12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (52 page)

BOOK: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
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What shall I do with the most difficult of questions? Consider them the gateway to the path of life.

What shall I do with the poor man’s plight? Strive through right example to lift his broken heart.

What shall I do when the great crowd beckons? Stand tall and utter my broken truths.

And that was that. I still have my Pen of Light. I haven’t written anything with it since. Maybe I will again when the mood strikes and something wells up from deep below. But, even if I don’t, it helped me find the words to properly close this book.

I hope that my writing has proved useful to you. I hope it revealed things you knew that you did not know you knew. I hope the ancient wisdom I discussed provides you with strength. I hope it brightened the spark within you. I hope you can straighten up, sort out your family, and bring peace and prosperity to your community. I hope, in accordance with Rule 11 (Do not bother children when they are skateboarding), that you strengthen and encourage those who are committed to your care instead of protecting them to the point of weakness.

I wish you all the best, and hope that you can wish the best for others.

What will you write with your pen of light?

Endnotes

1
. Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975).
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An experiment in literary investigation
(Vol. 2). (T.P. Whitney, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, p. 626.

2
. If you want to do some serious thinking about lobsters, this is a good place to start: Corson, T. (2005).
The secret life of lobsters: How fishermen and scientists are unraveling the mysteries of our favorite crustacean
. New York: Harper Perennial.

3
. Schjelderup-Ebbe, & T. (1935).
Social behavior of birds
. Clark University Press. Retrieved from
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1935-19907-007
; see also Price, J. S., & Sloman, L. (1987). “Depression as yielding behavior: An animal model based on Schjelderup-Ebbe’s pecking order.”
Ethology and Sociobiology
, 8, 85–98.

4
. Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). “Social status and health in humans and other animals.”
Annual Review of Anthropology, 33
, 393–418.

5
. Rutishauser, R. L., Basu, A. C., Cromarty, S. I., & Kravitz, E. A. (2004). “Long-term consequences of agonistic interactions between socially naive juvenile American lobsters (Homarus americanus).”
The Biological Bulletin, 207
, 183–7.

6
. Kravitz, E.A. (2000). “Serotonin and aggression: Insights gained from a lobster model system and speculations on the role of amine neurons in a complex behavior.”
Journal of Comparative Physiology, 186
, 221-238.

7
. Huber, R., & Kravitz, E. A. (1995). “A quantitative analysis of agonistic behavior in juvenile American lobsters (
Homarus americanus L.
)”.
Brain, Behavior and Evolution, 46,
72–83.

8
. Yeh
S-R, Fricke RA, Edwards DH (1996) “The effect of social experience on serotonergic modulation of the escape circuit of crayfish.”
Science, 271
, 366–369.

9
. Huber, R., Smith, K., Delago, A., Isaksson, K., & Kravitz, E. A. (1997). “Serotonin and aggressive motivation in crustaceans: Altering the decision to retreat.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 94
, 5939–42.

10
. Antonsen, B. L., & Paul, D. H. (1997). “Serotonin and octopamine elicit stereotypical agonistic behaviors in the squat lobster
Munida quadrispina
(
Anomura, Galatheidae
).”
Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology, 181
, 501–510.

11
. Credit Suisse (2015, Oct).
Global Wealth Report 2015
, p. 11. Retrieved from
https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=F2425415-DCA7-80B8-EAD989AF9341D47E

12
. Fenner, T., Levene, M., & Loizou, G. (2010). “Predicting the long tail of book sales: Unearthing the power-law exponent.”
Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, 389
, 2416–2421.

13
. de Solla Price, D. J. (1963).
Little science, big science
. New York: Columbia University Press.

14
. As theorized by Wolff, J.O. & Peterson, J.A. (1998). “An offspring-defense hypothesis for territoriality in female mammals.”
Ethology, Ecology & Evolution, 10
, 227-239; Generalized to crustaceans by Figler, M.H., Blank, G.S. & Peek, H.V.S (2001). “Maternal territoriality as an offspring defense strategy in red swamp crayfish (
Procambarus clarkii, Girard
).”
Aggressive Behavior, 27
, 391-403.

