The invention of deliberately simplified theories is one of the
major techniques of science, particularly the ‘exact’ sciences,
which make extensive use of mathematical analysis. If a
biophysicist can usefully employ simplified models of the cell
and the cosmologist simplified models of the universe then
we can reasonably expect that simplified games may prove to
be useful models for more complicated conflicts.
(John Williams, The Compleat strategyst)146
Ihave written each of the four core Scenarios like a short story to provide a lever for your imagination because I am trying to induce in you a concept of non-understanding, and we all have problems imagining not knowing what we do know. They are a deliberate oversimplification. I have constructed hypothetical worlds in which only one emotional state exists. This has enabled me to examine the consequences of the tactical affecting or suppressing of behaviour associated with that emotion to determine how the subject’s ability to understand a single emotion is affected. I have therefore broken down the causality of human actions to an atomic level. It is not possible to do this scientifically because when working with normal people (as opposed to hypothetical ones) it is impossible to filter out the emotional and behavioural white noise in a controlled experimental environment.
The Scenarios not only describe a hypothetical world where only one emotion exists, they also describe a situation where that behaviour is being consistently manipulated. In the real world, it is rare for behavioural manipulation to be absolutely consistent, but common for it to have a strong correlation one way or another. For example, if you lived in a world where everybody drank caipirinha and danced the samba, from your perspective it would be certain that this caused human wellbeing. But if you lived in a world where most people did this then you would consider it merely highly probable that this caused human wellbeing. The shift from the binary to the probabilistic does not stop humanity being a maths problem. A woman in Buenos Aires told me that she thought tango was a cliché, and all my preconceptions of Argentinians burst into flames. However, this does not stop there being a genuine thing called Argentinian culture, where most people think that human wellbeing is probably caused by eating steak, dancing tango and commuting to the office on horseback. We are simply shifting from binary to probabilistic.
However, in real life we also have to consider that real people don’t have just one emotion; they have several, or more realistically a spectrum where the boundaries between one emotion and another aren’t clear. And then we have the problem that sometimes we suppress or affect the behaviour of one emotion in one particular circumstance, but not another. Still, this does not stop it being a maths problem, but we have moved from the binary to a huge multidimensional computational challenge. In real life, the emotional and behavioural white noise reasserts itself. The result is that each of us is stumbling through a maze where various people in our world (including ourselves) are constantly affecting and suppressing the behaviour associated with multiple different emotions, including the shades of grey. Sometimes we do this on a one-off basis, generally as part of a tactical deception; and sometimes we do it systematically once that deception becomes a habit. Each of us is trying to solve a multi-dimensional problem, and even the smartest of us struggle with this. This is what makes humans so diverse and so complex. It is also why, for most of us, determining what brings us contentment is a never-ending project.
I want to close this part of the book dealing with individuals with a final Scenario that illustrates the multi-dimensional nature of behaviour manipulation. What happens when we do a mashup of the four Scenarios and make all four modes of behaviour manipulation occur together?
SCENARIO: BEAUTIFUL PERSON DISEASE
As she entered the room, everyone was aware of her arrival. Men looked furtively, and then pretended they hadn’t noticed. Women were made uneasy.
She stepped confidently forward, and then she saw the Not-So-Secret Admirer. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him; she did. But he was unable to conceal his adoration, and this made him someone she could never regard as an equal. His innocence was charming and a comfort to her, but this could be looked at another way: his naivety was an annoyance. It created a barrier between them that made a romance inconceivable.
She assumed that he was infatuated with her because of her beauty. In fact, this was not the case. What had prompted his belief that he loved her truly was that he alone had perceived her loneliness. This thought was irrefutable to him, since her efforts to suppress her loneliness meant that she portrayed it uniquely, and his feeling of sympathy that he thought was love was a feeling he didn’t experience with any other person. His belief that this feeling was love was an assumption that lacked a means of refutation. She held her head high, and talked animatedly to everyone as she passed, but the Not-So-Secret Admirer knew this was a façade. He had glimpsed her in her off-moments; when she was tired, or when she had been upset, and he had seen the look that lay beneath. He knew that she was lost. His feelings towards her were not driven by lust or the desire to possess her as a trophy. He yearned to nurture her, to comfort her so that she might never be lonely again. What made her unable to consider the Not-So-Secret Admirer as an equal also applied to other men. In her world were many who would have loved to treat her with kindness.
