Is There A Cure?

• As I write, President Biden has withdrawn from the Democratic campaign, paving the away for Kamela Harris and perhaps Gavin Newsom. Speculating on future world politics, brings up the question of what the United States considers a head of state should look like? Instead of answering that question, I will explore the implications of appearances and how that inflects something bigger.

The bigger question is that the world has a very serious problem. Powers that be are hurtling us over a cliff of self-destruction whose legal term is ecocide.

Peter Thiel, who at last count was worth over 11 billion dollars, is one of a hegemony of rich people, mostly white men, intent on bankrolling the current RNC ticket to replace democracy with an old-fashioned totalitarian monarchy. That hegemony advocates, "drill, Baby, drill." The dominance of the hegemony would be good for Thiel's taxes and bad for the rest of us. It is however, the logical outcome of a society that places a higher value on appearances and power than preserving culture or the Earth. "Drill, Baby, drill," is the mantra for the continued proliferation of fossil fuels, and impunity from the consequences of ecocide.

Science tells us that planetary damage from the proliferation of fossil fuels is immense and persistent. It qualifies as ecocide, an international crime against humanity. When corporations and individual corporate officers hawk fossil fuels, they are locking in ecocide for the whole Earth. In 2006, President George H. Bush identified this pattern as an addiction. If they know how pernicious the effects are, is there any reason for the continued proliferation besides such unfettered greed that all ethical restraint is thrown to the winds? Well, and anyway, there's the impunity.

I would call ecocide war against the environment. And if ecocide is also an illness, is there a cure? For many years, I have been publishing about my theory of how to solve problems that cause chaos. My solution is called trigger point theory. It is based on an aesthetic analysis of situations. I would call ecocide the surpassing problem in the world that is causing chaos. Totalitarianism isn't the answer to the problem. It is, however, arguably, the ultimate expression of narcissism.

Naming and identifying behavior that leads to ecocide targets the behavior as an international crime against humanity. As with any addiction, the self-centered need to quench unquenchable greed at all expense is terrible and precludes empathy for anyone or anything but oneself. But there are degrees of differences of pathology on a spectrum from self-centeredness to addiction to narcissism and eventually malignant narcissism.

My argument is that the end of the trajectory is not only ecocide but Fascism and fascism depends on an appearance of power, expressed as totalitarianism. The spectrum of pathologies and political styles is partly defined by the scale of a lack of normal empathy. The empathy deficit is as much for other species as for anyone disadvantaged. The dominant culture discourages empathy or even awareness. In fact, it is an intolerance for any imperfection that evokes humanity or life itself for anyone but the narcissist. As with all addictions and all political totalitarian systems, wherever the individual lies on a spectrum, the consequences for a high that is numb to empathy or consequences can be horrendous.

It is important to understand this trajectory because most of us contribute to its persistence and it will determine the outcome of this election in the United States.

So far, unlike a drunk driver that kills a child, the consequences of ecocide, even though it generally blends into the genocide of thousands or even billions of people, rather than a single child, are at best, uneven. However, I suspect the world is coming closer to a time of reckoning.

Meanwhile, how must we understand this reality and why? I will focus on the pathological patterns of narcissism. The addiction to greed, expressed in the accumulation of great wealth, as is typical of fossil fuel's hegemonic class, is often expressed as a matter of visual appearances.  At the furthest extreme, the paradigm for these patterns is arguably the (usually white male) patriarchal authoritarian figure, or strong man, who cannot brook criticism or defiance in others and rises to political power over others. To come back to our fossil fuel executive, accountability for one war criminal is an indictment of the entire spectrum of malfeasance. But what drives such a person, beyond childhood trauma? Many psychologists identify shame as a primary driver.

It has often been stated that the hallmark of narcissistic pathology, is the inability to experience empathy for another. There is some discussion about what causes this pathology, and whether it is an illness, heredity or caused by childhood trauma? Narcissism seems to arise in early teens, in response to abuse

Whatever the causes, we know it leaves a neurological trace; showing up in that part of the brain that feels empathy. And we know about the consequences of unchecked narcissism in broken hearts and lives. As a sociologist whose name I never caught from the eighties once commented and I have often quoted, 'it is amazing how much pain you can inflict f you don't feel your own.'

