LIMBIC TERRORISM
The brain — a parvenu — cannot quite achieve escape velocity from its libidinous spine. (An old question raised again: will the future of the human race be hostage to limbic terrorism?)¹
-Spinal Catastrophism
The limbic system is a 450 million year old adaptation² that the human race drags along with it into the present. It is made up of many highly connected parts which include the hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, septal nuclei, and anterior cingulate gyrus.³ It controls everything from basic needs to complex emotions and social behavior:
“Buried within the depths of the cerebrum are several large aggregates of limbic structures and nuclei which are preeminent in the control and mediation of memory, emotion, learning, dreaming, attention, and arousal, and the perception and expression of emotional, motivational, sexual, and social behavior including the formation of loving attachments. Indeed, the limbic system not only controls the capacity to experience love and sorrow, but it governs and monitors internal homeostasis and basic needs such as hunger and thirst, including even the cravings for pleasure-inducing drugs.”⁴
This adaptation that once bolstered our survival chances in the wild is now exploited to control us, locking people into fixed action patterns of consumerism.
First let us briefly examine the components of the limbic system and their functions. As we go through the various things (emotions, cravings, &c) the limbic components control, think what in your environment triggers that thing. The hypothalamus is responsible for internal homeostasis including hunger and thirst. It can initiate sexual and aggressive behavior as well feelings of rage or pleasure (ever seen a billboard with a pair of juicy red lipsticked lips next to a burger?). It also plays a major part in producing hormones. The amygdala controls base emotions such as fear, anxiety, and anger but also the seeking of loving attachments and long term emotional memories (pull up any political website). The hippocampus deals with memory, converting short term memories to long term. Another way it aids memory formation is by filtering irrelevant data (how many commercial jingles do you know by heart?). Extreme social and emotional functioning are associated with the septal nuclei along with long lasting emotional attachments (know anyone emotionally invested in a brand?). Lastly the anterior cingulate, which is heavily interconnected with the other limbic structures, contributes to memory and emotions such as misery and anxiety (what emotional state are you in after social media scrolling). It is implicated in language and long term attachments as well. These systems are tightly connected and exert both excitatory and inhibitory influence on each other and the rest of the brain.⁵
“Indeed, the old limbic brain has not been replaced and is not only predominant in regard to all aspects of motivational and emotional functioning, but is capable of completely overwhelming “the rational mind” due in part to the massive axonal projections of limbic system to the neocortex.”⁶
The powerful influence of the limbic system is exploited by most industries today: marketing, food engineering, porn, politics, music, social media, television, &c. The Videodrome (the integration of technology and the human body from a movie with the same name) which has evolved from the immobile TV to various portable screens, provides a mainline.
“The spectacular Videodrome generates subliminal over-stimulation and this hype leads to a craving for stimulation for its own sake […] The Videodrome through the television screen (in words, sound, vision, visual imagery) releases spores, pheromones which make us gorge ourselves on it, always wanting more, whether it’s tactile, sexual, phenomenal, social, material or emotional…”⁷
In the race for ever increasing profits every product is designed (for an in depth look at design as the manipulation of behavior of the inorganic and organic see Benedict Singleton’s essay Speculative Design in Speculative Aesthetics) to tap into this atavistic reservoir of motivation. Politicians tap into fear and anger, advertisers champion the old adage of ‘sex sells’, food is created to give off all the signals of a super food but with no nutrition, social media pushes emotionally charged narratives coupled with reward manipulation, the list goes on (Scott Alexander’s It’s Bad on Purpose⁸ seems more and more apt). These limbic lures operate on the concept of super stimuli originally discovered by Nikolaas Tinbergen. In 1951 Tinbergen published The Study of Instinct detailing experiments showing animals are attracted to seemingly absurd super stimuli over authentic stimuli.
“Although they are triggered by stimuli that are indicators of health, vitality, danger, or reproductive advantage, the unlearned actions of animals respond not to an exhaustive assessment as to whether an object satisfies these criteria, but to abstracted perceptual cues (blueness, egg size and shape, red underbelly) with which those assets or threats were consistently associated over the evolutionary period. It is these abstract cues that the ethologist’s schematic simulacra isolate and accentuate.”⁹
The oyster catcher bird will ignore its own eggs in favor of larger eggs with more pronounced markings, herring gull chicks will seek food from a simulacra with the reddest beak, and a male stickleback will attack an oval with a bright red lower half while ignoring a life like fish.¹⁰ This same manipulation is being done to humans today.
“…the redoubled return of the worst, most catastrophic, inherited aspects of our history-riddled ‘mind-with-a-past’: a hijack, by superstimuli, of our most base desires and compulsions; dopaminergic return, and lock-in of the most irrational tics and stereotypies. Technology increasingly gives us everything we want and more, but ‘want’ is, by this very same token, increasingly a question of the most salamandrine portions of our nature.”¹¹
Our environment is saturated with these super stimuli that trigger the limbic system. It is good to keep in mind that when talking about our environment that we aren’t talking about the biology textbook definition, rather what we pay attention to.
