A revolution of Thought?

Iain McGilchrist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuQ4Hi7YdgU&t=441s&ab_channel=DarwinCollegeLectureSeries

Carved into the stone of the ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to know thyself.
Without such knowledge, we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand.
Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament, and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an
aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world. I believe we've adopted a limited vision of a
very particular type. And precisely because it is limited, we cannot see that it is limited. We no longer
seem to recognize what it is. We do not know what our way of being in the world is pushing out of our
lives and out of our world. To understand what is going on, we need a breadth of view that is
increasingly rare. It is the possibility of this that I intend to explore here today.

Let me ask you this: do you think there is a connection between realism, the appreciation of
uniqueness, a capacity for understanding melody and harmony, an aptitude for appreciating time, a
sense of humour, the ability to read body language, to sustain attention, and the fight or flight mode?
Or on the other hand between a talent for manipulation, a giveness to literalism, to theory at the
expense of experience, unreasonable optimism, and a preoccupation with detail, as well as a loss of a
sense of the living body with in its place a focus on body parts? Perhaps not. Yet I assure you there is
such a connection. In either case it is rooted deep in us, and it is quite coherent once one comes to
understand what underlies the pattern.

My reason for starting here is to introduce the body of work generated over three decades and
published in two long books, “The Master And His Emissary. The Divided Brain And The Making of
The Western World” in 2009, and “The Matter With Things. Our Brains, our Delusions, and The
Unmaking of The World” in 2021. In these books, I examine critically and in depth the matter of
hemisphere difference and its important meaning for our lives. As you can see from the deliberately
random selection of respectively right and left hemisphere tendencies above, the distinction is not the
simple one that many might have heard and which should be unceremoniously buried. It's not at all
the case that the left hemisphere is unemotional and dependable, whereas the right hemisphere is
flighty and fanciful. If anything, the contrary is the case.

But that a question has been wrongly answered doesn't invalidate the question, but rather should in my
opinion invite further exploration. Consider these facts. The brain organ, the power of which consists
solely in making connections, is massively divided down the middle. Why? Moreover, it is
asymmetrical in almost everything that can be measured at many levels in both its structure and
function. Why? Not only that but the band of fibres that connects the hemisphere at their base, the
Corpus Callosum, is getting proportionately smaller not larger over evolution and is in any case to a
large extent inhibitory in function. Again, why?

Could it be that two aspects of brain function are being kept apart? Unfortunately, I cannot spend time
on the evidence here. For one thing, there is a great deal of it, and it requires to be examined. At
length, it is laid out for that purpose in the two long books I've mentioned. I'm going to go straight to a
characterization of some of the core findings, so please forgive me if these are lacking in finesse. To
some extent that is inevitable for present purposes, as I'm sure you will understand.

The right and left hemisphere

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In a nutshell, each hemisphere has evolved for classical Darwinian reasons to pay a different kind of
attention to the world. When I saw this, I have to admit that the full import of the distinction did not
immediately dawn on me because I'd been trained in the cognitive science paradigm that saw attention
as simply another cognitive function. But the nature of the attention we pay is of critical importance; it
creates and moulds the only world we can know. Indeed, it is a matter of a disposing of our
consciousness towards the world in a particular way.

The left hemisphere has evolved to pay narrow beam attention focused on the detail that we already
know and desire and are intent on grabbing and getting. Whether it be something to eat or to use in
some other way. In a word, the left hemisphere exists in the service of manipulation. The right
hemisphere meanwhile is on the lookout for everything else that's going on while we're manipulating.
For mates, conspecifics, offspring, and predators so as not to be eaten while eating. Its attention is
broad, sustained, coherent, vigilant and uncommitted as to what it may find. The exact opposite of that
of the left hemisphere. In brief, the right hemisphere is in the service of understanding the contextual
whole, which is nothing less than the world. And context changes everything.

The difference then is not – as used to be – supposed to do with what each hemisphere does, as though
it were some sort of machine, so much as the manner in which it does it, as though it were part of a
person. The hemispheric difference in attention is beyond dispute. Indeed, it is universally attested and
since the nature of attention also indisputably changes what it is that comes to our attention, such a
difference logically cannot but lead to two different phenomenological worlds. Hence, my belief that
attention is a moral act; it helps form both us and the world we come to know.

The left and right hemisphere worlds

So what are these two worlds like? Very briefly, if crudely, these worlds could be characterized like
this. In the case of the left hemisphere the world is simplified in the service of manipulation, it is
made of isolated static things. Things, moreover, that are already known familiar predetermined and
fixed. They're fragments that are importantly devoid of context, disembodied and meaningless,
abstract, generic, quantifiable, fungible, mechanical, ultimately bloodless and lifeless. This is indeed
not so much a world as a re-presentation of a world, which means a world that's actually no longer
present but reconstructed after the fact. And it is literally two-dimensional schematic and theoretical.
Not in fact a world at all, more like a map. Nothing wrong with a map, of course, unless you mistake
it for the world. And here the future is a fantasy that remains under our control. The left hemisphere is
unreasonably optimistic and fails to see the dangers that loom.

