Redefining what it means to be human

Good news is no news – this is, in principle, the motto behind all current media. It has always been this way. The only thing that varies is the intensity of the bad news. In recent years, we have all noticed that this intensity has intensified further.

But if you manage to silence the bad news media in your own mind for a day, or even longer, you can begin to realize that everything that is good works in the longer term and requires other channels.

To demolish, inhibit, or kill requires no higher intelligence and is also often quick.

To build up, benefit, or bring to life requires intuition, knowledge, and love; it is also often not particularly fast. That is why it is not reported in the daily feeds. It is, as it were, impossible to really see – without a certain intentional focus on the part of the individual.

It is easy to miss how immediately relevant the above is even for our purely physical existence.

Personally, ever since I started to think and try to understand the world, and myself, I have contemplated and analyzed what is going on in us and with us in ecological terms, that is, in terms of relationships and flows.

Right from the very beginning, and then decade after decade, this focus of mine has often confronted me with a peculiar inability and lack of understanding in most of the people I have wanted to discuss things with in depth.

Therefore, I early on made it my life's mission to explore why this is so – why it is so difficult for most people in our society to truly (I mean truly!) think and act based on relationships and flows.

Relationships and flows, in their concrete contexts, are not “linear”. They do not go unequivocally from A to B; they might just as well go from an unheeded C to A.

Many nod in agreement when I say something like that. But when I then stubbornly insist and demand that one must therefore, in all living contexts, think and understand things non-linearly, then it comes to a halt.

Most people then start to avert their gaze after a while, as if they no longer really know where they are in their thoughts. The foundation of how they usually think sways and drifts apart.

To think (yes, think!) in terms of relationships and flows means, namely, that it is not possible to think adequately about the world and oneself in the form of logically comprehensible causal connections in terms of fixed concepts. In turn, this means that it is not possible to predict anything, in the way one would like to believe should be possible.

No matter how you plan, or try to understand and get a handle on a lot of details, things still don't turn out as you wish. This applies in everyday life as much as in politics, economics, or science.

By organizing thoughts logically and actions in technological systems, one therefore strives to have control over and maintain proper order in thoughts and the world. But one always inevitably misses that unheeded C.

That is a problem, a big problem, if it is the world and oneself in the world that one wants to understand and act wisely in relation to.

Quite a long time ago now, specifically in May 1997, I participated along with a number of researchers, science fiction authors, and science journalists from various countries in a week-long workshop at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' research station in Abisko.

There, I discussed most of all, for quite a few hours, with the biologist Jack Cohen. And we talked precisely about flows, relationships, and so-called complex, non-linear, systems (in reality = ecological systems).

Jack had quite recently written an interesting book with the mathematician Ian Stewart, who was also in Abisko that week. Their book is called “The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World” (Penguin Books, 1995). It is still worth reading and in line with Neil Theises “Notes on Complexity”, which I highlighted here recently.

One occasion has particularly stuck in my memory from the days in Abisko. I am walking with Jack Cohen for a bit along the still-frozen Lake Torneträsk. A pale sun shines over ice and snow even though it is around midnight. We are talking about why, according to his experience as well, it is so difficult for people to truly understand and think in dynamic, relational terms and not just in static, conceptual ones. Then Jack says:

“It should be a movie I think.”

Exactly.

But then, surely today, almost thirty years later, it should be easier to exchange thoughts about ourselves and the world based on that – based on the fact that everything is moving, as in a movie.

But it isn't.

Jean-Claude Guimberteau is a surgeon and medical doctor who has made more films of what goes on in detail inside a living body than anyone else. And it doesn't look at all like one thought. It doesn't look at all like fixed cell preparations or illustrations in a medical textbook. Search for “Strolling Under the Skin”, for example.

When we invited Dr. Guimberteau to lecture and converse at the Swedish Fascia Convention 2024, in Uppsala in November, he responded enthusiastically:

“I have taken a close look at the “Fascia Guide” and I must admit that everything you say and write is perfectly in line with what I have been saying and writing for decades now.

I’m very happy about this, especially because you’re a new generation, the one who’s going to continue this adventure, which is quite simply a redefinition of what living matter and human is.”

Dr. Guimberteau has, in other words, for decades experienced the same frustration that the biologist Jack Cohen and I aired at Lake Torneträsk a generation ago and that I still experience.

I am sure that Jean-Claude Guimberteau means in all seriousness that what the adventure is actually about – right now! – is precisely “a redefinition of what living matter and human is”.

Therefore, I hope you can begin to sense, just as I have begun to understand in recent years, that this thing with “fascia” is far from just being about a certain type of organ or certain treatments, but about how we understand life itself, the very act of living.

Knowledge about “fascia” (actually the extracellular matrix, fascia in the strict sense, and the interstitium together) simply leads to a call to action, that we must learn to think and understand ourselves in the world in terms of relationships and flows in the living body as a whole in relation to its surroundings.

That is human ecology if anything is.

No one would be happier than me if you come on an adventure in Uppsala this autumn.

Let's create some good news together. It is only when people of good will meet around something real that such things come into being.

Besides, I will return to the subject, regardless.

To the Swedish Fascia Convention

By Per Johansson, PhD in Human Ecology & Historian of Ideas

About the Swedish Fascia Convention

For over ten years, we have tried to understand and explain what fascia is, why it is so important to understand, and how our entire perception of the body and of humans changes when we look at ourselves as living beings.

We are not alone in this. Prominent researchers like Guimberteau, Theise, Pollack, and Levy have fought against the current to get people to embrace the living body.

In November 2024, we will talk about this, live, in Uppsala.