Piled High and Deep

All people have a natural attitude, a default configuration. It is how one reacts and how one feels on automatic settings, without any conscious thought intervening and attempting to modify those feelings. One’s natural attitude is just how one is, naturally. It is the flash of anger one feels in traffic, or that outraged, wounded feeling one feels when he or she gets insulted. It is getting aroused by the sex drive, or getting sad when someone dies. It is getting irritable when one hasn’t had enough sleep or is hungry. Any thoughts or feelings that arise without conscious thought comprises this natural attitude.

Let’s take an experience that everyone experiences at one time or another, the snub. A couple of days ago, I was snubbed at work. Some guy walked up and interrupted a conversation I was having and sort of hijacked it, spoke to the other guy and completely ignored me, despite me saying hi to him by name. A classic snub. As soon as I noticed that I was being snubbed, the natural attitude asserted to me that I was getting slighted, insulted, and that feels like a muted form of outrage. How dare he! Once I felt that, it then became subject to my conscious consideration, my ability to look at it and to reason about it. At that point, I reminded myself that I never liked this weaselly dude anyway, so why should I care even one iota that he’s snubbing me? The opposite is true, in actuality, that a snub from someone I don’t respect is actually a compliment.

Though my rational mind was able to reason this out and categorize the weaselly dude as insignificant, I still felt the sting of insult inside, from my natural attitude. People feel this sort of tension all the time. It is the same tension one feels when a relationship ends, and the rational mind says, good riddance, but the natural self feels injured. This tension arises because the brain has different processes that evolved at different times. Down at the base of the brain we find the reptilian center, the earliest evolved section of the brain that handles the lowest-level processes, like breathing, hunger, temperature, basic drive to reproduction, and many others. It lacks linguistic capability. That comes later.

On top of that, people have a mammalian brain that does a lot of our emotional processing. Anger. Outrage. Love. Pride. These sorts of feelings. It was the mammalian center that felt outraged and insulted when I was snubbed, and that is because it is extraordinarily sensitive to status threats, to one’s place in the pack, or the hierarchy. This is such an intense feeling, it is clear to me that it must have been vitally important in our evolution to maintain our standing within a larger group. Life or death important. All people have this sensitivity to varying degrees. It operates close to the body’s hardware, and it can hijack one’s entire nervous system and make he or she feel rotten, or sad, or angry. It can take over completely.

Lastly, we all have a neocortex, which is the center of higher reasoning. The last evolved layer, it has limited access to the body’s hardware. The mammalian brain can in the moment completely silence it, segregate it, ignore it, which is the source of the aforementioned tension one experiences, this tug-of-war between what one knows and what one feels. It is the dumb mammalian brain doing its best to run the hardware, and the conscious mind resisting a complete takeover. Compared to the lower-level access that is characteristic of the mammalian brain, the neocortex, our reasoning center is exceedingly weak. It has a few unique abilities, like logic and reasoning, but it doesn’t have the same hardware access.

The mammalian brain can completely and almost totally take control of the hardware, the body, and make it feel completely miserable for sometimes months, even years, on end. That’s what depression and sometimes grief is about. The dumb mammalian center just settles in and takes over, and when this happens, it can even take control, to a large degree, of the neocortex. That why a depressed person, and I have some experience with this, finds himself or herself locked in a recursive negative loop. One feels bad, low, sad, useless, and the neocortex, rendered a zombie process, tells him that life is hopeless, that there’s no point, that it would be fine if he or she just curled up and died, and no one would care. It is why long-term grief can set in and the neocortex will keep repeating, you are never going to feel normal ever again. Life is going to be sad and compromised from this point forward.

Inserting Stoic Modules

Stoicism is the only philosophy that maps onto this situation with a set of functioning tools that enable the neocortex to regain and strengthen its foothold. I do find it interesting that when the Stoics were developing this toolkit, they had no evolutionary theory ,and no real understanding about humans as evolved creatures, and it is remarkable to me how they were able to reverse-engineer this understanding, because I see it as almost built into the philosophy, but not under different labels. Marcus Aurelius, when he was writing in his Meditations, never meant them for publication. He was keeping was amounts to a personal journal, and very often he worked to insert stoic modules into his programming, to disrupt his natural attitude. Marcus is keenly aware of the natural attitude, how there’s this default way of processing the world, and he continually reminds himself about the availability of stoic tools to combat this and correct it.

That process of inserting modules, I’ve found, is one of the keys to stoic practice. One must continually remind himself to use these tools, because they never get all that sticky. I can say that they get stickier with practice, but to this point in my practice, I’ve do not have one single tool in the stoic toolkit that is absolutely sticky and will automatically counter the natural attitude. I have a few that I can call upon quickly, though, which is what happened when I was snubbed. It went like this: I noticed I was being snubbed, and I felt insulted and outraged. When I felt outraged, that served as a trigger for my neocortex to call on a tool, to insert a module (like one might insert a module into the Linux kernel). In this case, it was the module I call talking apes, along with a second module, a reminder about how we ought to think about externals.

