Ive done it. Ive broken the code to humanity.
I start pulling on one little stray thread, and the whole f*cking world comes unraveled. It feels like the last five minutes of the most twisted suspense thriller ever, where the hero suddenly realizes that everything he thought was true about the world is based on one fundemental false premise, and without that premise the whole world as hes known it collapses. Feels like the last five minutes of that movie, only its been going on for two months now
Thinking back over all the people Ive known in my life, all the people Ive liked have had one thing in common, and all the people I havent liked all have one thing in common. Now everything makes sense.
All human behavior is based on emotion, and emotion is flawed.
People feel their emotions, and they want to feel good emotions. Every person has these mysterious forces at work within them that can make them feel good or bad. So many people have done so many things to try to keep good emotions. Emotions have built empires and religions, launched ships and crusades. And all to keep people feeling good.
An old friend of mine once explained it that people have control over their emotions but they dont use it. Instead, they allow their emotions to control them. (In aviation, we call that being a passenger instead of the pilot.) She was on the right track, but she fell short. Its not some cultural trait of ours, its not a conspiracy, and its not a simple unnecessary weakness of people. Its a statistical inevitability.
Until modern times, nobody has known what emotions are or where they come from. Now that people do, they can keep them in perspective. For the million years of human evolution leading up to this, however, nobody has known what they are. Consequently, nobody has learned to separate them from their thought processes, because nobody has had any reason to suspect that these emotion things are anything other than inherent parts of humanity. Theyve taken it for a given that emotions must be concrete points of reference within the person, because nobody has had any way to perceive them as anything else.
As monkeys evolved into humans, they developed intellect and emotion, and they used their intellect to provide for their emotional needsthat is, their desire to feel good emotionsjust as they used their intellects to provide for their physical needs. So naturally, people have become accustomed to providing for their desire to feel good emotionally in everything they do, without realizing it.
Tribalism is the most basic form of human organization, modeled after the family unit. Monkeys in the wild practice a rudimentary form of tribalism, thats how deeply ingrained it is in us. Its only natural that tribalism should be instinctive to humans, because humans can work to accomplish their mutual interests more effectively by cooperating with each other than they can on their own, which gives those who instinctively practice tribalism a Darwinian advantage over those who dont.
The proto tribe was a team of people, not necessarily united by blood but by common objectives. They banded together to cooperate to advance their mutual interests.
By cooperating with other tribal members, people came to feel good emotions. People came to associate the tribal situation with good emotions. Post-tribalism (as I call it) is now a group of people united not by their common interests but because theyre the stereotypical team players. They are all on the same team now for no other reason than because knowing theyre on the same team makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and their objectives are secondary to that.
In order to remain a tribe, the members of the tribe must be able to recognize who is in their tribe and who isnt. Visible indicators are the easiest to recognize, and there we get racial, ethnic, and cultural discrimination, thats elementary. A less-readily apparent manifestation of that principle is that among members of a group, habits and customs will formsocial rituals. Whoever practices your social rituals must be part of your tribe, and whoever doesnt practice your social rituals isnt part of your tribe.
Because emotions are taken as concrete points of reference for humankind, in order to function as a tribe, the members must align their emotional states. When one member of the tribe displays an emotional state, the other members must either sympathize with it or improve it. To do otherwise would provoke confrontation, and confrontation is the antithesis of tribal team spirit. Thus, those tribes that were better able to synthesize their mutual emotions were best able to operate as a tribe, and consequently took the Darwinian advantage.
After two weeks of listening to commercial radio at work all day, it all becomes clear. Here in the wealthiest, most privileged society the world has ever seen, people have the least need ever to cooperate for their mutual survival interests. But that emotional tribalism associated with those social rituals is still instinctive. People still get together and organize themselves as tribes in social circumstances just so they can feel good about the fact, even though they no longer need to cooperate toward their mutual survival. And if some dumb cunt gets on the radio and starts advertizing some bullshit, and she practices your social rituals and displays some good emotion toward this particular product, thats going to cause people who hear her to sympathize with her good emotion toward that product, and want to buy it. And the whole time, that fucking bitch doesnt give a goddamn about your emotional state or the product shes selling, that goddamned little whore is just preying upon your natural instincts to set off a chemical reaction in your brain to make you part with your fucking money.
