Why Everyone Blocks Everyone Else All The Damn Time

A psychological model of mindful misdirection and how to overcome it for the betterment of mankind.

I rarely use the block button and it’s your prerogative if you choose to do so. I’m a liberal, your life is your own and your block button predilections are yours to determine as you see fit. I’m here to advise… and occasionally to snark. Okay, cards on the table, I’m here to snark, but sometimes I throw advice into the mix too.

One of the ways I can advise best is to explain how the brain works and why you think the things you do.

It’ll help your understanding if you have a functional knowledge of ‘The Chimp Paradox’ by Steven Peters… but if you don’t, don’t panic. His books are, in my humble ornithological opinion, the best way to explain brain processes without getting bogged down technical jargon and bits of the brain.

I’ll give a very simple explanation here — but definitely do get the book and read it cover to cover if you want to understand more.

The three part brain

Peters model posits that the brain is divided into three sections that all talk to each other. He calls them ‘The Computer’, ‘The Human’ and ‘The Chimp’. They roughly correspond to the thalamus, the cortex and the limbic system but the model a gross simplification of the most complicated thing in the known universe.

And I’m going to simplify it even further.

In short… the human (thinking) and the chimp (intuition and feeling) both write information into the computer (memory banks). This creates a schema of behaviour, thoughts, feelings and beliefs. These all interact with each other on a daily basis and create your personality and temperament.

So far so good.

When a new situation arises, the computer (very fast) asks the chimp and the human what it should to do. In some instances, the computer doesn’t bother asking either of them… it knows the answer. In most cases if someone aims a punch at you, you’ll flinch. You don’t need to think about it at all.

You have to train very hard to psychologically override this impulse.

Anyway, if faced with confusion the computer asks both the Chimp and the Human ‘what now?’. In almost all instances, the chimp gets the right to reply. It’s stronger and faster. Counterintuitively, it then asks the Computer what stored information it has to help them.

That’s why it’s important to store rational and well thought through beliefs rather than intuitive lies.

Here’s how it might work in practice.

You’re minding your own business and reaching for something in a cupboard and you spot a large spider. Your computer will pump your body full of adrenaline and remove your hand automatically. Spiders are dangerous. That’s hardwired in our little chimp brains.

If your computer contains nothing about spiders — you’ll probably watch it for a while and see what it does. Most young children will do this. If your early years involved seeing a parental figure freak out, your chimp will have written ‘holy fuck spiders are dangerous’ and stored that in the computer.

Without any further information added, that’s your default response to spiders. When you avoid spiders in the future (because that’s the information you have stored) you’ll get a rewarding feeling of pleasure. Get enough rewards and you’ve got yourself a phobia.

To combat the phobia, your rational brain (The Human) has to re-write messages to your Computer (your memory store). It has to put enough messages in the Computer to counteract the existing belief. That way, you’ll still be scared — but when you check your Computer you’ll have phrases like.

“They’re more scared of you than you are of them” and “The vast majority of spiders aren’t dangerous”. Those might help you fight through the fear and get yourself a glass and a piece of paper. You’ll have a competent coping strategy.

If you want to progress further then you’ll need some exposure therapy, building up a bank of new memories in which the concept of ‘spider’ is reformed and reconstituted in your brain.

It’s possible to go from deathly afraid to having a tarantula sit on your hand if you’re aware of the process.

The essence of most therapy is writing good logical and rational advice into the computer, so the chimp doesn’t always have control of the outcome. It’s helping you separate the irrational thoughts from the rational ones and seeing how these affect your behaviour.

Here’s a more banal example.

A warning light on your car dashboard comes on. This creates a little jolt of panic in you… your Human and your Chimp come to the computer to seek new information. The Chimp says ‘don’t deal with this right now, it’s stressful’, so you ignore the light.

Stress avoided. Your Chimp calms down, have a dopamine sandwich.

Without something in the computer to say ‘I’m the sort of person who resolves problems when they arise’ put there by the Human — you will procrastinate. We’ve all done it. Your car will eventually break down and then your Chimp won’t take responsibility… but your Human (the bit that feels like you) will kick itself for once again putting a problem off.

Self-esteem takes a hit.

A lot of self-help advice is about moving things from the human (rational thinking) into the computer… so that the computer can deal with a stimulus on its own. When this happens we call it a habit.

Do something enough and you’ll do it automatically and there will be no need to check in with either your chimp or your human.

Why that matters in the digital age

Your chimp is the one that hits the block button when you feel threatened, it’s also the one that generates fear and disgust when you come across a story you don’t like. The chimp is both fast and lazy. Hitting block is an ideal solution to a complicated problem.

It’s effective too. Like the snooze alarm on philosophy. It’s solipsism at its finest and there’s no real rationale required. Your chimp checks in with your computer and the computer tells you what the chimp has encoded there.

People like this threaten us. Get away from them. In some cases the block button doesn’t come out because the chimp orders fight rather than flight. Spend enough time in my comments section and you’ll see this play out.

Chimps never stop to get informed enough to launch a cogent attack, they just want to win.

Whether they hit block or go off like a bomb, the result is the same. It’s the flight or fight response playing out, and to some extent, that’s fine. There are many reasons why people choose to listen to their chimp over their human and many of those reasons have to do with their own psychological safety.

You are your own guardian in this world.

But, one would presume, if you haven’t had a traumatic childhood, your human should’ve been encoding its own things into the computer. Things based on benevolent truths.

