Harsh-Pervez Hierarchy of human mind
Two South Asian thinkers just prompted me to develop a four-level model of human mind
Recently, I spent a week with Pakistani nuclear physicist and public intellectual Pervez Hoodbhoy and four days with Indian thinker Harsh Mander in Nepal. They participated in two panel discussions with each other one of which I moderated. I had invited both of them to Nepal for a festival of ideas that we organized in my hometown.
The reason was simple: they are among the rare breed of South Asian intellectuals who relentlessly speak truth to power no matter what the cost for them personally and professionally. To me, Hoodbhoy is the voice of conscience from Pakistan and Mander the same from India. In this era when human minds are awash with falsehood and propaganda, they stand very tall with their simplicity, humility, intellectual honesty and dedication to truth.
After our festival in Chitwan was over, one Nepali scholar told me emotionally that he feels like crying whenever Mander speaks. That may be because Mander’s melancholic face and voice carries the pain of millions of people silently suffering in his homeland and he has been fighting to the last calorie of his energy to alleviate it. Both men exude a soothing, sublime saintliness wherever they go.
Earlier in the year, I had spent two days with Mander, interviewing him for nearly two hours and moderating a panel with him among others besides having intimate informal conversation with him for hours. In 2011, I had attended a lecture by Hoodbhoy in Kathmandu titled ‘Pakistan: In search of nationhood’ and responded with my own article titled ‘Pakistan: rare opportunity for self-realization’.
This time, I listened to these two gentle souls from South Asia for days and talked to them for dozens of hours both on and off the record. I accompanied them to their lectures to students and to one meeting with a prominent Nepali politician. Through all this, they have given me an illuminating window to peek into the psyche of a very large number of people in the massive psychological laboratories in India and Pakistan.
This has set me into a journey to explore the answer to this question: what propels human mind to tyranny, brutality, bigotry and inhumanity to the point of participating in, enabling or even celebrating genocidal acts? How do decent and respectable people like you and me willfully end up as the cogs of a Nazi-like machine to exterminate fellow human beings just like ourselves? How does a moral universe of an individual slip from loving everyone to hating some group of people to the point of being ready to kill them?
Seeking answers to these questions has been all the more urgent to me also because of two books that I read this year. ‘Man’s search for meaning’ by Victor E. Frankl, the psychologist who survived Hitler’s concentration camp, gives a rare insight into the psyche of both the victims as well as perpetrators of the holocaust.
‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch depicts a grim yet entirely plausible glimpse of what life would be in a democratic society that degenerates into a fascist autocracy. This year the society is governed by an accountable executive branch of the government but by the next the mutilated bodies of children and teenagers who were snatched from their parents start being found rotten in sacks in the dark rooms with absolutely zero accountability.
No doubt, today’s world is a fertile ground for real life democracy-to-fascism experiments of this kind with some places witnessing even worse atrocities than in Lynch’s imaginary future Ireland. From Gaza to Sudan, Mali to Ethiopia, Myanmar to Afghanistan, China’s Xinjiang to India’s Manipur, people have been turning into monsters by vicious sectarian politics practiced by the power-hungry and bigoted politicians.
But the hot conflicts and abominable misery in those places are hardly conducive for deep reflection and analysis especially for you and me who are consumed by our daily needs and barely read the headlines from those places. Here comes the role of deeply compassionate individuals like Mander and Hoodbhoy who, despite having thought about and dealt with the horrors of brutality and violence in their societies their entire lives, have managed to keep their sanity and have been single-handedly fighting the wave of cynicism and nihilism surrounding them.
I think the mixing of faith and politics in Pakistan and India is one of the largest social and political experiments in the history of humankind with a whopping 1.67 billion people in the two countries now living with the consequences of the fateful choices made by their respective rulers: Mohammad Ali Jinnah for Pakistan at the time of its independence in 1947 and Narendra Modi for India at around 2014.
Insights from these two great minds have led me to propose this four level hierarchy of the human brain. With respect and gratitude, I name this model and the hierarchy after them.
Level 1: One-dimensional or linear mind
In people with such a mind, primitive, limbic brain dealing with emotions eclipses the intellectual neocortical brain. Most strikingly, their thinking is linear. This largely resembles the mind of pre-cognitive revolution Homo sapiens and other primates.
Sustained manipulation of the limbic system—analogous to mutation in genetics—can focus the brain to a single act, blocking everything lateral or contradictory to the philosophy guiding the act. And this can lead to extreme acts of aggression and violence often ending with spectacular acts of destruction of lives, sometimes including their own.
Examples: terrorists including suicide bombers, totalitarian rulers, leaders of lynch mob or solo lynchers.
Level 2: Two-dimensional mind
Intellectual brain in these people is somewhat functional but has lost the fluidity and flexibility in the perception of the world; and is heavily guided by and is in the service of the limbic brain.
Navigating in a 3-dimensional real world with a 2-dimensional mobility causes massive dissonance between perception and reality. The dissonance is often resolved with the help of information ecosystems that are heavily manipulated, highly selective and cherry-picked based on sham research and pseudoscience.
The gaps left by the two-dimensional model in a three-dimensional world are largely filled with conspiracy theories which get wilder and wilder as the person moves from the higher range of 2-dimensional soul to the lower range and with speedy enough radicalization, may eventually end up with a 1-dimensional soul in the course of time.
