Mechanic Motivational Quotes

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game where I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do. And if I lose, I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.

People who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.

But when you're concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.

The nerves of the skin send pain signals to the brain to warn us of the danger from and impending injury. In the case of self-inflicted wounding, this pain acts as the body's own defense mechanism to stop one from proceeding in the effort at physical injury. If a person proceeds despite the pain, that means that he or she is motivated by something stronger than the pain, something that makes him or her capable of ignoring or enduring it.

It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.

If your trust is in man, your joy will soon be buried in the cemetery. If you hope is in cars, your happiness will soon be found in the mechanic shop. You are missing it if man is your hope.

Happiness is like an outcome of a mechanical watch; you need to recharge your happiness hormones every day.

All types of societies are limited by economic factors. Nineteenth century civilization alone was economic in a different and distinctive sense, for it chose to base itself in a motive rarely acknowledged as valid in history of human societies, and certainly never before raised to the level of justification of action and behavior in everyday life, namely, gain. The self-regulating market system was uniquely derived from this principle. The mechanism which the motive gain set in motion was comparable in effectiveness only to the most violent outburst of religious fervor in history. Within a generation the whole human world was subjected to its undiluted influence.

-to me, the future doesn't seem real. It's just this magical place where I can put my responsibilities so that I don't have to be scared while hurtling toward failure at right hundred miles per hour.

It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who really do get a lot done – very rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated’ or ‘feeling inspired’. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood.

I feel bad about my deeper, underlying reasons for judging people with children. I judge them as a defense mechanism, because I am sad about my motivations for not having kids. I am self-centered and dysmorphic with low self-esteem.

The systematic study of mass psychology revealed…the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group…[these studies] established that the group has mental characteristics distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

I see affect or feeling as the primary innate biological motivating mechanism, more urgent than drive deprivation and pleasure and more urgent than physical pain. He goes on to say that without feeling, nothing matters, and with feeling, anything can matter.

Just as your body has self-regulating mechanisms, like perspiring to cool you down and shivering to warm you up, you can regulate your emotions according to the circumstances. You can abstain from over-reacting, and you know how to set boundaries and how to say "no.

I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practise when we try to "figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has, in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul, simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which fills our feeling of life (and should surely be " soul " if anything is) the Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that life in its course actualizes. I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote from actual life-experience and knowledge of men than a system without such elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will — all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was, something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the ever-becoming, the pure experience.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don't have pure motives (oh-it's-such-fun-I-just-can't-stop-who-cares-if-it's-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used it solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism [...]. But I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.

When you see through a defense mechanism, you don’t stop at the intimidating behavior but go right on into the underlying misperception about life and through that to the path back to harmony. When you see through people’s fear-based actions, motives, and secrets, you’re really aiming for their sweet vulnerability, inner beauty, and magnificence—and you find their soul.

Every negative complex of emotion conceals a conflict, a problem or dilemma made up of contradictory or opposing motives or desires. Self-observation must recover these emotional seeds of the dramatization of life if real control of habits is to occur. Otherwise, mere control of habits will itself become a form of dramatized conflict or warfare with the motives of our lives. Food desires, sex desires, relational desires, desires for experience and acquisition, for rest, for release, for attention, for solitude, for life, for death, the whole pattern of desires must come under the view of consciousness, the aspects of the conflicts must be differentiated, and habits must be controlled to serve well-being or the pleasurable and effective play of Life. This whole process is truly possible only in the midst of the prolonged occasion of spiritual life in practice, since the mere mechanical and analytical attempts at self-liberation and self-healing do not undermine the principal emotion or seat of conflict, which is the intention to identify with a separate self sense and to reject and forget the prior and natural Condition of Unqualified or Divine Consciousness.

Throughout the human life span there remains a constant two-way interaction between psychological states and the neurochemistry of the frontal lobes, a fact that many doctors do not pay enough attention to. One result is the overreliance on medications in the treatment of mental disorders. Modern psychiatry is doing too much listening to Prozac and not enough listening to human beings; people’s life histories should be given at least as much importance as the chemistry of their brains. The dominant tendency is to explain mental conditions by deficiencies of the brain’s chemical messengers, the neurotransmitters. As Daniel J. Siegel has sharply remarked, “We hear it said everywhere these days that the experience of human beings comes from their chemicals.” Depression, according to the simple biochemical model, is due to a lack of serotonin — and, it is said, so is excessive aggression. The answer is Prozac, which increases serotonin levels in the brain. Attention deficit is thought to be due in part to an undersupply of dopamine, one of the brain’s most important neurotransmitters, crucial to attention and to experiencing reward states. The answer is Ritalin. Just as Prozac elevates serotonin levels, Ritalin or other psychostimulants are thought to increase the availability of dopamine in the brain’s prefrontal areas. This is believed to increase motivation and attention by improving the functioning of areas in the prefrontal cortex. Although they carry some truth, such biochemical explanations of complex mental states are dangerous oversimplifications — as the neurologist Antonio Damasio cautions: "When it comes to explaining behavior and mind, it is not enough to mention neurochemistry... The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that “causes” certain manifestations. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits, and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. The deficiencies and imbalances of brain chemicals are as much effect as cause. They are greatly influenced by emotional experiences. Some experiences deplete the supply of neurotransmitters; other experiences enhance them. In turn, the availability — or lack of availability — of brain chemicals can promote certain behaviors and emotional responses and inhibit others. Once more we see that the relationship between behavior and biology is not a one-way street.

We now have a theory of effective collective action with decentralized authority. The theory is based on a conception of human nature as at once social, interdependent, justice-seeking, self-interested, and strategic. That conception is consistent with contemporary social science and with ancient Greek thought. The theory explains (through a mix of ideology, federalism, “altruistic” punishment, and existential threats) individual motivation to cooperate in the absence of a unitary sovereign as third-party enforcer. It provides (through information exchange) a mechanism that enables many individuals to accomplish common goals and to produce public goods without requiring orders from a master.

Nietzsche may have seen the relentless struggle of the individual as the prerequisite for his full development, the fundamental motive was at work, namely the resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say: "I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.