In a recent NPR segment, on the present state of American politics, Nicholas Kristof mentioned in passing that 1 in 7 children are growing up in households with addicted parents. Addiction counselors aren't unanimous in their solutions to addiction. Some now think it can be medically solved with prescriptions like Ozempik or talk therapy, which emphasize emotional support and introspection. In some recent reports, some neurological research suggests that narcissism is a dysfunctional response to over-stimulation.

That is the most interesting idea to me. I imagine how over-stimulation might burn out the brain's capacity for empathy, in effect, leaving the person emotionally crippled as an over-active solution to self-protection. In political terms, wide spread poverty and a yawning income gap is a consequence of politics as usual predicated on power and appearances Some psychologists argue that the apparent lack of empathy is simply a chosen defense against vulnerability. Vulnerability for a few vs the precarity of the many. Either way, the results are the same. But what if it were possible for the narcissist to observe these dynamics and find a path to empathy that feels safe from over-stimulation?

As I considered this data, I was working on a series of drawings about the trajectory of our future. I envision that within our lifetimes we might all be living in barren flatlands and dead forests because we have failed to address ecocide. My drawings outline people and fallen branches. They represent a series of variations on a visual metaphor for adaptation to a future life in the dead forest ecocide will leave us. In the work I did today, I explored how light cast on the shapes of people and dead trees produces the drama that illuminates that bleak story.  The story and my metaphor are over-simplifications of the complexity of what has brought us to this ecological impasse. I feel passionate about the implications of the metaphor.

As an artist, my task is to detach from potential over-stimulation without disengaging my capacity for empathy. I attempt to organize that chaos into a coherent story. After a lifetime, that is a very intuitive process. In my personal life, it feels more difficult, but I believe it is the same task.

The complexity of our current reality keeps me up at night. I am as over-stimulated by realistic anxieties as anyone and there are many of them, from world politics to my monthly budget.  

I do meditate daily. Meditation doesn't help at 2: AM to allay my anxieties and put me back to sleep.

I may not be able to sleep in response to political and personal sources of stress, but a lifetime in art has taught me how to harness meticulous attention to details and formal rigor to help me bring clarity to what I am looking at and what others might see. What I am usually looking at is a metaphorical reality of one kind or another, such as people lost in a nightmarish environmental reality of our own making. No, individuals didn't personally poison the water or the air that feeds the trees that saves us from fossil fuel toxicity, but we did choose a high consumption lifestyle. And when we extract without limitation, isn't that too a form of narcissism? Isn't it an attitude towards all life predicated on a grand entitlement?

In any 2-D graphic, such as my drawing series, light is what makes a picture three-dimensional. In the late sixteenth century, European artists from Rubens to Caravaggio explored how light could infuse story with emotion and imminent drama in the Baroque. A number of visual means developed to solve the new technical challenges, beginning in the late Renaissance with chiaroscuro and sfumato, as seen in Giorgione's Tempest , or in the anatomical distortions, which might be seen in Rubens copies of Michelangelo's Leda and The Swan.

In writing and conversation, we refer to "shedding light" on a problem to define how new information may allow us to consider an idea in more depth. In my own visual art practice, clarity comes from light.  What is the political version of that idea, that light brings a story to life and may illuminate something new in how we see a situation?

If we consider the implications of how circumstances can set a person on the path to narcissism, could they learn to manage their reactions? If people escape despair into addiction, can they stop that slide, and prevent themselves from taking their families with them? Are these deeper questions than any medication to control symptoms like impulsive behavior could solve?

In my book, Divining Chaos (2022 New Village Press), I tried to show how my art practice, specifically creating the Ghost Nets land restoration project, had birthed trigger point theory (TPT). It is a means to consider relationships between many factors, to reveal the depth of a situation and reveal one small place to unravel disorder. The goal of each revelation is always to identify where we could intervene in degradation. In the case of a discussion of narcissism and political disaffection, Where we might pay attention is to the idea that over-stimulation shuts down empathy. This is not inconsistent with theories that locate the onset of narcissism with severe abuse in early teenage years, when a child is most vulnerable and open in so many ways. Even without trauma or hypersensitivity, many of us simply can't cope with reality today. From fraught politics to fashion trends, we live in a culture of overload and maximum distraction. When the need for clarity comes in conflict with what we want as may often happen, it is hard to "see the light."

Could this meditation on light, as a manifestation of trigger point theory help us see solutions to our current crises; to forecast the world political future? In personal relationships of narcissists and the disaffection of voters, I suggest we need to find the data that links us to hope. What observers have noticed is that when people can touch each other, in a safe situation, something changes.