To say that there's a curse on industrial society is simply to use an archaic metaphor for a point I've been discussing in these essays since The Archdruid Report began six years ago, which is that the consequences of industrial society's mismanagement of its relations with the planet will not go away just because we don't want to deal with them. That metaphor has a range of relevant features, and one of them is that any effective response to the curse - or, if you will, the predicament of our time - has to begin by taking stock of the ways that each of us, as individuals, contributes by our own attitudes and actions to the mess we're in, and then making appropriate changes. \nAfter six years, I shouldn't even have to say that daydreaming about running off to some conveniently unaffordable eco-homestead in the country doesn't count. Unless you're in a position to do that, and the vast majority of us aren't, that's simply another evasion. What's required instead is the less romantic but far more productive task of adapting in place: figuring out how, living where you live now, you can place much less of a burden on the biosphere, and help other people do the same thing. It probably has to be said that perfection isn't a reasonable expectation here - there's a long learning curve, and our culture and built environment place significant obstacles in the way - but a great deal can be done nonetheless. That can easily lead into activism of various kinds, for those who feel called to do that specific kind of work; it can also lead in plenty of other constructive directions.

• society
• metaphor
• sin
• consequences
• change
• culture
• transition
• relationship
• imagination
• adaptation
• work

The study of the relationship between words and the thoughts they express is called 'etymology' since it seeks the 'true' (Greek etumos) meaning of the word. The etymologist looks for the 'root' of the word, that is the inner core which expresses its fundamental or 'radical' concept. \r\nFor example, if we were to seek the root of a modern barbarism like 'de-escalate', we should immediately remove the 'de-' and the verbal appendage '-ate', slice off the initial 'e-' as a recognizable prefix, and be left with 'scal-' for further study. The Latin scala means 'ladder' and we are clearly on the right track. But at this stage the etymologist will look out for possible vocalic changes occurring between dialects. One of the more common is between l and n, and we are not surprised to find that an early form of the root has n in place of l, so that Sanskrit, one of the earliest dialects of Indo-European, has a root skan- with the idea of 'going up'. Sibilants can interchange, also, such as s and z, and short vowels can drop out in speech between consonants, like i between s and c. In fact, we can break down our Indo-European root scan-, 'ascend', still further into two Sumerian syllables, ZIG, 'rise', and 'AN', up. \r\nOr again, should we wish to track down the root of our word 'rule', meaning 'control, guide, exercise influence over', etc., we should find that our etymological dictionaries will refer us through an adaptation of Old French back to the Latin regulo, 'direct', connected with *regno, 'reign', rex, 'king', and so on. The root here is plain reg- or the like, and its ultimate source we can now discover by taking our search back another three or four thousand years to the earliest known writing of all, that of ancient Sumer in the Mesopotamian basin. There we find a root RIG, meaning 'shepherd', and, by breaking the word down even further, we can discover the idea behind 'shepherd', that of ensuring the fecundity of the flocks in his charge. This explains the very common concept that the king was a 'shepherd' to his people, since his task was primarily that of looking after the well-being and enrichment of the land and its people. \r\nHere etymology has done more than discover the root-meaning of a particular word: it has opened a window on prehistoric philosophic thought. The idea of the shepherd-king's role in the community did not begin with the invention of writing. The written word merely expresses a long-held conception.

• thought
• etymology
• meaning
• latin
• speech
• influence
• adaptation
• writing
• language
• linguistics
• history
• will
• relationship
• control
• community

Since it has been established that very young children do in fact have episodic memories¹ , it becomes reasonable to ask why they don't retain them. Rejecting any Freudian notion of repression, Nelson embraces instead an evolutionary perspective which prompts her to focus on the function of event-memories: 'As an adaptive system, the general function of memory is to predict and prepare for future encounters, actions, and experiences. That is, memory as such has no value in and of itself, but takes on value only as it contributes to the individual's ability to behave adaptively' ² . In early childhood, accordingly, memory work is dedicated to the generation of general event-memories or scripts that help to organize the child's knowledge of daily routines - bathing, eating, going to bed, and so forth. In this early developmental context, Nelson reasons, memory for novel experience (the one-time event that at a later stage will be valued and stored as autobiographical memory) 'does not have the same functional value, unless it is repeated' ³ , and so, if it is not incorporated into a general event-memory, it is not retained.\r\n\r\n\r\n¹ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 162\r\n² Katherine Nelson, 'The Ontogeny of Memory for Real Events.' In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, pg 265\r\n³ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 158