But this kind of motivation never lasts. Guilt produces a dramatic, knee-jerk reaction, but the human spirit has mechanisms for getting beyond guilt. We assuage it by comparing ourselves positively with others. We rationalize our indulgences. We numb ourselves to others’ pain. “Smacking” us with guilt never produces sustained generosity.

I feel bad about my deeper, underlying reasons for judging people with children. I judge them as a defense mechanism, because I am sad about my motivations for not having kids. I am self-centered and dysmorphic with low self-esteem. I am scared I would give birth to my own childhood self-hatred. I am scared I would give birth with my head in the oven.

The sequel [to The Silmarillion and The Hobbit], The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business – an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic ‘Homeric’ horsemen, orcs and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose. We are to see the overthrow of the last incarnation of Evil, the unmaking of the Ring, the final departure of the Elves, and the return in majesty of the true King, to take over the Dominion of Men, inheriting all that can be transmitted of Elfdom in his high marriage with Arwen daughter of Elrond, as well as the lineal royalty of Númenor. But as the earliest Tales are seen through Elvish eyes, as it were, this last great Tale, coming down from myth and legend to the earth, is seen mainly though the eyes of Hobbits: it thus becomes in fact anthropocentric. But through Hobbits, not Men so-called, because the last Tale is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in ‘world politics’ of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil). A moral of the whole (after the primary symbolism of the Ring, as the will to mere power, seeking to make itself objective by physical force and mechanism, and so also inevitably by lies) is the obvious one that without the high and noble the simple and vulgar is utterly mean; and without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless.

Progress is like wheels that never stop; they have to keep turning in order to remain relevant to a car and all of its mechanical parts. Stopping is not an option in real time but it is to those that envy progress and upward mobility. Progress never ends because it is infinite but it rebuilds and readjust (s) to take small steps then massive steps if it is hindered.

The 9/11 attacks activated several of these group-related adaptations in my mind. The attacks turned me into a team player, with a powerful and unexpected urge to display my team’s flag and then do things to support the team, such as giving blood, donating money, and, yes, supporting the leader.31 And my response was tepid compared to the hundreds of Americans who got in their cars that afternoon and drove great distances to New York in the vain hope that they could help to dig survivors out of the wreckage, or the thousands of young people who volunteered for military service in the following weeks. Were these people acting on selfish motives, or groupish motives? The rally-round-the-flag reflex is just one example of a groupish mechanism.

A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. Aristotle believed that: “The lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.… The slave shares in his master’s life; the artisan is less closely connected with him, and only attains excellence in proportion as he becomes a slave. The meaner sort of mechanic has a special and separate slavery.” Plutarch wrote: “It does not of necessity follow that, if the work delight you with its grace, the one who wrought it is worthy of esteem.” Xenophon’s opinion was: “What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities.” As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. But why? Where did this distaste for experiment come from? An explanation for the decline of ancient science has been put forward by the historian of science, Benjamin Farrington: The mercantile tradition, which led to Ionian science, also led to a slave economy. The owning of slaves was the road to wealth and power. Polycrates’ fortifications were built by slaves. Athens in the time of Pericles, Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All the brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few. What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders—politely called “gentle-men” in some societies—who have the leisure to do science. Accordingly, almost no one did science. The Ionians were perfectly able to make machines of some elegance. But the availability of slaves undermined the economic motive for the development of technology. Thus the mercantile tradition contributed to the great Ionian awakening around 600 B.C., and, through slavery, may have been the cause of its decline some two centuries later. There are great ironies here.

Progress is like wheels that never stop; they have to keep turning in order to remain relevant to a car and all of its mechanical parts. Stopping is not an option in real time but it is to those that envy progress and upward mobility. Progress never ends because it is infinite but it rebuilds and readjust (s) to take increment steps then massive steps if it is hindered. - Terrance Robinson

It is therefore perfectly plausible that memories of childhood sexual abuse could be buried for years and then recalled, and that motivated forgetting, dissociative amnesia, or some other mechanism could account for some of the allegations in cases that Loftus has testified in. But because of the way in which the entire debate has been framed around the issue of "repression" and "recovery," these nuances have been largely ignored.

This, I suppose, constitutes one of the greatest dangers of retiring, the sudden cutting off of motive power while the mechanism is still running at top speed. It would be so much better and easier, if it were possible, to cut off the motive power gradually; in other words to retire by slow and easy stages, instead of being in full production one day, crying "Come on! Come on!" and turning aimlessly around the next still saying "Come on!" but for no reason.

Ryle explains Descartes’s dilemma: When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.

Man's search for meaning is primary motivation in his life and not a "secondary rationalisation" of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are authors that contend that meanings and values are nothing but defense mechanisms but i would not be willing to live merely for sake of "defense mechanisms". Man however, is able to live and even die for his ideals and values.

When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. Thgjnental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.

Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can't explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation.

Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.

Cocaine exerts its euphoric effect by increasing the availability of the reward chemical dopamine in key brain circuits, and this is necessary for motivation and for mental and physical energy. Flooded with artificially high levels of dopamine triggered by external substances, the brain’s own mechanisms of dopamine secretion become lazy. They stop functioning at anywhere near full capacity, relying on the artificial boosters instead. Only long months of abstinence allow the intrinsic machinery of dopamine production to regenerate, and in the meantime, the addict will experience extremes of physical and emotional exhaustion.

