Inception, influence and the task of healing ourselves
“Inception: The implantation of an idea deep in the subconscious that will bear future results.”
― 2010 movie “Inception” directed by Christopher Nolan
Climate activists have got their messaging all wrong.
Climate activists frustrated with effectively reaching the masses have got their communications strategies fundamentally wrong; the masses have shown consistently that they do not care about de-carbonization, carbon taxes or emissions.
In the course of my travels around the world, I have found that people everywhere generally share at least two universal aspirations:
- The ability to provide well for our family’s needs.
- The ability to create conditions for our progeny to thrive and flourish.
Our ability to feel that we are achieving a rich, vibrant, and fulfilling lifestyle today is directly related to our ability to accomplish these two universal aspirations.
We might wonder aloud why our society emits so much carbon, preach about how we must reduce our footprints, demand that our governments take action — but how do these things help someone to increase their ability to provide well for our family’s needs, or increase their ability to create better opportunities for their children to thrive and flourish?
Nobody aspires to “living within their means”, to a “reduced” or “Net-zero” lifestyle, or to a “low-energy economy”.
Countercultures such as Seasteaders, Eco-villagers and Permaculturists proclaim slogans like “REIMAGINE CIVILIZATIONS”, “FAIR SHARE”, and “RECLAIM THE COMMONS” in reaction to mainstream consumer culture, but the vast majority of us have been duped into believing that increasing our ability to buy things and experiences in the pursuit of happiness will yield a rich, vibrant and fulfilling “lifestyle”.
Edward Bernays & The Engineering of Consent.
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”
― Edward L. Bernays, father of “Public Relations”,
nephew of Sigmund Freud
The global marketing machine was consciously designed for the “intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” [i], purpose-built to create a perception of unfulfilled need(s) which we are constantly told can only be satiated by the purchase of a product or service — or even more perversely, that the more products and / or services we purchase, the greater our satisfaction.
Studies have shown that this is certainly not the case[ii]; beyond a certain threshold of being able to provide for basic needs, human well-being and happiness does not in fact increase relative to an increase in personal income[iii].
Consumer culture was intentionally designed to concentrate the tools of influence into the hands of a select few so that they might profit from this “engineered consent”[iv].
Therefore our task as change-agents becomes one of inception — we must learn how to wield these same tools that have been wielded against us, to disrupt the existing consumer-culture-driven narratives, and to redirect these two universally human drivers away from the myths of narrow self-interest and mindless consumption at the expense of all else, and towards the conscious cultivation of our true wealth — beginning with the repair, restoration, and regeneration of our natural systems that we have so badly damaged.
Shared Universal Trauma of Modern Life.
“We wander from room to room,
hunting for the diamond necklace
already around our neck.”
― Rumi
The values of our modern global economic paradigm[v] (aka the modern epidemic of global consumer culture) manifest all around us in daily life.
Expressed in even the most seemingly mundane aspects of daily life — from the violence of our industrial food supply chain that is embedded on our plates, to the fossil-fueled, chemically subsidized, manicured public landscapes we have been conditioned to prefer over the unruly polycultures of a wild ecology — these infinite expressions of a profoundly sick society reveal time and time again just how divorced modern values are from the fundamental laws of the natural world.
More and more of us are waking up to realize that we have been lied to; realizing that the gnawing, empty feeling growing in the pit of our stomachs is really the quiet, persistent insistence of our spirit tugging at our souls to remember the things that really matter, the things that true wealth are built upon: the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being of ourselves and of those around us (we are, truly, social beings) [vi].
Each of us descended from a people (or peoples) who were indigenous to a very specific place; that is, a people who first learned how to survive within the very specific biophysical limits of these places, and over time learned to thrive and flourish within those biophysical limits.
Some of us are fortunate enough to remain connected to those places, and even fewer of us are fortunate enough to remain connected to the ancestral values and knowledge systems which survive intact to this day. For the rest of us, we have suffered the deep trauma of being disconnected from these places — a trauma that goes unrecognized now that so many generations have passed since, and remain hopelessly unresolved — so that we wander lost in our searches for meaning.
The conditions were ripe for us to be colonized by untruths that purported to give us significance, and left us vulnerable to the manipulation of the few who sought to profit from our compliance.
When Edward Bernays ceased conducting psychological warfare on behalf of the US Government at the end of World War I, he realized that the same strategies employed “to affect the attitudes of the enemy, of neutrals, and people of this country could be applied with equal facility to peacetime pursuits,” [vii] and utilized these strategies to successfully and repeatedly engineer previously unknown desires for any number of products, to satiate previously unknown needs; thus starting his path to become widely considered as the father figure of public relations.
