Cancel culture is roaming the streets like a gang at midnight with machine guns in downtown L.A. Polarization is off the charts.
Who’s gonna be next? Nelson Mandela for being a racist? The pope for being a Bhoeddist?
Everything goes.
Twenty-two months of propaganda in the biggest sales pitch ever in the history of humankind, combined with the bulkiest fear-mongering media campaign of all times is asking its toll. We’re seeing the results right now.
Thank you big tech for not being really helpful with your A.I to maximize time on sight.
Christianity managed to scare the shit out of people with hell, their brilliant marketing tool. This lasted 500 years and ended with trying to kill everybody who didn’t believe the main religious narrative during the inquisition.
Then it was the witches turn to pay the price for challenging authority.
OK, probably those two events were worse, but we’re getting close. What didn’t change all those ages is our primal neural cortex responding to outside stimuli. What changed is the amount of stimuli.
Fear does crazy stuff with our minds and responses, our primal brain didn’t change in all those ages. .
Here’s a possible treat. A simple practice.
Why everybody is afraid, including our billionaires
The fourth industrial revolution is like a typhoon raging over our heads, leaving a vacuum of power and sense-making.
The root fear that most of us experience these days is that change is happening too fast.
Do we really want CRISPR edited tomatoes that help you chill out?, Virtual running and biking buddies? Robotdogs equipped with weapons? , CCTV, optimized face recognition, State-run cryptocurrency, Robotics making 60% of our economy a ghost town, The Internet of Things making everything trackable and hackable, Untested 5G, Climate Lockdowns, Social Credit systems, going cashless, Test stations, Vaccine passports, big data harvesting and Governments giving you advice about your sex life?
It leaves most of us at the sideline powerless. It makes us observe the exponential growth of technology without hand breaks.
Makes us shit our pants in fear.
We’re left speechless at the sideline
Societies response to big industrial or technological revolutions is always delayed and needs to be ground up.
We all need time to make sense of it all and reach some consensus on what is even true out there. This seems like an impossible task right now, but hopefully, things will cool down at some point.
When decision making is solely top-down, we call that a dictatorship, technocracy or authoritarian regime at best. Those are the entities taking advantage of the power vacuum that occurs in these periods of societal decay.
Those entities are profit-driven, not democracy driven. They’re inhumane. The biggest monopolistic molluscs in history: Big tech, Big pharma and Big finance. Recently, an inhumane Big Oil cooperation got somebody into jail who was questioning oil spills in the Amazon. Justice is now also bought by our pundit oligarchs.
They need to be stopped or they’ll take everything, including our precious home. Planet earth.
Clearly, there’s enough to be afraid of, for all of us. Even the billionaires. Since they’re human too. Imagine a nightmare where you get chased by 799.999 angry Amazone employees.
Not funny.
Acknowledge the fear in others
The present day framing, cancelling and massive weaponization of information all come from fear. And deep-felt unsafety.
I get it. I have the same fear.
It’s the fear for a society changing so fast that my basic security, my sense-making and my patterns to meet life don’t work anymore.
Also my core values are more and more dis-aligned with what people think and say out there. Its alienating.
The only thing I need is to be acknowledged in my fear. This will bring back my safety and a sense of belonging, a feeling of being in this shift together.
From these insights, the only way forward is to start acknowledging the fact that the people in the other camp are in fear too.
That makes them human again.
A practice that will change everything
When somebody is in freeze from fear, is suffering from severe tunnel vision, or is highly contracted into spasms of outrage, realize this are all defense mechanisms coming from a probably almost burned down nervous system.
When you’re a vaxxer and you see yourself blaming non-vaxxers for whatever. In fact, when you notice yourself signing petitions to re-open Auschwitz, maybe it’s time to realize that non-vaxxers have the same fears.
They’re humans, living on the same planet.
Vaxxers need to be acknowledged on the same level, with their needs and fears. There is nobody to blame, really. Just imagine for a moment how complex the world got in just under 3 years.
Practice this when you have some healthy nerves left. Let’s call it the acknowledgement practice. It’s a muscle you can train. Every day.
In the end, we all live on the same planet. One day, all of us, die.
Hey there, on the other side, I love you.
Lucien Lecarme
Fear is Driving this Insane Polarization — Not Covid, Truckers or Joe Rogan