“We are obliged to change and rethink the whole civilization,” says Boris Cyrulnik, the eminent neuropsychiatrist known for his work on resilience and trauma.
Our culture has lost the compass, we navigate by sight, jostled by events […] We must take a new direction because we have just understood that man is not above nature, he is in nature. Physically, psychologically and spiritually we are much more sculpted than we think by our natural space.
He focuses on healing the soul in his latest book, Souls and Seasons, and marks “psychological ecology” as the crucial component of the remedy :
In the quest for well-being and happiness, for a long time, our culture made us believe that we were above nature and that man should dominate nature. It is in the sacred texts of all religions: man must dominate animals, must dominate women, children and weak men. We have composed ourselves and our model of development for millennia with this representation in mind…Since the day we came into the world, we have perfected two characteristics of the human condition: the tool (technology) and the word (stories, philosophy).
He notes that civilization has gone too far and we consume too much. He proclaims that consumption has created the virus.
We are moving too much and much faster than before. It was the planes that carried the virus. Before, it was the boats. Before the boats, it was the camels, even if it went less quickly. Technically, the modern camel is the airplane. We have gone way too far. We (our cultural model as it has developed) made the virus and we transported it.
We are victims of our victories.
We have come so far that we have forgotten we were just a simple piece of nature, that we depended on nature and that, if we damaged nature, we would be damaged with it. We got caught in “A race for happiness” which harms our environment. This race was already making us very unhappy and, above all, it led us to the current disaster. Now we realize that we cannot crush others with impunity. We must respect the whole so that, we, ourselves are happy in this whole. Otherwise living in an earthly paradise is not necessarily a guarantee of happiness.
What makes us happy, as humans, is well-being, it is triumph over misfortune. This is why young people impose hardships on themselves They leave, work in NGOs, they go to the mountains… And they are right because, when they come back, they have gained their self-esteem, they are confident, they understand that others are unhappy. They are more relational, they develop their empathy, respect for others, and develop the art of living together.
But when we seek happiness at all costs, we make ourselves unhappy, because this process often involves consumption at all costs. This pursuit of happiness cannot give meaning to life. Domination, which was once an adaptation for survival, today only produces unhappiness.
A Shepherd’s Star, however, points us in the new direction, towards the unity of the Earth and to a world which is alive.
Duygu Bruce
The excerpt is taken from an interview made with Boris Cyrulnik on France Inter on 3 March, 2021.
