How should we judge an ideology?

Let’s start with a loose but practical definition of ‘ideology’. In common usage, it most basically and most broadly means a constellation of ideas, principles, beliefs, assumptions, biases, ideals, aspirations, dreams, conventions, norms, values, expectations, rules, guidelines, proscriptions, behaviors, attitudes, etc that more or less hang together as a singular system, vision, worldview, and way of life; much more than merely a stated theory or a set of claims. Based on figures of authority and compelled by voices of authorization, ideologies are what potentially give meaning and purpose in the deepest sense (inspiring, inciting, or impelling us), through which we perceive truth and reality (or else are deceived, manipulated, and coerced), according to which we act within the larger world (for good or ill). This is the primary collective force within human nature, what defines a people and determines who they become, the beating heart of a social order.

Ideologies always serve the purpose of social identity and social relationships, the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, commanding from us a totalizing sense of commitment and sacrifice; and so the loss of which would mean existential crisis, typically along with moral panic, or else transformation and revolution. As such, the only validity, legitimacy, and worthiness of an ideology is to the degree that it teaches, advocates, models, promotes, supports, strengthens, maintains, and enacts healthy and happy (not sickly and harmful) relationships and relational ways of being. That is to say wholeness, a sense of connection, of inclusion and belonging; rather than division, disconnection, and dissociation — love and kindness, empathy and compassion; not hate and fear, victimization and scapegoating. Simply put, are we better people for adhering to an ideology? And are others around us also better for it, are all others in our circle of influence positively affected?

This moral standard by which all ideologies must be judged is tangibly proven and (inter-)personally demonstrated in how people relate to family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens, but also minorities, strangers, outsiders, foreigners, immigrants, and refugees; in how people relate to the greater living world of other species, ecosystems, the biosphere, a sense of place and home, and a community of beings; in how people relate to past and future generations as inseparable from the here and now; and most of all how people relate to the least among us, the mentally ill, neurodivergent, gender non-conforming, poor, homeless, imprisoned, institutionalized, dejected, lonely, struggling, victimized, brutalized, oppressed, disenfranchised, powerless, desperate, and vulnerable. The real world results are seen and known in how groups, organizations, institutions, cultures, and societies embody specific ideological identities; who is helped and harmed, who is privileged and punished, who is benefitted and who is made to pay the costs. What does an ideology make possible, what follows from it? If given a free and open choice, is the ideological world in which you find yourself one you would consciously choose?

Any ideology (political, social, economic, or religious) that fails the test of positive relating, pro-social behavior, moral righteousness, and public good contradicts it’s only possible justification and value; no matter the claims to the contrary. This is what can make ideological dogma and ideological realism so troubling; in blocking our capacity of social awareness, intellectual discernment, and moral judgment. For this reason, we need to remain vigilant against any form of persuasive rhetoric and convenient rationalization; any blind indoctrination and enculturation, propaganda and apologetics; any authority that makes claims over us, that disallows us to think for ourselves. Beware of those who conflate an ideology with absolute reality, particularly when they claim sole authority in determining what is true and in interpreting what it implies. An ideology is not reality itself but how we relate to reality. An ideology is not a thing that exists on its own but something that resides in our minds and hearts, something we bring into manifestation, acting individually and collectively.

To repeat old wisdom, we should treat others as we would want to be treated but also as others would want to be treated, with discernment through the sympathy of moral concern and understanding of moral imagination, in ever seeking the common bond of a shared humanity. Ideologies aren’t something separate from us, something extra that is added on. Certainly, ideology isn’t only what those other people have but not us, isn’t a failing or falsehood that we can hold at a distance in knowing we are above it all, that we are superior to those other weak souls who fall prey to ideological sway. We are all ideological creatures, no different than that we are social creatures. Ideology is what shapes and determines the social realm, but often the power of the ideological is in it being denied for what it is, in how it is obscured and hidden — that is why ideology can so easily become an oppressive force of conformity and punishment to those who fail to conform, what makes it a tool of authoritarianism, of perception management and social control.

This sad fate is far from inevitable, meaning that our fate is nothing more than our character. And in the end, our character is just the expression of our ideological commitments, our ideological identity. Each of us is an agent of power, a nexus of forces, an actor in narratives of our own telling. Nothing is forcing us to passively accept, submit, and obey the ideological commands of others; be it a living voice (politician, charismatic demagogue, televangelist, Youtube personality, etc) or the dead word (constitution, legal system, holy text, etc). We can, instead, actively choose to bring ideologies into the light of awareness to see them clearly for what they are. We can and must take responsibility for the world we are co-creating. We are always responsible, we are always responding, we are always in the process of relating to others and the world. If the ideology we have chosen and continue to choose is not beneficial to us or anyone else, we forever remain free to choose once again. Our choices are only limited to our imagination. And there is no ideology that can’t be challenged, can’t be shaken loose by the radical imagination native to the human psyche.

All of us must confront the ideologies within us and in the world around us. Is the present ideology you find yourself in serving you well? Is it in service to others? If not, why are you serving it? An ideology that is morally worthy will offer guidance in how to relate well, in how to grow your circle of concern, in how to be more inclusive so that others feel welcomed and accepted; but it won’t dogmatically tell you who you can and cannot associate with, be friends with, or marry; won’t oppressively constrain and dictate how you are allowed and disallowed to socialize with others; won’t separate and isolate you from the rest of humanity; and won’t create an exclusive and exclusionary social identity. It will place relationships above rules. Realizing this fundamental truth is the first step toward imagining something new, something better, something more inspiring. What kind of ideology would help you to become a better person, a kinder person? In listening to the ideological voice you’ve internalized, are you a positive influence on others? In giving your power to an ideology, does it help or hinder relating well, does it bring people together or drive them apart? Is it a force for the greater good?

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This is our contemplation for the week, as we prepare ourselves for the coming Holiday gatherings of family and friends, sometimes involving stress and conflict. In this light, there is a personal context to our thoughts, but we decided to leave it as a neutral expression of our moral sensibility. There is also a desire to make talk of ‘ideology’ more comprehensible and relevant to everyday life, to ground it in human reality. We live and breathe ideology on a daily basis. It’s all around us in such a way that we forget what it is or else never learned in the first place, as most people probably do just take it as reality itself. This is why, in many other writings, we’ve turned to the words of religious heretics, of religious dissenters and dissidents, particularly from the European peasants’ revolts and the English Civil War, with their proto-leftist egalitarianism rooted in the primitive moral impulse that arose out of the archaic dark age following the Bronze Age collapse. Their righteous demand for heaven on earth still rings true, still rattles the bars of our prison and shakes loose the chains that bind.

But in the modern world of cynical (pseudo-)realism, ideology as a moral force can feel naive, as if there is no other possibility to the way the world is, an apathetic sense of being stuck. That state of fatalistic unconsciousness is not only sad but harmful, even dangerous. This isn’t merely about post-Enlightenment thought of critical thinking skills and intellectual defense but a psychological discernment, spiritual inquiry, and moral reckoning that has it’s roots in the axial and post-axial ages with its revolution of the mind — not only skepticism and science, democracy and liberty, but also: Buddhism and Christianity, mysticism and Gnosticism; that later inspired Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters, Protestants, Anabaptists, and much else. We often feel a longing to cut through the bull shit, to get at the raw nerves of our collective anxiety and neuroses, the ancient wounds of trauma that get passed on without healing. Ideology, when lurking in the darkness, acts more akin to a demiurgic and archonic force; and so we might be wise to think of it in religious terms, such as that of the ancient Gnostics (a favorite framing of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs when they wrote about power relationships and systems).

Ultimately, this is a similar message to what we’ve written hundreds of times before over the past decades, here at this blog and elsewhere. The deeper study is that of the human condition. But obviously, we are shaped by a modern ‘leftist’ take on ideology, such as the interpretation of Louis Althusser’s theory of interpellation (i.e., the commanding ‘hail’ of an authoritative voice that makes a claim over individuals and, in the individual responding, draws one into a social identity). The heart of this moral vision, as mentioned, is much more ancient. It’s really no different than the challenge Jesus posed in questioning the social, religious, political, and economic authorities of his own era. We were raised a Christian, if on the far radical left extreme of Protestant independence of mind, contemplative self-inquiry, and direct connection to ‘God’ (i.e., truth and reality). If we lose the authority of our own immediate experience, we lose the authority over our own lives and identities, we lose our relationship to the ultimate; then we are enslaved, rather than free. This is a difficult issue, since many fear freedom; to the point of it being overtly denied within some ideologies.

Consider that Islamic theology defines the human relationship to God as enslavement, such that we are slaves of God; whereas Christian theology, partly borrowed from Stoic philosophy of liberty, instead declares the human soul to be free of slavery, even when the physical body is in chains and the social self is in legal bondage. This conflict of ideologies is problematic for an Islamic fundamentalist living in a Western democracy, in having formed out of Christian culture, where liberty as non-enslavement is a key feature of the socio-cultural order and the politico-legal system. And it would be even harder for a Western secularist, non-believer, and Christian or even a Western convert to Islam or Westernized Muslim who suddenly found themselves in Islamic traditionalism and theocracy. The challenge of ideology as social identity and relationship would become quite stark and the stakes quite high. Yet in less obvious ways, ideological clashes happen all of the time, not only across societies but within people’s souls, competing claims that fight over identity. Multiple ideologies pulling one apart, in some ways, can be worse than the most violent external conflict.

