Living through this Age of Intellectual Regression
By: Christopher Laine
Tags: Current Events, Life Lessons, Philosophy, Psychology, Advice

Living through this Age of Intellectual Regression

Evolving as a species is a “two steps forward, one step back” affair

Photo by Gratisography from Pexels

We were never as good as we are now.

I know. Cue the huzzing roar of a couple billion people on the interwebs calling out in anger, shock, indignation, consternation. That statement of mine, it is contentious to say the least.

Hear me out.

Yes, the world is a friggin’ mess.

Everyone is yelling and no one is listening.

Racists are calling for violence once more, calling for their own race states to be created.

Imperial powers are rising up to strangle their people and vie for power.

Deniers of science, of reason, of common sense are popping up like daisies. Anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers, people who believe the crap on Goop. It’s like someone threw a moron parade and no one wants to be left out.

The economy and stability of our commerce is on a teetering edge that never seems to stop teetering.

Violence of every kind is all around us: religious, sexist, homophobic, racist, just to name a few.

Our planet is seriously unwell because of us, and is about to hand us our collective hats as it bears climate hell down upon us. Our wonderful cohabitants of said planet suffer and die in the millions, many bordering on extinction, all because of us.

And yet with few to no exceptions, we’ve been here before. As a species, we have visited all these ugly, cruel, unhelpful, and despicable places many, many times in our past.

Worse than before?

You might argue “Yeah, but not this bad”, and to some extent, I’d agree. We are up against a pretty big mess, with a lot of mess rising around our collective ankles.

And yet it all comes back to which mess is the biggest.

On the ecological front, let’s accept it. We fucked up, and we need to put this right. No matter what a bunch of corporate polluters and their toady politicians say, more and more people are woke to the planetary losing game which we’ve instigated with our stupidity and greed.

On other mess fronts, if you peruse my above “shit storm” list, you’ll likely note that all of the other items were worse at some time in the past. Unlike our predecessors, we have instant informational access to how bad things are, but assuredly the bad things we are facing have seen more dire times in the days of Yore.

Perhaps not us the living, but the human race has seen empires rise and fall; seen racists, sexists, homophobes, and murderers run the earth. Our species has seen violent, turbulent, terrifying times the likes of which we cannot imagine, especially in the modern industrialised world.

By comparison to what our ancestors faced, as a species, we have assuredly taken steps forward. So why are we seeing so many steps back?

Regression Therapy and you: Finding that old pain and dealing with it

In the world of psychology, there is a form of therapy known as regression therapy. Here’s a decent definition, courtesy of goodtherapy.org

Regression therapy is an approach to treatment that focuses on resolving significant past events believed to be interfering with a person’s present mental and emotional wellness.

We all have past pain, things of our earlier years which (either consciously or unconsciously) we can’t or won’t deal with. Pain is not something we want to face, especially those pains from our younger years. We all have them, and we all avoid dealing with them.

Photo by Kat Jayne from Pexels

The irony is that once you actually DO deal with them, you feel a shit tonne better. It’s not easy. It’s not pleasant. Yet out the other side of the dark cave you emerge, healed in some way that could never have healed before.

Now, I don’t believe this kind of therapy is just for individuals. I believe what we’re seeing (once again) is a moment in human history where we all collectively need to deal with our pain and our anger and our festering wounds of the past.

And a lot of us don’t want any part of that nonsense, nosiree.

The Collective Unconscious and how we are an emerging single big basket case

The collective unconscious, a term introduced by psychiatrist Carl Jung, is a form of the unconscious (that part of the mind containing memories and impulses of which you’re not even aware) common to all of us as a whole, originating in the inherited structure of our human brains.

The collective unconscious is distinct from your personal unconscious, which is made up of the experiences you’ve had yourself.

According to Jung, our shared collective unconscious contains these things called archetypes, or universal primordial images and ideas. So I might be a lady in Taiwan, and you might be a transgender in Sri Lanka, and that unassuming figure over there might be a guy from Texarkana, but all of us share many of the same fundamental images and impulses. Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, delves deeply into this realm in his work, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

We all are, in a way, connected to one another through these fundamental images and ideas. We have a common root, as it were, and as such we all deal with pain and past woes in similar enough ways. The person changes, their circumstances are unique, but the shared imagery and ideas, those are common to all of us.

