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Page added on January 10, 2014
The Schizophrenic Society
My first book, “Energy & Finance” is being published at the end of February and I am now researching a second one. This is the draft introduction to the book I am thinking of writing about society’s inability to act on the systemic threats that it faces. Proposed improvements and comments would be much appreciated.
Lost in a make believe world while we destroy the real one.
Human civilization stands at a crossroads, either it continues its current path of “business as usual” and faces escalating crises on its journey to destruction, or it fundamentally reassesses its relationship with its environment and accepts limits upon how much it can safely take from the earth each year. The underlying crisis that it faces is not climate change, peak cheap energy, or ecological destruction, as these are just symptoms of the underlying problem. All of these challenges stem from the continued exponential growth in human numbers and the demands that each of those humans, especially in the industrialized countries, make of the earth and its ecology. It is estimated that humanity currently takes from the earth at a rate that is 50% faster than the earth can replenish(1), and will require two earths worth within about two decades(2).
The only way that human industrialized societies have been able to continue with such destructive and suicidal ways is through the development of a delusional belief system, hallucinations that render reality invisible behind the cloak of an imaginary world, and deeply flawed illogic which passes for deep insight. As our societies hurtle towards extinction their citizens can remain blissfully wound up in their delusional beliefs, hallucinations and illogic. Confronted with an individual showing such symptoms a psychologist would quickly identify the outward manifestations of a major mental illness, schizophrenia. The larger and more complex our societies have become the greater the harm they do to our only home, the earth, the more we must descend into schizophrenia to escape the realities of our destructive behaviours. Unless the elites, who are both the guardians and the major beneficiaries of the status quo, are forced into a discomforting reengagement with reality, a new dark age will be our destiny. The only question will then be how long the incredibly complex and destructive societies that we have constructed for ourselves can be held together. These societies can only function through the plunder of the earth’s ecosystems, its mineral resources, and the fossil fuels which represent many millions of years of ancient sunlight.
This is not just an issue with capitalism, the removal of which will not change the path to destruction. The belief that the earth’s only function is for the benefit of the human race, and that through its cleverness humanity can overcome any of earth’s limitations, goes back many thousands of years. The genesis of such mistaken beliefs occurred with the extensive use of agriculture and animal husbandry, which both set humans apart from nature and allowed humanity some level of control over the natural world. Anthropologists have noted that the surviving hunter gathering communities tend to see themselves as part of nature, while agricultural and animal husbandry societies see themselves more as civilized entities set apart from the wild nature upon which they have gained some control(3,4). The masses of poor within such societies did not benefit from the utilization of agricultural practices, as attested to by skeletal remains which show a significantly lower level of health and stature when compared to hunter gatherers who consumed a much more varied and healthy diet. Any food surplus was quickly used up by growing populations and the demands of the elites that sprang up to expand their wealth and power through the control of those surpluses. The sheer weight of numbers, together with the ability to feed an army, made such societies irresistible in their continual search for more land to feed the increasing numbers and elite demands. The surrounding hunter gatherers either moved away or were defeated, with the unsustainable groups expanding at the expense of the sustainable. Over time many complex societies grew, and many collapsed, but overall the agriculturalists continued their growth at the expense of the hunter gatherers, who to this day are seen overwhelmingly as “savages” that need to be integrated or eradicated in the name of religion or progress. The religions of the complex societies came to reflect a human-centric view that both gave humanity dominion over the earth, and provided the rationale for the destruction of those “heretics” that would not accept the official “true” religion.
