how the man controls you
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"Oh, Beautiful, for Spacious Rooms..."
If you really want to understand what life in 21st-century America is all about,
visit Las Vegas. It's like being on a date with America when she's had one too many -
she's letting her hair down, flashing you some skin, maybe even letting you cop a feel (if
you pay extra). Money doesn't just talk in Vegas - it screams, it blows whistles, it blows
you. If prostitution is an uncomfortably true parody of the classic (read "biological")
male-female dynamic -- male exchanges resources for female's sexual favors -- then Las
Vegas is a parody of the relationship between America and her people. And by America,
I don't mean Mom, apple pie, and family values. I don't mean the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights, either. I mean what it actually is, the creation of a bunch of 18th century
bigwigs wearing powdered wigs, tights, and fake calves (eat your heart out, San
Francisco), the brainchild of a radical gang of freethinkers who wanted to protect their
own interests from overseas meddling, and by the way, had some pretty good ideas on
which to found a nation, if they were applied to everyone consistently. Trouble is, it's
easy to say, "All men are created equal," a lot harder to free your money-making slaves
because you actually believe it.
Which brings me back to Las Vegas. No hypocrisy here - it's the most honest city
in the world, its phoniness forgiven because it knows it's not fooling anyone, just like the
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stripper with the fake breasts knows she's not fooling you, but she knows you like 'em
big, so she complies with a pair of silicone-stuffed sacks that you pay real money to see.
Las Vegas knows you love money, too, and it convinces you with lights and whistles to
pay for the privilege of losing it. What you're really paying for is thefantasy of making
the big score, the fleeting hope that you might be the lucky one among all the suckers.
The real winners aren't the ones pulling the levers on the slots, but the ones pulling the
giant levers of the casinos themselves, the master manipulators who rely on seduction and
distraction to milk us dry like cows at a dairy farm.
"But I'm a contented cow," you say. Yes, aren't we all, chewing our cuds by the
roadside, envying the few lucky winners of the American Dream, the freaks among us
who can hit a 100-mph fastball or talk convincingly on the silver screen to a computer-
generated alien.
Las Vegas unzips and whips out into the open what we'd prefer not to see the rest
of the time - our own bloated, Jabba-the-Hutt-like appetites for the bright, shiny, and
unreal. Instead of a real trip to Paris, we take a couple of things we like about the place -
the Eiffel Tower and cobblestone streets - sanitize them (no dirty facilities or rude
Frenchmen here!), then plop the whole thing down on the same block as an air-
conditioned Middle Eastern marketplace, sans flies and exploding pipe-bombs, right
across the street from a mini-New York without gangs or graffiti. Instead of real women,
we take a couple of things we like about women (yes, a pairof things) and exagerrate
those to the point where we're seeing some sort of abstract, gravity-defying representation
of the female form. Instead of real food, we take the salt, sugar, and fat from any source
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wagon. The stranger's the man who runs the whole show, after all, exploiting the greed
and gluttony of young boys for his own ends.
The message of the story is simple: if you never evolve beyond your desires for
pleasure and distraction, you sacrifice your full human potential, becoming something
almost comically predictable (the average U.S. consumer), easily manipulated by those
who know how to pull your strings. And what is Las Vegas if not the string-pulling
capital of the world, run by bigshots who manage their own teams of mules - armies of
dishwashers, bellhops, and parking valets from Guatemala, Cambodia, and Cleveland?
And what does this show us about America itself? We're still being peddled the
American Dream, but isn't the situation in America today more like the World Series of
Poker? We all want to join the tables so we can become a big winner, but how many of
us have a spare $10,000 to buy in? We forget the old adage that holds so true in our
nation: it takes money to make money (yes, even the qualifying tournaments require a
fee). Most of us, denied access to even try a hand in the big leagues, settle for the
consolation prize, watching the contest on ESPN as those who are mostly well-off enjoy
the privilege of out-conniving each other. The tournament itself is like the business
world in miniature - a dead earnest, dog-eat-dog arena, no real human interaction going
on, all eyes shaded or frozen into unreadable reptilian glazes, because letting the other
guy see anything truthful about what's going on inside you gives him the means to take
you out. The object, of course, is to make (or, more precisely, take) money, and though
the competition starts out with the cash spread evenly among all the players (who at this
point are the human equivalents of so many small businesses), the field gradually
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decreases as the more canny players (the human corporations) gain more money and use
it to intimidate and swallow up the little guys, then turn on each other in a feeding frenzy
until all the money is in the hands of the most ruthless individual (the human Wal-Mart).
The World Series of Poker glorifies one of the archetypal characters in American
myth: the gambler. The gambler has always been a sort of mischievous imp lurking in
the fringes of our national consciousness, an amoral opportunist in the land of
opportunity, not participating in the American Dream himself, but parasitizing off those
who do. Seldom the main character of the story, the gambler is the snake in our Garden
of Eden, urging the legitimate hero, who has worked hard and earned his piece of the pie,
to go for broke, risk everything he has on the chance of gaining even more. Could our
current fascination with the gambler, our legitimizing of the previously illegitimate, be a
sign that we no longer believe our system allows us to achieve the American Dream
through good old-fashioned hard work, but forces us to rely on lucky breaks and shrewd
manipulation of our fellow American Dreamers?
Before I get too carried away, let's expose the gambler for who he really is.
Concealed behind his poker face, after all, is his ultimate shame. Hidden beneath layer
upon protective layer of bluffing bravado is the sad truth that he is wretchedly insecure,
unable to make it in the real world. Master of the limited domain of the card table, he is
baffled by the infinitely greater complexities of human relationship and responsibility.
The gambler is pitifully dysfunctional, a child who has become so entranced with a game,
he cuts himself off from the people around him and remains forever in search of higher
stakes, passing from saloon to saloon, casino to casino, adrift like a Mississippi riverboat
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without a rudder. Why do you never see the gambler away from the card table? Because
he is nothing without the game.
If you buy into the national game of SUCCESS which the U.S. promotes as a sort
of ideal, then this great land of ours becomes less a place to live and more an arena to
play out your competitive shenanigans with the other alpha-male-wannabes. Worse than
this, if you judge yourself based on your ability to play this game, if you truly start to
believe that you need to be a winner to count for anything at all, then you cut yourself off
from your very essence - you give up who you are to define yourself by what you do.
Your drive to succeed has driven the real you, cowering, into a dark corner of your soul.
You are nothing without the game. Your self-worth is now determined by dollar signs
and how many people know your name, not by how the people closest to you feel about
you, or even by what you know about yourself, which won't be much if your spiritual
immune system does not fight back against the endemic virus of our culture, this
desperate, overbearing need to succeed, this idea that if you are not "somebody" then
you're nobody.
Who promotes this slavish devotion to material success and achievement? The
ones who massage our brains with the inane television shows, movies, and magazines
which they use to peddle their products, the fat cats and corporations who own the
gleaming, towering steel and glass cathedrals built in devotion to the dollar, our national
symbol of success. It's very easy for the successful to worship success, after all, and
there's no better way of ensuring that the fruits of success are not spread around than to
convince everyone else that we should admire a man's ability to take whatever he can get.
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Ironically, it's often the have-nots, the ones who have the strongest reasons to complain
about this societal attitude, who often subscribe to it with the most fanatical intensity.
Stroll through any inner city ghetto and you will encounter the most fantastic dreams of
athletic stardom and rap star success. The pimped-up rides and bounteous bling are
ostentatious representations of the very materialism that fueled the slave traders who
started the whole mess of racial inequality in America in the first place.
The American population as a whole is no different. The average American
worker is like a battered child who hates his abuser and looks up to him at the same time:
"Keep making money off me, rich man - I want to stop you, but what I want even more is
to be you myself."
How does The Man pull it off? Easy -- he relies on The Man's best friend: The
Dog. Not the dog who paws your chest and licks your face when you get home, but The
Dog inside you, The Dog inside every man.