Things like:

At the end of the day, people who disagree with me are still people.

There’s no point being offended by the views of other people if those views cannot be changed or don’t affect you directly.

Most people are good at heart and want the best for themselves, their family and friends although they may not immediately make that clear

People, including me, are slow to change their minds and it can be tough to get people to move on issues they consider challenging

People aren’t often the best at expressing themselves but many people will move to consensus if they can.

These little things put into the computer don’t absolve other people of their viewpoints, but they help contextualise them. Professor Peters refers to these as ‘autopilots’. They are beliefs that guide you towards a productive solution.

When someone rocks into my comments section with an attack, I try (but don’t always succeed) to request that my Chimp, busy loading the verbal-gun, hold fire while I undertake further investigation.

I will attempt to rationalise what they say and reach a consensus. If you do this, you can sometimes come down from the brink of defensiveness. I try and give people a second chance.

If, after further investigation, the person reveals they’re incapable of rational discussion and have rocked up to sound off, then I let my Chimp lock and load. My Chimp has a strong aversion to being patronised, talked down to and belittled. That stems from my childhood.

The fact I’m aware of it means I can hold it in check. And I do… but sometimes, if a person has been obnoxiously condescending I decide not to. I’ve spent years working out how to use humor and sarcasm like a weapon and… my Chimp likes the exercise. Catharsis all round.

Allowing my Chimp this freedom means I don’t often need the block button. It means you can have a polite discussion with me, even if I disagree with you on almost every point.

You can point out my biases and debate me and I will be delighted to be invited. It’s fun and educational.

Replacing rational thought with ideology

If the messages that your Human writes always agree with the Chimp assessment, then you’re writing an ideological schema into your Computer. It may include things based on subjective truths supported by ideology. You’re creating core beliefs that are maladaptive.

People who don’t agree with Conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to speak, this is a vital protection mechanism for the nation state.

White supremacy and/or the patriarchy underpins every behaviour and thought that other people have (but not mine).

I don’t need to speak to liberals because they’re all socialists and socialism has never been proven to work.

Everyone is guilty of oppressing someone. If I feel threatened it’s probably because I’m being oppressed in some way.

On the surface, these beliefs will help you function in a dangerous world but in reality they don’t. The last one is particularly pernicious. If your view of the world is comprised solely of oppressor and oppressed then every interaction you have won’t be in good faith.

You’ll see micro-aggressions everywhere

You see a comment you don’t like, your computer asks your chimp and your human what it wants to do. Your chimp says. We hate it, run away. So you block the story before you’ve finished reading it. As with the spider example, your phobia of ‘alternative views’ begins to generalise until everyone who doesn’t share your worldview is a psychological threat.

That’s when you get anxious and need a safe space. And, as in the spider example, the cure for this is exposure therapy and breaking out of the bubble. You need to get into the world and see the people you’re most afraid of aren’t really all bad.

Some might be. Some spiders are poisonous after all — but most aren’t. The way to reduce a lot of the world’s problems is exposure therapy.

You have to come down out of your tree and re-engage with the world as it is, not as your limbic system wants it to be. This is true of those on the political left and those on the political right. This isn’t an attack on either side, it’s an attack on both.

If, when you see something you don’t like, your Chimp says ‘hate it, so kill it’- you’ll fire off a stinging rebuke. You might choose to hit the block button after this point. The equivalent of winning a fight by hitting someone from behind and then running off. A simultaneous attack and retreat you can chalk up as ‘freedom fighting’ — but I’d argue is disingenous.

Sometimes your Chimp says. We hate it, attack it but your Human overrides this. It does this because you know that you’re right and you want to be seen as rational and set a good example. The Human checks the database…. and instead of rational messages like ‘At the end of the day, people who disagree with me are still people’ you get ‘Everyone is guilty of oppressing everyone, and in this case it’s me’

This is interesting, because you now feel like you’re behaving rationally and your points may sound justified and considered. You aren’t writing from a place of irrational emotion, but you are writing from a place of irrational presupposition.

If the person you’ve picked to debate is me, you’ll get push back. The whole loop starts again and in most cases the human gives way to the chimp. It’s why so many conversations end with the phrase.

“I won’t waste any further time on you, it’s clear you are a bigot, do not reply to this message”

To overcome this you have to go in and check the rationality of the core belief. I think a lot of people in their mid-twenties are now questioning the core beliefs of the doctrines they inherited from identity politics on both the right and the left.

I can’t overstate how happy that makes me. I have met more than one person on this site who has expressed regret at the level of unhappiness caused by their sociological conditioning and, with the benefit of hindsight, is able to see how psychologically damaging some of those positions can be.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a core belief that leads to insular surliness as a mode of communication. Safe spaces, echo chambers and a lack of debating skills are slowly turning our Human and Chimp into a profound and disturbing level of concordance.

We have made irrationality a political position and we’re suffering the consequences. Post-structuralism, particularly on the left, has blended feelings and truth together in a way which will take a lot of deprogramming. It’s causing a lot of damage and anxiety — ever met a happy activist?

Post-structuralism. What I feel to be true is therefore true. Emotoveritas.

An instinctive irrational Chimp angry at injustice (without defining what it means) and a post-hoc rationalisation of every encounter in which you emerge the triumphant hero. Chimp and Human working in perfect harmony to close off debate at every turn and retrospectively explain to itself why it was the right thing to do.

Self-preservation perhaps, but the warning light on the democracy dashboard just went off. What do you want to do about it?

Want more about safe spaces?