Be Your Own Person

by James Hudson

  For example, working as a beast of burden on a cult’s farm while paying you no money and little food is bad. Various forms of deprivation tends to weaken the brain and make it hard to think your way out of whatever mess they pushed you into. This why cults are fanatical about getting you into daily emotional programing sessions because they have a lot of experience with getting people to think as they want them to think. Interestingly they always refuse to allow anyone outside the group cult to counterprogram them, meaning the cult organizers, as they do to others. Cults are instinctual groups that rely heavily on repetition of emotional propaganda. Cults and cult leaders should always be under outside control because they are inherently dangerous. They always lie, so that in itself makes them dangerous.

  Three Psychological Types Of People

  There are three general types of people with radically different approaches to life in general and thinking in particular according to David Riesman.

  The first type of person is tradition-oriented. They simply go through life doing as their parents did, and their parents in turn did as their own parents did. They are not original or innovative people. They are simply imitative and probably close to instinctual. You cannot expect any new ideas from them, and you can expect them to be primarily instinctual as well as imitative. They will recruit the offspring and relatives to their own brand of conformity. This sounds a lot like our ancestors back in the Dark Ages. Things simply stayed the same for centuries at a time, and change was not very forthcoming internally.

  Of course the Dark ages got pretty tiresome after a thousand or so years. People started running away from the feudal manors they were born on and ran away to the big cities of their time. The law at that time was that if they ran away and found a place to stay from a year and a day, they were free to stay there. Naturally the conformist instinctual people of that era, the noble men and knights were not very helpful to those who did not feel like doing their bidding. Knights have weapons, enforced the rule of conformity, were not democratically elected and were routinely violent against nonconformists who did not feel like giving half of what they produced to knights, the collection agents of their era. Not very surprisingly, society went nowhere during these conformist Dark Ages. They were very close to being purely instinctual and went nowhere as a result.

  The second type of person found in modern societies are the other-directed people. They always look to those around them for cues on what to do in a given situation. Anything can happen depending upon exactly what kind of people around them are like. They are total conformists who whichever way the wind is blowing, meaning whatever the people in their immediate environment happen to be thinking. If they are in a grade school, they do whatever they sense is acceptable to the majority in the immediate social environment. This might include acting up as soon as a teacher leaves the room. They will have no mercy on the teacher’s pet who ties to do whatever the teacher expects of the students in the room. One thing they are good at is coming down hard on whatever the majority deems acceptable as far as classroom behavior. They have no real principles beyond everyone wanting to be alike on the same lowest com denominator level. This is just another version of being purely instinctual and it also goes nowhere as a result.

  The third type of person is the one with an internal psychological gyroscope implanted in them by their parents. Riesman deems them to be inner-directed. They apply what they have learned about how to conduct themselves to an ongoing and changing series of social situations. This can include schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, civic associations and other situations. They embody principles that they put into practice wherever they go using general principles picked up earlier in life. Inner directed individuals are individuals, the others are not.

  One example is allowing everyone to speak their piece before coming to a group decision. This contrasts diametrically with instinctual groups, where conformity to something decided upon only by the instinctual types, is what usually goes on. Instinctual people with pre-packaged answers are the enemy of intelligent individualists. Jealousy, stupidity and the desire to control are what drives the conformists to into controlling others.

  Abraham Maslow postulated that some people can actualize their latent potential and go on to become what he called. “self-actualized” people who make use of their cerebral cortex to think. They are the complete opposite of conformist group thinkers who will never become self-actualized because they do not live up to their potential. People have a pyramid-shaped psychological ladder of needs that are both physical and psychological. Maslow’s’ work was humanistic or positive psychology, which contrasts with Sigmund Freud’s focus on psychological problems.

  Instinctual people add nothing positive to anyone’s life. They try to take effort from others for their self-benefit. They simply add problems without any compensating value being brought in. It is up to the instinctual people to tell normal people what they add to their lives. No evidence has ever been brought to show that they offer anything that normal people need or should value. Calls for conformity are simply calls for aiming at the lowest common denominators or human behavior. It is up to them to prove everything. Normal people need not pay attention to them, because normal people can do as they wish without the slightest regret. It is up to the instinctual conformists to conform to normal people.

  Instinctual confidence in the rightness of one’s cause sounds suspiciously similar to a religion, and are purely emotional in nature, according to Hocking. One is pulled along the path of supposed unquestioned belief. One must have no doubts whatsoever. One is supposed to pull in new adherents in both the cases of organized religion and purely instinctual behavior. One is supposed to vanquish all those ridiculous unbelievers. One propagandizes without mercy or uncertainty. Instinctual conformity sounds a lot like a religion on the path of proselytization.

