We are living in a culture that favors productivity over human needs.
A child growing up needs connection to develop and grow up to be healthy and what we might call a well-rounded human being. They need attachment, authenticity, and a safe space to feel their feelings. They are dependent on the grown-ups taking care of them for that development. Little people cannot regulate their emotions. This ability to regulate is a biological function that develops over time. Children are dependent on the big people around them having that function developed.
When we then impose on the masses the idea that making money is worth more than taking care of your family, you will see men leaving their families to make money, which puts pressure on the mother to provide all the needs of that family that typically are met in the home, such as time and connection, preparing and sharing food, teaching how to get dressed, and teaching the little person how to navigate life. But since the necessities in life are now dependent on having money and not just us working to grow or make them, money becomes a priority.
Also, we lead by example. So the rich white colonizing men… Well, needless to say, money has become more important than people, and this influences how we treat each other. It affects how we treat our children. Gradually over the generations, our human needs have been met to a lesser and lesser degree, which in turn deteriorates our ability to connect more and more because connection has not been modeled for us.
In our world today, we see a lot of love and happy people; another thing we see is a more significant extent of the inability to connect on a deeper level and be with our own and other people’s emotions. This inability inhibits us when we are trying to rear our young because they need attunement and attachment. They must be safe to express themselves authentically in a safe space with safe boundaries. When we’re not allowing that because of the stresses of our way of life, they feel they have to change themselves to fit in for us to accept them. This way of life has gotten us quite far away from how we instinctively connect with our young and each other. As a result, we don’t grow up healthy. The biological functionality that helps us regulate is not well enough developed. We grow up in a way that is more and more dysregulated and disconnected.
This dysregulation and disconnect express itself in many ways. For example, many stress reactions are not properly regulated, and the places we often learn to turn to for relief are not always healthy. Voices say that our culture doesn’t take care of mental health issues, and everybody’s looking to the government to fix it. But the fact is this could all largely have been dealt with by good family connections. We could have followed our instincts to care for each other. But with this focus on people’s well-being being less important than making money, we have, as a species, gradually bred ourselves out of taking care of ourselves and each other. So, by giving in to this idea that money is where the real value lies, that money is the thing, we are moving away from essential human needs and suffering from it deeply.
Historically it’s easy to see why we have taken on such a massively unfavorable belief system. The governing forces have used shame, violence, legislation, and lethal force to instill in people a respect for authority and a distorted idea of what it takes to survive as well as possible. They have also modeled what it looks like to «win» in life. This fictional winning is an illusion, as the true way to win in life is connection, which only comes from truly, safely, and openly connecting. And I feel confident that no human being gives up access to genuine contact, but if we cannot, we will go for what we believe we can achieve.
Gabor Maté says: Humans need attachment and authenticity to thrive in life, and we will give up authenticity for attachment.
So, if I make you behave respectfully to me, that is a lesser form of attachment. But, since I cannot connect deeply and meaningfully, I’ll take it.
Nervous system dysregulation is a cornerstone of the issues caused by this imposed belief system because the nervous system connects to all the essential functions in the body. Dysregulation can, over time, cause mental health issues, chronic illness, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and our ability to connect. It affects relationships and how we raise our children. We can’t be good parents because it has literally been bled out of the populace.
Back to the topic at hand: why are we so selfish? Because our basic human needs have not been met, and we are still scrambling to have them met. We have not developed the ability to have a regulated nervous system; thus, our capacity to care for others is deeply affected. A chiefly blameless yet victim-rich state of affairs. We are no longer oppressed physically; we are just frustrated, scared, and aimless. We’re so dysregulated we don’t know where to go with it. So, the consequence of our culture is dysregulation. I firmly believe that’s why the world is in the state it is right now.
So, in conclusion, the reason we see so much selfishness in the world today is because so many of us suffer from a deficiency of connection and love.
The good news is that it is never too late. Our nervous system is still here, ready to go online if we let it.
But we can't let the story stop here, right? Get involved with nervous system regulation. Go to www.irene.lyon.com and get educated. And if you would like some support on your way, do not hesitate to let me know at kontoret@terapi-for-deg.com. Let's save the world one important human being at a time. That, my friend, includes you ❤️.