In the case of the right Hemisphere, by contrast, is a world of flowing processes, not isolated things.
One where nothing is simply fixed, entirely certain, exhaustively known or fully predictable but
always changing and ultimately interconnected with everything else. Where context is everything,
where what exists are wholes, of which what we call the parts are an artifact of our way of attending.
Where what really matters is implicit, a world of uniqueness. One where quality is more important
than quantity. A world that is essentially animate. Here the future is a product of realism, not denial.
This is a world that is fully present, rich, and complex. A world of experience which calls for
understanding. Not the map at all, but the world that is mapped. The emotional tambra here is more
cautious and in general more realistic.

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We need both of these worlds to work together but also independently. Hence, the need for connection
and separation. Naturally, we are not aware of this because these worlds are combined at a level below
our awareness. We become aware only after an accident of nature, such as a stroke, tumour or injury,
or after commissurotomy, the so-called split brain operation, or if one hemisphere at a time is
experimentally suppressed. Then they may become suddenly vividly present to us.

The current domination of the left hemisphere

Yet because these two worlds have mutually incompatible properties, when we come to reflect
self-consciously and to rationalize about what we find, we're forced by the requirement for
consistency to choose between the pictures of the world they offer. This is why, as Iain Whitehead,
one of my intellectual heroes, observed: ‘A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyse
itself.’1 Once our lives become very largely mediated by self-reflexive language and discourse – as in
our postmodern world they are – the explicit stands forward and the implicit retires. Yet almost
everything that really matters to us the beauty of nature, poetry, music, art, narrative, drama, myth,
ritual, sex, love, the sense of the sacred must remain implicit, if we're not to destroy their nature. The
attempt to make the implicit explicit radically alters its nature.

[Now, under those circumstances] We can no longer rely on the wisdom that comes from these
all-important but hidden sources, from closeness to the long tradition of a society, to nature and to the
sacred to sophisticate our understanding. In fact, we see these not as irreplaceable guides to truths,
deeper than those that science can encompass, but as lies. Possibly entertaining lies but lies
nonetheless. We begin to see only the self-created, self-referring world according to the left
hemisphere. We go for the machine model, reductive materialism, and the consequences are all around
us.

Unfortunately, the two hemispheres are not equally veridical. In terms of our ability to apprehend,
take hold of and use the world, the left hemisphere is superior. But in terms of the ability to
comprehend the world, the right hemisphere is superior. In each of what one might call the portals of
understanding – attention, perception, judgment, emotional and social intelligence, cognitive
intelligence (that is, IQ) and creativity – the right hemisphere is so much superior, that the left
hemisphere on its own has been repeatedly described as frankly delusional. This is not a rhetorical
expression. Denial of the facts and delusional beliefs are far commoner in association with damage to
the right Hemisphere, and consequently dependence on the left hemisphere, than the reverse. On its
own, the left hemisphere confabulates, makes up stories so to fit with its beliefs. It will frankly insist
that a paralysed limb is unaffected, or if challenged deny that the offending appendage belongs to the
subject at all. “It belongs to you, Doctor”.

Unlike the right hemisphere, which sees more than one angle and has for this reason been called by
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran “The Devil's Advocate”, the left hemisphere never doubts that it is right.
It is never wrong and never at fault; someone else is always to blame. Furthermore, in what I take to
be the four important onward paths to truth – science, reason, intuition, and imagination – though both
hemispheres contribute, the crucial part in each case (including in science and reason) is played by the
right hemisphere, not the left.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1954/04/the-permanence-of-change-dialogues-of-whitehead/642
948/

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Our predicament is that we now live in a world, the understanding of which is largely limited to that
of the inferior left hemisphere. Some signs of this include our inability to see the broader picture –
both in space and in time –, the way in which wisdom has been lost, understanding reduced to mere
knowledge, and knowledge replaced by information, tokens, representations2. The loss of the concepts
of skill and judgment, which are the products of experience. The divorce of mind and matter resulting
in a strong tendency to simultaneous abstraction. And the debasement of matter to mere
“lumpenmatter”, therefore our exploitation. An exponential growth of bureaucracy and
administration. Everywhere the proceduralization of Life. The reduction of justice to mere equality. A
loss of the sense of the uniqueness of all things. The supplanting of quality by quantity. The
abandonment of nuance in favour of simplistic “either or” positions. The loss of reasonableness,
which is replaced by rationalization. A complete disregard for common sense. The design of systems
not for humans but to maximize utility. A growth of paranoia and pervasive mistrust: For, if all is not
under its control, the left hemisphere becomes anxious and protects its anxiety outwards onto others.
Nonetheless, we play the passive victim and abjure responsibility for our own lives. In addition, I
might point to the rise of anger and aggression in the public sphere, the destruction of social cohesion
and its replacement by angry, waring factions. Like almost everything that you to be said about
hemisphere differences, the idea that the left hemisphere is unemotional is wrong. The most highly
lateralized emotion is anger and, guess what, it lateralizes to the left hemisphere. And there are more
indications, but for today's purposes I'll stop here.

