One of the tropes that’s been trod to death by pundits and preachers in recent years is the idea of “resilience.” The meaning of the word falls somewhere between annoying adaptiveness and cloying optimism, which means that resilience refers to nothing substantive at all.

AI, which is driving hackneyed thinking and writing like nothing ever before, provides an example of how the idea of resilience is “nonsense on stilts”: “The ‘polycrisis’ concept highlights the need for spiritual and psychological resilience.”

Resilience used to be a very useful word. It once referred to the ability to bounce back from adversity. In its bastardized usage however, resilience has come to mean personal adaptiveness without regard to socio-political reality.

As the saying goes, “It’s no measure of health to be well adapted to a profoundly sick society.” Given the hyper-personal application of the idea of resilience, the word has become a cliché. And the drumbeat of resilience has promoted adaptation at the expense of what’s more deeply and urgently necessary -- a revolution.

Isn’t encouraging “the psychological quality that allows people to be knocked down by the adversities of life and come back at least as strong as before” incontrovertible?

Yes, though isn’t a matter of “the adversities of life,” but the intensifying agonies and angst of a globalized culture, which is completely overwhelming people. Resilience, like resistance, is pointless in the face of the polycrisis.

There’s a fine line between questioning whether the present age is hopeless and quitting on humanity. The momentum of man’s ecological and socio-political destructiveness may be too great to change course at this juncture. But if even a few human beings awaken the intelligence of insight, humanity could prevail in the future.

And even if man is doomed, quitting on life is not an option, because to quit on life is to become one of the countless walking dead. (There’s a reason that the long-running cable series by that name, or movies like “World War Z” are so popular.)

The fashionable idea of resilience is inextricably linked with two other false ideas – choice and agency. Consider this sentence for example, in an article in which the writer argues against the inevitability of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), “which would amount to creating a new species.” (That too is a dubious claim, since however far AI advances, keeping it in its place is necessary now, equivalent to keeping thought in its place, an insight virtually no one else proposing.)

“Technology is the product of deliberate human choices, motivated by myriad powerful forces. We have the agency to shape those forces, and history shows that we’ve done it before.”

“Agency” means, “having the power to act independently and make your own choices, free from external control.” Setting aside the tautology, there is no such thing as internal control, and the more we cling to that illusion, the more external forces control us.

Agency is just another word for free will, which doesn’t exist, because the action of choice through will is never free, but always conditioned (through socialization) within the individual.

Socrates tried to point this out 2500 years ago. He rightly said that when we’re clear, we don’t choose; we act. But the western mind divided choosing and acting, and privileged the illusorily independent self. “Agency” is just the latest misbegotten product of this long-running mistake and conditioning.

Indigenous people didn’t have a concept of agency because the individual was correctly viewed as embedded within the group, not some separate entity acting independently of the group. (“Group agency” is an oxymoron because the separate individual remains its cornerstone.)

Indigeneity has become “a thing,” which means that the same western civilization that destroyed innumerable indigenous cultures, and is now in its death throes, is colonizing indigenous traditions for meaning and profit.

A couple of years ago talked with a white, wannabe Native American in Michigan who started a retreat center based on indigenous rituals. His center on Lake Michigan has sucked in enough retreatants to make his business profitable.

Without a trace of self-awareness, this charlatan told of how current native peoples would sometimes tie a white wannabe Indian to a tree and leave him for hours.

To go from the slime to the ridiculous, a writer down under proclaims that “the global celebration of First Nations artists was a powerful way of showing that modern Australia had thrown off its colonial legacy, had grown into a truly mature and reconciled nation and come to terms with the ancient human heritage that makes it truly unique.” Clearly Americans aren’t the only people fond of believing their own bullshit.

In short, whether you’re Shoshone or white baloney, if you put your identity as x, y or z ahead of our basic, undifferentiated humanness, you’re contributing to the fragmentation of the Earth and the destruction of Humanity.

The resilience of the self is the death of the spirit. Resilience, to the extent that it implies adaptiveness, precludes psychological revolution.

Martin LeFevre

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