What Happens When Things Go Wrong?

Q: Do these discoveries about lifestyle and health mean we have to live in wooden huts, go hunting, and avoid technology in order to develop intelligence?

A: No. The fact that you are reading this online should answer that one. Our technology is just as relevant to us as our ancestors' technology of spears, clothes and wooden huts was to them. We interact with matter and we create organized complexity, and this can improve our adaptability. There is nothing wrong with technology; it is how we use it that matters. Understanding the biological conditions that decrease intelligence and promote violence and war also suggests ways to limit it without such fundamental changes.

First of all we have to recognize the truth and stop making excuses

Nobody is to blame. We are naturally trusting beings, and we have all been laboring under the illusion that everything was hunky dory and normal. If we doubted it, we blamed ourselves for not understanding it. In every age so far, society's 'maps' of reality and of ourselves and our species have been constructed to explain illogical violent behavior as 'normal'. We have believed “It's human nature” to go so nuts we kill one another and/or ourselves. We even do it in big groups in competition over bits of land containing the very resources that make us sick and leave shit everywhere.

We have believed god told us to do it. We have burned witches, said that the enemies were monsters or demons. We have claimed it's in our genes; we are their victims, we have put ourselves through centuries of anxiety-increasing guilt believing that we are born naturally as 'the baddies' (sinners). We have soaked up countless plays, books and movies portraying how dreadful humans are over the centuries, and never once has it occurred to us that all we are portraying is how dysfunctional humans can become when anything interferes with the healthy development of their intelligence. Anxiety gives us the equivalent of a pre frontal lobotomy and we consider this normal because everybody else has had one.

We have even twisted scientific discovery in the context of Darwin's observations into the “five o'clock news” mentality and claimed that evolution happens because of competition, forgetting how he stressed cooperation, adaptation and variation in natural selection.

Healthy competition is vital for a group to find out who can do what things best -for the whole group. If you're an intelligent group it's in the interests of your survival to know who is your fastest runner, who has the best memory, who designs and builds the best hardware, and who's your best medic. This is why we play online games and physical sports -notice the word PLAY. Play is always in the interests of survival through entelechy. It keeps you on the path.

Competition for 'status' related to resources is particularly stupid, because everyone is 'best' at something different. If only the biggest or fastest or strongest get food, most of the tribe may die of the next disease because the smartest herbalist starved.

Drawing from hundreds of studies, Social Scientist Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our constant efforts to defeat each other for no good reason --at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers. We lose the very factors of intelligence we need in order to improve ourselves if we don’t focus on working cooperatively instead of struggling to be Number One.

Kohn very effectively shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason society is in trouble is that it judges social status on values of financial competitiveness instead of ability, excellence and competence.) Rather than developing personality and building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It warps creativity and play -in sports and recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield for prize money, and in art by offering hugely more financial reward for portraying society's ideals or contributing to an input of sex and violence guaranteed to remind the population how terrible and scary real life is.

Creativity and intrinsic interest in any task diminish if the task is done intentionally for financial gain. There is no biological intent behind our efforts if they are not autonomous; in other words if we were ordered to do them or coerced into doing them, because this is conditional worth. The mind knows unconsciously that this is not a task worth wasting energy on, and we lose motivation.

It is obvious both that we can be extremely competitive and that we are able to use extreme violence if need be, for example to defend ourselves against predators, An attacking lion is worth competing with if you want to live. But it is our nature to be cooperative, peaceful, adaptable, explorative and alliance-seeking. These skills promote survival and thriving more than any other course of behavior.

We have been told that we were everything from victims to sinners, and we will now have to stand up and face the stark truth -we are “naturally” really nice, really cool dudes. No intelligent human would destroy a potential ally, because in the group survival-and-thriving game it is the equivalent of cutting off one of your own fingers! An ally shaken by the hand is worth much more -personally and to the group- than two enemies in the bush.*

We are designed by biology to play -and healthy sporting or competition IS play, bizarrely it is a kind of cooperation; an interaction in which we set our skills against each other to discover truths for the good of the group; it is the rear-network version of frontal net skills creativity (in which we compete by putting things together for the best designs, inventions and most effective ideas and stories for the good of the group), and scientific argument (in which we compete by taking things apart and setting theories against each other to discover truths for the good of the group).

