Mental Hygiene: Communication and the Health of the Mind

Copyright © 2014 by Lee Thayer.

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Rev. date: 05/06/2014

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Contents

Introduction

1    The Human Condition

2    The Healthy Body

3    The Healthy Mind

4    Communication—the Hygienic Discipline

5    Every Mind Is a Social Product

6    The Mind and Its Robotic Brain

7    The Explained World

8    The Explainers

9    Conscience

10  Causation and Justification

11  Addictions

12  Life Is a Verb: I

13  Life is a Verb: II

14  Life Is a Story

15  Life Is an Idea

16  Mental Hygiene Is an Idea

17  Your Life Is Whatever Your Mind Makes Possible…

18  . . . Then Do What You Have to Do

19  Brief Parting Thoughts

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T HE AUTHOR GRATEFULLY acknowledges the reading and

editing skills of Chris Comeaux and of Kate Thayer in the preparation of this book. Any errors, of course, remain mine.

—Lee Thayer

INTRODUCTION

H YGEIA (OR HYGIEIA) was the Greek goddess of health. We no longer have our gods and goddesses to blame or to intervene on our behalf. We are stuck with doing whatever we think needs doing to enhance our health and avoid those conditions that make us less than healthy. Otherwise, we would have a goddess like Fate to blame for our poor health, or like Hygeia to credit for our good health. When we stopped believing in the gods and goddesses for our good or poor fortune in our lives, we started having to figure all that out for ourselves.

In some respects, we’ve done a fairly good job of it. We’ve extended life expectancy—though not to the level of the best in the world. We’ve invented drugs to treat people with life-threatening diseases—as well as drugs for all kinds of cosmetic and feel-good purposes. We have the medical technology to keep people alive longer, even though they are not really living. We may live longer, but the number of diseases that are treatable by our medical industry has grown exponentially since records were first kept. We spend more money on health care than any other country. Yet we seem not to be gaining much health by doing so.

We try to fix things that aren’t working. People can provide convincing symptoms of being afflicted some disease. Treating either is not the same thing as preventing them. Hygiene is not about treating diseases. It is about preventing them from occurring in the first place.

It is about sanitation. It is about healthful living and nurturance. It is about being averse to what depletes a person—body or mind. It is about arising from bed and being able to do what needs to be done. It is about being who you would be if you could. Hygiene is the could part of it.

It is about cleanliness. It is about healthy metabolism. It is about not spreading your diseases or your unhealthy (or even useless) thoughts to others. It is about having immunity to what could debilitate you, and having healthy appetites for what could enable you to live the best life you can envision, and of which you are capable.

It is about what the Greeks referred to as virtuous living—by which they meant doing life in all of its ramifications in the best way possible.

That’s thinking about hygiene in the most general way.

In this book we will explore in depth the most basic and influential hygiene of all—mental hygiene. Why should we be concerned about this?

Most people treat their minds as they do their breathing. It’s something we all have, and therefore must come naturally. As we know from the extensive research that has been done, we are not very hygienic when it comes to breathing. We breathe in all sorts of toxins and contaminants, even without help from smoking, from perfumes and sprays, etc. We suffer all kinds of lung and heart and other bodily diseases as a result. We do not breathe in clean air. We do not fundamentally breathe as hygienically as we could or should.

As a result, our bodies fill up over the years with all of the toxins and contaminants that are ingested from our environment. We do not detoxify them by eliminating them. They collect in our bodies and we add daily to the work our bodies have to perform to survive. As a result, the quality of our lives is significantly affected. We fail to have the robust good health we could have. That requires both healthy air and healthy processing.

It is even more critical where the mind is concerned. Here’s why:

It is in communication with other humans that human minds are created. It is in communication with others, directly or indirectly, that the minds we have are maintained and evolve. If we had absolutely no communicative contact with other minds, we would quite soon cease to have the mind we had. That’s how critical the communication aspect of it is. It is not only about the survival of our minds, it is about how healthy they are, how they function—in what shape and condition and in what state of debility they are in.

Just as it is for we humans physically, some minds function well, and others poorly. That range of differences—if there are no clear organic pathologies—is a function of how hygienic have been the communication processes that have formed those minds and make them what they are.