If we step back and look at us, as a species, we can begin to see us as a whole. We are a lot of little personalities in a much bigger one, one which is amassed from our collective experiences, our collective history and pain and triumphs and dreams. With the advent of instant communications, we are becoming more than a collective unconscious, but also a collective conscious. We can now voice our opinions and thoughts to one another on a grand scale in nigh real-time. We can speak about our past, to share our feelings of today, our hopes for tomorrow, and our troubles of yesterday.

The emergence of collective consciousness. Photo by Anastasia Dulgier on Unsplash

So what we see every day now is this rumbling of all of the human race learning to talk together as a sort of a single mind. It’s a disorganised, chaotic mess, this mind, but it is a mind. We all are one of the voices in this big chattering brain, each playing some small part in its overall evolution, for good or for ill.

What we’re seeing is a lot of people driving to deal with our collective past, our pain, our personal take on our shared history and heritage, and how these different portions of this big mind (call them people, call them cultures, call them religions or nation states, it’s just a matter of perspective) are going to deal with tomorrow while still trying to reconcile our past.

And like I said, some of us are NOT up for that.

Intellectual Regression: The perfect dodge

If you’ve ever known someone who is emotionally damaged (say, for example, everyone), there’s this standard trick the affected plays so as not to have to deal with their pain: They dodge. They change the subject, they snap at you, they come up with some other thing which they claim is really what’s bothering them. They focus in on something else; they tell lies to themselves about their situation and the past, all in the name of the Dodge.

Dodge with all your might

Like I said, nobody likes dealing with pain, so dodging is a last-ditch effort for an out. Why face your pain, when you can take up skydiving, or obsessively clean your bathroom, or have an affair? Why own up to your previous cruelty or shoddy behaviour when you can just justify it in your head and march on, ignoring all else?

This is how we cope on an individual level.

On a global level, people do similar things to avoid having to deal with past pain and suffering, to not have to face the ugly truths about who we are or what we’ve done.

There’s the need to put things back to a place where none of this was an issue. Why talk about the wrongs of the past, or the issues we truly face now, or even how we are killing our own world in order to race after money? There was a time when none of this was an issue, when we didn’t think about this kind of crap, when things were rosier, a false past which we’ve collectively concocted to be full of a better way of life.

The pain of the past can be nullified if you can find some other reason for it: Some conspiracy of some sort, some cause you can believe in, because it just eats at you that people can’t see vaccinations are the cause of diseases, or that NASA is behind a 2000 year old conspiracy to hide the flatness of our world.

The wrongs we suffered, as well as the ones which we have committed, they can be set aside for now. Right now, the real cause of our unhappiness are those uppity women, those gays, those right-wing types, those immigrants. They are why we’re really unhappy. If it wasn’t for them, it’d be all roses, right? Maybe a gun is needed to sort their kind out.

Why honestly talk about our shared history (one strewn with violence, slavery, and death on so many sides, btw), when you can just scream into the internet void, or click likes, or share things?

We elect those who will make us feel strong again, make things like they were again, who say the things that justify and echo our excuses. We turn away from what makes us uncomfortable or upset, whatever that is, and turn only back to what is comforting and safe. We are forever looking for some way out.

Dodge, dodge, dodge. We take every opportunity to regress not emotionally, where we might actually have a chance to understand our collective unconscious better, but intellectually, culturally. We regress to less evolved habits, to ways that don’t frighten us, don’t challenge us. We want to understand a world through falsehoods, because even a comforting lie is a form of comfort.

Remember: this isn’t the first time we’ve done this. We do this every so often as a species. We don’t want to grow. We don’t want to evolve, or at least some portion of us don’t want it. Every once in a while, when things have edged forward a bit further than some are ready, there is this reflex in our societies, in some percentage of our populace, which must pull away, pull all of us back if possible. Invariably, it always fails in the end, but they have to try.

Conclusion

Like I said at the start, we were never as good as we are now.

For all our failings, for all our troubles and intellectual regression, we are a better species than ever we were before. We have evolved over millions of years, built our civilisations and cultures for 50,000 years or more. Each age before ours was more brutish than the one to follow it. Each age eventually faded, but not before a time of regression, of falling back, of trying to rewind the clock which can only tick forward.

We must face this current age of intellectual regression as one deals with such things: with patience, fortitude, and an unwavering faith in our ability to keep on evolving. There will be trials and tribulations along the way, but so it was for our predecessors. We have evolved because they faced their own age of intellectual regression. Hell or high water, they persevered, and our species has been made better for it. Our ancestors faced their own bad times, and overcame.

The same must be true of us.