Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[Jin+Guice]

@bsog: The thought experiment I'm running is "could these conditions exist hypothetically" not "could these conditions exist, given the world that exists?"

Why is personal growth necessary to self-actualize? Is it possible to imagine a world where we self-actualize automatically (which is clearly not the one we are in)? What might that look like?

I admit this is a weird though experiment. I thought of it while reading some Charles Eisenstein at the same time as I was reading a design book (also recommended by @moutnainFrugal). It occurred to me that we haven't really designed the world for people, rather different accidents of history have ad hoc designed our world for different things. For example, American cities are, in at least some ways, designed more for cars than people.

Something deep and fundamental has been bothering me for a few years. I've spent a lot of time and effort undoing things I was taught. Both in the physical and financial worlds through ERE and in the emotional and social world through therapy and talking to people. In my opinion, we expend most of our efforts trying to overmeet needs that are easily fulfilled, so much so that the overmeeting becomes part of the burden, while we ignore needs that are underfulfilled and pretend they don't exist.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't know, it's fucking kind of weird that we exert so much control over the natural world yet so consistently fail to design it for ourselves, while at the same time we consistently teach people bad information. So I'm asking why? And I'm trying to imagine a world where that doesn't happen and what that might be like.

I'm not doing that because I think I can influence the world to escape to it, I'm just wondering if I can learn something from imagining it and maybe change the few things that are under my control to create a world for myself and perhaps a few others that is better designed for us and better meets our needs.

[black_son_of_gray]

@bsog: The thought experiment I'm running is "could these conditions exist hypothetically" not "could these conditions exist, given the world that exists?"

I swear I'm not trying to be a pain here, but ... is it useful to make that distinction?

I totally agree that design that shows up in the man-made world often seems to miss the point, e.g. cities designed for cars rather than pedestrians. But to kind of flip the question on its head, what if the world as people have made it is actually the best that humanity* can do as far as personal development is concerned? Are there particular cultures/societies either now or throughout history that seem to have done a better job? I think answers to that question would be very informative as to what is possible because each culture in global history represents an experiment in the actual world, and at this point, thousands of experiments have been run. I don't happen to think that people are somehow teleologically advancing toward some enlightened destination (but maybe you do), so I would think that if it is possible, it has already happened, and if it hasn't already happened, it isn't likely to.

*Distinguishing "humanity" here from "specific individuals", because I'm reading your question as what is possible for a society/group of humans, and that is a very different question as to what a single human can do.

Why is personal growth necessary to self-actualize?

I've had way too much training in biology, so I'm inclined to filter this sort of question through a evolutionary psychology lens where I start thinking about how it makes tons of sense that tiny, defenseless, and inept babies/children are wired up to pay extra-special attention to parental behaviors and emotions and tribe mores and so on, because there are clear survival advantages to doing so. Group cohesion is a hard world is a matter of life and death. Which is to say, I think there is a compelling biological reason why most adults end up at Kegan 3/ at the level of taking on much of their identity from the ingroups they participate in. I don't think self-actualization or transcendence or deep personal fulfillment--whatever you want to call it--really offers much of a survival or reproductive benefit beyond those at Kegan 3, and in any case, involves extra, difficult, work.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't know, it's fucking kind of weird that we exert so much control over the natural world yet so consistently fail to design it for ourselves, while at the same time we consistently teach people bad information. So I'm asking why? And I'm trying to imagine a world where that doesn't happen and what that might be like.

I hear you. Honestly, the dissonance you're experiencing may just be part of the pain that one has to bear that goes along with the growth. Who would the "we" be, who is to design such a society, when most in the society haven't reached that stage of development? Why would the masses, who cannot see the value of such development, allow a small group such control?

In my opinion, we expend most of our efforts trying to overmeet needs that are easily fulfilled, so much so that the overmeeting becomes part of the burden, while we ignore needs that are underfulfilled and pretend they don't exist.

Yeah, agree. What people focus on and what people ignore ultimately point to the underlying hangups.

I'm just wondering if I can learn something from imagining it and maybe change the few things that are under my control to create a world for myself and perhaps a few others that is better designed for us and better meets our needs.

This is a great mindset. I'd like to hear more of your thoughts.

[suomalainen]

Obviously a complex subject, with some people hearing Yanny and others hearing Laurel, but my Yanrel on the topic is a mishmash of some of the ideas discussed above.

As an overview, I tend to also take an evolutionary psychology perspective and as a book DW is reading suggested, humans are not evolved to be healthy and happy; we are evolved to pump out as many babies as possible. In that sense, humans were not "designed to achieve" this thing (transcendence) that is so hard to achieve. Maybe it's hard to achieve because it's not what we're (generically) made for? In other words, it may take an extraordinary confluence of internal and external circumstances to achieve. External requirements would generally include safe enough world that you live to old age, which includes geopolitical and nutritional and family and health, etc issues. In other words, this is *solely* a "first-world problem".

Internal requirements would generally include a mind geared towards a "transcendent" inclusiveness mindset. And getting there I think does require a broader set of experiences than is perhaps common (or again, it's a first-world opportunity). This generally means that while you may have spent a good deal of time perusing maps, you have also gotten some territorial exploration as well. I think of this as "knowing about" vs "knowing". When I was religious, there were TONS and TONS and TONS of people who knew about Jesus, but they all acted like fucking assholes, so it was very hard to find anyone where I could think that they "knew" Jesus. Some people just can't make the transition from knowing about to knowing.

In addition to getting out of the library and into the lab, so to speak, I think transcendence is also something that maps onto maturity. It just takes time. You can't get experience without experiencing things. The only way to experience the dance is to dance and to keep dancing. While there may not be a purpose to the dance, to "level up", the introspective among us can see that persistent dancing will result in more dancing while other will take extended breaks or even be wallflowers.

Combining the two, as you dance the hell out of your dance while learning about other dance moves from some library time, you can expand your dance repertoire. You can match dances to moods or occasions; you become more versatile; you start to see the same dances naturally arising in the same ways at the same times, etc. You gain wisdom. After awhile, maybe you look around and you see connections that others don't see. You gain empathy or broaden your theory of mind from your own tribe/valley to other tribes/valleys.

