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← Prometheus Rising Book Summary, Notes and Highlights

Prometheus Rising Chapter 4. The Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit

Author: Robert Anton Wilson Publisher: Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press. Publish Date: 1983 Review Date: Status:📚

Annotations

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 679 The second circuit, the emotional-territorial networks of the brain, is concerned entirely with power politics. This “patriotic” circuit is built into all vertebrates and is perhaps 500 million to 1000 million years old. In the modern human it seems to be centralized in the thalamus—the “back brain” or “old brain” and is linked with the voluntary nervous system and the muscles.

Note: basal ganglia, default mode network

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 682 This circuit appears in each newborn when the DNA master tape sends out RNA messenger molecules to trigger the mutation from neonate to “toddler, ” which involves first of all standing erect. Walking, mastering gravity, overcoming physical obstacles and learning to manipulate others politically are the vulnerable points at which imprinting and heavy conditioning occur. The muscles that perform these power functions are quickly programmed with what become chronic, life-long reflexes.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 686 this circuit will organize itself into a strong, dominating role in the pack (or family) or a weak, submissive role. Status in the pack or tribe is assigned on the basis of preverbal signaling systems (kinesics) in which these muscle reflexes are crucial. All of the emotional games or cons listed in the popular psychological game-manuals of Dr. Eric Berne and the Transactional Analysts are second-circuit imprints, or standard mammalian politics.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 734 The standard “authority” reflex on the emotional-territorial circuit is to swell the muscles and howl. You will find this among birds as well as mammals, and in the Board meeting of your local bank. The standard “submission” reflex is to shrink the muscles, lower the head, and “crawl away.” You will find this among dogs, primates, fowl and employees who wish to keep their jobs everywhere.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 737 the second (emotional-territorial) circuit is chiefly imprinted by the father—the nearest alpha

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 746 In pre-ethological terms, the emotional-territorial circuit is what we usually call “ego.” Ego is simply the mammalian recognition of one’s status in the pack; it is a “role” as sociologists say, a single brain circuit which mistakes itself for the whole Self, the entire brain-mind apparatus.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 739 has been proposed, by sociologist G. Rattray Taylor that societies swing back and forth between “Matrist” periods, in which motherly oral values predominate and “Patrist” periods, in which fatherly anal values are in ascendance. Taylor’s table of the characteristics of these “Matrist” and “Patrist” periods is as follows:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 744 Whether or not societies wobble between these extremes as Taylor claims, individuals certainly do. These are merely the consequences of (a) having the heaviest imprint on the oral (Matrist) bio-survival circuit or (b) having the heaviest imprint on the anal (Patrist) territorial circuit.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 768 Persons (extreme cases) who take the heaviest imprint on this territorial-emotional circuit tend to be musculotonic. That is, they hold most of their attention and energy, in the muscular attack-defense systems and grow up medium weight—heavy enough to be hard to knock down, light enough to be quick and sinewy. Often, they become body-builders, weight-lifters etc. and have an extraordinary absorption in demonstrating their strength.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 775

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  • Highlight(pink) - Location 777 The second, emotional-territorial circuit, creates a two-dimensional social space in conjunction with first-circuit advance-retreat.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 779

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 780 The grid of Circuits I and II creates four quadrants. Note that Hostile Strength (the tyrant) is inclined to paranoid withdrawal; he must govern, but he is also afraid. Cf. the careers of Hitler, Stalin, Howard Hughes, etc. and the inaccessible Castle and Court in Kafka’s allegories. Note also that the dependent neurotic is not in retreat at all; he or she advances upon you, demanding fulfillment of emotional “needs” (imprints).

