Delusions We’re Molded to Have

The dead conquer the living

The School for Good Mothers is a dystopian novel that shows the insanity of modern solo mothering. In the story, mothers who fail at meeting parenting expectations are swarmed with cold-eyed surveillance. Then with documented evidence showing they are defective in some manner, they are put into prisons with other inadequate women to learn how to be good mothers. To practice good mothering, each is assigned a robotic doll resembling their child.

The surface of the narrative involves lapses in mothering and torturous repair. But missing in the narrative is any awareness of babies as living beings, agents who self-organize their psychological and neurobiological systems around moment-to-moment lived experience, who learn to self-regulate from the co-regulating behaviors of MULTIPLE bonded carers. Instead, children are treated like objects, as are their soloist mothers who are expected to follow rigid rules of interaction. To get out of prison, mothers must learn to follow the rules of object-to-object appropriate care, rules that resemble what dead, non-living AI would advise. It’s not a living world.

Unfortunately, too much contemporary discourse about parenting follows similar dead rules for relationships, as if babies and mothers are machines. (See post, Babies are not Machines.)

Mechanomorphism, treating living things like machines has poisoned the modern worldview, seeping into science, medicine, humanities, business, governance and the treatment of nearly every living being on the planet. Forest? It’s timber. Cattle, chickens, pigs? Meat. Waterway? Dumping ground.

Treated like objects from the beginning of life, each of us who survives learns to dissociate from the extreme humiliation, disrespect, and pain of our early years. That’s presumably why adults don’t want to hear about baby needs. They shut down, roll their eyes, leave the room. Or retort: “I was spanked and I’m fine.” “You’re telling me I should touch my child? You’re a Nazi” (an actual response from a European philosopher).

We learned to detach from presence, from being, to put up with the system’s disrespect of livingness. Treated like machines, we treat others the same way, using the part of the brain that enjoys this.

The modernist system governing our lives is based in the ego-consciousness and manipulative aspects of human brain function. Specifically, we live in a world dominated by the left-brain hemisphere’s worldview (McGilchrist, 2009). This has increased in the western world as babyhood and childhood deteriorated, undermining right hemisphere development (Schore, 1996; 2001, 2002).

It is half blind. Sees with only one eye.

NOTE: It is true that brain organization is more complicated than left and right, but when the two halves are separated experimentally or clinically, there are distinctive characteristics on average between the two halves. See Iain McGilchrist’s tomes (e.g., 2009) summarizing studies from experiments and clinical studies of brain damage.

I contend that the dominance of left-brain consciousness in adulthood emerges from the underdevelopment of right hemisphere capacities and knowhow in babyhood and early childhood (see Allan Schore’s long literature on right hemisphere development in early childhood; e.g., 1996; 2001; 2002). The right hemisphere organizes itself during embodied, lived, immersed experience in early life. The right hemisphere builds itself through a nearly hypnotic first six years of life jumping into testing and trying and imitating and enjoying being, then ever after through whole-body experiences.

Sitting encaged (in playpen, carrier, stroller), residing within four walls, watching screens—none of these develop a living understanding of the world. Children need to move at will, encountering endless diversity of people, animals, plants, weather—immersed experience in a living planet.

Undercared for babies and children miss sensitive periods for emotional, social and cognitive intelligences. Instead, modernized adults emphasize left hemisphere ego-conscious functions during the first handful of years—do you want a red or blue balloon? What do you want for lunch? Stop playing and learn to read these words.

And so we have a modernized world of adults with underdeveloped right hemispheres, dominated by left brain worldview preferences. Why is that a problem? (Look around.)

• Left hemisphere ego consciousness is subject to delusions because it has no direct access to the living world. It would normally grab that lived information from the right hemisphere which collects it from whole-body experience, but without much immersed experience made-up reality replaces it. It’s best to have lots of multicultural experiences to fill right hemisphere knowledge banks, shaping social and emotional flexibility and openness to learning (Narvaez & Hill, 2010).

• Left hemisphere ego consciousness has only a map of reality, it cannot access the world directly (it is wired only with itself, unlike the right hemisphere which is attuned to the rest of the body and the outside world, integrating them). Using this birds-eye view of life is helpful for solving problems when they arise, but not helpful for acting as a living being in a living world.

• Left hemisphere ego consciousness loves its skeletal map and cannot accept contradictory evidence. Instead, it rationalizes rejection of new facts (human-caused climate change? Naw, climate change has always happened). To support the rigid map, falsehoods are acceptable and needed. The familiar map/script/worldview must stay intact. Why? Because the underdeveloped individual does not have intact the sense of being, of livingness, that a healthy right hemisphere provides. So, if the map is dissolved, I perish.

• Left hemisphere ego consciousness instrumentalizes everything in a desire for power. Power or perish.

Sound familiar? That is the world we are living in currently. Everything is a commodity to be manipulated, whether parents, babies, workers, animals, or plants.

This is a totalizing system. A totalizing system has no respect for truth, goodness, beauty, living beings. It’s all about power.

Totalizing systems want everyone to behave in predictable ways. Sameness. The overall goal is to keep the megamachine going—whether totalitarian communism or totalitarian capitalism.

Remember that the USA and its allies fought against the totalizing communist system. But now, the oligarchic global society that corporations, the ultra-rich, and their political minions have been trying to restore for decades are supporting a totalizing corporate-capitalism. This is reminiscent of patriarchal alchemy’s desire to take over women’s role in creating life, to replace living beings with automatons (von Werlhof, 2011).

With the capitalist theology, human-made objects have more rights than living beings—don’t upset the ‘free market;’ don’t get in the way of holy money-making.

We become impoverished, emotionally, socially, ecologically. Our vitality is drained by predatory capitalism and its AI tools. Evil resides here. Destruction of the wellbeing of a living being is evil (Suchocki, 1995).

Isn’t time to end these destructive delusions before they completely destroy the visible living world?

To restore brain and cultural balance, we need to cultivate and nourish the right hemisphere (and the whole brain in balance). The evolved nest does that, which is especially important in early life when the brain and worldview are being co-constructed by experience. But people at every age can return to health with nestedness.

Sign up for the monthly EvolvedNest.org newsletter to learn about our forthcoming Nesting Ambassador program (starting in June) to help renest the world.

References

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Narvaez, D. Babies are not Machines

Narvaez, D. & Hill, P.L. (2010). The relation of multicultural experiences to moral judgment and mindsets. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 3(1), 43-55.

Schore, A. (1996). The experience-dependent maturation of a regulatory system in the orbital prefrontal cortex and the origin of developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 8, 59-87. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579400006970

Schore, A. (2001). Effects of a secure attachment relationship on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal, 22, 7-66. https://doi.org/10.1002/1097-0355(200101/04)22:1<7::AID-IMHJ2>3.0.CO;2-N

Schore, A. N. (2002). Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of posttraumatic stress disorder. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 36(1), 9-30. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1440-1614.2002.00996.x

Suchocki, M.H. (1995). The fall to violence: Original sin in relational theology. Continuum.

Von Werlhof, C. (2011). The failure of modern civilization and the struggle for a «deep» alternative: A critical theory of patriarchy. Peter Lang.