The basic process we’re examining is belief formation, which we   can notate like this:

When you’re high up on the Psych Spectrum, you get the best of all worlds. The Higher Mind understands that primitive pleasures like sex, food, and all-in-good-fun tribalism like sports fandom are awesome, and often necessary, parts of a human life. And like a good pet owner, the Higher Mind is more than happy to let the Primitive Mind have its fun... See more

Most of the problems with humans can be boiled down to unchecked Primitive Minds getting their way against the Higher Mind’s better judgment.

When we’re low on the Psych Spectrum, we’re short-sighted, we’re small-minded, we think and act with our pettiest emotions and our ego, we lack self-awareness, we’re short on compassion, high on hypocrisy—and because the Primitive Mind is an unconscious software program, we’re usually too foggy to see our own shittiness for what it is.

Many of the human world’s mysteries become a lot less mysterious when we put on our x-ray goggles. With x-ray vision, we can see the inner psychology that lies behind the scenes of every human What.

For the rest of this series, we’re going to apply one particular second dimension to everything we discuss: the Psych Spectrum.

The Primitive Mind in every animal—humans included—has been optimized to near perfection at getting animals to survive long enough to pass their precious genes along to new containers.

The tug-of-war isn’t binary—it’s a spectrum. Let’s call it the Psych Spectrum.

The hard thing is, we’ve all been trained to think in only one dimension—in the What dimension. We look at people’s behavior, their words, their tendencies, their habits, their demeanor, their disposition—and we stop there. The Psych Spectrum adds the critical second dimension to the equation that asks why people act the way they do. Or you can put... See more