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.

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Behavioral psychology is the study of psychology through a person’s physical actions.  That saves you from having to ask them any questions, for one thing, and for another, it lets you study their subconscious behavior—meaning things they think or feel that they aren’t aware of, and couldn’t tell you about anyway.

The basic assumption is that the person can’t be relied upon to have any idea why he acts the way he does, you can only determine that from the outside.  There’s a joke in behavioral psychology that goes something like this:

What did one behavioral psychologist say to the other behavioral psychologist after sex?

“Was it as good for me as it was for you?”

You use behavioral psychology any time you draw any conclusions about what a person is thinking or feeling based on the way they act.  Suppose you meet up with a hot chick and ask her for her phone number.  She gives it to you.  But then you call her and she doesn’t answer.  You leave a message.  But she doesn’t call you back.  You call her again, she doesn’t answer again, you leave her a message again, and she still doesn’t call you back.  So you call her again, leave another message, and she still doesn’t call you back.  What conclusions can you draw from her actions?  This is a pretty easy one…

Suppose your teenager was out at a party last night.  When you see him the next morning, you ask, “So, what’d you do last night?”  He launches into a really detailed story about, “Well, first I went over to so-and-so’s house, and then we went over and picked up someone else, then we went to the party and hung out for about an hour, then we went to the store to get some more soda…”  By the time he gets to the end of his story, he has an alibi for just about every minute of the night.  That probably means he got drunk, got stoned, or got laid, and doesn’t want you to find out.  If you care about that, you might keep an eye out for more clues to what’s going on, and then start trying to fit pieces of the puzzle together.

As you can see, you can break human behavior down into finer and finer details to find out more specific things, but as you do, you have to look harder and harder for the clues to fit together.  But that’s the basic idea.

Of course, this only works if you interpret the behavior correctly.  The hot chick who gave you her phone number but never answered her phone might’ve had to go out of town for a week because her mother was in the hospital.  Or your teenage son might’ve been at a party where some people were doing something he knew you wouldn’t approve of, so he came home with a well rehearsed alibi for every minute of the night so he could prove he wasn’t in on whatever you wouldn’t have approved of.  If you go searching through his laundry for beer bottle caps, empty condom wrappers, or bags of weed because you don’t trust him, well, maybe that’s why he came home with such a well rehearsed alibi, because he already knew you didn’t trust him!

When I was going to school for my automotive degree, there was a kid in my class who was a nice kid, pretty quiet, medium height, and a slim build.  Any time anyone made any kind of reference to homosexuals around him, he would always say, “Oh, I hate fags, I can’t stand ‘em.”  This school was located in the third largest city in Maine, which isn’t saying very much, because the Phoenix metro area alone has a population roughly 5 times the entire state of Maine.  As you might imagine, among people who go to technical college, and especially among people who go to technical college in such a rural environment, basically nobody likes homosexuals.  Or bisexuals.  Or even people who look like they might be homosexuals…

There you have an example of a more advanced use of behavioral psychology.  Since I knew these background clues about where this kid grew up, and I saw him go so far out of his way to denounce homosexuals multiple times, and he did it every time anyone mentioned anything about homosexuals around him, it was rather glaringly obvious that people had probably accused him of being a homosexual a lot when he was growing up.

Did he really hate homosexuals as much as he said he did?  Or was he just trying to keep anyone from accusing him of being one himself?  For as nice as this kid was, I can’t imagine him hating anyone that much just for being who they were.  Or had he made such a strong negative emotional attachment to the idea of homosexuality that he did hate one particular group of people that badly now?  Had he consciously figured out how to keep people from accusing him of being a homosexual?  Or had he just subconsciously moved stuff around in his brain until he started talking in a way that kept him out of trouble, and now he really hated homosexuals as much as he said he did?     I never found any of this out, but they are interesting questions to wonder about.

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Cognitive psychology is the stereotypical Dr. Sigmund Freud psychology of psychiatrists telling patients to lie down on couches and talk about their mothers.  From what I hear from psychologists, the basic idea of cognitive psychology that Dr. Freud came up with was a good one, but most of his so-called “discoveries” in the field were crap.

Cognitive psychology revolves around asking people questions about what they think and feel, asking them about their personal history and cultural background, and drawing connections among those things that point to subconscious reasons people have for their feelings.

A lot of ordinary people try to do this, and I think most people aren’t very good at it.  People who aren’t trained as psychologists can figure out enough about people to make this work with people they know, or at least, share some sort of common background with, but if people try to do this with anyone whose background is too far removed from their own, it’s really easy to f*ck up by making assumptions based on things that are true for you but aren’t true for the other person.

I ran into no end of this in flight school and with my former roommate the New Age game show host.  At flight school, my instructors would talk to me to try to figure out why I couldn’t learn what they were trying to teach me better than I was.  They all came from culturally conservative middle-class backgrounds, where people took it for granted that you’re supposed to follow the rules more or less, think inside the box, follow business professionalism etiquette, and make money.  They could understand that other people didn’t live this way, but their own values had become such fundamental parts of their brains that other ideas were foreign concepts to them; the instructors couldn’t truly accept that other people’s ways of life were equally valid to their own.  In my own cultural background, you follow rules that work and ignore rules that don’t, you only think inside boxes that are big enough to encompass all the ideas that need to be thought about, you be yourself, and you pursue a meaningful life.  My instructors took it for granted that their values were fundamental and should be obvious to any intelligent adult, and if I ever asked why they felt that way about things, in order to try to get them to see that their way of doing things wasn’t the only way—or even a very good way, when dealing with people from different backgrounds—they’d always say things like, “Because that’s how the world is and you just have to get used to it.”  As a result, their attempts at using amateur cognitive psychology on me were counterproductive, because they interpreted the things I said according to their own limited perspectives on the world, and reached conclusions that were completely misguided.

My roommate the New-Age game show host came from a middle class background too, but it was the pseudo-liberal emotionally dysfunctional kind, where people assume that college educations, high paying jobs, middle class values, and two weeks of paid vacation time per year will solve all the world’s problems.  Basically, my roommate was a middle class whore.  Not in the sexual sense, but in the sense that she’d sold her soul for middle class values, without even realizing it—because it was her cultural background, and she’d been taught to make strong emotional attachments to a certain set of values that only work well under certain circumstances and are completely inappropriate in most others, thereby trapping her in a pretty small existential box.  (It’s nothing personal; I meet a lot of people like that.)  We had the same goals in life, but she was approaching them from a direction that left her very ill equipped to reach them.  She knew that her own background didn’t work, but she assumed it must be somewhere close, so she could fix it by keeping it mostly intact but making some adjustments to it.  She was basically trying to figure out everything in these books, but she was trying to apply it to the lifestyle she’d learned growing up, where middle class values were more important than people actually giving a f*ck about their own families.  As a result, if she ever figures out everything in these books, it’ll probably take the rest of her life, because first she has to fully fathom that her own culture is founded on the faulty assumption that wealthy White farmers were inherently better than anyone else in the world, that the lifestyle of White economic imperialists is completely environmentally unsustainable, that with it it’s also completely socially, politically, culturally, and economically unsustainable, and that the Native Americans she was learning from, outspoken opponents of White imperialism though they may seem to be, couldn’t grant her magical powers to overcome these fundamental laws of physics.

