This post is Part IV (final) of a series. Go back to Part III, or start over at Part I.
Retrospective
Table of Contents
Neuromythography In Context
Mathematicians think in proofs, lawyers in constructs, logicians in operators, dancers in movement, artists in impressions, and idiots in labels.
Neuromythography offers an hybrid alternative to constructs and labels: archetypes representing artistic impressions that interpret neuroscience. This is something new, that was not possible until the past five years. We are explorers of a new frontier, endowed with a past heritage that could not understand the biological significance of their own prior explorations of the mythological world.
I have shown a series of archetypal personifications of real biological entities that exist in everyone. Yet left and right partisans each portray the other side as insincere. Academic scholarship has coined words such as “performativity”, “signifiers”, and “speech violence” to describe right-wing attitudes. Social psychologists claim to have proven that ‘conservative people’ are ‘authoritarian’, and at the same time resist submission to authority, without questioning the inconsistency of the constructs. Conservative pundits have coined words like “propaganda” and “virtue signaling” to describe left-wing attitudes, and persist in pathologizing the Other as unnatural or devil-inspired. Each of these denies the sincerity of the other side, perhaps as a rejection of the part of themselves that also holds these perspectives.
Meme Warfare and Propaganda
The right and left hemispheres prefer visual and verbal information, respectively. This is why you tend to see more creative right-wing memes and more elaborate left-wing manifestos, rather than vice-versa.
Conclusion
The duality that we perceive as “right vs. left” reflects dichotomies in our brains. These divisions include complementary neurotransmitters (oxytocin vs. vasopressin), complementary receptors (v1a vs. v1b), hemisphere lateralization (right amygdala vs. left amygdala), and vertical complements (dmPFC vs vmPFC). Each member of these dualities tend to vary together, resulting in the averaged appearance of a single right-left generalization. Within the interaction networks of these biological entities lie the various political ‘-isms’.
These potentialities exist in all of us, but at any time many people are lopsided towards one side or the other. Our upbringing, experiences, sex, and (to a lesser extent) genetic heritage tend to lean us towards one side or the other. Political rhetoric attempts to trigger us to become outraged at one side, and thereby join “the enemy of my enemy”. When one achieves mastery and balance, those who are enthralled with both sides become angered at them, accusing them of being ‘arrogant centrists who act above it all’. This is the price to be paid for awareness.
Earlier in this essay, I made the following claim:
Oxytocin is the energy of species progress and the Spirit of Community. Vasopressin is the energy of self-actualization, and submission to and rising up towards the Spirit of Dominion.
The erudite may observe parallels to this world vs. the next, species preservation vs. self-preservation, yin/yang, left and right, and so on. What I have done is show where the roots of these intuitive generalizations meander through the soil of of the brain, from neurotransmitters to receptors to the primitive brain nuclei to right/left hemispheres to the highest cortical areas, in all their organic messiness. But at the end of the day, awareness of these two fundamental energies as things to be balanced is the first step towards mastering them.
This post is Part IV (final) of a series. Go back to Part III, or start over at Part I.
