The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity:
The one thing I don’t have yet in my systems diagram of human behavior is something to connect the points to each other.
The basic premise is that what people call emotional or spiritual energy functions as the dark matter of human evolutionary behavior. It is a force that can’t be observed directly, but can be observed indirectly in a number of ways. Either it is a literal form of energy that we have no way of observing directly; or else it doesn’t literally exist but it acts like it exists, and our perception of it is fundamental to our brain structure.
This elusive spiritual/ emotional energy is the primary medium of theatre, and an entire industry of people have been studying how it affects human behavior for roughly 2,500 years. Two of the most well known examples of this mysterious spiritual/emotional energy are easy to demonstrate.
First, people who work at stressful jobs often suffer from weakened immune systems. They suffer from these weakened immune systems because they divert energy away from maintaining them to cope with their stress. In theory, the amount of energy they’re diverting from their immune systems could be measured in calories. But that doesn’t answer the question: Where is the energy going? It can be observed that these people have to expend physical energy to force themselves to stay at their jobs. That implies that some form of physical energy must be pushing them away from their jobs, because otherwise the energy expenditure equation doesn’t balance. Energy can never be created or destroyed, so obviously some energy isn’t accounted for here. So where does this energy come from? And in what direction is it pushing the person?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refers to this spiritual/emotional energy directly in his I Have a Dream speech. He says, “We must meet physical force with soul force.”
Suppose a Civil Rights protestor was marching down a street carrying a sign. At the other end of the street was a policeman with a fire hose. The policeman turns the fire hose on the protestor and knocks him off his feet. The energy that the protestor was expending to march down the street gave him force in a certain direction. The policeman with the fire hose used a greater amount of energy to exert a greater among of force in the opposite direction, which overpowered those of the protestor. That knocked the protestor off his feet.
The Civil Rights movement was won with soul force because the protestors didn’t give up. The energy, force, and momentum exerted against the protestor stopped him from marching down the street, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to march down the street. So as soon as he got another chance on another day, he did it again. No matter how much physical force the segregationists used, it was never enough to make the Civil Rights protestors stop wanting their civil rights.
It is conceivable that with a certain amount of physical force the segregationists could’ve changed the protestors’ minds. You see this in domestic abuse cases all the time. A person could beat another person so severely that the other person stopped thinking that a certain course of action was a good idea. That’s exactly what the segregationists with their clubs, fire hoses, and attack dogs tried to do to the Civil Rights protestors. But they just couldn’t beat them severely enough to win.
Now we’re talking about a sufficient amount of physical force being applied to a person to change the course of the person’s life. In theory, you could measure the force that was moving the person’s life in the first place by measuring the amount of force you could apply to the person with a club, and then measuring the number of times you had to beat the person with the club to change the course of the person’s life. But again that raises the questions: What force was the physical force counteracting? And in which direction was that force propelling the person’s life originally?
You could measure the direction this spiritual/ emotional energy was pushing the person with what I call a spiritual vector. Spiritual vectors are scientifically invisible, because they could only be drawn in what’s known as mathematical space.
You could draw a graph to compare every aspect of human behavior to every other aspect of human behavior, all at the same time, except for the fact that it would require hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of intersecting axes, each in its own dimension. Mathematicians can contemplate what that means because they’ve figured out ways to draw graphs that shouldn’t be able to exist in three-dimensional space. But even if it was possible to find a way to draw a graph that represented millions of intersecting dimensions, how would you plot points on it? How do you assign a numerical value to love? What number do you use to measure how much a person hates brussel sprouts? And how do you develop a universal scale to compare everyone’s love or hatred of brussel sprouts to each other?
Here’s a crash course in how theatre artists draw spiritual vectors: (I’ll refer to it in terms of movies, so you can go watch some movies and see it happen for yourself.)
The writer has characters in mind when he writes the script. When the director and the actors each read the script, they figure out what each character is like based on the time and place the movie is set, each character’s occupation, age, relation to other characters in the movie, and whatever other background information they’re given on the character. Then they get more clues from the things the character talks about, the words he uses, the way he talks to other characters, and so on.
Once the director and actors have figured out as much about each character as they can from the script, they build up the characters from there. The director looks at the whole script, the story that’s being told, the setting, and what he knows about each character in the movie, to get more clues about what each character needs to be like to tell the story. Then he tells each actor his additional information for each part.
Each actor takes all of this information and figures out how to bring it all together and embody it all in a single character. To do that, he has to fill in some additional details himself.
The storyline of the movie is told by the characters in the movie being pitted against each other in conflicts. At all times, every character in the movie wants something he doesn’t have. In order to get it, he has to interact with the other characters and his surroundings in the movie.
The conflict is caused by each character having goals that are mutually exclusive to the goals of at least one other character. Over the course of the movie, conflicts that arise may be resolved, but they are always replaced by bigger conflicts.