It's a Dog's Life
Why a dog within us? Why not a pig? A goat? While these are all acceptable
species we could use to represent the animal within every man (and I'm almost assuming
you're a man if you haven't tossed this book aside already -- hang in there if you're not),
there's just something very masculine about a dog, any dog. Yes, even poodles, who lick
their balls just as contentedly as do German shepherds.
First off, dogs are slobs. A dog doesn't care half a hairball how he looks. Take a
cat, by comparison. A cat will spend hours raising his hind leg over his head, twisting his
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body into a pretzel so he can lick down every last stray hair. A dog will lick himself only
when he's wounded, or he's got something on his coat that smells interesting, or simply
because it feels good (just ask a poodle or a German shepherd).
Dogs are ruled by their stomachs and their dongs. In that order. Men are no
different. If a man is feeling hungry and horny at the same time he will make a sandwich
before he calls his girlfriend. If his girlfriend is already there, he'll have her make the
sandwich before anything else happens.
Dogs run in packs. They spend their time horsing around as they look for food
and females. When a female is found, they invariably fight over her. If things get too
rough, the female will slink away. In dogs, as in men, it is often the lone dog,
unencumbered by the stupidity of males in groups, who will find the female and quietly
propagate the species.
Dogs are hierarchical. In any pack, there is always a clear leader. He is usually
the largest one. If not, he makes up for this through sheer aggressiveness -- he knows
what he wants and will bare his fangs to get it. If this is starting to sound more like wolf
behavior than dog behavior, you are being fooled by your dog's behavior when in the
company of humans. Throw a bunch of dogs together for any length of time and you'll
see firsthand what we mean by "dog-eat-dog."
So far we have described how men are similar to dogs. But how are they
different? Don't ask a man this question. He'll tell you men are smarter and they stand
on two feet. Don't ask a woman. She'll tell you men stand on two feet.
Ask yourself, "What does a dog do all day?" He eats, sleeps, keeps an eye open
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for food and females, and fulfills his role in the hierarchy. Ask yourself, "What do I do
all day?" If it's the same thing, welcome to the pack. You're living a dog's life.
"But I do other things, too," you say. "I watch TV, I play football, I don't lick my
balls -- I scratch them, blah, blah, blah..."
"Okay, what are some positive masculine traits? Loyalty, honor, bravery,
assertiveness, honesty, integrity, to name a few. Now, a dog can be just as loyal, brave,
and assertive as the manliest he-man. True, he has no conception of honor, honesty, or
integrity. A dog cannot tell a lie, and he can be nothing other than what he is. It's men
who can lie, cheat, and pretend to be something they are not. In fact, these can be positite
assets in the competitive world of adult men. For the man looking to score with the
chicks and accumulate as much money and power as possible, the act of incorporating
honor, honesty, and integrity into his life has the same effect as chaining a 500-pound
brick to the rear of his BMW roadster.
Honor... honesty... integrity. The words seem almost quaint, throwbacks to a time
of starched collars and ramrod righteousness, a time when we used the word
"forebearance" instead of "suppression," a time when keeping a leash on The Dog was a
point of pride with men. The Dog has always been with us, but our attitude towards The
Dog has changed through the eons.
A Brief History of The Dog (Among Other Things)
You might want to skip this chapter if you don't like history, but I'll try to be as
brief as possible.
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Back in caveman days, The Dog had it made, because men were openly and
unapologetically dog-like in their behavior. Brawny aggression and shrewd manipulation
of human-pack dynamics got you the good stuff -- first dibs at the leg of bear in the fire,
access to the females with the most pendulous breasts. If another guy complained, you
just grabbed the nearest heavy object and conked him on the head with it, or you called
upon your allies to cow him into silence through group intimidation.
Success in life depended on an almost preternatural connection with the natural
environment. Actually, it only seems preternatural to us -- in reality, being connected to
the natural environment is the most natural thing in the world, since we are (physically, at
least) products of nature. We have become so accustomed to city life, so removed from
the natural environment, we romanticize primitive man as a feel-good hippie type, the
original Nature Boy, when the brutal reality is that the aggressive-asshole caveman, who
suppressed his competitive instincts just enough to work in a group with ten other
aggressive assholes, was exactly what was needed to bring down a woolly mammoth and
continue the survival of the line that leads to the cell-phone-toting bipeds of today.
Perhaps that's the secret of the "Survivor" reality shows: you take twenty or so money-
hungry, exhibitionistic nincompoops, throw them together on an island, then sit back and
enjoy the show as you force them to engage in cooperative activities at the same time that
they each try to back-stab and cajole their way to individual victory. The hypocrisy
between seemingly altruistic behaviors and ultimately selfish motives is delicious to
watch and, disturbingly, more than a little reflective of our own lives.
Imagining ourselves as men in prehistoric times (even if only for the space of a 1-
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hour TV show), we see it is the strengths of The Dog which aided our ancestors in their
quest for material success: acute sensory attunement to the environment, loyalty and
cooperation in matters concerning the human pack, and aggressive instincts towards
obtaining food, sex, and social position.
These qualities are all very well and good, but they don't necessarily lead towards
the attainment of a stable society or civilization. For that we need the human qualities of
imagination and organization. Let's begin with imagination.
Imagination is first and foremost an act of playing with possibilities. An act of
"What if...?" if you will.
"What if I picked up that rock and threw it at Torg's head? Maybe then Oola
would like me more than Torg, because then Torg would have a hole in his head."
Because of imagination, an inanimate rock has been transformed into a means of
obtaining sex and possible social advancement -- the beginnings of human progress.
Simply put, imagination is the act of making that quantum leap in the mind from
"what is" to "what might be." From primitive tools such as stone head-openers, we
advance to major developments such as animal domestication, horticulture, and perhaps
the strangest and most human development of all, religion.
Religion is mysterious because the spiritual impulse that created it has nothing at
all to do with The Dog, and the pioneers in the spiritual realm were very un-doglike
people, the shamans. Not only did these people tend to be somewhat solitary and aloof
from their fellow hunters, they were more interested in the unseen harmony and order of
the world rather than in the tangible signs of passing game or fruiting trees needed for
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practical survival. The combination of introversion and intuitiveness which the shamans
possessed would seem to be a death wish, yet these individuals were highly esteemed by
their tribes because they gave their fellow hunters and gatherers an extremely precious
gift: a sense that there was an unseen dimension to the world which was fantastically
powerful and expansive, an implicit, universal order, like a cosmic chord of music which
one could tune one's life in harmony with and thereby realize one's true nature as an
integral part of the whole. The shaman promoted the realization of this harmony by
supervising initiation rituals of fasting, chanting, dancing, and the use of psychoactive
herbs, all intended to propel the initiate into a state of consciousness beyond everyday
experience, into a direct encounter with the spiritual realm.
The beginning of the end for the shaman and the tribal way of life (and a
corresponding devaluation of The Dog) occurred with the development of agriculture.
The unpredictable, here-and-now world of the hunt began to be replaced by the orderly
routines of planting and harvesting, dictated by the seasons, and requiring planning,
foresight, and oftentimes the cooperation of the entire group. The time of the organizers
was at hand.
Organization is an essential component of all civilizations, for as people become
settled and skilled at producing food from the earth, the population expands and it
becomes necessary to impose order on the whole affair, for now the size of the
community is such that many people are relative strangers to each other, and the sharing
of resources among the whole group is unlikely to happen. At this point, the group must
begin to function like a living organism, with different people playing different roles in
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the society, as the different organs of the body serve different functions to maintain life.
And so the society becomes "organ"-ized, with some people producing food, others
crafting tools, and still others becoming supervisors or bureaucrats to coordinate the
activities of the rest. A ruling class inevitably develops to make the big decisions
concerning the welfare of the entire group. The members of this elite class (the "brains"
directing the activities of the social organism) want to hold onto the power they enjoy as
a matter of course. Traditionally, they have often achieved this through a sort of
symbiotic relationship with the same individuals who would have been shamans in the
old days -- the priests. Sometimes this sharing of power was uneasy and acrimonious, but
when it worked (as in ancient Egyptian society), the religion of the priests supported the
moral order that held society together, an order which included the divine right of the
ruling class to lord it over everyone else. The priests, in turn, were happy because they
had a fairly cushy job of high status.
