World After Capital: Psychological Freedom (Fin)

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital ends the chapter on psychological freedom. The prior excerpts covered the freedom to learn, to create, and to share. The following ties this back to one of the central chapters on Humanism.

Psychological Freedom and Humanism

Self-regulation, through some kind of mindfulness practice, lies at the heart of psychological freedom. It allows us to separate wants from needs. It lets us take our initial reactions to content that we see and not immediately reply in anger. It lets us have empathy for others and their creations. It lets us be open to learning something new and it lets us overcome our fears of creating and sharing.

Still, as humans we have fundamental needs for purpose and recognition that wind up making many people psychologically unfree. If you feel that your life lacks purpose or that nobody cares about your existence then you are likely to experience a profound psychological crisis. Existential angst can express itself in many different forms, ranging from a paralysis to do anything to a manic desire to do everything (or own everything). The persistence of religion over millennia is in part explained by addressing these needs. Most religion meets these human needs by claiming that our purpose is to follow a divine set of rules and if we follow those rules the respective god or gods will recognize our existence.

Many organized religions intentionally disrupt the Knowledge Loop. They restrict the process of critical inquiry through which knowledge improves over time, through mechanisms such as censorship and divine “knowledge” which can only be provided by officials and is often permanently encoded in sacred texts. This of course serves to maintain and enhance the power of those who are gatekeepers to the texts and their interpretation. Adhering strongly to such a religion, while it may meet your existential psychological needs, may make it difficult if not impossible for you to participate fully and freely in the Knowledge Loop.

The same is true for many informal beliefs. There are anti rational memes, such as believing in a pre-ordained individual destiny, that can be used to answer one’s need for purpose, but will prevent one from being psychologically free. Or people can belong to communities that meet the need for recognition but at the cost of a conformity that restricts participation in the Knowledge Loop. It can often be difficult to recognize just how much of one’s behavior, which one thinks of as free and voluntary, is actually tightly controlled by custom or peer pressure.

A new Humanism, based on the importance of knowledge, provides an alternative source of purpose and recognition that does not inhibit psychological freedom but rather enhances it. Participating in the Knowledge Loop is our purpose and how others will recognize us. Learning new things, being creative and innovative, sharing with others is explicitly encouraged. This doesn’t mean everyone has to be a rocket scientist, instead there are a great many ways to participate in the Knowledge Loop, including creating art and caring for others and the environment.

We will need to substantially change the education system in most countries to help people be psychologically free. Today’s system was developed to support the Industrial Age. Its goal is to mass produce people qualified for participating in the Job Loop. Jobs are seen as the ultimate goal and knowledge as important only to the extent that it provides a qualification for a job. We will need a new system instead that celebrates knowledge (as broadly defined here) for its own sake, allows students to discover their individual interests and deepen those into a purpose, and educates them about techniques for being psychologically free. Put differently, we need to put Humanism at the center of education and learning.

Humanism and the Knowledge Loop thus have important implications beyond individual purpose for how we organize society and take responsibility for each other and the world around us. This will be the subject of Part Four.