The Not-So-Secret Admirer moved to speak to her, but she moved distractedly aside. She had cultivated a flighty absent-minded manner. It was a technique she had learned that allowed her to brush off men without ever being offensive to them. In fact, the effect was often the reverse: many men, particularly older men, were charmed by the casual way she dismissed them. She did this with a smile, as if to say that that she acknowledged their approach, but was oblivious to its motivation. She thought that her obliviousness was pretence but, as will become clear, she had an obliviousness that was real.
She engaged in casual conversations with people in passing, drifting from one acquaintance to another. Everyone acted like they were in a perpetual state of calm rapture. In this world there were no friends; only exploiters. But the pretence of mutual admiration created a denial of this and built a myth of bonding among competitors. And then she caught sight of the Cool One. She was looking at him when he turned towards her, but unlike the others he didn’t react. He made eye contact, but his face revealed no emotion, and then he turned away. She was intrigued.
The contrast between the Not-So-Secret Admirer and the Cool One couldn’t be greater. The Not-So-Secret Admirer’s inability to conceal his feelings excluded him as a romantic partner, but the Cool One betrayed no sign of what he felt. To her, it was almost an affront. She had become so accustomed to the impact she had on men that the absence of it left her feeling strangely powerless. She didn’t know what to do; and this was where her obliviousness was real.
She had, without realising it, always chosen lovers who concealed their feelings. Such were the only men she could consider her equal. Men who did not conceal their feelings betrayed the fact that they were overwhelmed by her beauty, and she was unable to deny the power that she had over them. Only men who concealed their feelings could she consider equal. But since all her lovers concealed their feelings, she had no idea what those feelings really were. This was the root of her obliviousness. It was also the cause of her loneliness.
Relationships with men who conceal their feelings always result in emptiness. But the longer this pattern of romantic liaisons continued, the more entrenched it became. She had reached the point where, though very sensitive with respect to her own feelings, she had no ability to understand the feelings of men, and this made relationships with normal men impossible. Whenever a man who did not conceal his feelings broke through her romantic filter, she did not know what to do. A man who does not conceal his feelings, would expect her to respond to these feelings. Her inability to know how to do this initially appeared to be innocent. In fact, it was a genuine innocence, but the innocence of a girl is misplaced in a woman. Soon, such men would back off from her; baffled by their inability to reach her on an emotional level. Some thought that the contrast between her sensitivity regarding her own feelings and her insensitivity to the feelings of men was borne of selfishness. But, as should now be clear, this was not the case, and she yearned for closeness with a man.
Her problems were further deepened by the fact that her emotional blindness extended to the physical. She was a “bad kisser”, but she had no way of knowing this. It seems incredible that a woman can reach adulthood, and not know how to kiss, but a lesser woman would somewhere along her journey be rebuked by a man: “Lips and tongue honey! Not teeth!” Lesser women therefore learned. No man would rebuke this woman; to do so would humiliate her, and any man that does this wrecks his chance to sleep with her. The older she gets, the more stinging the humiliation of the rebuke would be, and so the problem deepens with age. A man who gets as far as kissing her is focussed on a destination. Bad kissing is just a pothole on the route.
The Cool One ignored her for a while, and then he made his move. He approached her expressionlessly and introduced himself with a cold politeness. They made small talk for a while. Her normal easy, flighty manner had no impact on him, and her sense of powerlessness grew. He knew the watching eyes of the people in her circle inhibited his designs, so he suggested they move to another venue. The Not-So-Secret Admirer felt the hollow ache under his solar plexus as he watched the Cool One place his hand on the small of her back to guide her towards the exit.