As shown in the contrasts between theologies, enmeshed as they are in distinct cultural customs and historical legacies, religions are among the most powerful of ideologies to ever lay claim upon identity, to the point of making absolute claims over reality in a way difficult to accomplish for even the most totalitarian of political ideologies. Modern people turn to fundamentalism, a modern invention as Karen Armstrong argues, precisely because the traditional organic identities have been decimated. Religious extremism, going back to the fall of bicameral-minded civilization, has always been driven by an overpowering sense of nostalgic longing, specifically in terms of a loss of connection to divine experience, divine authority, and divine voice-hearing. The term ‘religion’ didn’t appear until the axial age, long after the full bicameral mentality disappeared. Interestingly, that word literally means to re-bind or re-connect; which indicates that relationship to the divine was broken and needs to be mended, to be re-established. That sense of emptiness still haunts the modern psyche; and, for the reactionary mind, it throbs like an inflamed and infected splinter, so small that it cannot be seen.

This vacuum of loss must be filled, and a certain kind of ideology promises to do so. That is what exacerbates and exaggerates the ideological impulse, of course not limited to the reactionary and religious right. We moderns have come to such a false, misleading, and constrained understanding of ideology for the very reason we are overwhelmed by it. Narrowing it down is an attempt at controlling and containing what so dominates us. But the repressed returns as an almost demonic force; or such is our fear, if we can rarely identify it, instead typically making itself known as a free-floating anxiety that pervades everything. We try to separate identity from ideology, an impossible task. That simply drives ideology deeper into identity, causing us to feel even more out of control; and so the vicious cycle of authoritarianism goes on and on. As we hope this makes clear, our criticism of oppressive ideologies doesn’t come from secular atheism but from an ancient righteousness that has been booming down the millennia. The forces of authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism have riven humanity since our present civilization was founded, and they’ve played out within religion.

Yet we’ve long sensed that there is another path, beyond polarization of the two-way reactionary dynamic. As said by Meir Berliner, having died fighting Nazis, “When the oppressors give me two choices, I always take the third.” There is something about the axial age prophets, teachers, and philosophers who demonstrated a different way of being and relating; an insight they offered standing at the crux of the newly emerging mentality. That is seen in Gautama Buddha having renounced his social position to become a monk, only then to renounce his renunciation by taking a middle path. Similarly, there is Jesus’ non-authoritarianism (not anti-authoritarianism) that feels like spiritual jujitsu, a non-confrontational confrontation that refuses and refutes authoritarian authority, that ignores the ideological hail of interpellation; maybe what could be considered a version of Taoist wu-wei, simultaneously non-action and effortless action. Ideology never completely falls under the purview of rational analysis because it underlies and precedes Jaynesian egoic-consciousness; something we don’t so much choose as assent or deny, not free will but free won’t (Benjamin Libet’s experiment; & Tor Norretranders’ The User Illusion).

Our main point most definitely is not to emphasize the dark side of ideology. There is no such thing as non-ideology. It’s built into human nature. It’s what it means to be a self-aware social creature. What gets called ideological realism, usually as a leftist critique, is fundamentally the same as what Robert Anton Wilson described as a reality tunnel. He pointed out that we are always in a reality tunnel. We can only jump out of one reality tunnel by landing into another. There is no escape, maybe along the lines of an existentialist or Buddhist mentality. The point isn’t to be free of ideology, since ideology isn’t separate from us, since we can’t know anything outside of it. Rather, the point is to learn to hold ideologies lightly, to use them instead of being used by them. Ideologies should serve humanity, not the other way around; or at least that is what non-authoritarian leftists tend to argue. In the end, our contemplation comes down to this. What kind of liminal space can be opened for creative imagination? The gap between one ideology and another, like a pause between the in-breath and the out-breath.

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authority, giving away one’s own, bowing down to that of others, once someone else’s authority is established over one there is no power left for autonomy and self-determination, hailing, interpellation,

early Judaism vs Rabbinic Judaism with arguing with God, Jesus defying power and authority, Islam and Bahai with legalistic rules and authoritarian lineage of authority, Buddhism and Protestantism with the authority of direct personal experience

Homo Cursus, the Running Ape

Homo sapiens are a highly mobile species. Along with opposable thumbs and a specially-designed brain, not to mention a few other nifty capacities, our bipedal locomotion is what makes us uniquely effective as survivors (Human Adaptability and Health). Over long enough distances, particularly in the heat of midday, humans can outrun or run down almost any animal. This is why the earliest humans were persistence hunters, a practice some tribes still use. Humans have been constantly on the move. That is how homo sapiens ended up in nearly every corner of the world. Maybe we should be called homo cursus, instead.

Throughout our life, we’ve always been into running. As a kid, in being physically active and athletic, we were one of the fastest kids in our class; although running is something all kids will do naturally, assuming they aren’t crippled, obese, and/or sickly (that the present generation of kids does little running around doesn’t bode well). We continued playing soccer, a sport requiring leg fitness like few others, into high school. And running has remained one of our favorite activities. Though a relaxed and meditative jog is most enjoyable, we’ve also gotten back into the habit of doing wind sprints, a variation of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), something we used to do in soccer practice.

Being in shape does make one feel good, no minor positive outcome considering the epidemic of mood disorders in this modern age of stress and sickliness. And there is nothing quite like cardio exercise, in particular. There is no doubt about the health benefits, in decreasing the risk of nearly every category of disease, even if one can’t outrun a bad diet (besides, there are better ways for losing excess body fat). But aerobic exercise is also nice simply in having the full lung capacity for everyday breathing; let us just say that oxygen is a good thing and the more of it generally the better. Energy, alertness, and stamina is another a nice bonus.

There are still other potential benefits, some being less immediate. It’s recommended to get in shape, if for no other reason than preparing for the unpredictable — none of us knows what the future will bring. As explained in one popular movie, “The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio. When the virus struck, for obvious reasons, the first ones to go were the fatties.” Zombies typically are slow, easily outpaced by a moderate gait, about anything faster than a casual walk. When masses of zombies are everywhere, speed is helpful and endurance is key. Don’t risk fighting zombies when you can otherwise escape; and such escape would be a constant necessity.

Okay, okay. So, you don’t believe in zombies. Let’s say apocalypse is caused by a different global catastrophe, such as mass death from plague or mass destruction of nuclear war. Having good cardio still will be useful for running away from roving gangs of enslavers and cannibals, along with the occasional psychopath and robber, or maybe an invading army; not to mention various mutant creatures, in the case of nuclear apocalypse. Sure, there are plenty of vehicles left behind when most of the population dies off, but they are largely blocking all of the roads and, besides, gasoline eventually runs out (do you really want, as in Road Warrior, to be fighting others over dwindling stores of gasoline?) — you’ll be mostly hoofing it everywhere you go and running will get you there faster.

The Native Americans experienced another kind of apocalypse when Europeans came and kept on coming; bringing with them disease epidemics, genocidal slaughter, and constant terrorism. When horses weren’t available, all that the natives had to rely on was their own bodies. While on foot crossing arid lands and often without water, the freedom fighter Geronimo and his fellow warriors were able to outpace the cavalry of colonial oppressors, defying what Westerners thought was physically possible. He explained that, “I only trust my legs. They’re my only friends.” Don’t knock such praise of legs. The one and only time we were a victim of a violent crime, a mugging, we resorted to running away. He who runs away lives to see another day. It’s a highly recommended solution to almost any problem — try it sometime.

If all else fails, you are still ahead of the game as long as you have your legs, and lung capacity helps. Without civilization to take care of you, once your ability to walk and run is gone, you’re screwed! You don’t necessarily even have to always be the fastest runner, either. Just fast enough. This is emphasized by an old joke. In the movie The Imitation Game, the character Alan Turing (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) tells one version of it: “There are two people in a wood, and they run into a bear. The first person gets down on his knees to pray; the second person starts lacing up his boots. The first person asks the second person, ‘My dear friend, what are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear. To which the second person responds, ‘I don’t have to. I only have to outrun you.'” Such wise words!

The naysayers will complain. They’ll say, But you can’t outrun everything. Even with the best cardio, few people survive in near total apocalypse or whatever. Besides, we’re all going to die anyway. Why get stressed out about it? Maybe we should just relax, take it easy, and accept an early death. Heck, who wants to survive in an apocalypse, anyway? You might as well get taken out earlier than to live through a horrific shit-show of suffering and death, right? That is one response and we aren’t here to judge. Indeed, that’s a fair point to make. Not everything is about mere survival.

That is the thing. Running doesn’t have to be always about running from death. Sometimes, it can mean the exact opposite; running right into the face of almost certain demise. In the infamous failed Picket’s Charge of the American Civil War, more than half of the Confederate soldiers died and most of the rest eventually were forced into retreat. Only a few made it across the field of slaughter. One such individual, the only survivor of those he fought with, was kindly helped over the stone wall by the enemy Union soldiers. So, he survived the field of battle only to become a prisoner of war, but his act was still heroic of sorts, if war is almost always meaningless. We should give credit to such an accomplishment. He must’ve had good cardio, one assumes.

