Moral Shrinkage: How did we fall so far?

Little films to watch on a weekend or holiday

Our 6-minute film, Breaking the Cycle, gives the overview of how the dominant culture lost its way. We are in a cycle of competitive detachment, an unnested pathway.

First, due to the structures of society and the cultural stories that rationalize them, everyone’s basic needs are not met which especially impacts babies and what capacities and orientations are grown. (Read more about infant needs and malleability here.)

This undercare (lack of our species’ evolved nest) results in dysregulation in various physiological, psychological and social systems that are carried forward into the rest of life. (Freud’s ‘stages’ offer documentation of how undercare, common in Westernized cultures, can lead people to get stuck, seeming to obsess about one thing or another, having aggressive, paranoid or controlling urges.)

So then we have adults who have various physiological and mental health problems, who necessarily become self-centered because they carry embedded ‘sickness behavior’ – basic depression and inflammation. Because of early life toxic stress (e.g., being left alone or to cry as an infant), they develop easily triggered stress responses. This disables ability to approach difference and diversity with openness and impairs insight, creativity and various intelligences. It undermines democracy.

These (unhealed) impaired adults, of every economic class, create and support the system with which they are familiar. They are soaked in cultural stories invented to justify their misery and to keep the system going. So they undercare for their young, just like they were undercared for, because they themselves are overwhelmed, emotionally detached/dissociated, and stiff-minded—also because the social systems don’t allow them to do otherwise.

Morality becomes one of justified self-protection: get yours before ‘they’ get it. Or for the highly educated, come up with reasons and laws to justify what you want to do for you and yours at the exclusion of ‘those people.’ Of course, when people are barely able to make rent or put food on the table, they typically move into protectionist mindsets just trying to survive.

The USA has slid into the culture of competitive detachment particularly since WWII when child undercare became institutionalized as ‘science’ took over mothering/nurturing: hospital births became the norm, along with infant formula feeding; behaviorist principles of child conditioning were incorporated into home life with Dr. Spock and others. Moreover, as USA manufacturing quality deteriorated with a shift in emphasis to profits and with government and business emphasis on planned obsolescence of consumer goods to force families to repurchase housewares, middle class women had to supplement household income to pay bills (lower class women had always had to work). Over the last decades, these and other factors have led to narratives justifying further undercare (e.g., sending babies to daycare—‘they’re resilient!’).

Because everyone in the culture is swimming in the same soup of undercare and its supporting myths, it is hard to imagine that things have ever been different. There is a myth about that too, that the lifeways of our prehistoric ancestors (and cousins who still live that way) were more violent and miserable than our own lives. It is a shock to learn otherwise—that cooperative prosociality is our species normal way of functioning. We can realize that we can return to the cycle of cooperative companionship that 99% of humanity followed.
Take some time over a weekend or holidays to watch our three little films to open your imagination about human futures.

Watch the 6-minute Breaking the Cycle film here.

Follow this with the next film 8 minutes about our species-normal way of raising the young: The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising the Young.

Then for a full dose of hope and inspiration, you can follow this with the 12-minute film, Reimagining Humanity.

Deep gratitude to all those who are making efforts to return us to a nurturing world!

 

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