Frantic Inertia
Why is the world so stuck?
With a title like ‘The Solipsistic Society’, Ivo J. Mensch’s essay – published this past spring as part of Perspectiva’s essay series – might not initially strike you as the kind of ‘light’ reading which many of us opt for during these final weeks of the northern hemisphere summer. And yet, it might also be just the right time to return to this piece and reflect upon a few more of its layers, before the usual rush back to busy-ness (and, so often, business-as-usual) in September. After a summer in which the southern portion of the country where I live burned, and the northern part experienced catastrophic storms, Ivo’s phrase ‘frantic inertia’ suddenly made complete sense to me – along with the inescapability of our need to change.
Today we offer you a couple of new ways in (or back) to the essay. The first is a recording of a live conversation between Ivo and Bonnitta Roy which they had in April about the intersections between their work. They considered what has been transmitted to us through the existing social imaginary, and the dangers of stuckness – as Bonnitta put it, “how do we think our way out of how we think?” It’s a rich conversation, and I recommend in particular watching the exchange that occurs nearly halfway through: Bonnie draws Ivo out on a fundamental tension that many of us sense, that of needing both to work through interior reflection and the need to act in the world in a connected, collective way – without falling prey to “fake connection via products.”
The second is an edited extract from an interview that I had with Ivo, digging down into some key ideas in his essay. I asked him about the individualist approach of the ‘coping industry’ (one of my favourite terms from the piece), as well as how to address the discombobulating loneliness that can accompany the process of re-orienting ourselves to the social imaginary. Ivo, who spent many years of his life as an ordained Zen monk, is not the sort to offer quick fixes – but he encourages us to ‘find the others’ with whom you can ‘travel together’ in the process of inquiry. ‘That would be my biggest proposal,’ he explains, ‘find the others who are also realising that the old – and here I mean the massive, old – modern imaginary is breaking down and is no longer a good fit for producing the kind of subjectivity we need to participate in life and offer us meaning.’
To that point, at Perspectiva we’re putting together an autumn with abundant opportunities for our community to ‘find the others’ – in the meantime, read on during these quieter late-summer moments to connect with the ideas from ‘Solipsistic Society’.
~Leigh Biddlecome, Visiting Curator & Editor, Perspectiva
‘To free ourselves, it seems like we’ll have to dismantle our inner machine – the internalised version of the imaginary of late-capitalist modernity that commodifies our attention, steers our behaviour and constrains our imagination.’
~Ivo J. Mensch, ‘The Solipsistic Society’
An interview with Ivo J. Mensch
“From self-control to collective unfoldment”
Leigh Biddlecome: At the risk of being overly obvious, I wanted to start with the notion of Solipsism itself. How is your idea of the ‘Solipsistic Society’ something different than how we might describe an individual person as solipsistic?
Ivo J. Mensch: It really started from the notion of immunity to change – our predicament right now – and trying to really dig in and discover the various mechanisms by which that happens. You could say that there is a failure to engage in collective action to address these issues, the big problems – I started thinking about why.
Immunity to change is a term that comes from two Harvard researchers, psychologist Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, and they identify immunity to change as an outcome of competing commitments. So for example, the conscious commitment could be that I want to develop a career as an artist – this is what I want to do, but somehow I can't really get to it. So there are a series of questions, like: why is it not working? Why do I fail?
What often generates conflicts that prevent us from moving in the direction we want to go are the competing commitments and assumptions that we believe will play out if you choose to pursue the goal. In the aspiring artist’s case that might be something like: ‘I’ll go broke’ or ‘I won't be there for my children and be a bad parent.’ So being a good parent, or maintaining a certain lifestyle are the competing commitments. These can be unconscious too.
What is the collective or social equivalent of that? I started looking at the mechanisms by which we can only see one part of the equation. So solipsism really came after identifying many mechanisms that keep us trapped in these self-referential loops. And when you connect that to the social imaginary, then you could say that there are societal commitments, these big ones, without which we can't really know who we are as a species and where life is going. These are big narratives and agreements that we don’t question like ‘Progress’ and ‘Growth’. It’s what we recognise as ‘us’ when we look in the mirror collectively – like seeing your own familiar face. So it’s a bit of a catchall term here that I expand from the normal colloquial notion, right?
