Sanction

by Roman McClay

  “Lastly, the left hemisphere has built a map of the world, a very simple map. The simpler the better , it thinks. And so left dominant people tend to think they have it all figured out. And the right hemisphere is actually more connected to the actual terrain, not the map, the real world, and it is less sure of itself and its impression of the world; but it actually, truthfully, knows more of the real world than the left side. Which is a good metaphor for real life, the guy who is certain he is morally right -a guy like you- is less moral actually in real life, than the guy -like me- who admits to his hypocrisies and his lies and his dark ways.

  “Right? The best lack all conviction , Yeats ? Anyway,” the inmate said. He shook off the need to quote poetry to a man who thought hotel brochures were high-art.

  Travis shrugged, he had no idea what the fuck any of this was.

  “Because most brains are integrated, via the corpus callosum, the person absorbs the real world with the slightly pessimistic right side, the imagistic and not so linguistic, the more touchy feely, Oracle at Delphi, the emotional and symbolic and religious or artsy side, he absorbs the real terrain of the world with that side; then the left compresses it, names it, maps it, and reduces it to a flat and easy-to-say little map of the world.

  “And if you are left dominant you tend to go around saying that you are not emotional or artsy or concerned with nonsense like feelings and shit like that, at all; you tend to announce your rationality with aplomb. But the truth is your brain is almost all emotional all the time and your map of the world was first formed from emotional cues and irrational shit that your right-brain first discovered and only then did your left side turn it into language that you use -first internally, in thoughts- and then only secondarily out loud for us to hear.

  “Inside you took that feeling, that instinct, that image, or dream or artsy-fartsy emotion and turned it into a word or phrase like, I’m a fiscal conservative and believe in law and order and I think socialized medicine is unaffordable and blah blah . The truth is you have gut instincts -mediated in the limbic and basal ganglian systems- instincts that insist that you don’t like people, and especially the poor or brown folks and you don’t like people getting free shit because it seems unfair -and unfairness is an innate sense, rats have fair and unfair rubrics in their heads by the way- and anyway, these other people seem disgusting to you, when you look at them you get sick; and in fact, just thinking of liberals and artists and bums and Mexicans and the lazy and the weak & sick makes you wanna scream and smash things.

  “Your emotions are what inform you politics, they have shown this over and over and over. Both with liberals and conservatives and basket cases like me who are both. We feel with our right brain first, with a gut feeling and then make up a reason in language, draw a map of the terrain that we walked in real life.

  “The map is not the terrain though. The terrain is the terrain. And your rational politics, your Keynesian stimulus or Krugman-the-Douche logic for why marijuana ought to be legal or illegal, or cocaine or speed limits or this or that shit, all of it is largely decided before it ever even gets to the left hemisphere to be articulated in a goddamn policy platform. Before you say one logical word, your lower levels of brain have already decided how you feel on politics.

  “If your right brain is merely disgusted by druggies and people with dark skin -like mine is- or you just feel nervous around people who drive fast or own guns -like you are- then I will or you will -anyone will- just make up some bullshit reason why pot should be illegal or guns ought to be banned or whatever. Each person feels their politics first, and again, study after study shows this is true. Most politics is basically disgust sensitivity, how grossed out you are by things, and openness, trait openness, how many walls you want around you .

  “So, the more walls you like, the more conservative you are, the less, the more liberal, and if you feel safe living with no walls you’re an idiotic liberal and if you are disgusted by foreigners you’ll be a neo-Nazi conservative on the border.

  “It’s really that simple, and you’ll cite statistics -all true, all true- but your stats are irrelevant. You don’t give a shit about GDP and immigration, you just can’t stand the idea of those filthy fucks coming over and into our gated community. And look, I am both, I like the idea of a border wall, because niggers and wetbacks make me sick to my stomach, but I also like the idea of allowing automatic weapons and legalizing all drugs, because I like the idea of mixing shit up a bit too. I’m high in trait openness, so I like a little chaos too.

  “Now, look, I know that my ideas, my so-called politics isn’t what it is because I have the stats to back me up although, I do, I actually know the stats on all this shit, and I can make the case for less immigration and drug legalization and all kinds of idiotic political shit. But, I learned years ago that my politics is like everyone’s: based on my temperament, not rational ideas like I’m John Stuart Mill or Kant.

  “So, Travis, my brotha , you can say you are different, and maybe you are the one guy who isn’t like everyone else, maybe you really are rational. But answer this: when a fact comes around to counter your facts, how likely are you to change that rational mind of yours?” the inmate raised his eyebrows as the stiches over his right eye made a dark frown.

  Travis shrugged and thought the question was a trick.

  “That is what I thought. Well, me neither, so you are not alone. Facts are not what we use to make decisions, we use facts to justify decisions we made long ago. Decisions of ours are both too high and too far away for mere facts to lay a hand upon, my brother.

  “Even stock brokers have been shown to make all financial decisions based on emotion; the studies have made this as clear as 16 dB glass. But, if you are left brain dominant fella, then you will deny this and if you are right brain dominant you will accept it; but it is true for both. And look, the left-brain people will often accept the true things that the right-hemi folks won’t.