Hemispheres and civilizational decline

In the second part of “The master and his Emissary” I traced the main turning points in the history of
ideas in the West and concluded that three times we have seen enacted a certain pattern. First, there is
a sudden efflorescence of everything that comes from the proper working together of the two
hemispheres in harmony. That then follows a stable period for a few hundred years at most. And soon
a decline, after which the civilization eventually crumbles under its own weight. I trace this pattern
beginning in the Greek world around the 6th Century BC, in the Roman world around the end of the
Republic and the beginning of the Empire, and in the modern world with the Renaissance. In each
case it's apparent that the vitality and Harmony of a flourishing culture is lost as in due course it
overreaches itself becomes less creative, more and more sclerotic, unimaginative, over-administered
over-hierarchical and power hungry. There is a coarsening of values. Where Goodness, Beauty, and
Truth had once been the guiding values, the need to control, the value of power, hold sway.

I'm sometimes asked why – if the right hemisphere is more intelligent and by a long way more
insightful than the left – this progression is always leftwards. It's a good question. In brief, there are a
handful of reasons. First and most obviously, the left hemisphere is designed to aid us in grabbing
stuff, it controls the right hand with which most of us do the grabbing. As such, it is seductive, not to
say addictive.

Second, the left hemisphere view sees a very simplified schema of the world and offers simple
answers to our questions. Its mode of thinking prizes consistency above all and offers the same
mechanistic model to explain everything that exists. When reductionist thinking encounters a

2
I am reminded of the case, where a judge in the Supreme Court of the U.S., when asked what a woman is,
answered that she did not know, since she is not a biologist.

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problem, in reconciling apparent irreconcilables for example matter and consciousness, it simply
denies that one element or the other exists3. That's very convenient.

Third, the left hemisphere's world-view is easier to articulate. Though language is shared between
hemispheres, speech is almost always confined to the left. The right hemisphere has literally no voice.
And the map is ipso facto vastly simpler than the complex terrain that is mapped. Almost everything
that really matters cannot be found there or in the banality of discursive prose.

Fourth, importantly, there is or should be always an appeal from a theory back to the empirical
evidence. If you like, the left hemisphere has a theoretical model, the right hemisphere on the other
hand looks out of the window to see if the model corresponds with experience. Since the Industrial
Revolution, and particularly in the last 50 years, we have created a world around us, which in contrast
to the natural world reflects the left hemisphere's properties and its vision. What we see around us
now looking out of the metaphorical window is rectilinear, man-made, utilitarian, each thing ripped
from the context in which it alone has meaning. And for many, the two-dimensional representations
provided by TV screens and computers have come largely to supplant direct face-to-face experience
of three-dimensional life in all its complexity.

Fifth, built into the relationship between the hemispheres is that they have a different take on
everything, including their own relationship. Essentially the right hemisphere tends to ground
experience, it knows that the left hemisphere has a valuable role though. The left hemisphere then
works on what it has offered to clarify, unpack and generally render the implicit explicit. And the right
hemisphere finally re-integrates what the left hemisphere has produced with its own understanding.
The explicit once more receding to produce a new now enriched whole. The left hemisphere's
contribution then is valuable, but must come at an intermediate stage. Problems arise when this is
treated as it now often is, as the end stage. Analysis is a valuable tool but breaking things down must
be followed by an attempt to understand the whole, once more. Unfortunately the left hemisphere is
unaware of what it is missing, it doesn't know why the right hemisphere is important, it cannot see the
Gestalt, the ultimately indivisible whole. Therefore, it thinks it can go it alone.

Sixth, a culture that exemplifies the qualities of the left hemisphere's world attracts to itself in
positions of influence and authority those whose natural outlook is similar, especially in the areas of
science, technology and administration, which have an undue importance in shaping contemporary
life. They then make us more like themselves. My worry is not that machines will become like people
– an impossibility – but that people are already becoming more like machines.

