Train of Thought, Part 3: A Society in Fight or Flight
Abundance is the state of there being enough, and it’s at least possible to imagine a world (or maybe just a community, or a group of friends) in which that is the dominant paradigm. And, while there are people out there holding that vision and working to make it so on a material level, it would be the understatement of the year to say that it is an uphill battle. The ideals of equality (everyone receives the same, like rights) and equity (everyone receives what they need, like education or medicine or support) get couched by the bosses of the system as “socialist” and “extremist” as if caring about the people around us is the most disgusting, offensive, and outrageous thing we could possibly do. How dare I want everyone to be fed, educated, cared for, and safe from violence, cruel rhetoric, and bigoted policy! I must be deluded if I believe that everyone deserves to have equal rights, freedom of personal choice, and corporeal sovereignty. What’s wrong with me?! I must be one of those “left-wing extremists.”
While I think that’s a lazy definition that reflects a lack of critical thinking and curiosity about who I might actually be as a person, we do live in a world of labels. If believing in equity, equality, integrity, compassion, the common good, and saving the planet through stewardship of Nature (the ultimate common good) makes me “radical,” so be it. I’ll wear that label and not lose sleep over it. The problem, however, is not in labeling itself, but that it is limiting. No person is just one thing; what people of all ideological viewpoints do is slap a label on someone – often from a place of emotional trigger or ideological parroting – and then that person can never be anything else. In this way, we put people in a box from which it is really hard to ever escape. In our paradigm of either/or, there is little room for nuance, especially when there is ideology and emotion involved.
Making up my mind about something that taps into my emotions is easy, which is why appealing to people’s feelings works so much better than appealing to logic. Almost everyone can make an emotional decision; when I’m in an emotionally heightened state (also known as sympathetic nervous system activation, or fight/flight/freeze), things get very either/or. Things are AMAZING, or TERRIBLE; that person is LITERALLY MY BEST FRIEND or THE ACTUAL ANTICHRIST. As a society, we spend a lot of time in sympathetic activation. The part of the human brain that deals with emotion is on a seesaw opposite the part that operates with logic and reason; when one is high, the other is low. Today, the business of driving people’s decisions by appealing to their emotional triggers is booming, and it makes sense; base emotional appeal is low-hanging fruit, and we like nothing better than getting paid a lot for the minimal amount of effort. If we can get ahead of everyone else while doing it, even better – Capitalism, baby.
Emotions and Control
Want to connect with someone, for a moment or a lifetime? It starts with finding emotional common ground. On the other side of that coin, do you want to manipulate someone? Find out what they feel strongly about and tap into it. Not incidentally at all, this is one reason we’re in the state we’re in politically – while the Democratic Party tries to appeal to people’s logic, reason, and so-called better sensibilities, the Republican Party understands the power of negative emotional triggers and how to manipulate them. There is little nuance in those base, powerful emotional states, and the amount of time we spend emotionally triggered leads directly to a need for things to be black and white, totally good or horribly bad. This is why we demonize anything and everything that makes us feel uncomfortable or that we don’t understand.
The simplicity of a black and white viewpoint also helps us feel less confused and more decisive, which we then associate with the decision we’ve made – a vote, for example – leading us to make more decisions from that often narrow ideological viewpoint. And of course, many of the strongest emotional appeals are ones that tap into our insecurity; this is one reason that social media is so insidious and powerful. Our focus on the negative – immigrants are taking our jobs (untrue), reproductive healthcare is murder (it’s really not), we need more guns to keep kids safe (seriously?) – has convinced us to hold narrow definitions of the righteous and given us vast numbers of ways to demonize, denigrate, and disempower.
We have weaponized our either/or perspective, to the detriment of many. Essentially, we are in a society-level state of fight/flight/freeze, where each thing is either a catastrophe or, occasionally, the fix for everything. We lose our ability to listen, collaborate, coexist, compromise, and find levity. Without the ability to shift from heightened emotion to calm, we are unable to access the nuance in which pretty much everything exists; this works fine for a very few, but especially for people who aren’t receiving the rights, education, support, and basic needs (food, water, shelter, medicine) that we all deserve, our lack of access to nuance is literally killing us.
Change in a Corner of the System
On the other side of the seesaw, the logic brain takes time to pull its weight. While the limbic system (emotion, memory, stress response) is busy developing quickly from birth, the prefrontal cortex (critical thinking, emotional regulation, logic) is on the slow train. This doesn’t mean that younger people aren’t capable of making good choices; it does mean that emotion is in the driver’s seat until the mid-20’s. One thing that helps us feel, move through, and process those base emotional responses is the development of executive functioning, which lives in the forebrain and which we learn through experience, trial, error, and education – hence the current dismantling of our educational system. A thinking populace might not just vote their emotional trigger of the moment; access to the nuanced grey area of a given issue helps us get out of the ideological echo chamber.