Each character has a goal for the entire movie. This is called his super-objective. This is his reason for participating in the storyline; the thing that he wants that puts him into conflict with other characters. Conflicts are always threats to characters’ super-objectives.
In each scene, each character has a scene objective. This is his reason for participating in the scene; what he wants to get out of the scene. This puts him into conflict with the other characters. The character’s scene objective is always a part of his attempt to achieve his super objective.
Dialogue is then divided up into units of intentions, or beats. With each line of dialogue, each character is attempting to get another character to act differently than that character was going to act, and to do something that will contribute to the first character’s scene objective and consequently his super objective. A beat is the thing the character is trying to do with that unit of dialogue. An exchange of dialogue among characters on stage is always an emotional fencing match on some level or another—even if only very subtly.
To a lot of people who aren’t theatre artists, it always sounds draconian of me to say that all of these things are always happening to every character in every shot in every movie. It’s obvious that they happen sometimes. It seems like they don’t happen sometimes only because sometimes they’re very subtle.
Every character is always in a state of conflict with every other character in the scene simply because they’re unique individuals. They each have different goals they’re trying to achieve, each of them has different abilities, skills, and resources to work with, and they each have different feelings. The conflict is created by the simple fact that each character is always trying to achieve his own goal, but each character needs something from at least one other character.
Even if a man and a woman are madly in love with each other, they still have different goals, simply because they’re different people. If each of them is trying to achieve their own goal and needs the other’s help, that means in order for the woman to get the man to help her achieve her goal, she has to divert him from trying to achieve his own goal. Meanwhile, the man is trying to do the same thing to her.
The more compatible their goals are, the less conflict there will be in the relationship. This is not to say that some relationships have conflict and some don’t; this is to say that every relationship lies at some point on the same spectrum. Some relationships seem to have conflict in them while others don’t, because in some relationships each person perceives that the benefits of the relationship are well worth the conflict, while in other relationships the benefits are barely worth the conflict. When the benefits of the relationship stop being worth the conflict to one of the characters, that character tries to break off the relationship. And remember, I am talking about movies here…
Now I can give you an example of how all this fits together in a classic tale of a small band of heroes who waged a desperate struggle to save the free world from the forces of evil.
In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sam’s super-objective is very simple: Help Frodo destroy the One Ring of Power. Frodo’s super-objective is more abstract: Destroy the One Ring of Power before it destroys him. Aragorn’s super-objective is even more abstract: Protect the free world from the forces of Mordor.
Each of those characters’ actions for the entire trilogy revolves around trying to accomplish those goals. In Sam’s case, the course of action he has to undertake is very straightforward: Get Frodo and the Ring from the Shire to the Mountain of Fire safely. Frodo’s course of action is less straightforward: Get the Ring to the Mountain of Fire and throw it in, while constantly struggling to keep himself from falling under its control. Aragorn’s course of action is even less straightforward: Help Frodo get the Ring to the Mountain of Fire as much as possible, kill a lot of badguys, forge an alliance to defend the free world from the badguys, fight a huge war to drive the badguys out of the human lands, lead a hopeless counterattack against the badguys to distract them from catching Frodo, and finally claim his place as the rightful heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Gondor.
Along the way, all of these characters interact with other characters, but their goal in all of those interactions is to get themselves closer to accomplishing their super-objectives. Sam makes a lot of seemingly idle talk to keep his own and Frodo’s spirits up. Frodo talks to a lot of people to try to find out more about what he has to do and how he has to do it. Aragorn slips in some romance-time with Arwen when he gets a few spare moments, because her super objective is to marry him. She also wants to help save the free world, but even that’s a pre-requisite to marrying Aragorn, because she can’t marry him if they get conquered by the forces of Mordor and killed or thrown in a dungeon. He wants to marry her too, but that gets in the way of his super-objective for the story. So even when they are together, he’s preoccupied with thinking about everything he has to do to save the free world, and she knows that he won’t marry her until he saves the free world, because he won’t stop fighting the forces of evil until the world is safe.
Even if the two characters are friends and are cooperating with each other in a scene, like Sam and Frodo usually were, the emotional duel is still taking place, very subtly. Each character has a different super-objective, which means that each character has a different reason for talking to the other character. Each character is trying to do something, and what they’re trying to do is different from what the other character is trying to do. That means that each character is trying to get the other character to do something different from what the other character is trying to do. Even if they have the same scene objective, they have the same scene objectives for different reasons—because it helps them accomplish their different super-objectives.
In the case of Aragorn and Arwen, Arwen would’ve been happy to marry Aragorn under any conditions, but Aragorn knew he had to save the free world and getting married before that would just be too much of a distraction. Since Arwen wanted to marry him, but she knew he wouldn’t marry her until after he saved the free world, she knew that the easiest way to get him to marry her was to help him save the free world. They both got what they wanted in the end, but his super-objective was very complicated, and her super-objective depended on his, so she had to use a very indirect approach to her super-objective.