What is an emotion, besides a chemical reaction in your brain? And what is a drug besides a artificially-introduced catalyst for a chemical reaction in your brain? I think radio commercials ought to be regulated by the FDA.
And our whole world revolves around chemical reactions. People are afraid of dying so they invent religions to make them feel better. Theyre afraid of their neighbors because their neighbors look different or dont practice the same social rituals, so they declare a war on them and wipe them off the face of the Earth. People hurt other people by hurting their emotions, they project their own emotions so forcefully to make other people react to them, manipulate people into cooperating with them, seize control of the situation by taking the emotional initiative, terrify people by displaying violent and unpredictable emotions. Pay other people to act like they have certain emotions, pay people to satisfy their own emotions, dress a certain way and require their employees to dress a certain way to emulate other peoples social rituals, make wealthy people think every waiter and checkout clerk in the building belongs to their own tribe, must be wealthy like them, even though all those wealthy-looking service people get paid minimum fucking wage.
And the chemical reactions that take place in the brains of developing children. And the things those children will later spend the rest of their lives doing to try to make up for whatever chemical reactions they didnt get enough of while they were growing up. Greed, gluttony, addiction, overeating, possessiveness, poor anger management, low self esteem, codependency, and then making psychiatrists rich trying to fix their problems. Cuddling with their girlfriends every moment of their waking lives cuz they didnt get hugged enough as a child and are trying to make up for that lack of chemical reaction retroactively, or beating their girlfriends cuz they were beaten as children and dont understand any other chemical reaction. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll because their repressive parents didnt let them get enough of that growing up, or sex, drugs and rock & roll cuz they had permissive parents and they dont understand any other kind of chemical reaction. And theyll build their own tribes and social rituals and emotional bonds based on that. And if you had a well-balanced childhood and dont need to participate in their social rituals to make up for any lack of chemical reactions in your own brain and your own past, you cant be in their tribe and youre nobody to them. But their parents didnt know any better, and they dont know any better either, and at this rate, nobody will ever know any better. Where do you break the cycle?
Of course wars of conquest are also mounted to appropriate supplies of resources, but what was wrong with the resources the people mounting the conquest had before? Obviously, if theyve got enough resources to mount a war, they must have something going well for them already. Do they think that because they feel good about the resources they have now, that if they get more resources theyll feel even better? Ten years ago, nobody had cell phones and everyone got along just fine. Now its practically considered poor etiquette to ever have to ask anybody to use a phone. Hows that for an indicator of emotional-materialistic gluttony? People cant even feel satisfied with a good phone system if a better one is available. God, Id sure hate to see what people like that would do if they discovered a new continent where scattered bands of natives with stone-age technology lived on lands holding veins of gold. Oh, wait, never mind
So thats it, is it? Thats the secret to our whole civilization. Emotions. Thats fucking pathetic. Thats got to be the most pathetic thing Ive ever heard in my life, I swear to Christ.
People get so paranoid about corporations and computers taking over the world. And they should be. Because they are. Because theyre more efficient than us. Because they arent affected and weighted down by emotional bullshit.
People I like control their emotions, and people I dont like let their emotions control them. But you know the worst part? My old friend who told me people can control their emotions doesnt talk to me any more, in spite of how much she knows we have in common. I dont practice her social rituals, and I dont even try any more. As near as I can figure, shes still being driven by her emotions after all, even though she doesnt think she is. Shes too busy with her new tribe, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside about the fact that they all practice the same rituals. And she used to tell me how I dont have emotional control. Ill be damned.
Im so sick of people.
Ha! Humans have been the most powerful force in the world for thousands of years, but now our advantage is slipping fast. If were going to stay in control, people had better quit being passengers and start being pilots.
How do you do that? We cant abolish emotions altogether, because they are a part of us. Many people have tried, and all have failed. Just ask any Catholic priest. But people can learn to put emotion in its place, and to recognize it as separate from fundamental survival objectives. Separate the form from the function. Quit being emotional bulimics, alcoholics, addicts, and start being emotional arists, emotional interior decorators. All the interior decoration in the world is worthless if you dont have a sound house to keep it in. The house will still stand and still shelter you from the elements without any interior decoration, but how enjoyable would that be? Emotion still has to be appreciated for its aesthetic value.
