Conditioned Away From Goodness
The following thoughts are interconnected recollections and with missing sources. They’re ideas I’ve connected from years of reading, talking, and experiencing life as a consumer. I’ve consumed videos, conversations, books, comments, commercials, video games, music, body language, acts of good and evil, and it’s been a contributing factor to who I am and how I think. Every stimulus is a form of consumption of the outside world.
Recently I’ve been focusing on what it means to be a good person even if doing good is not my natural instinct. I’ve found myself asking “If helping someone isn’t my natural reaction, and then I help them, was it a selfish desire? Because I wanted to do good?” I haven’t had the answer to that question, but it’s been a continuous ponder.
After talking with a good friend of mine we stumbled upon the word conditioning when describing how marketing and our external environment affects us and our perceptions of the world.
Conditioning: the process of training or accustoming a person or animal to behave in a certain way or to accept certain circumstances. “Social conditioning”
More on this at the end after two anecdotes.
The Stench Of Man
I read an article about a person trying to find an empty coffee shop to work in, and the only open spot in any of the coffee shops they went to was near a man who reeked of odor. The author of this article hypothesized the many different outcomes to confronting the man about his smell. Would the man leave and allow people to reclaim the space? Would the man become confrontational? Would there be violence? The author leaves the space momentarily but gives in to the thought of the man as a human, more so than the inconvenient smell that was interrupting his desire to work. The author of the article was a public defender and found similarity to this smell as the one he routinely found in the courts, where they served those the state appointed him to. Mostly homeless, mostly penniless, mostly people just trying to get by. After the immediate responses of disgust of the smell and annoyance of having to endure it, the author found their compassion. They struck up a conversation with the man and offered the remaining, untouched half sandwich they bought during their time away from the counter.
Surface Level Creativity
This retelling is more my feeling of the story than a potential recount of actual events. I read it years ago but it stuck with me when I undertake creative endeavors. It is both forgiveness for my lack of originality and a guide to my inner creative spirit. An art student in college outlined a daily exercise that their professor had them complete. The professor instructed them to doodle, to not follow the whims of the surface level mind, but to create until you couldn’t create any further. They had their students do this for a repeated amount of days until there was theoretically nothing left for them to doodle in all of existence. Then came the comparison. When initially placing students doodles next to their peers a phenomenon occurred that none of them expected. They all had similarities of style, topic, size, and scope. What the professor described to the class was the surface level expression of creativity. Our environment, our stimulus, our media, our everything floats around on the bubbling surface of our mind. Only when a person expels their surface level, easy to grab thoughts, can they sink deeper into their cognition and pull ideas that have substance and differentiation. The professor then compared the final drawings of the students. They were in the thousands of doodles by this point. Each student found their style, their passion, their creative expression by skimming away the metaphorical fat off of their creative broth. The drawings they produced were uniquely shaped, sized, and colored compared to their peers. After getting through their preconditioned surface level ‘creativity’ the professor pulled out from them their unique individuality.
After a serendipitous connection of these ideas I think I’ve come to an answer regarding my approach to goodness. If you’re American you’re conditioned to experience life as an individual as opposed to existing as a larger part of a whole. Our economy and social power dynamic are based on this conditioning thrust upon us. In the same way America has a Military-industrial complex to exert its power upon the world, American citizens have a Marketing-industrial complex exerting power upon their lives. Each conscious day we experience is filled with systems, built by the smartest PhD’s and enacted by the high performing value extractors in the market, meant to condition with a certain set of acceptable behaviors. Individual autonomy and the expression of the self through monetary based consumption is the goal of the system that tries to grow at 3% a year.
These collections of systems are incredibly powerful and equally difficult to resist. The author of the article outlined in the first anecdote said, “our thoughts are not us”, and that provided an opening for grace. Immediate reactions are impulses of our conditioning. Like the professor getting his students to wade through the fog of their environmental conditioning, we as individuals should give ourselves the opportunity to wade through the conditioning that predisposes us to act as selfish individuals, so that we can be the betterment of humanity.
Whatever your moral framework, give yourself the time to address the situation or thought. More of the same auto-conditioned responses will lead us to more of the same isolated, uncaring, passive experience of life. Give yourself the time to rekindle your unique humanity. The world deserves who you actually are.
