Instinct, Emotion and Reason

Why the Triune Mind Theory deserves a Red Pill makeover

Humans go through mental processes when presented with information in our environment. By varying degrees, all these stimuli demand our interpretation and a behavioral response. When I was studying behavioral psychology, I came across what’s known as the Triune Mind Theory. While this theory has been discredited for some time, the fundamental interpretive processes it described  – Instinct, Emotion, and Reason – are still the building blocks of all fields of psychology today.

The idea is simple; when environmental (and internal) stimuli prompt us, we process this information using three psychological mechanisms – primal instincts, emotional interpretations, and our capacity for reason. I’ve been the only voice in the Manosphere to describe these processes from a Red Pill perspective.  I’ve detailed all of these processes individually for years on my blog. However, they were outlined in the context of whatever topic I was focusing on. Now, I’m going to elaborate on these aspects individually. Later, I’ll explore how they act in concert with our overall cognitive processes and how they influence intersexual and intersocial dynamics. This is a helpful exercise because many foundational Red Pill ideas stem from these processes and the social conventions and interpretive priorities that Gynocentrism relies on today.

For the sake of clarity, I am going to use a few behavioral psych terms like stimuli. This isn’t to throw $10 words at you. It’s just easier to elaborate on these processes with abstract terms. For example, when I use stimuli, I mean any physical, environmental, or cognitive prompt that our conscious or unconscious mind demands our interpretation, processing, and response to. That can be a wide variety of things, so stimuli is a general term.

Full disclosure: The following is my interpretation of these processes. While much of this aligns with established theories, this is my take on them and not some official, settled science of facts. If you think I’m full of shit, please tell me why. This is still a work in progress for me.

Instinct

Instinct seems like the easiest of these processes to understand but is most often misunderstood, marginalized, and demonized. This is because our primal instincts reside in our subconscious (hindbrain) processing of stimuli. Instinct is autopilot for human beings. When I refer to men’s or women’s evolved mental firmware in my essays, it’s our instinctual process I’m referring to. These are the unlearned, inborn firmware of our nature that influence the other processes. The instinctual processes primarily focus on the most immediate of our needs – survival, self-preservation, and reproduction. It evolved as a vitally necessary aspect of our cognition. On the root level, it aids in our ability to survive in, and adapt to, a chaotic, primal environment when food was scarce, predators and rivals wanted us dead, and reproductive opportunities (and raising a child to a survivable age) were at a premium.

There are many examples of our instinct-level processing. Each instinctual response triggers more complex processing up the cognitive chain through Emotion and Reason. One reason the Triune Mind Theory was abandoned was its compartmentalization of each process. We know now that each process works synergistically with the others. For example, if we were presented with a dangerous stimulus (a sabertooth tiger), our instinctual process triggers a fight or flight response physically in our bodies (adrenaline release). This evolved adaptation served our species well and was passed along genetically as part of our mental firmware. I will use some simple examples here, but if you want to dig into our preloaded mental firmware and how we developed it, I would suggest looking into the earlier works of Dr. Steven Pinker and The Red Queen by Matt Ridley.

Another example is human beings’ innate fear (reservations at least) of snakes and spiders – poisonous animals that looked easy to kill but could kill humans without warning. That’s an example of relatively beneficial firmware. The reason instinct gets a bad rep is due to the instincts that once were beneficial to us individually but are less helpful to us socially. For example, greed and gluttony were very practical, instinctually motivated behaviors that stemmed from a need to survive in a time when resources were scarce. Today, greed is (mostly) seen as anti-social, and a compulsion to overeat in a time when food is abundant is why we presently have an obesity epidemic.

Those are easily understood examples, but where things get more complex is in how our instinctual process influences the other processes (emotion and reason). Instinct gets demonized because, in our ‘enlightened‘ era, we like to believe that our instincts cause more trouble than they are beneficial. Most of that is due to a belief that our other processes are superior to our instincts. Most of what we call sin, or immoral behavior, is motivated by instinct. The only time our instinctual awareness and reactions are credited with anything positive is when it gets us out of some life-threatening situation or leads to some prosocial outcome. For instance, the male instinct to protect women by putting himself between a woman and danger; that’s an instinct and resultant behavior (seemingly altruistic male self-sacrifice) that gets a lot of praise in our feminine-primary social order. However, for the most part, we tend to judge ‘baser instincts’ as a net negative.