As a result of her fundamentally warped perception of life, she would interpret everything I said the wrong way.  She wouldn’t interpret it in direct relation to the way she grew up, because at least she could understand that I came from a background that was different from hers and hers had some obvious problems with it, but she would still interpret what I said fairly closely to the way she grew up, because she didn’t fully realize just how differently it could be interpreted.  For instance, if she asked me, “Why do you talk so negatively?” and I said, “I don’t talk negatively, I just live one second away from certain death when I’m flying,” and she asked, “Why do you want to do that?” and I said, “Because America is under attack, which means it’s time for men to do whatever it takes to help keep it safe,” she would interpret that to mean that I’d been emotionally brainwashed into believing that by politicians or military recruiters or Hollywood action movies or dumb rednecks or somebody, without realizing (or caring, or fully comprehending, even if she did realize) that what I meant was that I was doing my part to fulfill my evolutionary role in my community, as opposed to shrugging my shoulders and saying, “It’s not my problem, so why should I give up my two weeks of paid vacation time per year to do anything about it?” which is what pretty much everybody from her cultural background seemed to be saying.  So as a result, my evolutionary cultural values ended up being yet another resource she and everyone else from her pseudo-liberal emotionally dysfunctional middle class whore cultural background had to exploit.  There I was, volunteering to risk my life to keep her and her family safe, and all that meant to her was that I was “doing my macho thing” and as a result (though I doubt she even saw the connection) her brother or cousin or nephew or whoever stood that much less chance of getting drafted to go risk his own life.  And she was convinced that the way I talk and the fact that I was willing to risk my life to earn a paycheck meant I had a bunch of unresolved emotional issues that weren’t her responsibility to deal with.

I must say, it’s ironic that since then I’ve made some friends in the Native Youth Movement, a Native American political activist movement who believe that rather than cashing in on the emotional dysfunctions of middle class White people like her Native Americans were doing, it’s their duty as able bodied members of their tribes—lo and behold—to do whatever it takes to keep their people safe.

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Evolutionary psychology is basically what these books are about.  Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology that begins with recognition that members of the same species all share a universal brain structure.  The study of evolutionary psychology is the study of how that brain structure works and recognizing how it manifests itself outwardly.

Metaphorically speaking, everyone on Earth lives in the same cheap suburb, where all the houses have the exact same blueprints.  Nobody in the neighborhood owns a copy of their blueprints, though.  All our houses look different, people have painted them differently, shingled them differently, gotten different curtains and shutters, decorated their yards differently, finished their driveways differently, built garages, built additions, and done every other conceivable thing to make their houses look different from the outside.  It’s taken a long time for anyone to figure out that all the houses might’ve started with the same blueprints.  Now some people are trying to figure out what those original blueprints are.

The two things that cause variations in that basic neural blueprint are genetic variation and life experiences.

Genetic variation happens in humans for the same reason it happens in any other animals:  to ensure that the species will contain some members that are well suited to various living conditions, so that regardless of how the living conditions change (to a certain extent, anyway), some members of the species will be able to adapt.

Life experiences differ for all the reasons I talked about in the last book—learning, childhood development, personal history, cultural background, abilities, skills, and all that.
One other thing that affects the outward manifestation of evolutionary psychology are variables that exists outside the self—namely, available resources, including the personalities of the other people the person is dealing with in a personal interaction situation.

From The Evolutionary Psychology Primer, by Dr. Leda Cosmides and Dr. John Tooby, who are the co-directors of the evo-psych graduate program at the University of California at Santa Barbara:

Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.

Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history.

Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve — they require very complicated neural circuitry

Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.

Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.

The Five Principles are tools for thinking about psychology, which can be applied to any topic: sex and sexuality, how and why people cooperate, whether people are rational, how babies see the world, conformity, aggression, hearing, vision, sleeping, eating, hypnosis, schizophrenia and on and on. The framework they provide links areas of study, and saves one from drowning in particularity. Whenever you try to understand some aspect of human behavior, they encourage you to ask the following fundamental questions:

Where in the brain are the relevant circuits and how, physically, do they work?

What kind of information is being processed by these circuits?

What information-processing programs do these circuits embody?

What were these circuits designed to accomplish (in a hunter-gatherer context)?

…In other words, everything I’ve been talking about for the past book.

If you want a Ph.D. in evo-psych, Dr. Cosmides and Dr. Tooby are the ones to talk to.  As a formal field of study, evo-psych is basically theoretical neurology, where people break human behavior down into smaller and smaller component by reverse engineering how our brains work and figuring out, “If this happens, what happens next?”

Something else you can do with this framework is build up from it, to see how it creates behavior patterns in groups.  As far as I can tell, I’m about the only person who’s doing that.

By breaking human behavior down into fundamental components, you can avoid the pitfalls of both behavioral and cognitive psychology.

For the practical application of evo-psych to everyday life, you start by asking: How is the person expending their energy?

Then you start asking further questions to refine your answer:  How does the person perceive that expending his or her energy in this way, as opposed to any other, offer the most effective means of preserving the survival of his or her DNA?  Is the person trying to survive, reproduce, or both?  How is he or she trying to do that?

Then you refine the person’s goals and instinctive perceptions further.  Intellect and emotional reactions (meaning instinctive reactions) determine the person’s perception of the situation.  Their instinct and intellects interact to give them their eight basic motivations.  Their choice is affected by the five outside factors in their decision-making.

Scientists have been studying evo-psych for 20 years or more now.  They’ve dumped tons and tons of research into it.  And what do they have to show for themselves?  A whole lot of highly technical discoveries virtually nobody can understand.   The science exists to solve all kinds of problems in the world, but if they can’t figure out how to win public support for it, it isn’t going to do anyone any good.

Once upon a time, people thought the atom bomb would be the ultimate weapon for ending wars of imperialism.  But on the contrary, the ultimate weapon for ending wars of imperialism turned out to be the AK47.  Millions of peasant rice farmers who were willing to fight as long and as hard as it took to win succeeded where dozens of the world’s greatest scientists failed.

So I guess this makes me the Ho Chi Mihn of science, eh?

Heh, heh, heh…

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Dr. Daniel Goleman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence, has another good book called Vital Lies, Simple Truths. It’s a good book, not very long, very insightful, and easy to read.  Hell, if you survived reading my last book, that one should be no trouble at all.
In his book, Dr. Goleman talks about how perception is affected by situations.  That is, how evolutionary mechanisms alter people’s perceptions to help them preserve the survival of their DNA.

I know that sounds kind of strange.  Basically, in some situations there are some courses of action that help preserve the survival of the individual’s DNA better than others.  These evolutionary mechanisms focus the person’s attention on the courses of action that lend themselves best to the preservation of the individual’s DNA, and shut out courses of action that don’t lend themselves well to the preservation of the individual’s DNA.  But there’s no guarantee that the evolutionary equipment is going to direct people toward courses of action that are going to lend themselves best to the preservation of their DNA under our living conditions.

Suppose you’re walking through the jungle and you get attacked by a tiger.  The tiger slashes you with his claws.  Ordinarily, getting slashed open would hurt—but not when you’re being attacked by a tiger!  The pain of the injury makes you aware of a threat to your survival, so under ordinary conditions, reacting to the pain would be the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA, because in order to make the pain go away, you have to rest and heal your wound.  However, when you’re being attacked by a tiger, you don’t have time to rest and heal your wound.  If you tried, the tiger would eat you.  So your brain subconsciously kicks you in the direction of saving yourself from the tiger by blocking out the pain for the time being.  That keeps the pain from distracting you from dealing with the most immediate threat to the survival of your DNA.  Or in another sense, a bleeding injury and a tiger attacking you are both threats to your DNA, but by shutting out the pain, your subconscious saves you the trouble of deciding which one you’re going to deal with first.

Now fast-forward 50,000 years, to recent history.  Dr. Goleman begins the book by asking:  Why didn’t the Cold War drive everyone insane?  For 50 years, everyone in the world faced a gigantic threat to their survival, but somehow, people all over the world were able to carry on with their lives as though the threat didn’t exist.  Instead of a tiger and a bleeding injury, now people were dealing with working for a living, putting food on their tables, and sending their kids to college on the one hand, and on the other, powerful men who lived far away, some of whom certain people voted for, others of whom nobody voted for, and some of whom lived on the other side of the world, who were building gigantic weapons that could annihilate all life on Earth.

How are individual people supposed to protect themselves from a threat like that?  Worrying about it accomplished nothing, so a lot of people subconsciously shut that threat out of their minds so they could focus their attentions on things they could deal with.

