Collapse of the First Global Civilization Part 4
The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology
Previous Parts in the Series
This series addresses the current environmental crisis in light of major new discoveries about human culture.
In Part 1, the 2 major reasons modern society has started to collapse were introduced: over population vs. limited resources, and complexity vs. limited human brain ability. The A3 discoveries were also introduced. They will be used throughout the series to explain in more detail why these two problems are causing the collapse and how society can best get through it.
Part 2 discussed how our current world population is using resources faster than the earth can replenish them. It showed that the “storeroom” of critical supplies nature created for us is running out, and explained briefly why humans can’t accept it, even though they see evidence right in from of them.
Part 3 explained how the limits of the human brain are not capable of dealing with the complexity of modern technology or the complex social structures we have set up.
This part, Part 4, will be a real treat for those following this series. It first revitalizes the work of Sigmund Freud linking it to Maslow’s hierarchy. It then summarizes the A3 discovery about how CONSCIOUSNESS works, for both animals and humans. It then explains how humanity’s failure to understand the brain has created a worldwide social culture that is not distinguishable from an insane asylum. On that basis, it’s a straight path to understand why psychotherapy doesn’t work, and how this all sets a stage for world society’s collapse.
Sigmund Freud Vindicated ! — a New 3 Brain Model
Most readers will be aware of Sigmund Freud’s 3 brain model: Id, Ego and Super-ego. Most will also believe that Freud’s theories have been disproven by modern psychology and therefore dismissed. But there is a big problem with that view. Modern medicine made multiple mistakes translating Freud’s book from German to English.
First, Freud never precisely described the 3 functions. He clearly acknowledged that fact in his books claiming only that he had observed 3 repeating patterns. He suggested that other researchers pick up where he left off and map out the details. Some tried but couldn’t make them match the physiology of the brain that was being discovered by more recent research.
I also tried to do it; and encountered similar problems. Then, I had a great stroke of luck! I stumbled on the reason why the matching wasn’t working: there was an ironic and tragic misnaming of the 3 brains when Freud’s book The Ego and the Id was translated from German to English!
The selection of the term “super-ego” (Über-Ich in German) did the major damage. Uber, in German, can mean: about, above, across, beyond, hyper, over. But to translate it as “super” was tragically misleading.
Second, the use of the English prefix “super” led many to assume that the “super-ego” brain was superior to the ego.
Third, if it was “superior”, they concluded it must have evolved later than the ego in the sequence of brain component development and was primarily a “supervising” function over the “earlier evolving” ego.
Fourth, if it was the “superior” brain, researchers assumed that the super-ego must be the site of human consciousness.
Fifth, brain analysis didn’t support that. So, Freud was thrown out. Modern psychology has gone down the wrong road since that time.
The stroke of luck that occurred to me was to try to switch the order of evolution of the ego and super-ego. When I made that simple assumption, a whole new brain model occurred to me :
>> Let Freud’s Id, which I now call “Hulk” (yes, the green super-hero), include all the brain functions that are strictly INHERITED: motor control, heart beat, temperature etc. Modern medicine calls these the “autonomic” system. But also let Hulk include the inherited drives for water, food, shelter and sex. (Yes, this model importantly connected Freud with Maslow.) Hulk is the most primitive brain. Both its structure and the rules that run it are inherited. Hulk is partially conscious (meaning perceptive of complex sensory input), but not “self-aware”. Hulk’s functions are reactive (meaning output producing in proportion to input).
I chose the term Hulk to describe this brain because this part of humans acts very much like the comic book super hero. When things related to human survival are going well, we don’t even notice he is there. But if something goes wrong, WATCH OUT! Hulk explodes with huge force. He takes over our bodies and mind to drive us toward singular goals that he perceives to be critical to save our life.
>> Let Freud’s super-ego, which I now call “Middle brain”, evolve second. It is a very different brain from Hulk with a very different structure. Only its structure is inherited. All of its “content” ”must be learned. One of it’s functions is promptly learning (storing) behaviors. It stores them as complex, streaming, associated, time-based, perception sequences ( all functions in bold are critical for this model). Middle brain is conscious (meaning perceptive), but not “self-aware”, which we might call being “self-conscious”, to distinguish the two. Its perceptions include the classic 5 senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell ( and the more recently accepted senses: heat, balance, rotation etc. ). However, and this is a key observation, Middle brain gets all its perception information from Hulk. It also gets “judgment” messages from Hulk. The judgment messages are perceived as pain and emotions.
>> Now, let Freud’s ego, which I call “Thinker” evolve last. It is also a “learning” brain. However, its perceptions of the outside world are summaries received indirectly from Middle brain after a lot of processing by both Hulk and Middle brain. The “summary” perceptions Thinker gets from Middle brain, which include vision, sound etc. include associated pain and emotion messages Middle brain generates itself, but also those passed from Hulk. Because Middle brain processes information it gets from Hulk, the perceptions Thinker receives from Middle brain are not produced in “real time”. That is, they are not coming in direct response to sensual input, but are playbacks of sequences stored earlier in Middle brain.
Here are some important observations that relate to all three brains:
- Their primary goal is protecting the life of the body that keeps them alive.
- The brains have a priority structure. In cases of crisis, Hulk has the highest priority, Middle brain is second, Thinker is third. The brains with higher priority can interfere with the operation of the other brains by shutting off their inputs and not listening to their outputs.
Consciousness — the New A3 Model
Consciousness is a brain response or “perception” based on transmitted sensory input. While plants also respond to external stimulus, they are not considered “conscious” by definition, because they don’t have a centralized brain system.
A1 Consciousness — Animals
In A3 theory, there are 3 levels of consciousness. These levels are NOT the same divisions as the 3-brains. This can be confusing for a first reading, so I’ve included a table below that you can refer to which shows the relationships graphically.
Let the term “A1” stand for being “aware”. Then:
>> Hulk brain is an A1 brain. All its functions are inherited AND its process knowledge is also “pre-wired”, automatic, and purely reactive. The nerve signals from the senses are sent directly to the Hulk brain. The nerve signals from heart beat, blood gases, blood pressure and many hormone levels are also sent to Hulk. So we can say, Hulk is AWARE of conditions that generate the energy forms it senses. All higher animals have this brain, which is often called the reptile brain. I say this brain is “reactive” meaning it lives in the moment. If things are normal, it maintains whatever state it is in. If something varies from “normal”, Hulk takes action to get back to normal.