What the rulers and the priests of antiquity feared more than anything else was the
primal energy of The Dog, which previously had free expression through the violence of
the hunt, but now had the potential of being a genuine threat to a stable society. It is not
surprising that so many religions expressed a profound distrust of the "lower" self (a.k.a.
The Dog) and sought to control it through various taboos and moral imperatives relating
to sex and violence, The Dog's chief domains. Civilizations, of course, are often violent
themselves and will gladly channel the aggressive energy of The Dog into organized
military forces, which they can then use as tools for expansion and conquest. Generally
speaking, however, The Dog is put on as short a leash as possible.
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Enter the United States onto the world stage. The founding fathers saw the
seemingly limitless potential of a huge land with bounteous resources and had a vision of
the continent as one vast arena where The Dog could be set free to frolic. In other words,
they wanted to create a white male entrepreneur's paradise, a place where the right of a
man to amass land and wealth could be given free rein, where a man could compete like a
dog with his neighbors for all that nature had to offer without interference from
omnipotent kings and meddlesome priests. The founding fathers more or less
accomplishied their aim by establishing term limits on their elected leaders of
government and attaining the separation of church and state, among other achievements.
For most of our history, this system worked for the ambitious man as intended --
if you were the right color and sex you could always head west to fresh pastures if all the
wealth was already divvied up in your particular area. Alas, those days are long gone.
Nowadays, instead of carving a new life out of the raw land, you must try to draw
sustenance in some way from other people's money, a situation which makes you feel less
like a creator of wealth and more like a flea sucking financial nourishment from the great
back of America. You might take one of a choice of increasingly meaningless jobs and
become a cog in the corporate business machine, owned and operated by those who have
already succeeded in the American arena. You might become an automaton in the
government bureaucracy, funded by the tax dollars of your fellow citizens. You might
even try to hack out your own clearing in the jungle of the business world, obtaining your
pocket money by providing something people pay for from theirown pockets. In any
case, to land a job that's even remotely satisfying, a substantial amount of money is
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generally needed in the first place, whether it's the capital required to start up a business
or the investment in education necessary to obtain decent employment.
Meanwhile, there's a huge portion of the population stuck in dead-end jobs
without much hope for the future. Add to these the thousands upon thousands of us who
do have a college education or enough capital to start a business but still can't carve out a
meaningful place for ourselves in the world of work. What is keeping The Dog from
bursting forth from all these frustrated lives and running rampant in the streets?
Certainly religion still plays a part in maintaining the moral order, but everyone
knows that religion receives more lip service than true devotion from most of the
population today. The truth is, The Dog is already running rampant in our schizophrenic
society. We decry the rate of teenage pregnancy and the hordes of young men growing
up without fathers and filling our jails as violent, frustrated felons -- but what do we
expect when our society and culture is run by the merchant class, the hucksters and
sellers among us, a class that promotes and caters to the needs and desires of The Dog?
For these pushers know that the more The Dog runs free, the more the people are no
longer masters of themselves, and the more money they will spend on Doritos,
Budweiser, and Marlboros. In today's America, the man of business is The Man, and as
stated before, The Dog is The Man's best friend.
Thus our modern era is perhaps the first in the history of civilization where The
Dog is encouraged to make the decisions and buy, buy, buy. Every time you watch a
commercial or read a billboard, The Man is whispering into your ear, hoping The Dog
will listen. "Buy that sportscar to feel powerful and sexy." "Buy that ticket to the
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football game" -- so you can have the vicarious thrill of "winning," a thrill you are
seldom allowed to experience in real life. By all means worry that your underarms stink,
your breath reeks, and your underwear looks soiled, because the only means to fix these
faults and get the girl is to buy the products The Man provides. Even if you don't get the
girl, there's no need to worry, because The Man has a wide selection of pornographic
material to titillate, but never satisfy, your carnal desires. Whatever you do, don't read a
book, for God's sake, unless it's mass-market brain candy by a brand-name author you
can pick up at the supermarket counter (no danger of you actually starting to think with
those books). Hopefully you don't figure out you can read better stuff for free at the
library.
The Man wants you to feel frustrated and insecure -- not to the point of outright
revolt, but just enough to the point where you need the succor of the distractions and
sorry, artificial pleasures he can provide. The last thing The Man wants is for you to
cultivate your higher self and seek spiritual enlightenment, for then you might completely
liberate your mind and spirit from the warped worldview of purely material concerns
promoted by his high priests, the advertisers and marketers. Even our schools have
devolved into indoctrination centers which spit out obedient, standardized mentalities that
mesh perfectly into the economic machine, rather than creative, critically thinking minds
that seek to improve or even revamp the machine entirely. Our political leaders cannot
save us, for they require money to splash their faces across the media and win elections,
and they obtain this money by kowtowing to The Man and grovelling for handouts,
becoming indebted hucksters in the process. No, it is up to you to break free from the
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mental constraints you may not even realize you're suffering under, and to do this you
must first seek to truly know and understand yourself.
Getting to Know You
"But I already know myself," you say, "better than I know anyone else in the
world."
That is exactly the point. You are so used to your own mode of thinking, your
own way of looking at things, your own chosen way of being in the world, that other
ways of thinking and being, ways that may be helpful to you, may be completely
unavailable to your conscious mind, even though they exist inside you. Who you are can
be thought of as a choice, based on inner urgings, to be one way and to not be another
way. Anyone who you find completely incomprehensible represents a road not taken in
your own life, a fork where you went right and they went left, probably ages ago. This
may explain the almost irresistible attraction of opposites when it comes to romantic
pairings. We are curious about the road not taken and the places it leads to, and being
with this strange other person gives us a glimpse into those mysterious regions we have
not explored ourselves.
Throughout history, philosophers, poets, and storytellers have attempted to map
out these "choices" of personality, these forking roads which lead to a person being one
way and not another, though often personality was looked at less as a choice and more as
something innate, perhaps determined by the stars, as in astrological systems, or even by
bodily fluids, as proposed in one of the ancient Greek theories. Today there are a
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multitude of theories of personality, but let's use as a starting-off point what is arguably
the most popular and widely accepted current method of dividing the personality into
distinct "types," the awkwardly-named Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI for short),
developed in the 1950s by Isabel Myers and Kathryn Briggs from the ideas of the great
Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung.
According to this system, each individual exhibits a preference for one of a pair of
choices in each of four crucial aspects of personality:
1). Extraversion or Introversion: The extravert is a "people person," the typical
"outgoing" personality prized by those seeking mates in the personal ads. The introvert is
more quiet and reserved, preferring to keep his own counsel and finding many social
interactions to be draining. Introverts are greatly outnumbered by extraverts, which is not
surprising since human beings are essentially gregarious rather than solitary creatures.
2). Sensation or Intuition: The sensing person has a literal-minded, "nothing but
the facts, ma'am" attitude towards obtaining information. He trusts solid realities which
he can gather with his five senses and is observant of his surroundings. The intuitive
person prefers dealing with ideas and possibilities in his mind rather than the mundane
reality of concrete facts. Not surprisingly, intuitives are greatly outnumbered by sensers,
since most of the intuitives, strolling through the woods absorbed in contemplating the
meaning of life, would have been eaten by bears or lions early on in the evolutionary
struggle.
3). Thinking or Feeling: The thinker bases decisions on logical standards -- what
works or what's right for a given situation, according to his rational analysis. The feeler
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bases decisions on emotionally-tinged values concerning what will produce the most
harmony and well-being for himself and others affected by the decision. This is the
classic "head vs. heart," "male vs. female" aspect of personality, and it is indeed the trend
in the overall population that males tend to prefer thinking, and females to prefer feeling.
