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Is The Reptilian Brain In Control?
I recently posted video from an interesting conversation between authors Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff. Though this video series is certainly not for everybody, there are a number of interesting things in it which I wanted to comment on. One of the main ones comes up in part 4. It features Douglas Rushkoff (who I love, incidentally) repeating a common progressive belief regarding the “powers that be” (PTB), that it is their primitive reptilian brains which are in control. And that this rule of the lizard brains is exactly what is causing us so many problems in society and in the world.
At first blush, I’m sure many of us would in fact agree with this assessment, because we look around and see a world where hatred and aggression are running rampant - a world obsessed with death and destruction. But the more I look at the historical and philosophical underpinnings of the “PTB,” the less and less I see of such things. It may be a wonderfully creative notion for us to believe that the “bad guys” are actually reptilian shape-shifters, but the cold truth is that they are in fact scientists; they are rationalists; they are philosophers; they are technocrats.
They do not deal according to “folk psychology” beliefs such as the soul, freedom, or good and evil. Those are just stories they trot out to pull those of US who operate more or less exclusively according to our reptilian brains along for the ride with what they have determined is rationally and scientifically the most sensible course of action to take.
They are not the shape-shifting reptilian aliens; we are. Hatred and fear do not rule the world; science and reason and money do. But it’s hard for us to face up to that simple indisputable fact, because then we enter into slippery Romantic territory, where emotionality trumps reason, and the appropriate course of action becomes the primitivist fantasy that pulling the plug on the whole thing will fix our problems. It will not. The lizard brain has just as many problems as reason. Neither is better. Neither is worse. Our strength as humans is that we bridge contradiction within ourselves at every level, not that we finally have to decide one way or another which side we are really on once and for all.
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:44 am
Well done. That just about sums it up. Thank you.
October 22nd, 2006 at 2:33 pm
A friend of mine has a blog on various religious topics. It comments on Gnosticism occasionally, often in a satirical light. I’d be curious to hear your take on things. It’s at link
Some gnostic related postings include;
http://tim.2wgroup.com/blog/archives/001204.html
http://tim.2wgroup.com/blog/archives/001197.html
http://tim.2wgroup.com/blog/archives/001261.html
Good luck!
October 22nd, 2006 at 2:37 pm
I watched the movie Escape from L.A. with Kurt Russell. (Kurt Russell was in the film I did not watch the movie with him). At the end, it is funny because the movie has the primitivist fantasy in which Snake literally pulls the plug that ends all of technology.
Robert Anton Wilson said that. I say most people in charge are simply unconscious and have a very distorted reasonableness, and they are not compassionate. There is no reason for the level of poverty to exist the way it does. The idea of the reptilian brain is apt metaphor to desribe such a state in which people in power often exist.
October 22nd, 2006 at 3:31 pm
hey - just wanted to let you know we’ve linked to your bit about the Buddhist monk-dog on our site. (sorry to be posting here in the wrong place, but i couldnt get anything else to work.)
this site’s great, by the way. really enjoyable, smart writing!
October 22nd, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Are the people in charge any different than you or me? Quite possibly, but I wonder just how much any of us would do to help people we perceived as a different class. People who, most probably, wouldn’t even like us were we in that position of power. A weeks wage from most of us would mean a huge amount to people in many places in the world. It could even be enough to mean the difference betwean their life and death. But, how many of us have ever donated even that much, directly, to someone? Not from charities which tend to filter it right out, but from actually flying over there to directly help out. If you haven’t, do you really think that with the added time drain and responsibilities which come with office that you’d be acting any differently?
October 22nd, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Here — this link has 3 pages of comments that I posted — giving other links and the details on the reptilian shape-shifting verified by Ivy-league anthropologists:
http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/f...rum/lofiversion/index.php/t75352.html
Plus the latest in Matrix technology, etc.
October 22nd, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Drew, I hate to have to single you out again, but I’ve noticed that your comments on this site seem to be very heavily self-promoting. I’m all for that sort of thing, but just not here. This is not an advertisement forum for your work, but a place for us all to come and share ideas with one another informally. If you could in the future refrain from trying to take over the conversation with links to your writing and tangents to the topic at hand, I would be very appreciative.