>> Middle brain is also A1. Its functional “wiring” is also inherited. BUT, all its perceptual “knowledge” has to be learned. All higher animals also have a Middle brain. This brain is physiologically distinct from Hulk. Middle brain gets its information from Hulk. But here is where the big difference starts. Middle brain memorizes streaming patterns of the sensory input that Hulk passes to it. Streaming means continuous recording over time. But these are super recordings. Not only does Middle brain record video, but it also records streams of audio and every other sensation of the body, all synchronized. That includes smells, taste, touch and physical pain, heat, vertigo and motion, digestive upsets, sleep deprivation etc.
Middle brain is especially focused on storing patterns that precede traumas and follow traumas. It does this to conduct 3 additional processing steps:
a. it continually matches and evaluates newly arriving patterns against stored patterns and “rates” how well they compare. We experience these “ratings” as “emotions”.
b. it can trigger the playback of stored patterns that the animal previously experienced. For emotions like “fear”, it can use those emotions to trigger other stored patterns of physical response. This could include things like fighting, or fleeing for example. For weaker threats, it can trigger playback in new combinations and let them run just to analyze a situation.
c. it is recursive of its own processes. That is, it can self-trigger playback and pattern matching, just for the fun of it, or more importantly, to replay, over and over, traumatic patterns from the past to draw the greatest number of connections between memories to best deal with related issues in the future.
I’m sure you can see where this is leading. In the graphic above, under “Middle brain”, is a list of “aliases”: Conscience, Mr. Grimm, Guardian angel, and Temptation. The constant chatter of pattern matching “ratings”, i.e. “emotions”, along with snippets of memories, are what we interpret as the “little voices” in our heads telling us the right and wrong things we need to do. And because these are “streaming” processes, we, and all animals, sense them as “awareness”.
The combination of Hulk and Middle brain still operates functionally as an A1 (aware) brain. The combination just has a greatly advanced decision making ability about events, over Hulk alone, because it can match sensory input with stored memories.
Middle brain is also divided into two functional sub parts: one is always awake; the other can turn on and off to produce different levels of awareness (being awake or asleep). The retriggering of memories during sleep, of course, is the cause of dreams.
A2 Consciousness — Human SELF-AWARENESS
Notice, Hulk and Middle brain, even together, do not yet produce the ability humans have that we call “self awareness”. Now let’s bring in the function of Thinker brain (A2). I believe a relatively simple mutation occurred in human brains about 40,000 years ago which caused A2 consciousness. The physiological structure of Thinker is just a simple repeat of Middle brain. But it is a second physical brain on top of Middle brain.
It is also a completely learning brain. It stores input streaming patterns. It matches and evaluates streaming input patterns and rates them for comparison. It can trigger playback of internal memories. It is recursive of its own processes.
What makes Thinker different from Middle brain and gains it an A2 consciousness rating is its input and output connections. Thinker gets some input perceptions from Hulk; but it gets most of its inputs from Middle brain. It sends its output decisions to both Hulk and Middle brain, but also to itself again.
What makes Thinker “self aware” (A2) is the simple connection it has to the output of Middle brain.
If we call Middle brain’s process of streaming sensory patterns, being “aware” (A1), then Thinker, by watching Middle brain, has become “AWARE (A1) of being AWARE (A1)”. This is, in mathematical terms, A1 times (or acting on) A1, or A-squared! (A2) THIS IS WHAT CREATES HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS!
Remember, this “advanced” capability is what Freud called the “ego”, not the super-ego. Thinker (A2) is only found in humans. All its knowledge is learned. It can remember some sensory patterns, but mostly it doesn’t. When it needs to remember such a pattern, it just queries Middle brain to find it and provide it. What Thinker is storing as patterns is large groups of abbreviated versions of the sensory patterns Middle brain is processing along with the evaluation emotions that Middle brain is creating.
When Thinker is awake, it is dominant over Middle brain’s on/off part and keeps it awake as long as Hulk does not get sleep deprived. When Thinker goes to sleep, if Middle brain’s on/off part is running, it can produces dreams.
I think you’d be curious about the process that led me to this discovery. Many books have discussed “awareness” and “perception”. But one book I read a very long time ago, used the term “awareness” in place of “perception” in a context I didn’t expect. The author, for example, called vision the “awareness” of external light images, rather than the “perception” of light images. BUT, he also called the brain’s ability to “perceive” the messages of pain and emotion “awareness”. He phrased this as being “aware of being aware”. My math background immediately tagged this A2 (awareness squared). Immediately after I thought of A2, another very simple, but very lucky puzzle piece fell into place. To me, the obvious extension was to ask, was there such a thing as A3? I.e., a brain that was “aware of being aware of being aware”? I wrote it down in my notebook and then completely forgot about it for 20 years. When the new 3-brain model occurred to me, the A3 consciousness concept also came into my head.
A3 Consciousness — Intuitive System Visualizers
What distinguishes our Thinker brain’s A2’s consciousness is that its “awareness” is observing streaming resolved patterns stored in our subconscious Middle brain. Thinker’s awareness is not primary sensory perceptions. But another key is that the resolved patterns in Middle brain are high level streaming descriptions, not only of events, but broad “retrospectives” of our entire experience “history” and their related emotional evaluations. These two elements of Thinker’s process, along with its physiological position of monitoring Middle brain’s output, produce a functional description for human “self awareness”. The A1 ability to re-trigger streams of prior memories is what allows humans to understand instructions and follow complex orders. It was A2 that gave humans the ability to “cooperate” and “build” a civilization. (Ironically, it also significantly explains many mental illnesses. More on that in later posts.)
But, as I studied what an A2 brain could actually do, cooperation and building cities etc., it became clear to me that an A2 brain would NOT be sufficient for humans to “envision” and “create” the technical marvels that exploded over just a few thousand years in ancient societies. That’s when I realized, if, right around the time that the A2 mutation occurred, a very similar duplicate mutation occurred, it could have created humans with a second Thinker-2 on top of the first Thinker-1, just as Thinker-1 appeared on top of Middle brain. That would be equivalent to what I call A3. This new brain addition is what Dr. Tyrrell in Ireland called the “brain’s BIG BANG!”
These A3 humans were the philosophers and architects of the ancient world. They were the ones who designed the cities, irrigation, armies, navies, governments etc. A3 physiological structure is just another repeat of the Middle brain mutation but with different input and output connections. The A3 brain gets highly structured inputs mostly from Thinker brain’s A2 output. It also gets some inputs directly from Hulk and Middle brain, and can be recursive of its own output. It sends output to Thinker 1, Middle brain and Hulk brain’s inputs and recursively back to itself.
The value of this A3 brain structure is that it allows those who have it to intuitively visualize complex systems. This is actually captured well by the old admonitions, “he can’t see the forest for the trees”, and “he’s got his head in the weeds.” An electrician is good at the intricacies of plug types, wire sizes, metals and insulation, circuit breakers, voltages, currents etc. But they can’t typically visualize how all of these functions working together in hundreds of variations, can be optimized for the energy efficiency of a city or coordinated automation. A civilization “architect” works at a level above wires. Her “components” are houses, factories, administrative buildings, power grids, road systems etc. Most people can envision all of these items. What would identify a person as A3 is their ability to “see” all of these things working together simultaneously in their mind. To be an A3, it is NOT sufficient to visualize them one at a time.