The intellectual brain in these people is consumed by the attempt to ignore or refuse the contrarian facts at any cost and is largely incapacitated. As the distortion arising from the endless dissonance between reality and perception has a tormenting effect, these people are restless and constantly battling the validity of the third dimension of reality which does not align with the ‘valid’ two dimensions. Rage is always pent up and often bubbles at the surface at slightest provocation. They tend to conflate the us-them division of people with the good-bad one thereby creating an entirely warped moral universe where there is no universal human denominator. Sectarian human identities are, for them, more rigid than even the inter-species divisions. They can thus be deeply ‘empathetic’ to a dog or a cow while condoning a brutal murder of a human being. Their worldview often leads them to the conclusion that human welfare is, ultimately, a zero sum game where one group can gain only at the cost to the other.
Denial is their preferred defense mechanism as this largely relieves them from the trouble of facing even more cognitive dissonance. In these people, ability to introspect and self-correct is almost nil. They are often rigidly aligned to an ideology. The concept of justice can be quite strong in an individual with such a brain but can be very conditional, selective and often strongly guided by the limbic brain.
Remaining functionality of the neocortex often prevents them from going fully one-dimensional but the risk of slippage over time is always there. They often root for tyrannical and authoritarian leaders to rule their groups or states and have trouble with free flow of information as it is the potential source of a huge new set of cognitive dissonance.
Level 3: Three-dimensional mind
A relatively balanced development of both the limbic and neocortical brain leads to this kind of mind. This is not immune from follies including moral and ethical ones but a mechanism for reflection and self-correction exists.
There is insight, humility, flexibility and openness to learn new things. The person is well aware of the fact that the new inputs may contradict their existing model of the world and may force one to update—and in the extremes, even discard—the existing worldview. This does not stop them from exploring the frontiers of knowledge and information. Instinctual and subconsciously internalized biases can exist but the person is constantly battling them.
Being the most flexible of the four levels, though, people at this level are prone to moving either up or down the hierarchy. Tyrannical and sectarian leaders and a toxic media ecosystem full of falsehoods, hatred and bigotry, over the course of years, can weigh down and result in barely perceptible drift down the ladder and they may end up in a rabbit hole of a 2-dimensional mind. Few even proceed to fall as below as the one dimensional mind.
Alternately, a sustained engagement in struggles for higher values like dignity and justice can elevate the individual to the 4-dimensional mind.
Level 4: Four-dimensional mind
People at this level are guided by an entirely new fourth dimension that is unique to humans because of our consciousness. Their sole focus is the welfare of others and the betterment of the world. Their language of both speech and action is empathy and compassion. Fairness and justice are their highest values.
This can be best visualized with a few examples. Adolfo Kaminsky risked his own life to forge papers and photographs of tens of thousands of Jews during world war II to smuggle them to safety away from the grip of Nazi Germany. Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh were among the first to educate girls in India and to challenge the casteist and patriarchal orthodoxy. Phule used to carry an extra sari to school because it was routine for the conservative villagers to throw stones and dung beside verbally abusing her. Mahatma Gandhi gave his own life while fighting for a just and inclusive India after largely succeeding in his mission. Indigenous leaders across the world are now fighting to their last breath to keep the planet earth livable for all of us.
Even though they look ordinary and have functional limbic system capable of generating all kinds of emotions, everything is secondary to the call to a higher cause for them.
Why this model?
Many pathologies have sickened the modern mind. Most people agree with this statement. What constitutes those pathologies and what can potentially save us from them? Here the answers can be totally divergent.
It is Okay to have divergent viewpoints about reality and the ways to change it. But what if we stop thinking about and comprehending the reality itself? What if the information ecosystem dumbs down people while making them infuriated at the same time? What if the people around us move into narcissism, beyond reflection and introspection? What if the entire society is sleepwalking into a disaster with most of us having no insight about the process?
Harsh Mander and Pervez Hoodbhoy left me reeling with these question with the gory tales of assassinations, lynchings, incarcerations, riots and killings of all kinds going on in Pakistan and India and the relentless radicalization of people—including children—resulting from these. It is understandable that greedy and incompetent leaders use division and bigotry to attain and keep power. But what happens when an entire population of a billion starts hating another billion and lasting enmity between such a large group of people takes root? What if not a small group of criminals but a cohort of hundreds of thousands looks forward to killing a hapless human being? What if the radicalization and indoctrination starts at a very early age, with the children being taught a highly distorted, partial and even fabricated history to incite them against the other community?
The 20th century disasters like the holocaust hold the answer to this. But eight decades after the end of WWII, we as humans seem to have completely forgotten the lessons and are now collectively flirting with so many of the ideas and machinations that led to the holocaust. Why?
We may not find the answer to this question any time soon. But my hope is that the Harsh-Pervez hierarchical model can give us a template to understand the processes going on within the human mind at an individual level. This should help us to devise ways to hinder the relentless fall of a large number of people down this hierarchy across the world.
To all of you who are reading this: please think deeply if, over the years, you are moving up or down the ladder. Compared to last year or the last decade, contemplate if you see the people around you in more colors. If they are morphing and consolidating into a progressively rigid good vs evil (i.e. us vs them) segregation, some deadly process of radicalization is going on in your mind. Once you do it with yourself, scrutinize people around you including your relatives and neighbors to find out which direction they are moving in the hierarchy.
This is what I have learned from Harsh Mander and Pervez Hoodbhoy: strive to move yourself and the people around you up the ladder and you will contribute to make the society better. The least you can do is to avoid slipping down the ladder yourself and help others hold their ground.
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Read the two books: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor E. Frankl (the latter is easily available online as pdf for free).