Escape from Reason

I was thinking about how our brains work and we (all of us) are prone to think emotionally and it takes effort to override that to make reasoned deciscions. And as the Repulican party is the most obvious example I Googled the pschology of ex president and found some old articles.

Emotions are powerful motivators of behavior. For most animals, emotion, not rational thought is what drives behavior, and this remains true for our esteemed species, self-christened as Homo sapiens—“the wise one.” But our decisions are not made solely by reasoning. In fact, in the most complex and momentous decisions we make we rely on emotion—gut feelings. Whom to marry, where to live, or even what entrée to select from a dinner menu, are decisions we make not by reason, but rather by how we “feel.”

Most of these circuits are deeply engraved by evolution in the brains of our primate and mammalian ancestors. A mother’s instant reaction to respond with unlimited aggression if necessary to protect her child is a familiar example. The human brain shares this same neural circuitry with other animals, and that circuit is separate from the neural circuit that launches us into defensive aggression in response to another type of danger, facing an intruder for example. To understand this election you must understand the brain’s threat detection mechanism.

This neuroscience perspective explains the seemingly incomprehensible situation of a privileged billionaire becoming the champion of working class men and women who are feeling angry and threatened. It is boggling to provide a logical explanation for this improbable hero of the working class, but his appeals to the anger, fear, and frustration that many feel—an appeal to the brain’s limbic system—is perfectly consistent with how the human brain makes complex decisions by relying on emotion when faced with momentous decisions. Perfume is not sold by describing how it will make us smell; it is sold by how it will make us feel. So it is with selling real estate. And rationally we know that all cars travel at the same speed on our roads. How then can we rationally explain the need to purchase a 500 horsepower Corvette, when it will ride the bumper of a jalopy in traffic, but cost 10 times as much? Marketing skillfully manipulates emotion—tapping into how we feel—to nudge our purchasing decisions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/trump-s-victory-and-the-neuroscience-of-rage/ Another surprise victory is unlikely to happen again if this election is looked at from the same perspective of neuroscience that I used to account for the surprising outcome in 2016. Briefly, that article explained how our brain provides two different mechanisms of decision-making; one is conscious and deliberative, and the other is automatic, driven by emotion and especially by fear. Trump’s strategy does not target the neural circuitry of reason in the cerebral cortex; it provokes the limbic system. In the 2016 election, undecided voters were influenced by the brain’s fear-driven impulses—more simply, gut instinct—once they arrived inside the voting booth, even though they were unable to explain their decision to pre-election pollsters in a carefully reasoned manner.

Trump’s dismissal of experts, be they military generals, career public servants, scientists or even his own political appointees, is necessary for him to sustain the subcortical decision-making in voters’ minds that won him election and sustains his support. The fact-based decision-making that scientists rely upon is the polar opposite of emotion-based decision-making. In his rhetoric, Trump does not address factual evidence; he dismisses or suppresses it even for events that are apparent to many, including global warming, foreign intervention in U.S. elections, the trivial head count at his inauguration, and even the projected path of a destructive hurricane. Instead, “alternative facts,” or fabrications, are substituted.

Anyway I wanted to save these links

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuroscience-and-psychology-suggest-no-surprise-victory-for-trump-this-time/

And to tie it to some other thoughts I see this along the lines of Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3671847252

The blog post where I try to drain Meaning of MEANING

From my first post form 2007, with some editing...

Tomorrow morning I wake up for the first time as a 50 year old man.
Statistically I have 25 years to live ( more or less). So what do I do with those 25 years? …
And if I don't or can't, does that mean I failed?
Is life about finding meaning?
Is life about not failing?
Must I find meaning?
If not that, then what?

OK. that was 14 years ago. WOW! (meaning now statistically I have 11 years to live)

This is only my third post this year. Which is fine, because I now use it as a place for me to put things I want to put somewhere. And I have not felt the need to say anything to my self, or to any unlikely passerby.

BUT, how would I phrase a new first blog post now?

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The Red Wheelbarrow
BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

You can Google that poem and find all sorts of meaning. And Williams may have had some explicit “meaning” in mind, but I don’t know and don’t care. I take the poem as an a song of experience. It could have been anything, a box and not a wheel barrow, a dog and not chickens...none of that "matters". What matters is accepting the experience, the immediate experience that prompted that poem. A reminder that wherever you are, whatever you see, it ALL “depends so much”

NOT what caused the wheel barrow to be there or what will happen to the chickens….PAY ATTENTION to the world NOW. So much depends because everything in front of us is NOW and we are all part of it NOW. PAY ATTENTION!

What does it mean?
What is the meaning of life?
To diagram a moment or a life like diagraming a sentence looking to find “meaning” is to conceptualize that which cannot fit into a concept. So give thanks that we are all in this together. EVEN if we all irritate the hell out of each other...give thanks. EVEN if we have not been the best version of ourselves, give thanks for this moment we communally experience all over the world. For this moment let go of the past and let thoughts of the future float away, they are fictions that distract us from living this moment.