Sheepwalking I define “sheepwalking” as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them a brain-dead job and enough fear to keep them in line. You’ve probably encountered someone who is sheepwalking. The TSA “screener” who forces a mom to drink from a bottle of breast milk because any other action is not in the manual. A “customer service” rep who will happily reread a company policy six or seven times but never stop to actually consider what the policy means. A marketing executive who buys millions of dollars’ worth of TV time even though she knows it’s not working—she does it because her boss told her to. It’s ironic but not surprising that in our age of increased reliance on new ideas, rapid change, and innovation, sheepwalking is actually on the rise. That’s because we can no longer rely on machines to do the brain-dead stuff. We’ve mechanized what we could mechanize. What’s left is to cost-reduce the manual labor that must be done by a human. So we write manuals and race to the bottom in our search for the cheapest possible labor. And it’s not surprising that when we go to hire that labor, we search for people who have already been trained to be sheepish. Training a student to be sheepish is a lot easier than the alternative. Teaching to the test, ensuring compliant behavior, and using fear as a motivator are the easiest and fastest ways to get a kid through school. So why does it surprise us that we graduate so many sheep? And graduate school? Since the stakes are higher (opportunity cost, tuition, and the job market), students fall back on what they’ve been taught. To be sheep. Well-educated, of course, but compliant nonetheless. And many organizations go out of their way to hire people that color inside the lines, that demonstrate consistency and compliance. And then they give these people jobs where they are managed via fear. Which leads to sheepwalking. (“I might get fired!”) The fault doesn’t lie with the employee, at least not at first. And of course, the pain is often shouldered by both the employee and the customer. Is it less efficient to pursue the alternative? What happens when you build an organization like W. L. Gore and Associates (makers of Gore-Tex) or the Acumen Fund? At first, it seems crazy. There’s too much overhead, there are too many cats to herd, there is too little predictability, and there is way too much noise. Then, over and over, we see something happen. When you hire amazing people and give them freedom, they do amazing stuff. And the sheepwalkers and their bosses just watch and shake their heads, certain that this is just an exception, and that it is way too risky for their industry or their customer base. I was at a Google conference last month, and I spent some time in a room filled with (pretty newly minted) Google sales reps. I talked to a few of them for a while about the state of the industry. And it broke my heart to discover that they were sheepwalking. Just like the receptionist at a company I visited a week later. She acknowledged that the front office is very slow, and that she just sits there, reading romance novels and waiting. And she’s been doing it for two years. Just like the MBA student I met yesterday who is taking a job at a major packaged-goods company…because they offered her a great salary and promised her a well-known brand. She’s going to stay “for just ten years, then have a baby and leave and start my own gig.…” She’ll get really good at running coupons in the Sunday paper, but not particularly good at solving new problems. What a waste. Step one is to give the problem a name. Done. Step two is for anyone who sees themselves in this mirror to realize that you can always stop. You can always claim the career you deserve merely by refusing to walk down the same path as everyone else just because everyone else is already doing it.

PayPal to a confident CEO who commands the respect of thousands. “I think there are ways he has dramatically improved over time,” said Thiel. Most impressive to Thiel has been Musk’s ability to find bright, ambitious people and lure them to his companies. “He has the most talented people in the aerospace industry working for him, and the same case can be made for Tesla, where, if you’re a talented mechanical engineer who likes building cars, then you’re going to Tesla because it’s probably the only company in the U.S. where you can do interesting new things. Both companies were designed with this vision of motivating a critical mass of talented people to work on inspiring things.

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are "nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations." But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my "defense mechanisms," nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my "reaction formations." Man, however, is able to live and even die for the sake of his ideals and values!

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. There are some authors who contend that meanings and values are “nothing but defense mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.” But as for myself, I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defense mechanisms,” nor would I be ready to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations.” Man, however, is able to live and even to die for the sake of his ideals and values!

When it’s said that quantum mechanics is ‘weird’, or that nobody understands it, the image tends to invite the analogy of a peculiar person whose behaviour and motives defy obvious explanation. But this is too glib. It’s not so much understanding or even intuition that quantum mechanics defies, but our sense of logic itself. Sure, it’s hard to intuit what it means for objects to travel along two paths at once, or to have their properties partly situated some place other than the object itself, and so on. But these are just attempts to express in everyday words a state of affairs that defeats the capabilities of language. Our language is designed to reflect the logic we’re familiar with, but that logic won’t work for quantum mechanics.

If we are to abandon Newtonian mechanics in the physical sphere we must also do so in the psychological and moral. In the same measure that the atoms are not billiard balls struck into motion by others, our actions are not entities forced into operation by distinct motives and drives. Actions appear to be forced by other things to the degree that the agent identifies himself with a single part of the situation in which the actions occur, such as the will as distinct from the passions, or the mind as distinct from the body. But if he identifies himself with his passions and with his body, he will not seem to be moved by them. If he can go further and see that he is not simply his body but the whole of his body-environment relationship, he will not even feel forced to act by the environment.

The civil machinery which ensured the carrying out of this law, and the military organization which turned numbers of men into battalions and divisions, were each founded on a bureaucracy. The production of resources, in particular guns and ammunition, was a matter for civil organization. The movement of men and resources to the front, and the trench system of defence, were military concerns.” Each interlocking system was logical in itself and each system could be rationalized by those who worked it and moved through it. Thus, Elliot demonstrates, “It is reasonable to obey the law, it is good to organize well, it is ingenious to devise guns of high technical capacity, it is sensible to shelter human beings against massive firepower by putting them in protective trenches.” What was the purpose of this complex organization? Officially it was supposed to save civilization, protect the rights of small democracies, demonstrate the superiority of Teutonic culture, beat the dirty Hun, beat the arrogant British, what have you. But the men caught in the middle came to glimpse a darker truth. “The War had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman,” Siegfried Sassoon allows a fictional infantry officer to see. “What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.”378 Men on every front independently discovered their victimization. Awareness intensified as the war dragged on. In Russia it exploded in revolution. In Germany it motivated desertions and surrenders. Among the French it led to mutinies in the front lines. Among the British it fostered malingering.

The American novel claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and recapitulate the behavior of a character. This is why the unity of this novel form is only the unity of the flash of recognition. Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions, and finally by acting as if men were entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension. In addition to the fact that realism in art is, as we shall see, an incomprehensible idea, it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization. It is born of a mutilation, and of a voluntary mutilation, performed on reality. The unity thus obtained is a degraded unity, a leveling off of human beings and of the world. It would seem that for these writers it is the inner life that deprives human actions of unity and that tears people away from one another. This is a partially legitimate suspicion. But rebellion, which is one of the sources of the art of fiction, can find satisfaction only in constructing unity on the basis of affirming this interior reality and not of denying it. To deny it totally is to refer oneself to an imaginary man.

People who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because you are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.

