Main Cause of Discrimination: Inequality of Consciousness

Education is mostly looked at for its empirically proven ability to raise socioeconomic standards but not in terms of public mental health improvement.

Inequality of conscious mental states is often overlooked when discussing social discrimination





We're well familiar how inequalities of power cause discrimination on international, societal, and individual level. We've also endlessly heard how education sets free and empowers.

What has been missing from the discourse concerning prejudice is the effects from inequality of consciousness. Sure, there were massive amounts of writings analyzing empirical socioeconomic results from inequality of education (that most certainly contributes the most to consciousness augmentation) but the research barely touched on analogies that can illuminate interpersonal perceptions. It's one thing to say that education differences cause Group A to have lower infant mortality, longer life span, and high GDP per capita while Group B trails. It's another thing to say that Group A views Group B (and thus interacts with accordingly) as one would small children, the retarded, and/or the elderly with dementia (or worse as history teaches us).

Whether it is Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama, or George Bush preaching to third world peasants, the sheer inescapable condescension (that greater consciousness brings) is undeniable. It is inevitable in that somebody who has more access to information and more effective techniques to influence reality will either use them in a zero sum game or share them. "Knowing what's best" can of course be a means towards horrid exploitation but also amazing improvement. Thus it was always a prudent idea to keep people who tell you they know what's best for you at arms length. More often then not the helping hand partially or fully enslaved. We can imagine the public reaction if some Chinese or Russian oligarch went to poor American neighborhoods and lectured American officials on improving standards and such.

Lets illustrate how different people can be of same level of consciousness (when it comes to interacting with their world) with three hypothetical individuals.

1) An illiterate 30 year old peasant in Sri Lanka who engaged in daily hard labor of subsistence farming for most of his life. This man is more than capable of communicating and interacting with the people in his isolated village and excels in many simple tasks compared to his neighbors. He doesn't know how to write and only knows how to read a few words here and there. He is content as his labor allows him to feed himself and his family even without education.

2) A man in United States with mild mental retardation ( IQ range of 50-69 but below the 80 level needed to be considered "fully capable of mental function". Although perhaps coherent enough to be executed in Texas) from a poor background. This man had the luck to be in a special school program that taught him to read and write to a degree that he is capable of. The man lives in a community with other people who have poor cognitive learning and application ability. He is content as he is among the most functioning in the institution and feels a sense of power through comparison. He engages in helpful duties assigned to him and is very efficient. The man is more than capable of living and functioning by himself in the simplicity of a third world level village.

3) An elderly rural man in United States who never finished high school and was engaged in farming for most of his life. He has ability to read NY Post level tabloids and fill out forms. He is deeply convinced that magical beings are real and play a part in the lives of humans. The man even talks to the magical creatures and organizes his life as if they were real and watching him. He is not troubled at all by his life as he is able to communicate and function perfectly in his village and is mostly surrounded by other Christians. His neuroplasticity (and thus mental functioning) have been hampered by almost third world level investment in education early in life (by 2009 standards), poor fatty diet, ceaseless propaganda from the clergy and the state (through television media), and additional creeping neural infirmities of old age.

These individuals are each severely handicapped in a different way (zero education in 21st century world, neural structure that prevents continuous learning, and anachronistic thinking compounded by neural deterioration and stream of useless religious lies). Each also has a strength that the others lack. The examples might not be perfect but we can easily imagine a parity arising in the level of consciousness between the individuals mentioned. That involves very key ability to comprehend new concepts, create complex mental maps for functioning in the world, assess their relative situation with increasing accuracy, verbalize grievances/aspirations/opinions, and influence socioeconomic societal growth. Besides an appropriate dig at maladaptive influence of religion, the examples are not meant to belittle (as anybody who delves into this territory would be accused of doing. See Obama's "clinging to guns" statement). They are meant to bring to attention the not so obvious fact that diverse individuals can 1) have roughly similar conscious mental mechanisms and 2) be empowered or disempowered through perception of others due to the fluid nature of their social/geographic location

However, perhaps the most important aspect of rise in consciousness is rise in self respect.

