Humans have an ongoing struggle with complexity. We are aware of how much we don’t understand about ourselves and the world around us needed to orient ourselves in the world.
Society is oppressive in that it creates a hierarchy of values and places people on it, but it’s better than being naked and alone in nature, so it also creates order which allows for freedom. We are individuals, but have been evolved to be social. We take advantage of and fall prey to the problems of being social.
You can inherit acquired traits. Most mutations are deadly, but very few are beneficial. There’s a randomness element to mutation. The environment is not a static place selecting for fitness, but is always changing and influencing biological beings, which mutate randomly with the hope that they match.
Sexual selection is one of the primary drivers of human evolution. The dominance hierarchy is 300 million years old. Animals with nervous systems arrange into hierarchies. This has been around longer than flowers and trees. It evolved, but it’s also part of the environment. Dominant males have the top sexual selection—either by chasing away those beneath them or because they are picked by females. The male dominance hierarchy becomes a method of selection, allied with the female sexual selection. In this sense, evolution is not random.
Why did the peacock tail evolve to be so big and dazzling? Its size and symmetry displays health. Humans evaluate each other by symmetry—shoulder to waist to hip ratio, facial symmetry, etc. Butterflies won’t mate with others that deviate from symmetry in the slightest. With some exceptions, women mainly select for men across and up the hierarchy—most wanting a man about four years older, as attractive as they are, and who make more money than they do. If a man is healthy and energetic, he’s more likely to be successful. If he is ill and can’t provide, there is too much competition and will not be chosen by a woman high on the dominance hierarchy. Men select across and down. They don’t care about a woman’s socio-economic status. They want younger, fitter, more fertile women. Both select for attractiveness, intelligence, and personality, though there are differences in what’s stressed.
People are different from animals because we’ve multiplied our dominance hierarchies. Animals have single ones. For instance, male elephant seals use size and power and perhaps aggressiveness to get mates. Power is associated with dominance, so larger seals have a better chance at mating. In humans, men are on average bigger than women physically, but we are also conceptually flexible. There are so many different ways for humans to be successful in a modern culture in dimensions not associated with each other: if you’re an extrovert you can be socially dominant, if you are agreeable you can be dominant in intimate relationships, if you are disagreeable you can be dominant in competition, if you are neurotic you can be dominant in protecting and establishing yourself and create security, and if you’re open you can be dominant in creative endeavors. If you are creative you can spin up a game that’s all your own with its own rules and be the best at it. Success is being competent across a wide range of potential dominance hierarchies, not merely a single one like in the animal kingdom.
The mythological hero is the representation of the person who becomes competent in multiple dominance hierarchies. We are multifunctional, general purpose animals that aren’t great at any one thing, but good at a lot of things. Some animals are specialized to live in one area or on one tree, but humans can go anywhere and thrive. This is also hero mythology—to thrive in any environment or circumstance.
When a wolf chases a deer, it jumps randomly, creating unpredictable chaos, so the wolf depends somewhat on chance to catch it. In order to keep up with unpredictability is to generate variance and get lucky. We also compete. Our brains are game engines that produce games. You produce an avatar of yourself and a fictional world, or many of them, and put yourself through imaginary scenarios that kill the avatar there rather than yourself in real life when predicting which steps to take to be successful. We run simulations.
We respond to patterns, not objects. Objects are subcategories of patterns. We see objects as patterns of utility—what can I do with it? Perception is the mapping of patterns onto more patterns. We can use keys to open a door or as a weapon. We also have unconscious pattern reception that causes a physiological response before we are consciously aware of why, like jumping from a stick thinking it’s a snake. The pattern appears in the brain as “snake” before you can think about it and your body immediately jumps away before you know why.
Sponges compress the entire world into what makes their pores open or close. They map patterns of behavior. “The world makes me do this or do that.” It’s very simple. But in more complex beings like humans, we can detect differentiation, complex patterns, and map complex uses for things.
The environment keeps challenging organisms to diversify. Single-celled organisms have been around much longer than multi-cellular organisms with separate sensory, nervous, and motor layers. These are emergent solutions to emergent problems. We retain our most base and primal behaviors as well as being slow and sophisticated.
Your brain wants you to be successful unconsciously as much as possible. If you are attentive to your errors, you are conscientious, and can modify your approach to make adjustments and succeed. This is good when not taken too far. You want to be in an environment where you have as little obstacles as possible and can succeed with as little conscious effort as possible.
We are born with proclivities that allow us to navigate and survive in our social environment. How do we manage this? We move on from biology to narrative: game, frame of reference, story, or personality.
Instinct is not a drive or a goal, it determines what you perceive. It causes you to focus on something in high resolution. It causes the world to manifest according to your goals, though it also pushes back and challenges you. It specifies your perceptions, your target, the current reality, and the likely procedure you are going to use to make all of that interrelated.