The talking apes module is a reminder that people are just talking apes. The reasoning goes like this: When I am walking down the street, and a dog barks at me, I never feel a status threat. I never think, oh my, that dog doesn’t like me. I’m outraged. What did I do to make it not like me? Never. Talking apes applies this to people. Why should a person snubbing me, or insulting me, or slighting me, bother me at all, if people are just talking apes? This serves as a rebuke to the natural attitude, which takes these things as threats to my status, and which doesn’t consider the source. That is what I mean when I say the mammalian brain is dumb. It lacks any real ability to assess qualitative information. In other words, some weasel at work who doesn’t matter is treated the same as if I were getting criticized by my boss. Both of these trigger the exact same response. Both are taken as threats to my status. Talking apes gives me a module that immediately tamps down that threat response the dumb mammalian brain wants to foist on me.

The second module is about externals is a little less straightforward. The stoics categorized anything that arose outside of ones control to be what they called an indifferent. To understand indifferents, we we must bring in what is perhaps the most important of the stoic tools, what Irvine called the trichotomy of control. One must get a firm handle on this module first. The trichotomy gives us three containers in which to place phenomena: There are things completely within our control, and there are things that are partially, but not completely, within our control, and there are things that are completely outside of our control. The first step in a functional stoic practice, at least in my view, is gaining the ability to correctly label the phenomena that come across our consciousness into one of these three categories.

Let’s say that one gets a speeding ticket. One sees blue lights in his or her rear view mirror and says to himself, damn it! At this point, getting pulled over is completely outside of his or her control. One must pull over and he or she must interact with the police officer. If it is outside of his or her control, there’s nothing he or she can do about it, so it means nothing. It is an indifferent. The only thing that is within one’s control, correctly triaged into the appropriate category, is one’s response to the situation. One must pull over, be respectful to the police officer, remain calm, and so forth. Those things are not indifferents. Those things reflect one’s character and one’s self-mastery. These are the only things that matter.

As a side note, when it comes to indifferents, the stoics saw two kinds, indifferents and preferred indifferents. To use an easy example, let’s say one buys a lottery ticket. Most people would call winning a load of money in the lottery a preferred indifferent. Winning the lottery is better than not winning the lottery. (actually, that isn’t necessarily true or all that clear, but I don’t want to digress too much. For our purposes here, let’s just say that winning the money would be a good thing, and therefore it is preferred.) Whether preferred or not, the base rule doesn’t change. If it is an indifferent, it is nothing.

Where this rule is often difficult to triage, at least in my experience, is when the indifferent wells up on the inside, from the mammalian brain. As I’ve pointed out, the mammalian brain is powerful and can completely hijack the body’s hardware, and it can even color and influence the mind’s reasoning center, and none of that is within one’s control. Take the example of my getting snubbed. I didn’t control getting snubbed. I didn’t control the feeling of insult and outrage that arose from the natural attitude, but because it comes from inside the body, triage can be a challenge. It is harder to recognize it as an external, as an indifferent, but when one can apply the trichotomy of control to it, it looks something like this: I just detected in myself a feeling of outrage and insult, a perceived threat to my status. That feeling is nothing to me, and I will not allow it to take control and rob me of my ability to reason, which is within my control.

To restate, indifferents can be preferred (winning the lottery, feeling love) or neutral (feeling slighted, getting a speeding ticket.) Indifferents can arise internally or externally. Usually, external indifferent are easier to triage than internal indifferents. Internal indifferents arise from the mammalian brain, with its low-level hardware access, and these emotions can masquerade as “truth”, and what I mean by that is that these feelings can trick the rational mind into believing that they are a true perception of reality. Again, in my snubbed example, perhaps the weaselly dude didn’t actually intend to snub me at all. Maybe he is just socially inept, which is entirely possible. My mammalian brain’s interpretation isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of reality, because I don’t have access to the weaselly dude’s intentions or thoughts, but it doesn’t matter anyway. As soon as I can call it out, label it as an indifferent, it doesn’t matter anyway. It is nothing.

Then, applying these tools, these modules, I can clear a space for a clear and joyful attitude to take hold. I can declare that I’m not going to allow things I don’t even control to ruin my day, or even to upset me for a millisecond. I control my response to it. Listen up, mammalian brain. Things are fine. This dude is insignificant. There’s no threat. Chill out and be joyful.

But. But! The mammalian brain is tenacious, and it is dumb, and it isn’t all that good with language. It can, and it often does, refuse to be denied, and it will persist. When something is bothering me, nagging at me, worrying me, I have become able to understand it as my mammalian brain trying to take control. I can insert my stoic modules, and they might work for a time, but the mammalian brain comes roaring back. I have to insert them again. And again. This can feel like I am making very little progress as a stoic, which, interestingly, is another mammalian thread, which I call the critical voice, or the negative voice. It is also an indifferent. I have all of these different threads competing and emanating from my mammalian brain, and the only thing I can do to quite down these voices, these threads, is to apply my stoic modules. That’s exactly what Marcus was doing in his Meditations. Inserting and re-inserting stoic modules. As it turns out, that is what stoic practice entails. That is being a stoic. Take that, critical voice!

That’s where I want to end this. I want to restate that these modules that must be tended and continually uploaded and reuploaded, that they aren’t naturally sticky, and that is what stoic practice actually looks like. The modules must be maintained and used. They must be brought to consciousness again and again and again, because the natural attitude always reasserts itself, at least, that how it has been in my practice thus far, and I’ve been practicing stoicism for almost ten years.