Ideas, Animism, and Healing
Can seeing patterns of information as animate beings help us heal as societies?
As I sit to start writing this, a small insect is crawling across my desk. Even after searching through online photos of lots of species, I still can’t quite tell what they are — a six-legged, 3 millimeter mystery — but I can tell this being is alive. A fellow animal like me, moving, searching, and following its own evolutionary map of the world.
And as my own thoughts and ideas are also moving and searching for this insect’s identity this morning, I wonder, can information also be alive? What similarities do concepts, characters, and thoughts have with plants, animals, and birdsongs?
The words “animal” and “animate” come from a very old root word: “ane”, which means breath. Very similarly to the word “spirit”, this concept of breath also has a longstanding association with the inner essence of who we are.
So it makes sense that “animism” would be a word we use to describe an ideology that considers all parts of the world as having their own spirit and essence, and thus be seen by us with a sense of kinship rather than objectification. Animism is central to many pre-colonial cultures, including my own in the places that are now Poland and the UK.
I personally love the depth animism brings to my relationship with the world, and I know it makes me act with more care. I was incredibly privileged to grow up surrounded by nature, and I feel a deep inner connection with the trees and clouds and landscapes I know I am so connected with. This has fundamentally shaped my current work as an advocate for both people and the planet.
Seeing all of the beings around me as having their own spirits and essences is an important part of my life. Without having to project my own human experience onto them, I can still see plants and ecosystems and mountains with the kind of beneficial love I share with family, the kind that makes me a caring and collaborative creature.
So here’s the fun part. Inside me, perhaps animism itself is also a beneficial, collaborative creature.
Beyond Behavioral Biology
For many biologists, our actions, behaviors, thoughts, and choices boil down to evolution and genetics. We study how specific behaviors benefit our survival and get baked into our instincts, our impulses, our pheromones, and our unconscious biases. And there is of course an important element of truth to this.
But I also like to think this isn’t the whole picture.
If we study behaviors and ideas just through the lens of our genetics, we miss the fact that we are much more than our genes, as well as the fact that our bodies aren’t the only beings adapting to survive through the selective pressures of the world.
Ideas themselves are also reproducing, spreading, and evolving.
Just like we have a robust microbiome of non-human cells in our bodies, we also have a robust inner and outer biome of ideas, information, and patterns. DNA is not the only way — or even necessarily the most effective way — to store and pass along information. Both physical life and ideological life can be seen as having dynamic and resilient ecosystems. We see beautiful ecologies throughout nature. We can see them throughout our nature too.
Each culture is like an ecosystem. Stories pass from person to person across generations, ideas shape and birth and consume other ideas. Ceremonies and traditions pass along their traits and also adapt over time. Each of our hearts and minds can be seen as a habitat, full of life. Each piece of artwork is like a seed pod, spreading the essence of ideas through the world and sprouting into other minds, carrying itself forward. Ideas reproduce all the time.
Some self-propagate through academia and the media, building nests for themselves in the shapes of schools and books and essays like this. Many are contagious through other means. How did your beliefs and ideas and behaviors make it to you?
Arguments have bounced around in scientific circles for many years about how it can be possible for behaviors like altruistic self-sacrifice to be as common as they are for human beings. If you give your life to help others, you’re not going to be passing along your own genetics, so if our behavior was determined only by our genes, people inclined towards kindness beyond their genetically-related kin would likely have died out.
But we see people throughout the world embracing personal losses and dedicating themselves to the well-being of those they will never meet — even giving their whole lives to benefit strangers. It happens all the time and is even encoded into many of the world’s most long-standing cultural ideologies.
So instead of thinking only about behavior through the lens of human evolution, what if we see altruism itself as its own life-form? Of course then it is benefitted by reproducing and spreading as widely as possible. Receiving an act of kindness can plant a living seed inside even a self-interested person to see the behavior it came from as being a good thing. And perhaps these good things are themselves alive, spreading like flowers we work like bees to pollinate. And in turn they fill our lives with sweetness.
Maybe life-affirming behaviors and beliefs are ideological symbiotes with us?
Healing Our Ideological Ecosystems
Many of us have grown up exposed to movies and books about zombies. The undead are a particularly fascinating trope in fictional worlds. Depictions of half-life and mindlessness in an apocalypse reflect back to us many real fears and present day societal patterns which we find ways to process through media.
But I argue we shouldn’t fear the undead; I believe we should fear the unhealed.
Many real-life beliefs and patterns of behavior spread through trauma, and if we choose to see these as ideological life-forms, they are ones that have evolved to spread by causing more trauma. Hurt people hurting more people.
While many forms of biological trauma responses are designed to keep us safe at an individual level, intergenerational self-destruction does not benefit our genetic survival. Perhaps it’s helpful to see some of these patterns as parasites or pathogens hijacking our self-protective instincts to propagate themselves, living ideas using us as vehicles for passing along their next generations.
Many patterns of trauma and the beliefs behind them are actively maximizing violence in a way that continues to spread and escalate more trauma, and it makes sense that these “contagious wounds” will continue to do so as long as they remain unhealed.
Any idea, belief, religion, political platform, or pattern of abuse that stems from harm and makes us cause the same harm to others is effectively traumatization reproducing itself through trauma in a way that can absolutely be viewed as the spread of an ideological life form.
Think about how terrifying a zombie movie would be if it just depicted the extent and impact of how this is actually happening in our modern day world.
In our physical bodies, injuries are often the places where we have the greatest risk of infectious pathogens taking hold. And it is in places of war and oppression and disaster and genocide that ideological patterns based on trauma can most easily take hold too. That trauma is self-benefitted by becoming reciprocally escalating violence back and forth, inherited violent beliefs passed across generations and externalized onto others.
