A Warning: Solve and Executive Dysfunction

In the last portion of his life, Friederich Nietszche went insane. He saw a horse being flogged by its master and was arrested for flinging himself between them. He wrote letters to acquaintances, signing them from Dionysus and Christ. He commanded that the emperor be taken to Rome for summary execution. He was soon commended to institutional care, and then to the care of his family members. Before long, he was catatonic, uncommunicative;  a few years later, he was dead.

Historical and academic orthodoxy— arising from a network of hideously unromantic institutions— has suggested numerous medical possibilities to explain away this insanity, from syphilis to dementia to mercury-poisoning. I, on the other hand, point to a different culprit: executive dysfunction.

On Executive Dysfunction

The solve process is a process of dis-integration. A pathology is  an irrationality hidden within the subconscious mind, disguised by the subconscious mind. To attempt to locate such an irrationality is to divide yourself internally.

The difficulty which this imposes on you, if you are to attempt the Framework Process, is that internal unity is the primary constituent of motivation. I mean motivation here in the colloquial sense, not in a technical one. To be able to do what you think you should do rather than what you wish you could do, you have to have the conviction that your judgment is sound.

Now, anyone with a pathology is already divided inside themselves— the lower mind, in hiding the irrationality which constrains its actions from the upper mind, already conceives of itself as separate from the upper mind. However, by making the upper mind equally aware of this separation, the solve process greatly deepens it. The result is dysfunction, which I describe narrowly within the Framework as “executive dysfunction”.

Executive dysfunction is comparable to a work-stoppage, a protest the lower mind lodges against the upper mind. The lower mind is operating on different premises from the upper mind, and is attempting to achieve different goals. When an uncracked person approaches the world through the veil of their pathology, their lower mind has a great deal of latitude to go about achieving its goals however it would like. By sending out intense feelings of shame, along with the appropriate rationalizations, whenever the person as a whole considers actions which their pathology forbids, the lower mind is able to greatly shape their lifestyle and activities without taking over the “driver’s seat” (That phenomenon, wherein the lower mind does take over the driver’s seat, will be discussed in more detail in the chapter on dominant and repressed modes).

As solve proceeds, more and more of this latitude will be lost by the lower mind. As the upper mind becomes aware of the insubstantiality of the excuses the lower mind puts forward, the lower mind is forced to resort to strong feelings of shame to carry out the agenda which the person’s pathology demands. The rationalizations which would normally pacify you as you are warned against— for instance— asking the waiter for a refill, or telling your friend you don’t care to hear about the dream they had last night, begin to crumble. You (the “upper mind” you, that is) will naturally attempt to push past these excuses, and perform the forbidden action anyway.

However, your body does not belong solely to the portion of your mind most identifiable as “you”. Control is shared between the upper and lower mind alike; as such, the body is the battleground over which these internal factions contest. The same tools which the pathologically-afflicted lower mind uses to warn the upper mind away from certain thoughts, it can employ to push the body towards or away from certain actions.

This state of affairs, in which the lower mind carries out open rebellion against the upper mind, is what I referred to earlier as executive dysfunction. It comes in two flavors— hyperactivity, and catatonia. “open dispositions” fall into catatonia; “closed dispositions” are compelled to hyperactivity. (We will discuss what “open” and “closed” mean in this context in great detail later on).

Catatonia and hyperactivity are, essentially, what they sound like; though, the scale of life at which a person becomes catatonic or hyperactive depends on the scale— or sublimation level— at which they possess a pathological disposition. Defined more narrowly, catatonia is an overwhelming desire to engage in security-seeking behavior, and hyperactivity is an overwhelming desire to engage in danger-seeking behavior. A person afflicted with catatonia lies around all day, doing as little as possible such that other people are forced to take care of them; a person afflicted with hyperactivity bounces from activity to activity, never stopping to rest.

It should be noted, though, that these pathological impulses arise from the conditions of an irrationality which is still fundamentally in effect. A closed-disposition person afflicted with hyperactivity isn’t necessarily going to take up heroin and sky-diving just to scratch the itch of their suppressed death-urge; an open-disposition person isn’t necessarily going to let their children go hungry because they can’t be bothered to go to the store— though, in extreme cases, people might be driven so far.

