The thesis of Sartre: condemned to be free
Are we free to think ? We think what we want and when we want ? Wait , do not rush to answer . Think thought , think about what you think and how to think . Someone may ask : " I am free of my mind , my thoughts submit to my will ." . It will be ?
The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre defended one of the smartest theses of philosophy: man is condemned to be free. Sartre was right or was naively romantic to defend this thesis? Are we free of ourselves?
If we look at the external behavior, there is no doubt that Sartre was right. An inmate may have his body confined behind bars, but your mind is free to think, fantasize, to dream, to imagine. If your self is not trained to reflect on your mistakes, the punishment will not be in any way educational. On the contrary, phenomena that build thoughts chains will make a multi-focal reading memory over days, months and years, building mental images of escape tunnels, shortening of the sentence; in short, everything to escape a worse prison than the physical prison: the prison of anguish, boredom, the stifling anxiety. Who built prisons throughout history did not study the process of building thoughts, did not understand that the mind can never be imprisoned.
Why dictators, however brutal they are, no matter how much control their people with an iron hand, fall? Because no one can control the movement of the self and its desires for freedom.
A baby will want to leave the mother's arms to explore the environment. A teenager will risk making new friends, even if it is shy. A person marked by a phobia departs from the phobic object; finally, will meet his freedom. From this angle, Sartre was exactly right: man is condemned to be free.
His thesis founded, including civil rights and duties of citizens in democratic societies. In them, we have the freedom to express our thoughts to come and go. But if, on the one hand, we yearn desperately to be free, secondly, to observe closely the process of building thoughts and sophisticated traps within it, we see that Sartre's thesis is naive and romantic. Unfortunately, we are not free as we would like to be in the intellect of the heart. In fact, the worst prisons, the worst dungeons, the tightest handcuffs may be within us. Let's see.
The Self is hostage to a database
We build thoughts from the body of information filed in our memory. All ideas, creativity and imagination are born of marriage between a stimulus and the reading of the memory, which operates in thousandths seconds. The I not aware that reading and organization of data at high speed that occurs in the mind scenes, only the final product staged on the stage, that is, thoughts already developed.
A frame, the characters of the movie or a book, however unusual they are, was gestated based on the reading of elements contained in the author memory. And memory is a product of our genetic makeup, the mother's womb, the social environment, the educational environment and the relationships of our self with the mind itself.
Thousands of experiences that are part of our early childhood database, such as rejections, losses, setbacks, fears were produced without that we could control them, filter them, reject them. Of course today, as adults, we make choices, take actions, but our choices are guided by the database we already have, and therefore our freedom is not full as Sartre thought.
A man who may be the greatest educator of history, saw this limitation clear and haunting way. When he was dying on the cross for more than 2000 years, he said something surprising: "Father, forgive them, they do not know what they do." A nonreligious analysis, but psychological and sociological, shows that the statement carries an unprecedented altruism. But at the same time, it seems unacceptable his attitudes to protect the executioners.
The Roman soldiers knew what they were doing, fulfilled the damning piece of Pilate. However, for the master of masters, the thoughts that they were built on the one hand, the result of free choice, and secondly, the basis of hostage data from your memory, tyrannical culture of the Roman Empire. Fulfilled orders, were not completely autonomous or the owners own destiny. They were prisoners of their past, "slaves" of their culture.
Culture is the foundation for the identity of a people, but if it prevents us from putting ourselves in the other and think before reacting, it is enslaving. For the master of Galilee, behind a person who hurts, there is always an injured person. This does not solve the problem of their opponents, but solved his problem. Protect his mind. I did not carry his follies and aggressiveness that does not belong to him. The tolerance relieved, even when the world collapsed on him.
The I may be overwhelmed by the phenomenon auto-flux
We do not cease to be free just because we are prisoners of our past, "freedom limited to an existential story." Even within this database, we do not have full freedom of choice, as Sartre thought.
Imagine that we have millions of "bricks" in our memory, which arise from the gene pool, the relationship with parents, siblings, friends, experiences at school, information books, the process of introspection. There is no doubt that we have freedom of choice to use these bricks and build emotions and thoughts at the pleasure of the self, thoughts accusing, speeches, analyze, welcome, criticize, accept, love, hate.
Unless someone is in psychotic break or under intense effect of a drug, or an unfit child to be aware of their actions, the exercise to choose and use the memory bricks are preserved. But despite the freedom that I have to access and use information to build chains of thoughts under their responsibility, there are unconscious phenomena that build thoughts and emotions without your permission. If these phenomena do exist, it dramatically changes our understanding of who we are, Homo sapiens.
You enter an aircraft knowing that there is a terrorist on board who could master the pilot and the plane to plummet? I asked this question to an audience of doctors. Of course, all said no. Then I asked, "Who likes to suffer, to grieve?". Fortunately, there was no present masochist. I continued, "Who suffers in advance?". Almost everyone in the audience demonstrated. Then I explained that if we regard the human mind as the most complex aircraft and the pilot, I, mental aircraft of them would be in free fall. I told them that "if I you is not a masochist, if no one hates or seeks to mutilate, why then suffer in advance? If it is not I that produces these disturbing thoughts, those who produce them? The conclusion is that there is a 'terrorist' on board, there is a copilot sabotaging mental aircraft. "
Who is this copilot? I call auto-flux. Later, we will investigate it in detail, but in advance I say that such unconscious phenomenon is of vital importance to the human psyche, for creativity and for the pleasure of living, but may lose its healthy function and pass to terrify us. In fact, he is largely responsible for producing the Accelerated Thought Syndrome.
