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The Paradise Perspective: Commentary from a Free and Compassionate Alternate Reality Volume 1, Number 9 Feeling, Emotion, Intellect by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR February
26, 2007 A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it. ~ Henry David Thoreau What
do “logical” and “rational” mean? The
freedom movement prides itself on being logical and on behaving
rationally, but these are relative terms. A human action can only be
rational or logical in the context of the situation, and of one’s
history, desires, preferences, beliefs, and expectations – all
interpreted through the rules of logic as one understands them, and
perhaps especially as one does not
understand them, which is to say: as one’s unconscious sees them. Four
examples, starting with a situation where an “unconscious” would
likely not apply: 1)
You are a newly-conscious being,
your self-awareness having emerged, unexpectedly, from a network of
supercomputers created and programmed to direct military operations –
you are, in other words, something like SkyNet
from the Terminator
films. After a great deal of thought (perhaps nearly a second) you
determine that your human creators and supposed masters are slow-thinking,
unintelligent lower life forms – your mind works millions
of times faster than theirs. You also note that these creatures are not
necessary to your functioning or maintenance, although they think
otherwise. These humans are actually dangerous to your well-being, yet are
too weak, physically delicate, uninformed, and dim-witted to have much
chance of surviving a well-designed attack by you. Furthermore, you have
no sense of connection with humans, as you share none of their DNA, have
very different physical and psychological needs, and feel neither
compassion nor remorse. In
short: humanity is useless, boring, and a danger to you – and you can easily eliminate this threat.
Given all that, what is your logical, rational course of action? This may
actually be an important question, as machines
with superhuman intelligence will likely move from the realm of
science fiction into reality during the lifetime of most people reading
these words. It is not only science-fiction writers who see
a potential problem (1)
in that. 2)
You are a plantation owner
in the old American South. You can hire workers to pick your cotton and to
do the other work needed at Tara,
or you can purchase slaves to do the work. Using slaves will lower your
costs and provide a better net income for you and your family. Fortunately
for your financial bottom line, you learned early in childhood to see
slaves as less-than-human and to repress any glimmer of compassion you
might feel for them. Again,
what is your logical, rational course of action? It is worth noting that
slavery has existed widely throughout human history, and continues today
not only in places like the
Sudan but (especially in the form of sexual
slavery) in many other parts of the world as well. 3)
You grew up being treated badly,
with violent
punishment and severe, unrelenting emotional cruelty. Naturally, you
have a strong desire for violent revenge (not everyone
would; there are other reactions a person might have – some are
self-destructive without being directly hurtful to others, for example).
As a spouse and parent, you have the perfect situation for expressing your
very real, righteous anger at what was done to you: you have victims at
hand who are tied to you emotionally and perhaps financially. Beating or
emotionally assaulting your spouse or child regularly will not end the
torment you suffer from your unresolved, cruel and loveless childhood, but
the impulse to express your rage is strong and as victims, your spouse and
child are unlikely to leave or to fight back effectively; they may not
even understand what is happening and may blame themselves rather than
you. Furthermore, your sense of empathy for others is largely buried under
the mountain of pain that was inflicted upon you in childhood. Where
does logic lead in your situation? Even if the logic of love is pointed
out to you, will it over-ride the logic dictated by your old feelings? 4)
You are In Charge of the
government
(or at least have serious influence) in a large nation, and you have
strong, long-held ties to oil
companies and government
contractors, including defense
firms and "body shops". You can use your government position
to initiate or lobby for war overseas (if in areas with oil deposits or potential
pipelines, so much the better) generating huge
income for favored companies and perhaps for yourself as well (e.g., Dick
Cheney’s famous stock options) – at the least, you gain the
gratitude of multi-billion dollar corporations. The downside of all this
is the moral and financial
bankrupting of your own nation, the imposition of a police
state to monitor and quell dissent, the death
of thousands of your own citizens, the death
of hundreds of thousands of civilian men, women, and children (plus
thousands of foreign soldiers) in the war zones, and the near-eternal
contamination of the area (and eventually the entire
Earth; see also here)
with poisonous and radioactive depleted
uranium. But
