The Enclosure of The Commons & Our Minds: As Above, So Below
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… The whole technological environment is increasingly designed so as to enclose the human psyche not with hedgerows and fences, but with an array of data gathering tools and techniques so that the human psyche might be rendered more manageable and so that its value can be more readily extracted.
Today I wanted to share this piece written by L. M. Sacasas, creator of the newsletter The Convivial Society, where he explains the parallels between the movement to enclose the commons in England (which was then expropriated throughout the entire world) and the imposition of digital technologies on our perceptions in modernity.
The piece puts into better, more concise language some of what we’ve been saying here and on our podcast for years. Every time we’ve been interviewed for someone else’s podcast, we are invariably asked as the interview comes to a close, “What do we do?” and always, we say that in order for us to make the collective changes that will facilitate a greener, more beautiful world, we first need the eyes to see it, and to have the eyes to see it, we need to be able to clearly apprehend reality in a world that is devoted to obfuscating and distorting the truth of how the system functions. The only way to do that is to see the sovereignty that exists within each of our minds — the final frontier, the final hinterland that the system seeks to colonize and turn into a monoculture.
It is so simple yet so difficult to achieve, and often it is advice that is unpleasant to the ear for people who are desperate for linear, actionable solutions. We’ve been conditioned under the false precept of the scientific method — one which tends to view the world in an easily comprehendible vacuum rather than a vibrant, uncertain mosaic. There is no problem in the world that is so simple as x + y = xy — each problem that we face as a creature is unpredictable in its consequence and often, its origin. The worldview that suggests we follow quantitative procedures and linear solutioneering is the same worldview that entrenches us in an endless cycle of cleaning up the messes that the previous solution created. The worldview is based upon the idea that we are a basically rational creature, and I will not be the first to say that, no, we are not. The worldview is, as Sacasas explains it, “the modern drive to operationalize mathematics as a universal key to understanding and manipulating reality—first nature, then society.” It’s the worldview that believes that life here on Earth can be equated to a machine — predictable, controllable, and certain.
We do not live in that world, however. We live in a deeply uncertain, mysterious, and uncontrollable universe and we are mere mortals, born now with the task to stave off our extinction by our own hands.
We are subject to a tremendous panoply of unconscious psychic maladies that we do not fully understand, pulled by some invisible tether towards expansion that will invariably end in contraction. The pathologies within our epistemological framework may be the tip of the iceberg for all that we know, and therefore, it behooves us now more than ever — more than Plato or Socrates or Heraclitus — to really try to understand ourselves with the requisite humility of hindsight. We fortify the hinterlands of our psyches by understanding that we may be swayed by technology, mysterious collective forces, and our own ability to justify and rationalize every behavior we have.
I think that one of the very best ways to resist enclosure is through curiosity. Curiosity about ourselves, the world, and the intricacies of the human condition at once inoculates us against hubris, as well as giving meaning to our suffering, confusion, and the feelings of being unmoored that are so prevalent in modernity. If we can approach our own lives and our own minds with curiosity, we might find mysterious patterns that keep us stuck in programs that harm us, and likewise, as above so below, we can see the patterns and programs externally. We can start to see the water we swim in and explore beyond the surface.
This is the central premise of Daniel Quinn’s triumphant works: in order to resist Mother Culture/enclosure/the Machine, we must first be able to see that it is something to be resisted.
When I wrote about this initially, I wrote about the way this enclosure is expressed in old dystopian novels — how the freedom they attain is only through their own minds. I wrote:
“As in these dystopian novels, in a world that has been wholly conquered, commodified, and colonized, the most important hinterlands to reclaim are within our minds. If freedom is the freedom to know that 2+2=4, that is the freedom we must exercise. Havel writes that ‘people are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies’ and similar to Huxley’s foreword, notes that this manipulation comes from ‘the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertise, commerce, consumer culture’ and a ‘flood’ of information. This, of course, is all in the service of our enslavement to the Machine world — the world of industry, technological acceleration and expansion, and an increasing divorce from nature, which is actually just reality.”
I write that this process is not inevitable — that our “domestication” to a Machine world is a process that we take part in, and can consciously reject. It is not inevitable that we adopt The Quantitative Cosmology. It is not inevitable that we misunderstand that the world is a Machine which is controllable by man.
In his piece, Sacasas explains how the “human psyche that is being enclosed, a process often rationalized along similar lines: the human psyche, unruly and inefficient, is in need of better management, and it is a source of potential value that must be cultivated and extracted.” He also explains that “we are abetting the enclosure of our psyche. And it is not only that our gaze is captured, it is that in that very process our perception is mediated, our consciousness commandeered, and all of this in such a way that empowers political and economic structures of control and extraction.” This is a process through which we take part, however unconsciously, however normal we may endeavor to make it.
In order to imagine alternative futures, we must resist this unconscious process by making it conscious. We must train our eyes to see the bombardment of deceptions and misdirections that permeate the water we swim in. As Sacasas explains, “the most important task before us is to resist the enclosure of the human psyche, because even our capacity to imagine an alternative way being in the world, to say nothing of enacting such a vision, depends on it.”
I recommend reading his piece in full, and I thank him for his analysis.
Written by Maren Morgan
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