No two minds are the same. That is because no two minds have the same history. They emerge and operate in different cultures, in different subcultures, in different human circumstances, and as a result of often quite different communication experiences.

Human minds are first created, then architected, in communication. Other creatures can certainly think—some more intelligently than others. But there is nothing else in nature like a human mind. That’s because we talk one another into having such a mind. Birds migrate instinctively. Minds migrate—but they are colonized by the other minds that preceded and surround them. The mind does not have instincts. It has only the mental models that have been built into it over time. No human mind springs full-blown from birth. It is always in the process of becoming what it is at any point in time.

We presume to know what constitutes a healthy brain. That’s because brains are tangible, fungible organs that you can hold in your hands. But a mind is not a brain. You may need a brain to develop a mind. But they are not the same thing. Brains are primarily biological things. Minds are primarily social things. We wouldn’t know we had brains if we did not have the kind of minds that enable us to talk about them.

Minds are created in communication with other human minds. They are forever evolving as a result of the communication events to which they have been and are being exposed. A mind is forever private, ineffable, knowable only from inference about what people say and people do. They are devious, complex beyond any final analysis, and changeable in an instant. They are the infinitely complex products of other minds. They are what enable us to have that mysterious sense of consciousness, and the even more mysterious sense of self-consciousness.

Mental hygiene is therefore the most basic and most profoundly consequential (for human lives) of any kind of hygiene that could be considered. We would have no concept of hygiene apart from how we talk about it. And how we talk about it determines what we do about it. How we talk about the mind—its sources, its destiny, its fables and foibles—determines what we do with it and about it.

The mind’s processes are purely hygienic—or not. The healthier it is, the healthier we can be. The more dysfunctional it is, the more dysfunctional we will be. And all of that is produced in communication—what we take account of, what meaning or significance we assign to it, and what we do about it. The causes of our behavior—individual or collective—are implicit in how we talk about or represent the things people talk about.

Other creatures indeed have minds of a sort. They need to avoid predators, they need to locate sources of food, they need to be able to find a mate. All of these and more require some primitive level of communication—of reading the environment around them and of doing so intelligently enough to live another day.

But people are the only creatures that communicate symbolically. It isn’t so much that we use words. It is that we live in and by the meanings of things that we presume to be relevant. Our words are not just signals, like bird songs or pig grunts. They are alive with meaning, as Helen Keller so eloquently told us. We live in and by the concepts we create in communication—not in the words or images as such.

The mind deals only in meanings. It does not—can not—deal with the raw stuff of the world. The world means what we say it means. The meanings we conceive of are the meanings we impose on people, on events, on ourselves. And where do we get those possibilities?—from the minds created in the communication we have engaged in since birth.

Once we are talked into having a concept of ourselves as a person among others, we begin to assign meaning to things according to who we imagine ourselves to be. We invent ourselves in the context of our explained past, explained future, and explained present. We are not a fixed entity but a trajectory. We are forever in the process of becoming who we are. In this process, it is the mind that rules. It may be healthy. It may not.

It is not science but scientism that would, in our time, try to reduce the mind to the brain. Or, sometimes, those who practice scientism—which is pretend science, pseudo-science—bypass the mind altogether in order to seek every sort of mental process and its behavioral manifestations in one aspect or another of the brain. That’s because science is stuck with explaining only material things. There can be no science of the mind. So those who want to appear to be scientists must ergo account for all human behavior as a product of the material mechanisms of the brain.

What the human mind is very adept at is explaining things. In mindful activities like poetry and sometimes philosophy, we explain ourselves. We explain the cosmos and everything in between. Evolution, as we humans understand it, is an explanation. It is a meta-explanation for how things came to be like they are. Things like human hands and gizzards evolved from other things. Our psyches evolved from other things. There is even a subfield of psychology called evolutionary psychology (which was doomed when it gave up mind as unscientific). Those folks can explain a lot of things about human behavior they couldn’t explain objectively before this new perspective took over.

That’s interesting. But it leaves the basic question unanswered. What genetically accounts for why these psychologists are explaining other humans in terms the psychologist would not use to explain his or her own behavior. If people are determined genetically or environmentally, then so are psychologists—evolutionary or not. They are not pursuing their interests out of choice. They are not discovering anything. Their thought and actions are being determined by their genes—or their brains—so they can claim no credit of their own.

