POETICKS

Introduction, part one

I’ve spent 45 years working on and off on a total account of the human psychology.  Needless to say, it is complex.  It is also stuffed with terms I’ve made up, and rarely can remember.  On my good days, I feel I really understand most of my theory.  On my best days, though, I fear that hardly anyone else in the world will.  Although I did take a few (undergraduate) college courses in psychology in my late thirties.  (I resisted going to college until I was 33 or 34, then spent five years as a full-time student at a junior college followed by the two years at a university needed for a degree–which was to allow me to take some graduate courses in play-writing, my main, highly unsuccessful vocation up to that time; I never took them, my aging parents needing me to look after them, my mother having become bed-ridden by a stroke–as my father slowed toward the age of eighty.  He died suddenly just two days before reaching that milestone, and I carried on as my mother’s sole care-giver, except for the many nurses and nurse’s aides we had, for the next ten years, when she, too, died.)

I’m telling you a bit about my personal life to try to fool you into taking me for a regular fellow you can trust no matter how outlandish his totally uncertified ideas are.  I also suspect my bits of autobiography will be able better to keep you reading this book than those ideas–because, hey, they’ll describe a fascinating loner working out in the wilderness to find Important Truths forty or more years in advance of the piddling discoveries of my competitors in the Establishment.  Forty or more years of Serious work, mind you.

Okay, back to what I was saying.  I mentioned all the terms I’ve made up.  Well, in this book, I’m going to avoid them as much as possible.  There are still too many of them I feel I can’t do without, though.. The first of them is conspiranoia.  Actually, I can’t take credit for that although I thought it was mine until I found out a guy name Devon Jackson beat me to it by a good ten years, using it in the title of a book of his.

I define it as the psychological condition of a person who has a seriously irrational belief in a conspiracy theory he (and, often, many others) considers of the highest importance.  I have italicized “seriously irrational” to distinguish a belief in conspiracy theories such as the one I consider myself a leading authority on, the one whose adherents hold that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon was a fraud, or the one concerning the UFO that crashed in or near Roswell, New Mexico, from the one John Wilkes Booth was central to, or the one concerning the Donation of Constantine.

A second crucially significant coinage of mine is the inner/outer ratio. (or “i/o-ratio).  This, in effect, is the ratio of the strength the energy available for the activation of a person’s memories (his mental energy) at a given time to the strength of the energy of the data he receives through his senses from the environment (his pre-mental energy).

This ratio is, for me, pivotal in determining the person’s temperament (or personality or character–any term you want to use to indicate how a person’s manner of dealing with life comes across to others).  If the memories a person is conscious of at a given time have the upper hand, for instance, the person will tend to go along with the crowd less than someone whose environment (dominated by the crowd) has the upper hand.  A simple example: Joe, Frank and Mark consider what movie to see.  Joe says he’s heard the one at the Bijou is terrific; Frank, for whom outer data is stronger than inner (at least at this time), immediately says he’d like to see that movie.  But Mark, with an opposite inner/outer balance, hardly hears Joe, remembering that he read about a current movie based on a book he’d enjoyed and thinking then he’d like to see it; he puts in for seeing that instead.  Frank at once changes his mind, going along with Mark.  Joe, with neither any strong memories against the movie Mark wants to see goes along with the others, even though his temperament is more like Mark’s than like Frank’s.

Yes, I realize that most such decisions are vastly more complex than I’ve described this one;  they can sometimes be as simple as this, though, and whether they are or not doesn’t matter, because I’m only trying to picture in what I hope is an easy-to-grasp manner the effect of the value of the inner/outer ratio.  (The risk of seeming condescendingly too clear means less to me than the risk of seeming annoyingly unclear.)

Those readers knowledgeable about the work of sociologist David Riesman may recognize in Joe a specimen of the other-directed type Riesman wrote about, and in Mark a specimen of Riesman’s inner-directed type.  My theory has different names for their temperaments, because–well, mainly because I like my names better.  But Riesman’s names are good ones, and familiar ones to many people, which is not the case, alas, with mine, so in this book I will go along with his.

There is one other character type Riesman hypothesized I should mention: the autonomous type.  The difference between this type and the other two, according to my theory, is that while an inner-directed person’s i/o-ratio will generally keep his memories significantly stronger than the data his environment transmits to him, and an other-directed person’s environment will generally dominate his memories, an autonomous person has the ability to change his i/o ratio memory-favoring to environment-favoring, or the reverse, so he will sometimes act inner-directedly, sometimes other-directedly.

I suspect that most people are more autonomous than either inner- or other-directed.  But this essay will focus on the few who are, basically, slaves of their memories–those who are excessively inner-directed, for it is only they who are prone to being deluded by preposterous conspiracy theories.

That’s because of the faulty functioning of such a person’s intellect, as I idiosyncratically define it–which is as a neuro-endocrine complex in charge of regulating the cerebrum’s level of mental energy, or energy used exclusively for activating memories.  The intellect has three departments: charactration, accelerance, and accommodance.

Charactration is what is responsible for a person’s normal level of mental energy.

Accelerance does just one thing: it raises the level of mental energy when appropriate.  Accommodance is its opposite, for the one thing it does is lower the level of mental energy. That doesn’t sound like much, but I consider it a much more most important component of human intelligence than accelerance, although the latter is mainly what IQ tests measure.

The intellect is not the only thing producing human intelligence.  Sharing that responsibility is its sibling, which I call the periphrelect.  Frankly, the name I’ve given it (which is an awkward combination of “periphery” and “intellect”), embarrasses me, so I’d like to get it out of the way as soon as possible.  I will just say, then, that it does with the data the senses transmit to the brain from the environment what the intellect does with memories: that is, it regulates the level of perceptual energy when appropriate.

Ergo, the i/o ratio is simply a matter of the intellect versus the periphrelect.  The latter, however, does not seem to me to have much to do with the ratio.  It increases the outer component of it at times, but generally only during gross emergencies, like a person’s discovering his house is on fire and running, or being attacked by a dog.  Disruptive but not long-lasting.  A person’s suddenly coming on some wondrous scene of grandeur, or hearing particularly appealing music of  might have a similar effect–although in such cases the intellect may also be involved.  In any case, it is only the intellect with which I’ll be concerned on these pages.  However much the periphrelect may be involved, the intellect’s faulty functioning is without question at the heart of conspiranoia.

The role of charactration is simple: the higher the level of mental energy it subjects the brain to, the stronger memories will be, and the higher the i/o ratio.  If it were not for accommodance, that would be the end of it, but accommodance which, it is to be recalled, can lower the level of mental energy–so much as to convert inner-directedness to other-directedness in healthy persons.  But not in conspiranoids, or those destined to become conspiranoids.  In other words, it is an intellect that combines gnerally strong charactration with weak accommodance that is the basis of conspiranoia (and similar afflictions).

Accelerance, which I consider the IQ factor, and which I look down on, honesty compels me to say, because my own IQ, although “above average,” is not world-shakingly high, does not greatly figure in my account.  As should be evident, its ability to raise mental energy should only aggravate inner-directedness.  Because, as we shall see, lack of significant help from accommodance will limit an inner-directed person’s effectiveness at finding answers to problems, strong accelerance will hinder him further by rushing him into acting on bad answers–that will lead rapidly to worse answers.

At this point, I think we have enough of a general idea of how conspiranoia comes about.  It is thus to work up a preliminary approximation of what a typical conspiranoid is like.

to be continued