Fear is closely linked to control. We fear nothing,
given absolute control over the elements of our lives, like Superman, or
Wonder Woman, but control of that magnitude is unrealistic. We fear
getting hurt, killed, sick, or preyed upon for good reason. Fear feeds our
imagination in a vicious cycle, and we became its prisoner.
Failure to master our human nature generates anxiety
and frustration. We rationalize our failures, justify and intellectualize
them. They’re not our fault. They’re due to circumstances beyond our
control. We squirm in discomfort knowing that we could be in complete
control of our lives if we knew enough and were smart enough to implement
that knowledge. Like pioneers besieged by Indians, we form a circle with
our wagons and cower in hopes that our collective numbers will somehow
protect us from our individual shortcomings, or that our alphas, real and
godlike, will apply justice where none exists.
We cannot even control ourselves. Can we lose or gain
weight at will, break bad habits, do today what we could put off until
tomorrow, keep our every New Year resolution? If the thing we call our
willpower is so easily overpowered by petty habit to the extent we cannot
even resist a cigarette, another handful of potato chips, or swig of
whiskey, we are but conscious detritus of physiological processes,
defenseless against the crosswinds of forces both natural and human. A
belief in helplessness of his magnitude digs us a deep and dark hole in
which to live.
We know that we consciously rule in some areas of our
lives. We build bridges and rocket to the moon unfettered. Why then do we
bicker among ourselves to the extent we can murder by the hundreds of
millions? What is it about human nature that sustains that nasty and
eminently self-destructive aspect of human behavior?
We’re beleaguered by the problem, but not crippled by
it, at least we don’t think so on a personal level. Others are
responsible. Others are unreasonable and don't see things our way. When
natural forces strike at random, we are all victims, and we get along just
fine. If only others would be as reasonable as ourselves and avoid evoking
our exasperation, disgust, and anger when the conflict is entirely human.
Reactive behavior, we believe, is justifiable. Reactive
behavior is the only way to relate to the unpredictable world. If we wait
to see what species of snake, or race of man, strikes at us, we’re dead.
Right? Our defenses are in place before we are ever threatened.
Reactive behavior, however, is never as consistently
graceful and elegant as we’d like. Emotions are not subject to
self-control unless we can pause, step outside of ourselves for a moment,
and use our imagination to reconsider the thoughts and blind reactions
that gave them birth. Caught up in a flow of strong emotion, our needed
'time out' is seldom possible.
And the purpose for our emotional reactivity? Emotions
serve as bait for conscious focus should our thought process fail to react
as quickly as our survival dictates. Emotions are a lure to switch
conscious focus in directions that have promoted survival in the past.
Emotions, however, cannot determine the specifics a unique situation
demands. Strong emotion is counterproductive in humans, far more suited to
crocodiles and the early reptiles from which they evolved. Animals, too,
require conscious focus to act and accumulate their space-time history,
but they do so with far less presence of mind and far more reliance upon
blind emotional reactivity.
Crocodiles have very powerful feelings. Environmental
stimulus trigger a broad range of reactive behaviors in these animals.
Passion derived from the feeding frenzy motivates sexual intercourse.
Love, the urge to assimilate, to bring something pleasant into one’s
sphere of being, protects a clutch of eggs. Rage, which is also derived
from the feeding frenzy, triggers attacks against that which inflicts or
threatens to inflict harm. After all, if something wants to eat us, our
best defense is to devour it first, and hard-wired instinct ensures that
the deepest, most primal and intense of all emotional reactions are
deployed.
Often, though, we don’t assign animals emotional
feelings. We'd rather idealize concepts of 'love' and 'honor' and declare
emotional behavior exclusively human. Some of us think ourselves capable
of impressive displays of compassion and self-sacrifice, and we think it
to be the thing that makes us human.
In reality, this is not at all true. Emotional
reactivity is always gut-level. Concepts of compassion, honor and loyalty
are at heart for more basic reactions fed through social filtering.
Aside from simple nurturing and a genuine care for others, ulterior motives are at work, often machinations we dare not openly
reveal. We do this to reap the reward of what we imagine to be proper
behavior, the imagined favor of a god or fellow members of society. What,
after all, is the definition of sacrifice or altruism which lies at the
heart of all ‘good’ behavior? Is it the giving up of a great value for an
lesser value, which hardly makes any sense at all, or is it the giving up
of a lesser value for a greater one, which hardly seems noble?
Actually, sacrifice is giving up a great value,
reluctantly, in hopes of reaping an even greater value in return, as in
the epitome of sacrifice, killing a firstborn to show a god how much he is
worshiped so that he will not starve us to death and burn us in hell.
