We humans have an enormous capacity to go through our daily lives without being aware of the many forces influencing us. This is a protective measure. If we were aware of all of these forces, but at the same time, lacking the understanding about how to deal with them on a conscious level, we could become overwhelmed by them and even psychologically paralyzed by them. So, for instance, to manage effectively the numbness which we are all experiencing, (one of the most important and, at the same time, harmful forces affecting people in modern technological society), the only real antidote for its effects is living a life full of primary experience. Full of direct interaction with other people: being part of a community, when possible, and being part of a family, forming good friendships, having a deep loving romantic relationship, engaging in sports, fixing and building with basic tools, the arts, travel, and reading, the latter of which I would actually consider a borderline primary experience, but an important one, nevertheless.By the same token, when I state that even people who are not part of Trump’s cult are still under the influence of the experiential vacuum in which we all live, and that rather than becoming zombies that they are becoming more like psychological cyborgs, this is a very heavy yet not very obvious commentary to be making about people today. Again, the way to break away from feeling like and acting like a cyborg is lots of primary experience. And this has to be done in spite of the fact that there are so few patches of traditional natural living environments left to act as good templates for primary experience, places to do the ultimate primary experience which is to commune with nature.
Now the perception of Trump’s followers as zombies is a much easier concept to grasp than that the rest of us should be thought of as psychological cyborgs. But the only difference is that zombies are numb entities who, in this case, seek out someone who is constantly creating abrasive stimuli that is constantly shocking them out of their numbness. Donald Trump is an ongoing tension-pocket who creates chaos wherever he goes. Yet the zombies love it. Psychological cyborgs are people who don’t recur to one person to pull them out of their numbness. Instead, like self-starting machines, they are entities that constantly keep busy with different tasks that act as sources of abrasive stimuli. What they don’t do well is generating and receiving organic stimuli through committed relationships whether family, friends, lovers or spouses. Instead, emotional relationships are constantly shifting for psychological cyborgs. Couples get divorced, family members stop speaking to one another. The same with friends. Employers let go of their workers. Workers quit. Workers get transferred at a moment’s notice. For psychological cyborgs, all human relationships are contingent, conditional. Such relationships take less time, energy and state of mind to maintain. But they provide less emotional satisfaction. They don’t provide the emotional grounding that all of us require.
Anyway, just as it is difficult for us to grasp that we are suffering from numbness due to the frictionless tractionless living environment in which we are all immersed, so it is equally difficult for us to grasp how this environment has shaped us and turned us into zombies and psychological cyborgs. And yet these concepts explain so much in terms of how we have evolved, as we have started to use modern technology more and more in our daily lives. There was this book that I had to read in high school called The Lonely Crowd which as the title suggests dealt with people frenetically trying to socialize in modern technological society and yet feeling very empty and very lonely in spite of it. Today people are so immersed in their digital technology that I doubt if they have much time or interest to get involved in frenetic socialization. At any rate, time spent glued to a screen, be it television or computer, is time not spent grounding oneself in meaningful social relationships. People have lost the capacity to display or to absorb the organic stimuli upon which deep social connections are built. And they are not only losing the opportunity to have deep grounded connections with others, which can help them to feel more vibrantly alive, but they are also losing the opportunity to give and receive meaningful organic imprints. The notion of giving and receiving meaningful organic imprints is a crucial part of primary experience. It is what explains what makes primary experience so important in our lives. By giving meaningful organic imprints to others, through making imprints, and then sometimes through preserving them and through being open to receiving them, we feel more vibrant in our daily flow of actions and we contribute to our surrogate immortality in our preparations for death. Without a good portion of our lives being primary experiences, we haven’t been living.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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