Our Pain is Not Dysfunctional

The world as we know it is in a devolutionary cycle. From climate change and environmental breakdown to rising authoritarianism to income inequality and racial injustice, strains on our systems are growing increasingly dangerous at an alarming rate. While threats are obvious, none of them seem met with the urgency necessary to stave off the disasters any one of them could portend.

The problem is not that people are ignorant about these challenges, so much as feeling helpless to do anything about them. We feel we’ve voted, organized, protested, run for office, done everything we’ve known to do, yet some impenetrable force seems more and more resistant to fundamental change. We have collective problems, but are plagued by barriers to collective problem solving. Anxiety, anger, depression, exhaustion, frustration and cynicism have become the new emotional norms, mixed with rampant disinformation and political corruption that only serve to make the problems worse.

Edvard Munch

And our pain is not dysfunctional. You registering pain over a world in trouble doesn’t mean that something’s wrong with you. Our mental anguish is a functional response to the times in which we live; much like physical pain, it is a message that something is very wrong and needs to be taken seriously. It’s a sign that certain things need to be recognized, and addressed, and transformed.

The world is on a self-perpetuating loop of pain affecting the majority of people alive, as unadulterated greed and its tyrannous hold on governments and economic systems run amok across the planet. Financial matters have given dominance over the truth of who we are, leaving us materially deprived and spiritually starving. Fear seems way more prevalent than love. We’re wounded people living in a wounded world, projecting our wounds onto the world and constantly being wounded again in turn.

Survival of any system doesn’t depend on it never getting hurt, however, but on the system having a healthy immune system. The physical body can take a huge amount of assault and injury and still heal; the psyche can take a huge amount of heartbreak and trauma and still heal; and civilizations can take a huge amount of dysfunction and still heal….as long as there is a healthy immune system.

That is how we should think of ourselves now: each of us an immune cell ready to rush to the wounds that now plague our body politic. Nature is imbued with a genius ability to transform itself, and so are we. We were not born to be victims to the dysfunction of the world; we were born to transform the dysfunction of the world. The chaos in which we find ourselves can give way to a better life, as change within ourselves will lead to changes in the world.

Our collective challenges have grown too large to simply manage anymore. They will overwhelm us, if we do not transform them. Our only choice now is to change our world, or to surrender to a future that is dystopian, even tragic if not for us then for our children.

But transformation is not a fix, or simply a treatment of symptoms. Problems outside us have roots in things going on inside us. We’re multi-dimensional beings with multi-dimensional problems that will only respond to multidimensional solutions. It’s not just what we’ve been doing, but who we’ve been being, that’s at the root of our collective dysfunction. In order for things to change, there is as much for us to rethink as there is for us to redo.

Few of our problems came upon us suddenly. Most of them have been present for years - some of them festering since our earliest beginnings - yet consistent warnings from scientists, nature, artists, philosophers and responsible politicians have gone unheeded. America – not that we are alone in this - now functions in a way that is so maladaptive for our survival, not only as a democracy but even as a species, that serious people talk casually about how to adapt to catastrophe now rather than even try to avoid it.

Yet resignation and surrender to some inevitable collective catastrophe is not where we need to be right now. We’re not the first generation to be in big trouble, nor the first generation to experience the excruciating birth pangs of a new era. Yes, our civilization is deeply wounded. But if we choose, and choose with conviction, then we will survive.

We will not survive the world as we have made it however, for we have made the world unsurvivable. In the words of Albert Einstein, “We will not solve the problems of the world from the level of thinking with which we created them.” 21st Century problems will not be solved by 20th century thinking. Our world must change, and for that to happen our thinking about the world must change.

We have been so arrogant as a species, so reckless towards the earth, so irreverent towards life itself, so exploitative not only toward our resources but also towards each other, that no one has to look too far to see the invisible hand Cause and Effect  on pretty much everything that is happening now. Nations that spend infinitely more of their resources on ways to kill each other than on ways to heal each other has a limited amount of room to complain.

We will have to look within ourselves as well as within our institutions, learn our history, take a serious look at how things got the way they are, hold ourselves accountable for ways we have at least subconsciously conspired with the forces that would hurt us, and then but only then will things begin to change. First, we will change, as we become people personally as well as socially mature enough to take on the real work of transformation.

No external savior, spiritual or political, is going to save us. We don’t need to hold out “false hope" that something outside of us is going to save us, but we do need to hold up a mirror to ourselves. In the words of Ernest Hemingway, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” All that a nation is, is a collection of people. America is broken, and the only question now is whether we will get strong at the broken places.

Becoming strong in the broken places involves internal as well as external investigation. To build a big building, one has to first build a very deep hole in the ground. We have to dig deep to discover where things got things off track in our lives, and not just what we have to do – but also who we need to be – to put things right. That’s the work not only an individual has to do in order to heal their life, and also what a nation needs to do. America is reckoning with our past these days in order to free ourselves to a better future. Such reckoning is painful, whether it’s one person doing it or a country doing it. It means cleaning out old wounds, enduring the pain of looking at things we’ve long avoided seeing, and committing to changes that might seem overwhelming at the time.

This moment is one of crisis, yes; of total systems breakdown, yes. But it is also a moment of profound opportunity, for ourselves, our country, and our world. It can be, if we choose, a portal into an entirely new and more sustainable era for humanity. Both the depressing part, and the exciting part, is that nothing less than that will do. Humanity’s behavioral patterns at this point are so maladaptive for our survival that the choice before us is to evolve, or to very possibly go slowly, painfully and tragically extinct.

We can countenance the end of the world, or we can transform it. Let’s choose wisely, passionately and proactively to transform.

Henri Matisse