This is the first part in a series I am working on about what is happening during the current inflection. Numerous social trends and technologies have reached a point where reality as we knew it has shifted. Just as the cannon destroyed the city-state, and the rifle destroyed the medieval knight, we’re reaching a point where the assumptions of the past no longer apply. In this first article I’ll be looking at how our new forms of storytelling are altering our perception of reality.

I am going to start with a premise which is so self-evident that it’s easy to miss, much as how a fish knows nothing about water. It is a necessary premise which must be accepted for everything else that follows. I worry that this premise might be misunderstood, either because of the language with which I choose to embed it within, or because of a desire to assert human uniqueness and independence from reality (I can see this easily occurring from both the theistic and atheistic sides), ergo I will start by exploring this premise thoroughly, until it’s a certain as the sum of two and two being four. The premise is this: humans did not evolve their brains to understand objective reality, they evolved it to understand social reality. The former is just a happy, unintended consequence of the latter.

The Mind is Not Rational

Let’s start by quickly exploring five facts about life and neurology, which have been thoroughly explored by Professor Jordan Peterson and expounded upon in his many lectures.

Lemma 1: Survival is an interplay of cooperation and competition.

Any given organism is a system founded upon co-operation. Whether single-celled or multi-celled, its inner components cooperate to maintain the survival of the whole, while competing with an external, hostile environment. Eat – or be eaten. Any sufficiently complex organism, particularly one which reproduces through sexual selection, finds that its main competition is the members of its own species. Predators and parasites exist as an external threat, but it will have the tools needed to protect itself or hide from them. With members of its own species however, it’s in direct competition for the scarce resources which they consume. And yet – particularly in the case of sexual reproduction – it must interact with them cooperatively, else the arm’s race of intra-species competition will become so destructive that it leaves them all vulnerable to outside predation.

Lemma 2: Dominance hierarchies are ancient and (mostly) inevitable.

When competing with other members of its own species, it behooves the organism to develop some sort of decorum, rather than to act with psychopathic violence. First, by having decorum – by recognizing some competitors as tougher, others as weaker, and constructing a mental-map of a dominance hierarchy within the species – the organism saves itself from expensive competitions with its superiors. It learns to run away, and live to fight another day. Second, by not fighting to the death, but only fighting ritualistically, it doesn’t exhaust itself in mortal combat, leaving it bruised and bloody, vulnerable to a lesser competitor who was waiting in the wings. Third – the best of the species aren’t destroyed by the endless assault of lesser-competitors. All members of the species benefit from this apprehension of a pecking order, and thus they cooperate to compete non-lethally. We see this in wolves and in deer: any time there is a challenge for leadership the creatures use non-lethal means.

Note: one interesting exception to this is octopi, who are intelligent but vastly different from chordates psychologically, though research into this is tentative. They’re capable of learning from one another, but seem to have very little cooperation. This is interesting if one is speculating about the minds of intelligent alien species – ergo, the caveat that dominance hierarchies may not be the only way to order intra-species competition – but irrelevant to our current purposes.

Lemma 3: Nature prefers brute-forcing problems.

Brute-forcing a problem refers to the practice of “Throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks.” Someone with advance knowledge of how a safe’s lock operates can easily determine the pass-code with a couple of hours of time. But 1000 men entering in random pass-codes – “brute forcing it” – will find the correct combination within ten minutes. One million monkeys with one million type writers will eventually write Shakespeare, and this is generally the method which nature prefers (and even in the case of Artificial Intelligence research, has proven to be the superior method for developing AIs).

Let us consider the example of sexual selection. For the females, determining what is best in mate selection is hard; a larger male will be stronger, but also require more resources to maintain. A more dextrous body can more easily escape predators. A peacock with a ridiculous tail must be doing something right if he’s not dead yet. Attempting to figure out the optimal-survival strategy is an impossible task, and so the females export this thinking onto the males – who compete within the context of the dominance hierarchy to prove their worth, and earn their right to reproduce.

