Chapter 5: Old Tools, New Tools - Part One

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Nietzsche was actually incredibly cautious, even stingy, when it came to doling out personal advice.  He consistently affirmed his own life choices and personal way of Being but also said he could not offer specific advice to another, different multiplicity of drives.  

“Insofar as the individual is seeking happiness, one ought not to tender him any prescriptions as to the path to happiness: for individual happiness springs from one’s own unknown laws, and prescriptions from without can only obstruct and hinder it."  (Daybreak, Aphorism 108)  

So, when it comes to discussing the psychological toolbox I want to chiefly follow Nietzsche's lead.  Theoretically, almost anything can be in a person's toolbox, any human experience can be used as a tool in any moment.  Against that apparent infinity I want to offer some general and a few specific ideas about psychological tools.  

Most of what follows are simply examples intended to shed light on the nature of the human psychological toolbox.  You will have to discover what works or doesn't work for yourself.  There is no “12-step program” to help you.  Programs pitched as a universal panacea to success or whatever are mostly bullshit.  Diversity of humanity ensures no single program (whether motivational or inspirational) will work for everyone.  Follow Nietzsche's lead, just don't go crazy in the process.

The easiest place to start is your emotions.  If you can experience or understand an emotion then that is a psychological tool.  How does this work?  Fear can save your life or cause your demise depending upon how it is used.  If fear makes you hyper-aware, prepared to react, looking for an opportunity to be proactive then obviously it is an extremely helpful psychic tool.  On the other hand, if it freezes you, trembling, unable to control your thoughts or the fact your hands are shaking then obviously it is an unhelpful tool.  

Either way, “you” are worked upon and “you” work upon “others” with such tools.

Fear is a “tool” in the sense that your experience and expression of it is the result of how you behave in fear.  You literally cannot avoid using fear in that moment.  How you use it is not always up to you.  Your brain reacts to most circumstances unconsciously, below your awareness.   But you can become better at observing and controlling the effects of your emotions with neuroplasticity.  The more flexible your brain skills, the more aware you become of who you really are.  Hard-brains are always myopic in their quest for the familiar and blind to the revelations of anything strange.  

Any emotion can be a tool of your behavior.  Love, which is usually accompanied by Eros, is an obvious tool to become more intimate with someone.  Hate is usually accompanied by anger and is either isolated from or weaponized by whatever it does not like.  Anxiety and aggression, courage and curiosity are definitely in the toolbox.  Habits and drives and biases are all possible tools, too.  Chances are you already use most of the tools at your disposal.  The trick is to learn to use them differently.  As Nietzsche said: “We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.” (Daybreak, 103)

Do you use your tools or do your tools use you?  Back to the fear example above.  Can you get control of your thoughts and react with awareness to the situation or are you going to freak out and run, hoping for the best?  In both cases fear is being used as a tool, the first consciously (which can be cultivated), the second unconsciously by your inborn biases, habits, or drives.  In which case those biases, habits, and drives are using the tool – the “you” you call “you” is not using it. You might not even be aware of its use.

A lot depends on how you see yourself.  Your tools will be used by yourself unconsciously unless you practice a method to observe them (algorithms can actually be a blessing here, see Part Two).  The vast majority of humans, including most enthnocentric stage and relativistic stage people, have little or no self-awareness of their biases, habits and emotions, though they might be highly aware of the biases, habits, and emotions of others.  To the extent that some of us gain any self-awareness we use these tools awkwardly and often harmfully.  

Luckily, many of our emotional tools are used in beneficial ways.  Otherwise, our culture would equate to chaos.  Though we are perhaps more anxious and depressed than ever in human history, the human sense of empathy and shared suffering, shared joys, remains a powerful force (karma) in the world.  The more awareness and control we can exert on our tools (rather than our tools using us), obviously the more we take charge of our own lives.

Being able to see yourself more clearly means to become aware of your habits and desires and emotions and biases.  I do not claim that we can ever completely understand, or even become aware of, all these things within ourselves.  If understanding is undertaken at all then it is a process of discovery that lasts your entire lifetime.  You can travel far without going anywhere at all.  

You will likely find habits you simply cannot break or discover biases that keep expressing themselves in your behavior seemingly beyond your ability to rewire them.  But you can add something to your psychological toolbox that was not widely used 3,000 years ago or even 100 years ago.  You can recognize and name your emotions, better manage your frustration, become less impulsive, more focused, and better take another person's perspective by developing your emotional intelligence.  

Daniel Goleman's groundbreaking book (1995) definitively demonstrates how garnering emotional intelligence (EQ) can lead to maximizing the ability of your flex-brain.  Becoming more emotionally intelligent is one of the best ways to promote your brain's neuroplasicity.  Some of us have a knack for it and use our emotional intelligence to better navigate our lives.  

Most of us start out as emotional idiots and have to work on it.  Most people hate this type of work (in Jungian psychology it is called “shadow work”), which gets back to my claim about the greatest challenge facing humankind today.  We might inadvertently choose to keep on making the same mistakes because we simply don't want to do this type of self work.  Nevertheless, EQ has emerged in the last 25 years to have a profound impact on society, particularly in the worlds of education and business management.  It is a new psychological tool and it should definitely be added to your toolbox.