It’s not even about necessarily making it across the enemy’s lines, as an heroic achievement against all odds. If you can simply make further than anyone else, it remains a small victory — there is some glory in that, just to see how far you can go before being mowed down. That is the ending to Gallipoli, a movie about World War I. Two friends, both competitive runners, join the military; but only one of them ends up on the frontline. The other guy is trying to get a message back to the commanding officer to stop the attack, while his friend is waiting to be sent over the top. The message comes too late and so, in following orders, he and his fellow soldiers enter no man’s land. He sprints at full speed, until he takes machine fire to the chest. The point is he got further than anyone else. He presumably would’ve died as one of the fastest sprinting casualties in the whole war. That is something.

We don’t have to go to such dark places, though. Running is even more wonderful in relation to celebration of victory. Take the famous example of Pheidippides. When the Greeks defeated the Persians in battle at the town of Marathon, he ran all of the way to Athens, 25 miles away, so as to deliver the message of victory; that was after having already run 150 miles to Sparta, to rally support, and back again in the prior days. Then he collapsed from exhaustion and died on the spot. But, hey, sometimes one gets carried away with the excitement. Now he shall be remembered for all time. Not bad for a simple messenger, although to be a military messenger in the ancient Greek world was to be a member of an elite corps (Dean Karnazes, The Real Pheidippides Story).

Running, like sports in general, has been a way for individuals, in particular the lowly, to challenge and prove themselves; often when few other opportunities are available. That is seen with Alan Sillitoes’ book The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), later adapted to a movie (1962), and still later to inspire an Iron Maiden song (2012). In the story, the protagonist, after being imprisoned, finds a love of running — he uses it as a way of self-determination and defiance. Death doesn’t always have to occur to attain personal greatness. Generally speaking, most of us want to live as long as we can and good aerobic fitness will help in that regard. There are many reasons to go for a run, jog, and spring, or go on a marathon

Whether escaping zombies or facing a storm of bullets or locked away in prison, take it like a man (or a woman) while on your feet. Better yet, run simply as an expression of being human, for the joy of it. That seems like a good philosophy of life. Be as healthy as you can, until the bitter end or, if possible, until the happy end. The average hunter-gatherer doesn’t reach their physical peak of running ability until their 40s and 50s, yet many modern urbanites these days begin experiencing major health decline by their 30s (Millennials Are Hitting Old Age In Their Thirties). One is better off having a long healthspan, to whatever age, than to have a long lifespan in a state of disease, disability, and decline. Just keep active for as long as you can. Death really is nothing more than the final act of no longer moving.

How an Older Generation Fantasizes About a Younger Generation

In Discovery, the ongoing Star Trek series, we are in the fourth season. The fourth episode, All Is Possible, was directed by John Ottman (b. 1964) and written by Alan B. McElroy (b. 1960) and Eric J. Robbins (b. ?). So, it’s slanted to a Boomer worldview, specifically that of American Boomers; of course, as projected onto an imagined distant future society. It’s definitely an American vision of multiculturalism, an idealistic American Dream or rather post-American Dream where anyone, even alien species, can get ahead; according to egalitarianism and fairness, talent and hard work.

This episode is all about therapy, self-development, personal growth, and such (Cora Buhlert, Star Trek Discovery realises that “All Is Possible” in a Tilly-centric episode); a theme having shaped that generation of Boomers; although a German commenter stated that it didn’t resonate for him because psychotherapy is supposedly less common in Germany. To start off, that brings us to some questions. Would therapy, as we know it, even exist far into the future when all of civilization had been transformed? Or would it be like a medieval Catholic, under the theocratic Inquisition, having written a story about confession in the 21st century?

That is what we are getting at here. What exactly is the cultural bias being brought to the narrative? What is this historical moment (in American society and Americanized global society)? To emphasize the generational point, the first major role for a psychotherapist on a Star Trek show, The Next Generation, was Deanna Troi played by another Boomer, Marina Sirtis (b. 1955). That iteration of the Star Trek universe, compared to the original series, was more laidback, thoughtful, and emotionally sensitive. But both it and the original had captains played by members of the Silent Generation, if one Canadian and the other English — we wouldn’t get an American captain as a main role until Avery Brooks (b. 1948), of the Boomer Generation, as Benjamin Lafayette Sisko. It’s been largely Boomers ever since.

Anyway, in that episode, one specific sub-plot has to do with teaching a racially and culturally diverse selection of new cadets, as the United Federation of Planets is rebuilt. All of the actors involved are Millennials. So, it could be taken as a story about future Millennials as conceived of by present day Boomers, many of them being parents of Millennials. It’s not clear this tells us anything about actual Millennials right now or merely how certain Boomers perceive Millennials, in being filtered through the dreams and fantasies, hopes and aspirations of science fiction. This storyline, anyway, is amusing.

During a training exercise, Sylvia Tilley (played by Mary Wiseman, b. 1985), with the help of Adira Tal (played by Blu del Barrio, b. 1997), leads a group of cadets: Taahz Gorev (Adrian Walters, b. 1993), Harral (Seamus Patterson, b. 1994), and Val Sasha (Amanda Arcuri , b. 1997). But a gamma-ray burst causes them to crash-land on the wrong moon, quickly the pilot dies, and, with comms down, no one else can know their location (presumably the beacon is also down or otherwise unable to transmit). To make matters worse, moon monsters attack their shuttle, attracted by all of the electronics, and they are forced to escape in the middle of a spider lightning storm (lightning that spreads out).

So, lightning aside, they decide to head toward high ground in order to be able to contact the starship. Then while being chased by the moon monsters that are moments away from killing them, future space Millennials pause to share emotions, express gripes, compare victimization, mutually listen, develop solidarity, and team build. Through their newly learned skills of team work, they cooperatively struggle to save one of their members, continue to evade the moon monsters, and then are successfully teleported back to the ship; just in the nick of time, right before Tilly was almost devoured. All is well that ends well, except for the pilot who nonetheless does get a name, Lt. Callum, before he met his end.

It’s a generational fantasy, par excellence. Still, it’s no more unrealistic than the original Star Trek show; a fantasy about a privileged white male as the hyper-masculine space cowboy Captain Kirk bucking the centralized bureaucracy and top-down hierarchy while breaking rules and having promiscuous alien sex (not to mention the first interracial kiss showed on television). In reality, that would’ve led to his early death, demotion, or firing, not to mention STDs. That early Cold War SF fantasy was created by Gene Roddenberry (b. 1921), of an even older generation. The producers, writers, and actors were a mix of GIs and Silents, a far different generational mix producing a different kind of SF vision.

If we must be lost in some far-fetched fantasy or another, the more recent variation described further above, from Discovery, is more appealing to those who aspire to freedom, egalitarianism, and democracy. Yes, it may seem naive, if not outright silly. After all, when imminent death is looming, it’s not necessarily the most optimal time to do group bonding and trust building, unless one is seeking to bond in a shared sense of mortality. But the general humanistic and compassionate ideal is probably not entirely unrealistic, certainly not undesirable, specifically in attempting to envision well-functioning democratic socialism; as supposedly is the post-scarcity and post-monetary Federation.

Timeline complications aside involving time travel, events transpiring more than a millennium in the future when the Starfleet Academy cadets are being trained, there is no doubt individuals in a world where exists a technologically and socially advanced intergalactic Federation would possess highly developed emotional intelligence, psychological understanding, and social skills. The thing is they’d most likely have already resolved their basic differences immediately after joining the Federation, not while confronting moon monsters during a failed training exercise as diversity workshop. Heck, one would think that, from childhood, they’d have training, enculturation, and modeling for interracial and intercultural relations.

Sure, rebuilding the broken and ailing Federation, from reforging old alliances to seeking new members, would be no easy task. As the series portrays, a lot of anger, fear, and distrust has formed when some of these societies became isolationist for a time. On the other hand, many of these humanoid species have been in contact with one another at least for centuries by that point and some of them for far longer (e.g., Vulcans having contacted humans all the way back to our own century, the 21st); and still others have faced common enemies (a detail that comes up in the episode plot). Interplanetary relations and multicultural dialogue is hardly a new phenomenon.

But presumably the writers thought the episode needed some extra oomph of tension, conflict, and drama; to be played out on an interpersonal level. Besides, the show isn’t really about prospective intergalactic distress and uncertainty, distrust and hostility but about the present state of intercultural tumult and international crisis here on earth. The optimistic narrative implies that Millennials will heal us or rather heal themselves, in these and coming times of conflict. Though, interestingly, the ship therapist, Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz, b. 1973), is a GenXer; as are many of us in the audience. During a psychotherapy session, Culber is the one who suggests to Tilly that she take on that training opportunity with her fellow generational cohorts.

So, in this futuristic fantasy, future GenXers play the role of mediators and guides — maybe speaking more to the actual role being played by contemporary GenXers now in middle age. Though, also like in the present world, GenXers are rarely in Star Trek leadership positions; such that no starring role as captain has ever been given a GenX actor; if memory serves us correctly. Yet Millennials have already played key roles as captains; including the main actress of Discovery, Sonequa Martin-Green (b. 1985) as Michael Burnham. GenXers on 21st century earth, forever sandwiched in between, have long understood that power would likely slip from Boomers to Millennials — apparently, the same applies to their 32nd century equivalents.