Distinguishing A3 in Modern Society
There are some important differences that distinguish between A2s and A3s. Both the A2 and A3 mutations were rare events when they occurred. The A2 mutation gave homo sapiens great survival advantages over their A1 Neanderthal competitors. By the time the A3 mutation occurred, most humans were probably already A2s. But the A3 mutation did not create the same dominance relationship with A2s, as A2 did over A1s. It only takes the creativity of one A3 architect to visualize a pyramid, or a city. It then takes the cooperation and instruction following skills of thousands of A2 workers to build the pyramid and city.
In an evolutionary sense, A3 skills do not gain a reproductive or survival advantage over A2 skills. So, while there are undoubtedly A3’s still among us now, I believe there aren’t very many. My current best guess, and it is only a guess based on personal experience, is less than 2% of the world population has an A3 brain. But even then, these 2% are hard to spot. They don’t stand out in society. If we try to identify them in standardized testing, they don’t stand out because the tests aren’t selective enough. Also, A3 skill abilities probably vary widely with an IQ like distribution. Some have very broad memories, while others can’t remember as much but are stronger in logical reasoning. On top of that, while A2 thinking produces strong cooperative drives along with strong aggressive drives, it appears that A3 thinking does not include the aggression. So A3s are typically less assertive, keeping them out of the limelight despite their creative abilities. And, of the A3s that are alive, many of them may be truly reclusive.
Do I think that I’m an A3? Yes. But I’ll be the first to admit, this is such a new idea that it will take the work of a lot of scientists to refine what the A3 brain actually does. A3 traits, like creativity, can easily be mimicked by smart A2s and imitated broadly through learned behaviors. Once an A3 gets an idea like the wheel, A2s can create wheels with a huge variety of variations. So, it could be hard to tell a high functioning A2, with strong memory skills, from an A3 doing most normal tasks. And when social and technical breakthroughs are examined, there are many situations where the “creative leap” is totally luck, and not true creativity. I think Google, Facebook, Microsoft and all the Apple upgrades fit this luck model. By way of contrast, the MAC graphic interface and the iPod were true genius (Even though we know the MAC graphic interface wasn’t the technical genius of Steve Jobs, but rather the engineers at Xerox. The product genius was clearly Steve’s doing.)
A3 is also not going to show up in IQ tests. Those tests are for memory. A3 will not correlate well with college degrees, either BS or PhD level, because those credentials are too strongly based on conformance with existing academic ideas. I’m also sure that A3 brains and skills will be negatively correlated with many highly regarded professions like doctors, lawyers and accountants. Each of these reward conformance to protocol, which is not a motivator for A3 thinking. We also have to be alert that the abundance of A3 creativity we observed in earlier society ( Archimedes, Aristotle, Plato, Da Vinci, Mozart, Edison) was very dependent on social structure. There are undoubtedly more A3s alive today than in the past. But modern information noise and suppression of innovation by governments and large corporations, stifles most A3s alive today. Unfortunately, A3s will very rarely be found in politics, a role in which their type of thinking is sorely needed.
So society’s prior ability to benefit from A3 skills during the dawn of civilization may be completely blocked during the unfolding collapse. This is, of course, a big tragedy because there is one area that A3s are very good at: understanding complexity. As I stated in discovery 4. HUMAN BRAINS, (A2s) have not evolved much since the Stone Age, and are NOT CAPABLE of understanding high complexity well enough to keep it from harming them.
Human Psychology
Maslow’s Hierarchy
In 1954, Maslow published his book, Motivation and Personality. In this book he suggested that basic human needs could be arranged in an order or “hierarchy”. The order was based on observations that, in animals, some needs had to be satisfied first, before psychological drives pushed the animal to satisfy other needs:
“… the average desires that we have in daily life… are usually means to an end rather than ends in themselves… If we investigate what is causing the desires, we will find other causes or desires beneath them.”
But, if we keep searching, Maslow tells us:
“…it will always lead to certain goals or needs behind which we cannot go; that is to certain need-satisfactions that seem to be ends in themselves… these needs have the particular quality in the average person of not being seen … ends in themselves are far more universal than the roads to achieve those ends, for these roads are determined locally in the specific culture…
Man is a wanting animal and RARELY reaches a state of complete satisfaction except for a short time. As one desire is satisfied, another pops up to take its place… “
Freud had made similar observations 25 years earlier. Both of these men made important statements about their “models” of human drives: even though humans tended to follow patterns, the drives were intertwined in a very complex web:
“(Maslow) …The appearance [of a drive] practically always depends on the state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of all other motivations… [but, it appeared that the appearance depended most strongly] ….on the fact that such and such other prepotent desires have attained states of relative satisfaction.”
The A3 consciousness model created a new brain organization that aligns directly with Maslow’s list of drives and allows them to be more precisely linked to brain function. The A3 hierarchy of brain physiology (3-brain types) and three levels of consciousness provide a new framework to understand the interactions of the drives and simplify their relationships. This is important because it greatly improves the explanation of human behavior in the modern world.
Maslow’s hierarchy is shown in the table below spread across the A3 hierarchy showing a strong match to the A3 functions.
While a lot of research is now needed to precisely pinpoint where these drives occur in the hierarchy and in the brain, what the order generally shows is the following:
- At lower levels, the intensity of the drive and its speed of occurrence is related to the amount of time a life form can endure lack of “satisfaction” before the life of the organism is threatened. For example, air and shelter are so critical that if a person is deprived of air for a few minutes, or subject to extreme cold or heat for even a few seconds, they could die. Hulk brain evolved to deal with these needs very quickly and directly.
- Food, water and sleep are of course critical for survival. These are also time critical over a day or week.
- Maslow also categorized the need for sex as a primary drive. While its critical evolutionary role of passing environmental adaptation forward is clear, at first thought, it does not seem to be time sensitive like the other primary needs. Yet observations of this drive clearly put it in the hour or day time criticality range for Hulk. Hulk brain obviously treats it similar to the most vital survival drives. I believe the explanation for this is that no where in the Hulk brain structure do we see mechanisms for long term planning or complex pattern recognition. And given two life forms, one that delays sexual activity for social reasons, and a second that pursues it continuously, the second approach, especially in males, appears to be more reliable, and more capable of higher reproduction rates. So for the bulk of evolution’s time scale, Hulk brain would easily optimize adaptability with a short-interval time-critical strategy.
