Universal Theory Part I

2003-12-18 - 11:30 a.m.

This entry is going to be pretty intellectual (or as I ironically described it to Lindsey......very thinky) so get ready. Don't read it if you're tired, intoxicated, or smarter than me because it won't make a damn bit of sense.

Lately, I've been working on my Universal Theory. You know, there's one of those for science stuff. It kind of ties physics and chemistry and biology and everything anyone knows together. I think they call it M theory or something. Anyway, I've been working on my own. It's not about physics, etc but more about people and how they think and feel. It brings politics and psychology and all kinds of shit like that together into one....statement or something. It's going to be fucking grand and the world won't know what hit it when I drop this bomb. The problem is that I haven't really come up with the actual statement yet. Just a bunch of ideas in different ideas that seem to me as if they go together, I just can't find all the damn connections.

I suppose I'm really searching for something more like Euler's law. That's the one that says e^(pi*i)+1=0. It basically ties all the important numbers and classes of numbers into one solid equation. Okay, everyone but Bill, Ted, and other people who have a clue/care about that shit can ignore this extremely nerdy paragraph.

I have been searching for this for a long time but I didn't really know it until yesterday. Could be the viruses and bacteria playing with my brain, or maybe it was just the hydrocodone, but something last night made me start thinking and connecting and it hasn't stopped since. In fact, I read a Time magazine that really got me on a roll with this stuff. It was all about how the American public has divided more severely over George Bush and other things recently. How people can interpret the same personality characteristics in a person completely differently. Is it confidence or arrogance? Is he a forceful leader or a bridge-burning cowboy?

The connection I make is that people's values aren't actually formed in the way we think they are. It seems as if people's political alignment nowadays depends more on a psychological identification with a specific style of leadership than on policy or even principle. Supporters of the President identify with his self-assured, black and white, America is the damned bestest outlook on the world. Detractors, on the other hand, are more likely to see things in terms of consequences and abstract philosophical concepts like justice and peace.

Obviously, I'm a little biased. But that's part of the whole deal. My side is just as guilty of playing psychological politics as the damn other guys. Hold on, maybe I'd better back up and explain a bit.

I tried to say something about this in English class once, but I don't think it got across. Partly, this is because no one in that class (or any other class) actually gives a fuck about politics, but also because I hadn't developed it enough to really say it right. I'm a little farther along now, but still not quite there (obviously). What I said was that people who tend to see moral issues in black and white terms are more likely to vote Republican, whereas people who are more relativistic and tolerant are more likely to vote Democratic. But it goes deeper than that, and I didn't really say that.

It goes all the way down. I see in my head this whole psychological profile of a liberal and a conservative. The problem is that they're very hard to describe, or outline. I get the feeling of them, as if I can become the conservative, think like him, and ditto the liberal. Obviously, I can only do it for a little while before I get sick of hating poor people, but that's not the point. The point is that there is a psychological profile that is identifiable, if not easy to describe. Also, describing them leads into dangerous territory of offending people. I don't usually worry about that, especially when it comes to politics, but this stuff is powerful....at least to me.

Once upon a time there was a very liberal candidate for President who lost the election, but won my heart with this quote, "It is not true that all conservatives are stupid, but it is true that most stupid people are conservative."

Sorry if that offended you, but that's not the intention. Here's my point. It is not stupid to be a conservative. There are many intelligent people who have decided to follow the way of the Devil (j/k) and go to the right. Before I started thinking about this stuff, I might have actually thought of them as very misguided or actually decieved by Satan. Not literally, but it might as well be. Either way I thought they were just missing some information that I had. I wanted to just sit all of them down and explain to them why they were wrong, both civically and morally. Hell, sometimes I still do. The difference is that now I realize that these people have reached their own conclusions based on something over which they have relatively little control: their psychological makeup.

