Habit Engines
It is clear enough that our habits work together, and that a habit fully instated becomes a source of energy. It opens a channel from the needs that flows more and more energy into itself, until the behavior is primary and natural (not require artificial effort from the will to hold together), and it would take more energy not to perform it. All four types of habits work together. When object X crosses our mind from our assumptions or senses, we already have a series of habits on how to feel, think, talk, and act on it. This is what is called a “complex” in psychoanalytical terms. Thus when we confront a car accident, we already feel, think, talk, and act according to a complex set of procedures without the need for new and active judgments.
All the habits interrelate, and they are always aware of each other, always negotiating with each other; this negotiation we call “thinking,” and all this thinking and acting comes together as system. That is our system, our #9 schema, our #27 structure.
So we have our system of habits, and this is our “way of life” our “go with the flow,” our “Tao”; this includes also our inability (unwillingness) to start new habits, new virtues, our excuses against them, our hypocrisy to praise them anyway, if that seems prudent. Its all in there, its all part of the system.
All intellectual objects are simple, easy to communicate, hardly anything at all. To transmit a sophisticated figure, something many sided, something with over 5 elements (a nonagon for instance), in other words, to create a schema, takes a long time. A schema nine months, a system nine years. Learning a new language, assuming one is still young enough to be receptive to it, requires at least this long. It is for this reason that for us, English is an easy language, the easiest language to think in, but as a second language to an adult, it is infuriating. This complex, many sided, ever so tricky beast “English” requires ten of our most formative years, ten of our most impressionable years. And only somebody who learns English as his first language, as his mother language, will ever write something great in it. His ideas may be superb, but he must belong English from the very start, and preferably without too many distracting other languages to sap away his strength. All hail monoglots.
When Freud created the Id demon, such a thing was very complex, and foreign to something as innocent as a hysteric. He had to work on a single man or woman for years, and use suggestion and interpretation (after abandoning hypnosis and cocaine) to put that demon in the deepest, where it could ingrain and secure itself, in order to spread outwards into other human beings the farthest. Psychoanalysis was never a quick and easy cure, but a long drawn-out, ridiculously involved ritual, requiring the deepest trust, the most shameless exploitation. All hail the patience Freud held to finally put his demons into others.
Therefore, let us learn a lesson. Ideas take decades to spread through the soil. New ideas require a few centuries before we take them for common sense. These ideas must be argued against, argued for, blood spilled on behalf of, courts and lawyers cheerfully exploited and misused for (of course I am thinking of evolution right now, but a hundred others could easily be listed) before the idea becomes so all-pervasive, such a part of every other idea, that we cannot think without it.
When the idea is everywhere, and every other cultural idea contains parts of it, we say that the idea is “universal.” Converting a nonbeliever to Christianity is not big deal: he already knows the very face of Jesus a thousand times over from billboards, tee-shirts, movies, etc. He knows how a Christian acts, what a conversion looks like. We know quite a bit about all the major world religions. We have stereotypes, we have fluidtypes. Its all in there. The average human brain easily holds all the information that has been put in all the books the world over.
An engine, therefore, is a unique habit in that it is no simple dynamo. A dynamo is a mutually exclusive set of ideas that find each other, yet do not destroy each other, but are united in a give and take relationship that wrenches forth a never ending torrent of energy (crea). The engine is much more complex. An engine is a habit that creates other habits.
Let’s start with a We-engine. When one belongs to a race, a religion, a tradition, or a nationality, he inherits a We. That We is something that thinks for the I, in its place. The I is the autonomous conscious will, proper, serving first of all the Needs of the Self. The We also serves the Needs of the Self, but not only. A We ultimately exists for the greater whole of Us. The church for instance. Once one has replaced his I-my-name with We-the-Christians, We- the-Americans, We-the-scholars, We-the-feminists, or whatever name We takes, We gain a new power. That is, the We acts as a filter and an orienter over all world-materials, and lets the I gain possession of many ideas unique to that We which have gained in refinement and power for centuries if not millennia.
