The Culture of Crisis - How Chaos Becomes the Norm

Yesterday, I spent a bit of time reading an older archived blog post from a writer I follow.  This particular post was literally written more than 20 years ago (more of an essay than a blog post really) and as I re-read it, I realized something I hadn't noticed before:  this writer used the word "crisis" to describe Western culture more than 30 times in the body of their text. 

And then I watched a bit of news.   As in - on the television.   And again I marveled at the number of times I heard the word "crisis" to describe something going on in the world.  I heard these words:  fuel crisis, drought crisis, economic crisis, healthcare crisis, education crisis, and the list goes on. I could literally use almost any other word and add crisis to it, and I'm sure it would fit into the Western narrative. 

But is everything really a crisis?   Let's examine the healthcare crisis in the US, for example.   It seems that there are a great number of rural areas that are experiencing a closure of hospitals and/or healthcare facilities, leaving those areas without access to the healthcare industry.   There was some speculation during the heart of the pandemic that this might even have been exacerbated by vaccine mandates.  And even before COVID, there were pockets of disaster in other areas as well - like China.  Now on the surface, these do appear to be alarming conclusions, and I will readily admit that if you are dependent upon the industrialized healthcare system to keep you alive, then these situations likely seem most frightening to you. 

And yet.   Yet.  

Humans have existed - and arguably even thrived - long before the advent of the modern healthcare industry.  It may even be provable that hunter-gatherer cultures live equally as long as those of us living in the agro-industrial dependent culture do, with very limited access to modernized healthcare industries.     So why, then, is access to the modern industrial healthcare machine considered a crisis?  

It has to do with our nomenclature, and our acceptance of chaos as a way of life. 

When all the world is in turmoil, people are driven toward ends that are fueled in desperation.  When chaos becomes the norm, we all listen to voices that sound like reason:  blame this individual or that system, topple them, and then we have victory.  And to us, in our very linear way of thinking, this seems like the perfect solution.  If we can just fix the next problem, whether by hook or by crook, then we will have avoided (or eradicated) one more crisis.  

And yet we never see the ends to these crises, do we?    Did anyone ever write the article (or give the news bulletin) that said "Pandemic is over; life returns to normal?"  No, of course not. Instead, what we heard was "the new normal."  In other words, chaos is the new regime. Accept it, or be ostracized. Live in it, or die. 

Our chaos, then, is born from our inability to understand the limitations of our own way of thinking.  We cannot see that our "all or nothing" approach to everything from healthcare to education to environmentalism is creating a world where chaos becomes the norm.  We cannot see that a re-evaluation of core values is needed. In our confused state, we reach for the first person/policy/group/industry that can be blamed for a crisis, and we proceed with our crucifixion.   We want someone to pay, dammit!  Someone must pay for the lack we experience, and once they do, we'll have had our say and feel better about things.  Even though we likely haven't solved anything at all. 

As humans, we're still in our infancy, really. We're just at that stage where we're beginning to see that these ways - which we think new and progressive - aren't actually working.  But we don't know what to replace them with, so we can't say that out loud.  We blame external sources/groups/people/industries/concepts, instead.   

But as I mentioned before, all of this points us to one inevitable conclusion.  One point, wherein we might find our rhythms again. One place - a sanctuary of sorts - where we can shed our crisis mindsets and shift our paradigm.  

It's the way of native medicine.  And it calls us to simpler living, more interaction with the Earth, lesser time on technology, and lesser time spent in the pursuit of meaningless bullshit. 

Only time will tell the story of whether or not we can return to our roots.