“When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly — of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”¹²
For most of us our environment is a kaleidoscope of screens occasionally interrupted. Our screens have become part of us, offering an easy and intimate route for limbic terrorism. It is true that limbic terrorism is carried out in order to drive site traffic, sales, and every other metric that serves holy Profit, but there is a more pernicious bent to it. The constant hijacking of the limbic system doubles as a powerful tool of control for The Lords of Things as They Are (a term borrowed from Norbert Wiener).
“This policy of lies — or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth — will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate — any candidate — or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudo science will sell an illustrated newspaper.”¹³
TLoTaTA once had to be satisfied with regional aggregates and tools like PRIZM¹⁴ when concocting their potions of hunger, hatred, horror, & horniness. Now they use the latest pinpoint digital surveillance to perfectly tailor their poison to the level of each individual.¹⁵ An ad with an unnaturally beautiful woman as you scroll through your favorite social media, followed by a nonsensical skit for a fast food joint elegantly chained together with an article of how a political side is gearing up to turn your children into dog food — a precision strike that would make Lockheed Martin jealous. And just like that you’re a Marlboro man, a Lululemon lover, or Apple apostle with a subscription to a certain political blog. TLoTaTA use these subconscious traps¹⁶ to corral individuals into different political camps and keep them too fixated (or busy) to question how they got there or whose beliefs they are espousing.
“Control over oneself rather than allowing one’s psychological triggers to be accessible to others is a primary concern. Things that place one under stress have survival significance to older physiological systems, which is why experiences that are paired with stress are imprinted more strongly into the preconscious mind. … As long as our responses to stress are fixed and predictable anyone aware of this can direct us like puppets.”¹⁷
TLoTaTA concern themselves with using the most effective tools to stay in power, not the consequences it has for humanity as whole. Incessantly jamming on the levers of the limbic system is reprogramming minds to ignore natural signs of health and fitness in favor of super stimuli and to become cemented in hyper-real reward circuits. “The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare.”¹⁸ There are many consequences to this, from a drastic rise in depression to increasingly absurd and dangerous politics, it has even been suggested as the species ending answer to the Fermi paradox.¹⁹
“Our motivational structures, our limbic systems, remain the result of Darwinian opportunism not rational design, and, aside from governing us with the cruel cane of suffering, as we explored in the previous chapter, they can be hijacked or misfired — potentially, as many have feared, even to the point of extinction.”²⁰
While it may not be possible to completely abjure your cellphone or politics, there are steps you can take to reduce your weakness to limbic terrorism. Hopefully this article will help you realize the next time you are snared in a limbic loop and to think who is pulling your strings, for what purpose, and where that might lead the human race.
“Currently, our ability to reformat reality appears not so much to be resulting in a hyper-dense kingdom of ends as to be incarcerating us into a limbic loop.”²¹
[1] Moynihan, Thomas. Spinal Catastrophism, Urbanomic Media Ltd, 2019, p. 222.
[2] Beck, Gabriel; Joseph, R. The Limbic System: An Introduction Hypothalamus, Amygdala, Septal Nuclei, Hippocampus, E-Book ed. 2015, l. 68.
[3] Ibid., l. 94.
[4] Ibid., l. 64–68.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., l. 81.
[7] Downham, “Videodrome”, 189.
[8] Alexander, Scott. “It’s Bad On Purpose To Make You Click.” Astral Codex Ten, 6 June 2022, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/its-bad-on-purpose-to-make-you-click. Accessed 2023.
[9] Kronic, Maya B. “ Hyperplastic-Supernormal.” Maya B. Kronic — Published and Unpublished Writings and Translations , 2017, http://readthis.wtf/writing/hyperplastic-supernormal/. Accessed 2023.
[10] Tinbergen, Nikolaas. The Study of Instinct, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955, pp. 27–45.
[11] Moynihan, Thomas. Spinal Catastrophism, Urbanomic Media Ltd, 2019, p. 221.
[12] Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants : The Epic Scramble to Get inside Our Heads. New York, Vintage Books, E-book ed 2017, l. 1765–1774.
[13] Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. 1948. Mit Press, 2019, p. 160. [emphasis added]
[14] Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants : The Epic Scramble to Get inside Our Heads. New York, Vintage Books, E-book ed 2017, l. 3295.
[15] Ibid., l. 6055.
[16] “A hunting trap doesn’t seek to ‘master’ the animal, in the sense of physically dominating it in a fair fight, but rather enlists the animal’s unwitting help in its own demise.” Mackay, Robin, and Benedict Singleton. Speculative Aesthetics. Urbanomic, 2018, l. 425.
[17] Unruh, Wes, and Edward Wilson. The Art of Memetics. Wes Unruh, 2008, p. 70.
[18] McLuhan, “Notes on Burroughs”, in Skerl, Jennie and Robin Lydenberg, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959–1989, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, p. 69.
[19] see Miller, Geoffrey. “Edge.org.” Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox, 2006, www.edge.org/response-detail/11475. Accessed 2023.
[20] Moynihan, Thomas. X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, Urbanomic, Falmouth, 2020, l. 8881–8883.
[21] Moynihan, Thomas. Spinal Catastrophism, Urbanomic Media Ltd, 2019, p. 221.