People had lots of different ways of shutting the threat of global nuclear holocaust out of their minds.  But essentially, they were faced with the same problem as the ancient proto-humans who wondered what happened to their dead friend.  Physical mortality was an inescapable threat to the people’s survival, and so was the threat of global thermonuclear warfare.  So in both cases, people found ways to alter their perceptions of the situation to shut out threats they didn’t know how to escape.

So to answer the question “Why didn’t the Cold War drive everyone insane?”, considering that everyone in the world was faced with a gigantic threat to their survival, a few people tried to do something about it, and most people just shut the threat out of their minds and pursued courses of action that benefited their immediate survival but did nothing to help them escape the gigantic threat to their survival, well, maybe the Cold War did drive everyone insane.  Or at least, most people, anyway.

…Either that, or it’s yet another example of a global graveyard spiral, in which people get themselves into a situation that their mental equipment isn’t very well adapted to handle, and acting on what they feel to be true just gets them into more and more trouble.

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For an extreme example of how a person can alter their consciousness to deal with a situation, come watch another Alfred Hitchcock movie with me.  Starring Anthony Hopkins.  Screenplay by Quentin Tarantino.

A Mafia don owns a private island.  Then some drunk college kid date rapes his daughter.  The Mafia don finds out who did it, and instead of having the rapist arrested, he sends his boys to abduct the guy and bring him out to his island. Then the Mafia don tells his boys he’s going to be on vacation for a long time.  He wants them to drop off supplies for him once a week, but other than that he wants to be left alone with his guest.

The Mafia don has a luxurious mansion on the island.  There’s no boat, and the island is too far removed from any other land for the rapist to be able to swim anywhere.  When the supply boat docks once a week, it’s guarded by half a dozen Mafia thugs with submachineguns while it’s being unloaded.  The rapist has no way off the island.

The Mafia don has three large hunting dogs who stay at his side at all times.  He also has a hunting rifle with a scope and plenty of ammunition, all of which he keeps under lock and key.  At all times, he keeps a taser, a can of pepper spray, and a pistol on his person.  He also keeps all tools, sharp objects, and dangerous chemicals securely locked up.  There is nothing the rapist can do that will pose any threat to the Mafia don.

Then the Mafia don gives the rapist free reign of the house and the island.  The only condition is that he must join the Mafia don for supper every night before the sun goes down.  If he fails to appear, no matter where he goes, the Mafia don and his dogs will find him.

So far, I have stacked the deck so completely in the Mafia don’s favor that there doesn’t seem to be any story left to tell.  There’s no amount of heroism that can save the rapist, so this isn’t going to be an action movie, and there’s no amount of subterfuge that can save the rapist, so this isn’t going to be a suspense thriller.  It’s going to be a psychological thriller.  Watch this:

The Mafia don is an excellent chef.  At supper, he serves the rapist a fabulous gourmet meal.  Afterwards, they drink coffee, eat desert, and then retire to the den, to sit in easy chairs and smoke cigars and drink cognac by the fireplace.

Then the Mafia don puts his pistol to the rapist’s head and tells him to accompany him to the basement.  His three large hunting dogs stand up and growl, just to remind the rapist that he only has one choice.

In the basement is a worktable with a chair in front of it.  The Mafia don tells the rapist to sit down in the chair.  He then chains the rapist into the chair, and then chains one of his hands to the worktable.  Then he picks up a large cleaver and very neatly cuts the rapist’s thumb off at the first joint.  Then he cauterizes the wound shut with a blowtorch.  All of this is done without anesthetic.  Then he sprinkles disinfectant over the wound and very delicately bandages it up.

Apart from these few minutes in the basement, the Mafia don is the perfect host.  He treats his guest with the utmost courtesy.  But the next night he repeats the process, and cuts the rapist’s thumb off at the second joint. The next night he cuts it off at the final joint.  The fourth night he starts on the rapist’s other thumb.  Then his toes, one joint at a time.  When all his toes are gone, he starts on his fingers, one joint at a time.  When all his fingers are gone, he starts on his hands and feet, one piece at a time.  When the rapist’s hands and feet are gone, the Mafia don starts cutting off his arms and legs, one inch at a time.

All through this process, the Mafia don is still the perfect host.  He serves the rapist three excellent gourmet meals per day and they spend each evening with desert, coffee, cigars, and cognac, and conversation by the fire.

While he isn’t cutting pieces of the rapist’s body off one by one, the Mafia don is the perfect nurse.  He keeps the rapist company and entertains him when he can’t move about on his own anymore.  He gladly helps the rapist with everything he can’t do for himself anymore.  He even smiles with genuine compassion when he wipes the rapist’s ass.

When the rapist’s arms and legs are all gone, the Mafia don starts pulling out his teeth, one at a time.  When all the rapists’ teeth are gone, the Mafia don starts in on his ears, his nose, his lips, and his eyes. He leaves the rapists’ tongue intact, so he can listen to what the rapist has to say all the while.

The plot of the movie is a study of the rapist resorting to one psychological defense mechanism after another, and all of them breaking down one by one.  I think the only way this movie can end is with the rapist going completely insane and blocking out the entire world.  That was a trick people used back in medieval Europe, when monarchs would watch captured enemies be tortured for recreation.  If prisoners knew they were going to be tortured to death, sometimes they could talk the torturers into a bribe.  If they paid the torturer off, they could convince him to hurt them so badly in the early stages of the torture that by the time the torture moved on to more elaborate, more entertaining stages, they wouldn’t notice anything anymore.

This story of the Mafia don and his daughter’s rapist adds an extra twist, however.  The Mafia don knows he has the rapist right where he wants him.   He knows he’s going to get to maim the rapist every night, right on schedule, and there’s nothing the rapist can do about it.  So he doesn’t need to resort to any emotional aggression whatsoever.  On the contrary, he can be the rapist’s best friend the whole time.

When the only other human being the rapist sees for the rest of his life acts like his best friend for all but five minutes out of each day, the rapist is going to cling to the only person he can to feel like he has someone there who cares about him and who’s willing to help him through this—the Mafia don.  And making that social/emotional/tribal connection is easy when the Mafia don acts like the rapist’s best friend for virtually the entire time they spend on the island together.

Before the rapist goes completely insane and shuts off his perception of the entire world, I’m willing to bet that his second-to-last defense mechanism would be to accept the Mafia don as his best friend and simply block out those five minutes per day.   This entire process would take eight months or more, which would be plenty of time for the rapist to try all kinds of easy defense mechanisms, like begging, pleading, threatening, offering bribes, ignoring the Mafia don, imagining he was somewhere else, and believing that divine powers would exact their revenge on the Mafia don eventually… and give up on all of them one by one.  By the end, the rapist’s perception of the world would be that he lives in excruciating pain, but his loyal friend stays by his side for every minute of it.

This is the perfect revenge for the Mafia don, because not only is he cutting the rapist’s body apart, he’s also cutting his mind apart at the same time.  To make his revenge complete, he could reduce the rapist to a sniveling groveling lump of flesh that used to be a man and still has a man’s brain inside it somewhere, which pledges his eternal and undying love for the Mafia don, and then shatter that one last illusion that was holding the rapist’s mind together.  He could start torturing him physically and continuously, although not hurting him as badly as he has been with the cleaver and the blowtorch.  All the while, he would keep talking like the rapist’s best friend, just like he had been the whole time, but now he would be very methodically hurting the rapist.  In doing this, the Mafia don would be preventing the rapist from being able to block out being hurt by the Mafia don while accepting the Mafia don as his best friend at the same time.  In the process, the Mafia don might even drag the rapist’s memories of being maimed nightly out of his subconscious and force him to remember that his best friend did all that too.  (That could happen in real life, but there’s no guarantee—but in a Hollywood movie, you can be sure it would happen.) Then to end it, the Mafia don could stick the rapist’s dick in a blender, and then leave him to bleed to death feeling like he’d been betrayed by his best friend.

Hey, you, reader, come back here!  You’re probably altering your emotional perception of the world right now, trying to shut all this out of your mind.  Well it’s okay, cuz that story’s over now.
As sick as all this sounds, this is basically how some parents raise their children.  (My parents worked for state foster homes for about 20 years, remember?)  First these parents trap their kids in a situation they can’t escape (their home lives), then they act like they love them dearly (which is what the kids want to feel), and then sometimes they abuse them—and sometimes even horribly.

