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I have never felt clearer about the reality we live in. Most of us are sitting helplessly watching Israel’s extermination of the Palestinian people. We see gruesome images of unimaginable cruelty and psychopathy. We hear and read about unbearable and incomprehensible injustices. We rage. We cry. We protest. Perversely, some activists get arrested and harassed in our own allegedly democratic societies just for naming what everyone can see. And all the while Israel continues to enjoy impunity and immunity as it expands and unleashes its cruelty and destructiveness in all directions far beyond its borders — now with direct US military participation. We live in a very bad world.
I’m convinced that if I stopped a soldier in the middle of a killing frenzy and asked him why he was doing what he is doing, he wouldn’t have an answer. Our species is caught in recurring and mindless destructive patterns we aren’t even trying to stop long enough to examine. We congratulate ourselves for our technological sophistication, which we mistake for progress and carry on. Who gives a damn if astronauts on Artemis II have now travelled farther in space than any human ever has, while we keep destroying everything good down here on Earth? We haven’t earned the right to be so smug and congratulate ourselves.
And talking about space exploration: Arthur C. Clarke, the great science fiction writer, was a great observer of humanity. All his stories involve encounters with intelligent beings from other planets in a variety of scenarios. He holds a mirror in front of us as he speculates about how humanity would behave in those scenarios. In every one of Clarke’s stories the protagonists — a minority of empathetic, principled, and courageous people — face a much more powerful and dominant minority of self-interested predatory people who wreak havoc and don’t play fair. The rest of humanity consist of a majority of fear-driven passive people whose actions are motivated primarily by concerns for their own survival. The majority go along with what’s happening even as they pay the steepest price for the actions of those in power. Clarke always described us painfully accurately.
His Rama series — for all its flaws — contains a few very unsettling observations. In the third book, vastly more technologically superior alien observers are filing reports on the human colony living aboard the Rama vessel. Although the scenario is completely fantastical, what the aliens in the story describe is immediately recognisable:
“The focus of the current human leaders is the retention of personal power, without serious consideration of the welfare of the colony.”
… “The humans have continued to prosecute the war against the avian/sessiles primarily because it distracts attention from the other problems in their colony, including the human-initiated environmental degradation and the recent precipitous decline in living standards. The human leaders, and indeed most of the colonists, have shown no remorse whatsoever over the destruction and possible extermination of the avians.”
… “The humans, however, especially the leaders, have their lives so filled with activity that there is very little, if any, time for cogitation.”
— Arthur C. Clarke. The Garden of Rama (Rama Series Book III) pp. 483-484.
The avians in the story are a peaceful, defenceless, intelligent species sharing the Rama vessel with the humans. The humans are hunting them for rings they wear around their necks. They’re massacring an entire species out of greed, despite living in an abundant environment that freely provides everything they could possibly need. This is fiction but it describes our lived reality all through human history.
Clarke’s stories tend to have ambiguous endings and he is often resigned to reality. But I’m not. I know we can change, and our starting point must be changing our focus from survivalism to potential.
People seek therapy because they are fed up with just existing. While completely natural and understandable, the very focus on survival, on not dying, is also the source of all of humanity’s psychological and spiritual suffering. A life organised entirely around survival — around not dying, not failing, not losing, is not a life. It’s just basic existence. No one does well psychologically when all they do is exist from day to day.
Most people who seek therapy don’t need to be convinced that their lives could be more than they are. They arrive in therapy already carrying the yearning for something beyond just existence, just coping from one day to the next, working just to make a living. They have grown up watching survivalism modelled around them — some versions crude, some more refined and respectable-looking — but they have never seen anyone actually develop and live a truly full and purposeful life, with ease and without anxiety. The work of therapy is not about persuading people to want something different, it’s helping them get on the path towards it. And we do it in a world that stubbornly continues to suppress people’s need for growth and that channels everything into survivalism.
The idea that a focus on physical survival leads to suffering is not new. It predates Rogers and Maslow’s 1940 humanistic revolution in mental health by thousands of years. Ancient philosophies recognised it and built entire systems of thought around it. In Buddhism the first noble truth is that suffering arises from clinging to existence. Chinese Mohism, in its emphasis on impartial love and care to all over self-interested survival, pointed in the same direction. The Bhagavad Gita addresses it directly in the battle between Arjuna who was paralysed by fear of loss and death, and Krishna who taught him that attachment to survival and outcome is precisely what keeps us trapped. The concept of moksha means liberation from fear-driven existence.
Even Christianity, beneath the layers of institutional religion and distortions caused by time, translation, and writers’ agendas carries the same teaching. In the gospel of John, Jesus suggests that those who love their life will lose it, while those who release their attachment to it will keep it. The Passion story is all about trying to teach humanity let go of its fear of death. In the Easter narrative when Jesus faces death willingly it becomes the passage to something that transcends ordinary existence. Our fear of death is what we have to surrender in order to actually live.