The truth about the instinctual process is that none of our other processes function efficiently without it. Yet, today, due to our feminine-primary acculturation, we want to relegate instinct’s influence to something “we’ve evolved beyond.” The widespread consensus is that we’ve raised ourselves above base instincts by either acknowledging the importance of the emotional process or that rationality and self-control immunizes us from its influence. Not only are these beliefs foolish and hubristic, but they’re also provably untrue. When it comes to concepts like the ‘selfish gene‘ and the physical differences in the evolved instinctual processes of men and women, it becomes necessary for a social order based on blank-slate equalism to demonize and marginalize the influence of, and behaviors attributed to, instinct.

The survival benefits and behaviors that make up the instinctual process were so necessary that they had to become part of our unconscious species’ firmware. Because the instinctual process is part of our animalistic hindbrain mental subroutines, we have little or no direct control over it until its effect is brought (often forced) into our conscious awareness. As such, and because we prefer to think of ourselves as emotional and rational beings, we tend to think of the influence of instinct as something we either have or need to have mastery over. To a large extent, this mastery makes sense. The truth is that instinct is an aspect of ourselves that needs to be controlled and embraced depending on circumstances.

Emotion

From an evolutionary perspective, the emotional process of interpreting stimuli is a mechanism of how our brains and biochemistry interact to affect our moods, demeanor, and ’emotionality’ in response to instinctual cues and the raw information of stimuli. Furthermore, the rational process can also influence and modify the emotional process. Again, I’m trying to simplify this, but our emotional response to information/stimuli is an evolved dynamic with latent purposes and practical functionalities. I’m making this distinction here because we’ve raised the effects of emotion to mythical, metaphysical importance for most of human history.

While emotion often has immediate effects on us, emotion also has long-term effects concerning the stimuli it processes. There are dozens of definitions of emotions, and there’s no way I can outline them all here. However, popular psychology asserts that there are as many as ten and as few as six base emotions:

• Anger.

• Disgust.

• Fear.

• Happiness.

• Sadness.

• Surprise.

Sometimes Contempt is added to this list. If these seem overly simplistic, know that they are abstracts on which to build more complex emotions (some paleo-researchers insist there are only four base emotions across our evolved ethno-histories). However, for our purposes, these base emotions will show the connections between the instinctual process that prompts them and the rational process that modifies and sometimes informs them.

These emotional responses are prompted by how our senses, brain, and instinctual process interpret stimuli. Again, using our sabertooth tiger example, the instinctual process determines imminent danger and triggers a synaptic and hormonal response to that danger. As a result of that instinctual process, an emotional process and response are triggered – likely fear (flight in most cases), but sometimes anger (fight).

Another example: you see an arousing woman (stimuli) at a party displaying behavioral cues and environmental indicators of interest (IOIs). Your instinctual process determines a high potential for a reproductive opportunity. From there, the emotional process kicks in: hormones and dopamine (and a testosterone spike) that your instinctual process triggered flush your system and serves as the basis for your emotional process to form an emotional response to the same stimuli. If it all passes the smell test, that response (hopefully) will be happiness (and a little surprise mixed in).

A visceral biochemical interrelation between emotion and the stimuli/instinct relation prompts the reaction. Adrenaline is one easy example. Another is oxytocin or the “love hormone.” This is a bit of a mischaracterization of the hormone. Oxytocin induces feelings of trust and comfort and is thought to be a significant factor in humans forming pair bonds and parental investments. There’s more to oxytocin’s implications for our evolution than that, but let’s look at how biology influences the emotional process.

We proceed from stimuli to an instinctual response. If nothing is mitigating that response (such as a learned buffer to mitigate it), the next step in the chain is a biological reaction to that instinct – such as dumping adrenaline into our bloodstream or a post-orgasm flush of oxytocin after sex. From there, the emotional process picks up the interpretation of this information as prompted by the chemicals moving through our bloodstream and affecting our mental and physical interpretation of that stimuli. Finally, that biochemical factor prompts one, or a combination, of the base emotions listed above.

