This week was Sinhala and Tamil New Year. What I call Avurudu and what my wife calls Puthandu is an ancient holiday, older than our mostly divergent cultures, based on an astrological chart that goes back to the Babylonians, at least. The holiday is so old that the Earth has noticeably wobbled and the astrological charts no longer match the astronomy. But we still use them, and still do the same things. The traditions tell you what color to wear, what direction to face, and exactly what time to do it. New Year, like the very concept of a year itself, is a Maui'ian act. Capturing the sun, and fitting it into a cultural cognition, then sustaining this hallucination over generations. We still go through the motions, even though we barely know what it means. This is the nature of cultural cognition. We think therefore we be.

The Rat Race

When I studied cognitive science decades ago at McGill, they were hyper-focused on individual cognition. I took an entire course on the Philosophy of Self, and we never seriously discussed the possibility that the self just didn't exist. My Philosophy of Science teacher, Mario Bunge, asked me what India had ever contributed to the world which stumped me, being neither Indian nor thus educated. All I knew was the western world, which was actually 500 years behind on many subjects (literally, it's currently 2569 in the Buddhist calendar).

Western philosophy arbitrarily draws the (time) line a few hundred years back (the Enwhitenment) and a racist line across Asia (Europe). There are more people studying obscure quirks of Kant than the entire rest of the world in most (western) philosophy departments, so much is the bias towards the faux continent. Western philosophy also arbitrarily draws the line around an individual, trying to explain lots of things through the brain and DNA, when human cognition is much wider than that. It's really happening at the human level, because we are social animals.

I'm not saying that we didn't study social cognition in school (as an elective), but the required courses started with classical condition. These were endless experiments on tortured, isolated rats and the theory built upon that. These were scared, isolated individuals, separated from their rat families and cultures, and tortured with lights, sounds, and intermittent electrocution and drowning. These are the rats that press a lever endlessly for cocaine, something rats in functional rat communities won't do. Sound familiar? The rat races I studied were like the rat race I was expected to enter into. Canada is a settler colony (like America) and this produces deeply unsettled people, divorced from whatever culture they came from and thrown into consumer culture, which is deeply unsatisfying by design. They give economics Nobel Prizes under psychology because economics is just the art of mass experimentation on human populations, without consent or ethics.

First Impressions

Of course, the field of psychology was changing on a yearly basis while I was there and has surely changed more in the decades since. But I have noticed that a lot of western psychology (studies say) backtracks to ‘eastern’ insights like ‘maybe having grandparents around is good for children’ or ‘perhaps we should improve society, somewhat.’ However, I think it's very hard to live this way, because the philosophical foundation is incorrect. Again, there was no proof that there even was a self in my Philosophy Of Self class, yet every other class was based on that assumption. Everything about western psychology is based on there being an individual psyche and there kinda isn't. The Buddhist insight is that there's an illusion of one, but that this fritters away the moment you seriously look at the back of your eyelids. You can try this yourself, it's not a particular hard experiment.

Western philosophy and psychology and pharmacology is based on this fairly obvious illusion, building castles in the sand. I say obvious because one or two generations back a lot of my Indic family barely has individual names, every name is literally relative, we were (and are) still such social animals. Yet the lab rats of colonialism are shipped far away from all that, thrown into cage-like cities, and given name tags that must be worn at all time, like Driver's Licenses and Passports. This is profoundly alienating and the therapy they give you to make you feel human doesn't really work, because it acts on neither the social nor the animal but an imaginary individual that is none of the above.

Most of western psychology is still what drugs you take and what your DNA is and what happened to you and how to be your best self, AKA you, you, you. This sounds much worse if you say me, me, me, but that's what it is, isn't it? Besides being self-indulgent, such an approach is self-defeating. There is no there there. Attachment to the self leads to suffering, as any religion or folk story will tell you. In the Buddhist view, there are three fetters that keep us suffering, self-view, skeptical indecision, and clinging to rites and rituals. Western psychology is basically founded on the three fetters though, hey, at least the drugs are good.

I'm not saying that ‘eastern’ philosophy is going to save you. I've seen too many westerners take up yoga as a substitute for whatever addiction and just become more insufferable assholes. I've seen too many companies use ‘mindfulness’ meditation to make people into better mindless workers. I'm also not saying that ‘eastern’ people are happier, we're crazy too and ‘westernized’ in ways we now consider eastern. What I am saying is that western psychology is deeply tied up with western culture, whether it acknowledges it or not. And that culture is capitalist alienation and colonization, which is evil. And, at a very deep level, that does not feel good. Hence depression.

Depression

For whatever reason, after four years of studying cognitive science my brain was a mess and I was pretty depressed. I often struggled with depression when I lived in America and then Canada, for reasons I couldn't express and which no one could explain to me, no matter how much we paid them. In hindsight, I think I was experiencing what the late, great Mark Fisher called the privatization of stress. Before he sadly (for us) killed himself. In Capitalist Realism, Fisher said,

Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

I didn't think about it at the time, but I wasn't in a very different situation from those rats we studied. Hell, I even participated in psychological experiments for 20 bucks here and there, that's where a lot of this data comes from. A lot of psychological research is done like this, on alienated, possibly inebriated college students separated from all family and culture in a space you literally have to pay to enter, ie capitalism. They use a bit of light meditation to get you pliable, but that's about the extent of any cross-cultural relevance. Such studies might give you some very narrow insight (though few studies replicate), but they tell you nothing about the wider cultural cage they themselves are embedded in. I could feel this in some way I couldn't articulate. As the Smashing Pumpkins said, despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.

