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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

To make sense of the quote below please review the previous quotes:

Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6 Part #7 Part #8 Part #9 Part #10

Well I’ve probably stretched this series out a little too long, so let me wrap it up here and finish off the end of the matter. If you’ve been following along you will have seen how McGilchrist’s description of a left hemisphere world is frighteningly like the world we live in. I guess McGilchrist can confidently say, “I rest my case”. So let’s put the final nail in the coffin as we finish off this tour of the left hemisphere’s perception of the world and recognise that truly the emissary has usurped the master in our collective head.

Reasonableness would be replaced by rationality, and perhaps the very concept of reasonableness might become unintelligible. There would be a complete failure of common sense, since it is intuitive and relies on both hemispheres working together. Anger and aggressive behaviour would become more evident in our social interactions, since of all emotional states these are the most highly characteristic of the left hemisphere, and would no longer be counterbalanced by the empathic skills of the right hemisphere. One would expect a loss of insight, coupled with an unwillingness to take responsibility, and this would reinforce the left hemisphere’s tendency to a perhaps dangerously unwarranted optimism. There would be a rise in intolerance and inflexibility, and unwillingness to change track or change one’s mind. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

I’ve just finished listening to the book by Matt Walsh, What is a Woman, based on the documentary which I’ve not yet seen but am now motivated to. His investigation suggests that in the world of gender identity there truly has been “a complete failure of common sense”. In fact this movement is only a flagship leading a much larger flotilla of unreasonableness and nonsense in so many areas of western society and politics. And the evidence of anger and aggressiveness that accompanies such unreasonableness is also a hallmark of the left hemisphere and the extreme left of politics (as they aggressively accuse the right of the very aggression they themselves exhibit - remember the left hemisphere never takes responsibility and will deflect, pass the buck, and accuse anything and everything but itself).

And isn’t it so true that in the midst of clown world destructive thinking and action there is an unwarranted optimism accompanied by intolerance and inflexibility. The characteristics of the left hemisphere and our current sociopolitical state is startling.

The sense of autonomy is complexly related to both hemispheres, but crucially dependent on contributions from the right hemisphere. An equivalent to what is called ‘forced utilisation behaviour’ in individuals might be seen: an increasing passivisation and suggestibility (if it’s there, you must use it, do it). There would be a lack of will-power in the sense of self-control and self-motivation, but not of will in the sense of acquisitive greed and desire to manipulate. In relation to culture, we would expect people to become increasingly passive. They would see themselves as ‘exposing’ themselves before culture, like a photographic plate to light, or even think of themselves as ‘being exposed’ to such things.

We could expect a rise in the determination to carry out procedures by rote, and perhaps an increasing efficiency at doing so, without this necessarily being accompanied by an understanding of what they mean. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

Certainly the point about people becoming increasingly passive has been evident here in Australia and no doubt in many other places around the world. As the powers that be lord it over the people, passing more and more restrictive and totalitarian laws, the people demonstrate a lack of will-power and incredible passivity. Nevertheless passionate about being a ‘good citizen’ as decreed by health authorities, but maybe this is partly the propensity to carry out procedural rules over and above exercising autonomy. Again, all characteristics of the left hemisphere being the master and commander.

We would expect there to be a resentment of, and a deliberate undercutting of the sense of awe or wonder: Weber’s ‘disenchanted’ world. Religion would seem to be mere fantasy. The right hemisphere is drawn forward by exemplars of the qualities it values, where the left hemisphere is driven forward by a desire for power and control: one would expect, therefore, that there would develop an intolerance of , and a constant undercutting, ironising, or deconstructing of such exemplars, in both life and in art. Pathos, the characteristic mode of the right hemisphere, would become impossible, perhaps shameful. It would become hard to discern value or meaning in life at all; a sense of nausea and boredom before life would be likely to lead to a craving for novelty and stimulation. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

For a long time now the left hemisphere bias has been undermining the transcendent, the realms of religious thought and practice. Interestingly though there is a resurgence in psychology and psychiatry for psychedelics (it’s a huge emerging industry, driven primarily by profit, no doubt) that can open up the mind to the mystical, intangible, spirit world. For the controlling left hemisphere this doesn’t sound like a good direction to take, but I guess for Big Pharma this is an enormous opportunity. It does, however, provide “novelty and stimulation” from a nauseatingly bored life stripped of meaning. There may be another agenda for psychedelics that have to do with opening people up to the spirit realm - but that’s a discussion for another post.