4). Judging or Perceiving: Judgers like to live their lives in an orderly, organized
manner, knowing what's going to happen next, comfortable that things have been
decided. Perceivers prefer spontaneity, playing things by ear and leaving options open
rather than deciding on things beforehand. Judgers and perceivers are fairly evenly split
in numbers among the population, with judgers doing most of the achieving and
perceivers having the most fun.
When determining which preferences you have chosen for yourself in each of
these four aspects of personality, it's important not to take my "fork in the road" analogy
too seriously, for none of these choices is an either/or proposition. In fact, you may feel
that you're pretty evenly split between, say, your thinking and feeling tendencies, which
you very well may be, or you might want to take one of several MBTI questionnaires
available online to help you clarify things.
Just When You Thought We Were Done with History
Let's review our examination of history and society, but this time through the lens
of the MBTI.
Probably the biggest difference between caveman days and today is that the
spontaneous perceivers had a lot better time of it then than they do now. Life in the wild
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was one reaction after another to unpredictably changing circumstances: saber-tooth
tigers popping out from behind rocks, bears moving into your favorite section of the cave,
other guys taking swings at you with mastodon bones. You had to be ready for anything,
and perceivers naturally thrive in uncertain conditions where keeping different options
open is a good idea. The poor judgers who preferred everything to be orderly, in its
place, and known beforehand were not exactly the fittest candidates for a life-long date
with Mother Nature.
But it was the judgers, of course, who wanted something more civilized, a place to
live in that was more predictable and suited to their penchant for organization, so it was
unquestionably they who pressed for the security and order of settled communities.
Agriculture must have been a supremely satisfying accomplishment for the judgers -- to
actually know they were going to have food tomorrow was calming to their jangled
nerves.
And let's not forget the introverted, intuitive shamans, those holy fools wandering
off by themselves with their heads in the clouds. As you may recall, both introverts and
intuitives are outnumbered in the population. To have both these traits in the same
individual is even rarer, and this was exponentially so in prehistoric days, for how many
of these abstracted loners would have survived? They must have seemed like aliens from
another world, and, in a sense, they actually were in another world, for they "saw," or
more precisely, intuited the presence of, another immaterial world lying behind what their
fellow hunters could see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. As stated previously, the more
generous of these shamans developed ways for their tribal peers to also enter this sacred
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space through initiation rituals, and the "religion" of shamanism was born. With the
advent of civilization and the rise of the organizing judgers, the unpredictability of direct
spiritual experience, mediated by the shamans, was replaced by the certainties of orderly,
systematized dogma: "accept everything on the official holy list as the truth, then relax
and take a magic carpet ride to heaven." The uncertainty and risk of the personal spiritual
adventure was replaced by the comforting security of religious group-think, sanctioned
by spiritual "experts."
Who Is America?
Fast forward to America in the 21st century. It's obvious that our society is an
extraverted (outgoing), sensing (practical), thinking (rational, male-dominated), and
judging (decisive, results-oriented) culture. If you tried to imagine a man with these
traits, you'd probably think of a no-nonsense boss-type, pushing you to work hard and get
things done on schedule. Sounds like The Man to me.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't have anything against bosses or boss-types.
They're certainly needed in any culture to run things in an efficient fashion. The trouble
occurs when a society goes so far down one fork in the road, it forgets or suppresses other
ways of thinking and being. I suggest that this has occurred in the good ol' U. S. of A., at
least in terms of the way we are "expected" to be in order to contribute to our society.
In the next chapters I am going to push towards finding ways we can balance
things out. It is unavoidable that I am going to sound as if I am against, say, the
extraverted or sensing aspects of being, but it's only that I feel a need for us to push back
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against our cultural leanings, to question the thousands of messages we receive from
television, magazines, billboards, even our friends and family, to be sociable and
practical every moment of every day. What you won't hear me railing about too much is
for you to be more in touch with your feelings, since I'm sure you get enough of that from
your shrink or your significant other, and if you happen to be a feeling-type already,
you're certainly being pushed enough in the opposite direction by the male cultural norm.
So bear with me as I bitch for a few pages about our overly extraverted, sensing ways and
the means by which our society isolates and encourages us to either convert or remain
locked into these chosen modes of being, then we'll try to find ways to reap the benefits
of our latent capacities for introversion and intuition.
Driven to Succeed
Every moment of the waking day, the "world" of your inner experience, or
consciousness, is divided into foreground and background. The foreground is that aspect
of reality that you choose to focus on, the background is everything else. If your focus is
outward, on the world and especially the people in it, you are an extravert. If your focus
is inward, on your own inner experience and needs, then you are an introvert. Everone
has at least a slight preference for one or the other ways of being, but no one can be all
extravert or all introvert -- in fact, if you try to completely ignore one way of being, if
you stuff it down into your unconscious, it will pop up in your life in ways beyond your
conscious control. Lean too far towards extreme extraversion, and your neglected,
innermost needs, even the dark ones, come creeping into your life unbidden. Your
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enthusiasm morphs into arrogance, while your desire to affect others becomes colored by
power plays and the quest for personal gain. We can see symptoms of this in the smiling,
back-slapping, life-of-the-party type whose behavior actually resembles that of a selfish,
inconsiderate boor. He's not actually a bad guy -- he's just so out of touch with what he
really wants that his needs express themselves in thoughtless, overbearing ways. Ever
meet a guy with a dynamite smile, stylish clothes, and polished persona, but you look in
his eyes and feel like there's no "there" there? This guy isn't soulless -- he just doesn't
know who he is.
Our culture tends to brand the introvert as somewhat weird. Why doesn't he want
to join the crowd and hang out with the rest of us? At best, he is pitied as a meek
wallflower or granted grudging respect as the silent type, at worst, suspected of being
entirely selfish. It's certainly true that the extreme introvert runs the danger of becoming
completely out of touch with others. But think of the extreme extravert, the outgoing go-
getter whose sole goals are to win friends and influence people so he can make it to the
big time. We stand back in awe of his single-minded dedication to our cultural ideal of
success. "He's so driven," we say, which is a very good analogy, because there's a good
chance that this guy actually feels like the passenger rather than the driver in his own life.
He's not even on auto-pilot. He's traveling at breakneck speed on the fast track because
our achievement-oriented culture is doing the driving for him. If the culture is heading
off a cliff, you won't hear him complain, though as soon as he feels the pull of gravity,
moments before his plunging vehicle smashes into the craggy rocks below, you might
just hear him ask, "Are we there yet?"
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Bread and Circuses, Cheez Whiz and iPods
In ancient Rome, the ruling class devised an efficient way of preventing the man
in the street from thinking about how sorry his lot in life was -- keep him fed and
entertained. Free food would be distributed to the great unwashed majority, and they
would be distracted for up to half the year by bloody spectacles at the local stadium
involving the killing of slaves, criminals, and animals, usually by each other. A lion
might feed on a defenseless Christian one day, then be set upon himself by an armed
gladiator the next. The best of the gladiators became the pop stars of their day, drawing
in the crowds to watch them perform socially sanctioned killings on a regular basis.
We may look down our noses at the barbarity of the Roman populace, who
themselves looked down their Roman noses at the "barbarians" beyond their borders, but
aren't there truly some uncomfortable parallels with our own society today? Though
many of our poor are malnourished and in poor health, at least their stomachs are
distended by our cheap, tasteless, nearly valueless sliced white bread. And when they go
home to their meager accommodations, they can try to distract themselves and warm their
lonely souls with a flickering face and tinny voice coming from the $59 TV they bought
at Wal-Mart.
For such an extraverted nation, there's an awful lot of loneliness in America. Our
cities are laid out for maximum efficiency of moving the workers in and out of the
downtown centers of commerce. The areas where the people actually live increasingly
have the soulless ambience of planned "communities" with no common areas where
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people feel the urge to linger and interact with others. We shop in giant, impersonal
warehouses where we hardly ever see the same checker twice. It's no wonder that people
are desperately turning to the internet to try and create a sense of community and
personal relationship.
For Pete's sake, people are actually using the movies to try and feel connected to
others, a trend picked up on by Neal Gabler, who studies these things at USC Annenberg.