The elites of these societies understood that more than just brute force could be used to control the masses that toiled to provide their wealth and power, and thus both bureaucracy and religion were brought to bear as efficient controls. Of course, where these failed there were still horrific punishments to deter challenges. There were repeated challenges from the masses, but the greatest threats to the rulers of such societies tended to come from within their own elite, from the elites of other competing societies, climatic changes, and the slow degradation of the soils inherent to agriculture. From the fifteenth century onwards the European nations solved the latter problem through the taking of vast new lands in the Americas, and Oceania, that provided nitrogen (for replenishing the exhausted European soils) and food, together with an outlet for surplus populations. These lands were depopulated primarily through European diseases with the human remnants dealt with through a subjugation and slaughter which has continued to the present day. A new lebensraum was created, cleared of its previous inhabitants. The subjugation of Africa and the Far East was slower given the inhospitableness of the climate and local infections to Europeans in the former, together with the resistance of established advanced civilizations in the latter. The overcoming of ecological limits through the taking of lands from others was reinforced as a successful strategy and shown to be the only way to survive as a society in the long run. Either take or be taken. The acceptance of ecological limits would simply lead to a level of weakness that would attract others seeking to evade such limits through conquest.
Still, even at this point in history humanity lived well within what the earth could provide. The cycle of societal growth and collapse would have continued over many thousands of years until possibly the next ice age came along as an insuperable challenge. Complex human civilizations owe their existence to the luck of being within the “long summer”(5) of the Holocene inter-glacial period when the ice sheets retreated towards the poles, opening the huge land expanses of the Northern Hemisphere.
The successful utilization of fossil fuels, first coal and then oil and natural gas, provided both cheap and phenomenally large amounts of energy that allowed human civilization to leap over the limits set by agriculture. Our beliefs give applied human ingenuity, technology, as the reason for the fantastic advances of the past two centuries. This technology though has been used to utilize the phenomenal and concentrated energy provided by the fossil fuels, without such the steam engine would not have been much use, and without a liquid energy source the internal combustion engine would have remained simply an idea in the same way that the sketches of flying machines and submarines by da Vinci have. The miracles produced with the fossil fuels, which we now take as given, allowed the belief in humanity’s ability to always overcome natural limitations to grow and become an accepted truism.
The increasing size and complexity of society, which accelerated with the use of fossil fuels, separated the individual from direct involvement in important events and replaced first hand experience with mediated recollections and interpretations of those experiences. Firstly through the pronouncements of church and state, then through the written word and mass industrialized schooling, and then radio, films and television. As agriculture has become mechanized, concentrating the population of the rich and developing countries into urban centres, even the first hand experience of the natural world has been removed. Trips to see “nature” are predominantly to the artificially created national parks and other eco-tourist destinations. The reality of living within nature on a daily basis has been completely lost. Instead, the average citizen exists within a totally human-constructed environment, completely dependent upon others to construct representations of reality outside their small artificial world. These constructed hallucinations have become a new means of control, where the very conceptual structure upon which decisions are made can be controlled through the manipulation of the steady stream of hallucinations that the media and other institutions provide. Both through the selection of events that are deemed coverable, and the interpretation of the larger meanings of those events, reality can be constructed and manipulated.
This “matrix” may not be as physically invasive as its movie counterpart but is still extremely effective in moulding the thought processes and beliefs of individuals in modern societies. Weapons of mass destruction are created from nowhere, the eradication of countless species is made invisible, and exploitative elites are celebrated. Given that these messages are predominantly controlled by those elites, who are both the most indoctrinated in the ruling beliefs and benefit from them the most, they will tend to reflect and reinforce the validity of such things as exponential growth and the limitless possibilities of human ingenuity. The group hallucinations provided by the media and other institutions of socialization will then reflect this invented reality, obscuring and hiding the actual reality of our ecological destructiveness.
With the overwhelmingly private media outlets reliant upon advertising revenue for their continued existence, upsetting and challenging content will tend to be either not shown, watered down, or juxtaposed with positive messages. The continuation of the consumer society is central to economic growth and people who connect their consumption habits to the destruction or diminution of the environment upon which they and their offspring are dependent upon may not exactly be the best consumers. Thus, the short-term imperatives of organizational success can overwhelm the longer run considerations of societal survival. This situation has been exacerbated by the concentration of the media, together with the ownership of media organizations by industries tied to continued economic growth and fossil fuel usage. The internet promised access to many new media sources, but in reality has become just as colonized by concentrated private entities which push hallucinations of happiness through consumption, never ending growth and human genius overwhelming all obstacles.
