The Magnificent Swindle

The Magnificent Swindle

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends.

And koinos Hermes.

We have considered the interwovenness of Soul and Soil, the interwovenness of Soul and Earth, the interwovenness of Psyche and Cosmos—the interwovenness of all things.

What does that interwovenness mean about how we arrive at true happiness and peace? And what does that interwovenness mean about how we arrive at insight, and how we arrive at better ways of knowing ourselves, each other, and the world we share?

If we want a better world, we must become better knowers. We must arrive at better ways of knowing and being, living and loving. That’s a profound shift, but one that comes with exciting and exceptional potentials for us all.

And the world depends on it. We don’t see how our habitual mind, the mind we use to do everything we do, actually doesn’t function very well. Our habitual mind doesn’t think the way Nature works, and we very much need to think the way Nature works if we want to thrive, if we want to create a peaceful, joyful, and just world.

But it’s not easy to make this switch. The change itself is joyful. It is a path of love and a path of joy. It is a path in line with our own highest values. It’s the path the soul wants us to walk.

But powerful forces keep us off this path of wisdom, love, and beauty, because this path presents a danger to the pattern of insanity and the structures of power and domination that keep that pattern of insanity going.

We’re kept away from truly dangerous wisdom because it threatens the pattern of insanity.

Force only works in a certain kind of society. And it’s not as effective as other forms of coercion.

We should make no mistake that the dominant culture does employ force and the threat of force. But the greatest levels of force tend to occur outside the borders of nations like the United States.

Within such nations, the best possible coercion is one that convinces people they are relatively free and happy in the midst of their own suffering. That’s what we have.

One way we can think of it is as a kind of bribe or swindle.

Over the past couple hundred years in particular, a kind of informal but incredibly binding material bribe has emerged: We willingly distract ourselves away from the soul, and we willingly go along with the pattern of insanity, in exchange for material consumption. This is an old issue, which the wisdom traditions have long warned us about, but it has taken on an exceptionally powerful and dangerous form with unprecedented consequences.

This distraction includes putting up with increasing inequality and various forms of injustice and insanity, including ecological degradation that threatens the very conditions of life we depend on—so we’re putting our lives at risk, and not just our own lives, but the whole community of life as we know it.

The material consumption is not just offered to us in some neutral or benign fashion. Rather, by means of powerful seductions and clever manipulations, we get it ceaselessly infused into our psyche as a substitute for what our spiritual hunger drives us to seek.

This process gets facilitated by the kind of duality many intellectuals of the dominant culture have encouraged. Some of these folks we still refer to as philosophers, even though they count only as professors of philosophy, whether they worked in a university system or not.

As I said, we can think of this as a material bribe. Lewis Mumford captures this bribe rather well:

"The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified."

“Magnificent bribe” is a perfect phrase, and also an imperfect phrase. It’s a magnificent swindle and a magnificent coup—and more than anything else, a magnificent domination of the soul. But the soul cannot really be dominated or controlled—its essence is wildness, wisdom, and wonder; love, beauty, great peace and joy.

There are always consequences for going against our own soul and going against life (by which I mean spiritual and ecological realities in their nonduality). We now face some of the more severe of those consequences, and we must do all we can to minimize the appearance of further, still more intense consequences, which are inevitable if we keep going as we are.

We need LoveWisdom more than ever just to be able to navigate the consequences we already have coming and cannot escape, and even more than that to avoid something worse.

Mumford says “we are being asked to ratify” this bribe because we have to constantly ratify it. We have to constantly ratify it because only we have that power.

The Scottish thinker David Hume recognized that the real power in a culture is on the side of the governed, not on the side of those who attempt to do the governing. We vastly outnumber those in power—those who benefit from our labor and life energy—and we must continually assent to their manipulation, control, and extraction, in a kind of “inverted totalitarianism,” to use Sheldon Wolin’s term.

Of necessity, we ratify this swindle by forfeiting our freedom. Freedom’s a tricky term. Whatever we mean by it, it has to involve something beyond our ordinary sense of being an “autonomous individual” or a “sovereign individual”. Instead, it has to mean something along the lines of what most of the great spiritual, religious, and philosophical traditions have promised us regarding our potential.