Experience or things that we would normally see as having a natural, organically evolving, flowing, structure, would come to seem composed of a succession of frames, a sum of an infinite series of ‘pieces’. This would include the passage of historical or cultural, as well as personal, time, and organically flowing shapes or forms, and ultimately the development, growth and decay of all things that are alive. This corresponds to the Zeitraffer phenomenon1. It is coupled with the loss of the sense of uniqueness. Repeatability would lead to an over-familiarity through endless reproduction. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

Remembering that it is the right hemisphere that has a handle on the flow of time - the left hemisphere doesn’t ‘get’ time and sees things like frames on a strip of film that are strung together, rather than a continuum. The inability to comprehend the passage of time may well have a detrimental effect on the perception of history, our vital links with the past, and the cause and effect relationships between past, present and future. Could the erasure of history by totalitarian propagandists be a whimsical reflex of the left hemisphere? We are amazed that people today do not see the parallels of what’s going on today and some of the 20th Centuries most dramatic expressions of totalitarianism. Is there a problem with their capacity to appreciate the past? Not amnesia, but something fundamentally like the left hemisphere’s ignorance of the flowing and organic past that has a direct connection with the now. There could be something more psychopathological going on here than we have realised.

As a culture, we would come to discard tacit forms of knowing altogether. There would be a remarkable difficulty in understanding non-explicit meaning, and a downgrading of non-verbal, non-explicit communication. Concomitant with this would be a rise in explicitness, backed up by ever increasing legislation, de Tockqueville’s ‘network of small complicated rules’2. As it became less possible to rely on a shared and intuitive moral sense, or implicit contracts between individuals, such rules would become ever more burdensome. There would be a loss of tolerance for, and appreciation of the value of, ambiguity. We would tend to be over-explicit in language we used to approach art and religion, accompanied by a loss of their vital, implicit and metaphorical power. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

Again I think this progression toward overly explicit rules, regulations, legislation, over moral sense and implicit social contracts, has been afoot for a long time. But now we see it in full bloom. What a death there is to the intuitive life. Indeed we are at the hands of soft despotism (see note below).

I’ll let the final paragraph speak for itself. We have, after all, touched on every point made below in previous commentaries. This has been the progression of western culture since the first industrial revolution, and seemingly accelerating incredibly in the past few decades. The parallels between modernism and schizophrenia is not only fascinating but frighteningly too close for comfort. We glibly say the world has gone mad. I wonder if it is more true than we dare acknowledge.

We would become, like Descartes, spectators rather than actors in all the ‘comedies’ the world displays. Art would become conceptual, having lost the capacity for eliciting the metaphorical power of its incarnate qualities. Visual art would lack a sense of depth, and distorted or bizarre perspectives would become the norm. Music would be reduced to little more than rhythm; art music would attempt to transcend it, but harmony and melody would be lacking. Dance would become solipsistic, rather than communal. Above all, the word and the idea would come to dominate. Cultural history and tradition, and what can be learnt from the past, would be confidently dismissed in preparation for the systematic society of the future, put together by human will. the body would come to be viewed as a machine, and the natural world as a heap of resource to be exploited. Wild and unre-presented nature, nature not managed and submitted to rational exploitation for science or the ‘leisure industry’, would be seen as a threat, and consequently brought under bureaucratic control as fast as possible. Language would become diffuse, excessive, lacking in concrete referents, clothed in abstraction, with no overall feel for its qualities as a metaphor of mind. Technical language, or the language of bureaucratic systems, devoid of any richness of meaning, and suggesting a mechanistic world, would increasingly be applied across the board, and might even seem unremarkable when applied to descriptions of the human world, and human beings, even the human mind itself.

This is what the world would look like if the emissary betrayed the Master. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that his goal is within sight. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

To make sense of the quote below please review the previous quotes:

Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6 Part #7 Part #8 Part #9

Family relationships, or skilled roles within society, such as those of priests, teachers and doctors, which transcend what can be quantified or regulated, and in fact depend on a degree of altruism, would become the object of suspicion. The left hemisphere misunderstands the nature of such relationships, as it misunderstands altruism as a version of self-interest, and sees them as a threat to its power. We might even expect there to be attempts to damage the trust on which such relationships rely, and, if possible, to discredit them. In any case, strenuous efforts would be made to bring families and professions under bureaucratic control, a move that would be made possible, presumably, only by furthering fear and mistrust.

