In my last post I ended by talking about information scientists and cyberneticists of the 1940s, 50s, and into the 60s, and their wish to divorce information from body, to dissociate body from mind. Why on Earth would these scientists knowingly wish to bring on such divorce, such dissociation?
In her book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles gives us a glimpse at a possible answer: in order for information scientists and cyberneticians to usher in the world’s of robots, cyborgs, and computer generated AI (artificial intelligence) they had to bring about widespread divorce and dissociation. To give us a closer look at these divorce and dissociation processes, Hayles points to the work of Philip Dick, known for his science fiction short stories and novels, many of which were released in the 1960s. Hayles focuses a lot of her analysis on Dick’s 1968 book entitled Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which was released as a movie in 1982 entitled Blade Runner). According to Hayles’ analysis, Dick attempted to understand his own personal experiences of dissociation brought about by early traumatic experiences, by trying to make sense of the processes of divorce and dissociation that surrounded him in the middle of the last century. Hayles suggests that the central question Dick grappled with was this: What makes us human? Yes, these early information scientists and cyberneticists were playing around with this central question What makes us human? but why? It’s entirely possible that this was a practical matter.
Keep in mind that these early information scientists and cyberneticists conducted their work against the backdrop of WWII. This was Bowlby’s backdrop as well. During WWI the term “shell shocked” was coined to describe the condition that many soldiers experienced following exposure to the various traumas associated with war, not the least of which was nearby exploding shells. Today we know shell shocked by the diagnostic criteria PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder. Generally speaking, a person experiencing PTSD has cognitive difficulties arising from brain centers no longer able to communicate effectively. As an example, PTSD is characterized by what are known as “reliving experiences.” PTSD sufferers will experience traumatic events from the past as if they were happening today in the here and now. In essence, brain centers that “house” these traumatic experiences are dissociated from the brain centers of the upper brain, home to such Executive Function skills as reflection, perspective-taking, and—key to reliving experiences—mental time travel or our ability to properly assign a sense of past, present, and future to memories. Reliving experiences are experienced “out of place and time.” Therapy is centrally about trying to bring back a sense of time to past traumatic experiences while creating an appropriate perceptive from which to reflect on these traumatic memories. In essence, therapists try to put traumatic memories back into an appropriate place and time. Therapists are acting, as Cozolino suggests, as neuroscientists reconnecting traumatic experiences to the Executive Functions of the upper brain. Here’s where the story gets a bit bizarre.
Starting in WWI, military scientists recognized that shell shock and later PTSD often rendered a soldier incapable of performing his (typically a male) duties. This was a liability. In fact, military scientists recognized that biology itself presented a liability. For this reason, military scientists worked diligently in an attempt to separate mind from biology by developing drugs to keep soldiers up for days on end, and to keep them mentally alert even in the face of traumatic experiences. Military scientists have even spent time trying to develop exoskeletons for soldiers.[1] One way to protect against dissociation brought about by trauma is to slowly introduce dissociation in small doses not unlike how vaccines work. (This is at the heart of the bootcamp training experience new soldiers go through.) I’m not suggesting that early information scientists and cyberneticists had as their intention to develop a “dissociation vaccine,” however, I’m sure that the agenda of separating information from body was picked up by military scientists who argued that if they could in essence “democratize dissociation,” then the risk of trauma incapacitating an individual would be reduced in the same way vaccines reduce the risk of becoming infected. This would mean that a “dissociation vaccine” would have to be administered both in wartime as well as in peacetime. This presumes that we have a state of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace—the title to Gore Vidal’s 2002 book, which has the subtitle of How We Got To Be So Hated. Do we have a state of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace? I would say, yes, we do. Let me explain where I first encountered this idea of perpetual war for perpetual peace.
In 1999, Sander L. Gilman released his book entitled
As it turns out, there are many of these “” relationships within our culture delivering small but consistent doses of “dissociation vaccine.” Violent video games would be an example. It’s no secret that over the last couple of decades military scientists have cozied up to video game developers, especially developers who write code for games with a militaristic bent whether killing soldiers, monsters, or aliens. Pornography and propaganda are two other delivery systems designed to inoculate populations with small doses of “dissociation vaccine.” The Internet has become one of the most powerful propaganda delivery systems known to man, one that, I might add, delivers copious amounts of pornography. For a book on how the Internet creates and delivers propaganda, see the 2019 book Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytics and the Plot To Break America by Christopher Wylie, one of the chief architects of the effort to weaponize Big Data sets like those Cambridge Analytics was able to easily secure from big tech companies like Facebook (now Meta). So, when Galloway suggests that children and young adults under the age of sixteen should be prevented from accessing and using social media, he’s in essence referencing the potentially destructive nature of the Internet and social media. Personally, I would up that age to eighteen, the age at which the Executive Function skills of the upper brain begin to come “online” in earnest.
