World in Two Minds

K W Jamieson

• Publisher: Shepherd Walwyn Publishers
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780856835216
• eBook ISBN: 9780856834455
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Society is in a state of chaos; yet almost all life stresses are human-made. Our species is literally making itself sick. In A World in Two Minds, Kenny Jamieson considers the two complex adaptive systems behind the chaos – the individual mind and the global mind – and how the latter emerges, in the form of culture, from the former. We have a global cognitive imbalance due to the dominance of the mechanistic worldview of scientific materialism, which is strongly rooted in the left mind and Western culture. Over centuries, this bias has gradually dissociated us from the right mind, lowering consciousness, denaturing the human condition and negatively impacting our health. Today, life offers the human race both opportunity and danger. Our global mind could evolve to a higher cognitive plane where harmony, health and happiness prevail, but it could just as easily disintegrate, leading to catastrophic conflict. Our future is unknown but whatever we bring forth will be the output of the global mind we collectively create. Critically, everyone has a role to play. Any one of us could be the final catalyst which tips our whole human system into a new era.

PART ONE

SEEING

The Shifting Sands of the Human System

— 1 —

Our Self-Inflicted Sickness

IN THE 5th century BC, Socrates concluded that he was wiser than all of the eminent Greek scholars and philosophers who had gone before him, because he alone recognized his own ignorance. That this observation is simultaneously boastful yet full of humility, illuminates the key characteristic of the human brain which lies at the very heart of this story; its amazing ability to reconcile contradictory concepts. As we will discover, the power of opposites is essential to how we process and experience the world around us every day. While Socrates perhaps possessed one of the sharpest brains ever to produce thought, the 1.5 kilograms of neurons, glial cells and blood vessels which is enabling you to read this sentence still shares this same characteristic, and many more, with the great mind of Socrates and with every other human-being who has ever lived. Those of us alive in the 21st century can now benefit from the accumulated knowledge of all the great scholars who preceded us, from the Western genius of Aristotle, Galileo, Copernicus, Da Vinci, Newton, Darwin and Einstein to the Eastern brilliance of Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra, Al Khwarizmi, Avicenna and Omar Khayyam. If, through the wonders of modern technology, we now have access to most of the philosophical, scientific, economic, mathematical, astronomical, geological, sociological, anthropological, theistic and literary output ever created, the mind of the average modern human must surely be more knowledgeable and infinitely wiser than the famous polymaths of history. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work like that! In spite of having the whole history of human development behind us, the intellectual ability of each individual doesn’t appear to have snowballed since the time of Socrates. Given everything we now have the capability of knowing, why aren’t we all smarter than Da Vinci?

The reason is twofold. First, in the modern world we simply don’t need to know everything. Our ancient ancestors, when they shifted from hunter-gathering to farming, had the bright idea of dividing labour so that each individual could specialise and didn’t have to master, or even participate in, all the tasks which needed to be performed. It was this social skill – the ability to communicate and work co-operatively with strangers for mutual benefit – which first allowed humans to grow beyond small family groups into the national and international communities we are all part of today. Now, there are billions of us participating in all manner of pastimes and professions, each often requiring very particular cognitive capabilities, and we have not only learned to divide our labour but also to divide our knowledge. Indeed, many of our economies are now primarily knowledge-based and, with so much information available and so many different ways to apply our skills, we have all become accustomed to only learning a very thinly sliced portion of everything there is to know.

However, there is a more fundamental reason why each of us can only retain a few drops of the ocean of data available to us – we are still operating with essentially the same brain as the very first homo-sapiens, around 200,000 years ago. While the information available in the outer world has expanded exponentially, our internal ability to process the data we receive has failed to keep up. In this new age of high-speed broadband, digital technology and global connectivity, we still have the same cognitive equipment our ancestors had when they first discovered fire and invented language, so it is perhaps no wonder that each of us can only grasp a microcosm of what we could understand with a more capable brain. We are no smarter than Socrates because our mental tools are no more advanced than his were. Indeed, such is our overconfidence as a species that, even with an additional two and a half millennia of learning, we are often less appreciative of our own ignorance than he was.

