The Root Disease of Modernity

The Root Disease of Modernity

We have hesitated for a long time to name this directly on the platform, although we’ve alluded to it in many places (The Origin Story). The trans-disciplinary research of many of our mentors and advisors points to modernity arising as a deviation from an ancestral baseline. The long form of this movement away from communality and reciprocity with the Living World has likely played out for 60 or 70,000 years.

The core alterations of ancestral operating systems are like flaws in the collective code that were introduced after dissociative occurrences in civilizational histories that gave rise, eventually, to modern society, to retro-actively explain them. With a macro lens, we can look back at cultural stories that echo this dissociative momentum. They are embedded deeply in the core narratives of western civilization.

From the Fall in the bible, to Odysseus’ search to come home, these are stories of a people in exile from the hearth (and from the heart, and the earth). These are stories of people who have fallen out of right relationship with all that is. The source of this break is various– in the story of the Fall, it is blamed on the transgression of a woman in collusion with a snake: a stinging repurposing of matriarchal systems and symbols of contact with the earth that transforms them into symbols of weakness and symbols of evil. In The Odyssey, the protagonist, Odysseus, that ‘man skilled in all ways of contending’ finds himself exiled from home and hearth: the narrative fuel of the story is his yearning to return to his native land, his wife, his son, his household. This animating longing, nostos, in Greek, is the yearning for home. These are stories that contend with exile. Both were written by peoples contending with the established fact of their experience of alienation. They were both attempts to explain why the people felt so far away from God (the Creator), kinship with the earth, the animals, and one another. They were deep grapplings with the feeling that we could not get home. Home to our deepest, wholest selves. Wrestlings with feeling locked out of the Sacred.

Yet what is the source of the exile? It is deeper than what is named in the Fall: the fall is merely an echo of an echo of a much older story. By the time the Fall was written (the book of Genesis is attributed by tradition to Moses (of the Hebrew people), but modern scholars place the book’s authorship in the 6th and 5th centuries BC), humans had already been on earth between 200,000 and 2 million years. Most of our history had already happened. Genesis, like all origin stories, was a grappling with the present day– it gave a why to a people who already experienced themselves as being profoundly alienated from the Source. It attempted to explain what had gone wrong long long ago: back at the beginning of things. And it blames this on a woman and on a snake.

What went wrong long long ago was that we lost an understanding of our proper place in relation to the cosmos (see John Stokes explain this here). From an original dissociative break, likely a result of collective trauma after a calamity and our trespass against life (war), begins a pattern of seeking to elevate ourselves above others because we no longer feel connected. Yet this movement of superiority always gives rise to its opposite. This is, we would propose to you, the source pattern governing the movement from the heart to the head, from individuals organized in relation to community to individuals exalting themselves, from an experience of being within Nature to attempting to control and extract it (see Pete Jackson address this in Building Peace). Yet the ‘putting on’ of this domination mind, this patriarchal mind, which is a reaction to a loss of relationship, engenders a kind of schizophrenia of supremacy that cements itself in a direction that will prevent us from ever healing the original break.

Acculturation into modern society is often socialization teaching children how to ‘put on’ this domination mind.

This root disease structures a society where dominant cultural groups have extero-jected the parts of their own identities that they are unwilling to know onto other cultural groups. Dominant groups become ejectors of psychic content, marginalized groups are forced to receive these projections. White violence becomes projected onto black bodies, white immorality storied into black bodies. Male violence becomes projected onto female bodies, male immorality storied into female bodies (the fall, for example). Depending on where we are situated along the continuum of dominant social groups, this structuring turns us into perpetrators and/or victims, rapists/ rape victims. It also creates a hopeless confusion, because cultural groups are attempting to eject their own psychic content into the bodies of other people who cannot in fact metabolize it. This is the culture-wide equivalent of an Axis Two disorder: a personality disorder of culture. The unmetabolized trauma at the origin of our modern civilization.

The structures of modernity that have organized the social order: Capitalism, colonialism, racism, misogyny are in fact reliant, for their propagation, on this deeper schizophrenia of supremacy.

And in order to comport ourselves with this profoundly anti-life system, modern people have to simultaneously know, and refuse to know, how sick it is. Many of us have various ways of knowing/ not knowing. We self-medicate to accomplish this. We drink, we drug, we lose ourselves in various ways to not confront this split heart at the center of the modern world. We compete, we try to win, we refuse to be ‘losers’, we achieve, we work ourselves into the ground–but even when we ‘win’, we lose. For to win we have to pass along the domination; propagate the disease.

How do you keep it bay? In the moments of silence, in the deep stillness when the cacophony and momentum of the modern world have receded–the moments in deepest night–how do you keep the knowing at bay? The suicidality crisis among our children is not a mystery. Our civilization so-called is enacting a collective homicide/ suicide. Young people can feel this.

The dissociated heart of the modern world pulses like a drumbeat of forgetting in our ears. And so how do you come out of the zombie state? How do you come back to life?