In a scene of two strangers talking to each other on the street—probably the most innocuous scene imaginable—each character is talking to the other because he needs to get something from the other character, or because he’s trying to get the other character to think differently or act differently.
Even if all you do is to ask someone what time it is, you’re trying to get the person to do something different from what he was planning on doing—because he wasn’t planning on telling you the time. Whatever amount of effort he expends in telling you the time is effort he was intending to expend on doing what he was trying to do—like, walk down the street. There isn’t much conflict in this situation, but there is still conflict. And this is probably the simplest thing you could ever ask someone.
If two characters agree to cooperate with each other, they’ve negotiated a trade. There is still conflict in the scene, but it’s been obscured by the effects of their cooperation. Each character has a super-objective that’s different from the other character’s super-objective. If the two characters agree to help each other, they each agree to do something other than pursue their own super-objective—namely, help the other character pursue their super-objective. Each of them makes a net profit on the agreement, which makes it mutually beneficial, and therefore the definition of cooperation. But each character made their net profit by making a smaller compromise on their super-objective. That means they each had to sacrifice something to cooperate with the other character, even if there was no way imaginable that either character could succeed at their objective without making the sacrifice. Hence the reason the mutual net benefits of the cooperation in the scene eclipses the conflict, because each character requires the net profit to succeed at their own super-objective. But that still doesn’t change the fact that each of them sacrificed something when they made the compromise—by definition of compromise.
If you were to direct a movie scene where two men meet in a gay bar and agree to have a one-night stand together, you could water down the conflict in the scene by making their super-objectives so similar to each other that it wouldn’t be possible to make the scene interesting enough for any audience to want to watch. You could make their super-objectives identical as far as the movie was concerned. That would eliminate all conflict from the movie, and that would make the movie cease to have a plot. But if you were to go to the extent of making a movie that accounted for every minute of each characters’ lifetime, which would take your audience members two lifetimes to watch, the watered down conflict in the gay bar scene would still emerge, because these are still two different people.
Even if their super-objectives in the two-lifetime movie were identical, their perceptions of how to pursue their super-objectives are created by two different combinations of abilities, skills, resources, personal history, and cultural background. That difference in perception is going to change their perceptions of how they can achieve their identical super-objectives. That’s going to make them different super-objectives in practice, because even though the super-objectives themselves are identical, the characters who perceive possible ways to achieve their super-objectives and therefore, how they need to act to achieve their super-objectives, are different. So over the course of a two-lifetime movie, their identical super-objectives would be undone by their basic human uniqueness. That would create conflict, and therefore a plot, no matter how slight.
When you compare this to evolutionary psychology, the parallels to this point are obvious. In real life, everyone’s super-objective is to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. But even though every member of our species has identical super-objectives, in practice those super-objectives are all unique, because each person who acts upon their super-objective is unique.
If you walk up to a stranger on the street tomorrow and ask him the time, you will see all of this happen.
The other person didn’t want to tell you the time. His goal was to walk down the street. In order for you to get him to tell you the time, you have to divert him from achieving his own goal. To do that, you have to figure out a way to make telling you the time seem like a better idea than not telling you the time. So you pick your words and your tone of voice according to which you think will be the most likely to get him to tell you the time.
If this was the entire movie, your movie would consist of one scene, made up of one sentence and one beat from you, and one sentence and one beat from the other person. Your super objective, your scene objective, and your beat would all be contained in your question, “Do you know what time it is?”
Your success or failure depends on the other person’s reaction. He could say, “Yes, it’s 2:35,” or, “No, I don’t have a watch,” or, “Sorry, I’m in a hurry,” or, “Don’t talk to me like that.”
If the person has a watch, your finding out the time depends on your making telling you the time feel like a greater priority to the other person than walking down the street. That depends on how much effort it will take him to tell you the time, how much of a hurry he’s in, and how you ask him. If telling you the time only depends on his looking down at his watch and saying a few words, it isn’t difficult to get him to tell you the time. But that doesn’t prove there was no conflict involved, only that there was minimal conflict involved.
This artistic technique creates realistic behavior because this is how real life works. Real life doesn’t seem like a movie only because people don’t interact in small, well-defined groups, their super-objectives don’t always bring them into big, dramatic conflicts, and their conflicts aren’t all resolved at the same time. The entire world, and all of world history, has been made up of zillions of movies all intertwining with each other.
To replicate all of this believably, the actor has to figure out how his character would have to think to make the character act in a way that told the story. To do that, the actor uses whatever he knows about who the character is and how he lives, and develops a feeling for who the character is.
When the actor gets into character, he makes himself feel like his character. His feeling for who his character is is a highly developed emotional state that makes all the things the character does feel like the right things to do.