One would think that it is species (such as humans) that evolve and not certain credentialed experts within that species. People have explained their own and others’ behavior from the first day they started talking to one another. The question then is this: from whence came the evolutionary need for a subspecies of humans to do this explaining on behalf of all the rest of us they presume to be less qualified?

We are who we are because of how we have explained things to one another. If we were determined by our brains, would there be 700 languages and just as many cultures on earth?

Once you have an all-inclusive theory of things (like Freudianism), which cannot be falsified, you are free to be credentialed as the analyst, who performs helping the patient understand himself or herself. Given that understanding, the patient can be said to be cured of his or her mental anguishes. Key question: the diploma on the wall that presumably gives the one person the prerogative to probe the other person’s mind… did that prerogative evolve from something biological? Or is it much more a cultural sort of arrangement?

Or has the psychoanalyst merely evolved from earlier witch-doctors or shamans and the patients for some inexplicable reason from past losers?

There must certainly be social evolution, which cannot be credibly accounted for biologically. Human societies, like humans individually, change over time. But they change differently. Does this suggest that evolution is socially selective?

There is clearly something else going on in people’s lives and the lives of civilizations that cannot be explained or predicted in terms of evolution—or by the brain. Do you know of any major poet who claimed that his or her poems evolved in some biological way? Or that what they wrote was determined by forces beyond their control? Why are poets dismissed? Why do we worship scientism? Does that make those who practice scientism the chosen ones from an evolutionary or brain-scan point of view? Are they superior to us because they have uniquely superior brain structures or functions? Has that ever been tested for?

Our worship of science stands in the way of our understanding what we need to mean by mental hygiene. Since neither communication nor the mind can be studied scientifically, those who might imagine that we have minds in addition to brains are at a disadvantage. We can’t readily eliminate that impediment to our thinking. But we need to be aware of it.

When humans apprehend or believe they comprehend the world they live in because they can explain it, they have to do so with their minds. Mind is essentially a verb: we mind our inner and outer worlds. It is the only way we have of making contact with either world. What we take into account in the world we live in has to be taken into account and interpreted with the only means we have for doing so—our own minds.

How accurately we do so is something we can only agree to. There is no other way. Whole civilizations have become extinct because there was a fatal flaw in how they minded the world. There is plenty of evidence that flawed minding of the world—including flawed beliefs about that world—can lead people individually or collectively into mental or societal jeopardy.

It is at least imaginable that the sane people in our own societies (as Szasz and others have argued) are those inside the walls of the asylum. We lock up those or go to war with those who do not see the world as we see the world. The way we talk about things determines those beliefs—those peculiar ways of minding the world. Just because a bunch of us agree doesn’t make us right. We have no direct access to reality. We can only explain it as we have agreed to explain it.

Orientals, as did American Indians, had their own system of medicine—of understanding health and illness. That doesn’t make them wrong, although we would like to think so. There is evidence that their ideas about health and illness were just as efficacious as is ours, or in some cases even more so.

People who grow up in alien cultures, having little or no intercourse with Western minds, have different beliefs, different perspectives, different mental models. They think differently because they talk to each other about things differently, just as we do in our culture. They may even see different colors than we see. We don’t see what is there. We see what we expect to see. And that is a function of minds, not of brains.

Cultures emerge from how the members of those cultures talk about things. Cultures are like collective minds—shared ways of seeing, doing, having, saying, and being. Within cultures, people do those things similarly. Between cultures there are often key differences. Such differences have in the past led to war and decimation. The European slaughter and the displacement of American Indians would be a good example, as would the British annihilation of indigenous peoples in Australia or the cleansing of the Aryan race not so long ago.

This book is not about the causes of wars or of conflict between cultures. Those along with marital spats are but the symptoms of their underlying causes. It is the underlying causes that we want to probe and explore.

This book is thus about the efficacy of the minds that lead into these kinds of problems. It is about how the source of the mind—communication—may or may not create those problems. Those problems may be personal, interpersonal, or social. Their consequences may affect the course of civilizations, as even Confucius suggested.