Finally, I've already referred to the problem that a civilization that is increasingly cut off from its
intuitive life relies more heavily on exchange of explicit ideas in the public forum. Here, though truth
is manifestly complicated and many layered, an awareness of inherent ambiguities and a capacity for
seeing both sides of a question (what happened to that?) is no longer considered a strength. The right
hemispheres view is multifaceted and also already takes into account the left hemisphere's point of
view. This virtue makes it immediately vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency, and it is therefore
liable to be dismissed.

The Meta Crisis

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Like the monists in the case of spirit and matter.

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I believe it is the left hemispheric view of the world – intellectually dedune(?)4 and morally bankrupt
as it is – that has resulted in what has been called The Meta Crisis. Not just the odd crisis here and
there, but the despoliation of the natural world, the decline of species on a colossal scale, the
destabilization of the climate, the destruction of the way of life of indigenous people, the
fragmentation, and polarization of a once civilized society with escalating not diminishing
resentments on all sides, an escalating not diminishing gap between rich and poor, a surge in mental
illness – not the promised increase in happiness –, a proliferation of laws but a rise in crime, the
abandonment of civil discourse, a betrayal of standards in our major institutions, government, the
BBC, the police, our hospitals, schools, and universities: once rightly admired all over the world,
which have all become vastly overweighted with bureaucracy, inflexible and obsessed with
enforcement of a world-view that is in flat contradiction to reality and isn't their job to enforce. And
the looming manace of totalitarian control through AI.

These aspects of the so-called Meta Crisis have a multitude of proximal causes: economic, political,
social, psychological, technological, and so on. But beneath and beyond that, each manifests within
those realms aspects of the left hemisphere's dysfunctional view of the world. The very thing that
originates the problem also militates against seeing the problem. Seeing the wider picture, a necessary
prelude to understanding, is now increasingly disfavoured and as a consequence the crises I've
referred to are often seen as isolated pieces of bad luck. But they're not. They could have been and
were by some predicted. The Meta Crisis is the predictable outcome of a complete failure to
understand what a human being is, what the world is, and what the one has to do with the other. And
all this is the sort of thing the right hemisphere is far better equipped to understand than the left.

Machines or organisms?

The rightful master, the right hemisphere, has been subjugated by his emissary or servant, the left. In
an entirely predictable parallel, we have become enslaved by the machine that should be our servant,
as so many have predicted since the time of Goethe. We cannot say we were not warned. Even physics
now teaches us that the mechanical model of the universe is mistaken. But because of our success in
making machines, we still imagine that the machine is the best model for understanding everything we
come across. We ourselves our brains and minds our society and the living world are now supposed to
be explained by the metaphor of the machine. Yet only the tiniest handful of things in the entire
known universe are at all like a machine. Namely, the machines we made in the last few hundred
years. Machines unlike life and all complex systems, whether animate or inanimate, are linear and
sequential, are put together part by part from the ground up and can be switched on and off at will.
Their default status is stasis, not flow. They are not resonantly embroiled with their environment, they
have precise boundaries, their parts do not change structure and function as the whole changes and
evolves. Not least because in the machine, the whole does not evolve. And they are utilitarian
constructs in service of the power of their maker.

None of this applies to life, nor does it to anything else in the universe. The brilliant mathematician
and biophysicist Robert Rosen in his book ‘Life Itself’ demonstrates just how unlike machines
organisms are. He further argues that the best way to understand all naturally occurring systems,
which are never merely complicated but complex – and therefore never fully predictable –, is as
organisms whether we choose to see them as alive or not. And that's before one gets to consider the
neglect of our emotional moral and spiritual nature, which is at the core of being human.

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We seem to have been seduced into thinking we understand everything and, what's more, can master it
and mold it like a machine, so as to provide a future that will benefit mankind. That this is a malign
fantasy becomes plainer with every passing day. Those with grand schemes to improve humanity have
caused misery on an almost unimaginable scale by their narcissism, cruelty and willful blindness. In
psychology there's something called the Dunning Krueger Effect which tells us that the less people
know, the more they think they know. It's hardly rocket science, I admit, but it is worth bearing in
mind.

Instead of seeing all things as processes running organically from the past to the future across time
and spreading out across the world through space – like water finding its way across a landscape – we
see ourselves and the world as composed of static slices or points, Here and Now, compartmentalized
in a way that conforms to the modus operandi of the left hemisphere. A world of meaningless bits. We
owe nothing to and can learn nothing from history, or so we believe. We owe nothing to and need to
leave nothing to posterity. We turn a blind eye to the inevitable impact of our rapacity on more humble
and more stable ways of life that have stood the test of time better than ours. We neglect the
importance of context. We believe we are right and that one size fits all, justifying the imposition of
vast global bureaucratic structures, not to say wars, so as to impose our thinking on cultures far
different from our own. Equally, we arrogantly critique our ancestors for not sharing the idiosyncratic
view of the world we've generated in the last 20 years and which we believe must now be forced on
all, whatever their reasonable misgivings. And we treat people not as unique living beings but as
exemplars of a category.

