That’s one of the aspects which struck me most back in March ‘20. People, even fairly senior people, seemed to become aware for the first time in their lives that they were mortal and that there was nothing they could do about it.
I thought it very odd at the time. Mortality, especially one’s own, ought to be something pretty obvious that one needs to accept (after a fashion) by the time one turns 21 or thereabouts.
Perhaps this is related to the dying off of the war generation. I noticed a distinct infantilisation not just of political but of general public discourse starting around the year 2000. That’s the point when people who had acting memories of WW2 started to leave public life. Regardless of which side they had been on, these people knew that when things go south they can go really south really fast. As a consequence they treated life with a seriousness that our current batch of clowns are simply incapable of.
Footnote: the left hemisphere angle provides an excellent explanation of the frustrating discussions I used to have with Objectivists. “Check your premises!” Indeed.
"the left hemisphere’s attitude is to have total control over this ultimate enemy (of death)."
Yes and the transformational archetype experience is an overcoming of this fear of death. The death/rebirth experience is an acceptance of death and a rebirth into a different state of consciousness that includes right side perception.
Whether one believes it was an actual event or not the account of the crucifiction is in that achetypical realm. The fear of death is confronted and overcome and there is a rebirth, a resurrection. The same archetype plays out across so many seemingly disparate 'things'. It is an underlying theme in a lot of myth, poetry, literature, and music.
In an earlier comment about left/right I mentioned the album Dark Side of the Moon as an allegory/metaphor. One of the cuts on the album, Great Gig in the Sky:
"And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I
don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime."
Back to Christianity. I think it is possible that the early Christian form of baptism by immersion in water may have been an overcoming of the fear of death experience. Symbolically and literally. It may have been an attempt to induce a near death experience.
"What have we lost in the 21st Century when we can’t accept that death and dying are a normal part of life? " I think it was lost long before the 21st century. Perhaps it has accelerated but atrocities are nothing new and I think they have their roots in the fear of death.
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years." R.D Laing 1967
"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."
The mass of humanity has been on that path for thousands of years. Some step off the path and onto an alternate path. Some leave guideposts, signs, directions. The hope for the future of humanity is on that path. Without that path we might have already become extinct or the world might be in an even greater state of barbarism.
I think of the allegory of the mustard seed. Perhaps the best we can do is to plant seeds.
One thing that seemed clear to me during the "covid" project was that one element of the mass psychosis bifurcation was the manifestation of positive feedback loops. The left hemisphere, in its suppression of the right, creates a closed system that is prone toward an increasingly paranoid need for control.
In a mass media and the light-speed environment of narrative shaping, this positive feedback loop becomes especially dangerous. Not only is the noise to signal inverted, rendering the discernment of threats and controls nearly inert, those inputs all become perturbances feeding into that loop.
Lacking both corrective right hemisphere constraints and minimal pro-social modalities of control, those left hemisphere dominant people were almost immediately trapped in their closed system in which negative inputs - and the vehicles like family, church, community bonds that might have purchase to deliver them, accelerated them into the psychosis and to this day they remain.
And as we know, positive feedback loops naturally exponential, move quickly to the extremes. Even though they will decay and ultimately destroy the system. this happens after rapidly oscillating across even diametric positions through these extreme positions in an increasingly chaotic state and so the "cure" of negative feedback inputs becomes increasingly difficult to achieve over time.
What struck me from the very beginning of Covid was the complete lost of values, especially human dignity: that which at least in the European legal tradition justifies treating humans as beings endowed with intrinsic value in the first place. (Otherwise, you might as well let 'em die to save the others.)
But the left hemisphere seems entirely incapable of even perceiving such deeper values. Hence the mind-boggingly stupid argument, when you confront Covidians with the idea of human dignity, that "dead people don't have dignity, so saving lives must always come first". It's classic LH reasoning - purely utilitarian and stunningly ignorant. But you can't argue with the LH, because it literally can't see what you are talking about when you say "dignity" or "freedom" or "some things are more important than survival".
