CBT for a better world

Why do we cause stress in ourselves? Well I have an understanding. Its addictive behaviour. When I used to get angry and escalated behaviour, I received immediate feedback. You get a rush of adrenaline pumping in your muscles. The endorphins flood your brain and rationality is quashed and you are left with absolute conviction of being correct. It’s so strong it removes emotions like care and love; well in fact it convinces one that you are doing it out of care and love.

So it seems the whole world is one massive addictive society. When we think about addiction we talk of alcohol and drugs and sex and power and these sorts of things. These are symptoms of a wider issue though it seems. The first point of addiction is addiction to the basic chemicals in our bodies that we learn to release through causing conflict in our lives.

Now, there seems to be another way. But it’s a harder way as the anger/stress way releases immediate response within seconds whereas the other way takes time and is intermittent in response. Behavioural studies of people show it is a lot of work to make behaviour changes and there needs to be a lot of clear incentives. Simply telling people that behaviour X will make them happier in the long run is not enough, especially when the change is difficult and even a change from everything they once knew.

Of course some people are more optimised then others to make changes in their lives. These are the people who need to be tackled first.

What is the other way? It’s optimising a different set of chemicals in one’s head. It is developing positive feedback loops based on consistent behaviour. We know that one of the greatest feeling humans have comes from positive self-regard. Positive self-regard is correlated with positive public regard (citation). Hence we need to enhance positive public regard or perceived public regard. Increasing positive public regard is difficult and takes a long time with many set-backs as we are in a dynamic model of conflicting human interactions and goals. But, enhancing perceived public regard is definitely “easier” though still complex and we need to be careful to not just encourage narcissism. So, if people perceive the world as a potentially delightful place where they have a valued place in society, then this could potentially lead to two elements: 1. We have positive feedback about the world thereby improving our interactions. 2. Our public regard does in fact improve as we are acting better because of 1. These two elements can interact to create a semi-lagged feedback loop that will increase life-satisfaction.

This is all a complicated way of saying people should be more optimistic. But there are hints at certain elements that need to be thought through as simple optimism is not the whole story either. It’s nearly a cynical optimism that is needed, or as Seneca might have recognised, classical stoicism. Because the world is so harsh and dangerous (or for those in the West, presented as harsh and dangerous) that it’s a lot of work to set up stoicism within the existing framework of an individuals lives. Person X does yoga for a time, person Y reads a self-help book, person Z joins a religion. All ways of searching for positive self-regard are rife for abuse and can even lead to opposite results and just set up further internal conflicts and conflict addiction. Hence the failure of most of these in most of the people we find.

This is all becoming more and more important as the traditional framework for keeping our conflict addiction in control through societal consensus was based on authoritarian systems of patriarchal family units and organised religion. With the semi-collapse of these in the West we are struggling to find responses to our conflict. But we are no worse as people and in many ways we are much freer (one could argue that free chaos is better then societal dictatorship, though not the place here to make such arguments). Whatever the moral advantage/disadvantage of our atomised society, we need to get on with trying to fix it up for ourselves. There are no utopias and there will always be hardship and suffering in a Darwinian world, but in the “safer” enclaves of society such as the modern dynamic city, there are definite possibilities to reduce conflict for something calmer. For something in a sense more familial.

I have no idea how to offer a better way as what worked with me cannot work for others as it’s so attached to particular thoughts, actions and readings. For example, I can offer no advice to those people who have never been the “Alpha” party in a destructive romantic relationship. So analysis of what I see as the issues facing us does not mean I have any ideas as to solutions. Well, the immediate thoughts on solutions are as authoritarian and horrific as anything that occurred in past history and I do not want to utter such insults to human solidarity.

But maybe I am just saying that we all need cognitive-behavioural therapy of one kind or another. That may well be true, but CBT is a way of coping with the way the world’s values are currently weighed. I think you can use some aspects of CBT, with other processes that are unique to individual psyches to produce a therapy that enhances the second category of addictive feedback (love/friendship). This whole thing may not take much; it’s just that it’s very heavily stressed in the beginning. So let’s say on a spectrum, to go from addictive reactionary behaviour to addictive positive self-regard, the first “step” whatever that is, is 90% of the effort. Then from there the feedback loops of positivity may just take over.

God as the Moral Law Giver

I was recently commentating on the video of the debate on god and morality between William Lane Craig and Lewis Wolpert and some of the comments for the video concerning god as objective law-giver really got me going.

 Just to state my overall position; I am an expressivist along the lines of Blackburn though I have some key points of difference that I will be discussing in the next few months. But in my arguments against god as moral law-giver, I will intially take the premise at face-value and not use expressivist arguments, but rather examine if this can be logically done away with using its own premises.

So a bried argument against “The god hypothesis”.

Now let’s say there is a moral fact that says murder is wrong. There are two further issues, what is the origin of that fact and how do we gain access to it? In terms of origin, well I really don’t see why god is any better an answer then to simply say there ARE universal objective moral facts. I mean what does it gain by inputting a god? Surely this simply makes it more subjective, ie a sentient being (god) still needs to decide the moral fact. Whereas simply saying there are objective moral facts, faces the objection that they are arbitary, but it still seems closer to objectivity then god. I just don’t see how god helps other then by giving a sense of sentience, a sense of brotherhood between believers and non-believers. The access issue is a whole different kettle of loaves and fishes and so I will tackle this another time.