A man with slightly above average level of consciousness ( it's assumed that within a population, consciousness is spread on a bell curve just like personal power is) can then look at a politician or a businessman and say, "hey! the people ruling me are a minority and are maybe 100% more conscious than me on average. Why do they have 100-10,000 times the power and wealth instead of twice as much?" That is why revolt or social reform often starts on campuses and among the middle class who got an empowering taste for self respect. At that point they are beginning to get a good idea of what's best for them rather than passively listening to higher ups for guidance (the way a peasant would due to lack of information and/or personal inability).

What's important to keep in mind is that the way a first world person with average consciousness views people like illiterate third world peasants, mentally retarded, or mentally sliding elderly, is also the way the power elites view the average person. The way is undefined but it could be anything from brotherly love, egalitarian respect, pity, and desire to help to feeling of superiority, disgust, sadistic disregard, and desire to control/exploit/eliminate.

It stands to reason that if a middle class white person may view a Sri Lankan peasant or a mildly retarded American in one of the ways above (while being viewed himself like that by those on top), those on top may view Sri Lankan peasants as one does cattle or dogs. Considering the eagerness with which the national elites sent their own countrymen to meatgrinder wars in the 20th century, a lot of Americans and Europeans were viewed as cattle as well ( and may very well still be). One pre-revolution curse word in the Russian language is skotina. It means cattle and the roots of its application to human beings stem from mass plantation type system that existed before 1917. We've seen analogies of this in the American south and elsewhere in the developed world.

It is time to move towards discussion of discrimination into areas of cognitive awareness and functioning. Working in this territory and utilizing these simple analogies allows the social need (for mass education with 21st methods) to become enhanced on an emotional instinctual level. In an interconnected world (where resentments can turn to explosions of nuclear fire, biological attack, or nanotechnological horrors) that is speedily marching towards cybernetic and pharmaceutical augmentation, the issue of consciousness inequality will become ultra important in years to come.

The Future is Positive Psychology

Positive psychology focuses on strong healthy individuals and thus finds ways to improve everybody regardless of label

Current negative psychology studies and helps miserable people and thus creates a counterproductive black and white duality of  broken vs. healthy









Psychology is a very young science. It only began to blossom productively once the power of the field's 19th century founding fathers declined. It only really started integrating biology and the corresponding physicality of pharmaceuticals half a century ago. Nothing seems fundamentally more important than the study of our mental faculties and of constructs to better explain why we think or feel the way we do. That is the road to finding ways to modify ourselves more to our liking.

We've heard the ancient suggestion "know thyself" many times but we still treat psychology as the co-equal of other soft "sciences" like sociology, economics, or cultural anthropology. Surely all those are important, have connections with psychology, and should be studied alongside it in an integrated manner. However, as Nietzsche put it, psychology is the mother of the sciences and we need to prioritize study of ourselves over groups, rockets, and interest rates. We as humans and our thoughts and personalities are more important and more physically tangible than concepts of marginal tax rates, legislative structures, and cultural evolutions. Understanding how we think and feel, learning to augment and modify ourselves, and to think in new ways obviously has direct effect on how we approach and view other sciences.

So why the socio-cultural neglect of psychology? The answer, besides it being such a young science, is that being labeled crazy, dumb, and different often got you killed (often horribly) for most of human history. Psychology did a lot of classification of human behavior and has labeled much of that behavior maladaptive and in need of change. However, most humans have a difficult time thinking in shades of gray so anything different or maladaptive is viewed through the binary lens of normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, self reliant/dependent, good/bad, crazy/sane etc. Nobody wants to be on the other side of the absolutist fence. In most of the world, you either buck up and survive long enough to have kids or you might as well not live at all.

 Reality is much more complex. Human population varies greatly in how much personal power individuals have. Personal ability to influence the environment directly affects how many resources one will have, how one will be treated, how likely one is to combine one's genes with a really good mate, etc. The more power one has, the more one is happier, wealthier, and better treated by others. People give attention/support to expanding growing organisms and create a virtuous cycle for that organism. Powerlessness as we all know creates a vicious cycle.