It used to be that we were living lives that were pretty full and rich, and movies both
diverted us from this reality and commented upon it in an entertaining way. Nowadays,
movies don't refer to our own lives, but to other movies (or comic strips or TV shows)
and to the people who make movies. Unless you're willing to reduce your mentality to
the level of a teenage boy, you don't watch movies now to be entertained by the story
itself, but by what the movie means in the lives of its stars, director, and other personnel
(e.g. "Will Smith actually acted well in this movie -- maybe he'll get an Oscar
nomination" or "Steven Spielberg seems to be slipping with this movie -- I hope he gets
back on track."). By watching movies, you feel privileged to enter the world of show
business and witness the career ups and downs of its denizens. Add to this the gossip
found in the tabloids and trade rags, and you've really got something to talk about at the
water cooler. There's even a competitive, gladiatorial feel to the proceedings, as new
stars rise up like saplings in a forest clearing, competing for the nourishing spotlight
hogged by the old, established names, and the television news (!) will actually proclaim
whether Brad Pitt's movie beat Harrison Ford's at the weekend box office.
Actors seem to sense that their profession is having even less bearing on the real
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world than it traditionally has -- witness their desperate attempt to influence political
reality in the 2004 election campaign, and the subsequent backlash from the voters
("How dare someone who makes $10 million playing a comic strip character tell me how
to vote?").
There's a strange, paradoxical phenomenon at work here. The spiritual impulse in
the general public is still alive and well, though distorted. We want to feel there is
something greater than ourselves, something mysterious and extraordinary, but our
traditional, fatherly notion of God seems too old-fashioned and irrelevant to many of us,
and a lot of the New Age ideas seem too mushily abstract and dare to require us to "get in
touch with ourselves," so we settle for our belief in UFOs, Bigfoot, and in the status of
celebrities as special beings different from ourselves. At the same time, we want to keep
the mysterious at arms' length, because direct knowledge of the extraordinary threatens
our more mundane, 21st century need for dominion and power, the need to believe the
world is a place completely explained by science and devoid of mystery. In other words,
we want to believe in God, or in UFOs, Bigfoot, and the special status of movie stars, but
when someone claims to have had a mystical experience of communion with God, to
have been abducted by UFOs or chased by Bigfoot, or when a movie star deigns to tell us
how to vote, we scoff, because our stubborn urgings towards childlike wonder are
embarrassing to our modern sensibilities and should not interfere with our daily lives.
The Hollywood pantheon must remain safely aloof in their hilltop mansions, God must
stay in the heavens where He belongs, because we will crucify any deity or demigod who
dares show his face on earth. There's ample evidence of this today, for we find nothing
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life, we gasped in awe as the symbols of the most powerful sector of the most powerful
nation in the world were knocked down like so many houses of cards. Our very sense of
the natural order of things was disturbed, because it was those buildings themselves
which shaped our sense of the natural order.
Think of how far we've come as a civilization, with our shrink-wrapped pork
chops and our shrink-wrapped selves, encased in towering glass-and-steel cages during
the work day, then zipping along in streamlined glass-and-steel cages on Goodyear tires
to our cookie cutter houses or apartment cells. From underground parking structure to
remote-control-operated garage, we need never glimpse the light of day unfiltered by
tinted windows. Drop a caveman into the center of, say, New York City, and watch the
poor disoriented clod, desperate for something he recognizes from the world of nature,
dash for the safety of the nearest tree (if there is one) or skitter down the subway stairs in
search of a cave.
Don't laugh at our Paleolithic friend. At least he's seeking something real. Most
of us don't even realize how lost our souls truly are in this topsy-turvy world, where
nature is a decoration, relegated to sidewalk plantings and manicured lawns. We still
have caveman brains inside our skulls, for evolution is immensely slower than human
progress, and our brains expect to see something natural, not man-made. The modern
urban environment is reshaping our minds, even our spirituality, our sense of what is real
and valuable. When you walk in a sun-dappled forest, then emerge into a flower-filled
clearing and gape at the looming, jagged silhouette of an immense mountain in the
distance, you are struck with a sense of both how small and how special you truly are,
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how privileged to appreciate and contemplate these wonders which existed long before
any human set eyes on them. If the spiritual impulse is present at all, you begin to ponder
the miracle of both this landscape and your own mind that perceives it. What's it all
about?
Walk through a city, however, and your sense impressions are dominated by
man's handiwork. Whether in the depths of a city canyon with walls of steel, glass, and
cut stone, or out in the flatland of the commercial landscape, hurtling along at inhuman
speed through concrete chutes with five lanes, the only splashes of color coming from
billboards instead of flowers, enticing you as a human pollinator to propagate the
consumer culture, you might be tempted to believe that there is no greater, all-
encompassing reality than what man creates himself. After all, even the stars at night
have trouble competing against the light which we throw up into the heavens. Instead of
being encouraged to experience what your heart is yearning for, the marvelous, unseen
dimension of the spirit, you are diverted by another unseen dimension, that which you
pick up from the air with your radio or television antenna, or download in bits through
your internet connection. The unrelenting assault of the media is seductive because it
joins our scattered lives together through the shared experiences of listening to the same
songs, watching the same shows and movies, eating the same McDonald's hamburger in
Peoria as you can in San Diego. If you start believing that this is what we truly share as
people, that this is what binds us together as human beings, then the media-controlled
public consciousness can be mistaken for a sort of community soul, a parallel dimension
that holds truth because it unites us from on high through hilltop transmitters, or through
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a latticework of cables spread across our civilization like spiders' webs. This network is
dominated more by The Man than by the public, yet it is so pervasive, so quasi-spiritual
in its ability to simulate something real and greater than ourselves, it threatens to replace
our connection with the truly transcendent and all-encompassing reality proclaimed by
the stars and trees and mountains.
Still, the "reality" provided for our senses by The Man is a pale imitation of the
real thing, so it's no wonder that we reach out for the only natural, godly creations still
available to us: each other. There's a reason why so many people have cell phones glued
to their ears 24/7. When everything you see around you is artificial and therefore
completely foreign to who you truly are, when all the people you encounter on your daily
rounds only stop long enough to get what they want from you, you have an urgent need to
hear from someone who has looked into your eyes and seen that you are there. As you
travel through the spiritual wasteland of your local urban landscape, that little voice
whispering through the earpiece of your cell phone convinces you that you still exist.
Self-Defense
I promised we would explore ways to become more introverted and intuitive, not
because they're inherently better than extraversion and the preference for physical
sensations (they're not), but because our culture tends to ignore these aspects of being.
The good news is that introversion and intuition are quite complementary. When you are
by yourself, you are better able to hear that "still, small voice" from the deepest part of
yourself, and when you listen to that voice, you'll find that it often urges you to circle the
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wagons around your soul when necessary to protect yourself from those who want to
move you in directions you don't want to go. This is not to say that you're cutting
yourself off from other people -- you just aren't being unduly influenced by them.
Let's leave intuition on the back burner for a few chapters and explore
introversion. I mentioned that introverts are often perceived as being selfish. It's
important to make a distinction between selfishness, which both extraverts and introverts
practice, and the sort of self-defense which introverts often employ. Selfishness is an
ego-centered outlook, a narrow point of view centered on personal gain and heedless of
the concerns of others. Introverted self-defense, in its pure form, is a sort of vigilant
mindfulness that others aren't always helping you, even when they think they are, because
it's impossible for them to know exactly who you are and what you need at this given
moment. There is often a tendency to be less agreeable when in an introverted mode,
because the need for companionship (which inevitably entails some form of self-
compromise) is not as much of a driving force. This attitude does not preclude
meaningful self-expression and communication with others, though sometimes the
introvert gives up on being understood and does shut himself off. When things are going
well, however, the healthy introvert projects a calm self-reliance which is appealing
because he sees himself and others quite clearly and is not overly needy of attention. If
introverts do not always seem to be the most overtly "nice" people in the room, it may be
helpful to remember that the person who is conventionally nice is often as boring as a
brick, because he's so well-adjusted to his society, such a paragon of what his culture
deems "good," we wonder if he is truly anthing other than what he's supposed to be.