Revelation. I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term ‘self-aware.’ Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted. With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended. I know how they make up my thoughts. These thoughts. Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthetic knowledge. All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What

Altogether, these observations suggest that several processes contribute to psychotic experience: the loss of familiarity with the world, hypothetically associated with noisy information processing; increased novelty detection mediated by the hippocampus; associated alterations of prefrontal cortical processing, which have reliably been associated with impairments in working memory and other executive functions; increased top-down effects of prior beliefs mediated by the frontal cortex that may reflect compensatory efforts to cope with an increasingly complex and unfamiliar world; and finally disinhibition of subcortical dopaminergic neurotransmission, which increases salience attribution to otherwise irrelevant stimuli. Furthermore, increased noise of chaotic or stress-dependent dopamine firing can reduce the encoding of errors of reward prediction elicited by primary and secondary reinforcers, thus contributing to a subjective focusing of attention on apparently novel and mysterious environmental cues while reducing attention and motivation elicited by common and natural and social stimuli.

What’s so magical about solitude? In many fields, Ericsson told me, it’s only when you’re alone that you can engage in Deliberate Practice, which he has identified as the key to exceptional achievement. When you practice deliberately, you identify the tasks or knowledge that are just out of your reach, strive to upgrade your performance, monitor your progress, and revise accordingly. Practice sessions that fall short of this standard are not only less useful—they’re counterproductive. They reinforce existing cognitive mechanisms instead of improving them. Deliberate Practice is best conducted alone for several reasons. It takes intense concentration, and other people can be distracting. It requires deep motivation, often self-generated. But most important, it involves working on the task that’s most challenging to you personally. Only when you’re alone, Ericsson told me, can you “go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. Imagine a group class—you’re the one generating the move only a small percentage of the time.

Propaganda is confined to utilizing existing material, it does not create it. This material falls into four categories. First there are the psychological "mechanisms" that permit the propagandist to know more or less precisely that the individual will respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus - Here the psychologists are far from agreement; behaviorism, depth psychology, and the psychology of instincts postulate very different psychic mechanisms and see essentially different connections and motivations. Here the propagandist is at the mercy of these interpretations. Second, opinions, conventional patterns and stereotypes exist concretely in a particular milieu or individual. Third, ideologies exist which are more or less consciously shared, accepted, and disseminated, and which form the only intellectual, or rather para-intellectual, element that must be reckoned with in propaganda. Fourth and finally, the propagandist must concern himself above all with the needs of those whom he wishes to reach. All propaganda must respond to a need, whether it be a concrete need (bread, peace, security, work) or a psychological need.

The popular 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma illustrates how AI’s personalization will cause you to be unconsciously manipulated by AI and motivated by profit from advertising. The Social Dilemma star Tristan Harris says: “You didn’t know that your click caused a supercomputer to be pointed at your brain. Your click activated billions of dollars of computing power that has learned much from its experience of tricking two billion human animals to click again.” And this addiction results in a vicious cycle for you, but a virtuous cycle for the big Internet companies that use this mechanism as a money-printing machine. The Social Dilemma further argues that this may narrow your viewpoints, polarize society, distort truth, and negatively affect your happiness, mood, and mental health. To put it in technical terms, the core of the issue is the simplicity of the objective function, and the danger from single-mindedly optimizing a single objective function, which can lead to harmful externalities. Today’s AI usually optimizes this singular goal—most commonly to make money (more clicks, ads, revenues). And AI has a maniacal focus on that one corporate goal, without regard for users’ well-being.

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

But the truth of the matter lies deeper; for it can be explained more clearly than appears at first sight. The power of inertia applied to bodies which may be moved by mechanical means only, becomes force of habit when applied to bodies which are moved by motives. The actions which we do out of sheer force of habit occur, as a matter of fact, without any individual separate motive exercised for the particular case; hence we do not really think of them. It was only when each action at first took place that it had a motive; after that it became a habit; the secondary after-effect of this motive is the present habit, which is sufficient to carry on the action; just as a body, set in motion by a push, does not need another push in order to enable it to continue its motion; it will continue in motion for ever if it is not obstructed in any way. The same thing applies to animals; training is a habit which is forced upon them. The horse draws a cart along contentedly without being urged to do so; this motion is still the effect of those lashes with the whip which incited him at first, but which by the law of inertia have become perpetuated as habit. There is really something more in all this than a mere parable; it is the identity of the thing in question, that is to say of the will, at very different degrees of its objectivation, by which the same law of motion takes such different forms.

The formula for this brand of "historical" writing is to put the public on the inside; to let them feel the palpitations of royal and imperial lovers and to overhear their lispings and cooings. It can be argued that a man has to live somewhere, and that if his own time is so cut up by rapid change that he can't find a cranny big enough to relax in, then he must betake himself to the past. That is certainly one motive in the production of historical romance, from Sir Walter Scott to Thornton Wilder. But mainly this formula works as a means of flattery. The public is not only invited inside but encouraged to believe that there is nothing inside that differs from its own thoughts and feelings. This reassurance is provided by endowing historical figures with the sloppiest possible minds. The great are "humanized" by being trivial. The debunking school began by making the great appear as corrupt, or mean and egotistical. The "humanizers" have merely carried on to make them idiotic. "Democratic" vanity has reached such proportions that it cannot accept as human anything above the level of cretinous confusion of mind of the type popularized by Hemingway's heroes. Just as the new star must be made to appear successful by reason of some freak of fortune, so the great, past or present, must be made to seem so because of the most ordinary qualities, to which fortune adds an unearned trick or idea.

Foreign nongovernment organizations (NGOs) that support Russian democratic civic groups are a particular target of Russian accusations of foreign economic intrigue. In 2004, President Putin accused Russian NGOs of pursuing "dubious group and commercial interests" for taking foreign money. FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev told the Russian State Duma in 2005 that the FSB had uncovered spies working in foreign-sponsored NGOs. He further claimed, "Foreign secret services are ever more actively using non-traditional methods for their work and, with the help of different NGOs educational programs, are propagandizing their interests, particularly in the former Soviet Union." Patrushev accused the United States of placing spies undercover within the Peace Corps, which was expelled from Russia in 2002, the Saudi Red Crescent, and the Kuwaiti NGO Society for Social Reform. Patrushev attributed an economic motive to these perceived foreign plots, alleging that industrialized states did not want "a powerful economic competitor like Russia." Echoing Soviet-era accusations of nefarious Western economic intent, he claimed that Russia had lost billions of dollars per year due to U.S., EU, and Canadian "trade discrimination. Pushing for stronger regulation of NGOs, Patrushev said, "The imperfectness of legislation and lack of efficient mechanisms for state oversight creates a fertile ground for conducting intelligence operations under the guise of charity and other activities. In 2012, Putin signed the "foreign agent law," which ordered Russian civil rights organizations that received any foreign funding to register as "foreign agents.