Figure 1, which is just grafted onto an IQ bell curve chart for a rough example, shows that most of the population just has an average amount of personal influence that is physiologically possible. Personal power is determined by a multitude of factors (many of them roughly co-equal in importance) which can combine in various way and which all influence each other.

Some examples of many are:

1) Bodily health (getting up every morning and coughing blood or feeling pain is no way to live even if wealthy or attractive)
2) Wealth
3) Neural structure (psychological health. getting up every morning with panic attacks and phobia of the outside is also not a way to live even if famous and intelligent)
4) Attractiveness
5) Intelligence
6) Uniqueness/strength/attractiveness of personality
7) Social class
8) Race
9) Age
10) Ethnic background
11) Gender

The factors vary from culture to culture and contribute to personal influence in constantly changing ways. To illustrate with a simple mathematical example, say there are 10 factors and each can be measured on a scale of 1-10. We can easily see how 2 people can roughly have the same amount of power while having very different factor strengths. Such measurement is obviously impossible but is useful to keep in mind as a construct. Many of the factors can obviously be lumped together or further subdivided.

The socially determined nature of some of these factors can have a drastic effects on the individual. Lets say there is a very bigoted society and there are 5 people in the room. They are all roughly the same in intelligence/neural structure/attractiveness/forceful personality/health (these 5 come close to being universal in terms of being socially constructed internationally). If one of the people in the room is of the race/gender/ethnic group/age/social class that is being discriminated against, that person will not be given as much power through attention/support. That person can be level 70 while others around him/her are level 68-71 yet the discriminated person will not feel like an equal. A person discriminated against has to be stronger than nearby people just to be treated as an equal.

As soon as two people meet each other their brains do a very rapid unconscious appraisal of the other person's strength versus their own. Immediately, the person labels the other as either a weaker competitor in the world, roughly equal competitor, or a stronger competitor. Often the initial meeting is enough for such assessment but often it becomes distorted through being in an atypical state such as on some drug or being extremely tired. The above mentioned factors all give a person a sense of where he should rate the person he meets as well as himself in the larger social sphere. Obviously if a person is a recluse, his ability to self rank and rank others is greatly dulled since social intelligence is not as developed. The sense of one's influence in the world as determined by the natural biology and environment is fluid and can swing forward and backward on the Figure 1 bell curve. Every person on the planet wants to expand personal influence infinitely in all directions. It is a very useful genetic command since it allows more reproduction, nutrition, as well as adapting the environment to oneself rather than the other way around. Infinitely means just that.

Let's use an extreme silly example. The genetically hardwired desire for influence reaches for the stars by wanting to 1) control all the resources on the planetary surface, 2) having everybody else think exactly like him/her self by liking his/her ideas so much as to internalize them completely, 3) having every female utilize same donor sperm so one's genes are in all the world's population and thus "win" (or in case of female, have the finest genetic material from world's top men and then have her sons compete and the winner impregnate everybody). Such an extreme bodily goal obviously is ridiculous but it allows the person to never fully be satisfied with one's current position. Such a goal is the best motivator toward better quality of life since no matter how high one rises, there are always equals to overcome and struggle against. It might never create satisfaction or contentness but it gives an endless journey of improvement and feeling that one's influence is rising. Although all may be programmed to want that, everybody reaches a major obstacle as he/she comes across everybody else. That's when reality sinks in and various individuals find ways to expand their influence in creative ways that is based on their physiological predisposition. An emotional actor does it one way, a big hearted public speaker in another, an aggressive soldier in another, and a calm mathematician in another. Many even blatantly admit they want everybody on the planet to think and act like them (just ask people heavily into organic farming/veganism or religious missionary work).

What does this have to do with positive psychology?

For most of psychology's history, it was negative. That meant that psychologists looked at the statistically small amount of people on the weaker side of the power bell curve. Why the weaker side and not the other extreme? That is because powerless individuals are the most likely to have a lifestyle that is labeled "maladaptive". They are the most likely to not acquire basic things on Maslow's pyramid of needs such as shelter, self-esteem, love, nutrition, and sex. People want to have constant supply of these basic things so they can focus on self-actualizing or making the most of their physiology/social position to increase influence. They need all of them (obviously to various degrees) like one needs a constant supply of food/sleep to fully function. Not having love for example can be as detrimental as not having sex/self esteem/quality nutrients every once in a while.