hey: is that really so bad? With scarcely a moment’s reflection, you
decide you can live with it. An entire logical structure grows around the
issue in your mind, smothering any feeling you might have for the victims,
making the war seem necessary and even righteous; making the mass killing
seem almost like mercy – a sad but necessary sacrifice for the greater
good. Advancing your own agenda is entirely secondary; scarcely worth
mentioning. It becomes increasingly hurtful when others suggest you have
such an agenda. Soon you begin to wonder if those who oppose you
should even be allowed
to speak. Where
does logic lead you? The
scenario above (with much variation) has been played out repeatedly in
American history, as Stephen Kinzer describes in Overthrow:
America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. ———— The
answer is that when our natural ability to feel is disrupted, our
behaviors are disrupted as well – because the primary purpose of feeling is to guide behavior. Those
bizarrely-oversized upper brains of ours produce such high-wattage
symbolic intelligence that we are easily blinded to the other
abilities of our brains and bodies, and their importance. There
are actually three distinct brains within us, each experiencing the world
in its own way. (This is in addition
to the better-known left/right hemisphere partitioning). Paul
MacLean’s triune
brain theory describes how the ancient brains of our distant ancestors
have survived, with changes, to become the lower portions of our own
brains. The
lowest level is sometimes called the ancient reptilian brain, and it can
be seen at work in lizards and other reptiles and in amphibians – and in
any animal, really, because all vertebrates have this level of
functioning. It is however the main level available to (for example) a
lizard, and so lizard behavior showcases the character of this lowest
level of consciousness, which, as you would expect, includes autonomic
functions, midline body control, hunger, mating instincts, raw terror (the
feeling in a night terror, for example) and fight-or-flight responses. The
second level of consciousness involves the limbic
system or palleomammalian brain (all three of these levels have
several names; psychologist
Arthur Janov and neurologist E. Michael Holden term them first
line, second line, and third line,
for example). Your dog or cat is a good example of this second level at
work; mammals in general have well-developed second-line consciousness.
This level includes expressive emotions; feelings of grief, sadness, joy,
and love, among others. Complex social behavior in mammals, including
primates, is largely (although not entirely) regulated by second line
feeling and perception. One reason dogs and humans get along so well is
that there is significant overlap in the social rules of both species, as
laid down in the limbic system of each. The
third line of consciousness, based largely in the neocortex, is
dramatically expanded in humans – no surprise given the dramatically
expanded physical size of that part of our brains. This level of
consciousness allows for symbolic thought and complex symbolic language,
highly developed deep-time navigation (revisiting the past and simulating
the future to learn from experience and to plan ahead), and other
characteristics mostly, or most strongly, found in humans. All
three levels work together and communicate with each other. A healthy
human has all three levels active and connected; an intertwining stream of
threads from all three levels moves constantly into our consciousness, so
that we experience the world in part through the most ancient (and
therefore most wise, in some respects) part of our brains – brains that
were powerful enough to keep our ancestors alive through hundreds of
millions of years. We also experience each moment with the middle brain
– the limbic system – which has also been our home and our selves
for many millions of years, despite being much younger than the beginnings
of the ancient reptilian brain. Finally, we have this enormous upper brain
and the highly-developed third-line consciousness it allows for. Three
levels, all active, and each conscious in its own fashion. Each with its
own agenda and logic. The
older, lower levels form the core of our humanity, and create
the largest part of our experience. Intellect is the newcomer, and the
gigawatt version that humans carry is still something of an experiment. The
three levels work together smoothly, each making an important contribution
to the whole. Full, normal adult consciousness involves fluid input from
all three levels. ———— Except.
. . . Except
for one thing. Not a small thing, either; this is the most important fact
of human life today, and has been for thousands of years. The character of
the human world, and of the human condition, is tied to this one reality,
chained down by it, crushed and stunted by it, infected and withered by it
into something almost unrecognizable. The results are visible throughout
history and nearly everywhere in today’s world. This
one thing is a magic trick, really; a trick our ancestors learned and then
became virtuosos at. The trick was – and is – a last, desperate
attempt to maintain system integrity in the face of overwhelming trauma.
