Daily Reflections

11/20/2022

And Behind it All

Peeling back layers of things like hate and aggression. Like Judgement or Apathy. All of it comes from fear or hope. Not inherently bad things on their own and the two primal drives for a reason. To propel us towards or away from something.

The ultimate in alternating current. Waves that offer the energy to swell or recede as the situation requires. Yet, in an affluence of comfort the length of the waves reaches much further than a day.

And therein lies the problem. Too much comfort offers two forms of nuance to these drives. Without fear for immediate survival, it is possible to set one’s gaze upon oncoming threats. To think ahead in prevention. Without difficulty in attaining food and warmth, it is equally possible to hope instead for something shiny on the horizon.

The immediacy that once procured the need for hope and fear has been offered up to the gods of collective survival tactics. And without immediate purpose, one might expect the drives to shrivel and wither off the vines of consciousness. This is not the case. So longs as the individual consciousness exists, so too will be its primary directive forces… to survive and to thrive. These are the edifications of hope and fear.

Now, none of the above, is terrible in and of itself, nor is it necessarily problematic. It is merely being pointed out that our collective efforts to advance our species have been so wildly successful that our basic drives have not matured on pace with our technology and comfort. Additionally, it is not implied that both fear and hope are an irrelevant developmental organ of the mind. Though it may be fair to say that they are very much an appendix to our knowledge as a species.

What Dennis Miller once, and rightly, called, “Our Paleolithic Underpinnings,” are just as necessary now as they were in the trees and caves of the ancient world. The disconnect is one of scale, not utility. How does one apply something like fear or hope in a community that is rapidly expanding. Both are inherently selfish drives insofar as they are concerned primarily with self-preservation and self-improvement. Yet as societies expand, such perspectives increase in number and proximity to one another. Without a similar expansion in the sphere of concern of the individual, when these spheres meet it tends towards collision and not collusion. And the pushback manifests as revulsion, anger, violence, sociopathy or any of the seven deadly sins that modern psychology misdiagnoses as ‘disorder’.

This is why empathy is an evolutionary tool. Without being able to understand ‘your’ fears and hopes, ‘I’ cannot begin to construct a healthy relationship with one another. Similarly, without groups of humans in one area realizing and rationalizing their similarities with other groups, there can be no coalescing into larger more successful organizations. No society.

Empathy is the genetic bridge between fight and flight. For this reason, it is neither surprising nor unexpected that those who suffer trauma and live in a perpetual revolving door of fight and flight, might get to understand the mechanisms better and quicker. Practice.

At its core, empathy as a tool is a function of observation. But as the expressions of fear and hope began to grow more convoluted with the rise of complexity within our system, the modes of observation need to expand, hand in hand alongside. Observation cannot be restricted to physical senses anymore. The predators just out past the fire’s light can no longer be sensed by the cracking of sticks or their musk in the air. They must be seen in the mind and known by the heart. This is how our compassion for others grows on pace with our advancement of convenience.

But it’s still all the same things, fear, hope and understanding. We frail and fragile mortals still do all the same things, eat, love, die. And everything in-between. All the same stuff and motivations. Fancier wrappers to be sure. Shinier with each generation. To confuse them with growth by their external complications is to mistake the view from the window with the curtains framing it.

Empathy as observation becomes the reasoning agent to mitigate which drive ought be properly alerted or engaged. However it has been said, that empathy without boundaries is self-destruction. Yet, at the same time, just as often recognized is the reality of our collective experience, our sameness. True integration into any whole involves the dissolution of the part. In this way, fear is very necessary. One guards one’s identity as fiercely as one built it. Hope, by corollary is equally as valid here as it is often the seed for growing integration as opposed to annihilation.

Behind it all, as our knowledge of the world around us expands, so too must our understanding. Donnie Darko remarked, “that you can’t just lump everything into just two categories, it doesn’t make sense.” He was absolutely right. Hope and fear are perhaps, oversimplified if only identified as drives. They are in fact, the extremes of decision making on a continuum. Empathy is the fulcrum of the scale. We expand the fulcrum, balance becomes increasingly easier.

That is the fear managed and hope mitigated. Neither dismissed or repressed. Instead we acknowledge them and offer them purpose in the staging area, just not in front of the curtain.