That’s one of the aspects which struck me most back in March ‘20. People, even fairly senior people, seemed to become aware for the first time in their lives that they were mortal and that there was nothing they could do about it.
I thought it very odd at the time. Mortality, especially one’s own, ought to be something pretty obvious that one needs to accept (after a fashion) by the time one turns 21 or thereabouts.
Perhaps this is related to the dying off of the war generation. I noticed a distinct infantilisation not just of political but of general public discourse starting around the year 2000. That’s the point when people who had acting memories of WW2 started to leave public life. Regardless of which side they had been on, these people knew that when things go south they can go really south really fast. As a consequence they treated life with a seriousness that our current batch of clowns are simply incapable of.
Footnote: the left hemisphere angle provides an excellent explanation of the frustrating discussions I used to have with Objectivists. “Check your premises!” Indeed.
Another great essay Winston.
My thoughts/opinion:
"the left hemisphere’s attitude is to have total control over this ultimate enemy (of death)."
Yes and the transformational archetype experience is an overcoming of this fear of death. The death/rebirth experience is an acceptance of death and a rebirth into a different state of consciousness that includes right side perception.
Whether one believes it was an actual event or not the account of the crucifiction is in that achetypical realm. The fear of death is confronted and overcome and there is a rebirth, a resurrection. The same archetype plays out across so many seemingly disparate 'things'. It is an underlying theme in a lot of myth, poetry, literature, and music.
In an earlier comment about left/right I mentioned the album Dark Side of the Moon as an allegory/metaphor. One of the cuts on the album, Great Gig in the Sky:
"And I am not frightened of dying, any time will do, I
don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying?
There's no reason for it, you've gotta go sometime."
Back to Christianity. I think it is possible that the early Christian form of baptism by immersion in water may have been an overcoming of the fear of death experience. Symbolically and literally. It may have been an attempt to induce a near death experience.
"What have we lost in the 21st Century when we can’t accept that death and dying are a normal part of life? " I think it was lost long before the 21st century. Perhaps it has accelerated but atrocities are nothing new and I think they have their roots in the fear of death.
"The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years." R.D Laing 1967
"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."
The mass of humanity has been on that path for thousands of years. Some step off the path and onto an alternate path. Some leave guideposts, signs, directions. The hope for the future of humanity is on that path. Without that path we might have already become extinct or the world might be in an even greater state of barbarism.
I think of the allegory of the mustard seed. Perhaps the best we can do is to plant seeds.
One thing that seemed clear to me during the "covid" project was that one element of the mass psychosis bifurcation was the manifestation of positive feedback loops. The left hemisphere, in its suppression of the right, creates a closed system that is prone toward an increasingly paranoid need for control.
In a mass media and the light-speed environment of narrative shaping, this positive feedback loop becomes especially dangerous. Not only is the noise to signal inverted, rendering the discernment of threats and controls nearly inert, those inputs all become perturbances feeding into that loop.
Lacking both corrective right hemisphere constraints and minimal pro-social modalities of control, those left hemisphere dominant people were almost immediately trapped in their closed system in which negative inputs - and the vehicles like family, church, community bonds that might have purchase to deliver them, accelerated them into the psychosis and to this day they remain.
And as we know, positive feedback loops naturally exponential, move quickly to the extremes. Even though they will decay and ultimately destroy the system. this happens after rapidly oscillating across even diametric positions through these extreme positions in an increasingly chaotic state and so the "cure" of negative feedback inputs becomes increasingly difficult to achieve over time.
This is far from over
What struck me from the very beginning of Covid was the complete lost of values, especially human dignity: that which at least in the European legal tradition justifies treating humans as beings endowed with intrinsic value in the first place. (Otherwise, you might as well let 'em die to save the others.)
But the left hemisphere seems entirely incapable of even perceiving such deeper values. Hence the mind-boggingly stupid argument, when you confront Covidians with the idea of human dignity, that "dead people don't have dignity, so saving lives must always come first". It's classic LH reasoning - purely utilitarian and stunningly ignorant. But you can't argue with the LH, because it literally can't see what you are talking about when you say "dignity" or "freedom" or "some things are more important than survival".