Perceiving complexity (part 8)
Part of the series Perceiving complexity
⟵ Perceiving complexity (part 7)
The traditional human gender relations have this feature of psychological differentiation, the men with a combination of gorilla-like masculine domination over women and chimpanzee-like masculine collaboration, while the women need to see the world from a disempowered abyssal perspective. This perspective is sensed as valuable by the men, it is sought after, but it remains at a personal, sub-cognitive level, only turning into a major overhaul of how they see the world as control of the situation. The men realize the mental fluidity they can have when taking in consideration the mental abyss of the raw reality, but they work with it as a pleasant control and organization over the women’s willy-nilly responsibility to deal with its complexity. Their approach to that complexity is that they dare to plunge into its unknown and that they can provide coherence by sustaining with their minds an organization capable of responding to unpredictable situations.
See Yaar Jundi De of the Punjabi singer Ammy Virk, it is an example that feels close to a common denominator of classical human masculinity projecting its usefulness. How is this man projecting power? He is making a point in how he responds decisively to unexpected situations and how he upholds individuals’ rights and welfare, thus mustering support among people, having a power base that under his leadership is able to prove reliable in facing unpredictable circumstances that real life brings. The image projected by him is that he can navigate the complexity of the real life. If a new challenge crops up, he will dive his mind in its specific context by taking in consideration aspects around it that may not be readily visible, he will face all that fluidity in that personal, sub-cognitive part of his mind and he will come up with decisions that are pertinent to that unexpected challenge.
Apparently it is about upholding order, but in order to uphold order, this man has to face the unknown of the complexity of each new practical situation life brings. Obviously, he is not really facing squarely the complexity, he uses the shortcut of “imposing order”. An order that is not an order per se, he does not follow a mental routine, he has to think anew for every challenge. Most likely he has an accumulated experience in thinking fluidly and also his mind has some efficiency in working with that subconscious fluid side of the human mind that accumulated the experiences of many previous generations of humans in dealing with real life.
It is an oxymoronic relation between simplistic order and facing the complexity of the real life. An order based on the disposition of his mind to be able to suspend belief in the spider web of patterns he currently has and yet sustain a control of the situation, to be immersed in the moment and rework the spider web in a manner that faces the unexpected new situation. Thus he can act in a manner pertinent to the context, plus that he creates an apprehension about the complexity of the unknown among those who are against him. Something like the rooster’s crowing, which feels like creating a world full of meaning out of nothing, like he is the master of the complexity of the world, only based on the personal dare to face the unknown. The others who are just relying lazily on the existing spider web in their minds feel a vibe of psychological unknown in such a man’s actions and presence, they become apprehensive and unsure about how to face him.
In Surname of the Punjabi singer Rajvir Jawanda, we can see a man who is not really diving into the unknown when facing real life situations, but nevertheless he relies on the control over the femininity to have a sense of order and meaning in his life. Much is said about the male gaze and how it is conditioning the women. But there is a lot also to say about the role of the female gaze for men. In this case, it is about a man like a ship sailing only on the coastline, and only in the range of lighthouses on the shore. The women are like lighthouses and he sails only in the fluidity illuminated by them. He is not venturing beyond that to have a suspended belief in the spider web of patterns in his mind and to think for himself in that environment. Thus he is on the lower echelons of power, he makes a point in saluting sternly and being saluted (he relies heavily on the existing social structure for meaning) and, when it is about presenting himself as a man upholding the others’ welfare, he is content to just put a hand on his father’s shoulder when the latter gives a donation for a hospital.
In terms of “playing billiards”, as the mental refreshment a man gets from a woman, the woman has to be as demure and airhead as possible, in order to ease his chances to hit the balls in a new order. He can’t admit at all he may not be skillful by default in that psychological environment. The previous singer Ammy Virk is not at all like that with the women. In his other videos we can see how he is open to the idea that he may not be so skillful. In Haan Kargi we can see how he acknowledges he is losing his control in the presence of the woman he is attracted to, he is really immersing in that initial billiard shot. In fact it is not anymore the classical billiard humans use to play officially in gender roles, he is immersing in that experience more than that (and thus later on he can be a man projecting that “master of the unknown” feeling). When he is about to approach her body for the first time in order to put the garland on her neck, this knocks out all the organization in his mind and he just stays listless. His male friends push him and, after he does it, he looks back to them as a beacon of clarity, there is not much to prepare him mentally for the multidimensional psychological experience the woman offers. Then, when they are alone in the room and he raises the veil from her face, he is again overwhelmed and enters in a state of emotional frenzy.