What executive dysfunction really represents is an intensification, a doubling- and tripling-down of the maladaptive patterns of behavior that a person’s pathology already mandates.  In forbidding security- or danger-seeking behavior, a pathology naturally carves out some exceptions, modes of behavior in which a person is “allowed” to obtain the thing they really want. A scrupulous open individual, too afraid to ask their friends for help, will return home to live with their parents, who bear a “responsibility” which their child is “allowed” to invoke. A nervous closed individual, who refuses to let anything get in the way of their career, will stay out every night of the week drinking with friends, stretching every moment of time that “belongs to them” as far as it can go.

As the solve process continues, executive dysfunction worsens. The irrational excuses of the lower mind are bandages on the unity of the whole person; as these excuses are removed, and the primary, irrational wound is revealed, your willpower collapses in proportion. Your problems— definitionally, the things which you dislike that you do— will grow worse.

On Who Should Attempt the Framework Process

So, why bother? If the process contained in this book is so harmful to your willpower and self-control, why should you go through with it at all?

Simple: The only way out is through.

This is not a bland platitude, it’s the fundamental principle of the process. The energy-unit of the Framework Process, the thing being gained, is knowledge. Knowledge can be forgotten, yes— but the mechanism which causes you to forget things, the repressive mechanism, is exactly the mechanism we’re fighting against in solve. To forget something important about yourself is to subduct it into the subconscious, to allow the lower mind to bear that burden. When we perform solve, when we pit the upper mind against the lower, this capacity is lost. As a result, the solve process is irreversible. What is learned cannot be forgotten, and, as such, the only way out is through.

Viewed one way, this is very good news; viewed another, it’s very bad news.

The good news is that, since the Framework Process is irreversible, there’s no backsliding. You’re spilling water from a bottle, and there’s no way to put it back in again. While the process may be externally subjective, since other people might not see what you’re doing, it is objective internally. While you may not know how much is left in the bottle, you will be able to see each drop you extract from it, and you will know that nothing new will be added to it while you’re not looking. Progress cannot be lost, only halted.

The bad news is that, since the Framework Process is irreversible, there’s no quitting. You can halt the process for as long as you want; I myself lingered at the end of the solve process, and the beginning of unio, for three years. But during that time, your executive dysfunction will not recover. However bad your hyperactivity or catatonia got is exactly how bad it will remain, until you return to process; and after you return to the process, until you complete it, it will get worse. You might very well, like Nietzsche, put this book away, collapse into a shivering pile, and stagnate for ten years. It’s a very small chance, but it’s a real one.

With this in mind, the question of who should undergo the Framework Process cannot be answered with a straightforward “everyone”. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll put forward a list of conditions which, were I were in your shoes, would push me away from the process— and, conversely, conditions which would push me towards it.

You should not pursue the Framework Process if:

• You have young children, under the age of five, who need to be taken care of.
• You are in a deeply satisfying romantic relationship and your partner is not willing to undergo the process with you. (This will be discussed at greater length in the chapter The Alchemy of Pathological Compatibility)
• You have unmanaged schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, austism, or any other serious mental condition which is not properly medicated.
• You have pronounced suicidal tendencies.
• You are working on something extremely strenuous and consequential which will be done in the short term (a year or less)

You should pursue the Framework Process if:

• You have older children, and are worried that you are raising them wrong or harming them in some way.
• You are in an unsatisfying romantic relationship that you’d like to repair
• Your more serious mental conditions are well-managed
• You feel trapped by your circumstances, and feel that you are the victim of self-defeating patterns of behavior
• You have, due to expected unemployment or other circumstances, come into substantial free time in the near future (a year or less)

If any of the conditions in the first category applied to me, I would not undergo the Framework Process. If none of those conditions applied to me, and at least one of the conditions in the second category did, I would undergo it. However, ultimately, you are your own master, and can only make this decision for yourself. Sometimes pathology can make a life unsustainable that, from the outside, looks ideal.

