Sep 7, 2022·edited Sep 7, 2022Liked by Jared Yates Sexton
Jared, thank you. This post is so good that I literally cried. And I subscribed. I'm not sure for how long because I'm struggling with some bills right now, but you deserve as much support as possible. People need to read your work. I'm seeing so many people still in denial, believing that Trump is the beginning and the end of the crisis in our country, and they don't understand that what is happening now was only a matter of time. All it takes is a lot of anger, a dose of grievance politics, and a demagogue like Trump, who has convinced millions of people that he, a privileged white knuckle-dragger, is "fighting for you." History repeats itself.
“What we are dealing with here is a moment rife with possibility. Because when we realize exactly how these things function, how obviously they are corrupted and corruptible, what also becomes obvious is the need for reform and progress. . . . Because with this level of corruption it’s not even a question anymore whether it might be time to try something else.”
Over a half century ago, 19 years old, ‘Summer of Love’, 1967, I stood on the back stoop of a third-floor walk-up in Old Town, Chicago, gazing at the early dawn glistening around the towers of the Loop thinking, “Social reality is a construct and, as such, it can be deconstructed and reconstructed to manifest whatever social reality we want. Which begs the question, what social reality *do* we want? Apparently, it isn’t the one we currently occupy. Which begs even more questions such as, ‘Whose social reality *is this* anyway?’” That I was also coming down from a 250µ dose of Purple Owsley no doubt significantly influenced this insightful train of thought.
What I’ve learned since then is that the problem isn’t what we think it is. It isn’t *what* we think — but *how* we think.
Less than three years after that early morning revelation, one of the authentic geniuses of the previous millennium, Gregory Bateson, put it this way:
“Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.
“If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
“If this is your estimate of your relation to nature *and you have an advanced technology,* your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.
“If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical *reductio ad absurdum* of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that *I* don’t know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. *I* am cutting down the tree. “Myself” is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.”
“The step to realizing—to making habitual—the other way of thinking so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.
“And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.” *
And so, now, a half century later, here we are — twenty years beyond where Bateson easily predicted we would be: Perpetually on the eve of self-destruction. Who among us has learned to “think in the new way?” Who among us even has a glimmer of understanding about what this new way of thinking is?
Your analysis, Jared, is accurate so far as it goes — which isn’t nearly far enough. That is because what is failing is not merely the State but the entire foundation of Western thought from which it historically emerged and out of which we constructed it. You speak of troubling the state of things as if this ‘state of things’ exists independent of yourself; as if troubling “it” would be no trouble to you at all.
Yet we are all troubled one way and another, aren’t we? Increasingly so, too, in recent years — with no end in sight. The political demystification you write so eloquently about scratches the surface of an itch that plaques all of us. Unfortunately, scratching will not rid us of this plaque. Only revelation and subsequent transformation — learning to think in the new way — can do that.
* Excerpt from:
“Form, Substance, and Difference,” published in Gregory Bateson’s, “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” 1972, Chandler Publishing Co.; Ballantine Books, Random House, New York.
“Form, Substance, and Difference,” was the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture, delivered January 9, 1970, under the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics. Reprinted from the General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37, 1970, with permission of the Institute of General Semantics.
If this sets the new (lowest, to date) standard, then at some point everyone in power or seeking it --left, right, center, whatever -- will adhere to this wretched dress code in the name of "getting things done." A collapsing state, indeed.
Jared, thank you. This post is so good that I literally cried. And I subscribed. I'm not sure for how long because I'm struggling with some bills right now, but you deserve as much support as possible. People need to read your work. I'm seeing so many people still in denial, believing that Trump is the beginning and the end of the crisis in our country, and they don't understand that what is happening now was only a matter of time. All it takes is a lot of anger, a dose of grievance politics, and a demagogue like Trump, who has convinced millions of people that he, a privileged white knuckle-dragger, is "fighting for you." History repeats itself.