The classic, now archaic theory of perception is that the world is full of objects, you see them, you think about them, you evaluate them, and you act on them. But the world is not made of mere objects, it is made out of tools and obstacles. We see the meaning of objects and their usefulness as tools toward our values and goals. We don’t care about all of the facts, data, and objects that don’t resonate with our goals.
You can’t derive ethical guidelines from factual knowledge—an ought from an is. Which facts are you going to use? Your values predetermine which facts you pay attention to.
The biggest perceptual category is that-which-is-not-relevant-at-this-time. If you are focused on taking lecture notes, your whole world shrinks down to the very sentence you are writing and the entire world fades away and is assumed as constant. All other students are ignorable entities, invisible blobs, unless they do something that disturbs the flow of the goal-directed action in which you are partaking. Everything that doesn’t get in the way of your goal is invisible, except for what can be used for your purposes. What disturbs flow eliminates the invisibleness of the universe and tells you there is something to pay attention to, either a tool or an obstacle—that it’s relevant and important.
We live in the landscape of relevance, not facts. Modern science says you perceive a universe of facts, derive conclusions, then act. But you don’t. You perceive a landscape of pre-categorized relevance that’s dependent on your ethic. What ethic best structures your perceptions?
We all act as if things matter. Irrelevant things don’t matter, and thank God for that. We have learned what to ignore, which is most of the world, and now have a small subset of things that are useful toward our current endeavors.
When arguing politics, people talk past each other because though they can talk facts, different values emerge from different temperaments to determine which facts matter. Temperament provides an a priori filter of values. Conservatives are conscientious and low in openness, so it binds them to a frame, which liberals don’t like because they are high in openness temperamentally. They can’t understand why anyone would want to be bound to a frame. Conservatives can’t understand how anyone can live without a frame. Conservatives like tradition while liberals like change and progress.
Positive emotions cause you to move forward. Negative emotions cause you to back away. Indeterminate states cause you to freeze. Not knowing what to do and living in anxiety is not a state you can live in very long and can break you down and kill you. Being lost means everything is relevant and you have to ramp up your capacity for action to deal with that. We have a low tolerance for not being where we think we are. We try to make sure we all know where we are and what we’re doing.
You want to set up your world where things will go your way, obstacles are minimized, and where almost everything else can be ignored.
Positive emotions are dopamine-based incentive rewards. “Come here and do this and you will be rewarded.” You move ahead, get victory, move ahead, get victory. This creates meaning. A meaningful event gets you to the next step and opens up more opportunities.
An envelope arriving in the mail telling you whether or not you’ve been accepted to a particular school is a portal. It will either mean an open a door for you, and therefore success, or that door closes and your future falls to ashes, so you have to rework who you are and where you are going.
Postmodernists excoriate the idea of hierarchy, success, and value. They want everything flattened so there are no winners or losers. They want to end all hierarchy. This leaves everyone with negative emotions, because the greatest predictor of positive emotion is merit by setting and achieving goals.
When things work out, you’re moderately happy, but when they don’t, you have negative emotion, which is experienced more powerfully. Loss hurts more than gains and rewards. Loss avoidance is a powerful motivation, as is desire to gain.
We are chronically dissatisfied with the way things are, and this causes us to keep moving forward. It’s stupid to tell people to be satisfied with what they have. Sure, it’s better than nothing, and you can be grateful for what you have, but you’re stuck in a permanent state of unsolved business. The problem of problems never goes away. You will never get it together, hit a plateau of satiation, then rest. You’ll never finally arrive and be happy. That’s not how the human brain works.
Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill for no reason is better than just sitting by the damn thing. Sometimes activity itself is worthwhile, attempting to solve a problem that can’t be solved.
Hope and promise is the state of believing you can reach a goal, an indication that something good is going to happen. This is a motivator.
Unpredicted outcome makes the irrelevant relevant and puts you in a state that makes you anxious, angry, curious, frustrated, and depressed. When something doesn’t work as expected, it means you’re misperceiving the landscape.
Don’t catastrophize. Minimilaize your situation to the most narrow constraint. When arguing with your spouse, catastrophizing sounds like: “You’ve always done this and you always will.” That’s hopeless. “Maybe we should never have married.” The parameter is too wide.
If you open the door wide enough so that every snake comes through, you become depressed, everything seems futile, every futility is felt with certainty, and the conclusion is always that life isn’t worth living and you should jump off a bridge.
Meaning is an instinct that orients people in time and space. It’s not an epiphenomena. It’s the most fundamental form of perception. It’s a real, orienting reflex. Nihilism says meaning is just an illusion, which is the view of a naturalist or materialist reductionist. The only optimistic thing ever derived from psychology is the possibility that meaning is real and linked to perception itself.