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 784 These four quadrants have been known since the dawn of self-consciousness. For instance, in the terminology of the medieval psychology of “humours,” these four imprint-types are known as:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 785

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 786 Clockwise, the Sanguinary type (friendly strength) was identified with the Lion archetype and the element, fire. The Lion, because of the dignity of these big cats, represents “good” strength, and the fire represents power. The Phlegmatic type (friendly weakness) was identified with the Angel archetype and the element water: these people are “too sensitive to fight” and “go with the flow.” The Choleric types were identified with the Bull archetype (truculent suspicion, paranoia) and the element, earth, standing for sluggish pseudo “stupidity.” (This is the traditional stance of defeated races dealing with their conquerors.) The Bilius types (hostile strength) were identified with the Eagle archetype (symbol of Imperial Rome, the German royal family, etc.) and the element air, air probably means sky, because these types seem “high and mighty.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 792 These symbols go back a long way; Cabalists find them in the Old Testament (where, indeed, the lion-angel-bull-eagle appear in Ezekiel). They are found constantly in Catholic art, associated with the four evangelists (Matthew-angel, Mark-lion, Luke-bull, John-eagle)* and run all through the design of Tarot card decks, medieval and modern.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 801 In the clever language of the fashionable Transactional Analysis system, these four imprint types are categorized as the four basic life scripts, to wit:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 802

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 803 It is the Phlegmatic (friendly weakness; dependent neurotic) type who generally turns up in the psychotherapist’s office seeking reimprinting voluntarily. They are not-okay, but they have great faith that the therapist is okay. The Bilius (hostile strength) and Choleric (hostile weakness) arrive in therapy, if at all, only because their associates or families, or more commonly, a law court, has ordered them to try to reimprint their compulsive hostilities. The Sanguinary (friendly strength) type virtually never comes for psychotherapy. He or she is satisfied with his or her life, and so is the rest of society. Alas, they nonetheless can get to the position where they need therapy of some sort, simply because they may take on too much responsibility and carry too many burdens. They will generally arrive at the therapists only if sent there by an M.D. who has intuited where their ulcers came from.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 810 This system is not meant to be rigid or to imply that there are only four types of humanoid robots. The later circuits, still to be discussed, modify all this considerably: some imprints are wobbly (cover two or more quadrants partly); and we are all capable of sudden brain change. It is also important to realize that the four archetypes are for convenience only

Highlight(pink) - Location 813 each quadrant can be subdivided much more sharply, if necessary for diagnostic purposes.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 814 For instance, an influential psychological test in this country, the Leary Interpersonal Grid (1957), divides the four quadrants into sixteen sub-quadrants and allows one to grade each in terms of moderate-to-excessive tendency to behave that way. In the grid on which the Leary categories are drawn, the moderate imprints are in toward the center and the excessive or extreme cases are out toward the perimeter, but what is being measured is still basically the way the first two circuits (oral-bio-survival and anal-territorial) are imprinted.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 819 To clarify this a bit further, imagine that four babies were all born at the same instant

