I just noticed a note a made myself.
The sense of the self is a fragile process. I imagine it like a crystal forming in a liquid, slowly. From formlessness, form. Even the infant which comes from the mating of a sperm and an egg–a kamikaze explosion from which bursts new life–is likely fractal in its early stages, and always fractal at some scale. We can all of us likely find fractals in our bodies even now.
Ah, here you go: http://www.fractal.org/Life-Science-Technology/Publications/Fractals-and-Human-Biology.pdf
I had not realized it, but I saw it in my mind.
Here is my point: you cannot grow a stable sense of self in a chaotic, constantly changing environment. In the most obvious, gross physical sense this would be parents throwing things at each other, and one or the other moving in and moving out constantly; or moving around continually as a child; or having daily different care-givers with widely varying capacities for attunement. Etc.
But more subtly, I think media colors us too. I see parents give their babies phones and my gut sense has always been that child is going to grow up missing something. And I think they do.
There is something about the continual noise in most American homes, this constant background hum, that prevents full crystallization, or in any event makes it less complete, less orderly, and less beautiful.
We have so much. We have built so much. All the physical ingredients are already made for building a utopia on Earth. But we have failed to learn many needed lessons.
Take Critical Race Theory. It is an atavistic holdout from the thought patterns of a CENTURY ago. And if you want to look at it as primarily Tribalism, writ large, it is tens of thousands of years old. Older: as old as human social systems themselves, and for that matter, even chimpanzees have their version of exclusionary practices, even if they are not rationalizing it with abstract and emotionally cold and callous words.
Think about the divisions and hate being taught through CRT and all the ideas which come with it, and compare that to the GOOD that would be done teaching kids about trauma, both complex and simple, and teaching them both how to heal it–or at least ameliorate it–and optimally to prevent it in the first place.
What stands in the way? Stupidity, pride and greed, themselves the results of highly flawed personality formation. Defective crystals, most of which KNOW they are defective and who are all the more abusive for it.