Chapter 10: The Challenges of Constant Becoming – The Einstellung Effect

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The emergence of Constant Becoming is inherently disorienting and fearful to most people.  The violence of the next 10 - 20 years (increases in mass shootings, hate crimes, political violence) is as inevitable as that of the past decade or more.  It will all likely continue to grow in the short term.  It is reasonable to expect all the resistance to the coming of the Modern will intensify as the Exponential Gap widens even more over the next few years.

But the Exponential Gap poses more problems than simply animalistic “I dominate you” violence.  It creates a myriad of novel problems that human beings have never faced before.  Is gender truly fluid?  Is the warming climate really caused by us?  Is social media actually causing mass depression?  Is it okay for major corporations to know everything I do on the internet?  
 
These are questions no human being has ever been able to ask in all of history because none of these questions were previously technologically possible.  They were ridiculous questions.  Few people would even hypothesize about them outside of insignificant cults and science fiction novels.  No more.  Every human being faces these problems and many more like them because of the enframing process of technology.  Enframing is forcing us to address issues that seem very strange to most of us.  

 
Be that as it may, a lot of the impact of Constant Becoming on hardbrains is self-inflicted by the brain's inability (disability) to adjust to the strangeness of Constant Becoming.  This is due to repetitive behavior over thousands of years resulting in specific neuron hardwiring that resulted in, among a great many other things, a massively widespread cognitive bias called “the Einstellung effect.”  This effect is basically the tendency by most people to use previous solutions to solve novel problems.  It is when "preexisting knowledge impedes one’s ability to reach an optimal solution." (source)

Keep in mind the “I dominate you” force in the world today.  Think of it as a tool most human beings use when disagreeing with other human beings.  It is a tool hardwired into our brains over tens of thousands of years.  It controls far too much of human behavior today.  The coming of the Modern has nothing to do with this trait, however.  "I dominate you" will exist within the Modern too.  Humanity is a very long way from making the “I dominate you” tool obsolete.  It is a matter of rewiring the brain to not prefer something it presently prefers.
 
The Einstellung effect is fundamentally obvious in attempts to apply medieval ways and means to answer any of the questions posed above.  These questions are new.  Human behavior is primarily shaped by whatever is technologically possible.  The Bible does not say anything about gender fluidity.  The Koran is silent about social media.  The Vedas never mention climate change.  These were not questions of those times and yet, due to the Einstellung effect, as a society we apply the answers all those sources supply to these new concerns.

People working under the Einstellung effect at this “spiritual” level tend to manifest a psychological disability.  We have paleo emotions and our cultures are draped with medieval institutions.  This represents a basic neurological environment in which our brain operates.  We are hardwired for magical thinking, for example.  Atheists and materialists must come to grips with this fact.  Their brains don't work like most of humanity's (yet).  We have to learn to accept that magical thinking is simply something a lot of people cannot avoid.  It is part of the way their brains work.

Likewise, part of the brain is hardwired specifically for religion.  Thousands of years of gathering for spiritual reasons has wired the need for ritual and the usefulness of a religious explanation for uncertainty, suffering and death.  Most people live at a psychological level (their toolbox) where religion is a natural expression of who they are.  It defaults all existence back to a higher power and thus offers relief from existential angst.  

Nevertheless, given the world of Constant Becoming, this hardwiring is similar to having a disability.  Most people are, in fact, dis-abled in terms of transcending their reliance on magical thinking.  They cannot handle with the consequences of being enframed.  We should not rage at them or joke about them.  They can Be no other way (without a lot of shadow work and rewiring which they see no reason to make the considerable effort about), just as humans enabled for the Modern can Be no other way.  The former are stilted, the latter are pioneers, yet subject to harsh judgment.

Another psychological disability most of us possess is a confirmation bias.  This bias effectively trivializes the importance of new empirical facts whenever these facts come into conflict with prior knowledge or belief.  Confirmation bias makes most people incapable of living a fact-based life.  They live in the world of their biases (many with magical thinking) to the extent their brain's psychological toolbox is capable.  This is an important fact everyone should accept if they want to understand why the world is the way it is and why it won't change faster.  

Technology can outrun our brains and that is a big problem, though a temporary one.  Enframing paradoxically ensures that Generations Z and Alpha will be humankind's most neuroplastic, fastest changing persons to ever live.  But they, too, will be subject to the Einstellung effect.  It is central to understand that the greater neuroplasticity provided by being enframed will allow more humans to overcome the prejudice they have for applying previous solutions. Most of all, that humans will allow their lived experiences to count for what they believe instead of being controlled by their paleo spiritual high and medieval modes of Being.  Given enough time, humans will learn.
 