In and among all of this talk of “dissociation vaccines” should be a discussion of how political structures can “extract” humanness out of us. In his 2023 book entitled Exploitation as Domination, Nicholas Vrousalis alerts us to the fact that capitalism is the successor to feudalism. Interestingly, Vrousalis suggests that the rise of small shops selling handcrafted goods during the nineteenth century, was a hybrid that bridged feudalism to capitalism. Vrousalis paints the “gig economy” that is prevalent today using a similar brush: it’s a hybrid between feudalism and capitalism. In talking about the economic concept of “division of labour,” Vrousalis writes, “Under slavery, feudalism, and the patriarchy … the claim maker [of labour] receives a share of the claim recipient’s surplus product—the product in excess of what she needs to subsist—by directly controlling her productive purposiveness.”
In feudalism, the feudal lord extracts labour and, along with it, purposiveness, “based on the lord’s might only,” Vrousalis alerts. He continues, “Capitalism, feudalism’s successor, does away with feudal might, and thereby with feudal right, by instituting the primacy of contract and by introducing the legal fiction of the labour contract.” Although beyond the scope of this discussion, philosopher John Searle argues that the conceptual power of money followed a similar track: from might to legal fiction. The point Vrousalis makes throughout his discussion is that capitalism by its very nature extracts things such as purposiveness or natural resources. On a simple level, information scientists are following capitalist dictates in their attempts to extract or divorce information from body. Vrousalis suggests (as does Jim Marrs in his book Rule by Secrecy) that at its core the American Revolutionary War was about moving from a “shackle” economy in the South to a “cage” economy in the North. “[F]inding yourself locked in a capitalist cage is a significant improvement over being shackled to a feudal wall,” Vrousalis contends. He reveals that “China and India are now undergoing this shackles-to-cage transition.”
Movements here in the U.S. such as the 1619 Project and DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) represent attempts to both bring old injustices such as slavery and the displacement of Native Americans to the fore, and to propel us past the cages of capitalism. The authors of the book We Don’t Speak of Fear call this process of reviving and reliving old injustices or conflicts “time compression,” not unlike the reliving experiences of PTSD that exist largely out of time and space. Bottom line: capitalism by its very nature seeks to extract, whether purposiveness, natural resources, or even information. To get past extraction you would have to get past capitalism in general and the extractive nature of the digital age that now surrounds us. And, yes, Galloway, in his TED Talk, suggests that to get past our current dismal situation, we should look at such things as universal basic income and age-gating access to Internet technologies. Galloway is calling for the “socialization of capitalism,” a call Vrousalis also makes. The recent election of President Trump could be looked at as a strong referendum against such calls.
I know I have taken a bit of a detour here. Allow me to bring things back around to Bowlby and Cozolino. In his book The Social Neuroscience of Education, Cozolino delivers a message that I wholeheartedly agree with: Early safe and secure attachment relationships (if all goes well) pour the foundation upon which robust Executive Function skills rest. As I argue in my book A Question of Attachment, I think in many ways Bowlby pointed to the same maxim. As an example, in a footnote to his second volume on attachment, Bowlby writes the following:
[F]indings strongly support the earlier conclusion that infants whose mothers are sensitive and responsive to them are those who later turn cheerfully to exploration and play. Their willingness to cooperate, their capacity to concentrate, and their good scores on developmental tests at twenty one months bode well for their futures.
Again, both Cozolino and Bowlby are trying to promote the idea that early safe and secure attachment relationships (if all goes well) pour the foundation upon which robust Executive Function skills rest, such as cheerful exploration and play; a willingness to cooperate and ask for help; to concentrate and appropriately focus attention; and to delay gratification[2] as revealed by the Marshmallow test developed by Walter Mischel. Where Bowlby and Cozolino’s efforts diverge is here: Bowlby spent considerable time trying to understand and address those areas of culture that carried with them the potential to impede progress toward the upper brain and Executive Functioning. One area of grave concern for Bowlby was mourning, a topic that appears to have fallen on the cutting room floor of modern attachment. Bowlby firmly believed that mourning was the organic system seen in higher order animals such as elephants, dogs, certain primates, and humans, that carried with it the potential to heal trauma and the breakdown of neurological functions often accompanying trauma. Now, there’s an interesting twist here that I recently discovered quite by chance. Allow me to explain.