The flawed and twisted logic propagated through fundamentalist religion still holds sway in many parts of the world, even in some of the most developed countries. To some of these true believers only God can affect large-scale changes and thus to even state that climate change is created by humans can be treated as heresy, and the destruction of the earth’s ecology is not important as God will rescue the true believers by beaming them up to heaven in The Rapture. For the rest of society human technology, endless progress, and economics are the new religions. In the latter, the economy can exist separately from society and even the earth, which is treated as an externality, with the “invisible hand” of the market the new God. Only through its unfettered actions can true happiness and prosperity be achieved, and our miraculous science and technology can replace “natural capital” with human created capital. Any limits can be overcome as humanity will always find a way to substitute for depleted resources and destroyed ecosystems. As with the previous religions, many proponents are true believers but others at least understand that substantial flaws exist but value the status and financial position that the outward display of true belief provides. Such individuals will understand more than even the true believers the importance not to confuse the masses with inconvenient facts and logic which may reduce belief in the new religions which provide them with their wealth and status. As with the previous religions the new ones provide a complex conceptual cover for the true reality, healthily funded by the elites that both benefit most from the status quo and are the most brain-washed with it.
For individuals to remove themselves from the current “accepted truths” and discover the reality of the situation will be very difficult, and somewhat uncomfortable as such a move will challenge the beliefs of family, friends, colleagues etc. This book provides an alternative story, based more on actual reality than our society’s current stories, to be used both for self-education and as a resource to counter others who are still invested in the dominant beliefs.
27 Comments on "The Schizophrenic Society"
GregT on Fri, 10th Jan 2014 10:32 pm
Without a doubt, the best article ever posted on PO.com.
J-Gav on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 12:01 am
The article seems to have been written somewhat hastily, and thus contains the occasional Expository Writing 101 blunder such as the comical “The technology has been used to utilize ….”
A snobbish quibble? Maybe, but if the book wasn’t written with greater care I’m not sure it will be an easy read.
That said, I agree with GregT that the essence of what is expressed has considerable importance, stylistics notwithstanding.
Though Boyd is hardly the first to point out the schizoid nature of modern society (see Alan Watts for example), putting historical, political and, especially, ecological arguments at the forefront gives his point of view added value and weight. Definitely a good choice from the PO team.
Dave Thompson on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 12:25 am
“and the demands of the elites that sprang up to expand their wealth and power through the control of those surpluses.” Energy inputs are the key to life. Great article and summation.
Northwest Resident on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 12:52 am
This article just about says it all and cuts right to the rotten heart that gives life to our sorry state of affairs. At first I wasn’t sure that schizophrenic was the right word to describe our western civilization (and let’s face it, western civilization is the driving force of BAU and the exploitation and plundering that defines it) — but on second thought, yeah, our civilization is exactly that — f’ing crazy. Dave picked out one of the best and most relevant quotes — “…demands of the elites…” — and who are THEY in so many cases but a bunch of the greediest, most ruthless and pompous bunch of humans that ever lived, addicts to wealth and power that rope us all into their rapacious and deadly pursuits. I respect and admire a lot of the “elites” — those with great minds and noble ambitions — but that is a small subset of the larger group of elites who do nothing for the good of humanity, they only serve themselves and their constant pursuit of MORE.
HARM on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 1:39 am
Great article, sums up the big picture (and why we’re probably scr*wed). However, it would be nice if there were a simple byline for each post telling us who wrote it.
Yes, I can click on the link at the bottom of the page, got the a third-party website and figure it out from there, but… how hard is it to just add a name to each post?
Makati1 on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 1:53 am
This should be required reading for every person on this planet. A concise, fairly clear, presentation of our situation. We have allowed our world to be ruled by insane men and women.
rollin on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 2:59 am
Basically the writer says that humans are insane. The inmates are running the sanitarium. Must be hell for the sane ones.
After that he tells flawed stories about the past, but so does everyone else.
“The only way that human industrialized societies have been able to continue with such destructive and suicidal ways is through the development of a delusional belief system, hallucinations that render reality invisible behind the cloak of an imaginary world, and deeply flawed illogic which passes for deep insight.”
