Hmmm, those points you raise about globalisation and interconnectivity are actually really interesting. I never thought about our society being connected like that before - it all seems so different when you stop to look at it from an everyday point of view “from below” (instead from a cold, clinical, high-up perspective).
This usually leads into what others term the “postmodern condition” in contemporary society (and this is usually why a lot of pseudo-intellectuals cry blue murder when someone mentions postmodernism or post-structuralism), a state of living where one’s sense of self, relations to the outside world and general everyday life is shaped by the predominance of various “symbols” and the ways they are communicated en-masse. This is postmodern because previous periods would only have been shaped by a singular, overriding “narrative” (like religion/spirituality in premodern times, and science in the modern; postmodernism is much like a kaleidoscope compared to previous rays of light; everything’s mixed up now, isn’t it?)
All these changes are shaping our lives now, for better or for worse, and there are signs society altogether is starting to buckle under the collective weight. Now, I should probably declare that the next part of this post was possibly planned as its own thread (leading on from here of course). I was thinking of ways to answer @SammyG’s question and suddenly realised…
The answer is “Trauma”; in spite of all our collective progress and development the problem we face is trauma.
I had already been pondering the nature of trauma in the first place (as in a “what is trauma?” thread). It was while trying to understand why all these recent (and possibly otherwise amazing!) developments in recent history had begun to cause such pain, through alienation and desentisation, that I was finally able to conceptualise while seeing why it always is so soul-crushing.
Trauma hurts us and haunts us precisely because it is an “echo”; it stays with us in ways we never expect because it is always active, always growing (very similar to how morphic fields work actually, which I think Sammy discussed only a little while ago…).
Here’s a little demonstration/case-study I thought of to illustrate the effects:
Imagine that as Humans in the beginning, we were formed by the impulse of Life (I know this is similar to the creation story in Genesis but I’m trying to keep this as broad as possible), like from a God/Energy/Field; we were connected to the underlying force of creation as we were birthed into being (however that happened), and this was right for us. We were in a mutual relationship with this “signal” as it grew and we grew; we were “healthy”, in a sense, because of it.
I call this God/Energy/Field/Impulse a “signal” because that is how we would have felt it ourselves. It would have propagated throughout existence as part of our creation and left its mark in various ways; awareness would come later, but for now this was all we ever knew.
Then came evolution, and the need for survival in a material sense. Now whether or not this falls into existing concepts of sin depends on your personal beliefs but, for the meantime, lets assume this simply began with the development of consciousness (to some extent). We as lifeforms now sought to assert our dominance against each other as means of protection (these animals are dangerous - kill them before they kill us; we need food - we must hunt; we need crops - we must secure land; this group/species is different - they are a threat; et cetera…) and in a very short time, our collective experience has been radically altered.
But what about that propagator-signal from the very beginning? In all the commotion and the sheer suffering of early life, it may have been forgotten or (more precisely) “drowned out” by everything happening all at once. The sheer trauma of the Human Experience sent out echoes in a more energetic sense, clouding our consciousness away from previous spiritual connections and cutting us off from God - the “True Divine”.
I think this is the reason why trauma is best imagined as an echo - it feels like a weight upon us, yet has an active energy of its own that allows it to grow, fester and expand within us; we are wounded by our trauma(s) and we carry the weight of it wherever we go and by whoever we meet. And it soon spreads. We are most likely to hurt each other when we think only of ourselves, to cut a long story short.
A lot of this has come to define modern culture, especially as part of the overriding Capitalist configuration we live in. Much of our understanding of modern economic sense is based on this prevailing “might makes right” myth where the ends will one day justify the means; the American Dream. Where I think this falls apart though is in its simplistic glorification of Trauma - the American Dream can only account for so much.
If you went from a completely impoverished peasant or immigrant to a Wall-Street Millionaire in your lifetime then your life would (strictly speaking) be a story of total success. You won at the game of life! But just because you succeeded (in a narrow sense of the word) in the future doesn’t mean the past can be forgotten. This is where the “might makes right” mentality originates - the idea that all the suffering you went through made you the person you are today and you should be glad for it! Now, at least on paper, such an argument is somewhat true; but that is only because of the inner-reckoning that is expected of individuation (however it is done). In a more everyday case this reckoning is undertaken and the existing trauma is left to fester. Your success or contentment at a later date does not directly counterbalance the pain and suffering you previously endured. Sometimes it can only make it worse (like in Trump’s case, for instance). And it stays with you.
Might makes right soon becomes might at all cost; hurting for hurt’s sake. Lashing out just to deflect from your own pain, equalising the cost. This is a form of bystander-apathy, letting things happen because they have happened before (if not to yourself in the past then to someone else).
Trauma as an echo has thus grown to cut us off from the natural God/Divine, debasing our spirit and consciousness and trapping us in a zero-sum game of gross mortality. In a historical sense, I very much believe that a lot of the issues we face today stem from more specific and dramatic echoes, setting events in motion as wounds are inflicted (like 9/11; the sheer suffering, anguish and trauma set the foundations for Trump’s use of populism in a very short time-frame).
What then has this got to do with social-media today? I would argue our use of social-media is a sort of carrier for these “echoes”, amplifying and spreading existing wounds while creating new ones. Such carriers have always existed to some extent but social-media is simply the newest, most sophisticated iteration. This might be part of the reason why the new mental-health crisis is continually growing, and why “sick-tok” is evermore popular.
But what is to be done? The most direct answer would be to confront our trauma as the existing religions and spiritual traditions recommend (to generally reach an “enlightened state”) and grow past our previous limits. The question raised with this approach being whether or not it is feasible on an ever-increasing scale.
The heart of the matter remains that the only solution or cure to trauma is, effectively, to yield. To say no; saying no to the continuation of the cycle. Forgiveness and compassion is all a part of this, but showing enough of these in our daily lives now is hard enough, let alone on a mass-scale! Jesus preached that in such cases you should “turn the other cheek”, but if you don’t have the faith or conviction to follow through then you would come to the conclusion that such advice is actually damaging; this is where Nietzsche’s idea of a slave-morality comes from (part of the “might makes right” myth I mentioned earlier).
And this is why I define trauma as an echo, because it is like a sound. If the original signal is just a single note (as in the purest, sweetest note of music you’ve ever heard) then each wound left behind has its own note too, and while these would might not be so loud on their own, they would each grow and build over time. The notes would combine into chords and eventually the main sound altogether would become very different. The Holocaust, as one example, was seen as a “death of God” for this very reason: how could one ever have to conviction to have true faith after experiencing such unimaginable suffering? That was the question posed by the collective trauma felt in the middle of the Twentieth Century.
Over time, the original signal is crowded out and distorted by the energy of these traumas, leaving us increasingly warped. We need religion/spirituality in order to escape this cycle and reconnect with God/The Divine. In spite of relative prosperity, comfort and progress these underlying problems are only getting worse (with the Web speeding up the processes that enabled them beforehand). How we can tackle these issues varies depending on your beliefs, of course.
. And part of a wider social shift away from our Prehistoric foundations rooted in religion/mysticism (generally speaking; I am writing to a mixed religious audience, of course), which has been part of our wider evolution and development over time (with religion declining largely in line with societal prosperity, among other factors).