Still, no matter how great the ‘sacrifice’, including the sacrifice of
one’s own life, sacrifice and altruistic behavior remain a matter of
putting one’s personal values at the forefront, ahead of the values of
others, not because the values of others are less important, but because
they are irrelevant and one’s own values are being displayed for public
consumption and glorification. We expect to be rewarded, if only by
ourselves. Such self-strokes add to our self-esteem, and there are few
personal values greater than our attitude toward our own self.
In the end, if emotion isn't spontaneously linked
directly to events happening in the here and now, psychological games are
being played, and few of those are healthy. As for nurturing and genuine
care for others, we do that without an audience, despite an audience, or
in spite of an audience, lovingly. The act is its own reward. Those we
love and sacrifice for are part and parcel of our 'soul', that part of the
world we may hold 'objective' that is closest to what we think we are.
We pretty much have our emotional repertoire in place
as children. By adolescence, we manage our emotions in characteristic ways
that will last a lifetime, although we may benefit from further
experience. We look to the best that we imagine we can be emotionally,
loving and generous, but seldom achieve our own ideals. We rationalize or
simply ignore our dismal day-to-day performance, or blame it on others.
"Don't make me hurt you!"
"Look at what you made me do!"
“If I can’t be as good as you expect me to, then
just watch and see how evil I can be!"
We can view the true level of our emotional maturity by
observing our behavior in our daydreams and the ebb and flow of thoughts
and emotions within them. Much of our exterior behavior is orchestrated
for the benefit of others, and on the inside, we may rage like barbarians.
We are far more honest with ourselves within the intimate confines of our
imagination, even when we place the responsibility for our wrath upon
others. With a little effort, it’s not hard to catch ourselves in our
daydreams cheating, lying and harming others to achieve our goals and
desires, and some of our daydreams are far, far darker than just bad
behavior. At the core of most daydreaming lies anger, but much anger is,
in fact, hatred, rage tinged with fear and despair.
We just don’t quite know what to do with the primal
side of our nature except to mask it as best we can with a twisted smile,
a veneer of sophistication, and an occasional insincere apology. The mask
of civilization is a facade and a very thin one at that. Civilization is
built upon the rule of might. Police carry guns and play judge, jury and
executioner when met with effective resistance. Disagreements between
nations lead to mass murder which we rationalize as legal war, justify as
patriotism, and intellectualize as a battle against evil.
This state of affairs is more than just tragic. When
threatened, animals reacting to fright fight, flee, or play dead, but they
don’t spend their lives obsessed with past events or planning future ones.
Our kitten arches its back and hisses in fright at a hand slapped at its
side, but relaxes and returns to its usual calm self an instant later, but
not a human whose prefrontal cortex is running through a hundred
simultaneous scenarios about what that slapped hand signifies and what
threat it poses in the future. For most of us, once these reactive
fantasies are ignited, they must run their course before calm returns.
Generally, they accomplish nothing except to keep our cortisone and
adrenaline levels, pulse rate, and blood pressure sky-high.
We could almost laugh at ourselves. The adversaries we
fight within our imaginations are figments of our own imagination. We are
role-playing, pitting our idealized selves against our personal versions
of other human beings, and then we have the gall to get upset by our own
internal puppet show. We whip ourselves into murderous frenzies of anger,
fall into fits of depression, and kill ourselves because of these
completely outrageous fantasies.
What do we think we accomplish? Do we actually believe
we are resolving genuine issues by acting for other people inside our
head, thinking for them, reasoning for them? Is this an honest thing to
do? Do we have a right? How do we feel about others pretending to be us
during an imagined social intercourse? Are we treated fairly, or with any
real accuracy, or are we hand puppets in the minds of others?
How often have we engaged with an adversary in our
imagination only to have the flesh and blood counterpart smile at us
during our next encounter without bringing up any of the strife and
tension we imagined would occur?
This is the nature of social extrapolation. We spend
much of our time imagining the behavior of those around us toward the end
of fostering positive relationships and avoiding confrontations, or
structuring ahead of time the ways we will attack or defend ourselves. We
do it all based upon what we believe to be true about ourselves and about
others, and most of those beliefs are old habits of thought we have never
bothered to question.
Learned reflex and habit rule our waking lives,
although we could not survive without them. We gave each habit and reflex
birth by a process of imagining the outcome we wanted and repeating the
behavior that achieved it until it could operate with relative
independence. It may seem that willpower is nothing but wishful thinking
and that all power lies with the imagination, but the imagination is a
tool, and conscious presence its master. The only way we loose control of
ourselves is to allow habits to establish themselves unnoticed, or to
uncritically allow others in our social environment to determine for us
our values, standards, rituals, and behaviors. In doing so, we relinquish
our conscious presence to the role of observer.
Most of us are, unfortunately, observers in life.