The machine bureaucracy

One aspect of this is the virtual machine known as bureaucracy. Famously, Hannah Arendt referred to
the banality of evil. One of the most disquieting aspects of the Nazi regime was its chilling
bureaucracy. Mind-numbing evil was committed by people who were for the most part not
conventional monsters but were simply following the ordained procedures. Real people and real life
had been almost wholly obscured by pieces of paper and the recording of numbers.

After the war Theodor Adorno saw developing around him what he called ‘Die verwaltete Welt’, the
administered world, in which everything was controlled, proceduralized and devitalized. Inevitably, at
that point in history this could not be separated from the evil that was Nazism, but Adorno can see that
it was much more than that. Nazism was at least as much a symptom of a new mentality as its cause. A
mentality of total control that had taken root in the form of a self-legitimizing bureaucracy, the roots
of which lay in the past. He quoted the mid 19th century Austrian writer Ferdinand Kunberger (?)5:
‘life no longer lives’. Who does not recognize with a chill this diagnosis of the modern human
predicament? And Adorno points out that it is not even the triumph of the logical, since administration
serves to rationalize the irrational, which explains why its workings and outcomes are often deeply
unreasonable and deeply damaging.

The cancerous growth of more and more elaborate and more and more expensive bureaucracies in the
world I particularly know, hospitals and universities (but the same could be said of government
schools and the police) is an inevitable and dangerous consequence of the world view we've adopted.
The other if possible still more dangerous expansion is that of AI. Bureaucracy and AI go hand in

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hand, enlarging the empire of the left hemisphere and making possible if not inevitable in the near
future almost total control of the populace by any regime, however malignant.

As we broaden our view, it becomes apparent how much The Meta Crisis can best be seen as a war on
nature and a war on life. This, my friends, is the reality we face. Why on earth should such a suicidal
war come about? There are three reasons that spring to mind. One is that the left hemisphere, which
makes us what Benjamin Franklin called ‘the tool making animal’, thinks like a machine and has
therefore exported machine-like thinking into our environment everywhere. Nature and life are
therefore ultimately an impediment. The second is that the left hemisphere really only understands its
own representations, what it itself has made and given to itself. Nature and life are therefore
ultimately incomprehensible. And the third, and most important, is the resentfulness of a mind that
believes it understands and can and – what's more – should control all it surveys. Here nature and life
are a rebuff to its power, a rebuff which cannot be tolerated. The German-American artist George
Grosz produced a shockingly vivid expression of this mindset as he contemplated Europe before the
Second World War, entitled ‘I Shall Exterminate Everything around Me That Restricts Me from Being
the Master’ (1921).

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The contemporary fantasy that we can be whatever we want and do whatever we want is a cruel
travesty of the truth. This was never true and never could be. It is the product of a culture of
narcissistic fragmentation. Ironically, we've invented new impediments to its fulfilment; we now live
in a world in which you cannot speak or act until you've put each word before a humulus(?)6 in a
tribunal which is ready to say ‘no’ to everything you want to say or do. I'm of course a boring old
stick, but I feel so sorry for young people now. Whatever happened to the spontaneous act, the sense
of joie de vivre, to the movement of the spirit out of sheer exaltation! Even an impulse to visit a
gallery soon runs into the need to have booked weeks ahead using an app. And that's just getting into
a gallery! What about negotiating the numberless hazards of a date? Life no longer lives. Wisdom,
skill, judgment, intuition, and even understanding all to be gained only from a life well-lived have
been sidelined in favour of machine-like algorithms that stifle true thought.

The assault on life continues. As far as a mechanical system is concerned, human beings must be
dispensable and wholly interchangeable. In fact, despite the rhetoric, true diversity is not to be
tolerated. Imaginative eccentrics lose their jobs, humans must have no allegiances which might
conflict with their duty to fit into their slot. Thus, it is that we've seen concerted attacks on the idea
that there aren’t any differences between men and women. Attempts to brainwash children; attacks on
family and kinship with their rightful claims on loyalty; on the professions with their expertise which
must be replaced by blind rule following, and their codes of ethics which a machine cannot
understand and which is therefore replaced by the pretence that teachers doctors and priests are just
providing a service to consumers rather than embodying what are ultimately sacred duties.