More complex emotions (feelings) and combinations begin to form an emotional interpretation and response. This emotional response can be anything from a fast, reflexive one to a more nuanced and contemplative one. Furthermore, our rational mental process and gendered capacity to process emotions can modify this emotional interpretation and response. One thing to remember about our emotional process is that it can imprint its interpretations into our ‘hard memory’ – sometimes so significantly that the memory of that stimuli can re-trigger that physical and emotional response.

Gender-modified interpretations of our emotional process are important in Red Pill praxeology. Until recently, the accepted ‘science‘ about our emotional process has been based on a blank-slate equalist approach to emotion. We still suffer from the outdated presumptions of academia that both men and women process emotion similarly and, in theory, are expected to have an equal capacity to interpret, respond, and express emotion. We know this old presumption is patently untrue in light of new research in various interrelated disciplines. Men and women have different mental hardware and are born with different mental firmware. Both sexes interpret and process emotion in gender-specific manners.

It’s important to consider that humans are predisposed to elevating the emotional process above instinct and reason. This is due to our survival dependency on our feelings in our evolutionary past. In a time when we lacked the rational faculties and information we have now, we depended on learning from emotion. The latent purpose it serves is a species-beneficial system. In our prehistory, we relied on our feelings to guide our behaviors (long and short term) when we lacked the more developed rational process we take for granted now. Emotions served latent evolutionary purposes for us in our prehistory. However, today we still overly emphasize emotion – often to metaphysical attributes – as superior to reason.

Reason

The final piece of our interpretive process is Reason or rationality. For all of the pretentiousness that our emotions have made us “more evolved” above instinct, our rational process has evolved us above both instinct and emotion. From an evolutionary standpoint, our rational process is a relatively recent development that’s pushed us past the limitations of instinct and emotion. The definition of rationality is the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. It is the ability to think sensibly or logically and endowed with the capacity to reason.

It’s postulated that our larger brains allow us to develop a capacity for reason, but that doesn’t mean other animals lack the same facility. It’s just that the rational process is less developed (some would say less environmentally necessary) in those animals by order of degree. Dogs, for example, rely primarily on the instinctual process and the mental firmware they’re born with to solve most of their existential/environmental problems. However, that doesn’t mean they cannot learn and form novel (adaptive) behaviors using a rudimentary form of logic. Animals can be taught things, but their intelligence limits their capacity to create novel ideas and behaviors. Humans, arguably the apex species on the planet, had the leisure to take the time necessary to evolve a capacity for logic and, as such, the rational process developed in us.

Of all our interpretive processes, Reason is the one that takes the longest to function. Our rational process forms our interpretation of stimuli based on information dissociated from the interpretations of instinct and emotion. Reason requires (accurate) knowledge derived from learning and experience, but the process also has an improvisational element (imagination).

Before I get too far in the weeds here, I must make a distinction. I’m outlining the rational mental process we employ to interpret and interact with stimuli, not rationality, the concept of reason, or rationalism. That’s important because it’s too easy to get lost in the philosophical implications of reason when we look at how we come to it.

As mentioned above, the rational process modifies the instinctual and emotional processes. For example, when we take driver’s education in high school, we’re taught to turn into a skid rather than slam on the brakes. When we’re driving, and we find ourselves in a skid, our instinctive impulse is to slam on the brakes or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Nothing in our evolutionary past prepared us to drive cars, so we have to rely on a combination of faculties that evolution gave us to adapt to driving cars. Our self-preservation instincts tell us to stop the vehicle in a skid, which worsens a precarious situation. However, when we’re taught and practice not hitting the brakes and turning into the skid, we make this our default reaction and avoid disaster. You can make a similar illustration by learning martial arts. This is the rational process of interpreting stimuli and forming a novel behavior that modifies and overrides the interpretation of the instinctual process.

The greatest limitation of the rational process is that it takes time to interpret and learn from information and then develop an adaptive strategy. Where instinct and emotion are intimately linked with our psychological firmware, the rational process is disconnected by a need to process information more thoroughly. The Instinctual and Emotional processes evolved from a need for fast interpretation and reaction. The Rational process requires time and repetition to be effective. Human beings are remarkably fast learners (even with complex challenges), but the learning that the rational process needs to be effective is slow compared to instinct and emotion, which are preloaded firmware in humans.

The rational process deals with the nuts and bolts of what we can understand of our reality. From there, it can modify the other processes, or it can serve to interpret stimuli on its own.