At least since the creation of the prototype for the modern advertising firm by Bernays, capitalists have sought to make us consumption addicts by design.[viii]
A return to indigenous values.
I have witnessed time and time again personal transformations that can occur during a well-executed 72-hour Permaculture Design Course (PDC), where participants emerged with a set of practical tools, a shared experience, and an embodied baseline knowledge of how to manifest and express a reset of their core values. Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share [i] set an ethical foundation which can become a practical filter for decision-making — a filter which quickly exposes consumer culture for the fraudulent manipulation that it is.
Permaculture is certainly not the only framework which offers a mechanism to return and rediscover our own indigenous values — we can look to the Aloha ʻĀina movement in Hawaiʻi, the Organoponicos of Cuba, the National Compadres Network of North America, the global Agroecology movement, or any number of local / global networks around the world.
Since my journey back to indigenous values began through the doorway of a PDC, please bear with me as I describe the following through the lens of my personal experience:
My own history (it's complicated):
As a 4th-generation descendent of Filipino plantation workers (on Mom’s side of the family) who moved to Hawaiʻi in search of opportunity to improve their lives, and a descendent (on Dad’s side) of the Irish and Scottish convicts who were shipped to Australia in the 18th century, not only am I proudly descended from a long line of troublemakers and misfits, I am also many generations removed from the very specific indigenous ancestral knowledge systems developed and refined by the peoples living in these very specific places over thousands of years.
My own personal values were incepted by consumer culture at an early age, in the pressure cooker which forged a teen coming of age in a foreign country during the 1990s. A product of an elite boys school attended by sons of the affluent and influential families of Melbourne, Australia, I was shamed and bullied relentlessly for being a different color, a different nationality, a different race - a different class.
The relative lack of money possessed by my distinctly middle-class family was made painfully aware by any attempt to fit in with the other kids, who spent weekends on underage drinking binges in the sprawling gated residences of their perennially absent parental units, and who spent weekdays taunting the way I looked, the way I walked, the way I didn’t fit in with any of them — shaming who I was, and thereby somehow shaping who I wanted to be.
One day after coming home to our family — who lived stuffed into Grandpa’s crowded duplex that we had to move back into when Dad lost his business in Hawaiʻi— after a particularly brutal week of being bullied, I quietly resolved that
- I would show those kids I was worth something, and
- that I would become the breakout in my family who would change the trajectory of our family’s socioeconomic status for generations to come.
In my twenties I moved back to Honolulu, and quickly knuckled down to a relentless pursuit of understanding how to make money, and how to make money work for you. I voraciously consumed the biographies of the world’s richest men, I sought out successful mentors who were willing to teach me, I used my life as an experiment by starting a business with zero startup capital and no college education — and by age 29, I was the owner of a small financial planning firm with a net worth in excess of $1M.
By age 31, the global financial crisis of 2008 was in full swing and I had managed to swiftly lose all of the material assets accumulated over the previous 10 years — luxury car repossessed, house in foreclosure, fair-weather friends scattered, and fiancée relationship in tatters — I moved back to Melbourne determined not to return to Hawaiʻi until I had something valuable to bring back which could make some kind of positive contribution to our islands’ society.
It was on an organic farm which had been regenerated from a degraded swampland in the middle of South Eastern Australia’s dairy country — surrounded by rich agricultural innovations born from the necessity of surviving a ten-year drought — that I was introduced to permaculture.
Permaculture: Principles of design for flourishing communities and ecosystems.
The founders of permaculture articulated the core values of their design system based on their own study and observation of indigenous cultures, as they sought to understand the common elements from these cultures which allowed them to thrive and flourish within the biophysical limits of the places they occupied.
They then sought to distill and articulate design principles[x] from these indigenous ancestral cropping systems so that contemporary societies might be able to engage in the conscious design of permanent agricultural systems which enhanced — rather than diminished — the health of the ecosystems supporting them.
If we understand food production systems as an expression of the underlying core values of the society from which they developed, than we can begin to understand modern industrialized agricultural systems as an efficient (if not deadly) expression of the values of modern consumer society:
Values of modern consumer society:
- Mankind has dominion over nature.
- Utilize any available resources to maximize yields.
- Optimize production for maximum financial gain.
- Externalize costs to ecosystem functionality and community
well-being.
Let us consider now the underlying values expressed by indigenous food production systems such as the “three sisters” cropping system from the Mesoamericas, or the “ahupuaʻa” system from the Hawaiian islands:
Values of indigenous ancestral societies:
- Humankind cares for, and is cared for by nature.
- Utilize locally available resources to optimize yields.
