How Your Whole World Gets Memory Holed (AKA "Shifting Baseline Syndrome")
Article by AlexanderTheWake
"Where a problem is of long standing people may fail to realize even that there is a problem, because they have never known anything better." [1]
"Shifting baseline syndrome"[2] describes the way human perception adjusts to slow, incremental degradation over time—where people become conditioned by their changing environments to consider normal or healthy things which prior generations would find absolutely abnormal or sick. While the term originated in marine biology, its logic applies far more broadly. First, it warps our awareness of the natural world: the decimation of fish stocks, deforestation, mass extinction of species, etc.—all become invisible when each generation inherits a slightly worse version of the world and mistakes it for normal. But the shift doesn'’t stop there. It extends into our inner lives through the normalization of chronic stress, depression and anxiety inherent to industrial conditions, all of which would generally be alien to anyone plopped in from pre-industrial settings. And finally, it reshapes our most fundamental values: freedom, dignity, autonomy, even the meaning of personal fulfilment. These also degrade slowly and, silently, until no one remembers what they once were.
With enough time, the benchmarks of a healthy ecosystem shift in the public consciousness. For example, what was considered overfished in the 1970s may be considered the healthy, natural level in the 1980s, and what was considered overfished in the 1980s, may be considered the healthy level in the 1990s, etc. As a result, a reform movement that seeks to undo any of the untold damages done by industrial technology over a protracted period of time (e.g., to the seas by overfishing, soil health from over farming, or habitat loss from the ever-expanding urban sprawl), will likely fail in restoring a healthy ecosystem even if it succeeds in reaching its chosen benchmarks because the members of the movement itself have lost sight of what constitutes "healthy".”
Many movements and groups advocating against overfishing use benchmarks solely of quantity in terms of desired restoration, but quantity is not the only indicator of a healthy ecosystem. In the mid 1940s, it was common for fishermen in many places to have most of the fish they caught be larger than themselves., iIn the 1980s, caught fish were often large, but rarely the same size as the fishermen, and in the modern day, most caught fish are rarely longer than a foot in length. Whilst “shifting baseline syndrome" was originally coined to describe the warped estimates of natural fish populations, in recent years the term’s usage has been broadened to include all forms of environmental degradation. For example, in 2022, the National Parks Service reported that at current estimates Bison only occupy 2%[3] of their historical habitat, though it's unclear how accurate this number is, since the habitat the NPS is comparing it against may also have shifted. Most drivers of considerable experience will note that they recall in the past having to frequently wash their windscreens due to the amount of bugs being hit on a journey, something modern drivers are likely not aware of. The passenger pigeon, a species of bird native to North America, once flew in flocks so large that people reported they blocked out the sun for several days. They are now extinct. Yet there is no outcry—people live in a world that has degraded so gradually they barely notice what's missing. And if we judge ecological health only by what's still visible, then we ignore the vast losses that have already occurred and may wrongly assume everything is fine.
The shift does not only affect our environment, but also our very physiology—and this is plainly obvious if you consider that all animals, including humans, are deeply dependent on specific environmental conditions to which they have evolved with over the course of millions of years. Low levels of persistent, chronic stress, sensory overload, depression and anxiety have become so normalized that few people recognize them as pathologies only until they reach an unbearably acute phase. These conditions are not innate to the human condition—they are industrial side-effects unthinkable to those living in more tranquil, pre-industrial environments. One of the most evident examples is chronic stress, likely felt in varying amounts by different people in modern society. Kaczynski notes that both he and his brother felt it to a degree when re-entering the city after prolonged amounts of time in nature.