October 22nd, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Drew, you’ve been asked nicely, warned sufficiently and are now banned. I am deleting your most recent comments as well. Have a nice day!
October 22nd, 2006 at 11:38 pm
I often find that the real unspoken motives of the most rationalistic and controlling people are almost exclusively of a base and reptillian nature. These people become very adept at providing rational justification for their actions, without ever addressing their underlying issues. You can’t tell me these republicans aren’t lizardly — avaricious? (check.), lecherous? (check.), violent? (check.), fearful? (check. check. check.)
You can see it in their rhetoric; their policy is *rooted* in their basest instincts.
I didn’t see the video, but the issue of the reptillian brain doesn’t necesarily have anything to do with extradimensional shape-shifters. The evidence is mounting; the powers that be (et al., whatever) are tapping into our subconscious impulses and using that manipulate us — it’s easy, if you know how, and I’m sure they have experts in their employ (probably from marketing/advertising circles) helping them to do this. “They” want us to think like they do.
Power is often quiet, and the art of open argument works fine on individuals, but when you’re dealing with the masses, you want to get that part of them that’s on all the time, and accepts everything — the animal element we all have in common.
October 23rd, 2006 at 12:39 am
That’s actually a really excellent point! I guess I’m not actually talking about politicians so much as “scientific managers” though - but even still, what you’re saying definitely holds true
Yes - it is these “experts” that I am referring to. How rational do you perceive them as being?
October 23rd, 2006 at 5:17 am
I think there’s some confusion, when the “rational” and “scientific” mind is opposed to an “instinctive” reptilian one. First of all, who said the reptilian mind is not rational? It’s just very simple, not irrational.
More important, science and rationale are just tools, just like improvisation, imagination and unpredictable behavior are. Ethics (the idea of good and evil) and the invention of Money are tools too, and very developed ones. All these tools can be used for, say, “primitive” purposes (the immediate satisfaction of our personal needs) or for more refined purposes (like something that is good or bad for many people, something that will be good or bad tomorrow and so forth).
My guess is that, at most, these differences in the way we can use our tools can be attributed to a “reptilian” mind against a “mammalian” or “human” one (although it should be proved). I totally don’t see the ethic opposition between the two minds though.
I think it is about the use we make of the tools our mind has at its disposal, according to the moment and to how much clearly we see the problem we are facing, and not about us pending toward ‘evil’ rationale (because scientist are evil and greedy) vs. ‘good’ reptilian (because everyone who is instinctive and irrational is well-meaning and pure).
Those are reptilian oversimplifications.
October 23rd, 2006 at 7:20 am
I don’t really see them as being nerds or uber-control freaks at all. I see them as highly intelligent, but better yet, intuitive people, who have a certain mercenary mentality when it comes to using/selling their skills.
Their level of sophistication appears to be as such that I don’t see them as coldly observant figures, pushing our buttons from a safe distance. I see them as people who know and relate to their own lizard brain and, because of that, know what works. They can personally feel the efficacy of their techniques, just like we do — only they’re aware of it.
October 23rd, 2006 at 9:45 am
The “powers that be” may be technocrats who use rationality, but it should be remembered what they’re using that rationality for. They use rational means — often Machiavellian means — to achieve the ends of power and wealth. Why do they want power and wealth? Their reptilian brains.
Their reptilian brains tell them they need to conquer others for power — like animals secure dominance over rivals to mate. Their reptilian brains (primed for scarcity) tell them they must get food wherever and whenever they can, which translates — through cultural conditioning — into the neverending “hunt” for greater wealth, even if other people as “prey” fall by the wayside. I believe that a lot of what we think of as selfishness — ego, atman — comes from the reptilian brainstem and its drives for fight or flight, food and… sex. Rationality may be how the brainstem’s drives are served, but rationality by itself cannot dictate a goal.
I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s essay “Machiavellian Realism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Means and Ends” which I think may have given me a few ideas for this post, what with the whole leaders-using-cold-rationality-for-selfish-reasons thing.