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Every culture is a form of "group-think," and all groups have a natural distrust of
introverts, who seem more involved with their own concerns than with those of the
group. For most of us naturally extraverted types, the security, camaraderie, and sense of
identity we derive from belonging to a group far outweigh any desire to maintain and
defend our own personal way of being. This is why there is such a repetitive, dull
sameness to people who identify too strongly with a particular group, whether they label
themselves as "all-American," a "man's man," a "staunch Democrat" or a "devout
Presbyterian."
The problem inevitably occurs when some part of you feels the urge to hum a
different tune than the group you've identified yourself with. Maybe you'd like to think
you're an Average-Joe American, but you find that you hate Budweiser and love ballet.
Maybe you're a Baptist Republican who's pro-gay marriage. You then have to decide
whether to be true to yourself or true to the group. Staying true to the group will
certainly make your life easier as a group member, but then this means that you've given
up the pursuit of finding out who you are, what you're capable of, and what it is that you
truly love. Your life will not be an adventure of self-discovery, but a carefully performed
sideshow calculated to please others, while the person who should be living your life is
left as a spectator on the sidelines.
One could say that the process of personal growth is a gradual shedding of levels
of identification, resulting in a corresponding enlarging of your being. Today you think
of yourself as an Irish-American-Catholic-Democrat-New Yorker. As you get older,
your New York attitude mellows, you begin to see the Democrats as just another bunch
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of sell-outs, and you decide it's all right to use contraception, but not all right to get
sloshed every Saint Patrick's Day. As you get still older, you start looking at yourself as
just another guy, and you start socializing more with other groups of people (with non-
whites, even). After you start noticing your hair turning gray, you feel freer to simply
chat with women even when you have no intention of hitting on them. Eventually you
get so damn old you figure you might as well start thinking of yourself more as a human
than as a man. Then you notice you're feeding the pigeons and stray cats in the park.
The former brawler and carouser is now sympathizing with other species.
I know what you're thinking: "This poor dope has lost all his self-respect. He
hasn't a shred of self-identity left."
Not true. This Irish-American-Catholic-Democrat-New Yorker has finally
dropped his need to cling to the constricting labels of group identification, the crutches he
used to prop his sense of self-identity, that sense of his very existence which was
formerly tightly bound and rigidly defined, but is now expansive as the sky,
encompassing the world. No longer a provincial buffoon, he is now a citizen of the
cosmos.
There are two important things to remember here. First, you need not wait until
you're at death's door to move beyond your current group identifications. Second, you
don't need to drop any of your group identifications at all. You can still identify yourself
as a manly American Libertarian crusader, or a sensitive metrosexual Bon Jovi fan.
There's nothing actually wrong with group identification. The problem occurs only when
your group identification gets in the way of your process of self-discovery, when you
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start slapping yourself every time you catch yourself humming a Barry Manilow tune,
because there's no way a macho musical connoisseur like you could like such sappy pap,
or when you find that your reputation as a player is more important than getting to know
that feisty Plain Jane whom you're uncomfortably attracted to, probably because she sees
through your bullshit and isn't afraid to call you on it. There's something grand and
almost Shakespearean in the heroic efforts we expend to avoid learning more about
ourselves -- "Get thee hence, Barry Manilow! Canst thou not see I desire not to explore
mine own cheesy, sentimental nature?... And you, my un-fair lady, get thee to a nunnery!
Out of my sight, unsightly dame, so that I may gaze on mine own true love, smiling at me
from yon mirror... Thou art da man!"
Just Who Are You (Really?)
Do you really know yourself? "Of Course I do," you say. "I'm the one living
inside this bundle of skin and hair." Yes, that's true, but consider the obnoxious poodle
down the street who yaps at you insanely from the window every time you pass by. He's
living inside his own little bundle of skin and hair, but does he have a sense of self? Does
he say to himself, "Gee, I'm really proud that I can keep people away from the house.
Good job, Fifi?"
"Of course not," you say. "How dare you compare me to a dog? I know myself
because I'm human."
This, unfortunately, is where too many people stop when it comes to getting to
know themselves: "I don't get spooked when I see my reflection, mistaking the man in the
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mirror for an intruder; therefore, I know myself."
Okay, maybe I'm being a little cynical, but isn't it true that we don't value self-
reflection and introspection very highly? If you invite someone to dinner and they reply,
"No thanks, I want to spend tonight with myself," it's considered the ultimate slap in the
face. "You mean, you'd rather be alone than be with me? You must really hate me!" Of
course, this example is not very realistic, since most of us are living such isolated lives
(not by choice) that we jump at the chance of companionship. Perhaps that's why we hate
our own company so much -- because we're forced into isolation by modern life. You
walk alone on the city street even when you're surrounded by people, for they don't see
you, and that voice in your head can be a damn pesky nuisance... "Did I leave the hall
light on?... I wish I had a car like that... Is that woman staring at my zit?... I wish I had a
bag of Cheetos." It's no wonder we stick an iPod in our ears to drown out the never-
ending stream of inanities, self-put-downs, and imaginary worries. Why would you want
to spend quality time with yourself when your "self" is a nagging, sniveling dumb-ass?
Hold on a minute. Did you ever stop to think that this pestering voice in your
head is not the real you, the true you?
You're probably thinking I'm talking baloney, so I'm going to have to explain
myself, or, more appropriately, my selves.
Adam and Eve and You
You might find it curious that after expressing a seeming distrust of organized
religion, I now turn to the Bible for help in discussing the idea that there are different
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selves within us. If you do not find this surprising, I commend you, for it shows that you
do not equate the Bible with religion, or perhaps you've simply noticed that I like to
overstate my case to the point where I come across as a total anti-American, anti-
consumer, anti-corporate Unabomber-type misanthropist.
The Bible holds such a sanctified status in our culture that it tends to elicit "all-or-
nothing" attitudes that indicate little more than our ingrained, habitual reactions towards
perceived authority. Either we bow in total obeisance to every sacred word or we dismiss
the whole document as a collection of outdated stories used for controlling the minds of
the gullible. Both stances reflect an emotional response to the Bible's reputation rather
than an active engagement of our minds with the text. Stop for a moment and truly
"listen" to the Bible on its own terms and you may find yourself transposing your own
thoughts onto the templates provided by the stories ("Would Ieat the Forbidden Fruit ifI
had the chance?"), for these stories were designed to resonate with experiences
encountered by every person, the meaning expanding as it bounces back and forth
between you and the page like the sound of strummed strings amplifying inside an
acoustic guitar. Read the Bible with an open mind and you may discover that it is not so
much a key to spiritual truth as a lock which inspires you to search for a key you already
possess.
Let us be free and easy then in contemplating the Bible and "play around" a little
with the story of Adam and Eve to explore the idea that we are made up of different
selves.
Imagine Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Life is good. All their needs are
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taken care of by a benevolent, protective being watching over them. They don't have to
work, and they get to spend their days frolicking around, naked as the day they were
born. Sounds like a dead-accurate description of infancy, doesn't it? It's hard to even
contemplate adult human beings in such a state of innocence, probably because we all
mature emotionally as we grow physically, whereas Adam and Eve were "born," so to
speak, as fully-grown adults. If you had a normal upbringing, infancy was your brief
taste of paradise on earth, when you were at one with the world, simply responding to it
with your infant drives -- rooting around for Mama's nipple, crying when you couldn't
find it, and smiling at her huge Mardi Gras head making silly noises just to amuse you.
The idea of your individual existence was not even a possibility in your mind (just watch
a baby stare in amazement at the wondrous sight of his own moving hands), nor was the
idea of the past or the future. Everything was simply marvelously present, in the present,
and you were a part of all of it, and all you had to do was scream your head off to make it
better if it wasn't as nice as you wanted it to be.
