Mr. Smith had piqued my interest. The idea of water as a solvent was obvious, but ubiquity had placed it beneath conscious awareness. What is a solvent but an agent that when introduced to another causes its disintegration?
Of course, as that world-view dissolved, an ostensibly more accurate revision asserted itself. But according to the principle, the revision had to be equally vulnerable to dissolution.
The concept of solvents applied to the world of the mind, that much was clear. The metaphor became the paradigm and was driving the alignment of its ramifications.
What exactly were the mental equivalents of chemical solvents and the things they dissolved? These had to be ideas. There was, therefore, a whole chemistry of ideas. Ideas could be inert or they could be combustible. They could be stable or unstable. Ideas could be soluble or insoluble. They could compose and decompose; be catalysts, like the idea of solvents had been. Most importantly, ideas could be neutral, or have positive or negative charges; they could be polarized.
Functionally, ideas viewed as chemical elements and reactions could be seen as on- and off- switches, as triggers, as medicines, as balms, as poisons, as incendiaries. Ideas could affect people like opiates and narcotics, like tranquilizers or stimulants. The analogy seemed completely coextensive. It all made sense and was fascinating.
Had Mr. Smith noticed my vacant expression, he would probably have assumed that it was due to adolescent distraction. Instead, my thoughts had gone off in pursuit of the full extent and boundaries of the metaphorical implications. Ideas, like chemicals, I realized, deserved their own periodic table.
Unfortunately, knowing what is happening or that it is happening, is no protection. A person may think that being conscious of the process is tantamount to being defended, or “inoculated,” against ideas as active agents, but such is not the case. On the contrary, it is a delusion, one of many delusions inherent in consciousness, that blinds a person to the fact of its happening, and this is yet another of the ideo-chemical reactions of which I was becoming aware. Seeing, reading, listening and hearing with comprehension is tantamount to getting the full dosage.
Several years afterwards, in college, we learned that, for ages already, philosophers have been admonishing people: “Know Yourself!” But knowing that our heads are beakers containing some stable, some unstable, some potentially volatile mixtures of ideas made this admonition patently absurd. Which of these ideas in the mix was to form a stable basis from which to evaluate the others?—particularly when one considers the fact that all of those ideas are reactive elements in and interactive components of one and the same dynamical system: the ecology of mind.
It seemed obvious that religions had been contrived to play this part. Their authority, their essential reality, to my view, collapsed with that realization.
There is no sentient eye in the universe behind which some volatile ideological soup isn't roiling and spattering; and that can only mean that there is no objective truth.
But for every ideological cauldron in a human body there are subjective truths; albeit, impermanent ones. Truths that are more or less transient. Any so-called truths would have to be the "heaviest" elements (by the metaphorical weight of social and cultural convention) or the most stable ideas, or complexes of ideas; those that dominate and endure at least long enough to manifest themselves in some form of expression through the body: in the emotions, on the face, in the behavior, speech, in writing, or in images. These subjective and relative truths are the ideas and complexes of ideas that constitute the beliefs, the values, and the assumptions—the structural elements of mind.
These bipartite frames are variously called dichotomies, or binaries, and they create artificial oppositions, choices, dilemmas, and pairings of concepts that by this very imposed association come to entail the implication of antagonism.
Regardless, of all these deficiencies, the human brain appears to have no recourse other than to try to reduce matters to binaries.
A large part of the appeal of binaries is founded upon the mutually definitive dynamic that operates between the two juxtaposed facets by virtue of logic: the act of postulating the obverse brings the reverse into existence by the dynamic of logical contrast. What the obverse is defined to be instantaneously excludes and therefore sequesters to the reverse all that which is excluded. At base, once the binary is framed, it engenders consequent reasoning by disjunctive syllogism: either p or q; not p, therefore q.
Although under certain carefully defined and qualified circumstances this may be valid, it is also irresistibly seductive, and invites minds to indulge in applying the formula in waves that radiate outward across categories: “us or them; not us, therefore them; we are good; they are not us; therefore they are bad; we are right; they are not us; therefore, they are wrong”; et cetera. As the process cascades, it creates an entity on the reverse side of the coin that is everything that the obverse is not, and attributes a range of potentially devastating characteristics to it by simple disjunctive imperative.
