Aiming for Balance: The Power of COS VAP in Structured Thinking

Introduction

Throughout my life, I’ve contended with ideas, experiences, interpretations, and people. I suspect I’m not alone in this condition. The reader has and will undoubtedly encounter the many ways that life—good and bad, hard and easy, light and heavy—presents itself. These myriad of interpreted experiences are collected into frameworks within the mind, sequenced into behavior, and given a positive or negative association. When a past experience is replicated, or when one that is determined to be close enough occurs, we resurrect the relevant sequences of behavior and their attached values to process the new input. Consider tying your shoes. This action is a sequenced behavior built into a mental framework, associated with the positive or negative feelings of success or failure. Now that you’re practiced at tying your shoes, the act is an automatic process, a pattern of thought married to behavior. This is part of Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development, which are the foundation for the processes that are implicit in this text.¹ Another way to think of the mental frameworks are like children’s building blocks, with their shaded colors representing the feelings associated with a particular section, which has to fit with both the piece that precedes it and the one that follows. Frameworks like these, scaffolding built from simple concepts with increasing complexity as they develop, often remain hidden within our day-to-day thought processes and are easily overlooked.

Our interpretations of experiences continuously alter or reinforce the hidden frameworks we use to think, speak, and act, affecting all aspects of our lives. These frameworks nest together in order to form a coherent narrative, using belief as a binder or ligament of sorts to smooth the edges of missing information or mal-formed narratives. The following writings explore how frameworks are supported by language, altered by individual and cultural forces, and are predicated on biological adaptation over countless generations. Although not inherently obvious, we can use the ideas I’m going to present to direct these frameworks and consequently bring immense benefits to our daily lives. The place to start any investigation or adventure is always by learning about the beginning, which, like these frameworks, should be consistently revisited.

A first consideration is that these valued frameworks take on a life of their own, functioning like their own sub-personality because they are rooted in our biological processes. An example of this is the instinctual function of fear that exists in all animals until they explore. As Jordan Peterson notes in Maps of Meaning, Fear is not conditioned, security is unlearned.² Exploring leads to knowledge, which minimizes fear of the unknown; fear being the nascent state, while security exists because of our implicit assumptions that we are safe, until a new threat arises and we eventually learn to not be afraid of it.

This process of learning security in spite of the profound quantity of things we cannot know is a paramount aspect of the human experience. This procedure involves the interaction of our experiences woven with our biological responses into our linguistic representations, and then represented in both the stories we tell ourselves and those that have been culturally perpetuated. To expand what is happening, consider that within the developmental concepts of Piaget are three categories of connected ideas: the first of these is action, imitation, and play. The key to this grouping is imitation, in part because despite its necessity to our early development, imitation will always remain one of the most powerful tools in our mental toolbox. This crucial piece of hardware in the human mental computer—imitation—is what initially facilitates our development from basic functions to understanding symbols. Symbols form words, which in turn form language, and language is the key to the second group: ritual, drama, and narrative. As our operations become more concrete, individual narratives interacting with other narratives eventually form the final group: myth, religion, philosophy, and rationalization. The interpretation of abstractions at this level of development depends solely on how we rationalize them and, by extension, how we evaluate categories of connected concepts.

Categories of connected concepts like existential danger and redeeming hope, evil and good, or negative and positive are just a few of these linguistic adaptations to the human condition that are woven into our frameworks. I put the categories in a different order than how they are usually spoken because even small changes in language will have large effects on how we rationalize. Ask yourself, If language isn’t tied to human function, why would we always say good versus evil, and not the other way around? If reading my mis-ordering makes you feel something without thinking about it, then you have recognized one place where your biology, language, and human functionality have been married. Despite living in general comfort and safety, these developmental processes have mixed with our biological responses, like the fear of the unknown. This is the same fear that our ancestors experienced, whether it is the fear of losing a job or the fear when you realize a panther has been stalking you.

Due to the primal nature of the fear response, it’s a crucial place to investigate the role our mental frameworks play in shaping our thoughts and behaviors, and their impact on the world around us. Among the many reasons to be aware of this link is this important one: fear is a powerful motivator and as such becomes a weapon, intentional or not. Barry Glassner highlights numerous examples in his book, Culture of Fear, like the misplaced fear surrounding Halloween candy poisoning given that, at the time of his writing, the only two known cases where children apparently did die from Halloween candy, the myth of the anonymous sadistic stranger was used to cover up the real crime.³

Glassner’s work shows that for decades there has been profound manipulation through fear, even when rational conclusions are easily available. Imagine someone who uses a drug like heroin willingly giving it to a random child, or a parent who misses the distinctly vacant shape left by an imbedded razor blade, or the indentation and discoloration that results from forcing anything into an apple. A well known but ignored fact of human nature that would dispel the fear is not considered; heroin addicts are not willingly giving away their heroin without something in return. Yet, every year this fear is revived and people become more suspicious of the stranger who willingly gives to their neighbors without an expectation of return. Fear of losing what we value most makes even the simplest scrutiny of knowledge secondary, at least until the fear subsides. This only amplifies in our modern lives, as the Internet exponentially exposes us to these psychologically maximized fear and propaganda purveyors. As our structured frameworks are exposed to information, carefully examined or not, they readily crystallize into beliefs and habits.

Let’s take a habit that may not be serving you well, like an addiction to alcohol. This short-term positively reinforced behavior, if left unchecked, may result in long-term negative consequences. Each time we use a substance like alcohol, the positive value we place in our mental framework strengthens our behavior regarding alcohol use. The control this structure has over our behavior becomes harder to ignore, because the temporary good feeling reinforces the drinking behavior, thereby creating the habit. To counteract this framework, we must build a new, equally fortified framework. Starting small and gradually building a reformed behavioral response the same way the negative habit was built is crucial if we