Each generation experiments with variation within the species, because the natural environment is infinitely changing. The locksmith above might be more efficient than the 1000 other men, but if the manufacturers change how the lock is made, he’s back to square one. Intelligence is extremely useful but also very expensive; it’s often more effective to spend those resources on cheap iterations.

Lemma 4: Humans are a social species.

While dominance hierarchies mitigate intra-species competition, and are a fundamental building block of the human mind, a social species takes things a step further. At the simple level you have herbivores who flock so that there is safety in numbers. At the more complex levels you have colony-species, where individual members subsume their identity to the collective (such as ants and termites), or predator species who coordinate to take down their prey. Humans and the other great apes are unique, in that we’re largely equipped like a prey species, and yet we organize like a predator species – perhaps we are food that decided to fight back.[i]

Where our brains came from is a mystery. Perhaps it was an example of runaway mate selection, like the peacock’s tail – our early female ancestors considered the more intelligent males to be sexier than the brutes. Perhaps it was a divine miracle, imbued by a God who wanted a creature who was like Him. Maybe aliens did it. Regardless of where it came from, it allowed our species to achieve global dominance by working together, each member of the tribe specializing in their particular role, and experimenting with new methods for survival.

Lemma 5: Objective reality is sub-conscious

The Psychologist Jean Piaget outlined four stages of neuro-cognitive development in humans. First is the Sensorimotor stage, lasting 18-24 months. At the conclusion of this is when infants discover ‘object permanence’ – the concept that objects remain even if they’re occluded from view. Second is the Preoperational stage, toddler to age 7, when infants begin to use language and think about things symbolically. The Concrete Operational lasts until the age of 11, during which children become less focussed on themselves, and instead focussed on others; and the final stage is called the Formal Operations stage, where children are able to employ abstract concepts such as mathematics and subjunctive counterfactuals (“What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?”).

Of the four stages, only the first deals directly with objective reality. Note that this model transcends the concept of body/mind duality. The first stage involves the calibration of the nervous system to the particulars of the body itself. It appears that rather than being preprogrammed with knowledge of how to operate the eyes or limbs, the nervous system – from the brain all the way down to the nerves in the fingers and toes – is able to adapt to variations in “the hardware” it discovers. Past this first stage, the nervous system begins to represent things symbolically. Object permanence conceptualizes objects as discrete entities, not merely patterns of light and touch (which is a useful, but extremely strange concept, if you ask where an ‘object’ begins and where it ends). In the second stage, language generalizes clumped phenomenon into specific forms. In the third, understanding other minds means attributing distinct agency to them, rather than viewing other people as a collection of impulses. And finally in the fourth stage, abstracting knowledge into mathematics and counterfactuals is the furthest removed of them all.

Only in the first stage is there a direct apprehension of objective reality; past this point, the world is understood symbolically, and the objective automated. An adult human can – perhaps – apprehend the objective when learning a new skill that’s entirely muscle-focussed such as prestidigitation – but the rest of the time, our connection to the physical world is as automated as our heartbeat. Mature humans live in a world of metaphorical concepts, not the world of objective mechanics. Once the basics of muscle-memory are established, the brain devotes itself to studying other members of its own species and engages them in play to learn how it should operate to survive.

Conclusion: The brain exists to imitate success, not understand success.

Much as the females of all complex species are presented with the impossible task of choosing the optimal mate, the members of a social species are presented with the impossible tasks of determining how to interact with their tribe. Thus the dominance hierarchy – initially developed to prevent self-destructive intra-species competition, and aid in mate selection – becomes repurposed to create a social hierarchy. We primates look around at the other members of our tribe, and attempt to emulate those who are recognized as being the most successful. The leader of the chimpanzee troop – is he successful because of his diet? Because of how he interacts with the females? Because of how he negotiates with the males? Or because of the funny walk (which is actually the result of a wasp-sting which occurred in his youth, but perhaps that funny walk causes him to stand out and be noticed)? Chimpanzees have neither the time nor interest to write books, breakdown the specifics of celebrity body language, or spend hours on forums determining which behaviours lead to success. All they know is that the big guy with the funny walk gets all the girls, so hey – why not adopt the same sort of stride? Even if it doesn’t help, it obviously doesn’t hurt.