The logic here and through much of the writing is deeply flawed. The way that industrial society operates is to remove food, shelter and land availability from the people. The only way to get these things is through money, and the major way to get money is to work for the industrial society.
Then you get to eat and live, otherwise you are outside the system and all the food is controlled, all the land owned or controlled and shelter is limited or unavailable. Slavery through economics and governmental/corporate control. Everyone knows this, that’s why children are told to learn so they can get a job. They are being told how to survive the industrial/privatized land systems. Sure there are a few who eat up all the garbage told to them, but most know the real deal, they just don’t think about it every day.
I think the author is trying to carry the schizophrenic delusional allegory too far and bending reality to it.
Roger Boyd on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 4:06 am
I am the author of this piece (from my web site, http://www.humanitystest.com, where I try to cover all aspects of climate change, peak energy etc.). This is a draft to get input, so yes a few grammatical errors and slip ups which will get fixed with better editing. Thanks for all your comments.
I have been researching this area for about 10 years now and took a Masters degree in interdisciplinary sudies to help look at things from many different disciplines.
I agree with some of the darker comments, as I am having difficulty seeing the elites driving the actions necessary in time to stop the worst. In keeping up with the science the future seems to get darker every day. The IPCC has been beaten down by criticism and also tamed by its political bosses into keeping the more scary scenarios out of their discussions. On the peak energy side the short term fix of fracking and tar sands has been grabbed heartily as the latest support for denial.
But at least Tessanne won the Voice, so how can the world be so bad!(is there an emoticom for cynicism?)
stevefromvirginia on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 5:00 am
I like it as it is, a very good summary. Looking forward to seeing more!
steve
GregT on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 6:54 am
rollin,
Really?
Makati1 on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 7:58 am
rollin sounds like he is too close to the mental ward inmates. Maybe it takes a life time of experience to see the huge difference between the 1950s and the 21 teens world? I see it. Do you?
Makati1 on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 8:02 am
Schizophrenia (/ˌskɪtsɵˈfrɛniə/ or /ˌskɪtsɵˈfriːniə/) is a mental disorder characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and by impaired emotional responses.[1] Common symptoms include delusions, such as paranoid beliefs; hallucinations; disorganized thinking; and negative symptoms, such as blunted affect and avolition. Schizophrenia causes significant social and vocational dysfunction….”
Sounds like a perfect description of Westerners and Western wannabees today.
Twin Performance on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 8:12 am
‘Sounds like a perfect description of Westerners’ Humanity is insane. Its innate . We see the world, i.e. perceive it through a lie our minds put together. Really no? Put random dots on a piece of paper and we automatically make shapes in our mind. Thing is they don’t exist, like numbers don’t exist, like morality doesn’t exist,… etc. We exist in all times a lie. The oil fuelled ordered world is a lie… The natural world of order is a lie. Chaos persists. If anything the fact we order chaos suggests the truth is whatever we want it to be. Point is. To be insane is to be human.
FriedrichKling on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 8:57 am
@ rollin
What are you talking about?
Northwest Resident on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 3:41 pm
Makati1 — Please don’t toss all “Westerners” into one big catch-all bin. A lot of us do not agree with nor support the policies and actions of the Western governments, which are owned and controlled by The Elites (TPTB). There isn’t much that we can do about it — we’re all on this Titanic boat together. Don’t blame the passengers for the fact that the huge egos and greed and pursuit of power embraced by the captain and its lords of finance resulted in hitting that iceberg.
J-Gav on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 4:37 pm
Roger – Thanks for answering comments here. I call that honesty and responsiveness, two qualities that I prize. Upon a second reading of your article, my enthusiasm (if that’s the right word in our parlous state) for your arguments jumped up another notch. I’ll definitely try and get the book – Good luck with the arduous task that ‘final touches’ always entail in works of such depth.
J-Gav on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 5:30 pm
Excuses to those that my prose bores to tears, but I must come back one more time to this subject of society-wide schizophrenia.