Indeed, that anything should be sacred is an affront to the power hungry left hemisphere dominated
mind. Belief in a divine cosmos is seen as standing in the way of whatever society the machine hurtles
us towards. Milton saw it all. Lucifer the bright cannot bear the imputation of anything higher than he.
And the very word society reminds us that no properly functioning society is mechanistic. So we see
social cohesion dissipate and living traditions erased, in their place fragmentation the stoking of
resentment and a rise of aggression. This in turn is deemed to require what Alexis de Tocqueville
pressingly described as a network of small, complicated rules that he foresaw would come to strangle
life itself. Once the integrity founded in an intuitive moral sense is lost, a society becomes like a
building that has lost its integrity and needs to be shored up with ever more scaffolding. Now there
has to be a law for everything, yet crime escalates.

Sustained incoherence

Why, when we see how devastating this process can be, do we carry on promoting it? The physicist
David Bohm reflected on a phenomenon he called sustained incoherence, characteristic of what he
called thought – the thought process we now know to be typical of the left hemisphere. What he
meant was that on seeing incoherence, it would be intelligent to stop, look for the cause and change
tac. But he noticed there was a reflex defensiveness in thought that leads instead to obstinate
continuation. In other words, the left hemisphere above all else does not want to hear why it might
have got things wrong. I see widespread evidence of this sustained incoherence in corporations,
governments, health systems and education, everywhere that ‘management culture’ hold sway. That
when things go wrong it's never that we've been travelling in the wrong direction or have gone too far
in what may once have been the right direction, it's always that we've not gone far enough.

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This links to the Dunning Krueger Effect: the less you know, the smarter you think you are. But a
further finding by Dunning and colleagues reinforces the relationship with the left hemisphere
mindset, because of its preference of simple linear algorithms and procedures, that it believes logically
must lead to a certain outcome. Those who've bought into such procedures think they must be in the
right, even when the outcome ought to compel them to the opposite conclusion. Psychological
experiments show that once they're committed to their theory of how things work, drawing attention
to its obvious failure in the real world leads not to a flicker of doubt but to arise in confidence and
redoubled efforts along the same line.

The squandering of trust

I'm sure we can all think of many such dead ends in the world around us, but I want to refer to just
one in the time available to me. The squandering of trust. This has the distinction of being at the same
time supremely important and almost completely ignored. Truth and trust, words which come from
the same root, naturally go together. One cannot have trust in a society where no one is speaking the
truth. And one cannot be true to a society where there is no trust. As Confucius told his disciple Su
Kong(?)7: ‘For a stable society, a ruler needs three things. Weapons, food, and trust. If he cannot hold
all three, he should forgo weapons first and food next for, quote, without trust we cannot stand.’ Trust
costs nothing but the time to build it. Once built, it is a fantastically efficient way for any human
enterprise, particularly a society, to operate. But it's easy to lose. There's a Dutch proverb ‘trust arrives
on foot but departs on horseback’. The massive complex of administration and AI do nothing to
promote a society of trust, but actively undermine whatever is left of it at every turn.

Being trustworthy is no small thing and its importance needs to be inculcated at an early age and then
nourished by both individual and society. No one will believe in us if we cannot believe in ourselves.
We need to start believing in ourselves again and deserving to be believed in. Once people lose pride
in being as good as their word, doing the best job they can and expecting much of themselves, rules
have to be enforced from without, and a penal code substitutes for the moral code it helped to
destroy8. Mediocrity quickly displaces excellence, boredom replaces vitality. This is not only vastly
less effective, but hugely costly in terms of administration and litigation, not to mention time and
morale. And it leads to a wicked problem. Once trust has been lost, it's not easy to remove the
scaffolding of rules and procedures, which have come to take its place.

In the world of capital older European business practices, based on honour, have been grossly
undermined by a ‘smarter’ paradigm – imported from America – in the pursuit of short-term gain by
defectors. This was very short-sighted. Trust has also been lost in the world of schools and
universities hospitals, the police and the army – all of which now have massive recruitment problems.
Because the perception is that lifes of service are no longer respected or properly rewarded, that the
necessary creativity, independence, self-reliance, and initiative required by a skilful professional will
be stifled. And that the best candidates will not be supported and promoted because of a patronizing
agenda based on the ticking of boxes and militating against excellence. Like civilizations before us,
which drifted further and further to the outlook of the left hemisphere, we would appear to be engaged
in committing suicide – intellectual and moral – if not indeed literal. For I fear that the Western world

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Ca. min. 43:32
8
There is the question about the need or use of positive law, especially positive penal law. Do explicit rules
actually play a role in modelling the citizen?

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may longer have the will or the skill to defend itself against authoritarian enemies that we cannot just
wish away because in our theory they don't figure.

Contemporary paradoxes

We seem sometimes bemused at how so often a path that looks promising leads us somewhere almost
opposite to where we intended. But seeing the picture in the round, we start to see why the outcome
we wish for eluded us. We feel we are beset by paradoxes. In ‘The Matter With Things’ I devote a
chapter to logical paradox and explore around thirty of the best known paradoxes that have intrigued
and largely baffled philosophers historically. In every case, I explain why the apparent paradox can be
seen as stemming from the different dispositions towards the world offered by the right and left
hemispheres. This doesn't mean, however, that each take is equally valid. In Zeno's well-known
paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, although he purports to prove that Achilles can never catch up
with, never mind overtake the tortoise, we know perfectly well that in real life he can overtake the
tortoise in a couple of strides.