By the way, Cruz as an actor made his initial fame playing the role of Rickie Vasquez on My So-Called Life, a show also created and produced by Boomers: Winnie Holzman (b. 1954), Edward Zwick (b. 1952), and Marshall Herskovitz (b. 1952). With his former and present roles alike and many in between, he has long been playing openly gay characters, from a homeless teen in 1994 to a spacefaring doctor in 3189. Talk about bridging a generational gap! One might like to believe that GenXers, if somewhat an overlooked generation, generally do carry a kind of social liberalism, a laissez-faire live-and-let-live attitude, forward from one century to the next and beyond; excluding, of course, reactionary knuckleheads like Glenn Beck, Kanye West, etc (Generation of Clowns in the Fourth Turning). Okay. okay, so it’s not a perfect generation — we had a tough childhood (Young Reactives In War (4th turning analysis); Trends in Depression and Suicide Rates; From Bad to Worse: Trends Across Generations; & Dark and Dystopian Entertainment). It’s our lot in life.

Interestingly, My So-Called Life played on tv the same year Kurt Cobain died, marking a pivotal period of cultural change remembered by both younger GenXers and older Millennials, these intergenerational cuspers sometimes being referred to as the MTV Generation; a time when what was formerly counter-culture became mainstream and hence co-opted and commercialized, symbolized by Cobain’s passing and what replaced him: “If you want to understand what happened to X sensibility in the nineties, everything starts with the gym scene in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and everything ends with the gym scene in “. . . Baby One More Time.” Those are the bookends” (Jeff Gordinier, X Saves the World, p.69). It was also the decade of the first Star Trek revival. Many of these teenagers grew up watching the ’90s era Star Trek shows: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. The first two are the only Star Trek series to ever have had a lead role for a young adult, both roles acted by a GenXer: Wil Wheaton (b. 1972) as Wesley Crusher and Cirroc Lofton (b. 1978) as Jake Sisko; plus Jake’s best friend, Nog (Aron Eisenberg, b. 1969).

That set the stage for where the Star Trek imaginary is heading again. The focus seems to have returned to a younger audience, albeit the Zoomer Generation is oddly missing from all the recent main series, or at least no major character comes to mind played by anyone quite that young. At first, it occurred to us that maybe some of the cadets in Discovery might be Zoomers, but it turns out that none were in that particular storyline. Nor are they apparent much of anywhere in these shows, as starships seem to have few families, specifically among those in command positions; although TNG and DS9 often showed families, children, and schools.

No doubt there are Zoomer actors in various recent Star Trek series, but none quickly come to mind. In looking to some of the smaller projects, though, Zoomers briefly come up in two episodes of Short Treks, in the second season. Interestingly, at least one of the directors and two of the writers are GenXers, the generation that represents the majority of Zoomers’ parents. For now, Boomer writers are still dominating not only politics and economics but the cultural imagination. Whereas GenX writers, though getting well up in age, are often still stuck to doing small side projects like these short videos that likely gets few viewers. And so there is no influential creative force to bring Zoomers into the Star Trek spotlight, even as there are plenty of other popular shows with Zoomer actors and Zoomer-focused stories. It seems a lost opportunity for hooking young fans as the next generation of Star Trek viewers.

To get a taste of what might be coming next in GenX-led storytelling, about the stories being told by these now middle-aged GenXers, one episode shows young school age kids who witness mass violence, but neither of the characters has any dialogue. The other episode, a cartoon, is about a little girl being told a story by her father. As with the Discovery episode with Millennial-aged cadets, both of these Short Treks episodes are about fear and overcoming fear, maybe indicating future Zoomers will likewise be needing therapy, or else how GenXers are worrying about the mental health of their own children, godchildren, nephews, and nieces. Certainly, mental illness is skyrocketing, from one generation to the next. How might this up-and-coming generation, along with the next generation quickly arriving on the scene, fit into the larger Star Trek universe? Stay tuned. Boomers and Millennials won’t dominate forever.

* * *

Transcript of “All Is Possible” (Season 4, Episode 4)

Gorev: Damn thing’s hunting us.

Tilly: It can’t see us with our equipment off.

Sasha: But we got to keep moving to stay ahead of this storm.

Gorev: But the lightning’s rolling in too fast. We won’t make it to the ridge.

Sasha: If we pick up the pace, we can get there ahead of the lightning.

Gorev: Stop acting like you are the expert.

Tilly: Calm down.

Gorev: You don’t know any more about this moon than the rest of us.

Harral: We’re too exposed out here. We need to find a cave and, uh, ride out the storm.

Sasha: Oh, there’s a genius idea. Let’s trap ourselves in a cave, make it easier for the monster to corner us. We don’t have time to stand around and argue. All right? I’m going.

Harral: This is ridiculous.

Gorev: If they’re going, I’m going, too. What about sticking together?

Tilly: Adira, stop. Stop it! All of you. Listen, you know, I’m usually a very upbeat person, bubbly, some would say. But right now I have one job: it’s keeping all of you alive. So we’re staying together. (Lightning strikes.) Adira! (Ice melts and then refreezes. Adira is frozen to the ground.)

Adira: I can’t move. I’m stuck! I can’t get out.

Tilly: Stay still, you’re okay. You’re okay. (Moon monsters screeching.)

Gorev: We have to do something before that gets here.

Tilly: Uh, okay, okay. Give me the emergency kit. Now! Come on. Here, Adira, grab it. You got it. Okay, everybody grab a piece. Sasha, you grab them. You got it? One, two, three, pull! (All grunting.) Pull! Pull! Almost. Keep going. Heave! Pull! Keep going! Come on.

Sasha: It’s working. Don’t let go! We got you. Keep going. Almost there. Almost. Almost there. Keep going. Closer! Almost! Keep going. Keep going, keep going! Got you! (All grunting.)

Tilly: You… you good? You good? Okay? Okay, good, we got this. The ridge is right there. We can make it.

Harral: Once we turn the comms on, that thing will sense us.

Tilly: Listen, we can do this. We just have to work together as a team. The same way we just did for Adira.

Gorev: Sure as hell would be easier if we didn’t have to count on an Orion.

Tilly: Hey.

Gorev: I’m just saying, he wanted to hide in a cave.

Harral: That’s what we’re trained to do.

Gorev: Just admit it.

Harral: We seek shelter.

Gorev: You only look out for yourself.

Tilly: Hey, enough! Enough. The Burn is in the past, all right? You got to decide now… are we gonna work together as a crew or not?

Gorev: When I was ten, an Emerald Chain raiding party commandeered my family’s food replicators because they could. I watched my grandmother starve to death. I had to bury the body because my parents were too weak from giving me their food. Now you expect me to work with him? (Moon monster growling in background.)

Tilly: I hear you. Have you ever asked him about his history with the Chain? Tell him. (Harral shakes head.) There is common ground here, but you’ll never find it unless you talk to each other.

Tal: Uh, his father was Bashorat Harral.

Gorev: What?

Sasha: Wh-Who’s that?

Tal: Uh, he was an activist. He drafted the Emancipation Bill for the enslaved, which was part of the armistice that the Emerald Chain eventually proposed to the Federation. He died a political prisoner before he could see any of that happen.

Harral: My father always said being an Orion meant we had an even greater responsibility to speak out against what the Chain was doing.

Sasha: Sorry for shutting you down earlier. The cave wasn’t a bad idea.

Tilly: That’s good. That’s really good, you guys. You’re talking. We need so much more of that. Right now, we need to make it to that ridge. Right? You with me?

All: Yeah. Yes.

Tilly: Come on, guys, you’re Starfleet now. It’s “Aye”.

All: Aye!

Tilly: Nice work, cadets. Let’s go. Move out! (Moon monsters still hunting them down.)

The Political Ratchet is a Political Racket

In the United States: Antifa, as a label, refers to no existing organization. And anti-fascism, as an ideology, is linked to no known acts of terrorism. These have become primary targets of bipartisan state oppression, as rationalization to suppress populist protest movements and to eliminate leftist critics of authoritarianism, social dominance, and psychopathy. This is how democratic self-governance is prevented, how a banana republic is maintained. This is how lesser evil voting ratchets up greater evil politics.

“On September 9, the news came out that a whistleblower within the Department of Homeland Security had filed a complaint about the department’s Trump-appointed leadership instructing him to downplay the threat represented by white supremacists and play up the dangers posed by anarchists and anti-fascists. Yet it has largely escaped notice how Joe Biden and other Democrats have embraced Donald Trump’s talking points about anarchists and anti-fascists. It is convenient for centrist Democrats that they can pose as Trump’s moderate critics while appropriating his talking points about protesters, letting him do the dirty work of establishing the narratives that justify state repression.”

The insidious workings of the political ratchet
from CrimethInc.

To Stand In Place

A strong gust blew through the forest. The house sparrow chirped and fluttered his wings, as he bobbed up and down on the branch he perched upon. In nervousness of being a guest in someone else’s space, he tried to make small talk.

“So, you grew up around here, right?” The white oak, standing there firmly in the ground, simply said, “Yeah.” An awkward silence followed. Not knowing what interests a tree, the bird puffed up it’s feathers and cocked it’s head. The tree remained without expression.

The little bird knew that the tree’s family lived nearby. So trying to coax more out of him, he queried further about his childhood and schooling, but was unable to garner any enthusiasm about the tree’s own life. He decided to take a more direct tack.

“Do you have many happy memories?” Then quickly added, “Or unhappy?” There still was little response. All the white oak would say was that he didn’t care about the place he lived. One place is same as another, he explained, solidly rooted to the spot.