The disjunctive cascade rolls out automatically and seems to answer a range of questions with enough logical certainty that somatic markers are likely to be created by the subsystems of the brain to reinforce the conclusions so generated; that is to say that visceral feelings of certainty are secreted to psychically reinforce such conclusions.
It is important to remember, however, that the entire process proceeds within the mind and without reference to external proofs, and therefore is likely to possess an exclusively human reality.
Polarization, or the binary disjunctive, also functions like a solvent. In a fast process, it reduces the immediately relevant universe to a pair of antagonistic alternatives, dissolves one of them by the process described in the preceding section, and leaves the other to authorize action almost instantly. The process requires virtually no conscious thought whatsoever, and thus is a transformation that leads to fast and decisive action.
Beside such stable binaries, there are ideologically unstable binaries which cause various degrees of chaotic perturbation in different societies. One of these is the unstable binary: Accomplishment / Process. In the context of American culture, the polarity of this binary is unstable: it vacillates, or oscillates, leading some to pursue as superior absorption in process, while leading others to pursue manifest or durable accomplishment—the diametric opposite.
In any particular culture, innumerable unstable binaries may be found wreaking havoc among the stable ones.
To clarify with several examples, the American culture has positioned the following as relatively stable polarized binaries, and has determined that one facet of each pair is positive, or operationally dominant: the idea of more as superior to less; the idea of material over spirit; the idea of individual over group; of action over thought; of new over old; of now over then; of fast over slow; of us over them; of might over right; of appearance over content, and façade over truth; of rich over poor; of white over black; of ends over means; of young over old; and of fun over practically everything else. The full array is too lengthy to list here—even if that were possible!
The machines of culture, ironically, take on lives of their own—and lives not necessarily aligned with the best interest of the species. Just as small binary machines compose machines called cultures, so too do cultures compose the larger machine of the global human community. The cultures are systems of ideas and valuations that often compete with one another for dominance and power in the larger sphere of the human community. This accounts for the fact that this larger machine of the global human community is and has always been characterized by threats of and actual violence, slaughters, murders, rapes, genocides, and mass-enslavements of both the physical and the economic kinds.
In attempting to produce perfect stereotypes, cultures encounter difficulties arising from: a) physiological variations among the brains of the population; b) imperfections in the process of enculturation; c) the interference wrought by antagonistic ideas and competing cultures; d) free and divergent ideas, strings of ideas, and partial and complete ideological complexes such as religions and national, ethnic, and gender identities. If not for these difficulties, each individual enculturated in the same cultural matrix would be as alike to all the others as peas of the same pod. The only differences between members of the species would be manifest in physiological variations, even as mannerisms, gestures, and expressions cleaved to one norm.
PART VI. Heroes and Identities
The array of positive attributes embodied in the hero-image are the points of adherence and communion for a culturally homogeneous audience. The cultural identities of the audience members comprise that same array of culturally determined attributions, more or less, so the audience cannot help but assimilate to the hero, there being no salient difference between themselves and the hero. Members of the audience are, potentially, duplicates or stereotypes of the identical cultural complex and thus, avatars themselves. The enculturated audience melds with the properly constructed hero like water into water.
In hero stories, as the hero dominates the extra-cultural world as manifested by various nemeses, and does so by virtue of the strength and power inherent in the shared cultural complex of positive attributes that he or she embodies, the audience is confirmed in its faith in its culture, and individuals are confirmed in their identities. Those cultural attributes inform, invest, and inspire the gender identities, national identity, and the range of socially acceptable persona-identities of the audience.
The positive attributes of the cultural array are the touchstones of social and societal communion. They confer upon their bearers existence itself, within the socio-cultural context. The greater the number of culturally positive attributes displayed, the greater the social substance, ontological status, and power of the one who manifests them.
The one who displays evidence of a full array of culturally positive traits is said by members of that milieu to have character. In the event of an encounter with an individual or group that fails to manifest a sufficient number of positive culture traits, a defensive reflex erects in-group/out-group boundaries (in accordance with strategic polarization, as discussed in part two). This defensive reflex runs down the full array of culturally positive attributes defining disjunctively the out-one, or out-group, by contrast, building an exclusionary boundary around them.
