A systems view of biological health

Section 1: Introduction

5 : What has gone wrong?

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.

It may perhaps be necessary to begin where we are standing and not some abstract idealised place. So I have also taken a little time to frame the goal – at least partially - in more culturally familiar terms – i.e. " What has gone wrong (so we might address it)?"

You don’t actually need to read this part!

Our 21st Century Western techno-industrial society has ended up with many belief systems about how the body-mind works that are incorrect; and has created a physical and social environment vastly different from the one our nervous system evolved in. Its almost as if you buy a new washing machine and the supplied instructions for use lead to a way of operating it that brings about its untimely and unnecessary self-destruction. But with a washing machine it would be more obvious – "This machine works best when standing in six inches of dirty water. Add two large bricks and a handful of screws, nuts and bolts to every load of laundry. If it stops working then hit it with the biggest hammer you can find and stab the control board with a screwdriver".

The net effect is that – relative to our hunter-gatherer ancestors - it is far easier to become both physiologically and psychologically (mentally-emotionally) overwhelmed. And then, starting from that state of overwhelm, far less easy to reset the nervous system back to safety. Although the tendency is to think of trauma with a capital "T" (a major violent incident), trauma as overwhelm occurs all the time when the total instantaneous demands on all of the physical / homeostatic / mental / emotional / immunological (etc.) resources of the body-mind crosses a certain threshold - and momentarily exceeds the person’s available reserves or resilience. It is true that can be caused by one big event. But it happens far more often with an accumulation or combination of relatively small everyday stressors that reduce the spare adaptive resource to critically low levels.

Similarly, dissociation may have a clinical (psychiatric) definition, but it is also a far wider phenomenon that is extensively endemic in Western culture at both clinically recognisable and subclinical (i.e. less visible) levels. We say there is a "problem with embodiment" – meaning that dissociation and disembodiment are rife. Trauma and dissociation both have similar causes, arise in largely overlapping circumstances, and are both usually residual overwhelm adaptations that have not re-normalised to the reality of the present moment. The result is that – for most people walking round in Western society - some parts of the organism of a single human being are adapting to "now", whist others are adapting to "then" (or many "then"s). This fragmented state results in a loss in biological efficiency, a reduction in physical-mental-emotional resilience, and a degradation of sensory capacity along with a subtle but pervasive reduction in quality of relationality and empathy.

Many of these stressors are cultural and specific to our Western techno-industrial society at this particular time in history - such that we live in a far more demanding environment than our stone-age ancestors, and have far fewer personal resources and adaptive choices available to deal with them. Probably the beginning of everything was that after a few hundred thousand years walking we reached the edge of the world, and from then on it started to get smaller, more cramped. Faced (from no less than 25,000 years ago) with too many people and insufficient space to hunt and gather in the most fertile parts of the known world, static agriculture started to look like a good thing, which then accumulated its own particular problems.

The stressors faced by many people in the modern developed world that were not present 100,000 years ago include :