If and when a person can learn to move through the emotional response, their logical brain has a chance to work. When we can access our emotions and seek to understand them, we understand ourselves better; this might lead us to wonder if the people we’ve formed labels for might be more than just that one thing. This curiosity about our fellow humans acts to counter our snap judgments; it might also help us connect with each other underneath what we’re told to believe about people with whom we are not completely ideologically aligned. This is a nuanced way for a system to begin to transform away from scarcity and towards abundance.
Of course, some people are courageously and tenaciously trying to force the issue on that change, because that’s their calling and mission. For others of us, who are not the type of warriors that fight the huge battles under the bright lights, there is still a way for us to participate effectively. It’s called working on the grassroots level; I like that word, because it reminds me of the small things that Nature does out of our direct view to sustain and expand her own growth and drive her own evolution. When it comes to shifting from scarcity to abundance, while the big warriors work on the big stuff, each of us can work on those smallest of levels, usually out of sight of everyone but ourselves. This seemingly small mission might be the most effective in bringing about change. The process of shifting to conditions of abundance starts with each of us learning to say, “I am enough,” learning to believe it, and then acting – living – from that place. The most grassroots approach you can take is work on yourself.
That can be hard to do in 2025, surrounded by toxic rhetoric and bigoted ideology, so much cruelty and callousness, such pervasive cynicism and injustice. And yet, no one has to – or can – change it all at once. If I just choose to make an honest study of my own self, I am actively participating in the change we so desperately need. I am part of the system, and by creating change in a small corner of the system, I change the system in a subtle (nuanced!) way. I have to get curious about myself: What are my beliefs and values and where did they come from? Do my behaviors, choices, mindset, and habits align with the type of person I believe I am and the type of person I want to be? Where am I succeeding or coming up short, not by the standards of our headline and highlight culture but by the standards of my intuitive sense of myself, my own integrity, and my moral center? What is most intrinsically meaningful to me under all the noise? Who am I without the restrictive, lazy, reductive labels that people use to describe me?
Uncompromising Self-Responsibility
These are not easy questions to ask or answer, because they invite us to reflect honestly and practice uncompromising self-responsibility. I can look inward all I want, but if I’m stuck in my own cycle of self-delusion (delusions of grandeur, or the opposite), I’m just living in my own silo. It’s not about beating myself up, either; I can be both truthful and compassionate. This is rare on a macro level in 2025, and is culturally unfamiliar for many of us, especially in the United States. Deep truth is absolutely not encouraged by the loudest voices in the room, and so we have to get underneath the noise.
When choosing self-examination, we have to be careful to avoid the trap of confirmation bias. This is the practice of only looking for evidence of what we already believe – and make no mistake, in today’s information-saturated, internet-accessible world, it’s easy to find validation for the righteousness of almost any viewpoint. Beliefs, though, come from the mind, and the great thing about having a mind is that you can change it. Once you begin to understand your beliefs – how you decided on them, where they come from, how they shape your identity – you can decide whether they serve you, not by someone else’s standards but based on what’s really true for you.
Human health and well-being are at an all-time low and getting worse, driven by choices made from a place of dominance-seeking, comparison, scarcity, and desperation. If you don’t feel like you can change that in the world because that’s just too big a task, I’m with you. Instead, what if you just try to change it within yourself and see what happens? At the very least, you will find a little more knowledge, purpose, calm, and the ability to tune out the noise when you need to. You might even discover depths and dimensions to yourself that were obscured by the labels put on you by others – and yourself. Some parts of your identity will be reinforced, others discarded, still others transformed into something more authentic to your true self. Some of your beliefs will change, which is both beautiful and a challenge in and of itself; even the ones that don’t will now be coming from a reinforced place of deeper reflection, critical analysis, and nuanced understanding.
Maybe you can do this on your own; maybe you need help (I know I do). If you are the type of person who is used to doing things yourself, whether as a point of pride or necessity, even the act of asking for help begins the shift, and allows you to step out of the closed loop of your own thoughts and adopted ideology. If you do that, and I do that, and a few other people do that, we are collectively creating a small corner of change; that is how systems begin to shift. Eventually, some people will notice your increased calm, better health, and deeper self-knowledge, and wonder. Maybe some of them will be curious enough to ask, “what are you doing with yourself?”
This is the “grassroots” method for creating a paradigm shift, and it can start with anyone. Why not me? Why not you?