People, and characters in texts, without these cultural traits become progressively insubstantial, or unreal. To the extent of the lack, these characters drift toward social insignificance, toward social invisibility. Such a defensive social reflex is automatic and tends to run to completion; at which point, the perceived outsider or out-group has been defined by an array that is everything that the in-group is not. It is an identification constructed by attributing to the individual or group so objectified the inverse of the cultural paradigm. It is inevitable that this entails for the one(s) objectified a potentially lethal loss of ontological status and moral protection. Such objectification often reaches the extreme binary determination: “We are human; he/she/they are not,” with tragic dehumanization resulting. It is the bedrock binary of social construction: “it exists / it does not exist.” Once this point has been reached, the objectified character has lost all ontological status and no longer merits human compassion. Such an “outed” character may be utterly ignored, or cruelly used; murder is freed from its moral sanction; the killing, the torture, the exile of the out-one(s) no longer carries moral or ontological significance.
Within a cultural paradigm, appearances, behaviors, and verbal expressions are formalized to express specific ideas and identities. The ideas associated with visual and aural signs are matters of cultural convention. They cleave to cultural value judgments. For each member of the society, generally speaking, to the extent that the ideas associated with the appearance are not belied by the ideas associated with the behavior or those associated with the language used, a person is adjudged honest, or sincere, or true, and will be accorded the trust and credibility of an in-group member. It is basic social competence to harmonize one's appearance, behavior, and verbal expression. Conversely, to the extent that any of the ideas transmitted by the visual or aural signals presented by a person seem dissonant, unease will be triggered in response, and social trust and credibility will dissolve, dissipate, or fail to materialize.
Since Mr. Smith's class in junior high school, I have known that knowing of this, being conscious of it, is no inoculation. The ideological processes of mind occur beneath the level of consciousness. But the fact that investigating these matters does not confer immunity is not a good reason to retreat from it. Compelling puzzles remain unanswered.
For all my preoccupation with ideas it might be thought that I had forgotten the human body. Such is not the case. People, by their behavior, make this impossible to forget for any length of time. Here is another thing I know: that beneath the cultural beakers and the ideological alchemy, humans are animals driven by hungers, and by such strong emotions as fear. We are one of the five species of Great Apes with whom we share membership in the family hominidae of the order of the Primates—but with one critical difference: the lost capacity for true contentment.
The complacency of our cousins, the chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, is striking by contrast to the restlessness of homo sapiens. It is the large, sophisticated neocortex of the human brain and its expanded capacity for consciousness, memory, language, awareness, and thought, that accounts for the difference.
In humans, the neocortex supports the emergent human mind, while the mammalian and reptilian brain complexes beneath it and immediate to our sensory engagement with the natural world sustain the physical human animal. If these latter brain complexes had never been surmounted by the enlarged neocortex, humans would never have left the forests of Africa. They would be, ceteris paribus, as the chimpanzees remain: social animals content with their ecological niche. But with the enlargement of the cortex came the emergence of the mind and its ideologies and capacity for idealization; and consequently, the engine of movement in discontent.
Before the bifurcation of mind occurs, the human animal is immersed in reality and at one with it, like the other apes. After the bifurcation, the here-and-now of the physical body fixed in time and place loses ontological status as it comes to exist as the less desirable moiety in juxtaposition with a constructed conceptual world of ideals. Thereafter, the projected or envisioned universe of homelands, utopias, Gardens of Eden, idealized communities, and of satiation and contentment, grows in power in the psychological ecology of mind to the detriment of the actual reality of physical experience.
The existence of the idealizations—and the powerful emotion called hope that charges and gilds them—denigrates the actual so that the negatively-charged emotions of dissatisfaction, discontentment, dislocation, and alienation become associated with actual physical circumstances. It is the dynamic of binary polarization. Mental focus and energy shift toward the ideal and away from the actual, reducing psychic presence and efficacy in the body. The powerful emotions of hope, faith, and desire continue to drive the bifurcation of mind as they charge positively the ideal world, the future, and such goals as pleasure, harmony, happiness, adventure, fun, fantasy, satisfaction, fulfillment, and homecoming. By the force inherent in disjunctive polarization, the complementary negative and equally powerful emotions of disillusionment, disaffection, and disengagement drive the psychic energy, or spirit, away from the actual physical circumstances of the individual. This polarization is the source of dynamic energy that drives the individual to strive away from the actual and toward the ideal. In the process, contact with reality is progressively diminished. The psychic friction of engagement between mind and the physical world is lost as emotions lubricate the interface. To the extent—and it is a broad spectrum of degrees—that emotions are aroused in response to ideals and become strongly associated with them, rational thought processes are squelched.
