5 How Pathology is Inculcated in Childhood

In the last few chapters, we’ve gotten down to brass tacks going over the Framework’s fundamental premises. I’ll now describe how these pillars combine to describe a system of childhood conditioning which gives rise to the eight pathological dispositions which will form the basis of your solve inquiry.

Each successive era of history gathers up the solutions to the collective action problems at a particular sublimation level and integrates them into a portable ideology which subsequently disseminates throughout society. However, we don’t obtain our conditioning by learning these ideologies as children; instead, the vast majority of the lessons we learn at any given sublimation level are learned ad-hoc, directly from our parents.

This is because, as it turns out, there are only really two directions in which a person’s problem-solving ethos on a particular sublimation level can be skewed— towards Eros, or towards Thanatos. Rather than a specific, diffuse set of problems and solutions to be memorized, Synthesis ideologies form systems of initiation which can bring a pathological person into balance relative to Eros and Thanatos within the sublimation level for which they are created. Once a person’s prioritization of Eros and Thanatos has been brought into balance, they will naturally transmit a balanced understanding of that sublimation level to their children, without needing to consciously transmit a balancing ideology to them.

Why the problems at a given sublimation level are so thoroughly entangled together that a person develops an overall skew relative towards them is unclear; I have a few thoughts on the matter, but for now, take it as an article of faith— another premise of the Framework, to be accepted for the purpose of understanding the book, and to be measured against your own experiences at a later date.

The result of this entanglement, at any rate, is that the process by which a person is inculcated with a pathology is very straightforward, despite the enormous complexity involved in deriving the underlying conditions which give rise to it.

Throughout our childhoods, we undergo a process by which we develop a solution-set to each sublimation level in order of their abstraction, one after another, in a mirror image to humanity’s historical evolution. The phases of this process are:

1. Physical— Infancy to Toddlerhood
2. Emotional— Toddlerhood to Late Childhood
3. Social— Late Childhood to Late Adolescence

The solutions we develop at each of these levels of development can be skewed toward Eros, Thanatos, or neither. We refer to a person skewed towards Eros on a given level as “closed”, a person towards Thanatos as “open”, and towards neither as “neutral”.

This terminology might seem needlessly confusing; but this obfuscation is intentional. Narrowly, the terms refer to a person’s conversational affect, that is, how expressive they are. A closed person, skewed towards Eros, is reserved, a “closed book”. An open person, skewed towards Thanatos, is expressive, an “open book”.

But the real reason we use these terms, rather than cutting directly to Eros and Thanatos to describe people, is that these dispositions represent the sum totality of your problems. In the next chapter, you’re going to read about the characteristics of each of these dispositions in much greater detail, and decide which one you possess. It’s important to this process that the names we give the dispositions carry as little baggage as possible— firstly, because your pathology is how you are, not what you are; if the names are too descriptive, too evocative, it becomes tempting to identify with your pathology, and that makes it all the harder to get rid of it. Secondly, because we’re going to be using these terms not just to characterize ourselves, but other people as well, and “open” and “closed” are much more neutral and less judgmental than “sex-driven” and “death-driven”, which is how laypeople would probably gloss Eros and Thanatos.

So, at each level of sublimation, a person is skewed towards Eros, Thanatos, or neither. What is fascinating is that the sole factor which determines which direction a person is skewed— and which pathology they develop— is how much attention is paid to them by their parents (or other authority figures). Too much attention, and they skew towards Eros, and become closed on that level. Too little attention, and they skew towards Thanatos, and become open on that level.

This is because the main characteristics of a person which are modified by their experiences in developing a disposition are their self importance and their self esteem.

Self importance, defined narrowly, refers in the Framework to the extent to which a person feels that their actions have consequences.

Self esteem, defined narrowly, refers in the Framework to the extent to which a person feels that they are a good person.

If a child’s parents are overly attentive to that child’s actions— if they overreact to things that their child says and does, and communicate that most situations are dangerous, and that the child should seek out their assistance rather than trying to do things themselves— they cause their child to internalize an excessive sense of self importance. As such, the adult that child grows into will feel that, on that sublimation level, their actions have a greater impact on other people than they actually do.

At the same time, the child will internalize a diminished sense of self esteem. Their experience of childhood was largely one of failure, of disasters for which they were responsible and which their parents were forced to rescue them from. The adult that the child grows into will feel— once again, on that specific sublimation level— that they are a bad person, that they make things worse by getting involved with them.

Conversely, if a child’s parents pay too little attention to that child’s actions— underreacting to things that their child says and does, failing to intervene in potentially dangerous situations, and leaving their child largely to its own devices— the child will internalize a diminished sense of self importance. The adult that the child grows into will feel that, on that sublimation level, they have a smaller impact on other people than they actually do.

At the same time, the child will internalize an excessive sense of self esteem. Their experience of childhood was largely one of solving problems under their own initiative. The adult that child grows into will feel on that sublimation level that they are a good person, and that they improve situations by getting  more involved with them.

And, naturally, if a child’s parents respond to them on the whole in a proportional manner, their child will develop senses of self esteem and self importance which are commensurate with their actual impact on other people.

At the end of the period of childhood in which a person internalizes the solution to a given sublimation level, they will undergo a process of calcification. In calcification, the overall solution to that sublimation level is internalized, and sinks into the subconscious as the child’s attention turns towards the more abstract problems of the next sublimation level. Once this calcification occurs, the thought processes and principles wrapped up in that sublimation are repressed by the subconscious, which recognizes that it’s important that the person’s attention shifts towards these new problems. The lower mind will deploy its two tools— shame and rationalization— to prevent the upper mind from reassessing the conclusion they have come to, or from even perceiving that conclusion as something they arrived at themselves, rather than being self-evident. The tendency towards Eros or Thanatos which that child developed is set in stone, and becomes (as far as they are aware) a part of “who they are”, rather than merely being an opinion they hold on the basis of specific and mutable evidence.