The liberation into which these traditions invite us differs from the ideas of “liberty” and “freedom” we find most widespread in the dominant culture. That means kind of liberation the wisdom traditions intend for us stands in tension with the ideas of “liberty” and “freedom” that have infected so many of us (even unconsciously), in the sense that this spiritual liberation has no dependence on property and possession, and it comes with an abiding peace and joy.

In our secular, desacralized world, we tend to chase comfort and what we refer to as “happiness” in place of peace, love, joy, and true liberation—in part because liberation in the sense intended by these traditions seems so daunting at first glance. It’s daunting to the ego, we could say, and so we get hooked by the swindle Mumford tries to get us to acknowledge and reject.

Many thinkers have reflected on this swindle in various ways. Walter Kaufmann wrote about it in his delightful book, Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy. Here’s a passage from that book:

"Cloudless contentment is not open to [human beings], and if [they trade their] freedom and integrity for it, the time will come when [they feel] cheated. This does not mean that [they] will openly regret the bargain. Most people have failed to cultivate their critical perception of their own present position and of the alternatives they might have chosen; precisely this is the trade they made; this is what they gave up for comfort and contentment. Now they feel cheated without knowing how and when and why. What they feel is a diffuse and free-floating resentment in search of an object. Having given up autonomy for happiness, they have missed out on both." (213)

The “happiness” here differs from the genuine happiness and wellbeing promised to us by the wisdom traditions of the world. Those varied traditions share a common ground, inviting us to renounce all our subtle and overt efforts to comfort, coddle, and pleasure ourselves. Even traditions that embrace sensuality and encourage a profound appreciation and enjoyment of life nevertheless differentiate this from our habitual notions of “happiness”.

In the ancient Greek tradition we find this discernment in the contrasting notions of hedonia and eudaimonia, with the former signifying conventional happiness and pleasure, and the latter signifying something deeper and far more meaningful, for which the ego may have to put up with a great deal of discomfort, pain, fear, uncertainty, and renunciation in order for us to bring that fuller happiness to realization.

Sadly, many people know this sort of discomfort and renunciation only in limited contexts like starting a business or playing a sport at a very high level. We don’t see many people working with these dynamics in the ways the wisdom traditions invite.

The very philosophical writer Kurt Vonnegut framed the swindle much more humorously than Kaufmann did, in a graduation speech that everyone in the dominant culture should read in full:

"I look back on all the taboos that I was taught, that everybody was taught, and I see now that they were parts of a great swindle. Their purpose was to make Americans afraid to get close to one another—to organize.

"It was even taboo to discuss the American economic system and its bizarre methods of distributing wealth. I learned that at my mother’s knee, God rest her soul. God rest her knee. She taught me never to say anything impolite about the neighborhood millionaire. She didn’t even want me to wonder out loud how the hell he ever got to control that much wealth."

Vonnegut, who was perhaps as affected by Nietzsche as Professor Walter Kaufmann was, does one better than the venerable professor: He intimates that the swindle must compromise intimacy, thus pointing the same way as those beautiful traditions of liberation, which always seem to invite us to verify the interwovenness of liberation and intimacy.

Ultimately, the assent to this swindle happens by means of a drugging or even a poisoning of the soul. Cutting ourselves off from intimacy and interwovenness is the poisoning of the soul, and since we must include Nature in this intimacy and interwovenness, we must see all philosophies as toxic which endorse a duality between human and Nature, and see the poisoning and degradation of ecologies as the poisoning and degradation of the soul.

In one way or another the soul must be controlled by structures of power, or else it will overthrow them. We may consider in this regard a painful description of how elephants are controlled by humans who have lost touch with their own soul:

dn’t step on me." (Bradshaw: 2009

Those are the words of Ray Ryan, a former zookeeper. The keepers of our human zoo cannot use too much force (at least not within their borders) if they want to appear “civilized”. So our souls are degraded and our assent is manufactured in other ways (the loss of intimacy means a loss of our true power). The threat of violence exists, and sometimes it gets acted out in horrific ways. But for the most part, only the threat matters, and the rest of the soul poisoning happens in other ways. Mumford’s analysis misses some key details of that.