So, the short answer to the question of how you get to transcendence easily? You're lucky enough to live in a peaceful-enough and abundant-enough time while being able to learn about and experience some not-so-peaceful and not-so-abundant situations. And you're "lucky" enough to want to do that learning. I don't think transcendence is a step that many or even any people "need" to achieve. It's just a step that some people are driven to, and if they keep their eyes open and stay in the game long enough, they'll find those moments. For the rest? Well, ignorance is bliss.

[Jin+Guice]

Thanks for the replies!

@bsog:

I have a real hard-on for hunter gatherer stuff, so I'm imagining that *maybe* they lived in a place where this is true. I don't think we should just do a bunch of hunter gatherer stuff because 1) I am just supposing and 2) as @Ego pointed out, we are not them and copying some of their traits is not likely to work.

I opted to make the experiment imaginary rather than talk about hunter gatherers because drawing conclusions from hunter gatherer societies is largely imaginary, in my opinion.

My guess is that living in a large-scale society messes up the conditions. Another guess I have is that the point of transcendence is to bond us even more tightly to one another, because normally we would depend on one another (and our immediate environment) way more. I'm guessing that interacting with a bunch of people we don't know and being able to purchase the labor of people we don't know has something to do with it (this is not a suggestion that we stop doing those things).

@suo:

I'm not looking for an easy way to transcend. I'm perplexed as why we pretty much universally feel the pull to transcend and wondering why? And why, if we do, it's so damn hard? And this lead me to wonder if transcendence once helped us survive and was a natural consequence of the way we live our lives.



I am looking to challenge all of these assumptions about how life has to be so hard due to evolution. I'm not trying to challenge evolution, but when we draw conclusions about "how we must be wired" because of evolution, I don' think we are engaging in biology any longer, I think we are engaging in social science. What if we are wired for happiness? What if we aren't? What if we are in certain conditions and not others? What if being blasted constantly by negative information and being forced into long periods of boredom is detrimental to happiness? I don't see how being baby making/ food finding "machines" implies we aren't wired for happiness, though I'm sure the evolutionary psychologist paints a nice picture about how that could be true.

I think stuff like that is great, but I don't think it's actual science because the hypothesis are untestable. My hypothesis is untestable too. I just also like asking the questions and then making my own story about the answers. And I enjoy talking to all of you about it as well.




Or another away of asking this is "what are the conditions humans are designed to live under?"

[Jean]

Relationships are what most people are missing to be happy. Relationship need some form of interdependance to be sustained. Interdependances are getting rare because of access to the market.
This is paradoxical, because interdependance is uncomfortable and we try to avoid it.
But in the same way, we need exercise to be healthy, exercise is uncomfortable, and we try to avoid it. Well, we don't because we know we need it, and do enough of it to be use to the disco fort it causes.
You can exercise alone, you cannot be interdependant alone.
That's why having families or touring with a band makes us so happy.
This is what we miss from hunter gatherer time, the need for our friend, because alone, we stand no chance to kill a mamoth, or any thing bigger than a bird forvthis mater, because they run away when you approach them, so you need a friend somewhere elsevto catch them.
But today, we don't need such relationship to survive, and because we don''t need them, we don't make enough effort to sustain them, and of course they crumble.

My society design suggestion would be to attribute different rights to people at birth, so that they will need eachother, and exclude the product of those right from the market. Also get rid of social security or anything that allow isolated people to survive.

At an individual level, the best you can do is probably start a familly or a company with some friends.
But as they can leave it without starving, it doesn't really work.
Maybe start a town in an area surrounded by people who wan't to murder you and your friends?
Well you get the idea. All these solutions have trade off. Being a hunter gatherer also had trade off, that why we created our world.
But now we miss something that was required to be trully fulfiled.

[guitarplayer]

One can argue that social security in its design is exactly the mechanism inducing interdependence. Though in practice it turns out to be too far removed or abstract for it to serve its role, or maybe mainstream culture is too removed from where it was at the time of setting up social security. So people think of it as something to be gamed rather than a social contract between generations.

[jacob]

I'm perplexed as why we pretty much universally feel the pull to transcend and wondering why? And why, if we do, it's so damn hard? And this lead me to wonder if transcendence once helped us survive and was a natural consequence of the way we live our lives.

Oh, I'm pretty sure that most humans definitely do not feel the pull to transcend anything more than they absolutely have to. I think it's been well established that feelings are a required part of what motivates humans. (Snap that part of the brain and one can't even make the simplest choice.) The existence and set point of certain neurotransmitters and receptors make us do stuff in the real world in order to reestablish the balance. However, different people have different set points. Some respond better to dopamine than others and so are easily overwhelmed by too much input like techno parties or loud restaurants. Others require a larger dose and so are compelled to seek out other people or new experiences to get it. Some crave more acetylcholine than others. When thinking and introspecting quietly this floods the parts of the brain responsible for abstract thinking. Others aren't really rewarded for this and so don't care to read or reflect on something unless they absolutely have to.

A great debate results. The former insists that the only true way for humans to live is a life of action and adventure with experiences surrounded by people. The latter insists that the only true way for humans to live is a life of ideas and quiet contemplation. Genes likely have an advantage of pushing both reward circuits and so you see them both in the human genotype, but expressed to different degrees---like a Bell curve---in various phenotypes. The respective outliers can't for the life appreciate how others possibly could enjoy something that they themselves don't feel rewarding at all. At best they can accept it. At worst they'll insist on a one-size-fits-all prescription. Meanwhile, the balanced middle don't understand what the outliers get so wound up about with their arguments, but on the other hand they'll also never experience the response-rewards available at the extremes.

Humans are in general not smart enough to appreciate that people other than themselves might fundamentally experience a very different emotional intensity about something than they do themselves, so as a species or culture, we argue back and forth.