Once alone, the Cool One talked to her in images and metaphors. She didn’t understand what he was saying. Her lack of understanding fed her sense of weakness, and this gave rise to a feeling. She couldn’t put this feeling into a context, and so any attempt she made to name this feeling would result in a belief. Whatever name she gave the feeling could not be refuted because there was no conceptual framework – no means of analysing the thought. When the Cool One suggested they go, she agreed without knowing to where they were going. She stepped into the taxi in a trance. The Cool One told the driver the destination, but she didn’t take it in.
Alone in his apartment, she had no power to resist. It wasn’t that she didn’t know, at some level, that what was happening was going to hurt her. But she didn’t have the strength to say “no”. He was gentle with her, but still he displayed no feeling. The certainty with which he proceeded made her resistance unthinkable. She submitted to him gradually in stages until he possessed her fully. Afterwards, she lay on her side and looked at him, and he sat on the side of the bed with his back to her. He only glanced over his shoulder at her face after he had lit a cigarette. Before she had left the next morning, she already knew he would not call.
Some days later, she was again breezing into a bustling room with her hair swinging behind her. She held her head high and talked confidently to business contacts and acquaintances. She worked her way through the crowd. Then she saw the Cool One. She was looking at him when he turned to look at her. Again he looked away without betraying any emotion. It was, she thought, just like the first time, but the implications could not have been more different. Last time, it had been an invitation, but this time it was a rejection.
Concealing her loneliness had become something she was used to, but now it was a struggle that she could not ignore. She felt distressed. She picked up a glass of champagne to try to regain her composure. At that moment, the voice of the Not-So-Secret Admirer came from behind her. She was overjoyed to find him there. She turned to talk to him. She knew she could rely on him for companionship. But the Not-So-Secret Admirer was the one person who could see her loneliness. As she spoke to him, she could see the concern in his face. Talking to him, she could not pretend that her feeling did not exist. The one person she could rely on at that moment, was the one person who could see the emotion that she was trying to conceal.
She exchanged pleasantries with him; asked after his family. And then she put down her barely touched glass of champagne and left. She hailed a taxi, and sank into the seat in the back. As the taxi sped her home, she stared upwards and let the lights of the city flicker across her field of view. They washed her thoughts clean, and let her bury her feelings. She forced her loneliness down inside, so that when she arrived home she had regained her outward calm.
This Scenario can be broken down into its components as follows:
I could have gone on, but the clock struck midnight and the Creative Writing Fairy vanished.
So let me sum up the whole of Part I in a single sentence: the evolutionary origin of emotions is that they drive actions that promote biological fitness; but humans with language can speculate future emotions and so they goal-seek emotional outcomes, reversing the causality; but tactical deception of the behaviour associated with emotions corrupts the data that each of us needs to goal-seek, and so we deduce suboptimal actions. [I can explain anything in one sentence if I am allowed to breathe at the semicolons.]
I would like to say that all self-destructive actions are derived from falsified behaviour. But can I really say “all”? Perhaps not! However, we have to start somewhere, and I am starting with the simplest idea that produces the maximum amount of explanation. This is good reductionism – reduction to simple axioms from which we can work causally and logically. Bad reductionism is the building of intellectual edifices with words that nobody can define to create the false impression that something is understood. This would include terms such as: souls, unconscious minds (which are the same thing), intentions (towards what?), objectives (to what end?), morality, God, free will, etc. Each of these unexplainable concept words has generated a library of explanatory literature, and part of the foundation for this industry is that some people don’t want these things explained.
Part I explains the cause of an individual human action. What happens when we all start tactically manipulating our behaviour and deriving strange courses of action from this together? In Part II, I want to elevate this theory to collective mass phenomenon. I want to show that by distorting collective perceptions of emotion; it serves as the origin of beliefs – political, cultural and religious.