For instance, contrary to what Mumford suggests, we don’t have “every material advantage.” Some of us have far more material advantage than others—a fact that (according to research we can save for another time) we may not really see, or may not want to see. Even basic things like clean air and clean water are becoming luxuries—again, we may not see this, or may not want to see it.

For instance, before the time of conquest, anyone who lived on Turtle Island (what we now call North America) could drink clean, refreshing, delicious water from rivers, stream, and springs that none of us can drink from now. The wealthiest among us can move to places with cleaner water or have the best possible water brought to their door. The rest of us cannot do so.

There is also a huge gap between the accessibility of quality food for the rich and for the poor. We have “food deserts” throughout the U.S., usually in poor neighborhoods. In such places, one is hard pressed to find an organic vegetable, but junk-food (and junk-ease) abounds—as do junk ways of knowing oneself and the world, even though all the people living in these areas have as much potential for wisdom, love, and beauty as anyone else.

And we can note that ongoing lack of total health and vigor works in favor of our current structures of power. From the standpoint of current structures of power and domination, the weaker we are—the more unhappy, domesticated, overworked, overloaded, and so on—the better. Physical strength must be confined to sports and other forms of entertainment, it must be restricted to media and marketing, and to sanctioned forms of violence, and must not be allowed to show up as the sheer physical capacity to non-violently rebel against aggression, extraction, degradation, and injustice.

Mumford, in the formulation we considered, also leaves out the way fear and misery function to keep us going. Fear and misery keep us deeply rooted in Sorrowville, hooked on its hopes and dreams, its delusions and pathologies. That means fear and misery of all kinds, including self-doubt, self-hatred, doubt of others, hatred of others, and more.

Generally speaking, the system takes maximal advantage of the aversion-craving axis of our habitual mind, and in some sense Mumford acknowledges only the craving side of the spectrum. But hope and fear, craving and aversion, go together. As we experience fear and pain, two things happen: We attempt to escape the situation (which can include blocking our perception of the facts), and to the degree we cannot escape we will medicate. Both of these reactions arise from a habit of reacting to pain and discomfort by focusing on ourselves, becoming, in one way or another, more self-centered. The same holds for the discomfort of craving.

Though we naturally want to alleviate our own suffering, we know in our hearts that to medicate is not to heal. Medication is not Medicine. We use things like junk-food, junk-ease, vacations, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, violence, gambling, fantasies of wealth and success, the vast array of media (including “social media”), the self-help-industrial complex, and of course all those opioids to medicate ourselves so that we can keep the engines of “progress” moving along.

It’s like a massive wheel. The engine of Sorrowville, the engine of the thought patterns of suffering, is a wheel, a merry-go-round of insanity we get trapped on, and right now it’s spinning faster and faster, which makes us all the more hesitant to jump off. The sheer pace of it encourages further medicating and unplugging. But we aren’t unplugging from the wheel itself, and we aren’t healing anything.

Since food is essential, medicating and unplugging by means of food happens pervasively. A tremendous amount of the processed insanity we call “food”—the rationally formulated poison referred to by capitalism as “food”—functions largely as a mechanism of distraction and profit: We are distracted from the real ills we experience, and in exchange we increase the wealth of corporations and a very small portion of the population.

We find two things at work here. First of all, we don’t eat food. Rather, we eat what capitalism provides us. Secondly, because of the nature of capitalism, it doesn’t work with natural hunger and appetite, but rather with craving.

t to eat it (see Laran et al.: 2011

We are all familiar with the insane offerings of the food-as-medication approach. The presence of extreme eating competitions is a strange symptom of our culture, as is the fact that we deep fry sticks of butter, eat pizza with cheese-stuffed crust, and try to put bacon in and on everything.

