We Have Become Physically Dependent on Our Ignorance — But We Can Heal
Many of us sense the need for a profound change in our world—the need for something on the order of a spiritual or philosophical revolution, at personal and cultural scales. Some of us feel acutely aware of species extinction, soil degradation, pollution in our very blood, and the breakdown of ecologies we depend on—ecologies something in us actually loves, or longs to love. Others may deny climate collapse, and maybe even deny some of the largescale injustice that characterizes our way of life, but nonetheless feel like something has gotten disturbingly out of kilter.
Something in us senses that we have become out of tune with spiritual and ecological realities, and at the same time, we don’t know what it would mean to change. We face a situation very much like physical dependence on a drug. It’s one thing to quit alcohol if you just drink and don’t have physical dependence, but if you have a physical dependence on the drug and you try to quit cold turkey, it can kill you. You have to get weaned off.
Anyone interested in leadership, vision, creativity, education, culture change, or justice needs to think through this issue. We can’t establish sanity if we don’t understand our present state. When we wonder to ourselves how “those people” could have such confused beliefs, when we feel a sense of dread about the prospects for a thriving world, we need to think about the ways we have become dependent on a pattern of insanity.
Why do things seem so crazy, and why can’t we change? Why can’t we seem to arrive at sanity?
In his novel Naked Lunch, William Burroughs puts pour situation very well, with poetic license that might sound offensive these days (perhaps it helps to recognize that Burrows had become an addict), when he said that the difference between a junkie and an ordinary person is that a junkie metabolizes junk. They don’t metabolize food. If you take junk long enough, and you start to take enough of it, eventually it changes your entire metabolism.
We need to think of that broadly, and understand that it applies to addiction in general, with or without physical dependence. It’s not only that we become less interested in fruits and vegetables than we are in getting more heroin. That’s true enough. But we also need to think of how our addiction and dependence change the way we metabolize our whole experience.
Once we do that, we can begin to understand the kind of shift that Burrows is talking about—and the kind of spiritual revolution that all the sages are talking about, because the sages tell us we behave like beings who have become physically dependent on suffering and ignorance. That may sound strange, since we naïvely think of ignorance as dangerous and we think of truth and wisdom as a proper foundation for skillful activity.
But ignorance and suffering can have a survival function. For instance, using violence, deceit, and manipulation can get us a lot of what we think we want. It certainly comes with consequences, but the consequences might seem manageable to us.
That appearance of manageability arises in part because, in behaving like someone physically dependent on their suffering, that suffering mindset, that conquest consciousness, changes the way we metabolize our whole experience. That leads us to cling to the suffering we know, rather than seek a more vitalizing but unknown happiness and wellbeing grounded in wisdom, love, and beauty.
The great sages of all the wisdom traditions of the world have delivered this message to us as part of their teachings. But it’s not so easy for us to face. When we look at the present situation, we can recognize that somehow or other we depend on the system we have to get from one day to the next. We depend on it. And that makes something in us nervous—even terrified.
Something in us fears that this dependence means quitting our addiction may feel downright uncomfortable. In any case, it involves a lot of unknowns, and the unknown in and of itself can provoke anxiety and reactivity.
Our dependence does not mean the system is good. Our dependence doesn’t indicate a moral or ethical endorsement of the system. It just has to do with the fact that we have become physically dependent on something fundamentally toxic. We don’t always see that toxicity, in part because our culture becomes such a limited and limiting ecology that we don’t know what we’re missing, and something in us clings to the supposed comforts and conveniences to which our addiction and dependence attach.
It may help to consider the perspective of an Indigenous person. Jeanette Armstrong offers some insightful reflections:
[The dominant culture is] grounded in the belief that the Grandmother [Nature] is wild and needs taming and that Indigenous Peoples are wild and need taming.
First they tamed Grandmother to make things. Taking things, easy to take without giving back. Taming the land. Agriculture was a way first to increase human advantage to sustenance. However, it also increased populations that now needed more and more and so more land was taken from other living things.