"[W]hen I returned for a time to the city after living for an extended period in the mountains of Montana, I realized upon readjusting to urban existence that all my life, until I escaped to the mountains, I had been subject to chronic stress. To be sure, it was stress at a relatively low level, a level at which people habituated to urban living are not aware of stress because they've always been subject to it and don’t know how it would feel to be free of it. It was only through my experience in the mountains that I learn how good it felt to escape from chronic stress altogether. My brother reported a similar reaction after spending long periods alone in the desert."[4]
While chronic stress is a recognized problem on an individual basis and often correlated to depression and suicide rates, it's usually only seen in isolation—for example, as a response to particular societal issue like overcrowding or overworking, as opposed to a generalized global problem fundamental to modern society, i.e. the dehumanizing nature of life within the industrial system and our detachment from nature. One could easily compare the consistent anthropological testimony of superior health and happiness of primitive people as opposed to those unfortunate enough to live under the crushing weight of the modern industrial system. A full comparative analysis is beyond the scope of this article, but the reader would do well to consider the following, which accurately conveys the general characteristics of psychological experience under both systems:
"The Pirahãs show no evidence of depression, chronic fatigue, extreme anxiety, panic attacks, or other psychological ailments common in many industrialized societies." …
"I have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for worry in their language. One group of visitors to the Pirahãs, psychologists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Brain a nd Cognitive Science Department, commented that the Pirahãs appeared to be the happiest people they had ever seen."[5]
This is not a one-off example. Though experiences varied and the ethnographic accounts are relatively sparce, those that do exist convey a clear pattern: a lack of anxiety and depression. Contrast this with the endemic rates of misery in the modern industrialized world, where "serious" rates of depression and anxiety affect nearly 4 in 10 worldwide,[6] and in the U.S. alone, depression rates have reached record levels, with 29% of adults being diagnosed with depression at least once—up by nearly 10% from eight years prior.[7]
The decline in mental health in the industrial world is, again, a gradual process—generational. It is certainly gradual enough to induce most sufferers of chronic low-level stress to believe that it is somehow normal to the human condition when in fact it is absolutely not. As reported by one author, "Rates of major depression in every age group have steadily increased in several of the developed countries since the 1940s. …Rates of depression, mania and suicide continue to rise as each new birth cohort ages…."[8]
The same logic at play in "shifting baselines" as applied to environmental degradation and psychological well-being can be observed in the gradual, generational transformation of fundamental values. Just as we no longer recognize a collapsed ecosystem because we were born into it, we no longer recognize the erosion of freedom, dignity, purpose, fulfilment, etc., relative to prior generations because we were born into it, and conditioned to accept it as normal through years of relentless education and propaganda. This can be seen most starkly in the case of freedom. The slow erasure of true freedom from memory mirrors the similar process in the natural world. What we take as "normal," whether in our landscapes or our social lives, is a mere shadow of what once was.
The term "freedom" has almost lost all meaning in today's society, and as such, Kaczynski differentiates the two types of freedom: true freedom, and permissive freedom4. Freedom in its modern sense is often interpreted as things the system allows you to do: voting, gun rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.—a menu of system-sanctioned privileges. Of course these are all important freedoms, but are superficial compared to the primitive experience of freedom that went beyond the confines of a 2-day weekend, and allowed you to live a life with more autonomy than what the system allows. This deeper notion of freedom—as lived autonomy rather than sanctioned privilege—is evident in the testimonies of those who lived beyond industrial and bureaucratic control. Among many tribal and nomadic peoples, freedom meant something deeper: the ability to shape their lives with total, rugged independence—a life unmediated by institutions, clocks or supervisors. This is not a speculative point, but one supported by direct testimony from those who lived outside the industrial system.
For a clear and sharp contrast between modern man's servile dependence vs. tribal self-determination:
"I am master of my Condition and mine. I am master of my own Body, I have the absolute disposal of my self, I do what I please, I am the first and the last of my Nation, I fear no man, and I depend only on the Great Spirit. Whereas... thou hast not the liberty of doing what thou hast a mind to... thou dependest upon an infinity of Persons whose Places have raised them above thee."[9]
Perhaps because freedom in its truest sense—the freedom of primitive anarchy—was so often taken for granted by these people, like the air that they breathed, and because contemporary observers often overlooked a focused study of freedom in its conception, you have to read the literature in full to catch cases of its explicit reference. By and large the facts of pure, primitive freedom are more often obviously inferred. They are shown, revealed by the facts of their free lives, less than stated. Still, the anthropological record contains many explicit statements about freedom, specifically the material dimension of freedom—that freedom is rooted in cold hard spatial and ecological conditions, not in philosophical or political pretentions:
“Down near Smoothing Iron Mountain we took twenty-five horses, tore down some fences and left things like we believed the Great Spirit intended them to be, free and open. The Indians believed that if the Great Spirit had wanted the country enclosed He would have fenced it.”[10]
The scattered voices all testify to the same thing: freedom was once assumed and embodied in life. Its disappearance did not happen overnight. The shift began with agriculture and intensified slowly as civilizations became more technologically complex, with the rise of bureaucratic states and cities, the transformation in life ordained by the relentless orderly logic of the factory and the machine. By the time of the bourgeois revolutions, freedom was no longer understood as anarchy pure and simple—as autonomy from organizations and institutions—but rather as a new kind of participation within them: property rights, limited civic entitlements, leisure and consumption.
We can observe this slow-morphing degradation by the early 19th century. In 1835, over 80% of Massachusetts' ’ population was still rural and pre-industrial, and as historian Roger Lane notes, people were “accustomed to considerable personal freedom”—whether farmers, artisans, or teamsters, they largely set their own schedules and lived physically independent lives. But the move toward cities and factories began reshaping behavior. Regularity, punctuality, and obedience to foremen and supervisors became new social norms, and as Lane observes, this transition “produced a more tractable, more socialized, more ‘civilized’ generation.”[11] Just so, gradually and over time, as this process continued, as technology advanced and industrial civilization amassed colossal power at the expense of the individual, the very concept has come to now be gutted, and replaced by a thin shell of permission, utility, and compliance. "Freedom" today is nothing more than an abstraction. A propaganda slogan. A neurotic mantra meant to delude and conceal the public psyche from the loss of their true anarchic freedom in wild nature and their helpless subjugation to impersonal technological systems and organizations.