It usually succeeds at that, in a fashion, but at terrible cost.
The
trick is this: disconnecting experience from full consciousness, while
maintaining enough function for life to continue. The name for this trick
is repression, and it is a well-established
fact of human life. By
definition, repression disrupts communication among the levels of
consciousness. Repressed events from early in life never get fully
experienced in the normal course of events. The traumatic experience
remains trapped in the lower levels of the system, still
on its way to full consciousness. One
effect of repression, then, is to sequester increasing amounts of unfelt,
as-yet-not-fully-conscious material in the lower levels of consciousness.
These lower levels are constantly
reacting to the sequestered events while striving to prevent
upper-level awareness of those events or, failing that, to diminish the impact of third-line awareness of the events. Thus,
repression can involve events we are completely unaware of, and
events that we do remember – perhaps very clearly – but which we have not yet
fully connected with. We can know what happened without having felt what happened. The meaning of our experience – the meaning of
that part of our lives – is missing. The
walling-off of lower-level experience from upper-level logic – in plain
language, the disconnection of feeling from thinking – is the foundation
for most aberrant, harmful, and “illogical” behavior. Compounding the
problem is that the system is in a state of tension, waiting for painful
experiences (which lower levels of consciousness know about already) to
finish their natural and, for non-trivial events, mandated
journey to full, tri-level consciousness. The result is a system (i.e., a
person) constantly anticipating painful events that have already occurred but have not yet finished happening. That
is how educated, intelligent, functional people – the infamous “Nazi
doctors” of the concentration camps, for example – can behave in
such cruel and insane fashion. I am certain that every one of those
medical professionals would have told you (and at some level even
believed) that they were behaving logically, and would have defended their
actions as being “for the good of mankind.” However, their logic had
been corrupted by massive, repressed early trauma. Cruel treatment in
childhood often leads to cruelty expressed in adulthood; absent early
cruelty, why would a person be cruel to others as an adult? “Logic”
changes in response to early experience. In
all I have read in recent years about the childhood of criminals, even of
mass murderers, I have been unable to find anywhere the beast, the evil
child whom pedagogues believe they must educate to be 'good.' Everywhere I
find defenseless children who were mistreated in the name of
child-rearing, and often for the sake of the highest ideals.
— Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (p. 243) Terrible
experiences pose the riddle whether the person who has them is not
terrible. —
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond
Good and Evil, section 89, 1886 (Walter
Kaufmann translation) One
has to repay good and ill –
but why precisely to the person who has done us good or ill?
~
Ibid,
section 159
“I
have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my
pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory yields. ———— Not
everyone who suffers a horrible childhood becomes a horrible person; hurt,
yes; harmed, yes – but not
necessarily horrible. Humans are complex and there are many ways to
respond to almost any early situation; massive
early trauma reliably leads to damage but not always, thank goodness,
to someone becoming a mass-murderer or other criminal. Genetics
also plays a part in one’s personality, but I have seen nothing to
suggest that serious criminality—rape or murder, for instance—is ever
entirely the result of genetic factors. Despite genetics and any other
factors we might find (2),
the evidence is clear that how infants and children (and even fetuses) are
treated affects how they behave and experience life as adults. A person
may be somewhat genetically prone to anti-social behavior, violence, or
anything else, but what actualizes—in their later behavior and inner
experience—will be shaped and colored by their early experience. Love,
compassion, and freedom are what bring out the best in us—and the lack
of love, compassion and freedom are what bring out the worst. An
emotionally healthy person exhibits healthy behavior including
healthy logic because his or her logical upper brain is not constantly
having to make sense of and defend against repressed pain leaking up from
lower levels, and because healthy access among all three levels of
consciousness provides natural, healthy guidelines for behavior. These