When faced with an infinitude of facts, monkey-see monkey-do is a far more effective strategy for success than attempting to build a mental model of society from the ground up.

The Next Step in Self-Awareness

 Stanley Kubrick had quite a bit to say about the human condition, and his film 2001: A Space Odyssey directly pertains to the topic at hand: the psychic shock our species is currently experiencing. A notoriously mysterious director, film students have been posting different theories for years in their attempts to understand what the Monolith represented, until the independent film analyst Rob Ager blew the mystery wide open (much to the chagrin of Professors of film studies who’d missed it for years): the Monolith is just a movie-screen flipped on its side. Or, more particularly, the Monolith represents our ability to self-reflect, to self-simulate, and a movie is the next level – a simulation of us self-simulating.

The movie starts out with a troop of chimpanzees on the savannah, being preyed upon by predatory cats. Then – inexplicably – a monolith appears. Upon seeing it, they grow excited – begin using tools – invent fire – and turn the tables on the predator which was preying upon them. When they stared into the monolith they stared into themselves. They saw themselves and knew themselves for the first time. By seeing themselves as a cluster of drives and instincts – by defining these drives an instincts symbolically – they could then see the latent symbols surrounding them, the symbol for tool, the symbol for animal. This new form of self-reflective reasoning allowed them to out-manoeuver the predator, not just by developing tools to use against it, but by being able to predict the animal’s behaviour because they could predict their own. This is the same ability that allows us to domesticate animals to this day, by seeing their emotions and out manoeuvering them, placing ourselves at the top of their local dominance hierarchy, and commanding their obedience (this is also why the Bible discusses Adam naming all the animals).

Next the film cuts to the present day, when a Monolith is discovered on the moon, and humans re-engage with the object that made them sapient in the first place. There is a sequence with the artificial intelligence HAL, further exploring the concept of what it means to be intelligent, and then the film culminates with the astronaut David Bowman being teleported through a psychic wormhole, and winding up in a white room where he watches himself watching himself watching himself. This leads to the ‘next stage of human evolution’ in which he becomes the Starchild.

The film was published alongside a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, which was written in the traditional manner of science fiction; Clarke speculated about an Ur-intelligence which promoted the evolution of intelligent species throughout the galaxy. Kubrick’s film should be understood in an entirely different manner, because he was creating in a different medium with a  different purpose. Where the science fiction author speculates about possible counterfactuals – a plausible “What if?” – the film is not meant to be taken literally, because – as Kubrick is implying in the film itself – all movies are dreams.

The Story Telling Species

Given that humans are a social species, which repurposes the dominance hierarchy to emulate adaptive behaviours within the individual – and given that humans abstract things symbolically – it seems inevitable that we created stories to attempt to explain ourselves to ourselves. The symbolic representation of the dominance hierarchy, existing outside the physical, out there in the world of forms.

Our earliest religions were indistinguishable from fictional entertainment – the Kings were manifestations of the heroes in the creation myths, and the Priests were those who could interpret the stories best. In The Republic Plato recognized this, arguing that only fiction which served the moral good should be allowed – something that seems restrictive in today’s era of mass entertainment, but it is doubtful that Plato meant nobody but Aesop should be able to write. Rather, that only the truly great entertainment should be shown to the youth – not the subversive or low brow Greek entertainment which has (thankfully) been lost to time, for the most part.