The most important thing to remember about executive dysfunction, though, is this: You’re already suffering from it.

If you’re a cracked person, you’ve already begun the solve process; potentially, you’re already quite deep into it. In such a case, you might be able to play-act a simulacrum of a functional life through stimulants or antidepressants, but, ultimately, your situation remains a precarious house of cards; drugs can’t stave off executive dysfunction forever (I should know, I’ve been there). The only way to truly change your situation is to complete the solve process, and move on to unio; as I said, the only way out is through.

If you’re an uncracked person, the question of whether to begin the solve process is probably an academic one for you, as you believe yourself to be mentally sound. However, if you’ve found yourself tempted by these first two chapters to dig a little deeper, or are wavering, consider this: executive dysfunction is, fundamentally, only an intensification of pre-existing pathological behaviors. You might consider yourself to be one, whole person, but your subconscious mind certainly doesn’t see it that way. Whether you’re afflicted by hyperactivity, or catatonia— or both— dysfunction already dictates the course of your life from behind the scenes. For you as well, the only way out is through.

How to read this book

Whether you’ve made the decision to undergo the Framework Process or not, I’d encourage you to continue reading this book— but to do it in a particular way.

There are two ways to approach this, or really any other, self-help book.

The first is to approach each section discreetly, as a series of propositions. You read each chapter one at a time, figure out what it’s trying to say, analogize it to your own life, apply it to a series of examples inside your own head, and then— only when you understand it completely— move on to the next. In this method, you consider every individual part of the book “on its own”, and understand it only in light of what went before it. (This is how, in school, you are taught to learn math.)

The second approach is to read the whole book in one go, lightly, skipping over anything you don’t understand in the hopes that it will be explained later. In this way, you approach the book as a single piece, a single thought you’re trying to internalize, rather than breaking it into individual chunks. (In school, this is how you read English literature).

I advocate for two read-throughs of this BlogBook, beginning with the “book as a whole” approach, then doubling back to the “book as a series of chunks” approach. While hopefully the extensive use of hyperlinking throughout the BlogBook format ameliorates this somewhat, the Framework is heavily weighed down by technical terminology, and this terminology has been purposefully designed to be evocative, to set the mind spinning into a network of associations. In order to form this network of associations, it’s best to go over the whole thing swiftly, so that all the points you can use to triangulate your location are set down in your head before you really start chewing on the ramifications of any one term.

Your first read-through should be quick, maybe two or three sittings, no more than 10-12 hours total. Go through the book in order, passing over and making a mental note of anything confusing; look more closely at the technical passages, in Theoretical Underpinnings of Solve Analysis, Practical Tools for DIY Solve, and Unio; read Historical Perspectives Through the Lens of Solve, the bulk of the book, more lightly— it’s intended for slower, more methodical consideration after you have a good grasp of the material which has come before it.

Your second read-through, if you choose to actually undergo the Framework Process, should be much slower. If you come to something you don’t understand, work through it before proceeding— use the hyperlinks, the glossary; think back to what comes in later chapters, and how that might illuminate it. If you’re inclined to take notes, this is the read-through in which you might want to write them down. If you come to any questions that the text of the BlogBook can’t resolve, feel free to email them to me at this juncture.

While the Framework BlogBook isn’t designed as a “read along”— it is not the case that each chapter contains a step in the processes of solve and unio which you should undergo, one at a time— it is designed from the bottom up, with the most fundamental principles preceding the ideas that are built out of them, and to be really understood it needs to be read in order.

Lastly— since this book is self-published, and I have the latitude at the moment to do things like this— I want to make this guarantee. If you, you reading this, find yourself afflicted by executive dysfunction as a result of undergoing the solve process, please, email me. I guarantee you that I will do or say pretty much whatever it takes to see you through it, to clear up any confusion, and to help you conduct yourself through the Framework Process and towards complete re-integration. This book is my life’s work; it asks a great deal of people, and I assure you, I don’t take any of this lightly.

Now, whether you’ve decided to undergo the Framework Process or not, we’re on to the next section: The Theoretical Underpinnings of Solve Analysis.