Constraints: The Human Zoo

Miss You Gus

Since the Neolithic, humanity has lived increasingly in environments resulting from its intentions and unintended consequences. As societies have become more complex, we increasingly live in environments that only minimally reflect the environmental context in which we originally evolved and thrived. This has had some profound effects that essentially go unnoticed.

Also, since the Neolithic, humanity has lived increasingly with other animals, not as part of their environment but in some form of captivity. Some of these animals have been domesticated and form a core feature of the adaptations that have allowed us to become the central biological force on our planet. Others have been kept for amusement and education, with contemporary zoos being the main surviving form of this practice.

Animals in zoos have an unusual experience. They find themselves taken from their evolved environment and moved to completely different climates. They are placed within false environments designed by humans based on what the human designers value, not what the animal needs. Food choices become contingent upon what is provided. Survival is primarily ensured through the animal’s threat assessment system, which does not know this and can become hyper-vigilant or completely inactive.

In most cases, after a relatively short time, an animal in captivity will begin displaying behaviors it would never do in its original environment. It will repetitively move around its space, often at precisely the same times daily, retracing steps repeatedly. It will engage in obsessive self-grooming and self-attention, even to the point of causing severe physical harm. It will overeat if allowed or starve itself out of boredom. Depression and anxiety often set in, and in extreme cases, so can acts of self-harm and even suicidal behavior. To treat these things, zoo veterinarians will prescribe anti-depressants and other psychoactive drugs, attempt to create new distractions in the animal’s environment, and try to control and vary food access.

Ever look at what most of your other humans are doing? One day to the next looks fairly the same. Get up at the same time. Walk the same circuit of their homes. Travel to the same places day after day. Some of the largest industries are those dealing with grooming, such as fashion, makeup, and body alteration methods. Very few people know or desire to know where their food comes from and what it does. Instead, they simply overeat or develop other food neurosis. Most humans report feeling depressed or anxious, for which they are prescribed anti-depressants and other psychoactive drugs. Vacation packages or entertainment are provided to help buffer against burnout. Exercise plans and fad diets are a booming industry.

For most of human history, survival was ensured by two different awareness skills. The first was scanning the environment for subtle changes to avoid threats and overcome change blindness. The second was to harness the ability to focus on a single task without distraction. Since the Neolithic, the capacity to focus has become an essential tool for creating our cultures and solving problems that would have been unsolvable otherwise. Unfortunately, the rapid rate of change in our present contexts, brought about in part by the increase of available information sources, is actively undermining the value of both capacities.

With the average person’s survival as ensured at that of a zoo animal, our scanning capacities have turned towards information sources. We are seeing a wave of “disconnection anxiety” where individuals live in fear akin to a survival threat at the idea of being disconnected from their means of communicating with others. We are also seeing new conditions, such as “continual partial attention,” where individuals cannot fully engage in a given moment due to being plugged into communication and information devices.

This condition is not going unnoticed by market forces and businesses. The most significant investments in marketing for the last two decade have been in what is termed “The Attention Economy.” Ways of capturing human attention utilizing subtle threats and then working to direct unfocused awareness have become the primary means of spreading influence aimed at causing people to buy. Rather than telling people about products directly, research into when and where people are most susceptible to play to their anxieties and self-soothing has become the critical tool for marketing products.

Of course, none of this applies to you, only to those other humans.

Of course.

Constraints: Cognitive, Affective, and Conative

One of the better models of the mind, likely with fairly ancient roots, separates it into three dimensions: cognitive, affective, and conative. The cognitive covers the linguistic and symbolic modes of thought. The affective deals with emotion and feeling. The conative deals with action and activities. Simplified terms for these would be Thinking, Feeling, and Doing. Each of these dimensions has a range of motion, which requires regular action to be maintained.

In the conative dimension, this can be seen in the actual movement of the body. If put through the full range of motion regularly, the human body can be capable of tremendous expression and freedom. If attention is not paid, the range of movement begins to limit due to residual tensions and anatomical adhesions. Restoration of full mobility then requires potentially long and painful actions to undo what inactivity has created—the cognitive dimension for the foundation of behaviors.

In the affective dimension, the key is learning to fully experience and express emotions rather than stifling them. Our emotions are a relatively rapid way of evaluating events; however, habits of repressing emotional responses, ignoring them, or attempting to think them away create tensions and adhesions similar to what happens with the body. Rather than having the full range of emotions to express your experiences, durable “moods” develop, which limit emotional expression and variation. This can lead to single moods dominating the mind in severe situations, creating emotional monotony. The affective dimension forms the foundation for values.