It has become widely known that processed foods come out of a scientific production process that seeks to achieve a “bliss point” of flavor that maximizes the addicting quality of the so-called food, usually by optimizing the hit of fat, sugar, and salt we take in with each bite—using ingredients that are typically produced via the wheel of suffering that makes us seek food-as-medication in the first place—the pattern of insanity is incredibly well-put-together.

The ingredients tend to be unhealthy for humans and for large-scale ecologies, and both the production of the ingredients as well as the consequences of using and consuming them create tremendous suffering—which leads us to crave more medication, including food-as-medication.

Our politicians constantly try to scare us and keep us scared, thus keeping us in a state of craving for medication and unplugging of all kinds. The U.S. is quite a fearful society, even though, in terms of hard facts and statistics, we are relatively safe, and even though many of us (perhaps most of us) don’t experience any ongoing threat of overt violence from the state or even from criminal activity.

We have to acknowledge that significant portions of the population do have to deal with this, both within the dominant culture and, especially, outside its borders, where it carries on, orchestrates, or otherwise supports violence, domination, aggression, atrocities. But, relatively speaking, people living in the U.S. have far fewer threats to worry about than people living in other countries. And we have to keep in mind that the fear mongers need to scare the people with the least violence in their lives. The ones who see violence and poverty already live with fear and dread.

And so the propaganda machine constantly tells us “the Muslims” are out to get us (various plots are even engineered by law enforcement to entrap would-be terrorists), that “Mexicans” are taking our jobs and engaging in criminal violence, that “blacks” and “immigrants” are dangerous, that people are grooming our children for unthinkable things, and so on. And we are a society of the gun, which means we see higher levels of weaponized violence compared to cultures that don’t have the same orientation.

In various ways, fear gets provoked in us—more or less intentionally—and this sense of fear in turn provokes us to think less wisely, less compassionately, and less beautifully than we are capable of. We get materialistic and greedy, and increasingly self-obsessed. We have to stuff our faces because the world might end, and we have to get ours before others get theirs, because there isn’t enough to go around.

This is not a conscious thought. It’s a matter of seeing destruction around us and feeling like something has to be done. Not knowing what to do, we focus on ourselves, and deep intelligences in us react as if there might be starvation around the corner, so they command us to feed—particularly on high calorie foods, even if they aren’t nourishing.

Eating or even binging (including binge-watching, which is “poor eating for the mind,” a variety of junk-food for the soul) distracts us from our suffering, and gives us a feeling that we have done something. We get some temporary relief.

We experience pain, fear, anxiety and depression, self-hatred (perhaps especially after social media exposure), loneliness, weariness from working long hours and lacking proper practices of rejuvenation. We need a cigarette—or a pack, or more—to get through the day. We need alcohol and pills to wind down at night. We need pain killers and other medications because the whole organization of society is unwise and unhealthy.

This “civilization” depends on ill-being, and health may look like wildness, even madness to those who have become “civilized”. We have learned how to know living this way, learned how to live knowing this way.

But, we cannot really evade sensing that this supposed “knowing” is stupidity. Thus we can say the bargain Mumford speaks of has changed. Though we might have agreed to play along, it has begun to break down, and the epistemic errors have caught up with us.

We seem to sense it, know it in our bones—even if the ego will not allow a full confrontation with it. We can call it an unthought known—something we know but dare not allow into conscious thought.

It may be part of why we seem to be pushing so hard to collapse the conditions of life.

But we find here a general crisis of meaning, because we don’t know the meaning of the game anymore, and the game has stolen deeper sources of meaning from us—swindled us out of them—because meaning tied to the soul and the sacred, meaning rooted in living ecologies and loving virtues, such meanings will always oppose the false meanings of the bribe Mumford refers to, the “nothing but” life CG Jung once described.

But, we remain under the thrall of centuries, even millennia of error. Wolin veers directly into Gregory Bateson’s ecological thinking when he describes the error as arising from lack of skill with large-scale patterns:

"Unlike the classic forms of totalitarianism, which openly boasted of their intentions to force their societies into a preconceived totality, inverted totalitarianism is not expressly conceptualized as an ideology or objectified in public policy. Typically it is furthered by power-holders and citizens who often seem unaware of the deeper consequences of their actions or inactions. There is a certain heedlessness, an inability to take seriously the extent to which a pattern of consequences may take shape without having been preconceived.