Global warming, for example, will become a powerful teaching moment for humanity.  We will come to know that it is something we should have addressed before most of us knew about it.  It was happening for decades with only a few specialists realizing it.  When Carl Sagan testified before congress in 1985 what he was saying seemed strange and to have no relationship with who we were at the time and yet we were already causing the planet to warm.  This was not reported widely in the news at the time nor did anyone talk about it in the course of their lives.  There was zero public concern for global warming in 1985 including most environmentalists.  The idea seemed far-fetched.

Since then, we are having a pulse breakthrough change in mainstream consciousness.  It is by no means fully accepted.  There is considerable pushback.  There is also the fact that we absolutely cannot presently sustain our lifestyles without coal-fire electrical planets and gas engines.  We are not at the point to where we can let fossil fuels go.  (We need more nuclear power online to feed the coming wave of electric cars.)  

Biden recently looked like an idiot when he proclaimed that America was going to close all coal-fire plants.  Of course, in the long run this is probably true.  But we are still decades away from being able to make that happen.  We are not going to give up our consumption and convenience, global warming be damned.  I don't see us off coal globally for another 15 years anyway, probably longer.  But the impact of this lingering "old way" will become outrageous to my grandchildren.

And we will see all this.  In the decades ahead we will become a changed people because the warming will happen with sufficient impact at last.  It will be horrific event, an extinction event for much flora and fauna, though we will survive it as we do almost all things (including the last asteroid hit).  My grandchildren will learn from all of this even if we refuse to.  Global warming will teach us something about the Einstellung effect, too.

There are new questions no one even saw coming.  There will be more new questions ten years from now, then five years, then one year.  No one sees any of it coming.  Constant Becoming.  The faster change happens, the less relevant and more volatile the behavior caused by the Einstellung effect.  This article offers an interesting take on the cognitive bias as well as some hacks for working around it.  These hacks can be applied universally and serve a basic overview of how the flexbrain works.  More on that in a future chapter.

The ultimate challenge for Constant Becoming is the regressive disability of not being able to cope with the pace of change and all the novelty that change brings.  This goes beyond the Einstullung effect to an intentional refusal to transcend our paleo and medieval psychological toolboxes.  Instead, we become more entrenched in the past, which is the ultimate source of the coming violence and present social trauma.

Ken Wilber, believes it is pathological to not enable emergent human consciousness.  In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, he discusses the failure to transcend psychologically to subsequent stages of consciousness or awareness.  This is precisely where we find ourselves today.  Most people do not want to transcend to the psychological tools that Constant Becoming requires.  They double-down on their current toolbox.  I dominate you.  This creates a pathology.  Violence comes in place of transcendence.

The Einstellung effect is not part of Wilber's thought but it reveals the basic human tendency not to “transcend but include” as Wilber puts it.  Because we keep applying old ways to new problems we are not only disoriented and violent, our actions become less relevant the faster the future unfolds within Constant Becoming.  

“Instead of transcendence, repression; instead of differentiation, disassociation; instead of depth, disease.  Because of the very nature of evolution, that type of dissociation can occur at any and all stages of growth and development.” (page 104)

“Whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation is not integrated, a pathology results, and there are two fundamental ways to approach that pathology. […] the higher structure relaxes its grip on consciousness, regresses to a previous level where the failed integration first occurred, repairs the errors on that level by reliving it in a benign and healing context, and then integrates that level...” (page 105)  This is Wilber's “optimistic” insight.

“The other general approach is retro-Romantic […] whenever evolution produces a differentiation, and that differentiation happens to go into pathological disassociation, then this approach seeks to permanently turn pack the pages if emergent history to a time prior to the differentiation.” (page 105)  Wilber's “pessimistic” insight.

Wilber writing in 1995 precisely described the “crisis” E.O. Wilson saw coming, the problem Heidegger and many others foresaw (we are living in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock but not the way he envisioned it).  We have reached a point in America, Russia, China and other places around the world where a large segment of the population is not only trying to use old ways to solve new problems, they are trying to eradicate each novelty or simply deny the new problems because the old ways don't work.  The result, once again, is a rising tide of disorientation, frustration and violence.

Wilber did not fully address the consequences of tens of millions of people simply denying the present until Trump and a Post-Truth World in 2017.  We see widespread denialism about climate change and gender fluidity and, in the near future, human longevity [making death a human choice] and virtual reality.  If they deny all of this, especially within a democracy where they can now organize through social media and beat the liberals at their own political games, they can conserve a world without Constant Becoming.