In the cognitive dimension, the key is to continue to explore and expand how you can and do your thinking. Acquisition of skills at attention, evaluation, and discernment go hand in hand with skills for communication, expression, and creation. Suppose you only review what you already know and consistently return to the same sources without integrating new sources. In that case, the cognitive dimension will become fixated and dull. The cognitive need to be challenged by integrating new information and novel interpretations to maintain its range of possibilities. The cognitive dimension forms the foundation of beliefs.

Each of these dimensions overlaps to some extent and has ways of trying to interact. Often, these are most apparent in conditions of conflict between what two dimensions are experiencing. When the affective dimension feels at odds with the actions of the conative dimension, tensions arise in both the emotions and the body. When the affective dimensions are at odds with the cognitive attitudes, they arise along with a tendency to ruminate upon specific events in a way that holds the attitude in place. When the cognitive dimension is at odds with the conative dimension, a kind of inertia sets in which can only be overcome by actions of will.

Being fully free to use all of these dimensions in their full range is an ideal, not something anyone has access to at all times. Life experiences will limit our ranges, either because we weren’t prepared or because we took actions that were, by necessity, imperfect. Developing practices that aid in mobilizing these dimensions and compensating for the residual damages of incorrect actions is vital to maintaining health and expressive range.

Orienting by Desire: Structures and Challenges

Take a look at the current expression of your Challenges. How is one of these Challenges influenced by, or dependent on, internal structures of the mind such as language and culture, as well as the dimensions discussed above. Try to get a sense of how the structural elements of the mind are leading to your challenge and how becoming aware of them can help transform the Challenge and how you address it. Then restate your Challenge in three to seven words as clearly as you can.

Constraints: Abstractions Towards Culture

“The mind has to be built out of specialized parts because it has to solve specialized problems. Only an angel could be a general problem-solver; we mortals have to make fallible guesses from fragmentary information. Each of our mental modules solves its unsolvable problem by a leap of faith about how the world works, by making assumptions that are indispensable but indefensible — the only defense being that the assumptions worked well enough in the world of our ancestors.”

from How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

What we experience as our perceptual, subjective universe arises mainly from a series of abstractions. By default, we take raw sensory experiences entering our nervous systems and, through a series of structures and processes, delete, distort, and generalize this massive amount of information into a relatively small, easier-to-work-within subjective universe. This process occurs so rapidly and so seamlessly that it has been the rule that most humans have never considered their subjective universe as not simply being the only universe.

Using the triune brain model, there are three fundamental directions that our sensory systems use to determine their actions. 

The physical system moves towards those things that please it, such as a full stomach and away from things that cause pain in the moment. The emotional system moves towards happiness, connection, and excitement and away from fear and terror. The logical brain moves towards understanding and a sense of “getting it” and away from confusion and overwhelm. In all three of these situations, the dangerous reality of the moment, including long-term threats, will be ignored, provided that the systems feel they are in conditions of pleasure, happiness, and understanding. 

From these basic systems of dividing experiences on “towards-away” lines, our mind can begin a process of abstraction. Raw experience is given meaning, such as “good” or “bad,” that will shape continued actions. Often, these abstractions become mistaken for the “real” event, as the mind is not good at distinguishing event and abstraction without training and vigilance. A negative experience with something might cause it to be considered “bad” for the rest of an individual’s life.

These initial abstractions develop into clusters of impressions or beliefs. These beliefs allow for less intellectual discomfort as they do not require new thinking once established. If you run into a situation, your beliefs will guide how you understand the experience so that energy does not need to be expended on new interpretations. Often, after the initial development of a human being has completed in adulthood, it is unlikely, barring severe shock or tremendous effort, for beliefs to change.

Cultures, in some ways, can be seen as transmitted systems of belief from individual to individual. As a means of surviving in a given context, individuals’ past experiences become abstracted and transmitted without real thought about how these abstractions relate to objective reality. This also saves discomfort across the mind’s systems and prevents potentially needless energy expenditures by individuals within the culture. Reconsiderations of a culture’s beliefs are actively discouraged, with violations of the transmitted interpretations in favor of individual experience having potentially deadly consequences. 

The abstractions of culture have positive elements as well. Cultures can be seen as a kind of multigenerational work of art, seeking its sense of the good, the true, and the beautiful to the extent that the context in which they live will allow. The structures of the culture, its beliefs about human identity, the cosmos, the human place within it, and how to interpret experience have guided and, in many cases, allowed for the thriving of humanity across centuries. Sadly, many of these cultures are being lost as we enter into a new period of human interconnection, and its effects are shattering established contexts and creating new ones faster than the process of culture can cope with. It also means that the future of culture and what will define the durable legacies of our time to the future is up for grabs.

