Overcoming Humanity’s Achilles Heel
The silver lining is our need for connection along with our desire for balance
Confusion is an easy thing to create and incredibly difficult to overcome. Thus it serves as a tool for manipulation and avoidance. It’s used politically. It’s employed in contentious environments within companies and organizations. It comes into play in family dynamics. It serves as a wedge in relationships. And ultimately stymies forward movement.
It’s an Achilles heel to humanity. A fundamental weakness that repeats itself time and again.
Gaslighting is the process of making someone question their memory and sanity. “Alternative facts” is a fancy way of saying there is no absolute truth, only that which we say is true. Use of the new AI is replete with deep fake and manufactured reality.
And as it turns out, news media outlets that lean heavily on perpetuating false narratives have found that it pays, so much so that one of these outlets was willing to shell out more than $700 million in legal judgements for the privilege of continuing with the lies and deceit, merely because their business model was built on lies that stimulate outrage.
Outrage sells is the simple truth of it.
We are a species susceptible to our failing of the need to be right, because being right feels good, and outrage is a powerful way of simulating our need to be right.
And so, where does this leave us? If we can’t discern between truth and falsehood how do we move forward in a way that serves the greater good? And how do we recover from confusion to live in the light of clarity?
Mr. Spock was arguably the most popular character on the original Star Trek series. Not only because Leonard Nimoy embodied the character so fully and believably, but also because the archetype of the logically minded thinking being who seeks rationality above emotion is an entertaining contrast to the emotionally charged James T. Kirk — as with contrast each extreme becomes more animated.
And yet in each episode it was typically Kirk’s emotion and intuition that saved the day. While he relied heavily on Spock’s logic, he processed logical realities and then applied his intuition to make the decisions that saved lives and planets.
In a sense, the Spock/Kirk partnership offered us a way of perceiving reality from a more balance perspective.
Outrage, however, short circuits the rational mind and prevents us from seeking and finding balanced approaches to the problems we face. Outrage stimulates the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotion, sometimes referred to as the lizard brain. The more intense the emotional response, the less likely we are to activate our rational side.
But there is another impediment to overcoming confusion that is more subtle and challenging to detect. It’s related to our ego. Not the kind of ego that seeks superiority or inferiority, but rather the ego that seeks validation — our need to feel validated through connection to beliefs and opinions.
The human ego is a befuddling and confounding construct that ensures our survival by the nature of its need for validation. If we didn’t have an ego we would largely cease to strive because other than hunger in the belly there would be little reason to go further than our next meal.
And survive we have done well. So much so that we have created an abundance of food, transportation, homes, technology, infrastructure, and so much more. Never mind that those resources are unevenly distributed, there are present in mass quantity. And they have come into being because of people (individuals and groups) working fervently toward goals and accomplishments, driven in large part by the need for egoic validation.
But the same ego that drives human survival is an impediment to our emotional health because its purpose is not about happiness but survival.
Our happiness is stymied when we need to be right, as being right doesn’t have anything to do with fact, it’s just about proving a point. And how better to prove a point than to stimulate the amygdala, the emotionally centered part of our brain that shuts off logic and rationality.
The same gift that ensures our survival is also our Achilles heel. The same drive for accomplishment is a cause for confusion so as to ensure our (personal) accomplishment and success as compared to others. We strive to survive, but also to prevail over others.
In Darwinian terms, the survival of the human fittest is the one who is more adept at creating confusion for the mere purpose of prevailing over others.
But there is a silver lining. A clue to understanding our very existence.
The great physicist David Bohm wrote extensively about the relationship between matter and consciousness, between physical reality and human culture. He perceived no separation between scientific, spiritual, economic, and social constructs. His rationality was born of a desire for balance, a type of Kirk/Spock partnership that would lead humanity to a better kind of world that truly served the greater good.
Albert Einstein frequently hailed Bohm’s intellect and perceived him as his successor in the field of physics and thought, while many in the scientific community ostracized him as being too esoteric and ungrounded. Today he’s considered, posthumously, as a man ahead of his time.
What Bohm spoke to, was the tension between the two realities of rationality and consciousness. It’s analogous to our susceptibility to confusion, which illustrates the tension between our need for egoic validation and our desire for belonging. The two contrasting human drives lead us to pull apart from one another so that we may feel the tension of separation, and thus the drive for connection to bring us back together again.
Like a giant rubber band stretched to its limit reaches the point at which the strength of the band overpowers the force pulling it apart. Similarly, our egoic desire for validation at the expense of confusion stretches us to our limit until the strength of our human desire for connection overpowers the ego to bring us back together again.
The silver lining is our need for connection — or more simply put — our true essence which is love.
The further we descend into confusion, the greater our love impetus grows in strength eventually overpowering the contrasting impulse. Too much Spock leads to an emboldened Kirk — too much Kirk leads to a sobering Spock.
Too much confusion leads us to throw up our hands in defeat proclaiming that we don’t know what’s what, and more importantly that we don’t care because crazy is crazy. But what we truly seek is connection, love, and a balance of the rational with the emotional.
In such a moment our intuition kicks in together with our rational minds (the balance). But too much rationality without intuition leads us to the opposite extreme (all Spock and no Kirk). It’s a balance, which is to say that the silver lining is our need for connection along with our innate desire for balance. These two human attributes will always bring us home again.
When rooted in ego we enjoy espousing opinions to the point of creating confusion. When rooted in love we are more able to process rational arguments and purported facts from a disconnected perspective — we are able to just listen and consider without judgement or investment in the outcome.
To Summarize
As repetition is helpful when dissecting complex topics I offer the following.
The egoic need for validation is a strong and yet subtle influence that is active in all of us. It’s different than the stereotypical form of ego that seeks self-aggrandizement, and it can be either helpful or destructive. One of the ways it manifests is in our positions, opinions, and philosophies. The more people agree with our positions the more we feel validated. If our ego is unhealthy we will seek to convince people of our correctness at all costs, including the use of confusion tactics.
The use of confusion tactics leads to separation because the more we argue and manipulate there will be people who will agree with us based on a visceral stimulation of their base instincts, and there will be others who will strongly disagree based on rationality.
The more we separate, the more the desire for connection rises within us. The more extreme the separation, the more we yearn for connection. The extreme of separation motivates our innate desire for connection. This is our underlying nature at work, which is love.
What we mostly seek is a balance, not too much Kirk or too much Spock — not too much emotional or too much rational. And it’s through the balance of the rational with the emotional, the consciousness with the scientific, the spiritual with the methodical that we transcend confusion, fear tactics, gaslighting, and manipulation.
In contrast, love will bring us home.
If you’ve enjoyed this post please like, share, and subscribe. And thank you for your support.
The need for balance is so necessary, and ignored by so many people. I think you might enjoy a pocast episode I just listened to yesterday that addresses many of the issues you flag here: "Dan Ariely | Why Rational People Believe Irrational Things" (jordanharbinger.com/903) Dan Ariely also advocated the need to love and sustain/rebuild connections with those "irrational" people, because isolating and ignoring them simply pushes them farther into the groups of "irrationality," where they do receive love and validation which is what they are looking for! Easier said than done in some cases . . .