When all other defense mechanisms fail, the kid can still warp his perception of the world beyond what most people could even imagine possible.  He wants his parents to love him, and he can’t run away from them, so he will subconsciously warp his perception of the world by any amount necessary to believe that he has what he wants.  So people start completely shutting out important events of their childhoods that don’t correspond with what they wanted their childhoods to be like.

So then as adults, these people go see psychiatrists to talk about why they feel like something is wrong with their lives.  They get to talking about their childhoods, and talk about why their parents got divorced when they always seemed to love each other so much.  But then the psychiatrist starts asking questions, and suddenly the patient remembers hearing his parents screaming at each other at night after they’d put him to bed.  Now suddenly all the pieces of his childhood don’t fit together the way he thought they did anymore.  Or patients start making statements like this one by  woman who Dr. Goleman quotes in the introduction to his book:

“I am very close to my family.  They were always very demonstrative and loving.  When I disagreed with my mother, she always threw whatever was nearest at hand at me.  One time it was a knife, and I needed ten stitches in my leg.  A few years later my father tried to choke me when I began dating a boy he didn’t like.  They really are very concerned about  me.”

I’ve known plenty of people who have said similar things about their parents—that their parents treated them like sh*t their whole lives, but they still want to get along with them, “cuz they’re my parents.”

Yeah?  So?  Out of all the people there are in the world who don’t treat you like sh*t, why do you keep running back to them?

Of course that’s easy for me to ask, because I never had this problem. But when I ask people why they feel that way, they can’t put it into words any more clearly than that.  Sometimes they grasp at something like, “Cuz that’s just what I feel like I need to do.”

One friend of mine couldn’t try to get along with her parents.  She never knew her father, her mother kept her for a few years but abused her, then put her up for adoption, then two adoptive families didn’t work out, then after a few years she moved back in with her mother, but they still didn’t get along very well, so finally she ran away from home.  Over the years they kept in touch from time to time, but my friend had been trying to get in touch with her mother for several years now but hadn’t heard from her, and figured either she was ignoring her or she was dead.  So she’d figured out how to put it into words better than anyone else by now, and she said:  “I feel like I’ve been robbed.”

And maybe I should add that my friend was probably 36 or 37 last time I saw her, and she had basically nothing to show for her life, except for her two kids who lived with their dad.  She was divorced, she had a few friends who treated her like sh*t, she couldn’t keep a job, she’d had to declare bankruptcy, she kept getting evicted from apartments, she’d end up homeless from time to time, or else living at cheap motels for months on end because she couldn’t save up enough money to get into an apartment, and finally she’d gone back to working as a stripper.  But she had to stay drunk to do that, and she had Hepatitis C, which is an incurable disease, so her liver was already working overtime… And she’d never accept my with hardly anything.  I haven’t seen or heard from her in a couple of years now either.  She couldn’t get anywhere in life because she had to build her house on the sand because her parents never gave her any other choice.  She felt like she’d been robbed, and she devoted he whole life to trying to stop feeling like she’d been robbed.  She couldn’t keep up in the world among people who didn’t feel like they’d been robbed, so she kept ending up with friends and bosses who kept trying to rob her even more.  Now a big part of “making herself stop feeling like she’d been robbed,” meant trying to figure out how to keep herself safe from those people.  She must be 39 by now, so you can just imagine how much of a future she has left as a stripper…

Dr. Mardi Horowitz compiled a list of different ways people use denial to block out their perceptions.  They are:

Avoided associations—the avoidance of anything that seems to be related to a stressful or threatening situation.

Numbness—the sense of not having feelings, or that appropriate emotions are going unfelt.

Flattened response—a reduced or constricted range of emotional reactions.

Dimming of attention—avoidance of focusing clearly on information, thoughts, feelings, or physical sensations.

Daze—actively unfocused attention that clouds alertness and attention.

Memory failure—inability to recall events or their details, or a selective amnesia for telling facts.

Disavowal—saying or thinking that obvious meanings are not so.

Blocking through fantasy—avoiding reality or its implications by fanciful thoughts of what might have been or could be.

When people get trapped in situations they have no way to escape, there are lots of ways they can alter their perceptions of the world to feel like things are working out for them after all.  There’s a pretty simple reason for that:  Once upon a time, some people who got trapped in hopeless situations they couldn’t escape gave up and committed suicide, and they didn’t pass their genes on to anyone.  My friend’s life might be a heap of smoldering wreckage, but she has kids and I don’t.  That means in spite of everything that’s gone wrong for her, she has successfully preserved the survival of her DNA anyway.

Some of the ways people warp their perceptions of the world are more obvious than others.  Some people realize they’ve done it, while others don’t.  The difference between my friend and the hypothetical psychiatry patient or the lady whose mother threw the knife at her was that my friend had figured out what had gone wrong with her life.  The hypothetical psychiatry patient not only forgot what went wrong with his life, he’d also forgotten that he’d forgotten.  That’s why his hypothetical psychiatrist had to carefully deconstruct his psychological makeup piece by piece until he unearthed that repressed memory.  The lady whose mother threw a knife at her not only forgot what had gone wrong with her life, and not only forgot that she’d forgotten, but she had forgotten she’d forgotten so completely that she could still remember the events themselves, but she had completely replaced the way they (presumably) made her feel with what she wanted to feel, and forgotten that too.  So ultimately, she had forgotten forgetting so completely that she could remember without remembering.

The mental equipment that made these things possible for these people is evolutionary equipment that we all share.  Suppose you find yourself trapped in a hopeless situation with no escape, and lots of other people find themselves trapped in the same situation with no escape.  In this case, you live on a planet with a greenhouse effect that’s starting to spiral out of control, and where there are 31,000 nuclear weapons, and lots of people who don’t trust each other, and two giant suicide cults that are trying to kill each other.  What are you going to do about it?  What is everyone else going to do about it?  Try to solve the hopeless problem?  Or tranquilize yourself by altering your perception of the world?  And what is everyone else going to do?  Try solving hopeless problems?  Or tranquilize themselves by altering their perceptions of the world?  If everybody tranquilizes themselves, who is that going to leave to solve their problems?  And if so many people tranquilize themselves that tranquilizing yourself becomes the best way to get along in society because it lets you share a common perspective on the world with the most people, now tranquilizing yourself becomes a social ritual and a cultural value.  And then what are people going to do but to help tranquilize each other?

If the mark of insanity is to act upon subjective interpretations of the world that defy objective reality to the point of self-destruction, then the majority of people in the world are insane.

But don’t take my word for it.  Remember Dr. Laing and his politics of ice cream?  As he put it,

“The range of what we think we do
Is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

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This story begins like all the others.  Once upon a time, people lived in a certain way, and their brains were very well adapted for it…

I’ve pretty much told you everything in Vital Lies, Simple Truths in the last book, but I find that seeing how different people break the same material down into component pieces helps to show how the same principles apply to different situations.  For this chapter about how perceptions and goals create intentions, I found Dr. Goleman’s version illuminating.

I’m sure something like this has happened to everyone at some point in your lives:

You anticipate something happening; you’re afraid of it happening; you try to prepare yourself for it; it happens; you have no idea what to do.

It could be anything, from being nervous about going to take your driver’s test and then suddenly forgetting how to drive and failing the test; or wanting to talk to some hot guy or chick, daydreaming about what you’d say, finally getting the chance to talk to them, and suddenly having no idea what to say; or getting ready to make a presentation, practicing it, being nervous about getting up and talking in front of all those people, then finally getting up there to give your presentation, and forgetting everything you were going to say.

In any of these cases, you’re being overcome by anxiety.  Some people get anxiety attacks so badly that they have to get medicated for them.  Most people just run into little things like this every once in a while.

