Overcoming Learned Helplessness
“There has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee.” -Noam Chomsky
There is an interesting discrepancy in the world right now. On one hand we’re being told that we have never been better off, that technology will solve every problem we face, and that we are at the end of any meaningful development as to how we live our lives. Yet, while this version of reality can be extrapolated from certain statistics, taking a more critical view changes the picture entirely.
Based solely on statistics we are increasingly depressed, lonely, and chronically ill, and while we may deny it, we probably do notice this in our own lives, be it ourselves or those around us.
We generally impose a pressure on each other, usually unconsciously, to be in a good mood and to be on top of life. And while this might not seem negative, we have to consider the setting in which we live.
I think that when most of us enter the school-system at a young age, we realise that there is a conflict between what we want to do, and what the world seems to demand from us. We may have great passion and curiosity around learning, yet what we are met with is a standardised education-system, in which we are expected to do well in every type of subject. A system that quells our desire for learning, and instead offers dry theories about how the world works as if it was objective truth.
When we reach adulthood, most of us have little passion left in us, and it seems that we are now forced to find a way to make a living until we retire. Even worse, it increasingly feels as though money can only be made by either discarding any real passion, and merely serving what large corporations demand, which is usually meaningless paperwork. And there is an underlying problem that is hard to notice, but which makes things even worse. We essentially have to work. While other animals are free to live in nature as they please, with exception of human civilisation, we don’t have the option to simply live. Most of the land around us is owned by states or individuals, and so we can’t really opt out of the system. We may choose to earn enough money to purchase land, but for most people that will require many years of income within the system.
Our lives are from the day we are born set up to live in a system that doesn’t really benefit us. It does, of course, try to convince us that it benefits us, but it is becoming undeniable that existence in our societies have become mere shells of what they could be.
I say shells, because most of our life is spent trying to prove that we are good citizens. Through our work, purchases, behaviour, it seems we struggle immensely to prove our worth as people. To prove our worth, so that we can finally escape into alcohol, drugs, shitty tv-shows, and other meaningless distractions. And that is in large part the life cycle for us.
Do what is required of you, then retreat into consumption.
This is not a life worth living, so why are we continuing to live this way?
Why do we give our lives to systems that favour a group of people that could fit into one room?
The economic system, consisting both of the state and the large corporations, seems like a behemoth, that is ever expansive and all-consuming.
A behemoth we all have to keep up with if we want to survive.
A behemoth which values short-term profit and centralisation of wealth and power above anything else.
A behemoth that has somehow claimed ultimate authority over us all yet offers mere scraps in return of obedience.
A behemoth that is destroying the biology on the planet.
The thing is, that this “behemoth” is us.
And while indoctrination and propaganda may have convinced us otherwise, we hold the power to decide what kind of world we wish to create. That is why there is such an immense effort into shaping our thoughts, as also pointed out by Noam Chomsky:
“There has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee.”
We come to believe that we are powerless yet forget that those we deem to be more powerful, are simply human. The system exists as it does, only through our collective consent, or as Chomsky put it:
“Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it’s necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything — that’s part of how you teach people they can’t do anything, they’re helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.”
We are not powerless. We may have good reasons to believe we are, and experiences to back up those beliefs, but ultimately these beliefs must give way to the reality, that while our institutions seem powerful, they consist of people like us. We don’t realise this, since the indoctrination starts at an early age.
Among the many disturbing facts that came to light in the CIA torture-report, was the fact that the torturers sought to instil what they called “learned helplessness”, in order to break the prisoners. It seems that when you convince people they have no power, they become malleable to control and manipulation. And this is, on a global scale, what has happened to all of us. Our passivity and apathy constitute exactly the necessary consent for a system of this kind to continue bringing about biological and economical collapse.
We need to question every “truth” that we have been taught, and especially when it comes to authority, refereeing again to Chomsky:
“The basic principle I would like to see communicated to people is the idea that every form of authority and domination and hierarchy has to prove that its justified — it has no prior justification. For instance, when you stop your five year old kid from trying to cross the street, that’s an authoritarian situation: it’s got to be justified. Well, in that case you can give a justification. But the burden of proof for any exercise of authority is always on the person exercising it — invariably. And when you look, most of the time those authority structures have no justification: they have no moral justification, they have no justification in the interests of the person lower in the hierarchy, or in the interests of other people, or the environment, or the future, or the society, or anything else — they are just there in order to preserve certain structures of power and domination, and the people at the top.”
We need to build a world where we live in alignment with nature and each other, and this can’t take place if we surrender all of our free will to centralised institutions in the hope that they will.
Furthermore, we don’t need to force our ideas of how we should live on others, no matter how convinced we are of knowing what would be best. There needs to be a fundamental recognition that we can all live harmoniously, despite having different perspectives on the world. Political struggle between left and right seem to promise some sort of solution, but how can it, when it stands to go against half the population, and act as a sort of zero sum game.
No one needs to be defeated. We need to recognise our shared humanity, and accept that we can only know what is best for ourselves, and not everyone else. We may perceive having enemies, but if we instead of blaming others, focused on creating what we wanted to see, we would be on a different path entirely. And while we may feel that us creating something new will be unimportant in the bigger picture, we again have forgotten that the main driving force in our civilisation, is people like ourselves. As Carl Jung stated:
“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and it sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”