The proof of this is the way in which millions of people can take the same information and reach entirely different conclusions about it. We all deal with the same world. There is not one truth for me and another truth for George W. There is only one way that History happened, there is only one God, and there is only one reality. Why, then, are there such a variety of belief systems even within the same culture? I firmly believe, simply according to the principles of the two groups, that a Mennonite Republican either doesn't know what it means to be a Mennonite, or doesn't know what it means to be a Republican. I firmly believe that Jesus's teachings clearly prohibit the use of force or violence as a means of solving problems. I firmly believe that Jesus's teachings also demonstrate an emphasis on social justice and care for the poor. Why, then, do conservatives use the Bible and Christianity as justification for wars and economic policies that fuck over the poor here and overseas? Are they just wrong? Maybe. But it doesn't matter who is right, actually. What matters is that two different groups of people have used the same words to form totally different belief systems.

This must mean that there is some internal force or process that transforms reality into a warped, possibly improved, but certainly simplified worldview. We like to think that we have learned our beliefs from our parents and from society or the Bible. We like to believe that it is we, operating under free will, who have built up our pyramid of principles and it is we who sit at the top (ouch lol) controlling everything. What if our parents' contributions to our belief structure are actually more genetic than educational? What if it is their DNA that affects our values more than their teaching?

[Side note - This is where my theory starts to get uncomfortable. Many of my thoughts have been more than a little disconcerting and worrisome. Unfortunately, despite their effects on my comfort, I seem to see these things as more and more plausible, maybe truer, the more I think about them.]

I don't want to believe this any more than you do, but think about it. Our society is so extremely polarized that people are ready to say that the other side is totally outside our culture. They are "unAmerican." Read some of the literature from the left and right wing organizations and writers. They consistently describe their opponents as "outside the mainstream," "wackos," and "crackpots." It's not that they are more centrist in their views, they just see the thinking of the others as completely foreign and incomprehensible. That's where it comes back to psychology. It is just as strange to me to think like a conservative as it is to think like a Type A person or write with my left hand. Maybe political identification is just like Type A/B personality types. [Note - If you don't know about Type A/B personalities, steal someone's psych book and look it up. It's fkn imporant.] You see, it just seems like everything you believe in depends only on the way your brain processes information, reacts to certain people, and delivers emotional responses.

I was watching this documentary that my uncle Dan brought to Thanksgiving. In between puking and blowing crazy amounts of snot into about eleventeen boxes of Kleenex, I managed to get downstairs to catch a bit of this groundbreaking stuff. It was all about how we as humans are preoccupied with death and mortality. It speculates that religions and philosophy are basically ways we have developed to deal with and dismiss the idea of our own mortality. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.....salvation, eternal life, whatnot......but I don’t necessarily buy all that. I think there’s more to it. What I saw, though, that really got to me was a couple studies that showed how people react to people who have different “death-defying systems.” When people were reminded of death through subtle questions and ideas, they demonstrated in several tests both a tendency to identify more strongly with people and symbols of their own belief systems and to react to others’ beliefs and symbols with hostility, aggression, and even violence. As soon as I heard it, it explained so much

Think about it......September 11 was a great big smoking burning horrible reminder of death that no person anywhere could ignore. All we saw on TV and in print was images of destruction. People jumping out of windows......burning fireballs from the planes..........people running screaming......you all saw them. Every single person was absolutely forced to contemplate death for extended periods of time and to wonder about the causes of such tragedy. What was our reaction as a nation? We immediately started clinging to the beliefs and symbols of America, returning to our churches (death-defying institutions), and reacting with hostility, aggression, and even violence toward those who are different. Patriotism and its primary symbol, the flag, were inescapable for a year. People donated blood and showed other charitable behavior en masse. But the scary and eventually important reaction was demonstrated in the language we, and especially our leaders, used to describe the horror of 9/11. It was not an attack on New York City. It was not an attack on a tangible building or resource. Instead, it was an attack on freedom, an attack on democracy. The terrorists were not political radicals responding to a specific set of grievances with the US. There was no need to ask about the reasons behind their violence because we all were so convinced that they were simply evildoers, enemies of freedom.

This is dangerous water. What I am doing right now is describing beliefs that millions of people hold very firmly as essentially a knee-jerk psychological reaction to being reminded of human mortality. Once I’ve started down this path, it’s hard to stop because it’s not just politics and relatively boring and innocuous things like Medicare and trade deficits anymore. Now, I am reducing very strong feelings that are extremely close to the center of our lives to, basically, a scientific phenomenon. It is very scary, and it’s about to get scarier.