When you suffer from anxiety, basically your mental engine slips out of ignition timing.  Your consciousness turns into a wash of static, like a TV that’s suddenly disconnected from its antenna.  You’re getting sensory input into your brain, but it’s triggering a bunch of conflicting thoughts all at the same time, so you can’t get figure out which ones to pay attention to.

Take the person getting up to give a speech, for instance.  He knows he has to talk in front of all these people, but he doesn’t want to.  He knows intellectually that he’s supposed to stand up there and say some particular words, but he feels like running away.  He knows he can’t run away, so he doesn’t do that.  Instead, he gets up in front of the people like he knows he has to.  But he gets so overwhelmed with overcoming his feeling of wanting to run away that it ends up taking up all his consciousness, so the words he was supposed to say suddenly slip his mind.

I used the example of the person making a speech because a lot of people really hate public speaking and get nervous when they have to do it.  Anxiety about public speaking doesn’t affect everybody, but anxiety about something or other affects everyone.  It affects some people more that others, and it might affect some people so little that they never notice it in their lifetimes.  That doesn’t mean some people are immune, it just means that some people never get pushed to their limits.

This is just another example of what happens when people get into situations their brains aren’t equipped to handle.  Intellectually you know you’re supposed to do one thing, but emotionally you feel like doing a different thing.  Your emotional reaction is a product of your evolution, and your intellectual reaction is the product of your learning how to act in a situation the rest of your brain isn’t designed for.

The total package of mental equipment you have to work with works pretty well most of the time.  That isn’t by coincidence, because there’s no way any group of people would ever work together to create a society where everything was so strange to them that everyone felt anxious all the time.   What we have instead is a living situation that works pretty well for most people most of the time.  Most people end up being anxious about something at some point, and a few people end up being anxious about everything.

That majority of people who aren’t usually anxious each avoid whatever things make them anxious and focus on doing things that don’t make them anxious.   Collectively they make their society function as a whole, even though everyone doesn’t participate in every part of it, and some people don’t even like some parts of it.

Those few people who get anxious about lots of things are outnumbered, so the society gets built by the other people, and then the chronically anxious people have to try to participate in that.  If those chronically anxious people were the majority, they would be the ones who made the society function, so we would have a completely different society, where the chronically anxious people each participated in whatever didn’t make them anxious and avoided whatever did make them anxious.  The non-anxious people would be able to participate in a lot more things than most people did, so instead of being people who kept to themselves most of the time, they would be leaders of the community.  But they would only be able to lead the community so far, because there would only be so far the chronically anxious people would be willing to follow them.

For instance, in real life, a few people are anxious about driving, but most people aren’t.  If most people were anxious about driving but a few people weren’t, a lot of things would be different.  We wouldn’t build so many cars, and we wouldn’t sell so many cars, there wouldn’t be so many different models of cars, there wouldn’t be so many car salesmen, there wouldn’t be so many mechanics, there wouldn’t be so many roads, and there wouldn’t be so many parking lots, because most people in the society wouldn’t care about any of those things.  A few people would, and some of the chronically anxious people would be willing to cooperate with those people, but they wouldn’t be willing to cooperate with them enough to make their society exactly the same as our real-life society only with a lot fewer cars.

As a result, the few non-anxious people would drive a few cars on a few roads and build their lives around that.  But the whole economy and landscape of the world would be different, because with only a few cars—and trucks—cities would have to be a lot smaller, if they’d exist at all.  If virtually no one dared to drive a motor vehicle, then virtually everyone would have to live close enough to their food sources to transport their food by horse—or whatever they used.

Anyway, back to anxiety in real life…

Dr. Horowitz came up with a good experiment for measuring anxiety.  He had some volunteers watch one of three films.  One was of the ritual circumcision of teenage Aborigines.  One was of a worker in a wood shop getting into some horrific accident with a power tool.  (Sorry, that’s all Dr. Goleman had to say about it, but I guess you’ve been through enough emotional trauma in this chapter.)  Both of those films were very graphic and very bloody.

The other film was a completely boring video of a man jogging.

Then he had his volunteers listen to a succession of musical tones.  (I’m really sorry, but Dr. Goleman, brilliant psychologist though he is, just isn’t very much of a storyteller.  Anyway…)  They had to listen very carefully and report whether each tone was higher, lower, or the same as the tone before it.  There were probably long pauses in between tones, and I’m sure some tones were pretty close.  (This experiment sounds like the hearing tests I have to take when I get my aviation medical certificates.)  So they had to pay very close attention, but this part of the experiment was really boring.

Then they’d take breaks in between sections of the experiment and write down what had been going through their minds while they were waiting to hear the tones.

Well guess what.  The first two groups reported having a lot of memories either of teenage Aborigines getting circumcised or of guys cutting their hands off (or whatever).  The third group didn’t report a whole lot of memories of some guy jogging.

The more upset the participants in the first two groups had been by the films, the more memory intrusions of the film they reported during the second part of the experiment.  Dr. Horowitz reported the following symptoms:

Pangs of emotion—waves of feeling that come and go, rather than being a continuous mood.
Preoccupation and rumination—a continual awareness of the stressful event that recurs uncontrollably, beyond the bounds of ordinary thinking about the problem.

Intrusive ideas—sudden, unbidden thoughts that have nothing to do with the mental task at hand.

Persistent thoughts, feelings, emotions, or ideas—which the person cannot stop once they start.

Hypervigilance—excessive alertness, scanning and searching with a tense expectancy.

Insomnia—ideas or feelings that disrupt sleep.

Bad dreams—including nightmares, anxious awakening, and upsetting dreams, which didn’t necessarily have any obvious connection to the original event.

Unbidden  sensations—sudden, unwanted sensations that are unusually intense or unrelated to the situation at the moment.

Startle reactions—flinching, blanching, and otherwise overreacting to surprises.

So if doing certain things make you have any of those reactions, you don’t want to do them again—if you even wanted to do them the first time. Those are all examples of ways that threats to your survival or reproduction can come back to haunt you by your imagining and remembering them, even though you’re only doing it subconsciously.  Whatever happens and however it happens, it takes up space in your consciousness and prevents you from using that space for something else.

Surely, our hunter-gatherer ancestors suffered from anxiety too.  After all, they were just a few people on their own in the wilderness.  Naturally, they were very good at surviving in the wilderness, but they were still threatened by a lot of things too.  They’re the ones who wondered what happened to their dead friend and invented religion so they wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen to them when they died.

So when I say that once upon a time people lived in different conditions from ours and their brains were very well adapted to them, that doesn’t mean they were immune to anxiety.  It means that as their brains evolved, they evolved anxiety, but they also evolved things that made up for anxiety.

For instance, the evolution of the abilities to imagine, remember, and communicate abstract ideas gave people a big advantage at hunting animals and doing everything else people do, but those things also made people constantly aware of their own mortality.  That constant awareness of their mortality was just one form of anxiety that those mental abilities brought with them.

On the other hand, those same abilities have enabled people to do everything that makes society today different from the way it was 100,000 years ago. As individuals go, every single thing people have ever invented and started using, beginning with the wooden club, they started using because they felt like it worked better than whatever they were using before.  The development of agriculture was one example of that. As a result of our using those abilities there are a lot more people in the world now than there were 100,000 years ago, so obviously our combination of mental abilities and the subconscious alterations we make to our perceptions has been a big help to our species in surviving and reproducing.

But what do those mental abilities mean for the future of our species?  Well, that’s what the rest of this book is about…

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Threats cause anxiety.  Okay, so what’s a threat?

Well, putting this into as simple terms as I possibly can for your average layman to understand, a “threat” is “whatever you feel threatened by”.

I talked about this in the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder section in the Instinctive Learning chapter.  If you’re a businessman from New Jersey who feels threatened by a mugger attacking you with a knife, that can set off PTSD, or anxiety, or any other kinds of a fear reaction, depending on how badly you feel threatened by it.  If you were my friend the former green beret that I met on the train, you’d feel threatened by it when it was happening, but then you’d just waste the guy and go back to whatever you were doing without a second thought.

