The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - 7 Shades of Jekyll and Hyde | Frankly #14

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

Its nigh Halloween. Monsters (in costume) and revelry. As humans - we each possess a rational, caring 'Dr. Jekyll' and an atavistic, emotional, reactive 'Mr. Hyde'. This brief (15 minute) reflection shows 7 areas of our life where Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde interact and suggests ways for a stable (and more sustainable) integration might occur. For Show Notes, Transcript, and more visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/14-7-shades-of-jekyll-and-hyde To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU8-SOzUcOs

Hello, winter is coming. That will be the subject of a future, frankly. The reason I say it now is because I have a hat on because it's freaking 33 degrees out here in northern Wisconsin. Actually, Halloween is coming in three days. Halloween was one of my favorite holidays as a young human because it gave us freedom to express ourselves and novelty of seeing things. people and costumes that we couldn't be in real life and because of the candy. You know, in this world of energy surplus, we look at our holidays, which is basically novelty and gifts and candy. And I wonder sometime in the future if our holidays will be

tethered to natural solstices and events. Again, that's a topic for another day. What I want to talk today about is the Jekyll and Hyde nature. of our daily lives, as individual humans, as a culture, and as a global species. So Robert Lewis Stevenson wrote a book about Jekyll and Hyde. It's been popularized in movies and other themes. And Dr. Jekyll was the impassionate observer,

the kind human, the scientist, the planner, the observer. And Mr. Hyde was the atavistic, emotionally response, bad behavior, destructive character in the book. So I came up with seven little categories to represent this in our daily lives. The first one is kind of personal. I love animals. I love wild animals, have my entire life, and I love domesticated animals. I have dogs and cats and horses and chickens. And I have a relationship with my chickens. They're my friends, especially Henrietta and the white one, which I haven't named, follows me around. I have relationships with these dinosaurs that survived. That is my jekyll. I feel empathy for these creatures.

However, I also, when Mr. Hyde shows up, I love chicken sandwiches. So I care about my chickens, but I eat someone else's chicken. And yes, I've given a pork long ago and I eat beef. It was raised in a spa. But I still eat chicken and fish. And given my concern for the natural world, this is a jekyll and hide thing. Another aspect, which also applies to me, Nate, but I think to many other people is the Jekyll thinks about the future

and makes plans to be an environmentalist and to lose weight. and to eat healthy and to read more books. And then tomorrow becomes today. And Mr. Hyde shows up and finds junk food and pornography and fantasy football and lottery tickets and Netflix and chill and all sorts of supernormal stimuli that are available in this fossil energy bonanza technology culture. and Mr. Hyde is pretty strong. Another aspect is social status and comparing ourselves to others.

Dr. Jekyll looks at our situation and recognizes that we are one of the richest generations in history. We have the complete total catalog of knowledge amassed by humans available for free on the internet. We can fly anywhere in the world for a week's salary or less. We have massive riches that we do take for granted because ultimately what drives us from a biological sense is we compare ourselves to others. So Mr. Hyde on a relative basis, despite being absolutely wealthy, focuses and obsesses on comparing ourselves to the Joneses or the Kardashians.

And it seems like as rich as we are, we don't have enough. So Mr. Hyde is climbing this perpetual treadmill, keeping up with the cultural metrics of success, which, by the way, are very energy and material intensive. Another category is recognizing the environment and climate change and CO2 and carbon and caring about, the human impact on nature, especially climate change, from a Dr. Jekyll standpoint. Mr. Hyde, however, will simultaneously demonstrate and picket and complain that gasoline prices are too high, or that we have too many weeds and we need more pesticides, or any number of things that Mr. Hyde believes will give him or her more convenience and comfort in the near term.

Moving on to a higher cultural lens, many people want to do work, want to spend their life energy, working on something of meaning, of import, of value to the future, regenerative agriculture, building community, knowledge, teaching, education, helping young people prepare for a better world. But Mr. Hyde wants to pay the bills, wants to get some vacation, wants to enjoy his or her weekends, Mr. Hyde in our culture has to have one of billions of bullshit jobs that may have nothing to do with one's ethos or caring about the future, because most of our work is done by fossil hydrocarbons, and the five billion or so real jobs are what society and this momentum of the superorganism has created. So the jobs that Dr. Jekyll would

like to do with his or her life are very disconnected with the jobs that Mr. Hyde has to do, given our cultural makeup. Moving up to the country level, the national level, I'm a citizen of the United States. The United States has been the world's benefactor, the world's policemen. We've had culture and innovation and massive global aspiration looking at terms of trying to emulate the United States and what we export, which are dreams and services and arts and science and invention. At the same time, we are responsible for a lot of violence and war and trickiness in other countries. Current example is NATO, led by the U.S. and the U.K., are waging war against Russia in the country