But first: Northwest – I fully understand your critique of Makati’s comment but I don’t really believe that he really believes what he said. I reckon he was just taking a short-cut, like most of us end up doing in comments from time to time. I see him as a man pissed-offed for legitimate reasons and so he occasionally reverts to over-generalizations for effect. Behind that, I detect a more nuanced individual, perfectly capable of recognizing that the good and the bad co-exist in us all.
Returning to schizophrenia, as an adolescent with a psychiatrist father, I had the opportunity to work as an assistant for a summer or two and a Christmas now and then in various mental institutions. Eye-opening to say the least! After the distribution of presents, a group photo was set up where it was clear that X was masturbating on the young lady in front of him and Y was pissing down the neck of a young man who, perhaps, he thought, had gotten a better shake present-wise than him.
Without going into further scatological details from those experiences, I’ll simply mention Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda’s description of the phenomenon (very approximately): “Reality shattered into a thousand pieces, some of which shine and thus attract the attention of the unfortunate man or woman for a moment, before he or she is yanked in another direction by another scintillation. At other times the state becomes catatonic, with no relationship to any form of reality, however tenuous.”
That’s not a real quote, but it’s close enough to show the real problem. Schizophrenia is no joke and, if the term can be applied to entire societies, as Roger Boyd says above, “I am having difficulty seeing the elites driving the actions necessary in time to stop the worst.”
Northwest Resident on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 6:02 pm
J-Gave, I totally agree with your take on Makati1. I was trying to make a polite request — and a hopefully valid point at the same time.
On another note: While I was working my way through college, I had a night-time job as a registration clerk at the country hospital emergency psychiatric ward in a huge city. I’ve come face-to-face with so many schizophrenics in my early life that I couldn’t even count them. Night after night I would sit downstairs in the records room, stuffed full of fat files with hundreds of thousands of evaluations written by psychiatrists. I read them, thousands of them, and I learned what makes a crazy person crazy. The common thread in all schizophrenics is severe abuse (sexual, physical or both) at an early age, before the person has a chance to develop psychological defenses. And with our civilization, it is derived from a deeply traumatic and abusive past — constant war, competition for resources, disease, famine — all of which taught our ancestors that the only way to insure survival was to take as much as possible NOW because there was no guarantee of tomorrow. That survival instinct and trait became engrained into humanity. What was once a logical and survival-oriented response has now become a threat to our very existence. Humanity is evolving, but the reality of what it takes to guarantee our survival has done a 360 on us. A schizophrenic develops responses to an abusive environment that seem to make total sense at the moment, but those responses appear “insane” outside of that abusive environment. And here we are.
GregT on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 11:04 pm
Thanks Roger!
I also look forward to reading your book.
J-Gav on Sat, 11th Jan 2014 11:04 pm
Northwest – That’s an interesting way to link individual and societal schizophrenic tendencies. Thanks for the mind-food, I’ll ponder it.
DMyers on Sun, 12th Jan 2014 1:00 am
The piece does offer a good description of the course civilization has taken. It’s a lot of ground for the book to cover, and its quality may ultimately be deemed by one’s satisfaction with the treatment actually given by the book to these indications of what it will explain.
The term schizophrenia here is a little tricky and possibly misleading. “Schizophrenia causes significant social and vocational dysfunction….”” quoting from Makatil’s definition, above. What the term describes in this writing is something altogether different from dysfunctional. This is more of a positive adaptation to what is perceived as consensus reality, which results in the reinforcement of social acceptance and prosperity.
The unreal constructs within which we exist are more along the lines of a shared illusion or fantasy than an hallucination. An hallucination is internally generated, where an illusion is externally delivered. And although Mr. Boyd exhibits hesitation when pronouncing, “[T]his “matrix” may not be as physically invasive as its movie counterpart…” ,this belies that the piece describes a massive influence from church,state, schooling, media, and society, all of which act on people through physical media.
One determinate of reality must be said to be that which one observes and in which one engages routinely. So long as we perceive collectively the constructs of our shared illusion, that illusion will continue. Our paychecks depend on it.