- Optimize production for maximum community well-being.
- Measure production systems’ efficacy based on community well-being and ecosystem functionality.
Permaculture then, might be better understood as a white man’s attempt to reconnect with indigenous ancestral knowledge systems that he had long been disconnected from.
The remaining strongholds of these indigenous ancestral knowledge systems are now repositories which hold vital lessons about how to survive and persist against all odds, and must be nourished, cultivated, and protected.
The permaculture practitioner becomes obsessed with reclaiming self-sufficiency and interdependency, restoring local ecologies and experimenting with low-input, ecologically appropriate food production techniques in even the most forlorn urban settings, and sets about resisting the status quo in a plethora of diverse expressions which scale up to localized movements ranging from the Greywater Guerillas, to the Permablitz network, to Transition Towns — all expressions of a return to human-scale, value-driven systems that are consciously designed to flourish within ecological boundaries.
Since its inception in Australia during the early 90s, the permaculture movement has grown to become a global network of bioregional practitioners, each working to express these (k)new core values in the different contexts that they find themselves in.
In many ways, I still consider myself to be practicing permaculture — albeit no longer in reclaiming urban backyards, but instead working now to cultivate healthy polycultures of new ideas in the gardens of the minds of university administrators — a form of “social permaculture”.
Indigenous ancestral knowledge systems draw from a wellspring of at least 40,000 years of experience, repositories of human knowledge built over generations of astute observation of and interaction with the natural world — experiments in how to survive, refined and honed over generations to become the vibrant societies that once thrived and flourished within the biophysical limits of the ecosystems they were embedded within.
These ancestral knowledge systems literally form our collective heritage — guarded by the few remaining communities around the world who faithfully nourish and nurture what remains intact — holding detailed practical knowledge about how to live in harmony with the natural world across a broad range of ecotypes, though often unrecognizable and therefore underestimated, unvalued and unable to be seen by the very institutions which purport to advance a “higher education” (and are likely built on lands of these ancestral knowledge systems that have been complicit in displacing).
In the face of the unprecedented ecocide and accelerating degradation of our planetary life support systems, surviving indigenous ancestral knowledge systems offer vital information about different ways of being, thinking and doing that will be essential for the human species to survive the transition(s) ahead with the best aspects of our selves intact, and re-learn how to live in harmony with our planet.
The remaining strongholds of these knowledge systems are now repositories which hold vital lessons about how to survive and persist against all odds, and must be nourished, cultivated, and protected.
Transformation: healing ourselves to heal our world.
“I once was blind but now I see.”
― John Newton, former slave trader,
writer of the hymn “Amazing Grace”
Once the lie of modern consumer culture has been revealed, the lie cannot be unseen.
Powerful forces once unseen can now be rendered naked, and evidence of just how pervasive the malignant infection of our collective psyche has grown can be perceived everywhere; the system’s elegant self-replicating design continues its relentless march to reinforce our unconscious consensus to each new generation through the compelling, subconscious power of social proof.
Like Joe Pesci’s character Cypher in The Matrix movie, each individual will still have a decision to make for themselves:
The social proof all around us screams to forget what we have seen, and to retreat back into the matrix, where one can yield and surrender back to the social currents ever pulling us into the depths of numb consumerism, only to dive deeper into the illusion and distract themselves away from inconvenient and uncomfortable truths.
If the individual can heal from the shock and trauma of being awakened from the matrix, and survive the pain of realizing that the seeds of this bondage were intentionally engineered by those who would seek to profit from our compliance, then the healed individual can begin to cultivate an immunity to this pervasive influence, and consciously seek to be a vector of transmission of this immunity through their own actions to rebuild a different kind of social proof around themselves — one that reinforces a new set of values that are (hopefully) similarly-based on the indigenous values systems that permaculture ethics and other frameworks strive to model, express and embody.
In this context, the act of self-preservation through the rebuilding of an individual’s socioeco-network has potential to become viral, potentially harnessing the same elegant self-replicating social forces which so quietly and effectively incepted entire generations’ collective psyche with the sickness of consumer culture values.
In this way, we might act as vectors to infect our host organism (which is dying from this terminal affliction) to mycelliate and reverse-colonize our collective human psyche with a fundamentally healthy set of core values that could support humanity to make the rapid adjustments necessary to survive and thrive in spite of rapidly deteriorating planetary systems.
Transmutation: “the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form.”
The seductive rhetoric of sophisticated marketers thus rendered ineffective, the liberated mind can now turn its attention to reclaiming its agency, free will and sovereignty, reclaiming the lost art of human “being” (rather than human “doing”).
