"It is becoming clear that much of the madness of modern technological society can be traced to a recent fork in the human journey that occurred about 10,000 years ago, just 300 generations back - the domestication of plants and animals. This was a purposeful separation of human existence from the rest of life. It shattered an ancient wholeness and replaced it with chronic traumatic stress."
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A quarter century ago, ecological pioneer Paul Shepard examined our alienation from the natural world. Shepard proposed that the deficient development of modern people has (at first unintentionally) led society to the destruction of its habitat.
Ancestral humans, he believed, acquired a healthy reciprocity with nature because young children experienced a mother always present, fathers with comprehensible roles, non-human beings in a primordial terrain, and deliberate adolescent initiation into adulthood.
Evolution from ape to man. From Proconsul to Homo heidelbergensis For Millions of years, our planet has been floating in space. Millions of creatures have lived on its surface. Many a quaint being ...
(Image by YouTube, Channel: Scientists Against Myths) Details DMCA
On the other hand, Shepard explains, industrialized cultures have abandoned nature and divided families, leading to an arrested development.
Poorly matured adults, Shepard says, harbor an infantile duality between themselves and nature, fear the organic world, and attempt to fulfill childish fantasies with patriotism, fundamentalism, or social status. Shepard saw the symptoms of this "[botched] childhood" in escapism, use of intoxicants and the massive numbers of people in therapy. He described the increasing injury to the planet as a "symptom of human psychopathology."
In Nature and Madness he wrote:
"The only society more frightful than one run by children, as in Golding's Lord of the Flies, might be one run by childish adults."
We witness these "childish adults" among the leaders of our world, addicted to money, power, prestige, intoxicants, and sex.
Chronic Traumatic Stress
Beneath all the symptoms of traumatic stress lies trauma's primary effect - dissociation - which creates "unexperienced experience: experience that has not been properly processed and integrated into memory. Like animals who "play dead," traumatized people split their consciousness, removing their suffering from awareness, leaving their bodies, going numb. We can imagine the "couch potato" obsessively watching television the "boob tube," or glued to his or her computer screen.
Dissociation is actually a brilliant way to protect the psyche from threats by which our nervous systems are overwhelmed: splitting and shutting down to avoid total breakdown. The purpose of dissociation is self-preservation from traumatic changes we are not prepared to integrate.
Whenever we are faced with an overwhelming experience that we sense is potentially disintegrating, we have the ability to suspend and freeze it in an unassimilated form and maintain it in that state indefinitely.
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It is important to recognize that much of our indifference, hubris, grandiosity, depression, anxiety and fragmentation stem at depth from our being surrounded by our technological world and a socially constructed, industrialized society.
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