#culture #empire #affect #education #ClimateChange #history #psychology #indigenous #WesternCulture #industrialization #Discipline #Punish

what do y'all think?:

"from the beginning of the industrial age, we have taken the whole of humanity on a big journey away from 'the natural world'... in pursuit of progress. ...in pursuit of our rational superiority to the world, and animals, and things like that.

we're beginning to review that now, and we're beginning to see the costs of that.

[...]

the whole of humanity has been busy putting up a sort of false self [of rationality] over what i call "the inner indigenous" - that "natural" self that's got a lot of spontanaeity, emotions. it's raw and sexual and things like that... we've been coating that with rationality and with progress.

the british system of boarding school is a perfect element at developing that kind of estranged self, which functions terribly well in other institutions - like in politics, in the army, in church, in business, in building empire. and of course that was the original motivation [behind developing the schools] - to develop administrators of the british empire.

but take it out of that environment and into the one where the natural self is more apparent - in the family - and it functions very badly, in general. so the breakdown of that self is liable to be in the family.

and [recovering] is not just an internal sort of psycho-spiritual adventure, it also means you have to come home to relationship, to being a social being, to being a family being, to being a body... and in that journey, that's where the true wisdom is to be had. you can take your refined mental appartus and use that to help you on that journey...and that's great." - nick duffell

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPHxGYAqbuU

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i think this is a very interesting line of reasoning!

i disagree with his contention that "the whole of humanity" is doing this, but that's another thing you'll find in mainstream western culture - a universalizing drive that takes characteristics of western culture & society, and treats them as if they apply to all people everywhere. he's a brit, i forgive him this error.

i don't know about "inner indigenous"...but i get what he's saying about a more "animal" self that gets turned into a "civilization-brain" self through an institutional education process.

the civilization-brain self does well in institutions (and so you see it rise to the top of things like international negotiations on climate change), but it has little connection to the "living" or "animal" self - which is what the fight over climate change is all about! like, valuing the actual living world! not some abstract version of it, but the actual land and people and animals!

i like his analysis because it ties together separation from self, separation from nature, separation from other people (emotionally), and empire, boarding schools, institutions of all kinds, industrialization (historically), and the global ecological catastrophe we're all a part of.

and i like that he recommends that people (especially gentlemen, who are more likely to have been disciplined out of their "animal" selves, imo) reconnect with other people and go on their own "psycho-spiritual" journey to discover whether that "civilization-brain self" is really all there is to life.

and i agree that if one hasn't reconnected to their own animal self, and hasn't reconnected with actual people and the actual land, it's going to be very hard to get in "good relation" to the planet (and solve the exploitation of nature that is like, at the root of climate change. if people lived in balance with the land (ie, in 'right relation'), we wouldn't have biodiversity loss, we wouldn't have climate change...because you'd be valuing the land and bringing it back to life, instead of exploiting it.