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:00 am
This is a very interesting article by Robert Anton Wilson about creative agnosticism. http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:o...4&lr=lang_en&client=firefox-a
I think that right now governments are becoming more authoritarian, repressive, corrupt, secretive. Science, Reason and money are major forces in the world and they always have been, and are not innately bad such things can improve the quality of our physical life.
But there is something terribly amiss in the undercurrents of our collective unconscious- and its dysfunction is manifesting through excessive logic and capitalism. And of course any new thought pattern is not going to solve it. It is important always to accept that there are positive forces in the world and in our beings. Life is not always about control and dominance. Existence gave humans meditation and yoga.
October 23rd, 2006 at 11:48 am
Whether or not the PTB have surpassed their reptilian brains, or rather, suffused them into their overall ‘consciousness’ for their ‘rational’ goals, is not even important.
Rather, what is important is that they have become expert at resonating the ‘common people’s’ reptilian brains, appealing to their mechanicality and animal natures in order to orchestrate what they want.
But the external influence is not nearly as corrosive as when they achieve the grand goal of getting people to actually like their own mental/emotional slavery and even seek it out, actively.
“Contemporary culture requires automatons. And people are undoubtedly losing
their acquired habits of independence and turning into automatons,into parts of
machines. It is impossible to say where is the end of all this and where the way out
or whether there is an end and a way out. One thing alone is certain, that man’s slavery grows and increases. Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.”
–Gurdjieff
October 23rd, 2006 at 4:38 pm
reptilian? the most territorial animal i`m aware of is the dog. some birds will chase you across the lawn if you come anywhere near the nest when the nest is full. i`m wondering if the entire cortex model is flawed. maybe if we used another way of characterising the types of people in power then david icke would shut the fuck up. i feel sorry for the woman in his movie about lizards who bought his metaphor to the point where she began hallucinating.
October 23rd, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Good point! Don’t most reptiles just sit around in the sun all day? How evil and “base” is that?
Yeah, me too… come to think of it!
October 24th, 2006 at 12:52 am
I don’t use the word “base” with any negative connotation. I would say the act of sitting and being aware is about the basest (most fundamental) behavior there is. This is a big (maybe the *only*) reason why we meditate; to reintegrate our conscious mind with our instinctive, unconscious mind (which is largely the reptillian brain, closely related to the “Freudian Id.”) When you meditate, you’re getting in touch with that “base” again.
The unacknowledged Id, however, is a FUCKING MONSTER! (even in nice people.) As we all know, it absorbs everything we’re exposed to and *makes* the world — there’s no way it couldn’t be monstrous. That’s where the element of “fear and loathing” comes in (repressed emotions, existential angst, kundalini trauma, wrath, lust, etc.)
If you just look at reptillian behavior, by itself, it’s frighteningly practical. They’re adapted to a very harsh and unforgiving world, so you really have to respect their power; they don’t fuck around. Our dominant body language comes largely from the reptillian section of the brain.
http://members.aol.com/nonverbal3/reptile.htm
That link (great site btw) also resonates strongly with what David said about unconscious/automatic (ritualistic) behavior in the reptillian.
To be honest, I don’t really care much for the actual “science” of it; if nothing else, it’s a very potent metaphor that has a ring of truth to it that is hard to dismiss. It’s not as if we don’t have reptillian ancestors; this is worth studying on, in any capacity.
A blogger (Qaexl) I admire, made some interesting points in the comments of this post:
http://community.livejournal.com/kung_fu/131522.html
and another post of his worth looking at, tangentially related:
http://qaexl.livejournal.com/175489.html
October 24th, 2006 at 6:18 am
yo, i totally just ran across this video myself on google the other day (havent been around here recently, my bad man) but word yo, i love how the universe works, the dude who asks this question of them is a friend of mine.. hes a MC cat from around here lol…
love it…
October 24th, 2006 at 6:46 am
What if it’s not reptiles but CATS that are in charge?
http://cognews.com/1155167611/index_html