Beats, the Laws of Physics, and the Future of Civilization—Remedial Version:
Any time you interact with anyone, you make things move around in their brains as a result of the beat you’re playing. The better you understand the beat you’re playing, the more control that gives you over how things will move around in the other person’s brain. You can’t control perfectly how the other person’s brain works, but you can control it better by understanding the beat you’re playing.
Of course, the other person moves things around in your brain any time he interacts with you, and the better he understands his beat the better he can control your brain. The better your emotional aikido, the better you can prevent him from controlling your brain in a way you don’t want him to control it, and the better his emotional aikido, the better he can prevent you from controlling his brain in a way that he doesn’t want you to. That almost sounds like I’ve talked myself in a circle and simply taught both of you how to do two things that negate each other. But not quite…
If you both play beats and use emotional aikido, you both can recognize what the other person is trying to do and you can prevent them from doing it if necessary. If you know how to prevent the other person from controlling your brain but you allow him to control it anyway, then technically, you’re still controlling your own brain. If the other person practices emotional aikido, then you aren’t controlling his brain either. If both parties are consciously aware of their emotional communication and emotional self-defense, then between you you eliminate the possibility of subconscious emotional control of either of you. If only one of you is consciously aware of emotional communication and emotional self-defense, whichever person isn’t is left vulnerable to the other person. If neither of you are consciously aware of emotional communication and emotional self-defense, then you’ve basically turned your lives into a soap opera, where both people are subconsciously trying to get something from the other person through their emotional communication and are subconsciously trying to prevent the other person from getting something from them. If you don’t believe me, try watching a soap opera sometime with the volume turned off and see how much you can tell about what each of the characters are trying to accomplish in the scene based on their emotional communication, even without your being able to hear what they’re saying.
(If you want to try a really funny experiment, record a soap opera, watch it with the volume turned down, and try to fill in the dialogue based on what they people look like they’re talking about. Then go back and watch it and see how close you got. You probably won’t be very far off.)
This is not to say that lack of consciousness of emotional aikido and beat playing is synonymous with lack of consciousness of emotional self-defense and emotional communication, because people can be consciously aware of those things in other ways also. It is to say however that emotional aikido and beat playing are specific direct forms of conscious awareness of emotional self-defense and emotional communication, while others are more abstract and intuitive. The reason for that is simple: Emotional aikido and beat playing both begin by breaking emotional self-defense and emotional communication down into their fundamental components and then building up from there, in the same way that the most effective way to build anything is to build it up from its fundamental components.
When you add in the laws of physics that exist outside of the laws of evolution that make people’s brains work the ways they do, things get more complicated. As I think I made abundantly clear in the last book, our brains are constructed to deal with living conditions that (virtually) none of us live in anymore. Two people interacting emotionally in a vacuum would be easy enough if they both played beats and practiced emotional aikido. However, since the laws of physics conflict with so much of what we naturally perceive to be true about the world, no interaction can truly be mutually beneficial to both parties unless both parties perceive it to be mutually beneficial, and their perceptions comply with physical reality. If both parties don’t perceive the interaction to be mutually beneficial, the two parties are not cooperating, by definition. If both parties perceive the interaction to be mutually beneficial but one or both turns out to be mistaken because their perception conflicts with physical reality, soon enough they’ll realize that the interaction wasn’t mutually beneficial after all. They may perceive themselves to have been mistaken, or the other party to have been mistaken, or the other party to have deceived them. Whatever the case, they will perceive the interaction to have harmed them when they expected it to benefit them, and whatever results from that can be pretty well guaranteed to create some form of conflict that wouldn’t’ve been created if the results had turned out to benefit them like they expected.
As this relates to the future of civilization, the future of civilization depends on cooperation. If we try to build a civilization on conflict in a world full of weapons, we can never succeed. If we try to build a civilization by threatening the survival of people in that civilization, we’re carrying on the Hobbesian cycle of aggression in a world where sufficient weapons to completely destroy civilization have existed for decades. In the Hobbesian cycle of aggression, aggression only begets greater aggression, and with the number of weapons there are in the world now, there’s only one way that can end. We are no longer poised to unleash all of those weapons simultaneously like we were in the Cold War, but now that those weapons exist, if a person feels his survival being threatened and the only way he can find to try to protect himself is by getting hold of some of those weapons, that’s what he can be expected to do. And certain people in the world who want to help destroy civilization, including a certain wealthy Saudi prince (if he’s still alive), have figured that out, and are finding ways to supply weapons to people who want them. As in any kind of a conflict, the best way we can defend ourselves is by not leaving ourselves vulnerable in the first place.