Twelve Thousand Years of Bad Habits

Due to circumstances which were part of our earlier evolutionary history, we humans began building civilizations which seemed to guarantee our survival and a more comfortable existence.

Our civilizations may indeed have achieved better survival and a more comfortable existence — for some people, at some times. But the same civilization also brought a structured hierarchy.

The structured hierarchy brought bureaucracy. Bureaucracy brought the need for centralized government, meant to operate a civilization smoothly. Unfortunately, the desire to live in a smoothly functioning civilized system brought a one-percent elite which operates the complex living systems and technological infrastructure of the ninety-nine-percent majority.

More often than not, this hierarchy became an authoritarian state, complete with powerful leaders and institutions whose power had corrupted them absolutely.

Despite several attempts to limit the great harm done by absolute power — including the Magna Carta and the development of Jeffersonian constitutionalism — the hierarchical system refused to break to allow for individual and national sovereignty.

The civilized system had developed some baked-in assumptions, and as long as those assumptions existed, individual and national sovereignty would remain subservient to the autocratic regime.

These assumptions were:

• A Newtonian clockwork universe in which a patriarchal deity remained in charge, and whose authority was reflected on Earth by the inviolate rule of a church and state which supposedly had the wellbeing of the ninety-nine percent at heart.

• A natural order which could feel right under the right mindset: God in His heaven, an autocratic church and state which have humanity’s best interests at heart, and a contented flock of well-kept humans.

Because no humans actually benefited from this order, the mindset was carefully crafted to offer the illusion that everything was safe, healthy, secure, and wonderful.

The whole system — which revealed its natural lack of safety and stability through many verifiable historical and modern examples — was a baked-in, enormous set of inaccurate suppositions.

From the late nineteenth century, the arrival of modern communication systems began transmitting more truthful information to many more people, and the enormity of this set of inaccurate suppositions became more obvious.

From the time of the American Civil War, the magnitude of these inaccuracies became exponentially understood — and being a perhaps twelve-thousand-year-old set of ingrained, established bad habits, it caused havoc.

As we might expect, twelve-thousand-year-old institutionalized, baked-in bad habits are not corrected in a few days, or in a few centuries. They take an enormously long time and great energy and resources to overcome.

We have been living through the mismatch between these false assumptions and the newly developing, more correct assumptions, based on more accurate science.

Although we can think of this as a power struggle between classes, it is more accurately viewed as an uncomfortable struggle to overcome both personal and societal twelve-thousand-year-old bad habits. Anyone who has ever had to unlearn bad habits, and to struggle to learn new and healthier ways of living, will have a good idea of the amount of energy and dedication required at a society level.

Thus our experience of living with increasing chaos and disorder since 1850 is placed in a more realistic perspective.

For our civilization, it means self-correcting both individual and civilization-wide mindsets, ingrained beliefs and practices and assumptions, across governments, institutions, and socioeconomic and psychosocial systems.

Our understanding has flipped the script: removing the concept of a patriarchal deity, or a patriarchal government, or a patriarchal one percent in control, which has our best interests at heart.

At the same time, we must adjust to the reality that humanity exists not in a state of absolute power and control over the universe, and is neither subservient to controlling forces — but exists, instead, in a give-and-take relationship.

Since the late nineteenth century we have begun to understand that we are part of the larger universe as a participant, and that any hope of control over our own reality lies in accepting this new relationship.

Control in a healthy relationship means existing in an exchange of energy between equals — an inversion of the old assumptions, which held that control comes from competition between unequals for dominance.

Control derived from a relationship based on competition for domination results in the complete loss of control or sovereignty for both parties. Such assumptions lead to the dark triad of psychopathology, where no one wins the battle and everyone loses — human life turned into an experience of battling for a supremacy which can never be attained.