We went to Washington DC for the weekend and did the whole ooh-ah walk of the National Mall. Mucho walking up and down and I quite enjoyed the Smithsonian stuff. I very much liked the Human origins section of the Museum of Natural History. I mean it’s one thing to read about evolution and mentally agree with it, and it’s another to see a whole wall of obviously not-quite-human skulls. It’s amazing to me that the idea of planting crops is only around 9000 years old and there’s a whole display on brain development. When I talk about The Time Before Writing I’m obviously being somewhat flippant and over-generalizing to make a point, but I have to say that standing in the middle of a great swathe of historical artifacts and sweeping history leading up to us, I felt a profound sense of reverence and connection.

My one giggle being the little tap dance about why the Neanderthals disappeared so quickly just as homo sapiens suddenly spread everywhere. Yeah you know what, maybe no one does know why they all disappeared… well I’m not saying we’re all related to a cohort of blood thirsty maniacs, I’m just saying imagine a village of Peter Griffins pretending to be Vikings squaring off against the Yale archery club. That’s all. We’ll just lay out the options and let the children decide for themselves.

Anyway I now have the perfect explanation for how the Rationalization Hamster gets to fool us so easily. Loosely speaking, there are three parts to the big meat computer that is the human brain…

Reptilian = Hardware:  The oldest part of the brain controls everything your body does automatically. Breathing, food seeking, making urine, flight or fight etc etc. You have no control over this part of the brain at all. I mean seriously, try and control your pancreas secreting insulin by thinking about it. Exactly… you have zero control over this stuff.

Mammalian = Operating System: This part of the brain controls basically everything about us that isn’t already covered by the reptilian part of the part. There’s a huge element of social interaction and mating in here. This is where Body Agenda is located. It really likes boobs, ass, pussy and cumshots. It doesn’t know that porn involves bad actors, that shit is totally real.

Neo-Cortex = Software: This is the part of the brain that does all the cool stuff like inventing string theory and the triangle offense in basketball. It invented power chords and figured out that blue liquid is the socially appropriate color to represent menstrual fluid in tampon commercials. It writes the script for the Big Bang Theory and finds reasons for women to not have sex with men they don’t like. It created the marketing for Britney Spears and the Ruy Lopez chess opening. It thinks World of Warcraft is the pinnacle of human achievement second only to landing on the moon. It decided Twilight is art and wrote Harry Potter.

So….

The software doesn’t run the operating system. The operating system allows the software to be run. Thus Body Agenda is always on, always running not so much as in the background, but as the foundation for all the software that is running. The Rationalization Hamster is just a program run from the registry that you can’t shut off without administrator privileges.

You’re never quite as in control of yourself as you think you are. You have a major influence to be sure, but not perfect control. And if you drink enough, you’ll pass out and piss yourself… just like any other mammal would. We share 98.8% of the same DNA as a chimpanzee, so half of Game is just asking yourself, “What would a sexually successful chimp do?” Then doing that.

It pretty much involves acting like a boss… but also making it look like you’re not acting like a chimp.

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