After a short visit, the anxious sparrow was glad to leave. He caught a breeze and darted away into the sky.

We Are All Liberals, and Always Have Been

Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory gained traction some years back. His ideas aren’t brilliant or entirely original, but he is a catchy popularizer of social science. Still, there is some merit to his theory, if there is plenty to criticize, as we have done previously. It is lacking and misleading in certain ways. For example, in talking about the individualizing moral foundations, Haidt has zero discussion of the personality trait openness.

That is the defining feature of liberal-mindedness. Openness is core to the liberal values of intellectuality, critical thinking, curiosity, truth-seeking, systems thinking, cognitive complexity, cognitive empathy, tolerance of ambiguity, tolerance of differences, etc. As an attitude, in combination with the individualizing moral foundations of fairness/reciprocity and harm/care, openness also powerfully informs major aspects of the liberal sense of egalitarianism and justice underlying social and political liberalism.

Openness represents everything that is unique in opposition to the binding moral foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Those other moral foundations, in being everything that openness is not, are what define conservatism, specifically social conservatism, and arguably are what makes conservatives prone to authoritarianism. One can think of authoritarianism as simply the binding moral foundations pushed to an extreme, such that the openness personality trait and the individualizing moral foundations are suppressed.

This is important for how the framing of the topic has been politicized. Haidt is a supposed ‘liberal’ who, in being conservative-minded, has made a name for himself by ‘courageously’ attacking liberalism and punching left, an old American tradition among pseudo-liberal elites. There has been an argument, originated by Haidt, that liberals are somehow deficient because of lacking conservative-minded values. But that is inaccurate for a number of reasons. The unwillingness to conform, submit, and fear-monger is in itself a liberal value, not merely a lack of conservative values.

Anyway, maybe not all values are equal in the first place. One study indicates, instead, that the binding moral foundations are not necessarily inherent to human nature and so not on the same level. The so-called but misnamed individualizing moral foundations are what everyone is born with. That is to say no one is born a conservative or an authoritarian. Instead, we are all come into this world with a liberal-minded sense of openness, fairness, and care. That very well might be the psychological baseline of the human species.

Yes, other research shows that stressful conditions (parasite load, real or imagined pathogen exposure, etc) increase both social conservatism and authoritarianism. But the evidence doesn’t indicate that chronic stress, as exists in the modern world, is the normal state of the human species. Would a well-functioning community with great public health, low inequality, a strong culture of trust, etc show much expression of conservative-mindedness at all? One suspects not. Certainly, traditional tribes like the Piraha don’t. Maybe physical health, psychological health, and moral health are inseparable.

In one sense, liberalism is a hothouse flower. It does require optimal conditions to thrive and bloom. But those optimal conditions are simply the conditions under which human nature evolved under most of the time. We have a threat system that takes over under less-than-optimal conditions. If temporary, it won’t elicit authoritarianism. That only happens when stressors never can be resolved, lessened, or escaped; and so trauma sets in. One might speculate that is not the normal state of humanity. It may be true that we, in the modern West, are all liberals now. But maybe, under it all, we always were.

* * *

We Are All White Liberals Now
We Are All Egalitarians, and Always Have Been
We Are All Bleeding Heart Liberals Now

The role of cognitive resources in determining our moral intuitions:
Are we all liberals at heart?
by Jennifer Cole Wright and Galen Baril

The role of cognitive resources in determining our moral intuitions:
Are we all liberals at heart?
by Caroline Minott

Some researchers suspect that the differences in liberal and conservative moral foundations are a byproduct of Enlightenment philosophers “narrowing” the focus of morality down to harm and fairness. In this view, liberals still have binding foundation intuitions but actively override them. The current study asks the question: are the differences between liberals’ and conservatives’ moral foundations due to an unconscious cognitive overriding of binding foundation intuitions, or are they due to an enhancement of them? Since both of these conditions takes effort, the researchers used self-regulation depletion/cognitive load tasks to get at participants’ automatic moral responses. […]

When cognitive resources were compromised, participants only responded strongly to the individualizing foundations (harm/fairness), with both liberals and conservatives deprioritizing the binding foundations (authority/in-group/purity). In other words, automatic moral reactions of conservatives turned out to be more like those of liberals. These findings suggest that harm and fairness could be core components of morality – for both liberals and conservatives. While many believed in an innate five-foundation moral code, in which liberals would narrow their foundations down to two, we may actually begin life with a two-foundation moral foundation. From here, conservatives emerge by way of expanding upon these two-foundations (adding authority/ingroup/purity).

Containment of Freedom

Human constructed physical structures, from roads and channeled rivers to walls and buildings, are the templates of social and psychic structures. This is the foundation of social construction and constructivism, upon which superstructures are built. Julian Jaynes suggested this operates linguistically by way of metaphors, helping to create analog structures (e.g., inner mind-space). Whatever the mechanism, the underlying theory is that we can tell a lot about a society by the kinds of structures they use, inhabit, and speak about.

For Jaynes, he seems to have limited his speculations in this area to that of the container metaphor. That makes sense. It’s not only that actual containers (pouches, jugs, jars, barrels, boxes, etc) became more common as civilization developed, beginning with the agricultural revolution and later increasing with surplus yields and wide-scale trade. All structures, from temples to houses to granaries, became more enclosed and hence more containing.

In contrast, there is the example of the Piraha with their animistic mentality (the term offered by Paul Otteson). At first, Marcel Kuijsten, the editor of many collections of Jaynesian scholarship, suggested that animistic mentality was a subset of bicameral mentality; but he clarified that his suggestion was tentative. We weren’t certain at first and we’re now leaning more toward distinguishing the two. The reason precisely has to do with the container metaphor.

The Piraha don’t seem to make or use containers. They rarely store food, except occasionally smoking some fish for trade. Even their shelters are as simple as possible. The few objects they trade for (e.g., metal axes) are treated with little sense of value and no sense of possession, just left lying around for anyone to use; or else simply to be forgotten. It’s unsurprising they have an extremely uncontained sense of self, not to mention an unstructured social order.

To be accurate, it’s not that the extreme end of non-WEIRD mentality is actually unstructured. Rather, it is structured more according to the natural world. Hunter-gatherers often have a sense of self that is shaped by the immediate environment and sensory field. For the Piraha, they live on a river and so maybe it’s unsurprising their very conception of reality is one that flows and shifts, that appears and disappears as if going around a bend.

The Australian Aborigines offer a middle position, as they already had basic agriculture, including granaries. Like many tribal people, they had highly structured the world around them, though early Westerners couldn’t see it. The whole world was a garden to be tended. The Aborigines managed water, fire, and animals; similar to Native Americans. Aboriginal Songlines were a geographic mapping of psyche, based on landscape markings, seasonal patterns, ecosystems, and ancient trails.

So, in reality, human experience is always structured. But maybe that isn’t quite right. Structure implies a struction, something that was constructed. Not all societies spend much time constructing, if there is no society that doesn’t construct something. Even the Piraha make basic things as needed, albeit on a limited scale, heavy emphasis on the latter point. The Piraha go to the extreme of not bothering to make jewelry or ornamented clothing. Neither do they construct stories, in having no storytelling tradition, although they’ll sometimes repeat the stories they’ve heard outsiders tell.

Still, the Piraha do build things, such as shelters, bows and arrows, etc. But there is something unique about building containers, an object of little use to the Piraha. The archaic bicameral mentality, according to Jaynes, likewise wasn’t modeled according to the container metaphor. Yet the structures that had developed by the time of the Bronze Age were much more containing, in the proliferation of enclosed spaces. And containers proper were becoming more commonly used.

In this context, voice-hearing also seems to have become more structured, as opposed to the egalitarian and non-hierarchical voice-speaking (i.e., spirit ‘possession’) of the Piraha. The first permanent structures were not houses to be lived in, granaries to store food, or any such thing. They apparently were ritual sites, that is to say houses for the gods, god-kings, and ancestors. The mummified bodies or skulls were literally housed there, presumably because they were maintained as an aid in hearing the voices of the dead or of hearing the voices that spoke through the dead.

Animistic tribes like the Piraha don’t do any such thing. There is no individual who permanently possesses or is possessed by archaic authorization. Spirits and the dead can speak through any number of people, as there are no authority figures of any sort, no shamans, healers, chiefs, or council of elders. As such, when any given person dies, it’s no more relevant than any other death. Access to the voices isn’t threatened because they are free-floating identities — one might consider them communal theories of mind.

All of that changed with the agricultural revolution, and so that is what begins an important distinction. Bicameral mentality not only with temples and later urbanization but increasingly with their walled city-states and emerging empires was more contained than animistic mentality, if far less contained than Jaynesian consciousness. The difference was communal-containment versus self-containment, but still a containment of sorts in either case, as contrasted to animistic uncontainment.

Both the bicameral-minded and the consciousness-minded had hierarchies, separating them both from the extreme opposite end of animistic-minded laissez-faire egalitarianism. Since the Piraha don’t have any authority figures at all, hierarchical or otherwise, there is no one in a position to monopolize and control voice authorization. Hence, no enforced authoritarianism, although plenty of tribalistic conventionalism and conformism that is maintained merely through shared identity.

