Paradigm from California
© 1978-1997 by Neil Robert Miller
neil@imaginenine.com (primary e-mail address)
neilrm@rocketmail.com (alternate e-mail address)
The Environment for Cognitive Development
P.O. Box 31035, San Francisco, CA 94131
excerpt from:
Volume II: Letter To a Responsible Party
Part V - Modern Times
Chapter 15: Jettison Sequence (1986)
Introduction to This Excerpt (May 10, 1997):
This chapter was so difficult that we sometimes referred to working on it as "jettison torture", not because of the content itself, but simply because the process of working on it, was such a dense and excruciating grind. The problem was to present the answer to: "why people change for the worse, politically speaking", in such self-evidently obvious, comprehensive terms, that authority would not be needed for anyone's cognitive mind to determine it's accuracy or usefulness.
Reading it over now, eleven years later, it all seems so obvious, and if it seems obvious to the reader, then we did our job. (If not, then there is more work to be done, of course.) Anyway, this excerpt is about 1/50th of the jettison chapter, each of the other forty-nine sections as unique and dense as this is or moreso. Each had to be discovered, researched, selected, articulated, shaped, and puzzled together. Each section, 1/50th of a year's work, eleven people, perhaps a thousand hours of intensive figuring. Once it's figured out, it doesn't seem that complicated at all, but the process of figuring it out in the first place was the major gnarlytown.
This excerpt consists of 400 words, and is one of four sections in the paradigm which describe "inner states" transfer. I have included an additional thousand words of context from before and after the section, so the reader may get some sense of the context for this "transfer of 'inner states'" explanation.
The full chapter itself, "Jettison Sequence", from which this excerpted, describes the neurological process by which a person's internal ideology, a person's "internal ideological homeostasis" changes -
to "unprincipled" (that is, "automatic majority-protection-seeking", "protection sent mainly upwards, and anxiety mostly slammed downwards").
This chapter describes - molecule for molecule and wave for wave, minute to minute and word for word - how a person is "jettisoned" from their natural-born (communist) "principled" ideology onto a diseased, anomalous and "unprincipled" (nazi/bourgeois) ideological track.
It describes the exact substances, processes, and structures by which the bourgeois pathogen spreads from one person to another, and comes to infect the entire society.
(The medical analogy is deliberate, relevant, accurate, and useful; it is not wild hyperbole, it is reasonable. But only, of course, as an analogy, or metaphor. All the same, the metaphor is close enough to be a helpful and positive aid in understanding these matters.)
At any rate, the first half of the chapter describes the various psychiatric structures and external conditions in the world that are of particular relevance to this "shift-of-ideology". These include particularly the external circumstances surrounding loss, and the various internal structures and methods that evolution devised for humans to respond to it.
The second half of the chapter, from which this excerpt is taken, describes a sample, stereotypical change in ideology of a particular individual, from principled to unprincipled, and divides the processes involved into six "Events".
There are four persons specifically involved in engendering the shift in the person who is the main subject in this description; each person is at one of four different, adjacent logical levels of hierarchy.
From the bottom up, first there is the subject's "caretaken party", residing at one logical level below the "subject person" in the general hierarchy of power and influence.
Second, one logical level up in the hierarchy, there is the caretaken party's protection, namely the subject himself or herself. In this section, we refer to this person, who is being jettisoned, as "the below party".
Third, one more logical level up, there is the subject's protection. In this section, we refer to this person as "the above party".
And finally at still one more logical level up, there is the subject's protection's protection. This person, at the most powerful level of hierarchy of these four, appears only once, very briefly in "the second event".
The excerpt below is part of the "fourth event" in the six event "jettison sequence", and involves a conversation between the subject (the person who is being "jettisoned", or changed from "principled" to "unprincipled"), and their direct protection, that is, a person one logical level up in the hierarchy. Presumably this might be an employer, a parent, a spouse or partner, a 'friend', a professional person, an advisor, an instructor, or a counselor, a legal or medical officer, or any one of a variety of persons who have greater power in the situation and/or in the world at large than the person themself.
This fourth event" describes the central "meta-homeostasis" process, by which a person's internal governing system "switches tracks" so to speak, plunging the world they live in and the world they affect, that is, plunging the planet, ever closer to extinction.
I should mention that this whole idea of "thoughts and emotions as substance" comes, in part, from Dr. Harry Stack Sullivan's illumination of "dynamisms", which he understood to be an "emotion" that was present in mother, and child, and in the environment between them, all simultaneously. We have refined, defined, and made precise the idea, to the point where, perhaps, Dr. Sullivan himself might not recognize it.