Now that I’ve established (at least in the context of this journal entry, not necessarily proved anything) that almost anything we do, think, say, and believe is attributable to our psychological composition, I’m about to reduce it even further. Basically, as far as anyone has proved, the roots of our feelings and emotions are in chemical signals between neurons in our brains. Now, there are many approaches to psychology, as I learned in Mrs. Fuller’s class, but even those who believe that we are the products of various internal and external forces can basically agree that the chemical reactions of the brain are critical to the function and maintenance of our psychological state. Some believe that influences in childhood are key to understanding how we think and believe. Others focus on the way in which the media influences our thinking. Whatever their approach, though, every psychologist is forced to admit that the effect of chemicals (drugs, hormones, etc) on our emotions and though processes is an absolute proven fact. Even though drug treatment works best when combined with people-oriented counseling or therapy, drugs like Prozac, Adderall, Valium, and countless other do actually change our emotional state and even our outlook on life.

I know this from experience, and if you haven't, you've probably heard me talk about it. I used to take Adderall (amphetamine) for ADD every day. I can't go into detail about all the shit I went through here, so if you want a taste, check out my ADD poem (link on the left). Anyway, I know for sure some of the chemical nature of our emotions, because when I was on Adderall I felt like I had absolutely no control over how I felt. I would feel sad for no reason, have these spells of a few days where I just absolutely did not want to do anything at all. Basically, Adderall sent me into clinical depression. The only times I felt normal when I took it was when I was also smoking marijuana. It counteracted the crazy side effects for days at a time and made me feel like myself again. Then I quit smoking it last year and the shit hit the fan. When I got back on Adderall I went nuts and had crazy thoughts and just had a horrible time of it. Part of that went into my short story (also linked on the left). I was lucky enough to have Carli and a few other people to pull me out before I sunk too deep, and now I'm on half the dose of Adderall and it's working much better with almost no side effects. Things are good. But I still remember the days when I would come home, sit in a chair and not be able to get up for hours because I couldn't see the point of anything. Chemicals. A few carbon atoms mixed with some nitrogens, oxygens, and hydrogens can really mess you up.

Here’s what I’m getting at.......What if everything you’ve ever believed in is the result of psychological forces within your brain, which are in turn the result of chemicals over which you have no control? Where does that leave us? Is love merely a prolonged increase in serotonin levels developed as a conditioned response to the presence of a specific person? Am I a Christian because I have high levels of neurotransmitters that help me to have faith and believe someone else’s teaching? Is there a pill that could turn me into a conservative? All these questions fly at me as soon as I think about this stuff, but I can’t answer any of them. I’m trying to take it further, but I don’t even think I can hold on at my present level because I still believe in God and I still think that it’s morally right to work for peace and social justice.

This is where my Universal Theory ended last night at about 11:30pm. I then proceeded to stay up thinking about things and for some reason reading the Appendix to Return of the King until.....about 2:30am. I had to get up to drive Brittany Johnston to morning practice, but I decided I wasn’t well enough to go. I’m still home and it’s about 11:30am. Obviously, I won’t be swimming in the meet today. I feel much better than I did at the end of yesterday, but I think that going to school yesterday was a mistake. I made it through but it made me a little worse, which is not worth it. I’m not as strong (and crazy) as Kari, so I can’t just plow through the days and drop time in the pool when I’m sick. I had a very good morning of resting, dreaming, thinking, and coughing (though not as much as before, w007 w007). Actually, they weren’t separate, they just flowed into one another. I would think about something and then I would be in a dream, then I would cough and think some more. Hard to describe. Anyway......staying home was a good idea I think because I can recover better, stay with Naomi (who is now also deathly ill) when my mom runs errands, and I can write more on my Universal Theory, which actually made some serious progress during my sleepythinkydreamycoughy morning. I have a hunch that Dland will tell my that this entry is too fucking huge to post if I type any more. So it looks like this one’s going to be a two-parter like my “short” story

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