Idealizations are, in fact, highly evocative of emotions, and highly likely to be strongly charged with them. The individual driven by a strongly bifurcated, ideal-real mind, gives up driving and is driven, often quite predictably. Grifters, salespeople, politicians, propagandists, lawyers, authors, and the proselytizers of various disciplines, faiths and religions, all know of this vulnerability and exploit it as a tool of their trade.
As individuals become removed from reality and immersed in a bifurcated world, the means of crossing from the shadow world of hunger into the illuminated world of satiation become paramount. To escape from the unfulfilling actuality of the present to the fulfilled ideal of the future, ways and means of transformation and translocation become supremely important—journeys, migrations, metamorphoses, and programs, designs, schemes, and plans to effect change, such as missions and quests, are initiated. The conceptualization of human life departs from metaphors that entail stasis or contentment to replace them with metaphors of journeys, voyages, and metamorphoses. The bifurcated mind posits the ideal against the real, and between them is born the concept of universal plasticity. Everything is plastic and subject to transformation, metamorphosis, to re-shaping, re-modeling, re-creating—even to every dimension of the human being: body, soul, personality, and identity.
The world is contrasted to the mind in the ultimate polarized binary in which the mind sequesters the positive charge to itself and its envisioning, to its ideas and ideals. On the other side of the coin is a negatively charged world from which people are detached by virtue of their minds, and through which they go adventuring. This conceptualization crystallizes and is preserved in the anti-natural cultural array. The contentment of the apes, their embodied lives in their ancestral groves, is betrayed and abandoned. Humanity has forgotten that it is one species of ape, preferring instead to see itself as a race of demigods. Humanity is descended from Cain, the other apes from Abel.
The metaphors of journeys travel roads, those of voyages sail the seas, and both traverse a world, a sea, of change. The individuated self assimilates to its idealizations, and by disjunctive framing, all other people assimilate to the world.
In its idealizing, each individual self conceives of itself as one unique paradigm, sui generis, distinct from and superior to the rest of humanity, while the rest of humanity becomes an element of the landscape or sea that is traversed. As such, people are reduced to obstacles or objects to be used; they become semi-transparent ghosts, pernicious pests, or resources to be exploited. Idealizations are solvents of realistic conceptions. The connectedness of humanity as one community is an idea that is dissolved in them.
To those whose identities assimilate to idealized heroes, and whose lives are idealized as journeys, or quests, the world is reduced to a theater of uncertainty, complexity, and threat; its dimensions are chaotic, dynamic, all in flux, and there is risk inherent in every passing instant.
There is what I call the “romance of the singularity,” for example. The emotion of hope, like the better-researched emotions of anxiety and fear, throttles the brain down to an intensified but radically narrowed focus that quiets other brain systems in favor of presence. In this state, the brain sees the one chance, the one possibility, that inspired the hope, while fogging out all highly relevant but peripheral considerations. Take for example, the typical state lottery in the United States. A player's odds of winning range from 20 million to one (20,000,000 : 1), up to 120 million to one (120,000,000 : 1); still, the player sees in the pinpoint focus of the narrowed mind's eye only the one chance of winning because it is the one that triggers the flood of slow neurotransmitters that we commonly call hope. The emotion fogs out the entire field of 20,000,000 losing chances and the extremely high probability of failure.
A very similar process occurs when a person “falls in love.”
The malcontents who seek the undefined ideal in the general terms of a quest for happiness, or fulfillment, employ the language of adventure, opportunity, and the delving of mystery to justify their journey. Some seek to justify their amorphous journeys further in terms of exploration, or enriching discovery. In most cases, the desire to move from the real toward the ideal is construed as a liminal phenomenon of metamorphosis, of becoming new, more, or better than what one actually is. It is always a forsaking, a leaving, a going, an ending, an abandonment, a molting, a shedding, a rejection. It is always a roaming, a seeking, an ambition, a lusting, a harvesting. It is always a devaluing of what is here, now, in hand, and an overvaluing of what is potential, ideal, envisioned. And in one obvious way, it is always tragic.