Certain realities slowly began to intrude, however. For example, you found out
that you couldn't always do what you wanted to do. Mama snatched things away from
your mouth before you even got a chance to use your tongue probe, and it seemed that the
smaller and more insignificant the things were, the more she didn't want you to taste
them. Very strange.
It got to the point where you finally realized that she didn't automatically do what
you wanted her to do, that she even wanted things that went against(impossible!) what
you wanted. In other words, she was she and you were you. Could this be true?
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Adam and Eve were the same in that they wanted to put things in their mouths
that God didn't want them to put there (I'm talking about the Forbidden Fruit, in case your
dirty mind is headed in another direction). And just like you, they put those things in
their mouths anyway, and just like that, Adam and Eve (and you) realized that you each
were separate, individual beings, that you had your own will and could make your own
choices even if God (or Mama) got pissed off, because who are they to hog the good
stuff? So gimme what I want. Now. Why? Because I wantit.
The Miracle of Me
Thus begins your great love affair with yourself. The "Terrible Twos" are nothing
more than the antics of a child hopelessly smitten with the most wonderful and
fascinating new acquaintance, who happens to reside in his own body. The identification
of "me" with the ferocious will contained in this small bundle of skin and hair, separate
and distinct and more important than the rest of the world, has been achieved, and now
it's time to test the limits, to see what this baby can do, and no one (not even Mama) is
going to stop you.
But hold on. Maybe Mama can be useful. After all, since you've just discovered
yourself through the realization of your separateness, and she's the main thing you've
separatedfrom, she defines you, in a way. She's the dull, drab background that sets off
flamin' hot you, the incandescent foreground.
"Look, Ma! Look what I can do! I said look, dammit!"
This is the strange paradox of the ego: just when you create your own sense of
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separateness and individuality, you find that you need other egos to prove to yourself that
you exist, or more precisely, that you're worthy of existence. Mama's smile can inflate
your ego to fill the heavens, but her frown can pop it like a toy balloon. And what about
Dad? What kind of a circus juggling act do you have to perform to get a human response
from this joker? It's enough to make a baby cry.
You'd better get used to crying, and if you're a boy, you'd better get used to doing
it on the inside. It's not easy to please Mom and Dad and be a kid at the same time. A lot
of us tend to choose one extreme or the other, either becoming a Mama's boy or a little
rascal. As adults, we side with society's standards or with our own ego, either becoming
repressed prudes or amoral players of a self-refereed game with no meaning.
"Yes, but the key to life is to balance the good boy and the bad boy, to work hard
when you have to and raise hell when you've got time off."
This is the most tired clich in the male playbook. Do we really have to live our
lives like modern-day sailors impressed against our wills into a corporate navy, enduring
the relentless drudgery of life on board a three-masted savings and loan or slinging hash
in the galley of the Sloop John Applebee's Monday through Friday, then whooping it up
at our favorite downtown-dive port-of-call on the weekends? When we finally drop
anchor long enough to raise a brood of kids with a buxom lass, we get an itch to escape
rather than suffer through the unending harangue of listening to them whine about how
we're always at sea.
Isn't there another way?
I believe there is, and it hinges on seeing a deeper aspect of yourself, more central
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than the angel and the devil of your personality, those two impostors who take turns
making you feel guilty or deprived. There's a good chance you're already in touch with
this core part of your being. But if you're not, I have to assume that you're too distracted
by the illusions created by The Man, or by your own mind. You leave me with no
recourse but to take off the kid gloves and slap them across your face. Put up your
mental dukes, because I'm coming after you.
Terms of Engagement
My beef with you is dependent on my supposition (totally unjustifiable, but
simply irresistible to my pugnacious heart) that you are either an amoral egotist or a
hopeless goody two-shoes. In order for you to see another option that is not simply a
balance or mean between these two extremes, I must do nothing less than engage in a full
frontal attack upon the worldview that keeps you trapped in this two-dimensional, either-
or reality.
As you may recall, I said that my aim in writing this book was to provoke.
I've changed my mind. I am going to land a blow to the solar plexus of your
head.
Airing Out the Brain
My aim in the next few chapters is to land a blow to the solar plexus of your head.
"Ain't gonna happen."
Well, okay. Your mental defenses have been toughened through years of
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vigorous sparring with other points of view. But little did you know that I've been trained
in the esoteric ways of the East. I will redirect the force of your intellectual power
against you so that you trip over your own logic. Impudent Western man, can you not
see that your rigid faculties of reason are no match against the fluid force of my intuitive
methods? Mwa, ha, ha, ha!
Okay, I'm bluffing with the Far Eastern trash talk. Realistically, my only hope is
to give you pause, to help you put your customary frame of mind on hold for a split
second, just long enough to let something else enter your consciousness, not something
from me, but something from you, something that through force of habit has tended to
remain quietly in the background, bullied into obscurity by the certainties which hog the
spotlight.
In the next pages, if you grow tired of my taking sides against everything we're
"supposed" to believe in, just recall that I'm not seeking to damage the vigor of our
cultural point of view, which provides us with solid foundations for the mental house we
live in -- it's just that it's beginning to feel stuffy in here because we've painted the
windows shut. We can see what's going on outside, but we can'tfeelit. If we smash the
windows first to air out our brains, maybe we'll find that the weather's not as cold as we
thought. And then maybe, just maybe, we'll actually step outside.
Absolutely Wrong
The Yoruba people of West Africa tell a story about the illusory nature of
absolute certainty. The tale involves the trickster god Eshu, a devious deity if ever there
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was one.
One day Eshu decided to have some fun with the inhabitants of two neighboring
villages. He strolled down the road between the two villages, wearing a hat that was
black on the left side, white on the right. The villagers on the left side of the road
commented to their neighbors across the way about the man with the black hat.
"You are mistaken," the neighbors replied. "He was wearing a white hat."
"You must be blind as bats. It was black."
"You must be crazy fools or liars. It was white."
"How dare you call us liars!"
Things quickly got out of hand, and in some versions of the story the two villages
wipe each other out in armed conflict over the color of a hat.
You can glean from this story whatever moral you want, but I'm interested in
exploring why each village was so certain they had a lock on the truth. It's not just a
matter of each village looking at the hat from different points of view. Both villages also
had to make an assumption that the hat was all of one color. But for the villagers, this
was felt to be a given rather than a supposition, something taken for granted because it
was backed up by countless previous experiences with solid-colored hats.
Some would call this inductive reasoning. You take a given set of observations
("Every hat I've ever seen has been of one color.") and infer a general truth ("Allhats are
of one color."). This process of assuming something to be true from experience tends to
close off even the possibility in your mind of an exception. This is a useful tool for
negotiating your way around the world because it gives you the confidence to "know"
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things without checking every side of every hat you come across, but it also puts a
blinder on your consciousness of the world, because it prevents you from checking the
other side of a hat when it just might bring you closer to the whole truth of reality. After
all, two-colored hats really arepossible.
Common Nonsense
What blinders limit our own conceptions of reality? What assumptions have we
made that prevent us from seeing beyond our own certainties?
Before we begin to explore these self-imposed limitations, I ask you to keep in
mind two things:
1). Much of what we take for granted as common sense is taught to us.
2). The truths we most take for granted are also the most limiting to our
consciousness of reality, as well as the hardest to see beyond.
In support of the first claim (we'll investigate the second claim in later chapters), I
present an experiment conducted by Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten at the
University of St. Andrews. In it, both chimps and children were shown by an adult how
to open a puzzle box by a series of steps involving pushing on rods and poking through
holes. Both chimps and children learned the steps and succeeded in opening the box to
get a treat. However, when presented with the same puzzle box, but this time made of
transparent plastic, the chimps immediately saw that all the steps except the last were
confined to a section of the box that had no influence on the section with the treat, so they
immediately skipped to the last step to get the goody. The children, on the other hand,
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still went through all the superfluous, nonsensical steps to get their treat. Whether you
interpret this experiment as showing that children are trusting innocents, eager brown-
noses, lazy good-for-nothings, or easily intimidated mini-conformists, one thing remains
clear: given the right conditions, incredibly silly things with no bearing on reality can be
passed by humans from one generation to the next.
