Addicted to Normalcy

The lengths we take to remain unchanged.

Hominid Skull, Graphite on paper

What do we mean by change?

I keep coming back to a grave doubt I’ve long felt concerning the way addiction is “treated.” Treated, both in terms of the “industry” built up around addiction and the way we generally consider addiction.

One of the most basic tenets of addiction treatment seems to be that, “Once an addict….” The echo, “Always and addict.” is never far behind.

This is why I ask what do we mean by change?

I’ve been fortunate, in a back-handed way. I’ve always been prone to addictive behaviors; but also, I’ve never had a robust enough constitution to really excel at being an addict. Starting as a teenager, smoking during summer vacation, sneaking boxed Winstons along with my “summer friends.” Then quitting, just like that, in September. I dabbled in drinking, again mostly in the greater freedom and space of summer, retracting back into a smaller, tighter regime during the school year.

In my twenties I dabbled in alcoholism, watching the clock each day, waiting for 4:30 when it was time for my partner and I to head off to the General Store for our Miller-Lite mini-twelve packs. Two, one for each of us. This only lasted for about a year until I blew up the life I felt trapped in and broke down and got out.

In my thirties I was “living” an undead existence, something like Vampirism. One night I realized that I was running from the impossibility of ever finding any satisfaction from within the solipsism of depression and a narcissistic upbringing and that I was reduced to hunting for vitality, ghoulishly seeking to draw any semblance of alive-ness out of anyone who would invite me in.

It took some time, but once I saw what it was. Saw it clearly, even for a moment, I recognized that it was over. It took decades to climb out of the pit of habit I was trapped in. It would be another twenty-odd years before I came across anyone talking about this same understanding in the way Krishnamurti spoke of change. That it has nothing to do with “trying” and that once the decisive insight arrives, “in an instant.” We are forever changed.

The only way this finds its way into the industry of self-help, even now, seems to be in the recognition that trauma affects us in an instant and changes us. Of course this is true. This is how we are damaged. The existence we find ourselves in today is the culmination of the various instances of trauma we’ve lived through.

But if we only recognize and accept this latter version and ignore the former we can do nothing but remain trapped.

I am no paragon. I don’t claim special powers. But I do recognize that I have changed in many ways over the course of my lifetime and that many of these changes have been healing. In my experience they come about as Krishnamurti laid it out and as I have found it to work.

The key, as I see it, lies with Proprioception, a term used by David Bohm to describe an individual’s capacity to perceive their own thinking and relationship with Thought.

By Thought – and whenever I use it in a capitalized form this is what I’m referring to – as Krishnamurti and Bohm describe it; what is meant is the whole of what I’ve come to call the Edifice of Thought. This includes all of our habitual reactions, emotional, intellectual, even physical habits that live within the historic boundaries of what has been thought, felt, and experienced in our cultural past and that which has built and continues to shape the world we find ourselves in and the ways in which we see ourselves in this world.

Thought does not include thinking. While Thought would have us believe that thinking is what takes place when we search our “databases” and “come to conclusions;” thinking is very different.

Proprioception in the Bohmian sense is a mental placing and awareness akin to the physical proprioception we feel in every day life. For instance, when we close our eyes and still have no problem finding and touching the tip of our nose.

Proprioception is not only, in my estimation, the most critical aspect of what Krishnamurti and Bohm uncovered and taught. It is also the one aspect that remains elusive. It has not entered the common parlance in any form. Unlike “Dialogue” and “Inquiry” and “holistic,” for example; that have become quite familiar even if only in reduced and garbled forms as the Edifice of Thought continues to defend itself from any of our attempts to break out of it. Proprioception has been ignored.

It’s from this perspective that I hold doubts about common sense concerning addiction. And, this question of how we look at addiction is looming larger and larger today.

The Democide we face is powered by addiction. Its proponents are addicted to Power. Its victims tend to end up addicted to all the ways the Edifice of Thought uses to keep us under its thrall. There just is no way to look at where we are and look at possible ways forward without running into this question at every step.

And, so, at this point, the expectation that, “Once an addict…” can only have one possible refrain; appears to be at the center of the blockage and double binds we find ourselves trapped in.