Or, for another example, if you were serving in the military and fighting a war against somebody, and you heard people shooting artillery at you, at first you’d always perceive that as a threat.  But then as you got used to the sound and could tell how close it was by how loud it was, and eventually you could tell if someone was shooting artillery at someone on your side who was miles away from you, you wouldn’t perceive that as a threat anymore.

So what do you think happens if someone crashes an airplane into a building and kills thousands of people?  And then your TV stations and radio and newspapers and magazines broadcast it all over the world for the next five years?  Or ten, or twenty, or fifty?  Suddenly, this big threat is going to be right out there in front of everyone’s perception.  People are going to remember it, they’re going to communicate it to other people, and they’re going to imagine it happening to them.  But not only that, the more TV keeps this big threat in everyone’s faces, the more TV people are going to watch to try to keep track of it.  The more it gets broadcast on the radio, the more people are going to listen to the radio.  The more it gets printed in newspapers and magazines, the more newspapers and magazines people are going to buy.  After all, this is America, where you win elections and make money by offering the public what they want.

So like I said in the last book, here we are, America this giant.  Then one emotional aikido master comes along, kicks us in the knee, and runs away.  So we chase him, but he leads us right into a tripwire, and we fall on our faces.  As someone once said, “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

So as I said, the terrorists have harnessed a weapon that exists inside every single one of “us”.  But not only that, they’ve turned our political and economic systems against us too.  They might be terrorists, but we built a fear bomb for them.  All they had to do was to figure out how to light the fuse.

Now we have this perception, and we have our goals, and by acting upon our perceptions in pursuing our goals, we’ve gotten ourselves into a war nobody knows how to win.  And what did Osama bin Ladin want right from the very beginning but to kill as many Americans as possible and make Arabs all over the world hate us?  So who’s winning now?

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To this point I’ve been talking about awareness and consciousness and perception, and it’s sounded like they’re all pretty much the same thing.  Well, that was the easiest way to explain everything to this point.  But guess what…

Consciousness is pretty much what it sounds like—all the things you’re thinking about at any given moment.

Awareness is basically the combination of your consciousness and subconsciousness.

Perception is the meaning you attach to all of the information you have available for use in your consciousness and subconsciousness.

Now here’s the trick:  There are a whole lot of levels to your subconsciousness.  How much you use any piece of information depends on which level it’s on.  Some of it affects your perception a lot, some of it affects your perception a little bit, and some of it doesn’t affect your perception at all because it’s been repressed or just completely forgotten.

Your interaction with the world begins with your senses.  With your senses you take in information.

From there you put the information into the sense filter part of your brain, where your brain sorts through it and figures out where to send it from there.  Some of it goes to your subconscious directly, some of it goes to your long-term memory, and some of it goes to your consciousness.  Of course, the same piece of information can go to multiple places at once.

For the sake of discussion, we’ll say that all the information that gets directed to your subconscious and nowhere else is all the information that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose.  You basically discard it, but it’s still there in your brain somewhere.  (In writing this section I have the choice between being very specific and using a lot of words you probably wouldn’t understand, or using words you will understand but simplifying my explanation.)

Information that goes to your long-term memory but not to your consciousness is information that might be important to you, but doesn’t seem important right now.  So you’re storing it somewhere where you could remember it if you needed to and where it will affect your decision-making subconsciously, unlike the information that you dumped somewhere in your subconsciousness and forgot about.  There are a lot of levels to your long-term memory, so some of the information stays closer to your consciousness than other information, and affects your decision-making more.

Information that goes to your consciousness is the information you think is the most important.  Information in your consciousness can pull information out of your long-term memory if it seems to relate to it.  And once you’re done with information in your consciousness, you can store it in your long-term memory for later use, or else you can discard it into your subconsciousness.
Once your information is distributed, there are five basic ways you can make decisions.  Of course, there are some combinations of these that you can do simultaneously.

Information can be routed from your sensory input directly to the instinctive reaction part of your subconscious, which will make you react without any memory of anything being necessary.  If you hear a loud noise, you jump.  If you see something flying at your face, you duck.  Some psychologists have even experimented with newborn infants and showed them pictures of people’s faces about 10 minutes after the infants were born.  Some of the pictures were scrambled up, so their eyes, noses, mouths, and ears were in the wrong places, while the other pictures weren’t scrambled up.  The infants reacted favorably to the non-scrambled pictures, and unfavorably to the scrambled pictures.  So literally, infants are born into the world expecting to see people’s faces.

Information can be routed to your consciousness where it will remind you of something and pull other information out of your long-term memory to compare it to.  This is what happens when you hear the opening chords of a song on the radio, immediately recognize the song, and remember all the lyrics.

Information can be routed to your consciousness where it doesn’t remind you of anything, or at least, not of anything that’s terribly relevant to your situation.  This is what happens when you hear the opening chords of a song on the radio and don’t recognize it, so you have no idea what the song is or whether or not you’re going to like it.  Technically, this is just a different version of the last example, because hearing the opening chords of the song does pull some information out of your long-term memory anyway—things like, reminding you that you’re listening to the radio and that you know what music is.  But really, in practical terms, how useful is that?  So those realizations don’t reach your consciousness.

Information can be routed to your long-term memory, where the related memories are so well ingrained that you don’t need to bring the information or your memories to your consciousness to be able to act upon it.  To use myself for an example, when I receive the information that I’m finished eating breakfast, I get up and put the milk back in the refrigerator and my bowl in the sink.  I don’t know how many times I’ve been on my way to work and thought I forgot to put the milk away.  But I’ve never forgotten to put the milk away, I just never remember having done it.

Information can be routed to your consciousness where it will remind you of something and pull other information out of your long-term memory, but without those long-term memories making it all the way to your consciousness.  You then act upon the conscious information and the subconscious information, but without realizing that the subconscious information is affecting your decision-making.  You think that you’re acting upon the conscious information only, so you don’t realize that you had more choices than you thought you did.  Some of the choices you could’ve made you decided against without realizing it, because you decided against them subconsciously.

This last one is hard to compare to anything, because you have no idea when you’re doing this.  So here’s an example.  In the last book I talked about how parents who let their infants cry themselves to sleep inflict emotional damage on their children that can stay with them for the rest of their lives.  The infant who cries himself to sleep can end up feeling lonely or insecure or like there’s something wrong with the world and he has no idea what to do about it, or whatever.  That feeling becomes a part of his childhood development, so it gets built into his developing brain and stays with him the rest of his life.

Then as an adult whenever he gets information into his consciousness, he’s going to act upon that information along with the subconscious “there’s something wrong with the world and I have no idea what to do about it” information.  Suppose the information he had in his consciousness at some point was a choice to get a job right out of high school or go to college.  He might not perceive that as a choice, he might only perceive that as someone offering him the chance to get a job and someone else talking about people going to college.  If he’s subconsciously combining this information with the “there’s something wrong with the world and I have no idea what to do about it” information, then he’s probably going to want to play it safe and not take his chances on going to college.  If he wasn’t acting upon the subconscious “there’s something wrong with the world and I have no idea what to do about it” information, he’d have more opportunities in life, and maybe going to college would work out better for him than getting a job right away.  But he can’t make that choice, because he can’t even perceive that there’s a choice there to make.

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When an idea enters your consciousness and your brain pulls a bunch of related ideas out of your subconsciousness to help prepare you for the situation the idea seems to indicate, that idea that entered your consciousness essentially comes with its own information package.  (Technically, this is called a schema, which comes from the same root word as schematic, and it means basically, “a set of ideas that gives you a blueprint of what you expect this situation to be like”.)

There’s a train passing by my apartment as I type these words.  When I first moved into this apartment nearly two years ago, my brain attached certain ideas to the sound of a train.  Now that I’ve lived down the street from a busy railroad line for two years, my brain attaches different ideas to the sound of a train.  When I first moved here, a train made a really loud noise.  Really loud noises usually mean that something important is happening, so your brain naturally attaches a “pay attention to what’s going on” idea to the “really loud noise” idea.  After two years of hearing the same really loud noise multiple times per day, my brain has gotten fine tuned to dealing with really loud noises.  Now when the “really loud noise” idea enters my consciousness, my brain pulls out the “what is it?” idea, followed by the “it’s a train” idea, followed by the “ignore it, it doesn’t mean anything” idea.