Lack of sufficient influence over the environment creates a vicious cycle. Since people on the left of the bell curve are weak, they compete less effectively. Since they competitive skills are lacking, they are deprived of things they want and most others get. Since they are deprived, they stagnate in function or decline and demonstrate to the world that they are less successful than most of the population. Since they are less successful, they are treated as failures and the gap widens even more. They compare themselves to their competitors and see most people as stronger and more capable. They are forced to interact with people who are their equals or those even weaker than themselves so they can rank themselves better. Not struggling as often with those stronger than them (out of fear of failure) stagnates the competitive skills even more.

Then 20th century comes around and psychologists come along. They start studying the failures and labeling the weak by categories. Many of the weak come to the psychologists and offer them money to get help in acquiring things they know they want. Psychologists then see similar narratives and the categorization process is sharpened. Small amounts of powerful people on the right side of the bell curve are less likely to seek help. People in the middle would rather not even dabble with such things lest they be labeled by professionals or society. People on top of the bell curve want to be like the strong and so give them power through attention/support, and label the statistically abnormal (often very rare and abnormal) as successful.

Psychologists are stuck studying the weak population which they call unhealthy, sub-obptimal, "abnormal", or deficient. Since people in the middle of power bell curve make up the majority of the population, psychologists use them as a guide and call them "normal" and use them as a point of comparison when it comes to the weak. Since most people are numerically "normal", they are the ones who shape cultural perceptions. Thus everything left of the fatty bell curve or in need of psychological help is seen in horrid black and white terms. Even slight deviations are unconsciously associated with the worst extremes. A mildly depressed person can easily fall in society's eye into the same category as a suicidal person whereas there would be a vast gap between the two. Nobody wants to be labeled as below average in social functioning even when only a narrow aspect of life is affected. The historically ingrained connotation is too strong as it has to do with weakness, failure, lack of offspring, danger, foreignness, and unacceptable behavior.

Let's re-imagine Figure 1 and see the extent of the problem caused by negative psychology. Figure 2 shows that being born into certain conditions can mask certain neural structures that are causing the person to function below full capacity. A person with high attractiveness and intelligence factors can easily fit into statistically "normal" category even while having severe psychological disposition that would make a less attractive/intelligent person fail in many situations. Thus many people think they can wing it without help if they expand influence against the world with average intensity. A person further right on the power bell curve, is even less likely to understand that his/her thoughts/feelings can be enhanced (and thus corresponding influence/functioning).

click to enlarge

Now that neural science is rapidly expanding with better scanning technologies and techniques, a new pharmaceutical era is about to open. We are well aware that anti-depressants and mood stabilizers can do wonders to improve a person's standard of living and functioning. The people who are in deep enough of a hole to seek help from such drugs are those that repeatedly failed to improve in non-pharmaceutical ways. Most societies don't have pro-active testing of the population so the person has to be pro-active him or herself. That is often done when the person has already fallen below what is considered average functioning in some key life area. Most people getting pharmaceutical help these days have began their medication in an unnecessarily weakened state to begin with. A person who is a 45 on the power scale can become 55 with a drug. Similarly a person with similar neurology who is in the higher "normal' band of 65 can become a 75. A very successful powerful individual who is an 85 perhaps can even push up to 90.

Figure 3 shows the progress that can occur once psychology becomes positive and once statistically "normal" are encouraged to better themselves regardless of their current status. Once we figure out what neural structures are the most common in human populations (through constantly improving brain scan technology), we can begin to engineer precise mind enhancing drugs for vast majority of people. For that to happen and for the quality of life to rise for all we must get rid of the focus on the unhealthiest/weakest members of society and focus on the strongest and most successful.

Psychology must lose its negative association and develop a strong positive active one. Hopefully in 20-30 years one can be "doing" psychology like ones does yoga or exercise.