I recently read and blogged about the 2023 book entitled We Don’t Speak of Fear: Large-Group Identity, Societal Conflict, and Collective Trauma, edited by Vamik D. Volkan, Regina Scholz, and M. Gerard Fromm (mentioned above). Although this book contains chapters by lawyers and politicians, many of the authors write from a psychoanalytic background. In one chapter we hear about the work of Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst of great note. This is the same Erik Erikson that Bowlby came into contact with during the Geneva conferences talked about earlier. We Don’t Speak of Fear reveals an Erikson–Bowlby connection of great import.
We Don’t Speak of Fear talks about Erikson’s concept know as the “transgenerational transmission of trauma.” I just about fell off of my chair. Bowlby spends considerable time in his trilogy on attachment talking about, you guessed it, the transgenerational transmission of trauma. Forgive my ignorance but I really thought this was an original idea on Bowlby’s part. I was wrong, but in a good way. According to the We Don’t Speak of Fear authors, Erikson spent a lot of time thinking about the transgenerational transmission of trauma or how trauma at both the personal as well as national level could be passed on from generation to generation. Apparently Bowlby ran with this idea and suggested that the mechanism of transmission could be found at the level of inner working cognitive models or schemas. Cozolino talks about inner working cognitive models or schemas in his book but never brings up the idea of transgenerational transmission of trauma, yet another bit of classic Bowlbian attachment theory (and even classic psychoanalytic theory) left of the cutting room floor of modern attachment.
Both Erikson and Bowlby wished to convey the message that if trauma, whether personal or national, is not properly mourned, it could became a cognitive contagion capable of being passed from generation to generation. This is not unlike my idea of a “dissociation vaccine” designed to put people into mild states of trauma that will never be mourned because of their subtle nature: receiving small, consistent doses over time. Does the U.S. have a backlog of trauma that has not been mourned? Yes, a huge backlog consisting of two world wars and many other wars and conflicts, not to mention natural disasters and the recent pandemic which brought about millions of deaths. Again, one of Bowlby’s big backgrounds of influence was the trauma of WWII along with the huge trauma that was being perpetrated against children in the form of Britain’s evacuation policies. Armed with Erikson’s idea of the transgenerational transmission of trauma, Bowlby sounded the alarm that in order to stop the transgenerational transmission of trauma, trauma, on a national level, would have to be properly mourned.
Sadly, his alarm was largely ignored. If you would like to read about what happens when a country does not properly mourn following a huge trauma like a world war, then I highly recommend that you read the 1967 book entitled The Inability to Mourn—Principles of Collective Behavior by the husband and wife team of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. The We Don’t Speak of Fear authors also mention the Mitscherlich’s book. Simply—and Cozolino provides the neurological evidence in support of this idea—locked mourning may well be one of the biggest psychological states that will prevent someone or some country from gaining access to the upper brain and Executive Functioning. The We Don’t Speak of Fear authors point out that locked mourning is at the heart of the many conflicts we see around us today, like the Israel–Palestine conflict that a group of the We Don’t Speak of Fear authors tried to address through their organization called the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI).
In the last part to this blog series I’ll turn to solutions, both Galloway’s solutions (like placing an age restriction on social media) as well as solutions that I see as being necessary. And I’ll play devil’s advocate. I’ll ask the question Should we really encourage people to take up residence in the upper brain, home to EF skills? Can you live out of the middle, concrete, black and white brain? Yes. In fact, I would suggest that during the election that just went by, liberals grossly underestimated how many people are living out of the middle brain and, in fact, advocate for middle brain life. In his book Moral Politics, George Lakoff tell us in the introduction that he would present both the liberal Nurturant Parent cognitive model and the conservative Strict Father cognitive model in an unbiased way … but only for the first eighty percent of the book. In the last twenty percent, he would make the case that the Nurturant model is the superior and desirable model both for an individual as well as for a nation, our nation. I applaud his transparency. But it would be just as easy to come out in favor of the Strict Father model as the superior and desirable model both for an individual as well as for a nation, our nation. At the risk of being glib, the election that just went by, in my opinion, sent a clear message that a majority of U.S. residents do feel that the Strict Father model is the superior and desirable model both for an individual as well as for a nation, our nation. In the final installment I will argue that we must find some way for both the Nurturant and Strict models to coexist and cooperate. Otherwise life in the U.S. will become brutish and a bit of a slog.[3]
Postscript: I feel compelled to make this point. I am currently reading the 2024 book entitled Multisolving: Creating Systems Change in a Fractured World by Elizabeth Sawin. I actually had to stop reading Sawin’s book midstream because it was so heavily biased toward moving us past the extractive practices mentioned above. Without actually naming it, it seemed like Sawin was suggesting that we should move past capitalism. It was for this reason that I found a book on capitalism, namely, Vrousalis’ Exploitation as Domination. After reading Vrousalis’ book it occurred to me that social thinkers who wish to take us part extraction are doing so in select, dare I say, biased ways. Case in point.