Of course, some people are more emotional than others. Thats fine too, just as long as everyone realizes that emotions are nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. The fact that these reactions are taking place in your brain doesnt change the world, it just makes the world appear different to you. Its your brainreact all the chemicals you want! Just dont hold it against everyone else if they dont seem to be reacting to a situation as strongly as you think they should be. If some particularly wonderful thing makes you feel 100% happy, odds are that it makes them feel 100% happy too, just that their 100% isnt as much as your 100%. Either that, or theyve got something else on their mind that you arent aware of and arent being affected by.
One other positive use for emotion is inution. As long as you can keep a level head on your shoulders in the first place and keep your situation in perspective to the world around you, if you feel happy it probably means something good is happening, and if you feel sad, it probably means something bad is happening. If you feel afraid, it probably means youre in dangerunless of course youre just misinterpreting or mistrusting someones foreign social rituals. If you feel like you need something, maybe you do, but look around you firstdoes somebody else need it worse than you do? And do they have at least a reasonable claim to it? (Yeah, I know crack addicts need money to support their habits, but thats just too goddamn bad.)
People know all these things to be true, Ive just put together the pieces that were already there. Im sure I cant convince everyone, cuz theres just too many people in the world that insist on remaining ignorant. But I bet I can at least convince enough people that its possible to separate emotion, tribalism, social ritual, and survival instinct that it will give us the Darwinain advantage. It would be easier for our children than it is for us, if they were taught the emotional-pilot way to approach life from the start, and as we start gaining momentum, Im sure more people will want to join us.
So: Its me against pop culture, counter culture, human nature, organized religion, commercialism, consumerism, and a million years of evolution. Its dark, and Im wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
I start pulling on one little stray thread, and the whole f*cking world comes unraveled. It feels like the last five minutes of the most twisted suspense thriller ever, where the hero suddenly realizes that everything he thought was true about the world is based on one fundemental false premise, and without that premise the whole world as hes known it collapses. Feels like the last five minutes of that movie, only its been going on for two months now
Thinking back over all the people Ive known in my life, all the people Ive liked have had one thing in common, and all the people I havent liked all have one thing in common. Now everything makes sense.
All human behavior is based on emotion, and emotion is flawed.
People feel their emotions, and they want to feel good emotions. Every person has these mysterious forces at work within them that can make them feel good or bad. So many people have done so many things to try to keep good emotions. Emotions have built empires and religions, launched ships and crusades. And all to keep people feeling good.
An old friend of mine once explained it that people have control over their emotions but they dont use it. Instead, they allow their emotions to control them. (In aviation, we call that being a passenger instead of the pilot.) She was on the right track, but she fell short. Its not some cultural trait of ours, its not a conspiracy, and its not a simple unnecessary weakness of people. Its a statistical inevitability.
Until modern times, nobody has known what emotions are or where they come from. Now that people do, they can keep them in perspective. For the million years of human evolution leading up to this, however, nobody has known what they are. Consequently, nobody has learned to separate them from their thought processes, because nobody has had any reason to suspect that these emotion things are anything other than inherent parts of humanity. Theyve taken it for a given that emotions must be concrete points of reference within the person, because nobody has had any way to perceive them as anything else.
As monkeys evolved into humans, they developed intellect and emotion, and they used their intellect to provide for their emotional needsthat is, their desire to feel good emotionsjust as they used their intellects to provide for their physical needs. So naturally, people have become accustomed to providing for their desire to feel good emotionally in everything they do, without realizing it.
Tribalism is the most basic form of human organization, modeled after the family unit. Monkeys in the wild practice a rudimentary form of tribalism, thats how deeply ingrained it is in us. Its only natural that tribalism should be instinctive to humans, because humans can work to accomplish their mutual interests more effectively by cooperating with each other than they can on their own, which gives those who instinctively practice tribalism a Darwinian advantage over those who dont.
The proto tribe was a team of people, not necessarily united by blood but by common objectives. They banded together to cooperate to advance their mutual interests.