The fundamental reason for this deep-seated carelessness is related to the well-known American zest for change and, equally remarkable, the good fortune of Americans in having at their disposal a vast continent rich in natural resources, inviting exploitation. Although it is a cliché that the history of American society has been one of unceasing change, the consequences of today’s increased tempos are, less obvious.

Change works to displace existing beliefs, practices, and expectations. Although societies throughout history have experienced change, it is only over the past four centuries that promoting innovation became a major focus of public policy. Today, thanks to the highly organized pursuit of technological innovation and the culture it encourages, change is more rapid, more encompassing, more welcomed than ever before—which means that institutions, values, and expectations share with technology a limited shelf life. We are experiencing the triumph of contemporaneity and of its accomplice, forgetting or collective amnesia. Stated somewhat differently, in early modern times change displaced traditions; today change succeeds change.

The effect of unending change is to undercut consolidation. Consider, for example, that more than a century after the Civil War the consequences of slavery still linger; that close to a century after women won the vote, their equality remains contested; or that after nearly two centuries during which public schools became a reality, education is now being increasingly privatized. In order to gain a handle on the problem of change we might recall that among political and intellectual circles, beginning in the last half of the seventeenth century and

especially during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, there was a growing conviction that, for the first time in recorded history, it was possible for human beings to deliberately shape their future. Thanks to advances in science and invention it was possible to conceive change as “progress,” an advancement benefiting all members of society. Progress stood for change that was constructive, that would bring something new into the world and to the advantage of all. The champions of progress believed that while change might result in the disappearance or destruction of established beliefs, customs, and interests, the vast majority of these deserved to go because they mostly served the Few while keeping the Many in ignorance, poverty, and sickness.

An important element in this early modern conception of progress was that change was crucially a matter for political determination by those who could be held accountable for their decisions. That understanding of change was pretty much overwhelmed by the emergence of concentrations of economic power that took place during the latter half the nineteenth century. Change became a private enterprise inseparable from exploitation and opportunism, thereby constituting a major, if not the major, element in the dynamic of capitalism. Opportunism involved an unceasing search for what might be exploitable, and soon that meant virtually anything, from religion, to politics, to human wellbeing. Very little, if anything, was taboo, as before long change became the object of premeditated strategies for maximizing profits.

It is often noted that today change is more rapid, more encompassing than ever before. In later pages I shall suggest that American democracy has never been truly consolidated. Some of its key elements remain unrealized or vulnerable; others have been exploited for antidemocratic ends. Political institutions have typically been described as the means by which a society tries to order change. The assumption was that political institutions would themselves remain stable, as exemplified in the ideal of a constitution as a relatively unchanging structure for defining the uses and limits of public power and the accountability of officeholders.

Today, however, some of the political changes are revolutionary; others are counterrevolutionary. Some chart new directions for the nation and introduce new techniques for extending American power, both internally (surveillance of citizens) and externally (seven hundred [military] bases abroad), beyond any point even imagined by previous administrations. Other changes are counterrevolutionary in the sense of reversing social policies originally aimed at improving the lot of the middle and poorer classes.

most exemplar of democracy?" (: 2017

We can sense here the way the aesthetic (which is beauty), the ethical (which is love), and in general a dimension of wisdom all come together. In balance, in a mode of health, these dimensions work together to empower our experience of sacredness.

Sacredness is a making sacred (not mere projection, but participatory activity, a co-discovery-creation), and when our epistemology or way of knowing becomes compromised by a loss of certain aesthetic and ethical factors, when we cannot find skillful, spiritual ways of liberating into the larger ecologies of mind that allow us to know ourselves and our World in healthy, healing, holistic, and holy ways, and thus arrive at insights, arrive at an Original Thinking that can cultivate life forward, then instead we will desacralize the world and perpetuate a process, a pattern of degradation.