In such a society people of all kinds would attach an unusual importance to being in control. Accidents and illnesses, since they are beyond our control, would therefore be particularly threatening and would, where possible, be blamed on others, since they would look like a threat to one’s capacity to control one’s life. The left hemisphere, as will be remembered, is in any case not quick to take responsibility, and sees itself as the passive victim of whatever it is not conscious of having willed. In the Renaissance, as in the nineteenth century, when the right hemisphere was in the ascendant, death was omnipresent in life and literature, was openly spoken of, and was seen as part of the fabric of life itself, in recognition of which alone life could have meaning. According to the left-hemisphere view, death is the ultimate challenge to its sense of control, and, on the contrary, robs life of meaning. It would therefore have to become a taboo, while, at the same time sex, the power of which the right hemisphere realises is based on the implicit, would become explicit and omnipresent. There would be a preoccupation, which might even reach to be an obsession, with certainty and security, since the left hemisphere is highly intolerant of uncertainty, and death would become the ultimate unspeakable. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

The things that cannot be regulated. Family and faith come to mind immediately, and these are the very things that come under attack in totalitarianism of the past and present. Look at how some pastors have been treated because they dare to put their religion before a nonsense health edict. Isn’t it interesting that the left hemisphere and totalitarian regimes have the same mistrust of faith, family and any other relationships that can’t be easily regulated and seen as a threat. I think it’s interesting that McGilchrist uses the word suspicion, as I think this perfectly describes the attitude of a left hemisphere that cannot comprehend relationships that are beyond utility and forged by love, faith and altruism. The suspicion is that there must be an ulterior motive, and a dangerous one at that.

This propensity, or rather need for control in the face of death is also playing out in startling clarity with the ‘pandemic(s)’. Regardless of the legitimacy of the pandemic, its lethality, or even if it’s anything new at all, the left hemisphere’s attitude is to have total control over this ultimate enemy (of death). Thus we have the ridiculous notion of “zero covid” or the locking down of entire regions because of a handful of “cases”, doing more damage than simply letting the virus (or whatever it is, if indeed it is anything) play out.

We also see the blame shifting - the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” sort of rhetoric. Classic left hemisphere that cannot accept any responsibility for anything. In split brain subjects the left hemisphere will confabulate all sorts of nonsense while shifting the blame to someone or something else. Frighteningly (but maybe not surprisingly) we are seeing this happen at all levels of our bureaucracy.

‘without batting an eye’ the left hemisphere draws mistaken conclusions from the information available to it and lays down the law about what only the right hemisphere can know… This may be linked to a phenomenon known as confabulation, where the brain, not being able to recall something, rather than admit to a gap in its understanding, makes up something plausible, that appears consistent, to fill it. Thus, for example, in the presence of a right-side lesion, the brain loses the contextual information that would help it make sense of experience; the left hemisphere, nothing loath, makes up a story, and, lacking insight, appears completely convinced by it… the left hemisphere needs certainty and needs to be right. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, pp.81-82, emphasis mine)

The left hemisphere, without the capacity to hold ambiguity and parallel possibilities in suspension, but needs closure and absolute clarity (for reasons of control), takes us into dangerous territory about things which it is clueless (remembering it has a mechanistic view of things, the birth and death within the biological realm being incomprehensible to it).

What have we lost in the 21st Century when we can’t accept that death and dying are a normal part of life? In the desperate grasping for immortality, are we robbing ourselves of actual living? How have we become so intolerant, so averse to any ill, yet willingly apply dangerous, even fatal remedies to avoid the mildest malady? And what do we do to humanity when we discount the guides of the transcendent, the priests, the prophets, the healers?

Truly we are quickly going down the path of insanity which looks very much like the left hemisphere’s version of reality, with no subjection to the right.