  “The right-hemi people think their emotions, or these revelations from God are real ; they think: that really is Jesus on the toast, man . And left dominant people know that sometimes their feelings -to the extent they even admit having them- are just that, feelings . They tend to discount them more easily than the right-side folks.

  “But one last thing, the right hemisphere does use language, but it uses metaphor, and inference, it gets the joke, or the implication, the nuance. If someone says, oooh, it’s chilly in here . The left side takes that language literally as a statement of fact of temperature, but the right side gets up and turns the AC down -or the heat on- to make you feel better. The right-side gets the big picture, and the left gets only the literal words.

  “So, if you ever laugh at an ironic or sophisticated joke, the right side got the joke in language, but it got it in big-picture language, in metaphor or artistic language. And those that study these things, they have figured this out -again by issuing a hemispheric paralytic for surgery- or, in the case of stroke victims, you know, people who have one hemisphere go dead all on their own. And if they lose their right-brain hemisphere, they can no longer get humor, or poetry or the point of stories at all.

  “They can still speak about specifics, they have no apparent language loss at all; until you realize they are unable to get the nuances, the implications, the joke of one’s words. So, those with no right hemispheric function, well, they can still be lawyers and politicians and TV people, oh and engineers. They just can’t be human ever again

  “Well, the implications are obvious; if you are a left hemisphere dominant man, you will take words literally, miss the joke, and not get the deeper meaning of things. You will not understand music, which explains why you like Lyle Lovett, nor will you like sophisticated film -like Terrence Malick’s oeuvre , or films like Solaris - nor will you like great novels and instead prefer science books or coloring books; you will prefer simple stories like Spielberg’s dross, and direct and simple language or even better, you’ll love mathematics.

&nbs
p; “But that is why left side dominant people are shallow, and don’t get art. Their brains truly are impoverished just as the right dominant people are as impoverished when it comes to specifics and precise language and thus, when they speak, they sound like a gibbering fool.

  “I mean try getting simple directions or instructions from a right hemisphere asshole, they make almost no sense at all. Trump is right hemisphere, he speaks in big picture, in outlines, in jokes that you have to implicitly get. That is why I find him hilarious, but you guys just don’t get the joke. But you vote for him anyway, based on the border wall. But he makes no sense to you, and it’s because he is a big picture guy, not a detail man. Which is why his sentences are insane. He sounds like he’s on meth for christsake .

  “However, just so we are clear, I am advocating balance, but I don’t like balance, I prefer extremes, I jump from airplanes and ride motorcycles without a helmet drunk on whisky and pills. I carry a gun and shoot it a lot; I run class V rapids in May with a deluge running down the mountain from the snow pack; I snowboard out of bounds and in the back country; and the most dangerous thing I did, I lived with two girls at once.

  “I break the law as often as I feel like it, in fact I have no respect for the law. And I many times hunted bear by sleeping outside in the wilderness at night.

  “But, I often sit home and read for weeks at a time and do nothing adventurous at all; I don’t like meeting new people and I consistently -pathologically- eat the same food each day. And I think the cops ought to hammer the shit out of everyone except me. I am a conservative anarchist. I am balanced the same way the desert is: it’s 120 degrees at noon and 40 degrees at 0300. The average is 80 degrees. Just like Hawaii that is 85 degrees at summer noon and 75 at winter midnight; the same average but two totally different milieu . You are all Hawai’i man. You never fluctuate more than a few degrees.

  “Travis, you are all left brain, you can’t even see the point in emotions or love or music or literature, and unless someone explains it in a power-point presentation with numbers and explicit language you cannot get the point at all. You see only what you want to see, you have no tolerance for new ideas at all; in fact, you won’t even remember one word of this speech; it’s all Greek to you.

  “And the funny thing is I could fix it, if you wanted it fixed. A two or three-gram dose of psilocybin mushroom leads to a full standard deviation increase in openness; and exercising of the right hemisphere for permanent central nervous system change. Taking one psychedelic trip would make you a more complete person, while leaving your core personality more or less intact. It’s like taking a round of steroids, which would make you recover and build muscle faster and then -with cessation- return you to normal with the gains built into your body now. You’d be a little stretched out .

  “It’s like falling in love, it teaches you what love is; or tasting sugar awakens your idea of what sweet is. Mushrooms open your right hemisphere up and allow it to communicate with the left better. It makes you able to understand the implicit, the nuance, the deep. Depth is actually a brain phenomenon, and right hemisphere people are deeper, emotionally, and intellectually deeper people; they are often wrong, and insane, but deep.

  “To take mushrooms might allow you -like me- to be left-brain dominant and yet right-brain literate; to be more complex and deep and alive. But, you have to be open and daring and alive to even agree to such a thing. And well, we both know the answer to that. But, your lamentation that you are shallow has found purchase with me; I am willing to dose you and guide you and help you make sense of the process. I am like a sherpa, a mental sherpa, if you want it. If you truly lament your shallowness -and let’s face it, you are pretty shallow- then I suggest a cure. But, like any medical advice, you are free to reject it and keep smoking or eating Cheetos or doing whatever the doctor recommend you cease doing at once. Ignore me at your discretion and your peril.

