The Right-Brain Revolution By Nowick Gray
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The Right-Brain Revolution
For a while now I’ve been mulling over a concept central to much of the world’s problems/solutions, one that I want to call “The Myth of Human Nature.” Essentially we’ve been fed this picture of history as dark and nihilistic as Lord of the Fliesor Game of Thrones, a portrait painted in the image of psychopaths instead of ordinary, peace-loving, family-centered and community-minded folks.
With such a deep and far-reaching topic, it’s intimidating even to venture into the territory. But this week’s post from Caitlin Johnstone, “Abnormalize the Status Quo,” speaks rather directly to the point, so I’ll pass the feather:
It is not human nature to be this sick, and anyone who tells you it is is lying. Anyone who tells you it’s human nature to be greedy, violent, domineering and abusive isn’t telling you about humanity’s nature, they’re telling you about their own nature. And it’s probably a bad idea to turn your back on them.
We can have health. We can have normality. But just as you won’t return to health by pretending that your fever and abdominal pains are normal, we can’t create a healthy society as long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated into the belief that our backwards, insane status quo is what normality looks like.
Perhaps the blame for our succumbing to this civilizational sickness is the wearing down of our right-brain, naturally intuitive immune system, so we have lost our resistance to the left-brain, hyper-rational cancer. And perhaps the source of healing can be rebuilding our capacity to live by guidance from our suppressed side: characterized by heart, love, flow, synchronicity, gut feeling, empathetic emotion, and the organic wisdom of nature.
Credit goes to a commentator by the name of Charlie Freak for the insight that civilization took a wrong turn down the road of left-brain dominance. The so-called Enlightenment (“I think, therefore I am”) aligned with the pre-eminence of European colonial empires who brutally extinguished heretics, women, healers, and indigenous cultures, on the road to erecting a new god, scientific materialism.
The above critique aligns with my own realization of late that we’re already past the stage of arguing the science of masks, for example: it comes down to a more fundamental matter of belief, of almost a religious nature–on both sides of the COVID debate. Recognizing how prone the “science” and “facts” are to manipulation and cherry-picking, the focus on core belief might even be a constructive change of direction. Quick gut check: when you see everyone walking around in masks, do you feel it’s healthy, or just plain wrong?
The Right-Brain Revolution doesn’t reject all science, technology, logic or objectivity. It uses them as tools, instead of worshiping them a giving all our power to them. They exist to serve us, not the reverse. “Cognitive dissonance” comes to mind as a caution: when confronted by facts that counter our pre-existing belief system, many of us retreat to our conditioned, programmed, unconscious fear or fixed belief. I would suggest that is an unhealthy response, and favor a more conscious choice. When confronted by a conflicting set of facts, instead of rejecting or retreating, we can expand our awareness with acceptance of both sides, even of insoluble paradox. Embracing the reality of competing narratives, we can still align with our internal compass of truth or belief. This more conscious core transcends the so-called facts and draws a baseline in nature: where with one glimpse of immediacy we can realize beauty and wholeness.
In the interview referenced above, the better known Michael Tellinger chimes in with his positive alternative, the “One Small Town” initiative, based explicitly on the faith that humans can solve our problems equitably and peacefully by cooperating on the local level. In another interview between Robert David Steele and Martin Geddes, the latter offers a surprising counterpoint to his IT background by offering the path of “loving kindness.”
These healthy attributes of human nature are part of what some call a “positive timeline” to follow as an alternative to the one we’re on. We’ve been programmed since birth to reject them as idealistic or unworkable, to disconnect from what we innately recognize as “natural law” and give all our allegiance and belief to the fake laws imposed by the empire-nation-state. To get back in touch with what’s real in nature, and human nature, we need to dive to our core; past our legalistic and economic identity and the rationally constructed hologram we mistake for reality.
The real Left/Right divide is not the narrow dualism of contemporary politics, but in our own brains and beings. The lefthand “Information Highway” is well marked now, with all the bright signposts blinking us toward a 5G-powered, AI-managed technocracy. The other road is not mapped in future time at all, except in the forests of possibility, the open fields of creative response. We can look to examples of natural peoples while some still exist to teach us, surviving in fragile outposts of “The Fourth World,” showing us timeless wisdom of “The Old Way.” Honouring these models of sustainable human nature, we might yet return to our roots for healing, and abandon the wholesale suicide of our left brain-lemming rush to the cliff of transhuman oblivion.
[image credits:]
book.jpg: transitionnetwork.org
serling: lesterandcharlie.com
cog-diss.jpg: Free Thought Project
photos (human nature.jpg, vista.jpg): Nowick Gray
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Nowick Gray writes from Salt Spring Island, BC. His books of genre-bending fiction and creative nonfiction explore the borders of nature and civilization, imagination and reality, choice and manifestation. Connect at NowickGray.com to read more. A regular contributor to The New Agora, Nowick also offers perspectives and resources on alternative culture and African drumming, and helps other writers as a freelance copyeditor at HyperEdits.com.