This is a VERY IMPORTANT OBSERVATION! Modern society, primarily through religious teaching existing over only the last 6000 years, has attempted to control sexual activity based on “social” principles. One of those principles is to deny the role of primary brain dominance in controlling the behaviors it has evolved to interpret as “life critical”. A corollary to this denial is the belief that human consciousness can dominate over primary biology. That denial has and is causing catastrophic consequences in our world.
The Hulk brain dominance test
Anyone who wants to test the dominance relationship between Hulk and Thinker in themselves can do the following breathing test. It is known medically that a typical brain can go without oxygen replenishment for about 5 minutes with no long term brain damage. Let’s do a short experiment lasting only 1 ½ minutes to be on the very safe side. It’s simple:
Take two deep breaths: in — — out — — in — — out. Now take a third DEEP breath and hold it. Using your conscious mind, tell your self “mind over matter”, “will over emotion”, or whatever you think will put your conscious mind in CONTROL. Your goal is to simply hold your breath for 1 ½ minutes. (Greek sponge divers and Everest Sherpas are excluded from the test ;-)
I have NEVER found anyone who could do it. So, if you are one, you are in a very small minority (Try the 3 minute test ;-) Pay attention to your body. You are about to find out why I named our primitive brain HULK!
Hulk doesn’t communicate to the other brains by email or text messages. He communicates by issuing PAIN signals. Notice where the pains occur. In your feet? In your fingers? Probably not. Chest? Stomach — diaphragm area? Are you still holding? And don’t worry, you can’t overdo the test. If you prove to have some outstanding (still unknown to science) mind control ability, when HULK decides “enough is enough”, he will just black you out. Your “conscious mind” — i.e. Thinker — will just be shut down. You’ll fall down if you aren’t already lying down, AND HULK will take over your breathing.
The reason I’m bringing this example up at this point is to make the point that Hulk has the same dominance ability with regard to sex. And while not controlled as directly — because the needed external partner is not under Hulk’s direct control — Hulk will surely impair the higher level brains to drive the body systems it controls to behaviors it has learned through evolution that sometime achieve its goal. This is not unlike the mind alteration seen with people who are starving, during which most of the “higher” level Maslow drives (including sex) are shut down so full concentration can be focused on finding food. And, of course, like Hulk responds in comics and movies, when he is cornered and FEAR arises in him due to a perceived threat, he also takes control away from the higher level brains!
Maslow’s SAFETY NEEDS become more complex because they start to be “enforced” by both Hulk and Middle brain. A fear of snakes, rodents, insects, dogs etc. in many people, have been shown to be inherited. So, for these people, danger signals are generated by Hulk directly in sensory processing. A person’s behavioral response quickly becomes complicated as Middle brain stores streaming patterns that link the primary DANGER messages sent by Hulk with other sensual observations. So, an encounter with a snake and a certain wood pile would be stored by Middle brain. A later visit to that wood pile would result in Middle brain playing the snake visualization to Hulk. Hulk would then generate the same danger message as well as race the heart, speed up breathing, start sweating, lock up the stomach etc. This would cause Middle brain, once again, to store this entire experience. If the snake was there again, the earlier pattern would be reinforced. If not, another contradicting pattern is stored. Both patterns are checked on future visits to the wood pile.
What’s the relationship of all this psychology to the coming collapse?
These three discoveries (3-brain organization; 3 levels of consciousness; Maslow’s list of needs) are important observations. In short, human psychology did not evolve to live in resource rich, highly populated, very technically and socially complex societies. Humans evolved to survive in harsh conditions as sparsely populated hunter-gatherers. Their environment was simple, and mostly knowable. When humans are brought into a complex new environment, our Stone Age brains fall back into behaviors that fit a primitive small clan mentality, which is all it knows. If this is denied by idealistic religious, academic, medical and political teaching, which put forward “wishful thinking” mental and social models, attempts to explain human behavior using those “wishful” models will totally fail. Not willing to admit the mismatch, the observations are matched to pieces of the model. I call this behavior SINGLE SENTENCE LOGIC. The media calls it “sound bites”. Religions call it sermons. The result, however, is that our world has essentially become filled with inconsistent “knowledge”. People, trying to follow such leadership, act in illogical and inconsistent ways. The result is, modern life has become indistinguishable from an insane asylum. People in such a situation not only go into mental distress, they do a lot of stupid things. And when those stupid things include using weapons of mass destruction, destroying many of the cities people need to live in, depleting the earth of resources vital to our survival, and massively polluting critical resources, bad things are going to happen as I described in Part 2.
As long as: (a.) resources are still easy to get, and (b.) they are “pretty” evenly distributed, people will construct a world of lies and denial around themselves to find mental peace. They will pretend things are going “pretty well”. BUT, as soon as either the direct (a.) or perceived (b.) fail, the deprivation they feel will turn into ANGER, which is a Stone Age brain’s primitive behavioral response to FEAR. Fear, as an “emotion”, is one of the ways Middle brain and Thinker experience a message sent from Hulk. It is a way Middle brain sends a message to Thinker. The consequences of fear and anger are the human animal treating others very badly.
The Seven Deadly Sins
The ancient philosophers already understood this human behavior in detail. They divided it up into seven categories that we now call the “SEVEN DEADLY SINS”. Ironically, as originally used, this knowledge had nothing to do with religion. The confusion arises from the word “SIN”. When the origin of the word sin is traced back to Hebrew, it meant “missing the mark” or “missing the goal”. As understood 4000 years ago, this meant doing something that caused social discord. It was only through Christian revisions that the “mark” was reinterpreted from being a social goal in a social context to an obedience goal in an authoritarian context — i.e. from a “natural” goal to a “supernatural” goal.
During abundant times, in small isolated groups, with simple cultures and with good leaders, we may get along ok. But as soon as the environment (physical, economic, or cultural) brings hardship, the party is over. THAT IS WHAT THE WORLD IS NOW FACING.
So, what’s the point about the Seven Deadly Sins (7DS)? The classical 7DS are: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Envy and Sloth. These can be further grouped because Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony and Envy are all variations on GREED. We see greed a lot in the news these days. There are strong fundamental reasons for that. So, let’s start there.
Greed
Greed is an intense and selfish internal desire for something far beyond the dictates of basic survival and comfort, with the intention to keep it for one’s self. It can also mean a behavior that suggests such a desire. To understand the importance of greedy behavior in ancient society, it is important to envision it in a society that was plagued with resource shortages and governed by authoritarian rule.