By cooperating with other tribal members, people came to feel good emotions. People came to associate the tribal situation with good emotions. Post-tribalism (as I call it) is now a group of people united not by their common interests but because theyre the stereotypical team players. They are all on the same team now for no other reason than because knowing theyre on the same team makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and their objectives are secondary to that.
In order to remain a tribe, the members of the tribe must be able to recognize who is in their tribe and who isnt. Visible indicators are the easiest to recognize, and there we get racial, ethnic, and cultural discrimination, thats elementary. A less-readily apparent manifestation of that principle is that among members of a group, habits and customs will formsocial rituals. Whoever practices your social rituals must be part of your tribe, and whoever doesnt practice your social rituals isnt part of your tribe.
Because emotions are taken as concrete points of reference for humankind, in order to function as a tribe, the members must align their emotional states. When one member of the tribe displays an emotional state, the other members must either sympathize with it or improve it. To do otherwise would provoke confrontation, and confrontation is the antithesis of tribal team spirit. Thus, those tribes that were better able to synthesize their mutual emotions were best able to operate as a tribe, and consequently took the Darwinian advantage.
After two weeks of listening to commercial radio at work all day, it all becomes clear. Here in the wealthiest, most privileged society the world has ever seen, people have the least need ever to cooperate for their mutual survival interests. But that emotional tribalism associated with those social rituals is still instinctive. People still get together and organize themselves as tribes in social circumstances just so they can feel good about the fact, even though they no longer need to cooperate toward their mutual survival. And if some dumb cunt gets on the radio and starts advertizing some bullshit, and she practices your social rituals and displays some good emotion toward this particular product, thats going to cause people who hear her to sympathize with her good emotion toward that product, and want to buy it. And the whole time, that fucking bitch doesnt give a goddamn about your emotional state or the product shes selling, that goddamned little whore is just preying upon your natural instincts to set off a chemical reaction in your brain to make you part with your fucking money.
What is an emotion, besides a chemical reaction in your brain? And what is a drug besides a artificially-introduced catalyst for a chemical reaction in your brain? I think radio commercials ought to be regulated by the FDA.
And our whole world revolves around chemical reactions. People are afraid of dying so they invent religions to make them feel better. Theyre afraid of their neighbors because their neighbors look different or dont practice the same social rituals, so they declare a war on them and wipe them off the face of the Earth. People hurt other people by hurting their emotions, they project their own emotions so forcefully to make other people react to them, manipulate people into cooperating with them, seize control of the situation by taking the emotional initiative, terrify people by displaying violent and unpredictable emotions. Pay other people to act like they have certain emotions, pay people to satisfy their own emotions, dress a certain way and require their employees to dress a certain way to emulate other peoples social rituals, make wealthy people think every waiter and checkout clerk in the building belongs to their own tribe, must be wealthy like them, even though all those wealthy-looking service people get paid minimum fucking wage.
And the chemical reactions that take place in the brains of developing children. And the things those children will later spend the rest of their lives doing to try to make up for whatever chemical reactions they didnt get enough of while they were growing up. Greed, gluttony, addiction, overeating, possessiveness, poor anger management, low self esteem, codependency, and then making psychiatrists rich trying to fix their problems. Cuddling with their girlfriends every moment of their waking lives cuz they didnt get hugged enough as a child and are trying to make up for that lack of chemical reaction retroactively, or beating their girlfriends cuz they were beaten as children and dont understand any other chemical reaction. Sex, drugs, and rock & roll because their repressive parents didnt let them get enough of that growing up, or sex, drugs and rock & roll cuz they had permissive parents and they dont understand any other kind of chemical reaction. And theyll build their own tribes and social rituals and emotional bonds based on that. And if you had a well-balanced childhood and dont need to participate in their social rituals to make up for any lack of chemical reactions in your own brain and your own past, you cant be in their tribe and youre nobody to them. But their parents didnt know any better, and they dont know any better either, and at this rate, nobody will ever know any better. Where do you break the cycle?