Spiral Dynamics describes this as a wave sloshing back between focusing on the collective and focusing on the individual. As such, humanity has created different versions of the Matrix and none of them satisfying to all. We have
Beige: Survival
Purple: Family and Tradition.
Red: Victory and Strength.
Blue: Faith and Order.
Orange: Ambition and Success.
Green: Community and Caring.
Yellow: Authenticity and Solutions.
Turquoise: Unity and Connection

Looking close enough, each new value system, represented by a random color, has been a response to something that the previous value system lacked and which enough people---with incompatible emotions, thanks neurotransmitters, thanks genetics---found utterly unsatisfying to be a part of. So they broke away from it. Or more specifically, they figured out what it lacked and "transcended" it with a new (but still imperfect) Matrix that eventually became the dominant one.

So yeah, what we're living in is just the latest Matrix.

Now, it's important to keep in mind that e.g. Yellow and Turquoise individuals existed thousands of years ago---likely they were the medicine man or the mystic---there just weren't very many of them. Because civilization is now more advanced, people live longer and are (far) richer than kings past. As such it's possible for humans to achieve both higher formal education as well as accumulate more life experience. It wasn't that many generations ago that 35 was considered old (like old enough to be president or a general in the military). Consider that the average education level of the entire world is now around the 11th grade. (So no wonder US high school dropouts are struggling when it comes to making enough money to live in the US). This means that half the world now understand---at least in principle---as much as Newton did about calculus; whereas in Newtons and Leibniz's time, there was only a handful of humans in the world with this understanding.

Concepts like ego-transcendence don't appear until post-conventionalistic thoughts are possible. This requires a certain foundation. Note that all Tier1 (Beige, Purple, Red, Blue, Orange, and Green) are all conventional in their value system. However, only Green has established a philosophy (postmodernism) that allows people to question authority. The other value systems just follow whatever their authority is (Family, Victory, God, ...) or don't even question it because it is presumed that theirs is obviously "the right one". However, Green created a backdoor to Tier2 which begins the postconventional systems. Note that the only postconventional aspect of Tier2 is that they are not as widely established. Perhaps one day, Tier2 will become conventional as well. As for now, the only difference between Tier1 and Tier2 is that Tier2 can simultaneously hold more than one value system in their head. This ability of course requires a combination of maturity and education ... and so only happens at scale if/when a society is capable and willing to support that and that requires enough members reaching that point.

Individuation is the starting point of the journey towards transcendence. However, you won't really see the tools for individuation until the idea of questioning one's own values and being becomes par for the course. An individuating person also needs to be comfortable that they won't get burned on the stake, lose their livelihood, or get excluded from the group, if they openly start questioning their values AND acting on the answers they find.

(Just look around and you'll see that this is still very much a risk in the US.)

Some people obviously have a higher risk tolerance for this than others and so will lead sooner. They'll be first. As society evolves, the risk also goes down. Risk tolerance, of course, also being related to some neurotransmitter, here serotonin.

Thus, if you're looking to transform society into a Matrix where everybody automagically seeks individuation followed by a form of transcendence, remember that you're working with ALL humans and not just a (self-)select group of them like here on the forum. Most humans rely on both instructional and institutional scaffolding without which they are helpless slogan regurgitators, functionally not much different from chatGPT. One reason ERE (WL6+) takes so much effort (from WL->WL6) is that one currently has to construct one's own scaffolding. This of course being a necessary part of building a new matrix, duh!

However, as scaffolding gets built, things proceed much faster. For example, ERE is much easier these days now that we have a forum and mastermind groups and meetups for support. It was much harder when there was just a blog and a book. It was even harder when there was nothing!

In conclusion, the pursuit of transcendence of the current Matrix(*) is helpful to the human gene pool, because it creates individuals that lead and push for a better Matrix that eventually takes over the previous Matrix. However, a society where everybody wants to lead and innovate is like herding cats. A gene pool where most phenotypes are followers is both more stable and more powerful because it allows for easier coordination. The reason is that it can organize around the leaders without descending into total chaos which is the case when everybody wants to lead or go their own way. Working together is ultimately very human and the more people are included in the coordination efforts, the more effective the group gets. This is also why you see a drift in the spiral colors from the selfish/egotistic individual to the family to the tribe to the church to the nation to the international and beyond humans. Each new matrix essentially expands the holons that integrate the previous holons and thus achieve a better and more effective coordination thereof. Yet, this requires human consciousness to get increasingly wider and deeper.

(*) Emphasis: current matrix. Transcendence from Blue to Orange is very different from transcendence from Red to Blue. However, the way transcendence is used in the vernacular with "mindfulness" and spiritual meditation, it's really in pursuit of Turquoise... something that started taking root in the 1960s. Many people jump on those methods as a way to resolve unsolved problems with the Red/Blue/Orange/Green melting pot that makes up the US. This has also been critiqued as a spiritual bypass and I agree. It just doesn't work that well. I think the ERE pathway is better as it goes towards Yellow first.

[Jin+Guice]

Just FYI... we are off on a tangent of where I am headed with this series of posts. I think it's an interesting tangent and I want to fully engage with everyone before I get back to where I am going, which are hypothesis about actualization.

I am NOT proposing that if we remake society in some certain way that we will get a society where we all transcend automatically.

My assumptions (for further writing about actualization) are : 1) Humans are designed for a certain environment and 2) we do not live in that environment.

My hypothesis is that if we lived in the environment we were designed for we would self-actualize and transcend. But we don't, so we can't know.



I wanted to clarify that because I get the impression that this automatic transcendence thing might be coming off as my thesis. It's not my thesis, but it is an interesting aside (to me) and, imo, it would support my thesis (though it's not necessary). This is not a criticism of people for probing this topic which was for sure part of my original post!

Ok back to automatic transcendence:

What I'm saying in this hypothesis is maybe we lived in the environment we were designed for at one point. I don't think we do anymore. Not living in an environment we were designed for is likely to do...something? Probably?

In the current environment it is difficult to ego-transcend. I don't think we could redesign our current world to cause ego-transcendence to be automatic.

But what if there was, at some point, an environment where developing an ego that one needed to transcend didn't happen? What if following the norms of that society caused a state that was like transcendence but with nothing to transcend? If you rely on everyone you meet and the direct environment around you provides what you need to live, it may be automatic to feel "connected and unified."