Let’s discuss…

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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6 Part #7 Part #8

Such a government (see previous post) would seek total control - it is an essential feature of the left hemisphere’s take on the world that it can grasp it and control it. Talk of liberty, which is an abstract ideal for the left hemisphere, would increase for Machiavellian reasons, but individual liberty wold be curtailed. Panoptical1 control would become an end in itself, and constant CCTV monitoring, interception of private information and communication, the norm. Measures such as a DNA database would be introduced apparently in response to exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances, against which they would in reality be ineffective, their aim being to increase the power of the state and diminish the status of the individual. The concept of the individual depends on uniqueness; but according to the left hemisphere’s take on reality, individuals are simply interchangeable (‘equal’) parts of a mechanistic system, a system it needs to control in the interests of efficiency. Thus it would be expected that the state would not only take greater power directly, but play down individual responsibility, and the sense of individual responsibility would accordingly decline. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

Allow me to remind you that McGilchrist was writing this over the decade prior to 2009 (when it was published). Yes all these things described in the paragraph above were developing at speed but boy, what about now! How this starts to read like alternative news editorials rather than a “what if the left hemisphere took over the world” muse.

I’m not sure where to go with this paragraph as it’s all so blatantly obvious to us now, slapping us in the face: government seeking total control; entrapped in a society wide panopticon and calling it liberty; individual responsibility abolished for efficiency (and/or ‘health’).

…the state would not only take greater power directly, but play down individual responsibility, and the sense of individual responsibility would accordingly decline.

This, we know, has been in the works for a long time. But the suddenness of the last few years of not just playing down individual responsibility, but strongly opposing it, is disturbing to the highest degree. Not just because power brokers are doing this to us but because so many embrace it! It seems good to many that they don’t take personal responsibility - an old communist ploy to be sure - and take it upon themselves to make sure others around them also let the power brokers do all the thinking and directing for our lives.

But this is perfectly ‘natural’ if we subscribe to the idea that there is a social-wide shift toward left-hemisphere thinking. The veil is thick yet imperceptible to the ones trapped in the left hemisphere’s hall of mirrors. The movement toward the left hemisphere perception of the world may have been nudged by the power brokers, the psychopaths, the forces of darkness, but once the pendulum starts swinging it seems to gain its own momentum. Maybe it needs a nudge here and a nudge there to maintain the trajectory toward left hemisphere dominance, but it’s a systemic psychopathology on a global scale. Solzhenitsyn would say it’s because we have forgotten God - I’d tend to agree with him. Nietzsche has a more dramatic view…

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Over to you.

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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6 Part #7

The left hemisphere prefers the impersonal to the personal, and that tendency would in any case be instantiated in the fabric of a technologically driven and bureaucratically administered society. The impersonal would come to replace the personal. There would be a focus on the material things at the expense of the living. Social cohesion, and the bonds between person and person, and just as importantly between person and place, the context in which each person belongs, would be neglected, perhaps actively disrupted, as both inconvenient and incomprehensible to the left hemisphere acting on its own. There would be a depersonalisation of the relationships between members of society, and in society’s relationship with its members. Exploitation rather than co-operation would be, explicitly or not, the default relationship between human individuals, and between humanity and the rest of the world. Resentment would lead to an emphasis on uniformity and equality, not as just one desirable to be balanced with others, but as the ultimate desirable, transcending all others. As a result individualities would be ironed out and identification would be by categories: socioeconomic groups, races, sexes, and so on, which would also feel themselves to be implicitly or explicitly in competition with, resentful of, one another. Paranoia and lack of trust would come to be the pervading stance within society both between individuals, and between such groups, and would be the stance of government towards its people. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary).

McGilchrist continues to reinforce the fact that the left hemisphere cannot have direct relationship with individuals but needs to keep everyone at arms length via the abstractions of categorisation. Categorisations that depersonalise and decontextualise the individual so they better fit a more uniform, less complex, and more malleable (from the Latin ‘to hammer’ - and doesn’t that feel right?) object for the sake of utility.

The focus on material things brings the world within the grasp of the left hemisphere, whereas the living can be too relational and flowing for any such grasp. In fact, it’s relationships - those intangible forces between ‘things’ that the left hemisphere has trouble with, and thus the static and inanimate are preferred over the living. The spreadsheet, that static snapshot of abstractions frozen in time, becomes more important (and comprehensible) than the dynamic lived experience of the one who is being represented by the numbers on the spreadsheet. Thus the bureaucrat is so often the epitome of a left hemisphere creature who doesn’t look up from the clipboard to see the person but is rather fixated on ticking the correct box (being the more important and comprehensible thing at hand).