It bears repeating that so much of our frustrations in life come from being confused. This feeling that the purpose of life is to be happy is a major source of our confusion. We want to be happy, and we like to think we were put here to be happy, so why aren’t we happy all the time? And why can’t we just choose to be happy? It makes perfect sense to desire happiness, and as much of it as possible. After all, happiness is the reward mechanisms in our brains firing. Remember the rats from the first part of this series? They kept pressing their levers, over and over, because the wires buried in their brains were located inside the reward centers. Pressing the lever made them feel happy, and there’s no better raw feeling in the world, so they would press the lever until they died. Drug addicts, overeaters, smokers, gamblers, alcoholics, and thrill junkies will all do the same thing. The happy chemicals flood our brains, and we believe we have found the meaning of life. I have sad news for you, dear reader. News that is so sad, it comes first with a reminder that happiness arises as we dispel confusion. And the reason we do not want to accept the following truth is because on its face, it seems depressing. But I promise that once we work through all the implications, we will be less confused and far happier on the other side. The truth is this: The meaning of life is to survive, reproduce, and see that our offspring survive. I know that’s quite the bomb to drop on you while we are discussing happiness, but there’s a reason I bring it up now. Because happiness and sadness are not states that our bodies seek for the sake of feeling those things. No, our bodies use happiness and sadness to motivate and reward us for certain

There are two fundamentally different ways for the strong to bend down to the weak, for the rich to help the poor, for the more perfect life to help the “less perfect.” This action can be motivated by a powerful feeling of security, strength, and inner salvation, of the invincible fullness of one’s own life and existence. All this unites into the clear awareness that one is rich enough to share one’s being and possessions. Love, sacrifice, help, the descent to the small and the weak, here spring from a spontaneous overflow of force, accompanied by bliss and deep inner calm. Compared to this natural readiness for love and sacrifice, all specific “egoism,” the concern for oneself and one’s interest, and even the instinct of “self-preservation” are signs of a blocked and weakened life. Life is essentially expansion, development, growth in plenitude, and not “self-preservation,” as a false doctrine has it. Development, expansion, and growth are not epiphenomena of mere preservative forces and cannot be reduced to the preservation of the “better adapted.” ... There is a form of sacrifice which is a free renunciation of one’s own vital abundance, a beautiful and natural overflow of one’s forces. Every living being has a natural instinct of sympathy for other living beings, which increases with their proximity and similarity to himself. Thus we sacrifice ourselves for beings with whom we feel united and solidary, in contrast to everything “dead.” This sacrificial impulse is by no means a later acquisition of life, derived from originally egoistic urges. It is an original component of life and precedes all those particular “aims” and “goals” which calculation, intelligence, and reflection impose upon it later. We have an urge to sacrifice before we ever know why, for what, and for whom! Jesus’ view of nature and life, which sometimes shines through his speeches and parables in fragments and hidden allusions, shows quite clearly that he understood this fact. When he tells us not to worry about eating and drinking, it is not because he is indifferent to life and its preservation, but because he sees also a vital weakness in all “worrying” about the next day, in all concentration on one’s own physical well-being. ... all voluntary concentration on one’s own bodily wellbeing, all worry and anxiety, hampers rather than furthers the creative force which instinctively and beneficently governs all life. ... This kind of indifference to the external means of life (food, clothing, etc.) is not a sign of indifference to life and its value, but rather of a profound and secret confidence in life’s own vigor and of an inner security from the mechanical accidents which may befall it. A gay, light, bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself—that is the feeling which inspires these words! Egoism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life. ... This attitude is completely different from that of recent modern realism in art and literature, the exposure of social misery, the description of little people, the wallowing in the morbid—a typical ressentiment phenomenon. Those people saw something bug-like in everything that lives, whereas Francis sees the holiness of “life” even in a bug.

This was Nassrin, or to be honest, this was the two of us together: sharing the most intimate moments with a shrug, pretending they were not intimate. It wasn't courage that motivated this casual, impersonal manner of treating so much pain; it was a special brand of cowardice, a destructive defense mechanism, forcing others to listen to the most horrendous experiences and yet denying them the moment of empathy: don't feel sorry for me; nothing is too big for me to handle. This is nothing, nothing really.

When behavior is coupled with strong emotions – if we experience feelings of pleasure associated with this behavior so that we are motivated by our own endogenous self-reward mechanisms to do or just experience something special – and if there are also signs of a specialized adaptation of this behavior in the brain, then it’s suspected that this skill or ability is not a purely cultural achievement, but part of our biology. However, the enjoyment of the subject and the emotional involvement alone doesn’t allow us to deduce, for example, why football causes such strong emotions and drives millions of people into the stadiums and

Gamification engages and motivates people across all kinds of activities using game mechanics such as badges, points, levels, and leaderboards.

Capitalism is not the mere existence of persons or firms producing for sale on the market with the intention of obtaining a profit. Such persons or firms have existed for thousands of years all across the world. Nor is the existence of persons working for wages sufficient as a definition. Wage-labor has also been known for thousands of years. We are in a capitalist system only when the system gives priority to the endless accumulation of capital. Using such a definition, only the modern world-system has been a capitalist system. Endless accumulation is a quite simple concept: it means that people and firms are accumulating capital in order to accumulate still more capital, a process that is continual and endless. If we say that a system “gives priority” to such endless accumulation, it means that there exist structural mechanisms by which those who act with other motivations are penalized in some way, and are eventually eliminated from the social scene, whereas those who act with the appropriate motivations are rewarded and, if successful, enriched.

Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) At the same time, logotherapy defocuses all the vicious-circle formations and feedback mechanisms which play such a great role in the development of neuroses. Thus, the typical self-centeredness of the neurotic is broken up instead of being continually fostered and reinforced. To be sure, this kind of statement is an oversimplification; yet in logotherapy the patient is actually confronted with and reoriented toward the meaning of his life. And to make him aware of this meaning can contribute much to his ability to overcome his neurosis. Let me explain why I have employed the term “logotherapy” as the name for my theory. Logos is a Greek word which denotes “meaning.” Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term “striving for superiority,” is focused.

The challenge for the institutional leader will be to quickly attract and mobilize passionate individuals wherever they reside within the institution (or even if they’re outside the institution). These individuals are often the most talented and motivated people in the organization, but they are also often the unhappiest—they see the potential for themselves and for the institution but feel blocked in their efforts to achieve this potential. Institutional leaders must encourage the mechanisms and structures needed to help connect these individuals with each other as well as with the institutional leaders, who must serve as both champions and resource procurers for these people.

Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion.

INTRODUCTION The Puzzling Puzzles of Harry Harlow and Edward Deci In the middle of the last century, two young scientists conducted experiments that should have changed the world—but did not. Harry F. Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin who, in the 1940s, established one of the world’s first laboratories for studying primate behavior. One day in 1949, Harlow and two colleagues gathered eight rhesus monkeys for a two-week experiment on learning. The researchers devised a simple mechanical puzzle like the one pictured on the next page. Solving it required three steps: pull out the vertical pin, undo the hook, and lift the hinged cover. Pretty easy for you and me, far more challenging for a thirteen-pound

Our Lord’s complaint against the church at Ephesus is “you have abandoned the love you had at first.” Literally translated, the text reads: “You have abandoned your love, the first.” Emphasis is placed on the adjective first, so the love they abandoned refers to their love as it was first expressed at the beginning of their life together as a church body. Jesus doesn’t say, ‘You have no love.” He says, “You have abandoned the love you had at first.” Their love was not what it used to be. While they still had some measure of love because they were, for the most part, true Christians and enduring hardship for his “name’s sake” (Rev. 2:3), they no longer possessed the kind of love they had in their early years as a church. They still loved the Lord, but not like they did at first. They still loved one another, but not like before. Their love for Christ and for one another had once motivated all they did. It brought joy, creativity, freshness, spontaneity, and energy to their life and work. But now their energy source was depleted. Their work had become mundane, mechanical, and routine, and their lives the picture of self-satisfaction. Instead of their love abounding, it had been lacking. Instead of being motivated by love from the heart, their works had become perfunctory. Even certain “works,” which sprang from their former love, vanished. For this, Jesus rebukes them and calls them to do those works again (Rev. 2:5). The object of their lost love is not stated. The text does not say love for Christ or love for fellow believers. It is best, then, to understand Jesus to mean Christian love in general, which would include love for God, love for one another in the church, and love for the lost. According to our Lord, love for God and neighbor are inseparable companions (Mark 12:29-31; Luke 10:27). It is impossible to love God and not love his people or to love his people and not love God (1 John 4:7-5:3). Jesus uses strong words in his complaint against the Ephesians. Jesus squarely places the responsibility at their feet when he says, “you have abandoned” or “given up”3 the love they once had. They can’t blame anyone else for this loss. They have had every advantage provided by years of good teaching, access to almost all of the New Testament Scriptures, and the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. No wonder Christ expresses extreme displeasure with the situation in Ephesus. Their loss of love is their fault. They have failed to “keep” themselves in the love of God (Jude 21). They must now face this fact and respond to Christ’s criticism and counsel.

If you can begin to see your life as a feedback mechanism that is reflecting who you are, with the ultimate goal to help you live better and more fully. All of a sudden you realize it was never the world standing in your way but your own mind.

If you can begin to see your life as a feedback mechanism that is reflecting who you are, with the ultimate goal to help you live better and more fully. All of a sudden you realize it was never the world standing in your way but your own mind.

Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour. Most lawyers—and nearly all lawyers in large, prestigious firms—must keep scrupulous track, often in six-minute increments, of their time. If they fail to bill enough hours, their jobs are in jeopardy. As a result, their focus inevitably veers from the output of their work (solving a client’s problem) to its input (piling up as many hours as possible

Interestingly enough, the reason people still support the idea of communism is because they ignore or are ignorant to what we’re looking at in this book; how human behavior works - what motivates humans to do anything. People don’t just work hard for no reason; expending great effort with the promise of zero reward. In fact, they always, predictably, will do the opposite, all animals will, and starvation is absolutely guaranteed when a mechanism ensuring this lack of merited reward is implemented via communism.

Alas, at the heart of private legal practice is perhaps the most autonomy-crushing mechanism imaginable: the billable hour.

This is where LO3 Energy ended up when it developed its Transactive Grid in Brooklyn, a prototype of interconnected households and businesses that share locally generated solar power. The community was motivated by a desire to give environmentally conscious consumers and users the capacity to know they are buying clean, locally generated power as opposed to just helping pay their utility buy renewable credits that fund green energy production elsewhere in the United States. In the Transactive Grid, building owners install solar panels that are then linked together with those of their neighbors in a distribution network, using affordable smart meters and storage units, as well as inverters that allow the grid’s owners to sell power back to the public grid. The magic sauce, though, comes from a private blockchain that regulates the sharing of power among the smart meters, whose data is logged into that distributed ledger. And in the summer of 2017, LO3 took the process a step further by developing an “exergy token” to drive market mechanisms within and among decentralized microgrids such as Brooklyn’s. (Exergy is a vital concept for measuring energy efficiency and containing wasteful practices; it doesn’t just measure the amount of energy generated but also the amount of useful work produced per each given amount of energy produced.) Note that LO3’s microgrid is based on a private blockchain. Microgrids offer one of those cases when this model is likely sufficient, since the community is founded on a fixed group of users who will all agree to the terms of use. That means that some of the large-scale processing challenges of Bitcoin and Ethereum can be avoided and thus that the high transaction power of a blockchain could be harnessed without requiring the implementation of the Lightning Network and other “off-chain” scaling solutions currently under development.