The Path of Least Resistance Quote

Structure determines behavior. The way anything is structured determines the behavior within that structure.

The next time you are in a building, notice how the structure of the building determines your path through it. Although you may move to your destination in a variety of ways within the building, your actions are still determined by the structure of the building. You do not walk through walls, you walk along corridors. You do not enter rooms through windows, you come through doors. You do not jump from floor to floor, you take the stairs, elevator or escalator. Similarly there are fundamental structures of your life that determine the path of least resistance. The structures that have the most influence on your life are composed of your desires, beliefs, assumptions, and objective reality itself.

from The Path of Least Resistance by Robert Fritz

Culture in Mind Quote

“The implications are, quite literally, mind-bending. At birth, the human brain weighs a mere 25 percent of its eventual adult weight. This is a curious state of affairs for the brainiest of the primates. A macaque, by contrast, is born with a brain that is 60 percent of its adult weight. Its neural growth has already slowed dramatically while still in utero. Even our closest primate relation, the chimpanzee, is born with about 45 percent of its brain weight already developed, and its brain growth slows down shortly after birth. Chimps mature both physically and socially years ahead of their human cousins.

Among primates, only the human brain continues to grow at fetal rates after birth, and the frantic pace of this postpartum neural building boom continues for the first two years of life before it begins to show any signs of abating. The cortex’s natural insulation, the fatty myelin sheath that grows about the axons and permits efficient conduction of electrical impulses, is not completely formed until about the sixth year of life. Only at puberty is the physical maturation of the human brain complete. After that, neural development continues throughout life. But this is, strictly speaking, more a matter of “mind” than of brain.

This delayed maturation of the human nervous system is paralleled by a general developmental retardation of the human child compared with other primates. Humans also show a tendency to both physiological and behavioral neoteny, retaining juvenile traits in adult forms of both anatomy (i.e., head-body ratio) and behavior (i.e., playfulness).

This combination of premature birth and retarded development means that fully three-quarters of the human brain develops outside the womb, in direct relationship with an external environment. Evolution has equipped our species with an “ecological brain,” dependent throughout its life on environmental input. This is a factor of extraordinary significance for cultural anthropology and cognitive psychology alike.

The human nervous system has presumably been preadapted by evolution for many perceptual skills. Take, for example, common human visual abilities like binocular vision, depth perception, back and forth translations between three-dimensional visual images and two-dimensional representations, mental rotation of imagery, or perceptual coordination of sight, sound, and touch. Though the human sensorium seems to be genetically prepared for such visual acrobatics, actual feats of perception must be brought to life through an individual’s concrete interactions with the world. People blind from birth that eventually gain vision through medical procedures can immediately “see” by means of their eyes but have to learn by practical experience to “perceive” actual forms and to coordinate perceptual relations between sight and other senses like touch.

The eco-logical brain does not develop simply in a natural environment. Our nervous system unfolds in relation to two quite different kinds of environment, the one more “natural” and the other more cultural. Basic cognitive skills like perception, classification, and inference have evolved in the species and develop in individuals as ways in which a particular kind of body (a human body) interacts with the contours of a particular kind of physical world.

Ecological psychology studies ways in which the human sensorium is pre- adapted to the “affordances” (i.e., the interactive possibilities and constraints) of such a generalized human life-space. Just as a toddler’s foot and leg muscles must learn to balance and carry an upright body over a complex and ever-changing terrain, so the human sensorium has learned to “read” its physical environment in the (evolution- ary) process of interacting with it.

At the same time, neural development also takes place within very particular and variable sociocultural environments. Cross-cultural psychologists have demon- strated that even basic aspects of perception are influenced by the way that experience is “modeled” by a particular sociocultural environment (Cole and Scribner, 1974). These “cultural models” might be usefully thought of as “cultural affordances,” equivalent to the physical affordances of the natural environment.

For example, individuals growing up in cultures lacking two-dimensional realis- tic art must learn how to recognize images when presented with photographs. Simi- larly, there is evidence that people raised in “carpentered environments” (with lots of measured, regular angles and straight lines) tend to be fooled by certain optical illu- sions in a way that is not generally true for those raised in visually “natural” environ- ments lacking artificial lines and angles and with no experience of two-dimensional representations. One cross-cultural psychologist who has studied cultural differences in numerous perceptual skills concluded that “ecological demands and cultural practices are significantly related to the development of perceptual skills. … In some sense, cultural and psychological development are congruent (Berry, 1967:228, quoted in Cole and Scribner, 1974:85).