Resource shortages would typically cause many people to die. So, any person, observed to be hording something of value for himself, was considered to be rejecting the implied or preached “social contract” which bound members of a tribe or clan to mutual support. “Royalty” overtly rejected such an obligation claiming that they were either supernatural beings themselves, or appointed to leadership by a supernatural power. Covetousness, Lust, Gluttony and Envy are greed for: anything another person has, sex, food, and social advantage respectively. The first three are tied to psychological drives right at the primary level of Maslow’s hierarchy. The fourth provides power in the community to control the first three. This connection to Maslow’s hierarchy is not coincidental. It is an important observation because human psychology and behavior are strongly and simply driven to protect basic life needs. Therefore, if a member of society was observed as greedy, this would raise strong security based fear emotions among the community, to the point of physical violence, against the greedy person. So, any form of greed was seen as a social disruptor.
Pride
PRIDE is also part of the Greed group. It’s just a lot more complicated. In almost every 7DS list, Pride is considered the original and most serious sin and the source from which the others arise. Most people view pride as a positive feeling someone gets when they do something good. Pride does have this positive side to it. Of course, that’s not where the problem lies. In fact, having this positive side is one of the reasons the negative side of this sin is so easily missed.
To understand the social concern with “Pride”, we should change the word used for this first sin from Pride to SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS.
A good description of this was a summary published by Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor. Paraphrasing: a self-righteous person is someone who “prides himself” as knowing the truth, but won’t acknowledge anything anyone else has to say about it. This isn’t a problem as long as a person is satisfied just following their own beliefs. But most self-righteous people aren’t. Self-righteousness turns into a social problem when one person’s “good” turns into everyone else’s “duty”. It becomes a social problem when a person views himself as a privileged judge of others, with a right to judge the others for their failure to perform according to the self-righteous person’s standards.
The “sin of Pride” is essentially the social imposition of hypocrisy and false pride on others.
“We can recognize a principle of self-righteousness when people associating with it, who don’t even understand it, go out in the middle of the night to light torches and break windows. We recognize it in the arrogance of associating with a cause or belief that makes people want to kill each other, and reject people different from themselves.” (Taylor)
In summary, self-righteousness is a pride that isn’t based on a personal accomplishment that has contributed true value to society. Self-righteousness is the composite personality a narcissist believes himself to be which he has stolen from others but can’t begin to live up to. Self-righteousness is the behavior of a gang of kids who have not contributed value to their school or community with skills the community normally defines as desirable, who strike out through violence against kids at another school just because some sports organization structures them as “rivals”. On a larger scale, we see this implemented as Nationalism. It is the self-righteous SIN of PRIDE that takes nations to war — AND, takes religions to war. Here is how Eric Hoffer put this in his book Passionate State of Mind:
“Monotheism — the adherence to a one and only God, truth, cause, leader, nation and so on — is usually the end result of a search for pride. It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be. Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a party or a holy cause, we are proclaiming our own uniqueness. …Nationalist pride, like other variants of pride, can be a substitute for self-respect.
Put another way, when a person insists that there is only one right way to do something, what he is really saying is that HIS way is the only right way. The hidden assumption is that he, of course, wouldn’t do something another way if there was only one right way. And, such a person can usually provide “proof” of his belief by pointing to all the others who also have that belief.
What that person doesn’t see is that his self-righteousness is based on the collected false beliefs of the others, not something he personally did. But, the world is a diverse place. Eventually the person runs into others who don’t share his belief. When that happens, he no longer gets the respect he is searching for. Social disruption occurs when this kind of person is so driven by a desperate need for belonging, that they resort to FORCE to compel the non-believing others to give them respect.”
Denial of Evolution
Before I leave the discussion of self-righteousness, let me address the case of self-righteousness that I think has probably done the greatest social damage to the human race. That is the self-righteousness concerning our human nature, through the DENIAL OF EVOLUTION — the rejection that humans have an intimate relationship with other animals. The denial of evolution is so destructive because it has blocked the human race from understanding the foundation and importance of both Maslow’s hierarchy and the 7DS.
By denying the connection between humans and our animal past, we deny that humans have inherited millions of years of animal brain development, honed to deal with survival in a brutal, hostile environment. When we deny that, and replace it with erudite, arrogant ideas of angelic virtues, we throw away the key link to explain why humans do many of the things they do.
Misunderstanding Evolution
When presented with the prospect that our Stone Age brains are not capable of managing modern complexity, many people suggest that evolution will provide us with adequate brains. This “solution” has two serious problems. First, it ignores the timescales it takes for evolution to work. If such a change takes, say, typically 40,000 years, it would be much too late to address the current collapse time scale, which is expected to occur in less than 50 years. But more introspectively, isn’t this yet again just another version of human arrogance? Why are we so sure the evolutionary changes will go in a direction that buys into the current social pipe dream? Evolution, described as “survival of the fittest”, has usually meant physical strength and ruthless domination. But, to be fair, that isn’t a hard requirement. The dominant requirement is passing needed traits forward through reproduction which sustain the population.
There is nothing in this requirement that guarantees the skills for dealing with high complexity will be favored. In fact, it is more likely that evolutionary change will favor the destruction of “life forms” that create and require complexity to survive. Think, maybe, “the meek shall inherit the earth”. Einstein had an interesting view on this, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Planet of the Apes ring any bells?
Anger
Anger, as referred to in the Seven Deadly Sins, isn’t just getting mad at someone. It is an extreme emotion in the form typically referred to as blind rage. As an action, it often involves violence. The principles of the 7DS state that anger is part of a human’s animal drive. Once we see that, we can identify its evolutionary past.
The word “blind” is the tip-off. When a person is overcome by rage, they become blind to reason. This is a case of Middle brain turning off Thinker. Now mix this with self-righteousness, greed, lust and envy and you have the perfect recipe for violence that is very hard to stop. When a person becomes blinded by anger, they vehemently deny truth.
While their denial is verbalized and directed toward others, more important, due to the blindness, the person is in denial to themselves. This is often called “lying to yourself”. How can such a thing happen?
The A3 model explains it. Middle brain doesn’t only store “truth”. It stores all human experiences. Later on, it keeps accessing all of these experiences trying to determine which one provides the best model to guide action in a current situation. When Thinker brain is trying to figure something out and probes Middle brain for memories, potential threat situations can easily trigger Middle brain to respond with fight or flight behaviors that more broad “logical” analysis would reject. Once this happens, a downward spiral occurs. Anger drives lies; lies drive more anger. The bottom of the pit is where we find REVENGE. What makes revenge so hard to stop is that it is not based on truth. It is not based on logic or facts. The brain generated emotions of FEAR and RAGE become the drivers themselves.
So, the key to understanding anger is knowing that anger is the emotional process that converts FEAR into violence. It is the fight element in the “fight or flight” response. This is a process that is partly hard wired into our brains from the earliest levels of animal evolution. It is not an easy problem to deal with.