Destructive habits are not flaws; they’re coping mechanisms that serve a purpose. They’re survival tactics we deploy to shield us from stress, sadness, fear, grief, and frustration.

The Phlegmatic-Sanguine Person (PHLEG-SAN) These people are mostly seen as introverts. They are most peaceful people who go forgo their rights in order to live peacefully with others. Their temperament combination makes them very ideal people to get along with. Strengths of the PHLEG-SAN person They are gentle people who are honored in any group they find themselves. They are also very thoughtful and diplomatic. They are dependable and will rarely let the secret confided to them by friends. They have self-control. They are rarely seen exchanging words with people. They prefer forfeiting their rights and living peacefully with people to demanding these, which may lead to married relations. They enjoy the quiet life. They are the types who tell jokes without laughing. while others are laughing, they remain quiet, as if the humor came from somewhere else. It seems all fields of work are open to them. For example, they are good accountants, registrars, ministers, mechanics, teachers, and counsellors. This group of people do not enjoy trading activities but can do them when motivated Weaknesses of the PHLEG-SAN person These types of people are almost similar to their counterpart- the SAN-PHLEG. They lack motivation. They need to be motivated else they will leave their responsibilities undone. They allow themselves to be instructed and directed by people around them. Thus here, they fall victim to the sin of negligence. They procrastinate and often come out late. As senior officers their trays are always full of pending letters. They build shells around themselves and avoid many people and activities that could be useful to them in future. They let golden opportunities to pass by peacefully. Unless they develop personal discipline, they may never develop their natural potential. They are fearful; they need little motivation to put them to action. They lead a too relaxed life; they can even fall asleep while waiting for friends at the reception. A person of this temperament can always move peacefully with the strong willed CHOL-MEL person.

Even if it’s only you being hard on yourself, part of your brain will react as if someone else is physically attacking you. Your fight-or-flight mechanism will kick in, your heart rate may rise, and you may feel jittery and queasy. But since you can’t flee yourself, there’s nowhere safe to retreat. “You become anxious and depressed,” Dr. Neff says, “and both of those are highly linked to self-criticism. It kind of undermines your faith in yourself. It’s like pulling the rug out from underneath you, and it ends up making it harder to be motivated to make a change.

The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s motivated physicists to tackle all the unsolved problems of physics with the new methods and see if they worked (they mostly did). But what was the evidence for any of this new way of thinking? The evidence that was persuasive at the time was a number of rather abstract physics experiments concerning the nature of atomic spectra or the interaction between light and metal surfaces. Each was important in its own way, but what ought to have played an important role in retrospect was something far, far simpler: the observation that magnets work. The crucial step was made by an unknown Dutch scientist called Hendreka van Leeuwen, and what she showed was that magnets couldn’t exist if you just use classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics. Hendreka van Leeuwen’s doctoral work in Leiden was done under the supervision of Lenz and the work was published in the Journal de Physique et le Radium in 1921. Unfortunately, it subsequently transpired that her main result had been anticipated by Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, but as it had only appeared in his 1911 diploma thesis, written in Danish, it was unsurprising she hadn’t known about it. Their contribution, though conceived independently, is now known as the Bohr–van Leeuwen theorem, which states that if you assume nothing more than classical physics, and then go on to model a material as a system of electrical charges, then you can show that the system can have no net magnetization; in other words, it will not be magnetic. Simply put, there are no lodestones in a purely classical Universe.

They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”74

We all hold differing views of the world, and subsequently hold differing mechanisms of personal motivation.

Social media serves as a double-edged sword; it provides a mechanism through which we can foster relationships remotely, but it also enables unhealthy social competition.

The only difference between a 25-year-old and 55-year-old is that the 55-year old’s body has had an extra 30 years to decondition itself. During this time, if he or she has not been doing strength training, his muscles will have atrophied. Yet, both the 25 and the 55-year-old require the same physiological mechanism to get stronger and build muscle. The 25-year-old and the 55-year-old both need to follow the same safety precautions, though the older person has a greater need to adhere to them.

The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and political consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A. M. Meerloo wrote in The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.

So what are the cognitive adaptations of which religion is hypothesized to be a by-product? The first is our hyperactive agency detection device, which leads us to infer that unseen forces are human agents (Thompson & Aukofer, 2011). This likely evolved as a protection or precaution adaptation (Boyer, 1992). We mistake a shadow for a burglar but never mistake a burglar for a shadow—an error management mechanism that helps us to avoid costly errors such as being robbed or mugged. This adaptation leads to misapplied anthropomorphism, as when we say “the sun is trying to come out” or “the clouds look angry.” Clouds and skies, of course, don’t have agency, yet we attribute human-like motivations to them as if they were agents with motives and intentions. Again, it is a small step to infer a god with human-like agency—a god that wants us to pray to him, worship him, sacrifice for him, and will punish us if we disobey him. Even children have what is called “promiscuous teleology,” the tendency to attribute purposes to people, groups, societies, cultures, mother earth, the universe, and god. A second class of cognitive mechanisms consists of theory of mind adaptations, by which we infer unseen beliefs, desires, and intentions in other people. Theory of mind adaptations are extremely useful in predicting the behavior of other people, their proper function. It is a small extrapolation to go from “there are people watching me who have a desire for my well-being” to “there is an all-seeing god watching me who has a desire for my well-being.” That is, we imbue these agents with motives, goals, and desires. Next comes the attachment system, which originally evolved in the context of mother–child bonds for protection and nurturance (Kirkpatrick, 2005). A 2-year-old reaching out to a mother to be soothed bears resemblance to a worshiper reaching out to a god: “we never lose the longing for a caretaker… [and] a god is always there for us” (Thompson & Aukofer, 2011, p. 45). Adaptations to form attachments, in short, get transferred to supernatural agents. Reciprocity adaptations are also activated, as when we make sacrifices for gods or make covenants with gods and expect that the gods will provide us with benefits in return.

