Why Metaphysics is Unpopular

I have a theory about human psychology. I believe human beings are obsessed with control. There is good reason for this. If we do not have a strong “spiritual belief system” we become convinced that the material world is the end-all. It is the only reality there is, and nothing else, God included, is considered.

When we are small children, our environment is pretty unsafe. We have very little control over anything. We have parents to protect us, and when they don’t do a good job of that, we become traumatized. All kids are traumatized, it is part of growing up. It is how we learn that we are ultimately responsible for our well-being—eventually at least. If we are acutely traumatized, say from some sort of serious abuse, then the adaptations we develop that are designed to keep us alive and relatively safe can be debilitating when we become adults.

These adaptations are formed in the unconscious and operate from that level of unawareness. They obviously influence our behaviour, and because they are unconscious we don’t know when they are no longer useful. For the most part, being a mature adult allows us more control over our environment, so we don’t need the childhood adaptions that were formed through trauma (due to lack of control). However, since those systems are stored in the unconscious, we have no way to regulate them, and they basically rule our lives.

Now that’s the really bad news. What I am explaining here is why people come to therapy. And yes, there is a way to effectively disassemble these unconscious systems through psychotherapy. But that’s another story. Obviously, not everyone experiences acute trauma in their childhood. But as I just said, everyone experiences some sort of trauma just by being alive—and we have less control over it when we are little newts than we do when we are full-grown creatures.

What about people who do not experience serious trauma as a little kid?

Back in the day, these kids discovered that there were some things that he or she could control, and some things they couldn’t. Kids are acutely aware of the mysteries of life. They encounter most things that come into their awareness with curiosity, imagination, and awe. They have no real desire to control everything they come into contact with because early on they become aware that not everything in the world is explainable—that reality is more than they can explain. When they are in awe and curious, most things they encounter are not a threat as well.

Somewhere along the way they learn about what we will call “God” for lack of a more descriptive term. This may be through formal religion, myth and tradition, or just through their own reasoning and awareness. It is a natural thing to believe that life has a very serious mystery to it that cannot be fully explained or even discerned—this mystery also does not need to be explained. This is natural.

Until they are taught otherwise.

They may be taught directly by the educational system that their natural belief the unseen and unknown is a part of reality, or they may just begin to sense it through the culture’s insistence that all things unexplained are either unreal and false, or will eventually be explained by science. They are taught at an early stage to worship technology and to regard science as a god.

Needless to say, an awful lot a kid encounters is explained by cause and effect science. And they are curious about these things too. They ask questions, they explore and discover, but again, not everything they come into contact with is explained by science. These are the things they are told don’t matter, don’t exist, are silly to contemplate, or will eventually be explained by science. We call this promissory materialism—meaning even though there is no current materialist explanation, eventually there will be.

When you grow up believing that everything is material, and anything that isn’t is not real, then you grow up believing that there is a possibility, and an obligation, to control everything in your life. This only makes sense, if that is your belief system. Why not? Science preaches to us that everything that our senses encounter in the physical world has a cause-and-effect etiology. Therefore everything, in theory, would be controllable. Nothing is left up to fate, nothing is in the hands of God, nothing is mysterious with no explanation, and no promise of one in the future, nothing has an unseen and meaningful purpose behind it.

We obviously do not have control over everything in life, but as a materialist we think we should. It is all ultimately controllable, isn’t it? Science will figure it all out, won’t it? And if it isn’t controllable, then it can get us and destroy us. Fear sets in, and since the material body is all there is, we fear losing it.

At this point in a person’s development, anything that is labelled metaphysical is certainly uncontrollable. And since control is the ultimate need, metaphysics is avoided. Unless a person rediscovers God (or whatever you want to call this unseen, and dynamic, part of reality) the thought of uncontrollable elements in their reality is frightening and thus very unpopular.

A person does not have to believe in the God that Christianity describes, or in Allah as Islam describes, or in any sort of “being” any religion describes—but if they believe in the unseen, in the mysteries of life, and in a benevolence as a pervasive quality of this energy (love), and they experience all of this as a part of reality, then they do not fear this loss of control I am describing. They surrender their being into this mystery. They know they exist beyond the material.

If my theory about control being the focus of human existence is true, then it stands to reason that anything that appears ostensibly out of control is a threat. Why would this not apply to everyone? Even believers? Because as a believer you know there is an order to things without human involvement. You are “taken care of” where it matters—soulfully. Things are in God’s hands, not yours, nor in any other human being’s hands, but in God’s.

So, if your environment is out of your control, what do you do? You become very anxious, for one thing. You also hand over the control to other people you feel are better equipped to “control” the thing you fear—like governments, authorities, doctors, and public health systems. You also expect those “controlling systems” to fix the bigger threats like Uncle Putin taking over the world by waging war with them. To a person out of control the next best thing to having control themselves is to hand it over to someone else they think has better control over things. And the only real thing these people have control over is us.

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