of Ukraine. So Jekyll is the good things that our nation, the United States, has created, but hide is the nastiness underneath. We go to war in Iraq and invent weapons of mass destruction because, well, Iraq has oil. So maybe it's that I've gotten older or maybe that the tea leaves have gotten clearer, but I am both proud to be an American and sometimes I'm ashamed to be an American. because of what I witness. At an even higher scale, the seventh shade of Jekyll and Hyde is being human. There are 8 billion humans alive today. Based on the number of people and the amount of our goods and services per human,

we have a thousand times the impact that our forebears did just 500 years ago. and look at what's happening to other species, to the oceans, to the climate, to plastic pollution, all these things, it kind of makes us feel as if all the accomplishments and the progress and the beauty and the art and the science that the human race has contributed during the past 500 years, the Mr. Hyde side of that, the dark underbelly, is our impact on the human. the natural world. And I am a human. So this Jekyll and Hyde dynamic applies at multiple scales. So where do we go with this? So Robert Lewis Stevenson at the end of the book, of course, as many of you know, it turns out that Jekyll and Hyde were the same person. They were two aspects

of a personality within the same human being. And this is true of us as well. Modern neuroscience explains some of this dynamic. There is a left brain versus right brain dynamic. If you look at studying behavioral response with our neocortex versus our limbic system, the neocortex can imagine and plan for the future, but the limbic system, our mammalian brain, cannot feel or visualize the future. We make emotional responses in the short term. So what does this mean? Let me revisit these seven scales. On the first scale, the chickens, what do we do? Well, we ultimately need to merge the jekyll and the hide in each of us. As far as the chicken example, we have to understand the system science and find a balance between

our wants and our ethic between your jekyll and your hide. And no one is perfect. And if we try to be perfect with our behaviors. We're going to end up having a hostile takeover by Mr. Hyde, much like Mr. Hyde kind of did a hostile takeover of our species around 10,000 years ago. The second thing about dopamine and our short-term time focus, fossil surplus and the result in technology has disconnected our work and our motivation from our reward. Neuroscientists like Andrew Huberman have suggested things like dopamine fasting or retethering our motivation with the work that leads to reward. And that's something that each of us has to strengthen, like do bicep curls and leg presses for Dr. Jekyll. Because otherwise, Mr. Hyde is going to increasingly be pulled in to the supernormal stimuli that is offered by our culture.

Back to the status, we will always compare ourselves to others. It is part of our biological heritage. But maybe instead of comparing yourself to your neighbor or your Facebook followers or your high school friends, try comparing yourself in your mind to someone living 500 years ago or someone living a few hundred years in the future. And if you feel that, if you feel the absolute wealth that we experience today, it might change your behaviors and kind of narrow the cap between Jekyll and Hyde. On the climate front, there are no easy answers. Again, we have to learn the system science.

Learning the system synthesis of how the human predicament fits together sets the table where Jekyll and Hyde can meet and have a conversation. There's no other way around it because just focusing on a single issue and then living the rest of our lives as if that only issue is the only thing that mattered, isn't going to be productive. As far as the jobs thing, unfortunately our culture has created not enough jobs where we can work on sustainable and desirable futures full time and make a living. So on this one, for many people listening, especially the young people watching or listening

to this, instead of worrying about the job, maybe focus on reducing your own energy and monetary needs, which would narrow the gap between Hyde and Jekyll and the, and and give you much more flexibility into the future. But ultimately, we're going to need a culture change to have a lot more of our vocations aligned with a more sustainable future. As far as on the national level, former President George Bush once famously said or infamously said, the American way of life is non-negotiable. As we're heading into a biophysically smaller pie globally, I think we're going to have to maybe

negotiate a little bit. Otherwise, we're going to result in a lot of violence and bloodshed. So a little bit of negotiation on national aspirations and material throughput expectations of the future is probably in order. And then lastly, of the 300,000 years of our species history, 25% of the members of the species homo sapiens have lived in the last. 500 years. So what is happening to climate, to oceans, to other species, to the biosphere is not our fault. But we are now, especially those listening to this and watching this, are part of the conversation. We have arrived at nothing short of a new social evolution opportunity and imperative for our species. So just like we learned that CO2 is acting as in effect a third.

thermal blanket on our planet, and this is due to our energy burning, and that energy underpins everything in our modern economy. We've also learned that human wants and needs dreams and behaviors and the things that we do and that we need underpin all human futures. So Jekyll and Hyde are us and the merger of those two parts of our phenotype is really important. to understand. A great simplification is on the horizon. Sooner or later, I suspect sooner. Who do you want to go as in a post-growth world? What sort of costume will you wear? Who do you want to be? I think this is something worth thinking about. That's all for this week. next week is an election so I have to think about what I'm going to say there you might guess maybe

not have a good weekend and happy Halloween