Why are the central nervous systems of mammals so much alike, and wouldn't it stand to reason that they serve precisely the same evolutionary purpose, motivating each creature to flee bodily harm and thereby perpetuate the species? If the purpose of pain is the same for us as for other animals, if the internal mechanisms of pain are the same, if the outward expressions of pain are the same, and if the medical treatments for pain are the same, why wouldn't the physical experience of pain be the same - and for that matter, the psychological experience of it as well?

But “as long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”2

Most people can motivate themselves to do things simply by knowing that those things need to be done. But not me. For me, motivation is this horrible, scary game the I try to make myself do something while I actively avoid doing it. If I win, I have to do something I don't want to do . If I lose. I'm one step closer to ruining my entire life. And I never know whether I'm going to win or lose until the last second.

But such compensation mechanisms work only so long as they align with a company’s values and help accomplish the fundamental function of compensation. And what is that fundamental function? In building a truly great organization, the primary purpose of a compensation system, however structured, is to make sure that you’re able to attract and retain the right people—self-motivated and self-disciplined people who embrace your core values—not to try to “motivate” the wrong people. It all goes back to the “first who” principle: get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the key seats.

Second: the people can be made to behave as you want them to behave via the subconscious of the public mind—no one else believed such a thing existed—which can be directed with symbols and signs. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” asked Bernays, “is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?

Only when businesses were allowed to compete unencumbered by regulation would the best ideas rise to the top, their thinking went. The profit motive, they believed, was the perfect sorting mechanism, capable of distinguishing the good ideas from the bad, and giving rise to the products, services, and systems that would benefit society at large. Competition was the paramount way to organize human activity, they stressed, and it was imperative that people stopped relying on the government—or worse, their employers—to ensure their well-being. Welfare,

First thing, I felt so much of love and compassion when I decided to operate without any defence mechanism. When someone is absolutely feeling secure, he becomes the safest person to live around. He gives security to everyone because he understands the value of being secure!

You are not a living mechanism, you are a living organism.

Motivational interviewing pioneers Miller and Rollnick have long warned that the technique shouldn’t be used manipulatively. Psychologists have found that when people detect an attempt at influence, they have sophisticated defense mechanisms. The moment people feel that we’re trying to persuade them, our behavior takes on a different meaning. A straightforward question is seen as a political tactic, a reflective listening statement comes across as a prosecutor’s maneuvering, an affirmation of their ability to change sounds like a preacher’s proselytizing.

I fix the machine so that they could talk.

Addressing the problem, and then taking this second step to fix the cause of the problem, distinguishes the people who are in control from the people who are not in control - the successful from the unsuccessful.

Most of us don’t face life and death situations on a daily basis. As such, procrastination has largely become an obsolete protection mechanism. And, if we aren’t careful, this mechanism

Beyond the fine points of how to properly interpret esoteric experiences, many mystical traditions also claim that there are methods one can use to develop a direct realization of these states. According to psychiatrist and meditation researcher Roger Walsh: Comparison across traditions suggests that there are seven practices that are widely regarded as central and essential for effective transpersonal development. These seven are an ethical lifestyle, redirecting motivation, transforming emotions, training attention, refining awareness, fostering wisdom, and practicing service to others. Contemplative traditions posit that meditation is crucial to this developmental process because it facilitates several of these processes.64 (page 28) Modern physics has achieved its own version of the perennial philosophy through the development of quantum theory. While many workaday physicists shudder over popular misinterpretations of their precious mathematical models, the founders of quantum mechanics were keenly aware of the radical philosophical changes brought about by their new theory. They wrote about it extensively, and most of them ended up sounding like full-blown mystics.

Fanon examined how colonialism is internalized by the colonized and inculcates an inferiority complex through the mechanism of racism. In the same way, the tyrannical mechanism of patriarchy oppresses women not only physically or mentally but also colonizes their minds and shatters their souls through constant emotional, economic, and mental violence. This internalization of inferiority by women themselves in a male-dominated society forcibly compels them to stay in a repressive and a violent marriage. In such precarious situations, with no available critical internal or external support from the wider family network or the state, and no hope left, a woman’s self-esteem collapses, and her humanness is crushed to the extent that she ceases to be a self-motivated person. The calculative presumptions of patriarchy control and overwhelmingly dominate and subjugate women while normalizing and trivializing their brutal torture and murder in the garb of transferring wealth to the daughters in connection with marriage.

Stress is a survival mechanism that serves an obvious evolutionary function. When we are anxious, our autonomic nervous system releases a cascade of chemicals (stress hormones), which give our body instructions on how to prepare to face danger. Our heart beats faster to pump more blood to the muscles, and our breathing becomes heavier to provide us with more oxygen. Muscles tense up to protect us from injury and to facilitate fighting or running. Sweating helps cool the body down. Our attention increases, and our reflexes become sharper, keeping us alert. Stress acts as motivation, helping us to focus on our goals and rise to meet our challenges, whether those involve studying for an exam, flying a fighter jet or scoring that match-winning goal. In short, stress serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that beyond certain threshold stress ceases to be useful.

Worse, tests emphasize exactly the wrong skills. They emphasize the memorization of massive amounts of facts that neurologically have a half-life of about 12 hours. They focus on short-term rewards through cramming to compensate for a failure in long-term development of value. It is no wonder we have financial meltdowns caused by successful students. We have to swallow a hard pill. The issue is not how do we make tests better? Or how can we have more or different types of tests? Or how do we arrange for more parts of a school program (such as a teacher’s worth) to be based on tests? The reality is, tests don’t work except as a blunt control-and-motivation mechanism for the classroom, the academic equivalent of MSG or sugar in processed food. In place of schools as testing centers, we have to begin imagining and setting up learning environments that involve no tests at all, that rely on real assessment and the creation of genuine value instead.

The starting point is recognizing that selection has shaped powerful mechanisms to protect against starvation. During a famine, those mechanisms motivate animals to get food -any food- eat it quickly, and eat more than usual, because food supplies are obviously erratic. The system also adjusts the body weight set point upward because extra fat stores are valuable when food sources are unreliable. And, as noted already, weight loss slows down metabolism, which is appropriate when a person is starving but the opposite of what is needed when trying to lose weight. Also, intermittent access to food signals unreliable access to food supplies, so it increases food intake and bingeing, even in rats.