We are our brain. We function as we have learned (or not) to handle it. The brain is 3% of the volume of our body, but consumes almost 25% of the body’s energy. That’s why it tries to make it work as automatically as possible because that way it uses less energy.
When we respond to a stimulus without thinking we save energy. Thinking, on the contrary, is a brain activity that spends a lot of energy. We make almost 40,000 decisions every day, but less than 100 are conscious.
The more automatically we respond to reality -for example, going down the street we always take to go to a certain place, which we usually do without thinking about it- the less energy the brain expends. The brain conditions us to think as little as possible.
How did we manage to have automatic responses? It is the result of evolution. Almost everything that is automatic in the brain we “learned” millions or hundreds of thousands of years ago. It was very good for survival at the time, but what we learned was to survive in another context.
Almost all of our “automatic thoughts” belong to the time when we were hominids or just beginning to be homo sapiens. They help us to protect ourselves from the lion and to hunt large animals, but today they can be a hindrance to deal with in a technological society.
Risk aversion comes to us from the time when going out to face the mammoth or jumping from the top of the mountain (à la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible) cost you your life. Learning not to take those risks allowed you to survive and pass on your genes.
More than 99% of the decisions we make are unconscious, automatic. The few we are aware of are influenced by automatism. For example: voting in a presidential election. We believe that we decided our vote consciously, but in reality it is not so.
People have many “a priori” before being individuals fully aware of our individuality. Actually, being an individual is something very rare and that is why individualization appeared very late in history: it is a recent phenomenon. Naturally, we are part of the mass: we are pack animals, like wolves.
As naturally we are all part of a pack our acts and our thoughts are adapted to belong to our tribe. That is before any conscious thought. The vast majority do not even realize how much the group influences their individual decisions. A study in Spain discovered, for example, that many people who defined themselves as atheists and began to vote for Vox (the most right-wing party) were “discovering” religion and “becoming” believers. Without their being aware of the conversion, the pack spirit led them to believe.
Those who are trapped in one of the two great factions of the Rift believe in everything that their side believes and think that the other side is demonic. Even people who in other matters of life can be quite intelligent on the Rift behave like troglodytes.
Knowing that our brain asks us for automatism and that, at the same time, it gives us weapons to be able to think better allows us to overcome those automatisms that hurt us. It is not easy, but it is possible. For example, we can see that being on the Rift is toxic. Manichaeism (and the Rift is pure Manichaeism) is always toxic.
Manichaeism is the belief that the world is divided into two forces (Good and Evil) that face each other: each Manichaeist (each person who enters the Crack) believes that he is in the tribe of the good people, the Light, fighting against the bad people, the Dark. This is how automatic thinking works. If you’re stuck in the Rift, your entire world is arranged this way.
Every tribe thinks like this in the world: I am where I have to be, on the side of the good guys. Those who are not here are enemies because they are bad. But that’s not true. Manichaeism is never true. Reality is very complex and cannot be reduced to a simple confrontation formula.
If we are interested in building ourselves as better people and building a better world, we should not give in to Manichaeism. This is a good recipe: distrust every automatic “outrage” that arises when the “bad guys” do something that you think is horrible because it opposes your belief. Outrage is a good thermometer to see toxic automatism. Reality is much richer than all the simplifications and emotional responses. Something that looks horrible to you because the “bad guys” did it may actually be no good. But it is not with hatred for them and nor motivated by indignation that the world is going to improve.
Sapere aude: Dare to think, as Kant said. That is the true path.