Now let's get to the nitty gritty, the bedrock truths that have been passed down to
us by our forefathers, and we'll begin (where else?) with the Bible, literally the Genesis of
our beliefs.
"In the Beginning..."
How fitting that these first three words of the defining document of Western
culture hint at one of its primary characteristics. The key word here is "the," which
should be underlined, capitalized, and printed in boldface. This is not just a beginning,
it's the beginning -- of everything, including time. The emphasis is on definitiveness.
There is just one beginning of time, as there is just one God. We love certainty and
decisiveness, the marks of a good ruler, which is what we expect God to be. The fact that
the Bible is what you might call the most complete narrative ever (it begins at the very
beginning and ends with a prediction of the End of Days) gives it a comforting sense of
closure for those who hate the open-ended. No loose threads here.
But let's get back to the beginning, when God creates his creations and, perhaps
even more importantly, imposes order by separating his creations in both space ("God...
divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above
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the firmament") and time ("Thus evening came and morning followed -- the first day").
God also categorizes his creations by giving them names ("God called the light Day, and
the darkness he called Night").
In less than the space of half a page, the specific flavor and drive of Western
civilization -- its intellectual and spiritual style -- is laid out clearly. We seek to
understand the universe by dividing it into discrete categories, differentiated by their
unique characteristics and their separation in space and time. We name and define things
and events, just as God did, breaking up the world into comprehensible chunks. We also
work in linear time with an aim towards progress, just as God worked in a steady,
accumulating progression, creating light on the first day, Heaven on the second, and so
on. Last but not least, we judge ourselves based on our achievements, just as God looked
on his Creation with satisfaction and "saw that it was good."
Oops, there's something I forgot to mention, probably because it's something I
take for granted when reading the Bible -- God is unabashedly male. In fact, there's a
characteristically masculine thrust to just about everything he does. For instance, God
imposes himself decisively on the void in order to effect Creation. He is the "first cause"
rather than the ground of being, the seed rather than the soil, the guy who does unto
rather than is done unto.
Think for a moment of the sex act (just for a moment, now) or of a sperm
swimming headlong into a waiting egg, and you will see why we think of masculinity as
defined by "penetrating" qualities (dominating, aggressive firmness) and of femininity as
defined by "receptive" qualities (yielding, accommodating flexibility). Since we consider
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God the one and only "Supreme Being," the specifically male qualities we've attributed to
him at the outset of the most influential book in the Western world can be looked at as
either reflective of, or leading towards, an inflation of the masculine and a devaluation of
the feminine in our culture.
"I Speak, Therefore I Think"
The first page of the Bible also points out the fundamental importance of
language. God speaks before he creates ("Let there be light") and also after he creates
("God called the light Day"). In other words, language is essential for both creation and
the comprehension of creation. Though you can argue the truth of this attitude, you can't
deny its influence on our cultural point of view. It's therefore a good idea to explore the
nature of our own language, for it influences our thinking in insidious ways.
English is a language that is frequently linear and fragmented, much like the
linear time and divided world presented on the first page of the Bible. Let's examine a
simple phrase in our Anglo-Saxon tongue: "The mailman kicked the dog."
When comprehending this sentence, we immediately think of a "doer" and a
"receiver": a "subject" (the mailman) does something to an "object" (the dog). Besides
the obvious separation of the subject and object in space, there is also a linear progression
of cause and effect through time; the mailman initiates a kick at one point in time, which
is then received by the dog at a later point in time. We take it for granted that this
"subject/object" mode of speaking is reflective of reality as it actually is, and not simply
of a worldview we have been taught to accept.
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One individual who does not take this worldview for granted is F. David Peat, a
physicist who became frustrated by the inability of the subject/object style of English
sentences to describe and explain the weird world of quantum physics, that wacky
domain where the scientist's very act of observing seems to create the reality he observes.
Quantum phenomena like this make little sense to our discrete, linear modes of thought,
yet appear to be perfectly real when examining an overwhelming body of experimental
evidence from the laboratory. Peat believes that the study of the Algonquian family of
Native American languages can be helpful in achieving a conceptual understanding of
these experimental results, because he feels these languages represent a completely
different way of thinking. Quantum phenomena, which seem frustratingly intangible
when described in our tangibly precise language, do not seem so far-fetched in the
Algonquian tongues, which are perfectly suited for describing the intangible, since verbs
are more important than nouns in those languages -- which is another way of saying that
interactions are more important than things for the Algonquians.
Peat explains the differences between the two languages (and the two ways of
thinking) by presenting a phrase in the Montagnais language, "Hipiskapigoka iagusit,"
translated into English as "the medicine person sings a sick man." This translation
doesn't make sense, because we are trying to force our linear, fragmented mindset onto a
language which prefers to think in terms of "timeless" process and unity. In the
Algonquian worldview, it doesn't matter who is singing to whom. The central, living
reality is that singing is going on now, and this singing, as an active process of mutual
interaction, unifies the medicine person and the sick man in a healing way.
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Process vs. Progress
In encountering a culture such as the Montagnais that stresses process over
progress, perhaps the hardest thing for us to understand is a phenomenon that the Hindus
call "non-attachment to the outcome."
A Montagnais healer is perhaps better called a "healing," for he does not actually
think of himself as doingany healing -- he merelyparticipates in a process called healing
to such a total degree that his very self is subsumed into the activity. His identity or pride
is not attached to the outcome of the process, because in the end the outcome is not up to
him, but to the process itself, which includes the sick man as an equal partner. The healer
understands that the more he is able to let go of his own investment in the outcome, the
more of his self remains free to give over to the healing process (because it's not "stuck"
on results), and the more effective the healing will therefore be.
In our culture, we place such an emphasis on successful outcomes that we often
sabotage our own positive results with distracting anxieties about whether or not we'll
achieve those results. We do have people like the Montagnais healer, however. Ask any
top-notch surgeon if, in the middle of a triple-bypass operation, he spends his time
worrying about whether he'll succeed or fail. The reason he's a top-notch surgeon is that
he gives himself over totally to the task at hand, just like the healing Montagnais.
Ask this doctor later about what it feels like to be "in the zone" while he's
operating, and he's liable to tell you that he's in such an utterly different place mentally
that time has no meaning -- he can't be sure whether minutes or hours have passed. This
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is the same sense of time we experience when an intense two-hour conversation with a
friend feels like a few minutes. It's the reason why browsing the internet is so addictive,
and it might be even more important than adrenaline for adrenaline-junkies. It's also the
"time out of time" that native peoples have lived in as a matter of course for thousands of
years.
Where did we go wrong?
Perhaps "wrong" is too strong a word. Our antsy ambition has taken us to the
moon and back, after all. We actually expectto make the world better over time. After
all, God made improvements to his Creation every day (except Sunday) of his first week
on the job. It was inevitable that we would make progress part of our ethic of interacting
with the world, because now the improvements are up to us. Unfortunately, we've made
a fetish out of progress by equating it with materialistic achievements, such as making
more money, and by narrowing its focus to include just our own lives ("As long as I'm
better off, the rest of you can jump in the lake.").
There is a peculiarly male flavor to our notion of time, which becomes
immediately apparent when we compare it to the alternative vision of time, which is
circular and repetitive, just like the cycles of the sun, the moon, the seasons, and, yes, the
monthly cycles of women themselves. It doesn't take much imagination to view our
linear arrow of time as a phallus, or to see the circle of cyclical time as a womb. And
since our arrow is meant to hit a target, we don't so much live in the present as in
anticipation of reaching a future objective, which, increasingly, is a goal we're supposed
to want rather than a dream we feel in the marrow of our bones. Life takes on the
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character of a race -- reach your goal before you die. Instead of asking yourself, "Am I
happy now?," it's always "What have I done and what willI do to reach my goal?" Lord
help you if you suffer the ultimate anti-climax of actually achieving your goal and finding
out that the brass ring you've been reaching for loo
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