NeuroBuddha - Chapter One v1.0
The Structure of Our Lives
I have quit heroin cold turkey more times than I can count. I have all the “C”’s in CPTSD. And yet, I swear to you that I’ve known no greater affliction in my lifetime than the burden of my own fucking integrity.
No drug, no toxic lover, no shitty cop, no bank, no private equity firm, nor the United States government have extracted more from me and compelled my mind, body and soul into more blunt force trauma while providing me less in return.
I cannot think of anything in life that can cost you everything else you hold dear while conferring nothing of use. I’m not being cheeky or hyperbolic here either. I mean it literally. Nothing of use.
The obvious objection that comes to mind is something like ‘social utility’ but integrity doesn't even provide that. Honor does. They’re very close concepts but they are not the same. No shade to Honor, but it relates to external esteem for adherence to agreed upon values. Earned, but external.
Integrity is an internal state. It refers to what you do when nobody is looking. If you do it while somebody is looking, it’s still good but it’s honor. If you do it while nobody is looking and you tell people, you made it honor and yourself a jerk-off. If you do it while people “may or may not” be looking, you’re still doing it for honor. Trust me here, I’ve spent a lot of time looking for loopholes and they aren’t there.
(Integrity and honor do frequently occur together but if you need me to break down correlation vs causation at this stage of the game, you’re probably in the wrong class. But please, stay for awhile more. You may come to learn that feeling like you’re in the wrong class sometimes means you’re in exactly the right place according to the Universe!)
In the physical world when we talk about integrity, we’re usually speaking of a structure, like a bridge or a building. By its integrity, we’re referring to the soundness or sturdiness of its construction. That has zero to do with the aesthetic presentation. It’s not impacted by rust or graffiti or how much millennials played out Taupe over the past decade. It is totally about the load-bearing ability. How much weight can it take on top? How much can the ground shake around it before it collapses? How much sun, wind, rain, sleet and snow can beat on it? For how long?
The answer to all those questions relies on internal metrics. Hard data, not feelings. And not simple information either. There’s the density of the materials, the thickness of the cut, the angle and amount of the joists and a dozen other things I’m not going to pretend to know.
In fact, the things I know on the matter firsthand are pretty light. I know I read the Fountainhead in rehab. In the Fountainhead, I know Ayn Rand described Howard Roark’s experience figuring out how to create structures and it seemed hard. I know that building plans, code regulations, variances, zoning and licensure for various trades and machinery exist. I have, in fact, participated creatively and economically in making buildings exist that didn’t exist before. I know that I navigated all these problems and that none of those buildings have ever collapsed. In fact, the only thing I would say I understand under oath is how to read paperwork and spreadsheets and ask ALOT of questions until my brain “feels” satisfied.
I have zero actual knowledge of the integrity of the building, nor the people building it. The building I’m in right now. The one from earlier. The road. The bridge. All the structures and humans building them. All of their integrity, absolutely invisible to me. I assume that it’s there. I haven’t died of a building falling on me, but people do die from that, so it’s a non-zero probability.
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Way back when the Ice Age thawed, cave living had low favorability because somebody’s spouse hated the view and somebody else’s spouse hated the walkability score. However, humanity was stuck in the caves because that’s all Earth gave us. We were nominally entitled to the fields and the trees and the hills, but you have to remember, those were different times. The system was incredibly structurally biased towards the majority coalition of Apex predators, accessibility was low and outcomes were poor.
One day, in the middle of a commute back to the cave, a human faced one of those poor outcomes. They ducked behind a tree, didn’t die and then a weird thing happened. The human had an idea. Ideas themselves were not new, tools were not new and making things was not new.
It was this particular idea that went something like: “If I had trees on every side of me and on top too, the lion couldn’t get me”. Then he did it. Or someone else down the line after the idea had been passed did.
And from thereafter, humans had a “container” big enough for humans over which we had agency. We’d had containers for other things before, but this was new. This was for our whole body. It required optimization for external support from the environment. This technology is called “structure”.
The “who” isn’t as important as it happened at all and that’s what I really want to press on here.
Due to our biological “integrity”, or lack thereof, since humans have existed on Earth, “shelter” has been a particularly urgent biological need for us. The natural world provided for that needed. Sparingly, but it did provide. Therefore, every dug-out, lean-to, hut or derivative is, by definition, artificial.
All manmade structure is artificial.
See, if you’ve ever been hit with an object and felt pain, it becomes very easy to conceptualize that hitting another being with an object will produce the same result. At least that’s what you would think up until the moment when you check your human privilege.
We think it’s easy but we forget we’re the top 1% of the top 1% of all the species in cognition per capita. The next two closest species, combined, generate enough cognition across the WHOLE species, to beat on nuts and shells percussively.
You think in terms of “fathers and son play catch”. Other animals don’t even have a concept for a fucking projectile, let alone a plan to reliability reconstruct them across time. It’s a big fucking deal.
Pull up any caveman object you can recall and chances are it’s probably at most two or three things combined. In terms of total discrete ‘parts’, my best guess is less than ten in most cases. The amount of objects, binding and variables needed to cognitively held and manipulated to arrive at “structure” is exponential, almost infinitely.
Sit with that.
At some point in time, immediately after we got out of caves, human beings had a pattern of technology, that on average, probably advanced in units of 8, 16, 32, 64, 256 and the entire genesis of this pattern was seeking relief from externally dictated bad outcomes.
And we got so wholly engrossed in this process, that we did it in total obliviousness to how unusual and disruptive it was to all the other organisms around us. Then we forgot the weird idea and the weird rhythm in (multiples of 8?), assumed it was self evident and all of our contemporary were less evolved for not having thought of it.
Don’t worry. I’m not done sounding familiar.
——
“Scrawny. Weak. Less athletic. Some might say puny. Won’t observe social norms, body language and syntax are slightly off in the base case scenario when you deal with them.
Keeps demonstrating odd obsessive behavior for no apparent reason but cool things happen enough that you can’t dismiss it either.
But also overreacts really badly to stimuli or conditions that are perfectly normal to the rest of us.
Can’t make any sense of the mood swings.
Seems to have an array of things going on under the surface really holding them back. Definitely needs to get out more.
Move around.
Some fresh air will probably help. “
That sounds like something your mother in law said about your sister’s kids before we had a word for it. Just like it. Like all things we’ve ‘learned the words for’ over the years, it has that quality of wrongness to hear. The wrongness is in direct ratio usually to how much the wrong words hurt or failed ourselves or a member of our close tribe. It’s that the proximity makes it the wrong tangible. You FEEL the wrong it in somatically.
That is your survival mode, correctly, whispering danger, like a good friend, just loud enough to so only you can hear. Yet also like a good friend, sometimes not as loud as you might need to get the message over the ambient background noise.
Whatever kind of human skittle you came out as, you know this feeling. It’s real.
And in this analogy, in the 21st century of this season of Humanity, we all know who the “they” is, right?
I want to put “Wrong.” in this spot for proper effect but because of the aforementioned integrity I can’t perform the behavior of gaslighting other humans. You were entrapped because I’m writer and you’re a reader and this what we do.
But truth of the matter is this a quote from the Prime Minister of the Bonobos at the Greater Primate Assembly. More of the "little weird ones" kept popping up and there were fires and other strange things happening. Primates were panicking and the panic kept making the weird ones…weirder.
And that is the pattern we’re going to spend the rest of this book unpacking.
(No, I absolutely did NOT forget that I lead in with ‘integrity’ and haven’t finished the thought yet. This is on purpose, has a specific place in this tapestry and oddly has to do with dolphins and crows, in totally separate contexts.)