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 820 We come back twenty years later and we find that each of them has a separate personality and life-style (a problem for the astrologers, but let that pass). To make things easier for us, they have actually landed in our four quadrants.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 822 Subject #1 is Responsible/Over-Conventional (Sanguinary). Everybody agrees that SHe (she or he) is usually a beloved community leader—helpful, considerate, friendly and solidly successful. Some may even say SHe spoils people with kindness, forgives anything, agrees with everybody and actually enjoys governing those who cannot govern themselves. The noble Lion. This person may be (and probably is) a total robot. That is, if SHe can never give orders in a strict way, is never able to doubt others, is never ego-centered, etc. then SHe has mechanically imprinted the First Quadrant, “friendly strength.” On the other hand, if SHe is able to move out of the First Quadrant in appropriate situations (exercizing hostility against the marauder or predator, admitting weakness when overwhelmed), SHe has an imprinted-conditioned predilection for “I’m okay, you’re okay,” but is not totally robotized by it.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 830 Subject #2 has, after the same twenty years of imprinting and conditioning, landed in Quadrant 2 friendly weakness (Phlegmatic). SHe is self-critical, shy, timid, easily led, “spineless,” and always looking for somebody to Take Charge and Give Orders. The unearthly Angel, or in modern symbolism, the Flower Child. Subject #3 had landed, with total robothood or with some small flexibility, in Quadrant 3, “Hostile Weakness” (Choleric). She distrusts everybody, rebels against everything, speaks constantly in sarcasms, complains chronically and is generally bitter, resentful and (to some extent) paranoid. The sullen Bull. Subject #4 has landed in Quadrant 4, “Hostile Strength” (Bilius), and is regarded as “bossy,” cold, unfeeling, dictatorial, self-important, boastful etc. but still in the judgment of most, “a good leader.” The imperial Eagle.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 838 The irony and the tragedy of human life is that none of these subjects are aware at all of their robotry. Each will explain to you, at great length and with great conviction, why each of these robotic, endlessly-repeated reflexes are caused by the situations around them, i.e., by the “bad” behavior of other people. WHAT THE THINKER THINKS, THE PROVER PROVES.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 842 Thus, if you put these four primates on a desert island, you can predict, with virtually as much certainty as a chemist telling us what will happen if four elements are compounded, that Subject #1 and #4 (Friendly Strength and Hostile Strength) will both try to take over—#1 to help the others, #4 because SHe can’t imagine anybody else in control. #1 will submit to #4 because #1 wants things to run smoothly for the good of all, and they never will run smoothly if #4 is not TOP DOG. #2, Friendly Weakness, will not care whether #1 or #4 rules, just so long as somebody else is making the decisions. And #3 will complain (and complain, and complain), no matter who is in charge, while skillfully avoiding any action that would require taking personal responsibility.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 848 Sociobiologists, who are very aware of these four quadrants in both human and animal societies, claim that each organism is born with a genetic predisposition to play one of these roles. Critics of sociobiology, who are dogmatic Liberals, denounce this idea as monstrous. We will not attempt to decide that difficult question here,

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 852 We say merely that, whether or not you or I were born with a predisposition for one quadrant, all organisms are born with a predisposition for imprint vulnerability, and the imprint, once set in the neural circuitry, acts as robotically as any genetic hard-wiring.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 894 It will be observed by the thoughtful or visually-oriented readers that each “extreme” type can be expressed on the Leary Grid as a very off-center pie-slice:

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  • Highlight(pink) - Location 896 Obviously, an ideally “balanced” person—that is, one not robotized and able to adjust to circumstances as they arise—would not be so off-centered. Such a person would be able to move a little bit into each quadrant “according to the times and seasons” as the Chinese say, but would basically maintain a centered detachment between all of them. She or he could be graphed as a circle:

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 899

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 900 The dark inner circle would represent the adamantine individuality of this ideally detached person—detached from robot imprints. The grey circle would represent the ability to move out into each quadrant in times when that was necessary.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 902 Circles of this sort, called mandalas, are widely used for meditation in the Buddhist tradition. Often they are cornered by four demons who evidently, like the Occidental lion, bull, angel and eagle, represent the extremes to be avoided.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 903

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 855 The top two quadrants of the Leary grid—Friendly Strength and Hostile Strength—correspond roughly to what Nietzsche called Herrenmoral, the ethics of ruling classes. Indeed, Hostile Strength is the embodiment of Nietzsche’s “Blond Beast,” the primitive conqueror-pirate type we find at the dawn of every civilization. This is what Nietzsche also called the “animal” or “unsublimated” form of the Will to Power. (Friendly Strength on the other hand does not correspond, except very slightly, to Nietzsche’s “sublimated Will to Power.” To find that we will have to wait until we come to the Fifth [Neurosomatic] Circuit—the stage of Conscious Evolution.)