But we will stick with the causes of so many of our problems, because that is where the human project—individually or collectively—can be put on the right trajectory. If how we explain things to ourselves and others is the source of so many of our problems, it is at that level that we will want to generate an understanding of them that actually enables us to make a difference.

Unless, of course, you actually prefer the problems you have to deal with in your everyday life with others in this world.

Most people assume that communication is wholly utilitarian—that it is mainly for the purpose of referring to something, or to something that should happen or has happened. In that sense, it is understood merely as the means to some end.

But communication is far more than that. Whether you are talking or listening, writing or reading, how you interpret what is going on affects your mind. Whatever you take into account in some way affects your mind, because what happens from there on is based on how you made sense of—how you attributed meaning to—what was going on then.

So what we need to learn and remember about communication is that it is not just neutrally referential. Whether we like it or not, whether we intend it or not, communication—how we talk about things, how we explain things to ourselves and to one another—is always consequential. That’s what makes it subject to considering it as a hygienic process. It either contributes to our long-term health and welfare, or it contributes to our social, mental, or physical problems down the road.

Our ways of communicating can be healthy. They can be unhealthy. It is never a neutral activity. However we may use communication for utilitarian purposes, it will have consequences—for you, for the others you are in communication with, and thus for the larger society.

Sometimes those problems can be ameliorated. For the most part, they cannot. They cannot because once they occur they become a part of who we are—individually or collectively. They become a part of who we are and where we stand when the next occasion arises. We are continuously evolving out of the consequences of our past communication encounters. We are always in the process of becoming who we are. There is no interpretation we make, no encounter we are involved in, nothing we take into account—that does not affect in some way who we are and who we are in the process of becoming.

In terms of quality of life, communication is the most vital process humans engage in. It is what sets and resets our destiny—individually and collectively. The consequences of diet or lifestyle are sometimes correctable. The consequences of our communication histories are not. We have to stand on our interpretations of our past mistakes to avoid future ones. That requires skepticism about those past interpretations.

So our mental hygiene is at least as important to human and social life as any other form of hygiene. If we don’t take care of our minds, our minds will not take care of us.

There is nothing we do that affects our lives as much as how we communicate. It can be good for us or bad for us. It is capable, as Freud once suggested, of creating our heavens and our hells. It depends upon how hygienically we can understand communication—this basic engine of our lives. That is why this book exists.

If you engage in communication in a hygienic way, you will yourself have a better quality of life. If you don’t, you will suffer the ills that befall you, others around you, and ultimately the ills of any and all of your relationships and the society you inhabit.

Communication is that consequential. That was taught twenty-five centuries ago by Confucius. Here in the 21st century, we are engulfed by the consequences of how we do and do not communicate. It is time we learned. It is time we did something constructive—which is to say, something more hygienic—about how we create and deploy our minds in communication.

1

The Human Condition

A S LONG AS humans have been talking and writing, they have produced assessments of—or recipes for—the human condition. As long as humans have been capable of self-reflection, they have wondered about the causes and consequences of their own individual condition. And, occasionally, they have wondered about the condition of humankind—why are we here? What are we supposed to be like? How can we do good (whether it is to get to heaven or just because it seemed the right thing)? What are people for ? Are we on the right track, or a wrong one?

And so on. We have puzzled over such matters throughout history. For many years, we have had more explanations than we have had questions. We now have our celebrities and other experts not only to tell us what questions we should have about our condition, but what we should do about it.

Even so, with all of that wondering and prognostication behind us, we don’t seem to be making all that much progress as human beings. We still have war and violence. We still have relationship problems. We still have political and economic and personal problems. We live increasingly amidst squalor and ugliness in our cities. There is less and less place for us to retreat to. We have a greater cornucopia of diseases and illnesses than ever before in human history. We have an infinite capacity for incarcerating people. If peace and joy were our aims, we seem to be missing our target more each passing year.

We try to make up for our distresses and anxieties by turning to our entertainments. When we’re feeling down, we go to a bar and laugh it up with our comrades while consuming depressants. When we’re feeling up, we have a drink or two to celebrate.