Wolin properly relates our inability to think ecologically or systemically with an abundance of Nature to absorb the burden of our stupidity. Nevertheless, as Bateson points out, the lack of wisdom and the concomitant employment of magical thinking (in the form of science and technology) never goes “unpunished,” which simply means it comes with karma or negative side-effects which we carry with us like Jacob Marley’s chains. All of this then give rise to a need for ongoing entertainment, because we have forsaken meaningful activity. Things stop happening in a sense meaningful enough to help us transcend our suffering, and we get sucked into limited thinking. Let us recall a little bit of how Jung put it,

"Everything is banal; everything is “nothing but,” and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war; they are all glad when there is a war; they say, “Thank heaven, now something is going to happen—something bigger than ourselves!”" (CW 18, para. 628)

“Something bigger than ourselves” means a decentering of the ego, on one level or another something spiritual, and something ethical, a we-consciousness. We precisely lack this.

To put it more clearly, the culture encourages the opposite of meaningfulness, sacredness, wisdom, love, beauty. It encourages an impossibility: To find meaning in “individualism” or “individuality,” which is like saying the culture directs us to find wholeness in fragmentation, to find wisdom, love, and beauty in competition, materiality, property, distraction, degradation, medication, nihilism.

In such a situation, patriotism, religious dogmatism, and materialism itself all become medications, synthetic substitutions offered to placate the soul’s need for sacredness. In the case of the atheist in particular, scientific materialism holds the place of religious dogma, and patriotism becomes defense of the territory of reason—for reason is the encumbered “strict father”—against the ignorance and magical thinking of the masses. But all of us get swindled and seduced by materialism to give up on the sacredness of the world, to treat the world like a collection of matter that doesn’t really matter. Even the most religious among us can get infected with this kind of scientific materialism.

In such a cultural context, work becomes a rather intense symptom and source of symptoms, because the soul hungers for meaningful work, work connected with life and with love. And we cannot have deeply meaningful work in the ecologies of suffering cultivated by the dominant culture. Moreover, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, the “inability to take seriously the extent to which a pattern of consequences may take shape without having been preconceived” locks us into a pattern of insanity that can only be healed by madness.

We don’t fully comprehend this pattern of insanity, or it would break apart. But we can sense the loss of the meaningfulness of our work. We can’t sense the larger consequences of that loss of meaning and its intimate relation to the living World, but something in us senses the lack of real meaning. This explains why roughly 70% of workers are not engaged with their work, including over 17% who are “actively disengaged”.

The psychological/spiritual need for meaningful work—and how to establish meaningful work—has been little discussed in most of our university philosophy courses. We really don’t understand it, don’t understand how to talk to our students about the need to establish meaningful work, and what that would entail given our understanding of ecology and spirituality, and this ignorance fuels a great deal of violence and confusion.

For instance, it fuels a perpetuation of poverty, in part because the propaganda of the dominant culture has taught us not to trust poor people or out-of-work people. They will take advantage of us all if we help them!

The culture must keep us away from any holistic cultivation of compassion. Though we may use the word “compassion,” we focus on empathy, and we stay away from the concrete practices and teachings on compassion, because the culture depends on ill-being, fragmentation, a denial of the interwovenness of things, an encouragement of mistrust, misknowing, and an obsession with pain and pleasure, material gain and loss, praise and blame, and celebrity and social invisibility.

As a general rule, in this kind of culture, we must lack truly meaningful work (and what meaningful work we find may come with significant rationalizations, because the culture as a whole is so out of congruence with the conditions of life), and our repression of this, our refusal to confront the anger, depression, and despair over how meaningless our jobs are, or how once meaningful jobs or potentially meaningful jobs have become compromised and degraded . . . all of this makes us unwell—and we look in all the wrong places for a cure.

We can also note here that lack of meaningful work goes together with a dearth of compassion. Compassion for both ourselves and others demands that we approach work in a way that challenges the pattern of insanity. Work must attune us with life, not with narrow human agendas, and work must further the conditions of life, rather than degrade them.

