Two Concussions

And how we know what we know

I am hopeful that this post is going to help you in managing feelings of gloom, end of days despair and generalized, normalized anxiety about the dismal state of the western world. Though it will not actually keep the lights on in your apartment. Sorry about that. I am inviting you to think about how your/our brain works, and why we seem to be stuck in the door leading to a more serene, less terrifying world. And what the divided brain has to do with it. It’s a complex but ultimately illuminating tale, that started with two concussions.

 Have a look at this picture of the divided brain, which is only a primitive and simplified map of what actually goes on in the brain and not entirely correct because the brain is actually not symmetrical as shown. But it will give you the general idea, a right brain concept in itself.

Based on this diagram, you can play a little mind/brain game now: which side of your brain is dominant or, do both sides play nicely together in your mind? That would be the ideal, according to a world authority on this sticky subject, Dr Iain McGilchrist. A neuroscientist and big picture thinker living on the Isle of Skye, he published a book with the odd title, The Master and his Emissary, the divided brain and the making of the western world, way back in 2009. In this 600-page voyage into the split mind/brain, he says that as a society, we have fallen into left brain dominance, leading to all kinds of serious deformations, societal problems, even insanity. We are becoming autistic, he says. He also claims that for most of our history, the west has always tended in that direction, with terrible consequences. Every time we’re deep trouble, we are in the thrall of the kind of thinking that the left brain excels at—being absolutely certain of being right—but cannot get beyond that. It needs the right brain to get out of its own way, and open doors to new ways of approaching old problems. This is another way of understanding why the last two years have yielded new lows in public miscommunication, fruitless arguments, and a serious loss of trust in the official arbiters of ‘truth’.

His thesis about the danger of left-brain dominance can be summed up in one of the numerous clinical outcomes he cites about patients whose right brains have been damaged. If you suffer from right brain damage, you can’t see the door because you are fixated on the handle. We, our society, is just like those patients. We need help to stop fixating on handles so we can get through the actual door, into the next room, the next reality. The arrogant Emissary can only see handles, not doors.

I hope I have got your attention now, so I can tell you more about my new hero, whose Master/Emissary book I ignored it because the title made no sense to me. I must be left brain dominant. Fast forward to 2022, when I, now quite old, did a faceplant on the sidewalk and staggered off with a concussion, (see my previous post). Then, a few days later, I began reading the book I had ignored more than a dozen years before. And graduated from a literal to a metaphorical concussion, feeling intermittently dizzy both physically and mentally. And since writing is the way I get a grip ( a left brain obsession), I am going to reveal the devilish details and hope that you, esteemed reader, end up with a much clearer image of the brain/mind as well. It’s not a simple story, but it is quite fascinating and relevant to understanding the times we live in.

McGilchrist has fundamentally altered the way I understand the world. I owe my belated introduction to Jordan Peterson, who invited him to his show to discuss the follow up to the Master book, with a much better title, The Matter with Things. Together, these three tomes contain a new vision of what it means to be human that has not penetrated to the mainstream. Pop psychology had hijacked that idea to such a degree that serious scientists did not dare ask the obvious question: what would be the evolutionary advantage of such a brain? Until McGilchrist did.

As for the title of the book, it is derived from an old fable. That a neuroscientist would use a fable as a metaphorical title is in itself rather remarkable. So here it is:

…there once was a wise king who ruled his kingdom so well that it grew large, and he had to appoint emissaries to administer the far-flung realm. This worked fine until, one day, one of the emissaries decided that he was smarter than the wise king and betrayed him by taking over himself. He did this without anyone noticing until it was too late, and the entire kingdom collapsed.

Here is the author himself, explaining this title and his reasons for writing the book:

The Master is the right hemisphere; the upstart Emissary is the left hemisphere, and if it is allowed to dominate, will eventually bring down the entire structure called ‘human civilization’. McGilchrist wrote the book as a warning, and felt he had to write the book because our society is in the grip of left-brain dominance, willfully ignoring the right brain with dystopian implications. He says that it is typical of ‘societies that have passed their peak’. Many people would agree with him.

Let’s give Dr McGilchrist the floor, as he describes the nitty gritty details of left brain dominance. Incidentally, he insists that he is describing predominant ‘attitudes’ in each hemisphere, not ‘functions’ per se. They both do what the other half does, just in a different mode. Okay, here we go:

First, the left-hemisphere view is designed to aid you in grabbing stuff. Its purpose is utility, and its evolutionary adaptation lies in the service of grasping and amassing ‘things’. As such it is seductive. It is probably for this reason that Eastern cultures which used to be more balanced in their outlook are now adopting the current Western model of the world with such enthusiasm….In the case of the Greeks, the Romans and the post-Enlightenment West, the decline of civilization has been associated, not just with more left hemisphere ways of thinking , but appropriately with forms of military or economic imperialism, and a consequent overextension of administration a coarsening values, and failure of vitality, vision and integrity.

