Are you willing to give up privilege for connection?
No one wants what I’m selling, which I completely understand. What people want is a delicious tasting candy that is guaranteed to help you lose 35 pounds in three weeks without diet or exercise or your money back — get your free bottle today! (An actual ad.) Unfortunately, what I’m selling is a way to come to terms with the reality of the situation we face and a way to move forward without any guarantees of success. And yes, some effort is required on your part. It will be uncomfortable.
Here is reality. We are currently facing a set of interconnected, existential threats that many are calling the polycrisis: climate change; the end of cheap energy; already extreme and growing political, social and economic inequality; the 6th Mass Extinction and habitat loss; rising authoritarianism; the erosion of public trust; the threat of nuclear and conventional war; post-baby-boom demographic shifts; and the rapid degradation of industrial farm land. Not in some imagined future, but right here and now.
I might be missing a few, but you get the point.
Analysis of any one of these crises implicates multiple others. We only have a climate crisis because of the strangle hold over politics by the economic elite who have made their money by exploiting political inequality to create dependence on the limited supply of fossil fuels and who are willing to use authoritarian violence and manipulation to divide and rally the masses to maintain that control. These are not isolated or disconnected problems. They all share a common root cause.
In other words, the polycrisis is a metacrisis: it’s a crisis of meaning and understanding.
All of these problems are caused by the underlying worldview that created the current global hegemony, what in sociology we call the habitus. The habitus is the way of thinking that caused all these problems in the first place.
The habitus is more than an intellectual or ideological lens (though it includes those). The habitus is:
- like water to fish — so pervasive that it’s difficult to be able to see it clearly from inside, and
- is social-emotional — it is the source of all sorts of habitual, unconscious, “triggered” reactions. (See “You’re gonna feel this”)
The habitus renders some thoughts as common sense and others as unthinkable. Our internalized understanding of what’s natural or unnatural, possible or impossible, “right” and “wrong” is all down to the habitus. It is a way of thinking that is so deeply ingrained that it is in effect our shared mental operating system. Changing the programming running on top won’t alter the operating system underneath.
We will never be able to see the habitus directly. It’s the elephant to the blind men. It can never be accurately described or named from within the culture that it has created. Part of the act of socialization is to make it appear that no socialization has occurred; it is simply the right and proper order of things.
We can only see the habitus through its negative; through the shadow it casts.
We can unearth the habitus by tracing and mapping the roots of (each of the crises of) the polycrisis. The roots all point to the habitus that fuels them but which can’t be seen directly. So, in part we see the habitus in critiques of modernity, the history of colonialism and imperialism, the features of predatory and extractive capitalism, the legacy of genocide and intergenerational trauma, and the delusion of separation that fuels all addictions. The habitus is what lies in the middle of all of these things.
Of these, I prefer the framing as wetiko because, like the idea of a lifeboat, it is more evocative than descriptive. There is less chance of deluding ourselves into thinking that we are accurately describing or “capturing” the thing itself. It is a “mind-virus” that takes control of us without our awareness and leaves us in a fevered state.
To make matters worse, our social institutions are the embodiment of the habitus which generates them and which exist solely to preserve, protect, and propagate the habitus. We are socialized into the habitus through the institutions of family, education, the economy and the media in millions of small acts that imbed the habitus deep in the psyche of the constituent members of the society. The societal becomes personal. Intergenerational trauma isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
So, we also see the habitus through our ingrained reactions; through the shadows we project on the world. We all act as unknowing agents of social institutions, able to provoke emotional reactions thru unquestioned beliefs and assumptions that trigger conditioned responses. The habitus feels personal and plays out as a highly charged localized emotional drama enacted thru social roles and identities, whether you identify as underling or authority; victim or perpetrator. You don’t think about representing social institutions, you feel it as threats to the identity you received and perceive yourself to be.
We see the wetiko habitus thru the symptoms of the mind-virus. As Vanessa Andreotti says, it “conditions us to avoid, escape, or want to be rescued from discomfort and to gravitate toward what validates our ego-logical desires for the 6 ‘Cs’ of comfort, convenience, consumption, certainty, control, and coherence.” We see it in privilege defending itself against need, and doubling down on repeating mistakes of the past in the name of “tradition.” It’s there when we blame the victim and kill the messenger. It’s there in defensiveness and taking offense.
I have come to think of the wetiko habitus as synonymous with privilege. We tend to think of privilege as an unfair advantage, but the root of the word is “private law.” Privilege is the idea that I am special; that the same rules don’t apply to me.
Unfortunately, privilege is invisible to those who have it. From inside, privilege is assumed to be the result of the natural order of things or deserved because of some special status. Therefore, challenges to privilege are seen/perceived/felt as personal attacks; as “reverse” oppression.
So, there is another crisis to add to the list: a global mental health crisis. We see it manifest in the explosion of diseases of despair, conspiracy theories, social media supported delusion, and the rise of authoritarianism. Reality demands we respond differently, but instead we react with Einsteinian insanity, continuing to do the same things and expecting different results. We search for someone to blame or someone to fix it; always thinking the solution to the problem lies “out there,” always looking for something new, something more. Privilege is a disease of disconnection that leads to unquenchable addiction.
You can never have enough of what you don’t need in the first place.
Our habitual wetiko instincts (actually conditioned responses), just make things worse. No real solution(s) can emerge unless and until we begin “thinking” in a different way.
Gabor Mate says the opposite of addiction is connection. And who doesn’t want more connection? Aye, there’s the rub. Because connection isn’t kumbaya. It isn’t a soft, warm hug. It involves recognizing the harms we have created in our delusion. It involves showing up and growing up and taking responsibility for the mess we’ve made in our fevered delusions of “specialness,” of somehow being different — the ones for whom the rules don’t apply.
So, are you willing to give up privilege for connection?
Hurt people hurt people, but healed people heal people. Vicious cycles are not inevitable; virtuous cycles are also possible. But if you are trapped in a vicious, addictive cycle you must first learn to do the hard work of not scratching the itch.
Pema Chodron teaches how not to bite the hook when shenpa arises. She likens it (via her teacher Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche) to having a case of scabies. We know that scratching the itch will only make things worse, but it requires so much discipline not to scratch! If we can restrain ourselves, eventually, we can learn instead to apply the ointment — to engage in the practices that reduce the suffering and create some space between us and that urge to scratch.
It’s not once and done. It’s not a silver bullet. It’s not a pill that can guarantee success with no effort, no discomfort — a money back guarantee. It requires effort. It requires discomfort and discipline. And there is no guarantee that it will work, that it will solve all of our collective problems. But it is the only approach that has any chance of success. It is the only thing that has a chance to help us find the way out of the pit we have dug for ourselves in our mindless reactivity.
So, very few people want to buy what I am selling and that’s ok. But if you are, I want to connect with you. I want to find ways to support each other in the only healing that has a chance of addressing the polycrisis/metacrisis. The primary advice to people attempting to move past an addiction is to separate yourself from people who are currently using. Learning not to scratch is almost impossible if you are surrounded by people who will scratch your itch before you even notice. How can we come together to support each other in learning how to let go of scratching the itch? How can we all learn to apply the ointment collectively? If you are interested, I want to connect. Join us at the Lifeboat Academy to learn how.
