The Subconscious and Climate Change
The Mahout, the Elephant and the Path. The mahout represents the rational and reasoned. If the mahout clearly understands where he needs to go he’ll direct his charge that way. The elephant represents the subconscious.
It seems incredible that the subconscious mind was first postulated by Sigmund Freud. If you are elderly it is likely that your grandparents imagined that the entire content of their mind was accessible to conscious contemplation.
Freud’s discovery opened the way for a flowering of scientific investigation into the nature of the occult workings of the human brain.
Now my knowledge of psychology is very much undergraduate level, and mid 20th century at that, so I would be more than happy to be corrected on any mistakes in this essay.
My interest is in what we might call the hierarchy of subconscious instincts, and how they might arise.
It is well known that new born babies carry into the world a knowledge of certain dangers. A well known example is fear of heights. This is an obviously useful phobia which is helpful for surviving the world outside the womb. To overcome fear of heights later in life is challenging.
Then there’s the instincts acquired at an early age, and within a definite time-window. An example of this was called “imprinting”. Imprinting involved among other things the recognition of the faces of family as well as the development of sexual preferences.
All this subconscious structure is in place to allow us to navigate the material world without having to learn by trial and error, “the hard way”. As such it is pivotal to our survival, and for this reason would not be given up lightly. We hang on to these precepts tenaciously even though we are only aware of them via emotional responses, rather than in the form of conscious thought.
This explains the phenomenon of “confirmation bias” where we ignore information that is counter to our (subconscious) world view. To do otherwise is to risk destabilising our grip on reality. This may well apply to the condition called post traumatic stress disorder,
Dogs provide a good example of the way this process works. Dogs seem to be either terrified of thunder or completely indifferent to it, and it seems to depend on whether or not they have experienced a thunder storm during puppyhood. If they have experienced thunder during that critical period it becomes part of their internal model of the world, and is accepted as “normal”. If on the other hand they first experience it in later life it produces absolute terror as does any other dramatic alien phenomenon encountered. Primitive humans deal with unfamiliar phenomena by invoking supernatural beings.
I think this mechanism could be useful in explaining some other seemingly irrational aspects of human behaviour.
Imagine a child born into a radical Islamist household. At a very early age a subconscious model of the world would form in which an omnipresent Allah holds dominion. This picture would be re-enforced through to adulthood. There would be no shortage of media stories about evil acts perpetrated by Infidels, all consistent with the call to kill non-believers. Living in, say, a non-English speaking suburb of Sydney, surrounded by a community with similar views, there would be little opportunity to develop a counter narrative. For de-radicalisation to work it would be necessary to erase this subconscious world view, probably impossible without erasing the identity of the individual concerned (whatever that might mean).
Let’s have a look at climate hysteria in this context. The pedagogues driving this would be left leaning, meaning that they have an ingrained belief that Capitalism is innately oppressive and that socialism offers a more moral system of government. In a move that is so clever it is difficult to believe that it has not been carefully planned, fossil fuels are targeted as the horsemen of the apocalypse.
Never mind that not just capitalism but civilisation itself is threatened.
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Wally
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Reminds me of the 24/7/365 “Holocaust” indoctrination.
Even thought the alleged ‘Nazi gas chambers’ were scientifically impossible and the alleged human remains of millions upon millions which are claimed to exist in known locations, in fact do not exist;
the impossible tale of ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ persists because some people want to or need to believe in the impossible. It’s generally called ‘religion’.
Only lies require censorship.
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Andy Rowlands
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You won’t win many new friends with that statement.
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Andy Rowlands
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Interesting ideas here. Whenever I hear about the subconscious, it always reminds me of the Id Monster from Forbidden Planet.
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James McGinn
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Turning us all into liars and brain-dead believers, the subconscious evolved as a means by which we maintain our ability to be reprogrammed with a new ideology. Human’s are not rational but are hyper-pseudo rational, meaning that we have a deep emotional attachment to the belief in the absolute certainty of our ideological beliefs.
Human’s are programmed through culture to have an ideology that comes part and parcel with an attitude to ownership of resources, especially territorial resources. This programming enabled our earliest communities to adjust to changes in level of scarcity/wealth in the context of dramatic annual shifts in level of scarcity/wealth as a result of dramatic shifts in level of rainfall in the monsoon habitat that emerged in east Africa about 7 million years ago.
Human communities were in competition with one another to maintain resources, keep migrating species from destroying their water supply and eating their garden resources, and to keep predators at bay. Failure could often result in extinction or at least the decimation of whole communities during the depths of the dry season. But these earliest hominid communities were rarely at war with one another. Instead, all communities were in a constant state of war against all other species with which they competed for often scarce resources.
Language, logic, and consciousness all emerged as part of communities overall strategy for our earliest pre-hominid ancestors to collectively achieve shifts in ideological perspective and, thereby, adjust to changes in level of scarcity/wealth in the context of dramatic annual shifts thereof, in order to maintain possession of protected territorial resources to survive the deadly dry season.
Us humans live our whole lives under the spell of a delusion that we are rational. We are capable of being logical, but logic actually evolved as a tool to achieve programming. Specifically, we use logic as a tool for story telling. And storytelling is the means by which we acheive programming and reprogramming of ideological perspective.
The currently popular Tool-using hunter/gatherer hypothesis is nonsense. Humans evolved logic and rational abilities as a means to achieve storytelling. It would take millions of years of human evolution before our ability to use logic had evolved enough sophistication that we would could start discovering the benefits of tools and tool making.
In addition to being communally territorial, our ancestors have been agricultural over the full breadth of human evolution. We have also always been warriors. Agriculture and war were the same thing. We used rocks and sticks to collectively maintain territorial resources against the constant onslaught of inmigrating species who if not stopped would destroy the community’s resources that it depended on to survive the deadly dry season. The evolution of a vertical stance in the earliest years of hominid evolution was instrumental in enabling us to be better rock throwing, stick wielding, noise making pest control agriculturalist.
The mistake that everybody makes when they get involved in scientific discussions and witness the unrelenting intellectual dishonesty in others is to assume that others are not witnessing the same in themselves. We are all liars, caught in the spell of our ideological delusions. And our subconcious protects us from any realization that would break the spell.
James McGinn / Woke Meteorology
https://anchor.fm/james-mcginn
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