BAD WORDS

What do all these words have in common? 

Concrete Information
Concrete Thinking 
Analytical Thinking
Rational Thinking 
Logical Decision Making 
Reason
Predictability

These words have all gone out of favor. We have hidden them in boxes on crumpled papers along side musty textbooks about Descartes. Never has there been a Cosmo article about the romance of the logical decision maker. Never will there be a Cosmo article on the sexiness of the concrete thinker who has a flair for analyzing information efficiently. Rarely is predictability considered an attractive feature in a mate. Rationality and reason stopped being sexy right around about 1805. I myself had very negative associations with all these words. Associations like cold, stifling, sterile, and boring come to mind. 

After developing a biological theory of the human personality, much to my shock and awe, I have come to love these words, and am trying repopularize and breathe new life into them. The abstract words we now use to describe our human personalities, like soul, spirit, ego, and subconscious give us no applicable information to utilize in our everyday lives, or in personality research for that matter.

We are not foggy, mystery filled abstract, subconscious spirits like we have been led to believe. We are concrete, flesh and blood, biologically driven organisms who operate according to predictable and easily observable patterns. We can easily observe and analyze the ways in which we analyze information in our environments. In fact, the ways in which we analyze and synthesize information in our environments tells us with 100% specificity who each one of us individually is. 

The only action item humans are physiologically capable of doing is analyzing  information by interacting with their environments and then making decisions based on their analyses.   My environment, wherever I happen to be, is everything around me that is not me. When I make a decision to interact with a particular environment, information flows into me through my sensory and nervous systems, I interpret that information by engaging my human behaviors, and then I make logical, rational decisions that make sense to my understanding. 

Once I make a decision, my brain and body work together to manifest that decision automatically. For example, I supply a string of decisions to make my arms lift or my legs  move. I don't turn a crank to make my legs move. I make a decision to move, and my legs respond to that decision automatically.  In any given moment I am the decision I just made and am about to make.

For example, if I decide to run in the woods, I might also decide to keep an eye out for tree roots. After many interactions in wooded environments, I've learned tree roots make me trip. I didn't come into the world with inborn knowledge about tree roots. I came into the world with inborn abilities to assess my environment at all times in order to be able to make decisions in order to survive in any kind of environment. 

Knowing I am actively capable of only one single thing every waking moment of my existence, information analysis and decision making, allows me to know everything I need to know to make my existence efficient and pleasing. Knowing I am an information analyzer and decision maker, and that is all I actively can do, allows me to problem solve and trouble shoot very effectively every moment of every day. Previously I was a total mystery to myself, had no idea how to even begin to "know myself," because I never had a working definition of self or personality.  I had many fancy, abstract, metaphorical definitions of self that kept me in perpetual confusion about how to operate myself in the world. I was also easily manipulated by people claiming to have special information about how to be a "better" or "higher quality" person than regular people.

Problems I experience as a human not related to injury or illness can only be related to problems with my decision making capacities, not my underlying psychology, which is a concept that offers no concrete definition or application. 

So how do I make the best possible decisions in my environment in ways that make sense to my personal decision making capacities? How do I live an efficient, pleasing, satisfying life and have relationships that are effortless and easy?  This is where those old, musty smelling words can come to our rescue. I will live a great life if I am allowed to apply my reason, logic, and analytical capabilities in concrete ways to come up with concrete ideas for making decisions about what to do next in ways that make sense to me. If I am allowed to engage in the world without criticism and constant correction, I will thrive. If I am chronically depressed, anxious, or unhappy, this means I have unnatural constraints on my capacities to analyze information and make decisions in ways that make sense to my ability to understand information. 

Predictability, another old musty smelling word we often view as frighteningly boring, can also enhance the efficiency and pleasantness of our human lives. Predictability is essential for the efficient operation of our decision making capacities. The more predictable our daily routines are, particularly as children, the more time we have to make well thought out decisions moment to moment.  Logic is no longer a bad word for me either. We look for logic every second of every day, because all of us make logical decisions that make sense to our individual capacities to assess and understand information in our environments.  Our life depends literally upon our ability to take in concrete information and make concrete decision that make logical sense to us. 

We cannot be abstract and we cannot use abstract information to help us exist. It is fun to think about abstract ideas, view abstract art, and read abstract poetry. But we cannot, for example, literally open our hearts or free our souls or let our spirits soar. These abstract ideas are as metaphorical as our biblical ideas, but often used as if they are concrete truths.  In the end, abstract ideas, when used as concrete information, are confusing to us and can be used to manipulate us.

We are often held hostage by people who claim to have better information about how to be better people than we know how to be. We are also held hostage by people who claim to know how to love and be loved better than we do. We love others automatically. We don't need to learn how to love. We do need to learn how to drive a stick shift, however. We have been confused about the kinds of information that can be helpful to us as humans. From what I can tell, we need concrete information about how to press down the clutch, how to make a lay up vs. a 3 pointer, how to change a diaper. We don't need to learn how to love that baby in the diaper. We don't need to  "improve our character" in order to be a good basketball player. We just have to learn how to play basketball to the best of our ability.

When our ability to make decisions in our environments in ways that make sense to us personally is constantly criticized, corrected, or shaped to make sense to somebody else's world view,  we will break down. And we will break down badly on a continuum that starts with anxiety, moves to rage, and ends up with violence or insanity. This is because our decision making capacities were designed to work on a dime just as they are, without the need for constant improvement so they can make sense to the perspectives of special people with special authority.

We cannot improve our decision making capacities any more than we can improve our bone structure. We can engage our capacities and our structure in ways that maximize them, but we are designed to activate ourselves in the world just as we are at every developmental level we are in. When we think other people are doing a better job at being who they are than we are at being who we are, we are easy targets for being manipulated by those people. Joe might be a way better mechanic than me, but his nervous and sensory systems are fine tuned for his brain and body, not mine. He can teach me how to change a tire, but he can't teach me how to engage in the world with my sensory and nervous systems tailor made for my brain and body. I am perfectly capable of being myself in the world, unless I am told or taught otherwise. 

We can "do" better in our lives all the time, become better cooks, mechanics, engineers, basketball players. But we can never "be" better. Information has been artificially split into these two categories currently. Religion, psychology, and spiritual healers purport to have information than can help us "be" better people. Religion, psychology, and spiritual healers claim to possess special information, albeit vague and abstract, that when shared, will cause people to exist in their "higher selves."  When we try to "be" better we break down. We will always fall short, we have no way of knowing specifically how to be better or what it looks like when we get there, or how long it will take. We can spend our whole lives striving to "be" better and striving for this "higher self." However, a higher self is a metaphorical and abstract ideal. It is a myth that paralyzes us in a state of inferiority.

When we try to "do" better we learn to play the piano better or perfect our culinary skills. When we try to do better and let others do better without trying to teach them how to "be" better, we will co-exist as human beings with damage free personalities. Humans who are applying their undamaged decision making capacities in new and creative ways, I am convinced, will solve our greatest human problems and create the kind of safe society we all know we are capable of creating where human equality is the rule instead of the exception.