We have too much time on our hands. To combat this apparently terrifying perspective in our lives, we become competent if not ingenious at killing time. We are better at wasting time than we are at fulfilling our own hopes and dreams. In wasting our time, we waste away our lives. We punctuate our lives not by the plans we have for improving them, but by the events that happen to occur in our lives that we neither asked for nor always welcomed.

From afar, it appears that we prefer playing the role of the victim rather than the achiever. We let our lives manage us. If we ever had the capacity to manage our lives, we seem to have lost it.

We have those moments when it seems to us that our lives are not what they should be—not even what we intended. But then we forget that by jumping into the busyness of the day. We know how to fake ourselves out by making the events of the day more relevant than the life we lose in doing so.

Drinking and drugging may be handy ways of avoiding our disappointments, as may talking to our fellow-travelers about nothing really important to either of us. We have cell phones now for just that purpose, not talking with a purpose clearly in mind, but essentially just for talking. We can readily connect with others to fend off the feelings of irrelevance, of utter isolation. We can get lost in five hours a day in front of a television, or an equal number of hours in front of a computer screen. Failing that, we can always read a junk novel—or a best-seller, which are often the same thing. Or we can become depressed and get a drug for that disease.

Is there is just less ordinary civility than there used to be—or that we imagine used to be? Or, even if not, that we might hope there would be? If so, what is the treatment for that epidemic?

Apparently, the U.S. ranks only 7th in literacy. We have citizens who cannot read or understand the label on a can of beans—and most cannot read poetry or understand a simple metaphor. We rank 49th in the world in life expectancy. Given the trillions of dollars we spend on health care, you would think that might produce better results. Maybe something else is going on here: we are also among the most obese people in the world. Our four percent of the world’s population consumes eighteen percent of the world’s oil. We rank 34th in infant mortality.

Our very lives may be less meaningless in the increasingly expanding scheme of things. But we might find some comfort in the fact that we have lots of company. The victim’s way of life has been becoming the norm for more than a century. We can float downstream together. Then we can take solace in imagining that is the way it should be.

Clearly something is amiss with the human condition. Hardly anyone would have chosen it to be as it is—unless you are one of the rich and famous. Yet there is research evidence that even that 1% of people do not necessarily have happy or enriching lives. Is it our best imagined destiny to be unhappy in a world of our own making?

It was assumed for many years that there was something known as human nature—and that it was more or less a static condition of being human. For example, Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1747:

Human nature is the same all over the world.

That of course depends entirely upon what is meant by human nature. Our nature varies (sometimes greatly) as a result of the culture we happen to have been born into. This is true across cultures as well as historically. But Lord Chesterfield was writing before anthropologists discovered how different human cultures can be.

There may be underlying consistencies across human cultures. There may also be significant differences in ways of being, doing, knowing, having, and talking. Beliefs differ. Ways of performing everyday life differ. In some cases, we even see different colors in the world and replicate them in cultural artifacts.

Human nature is thus a metaphor for the consistencies we see across cultures. Francis Bacon was surely using the term metaphorically when he wrote, in 1625:

"There is in human nature generally more of the fool than

of the wise."

What he probably meant is that people in general are likely to be more foolish than wise in their decisions and actions. Why would something as omniscient as human nature be taking us in that direction? Of what survival value would that be? Or maybe evolution plays no more than a small role in human and social life. We might assume that people would do what was in their own and their society’s best interests. But that only rarely turns out to be the case. It is well known, for example, that obesity contributes disproportionately to a wide range of serious diseases—from heart and lung diseases to cancer. It is reported that thirty percent of the folks in Mississippi are obese. In one study, people were told by their cardiologists that they would die if they didn’t significantly change their lifestyles. Eighty percent chose not to change. Was that wise or foolish?

Or does it just demonstrate that habits are stronger than what most people can muster in the way of willpower? Maybe that is what is meant by human nature: the inability to do what you know you ought to do? If so, human nature would be our enemy. It would require conquering by every person from birth on—it would be something to escape from.

In his Murder in the Cathedral (1935), T. S. Eliot famously wrote:

Human kind cannot bear very much reality.

If that is the case, and human history would seem to give credence to that observation, then human nature is an exercise in escaping from reality (as unbearable). The way we live has little connection with the realities of the natural world. In fact, we invent human creations (buildings, ships and airplanes, technology, art, business,