  Nietzsche said that “faith is for people who don’t want to know the truth.” That much is certain. Those whose instinctual conformity gives them all the certainty they can handle that they are in the right have boundless faith in their cause. The silly little problem is that no matter how certain they in the right about their cause, they are not correct. Certainty is not the truth and is not reality either. If the cerebral cortex is not involved, whatever they think, they are surely wrong. The intellectual part of the mind shows that they are simply confident without cause, like a football team that is confident that they will win because they “feel it” in their bones. Their instincts have no intellectual or real-world basis whatsoever. Instincts are always animalistic, period. If there is anything more, it is up to the instinctual types to show exactly what it is, and the intellectual types will pass judgement on them using the cerebral cortex.

  The fact that any person or group feels an instinct inside themselves has no particular meaning in the first place. The fact that a tribe of semi-humans back during the Stone Age felt an instinctual thrill when getting together to hunt their dinner, and the fact that sometimes they felt another thrill when they actually captured and cooked an animal has no particular meaning. Feelings are not facts. Instincts exist in order to motivate people to take risks in groups in order to survive. Instincts turn off the rational part of the brain in order to facilitate the survival of the group which shared such instincts at the expense of the individuals who make up the group. People feel important in groups because in groups they experience instinctual thrills when hunting, when football teams storm the field, and so on. Feelings of instinctual thrills served a reinforcement need for of certain types of behavior during the Stone Age.

  These instinctual feelings have no relationship to anything intelligent in the modern era. They simply make some people feel more important than they really are. Instincts can temporarily brainwash people of their rational mind. Instincts predate the rational mind, are survival-related and probably go back to the Homo Erectus stage of evolution. In the context of the environment of evolutionary adaptation, instincts usually overrode the rational
part of the mind because rational thought rarely had more survival value back then in the forest than anything else. This is why people panic as they did in the primeval jungle when there is a fire.

  Pushing Back

  We are surrounded all of our lives by other people trying to control us and direct our thoughts and actions, often using lies. They should be under your control because they are manipulative liars who offer you nothing and want to grab everything without compensation. What they really want is for us to be like them for no reason other than it being their self-centered narcissistic subjective opinion. The reality is that most other people have subjective opinions that are never worthy of your time and effort to consider, let alone work on. You do not need to pay attention to other people. You do not need to talk with them, you do not need to do what they tell you to do, which involves simply bowing down and doing as they tell you to do. Their ideas are garbage because they are not your ideas and are not aimed at satisfying your needs. They never tell you any reason why they want you to do this or that or what good it would do you. They might as well as ask you to eat the food that they eat even if it is not to your taste or wear the same clothing as they do even if it does not fit you. You are too important to be under their control precisely because you do not feel like catering to animal-minded conformists. Other people are not important because they are somebody other than yourself. They need to stop being self-centered and put others first. They bleat like sheep that you need to do what mindless conformists think you should do as opposed to doing what you think you should do. You need not care about what they want you to do and can do as you wish with your life. There is no proof of anything they say.

  Alexis De Tocqueville wrote that “A calm and considered feeling disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends.” You can choose to isolate yourself from anybody you and choose to associate with anyone you want. If you are a farmer, you can deliberately choose to not associate with the sheep-herders as you wish and never need to explain why. They are just a mindless undifferentiated part of a group you don’t feel like being associated with. You can always do better by being an individual.

  Rudyard Kipling said that “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” There is nothing special or worthwhile about a group of other people except that some people consider them to be mildly frightening. Opinions of group members are throwaway fluff, and are a dime a dozen. Groups of people are hunters in their primordial state of mind, that is all. If they temporarily overwhelm you, you can always change your mind about anything you said to them when they were around. Anything said under a real or implied threat is garbage you can always disregard later and lie to them about.

  You should always push back against group attempts of any kind to get you to agree with them or take action with them. Any individual is always smarter than any group, because groups of herd animals are always acting under the influence of instinctual animal emotions, which makes them sub-human. If there is anything human about anything done under the influence of an instinct, especially a group hunting instinct, the real people of the world need to know about it immediately.

  Group efforts pushed forward by group instincts are not worthy of the bother. Albert Camus said “More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.” Groups of any kind never have a good reason for what they do or want you to do. It always boils down to a vague irrational feeling that fluffy ideas that grew out of an instinct are binding on you because it appeals to the group instinct of other people. Other people’s ideas are not binding on you because they originate with other people and do not fitted to serve your needs. You can ignore them or censor them because that is your individual right.