There is another way to look at this, which is forced transcendence. While individuation is not necessary, it's also not an option.

It's also possible this only works under certain conditions. Maybe when food is abundant, population is stable and there aren't any competing societies to interact with we feel "connected and unified" but when certain conditions are broken, we don't?

I don't think we get complex society and automatic "ego-transcendence" too. I'm guessing that the more complex a society, the more complex ego-transcendence becomes.

I'm also not making a value judgement. "Transcendence" is usually seen as "positive" but I think positive and negative are always contextual. It sounds nice to feel deeply connected to everything and everyone, but it's also nice to feel intellectually stimulated in a way I likely would've never known by talking to people on this forum.





Back to where I'm going: I think individuation in our world is really important because I think we are living in this intense shadow world, sort of a collective ego response we've developed over thousands of years of living in environments we weren't designed for. On the path to individuation, I think that acknowledging that we've built a world we aren't designed for will encourage some towards individuation. Why discover your own voice? Because if you don't you'll follow everyone else's and they are telling you to do things that you weren't designed for and responding to collective signals that don't serve their stated goals.

[jacob]

My assumptions (for further writing about actualization) are : 1) Humans are designed for a certain environment and 2) we do not live in that environment.

I think the first assumption is outright wrong. Rather the human species is designed/evolved to be highly adaptable towards pretty much any environment from the worst prisons or slums to living in submarines or orbital space. There are enough variation in human capability that some can figure it out and others can follow with proper scaffolding.

For the second assumption, we currently live in an environment that is sufficiently free && complex && secure (food+safety) that very many people can in principle find a local environment that they personally thrive in---especially if someone else is there to show them the way; otherwise it requires more creative intelligence. But my point is: I don't have to focus my life on 9-5 ant work in order to buy stuff to show my success. I don't have to start a family. I don't have to join a roaming band. I don't have to worship a particular god. I don't have to travel the world as a (mini-)retired tourist. I don't even have to talk to people I don't like just to maintain social harmony. The smallest amount of lifetime effort now gives me access to shelter, security, food, and health care. I actually to have the freedom to do what I personally want, which is none of the above, and I'm currently doing it.

Where people struggle is perhaps exactly because of that freedom. If one can belong anywhere; if one's sense of belonging is not given by one's last name, tribal or national affiliation or vocation. If belonging is not something that is forced from above but which people have to choose on a menu or worse make themselves, many struggle because the majority of people are so used to following directions and not asking these questions.

I'm telling you. This is not such a big problem in a predominantly Green society, where people grow up constantly being asked which box they want to fit in, as it is in a predominantly Orange society, where people grow up being told that certain boxes make more money and have more status than others.

In terms of actionable suggestions, I would like to say that this stuff should/could be taught in school, but in light of my long post above and the comments about longevity, maturity, and education, I think K12 is too early for most children/teenagers to appreciate it. It is ideally something to figure out in one's 20s and 30s. This period of life is unfortunately also where the vast majority of humans come to a full stop in terms of further education and personal growth. As a result these questions only get asked if/when people seek therapy or coaching, typically after their life/ego has fallen apart due to not finding the environment that is right for them.

[suomalainen]

My assumptions (for further writing about actualization) are : 1) Humans are designed for a certain environment and 2) we do not live in that environment.

My hypothesis is that if we lived in the environment we were designed for we would self-actualize and transcend. But we don't, so we can't know.

Two things:

Agree that 1 is wrong. We weren't "designed" for anything. We are the descendants of mutants who thrived (popped out more babies that survived) as climate change changed jungle to grassland, so we came out of the trees. See, e.g., walking on two legs vs. legs and knuckles; weak-ass arms and strong-ass legs; sweat glands; bigger brains; etc. We are the way we are because each change happened to be beneficial to survival, so those changes propagated. Useless or damaging changes died off. Once on the ground, we spread from grassland to ... everywhere.

And your second point isn't a hypothesis because it isn't testable. It's just an assumption. I think what some of us are responding to is to say that your second assumption is wrong. There is no "automatic" transcendence, in any environment. If it were something solely triggered by environment, surely it would be a genetic code, like flowering plants triggered by sunlight. There's no evidence for that and while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence ... it's probably a better assumption that it doesn't exist than to assume otherwise. In that absence of evidence, we turn to other ways to think about it, that you seem to wave off as "social sciences".

Or perhaps I'm just totally missing your point.

[Jin+Guice]

Ok, y'all are giving me a lot of really excellent constructive criticism which I really appreciate.

I'm ditching those assumptions based on the feedback.

Also, I didn't realize that a hypothesis had to be testable (see me saying the hypothesis is untestable a bunch of times), so every time I used the word "hypothesis" it should say "idea" or something similar. Thanks to @suo for pointing this out.


I also regret not starting to make posts while I was visiting @mF because getting live feedback and discussing new ideas with him was invaluable!


Ok... let me tell y'all what I am thinking about and then ask some questions. This is what I was thinking when I came up with those assumptions. Maybe people will disagree with my thought process or maybe we can come up with some better ideas.


I've been working on designing my WL7 life system.

For the record, I don't try to go up Wheaton Levels because of trying to level up, I have found that, as predicted, they naturally flow from each other (with the exception of WL5->WL6 where I got stuck at WL5 for a few years and became bored/ anxious so decided to try out WL6 stuff just to see).

I did a bunch of WL6 skill stuff based on necessity/ interest for awhile but it was overwhelming. Basically my interests (even the free/ cheap ones) were too many to keep up with and my relatively simple life was too complicated to run efficiently and effectively.

As I tried to fix this, I realized I was subject to a bunch of heuristics that were in conflict with each other (homeotelic) and reality. I also discovered a lot of weird anxieties and fears that I was subconsciously working around. Additionally I was having trouble in relationships and skill building, seemingly getting invisibly stuck in both.

What I discovered is that I was suffering from a form of manageable insanity. I believe the root cause of this insanity comes from not knowing my own values and from responding to subconscious fears.

In other words, I was using external values, but these values were somehow in conflict with myself and reality. Uh-oh.