Lucky for him that the woman happens to be better prepared at navigating this fluid state of mind and creates a pleasant fluid tranquility (which may be unrealistic to entirely expect as a practical real life experience and, even more, as an overall guidance, since the woman may not have herself much experience around how to deal with this fluid psychological complexity; much of the long-accumulated feminine experience revolves around the existing masculine organization; if there were feminine organizational expertise about this fluid complexity, the women would have ruled the world since long time ago).
In Qubool A, he is pretty open to present an image of himself not all the time being in control of the situation in a relation (and the woman has such a vibrant expressivity). Exactly by acknowledging that you are not prepared as a man for these raw reality perceptions you can reorganize your mind to think yourself more fluidly and sail by yourself beyond the lighthouse.
When Rajvir Jawanda presents himself as a leader, it is rather the bad guy with a central role, like in Daler. It is not so much about his own organization, because he is not sailing mentally into the unknown brought by the unexpected of the real life situation. He does not have much organization of his own pertinent to the context to begin with. In a situation like the rape of the woman triggering the unfolding in Yaar Jundi De of Ammy Virk, the rapist was part of a another powerful group of men who think about themselves they are so great by default. How to tackle all the ramifications of confronting the rapist? The character developed by Ammy Virk in the video is immersing in the raw reality of the situation. Probably he does not have enough powerful backing to confront them all. But still that guy is bad and some action should be taken. How is that man bad? The character is immersing in the multidimensional vivacity of the context and he can express by his presence an authentic psychological condemnation of that man’s actions, dislodging him from the group. In the conduct of Ammy Virk’s character there is something psychologically destabilizing for the group that man is part of, his “rooster’s crowing” creates a new world full of meaning much more pertinent to the context. Can they come with a “rooster’s crowing” of their own for this specific context? Not so much, Ammy Virk’s character expressed too authentically how that man was wrong. And then it follows a low level confrontation in which he keeps the psychological upper hand. For this story to develop in real life, there are weak points compensated with wishful thinking, it depends also on how unintelligent are those from the other group. But in general lines, this immersion into the unknown and creation of new “rooster’s crowings” adequate to the moment is what tends to make a male leader successful.
Someone like Rajvir Jawanda, when put in the situation to face all the ramifications of such a situation is likely to have the reaction “Gosh, this is too much for my brain”, he does not have much training to think like that. Am I not the good guy? Isn’t that one the bad guy? The way Daler starts, with him badly beaten on the ground is the rather likely outcome of his approach to the situation. This easy good guy / bad guy “clarification” means that he already served on the plate the central psychological role to “the bad guy”. He is not himself the master of the unknown and he does not have an organization pertinent to the complexity of that particular context.
He has that masculine plunge into the unknown with the suspension of belief in the mental structures in your mind, when you find unexpected resources in yourself to project power in a fluid manner. This is why he went to confront “the bad guys”. But the organization in his mind making use of this fluid state went into the direction of orientating around his ego, he does not have much mental training for anything else. The overall organization turned into that à la Gaddafi outfit.
The particular way portrayed in the video that can awaken such a state of mind is realistic, namely by receiving support from someone you have helped in the past. If the moral support is felt authentic, this opens the path for a fluid thinking with an overwhelming strength. With this mental strength you suspend the spider web of mental structures in your mind and you are able to do unexpected things. I should mention that there can be many other ways to have this state of mind.
Another nuance in the video is that he may also feel ashamed by being helped by that lame man and subsequently he actually bases his psychological resurrection on the incapacitation of that man. This singer does not have the mental training to strike into the complexity of the human social life by himself and, in order to not face that complexity, he needs to prop up any reorganization on other people as initial pillars of meaning. The “bad guy” is a basis of meaning for his “good guy” approach, the incapacitated man is a basis of meaning for the psychological shape the fluid projection of strength was awakened in him.
Originally, it looks like the (pre-)human males had a masculine suspension of belief in the current mental structures in order to project power in a fluid manner. This is more about an unexpected mobilization of the depths of your psyche, focused on doing something directly, something like in the previous examples of Rajvir Jawanda. The females developed a suspension of belief in the mental structures with a focus on the raw reality of the context, with unexpected multidimensional perspectives. And my impression is that in the distant past the men got wind of this and incorporated it to some extent in their thinking process.