Not all religions points this way, of course. Some traditions reinforce fear and survivalism, and in doing so lead adherents deeper into suffering and into causing harm to others. The difference between a tradition that liberates us and one that imprisons us is that the former invites us to release our grip on fear and survivalism, while the latter exploits our fear of death to control us.
Part of what makes the therapeutic shift from survivalism to growth possible is confronting mortality directly. In youth it’s easy to look away from death. When we are young death feels distant and theoretical. As we age, life’s challenges and demands increase, people close to us begin to die, and the fact of our own inevitable ending becomes harder to avoid or ignore. Paradoxically, that reckoning is exactly where life often begins. Many people who have genuinely accepted that they will die tend to stop wasting time living in fear and paralysis. They naturally stop obsessing about things they previously fretted about and thought were important, and start asking better questions.
How do I make a living should not be the first question a young person is pushed to answer, yet our education systems are built around little else. What fulfils me? What can I contribute? How do I want to use my time on earth? — these are questions that would emerge naturally if we focused on helping young people develop to their potential instead of shaping them into economic units. Only a small minority ever get to make a living doing what is truly meaningful to them. The rest spend most of their lives doing what they must to survive, regardless of whether it fulfils them or contributes anything worth contributing. What a catastrophic waste of human potential.
As my clients begin to integrate, grow and develop something interesting begins to happen, and it happens to everyone. I watch my clients start to take better care of themselves. They begin to drop well-established habits and coping mechanisms. They start to eat better and look after their bodies more. They distance themselves from harmful relationships they previously felt compelled to stay in because of a sense of obligation, a fear of being alone or of losing other people’s approval. These changes happen spontaneously, naturally and with increased ease. As integration improves, self respect grows naturally. Once people value themselves more, they have no wish to harm themselves anymore and they no longer tolerate being mistreated by others. When people no longer live in constant fear, they also become physically healthier. It’s not surprising given that the brain regulates the entire body and that body and mind are part of one complex system. As people grow, they live and act in ways that naturally support and nourish growth and wellbeing. It develops into a self-perpetuating process in the direction of growth, peace and wellbeing — a positive feedback loop — and away from the previous equally self-perpetuating destructive spiral downwards.
As a species, if we focus on growth and development our art, medicine, nutrition, science, technology will be in the service of nourishing the body, the soul and the planet. Our current focus on survivalism has led us to create harsh and toxic symptom-focused medicine and psychology, and extractive technology that destroys and exploits, and that causes harm to us and the planet. Our psychological suffering — our mental health catastrophe — is a direct consequence. What we do and what we produce isn’t an expression of love or regard for ourselves. It reveals contempt and is often driven by greed, which itself is an expression of fear of not having enough. The same principles that operate in individual psychology and behaviour — both the destructive and constructive — apply also on the species scale.
We live on a planet that is 4.5 billion years old. Life has existed here for around 3.7 billion years. Millions of species have come and gone. There is a good possibility we too will become extinct eventually — whether we like it or not, whether we plan for it or not. Eternal physical survival cannot be our highest value, because ultimately it’s not on offer. Everyone and everything passes. All we need to do is to look at the remnants left by past human cultures and civilisations, who all hoped they would go on for ever.
Clarke’s human colonists on Rama III are massacring the avians for trinkets they don’t need, in a vessel that already provides everything, prosecuting a cruel genocidal attack that exists only to distract from problems their own leaders created. They are surviving badly, brutally, pointlessly, and it is killing them and everything around them. Their previously beautiful physical environment so thoughtfully created, is reduced to ruins.
That is the paradigm we are living inside. We have a constant stream of leaders who offer security from manufactured threats from their pet scapegoats. We wage wars that function as distractions. We destroy our environment and scar the Earth in the name of economic survival. The majority are too frightened, too exhausted, too consumed by day-to-day existence to stop and think about what any of it is for.
Clarke was probably hopeful. Why else would he have spent his life writing about all of this? But he didn’t know what to do about it, and his endings tend toward resignation.
I’m not resigned, not even close. I know we can change.
My clients change because they focus on growth. As their neurobiology changes in the direction of better development, everything changes.
We continue to choose leaders who make false promises of safety and survival instead of leaders who will help us re-shape the world in ways that support everyone’s growth and development towards their innate potential. The key lies in the same majority that have traditionally been frightened into paralysis, resignation, and compliance. When the majority stop seeing their individual psychological symptoms, their anxieties and depression, as a flaw in themselves or as a pathology; when they recognise that their suffering is a direct result of the environment they grew up and are living in; when people start insisting they deserve better than a life of fear and suffering — as all my clients do — humanity will begin to take a different course.
That paradigm change — from fear to growth, from survival to potential — is not a utopian fantasy. It is what happens in my consulting room every week, and I know it can happen at any scale.
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