Stupidity Of Be Yourself Viscerality by Santosh Jha (motivational novels TXT) 📕

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CHAPTER 2

Populism often has this weird tendency to ride on ‘abstract logic’, mostly suiting personal utilities. As individual desires are common and operative ambient milieus too are symmetrical, such populist perspectives become memes, which we call as ‘collective unconscious’. Pop cultures often have deep shades of powerful memes, painted on the canvas of collective unconscious, beyond conscious cognition. Consciousness anyway is usually in constant drift, blown apart by powerful pop sinews.

One such populist perspective is the term and idea called ‘visceral’. The populist perception is that what is instinctive to all of us has the ultimate utility and wisdom. This emanates out of this contemporary liberal and consumerist meme that ‘I Know and I Know It Right As It is Visceral To Me’. This seemingly embedded over-egoism of ‘I’ and its avowed ‘super-hero’ imagery has fueled this penchant for all things visceral.

This populist perception to validate all shades of desires and wants of our instinctive urges and drives however is only a very personalized value, which has become a meme but has no roots in logic and objective prudence. Interestingly mystical seems the realism that what happens to us, felt obviously by its deep-seated ‘desire-drive’, is more believable and acceptable than some distant and ‘external’ prudence of objective logic.

But then, scientists warn that most human drives or instincts are without conscience. They do not care about long-range effects. It seeks only immediate personal gratification as to most of us, feeling one’s own desires is the easiest thing and many believe – All good things need to be simple…!

Modern knowledge of brain realism also accepts that consciousness is very localized. It instinctively being a reactive mode facility cares for only short term utility and worth. And as deciphering one’s personal desires and gratification needs are the easiest wisdom, most of us fall for this utility of ‘intelligence’.

However, visceral drives and their utility apart, what singular objective logic says is –

‘If conscience exists, it exists in the intellect of the human, not always in instincts. To be human is to allow the intellect to preside over the utility and worth of every important action-behavior over the dimensions of time, space, people and processes. It is this necessary intellectual control of the instincts which makes a culture successful.’

Globally, there are studies and researches going on, which are looking into the dynamics of individual drives and social viability and they see clear trends. We see contemporary cultures in loads of drift and flux because majority of people are behaving true to their instincts (Visceral Wisdom), without much intellectual control and conscience.

Interestingly, even though this intellectual self control is a learned function and is called self-discipline, to over-ride less desirable instinctive behavior, the very seed of this need for self-control is deeply wired in our instincts itself. The guilt or remorse or even this ephemeral ‘second-thought’ that often follows instant-self-gratification is also instinctive and visceral. We seldom accept it this way.

That is why in most advanced contemporary cultures, where liberalism has unleashed uncontrolled instinctive drives of humanity, sans any intellectual self-control, the governments of the day have to spend huge moneys on police, jails and other emergency measures. Most modern cultures are failed cultures as the level of self-control in people in personal and societal spheres are very little and diminishing fast. The element of self-regulation and self-discipline, in the domain of ‘collective unconscious’; is gradually going down.

One such powerful instinctive drive of humanity, which has shattered most modern liberal cultures, because of ever reducing intellectual self-control is sex. This over-encompassing sex drive has lost its evolutionary role way back and it surely looks like an obstructive vestige of the obsolete evolution. Still, it dominates the human thinking and worldview in biggest possible way, overriding even survival sanity.

Evolution, at one point of time, many millions years back, switched from non-sexual reproductive procedures to sexual one as it had definitive benefits for species survival and genetic excellence. Evolution embedded sexual drive in neural wirings to ensure that human excelled over other species. This evolution then created gender roles and suitable physiological as well as neural differences were created in males and females. This scheme of things required that men always looked for sex and women used sex as selection tool for best mating option.

Things have changed in modern cultures. Evolution’s game plan is no more valid and no more required as traditional gender roles have changed and in liberal cultural scenario, sex has lost its old and tested evolutionary purpose. Moreover, in modern living, humanity does not have the old challenges of survival and species proliferation, as we are many times more in numbers on this planet and have managed to live quite long.

We do not need to go into details as everyone knows, how modern cultures have placed sex in a rather demeaning and diminutive imagery as fun thing, thrill-tool, boredom-buster and just time-pass activity, rather than a reproductive tool.

In modern civilization, where success of cultures depends on how intellectual self-control is exercised over instinctive drives, just the inverse is happening. Sex was once an instinctive drive, designed for species needs millions of years back. Now that modern human life-living situation and overall cultural advancement has made those needs obsolete, what we need is intellectual self-control over this powerful sex drive, which has lost its primitive usage. We need to accept sex in a totally different light and perspective.

Though, it is a long and complicated scientific explanation as how our brains have been designed in long years of evolution; we just have to know and accept that unlike other human organs, human brain is not a single organ. It is rather a cooperative of many parts, evolved during different times of evolution, with each part being an addition to the old one, not a replacement.