We could speculate that authoritarianism had already appeared, if barely, among the earliest bicameral-minded societies, following the agricultural revolution, since that was the beginning of new forms of extreme stress: overcrowding, resource competition, malnutrition, famine, infectious disease, etc — indeed, research shows that such large-scalle stressors are precisely the conditions of authoritarianism. Whenever it first appeared, we certainly can safely assert that full-on authoritarianism was taking hold by the end of the Bronze Age.

We lean in the direction of the initial wave of bicameral-minded societies only having been partly and temporarily authoritarian, as conditions changed. But is partial and temporary authoritarianism actually authoritarian? We sense that it is not or at least not in how we understand it. Humans can collectively respond to threats, sometimes in oppressive ways, but without forming permanent authoritarian social orders. The threat response is built into the human psyche, as it’s an evolved survival instinct. Authoritarianism isn’t merely the threat response under normal conditions for it only appears when stressors continue indefinitely without the option of resolution or escape — it becomes stuck in the on position and so takes exaggerated form.

The entrenchment of authoritarianism as overwhelming and pervasive stress, in inducing mass anxiety and trauma, might be the very thing that was undermining bicameral mentality by the end of the Bronze Age. Maybe bicameral mentality required the lingering traces of the non-authoritarian animistic mentality. The problem was that bicameral mentality required the control of animistic mentality in order to control ever larger and unwieldy populations, but this kind of social control is anathema to animistic communalism and egalitarianism.

If we accept that view, we could interpret bicameral mentality as a very long transitional phase from animistic mentality to Jaynesian consciousness. In a sense, it was never a stable order because it was built on an internal conflict. Over time, it demanded more and more authoritarianism, which undermined the very voice-hearing that held the society together. The bicameral-minded societies were the earliest attempts at making agriculture a sustainable social order. It was an experiment and no one knew what they were doing.

The container metaphor might offer us a central insight. To contain something is to control it. Hunter-gatherers often have little need for control, depending on how much or how little stress they are under. But once agricultural settlements become permanent, control becomes necessary for continued survival. Farmers can’t simply move on and go their separate ways. That was ever more true as urbanization increased, food systems complexified, and trade became interdependent. There was no second option. When drought or famine occurred, most of the population simply died. The containing structure of civilization sometimes became a death trap.

That could be what also distinguishes early bicameral mentality from late bicameral mentality. The earliest structures were apparently ritual sites that were visited, not places of settlements. And even the first settlements were typically temporary affairs. It took many millennia for permanent settlements to have become more common, as large populations became dependent on agricultural foods. There was no turning back, in the way that was previously possible with small city-states that regularly dissolved back to herder and forager tribes.

Maybe what we mean by Jaynesian consciousness is simply civilization finally hitting a tipping point, the ending of the transitional phase of bicameral mentality. The pre-agricultural practices and cultures had finally and fully been forgotten from living memory or somehow no longer valid and applicable to altered conditions. When the Bronze Age collapse happened, this was a crisis since there was no other option remaining, no option of a return to animistic mentality. Large urban and farming populations can’t easily transition back to tribes of any sort.

That was a period of catastrophe, as the great empires fell like dominoes when hit by a series of natural disasters (volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, wildfires, climatic changes, etc) that led to famines, refugees, and marauders. Vast numbers were suddenly forced out of their settled, stable, and secure lifestyles. What little they brought with them were containers of goods. It was the one structure they could rely on when all other structures had been destroyed, lost, or left behind. It was an obvious step for the container metaphor to become psychologically potent.

Self-containment was something entirely new, but it was built on the psychic structures of the prior age. It meant the final and complete suppression of the animistic mentality as a social order. Yes, the bicameral-minded social order, as a transitional phase, was over; albeit the animistic mentality could never be completely eliminated, however suppressed and distorted it became. This is maybe why some associate modern authoritarianism with a return of the repressed bicameral-minded impulses with its late stage authoritarianism: stratified hierarchies, centralized power, expansionary imperialism, standing armies, long-distance warfare, brutal oppression, genocidal slaughter, mass enslavement, written laws, court systems, moralistic norms, etc.

We were thinking about this in reading an interview with Brian J. McVeigh, a student of Julian Jaynes, in the collection recently put out, Conversations on Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind edited by Marcel Kuijsten. He was talking of the need to increase self-control to stabilize and optimize consciousness. We’ve come across him talking similarly in an earlier talk he had with Jaynes, from Discussions with Julian Jaynes. That meeting with Jaynes took place on June 5, 1991. So, this is a longstanding view of McVeigh, going back more than three decades, spanning his entire professional career, since that was the same year he got his doctorate.

This commitment to a control-orientation was probably something he picked up from Jaynes himself, as the two seemed in agreement. That perspective is understandable. As a society, we’ve become committed to Jaynesian consciousness. Our entire society is ordered in terms of it and so, at this point, it might be pathway dependence. The only way might seem to be forward. But one might wonder if there is an inherent contradiction to Jaynesian consciousness, as happened before with bicameral mentality, an intrinsic and irresolvable conflict that will worsen over time until it becomes an existential crisis.

The success of Jaynesian consciousness might end up being its doom, specifically as complexity leads to stress, anxiety, and trauma that would elicit increasing threat responses. To contain means to control, initially at a communal level, and that is precisely what predisposed bicameral mentality over time to worsening authoritarianism. That then made empires possible, if empires ultimately can’t operate according to bicameral mentality. It was an impossible situation that made collapse near inevitable.

Out of the wreckage, Jaynesian consciousness created a new order of control, but it came at a high price. Over the millennia, civilization has been on a boom and bust cycle with some of the busts being doozies. So, what if we are in a similar situation or else will get to that situation sometime in the future? We think of self-containment as self-control in making autonomy and independence possible. But maybe this is more of a perception than a reality. Only the controlled would imagine freedom as yet more control.

As a side note, the etymology of ‘freedom’ originated among German tribes, probably when they still were animistic. This word is cognate with ‘friend’. To be free, in this sense, meant to belong to a free people, uncontrolled and uncontained for the identity was shared and not enforced. It’s all about relationship, not individualism. So far, humans have never found a way to have individualism without authoritarianism for individuals act individually and hence need to be controlled for social order, collective action, and public good. This is made clear in how Germanic ‘freedom’ is opposite of Latin ‘liberty’ that, under the Roman Empire, simply meant not being being legally enslaved in a slave-based society.

This is the reason Southern slaveholders fought for liberty, not for freedom. They could make statements like, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Liberty only applied to those who owned themselves. Then again, all the way back at least to the Stoics, there was the beginning of a concept of self-ownership that even slaves could claim, as no one else could own one’s soul. This sense of individualism was in compliance with authoritarianism, as the liberty of self-identity didn’t require liberty of the body. This remains true with modern wage slavery. Unlike animistic and egalitarian tribes, modern humans have little freedom to do what they will, as we live under the constant threat of hunger and homelessness if we don’t comply with and submit to the system of control.

Do we really control ourselves at all? Benjamin Libet’s research would indicate otherwise, as we apparently only become conscious of our actions after they are initiated. Control is a narrative that we tell ourselves for comfort. Self-ownership of the propertied self, what a strange thing — as if the individual could be removed from the public sector and made into a private corporation. We know that the self can never be made into an actual object separate from enmeshment in the world and relationships. Yet self-ownership clothed in the Burkean moral imagination is ideological realism at the highest level. It’s so compelling, a hypnotic trance.

But one might suspect it’s a cognitive trap, a dead end. Isn’t this a metaphorical internalization and ideological interpellation where the ego-self is made into a tyrant and slaveholder of the psychic realm, a demiurgic and archonic overlord? It seems to be an odd self-enforced authoritarianism, where one part of the psyche comes to rule over the rest; or else merely made to appear so, in acting as a puppet dictator who rationalizes the forces actually outside of his control. Exactly who is owning and controlling? Who is being owned and controlled?

Is inner authoritarianism an improvement over external authoritarianism? Or are they mirroring each other? Aren’t they ultimately of the same cloth? Is this why so many authoritarian regimes, from the Nazis to the Stalinists, rhetorically praised the individual soldier, worker, etc? Is there ever the light of individualism without the shadow of authoritarianism? How is one free when inside a container one cannot get out of? If we truly seek freedom, we might want to consider a new metaphor, and that would require new structures from which to form new identities. But it’s unclear, at this point, that we are capable of transformation without collapse.

* * *

As an additional thought, we have doubts that Jaynes’ emphasis on metaphor is sufficient. That is the point of why we pontificate on actual structures. All metaphors begin in the physical world. But we are still left with explaining why some structures become common metaphors and why some common metaphors become internalized as identity. To this extent, we were building upon Jaynes’ own theorizing. And we could refer back to other thoughts we’ve had along these lines. It’s not only that structures of buildings and containers potentially shape the psyche. The most major factor might be how a key component of the civilizational project is the reshaping of the landscape, particularly in light of how central landscape has always been, such as with the earliest mnemonic systems of oral cultures, from the Australian Aborigines to the archaic Greeks.

This brings us to agriculture, as control of the earth itself (Enclosure of the Mind). But that is not how it began, in the earliest glimmers of the agricultural revolution. Even many millennia later into the post-bicameral dark age, agriculture remained a rough and primitive endeavor of weedy fields. The cultivation of grains, at the time, wouldn’t necessarily have looked much different from wild grasslands. It took the Axial Age to bring on systematization of farmland and farming practices (e.g., weed and ergot control) that would eventually make possible large and dependable surplus yields. Land reform, during modernity, took this to the next level as a nationalistic reform agenda to enforce what Brian J. McVeigh calls the ‘propertied self’. Every aspect of the landscape fell under greater control, from the plutocratic enclosure movement to technocratic land and water management. Nothing was left to remain uncontained and uncontrolled. Even ‘wilderness’ was to be carefully managed as part of bureaucratic park systems and national territories.