When asking “Of what use is religion?” one should ask “Of what use is Shakespeare?” Religious texts are replete with stories, told for century after century, slowly refined by the Shakespeares of each generation, into a crystallized form. Not only were these the stories which managed to inform people on proper behaviour to allow for civilization in the first place – they even contain great wisdom to this day, for those willing to dive into them and discover it. They are not an artifact of a primitive past, they’re a seed which contains the wisdom of our ancestors if only we allow it to grow.

At some point we moved from an oral tradition to a written tradition. With the oral, the audience was captivated by the speaker; himself a man of great status within the tribe, thus a man worth emulating – but more than that, those sitting around the campfire, listening to the tales of heroes past, would find themselves reaching within to find those archetypal structures which fit the narrative at hand. Hearing of the exploits of Cuchulain, David, or Gilgamesh, and the monsters they vanquished, did not create something subjective and unique to each listener; the patterns which formed in the minds were more primordial than that, more useful and necessary. By hearing the stories while the mind drifted in the twilight the listener was changed, becoming like that hero of myth. The minimalism of these stories was their greatest genius. By only having the great storyteller tell them, communicating as much through body-language and tone as through words, and by leaving out so many details, it maintained the purity of the archetype in which the youth were being instructed.

With the shift to the written word, the stories became less about the group and more of a private endeavour. The words on the page force the imagination to awake and co-create the story with the author. Because of the limitations of the written word – the lack of tone, of body language which the storyteller provides – the stories became more detailed and particular. A side effect of this is that they also became more logical and coherent. Plot holes did not exist in the ancient stories – the apparent contradictions were there to be wondered at until the answer presented itself (and there always was an answer, otherwise the story would not have survived). But with the advent of writing, the author was presented with the much more arduous task of maintaining consistency, of summoning up his own daemons who would explain the primordial archetypes so that he could fill out the story truthfully. The older myths don’t read as well – and are thus easily misunderstood, and looked down upon by many to their own impoverishment – but despite this variation in method, the integrity of the archetypes remains.

The Endless Dream of the Silver Screen

With both writing and storytelling, we engage in a co-creative process. The listener and reader is actively engaged, their neurons lighting up like a Christmas tree. But with cinema we see something different. A person who’s engaged in watching cinema has a mind that looks like it’s in a deep meditative state.

Kubrick understood this intuitively, and designed his films to be dreams. From the impossible architecture in The Shining, to the symbolic representations of characters in Full Metal Jacket, his films were intentionally nonsensical and designed to be interpreted afterwards – demanding to be interpreted afterwards. They weren’t merely a vehicle for distracted entertainment, but a challenge for the viewer to ask questions that would lead him to know himself and know his world. But not all directors are Kubrick. Most are not even competent writers.

While the author is required to maintain a consistent and logical thread in his writing, the same standard doesn’t apply for films or even rhetorical speakers and propagandists. In the film world everything is provided for you; the faces, the sounds, the music, and the special effects. You’re lulled into a dream-like state where you passively accept everything uncritically, allowing it to be recorded deep within your mind. Instead of summoning up the primordial archetypes which will grant you social success in the world, you’re having somebody else’s archetypes programmed into you uncritically. If it’s a Kurbrick speaking to you, that’s one thing. But if it’s somebody else…

Imagine your typical Hollywood writer, underweight and jealous of the attention that actors and directors receive, resentful of those who were more popular than him in High School, and supplicating to the women who ignore him. Imagine the incentives of an industry, which risks millions of dollars on each product, and is desperate to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible. Consider the faddish nature of contemporary politics – so often spoken, not written, allowing hypocrisies and contradictions to go unnoticed, unverified, in a manner that’s far harder to conceal in the written word – the politics of soundbites and self-aggrandizement, by which the acceptability of the movie will be judged.[ii] Imagine the actors, not chosen for their talent or dedication, but by the hormonal dictates of the movie-going audience. And even, if you will, consider the vested interest of institutional powers, such as the military-industrial complex or foreign lobbies, who will support or withdraw succour to the studio based upon what images they choose to display.