In real life, your emotional state makes you feel like certain things are the right things to do, and you do whatever you feel to be the right thing to do. The actor has simply reverse engineered that process. By looking at what the character does, he figures out how to get into an emotional state that makes doing all of those things feel like the right things to do.
Of course, the character’s emotional state is changing all the time. That means that getting into character depends on the actor making himself feel like someone whose emotional states would change over the course of the movie, and then make the character’s actions seem like the best ideas.
However an individual actor does it, by developing a feeling for who the character is that causes the character to feel whatever way he feels at any given moment of the movie that makes doing whatever the character does feel like the best ideas to him, the actor creates a gigantic systems diagram for who his character is. All the things that make the character who he is interact to make the character believe that each of his actions offers him the greatest probability of success at his goals.
When a professional-level actor says he is getting into character, he could just as easily say that he’s replacing the systems diagram he uses for dealing with his own life with the systems diagram his character uses for dealing with life. Of course, most artistic geniuses are not also scientific geniuses, so they’re not consciously aware that they’re doing this. They’re just aware that they make themselves feel like their characters, that they’ve used a very highly developed process of developing a sense of who their character is, that by acting upon their sense of who the character is they deliver believable performances, and whatever else the actor knows about all of this. But I think it’s safe to say that most actors have never even heard of systems diagrams.
This is not to say that the actor has to fill in the details for each block of his character’s systems diagram as well as he has filled in his own in his own life. He isn’t replicating his character’s entire life; he’s only replicating a couple of hours of it.
This is to say that the blocks in the character’s systems diagram have to exist. Then they can be filled in as necessary, as they relate to the movie. Then the actor can make all the right things interact with each other to replicate his character’s thought processes. Without the complete systems diagram, he can’t.
The story begins with each character being propelled through life by their spiritual vector. Then their spiritual vectors bump into each other when the characters start interacting with each other. Every time two spiritual vectors bump into each other, they both change courses. With each line of dialogue in the play or movie, at least one person’s spiritual vector changes course. It is common that more than one character’s spiritual vector will change course with a line of dialogue; it is also common that a character’s spiritual vector will change course more than once with a line of dialogue; and it is common that more than one character’s spiritual vector will change more than once during a line of dialogue. These changes of the courses of characters’ lives are the results of the other characters playing their beats, to try to get each other to act differently than they would’ve acted otherwise.
A play or movie begins with each character doing whatever they’re doing, in pursuit of the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required. When characters talk to each other, they learn new information from each other, and are affected by the other character’s emotional communication. Both of those things alter the character’s perception of the situation, which in turn alters what they do to try to provide for their needs, by changing their needs, changing their perception of their needs, or changing their perception of their ability to provide for their needs. The art of theatre is the art of weaving characters’ spiritual vectors around each other.
In any scene in any play with two or more characters onstage, emotional energy is being passed around among them. This is how actors create realistic scenes, in spite of the fact that spiritual/emotional energy is scientifically invisible.
A standard rehearsal technique among actors is for one actor to direct emotional energy at another actor, the second actor to catch the energy, process it, turn it into another form of emotional energy, and then direct it either back at the first actor or at a third actor. Numerous theatre games have been built up around this basic principle, and this scientifically invisible thing that actors toss back and forth around the stage is as tangible to them as a rubber ball.
In scientific terms it’s pretty obvious what is happening here. The first actor doesn’t project an actual form of energy at the second actor; he simply directs energy into his emotional communication, with his facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, body language, and choice of words. That emotional communication interacts with the second actor’s subconsciousness and sends a wave of energy through his body according to whatever emotional effect the first actor’s emotional communication had on him. The second actor then processes that emotional energy, turns it into something else, and directs it at another actor.
Every character, in every scene, in every movie, is in a constant state of conflict up until the very ending of the movie. Each character needs something from at least one other character in the movie. He interacts with all the characters in the movie to try to get what he needs. Every character is always in a conflict with at least one other character in the movie, in which each of their personal objectives are mutually exclusive. In order for one to succeed, the other must be defeated.
Each character has an objective he tries to achieve over the course of the movie, and an objective he tries to achieve in each scene. His scene objective is always an attempt to help accomplish his super-objective. Over the course of the movie, minor conflicts may be resolved, but they are always replaced by bigger conflicts. Conflicts are always threats to characters’ super-objectives.
Now here’s where the theatre systems theory of human behavior diverges from evolutionary psychology as it has been practiced to this point. The spiritual/emotional energy that’s passed around in a scene functions as a form of energy, and even though it’s scientifically invisible, it’s simple enough to translate between one and the other. But now the question is: Where did the spiritual/emotional energy that each of the characters started the movie with come from?