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 860 The bottom two quadrants—Friendly Weakness and Hostile Weakness—correspond to Nietzsche’s Sklavmoral, the ethics of slaves, serfs and “lower”-caste or “lower”-class persons everywhere. Nietzsche’s concept of “resentment”—the hidden revenge motive within “altruistic” philosophies—claims there is an element of hostility within even the Friendly Weakness side of the grid; i.e., in conventional “Christian ethics,” as typified by the image of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” This paradox—the Friendly Weakling is a Hostile Weakling in disguise, the Flower Child a potential Mansonized robot-killer—reappears in modern clinical parlance as the concept of “passive aggressive.” Occultists in their strange jargon describe these types as “psychic vampires.”

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 866 This is why Nietzsche claimed that St. Paul had destroyed the evangel (good news) of Jesus and replaced it with a dysangel (bad news). The evangel of Jesus, as Nietzsche saw it, was the sublimated Will to Power, the path of conscious evolution to Superhumanity. The dysangel, the bad news, created by St. Paul was traditional Sklavmoral—“Slaves, obey your masters,” but nourish your resentment with the firm belief that you are “good,” and they are “evil,” and you will eventually have the pleasure of watching them bum in hell forever.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 873 It is interesting, in this connection, that Nietzsche dropped “psychological” language from his books as he went along and replaced it with “physiological” language. For instance, in his later works, such as The Anti-Christ, the “resentment” within slave-morality (conventional Christianity) is diagnosed as a physiological reaction characteristic of certain physical types.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 876 Nietzsche was on the right track, but lacking neurology he looked for the physical basis of these processes in genetics alone. Imprinting theory suggests, on the contrary, that such physiological Bottom Dog reflexes are created by specific triggers at early moments of imprint vulnerability.

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 885 Since we all contain a territorial-emotional circuit we need to exercize it daily. Playing with children is one good exercize—especially if you play with large groups, in which case you will have to referee mammalian territorial disputes. Swimming, jogging or whatever else appeals to you is good, to keep the muscles from feeling you are trying to starve them. Trying to “psych out” somebody else’s emotional state is one of the best exercizes for this circuit, and is very educational in general. It activates the old mammal centers in the thalamus where body-language communicates emotional signals. A good General uses this circuit to “psych out” what the enemy General is planning. A good mother uses it, vice versa, to figure out what baby’s howl means in each particular case. Advanced work with this circuit, involving some hazards in personal relations, would involve such games as learning to bully somebody if you’ve never been able to do that before, learning to submit docilely if you’ve never been able to do that before, and learning to express anger appropriately and letting go of it when it is no longer necessary

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 907 EXERCIZES

  • Highlight(pink) - Location 907

  1. Whenever you meet a young male or female, ask yourself consciously, “If it came to hand-to-hand combat, could I beat him/her’?” Then try to determine how much of your behavior is based on unconsciously asking and answering that question via pre-verbal “body language.”
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 909
  1. Get roaring drunk and pound the table, telling everybody in a loud voice just what dumb assholes they all are.* • *Opiates and small doses of alcohol seem to trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of Circuit I breast-fed tranquility. Large doses of alcohol often reverse this and trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of territorial struggle. Note the anal vocabulary of hostile drunks as their alcoholic intake increases. •
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 917
  1. Get a book on meditation, practice for two fifteen-minute sessions every day for a month, and then go see somebody who always manages to upset you or make you defensive. See if they can still press your territorial retreat buttons.2
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 924
  1. Spend a week-end at an Encounter Group. During the first half-day, try to intuit which quadrant each participant is coming from. At the end, see if any of them have become less robotized. See if you have become less robotized.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 925
  1. Go to the Lion House at the zoo. Study the lions until you feel you really understand their tunnel-reality.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 926
  1. Rent a video of the kind of comedy that small children like—the Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello, etc. Observe carefully, and think about what function this humor serves; but don’t neglect to laugh at it yourself.
  • Highlight(pink) - Location 928
  1. Spend all day Sunday looking at animal shows on TV (getting stoned on weed, if this is permissible to you). Then go into the office the next day and observe the primate pack hierarchy carefully, like a scientist.

Notes

Amount: 19

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