The View From a Self-Traumatizing Society
The View From a Self-Traumatizing Society
The vicious circle of left brain-hemisphere overactivation and institutionalized suffering
I have mentioned several times before in these articles the “Divided Brain” work of Dr Iain McGilchrist. For anyone unfamiliar with this, I highly recommend watching the short animation below to get up to speed. I believe Dr McGilchrist's work helps us greatly to understand ourselves, and also to make complete sense of a lot of the nonsense we are currently experiencing. For myself, discovering this was life changing.
I have also suggested several times now that our society has institutionalized trauma, stress, and suffering, into a feedback cycle, in which folks traumatized by the system are self-selected by it into positions of power, who then terrorize and traumatize the rest of us, and turn us into co-dependents in keeping the system going.
In this article, I attempt to pull these two threads together more tightly. The basic premise is that, when we are stressed, suffering, or recapitulating our trauma/body memories, we lose access to the right brain hemisphere's way of attending to the world. Then, with the left's distorted, delusional and paranoid way of attending in the ascendant, we tend to wreak havoc on those around us, in turn causing their right hemisphere's way of attending to the world to also to be shutdown: a domino effect.
So, when chronic stress is endemic in society or culture, this tends to scale up, and institutions arise which are built entirely on the left hemisphere's way of attending to the world. These institutions then become major sources of stress to the whole society they are meant to serve, and the spiral grows. The whole culture begins to act as if everyone has had a right hemisphere stroke.
In the first part of his latest book, “The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World”, McGilchrist undertakes an extremely deep literature review, consulting many hundreds of scientific articles, of what is known about the difference between the left and right brain hemispheres' ways of attending, and hence what the world looks like when we have have lost access to the big picture, connected, embodied, living perspective of the right. In every way, he finds that the right hemisphere is more veridical (truthful, corresponding to reality).
This is the case for attention.
“The left hemisphere… seems to lack appreciation, not just of motion, but of emotion; it relatively lacks appropriate emotional depth, or concern, tending to be irritable or facetious, especially when challenged. It tends to disown problems, and pass the responsibility to others; is overconfident about what it cannot in the nature of things know much about; fabricates (often improbable) stories to cover its ignorance; sees parts at the expense of wholes; tends to see ‘from the outside’, rather than experience ‘from the inside’; and has an affinity for the inanimate, and for tools and machines in particular. It is also quite confident it is right.”
It is also the case for perception, judgement, apprehension, social and emotional intelligence, cognitive intelligence, and creativity.
“Insight into delusional thinking is dependent on the right hemisphere. In general, right hemisphere memory is more truthful than left hemisphere memory. Overall, in general it is the judgments on reality made by the right hemisphere that are more reliable.”
“The right hemisphere is superior at emotional expression and receptivity. It is crucial for empathy and for a sense of agency. It is important for understanding implicit meaning, in all its forms, including metaphor, and for reading faces and body language. It understands how context changes meaning.”
“Creativity involves a number of elements in which the right hemisphere is superior to the left: breadth of vision, the capacity to forge distant links, flexibility rather than rigidity, a willingness to respond to a changed, or changing, context, a tolerance of ambiguity, and an ability to work with knowledge that is, for the most part, inherently both imprecise and implicit.”
The Divided Brain research makes predictions about what a left-hemisphere dominated society would look like, when scaled up to the cultural level. The following quotes from McGilchrist’s earlier book “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”, are such predictions. For myself, the correspondence with these and what is actually currently going on in the world, and with the ideas, ideologies and cults which have come to dominate the West/Anglosphere, is stark. Indeed, this vision of what a self-traumatizing society would look like, to my mind, could not be a more perfect description of the world we do currently live in.
“There would be a focus on 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, 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.”
“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, an unwillingness to change track or change one’s mind.”
“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.”
Working backwards, can we see how some elected and unelected people in charge are very broken people, acting and thinking like folks with right hemisphere brain damage, whose agendas are bringing the Unmaking of the Western World about, and are, in turn, creating more and more extreme versions of themselves in the next generation through institutionalized trauma?
What can we do about it? A big barrier issue is that wanting definite solutions and an analytical “10 point plan” is inherently also a left hemisphere way of attending, and we can’t solve the problems with the same type of thinking which created them in the first place!
The big picture answer to interrupting the cascading or domino effect of right-hemisphere shutdown could include, firstly, awareness. We can begin to look at our institutions and the people which comprise them through the lens that McGilchrist has provided us with, and in particular, notice, and call out, when they are behaving like they have a right-hemisphere shutdown. We can not trust the delusional thinking arising from these people and places, and so should stop rewarding such folks and structures with our votes, voices, and our purchasing power.
The main answer, however, I feel, is to start to value again everything the right hemisphere way of attending stands for, as described in McGilchrist’s works. That is to embrace and embody the right hemisphere’s Ways to be our guiding Values and Vision for the world.
My online course, which I developed as a pragmatic way help people reduce their suffering, is heavily influenced by McGilchrist’s works on the Divided Brain. Enrolling in this is also a way to show support my work. Learn more about this:
There's also a chemical factor that ramped up society to be less "right brained".
In the first world, many children get shots at a ridiculously young age, before their immune systems are even developed to even do what the shots claim to do, create immunity.
There's also a lot more crooked faces, which tend to affect the left side of the face, which means the right brain has damage... http://areyoucrooked.com/
Did the pharma medical industrial complex know about this? Who knows, but it only accelerated the reliance on the left hemisphere.
I'm just glad that finally we can talk about how shots, even older ones aren't safe as claimed.
Hopefully this will lead to reform and a new generation that isn't damaged.
The COVID debacle was so extreme that finally people can step out of the left brain literal logic which is sustained by language of the lying ruling class and start seeing the big picture, not just about shots.
Judge by actions and results, not on promises pushed by language.
very valuable insights indeed. I suspect one's 'awareness' of the activities of the right hemisphere matures when one gets older: young children seem to thrive in a relatively ordered, regular environment, while their capacity to recognise regularity in complex, chaotic situations and their ability to trust their innate flexibility might develop somewhat later (post-puberty?). I'm not a professional, but I've worked with children as a dance teacher and in education (tutoring). currently I'm absolutely horrified at the villainous, negative attitude (and policies) of many of our so-called 'leaders' and bureaucrats, causing so much suffering. TQ for posting this!