Our overconfidence manifests in many ways, one of which is our habit of telling ourselves delusional but comforting tales which reduce any distressing cognitive dissonance we might be experiencing. On this basis, we might be tempted to convince ourselves that only we ‘mere mortals’ are cognitively challenged. Since large human communities were first created, they have been ruled, not by the ordinary populous, but by a political, academic, religious or commercial elite, which remains the case to this day. Armed with aeons of knowledge, surely our modern societal leaders must be individually smarter than Socrates and collectively wiser than all of the great scholars of antiquity? The state of the world we live in should quickly dispel us of any such notion.

A World in Chaos

These days, global human society seems to be in perpetual turmoil. A review of any 21st century newsreel would feature the terrorist destruction of the World Trade Centre towers in New York on 9/11, the hostile occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the re-emergence of a nuclear threat in North Korea and continued tensions between Israel and Palestine. We have seen the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen and the crushing of demands for democracy in China and Nepal. We’ve witnessed genocide in Somalia, civil war in Syria and the Ukraine teeters on the brink of implosion, inflamed by Russian interference. The United Kingdom has voted to ‘brexit’ the most successful customs union ever created and the President of the United States openly condones extreme right-wing, white nationalist groups. A terrorist group has created an Islamic caliphate straddling the border between Iraq and Syria, violating human rights and committing medieval atrocities on a daily basis. People are drowning in the Mediterranean as they try to escape these warzones, and the international humanitarian response to the refugee crisis has largely been lamentable. According to the United Nations almost 60 million people worldwide – one in every 122 humans – have been forcibly displaced from their homes as a result of persecution, conflict or human rights violations.¹ The tragedies reported in our media have become so prevalent that we are almost numb to their meaning. The massacre of school children by the Taliban in Pakistan was quickly followed by the slaughter of thousands by Boko Haram in Nigeria. The Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, police brutality on black civilians in the US, tourists shot on a Tunisian beach and the bombing of a shrine in Bangkok, all blend into a cacophony of carnage. Every single day new tales of human suffering unfold around the globe. A 2014 study by the Institute for Economics and Peace found the world has been becoming less peaceful every year since 2007, and that only 11 of the 162 countries covered by their research hasn’t, in some way, been involved in conflict during this period.²

Not only are we killing each other, we are also damaging the only planet in our universe capable of sustaining the human species. There is widespread consensus among the international scientific community that our methods and emissions are having a negative impact on our environment. Global warming, the increase in the average temperature of the earth’s air and ocean water, is a proven phenomenon and greenhouse gases, resulting from human activities such as deforestation and the use of fossil fuels, are significant contributors to it. There is broad alignment behind the prediction that temperatures will continue to increase well into this century, with significant implications for food supply, the survival of natural habitats and the availability of fresh water. At the 2009 Sustainable Development Conference, the UK government’s chief scientist Professor John Beddington warned of an impending ‘perfect storm’ of food, energy and water shortages by the year 2030. He predicted that demand for food and energy would increase by 50% and fresh water by 30%, largely as the result of a growing world population which will top 8.3 billion by 2030.³

In the developed world we have a surplus of food, yet are eating ourselves to death. Health-care resources are stretched to breaking point as a growth in heart disease, diabetes, cancer and stroke, result from increasingly sedentary and indulgent lifestyles. In developing nations poverty remains endemic, with many governments unable or unwilling to ensure the controls required for sustainable economic development, which could give every person access to their basic human rights of sustenance, safety and shelter.

The citizens of many countries continue to be racked by the aftereffects of the 2008 global banking crisis, as governments implement widespread austerity programmes to reduce spending and shrink national debts and deficits. Even in some of the richest economies, inequality of wealth distribution has led to 1 in 4 children being brought up in poverty and, each week, thousands of families rely on charity food banks to survive.⁴ Many people face the prospect of unemployment as an increasing number of jobs are off-shored to foreign workers, who are able to replace their labour at a fraction of the wage they would need to maintain their current standard of living. Many others are anxious at the speed of technological development, enabling human muscle power to be replaced by machines which can perform faster, and for longer, than their finite energy resources could ever deliver. Even knowledge workers are increasingly finding that their capabilities can be easily replicated by computer software, against which they cannot compete. Those still in employment are working harder and for longer hours, delivering greater productivity per head for progressively less pay, as businesses down-size to cut costs while increasing profits, enabling directors and shareholders to disproportionately benefit from their collective efforts. As inequality grows in an ever-shrinking world, economic migration is an inevitable outcome, increasing the pressure on societies to assimilate different cultures.

