Memory is what we use to ground our thoughts, our feelings and the events and experiences that happen to us, in order to preserve them as imprints in our minds. As important as it is to preserve the imprints we make on the fields of experience of the people who populate the living environment in which we dwell, it is also important to preserve these imprints within ourselves. In the first instance, we are preserving imprints in order to prepare for death by creating a surrogate immortality that will keep on living on after we die. In the second instance, we are preserving imprints in order to build up our senses of self through the gradual accumulation of life experiences within our minds. With this gradual buildup of our senses of self, we experience life more vibrantly. We feel what we feel with greater feeling. So, to summarize, memory allows us to prepare for death through a surrogate immortality and it allows us to strengthen our senses of self, raise our consciousnesses and, thus, feel more vibrantly alive.
Now just as we ground everything that happens to us in our minds, so, we, in turn ground our minds in our living environments. That is, we do this provided that our living environments have sufficient quantities of flowing blendable continual organic stimuli in order to be able to properly ground that which we experience in the external world. The organic stimuli are the substance which forms the foundation of the template which allows human interaction to take place in a healthy way. In our modern technological living environments, there is simply not enough flowing blendable continual organic stimuli in order to provide the kind of grounding we need to be able to properly preserve the imprints of our thoughts and feelings and of our life experiences and events through our memories. Without the grounding we need through a traditional natural environment, our senses of self do not properly develop. People with such weakened senses of self become, in effect, like zombies. People who suffer from conative anesthesia – numbed wills – and who have difficulty making important life decisions by themselves. People who sit in front of one kind of screen or another most days so that they won’t have to confront the reality of their hollowed-out lives. These are the people who become susceptible to being swallowed up by cults today, not just spiritual and religious cults like Scientology, Hare Krishna and the Moonies, but political cults like that which has been coalescing around Donald Trump. Now Trump does not focus on telling people how to live in terms of the various personal details of daily life. Rather he tells people how to think about themselves in the world (aggrieved personal victims), what is the cause of all their problems (conspiracies from dark forces), and how to solve the problems (would you believe insurrections, marauding mobs).
Weakened senses of self from a lack of grounding not only affect people’s capacities to remember, with any real depth, individual experiences, individual events, feelings and thoughts, but it also affects their capacities to tune into the collective memories of their families, communities, cultures and of humanity in general. These memories are very important in teaching us how to operate in groups. How to balance our individual needs with the needs of the group. Without these memories, it is very difficult to learn how to commune with groups of people. Instead, we end up either living in isolation or else submerging in group identities. Without proper memories from group identities which teach us how to interact with people in groups without giving up our individual senses of self, we get sucked up by the group. This, of course, is what has been happening to all the Trump supporters. They seem to have no group memory of what happened to the world as a result of the authoritarian populist cults of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The country may become susceptible to an old-fashioned strongman leader, but that isn’t nearly as bad as a dictator who is ruling from the perspective of a totalitarian cult.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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