Human beings as a whole are not genetically benefitted in the slightest by this, even though there are indeed disastrous and predatory patterns of profit being extracted by the few from this suffering of the many. If you see emotional wounds as lifeforms themselves, of course trauma wants to spread, and of course we can use our knowledge of biology and medicine to stop this cycle. In that framework, this is not who we evolved to become and it is not human nature: it’s an issue of injury, healing, and immunity-building.
I argue that some of the most important responses to tragedy have to be built around emotional security, trauma-healing, love, repair, and deep care given in deep relationships while at the same time meeting basic needs and establishing physical security. Of course we need to rebuild destroyed buildings and help economies to recover from disasters, but I think these actions should be in service of a more holistic goal — a lasting response to the systemic health of our communities that includes both physical recovery and healing the ideological ecosystems we will continue to pass along for generations.
We need to close the wound, treating it as serious and immediately important, and we also have to fight the infections initiated at the site of the injury. Of course this is daunting to translate into cultural healing with the sheer scale of institutionalized modern systems of harm — so many “trauma” infections have already become systemic — but it’s also actionable.
It’s actionable through building strong and caring relationships that help us process new hard moments and keep them from becoming deep emotional wounds. It’s actionable through spreading love and rest and prioritizing the well-being of those who are already experiencing cycles of systemic trauma in our families and communities and world. It’s actionable through improving access and trauma literacy in healing processes where we recover from emotional wounding instead of passing it along. It’s actionable through sharing beneficial stories that can act as protective and healing symbiotes inside our ideological biomes, building up immunity for the future.
We study physical forms of life all the time. We can bring this same care and attention and even a life-sciences-lens into the art and science of prioritizing healing processes for our internal ecosystems. Pre-colonial cultures continue to already know how to do this immaculately, and many still pass cautionary stories about consumption and exploitation along to new generations as if the stories themselves are vaccines protecting against the same ideological illnesses colonial cultures are all fighting now.
Seeing Ourselves
Perhaps the next time you think about thinking, you’ll consider if and how you might partly be an ideological being too.
When we think about what makes us who we are, it’s bigger than just our bodies. We have cultural identities, we find important parts of ourselves in studies and relationships and emotional healing. We can look at amazing pieces of art and see ourselves.
I believe it’s incredibly beneficial to see ourselves as part of larger ecosystems. Keeping a human away from nature and air and water and food is like keeping a kidney away from the rest of the body. And this is true for information and ideas as well. If information could not move into and out of and between us in its own colossal ecosystem, we’d suffocate in ideological sensory deprivation.
The whole global physical ecosystem is directly connected to our bodies. We’re like an organ of that larger body, and that makes this larger body inseparable from who we are as well. Its health is our health. And its dreams swirl together with our dreams.
All information is also directly connected with us. To perceive the world, we have to carry it inside us — an imprint of your whole known universe is sitting in the maps made by the cells in your body and brain. That’s the only way anything can become known to us: for it to become part of us.
And in this way, I like to think we are all the beauty we see in the world. We are the rainbows and the storms and the shelters we keep warm through it all. We become the art we paint of that rainbow and the resilience we learn from that storm and the wisdom of the countless generations which survived in the knowledge that enabled us to build and tend that shelter.
We are the love we hold for the stones and the trees, and we can also be and hold the same love for the spirits of art and writing and thought. Characters and archetypes and intergenerational dreams can be seen even by the hardest of sciences like lifeforms and symbiotes. We can see beings of information and culture as having life and spirit, and we can see ourselves as being connected with this whole living cosmos, a spectacular physical and informational system that’s all interrelating.
And in this sort of connected world-view, itself perhaps a living idea which is (re)introducing itself to you right now, we are not here to consolidate wealth away from the rest of this beautiful shared world-body. Seeing the whole world in connection with our bodies and senses of self stops life from being a game of smash and grab.
In any game where the player sees themselves as a connected and inseparable part of the whole board, the optimal strategy to win is love.
Love for the strangers farthest from us. Love for any biologists arguing humans are doomed to be selfish. Love for dedicated monks who prove the opposite. Love for those who seek safety across borders. Love for those being underpaid and exploited to build and guard walls along those borders. Love to mobilize solidarity and safety for the people experiencing genocide and love to meet and heal the generations of harm that have positioned the perpetrators to choose hate. Love.
We know the feeling of love in our bodies. Perhaps something in your physical body even relaxed reading the last paragraph. It’s built into who we are. When we think about this sort of all-encompassing love it can soften us at the level of our gut feelings. It feels safe and right to be loving, to meet needs wherever we are aware of them, and to prioritize the well-being of our larger community. That’s what’s baked into our evolution. That’s our nature.
I believe this has become our nature because, for countless generations and across countless transformations of culture, love has indeed been the optimal strategy. This whole time, even just from the framework of what has helped us survive at the most practical level, it has been most successful to be symbiotic with each other and the world. We have succeeded most and for longest when we have seen the world around us as a living being, when we build our flexible ideologies towards care and mutual collaboration. When we become symbiotes.
Let’s prioritize that mutual collaboration today. Let’s heal by example. Let’s show up for ourselves with softness so we’re kinder at checkout counters and more comfortable at city council meetings. Let’s prioritize the well-being of strangers. Let’s stand up and speak up. And let’s tend to our own hearts and bodies with this love.
Let’s tend softly also to this living thought, this caring creature that is the idea that everything has spirit. That we are family with everything. This is an ancient creature. She has names in Greek and Yoruba and Lakota and thousands of other languages. She has protected hundreds of generations of your family, and even if she was ever pushed away from your kin, she’s survived in songs and stories and quiet moments this whole time. She says this amazing world is all alive.
Let’s meet this amazing, living world with love. That’s always been the best strategy.
Wishing you a cosmos filled with love,
— Alex