Human Nature
Growth
"From this ridge, I can see that below and int he distance is a landscape licked by fire and swaths of trees dying from too little sun. These damaged habitats meet healthy sections of forest in borders that are sharp in places, wide in others. I have heard that things grow from their edges. For example, ecosystems expand from their borders, where they tend to host a greater diversity of life." - Joan Halifax, Standing at the Edge
The implications of this fundamental truth about growth, both in the environment and in the mental ecosystems of our minds are staggering. Might this be especially true of our creativity? Bathing in too much dopamine-soaked, algorithms screen time creates an internal poverty. A loss of the biodiversity of our spirit. Souls grow with the friction of our edges, sometimes in conflict, others in symbiosis. The friction of real spaces is the fuel that creates new insights and ideas in the rough boundaries between people, species, weather, states, everything. The digital world has been designed to be the solipsism of the seamless mirror. It's not AI that is draining us of our creative spark, it is the entirety of the digital landscape if we fail to keep to our edges.
And isn't this true too of therapy, where the edge between the therapist and the patient is where the healing happens? Digital spaces hide what we don't wish to see, but as Halifax also says: "...excluding any part of the larger landscape of our lives reduces the territory of our understanding." And I'd also say our growth.
Human Nature
More of a return than anything new. Just look at how we pull together when faced with natural disasters like the massive storm and flooding in North Carolina. Look at how living indigenous cultures live and work together for common purpose. We are not naturally this psychotic, misanthropic state we've become.
This state of being is the newer thing. We need a return.
Perhaps our more recent history looks this way because history books have been traditionally written by the rich and powerful. Studies have shown the rich tend to have lower empathy, higher narcissism (i.e. misanthropes) and beliefs cherry picked half-truths like "survival of the fittest (of course believing they are the fittest)".
So I wonder, if we weren't bathed in this selective and sick version of humanity created by the most inhuman among us, installed like a faulty operating system, might we already have achieved this?
Hope in Bad Times
Howard Zinn writing about Fannie Lou Hamer, civil rights activist, and her exercise of moral imagination after enduring horrific injustice and suffering:
"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history of not only cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the courage to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."