And Now, Back to our Regularly Scheduled Program

First off, I ran across this article about decision making, and my new goal is to become a "satisficer."

OK, so on to the real deal - today's brain seizure.

So I've been thinking about something Marc said a while ago, about us humans evolving to become codependents as a species, but that we've outgrown its usefulness, so now it's an obsolete flaw. And I was extending this Darwinian thinking onto the idea of the Itty Bitty Shitty Committee in our heads (IBSC, a term not coined by me, origin unknown, but I first was introduced to it here in this most excellent story).

There's the second mind concept (of mine), the little-devil-and-little-angel-on-the-shoulder concept (of cartoons), and then this concept of the IBSC which, as far as I can tell is analogous to what some shrinks call the inner negative voice (I'm thinking Robert Firestone, in particular, and his books on Intimacy). I think they're all the same phenomenon.

I digress here a bit to say that in my experience there's the main mind, that we function with on an aware level, all our waking hours, and then a singular second whatever-you-want-to-call-it voice, in our heads. I've personally never had multiple other voices, even though I joke about them.

So it boils down to Main Conscious Me, and Second Me. They often dialogue when making a decision, such as "should I or shouldn't I?" and that sort of thing. When they disagree, we feel angst, and then anxiety. When they coalesce, we feel depression, because that darned Second Me tends to be the pessimist, the negative one, and they only then coalesce when the Main Conscious Me is also down in the dumps. Which is why Firestone calls Second Me "the negative inner voice," and not just "the inner voice."

So my question is, why is it that anyone's Second Me is pretty much universally negative, in the human condition? And why does Second Me carry so much power, in our internal dialogues? If we could easily stomp out its voice with Main Conscious Me, then nobody would need a shrink. But we all do....

I was reading a post last night that was displaying an avatar. The person was bemoaning how awful they felt, looking in the mirror, hating what they saw, how they looked. But looking at the avatar, which showed a picture of that person, there really was nothing to complain about, at all. Yet the power of their Second Me superseded all reality, even on such tangible matters as looks.

We all have those experiences, where Second Me tells us negative things that aren't really supportable, and yet, we believe it - that is our default. According to Firestone, this is a rather universal phenomenon, and one of the main reasons we cannot attain intimacy, because we are stopped - put into defensive, closed-off posture in psycho-protective mode - by our Main Conscious Me's reaction to the negativity of the Second Me.

So, back to Darwinianism. Could this feature of human nature, the negative Second Me, be a result of survival of the fittest? That, in our phylogeny, we had to always think the worst, be ready for disaster, failure, assault, in order to be the fittest to survive? Was this characteristic beneficial, evolutionarily? If one is Darwinian, then it must have been, as it's now present, and therefore must have had an advantage to evolve with us.

And have we outgrown it? Now that we don't need to assume a Sabre Tooth is gonna slash us from behind, or our neighboring Neanderthal tribe is about to take our territory, is this characteristic still operative, or is it vestigial? One could argue that workplace politics render it quite needed, still. The stabs in the back may be virtual rather than actual, but can still threaten our survivability.

I think I just answered my own question. Yes, it must still be operative.

So now, I need to crawl off, and think how I could take the power of this Second Me, and turn it in a direction that is useful. Take what tends to add friction to my growth path, and turn it into propulsion. Time to think about some laws of physics, now. Or maybe geometry - twisting shapes one, into a different one.

Hmmmmmmm. I know. Too cumbersome to ponder. But like I said, I can't help what happens, in my mind. You'll have to forgive me.

-The Traveler