confused, and fearful — of any ‘enemies’ the authoritarian wants to dream up.
And that is precisely the reason that I’m becoming more and more pessimistic about how most people are going to handle deepening chaos and civilizational collapse. We are already seeing the ‘alpha’ rats in the overcrowded, increasingly resource-constrained cage hoarding everything for themselves, and the rest of the rat colony cowering in the corners of the cage, scared shitless.
So what’s happening in the brains of our ‘leaders’ and other members of the Epstein Class/Patriciate — the human equivalent of the ‘alpha’ rats in the overcrowded cage? As a result of their lifelong conditioning, the ‘mirror neurons’ in their brains (the ones that enable us to imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes) have shut down (or in the case of those with inherited wealth and privilege, never developed in the first place), to the point they’ve become incapable of empathy. You can see this in most presidents, the tech bros, and other corporate ‘leaders’. Extreme wealth and power, over time, physically damages your brain’s ability to relate to other people.
So with their damaged brains, the Epstein Class/Patriciate can easily be conditioned to believe their wealth and power is deserved, and others’ poverty, illness, and failure is likewise ‘deserved’. Barry outlines research (all of his videos include citations) that shows that the Epstein Class/Patriciate actually believe that their wealth is evidence of their superior moral worth. That they are ‘better’ people than others, and that their beliefs and actions are unimpeachable. Sound like anyone you know?
And this same Epstein Class/Patriciate that believes they are superior to others, and are incapable of any compassion for those not in their Class, have used their power to systematically entrench more and more inequality into all our global economic systems. Why? Because the rich and powerful deserve their wealth and comfort. And these economic systems impoverish everyone else and leave us all in situations of precarity and chronic stress. Chronic stress that leads to… guess what? It’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Barry concludes:
So when you combine all of those facts — the empathy gap, the neurological change from having power, the isolation, the moral licensing, the structural impunity, and the manufactured vulnerability due to inequality, you don’t get an aberration. You don’t get a one-off monster. You get inevitability. You create people whose brains are literally damaged in ways that prevent them from seeing other people as fully human. A system that allows billions of dollars to pool in individual hands, while others struggle to survive, is a system that creates monsters.
And that’s not to take responsibility away from these abusers… But don’t ignore the fact that abusers is what this system creates. Reliably, predictably, like a factory, except instead of making cars, the current economic system is making monsters. And nobody wants to shut down the factory because the factory owners are running everything… When you hear the word billionaire, you should feel the same disgust in your gut as when you hear the word pedophile.
Of course, there’s a name for this economic system that creates and enables abusive monsters. But don’t let the Epstein Class/Patriciate hear you disparagingly using the “C-word”. They’ve worked so hard to convince us it’s the best and only system we can have.