As the pace of social change quickens, most people feel compelled to try to keep up; making more choices, more quickly from a bewildering array of options, all communicated in a technology-enabled deluge of information they don’t have time to digest. Many find themselves under pressure to not only make a living, but to generate an income which allows them to compete with peers for the latest gizmo or gadget, as well as meet their children’s demands that they must do likewise. Under such social stresses many are driven into debt, some turn to crime, others to substance abuse. Suicide rates are increasing and strains on relationships have driven divorce rates to between 40% and 70% in many developed nations.⁵ With weakening family bonds, yet desperate for anchors of stability, many people have no idea who they can trust – the credibility of traditional institutions, like churches and banks, having been shattered by scandal and mismanagement. As politicians cut social safety nets, while feathering their own nests with taxpayer-funded expenses, the elites of society are finally being fully exposed for what they are – ordinary human-beings, with the same flawed brains as the rest of us.

For many ordinary people, life in the 21st century feels like living permanently in the midst of a hurricane, so we are on solid ground to say that the elites who run our world are certainly no smarter than we are. It is equally clear that their strategies aren’t facilitating peaceful global integration and that the social pressures produced by their policies, are not conducive to human health or happiness. Socrates believed that all human-beings, by their deepest nature, pursue their own happiness and thought that this could only be achieved through heightened self-awareness. Perhaps if we could understand what actually makes us happy, it might prove to be rather less elusive.

The Source of Our Unhappiness

The 2013 World Happiness Report, conducted across 156 countries by the World Health Organization (WHO), concluded that our average global happiness rating was only 5.2 out of a maximum potential score of 10.⁶ These measures vary by region and country. North Americans were happiest at 7.1, followed by Western Europeans at 6.7, while sub-Saharan Africans were least happy with a score of only 4.6. The least happy amongst us, the poor citizens of Togo, returned a despairingly low 2.9 out of 10 but, even for the top ranking Danes, a happiness score of 7.7 still seems like a fairly paltry return for two and a half millennia of post-Socratic self-discovery.

Other studies show that, even in the happiest regions, happiness isn’t growing but declining. Not only are we becoming unhappier, we are also very bad at judging what makes us happy. We tend to overestimate the value of work, money and material possessions, while undervaluing relationships. The connection between happiness and money is complex. Overall, people in wealthier countries do tend to be happier than those in poorer countries, but the relationship between the two isn’t very strong. In both the USA and UK, over long periods of unprecedented economic growth which brought great increases in personal prosperity, levels of life satisfaction didn’t grow but actually declined slightly.⁷ Nigerians rate themselves to be just as happy as the Japanese, even though their nation’s GDP per capita is only around 1/25th of Japans. Bangladeshis are twice as happy as Russians, although considerably poorer.⁸ The picture is the same in Europe. According to Gallup poll data, Britons were happier in the 1950s than they are today⁹ and a 2014 poll by the UK Office for National Statistics concluded that people in London, by far the wealthiest city in Great Britain, were more anxious and less happy than those in the rest of the UK.¹⁰ Multiple studies across many countries show either a decrease or no change in wellbeing, despite an increase in prosperity, and that no causal relationship can be found between economic growth and happiness.¹¹ The consensus across all studies, about the relationship between wealth and happiness, seems to be that a minimum threshold is required for the basic foundations of happiness to be satisfied – such as food, clean water and access to shelter – but that, beyond such rudimentary requirements, there is little or no correlation between increased wealth and increased happiness. Studies by Easterbrook and Layard estimate that happiness levels reach a plateau at a fairly low level of income, between US$10,000 and $20,000 per annum.¹²

So if money doesn’t make us happy, what does?