As external control has increased, so have the demands of internal self-control. Authoritarianism is ever more introjected. We can’t escape the oppression because it’s infected us, to such an extent we’ve become identified with the parasite. We can’t imagine anything else because our imagination is also contained, in having spent our entire lives within contained landscapes, especially with mass urbanization and city planning. It is near perfect epistemic closure; an all-encompassing ideological realism; a totalitarian interpellation. For all that tells us about our predicament, it’s still left to be determined what made it all possible, what motivated it in the first place, and what continually compelled humanity across millennia. The rarely discussed component is not just agriculture as a system and social order but what it produced.

This is seen right from the beginning of agriculture when the state of health plummeted, under the pressure of malnutrition and pestilence. The complete alteration of the human diet with farming, in particular, was one of the most profound changes humanity has ever experienced, maybe only equal to the megafauna die-off that immediately preceded it in causing the initial loss of nutrient density that turned humanity toward increased intake of plant foods. But it wasn’t only what was lost. In grains and dairy, there were substances that had not previously been a central part of what humans ate. Some of these substances appear to be addictive, along with affecting neurocognitive development (The Agricultural Mind). On top of that, it was what was being replaced

Taurine is a common, if often unrecognized, deficiency.

Taurine is not technically an essential nutrient, but many argue it should be labeled as such (see Harry Serpanos). It’s not unusual for people, specifically as they age, to not endogenously produce enough. As an osmolyte, taurine is one of the master regulator’s of the body. The health problems caused by deficiency of it are numerous because the purposes it serves are numerous.

One of the main areas taurine is involved in is digestion. It ensures proper pH levels for protein digestion, proper bile availability for fat digestion, and such. Another main areas is in homeostatically maintaining mineral levels, from iron to the electrolytes (sodium, potassium, and magnesium); as related to it also regulating fluids.

The last function helps explain part of what has gone wrong on the Standard American Diet (SAD). When carbohydrate intake is high, insulin is constantly being spiked. This causes fluid retention and hence excess electrolytes. This is why it’s generally recommended to lower sodium intake, as it increases blood pressure.

However, this is only a problem on a high-carb diet. Go to the opposite extreme of a keto diet, there is the opposite extreme of a problem. Without constant insulin response, the body excretes unnecessary water from the cells. That would be fine by itself, but it ends up also excreting the electrolytes in the process.

Keto dieters don’t have to worry about high blood pressure, even if they were heavily salting their food. The body will simply keep on eliminating it. The issue with that is something else entirely. Low electrolyte levels can cause havoc in the body: cramps, tiredness, hormonal imbalances, blood clotting impairment, etc.

Of course, this is simple to solve. Many people in regular ketosis just supplement electrolytes and then they feel perfectly fine. But why do they need to supplement? Hunter-gatherers don’t supplement. The thing is the official keto diet, as originally used for medical purposes, restricts protein for concern of gluconeogenesis (i.e., conversion to glucose; the reason one doesn’t need to eat carbs).

It is true that a large bolus of protein — as a large meal of meat, fish eggs, soy, seitan, etc — will boost insulin and knock one out of ketosis. It only does this briefly, as opposed to what happens on a high-carb diet, but those seeking ketosis for health reasons want to maintain it constantly. There are medical conditions, such as epileptic seizures, where this is necessary.

For most people, though, they don’t need to be in constant ketosis. Restricting protein inevitably means restricting taurine in the diet. That potentially can make it harder for the body even to make use of the protein that is consumed, which can cause one to not get enough anabolic growth, repair, and healing; such as not being able to build muscle.

Such a problem isn’t limited to keto dieters, of course. The average American only gets around 12% of their calories from protein, as opposed to something like 40% of calories from seed oils, the latter being bane of the alternative diet world. We’ve been told by health experts to reduce meat intake and most Americans have complied. So, down goes taurine levels in the general public.

There are still other complications for why taurine can be hard to get, despite theoretically being so plentiful in certain animal foods. First off, the highest sources of taurine is seafood, not something most Americans eat all the time. Even American beef consumption dropped quite a bit over the past century, if recently there has been a slight uptick.

Though ruminant meat is the second great source of taurine, there are two factors that can reduce the content in the meat that ends up on plates and between buns. Taurine is found in the liquid. Beef is often hung in a storage locker for months, sometimes a year and a half. This is the tender aged beef that we prefer, as we evolved to be scavengers.

As such, most of the meat we buy has already lost it’s supply of taurine before we even get it home. Then we are likely to overcook it and hence even more of the taurine-filled juices drip away. Few people catch the juices and consume them. That is easy to do with a slow-cooker, and you will notice the tremendous amount of liquid that sometimes comes out.

If one is to grill a steak, make sure to sear it at high temperatures on both sides. That will seal in the juices. Hamburgers are more problematic. The beef could’ve been ground much earlier and there is nothing to hold in the taurine. One solution is, if you have a butcher nearby, have them freshly grind up beef when you need it.

This knowledge is typically moot on a traditional diet, in particular among hunter-gatherers, since taurine is found in animal foods. They possibly are getting plenty of fish or at least plenty of fresh meat, often from ruminants. Dairy and eggs also have a fair amount of taurine, if not as high.

A related topic is the sodium issue for different populations. On a taurine-rich and/or low-carb diet, over-salting one’s food is a non-issue. Nonetheless, it’s interesting that, when looking at hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, it appears they don’t use salt (Ancestry Foundation, L. Amber O’hearn – Blood, sweat, and tears: how much salt do we really need? (AHS22)). The thing is there actually are plenty of minerals, including sodium, in animal foods.

If taurine is sufficient, as would be the case for the Hadza and others, the body will hold onto what minerals it gets. With homoeostatic regulation, there will be no problem of excess sodium nor deficient electrolytes. Just eat fish and fresh meat. Then you probably will be fine in this area of health.

There are additional explanations for why this is the case. There are two things the body needs extra salt for. One is to balance out potassium. And the other is to eliminate toxins. Both potassium and toxins are more often found in plant foods. Hunter-gatherers solve this problem by prioritizing animal foods, when possible.

Hunter-gatherers can seem amazing in how they have managed to solve health problems like this with no scientific knowledge. That is because they didn’t actually solve the problem. They simply prevented it in the first place by eating as hominids have done for millions of years.

Yet to the modern perspective, it sometimes can seem amazing. It’s not only that hunter-gatherers seemingly don’t bother much with salt. The nutritionist Mary Ruddick, in talks with Harry Serpanos, discussed her time spent with the Hadza. She observed they drank very little water.

On persistence hunts lasting hours in the heat of the midday, they’d carry no water and would not stop for water. They wouldn’t even take a break to get some honey from the hives they kept passing. All they wanted was the meat. Serpanos noted, in another video, that Inuit will drink the taurine-filled fluids from a fresh kill.

Those fluids, of course, contain water. And the taurine would help with maintaining low levels of thirst in keeping everything in balance. But also the blood would be low in deuterium, as the animals already eliminated it. The more deuterium one gets the more one needs water to eliminate the deuterium (see Harry Serpanos). That means less thirst and less need for water.

Serpanos suggested that this is why the Hadza will expend such effort in digging up, cooking, and chewing on tough, fibrous wild tubers that lack much in the way of nutrition, not even carbs. What they might be seeking is the deuterium-depleted water that is made available. This might be the same reason they’ll suck on certain kinds of leaves.

For all these reasons, hunter-gatherers could accomplish physical feats that seem impossible to an outside observer. Consider the Apache, on foot, who could outpace the United States cavalry while carrying no water or food, sometimes while crossing deserts and dry grasslands. Part of this is from being in ketosis that burns body fat for energy. Ketones are a superfuel.

The other thing is that the body will produce metabolic water from burning fat as well. And guess what? Metabolic water is deuterium-depleted. So, on a diet that is very low-carb or includes plenty of fasting, humans will be fat-adapted in allowing easy access to energy and water as needed, just as long as the body has a fat reserve.

Also, as long as the diet is animal-based, the necessary minerals such as electrolytes will be maintained. Unlike a modern athlete guzzling carbs non-stop, the hunter-gatherer can easily go on for hours with no intake of food or water, much less carbs. It’s simply not necessary. Humans were evolved for persistence hunting and for going long periods in between meals (Human Adaptability and Health).

The moral of the story: Eat a species-appropriate diet. Or else make sure to carefully supplement and hope for the best.

Beating the Bounds

It was the holidays. Family was gathered. They were clumped together in small groups in adjoining rooms. Where the father stood with his eldest son in the kitchen, the view was open into the main areas of the upstairs. The rest of the family milled about or were seated, many of them in conversations that overlapped across the open space. The mood was appropriately festive.

Everything seemed fine. There was laughter and smiles. Looking into the living room, the father saw his young granddaughter using pens and markers to draw a picture. The paper was sitting on an expensive ornamental rug. Having warned about this previously, he made a critical comment to his son, the father of the girl. That is how it began. The son didn’t respond, but the daughter-in-law did.