Christianity, like the cold virus, survives by an ability to mutate quickly again and again and adapt to any person. But the We-inheritance of Christianity includes virtually all the accomplishments of the religion. All the hymns, theologies, martyrologies, biographies of saints and sinners, philosophies, self-help manuals, etc. are inherited quickly and without interference of the skeptical and critical I. Usually, there is no need to seek a monastary to inherit these generations of millions upon millions of hours of work upon a few ideas, encoded in books, symbols, arts, and shrines: they are disseminated in self-protecting forms in every niche of our intellectual cutlure. The I as servant of the Needs naturally is extremely critical if not downright xenophobic against outside powers that wish to overpower the system with powerful habits. Consider how much most of us avoid addictive chemicals or bad habits and never cease to give such things a bad reputation.
The We-engine comforts us that it has tested and proved all that it will download into us, and that we may feel the comfort of faith that we need not (and also cannot) be critical over what belongs to Us-the-group.
With a lack of critical resistance to these ideas and habits, they chain together and dominate the system, so much so, that a serious and honest Christian can “hate father and mother” leave his family, curse them even, perhaps go to India or Africa, give his complete life over to “Christ” the warm big-brother posterchild plastered over the virus’s face, and feel he is being the best human he can by infecting many others with this virus. That is, everything normal and natural to his needs is usurped for “the greater glory of God.”
Let us be fair. This human individual, by sacrificing his Me to the We, has indeed gained many instant powers that he perhaps could never fashion in a lifetime. He has all sorts of thinking and spiritual habits, weapons and tools of many forms, that he did not have to understand or criticize, and now can do powerful things with them. He may feel fit to judge all men, greater men, intimidating foes and friends, according to that which he will now calls a “higher truth,” which unlike a higher truth, he need make no effort to achieve. But alas, having subordinated his I, he cannot use these powers primarily for his needs, but must always use them for the greater We. Even if he wanted to use them for his Self, he wouldn’t know how.
The We-body is all the people who share the We-engine, for the We-Engine teaches us how to recognize our own. It is in this way alone that we can take conspiracy theories seriously, that the world belongs to, and is fought over by, great collective conspiracies. Such subversive groups need not plot cosnciously. Their great power is that they create global crimes and triumphs without any indiviudal realizing what he is doing. Yet again, Christians, Muslims, and Mormons all talk of convering the whole world to their We. Not that they will accept a fake converstion: the convert must be thoroughly normalized.
A given We might fit with certain patterns of DNA better than others, and once it has filled this niche, it may both induce selective mating into it, thus adapting the DNA to be more We-receptive, and also be adapted by this genotype in turn to fit only with it. Such a We becomes a race and a heritage. Not all Wes are this way. Nevertheless, certain We-bodies that have existed a long time oppose other We-bodies, one religious faction kills the other, and the parts they kill off of each other change their gene pool, or at least change the way they marry and breed – and this resurrects for us the old disproven Lamarkianism of the 1800s. Part of who I am has been building for thousands of years; another part of who I am has been made by hand by my immediate family tree five generations back.
The Atheist-We has for the first time, and in our generation, achieved a great following. That the Atheist has difficulty being a “We” is long attested. Atheists disbelieve in the typical We-mascots of Gods and Spirits, and that is all the similarity they seem to hold. Even the deists resorted to God as a mascot for Reason, their true “God.” The God stands for an originator, protector, approver, and blesser of the We. No religion invented a God who chose some other people. The God, in turn, becomes the “voice” of the We-Engine in each individual, a sort of internal self-talking habit, or at least a complex of “religious” feelings that more than anything else orient the I to subordinate himself to the We-engine.
In Dawkins term, we would not call an engine a “meme” but only the information from which such an engine is instated. The engine, as a habit, is made of organized desires. The blueprints for the engine would be a set of memes, or in our terms, a set of assumptions, and again, the engine would filter through and latch unto the world memes it recognized in the world envirnoment (it would infect our eyes). Ultimately information is not desire, information is not habit, and so the We-engine is a user of memes, but not a meme itself. Once an engine is enstated, no mere change of facts can affect it.
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Take care, Caretaker!
Your innermost is the sacred!
\~0~/
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