The Story of Reason

On the Foundation of the Reptilian Philosopher

I well remember the exact moment in time that I became a theorist, although of course at the time, as is normal in the course of human events, I had no intellectual or emotional epiphany about that moment one way or another. After all, I was only four years old.

My family’s movements and my age in comparison to my brothers conspired to arrange a comparatively solitary existence in those early years. My father, having graduated from seminary in Indiana, had commissioned his first church in rural Ontario as a Mennonite pastor.

My older brother took the bus to school in a small town some miles away, and my recently born brother demanded my mother’s full attention. We had no neighbors to speak of except for a kind elderly couple who occupied my attention only when they caught me breaking the robins’ eggs in their bushes.

That left me plenty of time to roam the fields and forests surrounding our house. I did have a companion. He was a mutt like me. To your eyes he appeared a husky, although his short stature proved his questionable heritage. And he was anything but the stately image of faithful man servant or Lassie derivative; guarding the homestead and providing loyal companionship. On the contrary, he would disappear for days at a time.

Independent husky

Often in the summer I would look up to find him peering through the screen door, his head crooked to the side, looking at me with all the inquisitiveness that only a dog can muster. Just don’t ever invite him inside. He hated that.

I only dimly remember my days in kindergarten. But I have vivid memories of forages through the countryside with my dog (if anyone could in any way consider him theirs) on random exploratory missions.

I’m not sure who was following who, although that question only appears in retrospect. I’m sure it never occurred to me at the time. And I have no idea what my dog thought about it, although I’m very sure he had an opinion. Dogs have a great sense of dominion.

I remember walking through the woods with him, diverging widely on points of interest after our own methods, his range much larger than mine. Although his interest was particularly piqued when I turned over a rotting log or scared up a squirrel. Looking back, I’m happy that I could at least be of some use to him.

I don’t know how we ended up crawling through brambles and raspberry bushes, although I’m sure those were his ideas. And I’ll never forget the first time I found myself on hands and knees crawling through the clover, hiding from what I did not know, and being quiet for no reason I understood.

I remember his ears up and the stillness filled with the crackling of his energy.  I’ll always remember lying there in the green lush growth beside my friend, his hair on his neck bristling, his body tense and aching, his face masked with an anger I would only see again years later in a bar in Peru. The groundhog never stood a chance when my friend made his angry and deadly start.  I wondered at the strangeness and the natural miracle of the spectacle; the ferocity of the engagement, his body shaking with fury, his mouth red with blood, and after, his sense of propriety even as he dug a new hole for his future meal.

As I did then, I still believe he was sharing those moments with me. He could have easily lived on his own yet he came back to visit. And I’ll never forget the day he died running after us down our gravel road, me frantically staring out the back window of the car, imploring my parents to let him come even as an oncoming car smashed his body.

Years later, I heard and read about animal instinct and the evolution of species. And I read in philosophy and psychology about the evolution of man. And I read about the separation of emotion and reason, and the supremacy of one over the other as the guiding light of our advancement. And I was taught of the rationality of science and its great contribution to man’s greatness. And I knew it was all foundationally wrong.

Later I learned of the left and right sides of the brain, of the rational vs. creative dichotomy connected by our corpus callosum, and although I still use that language to describe ideas, I knew it was wrong too. For what I know as surely as living is that without language and the self-awareness it spawns, my dog and I think alike.

My dog taught me more than that. He taught me that our reptilian brain stems are a function of rational and emotional thought, that there is no difference to be made of the two, and that instinct is merely a fancy way of saying that thoughts and emotions in animals are not as refined and controlled as in humans, left unsullied by a self-aware intellect. And virtually all of the important literature of our time corroborates these notions, and that much of the thought that clouds these ideas are nothing but ideological claptrap.

There is no distinction between emotional and rational thought. There is no supremacy of science over spirituality. There is no separation of the creative and deductive areas of our brain. Even a dog knows that.

And cognition is always spurred on by the active engagement of the external world. Cognition is always emotional. Cognition is spiritual and instinctive. Planning is a function of the reptilian emotional brain. Ideas are first and foremost a social and externally focused emotional exercise. They only animate themselves to the interior after language is acquired.

What does that mean? Well for starters, it means we only give up our emotions, our curiosity, our engagement, after years of focused battering by rational passivity. Many of us in adulthood never get it back. We sublimate it. We deny it.

We believe our creativity is rare, when it is natural. We believe our emotions have no place in our ideas or our constructs, when they are the source of them. They define our individual and our social behavior. Without emotion, there is no logic.

Perhaps most importantly, our thoughts are meant to be heartily engaged. And the cognitive theories of the mind provide us with perhaps the richest understanding of who we are and how we interact of any discipline we have yet developed. Freud may have given us words. But he didn’t help us understand the power of our minds. Cognitive psychology did. Freudian therapy has been a complete failure. But cognitive therapy threatens everything we think we know regarding the medicinal approach to the mind. It is that effective.

What does this all have to with philosophy? And what does this story have to do with organizations? The answer is simple. Philosophy is in part a model of our reptilian brain stems. But its rationality misses the most crucial element of our evolution and development; any organism must address its emotional center. It is the most important and elemental part. And all organizations are organisms.

It is not necessary to teach active investment. Creativity and emergence are only suppressed by the utmost of effort and habit. Emotionally rational engagement is the most natural instinct in the world. Just allow it.