In Defense of The (Inner) Swamp — cultivating your inner life, avoiding shallow thinking and foolish action.
By: Andy Higgins
Tags: Philosophy, Inner Life, Activism, Religion, Swamp

To reject every word written before this age or any modern word you disagree with is to farm every swamp. Do you know what a swamp does? It swells and filters — that swelling holds back the stampede of rushing waters, and filters out unwise thinking and action.

Behind my childhood home was a large swamp, or marshland. I would occasionally try to walk through this bog-like biome during childhood, summer days, adventuring. It is very difficult to walk through. Its a watery, mucky, tangle of weeds and cat tails, plus an occasional open-water pond.

The benefit of this swamp to streams and rivers is that it slowed down and cleaned rainwater. Imagine a large field getting dumped on with rain. Much of that water is shed off to nearby ditches, ponds, swamps and waterways. In the case of my backyard it would shed to the swamp where all of that muck and tangle could absorb the water. The large swamp would swell like a sponge.

The marshland also provides a rich environment for a wide variety of species from bug to mammal to nest, mate, eat and grow. Biologically speaking, it is a diverse and nourishing culture.

One thing farmers recognized, starting in the early 1900’s, was if they ditched out those swamps, and made a wide clear path through them, the swamps would drain and they had more tillable acreage — there is not a more sensuous phrase to a farmer than “tillable acreage.” Say it slowly, but beware of it allure. Tillable Acreage. The down side to that tillable acreage is the increased speed in which rainwater makes it to the stream and to the river. You may be familiar with the Red River in North Dakota? It now has 20 foot high man-made banks on either side of it for many miles because of the perennial spring flooding. That flooding is mostly due to the tilling under of all the little swamps upstream in its watershed that would slow and absorb rain water.

The modern human has mostly not cultivated an inner, contemplative, marshland. Our society’s survival may hinge on weather we can take back our inner tillable acreage or not. For the threats of our modern world may only be mitigated by our collective wisdom, and wisdom is in the swamp, not the stream.

Society Loves a Stream

You must recognize the incentives of a farmer to move water quickly. Do you recognize that same incentive in media or yourself? Have you ever noticed the suggested articles at the end of even a long, thoughtful, and nuanced article? They are usually incendiary or sensual.

Those suggested articles flow down the well-worn paths of our minds. They are not there to make us think in ways we have never thought before about complex subjects. They are there to get us to walk down a well trodden path, or flow down a wide rushing stream. They want us to act like stream people. Not like swamp people, where ideas can trickle about with deep consideration.

Our sad modern education has not cultivated a life-giving marshland, that encourages bio-diversity of the brain. One common critique of our education system is that it was developed during the industrial revolution to be a pipeline of factory workers. If you know the outcome you want, you can design a system to produce it. That critique is not totally fair, for lo, we have consistently produced more that just factory workers. But our system does seem to make more stream people than bog people.

Our modern media definitely doesn’t encourage the swamp. Twitter does not recommend posts tagged with “a nuanced view you may disagree with,” however, it recommends the other posts that have people wound up in a tizzy. That tizzy is the free flowing river. Media wants to keep us hooked, they are incentivized to keep us hooked. The swampy part of you, the place where ideas are contemplated, would recognize those incentives, the article that only feels good, only confirm a previously held bias. Your swampy parts would encourage those ideas to meander a bit. The stream part of you is built for impulsive action, to pick up a pitchfork or pithy comeback and fight back!

There is a time to take action, but not all times. There are injustices in the world but they are seldomnly fixed by a mob. They are usually fixed by a handful of deep and dedicated people, swamp people who took slow and steady action. The swamp will filter out the pollutants, dilute them, break them down. Then, the water can flow out, slowly and purely.

Do we know how to make more swamp? How do you un-pave a culvert? How do you break up a river bed? How do you get off the crazy train of cheap dopamine?

Flow Dopamine Flow!

Consider this scenario. You are a 16 year old hormonal boy. You see porn for the first time. That dopamine flows like mighty rapids. What’s the off ramp? It seems to me that the modern human is not told to check that dopamine, to ask that porn to meander through the swamp, to interact with something more than the overly sweet stimuli of nudity.

A family may be a wisdom structure that can give some bigger picture to that boy. Outside of that? I once had a conversation with a grad student who was telling me that his nephew was 7 and had his own computer and spent most of his time looking at pictures of naked people, “because kids are so important and should be happy.” Kids are important, thus they probably shouldn’t be ruined with gorging the grand canyon via dopamine through their brain that is only stimulated by nudity.

We do have to learn from our mistakes but do we need to learn every lesson from our mistakes? What’s the saying “Those who don’t study history or destined to repeat it.” Where does one learn history around here? Weirdly, its not through our education system. I just saw yesterday that the daughter of my congressmen is an open Marxist. The ideas of Marx are interesting, worthy of contemplation — worthy of the swamp, the history of Marx is a bloody-hell. How anyone can fly that flag I find uber-ignorant, all stream, no swamp.

Intellectual Porn

Are you familiar with the term confirmation bias? Its the studied psychological phenomenon that shows that humans are inherently more attracted to info, stories, logic, etc. that confirm their previously held biases. For me, when I sit at my computer to read sports news, I first want to read the articles that tell me why my team will win, then I move on to why my team will lose. I am most attracted to the articles and arguments that confirm what I want to hear.

Echo-chamber is in this same category, and easier and easier to make these days as we train all our algorithms to show us truth made in our image!

All of that self love of the brain is creating a weird addiction to “like-minded” people. We reject our outside sense making apparatuses as we convince ourselves that they are all corrupted and we somehow pure. In that moment we become a cement bottomed rain culvert. Void of wisdom, void of romance. There is no room for the romance of uncertainty, the leap of faith that is love and grace. There is only exactly right answers. There is no moral dilemma there is only moral certitude.

As a non-objective onlooker I am appalled at the conclusion. From one echo chamber I hear “100 % Corruption!” yelled loudly and from the other I hear, “Zero Corruption!” These are the idiotic conclusions of a stream of people following their cheap dopamine to the top of an illegitimate hierarchy.

A swamp person would say “Of course some corruption, I didn’t just read a book, or watch one film, i have read many books and watched many variety of film. In every story there has been some corruption, whether on accident or by plan. But in all the stories I have never seen complete corruption, even in the stories with the worst ending there is a glimmer of hope, a child who holds the magic key, or a secret never heard before.” The swamp people are not ignorant of the past that they are from, they are aware of the risks that are all around them. They know they are both the hero and victim. The two-bit role player and the evil genius. I am not afraid of the random monster that hides in the swamp, I am afraid of the potential monster that lives in all of us when all of us decides that we have the universes one right answer!

Though they too may stumble on tantalizing, self-assuring narratives, the swamp people are cognizant of the risk and they oftentimes look over the edge of the boat to be sure their keel is still attached. They look back into history and see themselves as the Nazi soldier as well as the Jewish victim and American hero.

As this article is getting long I will offer it as the first in a series. I hope I have allegorized well enough the idea of the stream and swamp and I hope in subsequent articles to articulate what activities help to cultivate a healthy inner-swamp.

Be well,

Andy Higgins