For another example, when I lived in Utah, my neighbors owned chickens.  That included roosters.  You know when you watch a TV show about life on a farm, and every day begins with the rooster crowing at dawn?  It’s bullsh*t.  These roosters started crowing at about four o’clock in the morning, while it was still pitch black outside.  So when I first moved there, I got woken up at four ‘o’clock every morning by those goddamned roosters.  And they wouldn’t crow just once like they do on TV, either.  They’d crow about once every thirty seconds for about an hour or so.  That was just enough time for me to start falling back to sleep after they’d woken me up the first time, before they woke me up again.   So for about an hour every morning I’d lie there thinking, “Okay, you stupid bird, I get the point, you’re awake, now shut the f*ck up and let me go back to sleep before I make chicken soup for breakfast!”      The first show I worked on with the theatre company at the high school was Our Town, by James Wilder, which was a story about life in a farming town.  They needed a recording of a rooster for that stereotypical “rooster crowing once at dawn” mythology bullsh*t, so they were asked if anyone had a tape of sound effects, or a movie with a rooster crowing in it or something.  They couldn’t figure out how to get a recording of a rooster crowing?  It wasn’t like the town was that goddamned big.  Even if my neighbors were the only people in town who owned chickens, just about everybody should’ve been able to hear them from their bedrooms.

“Don’t worry,” I muttered, “I’ll take care of it.”

So the next morning at four o’clock I got out of bed, picked up my tape recorder, stepped outside, and held it up.  Scratch “rooster crowing” off the list of sound effects we need, and keep on propagating that myth about peaceful mornings on the farm.

The rooster crowing wasn’t a “really loud noise”, but it was an “unusual noise”.  When you’re sleeping, your consciousness isn’t working.  But when an “unusual noise” enters your subconscious, it gets directed to your consciousness and wakes you up, because it’s a potential threat, and usually the best way to protect yourself from a potential threat is not by sleeping through it.

When I’d lived there for a little over a year, my parents came to visit.  They were going to spend the weekend visiting me, then take a few days to drive to Colorado, see what there was to see in between, and spend the following weekend with my brother.

So they got there Friday afternoon or whatever day it was, and spent the night.  The next morning my mother said to me, “Oh, wow, your neighbors have roosters, isn’t that nice?”
Roosters?  What roosters?  They didn’t still have roosters, did they?

When the “unusual noise” idea entered my subconscious, now my brain was pulling out the “what is it?” idea, followed by the “it’s a rooster crowing” idea, followed by the “it’s nothing, ignore it,” idea. So nothing was reaching my consciousness anymore, and I wasn’t waking up.  For my parents, on the other hand, a rooster crowing was still an unusual idea…

A friend of my parents lives right under the approach and takeoff path to the runways at Logan Airport in Boston.  Whenever we’d go to visit him, air airliner would fly low overhear about every five minutes and just about shake the house off its foundation.  My parents’ friend said he didn’t even hear them anymore.

This process of shutting information out of your brain basically makes it the opposite of an information package—it makes it an anti-information package.  (Technically, that’s called a lacuna, which is Italian for “lake” or some sh*t, as in, “I don’t want this idea, so I’ll throw it in the lake.”)

There are lots of ways to teach people to connect ideas together to create information packages.  I assume this is pretty obvious.  Teaching people to make emotional attachments to ideas is a big one.  And as always, the more primal of emotions they appeal to, the more people they affect, and the less work has to be done to evoke those emotions from each person.  TV advertizers show ads of John-Wayne-type men driving pickup trucks across rivers and over mountains, and a lot of people attach the idea “big truck” with “manliness”, followed by “want one”.  Then the advertizers tell you how much it costs and where to buy it, so now you want one, and you know where to get one.

You see this in political races all the time too.  If a candidate gets the right haircut, wears the right suit, stands with the right posture, and talks in the right tone of voice, then the largest demographic of voters will associate those ideas with the “one of us” idea, followed by the “want him for president” idea.  Lots of other people associate those ideas with “professionalism” ideas, followed by “went to college” ideas, “know the kinds of things political leaders need to know” ideas, and “he’d make a good president” ideas.  There’s no reason a Black woman with dreadlocks couldn’t run for president wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but most voters would attach those ideas with “who the hell are you?” ideas and “don’t want you for president” ideas.

I saw this at work in flight school, where all my instructors had been trained in the importance of maintaining a professional image.  For most students that worked, because they attached “professional image” ideas with “knows what he’s talking about” ideas and “listen to what he says” ideas.  That worked for me too, until I hit upon the “doesn’t know the first f*cking thing about physics” idea, which triggered the “what else is he not teaching me correctly?” idea, followed by the “should I be listening to him or shouldn’t I?” idea.  That created a lot of conflicting ideas in my mind, which prevented me from seeing clearly a course of action to pursue.  Any other student probably shouldn’t’ve pursued the course of action they pursued as dogmatically as they did, but my instructors successfully prevented them from seeing that pursuing another course of action might be better.  For me, I could see that my instructors couldn’t understand fundamental principles of physics adequately well to be able to explain them to me, but they could fly just fine, so evidently they did understand those principles of physics well enough to be able to put them to use.  Continuing with my flight training still seemed like the best course of action to pursue, but for the rest of my training about 40% of my consciousness was taken up with wondering whether I was understanding my instructors correctly or whether I was misunderstanding them and was going to make a mistake that was going to kill me.  I got through flight training sure enough, but it ended up being a hell of a lot harder for me than it was for most people.

In effect, my instructors (or the owner of the school, the authors of the Aviation Instructor’s Handbook, the FAA officials who approved it, or whoever) discovered that one way to move students through training was to ensure the instructors had rock-solid understandings of their lesson material, but a more efficient way to move students through training was to ensure that instructors had adequate understandings of their lesson material and then dupe their students into not noticing that their understandings weren’t rock solid.  In terms of numbers of students adequately educated versus the amount of effort required to adequately educate them, it worked great.  In terms of providing adequate education for individuals, maybe 90% of individuals were adequately educated, and the other 10% were f*cked.

Lately, I’ve been running into a rather amusing effect of information packaging—or at least, it’s amusing now that I realize what’s been going on.  I meet lots of people who are working to win human equality and end war, so I tell them about this Science of Human Equality and How to Not Have Wars with Each Other I’ve found out about.  But as usual, I’ve been making the mistake of assuming I’m of average intelligence, so when I talk to people the way I’m accustomed to talking, nobody can figure out what the f*ck I’m saying.  For most people, the “guy who thinks he knows lots of important stuff about life that nobody else knows” idea triggers the “Charles Manson” idea, not the “Charles Darwin” idea.  Lots of would-be revolutionaries I meet connect “science” ideas to “evil propaganda” ideas and “people trying to take over our minds” ideas and “academic elitists trying to brainwash everyone into believing they know everything there is to know about life and nobody else knows anything” ideas.  So these would-be revolutionaries cripple their efforts by preventing themselves from learning new information that would help them save the world, and go right on worshipping free will as some supernatural force that will save the day, and they cling to their little stories about some group of indigenous people who live somewhere in the mountains of Peru who agree with them, and they point to the fact that 1% of Americans got more environmentally conscientious last year as proof that they’re winning while ignoring the fact that the American economy became 20% less environmentally sustainable at the same time (or whatever).  And in a way that makes these would-be revolutionaries look like a bunch of blissfully optimistic daydreaming pansies.  But at the same time it raises the very pertinent question:  Why have the people who are trying the hardest to save the world learned to make such negative emotional attachments to the ideas they need to learn in order to succeed?   (But I guess I’m straying ahead of myself again…)

There are lots of ways to teach people to attach ideas to create anti-information packages also.  These aren’t as easy to recognize, because they often involve people not doing something.