Third Culture

After university I confused all my relatives, left Canada, abandoned my US Green Card, and returned to a place I hadn't lived since I was five. Sri Lanka. I laid around being depressed for a year before my cousin introduced me to some people and I circulated and gradually became acculturated. I've been here for 20 years now and I rarely feel depressed anymore. Sometimes I feel really stressed, or really sad, but it's rarely a private stress or a private sadness. My burdens are shared, and my joys also. Even right now I can barely concentrate because there are five kids outside my door, only two of whom I'm related to. I have been desperately sad and grievously wounded, but never alone in this. Indeed, these were often pains I felt through other people. At these times, I often tell myself better outside problems than inside. I can deal with real problems, but unreal problems are often insurmountable.

As a third culture kid who returned to sender, I see people like me who didn't return and I wonder. I can see the struggle to hold an identity which inexorably dissolves into whiteness across generations. I can see the difficulty in separating from the hundreds of relatives we have here to form a small nuclear family somewhere else, then the explosion when they go off and form their own families, ie their own colonies. I also hear about the daily stress of figuring out when to wake up, what to eat, what to do, and how to do anything. A million podcasts have been launched from the fundamental lack of this cultural consciousness. Unlike traditions like Avurudu, which tell you what to wear, when to wake up, what to eat, and everything else, all of this must be recreated by each individual every day and it must be done the best, otherwise what are you doing? So many questions are dumped on a completely inadequate science which have been answered in a good enough way by culture, which colonialism and capitalism insists that you abandon. This is the privatization of stress Fisher talked about, and it seems exhausting.

Disneyfication

The general logic of the western, colonial world is that it's good to destroy religion, the family, and backwards culture, that this is precisely how you go forward in life. And that story is told through, essentially, edge cases. What if your religion oppresses you, your family abuses you, and your culture holds you back? And, indeed, religions can kill you, families can rape you, and demon dances don't cure many mental ailments. But these are the edge cases, these are the worst things that can happen in traditional societies, used to justify throwing out all traditions. But then you have the task of recreating a culture from scratch, and that also has edge cases, because to err is human, and now you kicked out any God that might forgive. It's just you reading a dozen books to figure out how to wean your baby, something your grandma would have told you if you hadn't moved 1,000 miles away. And if, God forbid, something happens, God could console you in a way Satanic statistics just won't do.

Capitalism killed God to replace Them with goods, displaced the family to replace them with coworkers, and neutered culture to make it a commodity. This enabled more people to colonize more land, but what does it do to the human heart? There's a White Hole at the heart of White Empire, a terrifying void where meaning is supposed to go, and it hurts. The fact is that liberalism genocides entire peoples, no workplace actually treats you like family (I remain unable to fire my cousins), and capitalist culture is the opposite of freedom, you literally have to pay for it.

In this new Disneyfied religion, old myths are repurposed to create a new one, that you need to bee yourself (Aladdin) and reject or ideally kill your parents (basically all of them). In the new families of choice, you're supposed to choose your own ‘tribe’ but then they leave because work or children, and it falls apart because you're not actually a family. With family I'm just close to people I have little in common with because I have no choice, but choosing and judging your ‘family’ all the time is exhausting. Even with the home and your own dome, you have to read a hundred studies and pay thousands of dollars to just make the correct breakfast, and you're always getting it wrong. It's a massive privatization of stress, alleviated only through periodic dopamine hits, like a rat pressing a lever for relief which never comes. As Paul Simon said, you get better but you never get well.

I think about this as Sri Lankans gather at the same time (nearly 5 AM this year) to eat the same meal (milk rice), facing the same direction, wearing the same colors. I say ‘think’ because it was too early this year and my family just slept in, as westernized heathens. But still, we ritually stay in the house while the Sun moves houses (because everything is closed) and then go out and greet people in the old village on a certain date, because that's what people do. The decisions are made for us, and this is an internal relief, though externally stressful. Avurudu is the hottest time of the year, when the Earth is most tilted towards the Sun. It's basically the worst time to be outside, but like northerners celebrating the shortest days (Christmas) to chase the blues away, it's what we do.

So we went back to the ancestral village to do ancestral things, where all the heat, noise, firecrackers, and stimulation promptly made my daughter explode. She was crying within five minutes and we had to go sit under a waterfall to avert core meltdown. But these cultural events are really a grand publicization of stress. You distribute your joys across the community, and your sorrows also. I don't want to say nationalization because this is older than nations or other such creations, like races or even religions. Sinhalese and Tamils don't celebrate too much together, but we do celebrate this somehow (shout-out Muslims, historically running the only shops that are open). Festival days are stressful to the modern mind, but to the premodern soul they distribute the load, across the culture, across the ancestors, across gods we barely remember but who are still looking out for us. I have strayed very far and yet I can still find ourself in the old village, which remains years behind but somehow 500 years ahead. So happy 2569 to you and yours. May it be blessed, destressed, and unalone.