As with any attempt to look at our conditions from any but the accepted perspective, the one that got us here, to paraphrase Einstein; we continually run into a learned incredulity. We run into a mechanism, developed from the early weaponization of modern psychotherapy by various Fascist entities. Propaganda and Marketing, two flavors of the same weapon developed to control and manipulate booming populations around the world. In its current manifestation these elements of control have morphed into what we all assume we understand when we hear about conspiracies….

Conspiracies. This Thought Stopper, as John Michael Greer came to label them, works all too well.

How can we act Proprioceptively in this environment?

This has been a pressing question, gestating for a long time.

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The section above the break has languished as a draft for many months. Looking for a way in, to find an entry into the impossibility of the situation in which this October finds us.

What’s so hard to put into words, to expect to be able to communicate right now, is that the waiting is over.

I read recently that Modernism was an attitude that prioritized our relationship with the future over everything else. I was born at the tail end of the year Leo Fender invented the electric guitar that came to be known as the Telecaster. At the height of Modernity. The same year as the explosion of the first Hydrogen Bomb….

I grew up under the glow of a black & white cathode ray tube, always on from first up to last to bed. Under the shadow of MAD. Every effort Madison Avenue made was to make sure we were never satisfied with today and always eager for Tomorrow!™

While the overt/covert efforts of the rulers over what had been a culture; but was now just another set of “resources” to be plundered; were assassinating anyone who challenged their hegemony and driving wedges between people who might otherwise discover a shared humanity. Freud and Goebbels’ heirs overtly and covertly pushed the Modernist creed at every opportunity. This included usurping whatever genuine critiques of culture modern artists might have made and creating a juggernaut of Modern Art™ to be used as a weapon in their Cold War. It also meant ensuring that “popular,’” and that meant telecast, entertainment would push, at every level and in every case, an agenda intending to dazzle us with the Future!™ While at every opportunity shattering the present.

Robert Serling turns out to have been a surprising and surprisingly wide reaching creative critic of this whole mess. He found that his teleplays set in realistic, contemporary settings would not get funded. The gate-keepers started shutting things down after the earliest days of television – as the internet has. He realized that if he told his stories as Science Fiction™ he could get funding and air his shows. In the end, hegemony did win out. Science Fiction became the new religion of Modernism. Convince me that Star Trek was not a CIA op…. They could afford a few lapses.

Serling’s episode, “To Serve Man” appeared on the surface to be just another anxiety-generating space opera. Flying saucers with the same hydraulic entry stairs as Boeing and Sud Aviation were using on their latest airliners; telepathic aliens; sincere statesmen; the UN; and out of touch “egg-head” scientists. It “checked all the boxes.” What makes it still chilling and prescient is right there in the punchline ending, “It’s a cookbook!”

After all these decades under the thumb of power hungry abusers, we still find it impossible to grasp that none of them have the slightest compassion or interest in serving man except as the prime meat on their menu. There is not a single person with any position of control or ownership over us who does not see everyone but themselves and their “own” in the same way that they see a sow in a breeding cage, male chicks on a chicken meal conveyor, or a Palestinian infant cradled in a makeshift tent. We are all just fodder.

Yet still, we keep our eyes firmly locked on The Future!™ Only now that future has been reduced; or let’s more accurately say, refined to what this project always had as its inevitable conclusion; a series of dystopian stories taking their energy from the un-ignorable realities of collapse occurring all around us. Control maintained by tuning them this way or that to fit their True Believer’s prejudices and projections.

How can we tell whether a story is a weapon or a telling of something happening told from a perspective of good faith? I’ve settled on a crude and simple heuristic: Did someone pay to have this story told? Is it in front of me because it has been “promoted” by someone interested only in their own “bottom-line?” If the answer is yes; and this applies to 99.999% of anything shown on corporate media or pushed as advertising on any platform; I will refuse to listen, watch, put energy into engaging with it in any way. “It’s a cookbook.”

At the heart of the modern catechism of electoral civics is the tenet of belief that we live in a market-place of ideas and that choosing our leaders requires billions in spending to “get the message out.” What we never hear, even from real critics, is that all this expenditure, no matter who it’s promoting or how “radical” the program, are always going to be funneled through the usual pipeline. As with the military-industrial complex and every consumption fostering complex from fossil fuels to pharma to big-Agra; their revolving-door money-laundering schemes, lobbying, and the promotion of violence acts as another way to get us to pay for our own destruction while ensuring that they end up with the profit.