Envy — as related to anger
Envy is an emotion a person has when they think someone else is being treated better than they are. Another word for it is jealousy. Jealousy is usually driven by self-righteousness. It can be an excuse a person gives himself for greedy behaviors. It surely plays a part in love relationships. And it usually involves anger. What distinguishes envy is that it is an outward looking trigger that selects a target for the inward looking elements of self-righteousness and greed that we can blame for our misperceived misfortunes.
Sloth
Sloth, in simple terms, means being lazy. While it might seem to only affect the person doing it, it takes on a whole new meaning in a social context. What happens if a large part of our society decides not to vote because they are just too lazy? What happens to a form of government like socialism if people are lazy and don’t want to do their fair share? What happens to our family structures if young people become lazy about taking care of their aging parents, or parents get tired and lazy about taking care of their kids? What happens if a husband or wife is lazy and won’t contribute effort to the marriage?
What makes sloth a social problem is that most human activities have social implications. One of the biggest examples of this is related to what we call entitlement thinking. To escape having to put out effort, humans quickly grab on to promises from their leaders, that the government will take care of them. Now bring in natural human drives toward greed. People are not willing to stop at just basic needs. They quickly convince themselves that everything they want is something they need. And, they want it ALL. They then convince themselves that the government, that promised to meet their needs, is supposed to give them everything they want. This creates a huge social problem because anything that is given to an “entitled” person had to be produced by someone else. It is a big problem because the inability of government leaders to understand the complexity of this situation lumps lazy people in with the many others justifiably suffering unwarranted hardship.
This issue was already contentious when the industrial revolution just started. A book called The Poor Laws written by Joseph Townsend in 1786 said:
“To a man of common sensibility nothing can be more distressing than to hear the complaints of wretchedness, which he hath no power to redress, and to be daily conversant with misery, which he can neither fly from nor relieve…
[discussing motivation of the poor] — what encouragement have the poor to be industrious and frugal, when they know for certain, that should they increase their share [i.e. contribution to society] it will be devoured by the drones [i.e. lazy people]? Or what cause have they to fear, when they are assured, that if by their indolence and extravagance, by their drunkenness and vices, they should be reduced to want, they shall be abundantly supplied, not only with food and raimament, but with their accustomed luxuries at the expense of others. The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action — pride, honor and ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labor; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger…
He who statedly employs the poor in useful labour, is their only friend; he, who only feeds them, their greatest enemy. Their hopes and fears should center in themselves.”
The Poor Laws, so generous in theory, promoted the evils they meant to remedy and aggravated the distress they were intended to relieve.”
As with many social solutions that have been and are currently being implemented, including many of the programs of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), the Poor Laws failed miserably because they did not take into account the structure of human brain thinking and the 7DS. Obviously, thinkers like Townsend already understood the general nature of human behavior. But then, as still persists today, because of the 7DS and particularly false-pride, the culture civilization has set up completely denies the inability of the Stone Age brains of our leaders to understand the complexity of human interactions.
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies, a 1954 book by William Golding, is a typical high school reading list book about a group of boys shipwrecked alone on an island. The early parts of the book, playing heavily on student idealistic stereotypes, leads the reader to believe that, left alone from adult interference, the marooned boys would pull together and build a tropical paradise. But, as the book unfolds, the kids break up into warring groups. I thought they would listen to the smarter kids who had good ideas about how to survive and signal for help. But the tough and ruthless kids played on the fears of the average and weaker kids and took control. They even killed the smart kids when they wouldn’t go along.
I remember how the students in my class, including me, didn’t want to admit that what the book was portraying applied to the world we wanted to envision. We wanted to believe that humans, especially when faced with crisis, would respect wisdom and work together to produce harmony in the world. The book had a very different message. Given human nature, wisdom will not be respected. Instead, society will revert to Stone Age survival behaviors led by the most ruthless among us. It depicted a society more like the reality show “survivor” than Swiss Family Robinson.
The teacher asked us to find precedents to support our position. That was more disturbing. The history of civilization, even with all the great thinkers like Socrates, Plato and Galileo, is a chronicle of war. And two of the three thinkers I listed were killed or imprisoned for just speaking their views. Even today, with all the resources humanity “believes” are available and the technology already available to extract and harness them, the planet is plagued by conflict, poverty and hardship, rather than progress based on mutual support. We surely kid ourselves if we attempt to group world nations into allied cooperating camps. As soon as some large corporations in the U.S. are challenged by cheap lumber from Canada, or cheap electronics from China, the “friendship” gets hostile right away.
In the Lord of the Flies, the survival instinct was not just a drive to secure Maslow’s basic physical needs. It was psychology driven by the 7DS — primarily GREED for power — to achieve security by dominance. This was driven by the lack of A3 thinking that understands and supports cooperation. This greed has always played a dominant role in human society. And human society’s inability to control this drive will be a primary reason for the collapse of society this series is discussing.
7DS conclusion
For humans to survive as a race, society needs to understand the behaviors described by the Seven Deadly Sins, and face up to the fact that they are integral parts of our human nature. We need to acknowledge how they mold human culture, and what needs to be done to address this nature. It’s a much bigger problem than anyone expects. But if we don’t make this acknowledgement, we will be trying to answer the wrong questions about human interactions, and keep coming up with wrong answers. And, to be clear, NONE of the 7DS explanations here are related to any religion. This is physiologically driven human psychology. In short:
- The Seven Deadly Sins are the key to understanding why humans have so much trouble building cooperative societies.
- The Seven Deadly Sins concepts were developed by ancient thinkers as a structure to guide people’s behavior away from violence.
- Humans can not escape numerous strong self preservation instincts that have been hard-wired into the human brain over millions of years of evolution.
There is a much more detailed discussion of the 7DS at a3society.org under 7 Deadly Sins.
Psychological Denial
Denial is a term for a “controlled” mental breakdown! When a person is confronted with information in the form of images or words, their Middle brain starts searching for memories of prior experiences where similar images or words were used. If it finds a clear pattern, it jumps to the following process:
- continue streaming sensory information to Thinker
- start interjecting a streaming condensed version of the person’s experience related to the confrontational images or words
- include emotional messages that were stored with the memories.
But Middle brain will not give up on trying to completely resolve the confrontation. It may take quite a bit of time — minutes, hours, days — to provide less clearly matching memories and logically related memories.
But, what if a person has a lot of conflicting or confusing memories? What if the memories had associated emotional messages that were very disturbing to the person? Remember, Middle brain’s goal is protecting the life of its body. Sending a false message might have severe consequences. So for memories tagged with “emotionally disturbing” memories, Middle brain will delay sending a response while it tries to determine what memory is most appropriate.