In theatre terms, every single sensory input is a form of energy. That form of energy interacts with each person’s unique brain differently, but it interacts with each person’s universal brain structure in the same basic ways. That gives human behavior an infinite range of possibilities, within certain parameters.
These sensory input virtual forms of energy could be expressed as kilogram meters squared per second squared (kgm2/s2), or joules, in which the meters are measured theoretically as vectors in mathematical space. This is only an analogy, but I’m using it to illustrate that where people naturally perceive spiritual/emotional energy to exist, and where scientists consider spiritual/emotional energy to be an illusion, theatre artists have developed an understanding of how spiritual/emotional energy motivates human behavior, which is made up of five components that are analogous one for one to the definition of energy used in classical physics. If energy works a certain way in physics, and something else affects human behavior in the same basic way, what else should people perceive that thing to be but some sort of mysterious life energy?
Since people depend on food energy to live, it’s usually most convenient to refer to units of energy as they relate to people in terms of calories—that is, the energy content of their food. Basically, calories and joules are two different units of measuring energy that were discovered by two different people and that were established as the traditional units of measurement in two different contexts before anyone realized that they were just two different versions of the same thing and figured out how to convert from one to the other. They’re still used in their traditional contexts now, like liters and gallons or feet and meters. You can measure food energy in joules instead of measuring it in calories, but most people have never heard of that being done.
The joules I’m talking about here refer to kinetic energy—the energy of motion. Calories originally measured heat, but when you heat water (or anything else) it makes the water molecules move faster, which gives them more kinetic energy. That means you could convert from the calories of food energy a person has to expend to force himself to stay at a stressful job to discover the amount of kinetic energy that was pushing him away from his job.
The only problem is, spiritual/emotional energy is scientifically invisible, so at this point I’m talking about theoretical physics. Spiritual/emotional energy is a form of energy that acts as if it exists, even though no one has figured out how to measure it scientifically.
The “direction” of a person’s life doesn’t refer to the passage of time, or to directions in three-dimensional space. It refers to directions in mathematical space, where every aspect of the person’s life is measured on one of an unknown number of intersecting dimensions.
To understand how the spiritual energy you get from your sensory inputs affects the way you think and act, you need to know five basic things.
How hard does the energy push you?
What direction does it push you?
How long does the energy itself push you? (By that I mean, how long do you see or hear the thing?)
How long does your the memory of the energy push you?
How far do you change the course of your life as a result?
Every sensory input changes the course of your life. Most things that happen in your life change your life so little that you don’t even notice. But the big things that change your life in ways you do notice work the same way, just on a different scale. We’re talking about two points on the same spectrum again.
If you feel hungry in an hour from now, that will change the course of your life, because that hunger will make you think about different things and make different decisions than you would make if you weren’t hungry. Your feeling of hunger will change your emotional state, and that will make you think some choices are good ideas and not notice other choices.
If you eat a sandwich and satisfy your hunger, the hunger will stop affecting the way you think and act, so it will stop changing the course of your life. You could say that compared to your entire life, or even compared to this one day, your getting hungry doesn’t change the course of your life because you knew you were going to get hungry at some point. But for the few minutes you did spend eating the sandwich, your hunger did change the course of your life. You spent those few minutes eating that sandwich because you were hungry. If you weren’t hungry, you would’ve spent those few minutes doing something else.
Now we can look at the five things to see how spiritual energy works.
How hard did your hunger push you? Not very hard. You felt hungry because you were running low on food energy, so you decided to use some of your remaining food energy to make yourself more food to replace your food energy. You decided to take action to adapt to the new situation.
What direction did your hunger push you? In the direction of eating whatever you could eat that you thought would satisfy your hunger. You took action and used your available resources to adapt to the new situation.
How long did your hunger affect you? As long as it took to eat the sandwich. You reacted to the sensory input for a certain length of time.
How long did you remember being hungry afterwards? You probably didn’t remember it. You didn’t to continue to react to the sensory input after the sensory input was gone.
How much did you change your life as a result of being hungry? You ate a sandwich and went back to whatever you’d been doing before you got hungry.
Now suppose you’re a peasant farmer. Tomorrow, if someone comes and evicts you from your farm, that will change your life also. Let’s start by asking the five questions again.
How hard did losing your farm push you? Very hard, because you lost everything. That big change in your situation forces you to make big changes in the decisions you make. Now that you’re losing your farm, you’re no longer physically capable of acting upon a lot of decisions you would’ve made otherwise—like, how you’re going to get your food next year.
What direction did losing your farm push you? If you joined a militia of dispossessed farmers, it pushed you in the direction of waging armed resistance against the people who took your farm. Once again you took action and used your available resources to adapt to the new situation. In this case, your available resources included an army made up of your neighbors who had lost their farms also, which you were welcome to join, and which seemed to you to be the most effective way to try to defend yourself.