Here’s an example I bet everybody’s seen at some point in their lives.  When a kid is first learning how to talk, he has lots of ideas rattling around in his head, and now he’s learning how to communicate his ideas to other people.  But he hasn’t yet learned that in some situations you’re supposed to communicate some ideas but not other ideas. I’m sure at some point we’ve all heard a two- or three-year-old say something, to which their mother replies, “It’s not polite to talk about that at the supper table.”

In this case, the mother is using her verbal communication and her emotional communication to separate her kid’s ideas into “ideas I’m supposed to talk about here” and “ideas I’m not supposed to talk about here”.  Over time, the kid learns that any time an idea enters his consciousness, he’s not supposed to put it into words immediately.  Or to put it another way, when an idea enters his consciousness his brain pulls the “am I supposed to talk about this here?” idea into his consciousness.  If the idea is, “I want some string beans,” he can say, “Please can I have some string beans?”  If the idea is that he has to urinate, he isn’t supposed to say, “Mom, I have to pee!” he’s supposed to say, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and trust that grown-ups can figure out why he has to go to the bathroom…

See?  You probably just used an anti-information package right there!  I said “he can trust that grown-ups can figure out why he has to go to the bathroom,” and you probably thought, “he has to go to the bathroom because he drank a lot of orange juice,” or something like that.  But you’re mistaken. He has to pee because he drank a lot of orange juice.  That’s exactly what went through his mind in the first place, so that’s exactly what he tried to tell you.  He needs to go to the bathroom because he has to pee.  But you don’t want to think about pee while you’re drinking your lemonade or whatever, so you teach your kid that instead of telling you about what bodily function he needs to carry out, he’s supposed to tell you about which room of the house he needs to go to.  From there, he can leave it up to you to think about what’s going to happen next.  Or, as the case may be, he can leave it up to you to block what’s going to happen next out of your consciousness too.

As the kid gets older and learns about what is and isn’t appropriate to talk about at the supper table, if he says something inappropriate, his mother could just look at him sternly without saying anything.  The “idea I can put into words” idea wasn’t followed by the “I shouldn’t talk about that here” idea, instead it was followed by the “I’m fifteen and I know everything there is to know about life so I’m going to say whatever I want” idea, or something like that.  The progression of ideas that his mother wanted to take place in his head to keep her from thinking about pee while she was drinking her lemonade (or whatever) didn’t happen.  So the next easiest way to reach the same outcome is to give him a dirty look, to put the “mom’s mad about something” idea into his consciousness, in order to trigger the “I must’ve done something wrong” idea, followed by the “I wonder what it was” idea and the “what did I just do?” idea.  That also triggers the “she isn’t saying anything” idea, which she intends to trigger the “I better not say anything either” idea.  If all goes according to plan, the mother straightens out her kid’s behavior without anyone needing to put anything into words.

Now here’s an example of that applied to the adult world.  Once I was watching a production of Hamlet.  Polonius, one of the main characters, was onstage talking to his servant Reynaldo.  At one point, there was a pause, which grew rather long compared to the tempo the actors had been keeping in the scene to this point.  Then Polonius asked Reynaldo, “What was I saying?  Polonius said, “You were saying, sir, that…” whatever Polonius’s last line had been.  “Ah, yes…” Polonius said, and repeated the line, and carried on from there.

I kind of chuckled to myself, realizing what had just happened.  Nobody in the theatre made a sound. The actor had forgotten his line.  He’d done a marvelous job of covering his mistake, probably marvelous enough to keep most people in the theatre from noticing it.  But I’d caught it, and I’m sure there must’ve been at least a few other people in the theatre who’d caught it too.
For me, the “the actor made a mistake” idea triggered the “I better ignore it” idea.  Evidently, that same progression of ideas happened for everyone else in the theatre who spotted the mistake.  Any one of us could’ve rolled on the floor laughing and saying, “Ha, ha, ha, that stupid actor up there on stage thinks he’s so important, but he can’t even remember his f*cking lines!  Ha, ha, ha, what a f*cking idiot!”  But not one single person did.  Instead, the actor’s mistake was essentially erased from existence by the audience’s collective ignoring of it.

Now here’s where all this starts turning into a problem.  Take that girl whose mother threw the knife at her.  The girl was born with the “I want my parents to love me” idea in her subconsciousness.  That was a pretty important idea, so she had it in her consciousness a lot of the time, and close to her consciousness all the time.  So when additional information came into her consciousness through her senses, she tried to fit it all together.  She started with the “I want my parents to love me” idea, and from the things she saw and heard—and felt—happen around her, she got the idea that “usually they act like they love me, but sometimes they try to kill me.”  The easiest way for her brain to combine all of those ideas into a package of information (and anti-information) that she could use in dealing with her situation was to turn the “usually my parents act like they love me, but sometimes they try to kill me” idea into a “my parents do love me even though sometimes they act like they want to kill me” idea.  To make it even easier to use, from there she subconsciously turned the idea into “My parents love me so much that whenever I do something that upsets them, they try to kill me”.  Now everybody in the situation has what they want:  The girl has parents who love her, and her parents have a daughter who accepts the consequences for upsetting them.

As I’ve said elsewhere in this book and in the last book, the easiest way for the girl to learn to conduct her actions in ways that best benefited her survival in her situation was to learn to live in the emotional state that motivated those actions.  She could’ve gone to see a psychiatrist to help her adopt an emotional state she liked better and taken acting lessons to learn how to conduct her actions in a way that didn’t represent her emotional state, and that communicated a different emotional state to her parents.  But she didn’t think of that trick, and it would’ve been very complicated anyway.  Alternately, she could’ve grown up hating her parents and learning to lie about everything, which is what a lot of kids in that kind of situation do.

Then what would happen if the girl tried to tell anyone?  Most of the adults she would’ve known were probably the same people who erased actors’ mistakes from existence through their collectively ignoring them.  An actor missing a line of his dialogue doesn’t have any effect on anything else in the world, so erasing his mistake from existence has no consequences.  A man trying to kill his daughter has serious effects on the world, and depending on how you act upon that information, it can have serious consequences.  If a teenage girl accuses her father of trying to strangle her because she went out with a boy he didn’t like, what idea package is that going to trigger in other people’s minds?  How about “teenage girl hates her parents”, followed by “so does every teenage girl”, “why would her father do that?” and “she’s probably just making it all up”?

Now people are editing information out of existence so they can act upon information that will benefit them. Literally, subconsciously they’re creating an information and anti-information package by assuming this girl is lying just because she’s probably  lying, in order to trigger an emotional response that they (subconsciously) perceive will best preserve the survival of their DNA, by keeping themselves out of trouble.

They could go so far as to edit the information in their package for the sake of making their social group function in the way that best preserved the survival of their DNA, at the expense of other people in their social group.  Depending on who her father was and what the other person knew about him, he might also think, “but he’s the mayor of our city”, followed by “he can’t possibly have committed attempted murder against his own daughter”, and maybe even, “I voted for him, for Christ’s sake!”

If the majority of people in the group do the same thing, then they’re abandoning the girl to her fate by collectively and subconsciously agreeing that she is lying just because she’s probably lying.  Now the majority of people in the group are each acting upon their own statistical predictions of the situation, based on their limited understandings of it.  If 9 out of 10 girls who hate their fathers falsely accuse their fathers of trying to kill them, then 90% of the time the best thing to do is to ignore their accusations.  One out of 10 girls is going to get killed by her father, but the other 9 times you avoid creating useless conflict among your group members.  All of evolution has been governed by laws of probability like this.  We all inherited our genes from people who did things like this, because doing things like this worked pretty well most of the time—on a sociological scale, over the course of thousands of generations.  As a result, those people reproduced successfully more often than people who tried anything else.

For this individual girl in this one situation, sociological evolutionary survival mechanisms are an obstacle, not a help.  So if she has trouble getting help, it’s because everyone around her is being affected by a sensory illusion.

Filed under: x: 42 Vol. II by Ezra
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