  “I research things, and have details like the left hemisphere guy, and get the bigger picture like the right hemisphere guy, and so I know that Johns Hopkins hospital -one of the most famous researching hospitals in the world- is doing psilocybin research right now and have found that it has amazing results in all domains. They are blown away, and these are not hippies or Tim Leary, they are MDs and PHDs and post-doc researchers working in rigorous lab conditions.

  “They are the ones that discovered what ancient people have known for 10,000 years: psychedelic drugs, entheogens, are a way to communicate with the right hemisphere and expand your knowledge of self, and the world and maybe even God himself,” the inmate looked at the wall at saw it had been 9 minutes and 45 seconds, and smiled and hung up the phone. Travis held the prison’s phone to his ear idiopathically and tried to steady himself.

  “Time,” the guard said; adding, “MacLeod.”

  The inmate rose and stroked his beard into a point. He knew the human brain and personality was being hacked now by AI, and that unless modern man was aware of himself, deeply aware of his brain and emotions and all undergirding rationales, he was vulnerable to the hacking AI was doing to manipulate people. He knew his advice was meant as self-defense and that nobody would take it seriously for one second. You can be too smart to be listened to; science has shown that as well. Any more than two standard deviations in IQ from the speaker to listener attenuates almost all knowledge transfer.

  He winked at Travis and turned toward the door and strode away in a strange combination of vulnerability and confidence, like a man who has resigned himself to his fate; like Empedocles at Mt. Etna’s ridge.

  Travis had no intention of doing anything his little brother said; that guy was lost, and insane and all wrong, he was as wrong as any one man could be , Travis thought in the quiet and safety of his head. Nothing Lyndon said made one bit of sense ; of that Travis was certain. He made himself be certain as he walked passed each door jamb, each guard, each person he suspected on his way out of the ADX.

  He repeated that mantra as he took the coded message and -making sure not to think anything supportive as the lab guys had instructed- walked with his thoughts to the lot and clambered inside his truck as the starlings circled just at eye level and the crows circled above so that their shadows made the starlings glint and darken and seem like illusions of chiaroscuro on the ground.

  II. 2028 e.v.

  And of course, it's more than a cliché. Men have minds made to understand systems and women have minds designed to understand people. And it works, he thought.

  He stood in the back and for once he truly wanted no one to look upon him; nobody to acknowledge what he had done or how what he had done had helped them. He was happy, for once, to witness the joy in their hearts, the expressions of long held emotions, alloyed, tempered, made strong or weak by time and pressure inside the furnace of their minds and the quick cooling bath of water that life outside their eyes held in that vast basin for them.

  He knew, as he watched each man or woman, mostly women he noticed, and their children, fawning little duck children holding on to her and each other, brothers and sisters like paper cut outs -hand and hand- he knew that they were feeling a small joy, small hope, that felt big to them: they were going to have a chance to live in a world where they understood it. No longer, they felt, no longer would they be kept from the secrets of the world; the secrets that led from birth to school to work to everything that looked pretty and smelled nice and was soft to the touch.

  They had rebelled against the idea that it was something wrong with them or their children for so long; their civic leaders had too. They had been told and began telling everyone, even if in whispers, that there was nothing wrong with them or their children. But, they knew, they knew that the answers came slowly to them, that their children lagged in school, that fights broke out too easily and arguments turned to violence too quickly and with too long a list of consequences.

  He knew their dignity suffered in this too. He knew that he was once broken too and did not want anyone to know. He too kn
ew what it was like to have low impulse control, a quick temper, a low inhibition behavior scheme. He knew them.

  So, he had built one tool to fix himself. A tool they lacked.

  Lead paint and bad genes had conspired to lower the average IQ of the average person in that housing complex to 90; which was one standard deviation below the mean, the norm. These people were cognitively impaired on average but as simple as their minds were, their problems were complex and their hope still sprang each spring; each vernal bloom of wants and needs for them and for their progeny was as ornate and soft in the center, as simple and firm at the edge as any dream he had had.

  He began clapping as their names were called and each family rose with effervescence and staccato bursts of relief. He clapped quietly as to not attract any attention.

  He imagined their souls like soil; their hopes like seeds and this day like rain. He remembered Rachel teaching him about soaking seed to soften to husks; the window sill he set them on after a few days in the dark. The white tail of its first root escaping the soft cracked mottled seed husk, oriented down in the soil he packed into a coco-plug in rows of 10 .

  He remembered reading about how to discern male from female and how to cull the weak ones early, and how he had wanted even the weak ones to somehow grow. He had felt sad for the little weak saplings, the clover or pepper sprouts or mint as they sat on the ledge. He saw each one as important, while Rachel had said an 80% success rate was good enough. He couldn’t help but see each one as important and this is what most people in his industry -and in science in general- never seemed to get. He wanted each person to make it, each flower, each sprout, each idea he had.