dr_lizardo

Yesterday I was having myself a cheeseburger and some chili at the mall food court when I got me an idea and was therefore rather annoyed. The trouble with new ideas is that when you get them you have this responsibility to the world to propagate them for the benefit of all mankind. Which is fine unless you don't have a graduate degree in the field in which you get important ideas, in which case noone is ever going to pay any attention to you.

For this reason, my fallback position is to my journal on the SG website as a medium for scattering the seeds of my ideas on the wind, and hope that somehow sooner or later to make a connection with them, and grow them beyond the confines of my admittedly capacious cranium.

I'll try to be succinct so I and my readers can return to looking at and reading about the lives of charming and attractive tattooed young women, in a timely manner.

A few years a go I worked out 5 yes 5 fundamental impulses, or 5 fundamental aspects of motivation, that account for very nearly everything that human beings and most other complex organisms think and do.

1. Competitive
2. Communicative
3. Consumptive
4. Reproductive
5. Upkeep.

Lots of things like the drives to learn or to control or to conform are actually when you examine them, what I call "synthetic" impulses, distinct categories of action that stem from the action to two or more of the basic 5 impulses working together. Most activites satisfy the demands of more than one impulse. Incidentally it isn't necessary to infer the existence of something you cold call a survival instinct, although if you wanted to think there was one it wouldn't really interfere with anything for the most part, it's just unnecessary. An organism need only have drives to do things, it doesn't mean that there has to be a sort of theoretical orchestrator working behind them.

Anyway, there were some goings-on in they psychology discussion groin that got me thinkin and theorizin about some stuff, but first I think I need to point out a couple of other things, one being that the competitive and communicative impulses are actually one and the same thing, a distinct behavioral agenda with a distinct mechanism for achieving that agenda. The second is that human beings are pretty much all arranged in a pyramid, the rich and powerful on top, the poor and ostracises on the bottom, slackers and SG's and others in various positions between. The compet/comm impulse is the drive to take the very best position that you possibly can on the pyramid. According to circumstance of ability and environment it can mean trying to climb higher or working very hard to fix yourself in a favorable place, it can mean pushing others down or pulling them up. (nurturing is a synthesis of comp/comm and reproductive). The pyramid is built and operated by an astonishingly complex network of statements exchanged between people that describe who belongs where and what posessions and occupations and beliefs and whatnot function to establish that they belong where they belong.

For each of us it starts out like this. You are born, Splat. You cryout and someone picks you up and starts to take care of you. This basic process never fundamentally changes, it just gets real complicated. You can't just cry out and belong, you have to do specific things, what to do and say, or people are going to trample you into a bloody mire, to borrow from Tolkien, pushing you down and pulling themselves up, even fusing to bond with you to hold you in a workable place.

Well, the psych discussion group has recently been having a heated exchange about whether people choose to have mental illnesses. Those who regard mental illness as chosen by the mentally ill will say such things as the mentally ill are just having a pity party, they are seeking attention. Without going too deeply into that debate, everyone in the world needs some attention. Some are just more adept at doing exactly what their culture asks them to do, according to its particular norms. People, like me, who are described as neurotic, somehow cannot meet the general expectations of what they think various social pressures demand of them, and that can cause depression or anxiety and various other reactions. The thing is that even if you see youself as not fitting in, as having no place place in the pyramid, the comp/comm impulse NEVER turns off; even suicide is just the overwhelming power of that impulse having internalized negative inputs/statement about the self which have then made this drive turn toxic and destroy the self with all the power that's evolve to drive the self to survive. Suicide is also widely known as a cry for help. I'll also quickly point out that depression is in fact not a feeling so much as an unwillingness to feel, the mind that cannot make the connections to others that it needs to make, that has internalized statements(perversely at first from others but then taking over for them, via the very action of the drive to communicate and pick up things to say with which to present oneself) that it cannot make the needed connections with others, and as a result has the rug pulled out from under the feet of the very force of its being, it wills itself to shut down, be unable to feel the force of life itself.

All this is presented in order to say that human beings have an overwhelming drive to construe themselves as belonging somewhere, and one and the same with this drive is the overwhelming need to Say Something to Somebody. Indeed, why the hell else would i be typing this, or belong to this site or ever leave a comment in anyone's journal.

Now because I've never really been in the habit of using my time wisely, yesterday when I was in the mall food court prior to heading over to B&N to look for books on how to draw manga, i somehow got to thinking about a History channel program I once saw about the history of prisons.
In the mid to late nineteen century there was this idea of keeping all of the prisoners in solitary confinement, so that they would have time to contemplate their lives and get reformed. Problem was this didn't work, the prisoners went insane. Don't know what percentage went insane but a significant one. Anyway that Idea fell by the wayside and solitary is now sort of prison within prison.

The problem with allowing inmates to interact with one another is that the're criminals, the use a lotta drugs and rape and murder each other most assiduously. A man in prison either commits a crime or has one committed to him every day that he is there. This is not a place where people get rehabilitated. Which is an oversimplification but not exactly a wanton one. Or as Chris Rock puts it, prison is crime school. Prison inmates are their own pyramid with in the larger pyramid of the culture that put them there. It is their community and they learn to be part of that culture in order to survive just as every human being in every other circumstance does.

My idea is to erase the community of criminals/prison inmates altogether. Prisoners should be kept completely isolated from one another and allowed form no relationships of community with other criminals. Instead they should only be allowed access to other forms of community, with counselors at the prison, perhaps, but the idea I have had is that they should be given an online community, effectively. They should be given pen-pals, or web correspondents on the outside world. The system should be heavily firewalled so that the inmates should never have any means of gaining personal imformation about the persons outside with whom they are communicating, nor should the persons on the outside ever have any way of determining the identity of the inmate of giving them personal information in any way. There will certainly be manipulative psychopaths who try to abuse the system and victimize people on the outside when they get out and the anonymity firewall is to protect all involved from each other. Anyway, the object is that the inmate, having this overwhelming need to Say Something to Somebody, will find that the only people available to him are those on the outside, who are to be volunteers, including ordinary people, perhaps therapists and/or clergy according to what the inmate seeks out. I know you could set up an Orwellian Dystopia using very similar techniques. But what I want to do is to use this human drive to communicate and form bonds to facilitate the minds of criminals repairing themselves by giving them the opportunity to form bonds and integrate with non criminal culture. I know there all sorts of reasons why this might not work, among them that criminals and non-criminals may have so little in common that they would have nothing to talk about, or the indifference of man toward his fellow man could mean that there would never be enough outside volunteers to correspond with the inmates for the program to ever be more than an experiment. It would also require a change in the theory of prison sentencing, rather than length of sentence being measure in proportion to the severity of the crime, this kind of theory of prison would necessarily create a greater uniformity of sentencing, prescribing terms not based on the severity of specific crimes but based on the amount of time that the inmate needs, if this idea is not manifiestly folly, to create himslef an new identity of one who share common bonds and values and view of self with people who are not criminals. In a certain sense you could say that a genuine attempt to change people's minds rather than just punish them as insidious quality of judging those minds as broken and then performing radical surgery to change them. and it migh vor various reasons never work. But It is at least rooted in the theory that if you give people the oppotunity to form bonds with other health and supportive minds that they shape themselves in accordance with the values that they will hopefully come to share with those minds. Practice is always far intidier than principle, so who knows. But at least this idea is in digitally transmissible form, and has a little whisper of existence.

Thanks if you've read all this, an unseemly long serious blog about psychology and prison reform.