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We get wiser as we age right?
Then why doesn’t the same apply to our almost 250-year-old country?
We’ve too often lost our critical thinking ability—our discipline to pause and reflect, not only on facts, but on our own response to news or someone’s words.
Social media supports this primitive reactive self by making communication easy, quick with no consequence or consideration. I’ve fallen for it, and I venture to say you have, too.
Here’s what I’ve learned as a poet, observer, artist, and mystic, not an expert in physiology, biology, or psychology (so take it for what it’s worth).
In the absence of contemplation, the mind tends to gravitate toward negative thoughts, driven by a biological predisposition to prioritize threat detection and survival. This “negativity bias” is rooted in our evolutionary history, where vigilance toward potential dangers was essential for survival. Negative experiences have a more lasting impact on our brains, making us more receptive to negative information.
Our lizard brains (that non-rational, solely self-interested brain) had to evolve rapidly to identify threats and prioritize survival, resulting in an increased sensitivity to negative information.
Negative thoughts trigger the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for emotional, reactive processing, which then redirects resources away from the prefrontal cortex.
The prefrontal cortex is essential to executive functions, including planning, decision-making, working memory, controlling impulses, attention regulation, memory processing, response inhibition, and emotions.
Simply put, we have a natural and intact proclivity to react with a negative bias, unless we intentionally choose to challenge these thoughts.
While negativity bias automatically emerges from our primitive, instinctive mind, we can learn to take control by disciplining ourselves to deliberately consider logic and facts, rather than allowing emotion and impulsivity to run rampant.
We do this by developing the practice of body and environmental awareness. This includes taking control of feral stampeding thoughts by pausing to identify, then concentrating on real time, real place, real facts and evidence.
This challenges reactive thoughts and patterns, reconnects our intellectual ability for critical thinking, and enables us to access actual input and respond to the reality of the given situation rather than reacting to what we imagine as a threat.
Why did they storm the Capitol?
Why are they calling others names?
Why are they typing in all caps and punching peaceful protestors?
Why are they so blind to the neon lies, to the brilliance of the truth, to the light we could have chosen?
Because they are operating on the most base and primitive level.
What scares me most, though, is how it can so easily bring out the club of retaliation within me. I am a woman of faith, a Biblical scholar, a preacher of peace, a minister of mindfulness and love.
Yet, even with facts and compassion in my satchel, with empathy and the wisdom of all the saints within this clergy collar, I can too easily get hot under it, loud despite it reminding my throat to bless and pray. I can too easily be provoked to react, without the patience of Job.
I’m put to mind when Jesus cursed the fig tree, but also when God reminded us not to cut it down too soon. Let the tares be revealed without us tearing them out. What do we do as the gloating toads eat the first harvests, and the second, and the third, as they burn what’s left in the fields so the poor and the good starve?
We occupy.
We resist.
We speak truth.
We seek clarity and discipline, and prepare for ways to heal the land and the people once the pillage and rape is finally stopped.
The philosophers and sages were right—not “far right”:
“An unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates.
“I think therefore I am,” said René Descartes.
Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
“To thine own self be true,” wrote William Shakespeare, in Hamlet.
“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care,” said Theodore Roosevelt.
Saint Francis de Sales said, “[There is] nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.”
“Morality is based on duty, with actions being morally good if done out of a sense of duty, not inclination or self-interest,” said Immanuel Kant.
Chief White Eagle said, “Within each one of us lies the power of healing, of understanding, of peace.”
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” opined Carl Jung. And, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become,” which is often misattributed to Jung.
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced, said Søren Kierkegaard.
And Jesus said, “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
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