But America by itself cannot stop Constant Becoming.  More consciously advanced people in, say, Canada and Europe and probably Japan and South Korea will accept all the things I just mentioned.  The climate will change our way of generating energy, gender fluidity will broaden the possibilities of human experience.  Perhaps people living 200 years will find greater wisdom because human life has been shortened for so long they didn't realize there is a “second wind” to life past 100 years in a body that is (due to technology) 30 years younger.  Or, perhaps, the accumulation of 12 decades of life instead of seven or eight will in itself lead to a greater sense of wisdom.  The increase in the accumulation of experiences when we feel “older” will impact society at large.  Virtual Reality and subsequent new networks of data exchange will offer a new frontier of wealth generation because it represents an enormous expanse of human consumption and convenience.  This is the Singularity transhumanists are looking for.

Nevertheless, the important point here is that, by its inherently disruptive nature, Constant Becoming is and will be rejected by every pre-capitalist tradition (stages “red” and “amber” in Wilber's spiral dynamics).  This rejection is and will occur over a vast segment of the population.  The problem of what happens when a level of transcendence is widely rejected by a given population is not sufficiently answered by Wilber.  

It is not unreasonable to assume that the fear and rage and capacity for violence that Trump tapped in to so effectively in 2016 and greatly expanded with his voter registration drives (2020) and concentration on controlling state elections (2022) will continue to be a growing factor in the future of America.  The crisis is not upon us.  Like enframing, the crisis has already happened.  We are already in it.  We call it dystopia but we are looking for it in the future.  We are mistaken.  Dystopia happened decades ago and now it is the karma of how things play out.

Wilber's “permanently turn back the pages of emergent history” is fine on the individual level.  It is part of the overall spiritual journey.  All major religions, for example, accept the difficulties of their respective paths to fruition. Setbacks are to be expected on the individual's path to God or nirvana or transpersonal transcendence or whatever.  And most people fail anyway, never really knowing themselves on a transformational basis.

If I fail on my spiritual path it generally does not harm your spiritual path.  But if an organized group of psychologically disabled people immersed in the Einstellung effect reject Constant Becoming, then it will impact other groups who wish to embrace the diversity and possibilities of the present.  We see this now with the culture wars.  

Transgenderism is at the forefront of these wars.  There are no “old ways” known to mainstream Americans to deal with the strangeness of people being the opposite of their birth gender, to people exploring a variety of previously “gendered” behaviors throughout their lifetime.  This is too open, demands too much acceptance, for the Einstelling effect crowd.

The angry mob of the pathologically disabled can do real violence to the world of Constant Becoming.  The woke mob has already traumatized the traditionalists.  It cuts both ways, pulse breakthrough and pushback.  It can lead to all manner of regressions and reboot American society back to the 1950's, as the Supreme Court potentially (though not completely – yet) did with abortion rights.  It allows the States to choose whether they want women's rights to be in the 1950's or the 21st century.

But, to bring this all the way back, you cannot stop Constant Becoming.  It is fundamentally in the nature of our brains being enframed by technology and the subsequent exponential gap.  That is why I see violence at least in the form of frustrated mass shootings continuing to grow more frequent in the coming decades.  Ultimately, however, most of Generations Z and Alpha will not find the old ways to be relevant to themselves.  They will prefer the strangeness of the Modern more than any humans before them.  Within the next 50 years the regressive population will dissipate and die out.  Political power (wherever democracy survives) will go to a new voting majority that is more accepting of novelty and possessing a radically dynamic awareness for change.

A young service tech visited my property yesterday.  He comes every two months.  He likes to talk.  He is a hard worker but a simple guy.  I told him that he had a pretty day to be out working because it was, in fact, a warm fall day.  He said he'd rather be deer hunting.  That led him to immediately bemoan the death of hunting and the resulting population explosion in local deer.  He had already killed a buck and six does and he told me he “hadn't put a dent in it.”  For some strange reason, he unburdened himself to me about how people felt that hunting was “immoral or whatever.”  He let it slip that those people make some hunters “feel bad” about hunting.  Anyway, there aren't as many hunters now as in previous generations because few of the younger generation (Z) likes to hunt.  He is prescient but not in the way he might think.  He is simply at ground zero watching the world change.  

As global warming is a teaching moment, so too we will learn the full consequences of unlimited consumerist growth.  We will learn to think more broadly than just for ourselves and our families and friends.  Constant Becoming teaches that all the world is in the mix.  The diversity of our humanity and our environment is our greatest strength.  Far from being the existential threat we fear, you being different from me makes us both stronger.  Overcoming our commitment to a changeless reality, and thereby accepting and understanding an ever-changing reality will lead humanity to unprecedented wealth and sophistication.  More on that in a future chapter.

Had he known about the Einstellung effect, Nietzsche would have prescribed against it.  He was not about old ways at all.  He professed that society should create new values.  He craved a transformation of perspective that would bring worth a completely revalued cultural force.  Those exhibiting such lives would be the Ubermensch - the “free spirits” and people “overcoming” themselves.  “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” (Z, I, 5)  Such is where we all find ourselves today.