15
. Waal, F. B. M. de (2007).
Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes
. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; Waal, F. B. M. de (1996).
Good natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

16
. Bracken-Grissom, H. D., Ahyong, S. T., Wilkinson, R. D., Feldmann, R. M., Schweitzer, C. E., Breinholt, J. W., Crandall, K. A. (2014). “The emergence of lobsters: Phylogenetic relationships, morphological evolution and divergence time comparisons of an ancient group.”
Systematic Biology, 63
, 457–479.

17
. A brief summary: Ziomkiewicz-Wichary, A. (2016). “Serotonin and dominance.” In T.K. Shackelford & V.A. Weekes-Shackelford (Eds.).
Encyclopedia of evolutionary psychological science
, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1440-1. Retrieved from
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310586509_Serotonin_and_Dominance

18
. Janicke, T., Häderer, I. K., Lajeunesse, M. J., & Anthes, N. (2016). “Darwinian
sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom.”
Science Advances, 2
, e1500983. Retrieved from
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1500983

19
. Steenland, K., Hu, S., & Walker, J. (2004). “All-cause and cause-specific mortality by socioeconomic status among employed persons in 27 US states, 1984–1997.”
American Journal of Public Health, 94
, 1037–1042.

20
. Crockett, M. J., Clark, L., Tabibnia, G., Lieberman, M. D., & Robbins, T. W. (2008). “Serotonin modulates behavioral reactions to unfairness.”
Science, 320
, 1739.

21
. McEwen, B. (2000). “Allostasis and allostatic load implications for neuropsychopharmacology.”
Neuropsychopharmacology, 22
, 108–124.

22
. Salzer, H. M. (1966). “Relative hypoglycemia as a cause of neuropsychiatric illness.”
Journal of the National Medical Association, 58
, 12–17.

23
. Peterson J.B., Pihl, R.O., Gianoulakis, C., Conrod, P., Finn, P.R., Stewart, S.H., LeMarquand, D.G. Bruce, K.R. (1996). “Ethanol-induced change in cardiac and endogenous opiate function and risk for alcoholism.”
Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research, 20
, 1542-1552.

24
. Pynoos, R. S., Steinberg, A. M., & Piacentini, J. C. (1999). “A developmental psychopathology model of childhood traumatic stress and intersection with anxiety disorders.”
Biological Psychiatry, 46
, 1542–1554.

25
. Olweus, D. (1993).
Bullying at school: What we know and what we can do
. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Janoff-Bulman, R. (1992).
Shattered assumptions: Towards a new psychology of trauma
. New York: The Free Press.

28
. Weisfeld, G. E., & Beresford, J. M. (1982). “Erectness of posture as an indicator of dominance or success in humans.”
Motivation and Emotion, 6
, 113–131.

29
. Kleinke, C. L., Peterson, T. R., & Rutledge, T. R. (1998). “Effects of self-generated facial expressions on mood.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74
, 272–279.

30
. Tamblyn, R., Tewodros, E., Huang, A., Winslade, N. & Doran, P. (2014). “The incidence and determinants of primary nonadherence with prescribed medication in primary care: a cohort study.”
Annals of Internal Medicine, 160
, 441-450.

31
. I outlined this in some detail in Peterson, J.B. (1999).
Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief
. New York: Routledge.

32
. Van Strien, J.W., Franken, I.H.A. & Huijding, J. (2014). “Testing the snake-detection hypothesis: Larger early posterior negativity in humans to
pictures of snakes than to pictures of other reptiles, spiders and slugs.”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8
, 691-697. For a more general discussion, see Ledoux, J. (1998).
The emotional brain: The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life
. New York: Simon & Schuster.