As a society, we pursue happiness, and we become measurably less happy over time. Studies of rates
of psychopathology in adolescence, relying on serial contemporaneous assessments, using the same
objective instrument and meeting stringent standards over the period from 1938 to 2007, showed that
there were between five and eight times – not five or eight percent more – but between five and eight
times as many students that met a common cut-off for psychopathology in the latest cohort compared
with the earliest. And this may be an underestimate because many recent subjects were already
stabilized on an anti-depressant, a possibility that didn't exist for the earliest cohorts. Rates of suicide,
which have always been about three times higher in men, are rising most steeply in young women. We
privilege autonomy and end up bound by rules to which we never assented, and more spied on than
any people since the beginning of time. We pursue leisure through technology and discover that the
average working day is longer than ever and that we have less time than we had before. We also find
that the technology places an enormous burden on our time, alienates us from human intercourse and
exposes us to risk from organized criminals. And mind control by disorganized criminals such as
governments.

The means to our ends are ever more available, while we have less sense of what our end should be or
whether there is purpose to anything at all. Economists carefully model and monitor the financial
markets in order to avoid any future crash; they promptly crash. We're so eager that all scientific
research results in ‘positive findings’ that it has become progressively less adventurous and more
predictable, and therefore discovers less and less that is truly significant, advanced and scientific
thinking. We grossly misconceive the nature of studying the humanities as utilitarian, in some way, in
order to get value from money and thus render it pointless and in this form certainly a waste of
resource. We ‘improve’ education by dictating curricular and focusing on exam results to the point
where free thinking, arguably an overarching goal of true education, is discouraged. In our
universities, many students are in any case so frightened that the truth might turn out not to conform
to their theoretical model that they demand to be protected from discussion that threaten to examine
the model critically. And their teachers who should know better in a serious dereliction of duty
collude.

We over-sanitize and cause vulnerability to infection. We overuse antibiotics, leading to super-bacteria

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its means of achieving it alarmingly linear, as though it could only see one of the arrows in a vastly
complex network of interactions at any one time, which is all that it can.

If these paradoxes surprise us, it's because we've not thought far enough ahead in time or broadly
enough in space; we take a small part of the complex for the whole. The awareness coming from the
right hemisphere can embrace that of the left, but not the other way around. When the hemispheres are
working together under the unifying influence of the right hemisphere, the effect is not purely additive
but transformative. However, since the left hemisphere not only takes in less but understands what it
does take in less well, our almost exclusive reliance on it, the servant, in contemporary Western
culture is a problem of some considerable proportions.

The three things on which human flourishing and well-being most depend are these. Belonging to a
cohesive social group which one can trust and with which one can share one's life. Closeness to the
natural world, and communion with a divine realm, however conceived. This is not just my opinion
but borne out by a vast and ever-increasing body of research. But none of this accords with our current
value: power. It's hardly a surprise then when we see that material affluence does not make us happy if
accompanied by spiritual poverty.

The realm of value today

Let me finally consider the influence of left-hemisphere capture on the realm of value. For over 2,000
years, in the Platonic and later the Christian tradition of Western thought, human life was seen as
orientated towards three great values. Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. Each of them in turn seen as a
manifestation of an aspect of the sacred. During my lifetime I've seen each of these important values,
along with the sacred, repudiated and reviled. A model that favours the machine over the human
being, the inanimate over the living, is one that is corrosive of all that is beautiful, good, and true, and
has no place in it for the sacred. The early 20th century philosopher Max Scheler was much concerned
with questions of value. When he died in 1928 Heidegger, who gave his funeral oration, described
him as the most potent force in the world of philosophy at the time. Scheler thought there was a
hierarchy of values, with those of pleasure and utility, the values of utilitarianism in the left
hemisphere, at the lowest level, and rising by stages to that of the holy or sacred, which he considered
the highest. A value which I suggest is incomprehensible to the left hemisphere. In between were first
the ‘Lebenswerte’ or values of life, such as courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility. And
then the ‘geistige Werte’, the values of mind or spirit, such as Beauty, Goodness and Truth, which I
suggest are better understood by the right hemisphere.