When you’re upended and knocked back on your heels, it can take years to sort out your past to understand what happened. You generate numerous fantasies to explore about your past, present, and future. You are left in a chronic state of anxiety.
What does an unpredicted event or anomaly mean? It can be threat or promise. It’s ambivalent. It can be positive or negative, and we become stressed sorting it out, which makes us angry. This is good, because it moves us to act, but anger is very hard on us psychophysiologically. Your emotional response should be proportionate to the level of the anomaly.
Making a marital vow saying you will never leave no matter what says, “We acknowledge that we are going to be trouble for each other, but it won’t end us.” It’s incentive to work things out. “We’re stuck together, so let’s fix things so we don’t box for the next forty years.” If you want to leave the future open, then anything can happen, everything becomes a threat of ending the relationship, and you’re lost and wandering your whole life with no narrative. That’s the price of “freedom.”
You can have irreconcilable differences, like one wanting children and the other not, which is a dealbreaker, so not every problem in marriage can be solved, but commitment to marriage assumes you can resolve problems. Once you divorce, subsequent relationships rarely fare better. To have kids and get divorced is incredibly expensive. The woman is going to be poor and the man is going to be an indentured servant. It’s like having non-fatal cancer. It will go on for twenty years, cost you $250,000, and it will be bad for the kids. Step parents don’t love other people’s kids as much as they love their own, and they view them as competition for the attention of the person with whom they are romantically involved. The abuse of children by step parents is astronomical. If you marry and have kids, you want to do everything you can to stay together.
Those who are exceptional at one thing and shoot for the top live one-dimensional lives. They don’t have a life. It’s all work and focus, sacrificing everything for their career, working seventy hours a week to beat their competition. This is good if this is what they really want to do. A healthier life is more balanced. It spreads things out so you have room for family, friends, a social life, and a career. The more you strive to optimize each of these areas, the less you will be stellar at any of them.
Have alternative plans. If you take a high risk toward a top position in a specialized field, scaffold yourself in other areas so you don’t fall to the floor. Maybe you can’t be a doctor, but you can be a nurse, and that’s better than nothing.
Socioeconomic status in men is important to women, but men don’t care about women’s socioeconomic status. Women who want kids but sacrifice this for a career are deeply unhappy, so women in their thirties tend to bail out of uni-dimensional careers for a more balanced life.
Being low in serotonin means you are more impulsive and emotionally disregulated. You take good feelings wherever they can find them. Being high serotonin means you are more satiated and dominant. If your life has collapsed and you are at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and can’t get out, you aren’t depressed, you are just stuck.
Why don’t people pursue goals that give them meaning? Because they are lost, haven’t developed their values, are ignorant, can’t take on responsibility, and get lost in immediate pleasure, impulse, and escape. It’s why people drink or do drugs—to not care and to dampen their anxiety. They want to make a life a party—let’s do stupid, fun things in the moment with no thought of the future.
Children are pure potential. Peter Pan is a child. He doesn’t want to grow up. Captain Hook is an adult and he’s a tyrant who has a hook for a hand. Peter Pan doesn’t want to end up like that, so he’s king of the Lost Boys in Neverland, a place that doesn’t even exist, and forfeits his chance at a real relationship with Wendy, a conservative middle class London-dwelling girl who wants to grow up, have kids, and have a life. She accepts her mortality and maturity. Peter Pan, on the other hand, has to content himself with Tinkerbell. She doesn’t exist. She’s the fairy of porn. Peter Pan denies reality for fantasy. He wants to remain pure potential and never become anything.
If you haven’t matured by forty, people wonder why you are so clueless and haven’t figured your life out. You’re like an old infant, wondering what the hell you’ve done with your life. Something is wrong if you are forty and could still be anything, as if you’ve just left high school. You need to become something. You need to sacrifice or life will catch up to you in middle age. A career and stability is better than endless entry-level jobs your whole life.
The best way to teach critical thinking is to teach people to write. There is no difference between writing and thinking. You don’t just write to get a grade, but to learn to think, speak, and reason so you can be deadly in the world. With those skills, nothing can get in your way. Learn to think and speak coherently. Learn to articulate. With these skills, people will give you opportunity, money, and influence. This is what the humanities is all about—students developing the ability to be open, to learn, to discuss, and to debate, but it has been taken over by social justice ideology and activism which shuts down debate, discussion, and dissenting views. Universities are happy to placate students, who they view as worth $100,000 each. They don’t mind putting kids into debt the rest of their lives, giving them degrees that won’t get them careers, and not serving them well by teaching them to undermine everything with poststructuralist nihilism and meaninglessness, then sending them off into the world. How is that helpful?
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