The proxy war in Ukraine.

Second, the left hemisphere view offers simple answers. Its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all and claims to offer the same mechanistic models to explain everything that exists. This thinking is common to those who espouse naïve reductionist science (scientism) (The Science), enthusiasts for technological solutions to what are complex human problems, and to designers and implementers of bureaucratic systems…

Third, the left hemisphere’s world view is easier to articulate. The left hemisphere is the speaking hemisphere: the right hemisphere has literally no voice. The attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature; as a result, finding the language to put across the way of being of the right hemisphere is simply harder than doing so for the naturally explicit left hemisphere…in a left dominated culture, metaphors and narratives are disregarded as myths and fables or, at worst, downright lies…

The vilification of the Truckers and their supporters as people with ‘unacceptable views’.

Fourth, since the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last fifty, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. Today all the available sources of intuitive life—the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art—have been so conceptualized, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyze them, their power to help us see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them. For many, TV screens and computers supplant direct face to face experience of reality. (ZOOM). The cerebral and the abstract-for example, management and its systems-have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve…

Fifth, built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on everything—including on their own relationship. The right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, ‘both/and’, synthetic, integrative; it realizes the need for both. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, ‘either/or’, analytic and fragmentary—but, crucially, unaware of what is missing. It therefore thinks it can go it alone.

No other opinions are allowed. Questions are regarded as heretical.

Sixth, a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere’s world attracts to itself, in position of influence and authority, those whose natural outlook is similar. …thus, a culture which already has some prominent autistic characteristics, attracts to position of influence individuals who will help it ever further down the same path. This is not the only vicious cycle involved. Increasing technologisation and bureaucratisation of life help to erode the more integrative modes of attention to people and things which might help us resist the advances of technology and bureaucracy…

Finally, though the ‘takes’ of the two hemispheres are made to work together below the level of conscious awareness, they are not strictly compatible. …. Once dragged into the light of day and scrutinized, the hemisphere’s takes are seen often to pull in opposite directions. The catch is that in such a society as our, any apparent inconsistency is treated as a sign of error or intellectual muddle. Ambiguity is no longer a strength, given that truth is known to be complicated and many layered; it is a weakness since truth is thought of as simple and straightforward. It is therefore easier to accept the left hemisphere point of view, which is easier articulated and unambiguous and simply stands in contradiction to the right hemisphere’s view, than to accept that of the right hemisphere, which is more multifaceted and harder to articulate and is already inclusive of the apparently incompatible left hemisphere’s point of view. This virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore dismissed.

The Great Barrington Declaration.

That, in a convoluted nutshell, is what is ailing us at this dangerous hinge of history. Things are more complicated, convoluted, contradictory and downright crazy than they have been since, well, the American Revolution. Or the French one. Yet we, the left-brain slaves, insist on simple, easy to grasp, handy technical ‘solutions’, and are thus driven deeper into what is increasingly looking like the abyss. We are in desperate need of Big Picture People, whether scientists, artists or even politicians, but because of the stranglehold of the dominant left brainers running this dreadful show, they are not getting their say. At least, not yet. They are the only ones who have the visionary capacity to drag us out of the tight corner we’re finding ourselves in. They are the people who understand that doing the same thing over and over again, like waging futile wars, isn’t going to deliver a different outcome. They are the people who comprehend that, in the words of McGilchrist, …we don’t need a lot more quick fixes. We need a shift in the paradigm.

The shift means reintegration of the holistic, implicit, intuitive, traditional knowledge of the right brain with the mad, abstract, explicit technological utopianism of the left brain. If we want to stop dismantling of our world, that is. Turns out that you can destroy an entire society more than 300 years in the making in roughly 2.5 years. All you have to do is frighten everyone with a  story about a killer virus, then lock everybody down, then force them to submit to a hastily concocted ‘vaccine’ and voila—society starts to collapse into neat piles of the insanely rich and the rest. And then the basic structures begin to unravel. You could argue that this is no way to run a society.

The overwhelming question is WHY. I used to believe that the elites—the WHO, the Klaus Schmid crew, Big Pharma, the assorted oligarchs running global investment outfits like Blackrock, the high-tech gods like Apple and Google, the global banks and the energy companies—are simply evil. That they are engineering what looks like the coming collapse of the west. Corrupt people without a shred of morality or ethics, in it for the profit, which they have indeed gotten. However, for the majority, that story is too hard to swallow. Nobody wants to believe that ‘they’ are out to kill us, our children, and grandchildren for the sake of Profit.

