09021 Psychological Issues in Resilience, Persistence, and Constancy: a back of the envelope calculation

The big boys in their shiny armor are up there on castle walls hurling their thunderbolts. We’re the ants patiently carrying sand a grain at a time from under the castle wall. We work from the bottom up. The knights up there don’t see the ants and don’t know what we’re doing. They’ll figure it out only when the wall begins to fall. It takes time and quiet persistence. Always remember this: They fight with money and we resist with time, and they’re going to run out of money before we run out of time. — Utah Phillips

I am not a psychologist nor do I play one on television. I am not qualified to diagnose anyone’s mental states except for my own, and probably not even that. For a much more in depth and professional look at these issues, read every single blog entry at the Peak Oil Blues blog http://www.peakoilblues.org/blog/ written by Dr. Kathy McMahon, whose doctorate is in psychology. She writes —

We’re bombarded with alarming headlines on a daily basis. How do we find the sane space between Doom and Denial?

That’s what we’re going to talk about here. This is a back of the envelope calculation, take it for what it is. And what it isn’t also.

We live in an ongoing, slowly unfolding, catastrophic disaster.

Just as in a standard disaster movie, one person gets crushed by a collapsing building while another seemingly skates through unscathed. The disaster hits different people and different places in different ways, with varying intensities and magnitudes and time scales. Many people are mostly fine. Other formerly middle class people must now learn to live out of their cars or to sleep in a homeless shelter. Another group die because they had the misfortune to be caught between two warring factions. Refugee camps trap millions of people that have no place to go.

Depending on your physical, economic, and social locations, your children could be starving to death before your eyes. (You probably aren’t reading this if that’s true.) They could be at risk of death by terrorism or military attack. (Most of us reading this are at risk of terrorism and military attack.)

In a different physical, social, and economic place ... you might be headed to a ball game in an SUV loaded with friends ready for a good time. You never think about the people that die everyday because of the consequences of poverty. You don’t know, or are in denial, about the guilt of the wealthy countries, whose greed, violence and covetous sense of entitlement to cheap resources conspire with corrupt leadership classes to keep people mired in poverty and despair.

None of this is free of psychological impact, common sense tells us that. But we can be incredibly delusional about the consequences of all this catastrophe on our lives. Denial is not a river in Egypt. Denial is a pandemic psychological problem that afflicts multitudes.

The mainstream mass media daily exposes us to vivid portrayals of murder, violence, and cruelty. (This is a good argument to minimize your exposure to such “stimulations.”)

The mainstream media teaches us that we have value only as mindless consumers. Authorities tell us that satisfaction can only be found in accumulating ever greater quantities of cheap, useless junk. Movie scripts teach us that violence is fun and solves problems all the time. Our leaders praise gluttony and scorn frugality. Competition becomes more important than cooperation. Commentators preach the virtue of selfishness. Their words fall on minds perfectly prepared by war and violence to not only hear, but to embody ethics of egoistic gluttony as a way of life.

As bad as everything looks, this is not all of reality as reality actually is.

Evil exists, denying that is foolish. We experience evil, violence, selfishness. We find beauty, wisdom, love, and goodness. Where do you want to be? Do you want to share bread with Adolph Hitler? Or would you rather be with people who personify wisdom and goodness instead of violence and death?

This homely way of looking at things rings true even in the face of the overwhelming media onslaught in favor of lifestyles of the conspicuous bloodthirsty lustful glutton.

Don’t fight against the system, they tell us. The system always wins. The nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered down.

That’s certainly what the governing elites want us to believe.

But the real reality (which is different from the faux reality and faux consciousness driven by politicized mass mainstream media) is a much different situation.

As Utah Phillips points out (and a hat-tip to Dr. McMahon because I found the quote at her Peak Oil Blues site), they fight with money, we resist with time. They will run out of money before we run out of time.

Consider a forest. There are those who would have us believe that it is a place of vicious unrestrained competition. That’s not what we actually see, is it? What happens in the forest is cooperation, where the waste of one element is food for another. The forest system regulates itself and is greater than the sum of all of its parts. There is no waste in a forest. Everything is food. Many of us, however, can’t see the forest because of the trees. In other words, we focus on the parts so we don’t see the whole.

The story is not over until it is over. I have over the years become fond of self-fulfilling prophecies. I like them because they always come true. That’s why they’re called self-fulfilling prophecies.

I think we should be careful, however, in the prophecies that we self-fulfill. It is not hard to self-fulfill prophecies of doom and destruction. It is much better for everyone, the planet included, if we self-fulfill prophecies of joy, wisdom, love, goodness, and peace.

There we find the real psychological questions at the heart of resilience, persistence, and constancy:

What am I doing with my life? And why am I doing it?