First of all, the problems of conception and naming: the idea of vagabondage, or mendicancy, initially appealing, was finally understood to be both socially frightening to the vested interests and denotative of directionlessness: of the goalless journey. Vagabonds, mendicants, gypsies, hobos, and the like, evoke fear and anxiety responses in people who own land and property, which the majority of Americans do. Taking as one's identity such a mien would initiate in others a reflexive rejection of that persona. If perceived as a vagabond, one would be subject to the defensive and reflexive disjunctive objectification that was described in part seven. The "vagabond" would be sequestered to the status of outsider or a member of some out-group, stripped of ontological status, deprived of social credibility, and become persona non grata. It is the identity of the pilgrim as one who travels or wanders yet with a valid destination in mind that is the best choice of capsid. The pilgrim is an archetype—a prominent figure in mythology from ancient times to the birth of the American nation. The pilgrim's goals are always inherently, socially, and spiritually worthy. It is the appearance of having a valid goal that justifies and sanctions the wandering pilgrim in the socio-cultural matrix.
Imagine this: both people and texts can be conceptualized as function machines. In both, ideas go in, are processed through active principles, and come out changed. In texts, we read the long string of words from start to finish in order to discover what the function is—or in terms of more advanced algebra, what the functions are—that inhabit that function machine. The text might include vivid description and rich detail, and it may be couched in the best words the language has to offer, but it will not excite and satisfy the mind if it is not inhabited by a fascinating function or functions that can be recognized or derived; in that case, the text will remain a string of words suffused with poetry. A text that composes a story may be, and perhaps must be viewed as a machine of fabrication.
Needless to say, the function of the textual machine is not limited to epideictic celebrations of cultural values and their embodiments—unless profit and fame are the motives of the author, for these are perennially popular.
Heroes journey for the glory of their culture. In a pilgrimage, one pilgrim dies and another carries on. Adventurers are followed by more adventurers. And since consciousness began, humans have sought to know their identity and purpose in the universe by wandering. The motive always transcends the character. Each one moves for some greater purpose.
Of course, human purpose is not by any means encompassed by these four archetypes. The range of human purpose is a wide spectrum of degrees that descends from the rarefied atmosphere of the spiritual into the depths of depravity. By personal inclination and moral compass, I am repelled by the color-range that departs too far from the moral, spiritual range. Human behavior that seems more animal than human seems to me unworthy of recording. Lust, violence, sex, insanity—all popular matters in fiction writing, to be sure—seem no more than stories by the limbic brain for the purpose of stimulating the limbic brain, the emotions.
De gustibus non est disputandum. There is no accounting for matters of taste.
There can be no doubt that each of the archetypes is human and is driven by and for lust, violence, sex, and insanity. These are inherent to the human animal; but to my mind, the reason for writing at all is to record for the sake of universal identity and understanding the dimension of humanity that transcends its animal basis, not to wallow in it. The purpose of writing and of reading and of art in general is not merely glandular. I believe that the purpose must be to bring the enlightenment of knowledge and understanding to human minds by which they may become more aware and more responsible small function machines in the ultimate function machine that is the universe.
Unlike a hero's quest, an adventurer's expeditions, or a drifter's wanderings, a pilgrimage may be as transgenerational as any great migration. A migration is a pilgrimage. Individual monarch butterflies are not in any way, shape, or form subject to heroic conceptualization. They are undifferentiable, like the honeybees, and rightly so. In them, and in all of the migratory animals, the species moves to seek its own perpetuation. Individuals are only so by the intervention of the anthropocentric human brain as it asserts its dichotomies. The pilgrim moves for powerful reasons that he or she cannot completely understand, as an agent of the species, not the culture. The pilgrimage is not a journey, not an adventure, and not a wandering. Confused individuated human beings lust after the status of the hero, or the adventurer, for its material and social rewards; less so after the status of a pilgrim or a drifter, although even these succumb to such desires. In reality, there are no individuals, only the species pursuing perpetuation. Cultures are just one of their means.