So an important part of the evolutionary heritage of the sapient hominid is a nervous system that has evolved under the sway of culture (in general) and which develops in each individual under the sway of a culture (in particular). The human nervous system appears to be dependent on external models or programs for normal operation, and this notion of models has significant importance for anthropologists and psychologists alike. 

from Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning by Bradd Shore. 

Constraints: Orienting by Desire III

4K 3840×2160 3D Animation

Orienting By Desire: Challenges 

For those of you doing the exercise portion of this series, take another look at your Challenges.

How does other people influence your challenges?

What assumptions about yourself and the world you inherited form others?

How can consciously using the influence of others be a tool towards overcoming your Challenges?

Re-write your Challenges in all six dimensions* based upon your insights.

*A refresher on the Six Dimensions

Internal: Physical, Emotional, Mental
External: Ecology, Community, Culture

Constraints: Behavioral and Cultural Transmission

There is an apocryphal tale told among Primatologists that, unfortunately, has some roots in actual research. As an experiment, five monkeys are put into a cage together. In the center of the cage is a staircase leading up to a set of hanging bananas. Seeing the bananas and being monkeys, the monkeys step onto the staircase. As soon as they did a hose, it turned on, shooting cold water at all the monkeys, leaving them shocked, wet, and unhappy whether they were on the stairs or not. After enough rounds of this to see a direct connection between the stairs and the water, the monkeys start patrolling each other. As soon as one goes near the stairs, the rest start beating the hell out of them to make them stop.

After the original group of monkeys has come to this new equilibrium of “got to the stairs, get beaten up,” the researchers take one of the monkeys out and introduce a new monkey. Having no idea what is happening, the new monkey heads to the stairs, but before they can get there, the long-term monkeys beat the hell out of him. Being monkeys, they cannot explain why, but they aren’t going to risk getting hit with the water again. Any time the new monkey goes down the stairs, they get beaten up and learn quickly not to go near the stairs.

Once this levels out, another of the original monkeys is removed, and a new one enters. The cycle repeats itself, with the previous new monkey helping to dish out the beatings. One thing level off again, another of the originals is cycled out. Eventually, you have all new monkeys not part of the original groups.

They get beaten up whenever one of the new monkeys goes near the stairs. It doesn’t matter that none of the monkeys giving out the beatings were there for the cold-water hose by the end of the experiment. Any monkey goes near the stairs, and they get beaten. It doesn’t matter that the hose was disconnected after the second monkey was replaced.

This apocryphal experiment demonstrates how behaviors are transmitted between individuals in groups. The reasons for the behavior, however rational originally, rarely filter down in the transmission. They do not matter. Only the stimulus and response matters in terms of the behavior. This Behavioral Dimension of Evolution is relatively common to warm-blooded animals. However, as cognitive capacity increases, this level’s variability also increases.

Interestingly, humans have this Behavioral Dimension of Evolution available to them and another dimension of adaptation termed Memetic. “Memetic” derives from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and represents the smallest unit of cultural transmission, a “meme.” Unlike nearly any other animal known, humans are capable of a kind of near-instant mimicking of activities from other humans or the environment. Like most instant replications, this happens with a fair amount of variations, which are then selected by environmental and internal factors. When this memetic dimension of Evolution came into being is uncertain. However, findings from Sonia Harmand suggest memetic transmission since at least 3.3. million years ago based on stone tool evidence.

The appearance of the Memetic Dimension of Evolution is significant as it correlates strongly with the brain expansion unique to the Hominin lineage of primates. Once things like stone tools enter the Hominin adaptive strategy, they alter the selection process in human evolution from being about genes to increasingly being about memes and, eventually, culture. This seems like an elusive thing to us, the result of this process, as we are nearly oblivious to the extent to which culture permeates the totality of our being. And like the poor monkeys in our Primatology Parable, much of what we have inherited culturally, however rational initially, has had its origins lost to us, and the context in which it was valuable no longer exists.

Anthropologists tend to wax poetic about culture and what defines it; however, one of the best descriptions for our purposes comes from business psychologist Edgar Schein. Schein defined culture as having three levels: artifacts and behaviors, espoused values, and shared tacit assumptions. It is the level of assumptions that is key at the moment. Schein described this level as “the basic tacit assumptions about how the world is and ought to be that a group of people share and that determines their perceptions, thoughts, feelings and overt behavior.” “Tacit” is the key term here, meaning “understood or implied without being stated.”

No one ever outright explains the assumptions of your culture. They are transmitted as an implication of the rest of culture and become so embedded in our development that short of something radical occurring, we never even realize it is there. For most of human history, this was a good thing, as people who thought about or, worse, questioned these tacit assumptions might risk their death or the death of their band. However, in our world of rapid change, especially for Initiates, such unexamined assumptions can be deadly.