The result is a perfect storm for a complete loss of integrity. Like a soda-drink company switching from cane sugar to GMO corn syrup and slowly increasing the serving sizes of their beverages, the film industry is becoming cancerous and toxic for the movie-going public. And the movie-going public is everyone.

Jean Baudrillard wrote about how our Media Society would result in a world where Simulations were more widely known than the object they were simulating – like a teenager, who upon driving his first car, is reminded of all the simulated cars he drove in video games. But the simulation eventually gives way to a simulacara – a simulated thing which everybody knows, which has no basis in reality (an example of this from TVTropes is “Reality is Unrealistic” – the sounds of actual punches and gunshots have little relationship to what people have come to expect). In and of itself, this seems harmless – how important is it that Pirates of the Caribbean accurately depict hardtack and its attendant weevils? But this presupposes a world where behaviour is arbitrary, where there aren’t meta-level rules – some Natural Law – which me must conform to, else be destroyed by reality.

The worry is not that movie goers will believe that lightsabres exist, or that magic is real, the worry is that they’ll see the movie characters as the archetypal heroes of the past and attempt to emulate their maladaptive behaviour. Some recent examples of this:

• Action Girl: modern movies abound with 120lb women fighting 220lb men; equating a false physical equality between the sexes, as opposed to their moral equality; an abandonment of the ethic of “Men shouldn’t hit women.”
• Deadpan Snarker: heroes who engage in flippancy, rudeness, and sarcasm. The villains often embody a risible taciturn stoicism, while the hero encourages the audience to be snarky and juvenile.
• Mooks: anonymous villains who are dehumanized and acceptable to kill, even by characters who won’t kill major villains.
• The Chosen One: the protagonist is elevated to heroism by a circumstance of birth, rather than by individual accomplishment. This is fundamentally Gnostic (in that only secret knowledge can lead to truth), and serves as an excuse for the audience to not be heroic – they can sit passively in the audience and cheer (for politicians or TV personalities) while remaining complacent with their own moral turpitude.

For examples of the above – and many other destructive messages – see any film within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they are replete with them.

When someone is exposed to a film they’re put into a passive dream state, absorbing messages about how they ought to behave on a primordial level. And the messages we’re receiving from Blockbusters are fundamentally toxic and destructive of human society. The generational anger which we see everywhere – the Manichean conspiracy theories of both the left and the right – the fake-spirituality of those who live disordered lives – and the abandonment of marriage in favour of trying to make friendship last eternal – all of these are existentially dangerous social artifacts which have been learned through the movies, and they don’t appear to be going away any time soon.

On the one hand, this new form of storytelling could create the Starchild – a deeper and more profound understanding of ourselves which allows us to harmonize as a species, to coordinate to greater ends while avoiding the destructive potential our technology allows. On the other, it could plunge us into a completely subjective and self-destructive social reality which demands tyranny to keep the inevitable pain at bay. When the crowd is taught that a particular behaviour will result in success – and then, upon emulating that behaviour, experience failure – especially when also taught that malign forces exist whose sole desire is to create suffering for the sake of suffering – they will scream for a tyrant to destroy the evil, and give them the success which they were promised.

At present, the solipsists seems to out-number the Starchildren. I would estimate that 50-80% of the population exists in that fake dream world. We are going through a social inflection point, and this devolution of cinema into solipsism, Gnosticism, and narcissism is one of the crucial factors at play which must be accounted for by the few of us who are trying to keep our feet on the ground.

Never underestimate the power of stories.

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[i] I read this quote from a Star Wars novel many years back, I can’t recall who the author was.

[ii] My own short film Lust in the Time of Heartache ended its dream sequence with the protagonist being murdered by the personal demons he was trying to fight – the message being that you don’t fight demons, you overcome them. This was deemed too violent for public viewing (despite the previous martial arts scenes being acceptable) and was removed, fundamentally altering the message of the film.