In recent lectures and workshops I have heard much debate about how much control and free will we exercise over our choices and our lives. At the extreme are the advocates of The Secret, who believe that individuals have total freedom and can create whatever they want. This seems patently absurd to many of us, for we do not have that experience of unlimited freedom. The Secret's advocates would counter that we just don't apply ourselves. We don't spend enough time visualizing that new Porsche in the driveway. If we did, it would appear. Others, however, point out the inherent selfishness of this line of thought in a finite world. Unlike Secret advocates who believe in abundance, we may consider that the earth's resources are limited. Not everyone can have or drive a Porsche. Indeed, estimates made at MIT in the 1960s placed the limit to growth in a finite world as fresh water. That commodity disappears even before food.
I suggest it is an illusion that we control even our brains. We are largely unaware of our connectedness to others and our embeddedness in social networks in the modernized world. Indigenous people are more aware of these inter-relationships as the movie Avatar dramatized. The neuroscientist Nisbett showed that the brains of Japanese people in Japan and Americans in the USA actually work different. When showed movies of fish in underwater scenes, the Japanese noticed the background and the relationships of fish to each other and to background far more than the Americans who focused upon the biggest, fastest, or most colorful fish. The Americans could remember these fish with 100% recall; whereas the Japanese posted 30%. As Japanese lived in the USA, their brains slowly changed and their dominant mode of perception became more focused on large, colorful, or fast-moving objects in the foreground to the exclusion of the background. We are raised in the United States in such a way that our brains are not designed to see our connectedness with everyone else. We are designed to notice the biggest, fastest, or most colorful objects in our environment and to see them as individual entities and as parts of connected wholes.
I propose that our brains are neurons in a larger social brain. We are embedded in social networks with multiple, interlocking connections emerging from an environment which contextualizes us. In such a network, no one is in control. We can capture the illusion of control when we sense the direction in which the network is going and push in that direction ourselves. It can even seem as if we are leading when we do this at the edge of the network or at its boundary with other networks. Try going against the network's direction of movement and see what happens. It's like swimming against strong current. One isn't likely to go far. I believe we are controlled far more than we think by our relationships and the environment in which we find ourselves/
Stories are the electrical impulses of social neurotransmission. Through stories we connect with each other and maintain our connections. Some stories are more rigid than others. Some stories hold us in place more than others, which allow greater flexibility.
What about The Secret? How much can we influence our present and our future? A Lakota concept aids us here that of wo'onsila. This word sums up the pitiable state of having been thrown into a universe of large forces who are largely ignorant of us (and don't care so much anyway) and whose activities affect us in unpredictable ways that we can't control small, insignificant beings that we are. We start in wo'onsila and work from there.
When evaluating belief systems, we need to examine their impact on larger groups. I propose that we need a flexible story in which we can explore the possibilities of individual influence while recognizing the real constraints of network embeddedness. When we place too much power in the individual, then individuals who "fail" to achieve what they desire feel inferior. If we placed no influence in the individual, then excessive passivity would ensue. We need a flexible philosophy of accountability and response-ability, within the constraints imposed by our embeddedness. We are capable of responding. Sometimes our only possible response is to bear our suffering well. Sometimes we are permitted and have the lattitude to change our circumstances so as to reduce our suffering. We can only learn the degree to which change is possible by trying to change. When no change is possible, sometimes the only possibility is to enrol more people in supporting our change process. The larger our network, the more it can carry us away from situations that stifle us. The "failure" if there is any, in achieving our goals, lies in the smallness of our networks, and not in ourselves.