Thinker brain, of course, is monitoring all of this and knows something is wrong. It can tell right away that that the memory stream from Middle brain has slowed down or stopped. It might even see this as a frozen video! It can sense that Hulk is still sending new and changing information to Middle brain, but Middle brain has STOPPED TRANSMITTING! The person’s head is rigid, and their eyes are locked in a blank gaze into space. If Thinker, from the information it has received so far believes the situation is dangerous, it can pressure Middle brain to send whatever it can. Middle brain will then do that. If this information is tragic, this launches an episode often referred to as PTSD.
But Middle brain can also resolve the pressure with a “safe” response. It can choose a “default” memory that it has high confidence is safe, even if it contradicts a lot of information. This launches an episode referred to as a DENIAL RESPONSE.
This can be viewed as a small mental breakdown because, even while sending the “safe” message, Middle brain knows the match is not good. It will not stop searching for a true match. That means, the person will feel anxiety, and start acting like they are “distracted”. Middle brain’s search effort on the dangerous or disturbing subject will limit its ability to focus on new material coming in. So it will only pass part of that through. The information that gets through to Thinker will be erratic in timing and full of obvious errors that Thinker’s memory will detect. As Thinker sends messages to Hulk to move the person’s body to interact with the world, things will go wrong because the actions will be based on erratic information. These errors will generate new problems for both Hulk and Middle brain. Middle brain will then be under further overload. If the conflict does not resolve, the person can go into a full mental breakdown.
For example, consider Jim, a young, average guy who has just been married to his “dream” partner. He has worked hard in school and has found a good startup job. A glorious future lays before him. He and his wife are walking in a park on a beautiful sunny day in July. They pass a table where some climate activists are handing out literature. They stop to see what it’s all about. The pamphlet he picks up says, “if governments don’t “move” quickly, the “worst” scenario for the climate could happen.” So Jim asks the woman behind the table what “the worst” means.
She tells him about the Club of Rome report. She says, “it is already too late to stop a lot of damage to the earth. We can expect a major population crash that will be in full swing within about 5 years. Every part of society we now know is going to be torn apart. What the pamphlet is saying is that, if governments don’t move quickly, the population crash will be deeper, and the losses to the environment so great, that it will possibly push civilization back into a dark ages.”
Jim is STUNNED! His face goes cold! His eyes lock into a gaze that looks right through the woman’s face into a black universe. These facts conflict so drastically with the vision for his future that he has worked so hard for and believes in so completely. None of the visual models his Thinker brain has created match what he’s just been told in any way. Thinker sends a distress emotion to Middle brain to search for related memories. Middle brain finds many memories that disagree with the new facts. BUT, it also finds some that agree with it.
Falling back to a fight-or-flight process, it starts to build two cases: one to discredit the new information (fight); a second to support its old view (flight). This it can do very quickly. But all the facts still don’t line up. So, it sends a DENIAL message which is essentially the flight position, supported just by memories related to his future dream. The future dream memories are accompanied by a large chemical release to provide Jim with a sense of calm. He comes out of his trance and tells the woman, “this is such a bunch of rubbish”, and walks away.
But as long as the possibility of harm to him and his wife are suggested in many of his memories, Middle brain will still keep replaying the nonconforming messages. The chemical releases and emotions from this process are felt as anxiety right in the middle of the calm feeling. We call this restlessness.
The mental process that we observe as “denial” is a controlled process (mental breakdown) that Middle brain uses to distract Thinker brain when Middle brain is unable to resolve a serious contradiction. This process is parallel to the loss of consciousness control that Hulk uses to block out both Middle brain and Thinker when the “higher level” brains request actions that go outside boundary limits that Hulk deems life critical.
This Middle brain process exerts strong biological controls on social behaviors that human society ignores and rejects AT ITS PERIL!
One problem with this brain function is, of course, the principle that: HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY, which is optimized for Stone Age complexity, prevents individuals from seeing the potential harm of modern complexity. The psychological need to feel secure misleads people into believing that they are in control: of the physical gadgets, legal situations, financial products and information sources they can so easily purchase; of the government, decisions for war, destruction of the environment, direction of the economy, and control of crime that they so easily “guide” with the one or two votes they cast now and then. But they aren’t in control. When they are harmed, their psychological need for security looks for simple answers, like blaming others for their failures.
Another problem is the principle that: The majority of people on earth are either not able to understand or don’t agree with the alarms about the crisis of limited resources we are already observing. They are both living in worlds of denial. It is this MAJORITY, acting in a democratic society, that will cause the first truly global civilization on this planet to collapse.
Why modern psychotherapy doesn’t work — Truth, Values and Freedom
If the unfolding collapse of human society is primarily a psychology problem, can’t psychotherapy help? Unfortunately, NO. The reason is, psychotherapy, as a modern medical specialty, is a tragic failure. The reason is its inability to deal with TRUTH and VALUES.
To understand this, it’s important to understand the point I made earlier: modern society is equivalent to living in an insane asylum. The primary reason for this is that civilization has lost the ability to agree on two concepts: TRUTH AND VALUES. While we hear politicians talking about values every day, and every politician has his own list, none of them understand what they’re talking about. They are not able to understand values based on logic and reality. Ayn Rand provided a lot of insight about it. A good summary with a sound evolutionary basis came from Nathanial Brandon in Psychotherapy And The Objectivist Ethics:
“Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action…. Value presupposes a standard, a purpose and necessity of action in the face of an alternative. It is only the concept of ‘life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
The key to motivation lies in the realm of values. … it is a man’s notion of what is for him or against him … that determines the goals he will pursue and the emotions he will experience.
The majority of men hold values that are part rational, and part irrational… and they spend their lives in anxiously precarious fluctuation… they pay the price of their unresolved contradictions in frustration.
The paradox … of psychology is that VALUES IS THE ONE ISSUE SPECIFICALLY BANNED FROM ITS DOMAIN. The majority of psychologists … have accepted the premise that the realm of science and the realm of ethics are mutually inimical, that morality is a matter of faith, not of reason, that moral values are inviolately subjective…”
In the modern world, where Cognitive Psychology is the new fad, one would think that therapists would discuss values with patients. Cognitive Psychology is based on the assumption that the human brain makes “logical” decisions based on “logical thinking” rather than the decisions being due to inherited biological drives, as assumed during the previous fad of behavioral psychologists. “Logical thinking” means making “rational” decisions based on what a person values. Most people, when they first go to a therapist, make the assumption that, things are going “wrong” in life because someone is “screwed up”. By “screwed up” they mean doing something “illogical” or “irrational” based on observations of “reality”. They usually believe it is the fault of someone else— NOT THEM. But, I think most people at least consider that they could be part of the problem. So, when they go to a therapist, they expect their therapist to tell them the right thing to do.