• Relatively sedentary lifestyles [1] - our bodies are not fully used[2].
• Massive reduction in food diversity – both in terms of range of species (Bronze Age remains indicate foraging included well over 200 plant species[3]) and genetic diversity (agriculture has increasingly hybridised plants to improve certain qualities – but that has in turn also reduced the phytochemical variety). The modern diet in particular includes refined foods and poor quality fats. All of which lead to a substantial reduction in gut microbiome health [4] with many associated health implications[5].
• Tokenisation of resources. Instead of being able to just go and dig up a root or hunt a deer in a vast and abundant landscape, we rely on tokens (money). In a token-free world, everyone has more or less equal access, resources stay where they are, and debt (having relied on someone else’s generosity) is a glue that is beneficial to the community. Tokens tend to facilitate a constant drain on communal wealth out into a few hands, debt increases that drain; and anyone can run out of tokens whilst living next to plenty. Communities form out of a common need and purpose, so tokens also degrade relational community interactions into impersonal transactions.
• An exponential increase in environmental pollution from heavy metals, radionuclides, man-made organic chemicals and sensory pollution (light, noise[6]). Airborne micro-particulate pollution [7] particularly challenges the immune system because it absorbs so easily through lung endothelium. These chemicals include ubiquitous neuroendocrine disruptors and antibiotics (substantial amounts even in tap water, absorbed into food from plastic packaging, and in home environments – e.g. fire retardants in all soft furnishings). This unnatural background environmental load has a dysregulating effect on the body’s internal system of homeostasis, communication and immune identity.
• Manipulation of information (advertising, propaganda, social media algorithms, etc.) and globalisation of news networks, presenting us with "bad news" from everywhere. Our nervous system evolved to deal with what is immediately in front of us in our immediate environment [8] and there were different and simpler requirements for exercising trust vs caution.
• Modern techno-industrial culture encourages a problem-solving left-brain mindset, (categorising, separating, everything is already known) focussing on thinking about what is wrong[9], including a medicalised way of thinking of the body. A problem-solving view of the body sees it as a set of illnesses waiting to happen and a liability. Right-brain activities (playful exploration, being comfortable with the unknown – so new things can be discovered) including regular access to a sense of awe or wonder or spiritual humility or ineffable connection – are generally less valued. The English language is particularly fond of of nouns (things we already know and have classified) compared to verbs (processes, relationships). The cerebral approach to Life adds to the problem by amplifying an already existing artificial separation between body and mind. Anyone thinking a lot or engaged in non-organic thought patterns (any kind of programming or human-computer interface) is already forcing their physiology to live in at least two worlds.
• We no longer live in a natural ecosystem but have created a parallel human "meta-"ecosystem - visible in most Hollywood films, books, popular media, in which humans are all that exist. The "apex predator" in the entire world may be the human being, but in the human world it is the warlord, the King, the Emperor, the dictator, and more recently the billionaire.
• Our sensory nervous system has evolved to interact with a living landscape, and we evolved sleeping on the Earth, under the stars. The separation of human and other ecosystems has also removed an unfathomable layer of relationality from our daily lives. This compound loss of biological and geographic co-identity is so distant that it literally takes months of sleeping continuously outdoors to recover some of the embodied presence it brings, and to be able to perceive the previous state as being deficient in some specific, important and irreplaceable quality. Human-constructed environments are relatively fixed combinations of individual "things". As such they are less stimulating in the right kind of way and more stimulating in the wrong kind of way – compared to a natural ecosystem environment that has grown of and out of itself through an infinite number of relational interactions.
• Human societal structure has shifted, and much of the support it gave from birth onwards is no longer present – e.g. the separation of home and work, adults and children – partly as a consequence of legislation following the appalling working (and living) conditions imposed by coal-fed industrial economies. The general societal attitudes to babies and the medicalisation of birthing practices may bring benefits in terms of less maternal and neonatal mortality – but they are not designed to the needs of a baby’s nervous system. They could be so designed, but are not. We are born into a fundamentally dysfunctional and unsupportive family/social culture[10]. Rather like the loss of connection to the Living Earth, it has to be substantially in excess of its already dysfunctional baseline for any dysfunction to be recognised as such. In contrast, our nervous system evolved when we moved around in small integrated extended family groups. Everyone relied on everyone else, children were raised, protected, educated, nourished by the entire family/tribe, and other humans were sources of support and resilience.
• We have accumulated generational trauma and overwhelm from pretty well the whole of human post-hunter-gatherer history, but mainly from the industrial wars of the past 120 years - that affects us epigenetically[11], and also lies heavily in the collective psyche[12]. These are present in many different layers - as epigenetic shifts in methylation, as subconscious memories, sometimes as profound fragmentations of the "soul". Furthermore, babies copy their parent’s body-usage as one way of learning how to inhabit and use the body they are growing, and sometimes accidentally copy the dysfunctional imprinted patterning.
• Poverty is now endemic in almost all countries. This is a major survival stress that also directly affects the ability to respond intelligently[13].
• Operations, anaesthetics and morphine/cannabinoid/cocaine-derived painkillers may be life-saving medical interventions. However, the body-mind does not always like them. It can interpret the operation as "being eaten". The anaesthetics and painkillers may sometimes induce chronic overwhelm-like states.
• "Problems" faced by hunter-gatherer communities would on the whole be human-level, be faced by the entire community, and the response would involve physical action – there would be very little vicarious traumatisation. Wall-to-wall (largely "bad") news and awareness (or even subconscious awareness) of global-scale issues such as climate change and war, many decisions affecting our lives being made by other people – politicians, administrators, employers – inevitably reduces any sense of feeling (or being) "in-control-enough".
• There is a cultural tendency to treat the human body and every other living thing in a "colonial" way – if something is not working as we would wish, we just manipulate it or chop it or change it until it’s "better", assuming that what we think is better must inevitably be better. This ingrained habit of forceful interference often includes an inability to comprehend that any other form of action is possible. Colonial attitudes to the self, to others (psychopathy / sociopathy) and to the Living world are an extension of the Left-cortex tool-making capacity. Every living creature changes its environment to better suit its needs. But our amazing tool-making brain is capable of seeing its own body, other people and other Life as just something else that can be used and manipulated, and valued in that measure. This is an a priori state of being in Western culture, but is a choice we made sometimes in the distant past and not a biological "given". Societies where this does not happen have a conscious lived relationship with the whole of Life as a sacred being in its own right.
• … and many other factors besides

