The preponderance, in our lives, languages and cultures, of two seemingly contradictory, but in actuality increasingly apposite, modes of thinking, negativity bias and toxic positivity, bears significant reflection on for budding decolonisers. What they signify, socially, culturally, anthropologically and psychologically, collectively and individually, is redolent with meaning, depth of understanding and calls to action.
For you, for me, for Scots, for anyone who cares to engage with decolonisation of a mind or minds.
So much so they require their own blog posts, watch this space etc etc.  For now, they are not the thoughts I am looking for, right here, right in this space and time, though they frequent the same cantinas.
What they have to say, pulling back, gaining perspective, not of the words used but of what is said, particularly where they have been used as drivers in political discourse, or in disengagement from it, is not epistemological but existential. The central question for any decolonising project, in both the wider political sense and for the Yes movement, for the minds which gather in it, is not what we know or fail to know, but to what extent we have made, can make, our lives, individually and collectively, our own.
Lives sit in context, in a hyper-reality of the world in which we now find ourselves, marked by perma-crisis, to which we respond with disengagement, lest it overwhelms, or, if we engage, imbued still with the same, all-encroaching sense of futility. British iterations sigh with ‘oh-dearism’.
Our responses are collective coping mechanisms for despair, societal cognitive behavioural therapy. We acknowledge the crises, real and manufactured, permeating every corner of our domestic, societal and cultural lives. We acknowledge our inability to act, to change any of it, and carry on regardless.
We don’t keep calm while we do. Deep-held anxieties inform our every action and utterance. We just wilfully, suppressing, repressing, fail to address the underlying causes of them.
Politicians, even activists, with every disdain or disregard monetised in cynically reflexive influence or engagement, triangulate around surfaces. Reactionary behaviours responding to much deeper rooted, societal malaise by being seen to address it but not actually addressing it. Self-replicating anxiety driven lack of action, in a self-fulfilling, entrenching abandonment of authentic self, in almost paradoxically selfish paroxysms of self-harm.
Self, self, self. We need to raise awareness of awareness. Put this coloured square on your digital profile. Hang it in your analogue window, so the world can see. Don’t feel better.
While we square the surreal circle we represent, we pour it out in endlessly repeating libations, tributes to the two-faced, multi-faceted gods of datafication and social media. Through portable shrines we choose to carry with us. Always, everywhere, at worship.
Deep in the uncanny nature of our daily grinding lives, we studiously disengage, while ubiquitously connected. Stubbornly, wilfully ignorant of the extent to which we have increasingly failed to mean what we say.
This is the existential vacuum into which right wing populism has crept, cajoling, seducing. First throwing seemingly gentle pebbles at the Overton window of our lives, catching the attention of the disengaged. Hacking and capturing it, then smashing the window altogether.
It is sometimes difficult to comprehend, yet almost impossible to avoid. The nature of our existence, its (barely) managed decline the endpoint of Enlightenment trajectory. Signalling its ultimate failure.
We are not without hope though, even if it is the last thing in our inbox.
Like Stanley Cavell, marrying politics and practical philosophy, or more belatedly Graeber and Wendow, or Zuboff (sure, I’m gonna keep banging those drums, they matter, they are signal in the noise), can we redirect trajectory? Can we do it in such a way as to (re)understand, recontextualise our individual selves and how we engage with autonomy, agency, citizenship and political discourse?
Personally, and with deep conviction, I think we can. As Alex Steffen has it, we can ruggedise our lives for the present and coming storms, brace ourselves against the legacy of past failure as seemingly inevitable trajectory. Mostly, it’s because of quantum.
Where we find ourselves, our individual and collective consciousness, stating the bleeding obvious, is, by its very nature, existential. Somewhere, whilst we acknowledge the failings of the empirical, in all its nefarious senses, thought and deed, of Enlightenment, we must also acknowledge the innate absurdity of being able to conceive of a general theory of relativity, of everything, but to nowhere have conceived of anything even remotely resembling a general, or even generally accepted or acceptable, theory of human consciousness, from which it emerged. Or which conceives of itself.
When we look at our brains, mind and consciousness, we should tremble at the works they have wrought, in our individual, collective and networked lives. We can acknowledge that the biology, the ‘simple’ neurology of the former, somewhere gives rise to the emergent properties of the two latter. Even to all else humans have ‘achieved’ as equally emergent properties of them all, manipulating the environment around them. But the physics of it cannot describe or explain the last. Classical, empirical, ‘objective’ mechanics cannot, for the life of it, explain consciousness.
The brain is biology, mind its emergent property. Yet consciousness is both their awareness of themselves and the pilot which determines them. Exercises will, or determines, in our current existential crises, whether we exercise it or not.
Theories of quantum mind and quantum consciousness hypothesise that quantum-mechanical phenomena, like entanglement and superpositions, better explain how brain, mind and consciousness function and interact. They remain largely, for now, posited in the hypothetical, in the philosophical realm of ideation.
But, if we avoid the pitfalls and traps, trap, trappings of quantum mysticism, they can become practical and political. More than that. They hold a skeleton key to unlocking the seeming inevitability of human trajectory, to opening the doors of our existential plight’s cage.  And, somewhere, to regaining genuine agency, autonomy and authenticity, as we step blinking into the half light, into a world ravaged by our absence of them.
If ‘oh-dearism’ is the response, quantum consciousness is its returning call.
(I hear, heard, keep hearing it; I’ll be back around to say what I think it sang, sings to us)