But modern medical psychotherapy FORBIDS this! The standard approach is called “non-directive counseling”. This was described by Lloyd Smith in 1950, when the fad was just starting, as follows:
“This therapy does not try to solve the patient’s problems for him, but rather establishes the conditions under which a patient can work out his own salvation.” (Ref. 1)
In short, “non-directive counseling ” is a training class aimed at teaching people how to make “logical” and “rational” decisions. But the foundation behind psychological education has NO IDEA how to do that either. What that education has become is a rigorous review of a wide variety of medical studies with no solid framework related to mental illness to bring it all together. The result is an army of therapists, who went into school already locked into many forms of distorted world views, who just picked and chose examples from the studies they read to reinforce their existing beliefs. My interactions with many therapists supports this. Every one of them told me that what they learned in class was practically useless. So they have developed their OWN approach based on their work with patients. This is why the success rate of psychotherapy is so poor and is dragged out so long.
I will come back to this discussion with more detail in later parts of this series. But to finish up this part, here is a summary of the overall psychotherapy problem.
It is important to clarify that the science of psychology, even though it is messed up, is NOT the ROOT of the problem. The root of the problem, as stated above, is that the whole of human civilization lost its universal way to establish Truth and Values!
In ancient times, truth and values were easy. All societies were ruled by absolute monarchs: kings, pharaohs, emperors etc. They decreed Truth and Values. If a person accepted them and followed them, they lived. If they didn’t, they were killed.
In our modern world, the technologies of transportation and communication have brought many different beliefs together. Western cultures have also accepted the concept of “democracy”. That means, not only do we expect that separate nations might have different world-views, but individual citizens in the same nation might also have differing views. To maintain peace with such an arrangement, both governments and institutions, such as universities, professions, religions etc. have envisioned, as a RIGHT, that ALL people should be allowed to BELIEVE WHATEVER THEY WANT. In fact, modern culture believes this so strongly, it has become a foundation of governments. It sounds so “democratic”. It was a basis of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What humanity does not understand, however, is that THIS CAUSES BIG PROBLEMS IN THE PRESENCE OF COMPLEXITY! Humanity has not thought this out well.
Consider medicine as an example. How would medical care work with an “anything you want” philosophy? What if every doctor, every nurse and every drug company could do things any way they want? How about paying taxes? Couldn’t everyone just follow their own beliefs about that? How about our legal system? Couldn’t everyone decide what laws they want to follow? How about automobiles? Couldn’t everyone decide to drive any way they want? Couldn’t construction crews build roads any size they want? How about living in a house? Couldn’t everyone decide to build a house anyway they want? Why do we need all those fire-prevention codes, or electrical-codes, or zoning ordinances? Couldn’t we all decide how and where to dump our garbage and sewage any way we want? How about on our neighbor’s lawns, or in the street? How about electric power? Couldn’t every power station decide to chose their own voltage, plugs and wiring? How about every railroad being able to put tracks anywhere they want and use any size track they want? Couldn’t every teacher decide to teach anything they want?
The point is, for a modern, COMPLEX civilization to work, with its tight interconnectedness of specialized labor, ALL world societies, and everyone in them, needs to rethink the entire fundamental concepts of FREEDOM, TRUTH and VALUES. Until society finds ways for people to agree on what citizens are free to do, and what not to do, and what parts of life can be understood as truths, and what can’t, we are essentially living in a world wide insane asylum! Everyone lives in their own world and it doesn’t have to conform to what science calls the material universe.
A major symptom of this “think anything you want” foundation is the breakdown and gridlock of communication and cooperation in democratic governments. This is not, as is so frequently reported, “just” due to differences of opinion. It is the lack of a basic structure to guide both communication and cooperation.
Related to psychotherapy, even at our ‘modern’ stage in human development, the human race still has no clue how to sit down and figure out “the right thing to do”. They have no clue how to list out, or even discuss a set of “positive human values” that all or even most of humanity can agree on. As soon as any formal effort tries to do this, people take sides with entrenched factions, pick up guns, and massacre each other. And if any college or government tried to do it, the same factions in those institutions would stir up a major crisis. So despite all the rhetoric about ‘family values’ and ‘human values’, formal large scale attempts to even try to agree on what “values” are, are still a big taboo.” And if no major social institutions, like governments, religions, medical schools or universities will do this, how can average people be expected to know what to do?
This is the dilemma of cognitive therapy. There is no fundamental social structure to base it on, even at the local level. Trying to teach people better logic skills fails because the multiple disagreeing underlying social structures they are forced to juggle to maintain daily life can not be logically tied together.
Summary for The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology
In summary, this part explains how science has based modern concepts of brain structure on a flawed language translation of Freud’s clinical observations. New research has created a better model which is still a 3-brain model that is, ironically, consistent with Freud’s original work. This new model leads directly to a working explanation for human consciousness referred to as A3. The new 3-brain model provides a strong physiological basis for Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The combination of these new discoveries provides a foundation for understanding some of the major unanswered questions of human behavior. This new understanding suggests that the basis of modern social problems lies very far in the past — in the evolution of our human Stone Age brains. Because the 200 years humans have lived with modern technology and culture is so short on an evolutionary basis, there has essentially been no evolutionary brain change to adapt to the technology change. Because humans have been able to so quickly develop technology that can destroy them, but not the technological or social understanding to protect themselves, any reliance on evolution to save humanity is not supported.
One positive factor for human progress is realizing that the “great thinkers” in ancient times already understood how inherited biological drives negatively impact social harmony. These have been labeled the Seven Deadly Sins by modern writers, though their initial understanding had nothing to do with “sin” as that term is now used.
The process psychology calls “denial” is due to strong biological controls on social behaviors.
The hope that modern medical psychology can bridge the divide between ancient brain structures and modern complexity is lost until human culture can understand the roles of Freedom, Truth and Values in complex society. Until these principles are understood, the misunderstandings will results in the symptoms of social mental illness and gridlock in government. The symptoms will spread like a “zombie plague” throughout society. The plague will be expressed with high levels of violence and a “Tower of Babel” like breakdown of the ability to communicate, throughout all social institutions.
You can read more about the “lost understanding of Truth” on the A3 Society website. Additional discussion of other issues in the post can be found under the following tabs: 7 Deadly Sins ; Brain Theory ; Democracy ; Human Species ; Language ; Psychology ; Truth .
The next part in the series, Part 5 , discusses Language, Government Gridlock and the Breakdown of Communication. It digs into a never before understood problem of human language that has gridlocked governments around the world and prevented humans, the media, academia and public spokes people from being able to understand each other.
References (*)
(1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1520614/pdf/califmed00245-0055.pdf
Images courtesy of flickr — ascriptions with photos
Stone Age Man from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