To cut this short: Nobody with something to sell, especially those looking to sell at scale, is making any statement in good faith or has any interest in anything that could even vaguely be characterized as a public good.

Or, to put it most bluntly: Your abusers don’t love you.

They also do not see your allegiance as a side in a bargain or agreement, least of all as part of a reciprocal relationship. They only have room in their destroyed psyches for one thing, domination. Alon Mizrahi puts it very clearly in this short video. He’s specifically talking about a fragment of those chasing power lost in its thrall, but what he says applies to every abuser.

Before; and by that I mean before now, before The Future!™ arrived; we could always fantasize over how we would have done things differently. You know, back when surgeons refused to change their bloody aprons between amputations, or when the world was being swept by virulent hatred and aggression. “I would never have just stood by! I would never have just looked the other way. I would never have grabbed that bargain-priced heirloom stolen from some victim on their way to mechanized death and annihilation.”

It’s not before anymore.

So why do we act like it’s perfectly normal to forget and abandon 150 years of infectious disease practice and return hospitals to their old role of hell-holes of last resort where the unfortunate go to catch their deaths? Or, as in Gaza, where they are penned in to be easier targets for blockbuster and incendiary bombs?

Well “Its complicated….”

Is it?

“It’s a cookbook!” Is that complicated too?

Thought has lumbered along, a giant snowball heading down-hill for thousands of years. At this point it has become an avalanche destroying everything and everyone in its path. And that includes all of us. Everything and everyone we know and care about. Look at any parameter you care to look at, from micro-plastics to sea-floor mining to levels of extinctions. Look at the way any trace of living in a viable, life-respecting, social or cultural entity of any sort has been systematically destroyed to provide a bottom-line for a tiny, tiny minority of oligarchs. Look at the way we have had any semblance of an ethical sense pulverized within us by the double binds these abusers hold us to. Is there still room to say, “Well, it would be worse if I decide to refuse to comply?”

Modernist Times did not end with Post-Modernism, or with any of the hot-house mannerisms that have been its long tail.

What we are experiencing right now is the end of that obsession focused on the Future!™ Everyone with “something to sell” or holding onto an allegiance to abusers and an abusive system whose visions always aim for a Thousand Year Reich!™ or Tomorrow Land!™ or My Mars Colony!™ never do get any farther than grey concrete as the dank walls of their final bunkers close in on them. While they get to decide between the Luger and the cyanide capsule any of us left have already been abandoned to our Fates.

We only have time for some severely limited “choices” too. Did we comply to every demand? Did we refuse? On any level, did we take any effort to separate ourselves from the hold Thought has had over us?

Expecting that what “I do” will change the course of the world; will do anything but affect what will happen to us or those we love; is a relic of our belief in Power. The difference between futuristic fiction and what actually happens shows us again and again that cause & effect can never be parsed out and applied as we would wish. The actual future, as it becomes our present and then our past in succession never fits our expectations. Even the milestones, the days that change everything, either in our personal lives or globally, as long as we continue to live, end up blurring together into a continued sense of normalcy. We may or may not be stuck with the trauma of past pain, but we can never actually re-call past pain. Pain only exists in the moment and is subject to our level of proprioception.

This normalcy arises as a result of the way perception is perceived. We cannot notice what we fail to perceive and what we do perceive appears seamless. Try to see your eye’s central blind-spot where the optic nerve meets the retina. It is difficult to find and impossible to retain. As soon as we turn from looking at seeing to “seeing” again, it disappears. This is the way normalcy works. What-is, although in actuality what we wish-to-be, just-is for us. Incidents will knock us into bewilderment or surprise for a moment, but normalcy quickly re-establishes itself.

This, as with the fiction of seamless perception, is a “necessary fiction.” Conscious creatures, and every creature is somewhat conscious, need to have gyroscopic balance so that perturbations don’t knock them permanently out of whack. Extreme trauma does do this, but that tends to kick-in in extremis; when death is near for example. Normalcy resets. Pain passed cannot be recalled. Demands on the individual and the forces of habit that power Thought establish a new baseline and we cannot function without “putting it all behind us.”