Turning to the most basic psychological models (I hope I understand these correctly), I am sometimes responding to my superego's understanding of externally generated moral code and sometimes responding to my id's instinctual desires. My ego is writing the story that makes these inconsistent and externally motivated actions seem consistent and internally motivated. And now, trying to make a system out of my goals and actions... I've discovered this shadow-self/ roadblock. In terms of building the system, it was impossible because there was no fundamental or consistent vision driving my goals or actions. Fuck!

I started looking for methods to get out of my various anxieties, fears and insecurities. But, as people do, I also looked around myself at other people to see what they were up to. Y'all the situation is... not great.

we currently live in an environment that is sufficiently free && complex && secure (food+safety) that very many people can in principle find a local environment that they personally thrive in---especially if someone else is there to show them the way; otherwise it requires more creative intelligence. But my point is: I don't have to focus my life on 9-5 ant work in order to buy stuff to show my success. I don't have to start a family. I don't have to join a roaming band. I don't have to worship a particular god. I don't have to travel the world as a (mini-)retired tourist. I don't even have to talk to people I don't like just to maintain social harmony. The smallest amount of lifetime effort now gives me access to shelter, security, food, and health care. I actually to have the freedom to do what I personally want, which is none of the above, and I'm currently doing it.

I think internalizing that paragraph fully is WL8 and though it is sitting right in front of me (and us) I can't fully do it (and I think many of us struggle to). I don't know if I can summarize my personal insanity better than this. I don't know if I can summarize our collective insanity better.

I don't think this is a matter of intellectual, I.Q. intelligence (shoutout to @mF because we discussed this point a lot!). Showing that there is enough food and safety to do anything you want and pointing out that we are collectively spending our time, resources, effort and energy on hoarding food, safety, status points and stuff we aren't even using is merely pointing out material reality. People are domain dependent so noticing material reality is not always a strong suit of ours. It perhaps then takes a high I.Q. individual to be creative enough to notice the problem and see the solution, but once it is revealed, I don't think the main problem of following the instructions is intelligence. I think the main problem is it requires positively disintegrating the ego.

Positive disintegration may also require a certain threshold of intelligence, but many people who possess that level of intelligence still end up not doing it.



From these observations it seems to me that we've built a society based on an ego story that differs from reality. We may be at SD Orange, who's ego story is collecting status points, which is different from SD Blue, where the ego story is collecting fitting in points, but both obscure what is possible.

All of this individual and collective ego development stuff is quite interesting and helpful for trying to build an efficient and effective personal system, which is my overall goal. But... it is still fucking weird.

Why do we need to individually and collective tell ourselves a spiral of lies only to eventually shatter those lies?

-or, if you don't think we need or are instinctually compelled to shatter the lies (actualize)-

Why do we need to individually and collectively tell ourselves a spiral of lies?


Just as I'm not sure who exactly is driving my own externally motivated desires, I don't see a large cohesive conspiracy directly benefitting from our collective SD/ ego stories.

I thought maybe we have changed our environment so that our evolutionarily evolved (this is what I meant by designed) impulses no longer give us the correct signals for the environment we live in?

And perhaps, at some point in the distant past when we evolved these internal signals, they told us the correct information and responses to best ensure our health and survival?

And perhaps ego development/ SD evolution is our logical mind/ ego trying to make sense of a world where listening to our bodily/ emotional information systems and impulses are no longer the best method for survival and reproduction?

[jacob]

Also, I didn't realize that a hypothesis had to be testable (see me saying the hypothesis is untestable a bunch of times), so every time I used the word "hypothesis" it should say "idea" or something similar. Thanks to @suo for pointing this out.

Just to squabble for a bit ... This is domain dependent though. There are fundamentally two ways of modernist reasoning: inductive and deductive.

The original approach to science was inductive. A hypothesis was created by "generally agreed upon facts" which people then proceeded to generalize in order to explain how they fit in with each other. Better explanation = better theory. This is essentially what you're doing here. Such a hypothesis doesn't have to be testable. It just has to start from "facts we agree on"(*). One problem with the inductive approach was that scientists could make up all kinds of good explanations and as long as they sounded good they were accepted. (This is one reason why we have so many conflicting theories in economics or psychology even if people agree on the same facts.) Think of it as a root of a tree (the facts) that branches out into different theories depending on what people generalize and focus on.

(*) Except in this case we don't. Ouch!

The modern approach, which followed Popper, and pretty much all the hard sciences now subscribe to is deductive. Again, you can make a hypothesis and it doesn't necessarily have to be true. For example, we can assume that "electrons are infinitely small point particles" (we know that they aren't!) and proceed to build a theory of electrodynamics (in this case classical ED). Instead of generalizing observations of electrons and coming up with explanations, the deductive approach forces us to reason out the logical consequences of our hypothesis. In order for this to be science, these consequences must be testable. If they fail the test against reality, the hypothesis is wrong(**). IOW, it is not the hypothesis that must be testable but what logically follows from the hypothesis. You can kinda see why the deductive method works better in physics than in sociology or economics (Hint:physics allows for repeat experiments and isolation that reduces the degrees of freedom.) The facts that are important here are the results we observe and compare to predictions. The more things a hypothesis+deduction can predict correctly, the greater our belief that the hypothesis is true.

(**) The point particle hypothesis will withstand a great number of tests. It was only when the double slit experiment was performed that everything changed. The result was a new hypothesis (electrons can be or at least act like both a particle and a wave... and people are still interpreting what that hypothesis actually means). Still, for most other situations, [assuming point particles] a useful hypothesis.

In the old scheme, people would converge on theories that explained more and more. Indeed physicists used to believe that pretty much everything was known by 1890 or so. Such an attitude leads to stagnation. Whereas the modern focus is on disproving theory. Nothing is more glorious than shooting down a theory, the bigger the better. A side-effect of that effort is that theories+hypothesis still standing are increasingly bullet-proof due to survivorship.