Therefore, what we need to accept is that our brain is not doing this favor of intellectual discretion to us. It still has the primitive brain, over which the new parts have piled up. That is why our brain still has the primitive instincts and drives. It also has modern logical parts but brain is not doing any automatic pruning for us. We have to exercise learnt and nurtured intellectual control over our instincts. Both instincts and intellect are part of our brain mechanism but this self-control thing works well only when we have evolved a higher consciousness.

This hypothesis advocates this contemporary wisdom that ‘Be Yourself’ ideology is a qualified wisdom. Just being yourself or blindly following what our instincts leads us to is stupidity. True meaning of ‘Be Yourself’ is seeing, understanding and accepting the drives and instincts through a tough and objective process of ‘self-actualization’ and ‘self-dialogue’ and then install intellectual self-control over all our visceral desires.

As ancient spiritual traditions as well modern science has been telling us – ‘What we seek is what we want and all that we want is not what we need.’ There is this fine-line between what we ‘want’ and what we actually ‘need’. This is the prudence of evolving and maturing as a human being. Our visceral self shall always lead us to our primary drives of 3Ps – Possession, Preservation and Perpetuation. These drives are wired intelligence, so that we all survive and excel. However, our drives are value-neutral and very localized. In collective modern living, we cannot solely rely on our drives and justify it by professing to Be Yourself viscerality. We need to apply intellectual self-control to prune our old and obsolete vestiges of drives.

There was an interesting survey in USA, where a group of people were asked whether they would accept $100 right then or forego it to get $500 after six months. Study found that overwhelming majority of people accepted only $100, not bothering to wait for six months in anticipation of better gains. This is some viscerality, which we need to unlearn. Be Yourself drives and instincts can be good, but not always and not in all situations. Our drives were created when humans lived in precarious life-living milieus. WE now live in reasonably settled and structured milieus. That is why, we cannot and should not rely blindly on such old and obsolete drives, which have lost their utility and worth in modern milieus.

Instinctive behaviours are auto-mode, intellectual initiatives are not. Therefore, the intellectual self-control needs to be inculcated and persevered through conscious practice. This presupposes quality time with self. Contemporary life-living of constant drift and flux drowns us in auto-mode reactive decision-making, conditioned by our raw viscerality. This we all need to unlearn.

No doubt, human inventiveness and human intellectual prowess are potent mechanism, which can engender so much novelty out of even a waste. Sex however is such a beautiful human experience. With applied human intellect, modern humanity and cultures surely can turn this obsolete sex drive into a highly beautiful, artistic and worthy entity.

There is this very subtle difference in cognition regarding so many life-living realisms, which produce two extreme causalities – extremely beneficial or extremely calamitous. This difference in cognition is about how we hit a poise of higher purpose between tangible as well as intangible elements of some realism. This needs to be applied in the domain of sex.

The tangibles of sex, the visceral overtures and physical intimacies have a very limited purpose, which are now evolutionary vestiges. We surely do not need sex in its primeval tangible form. However, the intangibles of sex are unlimited and they offer us so many sunny shades. The intangible elements of nurturance, mutuality, intimacy, cooperation, compassion, commitment, trust, etc are all very beneficial requirements for overall wellness of we all and all these elements must be made to ride on the tangibility of sex.

Evolution has given us a vehicle, a medium, but what we carry on this vehicle is now the role of our intellect and higher consciousness. We talk about human mechanism of this dualism of ‘wants’ and ‘needs’, with reference to drives in detail, in next chapter.

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CHAPTER 3

Science is working on bio-engineering probabilities, which could install a ‘package’ of knowledge and information in the minds of every new born, like a computer is installed with a software, so that every individual of every new generation could not have to spend long years reading about them and learning them. May be, science could also be someday successful in creating a ‘pre-fabricated’ brain-software, which makes it possible for all kids to be born with all past knowledge of humanity. Till then, it is ‘field-day’ for every stupid man and woman to flamboyantly flash his or her ignorance and proudly proclaim it to be the ‘exclusive genius’ of humanity…! This is visceral…!

Solipsism, early-life streaks of ‘anti-intellectualism’ and ‘anti-rationalism’ is not something, which come ‘pre-installed’ or ‘pre-fabricated’ in human mind but we are wired for them. Individual men and women ‘learn’ these ‘stupidities’ from their mad-milieus, as not only now, in all ages, ambient social-cultural milieus always have abundance of ‘stupidities’ for every young man and woman to ‘learn’ and then flash them as ‘exclusive genius’ of personal possession. Aping is visceral, however, what one apes is his or her choice, evolved out of the milieu, he or she was born and raised into…

Somehow, every newborn boy or girl comes on this planet with just an operating system of raw instincts, wired deep in his or her neural-make-up of brain states. Though, science may not yet have devised this ‘magic-software’ of ‘knowledge-package’, to install in every newborn’s mind but for sure; since ages, most newborn boy and girl are blessed with two ‘engineers’, in the form of mother and father, who keep installing ‘good-software’ of necessary personal/social/cultural knowledge and information in the computer of young minds, so that they have the contemporaneous mind training to fit into the larger sanity of humanity as well as ambient milieus. However, tragically, not only in contemporary world, but in almost all ages, majority of newborns are assigned stupid ‘engineers’ of mother-father,