The Temple of Set’s solution to the problem of shared tacit assumptions in culture comes in three ways. The first is through what Ipsissimus Don Webb calls “Satanic Anthropology.” Setians are encouraged to find cultures other than their own that resonate with them to interrupt their own culture’s hold over them. It is in the interference pattern between their original culture and this new culture that growth and Xeper can take place. This can begin as casual as getting into Vikings due to seeing a Kirk Douglas movie and develop to getting an advanced degree in Germanic Studies. What matters is learning how the tacit assumptions you inherited need not be the only way to see the world. Learning to see through a different set of assumptions and to use the experience to design your sense of the foundation of your values.

As an adjunct to this process Setians are encouraged, depending on their talents, to pursue languages other than their native tongue. Language, perhaps more than any other inherited cultural artifact, directly shapes consciousness by being the medium through which the mind expresses itself. By learning other languages, including programming languages, your ability to code thought begins to find new expressions and can open doors to learning to think in new ways.

Finally, and perhaps most notoriously, the Temple encourages the mindful inversion of tacit assumptions in the context of Ritual Behavior. This lies at the foundation of the behaviors that Ipsissimus Stephen Flowers identifies with “antinomianism” and returns to the root of that word as “against cultural assumptions.” For many people, the amount of emotional and limbic energy released through the inversion or desecration of symbols tied to the tacit assumptions they inherited, from High Black Masses to minor private blasphemies, can act as the necessary fuel to push them beyond their own habit gravity and into new realms of self-design and self-development.

Constraints: Self and Others

A classic psychology experiment involves three volunteers entering a room to take a test at desks. The test itself is relatively insignificant, involving a long series of multiple-choice questions. In the course of taking the exam, smoke begins to fill the room through vents. What do you think happens?

The test, of course, has little to do with the actual experiment. Only one person in the room is the subject of the experiment, with the other two having been given different instructions. The two participants were told that smoke would begin to fill the room and that they would simply keep taking the test as if nothing were happening. The experiment is to see what the subject will do when there could be severe danger, but no one else responds. For better or worse, in most situations, the subject of the experiment will sit there, too, because no one else is doing anything. This is an example of what Robert Cialdini terms “Social Proof” in his seminal Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.

That our involvement with other humans can profoundly influence our behavior does not come as a surprise. Like our nearest primate relatives, the Gorilla and Pan genera, we have likely relied upon multi-human groups to survive since the earliest branching of our hereditary line from them. While we do not have direct evidence for those earliest phases, by the time of the emergence of the genus Homo, we were living in groups of up to 100 individuals with a high degree of mobility and fluid social formations. We are the product of millions of years of group affiliation being a pivotal component to our survival and evolution.

The survival aspect of group involvement also speaks to one of its greatest dangers. Because our ancestor’s very survival rested in many cases upon their involvement in the group, anything that violated group norms in thought or deed could be grounds for death. This same pattern has been replayed repeatedly as human social structures have become more complex. Go too far against the group, and it can be fatal. See the stories of Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Kennedy, and others.

Unsurprisingly, though, we rarely think of ourselves as being influenced by our group affiliations. We prefer to think of ourselves as individuals and unconsciously rationalize our group influences into being purely our own decisions. Yet, even on an anatomical level, we are profoundly influenced by the actions we observe and integrate them as if they were our own. The discovery of so-called “mirror neuron” activities by Giacomo Rizzolatti and subsequent research shows that when animals with complex nervous systems, including humans, observe another acting, their own brain fires patterns of neurons as if they were doing this action. It is speculated that this capacity is a means of rapid learning for new behaviors. This seems particularly complex in humans, spreading to further regions than observed in other animals.

What we see for others we remake as our own. Often, we even think we came up with it ourselves.

There is tension for all of us in our individuality and our connection to groups. The unhealthiest relationships to either an over-identification as an individual or an over-identification with a group derive from personal boundary issues. For the unhealthy individualist, their personal boundaries are stiff and brittle, leading them to avoid anything that requires them to behave in new ways. The unhealthy group identifier, in contrast, has poorly defined personal boundaries and simply allows them to get swept up in outside influence, thinking it somehow makes them superior.

A healthier approach is to turn the unconscious effects of group involvement into a conscious tool. Finding, studying, and designing social groups allows you to see what involvements work best for you. It allows you to network with other perceptive humans who are developed in different ways than you are and can come to modes of thinking you might not have been able to do on your own. It has been found in small-scale social experiments that the more diverse the group is working on a topic, the more rapid their ability to find solutions.