Here’s a quote from a post I wrote back in October of 2024:
—-begin quote—-
Writing in her 1999 article entitled Why Is Attachment in the Air?, feminist psychoanalyst Susie Orbach tells us that “[f]eminist analysts first had a difficult time with what they perceived as Bowlby’s [scientific] valourisation of the maternal at a moment when we were trying to [sociologically] understand the relationship of women’s oppression to the structure of the nuclear family.” Orbach continues, “Bowlby’s [scientific] observation of the child’s need of the mother was just the kind of presumption that needed [postmodern] deconstructing.” In essence, feminists took an anti-science stance towards Bowlby’s work, and, instead, framed it using the emancipatory trends contained in postmodernism, which, back in the 1960s and 70s, was gaining popularity within certain academic circles.
—-end quote—-
Emacipation is a form of extraction as well. In essence, feminists sought to emancipate or extract mothers from the biologically-medicated early mother-child attachment relationship. In her book Multisolving, Sawin frames systems thinking using terms and concepts associated with EF or Executive Function skills like mental modeling, perspective-taking, and imagining the future (i.e., mental time travel). In essence, Sawin suggests that systems thinkers have access to and utilize the executive functioning skills of the upper brain. That may well be true, but it’s a heavy bias. Even Lakoff in his work suggests that democrats tend to be systems thinkers and think systemically. Ergo, Sawin is heavily biased against conservative thinkers and biased for liberal thinkers.
At no point does Sawin ask what I consider to be a fundamental question: Where do systems thinkers come from? Another way to frame this question is to ask How do people gain access to and utilize Executive Function skills. How? Principally through the same early mother-child attachment relationships that feminists wish to extract mothers from. This sets up a negative feedback loop that produces unintended consequences, consequences that stand in opposition to the desires expressed by feminists, that of liberation. Emancipate the mother, imprison the child. Again, to simply come out in favor of the upper brain and emancipation “excludes” middle brain thinkers and conservatives. That does not seem to me to be very inclusive or diverse or equitable. By keeping kids and adults away from the upper brain, you also keep them away from the critical thinking that is so purportedly important to feminist and emancipatory thinkers.
True systems thinking will find ways for the entire (social) brain to be productively employed: lower brain, middle brain, and upper brain. Any program that excludes any one of these brain levels is destined to fail. Organic systems theory holds that if you shock an organic system, it will, by evolutionary design, drop to lower and lower levels of functioning as a form of protection. This is the role that dissociation plays in the life of the brain, and it can happen quickly in the face of trauma as it should. Unfortunately evolution has not given us a quick “re-association” mechanism. The best one we have is … wait for it … mourning. As a modern society we have taken socially shared mourning rituals and put them into the therapist’s office. And now the therapist’s office has been put online subject to the extractive forces of the digital age. As the kids say, what a hot mess.
Notes:
[1] – See the article entitled The Rise of the Humanoid: Exoskeletons Revolutionizing Military Readiness:
https://www.afcea.org/signal-media/rise-humanoid-exoskeletons-revolutionizing-military-readiness
[2] – Cozolino also mentions how early safe and secure attachment relationships can contribute to developing the Executive Function skill of delaying gratification.
[3] – I have mentioned this book many times before, however, I’ll mention it again. It’s the 2009 book by Iain Mc Gilchrist entitled The Master and His Emissary—The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. McGilchrist argues with great detail and data that over the last couple of millennia, Western civilization has oscillated between left-brain dominance and right-brain dominance. The left brain is typically linear, logical, and sees things in black and white, right and wrong (i.e., Strict). The right brain is holistic, systems-oriented, and sees things in varying shades and accepts vagueness (i.e., Nurturant). McGilchrist argues in terms of left and right brain. However, I would argue that many of his descriptions could be framed in terms of middle brain and upper brain. In all likelihood, the cultural oscillations that McGilchrist describes have both horizontal, side to side components as well as vertical, up and down components. Interestingly, McGilchrist never mentions the possibility that trauma leading to dissociative states plays a role in driving these vacillations. I find this to be a failing of an otherwise compelling discussion of neurological patterns at the level of Western culture across time. In talking about the transgenerational transmission of trauma, both Erikson and Bowlby are talking about neurological patterns at the level of culture. But there again, so was Freud when he came up with his id, ego, and superego.