In a world that is not dominated by Thought this just works. It allows creatures to focus on what can be done. We do not live in that world anymore. No where is it possible, and no creature now inhabits such a world. This is what drives extinction. When a creature’s capacities and abilities to cope with the demands of their surroundings have been outstripped by a change in conditions they will fail to thrive and will die. If this is applicable to an entire species, a genus, a family, etc., they will go extinct if there is no other, compensating change.

This is true of every plant and animal that finds it cannot cope with the accelerated velocity and scope of changes Thought has forced on our world. It is true for us.

Cognitive dissonance is the name we give this condition: an inability to align belief with result. It includes the way we default to altering our sense of what we perceive to allow us to continue to believe what we have believed in the past. In this way it could be said that cognitive dissonance is the driver behind the way Hubris leads to Nemesis. The furies will drive them mad who the gods wish to destroy for their usurpation; as the ancients put it.

The root of Our Predicament is that Thought arose within us and has generated this Edifice of Thought in which we find ourselves. Normality worked in the world as it was before Thought’s dominion. It does not work now. Normalcy has become an enforcer of Thought’s dominion.

Before industrialization and consumerism everyone used whatever they had to use for whatever purpose and when they were done they left it where it would be reincorporated into the living world. There was no “littering.” No “trash.” Certainly no toxic waste. Through the course of the Twentieth Century as the ubiquity of industrial output entered the stream of cycles of use and re-use at an ever-accelerating and expanding scale we had to confront the dissonance between our expectations that we only needed to be concerned with things while we wanted them had to be addressed.

It was never adequately addressed since to do so; as with any clear-sighted critique of this Edifice of Thought would demand; we would have had to confront a hard and fast limitation on what we could accept as normal. We failed in this instance and we have failed at every instance.

In hindsight this should not be surprising. Without insights into Proprioception and the machinations of Thought we had no tools to conceptualize with or pathways to metabolize the kinds of changes our predicament demanded.

This continues to be the state of the world.

Continuing on this fatal, suicidal, path does not have to be the only possibility. But, without entering into Proprioception and recognizing how Thought maintains its dominion we can do nothing other than continue to shift our sense of normalcy farther and farther into cognitive dissonance. Shifting our “Overton Window” farther and farther into an acceptance of fascism and suicidal annihilation.

As the coming election to choose the new Leader of The Western World™ looms, we are presented with a choice between a petulant senescent “man-child” racing the clock to make it until November with any semblance of mental-function remaining running against a hollowed out husk of an alchoholic authoritarian. Normalcy insists we take this as…, well, as normal. This is our chance to “vote for Democracy!”

A stable system of abuse, in a family, a nation, the world, maintains itself by providing “options.” We have a “choice” between identifying with and obeying one flavor of abuser or another. There is the openly cruel and viciously angry one. “Daddy” as Tucker Carlson now admits. And, there is the enabler who purports to act as a counter to the other while doing nothing substantive to change the status quo. The abused, damaged, off-balance, and habitually lied to; reel under the weight of cognitive dissonance.

Neo-predation, the willful misunderstanding of what predation is within a web-of-life, high-jacked humanity during the Late Neolithic. “Success” as humans came to be equated with the success of abusers taking advantage of everyone and everything as they careened along under their intoxication with the fantasy of power. A Ponzi-Scheme-to-end-all-Ponzi-Schemes began and has run until today. Kicking the can of ultimate consequences down the road as local impoverishments became regional and are now swallowing the entire planet.

Neo-Liberalism has been its last gasp. Old-fashioned authoritarianism has dropped any cloak of “decency.” The Good-Guys!™ are chasing each other as far right as possible as quickly as possible. Desperate to get one last “mandate-from-the-people” to continue genocide, democide, and general extinction. In their twisted calculus, a “win” means more cop-cities, fracking, wall-building, and bombing. A loss means they get what they want and get to fund-raise as they pretend to care while getting what they want.

Neo-predators always fall for believing their own lies. They believe their power and wealth will protect them. They believe that all the way down into their final bunker….

My only question now is, will we continue to obey? Acquiesce? “Decide” that the only path we have left to us is to side with our abusers?

What they want from us is our utter humiliation so they can celebrate their utter domination. This is how normalcy has brought us to the end of the Future!™