Learned Helplessness

In any system - physical, biological, or social - the more energy there is in that system, the more resilient it will tend to be. Conversely, the less energy there is in that system, the less resilient it will be, whether that system is a chemical reaction in a lab... or your life itself.

Complex systems are self-organizing, which means that they take in energy (from surrounding systems) and use it to make themselves more complex. Think of any business, human being, river system, or idea.  Being complex systems, they all have a tendency to be "greedy" in some way, to increase, improve and better themselves, forever. This is what self-organization means.

Greater complexity within any system really means that there is just more of that system - more energy, more interacting parts, more size, more activity, more of the emergent qualities of that system (e.g. more profit-making, more saving of souls, more personal skills, more species, more ways of applying ideas.

In biological systems, such as ecosystems, the more different niches there are and the more different species there are occupying those niches in cooperative ways - in other words, the more complex the system is - the more resilient it is. Vulnerability in ecosystems is at the species level and resilience is at the ecosystem level. We understand biological complexity as "biodiversity." In fact, we really understand almost intuitively that greater complexity in biological systems means the system can withstand more shocks or losses and then recover or even benefit from the "pruning."

We also understand that the larger an economic system is - that is, the more money, businesses, consumers, factories, political organizations, etc, the more resilient that economy is to changes in resources from outside the system. A small economy like Nepal's, for example, has far less resiliency against increasing oil prices than, say, the European Union. In Nepal, all the gasoline comes from one source: India. In Europe, it comes from multiple sources and there are many options for shifting the flow around countries with political trouble. So, as fuel prices rise, there are riots in Nepal and there are not even changes in traffic patterns in Europe.

When it comes to our own lives, the exact same principles apply. The more friends, family, clients, suppliers and money you have in your life, the more options you have, the more energy there is flowing into the system that is called your life. Vulnerability in your life is with your personal mind-body-brain, while resiliency is at your tribe or band level.

The mechanism is simple: you've just got more options if you've got more close personal relationships. Just knowing that you have options improves your health and well-being. If you know you can call on Grandma to watch the kids when you are feeling under the weather, you're a lot more likely to take it easy at the first sign of needing a little personal time. If you can call your friend Joe and bitch for three hours about what your stupid boss did to you, you're a lot less likely to get a paranoia complex about what your boss is going to do to you tomorrow. And if you've got five different potential boyfriends, you're going to expect and command respect from each of them because you've got options and you know it.

You and I live in a society that has taught its members not to depend on each other, but instead to depend on the economy. We are supposed to buy everything we need, and we are supposed to devote the first 65 years of our lives to getting the money for the purpose of getting what we need.

It seems as though this system should work. The logic most of us have been taught is that, as human societies began to grow a few thousand years ago, it became impossible to carry around and trade the physical materials that were necessary to the community because of sheer quantity of materials. Furthermore, we began interacting with larger and larger numbers of people, and couldn't keep track of how much time we owed each other. Cash as a representation of value could be carried around in the pocket. Therefore, all we're doing in modern society is being more efficient by not having to carry truckloads of cell phones and carrots and not having to keep lists of who spent how much time on work and so on.

The only problem with this idea is that it's incorrect and yet most of us believe it. We believe that the money economy requires less work, effort and bookkeeping than a sharing or immediate-return economy. We also believe it's the only possible way for each of us to do things. After all, it is true that if seven billion people tried to do immediate-return economics with each other, there'd be total chaos. And we are one big global community, right?

So we're taught that the way to live is to get money and the way to have power over others is to get money and the way to have love from others is to get money and the way to be healthy and happy is to get money.

Meanwhile, how many of us actually know how to grow food or where our clothes come from or what to do about a bad infection? How many of us could help a woman give birth or teach a child how to play piano or build our own house? How many of us know the difference between an edible wild plant and a poisonous one?

How many of us know the names, personalities, and skills of the hundred people living closest to our home? In fact, the more money a person's got, the less likely they are to have a clue about basic survival or about their local landbase and its human community

We're taught to be this way. We are taught to be helpless so that over and over and over again we will choose to exercise our one option: get money. Pay strangers for what we need: food, shelter, health, love, child-rearing, protection.... as the global economy deteriorates, this leads to more and more illness throughout the personal, social, biological and physical systems of the planet. As we all know, poverty causes misery.

Except there are still people living tribally on this planet, people living with immediate-return economic systems, and they are exactly as healthy and happy as humans have evolved to be; that is, certainly much healthier and happier than your average civilized person.

So, what's the solution? For each and every one of us it's the same: we need more energy in our lives, and by that I mean more social energy, more relationships. But this is very difficult, because it requires that we invest a lot of energy in other people's practical matters as well. And it requires that we do it for free. Where are we supposed to get the time and energy to do this?

I propose that we obtain the energy by becoming more conscious in our daily lives and organizing our actions more efficiently. This means first determining who we are. From this, we will determine what the purpose of our individual lives is. And when we are clear about that, we will invest our daily allotment of energy into things that are meaningful to us.

That's also exactly where we'll find and build those meaningful relationships. In the space where our life's purpose lies.