"In today’s society the common people, generally speaking, seem to have lost any conception of freedom beyond the kind that comes with days off from work."[12]
While this essay focuses on freedom as a test case, the same dynamic applies to other values: dignity, self-sufficiency, privacy, and more. All have been steadily whittled down by the logic of technological society.
So why does this all matter? The first and most obvious point is that society can easily drift, very gradually and over time, into a horrifically dystopian state where no one can identify a single tipping point or catalyst. Like the proverbial frogs in slowly heating water, they don't notice anything is wrong until it is too late, and they all die. The same is true of environmental collapse, psychological disintegration, and the erosion of once time-honored values into mere verbal window-dressing. Old growth forests vanish and thousands of species disappear. People become lonelier, more anxious and depressed. Values become surface-level propaganda slogans.
The second point is crucial to any anti-tech revolutionary movement that aspires to halt this negative shift—whether the shift happens to human dignity or to environmental integrity. When a problem is of long-enough standing, or slow-enough evolving, it becomes invisible. Those seeking to halt or reverse the erosions are not just fighting deeply entrenched powers, but a population oblivious to the loss itself. The public itself ends up resisting the revolutionaries not out of loyalty to an opposite truth, but out of their conditioning—because they have no memory of anything better.
And yet, the fact that true freedom is nowhere to be found (in the modern, techno-industrial world) does not mean it never existed, or that it cannot exist again. It is vital to point to the base of the baseline—to the historical and anthropological record—not just to remember what has been lost as the technological system has ravaged the human and natural spheres, but to affirm what is still possible. The revolutionary task then is not just to critique the present, but to expose the past in full clarity. In order to restore the forests and rivers, a revolutionary program must also resurrect the very idea that a more complete, more dignified, freer, and more fulfilling life once pulsed through natural environments. It is this buried baseline—not a utopia, but a lost reality—that anti-tech revolutionaries aspire to restore.
___________
NOTES:
[1] Kaczynski, Theodore John, Technological Slavery, Volume One, Fitch & Madison Publishers, Scottsdale, AZ, 2022, p. 189.
[2] https://ecologytraining.co.uk/shifting-baseline-syndrome-the-alarming-consequence-for-wildlife-conservation/ “Shifting baseline syndrome with regard to nature is the gradual shifting of the accepted norm when it comes to the condition of natural places. We notice changes occurring in our lifetimes and take the status from when we were young to be the best condition. We cannot go back and see the conditions as they were when our parents and grandparents were young. This is the same for older generations who cannot see times before when they were young."
[3] 1. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/shifting-baseline.htm
[4] Kaczynski, pp. 1839-1840.
[5] Daniel Everett, Don't Sleep There Are Snakes, Vintage, New York, NY, 2009, p. 278.
[6] Dugan, Andrew, "Serious Depression, Anxiety Affect Nearly 4 in 10 Worldwide," Gallup, Oct. 20, 2021. Last accessed on 5/3/25 at https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/356261/serious-depression-anxiety-affect-nearly-worldwide.aspx
[7] Witters, Dan, "U.S. Depression Rates Reach New Highs," Gallup, May 17, 2025. Last accessed on 5/3/25 at https://news.gallup.com/poll/505745/depression-rates-reach-new-highs.aspx
[8] Gershon, Elliot S., and Ronald O. Rieder, “Major Disorders of Mind and Brain,” Scientific American, Sept. 1992, p. 129.
[9] Adarion, 17th Century Huron chief speaking to Frenchman Baron de Lahontan, as quoted in McLuhan, T. C. (ed.), Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian Existence, Promontory Press, Victoria, BC, 1971. p. 50.
[10] Lehmann, Herman, Nine Years Among the Indians 1870-1879, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM, 1993, p. 71.
[11] Graham, Hugh Davis, and Ted Robert Gurr (eds.), Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Bantam Books, New York, 1970, Chapt. 12 by Roger Lane, pp. 476-78. See also: Kaczynski, Theodore John, Technological Slavery, Volume One, Fitch & Madison Publishers, Scottsdale, AZ, 2022, pp. 104-05.
[12] Kaczynski, Theodore John, Technological Slavery, Volume One, Fitch & Madison Publishers, Scottsdale, AZ, 2022, p. 331.
Copyright © 2025 by Wilderness Front LLC. All Rights Reserved.