The categorisation of people mentioned here is exactly what we are seeing in “race Marxism” (so brilliantly analysed by James Lindsay) where the sharp delineation of races belies any similarities (which are pervasive and obvious). And not only the categorisation but the sense of competition, resentment and paranoia, also come right out of the race Marxism playbook and eagerly adopted by a left hemisphere biased society.

Not only between the categories of race, but between the larger categories of ‘the government’ and ‘the people’ does an increasing paranoia develop, resulting in actions that reinforce such paranoia. Or the ‘believers in The Science’ and ‘the deniers’ - same story. The animosity between groups, I would say, does not mean both sides are under the deluded perceptions of a dominant left hemisphere. It only takes one side for the competition, paranoia, and animosity to explode, as we have seen. This is a case where it takes only one to tango!

I must point out, however, that I don’t believe a left hemisphere bias in society (which leans towards symptoms of schizophrenia) is the full picture of all the ills we are suffering, although it does provide a compelling variable. Another important variable is psychopathy in places of political power (see Harrison Koehli’s Substack who has a good handle on Political Ponerology having edited the book of the same name by Andrew Lobaczewski). And so broadly the variables are psychopathology - pervasive schizoid leanings in the general population punctuated by tyrannical leadership by psychopaths - no wonder it feels like we are in an insane asylum.

What are your thoughts?

Do you see the erosion of social cohesion, the displacement of relationship between people, place, and contexts for the decontextualised abstraction of a left hemisphere world?

Let’s talk about it…

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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6

Philosophically, the world would be marked by fragmentation, appearing to its inhabitants as if a collection of bits and pieces apparently randomly thrown together; its organisation, and therefore meaning, would come only through what we added to it, through systems designed to maximise utility. Because the mechanical would be the model by which everything, including ourselves and the natural world, would be understood, people in such a society would find it hard to understand the higher values in Scheler’s hierarchy1 except in terms of ultimate utility, and there would be a derogation of such higher values, and cynicism about their status. Morality would come to be judged at best on the basis of utilitarian calculation, at worst on the basis of enlightened self-interest. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

Here we have another powerful vision of the world according to the left hemisphere that for all intents and purposes is upon us. The fragmentation is obvious, the atomising of everyone and everything, and incomprehensible without guidance as to how it all fits together for the sake of utility.

We won’t talk more about the mechanical model the left hemisphere relies on - we’ve covered that well enough.

But what of the higher values? What of the holy, the unholy, the transcendental and the intangible? Some, maybe many, would say we’ve evolved to discount such notions and are not values at all but mere superstitions that, if anything, held up a progressive society. Scheler’s hierarchy is turned on its head and the sensual values are primary and of highest value. If you speak of a creator God, you are ridiculed as primitive in intellect, myopic in outlook, dogmatic and closed minded. Any concept of the holy must be discarded as it brings with it notions of self-constraint, responsibility, sin, and something higher than self. There can be none of that for the full expression of the sensual, unrestrained, full expression of whatever it is that you want to be or do.

What if the dismissing and abandonment of the holy (in fact all of the top tiers of Scheler’s hierarchy) was a complete delusion of the left hemisphere? What if it has less to do with reality than it has to do with an over reliance on brain regions that are just not up to the task of embracing those aspects of reality?

There’s some more on the spirit and the left hemisphere here:

Escaping Mass Psychosis

The Spirit

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that Godlessness is the first step towards tyranny and oppression. And in some ways we can interpret a shift toward Godlessness through the lens we have been looking - the…

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4 years ago · 9 likes · 5 comments · Winston Smith

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Scheler’s hierarchy of values:

From lowest to highest these modalities (with their respective positive and corresponding negative dis-value forms) are as follows: sensual values of the agreeable and the disagreeable; vital values of the noble and vulgar; mental (psychic) values of the beautiful and ugly, right and wrong and truth and falsehood; and finally values of the Holy and Unholy of the Divine and Idols.