LB: Yes, it’s broad, but it’s also helpful, especially when you talk about this idea of a self-referential loop. That allows us to understand what the quality of solipsism might feel like while you're in it, versus simply an adjective that you place on another person. Can you talk about that quality and what would it feel like to shift from a sense of stuckness within the solid system into something else (whatever that might be)?
IJM: If you only know yourself, you are drawing information from a known environment in some sense, right? So the feeling is one of familiarity. You can even liken it to the feeling that you have when you grow up as a kid. Hopefully it's a nice environment, but in the family system, it's clear, [that there are] loads of unspoken rules. There is a feeling of familiarity in this solid system. And I'm speaking here again about the big solid system of society which gives us the ‘SoSo’ [Solipsistic Society].
It gives that sense of implicit belonging, and you can move through the world with an implicit sense of knowing what it is and what your place is, how you should behave. The sociologist and philosopher Charles Taylor would describe it as being ‘enculturated’, how you exist within social practices.
LB: I'm curious about this pairing between the idea of the authentic and the social imaginary and what would be possible in a reimagined social imaginary – or at least a world in which we were more conscious of the social imaginary. Part of what you're trying to get at is what it would mean to become more aware of what we're living within.
IJM: Yeah. I think about this mostly in the way I have been taught in the various spiritual and inner work schools that I've been in. And there is this notion that I use all the way in the beginning: being in the world, but not of it. And by ‘being of the world’, I would say you are like a product of culture and the social imaginary, you have internalised the model and practices until you embody these things. But as soon as you kind of grow beyond your socialisation, right, beyond the downloaded messages of how to be, what to do, and how to live your life … at some point, this can happen in people's lives. At some point they start waking up, like, ‘oh, wait a minute, I didn't shape these ideas, I just got them downloaded into me from culture, parents, et cetera’. And then people go through a period often experienced as a crisis. It comes at a cost – it really is not comfortable terrain because you start to know yourself and that changes how other people perceive you. The outcome is uncertain.
LB: There's a potential loneliness to that endeavour.
IJM: Exactly. And you might want to take that all the way to where you are completely free, and by ‘free’ I mean you've completely emptied out in a sense – or ‘disentangled’ is probably a better word, disentangled yourself from that internalised model of how to be of the world. Then the world is more spacious, your mind is more spacious, you're more spontaneous, but there is a certain kind of inner aloneness that is there. And it's mostly because so many of the practices that we engage in as a culture don't make sense to you anymore. I mean many people already consider themselves, let's say, ‘post-consumers'. If you go out into a busy shopping area, you see how entranced everybody is, being happy chasing their stuff. And if you're not engaging in these practises, then you think like, ‘oh my God, this is so not me.’ And <laugh> you feel separate.
If you fully step out of that imaginary, and you just are not being seduced by it anymore, then yeah, you've just woken up in a bit of a different world, and therefore are actually quite alone.
LB: You wrote in the essay that ‘the imaginary is more temporarily extended and colours our lives with a diffuse sense of meaning, helping us to make sense of, and to feel situated in our lifetime.’ So I thought, okay, without that, how are we making sense? How are we feeling situated in our lifetime?
IJM: You will start a process of seeking, which is natural – ‘if this doesn't work for me anymore, so what is then next?’ And so you engage in a process of inquiry. And it's uncertain. It takes a bit of courage, because it really is about changing your identity. Because, you know, we haven't even spoken about this, but obviously our identities are entangled in the social imaginary, so you’re really leaving the familiar behind. And it can be quite discombobulating until you construct something new, a new place where you can hang out and breathe.
But this meaning then has to be found in this exploration of being where you are, without expectation of reward in some sense. And often here's also where people start to find the others. To find your new tribe. And that makes it meaningful if you're travelling together and doing this process of inquiry.
That would be my biggest proposal. Find the others who are also realising that the old – and here I mean the massive, scenesent – modern imaginary is breaking down and is no longer a good fit for producing the kind of subjectivity we need to participate in life and offer us meaning. It is therefore quickly losing its organising power for producing the kind of subjectivity we need to meaningfully participate in life.