The WHO World Happiness Report found that positive mental health is the single most important determinant of happiness, and that as many as 10% of the world’s population suffers from depression or some other form of psychological disorder – over 700 million cases worldwide. Furthermore, mental illness is a common occurrence in all countries and all regions of the world, with no significant difference between rich and poor nations. In August 2014, the death by suicide of the popular American actor and comedian Robin Williams highlighted that fame and wealth are no barriers to mental ill health. The WHO report also discovered that mental illness is massively undertreated everywhere. Even in wealthy countries, less than one-third of those mentally ill were in receipt of any sort of treatment and no government spent more than 15% of their total health budget on mental healthcare, despite mental illness being a considerably greater cause of human suffering than physical illness. In poorer countries these statistics were significantly worse, with lower income nations spending, on average, only 0.5% of their total healthcare budget on mental health. In line with other studies, the WHO report confirmed that economic wealth played no role in creating happiness, beyond the minimum threshold we all need to provide sustenance, safety and shelter.

The World Health Organization places great emphasis on pointing out that positive mental health is not simply the absence of disease or infirmity, but a

state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.

This includes the ability to learn, to feel and express a range of emotions, to form and maintain good relationships and to successfully deal with change and uncertainty. Happiness, therefore, isn’t derived from simply not being sick. To be happy we must find the right balance between the intellectual, emotional and social tools we need to successfully interact with the outer world, to meet our goals and to deal with any challenges we encounter. Only these tools, employed in appropriate balance, can enable us to cope with and fulfil our potential in life. What constitutes the right balance will vary from person to person, but we all need to stay within a range of equilibrium to be mentally healthy. So, for example, someone who is too emotionally sensitive is more likely to experience the ‘up-and-down’ life which may lead to mental illness, while someone who isn’t emotional enough, whether through detachment or suppression, is equally unable to access the full benefits of positive mental health.

A chaotic outer world can therefore be extremely damaging to mental health, because it challenges the ability of the human mind to sustain itself within a natural range of healthy equilibrium, and the fact is that almost all of our life stresses are human-made. While natural disasters or viral epidemics do occur, and negatively impact human life, such events are actually very rare. As a species, we can only continue to develop technologies which minimize their effect on us. However, the huge majority of our problems, from wars and environmental damage to unemployment and poverty, are actually inflicted upon ourselves by ourselves. Global human society is ultimately the manifestation of human thoughts and feelings, because all of our actions must first originate in the human cognitive system – our embodied senses, nervous systems and brain structures. While it may be more obvious that our personal behaviour is the output of our own cognition, it is no less true that our collective actions, as a whole species, are ultimately the result of the collective thinking of all of us. While we may not wish to admit it, the communities, cultures and conflicts we experience, are what emerge when we put our minds together.

In short, we are making ourselves sick. The outer world chaos causing our major life stresses is ultimately the product of the same brains which are suffering self-inflicted mental illness, and making us unhappy. How is this even possible, when it runs entirely counter to evolutionary principles for any species to make itself ill? The answer lies in understanding consciousness, culture and complexity.

Our Hidden Driver

We are deeply conditioned to believe that our thoughts and actions are the direct output of our consciousness but, over the last few decades, developments in neuroscience and psychology show that our behaviours are, in fact, predominantly driven by a much more powerful unconscious mind. Indeed, some scientists estimate that as little as 1% of all our cognition may be consciously processed, and most agree that it is likely to be no more than 10%.¹³ At least 90% of our thinking may therefore take place beyond our awareness and, far from enjoying total free will, most of our actions are actually driven by automatic processes over which we exercise little or no control.

To grasp how this is possible we must consider the anatomy of the human brain, which consists of three overlapping structures, each of which evolved over millions of years. The oldest of the three, our reptilian brain, contains the brain stem and cerebellum and controls our body’s vital functions, such as breathing, heart rate, temperature and balance. The ‘thinking’ that’s required to constantly monitor these functions takes place automatically and unconsciously because we simply don’t need to be aware of them, other than when something goes wrong. If there’s an emergency, like a significant increase in heart rate or even something less dramati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Seeing – The Shifting Sands of the Human System
• Part Two: Thinking – The Modus Operandi of an Ancient Brain
• Part Three: Learning – Origins and Oscillations of a Global Mind
• Part Four: Growing – Pitfalls and Possibilities at the Edge of Chaos
• References