There’s also the case where one senses the unreality in the reality but still must concede that what he sees must be real, even if unreal. I used to drive Interstate 40 on my morning commute. As I witnessed a high speed mass of steel, three lanes wide, going in both directions, it was apparent that this represented both an illusion and a reality at the same time. The illusion is that this is normal and will continue indefinitely, while the reality is that the most important energy driving this scenario is inertia, a force which readily succumbs to friction.
rollin on Sun, 12th Jan 2014 1:53 am
Everything must change or everything will change, but not for the better.
Northwest Resident on Sun, 12th Jan 2014 2:12 am
DMyers — Very thought provoking post. I also initially pondered whether “schizophrenia” was the right word to characterize our society — our civilization. And I totally get your point of view on the subject. But if I may offer a counter-opinion…
If you look at our civilization as a living organism, taken as a whole, and then ask if civilization displays schizophrenic behavior, I believe the answer is definitely yes. First, let’s look at the actual definition of schizophrenia:
Schizophrenia is a group of severe brain disorders in which people interpret reality abnormally. Schizophrenia may result in some combination of hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking and behavior.
In America, there is no doubt but that we have large segments of the population who are interpreting reality abnormally. Presented with facts, they see something entirely different than what an intelligent, perceptive and objective individual would see. This manifests itself in political and religious views, views on scientific fact, views on racial and financial matters. And of course, also on the subject of diminishing, bottom-of-the-barrel energy resources. A lot of people are just immune to fact — they are interpreting reality abnormally.
I guess I would have to stretch my imagination a little to come up with some analogies for society suffering from hallucinations. But, there is no doubt but that we have, again, large segments of the population suffering from delusions and disordered thinking and behavior. As I read parts of the posted article again, I think the author is in a roundabout way addressing and describing those clinical aspects of our “schizophrenic society”.
But that is just one way of looking at it. Like I said, I totally get your point of view and it stands on its own. Shared illusion and fantasy — no doubt.
I guess we’ve all been in environments during our lives where we have learned to exhibit certain behaviors, but as we moved on, we discovered that those behaviors were inappropriate or self-defeating in other environments. So, we adjusted our behavior, and that’s what mentally fit people (and societies) do. But our society now is continuing to exhibit the same behaviors that propelled us to the edge of this cliff, the same behaviors that now threaten to push us over that cliff and into catastrophe. Society is NOT adjusting. To me, that is insanity, whether we call it schizophrenia or some other mental disease, whatever, it is pure lunacy.
Who do we blame? Not me. Not you. Not any of us here. We blame, collectively, the human race. That’s what I think. It is who we are, taken all together, and it is going to take a very stern lesson to force us to change our behavior. That moment, I feel, is not so far off. Just IMO.
energy investor on Sun, 12th Jan 2014 3:20 am
Hi Roger,
I enjoyed your article. Perhaps shorter paragraphs to hold the reader’s attention.
We schizos have short attention spans.
I suppose that also helps our jailers.
Beery on Sun, 12th Jan 2014 10:09 am
“Human civilization stands at a crossroads, either it continues its current path of “business as usual” and faces escalating crises on its journey to destruction, or it fundamentally reassesses its relationship with its environment and accepts limits upon how much it can safely take from the earth each year.”
As if there’s a choice.
The fundamental flaw in articles like these is that they are based on the fantasy that the human race is capable of the change that is needed. The destruction of the Earth’s ability to support 7 billion of us is not some optional thing – it’s unavoidable, because we have an innate need to exploit resources.
rollin on Tue, 14th Jan 2014 2:45 am
I believe the human race has the potential to change, but as Beery says, the may not be capable of change.
Roger Boyd (author of the piece above) on Tue, 14th Jan 2014 3:00 pm
To answer Beery, I make no such assumption that humanity will pass its test. There is though the possibility that even a large scale die off may be survived by perhaps simpler societies who lived in the luckier places. For example, paleoclimatology shows that the northern hemisphere may flip to a new hothouse well before the southern, which would wipe out the majority of civilization as that is where humanity predominantly lives. Understanding the science as well as the economics and sociology is critical to understandings things properly.