The Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online describes Tyranny as “a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force.”1 Today we turn our attention to perhaps the greatest tyrant in the history of humanity, the final seat of the intolerance of all mankind, the ultimate seat of all tyranny, the human mind.
The mind is the final common pathway of all human suffering. Perhaps perversely, the mind is likewise the architect of its own suffering as well as the suffering of others. Accordingly, the American President Franklin Roosevelt noted “Men are not prisoners of fate, but prisoners of their own minds.”2
The consequences of the slavery of human beings to their own thoughts, wishes, and desires is staggering. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enumerates the leading cause of death of Americans as:
1. Heart disease
- Cancer
- Chronic lower respiratory diseases
- Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases)
- Accidents (unintentional injuries)
Much of the burden of heart disease and stroke is attributable to appetites generated by the mind. The famous American medical institution The Mayo Clinic stated, “Atherosclerosis is also the most common cause of cardiovascular disease, and it's often caused by an unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, being overweight and smoking. All of these are major risk factors for developing atherosclerosis and, in turn, cardiovascular disease.”3 The fact is, dietary choices, drive to exercise, and motivation to lose weight or smoke tobacco are all factors determined, in the final analysis, by the mind. Likewise, according to the American news agency CNN, one third of the deaths of drivers killed in car crashes involved drugs.5 Furthermore, the CDC estimated that over 2,000,000 years of potential life were lost due to alcohol between the years of 2001 and 2005.6 More specifically, the agency notes “More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.”7 As such both common sense and science both indicate that the same brains that often understand all too well the risks of an unhealthy lifestyle also insist that we eat unhealthy foods, smoke cigarettes, drink and drive, do drugs, not exercise sufficiently, and in general slowly poison ourselves and our society.
No matter how much our logical selves protest, our minds often stay deaf to our true needs, propelling us indiscriminately towards behavior that often kills us. And this is to say nothing of the death and suffering caused by the mind-initiated pursuits of war, intolerance, racism, and genocide.
Truly we are all to some extent prisoners to our own base nature.
Interesting new neuroscience work done by John-Dylan Haynes and colleagues at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin indicates that our brains may be making some decisions a full 10 seconds before our mind is even aware of a choice being made.8 Though these experiments regard simple decisions involved in pressing a button, they illustrate the concept that our brains may be making choices long before we are even aware of them.
Often, it seems, the tyrannical, intolerant mind leads us, consciously or unconsciously, to a decision which it then is very good at justifying. This is shown, for example, in the work of Sharot and colleagues.9 In their experiments, people were asked to imagine going to and then choose from a number of places they might like to vacation. After making the choice they were surveyed to discover how much they might enjoy their choice. Compared to instances when people were not asked to “choose” a vacation spot, those who later “chose” a spot consistently rated their choice as potentially more enjoyable. Or, as the authors said, “Specifically, ratings of estimated hedonic reaction were greater for selected stimuli relative to rejected stimuli only after a choice was made.” In other words, the mind artificially makes people value a choice more AFTER a choice is made.
Addiction, obesity, racism and prejudice, oppression, intolerance, toxic relationships, even some cases of suicide or homicide. . .who among us can say that they have never known thoughts leading to any of these? Who can say they never made an unhealthy choice despite conscious knowledge of the pain associated with each? Yet the rigorous, “outside” force of the tyrannical, intolerant mind seems to force us to make and then justify decisions leading only to more suffering.
I AM THE DEVIL
ResponderEliminarNice to meet you, Mr. Devil
ResponderEliminar