Carrion Comfort Read Free Page B

“cold-blooded killer” is almost certainly accurate, since so much of extreme human violence is a surrender to the constant reptilian aggressive-hierarchical kill-or-be-killed urgings of the R-complex at the base of the root of our brains. Machiavelli’s advice to the Prince, when all language and higher brain-function manipulations of others failed, was “knowingly to adopt the beast.”
    The ancient Greeks never dreamt of equality and fraternity. Their view of the world was of a constant
agon
(yes, the root word for “agony”)—an endless competition to separate everyone and everything in the world into the three categories of
less than
,
more than
, or
equal to
.
    But the R-complex reptile brain— present in all of us, always dominant in the mind vampires among us— knows no “
equal to
.” It allows only for the dinosaur-predator hierarchical imperative of
greater than
or
lesser than
and it will kill you, if need be, to establish itself in the former category.
    In the modern human brain, the neocortex makes up about 85 percent of our brain mass, but much evidence suggests that the majority of our individual behavior, our social systems, our political systems, our sexual behavior, our bureaucratic behavior, and our endless wars are controlled by the reptile brain in us.
    As G. K. Chesteron once wrote: “You can free things from alien or accidental laws of their own nature. . . . Do not go about . . . encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.”
    As a teacher (including as a BOCES-trained “resource room” teacher in New York state, assigned to test, diagnose, and remediate learning disabilities), I worked with children with borderline autism and psychotic children exhibiting such behavior as hebephrenic schizophrenia. As a classroom teacher for eighteen years, I worked with severely emotionally disturbed children, including two who were sociopaths.
    All
children, especially younger children, when left to their own devices, show frequent and deep ritualistic behavior. With the mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed, this ritualistic behavior was often visible as what we called
perseveration
— the inability to stop a behavior, such as fanning a hand in front of one’s eyes or constant rocking or humming. With autistic children, the ritualistic behavior could become elaborate— homemade cardboard “machines” and string “wires” that had to go everywhere with the child just, he thought, to keep himself alive.
    With all children in their natural state, the ritualistic behavior— most clearly among boys but more covertly among girls— included a constant sorting of themselves into hierarchies of acceptance and inclusion, with the losers being miserable and lonely as outsiders.
    The neocortex in children is still developing and incomplete in its control.
    The reptile brain is very alive in children. And sometimes it is frightening to watch it in action.
    Montaigne, in his
Essays
(II-8) once wrote—“. . .
most commonly
,
we find ourselves more taken with the running up and down
,
the games
,
and the puerile simplicities of our children than we do
,
afterwards
,
with their most complete actions
;
as if we had loved them for our sport
,
like monkeys
,
not as men
.”
    But it’s not monkeys that a trained eye will see when watching children playing among themselves. It’s male and female velociraptors.
    Mind vampires may be an evolutionary example of arrested neocortal natal development combined with rare frontal-lobe overdevelopment that creates neuron spin axis perpendicular to physical polar magnetic field axis differenting their brains as a form of crude holographic
generator
rather than a mere wave-front collapsing interferometer, as is the case of the rest of us. The R-complex in mind vampires, in other words, can
project
sheer force of will to the more passive neocortical, limbic,