33
. For the classic treatise on this issue see Gibson, J.J. (1986).
An ecological approach to visual perception.
New York: Psychology Press. See also Floel, A., Ellger, T., Breitenstein, C. & Knecht, S. (2003). “Language perception activates the hand motor cortex: implications for motor theories of speech perception.”
European Journal of Neuroscience, 18
, 704-708, for a discussion of the relationship between speech and action. For a more general review of the relationship between action and perception, see Pulvermüller, F., Moseley, R.L., Egorova, N., Shebani, Z. & Boulenger, V. (2014). “Motor cognition–motor semantics: Action perception theory of cognition and communication.”
Neuropsychologia, 55
, 71-84.

Flöel, A., Ellger, T., Breitenstein, C. & Knecht, S. (2003). “Language perception activates the hand motor cortex: Implications for motor theories of speech perception.”
European Journal of Neuroscience, 18
, 704-708; Fadiga, L., Craighero, L. & Olivier, E (2005). “Human motor cortex excitability during the perception of others’ action.”
Current Opinions in Neurobiology, 15
, 213-218; Palmer, C.E., Bunday, K.L., Davare, M. & Kilner, J.M. (2016). “A causal role for primary motor cortex in perception of observed actions.”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 28
, 2021-2029.

34
. Barrett, J.L. (2004).
Why would anyone believe in God?
Lanham, MD: Altamira Press.

35
. For a decent review, see Barrett, J.L. & Johnson, A.H. (2003). “The role of control in attributing intentional agency to inanimate objects.”
Journal of Cognition and Culture, 3
, 208-217.

36
. I would also most highly recommend, in this regard, this book by C.G. Jung’s most outstanding student/colleague, Neumann, E. (1955).
The Great Mother: An analysis of the archetype
. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

37
.
https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/occ_gender_share_em_1020_txt.htm

38
. Muller, M.N., Kalhenberg, S.M., Thompson, M.E. & Wrangham, R.W. (2007). “Male coercion and the costs of promiscuous mating for female chimpanzees.”
Proceedings of the Royal Society (B), 274
, 1009-1014.

39
. For a host of interesting statistics derived from the analysis of his dating site, OkCupid, see Rudder, C. (2015).
Dataclysm: Love, sex, race & identity
. New York: Broadway Books. It is also the case on such sites that a tiny minority of individuals get the vast majority of interested inquiries (another example of the Pareto distribution).

40
. Wilder, J.A., Mobasher, Z. & Hammer, M.F. (2004). “Genetic evidence for
unequal effective population sizes of human females and males.”
Molecular Biology and Evolution, 21
, 2047-2057.

41
. Miller, G. (2001).
The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature.
New York: Anchor.

42
. Pettis, J. B. (2010). “Androgyny BT.” In D. A. Leeming, K. Madden, & S. Marlan (Eds.).
Encyclopedia of psychology and religion
(pp. 35-36). Boston, MA: Springer US.

43
. Goldberg, E. (2003).
The executive brain: Frontal lobes and the civilized mind
. New York: Oxford University Press.

44
. For the classic works, see Campbell, D.T. & Fiske, D.W. (1959). “Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix.”
Psychological Bulletin
, 56, 81-105. A similar idea was developed in Wilson, E.O. (1998).
Consilience: The unity of knowledge
. New York: Knopf. It’s also why we have five senses, so we can “pentangulate” our way through the world, with qualitatively separate modes of perception operating and cross-checking simultaneously.

45
. Headland, T. N., & Greene, H. W. (2011). “Hunter-gatherers and other primates as prey, predators, and competitors of snakes.”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 108
, 1470–1474.

46
. Keeley, L. H. (1996).
War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage
. New York: Oxford University Press.

47
. “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil. Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.” Solzhenitsyn, A.I. (1975).
The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An experiment in literary investigation
(Vol. 2). (T.P. Whitney, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row, p. 615.

48
. The best exploration of this I have ever encountered is to be found in the brilliant documentary about the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, entitled
Crumb
, directed by Terry Zwigoff (1995), released by Sony Pictures Classic. This documentary will tell you more than you want to know about resentment, deceit, arrogance, hatred for mankind, sexual shame, the devouring mother and the tyrannical father.

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