It came over him like a fit; it was like a single spark kindled in his soul and spreading fire through him. Everything in him softened at once and the tears started into his eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot....He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth, and kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got up and bowed down a second time
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky

That is how I would start a new blog.

No Self, No Problem

I've been reading "No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism by Chris Niebauer Ph.D" and it is really in line with with my thinking of the last few years. I am still not exactly sure what I am, but this may help.

A few quotes for a preview

Sure, the physical entity of my body and my brain is there, but the “I” attached to it only exists as a thought—and only when I think it.

Seen in this light, “I” is simply a useful, categorical fiction, expressed through language.

The Only Certainty is UN-certainty

I am still mulling over my Grand Theory of Everything. Very slowly but it is still there.

Anyway given recent political events and beliefs driving those events, that brought my thinking back to humans and their love for certainty, AND the vehemence people maintain their certainty. Following a link to another link I found this article .

That science can fail, however, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's a human construct, after all. And if we simply accepted that science often works imperfectly, we'd be better off. We'd stop considering science a collection of immutable facts. We'd stop assuming every single study has definitive answers that should be trumpeted in over-the-top headlines. Instead, we'd start to appreciate science for what it is: a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.

Acknowledging that fact is the first step toward making science work better for us all.

And the point is people in general think their views have the certainty of established sience, but actually established science isn't all that "established"

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/13/8591837/how-science-is-broken

The Episode Where We Escape From Freedom

I have been reading Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom recently, and to fill in some blanks I went looking for some background on Fromm on the Internet.

Nice Quote

Fromm identified deep feelings of anxiety and powerlessness upon which Hitler had been able to capitalize. His sadomasochistic message of love for the strong and hatred for the weak — not to mention a racial program that raised “true-born” Germans to the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder — provided a means of escape from intolerable psychological burdens experienced on a mass basis.

Escape From Freedom was not merely an analysis of Nazism. At the heart of its thesis was the notion that capitalism — particularly in its monopolistic phase — fostered “the development of a personality which feels powerless and alone, anxious and insecure,” and which is therefore tempted to surrender its freedom to strongman leaders.

 

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/erich-fromm-frankfurt-school-marxism-weimar-germany

Where fiction affects facts

In the conversation with my self my self points out that money and race and nations are quite real to most people. In the horror show of a year it is alarmingly clear that race and money affect people’s lives and sometimes with deadly consequences.

Good point!

In fact I am glad you brought that up. (what a helpful fellow that sell guy is)

I may or may not have demonstrated the fiction of money by holding up a $100 dollar and a $1 dollar bill and asked why one is much more desired than the other. If I have not done that bit then the gist is they are both on the same kind of paper of the same quality of design and such stuff. Obvious we all just agree that when we see $100 we will give and get more stuff than the $1. In the part of my act I go deeper to say even IF there was a pure gold standard where the 100 meant there where 100 units of gold for each dollar the $100 bill represents, it is STILL just “belief” that those gold pieces mean anything. Why do thing gold is the “gold standard” or money? What the hell is gold to a human, it is a crappy metal for building plows or steamships. It has “value” only because we humans declare it has value.

The point is it is just a piece of paper in front of you and even it was a chest of gold on your door step it is only valuable for the same reason paper currency is...because we believe it has value

HOWEVER, if you don’t have money it sure makes paying your bills REALLY difficult. And while you are explaining to some racist that biologically there is such thing as a “race” culture is even less tied to DNA...if you are explaining this while a some A-hole racist is threatening you the consequences of these fictions are quite

. And that makes it all the more absurd. People and groups define themselves by these fictions and because of it people die. People are tortured. People suffer. Dying and suffering are for sure real and all driven by a lie.

Ain’t that a kick in the pants?

We Are at the Place We Find Ourselves - Finally

Our story so far…(a work in progress)

NOW
There is only now
There is no past there is no future
Just now
NOW

To uselessly elaborate a little, when you think of past sorrows, embarrassments, joys or victories, as well as future fears or plans… you are doing all that NOW.

Existence is not a VHS tape where if we could only learn to rewind or fast forward the tape of time THEN we could visit that solid event in the past or the solidified future experience. Whatever you are planning or remembering it is all in your head and everything is happening NOW.

And even more astonishingly it is all the same for ALL of us, for ALL sentient beings, for ALL inanimate objects. ALL existence is connected NOW.

WE are ALL in this together, whether we know it or not.
:
Tell me a story.
In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.
Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.
The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.
Tell me a story of deep delight.
- Robert Penn Warren
:
The bit from Robert Penn Warren’s poem may speak to this, and this is just my interpretation, but when you are captured but a story you experience it right THEN. And yes we frame our outlook on the world through the conceptual lens of Time. But that is not how we experience life.

PART II
Assign value, to assign blame and glory
:

And so ends today’s sermon