“What we are dealing with here is a moment rife with possibility. Because when we realize exactly how these things function, how obviously they are corrupted and corruptible, what also becomes obvious is the need for reform and progress. . . . Because with this level of corruption it’s not even a question anymore whether it might be time to try something else.”
Over a half century ago, 19 years old, ‘Summer of Love’, 1967, I stood on the back stoop of a third-floor walk-up in Old Town, Chicago, gazing at the early dawn glistening around the towers of the Loop thinking, “Social reality is a construct and, as such, it can be deconstructed and reconstructed to manifest whatever social reality we want. Which begs the question, what social reality *do* we want? Apparently, it isn’t the one we currently occupy. Which begs even more questions such as, ‘Whose social reality *is this* anyway?’” That I was also coming down from a 250µ dose of Purple Owsley no doubt significantly influenced this insightful train of thought.
What I’ve learned since then is that the problem isn’t what we think it is. It isn’t *what* we think — but *how* we think.
Less than three years after that early morning revelation, one of the authentic geniuses of the previous millennium, Gregory Bateson, put it this way:
“Freudian psychology expanded the concept of mind inwards to include the whole communication system within the body—the automatic, the habitual, and the vast range of unconscious process. What I am saying expands mind outwards. And both of these changes reduce the scope of the conscious self. A certain humility becomes appropriate, tempered by the dignity or joy of being part of something much bigger. A part—if you will—of God.
“If you put God outside and set him vis-à-vis his creation and if you have the idea that you are created in his image, you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration. The environment will seem to be yours to exploit. Your survival unit will be you and your folks or conspecifics against the environment of other social units, other races and the brutes and vegetables.
“If this is your estimate of your relation to nature *and you have an advanced technology,* your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die either of the toxic by-products of your own hate, or, simply, of over-population and overgrazing. The raw materials of the world are finite.
“If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical *reductio ad absurdum* of our old positions destroy us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. Let me say that *I* don’t know how to think that way. Intellectually, I can stand here and I can give you a reasoned exposition of this matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think “Gregory Bateson” is cutting down the tree. *I* am cutting down the tree. “Myself” is to me still an excessively concrete object, different from the rest of what I have been calling “mind.”
“The step to realizing—to making habitual—the other way of thinking so that one naturally thinks that way when one reaches out for a glass of water or cuts down a tree—that step is not an easy one.
“And, quite seriously, I suggest to you that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit.” *
And so, now, a half century later, here we are — twenty years beyond where Bateson easily predicted we would be: Perpetually on the eve of self-destruction. Who among us has learned to “think in the new way?” Who among us even has a glimmer of understanding about what this new way of thinking is?
Your analysis, Jared, is accurate so far as it goes — which isn’t nearly far enough. That is because what is failing is not merely the State but the entire foundation of Western thought from which it historically emerged and out of which we constructed it. You speak of troubling the state of things as if this ‘state of things’ exists independent of yourself; as if troubling “it” would be no trouble to you at all.
Yet we are all troubled one way and another, aren’t we? Increasingly so, too, in recent years — with no end in sight. The political demystification you write so eloquently about scratches the surface of an itch that plaques all of us. Unfortunately, scratching will not rid us of this plaque. Only revelation and subsequent transformation — learning to think in the new way — can do that.
* Excerpt from:
“Form, Substance, and Difference,” published in Gregory Bateson’s, “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” 1972, Chandler Publishing Co.; Ballantine Books, Random House, New York.
“Form, Substance, and Difference,” was the Nineteenth Annual Korzybski Memorial Lecture, delivered January 9, 1970, under the auspices of the Institute of General Semantics. Reprinted from the General Semantics Bulletin, No. 37, 1970, with permission of the Institute of General Semantics.
If this sets the new (lowest, to date) standard, then at some point everyone in power or seeking it --left, right, center, whatever -- will adhere to this wretched dress code in the name of "getting things done." A collapsing state, indeed.