We have in common with birds of prey the ability to focus our gaze (on our prey). This property makes us desire a little piece of paradise in the middle of a vast rubbish dump, a desire amplified by advertising. It makes us admire tyrants and justify slavery. It makes us invent a God and cover ourselves in shame.
It makes us consider that our head governs us: that we can separate body and mind, and put the latter first. In the Middle Ages, this center was the heart, but our materialistic age has chosen the brain. Is it because it's behind the eyes?
Vision has become the predominant sense. It is also the most alienated. Its reign coincides with dualism, which tends to separate seeing from doing. Rousseau's thesis, the illusion of a “social contract”, makes relationships disappear in favor of poles. This hierarchy distinguishes between a foreground and a background, the famous “low noise”. Centralization, but also capitalism, are the offspring of this predatory disposition.
Civilizations have been established on the basis of predation: the rush to the American West, the Brazilian bandeirantes. Capitalism itself is the victory of plunderers.
The need for a leader is perhaps a result of this focus. (Ein Kampf, Ein Sieg, Ein Führer...)
Magic, like propaganda, exploits this characteristic, and we find it hard to understand a meeting: a whole, a kind, a totality, an interdependence, an ecology, a society... Most of the time, we replace them with categories, i.e. intellectual abstractions. (Holistic reasoning, which is global but slow and difficult, is opposed to rapid problem-solving by analogy: heuristics). The first categorization is enumeration, and our economic society is the result of this quantification.
Teleology, or the science of the goal, is based on the abstraction of means. Yet it is these that we find in the result, reinforced and having imparted their characteristics.
Focus is also found in a certain social organization, in the tendency to centralize, in the need for leaders. Focusing presupposes a hierarchy of attention, and the relegation of the unspectacular to the “background”. Perception is our immediate relationship with the world.
When this perception is reflected in a common representation, it becomes consciousness. Consciousness uses distance to bring certain elements together, while others remain separate. The field of all perceptions is then polarized. Both the physical and mental worlds have poles, places of grasp, contact and exchange. The division into social classes and the grouping into tribes on social networks are examples of these polarizations, which group similar people together and separate them from others.
Human beings are gregarious animals who focus on a single orientation. Our society “naturally” tends to be hierarchical. This hierarchy is, of course, achieved first and foremost by force. It's the all-too-famous “law of nature”.
Force remains the essential element of domination, which is felt through voice and attitude, when not directly or with arguments. However, since prehistoric times, throwing weapons have ensured the victory of the most experienced over the strongest. The legend of the fight between David and Goliath still bears witness to this. Strength is replaced by self-esteem: you have to be convincing. The concentration of strength has been transformed into the strength of concentration. The ability to direct attention is the object of a power struggle.
The devaluation of force in the face of cunning, which begins with artillery and is perfected with influence, has not finished enabling new social conditions. This is the meaning of the current refrain of “transition” (digital, ecological...). When it comes to resolving conflicts, a number of characteristics can be seen: the warrior is not afraid to take and give blows, the weak rejects conflict and accepts domination, the cunning prepares traps, the evader is opportunistic, the patient organizes his distance... Fear is the weapon of domination.
La Boétie is famous for his discourse on voluntary servitude, a few centuries before Wilhem Reich analyzed this propensity to want to be ruled: voluntary slavery. Unfortunately, many people classify themselves as victims: just look at how they categorize themselves. You can see, for example, the interest they take in money.
France, among other singularities, is the country in which this centralization has taken place with a physical rather than a moral link to the people, a link less apparent in the Chinese empire. Since Bouvine, France has been an idea in the hearts of the French. After Portugal, it's one of the oldest nations. This national bond has been perverted by nationalism, by the “national novel”, another focused version of the national narrative. In the nation, as in any community, there is a betrayal of the common bond: a kind of masochism. Empires push this betrayal to the limit of depersonalization.
Despite its image of uniformity, the globalization of the 20th century crystallized the planet around metropolises, and constantly created abandoned, “developing” or simply forgotten territories.
Researchers Duncan Godden and Allen Baddeley experimented with deep-sea divers. They discovered that while divers memorize something when they're on the beach, they tend to forget it once they're underwater, and can only remember it completely once they're back on land. And the same phenomenon occurs in reverse: if divers memorize a list of words underwater, they have difficulty recalling it on land, but find it again as soon as they return underwater. Attention is all in the moment: someone walking through a door changes their mind.
Criticism of this characteristic should not lead us to underestimate what it brings us. Prioritization is a powerful tool for understanding and acting on the world. A posture without focus would be much more passive and submissive. That's what pigeons, or most fish, do, for example. Focusing, limiting ourselves to one problem at a time, is as necessary to the advancement of solutions as it is to a general view. The links between particular problems and the understanding of the whole depend on a proper appreciation of scale factors. Teleology, or the science of purpose, is only possible if we abstract from “full awareness”. It enables us to evaluate the means and organize the best. To be an adult is to deal with the given: focus is necessary for willpower.