Essay 11: Blood Tastes Like Iron

Essay 11: Blood Tastes Like Iron

“Smile has blood, and his blood tastes like iron, hence he wasn’t a robot.” In a show called Ping Pong the Animation (phenomenal by the way), a friend of the main character (Smile being the main character) said the above in reference to the main character. Smile was a closed-off person, detached and emotionally uninvolved to a fault. Any activity that involved an element of risk-taking needed to be done through the guise of a robot so he could detach himself from the potential consequences of his actions. By the end of the story, it was evident that the main character always loved ping pong with all his heart, but it took a long time for him to come to admit it. His detachment was most highly expressed while playing ping pong, meaning he refused to let himself have fun while playing. Why would anyone do that? If someone loves something and nothing is materially stopping them, why not just do it? In Smile’s case, everyone wanted him to do the thing he already loved and supported him doing it, so why would he not let himself have fun? The answer reflects one of the greatest complexities of what it is to be human; he could not have fun because he loved it. We all love life; many of the elements that we hate we do because our love is getting turned against itself. Hate is simply the act of dehumanization and slander done to make our choices more acceptable to ourselves. It is the love found within ourselves (blood) that gets turned into a shell of iron that protects us from having that love be betrayed again. That iron shell is largely indistinguishable from hatred, which is why Blood Tastes Like Iron, but it is nonetheless true that it is love that we are confusing with hatred. In this essay, I will explore the mechanism for this cognitive dissonance and repression through the lens of the relationship between our beliefs and our needs, how this relationship places various parts of ourselves at odds with one another, and the implications of this conflict on our lives.

Beliefs and needs have an interesting, reciprocal relationship that I already discussed, but would like to take a moment to rephrase. When unintelligible sense data comes in through our senses, it is our beliefs that turn them into something intelligible. Intelligible in this context really just means that it is something relevant to our needs. So the formation of things and concepts (which are also things) is simply turning sense data into something that matters to us (i.e. what’s the point?), we talked about the process of doing so previously as subjugation. As I mentioned in an earlier essay, things are simply a unit of purpose. Things are formed through the story of our interactions with the thing historically. This story allows us to remember the different attributes the thing has, thus allowing us to identify it, but this is predicated on our identifying the thing as a thing in the first place. We only ever come to recognize something as a thing if understanding it or labeling it fulfills our needs in some way. From then on, we only ever continue to interact with the thing when we feel the thing is in some way involved with fulfilling our needs or further depriving them. With every interaction, we come to revise the story we have of the thing, which manifests as a change in its associated beliefs over time. Every belief is thus how we turn sense data into something relevant to the fulfillment of our needs. So this is the relationship between them: our beliefs interpret the world into something our needs can navigate, and our needs provide our beliefs with structure by means of importance (look at the previous essay if you forgot what that means) alongside motivating the formation of the belief in the first place.

This relationship is the mechanism through which we come to reject what we love. While there are multiple ways this emerges in us all, it fundamentally boils down to something demonstrated by putting fleas in a jar. Many of you already know where I’m going with this. Most fleas can jump almost a foot high, so what happens if you put a flea in a jar only 6 inches tall? Naturally, they hit their head against the top of the jar. Then they jump and hit their head again, and again, and again, and again. Every time their head hits the top of the jar, it hurts, and thus the story they have of jumping gets reconditioned so that any jump of more than a certain level of intensity results in pain. Every time a weak jump results in no pain, this story gets turned into a belief that “I should only jump five inches at most”. Certainty, as the need to avoid pain, grants the belief a greater sense of importance every time it is reinforced, and the result is personally haunting. Once the lid of the jar is removed, most of the fleas will still never escape the jar. They will stick to only jumping at most five inches for the rest of their lives, and their children will model and replicate the behavior. This goes to show that we reject the love we have for some things (be it objects, people, actions, passions) because we come to associate the thing with depriving us of our needs. This is only possible because of the complexity of the relationship between beliefs and needs. Let’s highlight this complexity by describing an example of the aforementioned internal conflict.

Here is the first example. Take someone who had bad experiences with people when they were younger. In school, he always went out of his way to start conversations with others without the favor being returned. At the beginning of the school year, he met some people and thought he was building something good with them, but they went on to their own groups and never went out of their way to include him. He saw how others told jokes that everyone laughed at, but his rarely resulted in a chuckle. Almost everyone he was romantically interested in rejected him, and the few he went on dates with he rarely went on a second or third. We all have the needs of connection and significance, this is a fact of being human. Just as these needs could have been fulfilled through successful social interactions, they can be deprived with failure. That deprivation hurts, and that pain incentivizes the formation of new beliefs to prevent that pain from happening going forward. The new beliefs? Nobody enjoys spending time with me. Nobody respects what I have to say. I’m unattractive. I’m autistic. I’m needy. Eventually, this can evolve to “Other people backstab each other”, “They do not share any interests with me”, “I prefer to live without the drama”, and “I am perfectly fine living without them”. Why does this happen? The fact that he has been starved and deprived of his needs should mean that he wants it so much more than many others, so why does he stop himself? If he forms new beliefs justifying why he doesn’t need others, then any potential emotions that come up to the contrary get ignored. As mentioned before, important beliefs manipulate reality as perceived (our state-of-things) to make it more suitable for the belief in question. Since he formed the belief and assigned it importance, he can now subconsciously ignore how hungry he is for social interaction, and since the urge makes it to his conscious awareness less often, he tries less and can live in blissful ignorance of his own desires. Eventually, the practice of not initiating social interaction with others becomes a habit, and thus certainty comes into the equation. Once that happens, resistance to and potentially outright fear of social interaction occurs, further containing the expression of the desire to form relationships. The desire is definitely still there; in my experience, it comes out when I’m tired. In the dead of night, when I’m trying to go to sleep, I fantasize in a desperate attempt to ignore how lonely I am, but it is at best a band-aid to help me go to sleep so that I can wake up the next day and let the adrenaline caused by my responsibilities mask the desire again. We form these beliefs because it is less painful to ignore our needs than to be rejected again. It is easier to strive vainly to reject that which is fundamentally a part of ourselves than to let it continue to hurt us. To summarize, the reason we stop ourselves from doing what we love, is that if we acknowledged we love it, we would want to do it again, and it is less painful to ignore than to love and be rejected, especially as a child. 