It doesn’t matter how many scientists a person has to back up what they …

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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5

Berger and colleagues1 emphasise that consciousness changes its nature in a world geared to technological production. It adopts a number of qualities which again are clearly manifestations of the world according to the left hemisphere, and therefore in such a world technology could be expected to flourish and, in turn, further to entrench the left hemisphere’s view of the world - just as bureaucracy would be both a product of the left hemisphere and a reinforcement of it in the external world. In a society dominated by technology, Berger and colleagues predict what they refer to as: ‘mechanisticity’, which means the development of a system that permits things to be reproduced endlessly, and enforces submergence of the individual in a large organisation or production line; ‘measurability’, in other words the insistence on quantification, not qualification; ‘componentiality’, that is to say reality reduced to self-contained units, so that ‘everything is analysable into constituent components, and everything can be taken apart and put together again in terms of these components’; and an ‘abstract frame of reference’, in other words loss of context. The philosopher Gabriel Marcel speaks of the difficulty in maintaining one’s integrity as a unique, individual subject, in a world where a combination of the hubris of science and the drive of technology blots out the awe-inspiring business of conscious human existence, what he refers to as ‘the mystery of being’, and replaces it with a set of technical problems for which they purport to have solutions. He warns that in such circumstances we would be too easily persuaded to accept the role thrust upon us, to become an object, no longer a subject, and would connive at our own annihilation. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

For those readers new to this series I’d like to reiterate that this picture McGilchrist is painting is the summation of hundreds of pages of analysis of the nature of the left hemisphere and what the left hemisphere’s world would look like. It is easy to think, compelling even, that McGilchrist has just looked at the world today and dictated a case study from such observations. But what is stunning is the pure correlation between the left hemisphere’s phenomenological being in the world, its drive to shape the world in a certain manner, and the reality we find ourselves in today. You might say it’s obvious, nothing stunning about it at all, but that’s always the notion after the fact, isn’t it? McGilchrist hasn’t looked at the status quo and then come up with a story of why it’s so - he has built a solid case, from the ground up, as to the potentiality of a left hemisphere world, and then held that up against what we observe today. And so it happens the theory and the reality seemingly match incredibly well. Frightening even, as we have not yet seen the fullness of a world according to the left hemisphere unbridled by the right.

This paragraph, in particular, describes the heart of a world created by the left hemisphere. A world manufactured in such a way that positive feedback loops ensure the further deepening and propagation of a mechanistic system that the left hemisphere not only understands but is fully convinced is the only way. Let’s look at some of the components mentioned here:

MECHANISTICITY: The development of a system that permits things to be reproduced endlessly, and enforces submergence of the individual in a large organisation or production line. Of course the production line has been around since the industrial revolution started and we’ve seen this taken to great heights of efficiency with people and machines in the 20th Century. The individual a “cog” in the machine, ultimately to be replaced by actual cogs and not humans at all. This is the dream of the so called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” where machines, smart ones, replace humans, so the system can produce more, faster, for longer, for cheaper, forever. Mechanisticity is being applied to everything that produces anything - because volume, speed, efficiency, trump any notion of humanity being involved in the process (unless the notion of humanity is useful from a marketing perspective, but it will only be the notion that is utilised, the actual manufacture will be by intelligent machine). Human being is not an important part of production output and is seen as a liability for the most part. The utility of the individual is in the programming, the initial design, the setting in motion, but beyond that the individual is likely to just be in the way. And even the programming, the design, the setting in motion, is ideally done by an intelligent machine.

MEASURABILITY: The insistence on quantification, not qualification. We’ve touched on this in previous posts, but here it is again as a core attribute of the left hemisphere’s ideal world. Quantification is primary because it can be represented as numbers, a complete abstraction, and thus easily manipulated and controlled, or so it seems. The qualitative is not so, it can be vague, awkward, open to interpretation, even intangible which is rather intolerable to the left hemisphere. It it can’t be reduced to a number sequence to be ingested by a machine, or an algorithm to drive a machine, then it’s unlikely to be of any use, according to the left hemisphere. (I’m assuming McGilchrist use of the word qualification as indicating the nature or characteristics of a thing, as opposed to the more modern usage meaning adequate skills for a particular task.)