How long did losing your farm affect you? Only for a few days, while you were packing up to move out. You reacted to the sensory input for a certain length of time.
How long did the memory of losing your farm affect you? For the rest of your life.
How much did you change your life as a result of losing your farm? About as much as it was possible to change your life. Now that you’re no longer in physical possession of your farm, it isn’t physically possible for you to carry on with the life you were leading, until you get your farm back.
After you lost your farm, you had to make a new life for yourself, living in different surroundings and doing different things. If you joined the militia you switched from leading the life of a farmer to leading the life of a soldier. Instead of spending your days working on your farm and growing food, you started spending your days hiding in the forest and fighting battles. Then you win your revolution and destroy your government, or you get killed in battle, or you get captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp, or whatever. Exactly what happens to you isn’t the point; the point is, what happens to you as a result of being a soldier is going to be a lot different from what would’ve happened to you as a farmer.
By acting differently now, you affect your surroundings differently. You make different things happen in the world as a result of changing your own life. The next time something happens around you and you react to it, the thing that happens can happen as a result of your previous actions. Now you’re helping to create the surroundings that you will react to in the future.
From this we can see that the five basic things that changed your life when you were eating the sandwich were the same five basic things that changed your life when you lost your farm.
Since your farm was everything to you, when you lost it, it pushed you very hard. It made you think a lot differently, it made much different things seem like good and bad ideas to you, and it made you act a lot differently.
Now we can see that whatever direction losing your farm pushed you, it pushed you very hard in that direction. Instead of joining the militia you could’ve committed suicide, or you could’ve started drinking 20 bottles of whiskey every day to try to make yourself feel better, or you could’ve fled to another country to try to make a new life for yourself there, or you could’ve moved to a city slum and gotten a sh*tty job in a factory. But after something that big happens to you, whatever choice you make is going to be a very big choice.
The actual event of losing your farm only consisted of the time that passed from your being told to leave your farm, to your moving off of your farm. That makes you spend your days packing up your belongings, instead of whatever you would’ve done those days. In the same way you spent a few minutes eating a sandwich because you were hungry, but wouldn’t have spent those minutes eating the sandwich if you weren’t hungry, you spent your time packing up your belongings because you had been forced to vacate your farm. The difference here is that after that time passes, you can’t go back to doing what you were doing before, so you can’t forget losing your farm the way you can forget eating a sandwich.
The memory of losing your farm will stay with you for the rest of your life. Every day for the rest of your life, you will know that if you hadn’t lost your farm, you would be spending that day on your farm, and working on your farm, just like you always had done.
Now we can look at how much you changed your life as a result of these things.
To do that, you just have to compare what you’re doing today to what you would be doing if you still had your farm. If you still had your farm, you would still be farming. Today you’re drinking 20 bottles of whiskey, or you’re working at a sh*tty factory job, or you’re living and working in another country, or you’re hiding in the forest fighting a guerilla war.
Now we can compare how you’re living now to the way someone else in the same situation is living now, but who has a different history.
If the other person has worked in a sh*tty factory his whole life, he probably doesn’t like his job either, but he doesn’t have anything else to compare his job to. That’s the big difference between you and him. You know that you used to have a farm, and that if you still had your farm, you would be working there and making a better living. So you’re going to hate your factory job a lot more than the other person.
The alternatives aren’t much different. You could drink 20 bottles of whiskey today and hate the people who took your farm. You could work in another country today and hate the people who took your farm. You could hide in the forest waging a guerilla war today, and hate the people who took your farm.
As sensory inputs affect people’s lives, the people react to those sensory inputs by changing their surroundings. Those new surroundings create the next batch of sensory input. When the people react emotionally to the second round of sensory input and change their lives to some extent or another, they’re reacting in part to the surroundings they’ve created.
This spiritual/emotional energy exerts psychological force on the person’s decision-making. When they take action upon their decisions, they create the surroundings that create the sensory input that affects other people, or else they create the sensory input for other people directly with their actions, including their verbal and emotional communication. People’s perceptions and consequent actions are always affected by the sensory input coming from their surroundings, which includes the other people in their surroundings.
Even unrealistic characters have to be believable to the audience in some way. To make aliens, robots, elves, dragons, or ghosts believable to human audience members, those unrealistic characters still have to use emotional communication the audience members can understand. Most of people’s perception of what qualifies as a sentient being derives from their real-life experience with the only sentient beings humans have ever encountered—namely, other humans. That applies to both our own memories we’ve developed over the courses of our own lives, and to our subconscious expectations that formed over the course of our evolution. Most of our understanding of emotional communication we’ve either learned or evolved from dealing with humans and other animals. (The exceptions to these things might be some science fiction fans who have devoted a lot of thought to how sentient computers would act differently from humans.)
