Civilized to Death: What Was Lost on the Way to Modernity

by Christopher Ryan

We roll in, cup of stimulant in hand, shuffle papers, try to look busy and stay awake, fight the hopelessness, then go home and drink too much. Show up, punch in, tune out.

useless, meaningless work is standard-issue in our world.

Once human communities grew beyond the point where every individual had a direct relationship with everyone else, something fascinating and terrible happened: Other people became abstractions.

Humans seem to be two different creatures when we compare how we function in small-scale versus large-scale societies. Grasshoppers and locusts.

In 2011, Apple’s Tim Cook was paid $378 million in salary, stock, and other benefits—6,258 times the wage of the average employee at Apple. The richest eighty-five people in the world control more wealth than the poorest half of the planet’s population.

it’s very difficult to know when to stop striving for more, to take the money and run.

And if the futility of their situation ever dawns on them like a dark sunrise, they’re unlikely to receive a lot of sympathy from their friends and family.

We use money to insulate ourselves from the risk, noise, inconvenience. But the insulation comes at the price of isolation. Our comfort requires that we cut ourselves off from chance encounters, new music, unfamiliar laughter, fresh air, and random interaction with strangers.

single most reliable predictor of happiness is feeling embedded in a community.

Maybe it’s time to ask some impertinent questions about formerly unquestionable aspirations, such as comfort, wealth, and power.

long overdue

But what if that tired story is just another facet of a scam in which we’re all getting ripped off?

But I am arguing that being wealthy isn’t what it’s cracked up to be—not nearly so—and that those who spend their lives chasing wealth that they think will bring them happiness are trapped running on the same wheel as everybody else.

people of higher socioeconomic status were actually less able to read emotions in other people’s faces. It wasn’t that they cared less what those faces were communicating; they were simply blind to the cues.

I’m saying that being rich tends to corrode whatever heart you’ve got left. I’m suggesting, in other words, that it’s likely the wealthy subjects who participated in Muscatell’s study learned to be less unsettled by the photos of sick kids by the experience of being rich—much

“Power diminishes all varieties of empathy.”

that as a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.”

Selfishness, they understood, leads only to death: first social, and then ultimately, biological.

We know we will suffer and we know we will die—and this knowledge can drive us to distraction.

In our panic to avoid the darkness of death, we sacrifice the light of our lives.

we subconsciously seek to deny our mortality by aligning our personal identity with totems, taboos, religions, and armies. Culture, they believe, offers a refuge from existential terror by providing meaning and guidance. If we follow the rules, we may even have hope of immortality in the form of an afterlife or reincarnation, or it may be symbolic: monuments, works of art, or streets bearing our names.

Why worry about death? It’s the dying that keeps me awake at night.

Yet civilization amplifies and is fueled by our fear of death, when it’s the dying we should really be concerned with.

“If a decent death is defined by the absence of extended suffering, an American who lives into advanced old age in the twenty-first century probably has less chance of receiving that mercy than the poorest peasant did in the fourteenth century.”

Rather than prolonging life, we appear to be extending the process of dying.

extended death march

Here we have a situation where we really can do far more with far less.

Really? I suspect they’d have plenty of questions about our state of mind, starting with, “Why are so many people so lonely? Why is war constant? Why are so many of you living in such pain that you drug yourselves, often, to death? Why

Recall that the “pervasive happiness” of the Pirahã is due, in Everett’s estimation, to their “ability to handle anything that their environment throws at them [so] that they can enjoy whatever comes their way.”

The continuum has been broken because the human animal no longer lives in a human world. We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter, and leisure.

perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, referring to “millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

Among men in their fifties, suicides were up 50 percent, while suicide among women between sixty and sixty-four rose nearly 60 percent.

notion that mental illness is merely a result of brain anomalies misses the subtleties of how human beings interact with our social contexts: “Social experience plays a significant role in who becomes mentally ill, when they fall ill and how their illness unfolds. We should view illness as caused not only by brain deficits but also by abuse, deprivation and inequality, which alter the way brains behave.”

lack of exposure to nature, and early separation from parents

In other words, the further families are from the kinds of mutual support and social cohesion enjoyed by foragers, the more likely their children are to suffer severe mental illness.

The WHO concluded that living in a developed nation was a “strong predictor” that a patient would never fully recover.

the civilized mind neglects mythological ways of understanding the world, so these images and insights are suppressed, emerging only in fantasies and dreams.

But most of the suffering we see around us today is due to social causes that can and must be addressed before they manifest as mental illness: economic insecurity, misinformed parenting practices, oppressive educational systems, war and domestic violence, shame concerning sexuality and our bodies, absurd notions of beauty and success calculated to keep us always dissatisfied with ourselves and our lives. No pills will ever address these sources of our distress.

We place babies in sterile incubators; send our children to schools with armed guards, metal detectors, and teachers who are legally forbidden to touch even a crying child; drop bombs across the globe that create more potential terrorists than they kill; and administer drugs that quiet voices we should be listening to.

The “war on drugs,” it turns out, was never really about the drugs. It was simply a way to marginalize and silence protest against the waste of life and treasure in Southeast Asia.

use of ayahuasca and iboga—the most effective addiction treatments known.

In his cult classic Ishmael, for example, Daniel Quinn distinguished “the leavers” from “the takers.” At the risk of sounding hopelessly Rousseauian, I’d suggest an equally clarifying polarity is love versus fear.

Learning to accept the inevitability of what we fear most is the essential step on the path to a life worth living.

relaxed, egalitarian primate into a beast that is often aggressive, frustrated, and fearful: We’ve gone from grasshopper to locust. “In the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity,” wrote Aldous Huxley, in Ape and Essence. “And fear, my good friends, fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life.”

We learn to work toward everlasting life by praying to the right god, purchasing the right stuff, going to the right schools, taking the right supplements, doing the right exercises, and fighting for the right army. At the same time, we’re reminded that it’s a cruel world out there, and that we’re all helpless. We rush onward, trampling what’s left of the Garden, fleeing inchoate specters of hunger, abandonment, terrorism, economic collapse, police and criminals, nuclear meltdown, volcanic upheaval, asteroids, and death. Always death.

well put

We need to take our wisdom where we find it, and that clearly includes psychedelics. “It’s not ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’ ” anymore, muses Doblin. “It’s ‘turn on, tune in and take over.’ ”

yes

Science is certainly one of the strongest lights ever to illuminate the known universe. But the light of science can be shadowy and spectral. Those who insist that nothing exists beyond that which is scientifically demonstrable are like children who cover their eyes and imagine the world disappears because they cannot see it.

the forbidden dimension

Nobody can foresee the changes that will come as the human swarm reconfigures itself with interconnectivity at a level unimaginable just a few decades ago.

Peer networks reflect the deepest human values, nurtured over the millions of nights our fiercely egalitarian ancestors sat around the fire together, telling stories, enjoying the presence of old friends, deciding what to do tomorrow.

interesting

Hope embraces the unknown and unknowable, while optimism is a belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. I am convinced that everything wasn’t, isn’t, and probably won’t be fine.

But I think there’s still a path that leads toward home. The future I imagine (on a good day) looks a lot like the world inhabited by our ancestors—which makes a certain kind of sense, as many journeys end with a return to where they began.