The world is becoming more polarized.
It’s happened before, but perhaps not in a way that’s so simultaneously global. It’s cancerous and contagious. I think a lot of what we’re seeing draws from a growing understanding about how we’re setting our future up to fail, and a feeling of powerlessness to address it. Our thin veneer of civilization is fraying; a unique experiment might be coming to an end before our eyes. So now we resemble a pack of wolves trapped in a raft, feeling the tug of a distant cliff, fearing there’s nothing we can do about it, turning against each other and eating ourselves alive. It’s a retreat into the defensive animal crouch as we realize it will certainly get worse.
Our lizard brains are telling us what we aren’t able to consciously admit; what our selfish genes refuse to disclose to an intelligence that was only ever supposed to be another tool in the evolutionary box. That our very nature, the competitive force that allowed us to survive and master a hostile world, now unavoidably leads us to consume straight to our own oblivion. The lizard is like an autistic child, bombarded by stimulation. It hears every word, its mind records and processes but can express nothing back through an uncompliant body except sheer, raw, blazing intention. But it knows.
The average Joe knows it too, even as his sports app quickens his pulse while he pulls from his beer and basks in the satisfaction of his middle-American comforts. He knows, deep down, no matter what Fox News tells him, or his pastor, or his father, that the worldwide community of professional journalists can’t all be in on a great conspiracy to mislead him; that the scientists responsible for moon landings and antibiotics and pest-resistant corn and anti-ballistic missile defense can’t actually be so terribly divided about the state of greenhouse gasses they’ve understood since the Industrial Revolution. His lizard brain tells him that if a population continues to grow in a finite space with shrinking resources, the result will also be violently finite. It taps out its message in prison code, resonating with the force of butterfly wings.
The conscientious progressive who sorts her plastics and drip-irrigates her lawn, who carpools in her Prius and composts her vegetable peelings knows. NPR tells her about the Green New Deal, and she purses her lips at its extremity, questions that it reaches too far, too fast. Radical measures that would disrupt her curated balance of responsibility and prosperity. Jobs might be lost, prices might rise. But her lizard brain knows it doesn’t go far enough. It understands that industrial growth can’t last forever, that the ores we burn, and the cows we feed, and the rivers sucked dry to grow avocados and golf course sod must inevitably lead to a breakdown of the economic system once that system meets its boundaries. Jobs will be lost, prices will rise. The lizard noses her softly, again and again; water torture that steals her sleep and interrupts her dreams.
And yet we don’t stop, because we can’t. The lizard brain is evolution’s final irony; it kept us alive since we crawled from the sea. It guided us to combat what would kill us and avoid what we couldn’t. It led us to warp the world into accommodating our comfort and pleasure, and now it whispers that we face a new threat of its own making. The cognitive dissonance is tearing us apart. We don’t feel it, not every day. We believe we’re doing right by the lizard; it feels right to prosper and grow. But deep in the cerebellum, it gnashes its impotent warnings. We lose patience; stress fractures fork across the fragile crust of civility. And everywhere, we identify the other the lizard taught us so long ago to view with suspicion.
In our fear, we revert. We distrust. Because the anguish of the lizard is that we came so close. Each victory of the mind over the animal built a dopamine facade, allowed us to believe we were exceptional. Not of this world, something overlayed, floating just above it. With only a little more time, we could break away and become creatures motivated only by intellect, by reason, and we almost were. Or so we thought. But in the end, we may be no more masters of our world than a culture of bacteria in a dish. The cycle continues, and the only question is: what will we learn? We will not all perish. Some dogs will remain, dashed on the rocks, swimming to the shallows. What will the survivors do with what’s left? What tools can we give them? What words can we offer to drown out the seductive song of the lizard? It will be their world to define and rebuild. It’s nearly out of our hands now.
— Dave Coulter
11/16/2023
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Lizard Brain. Question Everything.