Note that both kinds of reasoning depends on agreeing on certain facts. They just start from different ends of the reasoning chain: From the specific to the general or vice versa. Contrast that to postmodernist reasoning where facts (from whichever end) no longer have to be agreed upon. In pomo, it's perfectly valid to insist on "personal facts" based on "lived experience". Even if such facts don't match up with reality, it is the "personally subjective" that matters to the postmodernist, not the "interpersonally objective", which is the only thing that matters to the modernist. This is a big part of why modernists and postmodernists don't play well together.

[suomalainen]

I may be too much of a lawyer to permit "hypothesis" to mean two different things. I prefer the distinction between a "testable hypothesis" and an "untestable idea / theory / thought experiment". But that may just be me. And to me, just because it isn't testable doesn't mean it can't be interesting or useful.

The challenge, I think, is that the social sciences have a real hard-on for the "hard sciences" when the subject matters are so vastly different. As Jacob says, in physics, you can keep narrowing the degrees of freedom to test each strand of a complex idea individually. This is very, very hard to do when the subject matter becomes something so complex as a biological being in a complex social structure like humans.

What I discovered is that I was suffering from a form of manageable insanity. I believe the root cause of this insanity comes from not knowing my own values and from responding to subconscious fears.

In other words, I was using external values, but these values were somehow in conflict with myself and reality. Uh-oh.

I think of this as acting and thinking in resonance with your core values. I also believe (my "hypothesis", as it were) that our core values are not freely chosen, but are genetic. They are discoverable, not creatable. Opinions on this point differ, but one of the most powerful ideas in this realm I ever came across is also one of the simplest: You can choose what you do; you can't choose what you like to do. (credit (can't believe I can remember where I learned this from all these many years later): https://gretchenrubin.com/articles/my-s ... d-my-life/).

I don't really subscribe too much to the id-ego-superego idea, but one powerful idea that I came across was an evolutionary-psychology one which went something like this: our emotions aren't "real". What they are are shortcuts. They are evolutionary judgments packaged into insta-messages to assist in our survival. Example: you see a tiger, you feel fear. That fear is a judgment: danger - get the fuck out! In those scenarios, it is life-and-death to listen to those emotions and act on them instantaneously rather than to mull them over with our "superego" / cerebral cortex. In the modern world, these primitive emotions / packaged judgments are layered onto an evolutionarily new environment (perhaps this resonates with some of the thought avenues you and mF pursued). But now, (in therapy) we have a chance to unpack those packaged judgments to understand what our emotions are responding to and it gives us a chance to choose a different way of responding. We can interrupt the knee-jerk reactions and build new pathways of response.

Looking around ... most people never mature past high school. Maybe someone knows statistics for wheaton levels or kegan levels or whatever other metrics exist, but in my personal experience, yeah, society is mostly a bunch of (in my view) emotionally stunted individuals running around.

Why do we need to individually and collective tell ourselves a spiral of lies only to eventually shatter those lies?

-or, if you don't think we need or are instinctually compelled to shatter the lies (actualize)-

Why do we need to individually and collectively tell ourselves a spiral of lies?

Just as I'm not sure who exactly is driving my own externally motivated desires, I don't see a large cohesive conspiracy directly benefitting from our collective SD/ ego stories.

I thought maybe we have changed our environment so that our evolutionarily evolved (this is what I meant by designed) impulses no longer give us the correct signals for the environment we live in?

And perhaps, at some point in the distant past when we evolved these internal signals, they told us the correct information and responses to best ensure our health and survival?

And perhaps ego development/ SD evolution is our logical mind/ ego trying to make sense of a world where listening to our bodily/ emotional information systems and impulses are no longer the best method for survival and reproduction?

On these points, I'd perhaps refer you to the study of the various cognitive biases and their (induced) purposes. But, generally speaking, they all seem to boil down to: it's easier that way. Why do people lie and believe lies and move onto new lies and join in group lies and conspiracies? Because it's easier. It feels good. Or it feels safe. Or it feels like belonging. Or it feels powerful.

[Jin+Guice]

Interesting discussion about hypothesis and the history of scientific testing and thought. I find this stuff fascinating, but I don't have anything to add.

I think of this as acting and thinking in resonance with your core values. I also believe (my "hypothesis", as it were) that our core values are not freely chosen, but are genetic. They are discoverable, not creatable.

My concept of "actualization" is "being in alignment with our core values." The issue I think is that we don't know our core values. This is what I'm trying to probe. The directly actionable question is "how do we discover our core values?" but another question I have is "why do we not know our core values?" I think discovering our core values is the difficult part of actualization.

but one powerful idea that I came across was an evolutionary-psychology one which went something like this: our emotions aren't "real". What they are are shortcuts. They are evolutionary judgments packaged into insta-messages to assist in our survival. Example: you see a tiger, you feel fear. That fear is a judgment: danger - get the fuck out! In those scenarios, it is life-and-death to listen to those emotions and act on them instantaneously rather than to mull them over with our "superego" / cerebral cortex. In the modern world, these primitive emotions / packaged judgments are layered onto an evolutionarily new environment (perhaps this resonates with some of the thought avenues you and mF pursued).

This is more or less what I was trying to say, but my interpretation of it is different...

Emotional and bodily impulses were once in alignment with our environment. If you felt fear or sadness or happiness or anger or one of your five senses gave you a positive or negative signal, following those signals directly increased your chances for survival.

Now we are in an environment where that is not true. Feeling back pain from sitting too much at a desk job which you require to get resources is no longer an immediate threat to our survival. However, ignoring that signal, which helps us in the short-term, can damage us eventually.

The same is true for emotions. Feeling fear and reacting to that fear as our bodies tell us no longer increases our chances for survival. Actually fighting, fleeing or freezing when our emotions tell us too would be disastrous.

By the time we reach adulthood or even adolescence, we've had to override our sensory and emotional feedback mechanisms thousands of times, often in situations we were not fully equipped to understand. We learn that these mechanisms, which we are wired to believe are necessary for survival, confusingly threaten our survival. We've learned not to trust those mechanisms, which means not trusting ourselves.

I learned to think about these mechanisms as flawed and take the modern environment as normal, necessary and positive. However, I argue that it is equally plausible to view the modern environment as poorly designed for people and the sensory and emotional knowledge and feedback processes as being ill-suited to that environment.