The daughter-in-law, who always heard everything anyone else said, typically became defensive of her daughter. The father, who usually avoided confrontation, didn’t back off this time. It wasn’t long before she was yelling. The granddaughter, sitting on the floor at her mother’s feet, was apparently oblivious to all that was happening; or else used to ignoring her mother’s tirades.

The child’s appearance of equanimity would not last long. The mother was now fuming mad. Glaring at her father-in-law, she grabbed her daughter by the wrist, yanked her up, and screamed, “You’re traumatizing her!” The girl, indeed, began crying. If she was not traumatized then, she would over her childhood learn to be traumatized. It was an important lesson to be internalized. It was a rite of passage into adulthood.

As the child’s head is hit at each boundary marker in the feudal custom of beating the bounds, egoic individuality also has to be imprinted through pain and suffering, abuse and fear. The most important point is not only that the boundaries of self must not be forgotten but that they must be associated with the earliest experiences of being hurt by those who are supposed to protect and care for the child.

Self-consciousness is defined by betrayal. The first demarcation to be established between self and other is the separation between child and mother. Then the child too can become an individual, if at first with the help of a favorite blankie or teddy bear. Then the proper social order will be ensured, the social order where everyone is alone, even when together. The greatest threat to society is the child who grows up never learning this. But this child did learn.

Now the holidays can continue. The incident will slip away, just something that happened. To keep the peace, a covenant of silence will seal the shared memory. Later in life, the child won’t recall what happened and no one will tell her about it. All she will have is a gnawing sense of anxiety, of mistrust. To help her fit into this society of other damaged individuals, she will go to therapy, take her meds, and keep her head down. Buried in the unconscious, a child still sits on the rug lost in drawing.

Literalist Fundamentalism Requires Murdering Children

“As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods?”
~ Psalm 42

From the perspective of egoic individualism, what Julian Jaynes simply referred to as ‘consciousness’, there is a sense of loss and longing for the archaic authorization of the voices and visions from gods, spirits, and ancestors. But there is simultaneously a fear and denial of this archaic authorization that can undermine and usurp the walled position defended as the demiurgic ego’s domain.

The takeover of Jaynesian consciousness didn’t happen naturally, easily, and quickly. It was a slow process of suppressing and eliminating the voice-hearing bicameral mind, including the regular killing and sometimes wholesale slaughter of the remaining bicameral humans. This is attested to in the Old Testament where even voice-hearing children were not to be spared by their own parents who were commanded to murder them.

“And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the Lord: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.”
~ Zechariah 13;3

* * *

There is a present and practical implication to these thoughts. Literalist fundies like to claim they follow all of the Bible without any personal interpretation or cultural bias, treating it as the actual voice of God whose meaning and intention are simply known to the Elect of God’s People. But that is obviously bull shit. Our grandfather, a minister, stated that anyone could find a Biblical verse to support anything they wanted to believe. Such self-serving delusion does not make one a good Christian.

The stories, histories, traditions, teachings, moralities, commandments, laws, etc accumulated from dozens of separate cultures and populations before finally being written down in the Tanakh during the Axial Age. There is no consistent and coherent theology that can be found, as the monotheist authoritarian priestly class that wrote it down was drawing upon the prior paganism, polytheism, and henotheism; the traces of which remain in the texts they recorded and rewrote, edited and interpolated.

One would literally be insane, dangerous, and criminal if attempting to apply everything in the Bible to modern life and society. The Tanakh is a holy text not only to the Jews but also to Christians, Muslims, and Bahai. Could you imagine all of the monotheistic fundies all over the world suddenly doing every batshit thing the Old Testament commanded, even killing their own children when they claimed to hear voices, even the voice of God?

Then there is the additional problem that so much of what is in the New Testament contradicts and opposes what is found in the Old Testament. In fact, that is why the New Testament canon was created by Marcion, specifically to show and prove that the loving God of Jesus was not and could not be the same as the bloodthirsty, tyrannical, and demiurgic Yahweh. Jesus’ teachings and example are dramatically different from everything that came before in the Jewish tradition.

In challenging the commandment to execute wrongdoers, Jesus confronted the righteous Jews ready to stone someone to death by saying that anyone without sin could cast the first stone. Yet no where in the Old Testament does it ever state or suggest that being free of all sin is a requirement for punishing other sinners. For Jesus to say that was a complete defiance and overturning of Jewish tradition, law, and practice.

Indeed, that was the whole point. Jesus stated in no uncertain terms that he came to fulfill the law, that is to say the old laws no longer applied — not abolished but simply irrelevant and moot, no longer applicable. He brought a new revelation, not anti-authoritarian revolt that reacts against the old but non-authoritarian love that manifests the radically new. Love was all that one needed to understand, as it always had been the one and only truth, so claimed Jesus.

Based on everything we know from the Gospels, Jesus would’ve condemned any parent who murdered or attempted to murder their child for hearing voices. When he was brought to a man possessed by demons, he didn’t declare the man must be punished, banished, or killed. No, instead, he healed the man of what was possessing him. Anyone who believes that they should fully and literally follow the Old Testament, even to the point of murdering children, whatever they might be they for certain are not a Christian or at least not a follower of Jesus.

* * *

As supposedly described by the Hebrew prophet Zechariah and, below that, as explained by Julian Jaynes:

King James Bible
Zechariah 13

1 In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.

2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord of hosts, that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.

3 And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the Lord: and his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.

4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither shall they wear a rough garment to deceive:

5 But he shall say, I am no prophet, I am an husbandman; for man taught me to keep cattle from my youth.

6 And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.

7 Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is my fellow, saith the Lord of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones.

8 And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, saith the Lord, two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be left therein.

9 And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my people: and they shall say, The Lord is my God.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes
pp. 310-312

A further vestige from the bicameral era is the word ob, often translated as a “familiar spirit.” “A man also or woman that have an ob . . . shall surely be put to death,” says Leviticus (20:27). And similarly Saul drives out from Israel all those that had an ob (I Samuel 28:3). Even though an ob is something that one consults with (Deuteronomy, 18:11), it probably had no physical embodiment. It is always bracketed with wizards or witches, and thus probably refers to some bicameral voice that was not recognized by the Old Testament writers as religious. This word has so puzzled translators that when they found it in Job 32:19, they translated it absurdly as “bottle,” when clearly the context is that of the young frustrated Elihu, who feels as if he had a bicameral voice about to burst forth into impatient speech like an overfull wineskin.

The Last of the Nabiim

We began this chapter with a consideration of the refugee situation in the Near East around the latter part of the second millennium B.C., and of the roving tribes uprooted from their lands by various catastrophes, some of them certainly bicameral and unable to move toward subjective consciousness. Probably in the editing of the historical books of the Old Testament, and the fitting of it together into one story in the sixth or fifth century B.C., a great deal has been suppressed. And among such items of information that we would like is a clear account of what happened to these last communities of bicameral men. Here and there through the Old Testament, they appear like sudden glimpses of a strange other world during these periods which historians have paid too little attention to.

Groups of bicameral men certainly persisted until the downfall of the Judean monarchy, but whether in association with other tribes or with any organization to their hallucinated voices in the form of gods, we don’t know. They are often referred to as the “sons of nabiim,” indicating that there was probably a strong genetic basis for this type of remaining bicamerality. It is, I think, the same genetic basis that remains with us as part of the etiology of schizophrenia.

Edgy kings consulted them. Ahab, king of Israel in 835 B.C., rounded up 400 of them like cattle to listen to their hue and clamor (I Kings 22:6). Later, in all his robes, he and the king of Judah sit on thrones just outside the gates of Samaria, and have hundreds of these poor bicameral men herded up to them, raving and copying each other even as schizophrenics in a back ward (I Kings 22:10).

What happened to them? From time to time, they were hunted down and exterminated like unwanted animals. Such a massacre in the ninth century B.C. seems to be referred to in I Kings 18:4, where out of some unknown, much larger number, Obadiah took a hundred nabiim and hid them in caves, and brought them bread and water until the massacre was over. Another such massacre is organized by Elijah a few years later (I Kings 18:40).

We hear no more of these bicameral groups thereafter. What remained for a few centuries more are the individual nabiim, men whose voices do not need the group support of other hallucinating men, men who can be partly subjective and yet still hear the bicameral voice. These are the famous nabiim whose bicameral messages we have already selectively touched upon: Amos, the gatherer of sycamore fruit, Jeremiah, staggering under his yoke from village to village, Ezekiel with his visions of lofty thrones on wheels moving through the clouds, the several nabiim whose religious agonies are ascribed to Isaiah. These of course merely represent the handful of that much larger number whose bicameral voices seemed to be most consistent with Deuteronomy. And then the voices are as a rule no longer actually heard.

In their place is the considered subjective thought of moral teachers. Men still dreamed visions and heard dark speech per-haps. But Ecclesiastes and Ezra seek wisdom, not a god. They study the law. They do not roam out into the wilderness “inquiring of Yahweh.” By 400 B.C., bicameral prophecy is dead. “The nabiim shall be ashamed everyone of his visions.” If parents catch their children naba-ing or in dialogue with bicameral voices, they are to kill them on the spot (Zechariah 13, 3-4).That is a severe injunction. If it was carried out, it is an evolutionary selection which helped move the gene pool of humanity toward subjectivity.