Some of them got increasingly better at using the raw reality multidimensional perspective into that masculine suspension of belief used to project power. From the information I could gather, the chimpanzee males have some rudimentary mixture of these two suspensions of belief, which enable a social organization with some complexity. At humans probably it slowly evolved towards an increasingly fruitful sub-cognitive exchanges of perspectives between genders when they were facing real life challenges, which turned into the current typical human static plateaus of “meaningful world” suspended over a complex fluidity that both men and women work with.
Lots of men and women do not sense the importance of the rather sub-cognitive part of the human thinking, as on the surface everything appears so straightforwardly meaningful. A man who does not have much mental training to work with the feminine-inspired multidimensional fluid worldview may end up developing an antagonist and worshiping him as a “bad guy” mastering of the unknown. Thus he still can have success like at the end of the video by stirring up the population, giving them easy meaning in life with that antagonist as the scapegoat. It is that poor quality leadership that plagues humans. Lots of men have similar simple thinking like such a leader and they will follow him, lots of women do not have much awareness of the undercurrents of the human psyche, their feminine perceptions are too much on autopilot, they are too much in awe with men and they follow too such a leader.
It is not that there are no bad people in the human societies, but the underlying textures of these societies are much more complex than they appear at a first glance, as they grew from the immersions of men from earlier generations in raw reality perceptions. The “rooster’s crowing” sense of order and meaning in life that these immersions tend to create can make everything seem so clear and organized. It is about keeping and/or reimposing the order, how more straightforward than that can it be? But it is an order that requires you to constantly pay attention to (sub-cognitive) complexities underlying it. If you are not up to the game you remain just with… the idea of order and you salute sternly your superiors like Rajvir Jawanda in Surname or, if you want to do more than that and express that basic fluid masculinity focused on direct action, you venerate someone else, you give him the central role as a “bad guy” and stir people against him like in Daler. The practical result in the latter case is that the people replace a narrow-minded person (if that “bad guy” is really bad) with another narrow-minded person, they miss the point of what order is.
These human masculine “rooster’s crowings” create a sense of meaning suspended over an incredible complexity that is perceived as chaos by those who can’t follow it with their minds. The men who lack mental training in immersing in raw reality perceptions, but they still want to prove themselves and strike too into unknown, may quickly realize that the existing structure has some scary underlying psychological depths that they cannot grasp. And then you see these annoyed men stuck in the veneration of the current structure as the only pillar of meaning they have in their lives while banging their heads against it like a motor out of gear, like these Spanish men throwing a fridge off a cliff.
The man who throws the fridge exudes such a sense of liberation, some sort of Nirvana-on-demand, he is able to transcend the current social structure and find his own mental fluidity as a man. He feels capable to really do something by himself, to have something that he can call a personal accomplishment in that fluid psychological area that makes a man feel great about himself. He does it by explicitly going against aspects that are dear and important to the social structure, like the current really serious importance of recycling. Like someone piggybacking while doing bad things against the person on whose shoulders rides, in order to assert his own individuality.
The other man who is filming expresses such a perverse veneration of the existing structure with the iconoclast vibe of “Recycling… We’re going to recycle it!” It is an iconoclasm expressing the feeling that there is much more beyond the current social structure, only that this structure keeps them prisoners in some vague, hard to understand ways. This while nobody keeps them prisoners, it is rather up to them to strike into the unknown. But to really do that, they need to realize the existence of that part of the human psyche beyond it, which uses to think in a fluid multidimensional manner (a realization which supposes some reorganization of what masculinity means).
The root of the stance of mind that creates such a stuck mindset is the lack of a good understanding of what a human social structure is about. There is this masculine impression that you can just strike into the unknown, you will immerse in the unexpected you face and you will get some freshly tasting fruits of your endeavor. The reality of much of the long human history was that the majority of the men were mostly living in the shadow of the disempowered female mediated relation with the complexity of the unknown. It is about those men who have a limited or non-existent immersion of their minds in the unknown by themselves, they “navigate only on the coastline” while they are under impression that this is all the fluid part of the human psychology a social life supposes. There were always a few men in the respective societies who had at least some openness to face by themselves what is that mental abyss about, who were able to suspend the belief in their current spider web of patterns and to think by themselves to some extent in that mental environment, to create and/or further improve/reform what previous “suspensionist/immersionist” men created and thus to continue developing an increasingly complex social structure.