We did not choose this environment nor can we totally redesign it. I wonder what we can learn from unlearning that our emotional and sensory systems are flawed and what damage learning to distrust these systems has done?

I am also suggesting that being out of touch with these systems could be a possible reason why core values are so hard to understand. Where do preferences and values come from if not from emotions and sensations or the alignment of the mind, emotions and body?

[black_son_of_gray]

Emotional and bodily impulses were once in alignment with our environment. If you felt fear or sadness or happiness or anger or one of your five senses gave you a positive or negative signal, following those signals directly increased your chances for survival.

Bold mine. Is that really true? Or perhaps more precisely, is this too general a statement to want to base your arguments on?

I think of an organism's evolution with respect to its environment as a kind of never-ending arms race, which is to say that the organism's population drifts over time in ways that increase fitness*...but then, the environment is also, simultaneously, drifting over time as well. [Here I include other organisms (e.g. the first organism's predators, prey, competitors, etc.) as part of the environment, as well as things like the physical environment.]

The result of all this never-ending jostling is that the term 'alignment' is kind of a tricky thing to peg down. At bare minimum, an organism's adaptations need to be 'good enough' for the environment, otherwise poof! Extinction. Game over. But good enough is, well, good enough, even if that means actually not that great, or perhaps "with difficulties".

Anyway, I say all of this because I'm rather of the mindset that the trajectory of human evolution has been more along the lines of "good enough" rather than ever really achieving any kind of decent "alignment" with any environment. That was true 100,000 years ago, and it's also true now. It's all just so sloppy.

If you felt fear or sadness or happiness or anger or one of your five senses gave you a positive or negative signal, following those signals directly increased your chances for survival.

I mean, not really. All that is required from an evolutionary view is that the fear, happiness, sadness, anger, signal from the senses, and so on, worked on average, across a population, a tiny bit better than the version before. None of it ever needed to work all that well, or not without massive externalities (e.g. language leading to abstract thought leading to a human scratching their head thinking, "but what does it all mean??"; or fear responses of snakes (good!) sometimes going haywire and ultimately, waaay down a long long line, manifesting as crippling anxiety or depression, and on and on...) It just needed to be good enough at the population level over time. For any given individual in a population, it could have even been problematic or disastrous.

That said, it very well may be the case that what might have been "good enough" in past environments may no longer be good enough in the current, radically altered environment that humans have made of the world. But again, all the little subtleties apply; we need to distinguish between individual fitness vs. population fitness, and maybe get a sense of the magnitude of the deficit. So, is what was once 'good enough' now 'not quite good enough' or something more along the lines of 'horribly inadequate'? Is most of the population still in the 'good enough' range, even though a subset of individuals have experienced a precipitous decline?

Apologies if all of this comes off as missing the point or pedantic. I just want the premise of your ensuing arguments to be as solid as possible. Carry on.

*There's no reason why the direction of drift can't end up in a dead end. In which case, poof! Extinction. (Alas, this has been the fate of most living things...)

[AxelHeyst]

I learned to think about these mechanisms as flawed and take the modern environment as normal, necessary and positive. However, I argue that it is equally plausible to view the modern environment as poorly designed for people and the sensory and emotional knowledge and feedback processes as being ill-suited to that environment.

We did not choose this environment nor can we totally redesign it. I wonder what we can learn from unlearning that our emotional and sensory systems are flawed and what damage learning to distrust these systems has done?

I agree with the nits people are picking about some of your statements, but I also think I'm picking up the gist of what you're putting down and I'm here for it, in particular the above.

For a variety of reasons I learned to think about the modern environment as flawed, unnecessary and negative from a young age. I have viewed the modern environment as poorly designed for people more or less since young childhood. Whenever I had to override my natural reactions to the modern world (e.g. sitting too much or being stressed by petty bs) I, at minimum, grumbled to myself about how much the world sucked and dreamed of an environment that was well designed for humans and the rest of the critters (the modern world is a pretty shit deal for a lot of them, too, with the exception of many first world cats).

So... my core values and preferences came to be defined by this mismatch: a core value/ethic of mine is trying to figure out how to unfuck the design of the modern world. It's like a keystone value: if the environment is so fucked that it puts us out of touch with our core values, the first/most important thing to do is unfuck our environment. Duh! (ETA: One really interesting aspect of the current arrangement is that it is set up with an enormous availability of freedom and power to do anything we want, like Jacob said, which is convenient.)

eta: the point that humans adapt, but are just out of step to some of the fast changes in the modern world, is a solid one. I don't think it's wise to lock in amber some idealized "perfect for humans" environment that we "should" get "back" to. Humans can adapt all over the place, it's true. However, I don't think it's wise for humans to adapt to terminally flawed changes in the modern world. That gets into the realm of future scenarios, worldview, and possibly politics so I'll refrain from going too far in that direction, but if there's an aspect of modern society that has a pretty short shelf-life due to any number of reasons (energy, resources, biophysical limits, etc), then those are things we shouldn't be very gung ho about adapting to.

(Dunno if this is useful at all to your thread...)

[suomalainen]

I think some of what @axel and @bsg is getting at is a viktor frankl situation. If you (an individual) can change an external situation to make it better, you should go for it. If you can't, you should adapt (or die). Average that shit out over a long enough period of time and you get population and/or environmental shifting.

But to get to the point:

The issue I think is that we don't know our core values. This is what I'm trying to probe. The directly actionable question is "how do we discover our core values?" but another question I have is "why do we not know our core values?" I think discovering our core values is the difficult part of actualization.
...
I am also suggesting that being out of touch with these systems could be a possible reason why core values are so hard to understand. Where do preferences and values come from if not from emotions and sensations or the alignment of the mind, emotions and body?

I think core values come from genetics. Culture and parenting can influence this a tiny, tiny bit, but only at the margins and only if they happen to already be aligned with your core values. If they are diametrically opposed, you either break free or get crushed. Think of gay people in severely anti-gay cultures as a stark example. You learn you're gay over time and you stay in the closet for fear of violence; the lucky ones get free in some way and come out; the unlucky ones come out and/or get outed and get murdered. I don't think I've heard many, if any, happy stories of gay people who thrived when they stayed in the closet their whole lives.