This mismatch I described in the essay is in terms of the framework of active inference, that says we have constructed a mental model of the world and the self, that allows us to predict what the world is, who we are and what will happen. That was evolution’s strategy to ensure our survival. But now we have this mismatch between the model and reality — it’s a collective prediction error. And so it’s increasingly harder to thrive in the world because we’re not updating the model’s implicit beliefs that are baked into our social commitments, collective practices and social structures. You can say our addiction to certainty lies at the heart of immunity to change and the failure to address our big issues. That’s why I want to invite people to give up control and enter into unfolding.
LB: This is relevant to this term that you've coined, which I love, called the ‘coping industry.’ I’d love to get you to talk a little bit about that.
Maybe I'll just preface it by saying that at that part of the essay, I started highlighting almost every sentence. I had this sense of, ‘finally!’ – like, someone else also gets this in a way that I have felt very alone in my own vague critique of this phenomenon, especially when I was living in San Francisco about 5 years ago. So many new business ideas there (tech-related and not) were related to alleviating this discomfort that people were feeling with their lives – but the business models were still all caught up in the system as it currently existed. It just felt like various superficial, temporary ways of dealing with the discomfort of coping – and making money off of it. What is our alternative to this ‘coping industry’?
IJM: I’m happy that clarified it for you. Yes, that coping is the attempt at control. And the means is often self-development. To be clear, I am not against coping. This environment demands good self care, and a measure of wellbeing to be effective. But we should not stop there, we also need to see that it perpetuates our immunity to change by keeping the current systems going. To echo Jidda Krishnamurti, it’s no sign of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society. And what currently poses as spirituality is in fact coping, not aimed at real transformation.
So we need to look outward more, to the sick society, but also to what lies beyond and what spiritual practices not solely aimed at the individual can offer us. The first mistake to avoid is to think of individual development as the only driver of social change. Many adopt the change-the-individual-to-change society-approach as their theory of change. This is an example of what I term an imaginal constraint: the way the imaginary determines what we see and can imagine, through the high-level constraint called individualism, with its limited horizon of care. Anthropocentrism is the collective version of that same mental malware.
I argue in the essay that we have narrowed the space in which we feel agency and see the possibility for change. You can imagine someone thinking, ‘I feel really stressed…’ This may be because of an ‘exciting, dynamic and fast-paced work environment’ as is often advertised as something positive in job ads. We all know what that really means. But instead of thinking about changing company culture, we go: Oh, wait a minute, here is the mindfulness meditation app that I can use to breathe the stress away.’ Or you could order nootropics, you know, to get a bit of more of a brain boost or something, or hack your sleep, put some blackout curtains in your bedroom, use blue light blocking glasses, take some melatonin et cetera.
So we have this whole self-help industry, but what it all points to is the self: it's all you, it's all your responsibility. That means we direct all our agency and our power to ourselves, like it's the only project that we can meaningfully change. The object is mostly the body – our bodies. What it [the self-help industry] doesn't do is say, wait a minute, maybe we should just try and change the structures of the world that are driving us into this coping.
So we can cope better, but little attention goes into seeing what we’re a part of and what we enact together, right? We have lost that sense of creative possibility. And so this retreat into our individual selves is a shift that we've made as a culture. But we know that this separate individual is not a true reflection of reality – we are social primates and are not even bound by the body either. 4E cognitive science tells us that we are Embedded, Enacted, Extended and Embodied beings. We’re active weavers of cognitive and meaning-generating networks. We create our contexts and are in constant evolutionary dialogue with them, co-shaping our social world and self.
The broader move I propose is to go from a mindset of control to a mindset of unfoldment so it really is not just about changing yourself according to the fixed ideals and commitments that the current imaginary hands you. And this is why I talk about collective unfoldment, that it's not just about ‘working on yourself’ but equally about metabolising the social structures, freeing the energy and ideas held in them and enacting new structures and processes that are better aligned with the dynamism of reality. It gestures towards an expansion of agency; rather than withdrawing into ourselves and becoming better at coping (which is also a kind of rat race, like ‘who can become the most optimised or productive?’), it's about starting to think – and this is why I wanted to point out the social imaginary – how does that interface with what we enact together in the inbetween and what possibilities does that afford us for outgrowing our immunity to change?