So, Maurice, you seriously think that our Neocortex has got that old emotional limbic contraption under proper control…
I find that a good quality (quantum?) cortex is a wonderful piece of machinery, but, according to my life-long observations, emotions – and all those many dancing Archetypes – usually will still remain in charge.
Imagine a beautiful sports car – a top of the line Maseratti – and you look at the driver, and to your surprise it may well happen that he somehow doesn’t “fit”. Perhaps, you see that he looks and behaves like a darn fool. With many very smart people the problem is the same – they may have a great cortex, but the infrastructure of their personalities may be pretty freaky, and their smarts will be often used for no good purpose.
Indeed, many of the smartest people I have ever met were in some ways sort of… stupid. One of my favorite lines, with which I have come up recently (and on which no one has ever commented -g), builds on the term first introduced by Comrade Ulyanov – Lenin: It usually takes a very intelligent person to make a truly useful idiot.
Young people will smash away anything which will preclude them from being slaves to their hormones. Empires (and personal fortunes) have been built as a result of an impulse to expand – but also out of fear and out of a need for safety and security. How often is a person driven to become a psychiatrist or a philosopher or a scholar because they hope that along the way they will learn to become whole (again?). Yes, quite often they are driven by their own emotional imbalances. You realize that this list can go on forever.
Logical thinking is like a computer running a program – and the individual’s Ego with all its complexities is the boss, the taskmaster. A defective Ego will coerce the computer to take garbage in – and to put garbage out. Very cerebral people, like Hegel, were able to bring logical reflective thinking up to truly great heights – and then people like Lenin came and corrupted (translated) his thinking into a revolutionary ideology.
I realize that these issues are tricky to discuss… If you – or anyone – will respond, go right ahead (to the head of the line… -g). I will happy to rejoin the party in a few days – now, it’s time to give both my computers some rest… I am off to Colorado tomorrow.
Cheers!
SkiNowSki |
