Ideal Mental Landscape
Cultures promote different standards for ideal mental landscapes, which structure how adherents optimally govern their thoughts and feelings. There are two broad extremes here: A dictatorial mental landscape and a harmonious one.
In the dictatorial extreme, one aspect of a person’s character (for example, their logic) is meant to strictly control the others and lapses of this control are viewed as a sign of personal failure. In a harmonious landscape, all internal impulses are generally regarded as equal and the goal is to have them work together as organically and with as little conflict as possible.
Our cultural predisposition here is so strong it is hard for us to understand why anyone would want the alternative. To us, it seems obvious that you would only want the parts of your brain operating on logic to be in control and that all the other voices in one’s head are either manifestations of self-indulgent hero/power/victim narratives or emotional states that evolved in a very different set of ecological and social conditions.
When you allow a personal narrative or an emotion to be used as justification for an action, you create all sorts of terrible externalities in the way you act as a leader, relate to societies, and act within relationships.
- A leader who is operating on logic can always be trusted to act in congress with their goals. You can use that information to decide whether you want to follow them. A leader who is subject to the caprices of emotion or personal narratives is unpredictable and liable to be inconsistent in their leadership.
- The same can be said about a follower. Someone who follows you and is governed by logic is fairly predictable so long as you know their goals. Someone who is governed by their emotions can never be trusted with much power as they could switch their allegiance or focus due to exogenous factors outside of their control.
- If all partners in a relationship operate off logic and have aligned goals, only a lack of communication or information asymmetries will produce discord. When partners are governed by emotional states, disagreements can arise for which there is no resolution. An extreme example of this we have seen a few times arises when one partner treats the other cruelly because they had a dream in which their partner did something that angered them. How could you ever trust someone to be there for you if they would retaliate against you for something that only happened in their imagination?
There is a point which seems to come up in every one of our books that we must emphasize. Inside Out is a movie, not reality. Indulging in an emotion like anger or sadness is not “healthy.” Every time an individual indulges in an emotion, that emotional path gets strengthened and it becomes harder to resist in the future. For example, if an individual punches a punching bag after getting angry they will end up angrier than if they distracted themselves or did nothing.[[28]](#_ftn28)
Why do some cultures promote “mental harmony” between all the little voices in their heads? Mostly because it’s easy. This ideal mental landscape is typically only found in soft cultures. Most hard cultures—even those often mugged of their traditions and aesthetics by “spiritual” people, like Jainism and Buddhism—promote authoritarian mental landscapes (you only get things like Sokushinbutsu or Sallekhana, starving oneself to death, in a culture promoting self-control).