You may have found out a lot of unexpected things today. This knowledge will unfold a great deal for you as your mind assimilates it and makes associations over the next few days, weeks or months, if you understand it you will realize things not just about yourself but also about others, their behavior, and their state of mind. As we progress through the tutorials we will show you techniques for conflict reduction and resolution in personal and group situations. This opens up a whole new door to successful relationships and social interaction. We'll also show you techniques to turn a dull task into something you can use for improvement.

Incongruity

The biological aspect of your being that strives for entelechy needs and receives positive regard and self-regard. Rogers' personality theory calls this the real self. It is the “you” as the optimal intelligence that if all goes well you will become.

To the extent that our society is out of sync with “the path” (entelechy), we are forced to live with conditions of worth that are out of step with our biology. In an anxiety-based environment we receive only conditional positive regard from teachers and grown ups (“You're only 'good' if you do what I want”) and so we develop conditional self-regard, trying to be like society's ‘ideal self’ (the ‘ideal’ of society).

By ‘ideal’ here, Rogers is suggesting something not real; something synthetic and idealized (idolized) that is always out of our reach, a standard we can’t meet because to aspire to that idealized contrived 'personality' we are forced to do things that degrade our self worth and things that harm us and make us sick and dumb. The more we strive for society's ideal, the more of these things we must do, the more dysfunctional we become.

“You are not yourself!”

(Frodo, when Boromir goes mad, 'Lord of the Rings')

This gap between the real self and the ideal self, between the person that biology and intelligence need in order to follow the path to thriving and the person who society ideally wants, is called incongruity. The greater the gap, the more incongruity. The more incongruity, the more anxiety. In fact, incongruity is essentially what is meant by neurosis: Being out of sync with your own self.

When you are in a situation where there is an incongruity between your image of yourself and your immediate experience of yourself (i.e. between the real and the ‘ideal’ self), you are in a threatening situation. For example, imagine if you have been taught by society and your parents to feel unworthy if you do not get top marks on all your school tests, and yet you aren't really all that interested in some subjects, and your own biology has designed your brain to grow intelligence by avoiding the activities that bore you and chasing those that excite you, then situations such as school tests are going to bring that incongruity to light and will be very threatening.

When you are expecting a threatening situation, you will feel anxiety. Anxiety is a signal indicating neurochemical imbalance, but the constant uneasiness high Cortisol levels promote convinces you (often unconsciously) that you really are threatened by the situation. In this state of mind if you go ahead, your performance WILL be poor, for obvious reasons, so you cannot win! One way to avoid threatening situations is to run away from them and isolate yourself. Another is to attack. Often instead of running or attacking physically, we run or attack psychologically, by using defenses.

“You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

(Morpheus, “The Matrix”)

Rogers suggests that the incongruous individual who is always on the defensive and cannot be open to all experiences is not functioning ideally; i.e., is dysfunctional. They work hard at maintaining/protecting their self concept. Because unconsciously they know their lives are not authentic this is a difficult task and they are under constant threat. They deploy defense mechanisms to achieve this. He describes two mechanisms: distortion and denial.

Distortion occurs because the anxious individual constantly perceives a threat and distorts their perception of events so that it fits their anxious view of reality. Denial follows the same process except instead of distorting they deny the threat exists.

Defensive behaviors reduce our conscious awareness of the anxiety but not the anxiety itself. As the threats mount, the work of protecting the 'reality' view becomes more difficult and the individual more defensive, stuck and rigid in their habitual self structure. If the incongruity continues this process eventually leads the individual to a state that would typically be described as neurotic. Their functioning becomes precarious and psychologically vulnerable. If the situation worsens it is possible that the defenses will cease to function altogether and the individual becomes aware of the incongruity of their situation. Their personality becomes disorganized and bizarre, irrational behavior, associated with earlier denied aspects of development, may erupt uncontrollably.

Unfortunately, every time we use a defense, we put a greater distance between the real and the ‘ideal’. We become ever more incongruous, and find ourselves in more and more ‘threatening’ situations, develop greater and greater levels of anxiety, and use more and more defenses.... It becomes a vicious cycle that the person eventually is unable to get out of, at least on their own.