That means that in order to portray sentient beings, theatre artists have no other point of reference besides humans to relate them to that their audiences will be able to understand. Even if an actor played a robot who used no emotional communication whatsoever, that robot character would still have to talk in some ways as opposed to other ways, and use some body language as opposed to other body language, and use some facial expressions as opposed to other facial expressions. Acting choices still need to be made, in other words, because even a blank facial expression is a facial expression. Whether the character intended for humans in the story to react emotionally to his words, body language, and facial expressions or not, the human audience who is watching the movie will react emotionally to whatever those things seem to indicate to them. The writers, directors, and actors know this will happen, which is why they choose emotional communication for emotionless characters that will lead the audience to make emotional connections to the sensory stimulation that will help them understand the rest of the story instead of distracting them from it.
In other words, when an actor plays an emotionless character, he has to play the character as if the character is communicating emotionally, because to do otherwise would confuse the audience. The actor has to make his acting choices based on the emotional effects his facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language will have on the audience, even though those things are irrelevant to the character. The actor will do this to evoke an emotional response from the audience members that will contribute to the rest of the story—meaning the emotional response all the artists working together are evoking from the audience.
The actor playing the emotionless character doesn’t have to portray emotional communication that would be realistic for a human, but he does have to portray emotional communication that makes the audience feel the way he wants them to feel about the character—which is the same way they would feel if a human used that emotional communication, even though a human wouldn’t use that emotional communication in real life. If the emotionless character acts strangely compared to people in real life, the audience will feel strangely about him—which is exactly what the actor wanted. Of course, the fact that a human is playing the part proves that it is possible for humans to act that way, but at the same time, the fact that the actor found a way to act that seemed strange to the audience proves that people don’t usually act that way. Mr. Spock and Mr. Data in Star Trek are perfect examples of this, so is C3PO in Star Wars, and you can see variations of this in Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, and any other movie with strange alien, strange robot, or strange monster characters.
Every voluntary action anyone ever takes is always affected by the combined emotional attachments they’ve made to all their sensory inputs that are currently in effect. As science has worked to this point, the effects of those sensory inputs could only be studied piecemeal, because spiritual/emotional energy can’t be directly observed scientifically. However, everyone feels this energy to exist, and they have used it to tell stories to create mental models that replicate the world in terms other people can understand, ever since the beginning of spoken language.
This brings me to the final piece of the puzzle: How energy flowing through a person’s brain creates their decision-making. So far we have defined the environmental pressure that creates the sensory input that causes the psychological effect (kilogram-meters), the duration of the psychological effect (seconds), the duration of the memory of the sensory input (seconds), and the person’s physical response that creates his new environment (meters) to give us kgm2/s2. The one last thing we need is to define how the total amount of electricity flowing through the person’s brain makes the jump from emotional effect to physical output.
All life depends on energy. Energy efficiency is our single most fundamental survival instinct. The attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her necessarily means the most energy efficient perceivable means of preserving the survival of his or her DNA.
Now back we come to the question I began with: If a person works at a stressful job and suffers from a reduced immune system due to diverting energy away from his immune system to deal with the stress, where does all his energy go?
His feeling of wanting to leave his job isn’t created by a physical force pushing him away, but by a physical force pulling him away. Specifically, all of the emotional connections he’s made to the total number of sensory inputs remaining in effect in his brain make him perceive a path of least resistance in life, even if only subconsciously. Whatever decision adds up to the most effective perceivable means of preserving the survival of his DNA, makes him perceive that course of action to be the most energy efficient. If a conflicting set of sensory input makes him perceive consciously that another course of action is the most effective means of preserving the survival of his DNA, he will feel a lot of personal conflict without knowing why. Now he has to expend additional physical energy to push himself in the direction he consciously wants his life to go, in order to escape being pulled in the direction he’s trying to make his life go subconsciously. He is naturally drawn to the path of least resistance that he’s found subconsciously, so to avoid being drawn into it, he has to expend physical energy consciously, or at some less-profound level of subconsciousness, to outwit his subconsciousness and make the course of action he consciously wants to pursue seem to himself to be the path of least resistance.
In effect, within his own mind and his own life he has created the equivalent of a governmental subsidy for a failing industry, where people pay higher taxes to keep from getting laid off from their jobs. What he’s doing seems economically viable to him because he’s only partially aware of what he’s doing. But then he feels physically exhausted without knowing why.
Alternately, he might be fully aware of these two conflicting choices, but he goes on expending the extra energy to force himself to stay at his job because he knows he can’t afford to quit. If anything, this situation is even worse. If he knows of two choices and knows that the one he prefers won’t work, but still can’t fully commit himself to the other choice without his psychological government subsidy, he’s still in conflict with himself. That means he’s still trying to figure out a way to make some other choice work. That could be a way to make his preferred choice work, or some other choice he could make to escape his job.