Agriculture needed easier tools in order to produce more and more. Then it created a need of tools for war in order to keep the tamed lands and tools to take more land from more peoples. Then it was necessary to make more war tools so taking was easier.
It was necessary to make more tools and to teach people to run the new tools to feed their families. It was necessary to make them believe that they could be wealthy and thus happy. It creates junk-ease.
Tools were made to reach into every house with that in mind. To keep people believing in making more tools to make life easy, and to rush to use new tools and thus to believe they need such tools. And so it is necessary to tame more and more—necessary to make junk easier and easier and they might be happier.
We have junk-ease, arising from our junk-knowledge. The Keurig coffee machine typifies this sort of junk-ease: It’s junk, and it supposedly makes life easier. Indeed, a recent news story quotes a woman as saying about her single-use coffee machine, “That thing is my life.” She also said, “But I know that tossing the empty little cups in the garbage after I use them isn’t the most environmentally friendly thing to do.” Rather astonishing—to try and live with that sort of incoherence and incongruence.
We see here a clear sense of dependence: “That thing is my life.” The dependence may not be real, but we perceive it as such, and have no idea how we might live without it. Something in us refuses to think a better culture, with better versions of ourselves, into being.
Sometimes the dependence has more solidity, so to speak. Many of us would have a hard time adjusting to life without dentists and high-tech oral care products. Our paleolithic ancestors had far better oral heal than we do, and we have become dependent on the system we have to keep our teeth healthy. We could make a big shift, but it’s scary to contemplate.
With respect to the Keurig cups, Armstrong might say the woman who sees them as her life also senses “nature’s economic requirements of us as humans in the way we are,” but her relationship with time, her relationship with work, her entanglement in a thousand abstract agendas reinforces that “ever increasing . . . insulation from nature’s economic requirements.” The same news story reports that in 2015, the last year for which data were available, Keurig alone produced 10.5 billion of those little plastic cups, and other companies also produce them. Indeed, market share of single-serve machines has reached 41% of U.S. consumers!
This has led some people to consider banning the single serve cups. Of course, the pattern of insanity holds, and plenty of people will step in to tell us we needn’t worry, as in the case of Adam Minter, writing in the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Minter reasoned—he reasoned, mind you—using the figure of 8.5 billion plastic cups made in 2013, that this would come to a mere 25,500 metric tons of plastic, which amounts to .01 percent of the solid waste generated in the U.S. each year.
He notes that we throw out 860,000 tons of books each year. However, he fails to note that plastic cups do not biodegrade (though, some elements in books might not either).
But the insanity comes to the suggestion that 25,500 metric tons of plastic is okay (860,000 tons of books is no small symptom either, and we can’t blow dandelion seeds into the wind without some of them landing on a person with a book, a podcast, and a coaching practice, all of it with ecological consequences). Minter engages in unabashed rationalization of our insanity, thus presencing it rather directly in our minds—though not fully enough that we wake up from the nightmare.
A similar line of thinking arrived in our midst courtesy of the U.S. government, a system that serves the pattern of insanity in such a way as to keep us domesticated and hooked on junk-ease, a system that does everything it can to keep conquest consciousness going. From a recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Report:
Using the IPCC estimated carbon budget, as of 2011, approximately 51 percent, or 515 Gt C (1,890 Gt CO2), of this budget had already been emitted, leaving a remaining budget of 485 Gt C (1,780 Gt CO2) (IPCC 2013b). From 2011 to 2015, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, cement production, and land-use change totaled approximately 50 Gt C (183 Gt CO2), leaving a remaining budget from 2016 onwards of 435 Gt C (1595 Gt CO2) (CDIAC 2016). Under the No Action Alternative, U.S. passenger cars and trucks are projected to emit 23 Gt C (83 Gt CO2) from 2016 to 2100, or 5.2 percent of the remaining global carbon budget. Under Alternative 1, this projection increases to 25 Gt C (91 Gt CO2) or 5.7 percent of the remaining budget.
The emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet but would also require drastic reductions in all U.S. sectors and from the rest of the developed and developing world. In addition, achieving GHG reductions from the passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet to the same degree that emissions reductions will be needed globally to avoid using all of the carbon budget would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to substantially move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.
This makes for exceptionally logical thinking, and we should receive it as an astonishing artifact. Since improving emissions on U.S. cars won’t, by itself, save the climate from collapse, we shouldn’t bother doing it. We have our agendas. We can forget attunement with our home (or its Creator).
We depend on our cars, and we in some way or other depend on the pattern of insanity for our very existence. Most of us couldn’t eat without what the pattern of insanity provides, even if we shouldn’t always call that stuff food.
As we noted, our dependence does not mean the system is good. Some people get confused on this point. Since the pattern of insanity seems to deliver something better than having to live like troglodytes, we figure it must be good overall—enlightenment now! But these relative goods and our dependence on them simply do not add up to a moral or ethical good. They just reveal our dependence on something fundamentally incoherent.
That’s not a good thing. We don’t want to try to excuse the situation. We don’t want to perpetuate our profound addiction to alcohol because quitting it could kill us. That’s not an acceptable reason to stay addicted and dependent.
Someone might say to us, “Well, it won’t kill you to quit, but it might be really, really hard. You’re gonna go through a hell of a time.” That’s not enough reason to keep taking the poison. The fact that it’s going be uncomfortable to quit doesn’t make it wise, loving, or beautiful to stay with the addiction or the dependence.
And we seem to face that situation today. Something in us realizes we have become dependent and addicted to the pattern of insanity. And we sense that it might feel pretty uncomfortable to quit. Maybe not. Maybe it will feel far easier than we imagine, though, no matter how challenging it may actually be, we will certainly feel inconceivably better once we shake free from the addiction and dependence.
We have to remember that last bit, and also remember that our dread for potential discomfort so often fails to match actual experience. We put off the simplest things because we think they will suck.
We put off our taxes because we think it’s going to be such a hassle, we put off conversations because we think they’ll feel so uncomfortable or will create so much hostility, we stay in relationship because of how awful we think the breakup will be. And we find out again and again that the things we want to avoid aren’t as bad as we imagines, and that putting them off created far more suffering than confronting them would.
In any case, we can all understand why an addict should quit, even if the process will indeed feel like a kind of torture. We know they will come out the other side better able to truly know themselves, better able to realize their fuller potentials, and better able to live in accord with spiritual and ecological realities. There’s nothing more valuable, and so the short-term suffering to get there pales in comparison.
Though we have become addicted to, and even dependent on, the pattern of insanity that characterizes the dominant culture, we can dispel that addiction and dependence. The wisdom traditions invite us to see our present context as a bottom-of-the-barrel situation, the opportunity for a moment of clarity that leads us to seek our highest values instead of seeking what the pattern of insanity condones.
In a letter to William Wilson, founder of the famous 12-step program, Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung offered suggestions about alcohol that apply to our general crisis of LoveWisdom, values, attention, and intention; our seduction away from care, attending, and spiritual practice; our seduction into amusement, medication, distraction, addiction, and dependence:
His craving for alcohol was the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.
How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days?
The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism . . .
I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society, cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouses so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible.
. . . . You see, “alcohol” in Latin is “spiritus” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum. (1976: 623-5)
We all know the pattern of insanity distracts us from what matters most. We have projected goodness into the devil in the bottle we call by varied names: “progress,” “development,” technology, capitalism, the market. The first two words mirror the use of “spirit” with respect to alcohol: We want progress, we hunger for development—but we long for them in ways which the market, the philosophies of technology and capitalism, and the pattern of insanity in general can never provide. They only keep us in a stupor and a stumble toward perdition.
The time has come for a return to a spirit of wisdom as a way to dispel this spirit of ignorance. The great mystery awaits, and our soul hungers for union with it. We needn’t waste another day.