The left hemisphere's raison d'être being power and control, it naturally puts values of utility and
hedonism, those of the lowest rank in Schelers pyramid, first. I may be wrong, but it's my distinct
impression that there has been a decline in courage, magnanimity, nobility, loyalty, and humility in our
society. Indeed, in all behaviour that carried its costs up front rather than concealing its sting in the
tail. Speaking the truth takes courage, and it would seem that those in our public institutions would
rather conform than confront untruth. And along with the loss of courage to speak the truth, there's
been an undeniable withdrawal from the beautiful and the sacred. All of this combines to reinforce a
loss of sense of purpose and direction, hence the crisis of meaning that is by now a common place that
we face.

Scheler calls the human being ‘ens amans’, the being that is capable of love. In its place, we have
‘homo economicus’. In the world we live in, reductionist materialism inverts Schelers perception and

12
in a thoroughly cynical assessment of what it means to be human, we have exalted the individual ego
over all else. And it has rendered many virtues – including but not confined to beauty, goodness, and
truth – obsolete. These values, I believe, far from being human inventions are ontological primitives,
for they are aspects of the ground of being. Our capacity to respond to them and draw them ever
further into being is our privilege and indeed, I argue, our purpose. That is why there is life at all. We
can of course also ignore them, devalue them and cause them to wither away. At what cost to us
personally and to the whole of the living world, we can only surmise. The world we are creating is
one that computes, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned, but is grossly impoverished,
demoralized and lacking in meaning. One that is in some more fit for a computer than for a human
being.

A solution?

I'm often asked what we need to do about this predicament. This is understandable, of course. But I
think that any list of bullet points, though no doubt needed at one level, risks missing the point almost
entirely at another. For it's not that we took the wrong decision here or there but that we've completely
lost direction, because of the value we've come to espouse. As I get nearer to the end of life, I'm more
and more convinced that not only is being receptive to the summons offered by values the key to a
fulfilling life, the key to a flourishing society and a flourishing natural world at large, but every bit as
important as survival itself. What I mean is this. Even if we were, by a massive effort and a massive
stroke of fortune, enabled to prevent any further loss of the world's forests, reverse the pollution of the
oceans, reverse the decline of species, and similarly tackle the other aspects of The Meta Crisis I have
mentioned, this would be in vain if it simply meant that we did not change our hearts and minds. For
we would still be the same hubristic, entitled, resentful, power-hungry animals that we have become.
And this, like the rest, has everything to do with the dominance of the left-hemisphere's mode of
being. We can be far better than that.

So what are we to do? I could list the bullet points, the left hemisphere would like me to, which along
the way would inevitably refer to reforming the educational system, to a revival of the humanities, a
serious reduction in bureaucracy, to the cultivation of meditative or spiritual practices, to abstinence
from social media, keeping machines in the background – where they can be helpful – but away from
intercourse with humans, and much more that we all know might help. And, of course, it goes without
saying that we must tirelessly seek to stop, and where possible, reverse damage to nature (I will not
say ‘the environment’ since the term expresses the separation from nature that is part of the problem).

But these will not themselves heal a matter of psyche or soul. There is no quick fix for such problems,
alas. As a psychiatrist, I would often know after listening to a patient for an hour or more on their first
visit what it was they needed to do. And when I was inexperienced, I used to tell them. That was a
mistake. Until a person truly sees for him or herself from the inside what it is they need to do, they
will not do it. And once they do see it, they will not need to be told. The work is to get them to that
place. The good news is that we can begin healing the work, each one of us, today. People say: ‘what
can I do? The world is so huge, and I'm so small!’ And sometimes they add: ‘and our planet is so
small in an incomprehensibly vast universe’. There's a lot I could say about that, but this is to think in
the left-hemispheres terms, measuring and quantifying. When the lover says, my love is as deep as the
ocean and as wide as the skies, how large or small is that? All the important changes happen from in
here [points to the heart], not out there. It's been said that if we could change radically the hearts and
minds of only 3% of people, we will be able to change and bring about the changes we need to see in
the world around us.

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So my recommendations might be quite simple. Begin by cultivating a sense of awe and wonder
rather than clever, clever knowingness about the extraordinary complex and beautiful cosmos, which
it is a pure gift that we have been given a life in. Think about what we're to do with it and in order to
do that well, to have compassion to others and to all the living world, not a sense of aggressive
embattlement against forces that we quite probably misunderstand. And to begin to adopt a sense of
the little that we can know. In other words, a kind of – not willing ignorance – but the beginnings of
true knowing, which is when we recognize how little that we know9. That is the first step towards true
knowledge.

For this to happen, we need to understand ourselves anew. Γνῶθι σαυτόν (gnōthi sauton), ‘know
thyself’! We need every insight we can get into what we're doing to ourselves, to life itself, and to our
inexpressively beautiful and complex world. I hope I may have here offered one such insight, however
small. The Work is great, but we are capable of greater things than we know.

Thank You.

[Applause]

9
‘I know that I know nothing’

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