• flag
• memory
• reference point
• early childhood development
• evolution
• adaptation
• experience
• scripts
• time
• work
• will
• language
• knowledge
• perspective
• children
• future
• repression

One can hardly doubt that consciousness, like the ability to resist disease, confers an immense adaptive advantage on any individual who possesses it. In the search for a causal agent capable of synergizing cognitive activity and thereby of playing a role in the emergence of the hominid, researchers might long ago have looked to plant hallucinogens were it not for our strong, almost compulsive avoidance of the idea that our exalted position in the hierarchy of nature might be somehow due to the power of plants or natural forces of any sort. Even as the nineteenth century had to come to terms with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes. Being stoned seems to have been our unique characteristic.

• consciousness
• evolution
• adaptation
• existence
• psychedelic drugs
• drugs
• nature
• science
• fear
• religion
• humanity
• population growth
• power
• doubt
• activity
• disease
• plants

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.

• history
• evolution
• adaptation
• piecemeal engineering
• future
• past
• progress
• novelty
• mckenna

But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself … does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.29 This is a superb characterization of the “culturally normal” man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties. Again, too, this kind of characterization must be understood as being on a continuum, at the extreme end of which we find depressive psychosis. The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down. Kierkegaard phrases it beautifully: If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb … for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.30 This is precisely the condition of depression, that one can hardly breathe or move. One of the unconscious tactics that the depressed person resorts to, to try to make sense out of his situation, is to see himself as immensely worthless and guilty. This is a marvelous “invention” really, because it allows him to move out of his condition of dumbness, and make some kind of conceptualization of his situation, some kind of sense out of it—even if he has to take full blame as the culprit who is causing so much needless misery to others.

• false personality
• the fourth way
• culture
• assimilation
• adaptation
• neurosis
• society
• depression
• existentialism
• guilt
• will
• danger
• unconscious
• kierkegaard
• situation

The absence in our culture of rites and institutions designed, like the rites of puberty, to smooth the adolescent's passage into the world is one reason for the incidence of neuroses in youth, common to all of which is the difficulty of facing up to the demands of life and of adapting to the collective and to one's partner.  The absence of rites at the climacteric works in the same way.  Common to the climacteric neuroses of the second half of life is the difficulty of freeing oneself from worldly attachments, as is necessary for a mellow old age and its tasks.  The causes of these neuroses are therefore quite different from, indeed the opposite of, those occurring in the first half of life.

• adaptation
• adolescent psychology
• collective
• culture
• life
• neurosis
• reason
• old age
• rites

The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or  those deemed desirable by the collective.  Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality.  The 'inner voice' is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values.  The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience.  When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.\n\n 'Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious.  As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind.  Thus 'feminine' or 'soulful' characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one's specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship.  This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex.  This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.

• adaptation
• children
• collective
• conscience
• contrasexuality
• god
• individuation
• personality
• sacrifice
• sexuality
• unconscious
• morality
• experience
• culture
• relationship
• law
• paradise
• feminine
• sex
• repression
• differentiation

The development of personality proceeds in three different dimensions.  The first is outward adaptation, to the world and things, otherwise known as extraversion; the second is inward adaptation, to the objective psyche and archetypes, otherwise known as introversion.  The third is centroversion, the self-formative or individuating tendency which proceeds within the psyche itself, independent of the other two attitudes and their development.

• adaptation
• centroversion
• personality
• self
• archetypes
• psyche
• other

For every one of the liberated prisoners, the day comes when, looking back on his camp experiences, he can no longer understand how he endured it all.  As the day of his liberation eventually came, when everything seemed to him like a beautiful dream, so also the day comes when all his camp experiences seem to him nothing but a nightmare.

• adaptation
• suffering
• memory
• experience
• transcience

If the inward power that rules us be true to Nature, it will always adjust itself readily to the possibilities and opportunities offered by circumstance.  It asks for no predeterminate material; in the pursuance of its aim it is willing to compromise; hindrances to its progress are merely converted into matter for its own use.  It is like a bonfire mastering a heap of rubbish, which would have quenched a feeble glow; but it's fiery blaze quickly assimilates the load, consumes it, and flames the higher for it.

• adaptation
• fate
• stoicism
• power
• nature
• will
• aim
• circumstance
• progress
• rules
• matter

Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

• adaptation
• humanity
• definition