Iain McGilchrist on preserving a free society
From an April 2022 video interview with Dr Iain McGilchrist “The Attack On Life and Understanding Our Times. A conversation with Iain McGilchrist and Mark Vernon”: “The two hemispheres hypothesis, championed by Iain McGilchrist, has become well-known. What light does it cast on modern society and our direction of travel?…”
Paraphrase starting from Minute 50:00: The desire to be safe, is fine as long as it starts with you keeping yourself safe. Once you put the responsibility on other people around you, to make you safe, you’ve avoided (projected) the responsibility you have to keep your own self safe.
One of the main activities of mental health professional is to get people to take responsibility for their feelings, not to blame others for them. To inform them, if you react this way and you feel that; then, let’s look at what you’re doing to make this happen. Your solution will come not from changing someone else; it will be about you changing you.
This points up the connection between self-connection, self-discipline and freedom (freedom from fear, to feel safe). These complement each other. For a person to feel safe and free, there needs to be some self-discipline. If there is no self-control, then external controls come in and make a mess of things; and, no one feels free any more.
During my lifetime, it was fashionable to throw off most of the obligations, the duties, the self-control and self-discipline of the earlier generations of WWII and the 1930s Great Depression. At one time, these self-controls were thought to be a big part of a sane society.
Now, many younger people are facing the dangers of having thrown off many self-controls and worshipping individual freedom and individual rights with no obligation to self-connection, self-control or self-discipline. Then people say, “I don’t like it! Protect me! Protect me!” Well, this is not the posture of a healthy adult, as you know.
What should we do? We must stop demanding protection from things which are minor dangers. Instead, we must focus on the larger dangers, loss of free speech, loss of vitality, loss of quality of life, all the things which make a free society.