James Hillman touches on some of these threads:

"The thing that therapy pushes is relationship, yet work may matter just as much as relationship. You think you’re going to die if you’re not in a good relationship. You feel that not being in a significant, long-lasting, deep relationship is going to cripple you or that you’re crazy or neurotic or something. You feel intense bouts of longing and loneliness. But those feelings are not only due to poor relationship; they come also because you’re not in any kind of political community that makes sense, that matters. Therapy pushes the relationship issues, but what intensifies those issues is that (a) we don’t have satisfactory work, or (b) . . . we don’t have a satisfactory political community.

r jobs." (Hillman and Ventura: 1993

This disengagement, this being trapped in petty, meaningless, and terribly authoritarian activity, along with our general level of pain and suffering—and the general collapse of meaning that goes altogether with the rise of nihilism and the degradation of ecologies that forms the context (and ironically the aim) of all our thinking—drives us into addictive behaviors—including, as we have suggested, the addiction to abstractions, intellectualism, knowledge, control, writing, analyzing, and all the other means of escape we try—even if it takes a confrontation with our own spiritual materialism to see this, to be able to honestly admit it.

We can say there is always going to be a cycle or set of cycles in life. But what does the cycle reinforce? What powers will live us in any given cycle?

Because we have become so materialistic and deluded, disconnected, fragmented, our cycles reinforce suffering, to a degree that has become basically traumatizing—and, oddly perhaps, because we have tended to reinforce suffering in general, for a long time now we have become increasingly materialistic, or at least increasingly prone to seek a kind of material escape through numbing medication and degrading consumption (rather than healing medicine and vitalizing consummation).

The main thing to realize about our materialism, particularly with respect to the magnificent bribe, is that materialism of any variety cannot make us happy. It is an attempt to eat shadows. It is not that we are “immaterial” beings, but that we aren’t “material” beings.

ith “wealth”). Kasser’s: 2002

His work shows that materialism seems to cause unhappiness, and that unhappiness itself can drive materialism, thus showing the well-put-togetherness of our suffering, and the feedback loop that it entails. These are findings that most spiritual traditions have reasoned through in some detail, and some spiritual traditions have already done a scientific verification of the unhealthiness of materialism by means of a science of mind. By carefully observing the effects of materialistic thoughts, aspirations, and actions, some traditions have made an empirical, experimental case for the total unworkability of a materialistic orientation to life.

This contrast may be a little confusing. If we say that a spiritual life is the only realistic chance we have for true fulfillment, and a materialistic life leads inevitably to ill-being (for ourselves and others), what are we saying?

Some people, in the dominant culture especially, tend to think of the contrast between the material and the spiritual as something like a contrast between “reality” and something airy-fairy (we sometime make this contrast through the dualities of science and spirituality, or the natural and the supernatural, or the rational and the mystical). But the sense of spirituality we have touched upon in our inquiry makes it clear that we should have something else in mind—indeed, close to the “opposite” in mind. The basic idea goes something like this: Spirituality refers to a commitment to bring something to realization for oneself and all beings (not merely to “believe” or to “know,” but to taste—Sophia as Sapienza), and to participate in life, to participate something meaningful that transcends the ego (a forgetting or decentering of the “self” as ego).

The transcendence we need demands a better way of knowing—a more skillful way of life. Spirituality fundamentally involves insight and intimacy—the presencing of wisdom, love, and beauty—and these are not “physical” “things”. They are not objects and are not material in any reasonable sense. Moreover, we have no indication that anything material can provide these experiences.

Thus, to think of the world in material terms, to pursue material objects or material gain, to exploit material resources, to do objective and materialist science, all of this will lead us into difficulty, because these gestures lead us away from our basic spiritual hunger, the hunger to know ourselves, to know the nature of reality, and to enjoy true peace and happiness, to enjoy wisdom, love, and beauty, and to practice-realize a meaningful existence. This basic hunger should make philosophy courses the most popular courses at any modern university, and make philosophy among the most common majors. What we have now should stand out as symptomatic of a most serious illness, a conditions-of-life-threatening illness.