A Different Sort of Matrix

Incongruity is a key way in which people get what is called ‘stuck in a matrix’. In biological terminology, a ‘matrix’ is a context in which one phase of growth & development can take place. (so this is not at all the same Matrix that Neo was stuck in, it’s a matrix with a little ‘m’.)

We're not going into detail here (if you want to know more before going on, you'll find matrix theory in the theory & research section of the library), but according to matrix theory, different matrices (matrixes) provide such contexts at different stages of our development, ideally (but not essentially) in timed genetic synchrony. In healthy development, the organism “shifts matrix” when one phase of growth is complete, and begins a new phase (in the brain these shifts are marked with brain-growth spurts). If development is interfered with, however, we get “stuck in a matrix”, and currently this happens to the majority of us. Anxiety reduction and input control are two ways which help to get us “unstuck” and back to congruity, at which point the development of intelligence continues. If we don’t get unstuck, it doesn’t continue, so many people never fully mature all networks or develop full intelligence.

Behave as though it's happening, and the brain will think it's happening

You already know that input control is an important key for adjusting personality, behavior, health and intelligence. Here you will discover how pervasive simple, everyday influences are and why it makes such a big difference when you adjust a lot of little things. Who you are today is largely the result of what input you have experienced in the past, but who you are tomorrow is largely the result of what input you are experiencing today.

Do you remember our description of input control from tutorial 2?

Changes in the inner environment (your brain chemistry) in response to changes in the overall environment are what signals the genome. Input control is all about making beneficial changes happen on purpose in that 'inner environment' by manipulating input from the overall environment.

You can also induce these beneficial changes by manipulating input from yourself!

You may not yet know of the power of input control to the unconscious mind from yourself; in the words you speak and the ways that you behave. The ideal state of mind for growth, development and learning is that of creative play; an attitude that is childlike rather than childish, and one of the most powerful types of play is imitative play. If you behave as though you are a more intelligent, more autonomous, more confident person, your brain will happily adjust neurotransmission to match your new behavior and without having to work at it you'll become the person you are imagining yourself to be. 

The power of mimicry is obvious on the environmental level, because it's how we interact and learn, we are natural 'mimics'; to learn a procedure we 'behave more like the teacher' and copy their behavior and/or train of thought (forging the same pathways in our own minds) but it is also true on an unconscious level; it's a part of how bonding happens in healthy relationships, and also how empathy functions.

Unconscious signals induce mimicry as much as or even more than conscious ones. Your own behavior signals your genome, requesting production of the relevant proteins to match body state with mind state. Confident, light-hearted behavior and play induce the neurochemical balance best for learning and adaptation.

This works the other way round too! Every time you don't keep integrity to your 'real self' as Rogers calls it, your brain gets a checksum error between unconscious and conscious input because the signals do not match up. This is what Rogers means by incongruity, and without it we lose our natural morality, because the world no longer makes sense.

If you want to affect real change and improvement in your life, and experience reality with a powerful intelligence, behave as though it has already happened. Enjoy being that real you. The more you play at being them and doing what they would do and saying what they would say, the more you are literally becoming your real self.

You'll also become much more aware of the effect of others' behavior on our unconscious minds, and how people seem to 'catch' anxiety from each other, so for your own health avoid mimicking dummies and start copying the intelligent dudes.

DO IT NOW

Spot Examples of Unconscious Mimicry

You can do this is real life situations watching real people, or in movies. Look for situations where one person's anxious behavior appears to make another person become anxious. Who throws the second punch? How is group behavior on the street different from individual behavior on the street? How do people attracted to each other change their body language?

How do you behave differently when with a group? Do you feel yourself getting more anxious in situations when someone is behaving stupidly, or suddenly panicking when confronted by an idiot? Learn to recognize that moment -that is exactly when your unconscious needs an explanation. Once you get used to recognizing situations like this you can learn techniques for beneficial, non-violent conflict resolution.

Notes

*Why two? Because if you piss off a dumb dude they always come back the next day with a mate and big sticks