There are many alternatives people are consciously aware of that seem like they might work, if only this person could figure out how. There are also several very simple solutions that we aren’t supposed to think about, but that worked well for our ancestors throughout the course of our evolution. Killing his boss is an option. Armed robbery is an option. And so on. If he still has to consciously force himself to expend energy to make his conscious choice feel like the most effective means of preserving the survival of his DNA, then he’s still being drawn in the direction of another choice that feels to be a more energy efficient means of preserving the survival of his DNA.
However you look at it, the combination of the person’s universal human brain structure, unique brain makeup, life experiences, and sensory input gives the person an emotional state. That emotional state makes him feel like certain courses of action are the best idea and make him feel like acting upon them. That directs a lot of energy through his brain and body to make him do those things. If he knows he can’t do those things and that he has to do something else instead, in order to be able to do that other thing, he has to move more energy through his brain and body to block the other energy and push himself in the direction of doing what he knows he has to do. That will take a lot of energy and leave him physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausted.
There are all kinds of ways you could argue this point back and forth in the case of one individual. So let’s take it to the next level and see what happens there.
A sociological force is made up of the individual decisions that the majority of the members of a group make. Let’s look at what happens to a group of people in that situation. From what I’ve said so far, there are several conclusions we can draw, all of which are proven accurate by other existing information.
First, if the majority of people perceive working at their stressful jobs to be the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA simply because any other choice would be an even less energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA, the majority of people will keep working at their jobs, even though they don’t want to.
Second, even though most people will keep working at their jobs, some people will take their chances on trying to find better solutions. This will happen because some people will perceive that some other course of action will be the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA. Young, healthy men in particular are the most likely to perceive that violence is the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA. So among a large group of people who are forced to work at stressful jobs, there will be a high crime rate among young men.
Third, if a sufficient number of people perceived a sufficient level of rebelliousness had been reached within the group, violent revolution would quickly follow. Everyone’s perception of what constitutes this critical mass of rebelliousness would be different, but it would create a positive feedback loop. As more people perceived a violent revolution could succeed, more people would perceive that enough other people believed a violent revolution could succeed to make it succeed. So the rebelliousness within the group would grow at an exponential rate. This would probably start with young men who already perceived violence to be the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA (even if they were mistaken at first). Then they would be joined by other group members who had a lot at stake, such as parents whose children were threatened by high rates of child mortality, and other adults who couldn’t even afford to have children. From there it would snowball. Leaders would soon arise within the group who would have ideas for how to make the revolution succeed. Other people would support the revolutionaries with food, clothing, weapons, equipment, medical care, and serving in the other usual home front capacities.
Fourth, if the people had been forced to work at their stressful jobs long enough, by another group of people who was so much more powerful than them hardly anyone but some healthy young men dared to fight back, the critical mass of willingness for a violent revolution would never be reached. However, that wouldn’t prevent a critical mass of desire for a revolution from arising, and lingering. As long as the majority of group members believed that no type of resistance could succeed, they wouldn’t resist. Instead, they would go on waiting for an opportunity to resist, and they would condition themselves mentally to keep working at their stressful jobs and waiting for a chance to fight back. Eventually, a lot of them would learn that working at their stressful jobs while waiting for a chance to fight back was the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA. That would be closer to what they subconsciously—or consciously—wanted, so making this choice would seem to be a more energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA than forcing themselves to go on working at stressful jobs with no end in sight. Over time they would develop a vast array of ways to condition themselves mentally to accept their living conditions until they had a good opportunity to fight back. For a few examples, the oppressed people might be more religious than their oppressors, sing louder, create more powerful music, dance better, be more poetic, have goofier senses of humor, and have stronger senses of community. All of those are ways to trigger self-gratification artificially, and the stronger sense of community is also a more tightly woven economic system in which people work together more closely for their mutual interests.
Fifth, among this invisible critical mass of rebelliousness leaders could still arise, if they could find ways to make a revolution succeed. Since the people had developed so many strategies for helping themselves cope with hardship at their stressful jobs, those same strategies would serve them well for enduring the hardship of the revolution. Before the revolution they had figured out better ways to make working at their stressful jobs seem like the path of least resistance than by their mental government subsidizing of that choice. During the revolution, they could use those same basic strategies to make continuing the revolution instead of giving up seem like the most energy efficient means of preserving the survival of their DNA. People who are more religious than their oppressors, sing louder, create more powerful music, dance better, are more poetic, have goofier senses of humor, and have stronger senses of community, also fight a lot harder.
Hence Dr. King could stand up in front of hundreds of thousands of people, say, “We must defeat physical force with soul force,” and be almost drowned out by cheers from all those hundreds of thousands of people who knew exactly what he was talking about, in spite of the fact that what he was talking about was scientifically invisible, and in spite of how many fire hoses the segregationists had used to try to make Civil Rights demonstrators stop marching down their streets.