This TED talk by Daniel Goleman succinctly presents many of the points I made in an earlier post about feedback and attention.
It's not that the consumerist, managerialist, corporate reality prevents us from caring. Of course it doesn't prevent it - individuals are the primary volitional units, and we have choices. But it does, in an increasingly well-understood, psychologically concrete manner, subsidize and reinforce a very particular sense of identity. This subsidy takes a lot of our resources to preserve a system of central management, but hides the costs from us in a variety of ways.The self involvement of which Goleman speaks does not appear to preclude basic empathy. It simply rushes and distracts us, forcing us to think about community participation in terms of more and more involved and complex management of our personal resources (in terms of time, attention, emotional energy, money, etc.). We find ourselves with less time and less energy, focusing more on our own needs and desires. Consequently, our relations with others become abstracted into less visceral, personal channels, which then require mediation and scientific, centrally coordinated approaches to the problems this management necessarily creates. In other words, it's a bit back-asswards.
Certainly, lack of compassion predates the modern system. What's interesting is not that some people don't care, but rather how the people who do seem to care feel powerless to act. Because the managed society (espeically the therapeutic State) wants to systematize our approach to all problems, individual and collective, people tend to think that these issues require redress by a new institution that can organize and coordinate an approach. Simultaneously, the increase in information about these problems dwarfs our individual initiative that might make a difference on a neighborhood or individual-to-individual basis.
These dynamics are not really new or unique phenomena; they rather attest to the possiblity that the progressive, modern society is not a clear improvement for humanity. Rather, this inattention to the empathy and compassion may be regarded as simply one more side-effect of a century-old project: viewing the population as a massive psychological entity to be tuned and managed. Individuals no longer matter - they are simply deviations on the bell curve distribution of behaviors, personalities, and interests. The managerial society positions itself as the mediator between the individual and the environment (social and natural) and gives people a way to farm out basic parts of being human to an authority. Indeed, it does this on an intrapersonal level as well, giving the individual myriad distractions and crutches for maintaining a shallow sense of self and one's identity.
So when I talk about the "subsidization" of inattention to one's self and environment, I'm trying to use the same language that economists use to describe the way the State intervenes to distort feedback mechanisms in the allocation of resources. Similarly, the corporate society is a large scale, expensive system that intrudes into the individual to offer an artifically cheap and easy way to live in terms of psychological and emotional effort. That's not to say people are oblivious; many aren't, but they have to coordinate the personal and interpersonal resources to address these issues on their own, whereas people who go along to get along with the system have an easier time. Tuning out from the real world becomes a defense against an increasingly incomprehensible, complex world that the system never stops working towards addressing but never seems to quite figure out.
So how does society change its course? One person at a time. Indeed, the act of one individual investing in himself or herself to start addressing these problems peronsally is painfully dissonant to the average tuned-out person. What we need to understand is that nobody really has a right to tune out, to live in the artificially isolated matrix we see around us. The act of living and being members of human communities will necessarily impact others, just as their choices aggregate into effects that impact us.
We are revolutionaries when we take it upon ourselves to define our authentic interests (however we may conceive of them). The actions that follow from those are not as important; what's important is to take responsibility for the basis of those actions, instead of defining your world in the context of managed news and information, managed community, and managed identity. This will necessarily be grating on those who don't want to take responsibility, because it shows them an annoying alternative to their current lack of engagement in life. But that's precisely the kind of feedback they fear, because it shows them that their sense of their environment is not as safe and secure as the managerial consensus represents.
Those who want to remain managed are welcome to invest their time and energy in reinforcing their own apathy. Many actually will out of desperation and a fear of the unknown, dynamic society us decentralists advocate. But then a funny thing happens: they are suddenly not being apathetic. Instead, they are engaged in the social conversation. And when that happens, when we're actually connecting with others and not reinforcing our collective inattention to the state of our environment, the people in the system are no longer stable and predictable. The mass psychological perspective becomes less useful, the system decomposes into something that cannot be managed, and we regain a sense of our own power - individually and collectively.
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