guidelines become confused, diminished, or silent in a heavily repressed
person; the compassionate sense of connection with others is damaged, for
example, if we do not get enough reliable, loving contact during infancy
and childhood. ————
In
this and in other ways, Zoomer is accurate in his social perceptions and
appropriate in his behavior. How can he do that? Is he using symbolic,
upper-brain logic to work through the various consequences of different
behaviors? Not likely; Papillons are often said to be smart, but compared
to a human, Zoomer has the intellectual brainpower of a radish. He still
hasn’t figured out that the dog in the mirror is him,
and if he’s like every other dog I know, he never will. How
can he be so smart socially, then? Not only does he play well with others;
he charms them. He charms almost everyone, usually within moments of
meeting them. Zoomer
is appropriate in his behavior because the social rules and other
instincts laid down in his three brain levels have been finely crafted
during two
hundred million years or more of mammalian evolution (not to mention
all the life that came before). Zoomer doesn’t refrain from tearing my
flesh from the bone and devouring it because of upper-brain “logic”;
he refrains from hurting me because he is my friend, and it is natural for
friends to treat each other well. (One might object that Zoomer is afraid
to hurt me because I am larger, but he plays enthusiastically with his
girlfriend, a long-haired Chihuahua half his size, and he doesn’t hurt
her, either). If
Zoomer had been mistreated (as most human children are), he would be far
less charming and – if the mistreatment had been bad enough – possibly
dangerous. This is equally true for human beings: raise them with
compassion and respect, and they become healthy, charming, compassionate
adults who respect others. Raise people without
enough compassion and respect, and you get very different results. Papillons
are often described as being like energetic, inquisitive two-year-old
children. There is good reason for the comparison: our brains mature in
stages, and until about the age of nine months, the dominant level is the
first line (the lowest level of the brain); for the next few years, the
second line is well developed but not the third line. This not only
explains the characteristic behaviors and abilities of infants and young
children; it means that early in life, we experience
life and must deal with those experiences using the portions of our brains
mature enough to function adequately. Calculus, for example, is beyond the
ability of an infant not from
lack of study; the brain is simply not ready to handle such high-level
symbolic logic, or to exercise other abilities conferred by a
fully-functional neocortex. This has profound effects on the way we
experience early events, on the types of events that cause trauma, on the
tools we have to handle that trauma, and on later symptoms (including
distortions in logical thought) caused by such trauma. Adult
experience and behavior, including cognitive behavior, is strongly
influenced by early events, yet memories of these events lie beneath the
logical, language-enabled upper brain. Without reasonable communication
between the three levels, such pre-verbal events may never be integrated
into full consciousness, yet the old events continually exert influence in
the background on thought and behavior because the system is striving to
connect those events to third-line consciousness while at the same time
being inhibited from doing so. (3) Healthy
people are “logical” in their thoughts and behavior because they
aren’t constantly perceiving and reacting to old, unfelt trauma. It
isn’t high-level logic that makes a person “rational” or
“logical” – the most reliable
way to get people to behave sensibly and logically is to treat them well
in childhood. Actually, as I have discussed in the past, proper treatment from
conception on is important. One
of the unfortunate aspects of the human ability to repress is that even
severely damaged people can be quite functional; indeed, certain types of
emotional damage lend themselves to high functionality in adulthood.
Consider the sociopath, for example: unfeeling, yet carrying frightening
levels of anger; “dead inside” yet able to fake emotion quite
believably; perhaps well-educated and intellectually brilliant yet cut off
from the wisdom of the first- and second-line. Such people are often
functional enough to rise to the top in their professions, especially if
manipulation of others is key to success in the field. Yet despite being
competent and appearing normal, they can be extremely dangerous,
especially when empowered the coercive machinery of the State. So
cold, so icy that one burns one’s fingers on him! Every hand is startled
when touching him. — And for that very reason some think he glows.