Of course wars of conquest are also mounted to appropriate supplies of resources, but what was wrong with the resources the people mounting the conquest had before? Obviously, if theyve got enough resources to mount a war, they must have something going well for them already. Do they think that because they feel good about the resources they have now, that if they get more resources theyll feel even better? Ten years ago, nobody had cell phones and everyone got along just fine. Now its practically considered poor etiquette to ever have to ask anybody to use a phone. Hows that for an indicator of emotional-materialistic gluttony? People cant even feel satisfied with a good phone system if a better one is available. God, Id sure hate to see what people like that would do if they discovered a new continent where scattered bands of natives with stone-age technology lived on lands holding veins of gold. Oh, wait, never mind
So thats it, is it? Thats the secret to our whole civilization. Emotions. Thats fucking pathetic. Thats got to be the most pathetic thing Ive ever heard in my life, I swear to Christ.
People get so paranoid about corporations and computers taking over the world. And they should be. Because they are. Because theyre more efficient than us. Because they arent affected and weighted down by emotional bullshit.
People I like control their emotions, and people I dont like let their emotions control them. But you know the worst part? My old friend who told me people can control their emotions doesnt talk to me any more, in spite of how much she knows we have in common. I dont practice her social rituals, and I dont even try any more. As near as I can figure, shes still being driven by her emotions after all, even though she doesnt think she is. Shes too busy with her new tribe, feeling all warm and fuzzy inside about the fact that they all practice the same rituals. And she used to tell me how I dont have emotional control. Ill be damned.
Im so sick of people.
Ha! Humans have been the most powerful force in the world for thousands of years, but now our advantage is slipping fast. If were going to stay in control, people had better quit being passengers and start being pilots.
How do you do that? We cant abolish emotions altogether, because they are a part of us. Many people have tried, and all have failed. Just ask any Catholic priest. But people can learn to put emotion in its place, and to recognize it as separate from fundamental survival objectives. Separate the form from the function. Quit being emotional bulimics, alcoholics, addicts, and start being emotional arists, emotional interior decorators. All the interior decoration in the world is worthless if you dont have a sound house to keep it in. The house will still stand and still shelter you from the elements without any interior decoration, but how enjoyable would that be? Emotion still has to be appreciated for its aesthetic value.
Of course, some people are more emotional than others. Thats fine too, just as long as everyone realizes that emotions are nothing more than chemical reactions in the brain. The fact that these reactions are taking place in your brain doesnt change the world, it just makes the world appear different to you. Its your brainreact all the chemicals you want! Just dont hold it against everyone else if they dont seem to be reacting to a situation as strongly as you think they should be. If some particularly wonderful thing makes you feel 100% happy, odds are that it makes them feel 100% happy too, just that their 100% isnt as much as your 100%. Either that, or theyve got something else on their mind that you arent aware of and arent being affected by.
One other positive use for emotion is inution. As long as you can keep a level head on your shoulders in the first place and keep your situation in perspective to the world around you, if you feel happy it probably means something good is happening, and if you feel sad, it probably means something bad is happening. If you feel afraid, it probably means youre in dangerunless of course youre just misinterpreting or mistrusting someones foreign social rituals. If you feel like you need something, maybe you do, but look around you firstdoes somebody else need it worse than you do? And do they have at least a reasonable claim to it? (Yeah, I know crack addicts need money to support their habits, but thats just too goddamn bad.)
People know all these things to be true, Ive just put together the pieces that were already there. Im sure I cant convince everyone, cuz theres just too many people in the world that insist on remaining ignorant. But I bet I can at least convince enough people that its possible to separate emotion, tribalism, social ritual, and survival instinct that it will give us the Darwinain advantage. It would be easier for our children than it is for us, if they were taught the emotional-pilot way to approach life from the start, and as we start gaining momentum, Im sure more people will want to join us.
So: Its me against pop culture, counter culture, human nature, organized religion, commercialism, consumerism, and a million years of evolution. Its dark, and Im wearing sunglasses.
Hit it.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
Emotion was an evolutionary necessity. If it wasnt, we wouldnt have it. It serves as a motivational force and a physiological catalyst. If you are walking through a jungle where you know tigers live, youll be afraid. So youll watch out for tigers and youll be ready to fight or flee if you see any. And so long as that trait keeps you alive, it will allow you to reproduce and pass it on to your offspring. There we get instinct and intuition.