Dr. John Bowlby's illuminations of "control systems", in Part II of "Attachment" were also enormously helpful regarding these understandings, and he, of course, gives the major credit to Charles Darwin. Additionally, Dr. Paul Watzlawick's ideas about communication and Dr. Salvador Minuchin's idea about hierarchy also played significant roles. And, of course, it never hurts to read Lewis Thomas when thinking about these matters.
And in the background, there is Jean Piaget's illumination of the phenomenon of "maps" of the world that one develops and carries in one's mind - either an accurate, and therefore a health-maintaining picture of the world, or an inaccurate and therefore a self-harming picture of things. As such, Piaget's ideas too left their mark on these pages.
Note: There is a serious terminological difficulty with the term "inner state", since the substance we are describing is not simply within a person, but is sometimes in the air between persons, sometimes within another person, and even sometimes simply being created, maintained, or destroyed, in the external environment. As such, I (we) have devised better and more specific terminology which we put to extensive use in Volume One. However, I do not wish to release that terminology outside the full context contained in the Volume One explanations. Consequently, until Volume One becomes published, I stick with the misnomer "inner states" as that term is within the already given common vernacular. For here, the term "inner state" is defined as "the substance that includes a thought or thoughts and an emotion or emotions".
Furthermore, the imagery from which the word "jettison" as used here derived, was Not that of "casting something overboard", but rather of "flying away from" an organized, recoverable, survivable track.
First, a few preceding paragraphs, for context:
Now comes the fourth 'event' of this sequence, which is the second conversation between the still principled but soon to be jettisoned below party and their unprincipled above party.
It is during this second conversation that the flow of inner states develops such that the overall homeostasis within the below party begins to change; that is to say, it is here that the particular "meta-homeostasis" known as a "jettison sequence" formally goes into motion.
It is to be recalled that an 'inner state' - that is the "inner condition" of a person, consisting of a "type" of emotional organization and a "type" of thought organization - is always created within a particular person (although not necessarily within the person who is in possession of it or who is spending it).
Once an inner state is so created it can be "held intact, crystallized, built upon, utilized, transformed, consumed, destroyed, or transferred." What is important for this discussion is the process by which such inner states are transferred from one person to the other.
For example, looking at the path of an 'inner state' from the point in the central nervous system of an individual where decisions join other electronic impulses already traveling along the neuronal system, an entire set of signals arrive at the cerebral cortex.
The cerebral cortex then translates the electronic message from the various types and portions of mental 'processing' facilities (including high level decision-making processes, of course) into another sort of group of electronic signals.
This group of signals constitutes a direct 'command' to the vocal cords and other components of the "enacting speaking" system, part of the physical - or 'physiological' - system.
There, in the area of the vocal cords, sound waves are formed in a certain specific configuration wherein they stimulate air in a certain specific pattern of vibrations and such vibrations travel through the air to the ear canals of the other person.
At the inner ear of the second person, the specific configuration of air vibrations is turned into a group of electrical signals in the second person's central nervous system and, by a variety of routes, such signals make their way through various central nervous system pathways - some within and some outside the person's conscious consideration - all along the way, the signals being sorted and rerouted according to a variety of mechanisms and factors.
Finally, the electrical signals come to the place in the second person's central nervous system where they are joined by the person's internal, personally accountable, decision-making facilities, where we will leave our description of this particular transfer of an inner state from one person to the next.
It can be seen that the inner state, traveling as a configuration of electrons within one individual, traveling as 'sound vibrations' through the air from the central nervous system of one person to the central nervous system of the other person, and traveling as another configuration of electrons through the other person can consist of either a "tone" - security or vitality - or an "anxiety".
As such, one key question, regarding a conversation between two persons such as we are describing here, is the matter of whether the audio signals passing from the speaker to the listener are truthful communications (usually, but not always, 'securities' or 'vitalities' - "tones") or whether they are lies (almost always "anxieties").
It is to be recalled that earlier in this letter we mentioned a clear delineation between the truth, untruths, and lies.
The truth, we mentioned, is singular, unchanging, and the same for everyone; untruths are multitudinous and are sometimes absolutely necessary as an aid in finding the truth and are absolutely necessary in other ways as well but are also, sometimes, destructive; and lies in particular are a special sort of untruth that always, by definition, harms, maims, destroys, and kills - often, one, two, or three steps removed from the immediate situation at hand.
A lie, especially to a below figure, can be seen as something which may, if it is not stopped, travel through several people, dishonestly claimed to be unnoticed, until someone perhaps five steps removed, ten thousand miles away, lies dead on the ground.
The damage in most cases, of course, is far closer at hand.
________________________
1986, 1997 © Neil R. Miller
neil@imaginenine.com
All Rights Strictly Reserved
Text Only Home Page
Graphics Home Page