Common Sense, Cops, George Floyd, And Human Nature

Yes, it’s all connected

The hazards of Chauvinism

First off so there is no confusion, I am going to refer to human nature as natural tendencies. This is because as an Ecopsychologist, I do not separate nature — the network to which we belong — from our instincts. Separation from those instincts is what creates domination hierarchy. DH, (as a shorthand) arose on our planet just about 12,000 years ago with agriculture and city states.

For the far greater time of Sapiens existence on Earth, we had small tribal affiliations, and no dedicated fealty to “the state” or white, male supremacy authority either through religion or the law.

Nature, then endows our species with several senses to thrive in the world. Among these is a sense we call “common sense” or a gut-centered, brain enhanced, and heart-informed idea of how to treat one another.

Headlines today hurt our heads. That is because we are reading that a cop that uses excessive force to murder a man, was “possibly just following the rules,” or had “leeway to interpret the laws”, or “was acting under the authority of the badge.” There are many variations on this theme, but why does it outrage us so much and make us face-palm our weep-wanting eyes into our hands?

This happens because our human instinct to know how obvious it is to not use excessive force on a prone, or helpless person. We are gifted with common sense, natural tendencies, and intuitive reactions about the right way to help our fellow human.

All of that goes out the window in the case of a police state mentality. Such a mentality appoints a higher authority to have control over others by misuse of what we call “law.” The reason Black Lives Matter is such a global movement, is that so many people with common sense, can easily see how utterly unreasonable and absurd it is to appoint one human tasked to protect another with being the “authority” with the right to kill him.

Those who succumb to the allure of “us versus them” are led to believe we will have chaos, crime, migrants and madness if we don’t get tough on crime.

Thus, we militarize power, and intimidate the populace. If we were to invest in human beings rather than policing “thugs” however, it might be amazing to see what results. All we really need is police that protect and serve rather than threaten and bully to keep those miscreants in line.

Why we Ally

There are many movements in the world today that appeal to such a sense of natural tendencies. We are also equipped by nature to have a sense of reason, a sense of proportion, a sense of compassion, and a sense of self-actualization — to name just a few. Many movements on Earth today include all social justice programs based on a sense of JUSTICE. Having such a sense enables people to gather their shared sense of alliance (another one!) and push for better rules overall.

Movements such as Fridays for Future, #MeToo, Extinction Rebellion, BLM, and so many more exist because of our natural senses. Wonderfully, we have perfected technology that can connect us if we figure out how to move past the ways in which that same technology is trying to mine our data, steal our will, hypnotize us with gossip and entertainment, or numb us to injustice by keeping us divided.

Keeping us divided, polarized, is highly profitable and enables warring politicians to rise in power. Please note that DH, so-called “strong man” authoritarians are popping up all over the world.

The good news is that we contain in our inner social sense of belonging all the aforementioned “common senses” that can allow us to ally with justice. We can enact programs, for example, to end disproportionate racist and sexist pollution and premature deaths in regions ravaged by over exploitation on people and land.

We can train professionals, not to threaten, but to appeal to our shared human sense of decency.

Ecopsychology displays natural limits of mind and matter

If you have noticed a distinct dis ease, (think of it as disrespect to your sense of ease) in the world today, then you are attuned to the loss of the world before. The world before, although always under pressure from certain domination-oriented people, had not reached her limits.

But today, due to the climate crisis, burden of eight billion people, loss of species, fires, floods, famine and refugees, we have reached the threshold of some limits.

This loss, often called Solastalgia, depression, or disconnect from Biophilia, is real. It erodes our natural sense of empathy, too.

There are many tons of people out there who will insist our disease with modernity has more to do with immorality, immigrants, or some other scapegoats. Or they will say ecology has nothing to do with crime, police violence has nothing to do with the human psyche.

Yet science supports that we evolved in nature, with instincts, and social directives to support not only one another with altruism for survival, but our mutual home, as well. Our natural tendency, despite being told otherwise, is to collaborate to protect, rather than neglect, one another within our abundance of soothing biosphere and sustenance.

If our natural tendency is to fight and employ extreme “otherism” of race or gender, we would never survive the grocery store check-out line.

Our mental health, our physical health, and our spiritual health all depend upon our belonging.

Bullies don’t belong, and in natural systems, they get rooted out.

In the simplest way of understanding it, when we feel a disconnect among our own species and planet, we are in painful, and intolerable, anxiety. This is an unsustainable cognitive dissonance.

Police state of mind

Living in a police state is the opposite of living in comfortable cooperation.

Not just the conquering mentality of exploiting Earth, or conquering and colonializing cultures, but in everyday experience of one another as allies.

As religion wanes — or even if it does not — we have an obligation to protect and serve one another. That is why it makes us crazy to see quibbles about how much violence is “acceptable” when one person’s life is entirely in the choking hands of another person.

Our hearts, heads, guts, and souls naturally know it is wrong.

When I say one another, we must necessarily also look at the other organisms being driven to terrifying extinction by any collective bullying misbehavior, I mean precisely that: all others who create life.

Some of our mental illness is a completely natural outcome of (up until today’s activism), allowing ourselves to be constrained and conformed into a rigid hierarchical system that is foreign to our 200,000 year old habits of living cooperatively.

If you feel uncomfortable watching modern news, that’s good. It means you are still a natural human in an unnatural habitat.

There’s hope.