This subconscious power to ignore parts of ourselves was described in what I like to call one of the greatest ideas any person ever had. That person was Carl Jung, and the idea is the Shadow. Carl Jung depicts the Shadow as the dark side of our personality, containing qualities that we consider unacceptable, negative, inferior, or counterproductive to our ideal selves, but are nonetheless present in everyone and a part of what it is to be human. The mechanism for doing so was described in the previous paragraph, it just continues to compound over time until it enters the locked box we call the Shadow. What I would like to take the rest of the essay to explore are the italicized words and their implications. First, “ qualities that we consider unacceptable, negative, inferior, or counterproductive to our ideal selves,” what does this mean? Our mind seeks its ideal self. Each of our needs has their own opinions on what that ideal self is, and influences our behaviors and habits to create a person who seeks its fulfillment. Even beyond our needs, our beliefs also seek their own expression in the world, and the power they have to do that is their importance. Needs seek their fulfillment through reinforcing the beliefs that serve as the most effective pathways to their fulfillment through the assigning of importance to those needs. This naturally means that our needs/beliefs come into conflict with other needs/beliefs regularly. Since all needs and beliefs seek to be expressed/lived by as consistently as possible, it uses its importance to influence you to act in ways that support its expression at the expense of contradicting beliefs and needs. It’s not like underlying beliefs and needs disappear, though, they get transferred over to the Shadow; the set of beliefs and needs deemed “unacceptable” and fail to be expressed in our day-to-day. But if expression is the air that these various facets of ourselves breathe, what happens when we try to suffocate them in the Shadow?

Herein lies why I believe Carl Jung speaks of the Shadow as a “dark side” of our personality. When some element of ourselves becomes so neglected, it fights for air. To expect it not to fight is like drowning someone so they do not create ripples in the water, and then being offended when they swim up for air. So whenever our neglected, deprived beliefs feel a crack in the armor, it expresses itself in an extreme fashion and from a place of pain and desperation. This extreme expression of rejected personality traits in what is often our most vulnerable moments is a major portion of why it is considered a “dark side” but there is another to note. The frame of analysis we use to form an impression of  those spurts of emotion is built by the same dominant beliefs that rejected the repressed beliefs in the first place. It is incredibly difficult to be objective in matters associated with our Shadow because the repressed belief is the one breaking the status quo, and the more important beliefs that define our “objectivity” have an interest in the repression and alienization of the repressed belief. This leads to the greatest takeaway of the essay in my mind.

Hatred is something that forms because a given thing is diametrically opposed to our beliefs and a threat to their expression. While my take on hatred more broadly will be discussed in more detail in one of the final two essays of the book, what I seek to get across here is that it is a dehumanizing emotion. Hatred is our beliefs using their importance to bias us against understanding the human reasons behind some other thing. This emotion should never be turned on yourself.

A couple of years ago, I went through a pretty major internal conflict. I had pretty graphic, aggressive, intrusive thoughts that came up seemingly out of nowhere and were only getting worse over time. Of course, I didn’t believe for a second I wanted to do those things, so I kept mentally screaming at the thought to leave, or I slapped myself to knock myself out of it. At some point, I simply formed the conclusion that this is something everyone goes through, and I’ll just have to live with the thoughts for the rest of my life and pretend I’m not like everyone else. I was fundamentally disgusted with the idea that anyone could want to do what the thoughts suggested I do, so any interaction I had with the part of me the thoughts came from boiled down to anger and telling it to back off. In my mind, it was nothing more than a necessary complication of living with a human brain, absolutely distinct from myself and what I want. A problem that I would have wanted nothing more than to solve.

While I will be spending the next essay going through the process in more detail, the solution was actually to love and accept that part of me. It is only once I operated from the place of realizing that the underlying cause was fundamentally good and let it be a part of me, operating with the same respect and dignity as every other part of me, that I was able to fulfill its desire in ways that were in balance with everything else. I came to realize I was suffocating a part of myself, and grew angry that it took a deep breath when it forced my hands off its throat. Empathy and a fundamental belief that every part of you is fundamentally good and worth accepting is how we become a more integrated person. Of course, this does not mean taking your thoughts at face value, identifying with your emotions, or labeling yourself, but the difference will be discussed next time. 

That is all, see you all sometime by May 15 for Essay 12: Know Thyself!