Like the Germans under the Nazis who could not bring themselves to believe in the horrors that Hitler committed under their noses in the camps, the majority of our citizens cannot buy that narrative of planned destruction because it is too horrifying. They turn away and hide their heads in the proverbial sands of denial. I can’t say that I blame them.

I have had an ongoing argument with one of my closest friends over the question of whether the elites are doing all this knowingly and with evil intent or if they simply panicked, continue to panic and thus make very bad decisions because they simply can’t see their way out of the massive, left-brain mess we are in. I have always maintained that they are doing it intentionally, frightening as that belief is. After reading The Master and his Emissary, I am no longer sure that is the whole story. It is more complicated than the pure evil narrative allows for. These ‘elites’ are caught in ways of thinking that are embedded in the left brain. They believe in those utopian and ‘well meaning’ narratives. Let’s face it, all leaders, since the beginning have believed they were ‘doing the right thing’, quite sincerely in most cases. With exceptions. I think Hitler went insane and Stalin always was, in the way that McGilchrist characterizes it.

What convinced me of this was that McGilchrist proved the main thesis of the book, that the left brain dominates in the western culture. In the final chapter, he describes a hypothetical society under the exclusive sway of the Left Brain. Unfortunately, the society he describes so vividly and in such detail is, you guessed, our very own. Here are some of the highlights:

…we could expect, for a start that there would be a loss of the broader perspective and a substitution of a more narrowly focussed, restricted, but detailed, view of the world making it difficult to maintain a coherent overview. The broader view would in any case be disregarded, because it would lack the appearance of clarity and certainty which the left hemisphere craves.

Think lockdowns and the utter failure to envision the bigger picture, that is, the horrific collateral damage done to society.

…ever more narrowly focussed attention would lead to an increasing specialisation and technicalising of knowledge. This in turn would promote the substitution of information and information gathering, for knowledge, which comes through experience.

This is what SAGE (haha) and other government quants making ‘models’ of how the virus would behave did. The quantitative ‘models’ were always wrong, yet were allowed to set policy in Britain and elsewhere.

…there would be an increase in both abstraction and reification, whereby the human body itself and we ourselves, as well as the material world, and the works of art we made to understand it, would become simultaneously more conceptual and seen as mere things. The world as whole would become more virtualized, and our experience of it would be increasingly through meta representations of contact with anything in the real, lived world, rather than with plans, strategies, paperwork, management and bureaucratic procedures…. there is a complete loss of the sense of uniqueness.

Big Pharma treated our bodies as ‘things’, interchangeable and all alike, hence endless repeated vaccinations without consultation with a doctor, without any regard for individual medicine as it is supposed to be practiced.

…numbers, which the left hemisphere feels familiar with and is excellent at manipulating (though it may be remembered, it is less good at understanding what they mean), would come to replace the response to individuals, whether people, places, things or circumstances, which the right brain would have distinguished.

Remember the endless reams of Covid infection stats without any context, published every day with great fanfare?

…Such a government would seek total control—it is an essential feature of the left hemisphere’s take on the world that it can grasp it and control it. Talk of liberty, which is an abstract ideal for the left hemisphere, would increase for Machiavellian reason, but individual liberty would be curtailed. Panoptical control would become an end in itself, and constant CCTV monitoring, interception of private information and communication, the norm. Measures such as a DNA database would introduced apparently in response to t exceptional threats and exceptional circumstances, against which they would in reality be ineffective, their aim being to increase the power of the and diminish the status of the individual.

This is precisely what we have been subjected to during the pandemic and even before. The system was in place already; it just needed a good excuse to be activated. There is a bitter, rearguard action against becoming a total digital surveillance society.

…the concept of the individual depends on uniqueness; but according to the left hemisphere’s take on reality, individuals are simply interchangeable ’equal’ parts of a mechanistic system, a system it needs to control in the interests of efficiency.

…in such a society people of all kinds would attach an unusual importance to being in control. Accidents and illnesses, since they are beyond our control, would there for be particularly threatening and would, where possible, be blamed on others, since they would look like a threat to one’s capacity to control one’s life.

This is the most exact description of how people acted and thought during the pandemic that I have read anywhere. Ironically, it was written a dozen years prior to its outbreak, proving that we have been in the grip of left-brain dominance for a long time.

Finally: …there would be an obsession with certainty and security, since the left hemisphere is highly intolerant of uncertainty, and death would become the ultimate unspeakable.

Well that kind of says it all, doesn’t it. McGilchrist has our number. He is clearly someone whose mind is not dominated by the left brain. His mind is integrative, using the left brain as writers do while allowing the Master, the right brain, to be the wise, big picture, empathetic King. Let’s give the last word to one of the greatest poets/prophets, a right brain master: Leonard Cohen. He knows.