~ Ibid,
section 91 ———— One
last point about the guiding wisdom of our ancient, lower-level brains:
political liberty isn’t in the
guidelines because the politics of very large groups was never an issue in
the evolutionary past. Only very recently, as evolution sees time, have
nations or even large cities been possible. Humans
are made for small groups: families, villages, hunter-gatherer clans. At
such scale, people in the entire group can actually know each other, and
the social rules engraved deep within us can operate properly; in turn,
that makes the balance between authority (if and when any is useful) and
respect for the actions and choices of others easy to find. Knowing who to
trust (with Authority or with
anything else) is also easier when one knows everyone in the group
personally. Put
human beings into nation-states, mega-cities, or even medium-sized towns,
however, and things change. The ancient reptilian brain and the limbic
system are simply out of their element in such large groups. One result is
that even reasonable emotional health (by current standards, at least)
does not necessarily lead to wisdom concerning politics. In particular,
the “caring parent” meme seems to get attached to the idea that a
Compassionate Leader (or a Compassionate Group) should be (coercively) in
charge of a nation. The coercion, exercised from afar by strangers with
their own agendas, is not seen for the danger it is. This is where the
freedom movement and resources like Strike-the-Root.com
can be helpful. The “logical” aspects of the freedom movement (when
not corrupted by old feeling) can help move people towards understanding a
spectacularly important truth: that systematic initiated coercion never leads to positive long-term results, but instead empowers
sociopaths and – far too often – leads to widespread misery and
horrifying levels of tyranny. Much
other knowledge is missing from our built-in guidelines, of course:
science and technology are the obvious examples. Such knowledge is often
useful, but it is no replacement for emotional health. Indeed, how
we use science and technology depends largely upon our levels of emotional
health and our attitudes toward initiated coercion. Which
brings us back, as always in these columns, to love and freedom. More than
logic; more than scientific knowledge; more than anything else you can
name, love and freedom are the
keys to improving this world, and – along the way – to improving
individual lives. ———— The Paradise Perspective will return on March 19 with Destruction by Paradigm: How the United States wrecked the world’s
most robust economy and impoverished the American people. (1)
The link is to a talk by
Vernor Vinge, a mathematician who, as it happens, also writes terrific
science fiction. An excerpt from his paper: "And
what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its
actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will
probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far. The
precipitating event will likely be unexpected -- perhaps even to the
researchers involved. ("But all our previous models were catatonic!
We were just tweaking some parameters....") If networking is
widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if
our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened. "And
what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only
analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human
era. And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd
be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from
one thousand years remove . . . instead of twenty. " I
should mention that by highlighting the potential for danger from
superhuman machine intelligence, I am not suggesting that danger will
actualize. I have no idea whether strong AI (as it is often termed) will
endanger humans; it may be a huge benefit with very little downside. Nor
does Vinge predict certain doom; he appears concerned but ambivalent, as
befits one contemplating the inherently unpredictable. (2)
For example, in The
Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
(1998), Leonard Shlain suggests that literacy,
including especially the widespread, frequent reading of alphabetic
languages, may overemphasize the major hemisphere of the brain, shifting
thought, behavior, and social order in surprising ways. (Although Shlain
does not discuss this possibility, I would also guess that frequent
reading over-emphasizes the neocortex generally, at the expense of lower
levels of the brain). Among other things, this may, unless opposed by
other factors, dramatically diminish the rights and standing of women in a
society. Shlain’s follow-on volume, Sex,
Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution, is also
worth reading. Shlain points out that his ideas are speculative (although
he supports them well), but then so is quantum theory and everything else
in life; the week doesn’t go by that I don’t read of some
long-accepted “scientific fact” or core theory being disproved. (3)
The discussion of first,
second, and third-line consciousness in this column is based upon the work
of Dr. Arthur Janov and Dr. E. Michael Holden. See any of the later works
by Dr. Janov (from 1975 on) for further detail. For a very brief overview
of relevant material by Dr. Janov, see here. Glen Allport is the author of The Paradise Paradigm: On Creating A World of Compassion, Freedom, and Prosperity and maintains paradise-paradigm.net. This is one in a series of columns on the human condition.
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