DisConnected

All of Steve Taylor’s books are fascinating, beautifully written and deal with complex themes which he has the great gift to explain very clearly. His new book, DisConnected: the roots of human cruelty and how Connection can heal the world, is another tour de force and is designed to make sense of another kind of world, this time our political one. It shows why world politics are as crazy and violent as they are, why so many psychopathic tyrants are attracted into leadership positions, why they get elected, and further, what we might do in the future to reverse this trend.

Steve’s core thesis is to remind us that being connected to ourselves and each other and nature is innate to us. He points out that in the days when humans were hunter-gatherers, we lived in harmony with ourselves, the planet and our fellow human beings. Above all, we respected women, and there was no warfare. Our tragedy is that many of us have ‘fallen’ out of that state; we have learned to become disconnected, and in so doing, we have lost our capacity to be empathic and altruistic which Steve believes is natural to all of us. Our egos have evolved unhealthily, so that we are drawn into ways of living that separate us from our true nature and many of us behave cruelly and violently. The author points out that there is a continuum in the degree of our disconnection; we can either be lightly or heavily disconnected.

In Steve’s terminology, the ‘hyper-disconnected’ person is totally walled off from himself and others. There is no compassion, joy, or goodness in their lives. In order to compensate for feeling empty and inferior, such people have tended to compensate by becoming grandiose. They crave wealth, fame, power and status. The tragedy is that many of these hyper-disconnected people are not only attracted to crime, the corporate world (the bullying Robert Maxwell who stole millions from his employees’ pension funds) but also to the world of politics. All these professions potentially offer one the opportunity to become rich, powerful and famous.

The Polish psychologist Lobaczewski invented the word Pathocracy to describe the regimes created by these hyper-disconnected, pathological world leaders. Steve refers to men like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Mussolini and Putin as ‘pathocrats’. We learn that the fascism characterising all their regimes is not a coherent philosophy, and that these hyper-disconnected people use their leadership positions not to benefit their countries (they couldn’t care less about their people) but rather to satisfy their need for adulation as well as offer them a space to act out their malevolent, warlike, anti-empathic, xenophobic intentions. We learn that in Pathocracies, wars break out - most recently, Putin invading Ukraine – not because the peoples of those countries want them, but because hyper-disconnected leaders initiate them to enhance their personal prestige.

All these tyrants have much in common. They all endured miserable and tortured childhoods which planted the seeds of disconnection by giving them a deep inferiority complex, an inability to experience love or intimacy and a predisposition to prefer death over life. For example, when Hitler realised he was losing the war, he gave orders for his whole country to be destroyed! The themes are familiar: malevolence, lying, oppressing anyone opposing them, and needing someone or some country or race to hate, be it Jews, Muslims, immigrants, gay or trans people.

Pathocracy is very ancient. Steve sees colonialism as a totally psychopathic activity where nations were conquered for their wealth, their peoples killed or enslaved. He reminds us how much the world has suffered over the centuries at the hands of these hyper-disconnected leaders and that in the Middle Ages, intelligent women were burned at the stake and that horrendous activities took place in the Spanish Inquisition!

Steve points out that all fundamentalist religions have a pathological and often paranoid streak. Often, anything pleasurable is denounced, and at best, women are marginalised, and at worst, persecuted (see Iran). The Shadow never gets owned but is always projected onto others. It is interesting how Putin often refers to the Ukrainians as terrorists or neo-Nazis so that he needs to sacrifice the lives of his own people for the purposes of liberation.

We also learn that many so-called ‘enlightened spiritual masters’ and cult leaders (e.g. Charles Manson) may also be hyper-disconnected human beings who manipulate their followers and acquire their power by hypnotising their flocks to worship them. He cites the ‘crazy wisdom’ tradition of the highly manipulative Adi Da, and the many weird goings-on at Osho’s ashram, as good examples.

The author repeatedly stresses that, contrary to what many people think, war is not natural to us, and that we haven’t always fought wars. In truth, human beings are naturally empathic, altruistic and co-operative. In other words, our true nature is to desire to contribute rather than accumulate. People who are properly connected to themselves have no need for fame or power.

Quoting from his book The Fall, Steve identifies the origins of the tragedy in the transition from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies resulting in an egoic sense of separation. The shaman of old who saw soul in all things and revered the natural world was replaced by the patriarchal hero and conqueror and a corresponding judgmental God. The more the left hemisphere or reasoning side of the brain evolved, the more humanity’s goodness became suppressed and the more disconnected we became.

However, there have always been leaders who were highly connected, such as Jesus and the Buddha. In modern times, Lech Walesa, Mandela and Gorbachev are great examples of how to lead with integrity. There is much we can all do to enhance our own connectedness. Our great challenge is to evolve our spirituality, which means growing our connection to ourselves and our world. There are four different types of awareness that we need to develop: a greater perception of the world around us, greater self-awareness, greater empathy and compassion and the embrace of a more world-centric perspective. The more we transform ourselves, the more our society changes.

Steve also has many suggestions of what we, the people, can do to protect ourselves from pathocrats. We can restrict their access to power; we can try to minimise their influence, and prevent dominant and controlling people from attaining leadership positions. We can assess them for empathy and if they don’t make the grade, deny them access to power. Steve tells us that in hunter-gatherer days, leadership was rotated so that no one person stayed in power for too long (today, all pathocrats want to stay in power forever) and that in ancient Greece, all political decisions were made by collective assemblies.

But how feasible are these suggestions today? While I agree that there is much that we can all do to try to transform ourselves at a personal level and that the shifts we make individually then percolate into society, I wonder if Steve may be over-optimistic, as disconnection is so prevalent in our society? We are living in dark times. The collective disconnected shadow side is coming up very strongly for us to confront. Like Steve, I believe that a new society is beginning to be born and that the new always casts its Shadow in front of it. It may be that the only way for humanity as a whole to regain its lost connectivity is to be confronted with, and suffer through, the worst excesses of its hyper-disconnectivity.

This is a fascinating, beautifully-written and cogently-argued book and I couldn’t put it down. In particular, DisConnected asked me to look at evil from a whole new perspective and gave me many insights into the subtler workings of life’s dark side. In terms of why we ‘consent’ to have pathological leaders, I also saw that the problem is two-sided. What is it in our wounded psyches that drives us to elect such pathocrats in the first place? Buy this book. It will make you think.