A systems view of biological health

Section 5: Putting it into Context

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

I'm going to briefly cover a few wider issues - related to the current global situation.

All the material presented in this online book - the theory, the practical applications - have a context within which they are relevant, and as such also have distinct limitations.

We live in a difficult age, and enumerating those difficulties is rather painful. We have mis-managed our one-and-only planetary home to the extent that everything is going to change and make it a far less hospitable place to live. The timeframe for those changes is probablky less than most people realise. There is enough in the world as it stands to cater for everyone's needs. But a historical accumulation of greed has resulted in all but a few tiny isolated countries entering resource overshoot well before the end of each year [1]. We are using up and/or squandering and destroying more resources of all kinds - food, soil, forest, metals and minerals (etc) than can be sustained for any significant length of time. Add to that pollution - CO2, plastics, man-made chemicals and waste, effuent from farming and human cities - that further degrade the environment and create long-term changes, and extinctions [2] that are rapidly degrading the capacity of the world's ecosystems to remain resilient and sustainable.

It is in reality a fruitless exercise cataloguing all of the ways that we have got it wrong, because the most pressing question is - how do we turn that round and get it right? i.e. live in a manner that ensures we and our planet (and all of the life-forms we co-inhabit it with) have a future?

There are many possible answers to that question, mainly involving better technology (even to the point of colonisation of Mars). But the fundamental issue is that we, as humans, have philosophically removed ourselves from the rest of the Living world - thinking that we are separate from it, living as if we can be separate from it. To the extent that we have created human ecosystems - human jungles - in which humans occupy various niches in a societal cultural pseudo-ecology. It is extraordinarity easy see our attitude to the ecosystem of the Living world by witnessing the various ways in which humans abuse and destroy and exploit other humans in the human-created ecosystem of families, countries, corporations and all the other various forms of human activity. I have heard “we should treat animals better because then we would treat humans better”. It is true that this might take us some distance - but this is still not the correct “level” to make changes, because there are underlying reasons that would remain that cause us to act in this manner. Reasons more to do with why humans can behave so badly, carelessly, vindictively, destructively towards eacxh other and to other living creatures.

Of those reasons, it is possible to say that...

1. Even in the early bronze age (when global human population was only a few million) it was recognised that there were too many people, putting pressure on resources. The solution offered in Indio-European lands at this time was war, to both expropriate more resources for the victors and to reduce population.
2. Civilisations that separated themselves from the Earth through agriculture and other forms of technology became powerful with the capacity to defeat and assimilate other peoples. Thus, technology, separation from the Living world, accumulation of wealth, and turning living creatures (including humans) and land into a form of wealth - don't necessarily have to be connected, but historically they all tend to go hand in hand.
3. That conceptual shift - the objectification of Life and Earth into a commodity - requires a similar transactional shift in our relationship with our bodies. The body is the medium with which our awareness interfaces with the Living world. So that process of commodification of the outside world also distorts the relationship to the inside world - and is essentially dissociative. If we could feel what we are doing to other people or to the E\arth, then - we simply would not do anything violent at all.
4. Once there is dissociation (numbness) then there is less and less sense of what is being done, and the first layer of dissociative disconnection is the creation of a strong distinction between I and other. Other is only distinct from I when the senses that say otherwise have been lost - dissociated first and then the first layer of dissociation allows them to be further suppressed as inconvenient weaknesses. Then when enough people have lost sufficient sense of universal connection, the senses that dissolve I/other can even be considered to be evil, or signs of non-human-ness. And cultural practices in birthing and child rearing, education and so on tend to be chosen in a way that further amplifies that dissociation, because it is not possible to be non-dissociative and fully patrticipate in a culture perpetrates this amount of violence on itself and on Life in general. Settler-colonialism (the taking of vast areas of land by believing that its previous inhabitants were not human - and therefore subject to human-livestock relationship), slavery, etc - are a direct result of the ability to compartmentalise I/other.
5. Loss of body conbnection further makes it harder and harder to feel what is right - both in our own actions and those of others. Ethical, compassionate actions and feelings have a certain quality that is subtle - loss of awareness of that level of feeling makes ethics a mental activity and also means that truth and lies can only be discriinated by the mind. From here, everything goes downhill. Maybe not for a few generations, but eventually numbness allows violence - which then causes more numbness. So now dissociation - a loss of felt/experienced (instead of “mentally imagined”) sense of connection to the flow of Life becomes endemic, normalised, and all societal norms take it for granted. Of course we need an army and a police force, and courts and prisons, and treatment for mental health problems.

So the online book I have provided is one answer to all of that. Obviously not the only answer, because many inputs are necessary, and some will work for some people and some for others, and as we all progress on the journey of findiong ourselves again different needs will become apparent along the way.