Let’s talk articulacy.

There is a fundamental error in the natural thinking patterns of the highly articulate.

Say you’re a highly intelligent and articulate youth. ^[1] You want to do something exciting and dangerous. Your parents, naturally enough, don’t want you to do it. So you angrily challenge them to give you one good reason why you should not do it.

And say your parents are good people but of average intelligence and articulacy. They know there’s good reasons not to do this crazy thing, but they are neither intelligent nor articulate enough to be able to spit them out right away.

You, the arrogant teen, then say “Hmph! I didn’t think so. ” And storm away, thinking you didn’t just win the argument, you proved your case.

But you’re wrong. You haven’t proved a thing except that you think faster than your parents, and you presumably already knew that. There could still be very good reasons not to do the activity and you would never know because you have confused articulacy with reality.

That’s the fundamental error. If you follow that logic far enough, you see that by confusing winning an argument and proving a point, you end up with a worldview limited by the articulacy of those you happen to encounter and argue with. The inability of people to prove you wrong has no bearing on whether or not you’re right.

Reality just plain doesn’t work that way.

But it’s an easy delusion to fall into because the reptile brain at the core of all our noggins insists that if you win the fight, that means you’re right. Winning at anything gives people a rush of confidence and pride that can have a powerful effect on the psyche and distort our sense of reality, which is, of course, a product of higher, less primitive forms of thought.

The hierarchy of the mind, sadly, is in a sense extremely unjust. The more primitive parts of the mind hold veto power as well as override priority over the more sophisticated and, dare I say, human parts of the mind. That is why it takes a very specific kind of mental strength to resist what our very powerful primitive minds, which have at their disposal one’s entire endocrine system, are saying.

And I doubt anyone has developed total immunity to it. We are, at best, lucky enough to be able to hold on to a few pieces of the big puzzle called Truth against our inner Godzillas.

Luckily, as a species, we can communicate these truths to one another, and that means there is a possibility they will accumulate.

It is hard for many of us brainy types to accept that we too are subject to primitive, tribal instincts. After all, our higher brains are so well developed and we can easily prove how we are able to produce very impressive sounding verbiage at the drop of a hat. It is all too easy to slip into thinking that this makes us special and not subject to the baser instincts.

But that is the arrogance of the ego talking, not rationality. No matter how high you build your ivory tower, its base will still be in the id, and it is literally impossible to move entirely into the upper reaches of your tower while pulling the base out from under you.

The only way to develop any sort of resistance against the distortions induced by our primitive minds is by acknowledging them, owning them, recognizing them as valid and worthy parts of ourselves, and most importantly, listening to them.

The tendency in intellectuals is to ignore the input of the id and to treat it as noise one must tune out into order to be logical. And that’s not a bad thing to do. It is fundamentally correct to say that the deep abstract reasoning skills necessary to the development of the higher intellect rely on just such a tuning out. There is much thinking that simply cannot be done with emotion getting in the way.

The trouble comes when this filtering out of the id’s messages becomes one’s blanket response to reality. Under such a regime, the id never gets expressed or listened to or even acknowledged.

This can be, in a word, disastrous. When ignored, the id runs rampant, pushing the ego out of the way and leading to a life that is out of control, chaotic, and the exact opposite of logical, all while the ego sits in its lofty tower cooking up facile justifications to explain how all of this is, in fact, logical and sane.

That’s no way to live, and yet, it is a pitfall into which many of us smart types easily fall, myself very much included. It is a very sophisticated system of self-delusion because it wears a cloak of logic reasonableness. A lot of people make the decision every day to turn away from reality in favour of the world of the mind and let nearly anything happen to their lives rather than face the truth.

But the id’s truth is just as important to your life as the ego’s. The fact that it can distort the results of objective thought does not make it worthless. It is where emotion lies, and emotion is the entire reason we do anything. The id may not tell you what reality is, but it will tell you who you really are, and its alarms and warnings make for a very good roadmap to what is going wrong (and right) in you if you but take the time to interpret them rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending it isn’t there.

True enlightenment can only come when you accept and integrate both id and ego into a full, rich, informed superego that honors both mind and heart and knows there is not battle because they are two halves of a single whole, and without one, we are incomplete.

We are, when all is said and done, merely very clever animals.

We only go wrong when we forget this.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.