  Group instinct ideas catch on fast among unintelligent people because they are emotional and not of an intellectual nature. The problem is that group concerns divert them away from individual concerns that can actually improve their chances of survival, such as learning to use a bow and arrow instead of holding sharpened spears for group use against a forest boar. The reality is that instincts are survival mechanisms implanted in the brain for use in a Stone Age environment. Such instincts were useful in the Stone Age and went on to be genetically retained, just like running in a crowded theater when we sense a fire around us. The problem is that instincts are rarely under control by the conscious mind, meaning the cerebral cortex. If we panic when we see a realistic picture of fire projected in front of us in a movie theater, our instincts will mislead us.

  Instinctual people are obsessed with turning you into an obedient servant to their will because that is their instinctual, animalistic way of life. They never have intellectual reasons for what they want you to do. They do not want you to use your intellect to outclass them. They are hostile to superior individuals. They are not capable of anything more than aggression and appeals to reasonless conformity. Their conformity instinct will not let them do anything else. Keep in mind that they are instinctual because that emotion is embedded in their minds by their instincts.

  According to Micah Edelson, their conformity is rooted in the long-term memory because that is where their instincts are based. It includes a certain amount of anxiety, which probably induces them to preach their faith in conformity to others. Getting others to agree with them relieves their anxiety. Blind faith in instincts is nothing much to base one’s life upon, but that is the fact of the matter. Nietzsche noted that faith is for people who do not want to know the truth, and that convictions, meaning emotional biases, are more dangerous enemies of truths than lies, because they block the ability to think with the cerebral cortex. People whose minds are clouded with any sort of delusions often do such things.

  Instincts are simply prehuman mental influences that continue to exist in the minds of men. They are usually delusional and have no real bearing on the truth. Men who hunt animals cannot be expected to have a grasp or the truth any better than animals if they are pushed to do or think anything under the influence of Stone Age instincts. Animal instincts are not a good guide to what to do in human life any more than the hunger instinct provides a guide to what to eat when you are hungry. Both need to be under the control of the cerebral cortex, the human part of the mind. Human instincts are no more a guide to life than are weather patterns or a bolt of lightning in the sky, all of which are completely nonintellectual. Those who believe in the infallibility of instincts as a guide for human actions will believe anything on any subject. Don’t let them ruin your life.

  Individuality Is

  The Purpose Of Life

  Life has no meaning for those who simply want to be undifferentiated parts of groups. They are simply satisfied animals thinking about the feast they hunted down that night. Groups never do anything except perpetrat violence. For that matter, demands for conformity are simply a form of aggression common among groups that want to assimilate individuals into their mammalian hives. Nothing intelligent ever came out a group. They are like mindless amoebas assimilating without producing anything beyond psychological reproduction. Groups are mindlessly and xenophobically hostile to individualism because individuals who can think for themselves want to have lives, thoughts and actions that are diametrically opposed to group instincts and actions. Individuals go places, groups do not. The more mindlessly group-oriented they are, the more they hate whatever is different. The group instinct may have a self-survival capability that precludes individualism simply because it is not the group instinct. The group instinct treats whatever is different with xenophobic repulsion. Instinctual people can’t think rationally so they react with xenophobia to anything intellectual. They do not like anyone who is different. The crowd is untruth, accord
ing to Kierkegaard. Thinking with emotions is never truthful nor rational.

  There may a few mindless individuals who think that there is nothing more to life that being a member of group, like having a membership badge on the wall you can always look up at. Nobody has ever been able to explain exactly what advantages being a member of a group confers on anyone, except for violence, like a street gang member jacket. Group membership instincts are the conformists’ substitute for intelligence and individuality. There is no such thing as group intelligence and no such thing as group individuality, any more than a thing can be both black and white at the same time. Group instincts and conformity are byproducts of group mindlessness, like hunting an animal with sharpened spears. Intelligence and individualism are byproducts of being a fully evolved human who thinks for himself. Instincts are the opposite of rational thinking.

  One unusual feature of instinctual behavior is that people who have been in the thrall of group instincts, such people caught in a fire in a crowded theater or a football field riot do not remember anything about what happened or what they thought or felt. Remember that instincts are carryovers from previous states of evolution. Modern brains not adapted to retain any memories of what happens when we are swept away by our instincts. Instincts shut down our cerebral cortex and the ability to think rationally. All we typically retain is a vague sense of having been in a life-threatening situation.

  Individuals are superior to those under the influence of any sort of group mind influence. Gustave Le Bon noted that “An individual in a crowd resembles primitive beings.” Furthermore, crowds resemble primitive beings precisely because groups are prehuman crowds. A street mob exhibits a psychology that is more animal than human in terms of violence and irrationality. You will feel bad if you go along with any instinctual crowd. Arthur Hugh Clough referred to this as the “horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people.” There is no need to cater to inferior minds that run on animal instincts.