Doctors began, finally, to understand that the thesis of Jean-Paul Sartre did not hold. Our Self is free to think, to organize the data in your memory, but at the same time, there are unconscious phenomena, which until then had not been studied by other theorists, producing thoughts without the authorization of the Self and that can sabotage it does, enslave him, imprison him.
We can not say that we are condemned to be free. We are not alone in mental aircraft ... We can and should be educated to be authors of our history, but this freedom is won and has its limits. The history of humanity, with its many injustices and atrocities, is a clear example of this.
The RAM phenomenon dominates memory and the I.
The third element of questioning Sartre's thesis is linked to the limitations of the self as the archive memory. In computers, we are gods, we record what we want and when we want, but in human memory that is impossible. The record of all we contact is automatic and involuntary, produced by an unconscious phenomenon called Automatic Memory Register (RAM).
Not just what our I want to be archived, but also what he hates and despises. All that most hate or reject will be recorded with greater power, forming traumatic windows, I call killer. If you hate someone, make sure he will sleep with you and spoil your sleep. So if I, which is the ability to choose, is not free to avoid the registration of our disturbing thoughts and stressful stimuli that we cover, how can we say that man is condemned to be free?
Study and understand these unconscious phenomena not just leave us stunned, but will also lead to a new understanding of the science of education, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and sociopolitical relations.
The process of building thoughts and all its psychological and sociological implications have not been systematically studied by brilliant thinkers as Freud, Jung, Roger Skinner, Piaget, Vygotsky, Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hegel, Kant, Descartes, among others.
The great theoreticians of psychology and philosophy have used the thinking ready to produce, with brilliance, knowledge about the process of personality formation, the learning process, ethics, sociopolitical relations, but little investigated one that can be considered the last frontier science: the very thought.
Over more than three decades, thoroughly studied this area and developed the theory of Multifocal Intelligence. I thought day and night, year after year, analyzing and writing about the nature, types, limits and the process of building thoughts.
This trajectory not leveraged my pride; instead, put me in touch with my ills and my smallness, because it made me realize in psychotherapy sessions and psychiatric consultations, all patients were as complex as the most cultured and rational human beings. Study the dynamics, the construction and movement of fully thoughts left me convinced that each patient, more fragmented that was his personality, had the same dignity as me.
We have the custom to qualify in black and white, rich and miserable, celebrities and anonymous, intellectuals and illiterates, kings and subjects, because we stand on the surface of the psychic world, because we know no more than the anteroom of the phenomena that weave us as Homo sapiens. We are a sick kind that little has honored the art of thinking.
The fact that the most complex of all phenomena of intellect, thought to have been very little investigation brought very serious consequences for the development of our species. Thinking thinking systematically leads us to break the prison of our truths and opens a universe of possibilities to understand who we are. And also to understand that the construction edit thought a high frequency leads to the evil of the century, an unprecedented brain wear.
Einstein's error and other consequences
For not having studied the process of building thoughts, their types and their nature not developed tools for the I be a psychic manager, which led to some distressing paradoxes. Let's see. We are at the height of medicine and psychiatry, but have never been so sick.
A recent study of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan shows that, over a lifetime, one in two people should develop a psychiatric disorder, ie, more than 3 billion people. We are in the leisure industry's heyday, but there has never been a generation so sad and depressed like ours. We are in the era of knowledge, information democratization, but never produce so many repeaters of information rather than thinkers.
And the paradoxes do not stop there. For not having investigated the fundamental phenomenon that makes us thinking beings, we experience today blunders and very serious sustainability of human relations, including social inclusion. What is the difference between a person psychotic break and an intellectual?
There were differences between the great Einstein and the psychotic son he interned in a mental hospital and never visited? There were some differences in the thinking organization, the parameters of reality, in the depth of the ideas in the imagination of the formatting, but behind the scenes of the mind, they were exactly the same.
Einstein's son could build illogical thoughts and mental images disconnected from reality, but the performance of self and the unconscious phenomena that built these thoughts and images was exactly the same as Einstein used to produce a sophisticated theory of relativity. Redeem a verb out of billions of options and use it in a chain of thought, even illogical, equivalent to shoot the moon and hit a fly.
The very rapid reading of memory and use of data that financed the bizarre characters and persecutory ideas Einstein's son, I repeat, not far were less complex than those of his father. However, the gloomy environment of a mental hospital, the difficulties of dealing with the child's reasoning without logical parameters and Einstein's impotence feeling led the man who most met the forces of the physical universe to be suffocated by the forces of a more complex universe, the psychic.
When we study the process of building thoughts, we are enlightened to understand that madness and rationality are closer to each other than we think. Therefore, an intelligent person never discriminate or decreases others.