All of these factors (more stress mentally, emotionally, immunologically, biochemically etc; less support from extended family and society and societies that metaphorically eat their own children; more baseline inherited stress adaptations and memories; etc.) - mean that overwhelm is a common state.

Once overwhelm occurs, our societal mindsets and lack of understanding of the body (because we have ideas about the body more than relying on positive lived experiences of it) tend to disrupt the evolved pathway that resets us from danger to safety.

Trauma-overwhelm is therefore a societal norm, and therefore largely invisible because it is everywhere, only becoming visible when its degree exceeds our threshold of recognition. Even as far back as the 1950’s Krishnamurti felt the need to say something like :

Heaven knows how much more that is the case today.

Systemic overwhelm that has not reset (by returning to a sense of being safe-enough and in-control-enough) has been recognised and described as "Trauma" since roughly the 1980’s.

The effect of overwhelm leading to chronic trauma tends to be – for modern humans - cumulative not just in one lifetime, but across generations, and is endemic. It disrupts the healthy organisation of the entire physiological body and body-mind (and from there to families, communities and entire societies) - by creating pockets of overwhelm that are frozen in time, still attempting to deal with life-threatening emergencies that happened in the past. These pockets (or fragments) co-exist within the rest of the body-mind that is (ideally) better calibrated to its immediate environment – but they also tend to make the rest of the body mind have difficulty in fully calibrating itself to real levels of immediate safety. This fractured, fragmented state is far less efficient in the task of self-regulation, which in turn causes:

• the sensory system to be both hyperaroused in some areas and numbed in others – with substantial personal variation in the specific proportions of these opposite states. They are often "invisible" because they quickly become familiarised if they do not cause severe distress.
• a de-coupling of subtle but important layers of communication in the body, resulting in many mental and physical illnesses (as documented e.g. by Robert Scaer[15])
• a reduction in quality of relationality – between the mind and body, socially, and with the living environment

These effects have increasingly tended to reinforce themselves through societal violence and through other societal patterns, behaviours, expectations and institutions – all of which have grown out of endemic activation and empathic numbness. The continuous accumulation of wealth and the "growth economy" (including usury) is itself a violent act if one looks at the degradation of human life and environment that inevitably underlies it. But it too has become normalised through a collective dissociative numbness. Even small wealth-accumulators (pensioners such as myself relying on income from an invested pension fund) are happy being unaware of the ways their investment is being used or the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources that underpins it to return an interest on invested capital. Such as cash crops irrigated by water "mined" from reserves that are irreplaceable - because they fell as rain tens of thousands of years ago.

This cycle of "overshoot" is not a new one and its origins go back to well before the Roman Empire. Neither is it unique to European or Western culture – so the climate on the Eastern edge of the Kalahari was already made much drier by human deforestation only 100 or so years before Europeans settled Southern Africa. As a society we are all, as individuals, stuck like flies in its demonic logic. If we are to become healthy as an entire society, and the entire Earth is to return to health as a bio-geological homeostatic organism, there has to be some change in the tokenised money system and attitudes towards wealth. And that will really only happen as one person at a time becomes less dissociated and as a consequence regains more embodied, lived, somatically experienced empathy with the Living world.

As a society, if not empathically numb then we particularly tend to focus on what is "wrong" so that we can fix it – a pathology-oriented, survival-driven way of seeing. And if you can appreciate the irony, in describing the "problem" (so we can "fix it") - this is exactly what I have done in the above few pages[16].