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Faces of Denial -- Failing Institutions

Not everyone is going to ecstatically embrace change.

Some would rather things just stay the same -- as if that were even possible. But that's another philosophical discussion.

Some ecstatically embrace the notion of apocalypse, almost as if it feeds their own narcissistic need to feed their sadomasochistic subconscious drive to fulfill their ultimate destiny with death. Chris Hedges alludes to that in a recent essay, We Are All Aboard the Pequod. He portrays it as an unconscious lust for self-annihilation. My own response to this subjective suggestion to develop consciousness about both a literal and a symbolic notion of apocalypse is to be aware of these extremes so that they do not overwhelm me and become my ego presence, thereby replacing a more timeless and transcendent awareness with the machinery of thought and opinion constructions.

Erich Fromm also goes into the structure of subconscious urges in that direction in his tome about why people flee from the responsibility of becoming conscious in Escape from Freedom, known outside the US as The Fear of Freedom. In seeking escape from the fear of freedom Fromm suggested the following set of characteristics may unfold in a society where people are collectively escaping their freedom:

Authoritarianism: Fromm characterizes the authoritarian personality as containing a sadist element and a masochist element. The authoritarian wishes to gain control over other people in a bid to impose some kind of order on the world, they also wish to submit to the control of some superior force which may come in the guise of a person or an abstract idea.
Destructiveness: Although this bears a similarity to sadism, Fromm argues that the sadist wishes to gain control over something. A destructive personality wishes to destroy something it cannot bring under its control.
Conformity: This process is seen when people unconsciously incorporate the normative beliefs and thought processes of their society and experience them as their own. This allows them to avoid genuine free thinking, which is likely to provoke anxiety.

Joseph Campbell suggested that the image of earth-rise might be a possible mythic guiding image for our time:

Those of us who attempt to understand the meaning of a new, rising earth imagery from a moon perspective, emerging as a photograph for public view over forty five years ago, when we all shared that glimpse of earth from an Astronaut William Ander's camera while he was watching it rise above the horizon line while standing on the moon, now have an opportunity to look at our home and environment in new ways. For me, someone who was in Vietnam when that photo was taken, who later discovered the discipline of anthropology, that attempt at understanding comes in terms of a several hundred thousand-year human career that only in the last 9 thousand years since the appearance of arguably the first known city, Çatalhöyük, has come upon this issue of civilization and a rolling series of rise and collapse scenarios.

How did the people who first came together to form Çatalhöyük envision their world? Certainly they had some vision. We can find plenty of evidence in the unearthed remains that they created representations of their world through art, implying they had some vision of their world to bother with representing. How did that vision become collectively organized and shared so that civilizations could arise? We can't ask them, we weren't there to live it. It's not a question to be answered factually, it's a question to raise consciousness of our very limits to know anything with certainty, which leads to facing the reality of our here and now, and our very own apocalyptic epoch.

The earth rising image may, therefore, invoke yet another series of ideas depicting "new" ways that have become entangled with our ever clever capacity to create technologies of increasingly complex natures, allowing, and even invigorating, increasingly complex solutions to simple survival, a basic need for each one of us, individually. Far more than mere fictional speculation, though sometimes so abstract as to be impossible to characterize holistically, these technological survival enhancements have integrated into our conscious depictions of what life should be, and in so doing, have become dominant features in the narratives that we share.

We have yet another opportunity to investigate, even imagine, new ways that can complement our shared human capacity for imaginative thinking and playfulness, a characteristic that may once have helped make us the superlative social beings we are before institutions began to dominate our ways of thinking. But our institutions -- a technological product of organized collective thinking, a technology in which the humans involved become mechanical parts of the whole -- rear up as dominant metaphors of reality in their own right, incorporating us in their purposefulness, and employing us as managed actors to achieve their ends. And we are, individually and collectively, challenged to deal with these powerful narratives as we attempt to create our own in making sense of our immediate day to day lives.

All of our modern technologies are not neutral. We must consider them in our assumptions about individual freedom, including our treasured freedom of choice of all these glittering toys dangled in front of us daily.

The Treachery of Technology -- Part I An interview with Jacques Ellul

Of course certain science-based facts do threaten to take the fun out of the exercise of creating renewal. As we experience the results of failing institutions, we must first make an effort to ascertain the degree of threat we face. Fact will only be a part of that effort, and fact will be subject to our interior belief and meaning making capacities. Complications of communication arise like a spectre behind me.