How do you find core values? Experience. Read/study some stuff and see if it feels resonant with you. Practice/do some stuff and see if it feels resonant with you. Do more varieties of the stuff that resonate and less of the stuff that doesn't and you can narrow your way down to labeling your core values. This takes a lot of time, and a lot of courage and openness to experimentation and discovery. This is why it's not that common, especially in closed societies where such dogma deviations are discouraged, made a bogeyman or even punished. So the emotions and sensations is not where preferences and values "come from" or originate, but this is the process by which we are able to label them.

Why don't we automagically know our core values? Same reason why we don't automagically know anything at birth. Our coding does not include a knowledge bank. We first learn "mom" and "dad" and foods and colors and numbers. We learn facts and figures. We learn to obey. Some go on to learn critical thinking. Some of those apply it to themselves. Complexity builds if you're open to it and have the talent/capacity. Some just stop at a 5th grade level or 10th grade or whatever. Some keep going. What decides who keeps going and who stops and where they stop? Probably mostly genetics again. You'll never keep learning if you don't like to learn or if you aren't forced to learn, and you can't choose if you like to learn and "force" is generally externally applied by parents or the environment generally. In extreme cases, if you don't learn (how to find food during a famine), you die.

[ertyu]

Idk why the discovery of one's core values necessitates this much intellectualization. Just be brutally honest with yourself? The first order nodes a wog's meant to point to are meant to be core values. When the EK Lady tells you to slow the fuck down and admit to yourself what's true for you in your body on a sensational level, she's trying to get you to be honest w yourself. Open an ACT therapy workbook, you get an explanation of core values and how to find them. This one's good, for instance:



Quit intellectualizing and get honest w yourself, that's all. A core value is a way you find worthwhile to be regardless of external circumstances, opinions, and rewards. If you can't be something external that someone told you you should be, or something that's not a core value but you think it's good to be it, you feel guilty: for me, the feeling when I have failed to be "productive" and, bummer, I still haven't done the dishes. When a core value isn't met, you know something key and fundamental is missing: something that MATTERS. Here's a core value not being met:

You might be there for them to talk, you might thoughtfully stay with their stuff because you love them and it's healing and it matters, and then when you need someone to be there for you, there will always be something more captivating for them elsewhere.

I show up in a certain way in relationships because it is inherently important and rewarding and IT MATTERS. When the type of connection I hope for doesn't happen, possibly due to values mismatch, I am disappointed and I feel something fundamental is missing, but I won't stop showing up how I show up because showing up in that way was never about getting something from someone else, it was INHERENTLY MEANINGFUL.

So, across the various aspects of your life, how does it feel deeply right to show up? Get an engineering type, they will tell you that it's deeply right to show up in an efficient and optimized way, something just feels deeply meaningful about that. @AH will tell you it's about designing an environment where humans can feel human, @jacob will tell you the key thing is to understand the world, produce a theory -- something about this process is incredibly engaging and important and right. One I've heard you mention is that you enjoy interpersonal fun and cultural capital: it was important enough to you that you made space for it in your life even when a 9 to 5 engineering job would've been more lucrative. So: what is it that, if you don't have it in life, something key will feel like it's missing? What would you choose to do regardless of reward? Intellectualizing about the nature of transcendence and whatever it did or didn't do evolutionarily takes you away from what you want to zero on, imo, not towards.

[AxelHeyst]

Idk why the discovery of one's core values necessitates this much intellectualization. Just be brutally honest with yourself?

This sounds analogous to the "Why don't you try being more cheerful?" brand of advice given to depressed or melancholy people. If it were that easy, those struggling to make durable contact with their core values would have done it by now. Either that or they are morons, which makes this kind of advice unfun to take. For example, I'm very comfortable being brutal with myself, but honest? Man, that's tricky! How do I know if I'm being brutally honest or blowing brutal smoke up my own ass? How do I know if that subtle "this feels right" bodily sensation is truly 'me' or a deeply socialized reaction?

"You'll know it when you feel it" is infuriating advice to someone who's either wired or socialized or traumatized in such a way that processing their bodily sensations feels like reading Braille with gloves on, and also never having been taught how to read Braille in the first place. "You'll know it when you feel it" -- no, trust me, I won't, not if I'm in a glitch loop, and admonishing me to 'just stop overthinking it' will spin up another overlapping glitch loop. Not every tool works on every machine. I have different solutions that work for me.

This is one of the points JnG is getting at: how do you know how you feel if you've have the feelings hammered out of you? If you're conditioned to be deeply suspicious and/or dismissive of the signals you receive from your own body, to the point that it takes active and 'unnatural' feeling work to even consciously notice them?

Certain personalities will, along this journey, get very curious about WHY they've had feelings-sensitivity hammered out of them, and ask questions about their environment. Not everyone sees this process of inquiry as necessary, in fact some see it as a distraction, which may be true for them, but for other personalities the curious inquiry process is a mandatory part of the process. It's not enough for me to know that I've got some issues with making contact with my core values, I've got to have a mental model of why there's a numbness there (or whatever my relationship with access is). Only with this model will my brain/self feel capable of participating in the process.

[jennypenny]

This sounds analogous to the "Why don't you try being more cheerful?" brand of advice given to depressed or melancholy people. If it were that easy, those struggling to make durable contact with their core values would have done it by now.

...

It's not enough for me to know that I've got some issues with making contact with my core values, I've got to have a mental model of why there's a numbness there (or whatever my relationship with access is). Only with this model will my brain/self feel capable of participating in the process.

Yes, but there is a basic assumption in this discussion that everyone possesses deep core values (and at any age/experience level). It could be that not everyone lives by an extensive internal core of ethics, or that some of the trauma you describe delays developing such things, so the search for how to get in touch with them is futile and potentially more traumatizing. Heal, then grow. The angst could be that one is trying to drink from a cup that hasn't been filled yet.