Yuval Noah Harari (2015/2017) views our emotions in a very specific tool-like way.  He sees them as the earliest and most effective algorithms, lasting for millions of years.   Yet he says this is, suddenly, no longer the case.  He sees the immediate future as giving rise to what he calls Dataism which, he supposes, could eventually challenge the Western Enlightenment.  Further, intelligence (as artificial data) is “decoupling from consciousness” and that “non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.” (page 402)

“For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world.  Hence, in the days of Confucius, of Muhammad or of Stalin, people should have listened to their feelings rather than to the teachings of Confucianism, Islam or communism.

“Yet in the twenty-first century, feelings are no longer the best algorithms in the world.  We are developing superior algorithms that utilize unprecedented computing power and giant databases.  The Google and Facebook algorithms not only know exactly how you feel, they also know myriad other things about you that you hardly suspect.  Consequently, you should stop listening to your feelings and start listening to these external algorithms instead.” (page 397)  

Harari makes it clear that he does not claim to be a prophet.  He suggests that he simply offers intelligent possibilities based on what history teaches us. He sees human history as centrally being the story of human ingenuity and functionality in building “a global network” of information that lasted for thousands of years, particularly after the invention of writing.  But now with AI and biotechnology we are witnessing the rise of Dataism, the religion of intelligence itself, as separate from physical, tangible consciousness.  

I don't know whether or not data intelligence will lead to Dataism.  It is an intriguing possibility.  I am more certain that this “global data network” is actually analyzing and learning from our humanity.   We do not see that we are being watched, the consequences of such a network.  As long as the network we supposedly “build” continues to serve our drives for consumption and convenience then all other consequences are trivialized.  For most people drinking from a plastic straw is more important than the massive plastic pollution to which plastic straws contribute.  I'll return to the idea of algorithms as a tool in a moment.

While many emotions can be used for good or ill, other old instruments in your toolbox are less relevant today.  Psychological certainty, for example, is imbued in every religion in the world.  Not so in the scientific world.  Professor Harari has pointed out (2011) that science is the practice of discovery out of ignorance.  Certainty is less useful than ever before given the diversity of knowledge and of the world and the multiplicity of change.  Being competent with uncertainty is now more psychologically useful even though it was manifestly unhelpful 10,000 years ago.  Such is the nature of the Modern.  Transformation makes previously unhelpful tools helpful and previously helpful ones into challenges to overcome.

Other tools are more helpful than ever before.  Curiosity, for example, has traditionally been warned against by the orthodox.  Tradition teaches that it is best to keep to the stories and rules as they are told.  But curiosity enables ignorance to work its magic and for us to discover novel things without necessarily desiring them.  Too much curiosity in the Mongol Empire would probably get you killed.  It got Copernicus and Galileo in trouble with the Catholic Church.  Today, it is an essential way to remain open to a world of constant becoming.

Curiosity goes hand-in-hand with skepticism and imagined possibility in promoting a well-balanced brain.  It keeps you engaged, questioning, revising, perhaps even transforming.  For thousands of years “mystery” has been the chief source of a sense of wonder in the world.  Today mystery is less valuable.  People who garner wonder through mystery are subject to all sorts of confused and conspiratorial thinking. Possibility, on the other hand, works well with curious skepticism to maintain an openness toward the future and a child-like sense of wonder engaged with Becoming rather than simple acceptance of precedent.   

Along with uncertainty, ambiguity is to be treasured.  Constant becoming means constant change and very little is going to feel familiar or “settled.”  Definitive answers are always questioned.  The Modern is, at least in its beginnings, highly ambiguous.  The consequences of rapid change are, by nature, evasive in terms of the ironclad commandments that have traditionally been the basis for civilization.

EQ allows for seeing your own perspective and taking the perspective of another person.  Persons with high EQ will naturally be inclusive people.  Inclusivity cannot be attained politically or even culturally.  It can only come from individuals with an ability to shift perspectives, the hallmark of neuroplasticity.  This requires a mixture of communicative competence, tolerance, and compassion.

The great German philosopher Jurgen Habermas addressed the practical aspects of such intelligence before EQ was even a term.  He advocated “communicative action” and “discourse ethics” and wrote extensively about their application in the social dimension (1983/1990).  “...understanding what is said requires participation and not merely observation.” page 27)  In other words, genuine communication with another involves the flex-brain stepping into the unfamiliar terrain of another brain via communication.    

Using human reason, Habermas attempts to distinguish how to best accomplish this.  His “discourse ethics” (far out of fashion, but nevertheless helpful, in today's polarized culture war reality) is a useful tool in the same way meditation or EQ might be.  It involves “the decentering of the...person's understanding of the world.  It also draws attention to the structures of interaction themselves, which set the parameters for the constructive learning of basic sociocognitive concepts...” (page 132)  Obviously, if you become aware of “the structures of interaction themselves” you are going to be highly inclusive.

So, there are several tools here of which the flex-brain can take advantage.  Emotional intelligence, communicative action, and inclusion are all geared toward and created out of neuroplasticity.  They create a feedback loop where the novel activity or technique creates behavior and the behavior itself feeds the plasticity of our brains.  In other words, we are hard-wiring our brain in flexible ways – another novelty of the Modern.

(to be continued)