Archdruid John Michael Greer hits the nail on the head again with
Hair Shirts, Hypocrisy, and Wilkins Micawber:
What comes to mind at this point, rather, is an acronym – LESS – that stands for "Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation."
The last point, "stimulation", being the most critical for pointing out why we are where we are:
dopamine hegemony. I want to make clear that the problem isn't simply stimulation, rather, stimulation for stimulation's sake only. I use many of the technologies that the Archdruid refers to for the purpose of stimulation... however, I use it to awaken my understanding of my (mostly hidden) desires and of the world. I use it as I say in "About Me" to transform myself from asleep and incidental to awake and intentional. This is a far cry from how and why most people experience stimulation:
A mind that’s constantly flooded with noise from television, video games, or what have you, is a mind that never has the time or space to think its own thoughts, and in a nation that’s trying not to notice that it’s sold its own grandchildren down the river, that’s probably the point of the exercise. Be that as it may, recovering the ability to think one’s own thoughts, to clear one’s mind of media-driven chatter, manufactured imagery, and all the other thoughtstopping clutter we use to numb ourselves to the increasingly unwelcome realities of life in a failing civilization, is an indispensable tool for surviving the challenges ahead, and one that I’ll be talking about at more length in a future post.
Once dopamine hegemony is recognized as the primary driver in our society, the next step is recognizing our overwhelming,
predictable irrationality and managing the impact of our
human cognitive errors.