The examples of Ammy Virk and of Rajvir Jawanda were good because they showed the extremes of the masculine approach to the complexity of the unknown. In real life, men tend to have a mixture of both, to be somewhere on a scale between these extremes and to have some sides of them more towards one approach, other sides of them more towards the other approach. Especially in the past, it was not at all necessary for a man to be entirely like Ammy Virk. And I should also mention that Ammy Virk’s approach to women is already too specific, there can be many specific nuances among men, but the general idea is that a man should have some openness to sense that he really has to face by himself the complexity of the unknown, he needs to have a suspended belief in his own spider web of patterns and notice that human raw reality perspective if he really wants to organize something. And usually, in the human history, this tended to be very sub-congnitive.
Many of the male heroes of the past were depicted as successful by confronting a beast as a representation of the complexity of the unknown. They were managing to defeat it in the idea that they were able to create a social structure responding to the complexity of the unknown revealed by “that beast”. And, in the first place, the complexity of the unknown appeared as a beast because the manner those men in the past were facing it was by looking for a sense of order, by being in control of the situation. The result was a creation of meaning and social structure as a sense of order that continuously faces the unknown at a sub-cognitive level.
This turned into a situation in which on the surface everything appears so clear and obvious, like 1 plus 1 equals 2. But, as all this sense of meaning is in fact floating on the complexity of real life, this creates from seemingly obvious “1 plus 1 equals 2” initial axioms further inferences in which the result of how much 2 plus 2 makes can get all kind of unexpected answers. This while the people immersed in straightforward classical sense of being in control of the situation tend to be oblivious that their specific answer is not “the answer”, but just a peculiar way their mind faced the unexpected that real life brought in their face. If it is about patternization, it is rather about the control of the patternization.
Normally, this social organization floating on the complexity of the real life with the help of the raw reality perspective should not be about defeating a beast. This victory is about a sui generis sense of order that manages to take in consideration complex raw reality perceptions. This taking in consideration is too sub-cognitive compared to the apparent sense of order and further on lots of people do not pay proper attention to it. The social life for these people turns into a continuous fight with “that beast”, a fight too difficult for them to win (and they are ready to follow the leadership of those people who perversely worship “bad guys” as some ready incarnation of “that beast”).
The raw reality directly cognitive part, as the feminine assumption of responsibilities for the self from that point of view, is lost in this kind of thinking. Instead, the raw reality perspective is used to develop mental tools able to support the consistency of a simplistic spider web of patterns in the mind with which you can face constantly the complexity of real life in the aforementioned sui generis rudimentary manner. This is how it seems we ended up with the cognitive capacity with classical human nuances.
In the past it was likely felt as a huge opening of the mind, the women tend to be in awe with the masculine capabilities to think in terms of patterns while suspending belief in those very patterns by projecting control of the situation. This while the men tend to make sure the women are kept scared enough to not imagine they can organize things by themselves, the undercurrents of the masculine projection of real life knowledge towards women are something like “Can you be in control of the situation and of the overall meaning by projecting confidence, strength and dare to plunge into the unknown? If you can’t, then mind you auxiliary feminine activities”.
The women tend to find redeeming the classical masculine approach to project meaning in life, for them it manages to make some sense out of all that complexity. The raw reality perspective is not used in its full-fledged potential, but who needs all that burden of complexity when the men can provide this daring solution? After all, that raw reality perspective is still deeply inherent in the “meaningful world” created by the men, it still gets some value there. And many women find their satisfactions in using their direct immersion in the raw reality perspective when managing their public persona projection in the “meaningful world” (this management is perceived as way easier than facing directly the raw reality, things are considerably eased when you just need to work around some simplistic premises).
Thus too much of what concerns women is under the radar at the human species, both in terms of public projection of the sense of self and in terms of personal involvement in gender relations. In the latter case, the practical situations range on a scale from intimate empathetic collaboration to intimate disdain. But even if there is disdain, both parties tend to end up too much in “the Matrix” of this peculiar human take on gender relations that creates “meaningful worlds”. It tends to end up as a disdain in the terms of the “meaningful world”.