What Tom Stoppard refers to as entropic, through his character Valentine in his play ARCADIA, may not be that far off as a metaphor for the limits that this peculiar form of technological social organization -- call it industrial civilization, if you wish -- has finally reached.

I tend to think of what I'm seeing these Apocalyptic days as something akin to the experience of watching a family member go into a state of catatonia when I was a child. At this point memory becomes metaphor for me. They were able to medicate her to bring her out of it, but I was never sure she was completely with us in or out. In her catatonia she was still apparently conscious of our presence and her surroundings, but unable to formulate a plan and therefore unable to put any plan into play as action. She appeared so numbed into a state of frozen inaction that even formulating a thought to express as a sentence appeared to be impossible, though sometimes her mouth moved slightly and it looked as if she was trying.

The Many Faces of Denial -- Paul Cefurka

"Denial wears many faces. Whether it's average people who are too busy with their lives to take on board the more extreme reports of environmental degradation; bloggers and politicians who believe that it's all a hoax cooked up by evil scientists to get grant money for bogus studies; or, perhaps surprisingly, the green activists who believe that more political or technological change will improve or even fix the situation - these are common techniques we use to avoid confronting the horror of global collapse face-to-face.

We are all familiar with the face of climate change denial. The Koch brothers, James Inhofe, Anthony Watts and a host of bloggers and politicians work tirelessly to derail any efforts to address humanity's greatest existential crisis since the Toba super-volcano 75,000 years ago. They are a resilient species, their fact-resistance bolstered by inoculations of status and cash.

But this form of denial is easy to spot. There is a more subtle form, one that is endemic among the white hats of the green movement. They are the ones who tirelessly work from the moral high ground - to change policies, to develop and promote green technology, to encourage sustainability. They resolutely refuse to countenance any thoughts of our predicament being inextricable. Tireless work, even in a lost cause, tends to keep one insulated from the deeper, darker realizations, and lets one keep fighting the good fight. Heroism has always been an intrinsic part of our story: "Quitters never win and winners never quit!" (Paul goes on to describe his choice in taking what he calls the inner path. Read the rest of the essay at the above link.)

Ocean Apocalypse: An Evening Lecture at the U.S. Naval War College -- by Jeremy Jackson

Speaking of surviving our failing institutions, without even watching the above video, I think most of us know enough to recognize something incongruous is taking place. For me it goes something like this: I am aware that the U.S. Naval War College is a kind of a brain subsidiary institution within the larger set of related institutions we now call the MIC, or the Military Industrial Complex of institutions. This entire complexity of institutions is part of a hierarchically ordered, vertically integrated set of institutions under the management of another institution, the Presidency. Surprise, surprise, the U.S. Presidency is an institution, the President is its more than less iconic representative. Which should stimulate anyone who recognizes this to begin to question just what it is they actually do in that voting booth every four years.

The lecturer, on the other hand, is a member of a different type of institution, a fact gathering and analysis institution based on something we like to think of as science. Dr. Jeremy Jackson, the lecturer, is an award winning professor emeritus at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, one of the elite of the elite locales for a gathering of studies involving the oceans, and he is bringing a reasonably coherent data-based presentation portraying the human-wrecked state of all the planet;s oceans, demonstrating with facts the dramatic demise of the all the oceans' ecosystems and fisheries that have taken place, due and traceable to human activities over the last two hundred years. This lecture, which could be presented to anyone or group, is presented to students, professors, and others in the U.S. Naval War College.

But -- and this is the first indicator of institutional failure -- the War College doesn't make policy regarding how the oceans are to be used. It may make certain plans and suggestions of some sort up the chain of command, but it primarily follows orders and enacts policy related to national defense concerns, most specifically with relation to the oceans and any posed military threats to the nation's sovereignty.

So we have one institution involved with dire information that has something to do with what's needed to make policy decisions regarding the forthcoming and unfolding apocalypse of the ocean, talking to another institution about something the other institution has nothing to do with deciding about. And that, as Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies) and others have pointed out, is the essence of how complex societies fail. This is a theme I'll be weaving through my various scenes, because it is critical to any apocalyptic epoch we've ever attempted to examine, historically, anthropologically or otherwise. To avoid reading the book, substitute an hour long lecture that presents Tainter's collapse hypothesis in the video below:

Collapse of Complex Societies by Dr. Joseph Tainter