COMPONENTIALITY: Reduced to self-contained units; analysable into constituent parts; components that can be disassembled and reassembled; abstracted from any context. Here is the great deception of the left hemisphere - that all things are discrete things assembled to make more complex things and just as easily disassembled into simpler things. The continuous and non-linear flow of life (where there are no discrete things) is replaced with the mechanistic cause and effect linear perception of a grand machine (for a detailed look at this go to Are You A Machine?). Context is lost, or rather ignored, because it’s too complex (and often too complicated) and unable to be quantified (because it’s complexity necessitates a qualitative appreciation rather than a quantitative definition) and difficult to abstract for any utility. And what I mean here is that to comprehend the broadest context of say the firing of a neuron, would embrace the neurochemical, electrical, electromagnetic activity of all the near-field cells, and further out the same activity of the entire nervous system, and the hormonal system, and the influence of all the symbiotic microbiota, toxins, free radicals… and you can see how un-quantitative it can quickly become. So to isolate the firing neuron from its context is to better quantify it in order to understand its mechanisms. This may be useful in some circumstances, and indeed necessary in many areas of understanding how things work. But the propensity of the left hemisphere is to apply this approach to all things, all the time, about everything. And so the universe is seen as the grand machine that can be understood only by breaking it down to its component parts and reassembling it from those components. In fact this is so part of our education system that most will argue that indeed the universe is a complex machine - not a metaphor, but actually. We have been indoctrinated that even the organic is a machine - the book “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins, in an attempt to explain complexity through natural selection, uses the machine metaphor as representative of life. I won’t say any more on this as it is well covered in Are You A Machine?.

And so finally what of the sentiment of Gabriel Marcel? I’d have to agree with him wholeheartedly that we need to be on guard against being persuaded that we are just objects and no subjects, and thus our humanity annihilated. We should do all in our power to maintain our uniqueness as individual subjects who are un-quantifiable yet have many beautiful qualitative aspects to be celebrated. We should remain a mystery to the machine - even the very ‘intelligent’ ones. The technocrats think you can be completely defined and knowable by reducing you to an array of quantifiable variables (a bunch of numbers), and therefore able to be abstracted to an object of utility - able to be controlled and used.

This is not just philosophical musing for intellectual entertainment - this is about the reality of our life right now. The digital ID, the social credit system, the mass vaccinations, mass lockdowns, hyper-surveillance, all the mechanisms of control over an individual’s ideals, ideas and freedoms, all stem from “a world geared to technological production” and the perspective of the left hemisphere.

As McGilchrist says, the left hemisphere is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. Which is why we cannot let that vocal part of ourselves, that sees only in part, betray the silent part that sees the whole.

Over to you - what are you seeing?

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In this series of posts I’d like to break down his conclusion and discus just how closely our world is conforming to the left hemisphere’s perspective.

Previous entries: #1 #2 #3 #4

Numbers, which the left hemisphere feels familiar with and is excellent at manipulating (though, it may be remembered, it is less good at understanding what they mean), would come to replace the response to individuals, whether people, places, things or circumstances, which the right hemisphere would have distinguished. ‘Either/or’ would tend to be substituted for matters of degree, and a certain inflexibility would result. (Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary)

Just a short paragraph today as we track through McGilchirst’s closing chapter, but an important one, and I feel blatantly obvious in our world today.

A long time ago I used to be in a certain field of emergency medicine and a tedious aspect of the work was detailing reports with a myriad codes that often took longer to type in than dealing with the patient directly. Every aspect of the treatment was reduced to codes, numbers, that would be fed into databases for analysis. Of course the computer doing the analysis worked only with numbers and so everything about the person and their treatment had to be reduced to a series of digits. Sure, there was my own notes, with the usual medical shorthand - both the subjective as well as the objective story of what happened. The computer, however, had a series of numbers that roughly approximated an objective, decontextualised, abstract ‘picture’ of some of what went on. These numbers were the re-presentation of real people and their experience that would be subject to all sorts of combinations and statistical theatrics to work out how well we were doing (or for some other practical or political purpose).

Now there is much utility in this way of understanding things, and that is all good, even necessary in some circumstances, but it does seem to be getting out of hand. We are all being reduced to numbers, the language of the machine. Once we have been defined by an array of numbers we have become a virtual ‘thing’ in the machine - to be analysed and manipulated, ultimately controlled by algorithms that are completely detached from the real world, working exclusively in a poor re-presentation of reality.

Your future digital ID will be the ultimate expression of who you are to the powers that ultimately have control over your life. There will be key variables (numbers on a sliding scale or simply a 0 or 1) that are important to the machine masters in defining you, your freedoms, your existence, but a rather insignificant representation of who you really are and your intrinsic value. Utility, and not for your own sake but for the State, is the important output, and intrinsic value only makes sense to the machine and its masters as much as it equates to utility. You are not valuable just because you are a person, you are only as valuable as you are useful to the system, and there’s a number to express that.

I’m keeping it short…

What are your thoughts?

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