Of course, the fact is that if a person has developed a pathological disposition, they have come to the wrong conclusion during a phase of their development. This fact will inevitably be made apparent and brought to the attention of the upper mind at times after their conditioning has finished, whenever they encounter anyone who behaves differently than they do. The lower mind will have to engage heavily in the use of shame and rationalization to keep the upper mind focused on the material before it, rather than delving back into ratiocination; as a result, the lower mind will establish a “no go zone” around certain questions and types of behavior, and this splits the mind into its dominant and repressed modes.

Another thing which is essential to understand, at this point, is that each successive phase of development is wholly dependent from the one that came before it. A person might develop a closed disposition on one level, and an open disposition on another, or vice versa. If the extent of attention paid to a person changes from one phase of childhood to another, then they will develop a differing disposition on the next level; if it doesn’t change, they will develop a similar disposition. The phases of childhood, corresponding to distinct levels of sublimation, operate distinctly.

With all that said, allow me to sum up the process by which pathology is inculcated:

In each phase of childhood, you undergo a process in which you internalize a disposition regarding the problems of each sublimation level. If your parents give you too much or too little attention, the solutions you internalize will be skewed towards Eros or Thanatos, and you will develop a pathology on that sublimation level, splitting your mind into dominant and repressed modes. You go through this process three times, corresponding to the three cycles of history which the human race has undergone thus far.

However, there’s a very good chance you’re scratching your head at this point— something isn’t adding up. If all this is true, why are there nine dispositions, and not twenty seven? There are, after all, three polarities— open, closed, and neutral— and three sublimation levels.

The answer is that there are twenty seven dispositions, in theory. But I have chosen to dummy the first level of sublimation entirely out of the system. It doesn’t appear in my analysis, and from here on out, it is not relevant to the Framework.

I have  chosen to do this because, in developing the Framework, I observed the sets of behaviors which make up the 9 dispositions first, and only came to understand the principles which gave rise to them later. The sets of  behaviors which are characteristic of the 1st level, however, were invisible to me. I have two theories about why this is.

My first theory is that the problems inherent to the 1st level are so elementary— “people don’t like it when you hit them” sorts of things— that modern societies are extremely effective at catching on when someone has been conditioned incorrectly regarding them, and we move swiftly and automatically to heal them. This could take the form of teachers and other institutional authority figures intervening on the child’s behalf, having conversations with them in which they explicitly address the problems bound up in that sublimation level; it could also take the form of people in general—almost everyone that the child interacts with— spontaneously having conversations with them in which they explain the proper way to behave. In either case, the result would be a process of solve and unio conducted automatically, a sort of immunization our society has evolved to such elementary  pathologies. This would align with a theory I have regarding the nature of knowledge— I believe that we exist within a zone of complexity, that we can only see things which are complex enough, but not too complex, for us to perceive. Things beneath this level of complexity we consider self-evident, literally impossible not to get; and things above this level we consider ineffable, literally impossible to understand.

However, I have no evidence that the problems of the physical level of sublimation actually are that simple. It’s entirely possible that they are too complicated to be resolved by an unintentional course of solve and unio administered automatically by the people you just happen to run into. If this is the case— that the questions answered in the 1st level are more complex than just “people don’t like it when you hit them”— then we should expect the pathologies which manifest at the 1st level of sublimation to be both very straightforward, and very intense. The people who bear these pathologies should exhibit behaviors which are both nakedly self-defeating, and fairly extreme. This leads me to my second theory: it’s possible that the first-level Thanatos-skewed disposition, 1o, aligns with bipolar disorder, and that the first-level Eros-skewed disposition, 1c, aligns with OCD.

Frankly, this latter possibility poses a bit of an ethical quandary. Bipolar Disorder and OCD are very serious mental illnesses, and I am in no way qualified to help people with them. What’s more, I don’t know very many people that have them, and the people I do know that have them don’t tend to be very receptive to talking about them at length; as such, it’s hard to get a read on whether this second possibility is accurate, or whether it’s just a red-herring. After all, at such minute timescales, it’s hard to suss out what’s psychological from what’s a physiological artifact of brain-chemistry; this is already a bit of a problem on the 2nd level, which is an order of magnitude more complex.

With this in mind, I am reserving judgment on the matter. I’m not doing any further writing on the subject than this until I’ve thought about it a lot more— ideally, not until I’ve walked a large number of people through the Framework Process, and have the resources to conduct a more extensive inquiry. I might also need to attend graduate school to get the requisite certificates to legally interact with this problem in a meaningful way.

With the inculcation of pathology explained, we have finished the section of the book on the theoretical underpinnings of solve analysis. Everything that follows is downstream of these three pillars, and the process of childhood inculcation which they reveal. What I mean by this is that you could, in theory, take the chapters you’ve read so far and— by intersecting them with your own experience— generate something that looks very similar to the rest of the solve portion of this BlogBook. We’re done with the important premises, the big leaps of logic which you have to take on faith without really understanding them; from here on out, we’ll be working out the fuller ramifications of the things you’ve already learned, and smashing these ramifications into the real world situations that you and I live with every day.

The next chapter will give an overview of the next section of the book, Practical Tools for DIY Solve, in which we go over some of the most useful ways you can use the insights the Framework provides. That section will begin with An Overview of the 9 Dispositions, wherein you get to take this system of inculcation we just discussed, and determine exactly how it played out for you yourself.