Gifted with the dual blessing and curse of our newly broadened perspective, it becomes our task to listen deeply, and to love one another through the process of rediscovering our connections to (and the limits of) the natural world.
Our responsibility is to seek to understand the context(s) that others are making decisions from, work diligently to meet people where they are at, and to commune with compassion so that we can create experiences which remind each other that our ability to survive, thrive and flourish is mutually contingent upon each other’s ability to do so.
First, by reprioritizing our own life choices according to the fundamental elements of human well-being: our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health through intentionality and mindfulness, and by paying close attention to the small and simple things which yield us the most joy.
When we have the eyes to see what is all around us, life becomes full of abundance, each moment ripe with potential and possibility.
When we give ourselves time for powerfully simple human experiences — growing a portion of our own food, waking up when we are fully rested, surrendering to the unfolding of treasured moments with a loved one, or perhaps walking with reverence in the woods to physically remember how our ancestors used to commune with the natural world — we weave another thread back into the frayed tapestry of the shared human experience.
Second, by turning our attention to seeing, and caring for others around us - especially those who are still unaware that they are entangled in unhealthy systems and do not yet have the eyes to see.
In order to create an “empathic civilization” we must ourselves remember and cultivate our ability to empathize, and become empathic beings ourselves.
Remembering that we too, were once entangled in the matrix, we must remember how we stumbled into an epochal moment to discover our portal out. We too, were once obsessed in the never-ending toil of increasing our ability to buy things and experiences in the pursuit of happiness towards a rich, vibrant and fulfilling “lifestyle”.
They too, have been told the same lies, and like a fish in a fishbowl, may not yet have gained the perspective needed to perceive the limitations of their entrapment.
Be, Do, Have.
“We are fighting to replace our fear with love — and this time bullets arrows and cannonballs won’t save us — the only weapons that are useful in this battle are the weapons of truth, faith and compassion.”
— Lyla June, co-founder of The Taos Peace and Reconciliation Council
Our actions speak so much louder than any words could aspire to, and often with a resonance that lingers far beyond our presence in the room. Our “being” has a far deeper ability to influence than our “doing”.
Our words are often our most direct way of transmitting our thoughts — therefore choosing our words with care, intention and precision is essential to our ability to be heard — and our ability to be understood is directly related to our ability to influence.
We must move away from the technical jargon that we have developed in our tribes of climate activism (which serves us well to describe with precision the elephant in the room that is climate change, but has not served us well in terms of elevating the urgency of our situation to mass consciousness), and we must now learn how to express our thoughts in terms that our audience(s) can understand, feel and act upon if we are to have a chance at bringing others along to a place of deeper understanding.
We must embed these interventions in the ways we communicate about, and respond to the coming challenges; and in the ways we go about our daily lives, for though we may have little control as individuals over where humanity’s destiny lies as a species, we do have direct control over how we arrive, no matter our destination.
Humans have capacity to commit unspeakable atrocities upon each other, especially when put into a context of scarce resources; yet we also have the capacity to express and bring forth awe-inspiring beauty which can outshine even the most heinous expressions of our potential.
Wherever we arrive, whatever is in store — we must arrive with the best aspects of our humanity intact.
Questions for reflection:
- How might we harness these two universal human aspirations to provide better futures for our families and for our future progeny, and translate them into new ways of being, thinking and doing which nurture true wealth: our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being?
- How might we support each other to transcend the traumas we have each wrought and suffered over generations of disconnect from our indigenous ancestral knowledge systems?
- How might we reconnect with our own indigenous ancestral knowledge systems - which were forged over generations of empirical observation, rich interaction and deep relationship with very specific places?
- How might we create conditions to catalyze individual transformations across society?
- How can we heal ourselves, so that we can heal our planet?
References:
[i] 1928, Bernays, Edward. “Propaganda”, New York: Horace Liveright
[ii] https://www.ted.com/talks/nic_marks_the_happy_planet_index?language=en
[iii] 1995, “Edward Bernays, ‘Father of Public Relations’ And Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103”, NY Times Obituaries
[iv] 1928, Bernays, Edward. “Propaganda”, New York: Horace Liveright
[v] http://planet3.org/2012/01/11/economic-growth-and-human-well-being/
[vi] 1984, Cialdini, R. B. “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”; 2015, Pentland, A. “Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter”, Penguin Books
[vii] 1928, Bernays, Edward. “Propaganda”, New York: Horace Liveright
[viii] 2016, Orr, D. “Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward”, Yale University Press
[ix] 1991, Mollison, B. “Introduction to Permaculture”, Ten Speed Press
[x] 1997, Mollison, B. “Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual”, Ten Speed Press
