Caleb Anderson: The Simplified Life: How the West Lost Its Mind to the Left Brain

It is interesting to reflect on whether ideas corrupt people, or people corrupt ideas. While inevitably a mix, we seem very often to lean toward the latter. The most dangerous thing you can do to an idea is to strip it of its context, and hence of its complexity.

When complex human realities are reduced to simple slogans, rubrics, or policy checklists, they become distorted, myopic, manipulable, and inevitably weaponised.

We live in an era obsessed with utility and packaging. Information must be bite-sized, digestible, dumbed down, and immediately actionable. In a frantic effort to simplify cause and effect, we have engineered a profound crisis of meaning. The reduction of deep, multi-faceted, issues into rigid frameworks, has untethered them from the very things that define, contextualise, and necessarily, delimit them.

This is a historical feature of totalitarian control. The control, and manipulation, of thought itself.

Today, this tendency is most profoundly evident in/from the political left, although it can equally be employed by the political right. Genuine intellectual inquiry is replaced by locked-in, and non-negotiable, patterns of thinking. We are witnessing the consequences of this shift across the Western world, and New Zealand is by no means immune. Our current political situation is self-evident proof of a culture that has largely abandoned deep reflection, accumulated wisdom, and basic common sense.

When the big picture is lost, the self expands to fill the void, becoming the ultimate primary reality.

In this hyper-individualistic landscape, alternative viewpoints no longer serve as a healthy counterbalance. Instead, they are treated as existential threats.

The person holding a differing view is no longer to be understood, but has become an enemy to be marginalised, pilloried, demonized, or destroyed. And in this process the middle ground is surrendered. Subjective perception completely overrules objective reality ... we are told that women can become men, and men can become women, that history is two dimensional, that systematic redistribution of wealth grows healthy economies, that hurt feelings trump objective truth, and that thoughtful, and dispassionate, investigation is a white construct.

And simultaneously, personal responsibility is displaced by a culture of persistent finger-pointing and institutionalised grievance.

New Zealand, alongside the wider West, is currently in the grip of a profound cultural malaise, a sort of emergent mass formation, characterised by a loss of meaning, persistent propaganda, the steady erosion of social cohesion, and the atomization of society into ever smaller warring groups.

This cultural shift correlates precisely with cutting-edge insights from modern neuroscience, particularly the balance between the brain’s co-dependent hemispheres. We have become a population largely dependent on the left brain (order, certainty, and product), while suffering a functional disablement (or disengagement) of the right brain (possibility, intuition, and process).

While necessarily complementary, they have become increasingly antithetical.

The left hemisphere thrives on categorization, abstraction, utility, and denial. It loves the rubric and the slogan. Things are to be grasped, dismembered, and put to use, rather than understood, contextualized and relativised. By isolating ourselves within its domain, we (and the body politic at large) have neutered our sense-making capacity, and separated ideas (and people) from countervailing contexts.

We are in denial of the creative, holistic, and all-encompassing engagement of the intuitive right brain. Our thinking is becoming trapped in the very mechanisms that divide us, and cause and effect is surrendered to those whose ideas seem to promise much, and ask little, but which, in fact, promise little, and ask much more than we realize.

This is very much the currency, and calculated intent, of much pre-election rhetoric ... and the reason why we may well have a left wing government in two weeks time.

What we have is a crisis of meaning (or sense), and an army of self professed "ëxperts", armed with the weapons of certainty (simplicity), who will be quite delighted to step into the void, and equally willing to attribute their ultimate failure to the inevitable one term in government that will be their lot.

When complexity becomes the price demanded by simplicity, as it so often is, balance is lost, and possibility inevitably becomes the price demanded by certainty.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.