We do not seem to have any way of making ourselves happy and healthy with a materialistic approach to life. But the basic dynamics of our culture rely on a materialistic approach to everything, and so we are encouraged into materialism and away from anything spiritual—and, to help the bondage function, the “spiritual” is placed at odds with the material, the scientific, the economic.

The scientist and the engineer are forced to feel like sell-outs if they pursue anything that sounds like “woo,” or like superstition or faith. It gets cast as weakness or some kind of affront to reason and rationality. The result is a spectrum of trauma and addiction from which all of us suffer, even if we are lucky enough to be at the less intense end of that spectrum.

The addiction researcher Bruce Alexander sums up the situation rather nicely:

"Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

"People adapt to this dislocation by concocting the best substitutes that they can for a sustaining social, cultural and spiritual wholeness, and addiction provides this substitute for more and more of us.

"History shows that addiction can be rare in a society for many centuries, but can become nearly universal when circumstances change—for example, when a cohesive tribal culture is crushed or an advanced civilisation collapses."

Alexander is famous for his work on Rat Park. As a young researcher, it suddenly dawned on him that the addiction research done with rats had them living alone in bare metal cages. That’s not a life for any being. In these terrible conditions, in which the rats were sometimes starved for 24 hours so that they would perform experiments in exchange for “food pellets,” they were also rigged up for addiction research. This involved surgically implanting a needle that would inject a drug into the rat every time they pressed a little lever. The rats quickly developed strong symptoms of addiction, and many concluded that drugs like heroin and cocaine are so addictive that, if we take them, we automatically want more. Alexander wondered if there might be more to the story.

Alexander and his team built “Rat Park” for the rats to live together in. They had plenty of rat friends to play with, as well as some toys and other sources of stimulation and exercise. It was not as exciting as life outside the lab, but it was way better than the standard setup. When the researchers made drugs available in the park, they found far lower levels of addiction than in the standard studies. Eventually, they came to the realization that human beings are more likely to take drugs and become addicted to them when they are, at one level or another, experiencing a “caged life”. Recall here what Ayahuasca offered Michael Pollan as a koan: Only an animal can be caged. He realized he had to sit with that, not to grasp after an “answer”. We do too. Our trauma, anxiety, and addiction are Ecological problems in a very broad sense, not issues of “individual” “psychology” or even “social” or “economic” maladies.

It’s important to see the ways in which our society isolates us and essentially creates a caged life for us all—a bare and barren Ecology, a degraded Landscape of the Soul that arises altogether with a degraded Landscape of the World.

In this culture of fear, stress, and trauma, we are taught to be suspicious of and competitive with each other—in other words, we are inducted into conquest consciousness. Writing about the troubling rise of loneliness (a disease of those who have made themselves “a distinct species,” those who lack a Nature-Culture that helps them practice-realize a sociosensual and hypersensual or ecosensual awareness, a Liminal Awareness engaged in intimate relationality), George Monbiot notes that,

"Ebola is unlikely ever to kill as many people as this disease strikes down. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity. Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents – all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut. We cannot cope alone.

"Yes, factories have closed, people travel by car instead of buses, use YouTube rather than the cinema. But these shifts alone fail to explain the speed of our social collapse. These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man – competition and individualism, in other words – is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage."

When “social” creatures (creatures of Interbeing, creatures of Interwovenness) are isolated, they cannot function at their best, which means they cannot as easily see into the ills of their society and envision alternatives. Nor are they enmeshed in loving connection with one another.

We long for love and connection—from the core of what we call our biology and psychology, and also from a spiritual center—but a materialistic approach must drive us apart—apart from ourselves, apart from each other, apart from other sentient beings (including countless Wild beings and the Wildness of Nature), apart from a Landscape and Nature, apart from Heaven and Earth, apart from Wisdom, Love, and Beauty—a materialistic approach to life must drive us apart from these most precious things, for otherwise we will discover that we have no abiding interest in material things, and the whole game will fall apart.

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If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the magical and sacred interwovenness of cosmos and psyche, or anything else we have discussed, send them in through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.