The reptilian brain gets us into more trouble than any other feature of the human body (except maybe for one little part, Gentle Reader!). By reptilian brain I am of course referring to the amygdala, that small almond-shaped base in the back of the brain. It is little different from the brains of reptiles and other "lower" animals. It is the organ of instinct, fear, fight or flight, comfort and survival. The more evolved parts of the brain, that involve calculation, reason, aesthetics, spirituality, ethics and compassion are also weaker than the amygdala, which has been around longer, way longer, at least five hundred million years longer than all that high-falutin culture, enlightenment and education crap. If the amygdala has a music playlist, it would be made up entirely of selections of heavy metal, rap and country and maybe Wagnerian opera.
The amygdala should be happy and well cared for if it isn't going to interfere with the more recently evolved, higher functioning areas of the brain. Civilization and culture tend to flourish at their best when everyone is safe, well-fed and housed and there don't happen to be any wars pending. Progressive and liberal democracies are more likely to do well during the good times. But when things get wonky, when there are terrorist attacks and a tanking economy, and when inequality becomes the normal state of affairs within populations, this is when the amygdala gets itchy, nervous and begins to twitch like a debutante on her first dance.
I have mentioned in an earlier blogpost that conservatives, republicans and populist fascists all have a larger than average amygdala. This is what makes it impossible to reason with these kind of people. Reptilian brain with all its most basic and instinctive drives becomes too loud, too active and too powerful to pay attention to the sissy know-it-all higher cerebral functions. Whether you are a BC Liberal Party supporter, a Federal Conservative, or, (worse) an American Republican, or (worse still) a supporter of President Dump, the Great Deplorable in the Oval Office, or a white supremist, it is going to be an exercise in pure futility trying to rationally convince you of the error of your ways, the idiocy and complete lack of coherent logic to your belief system, and you are still not going to get it, you are not going to listen, you will likely yell insults in my face and maybe punch me as well.
The evolution of culture and the development of civilization for the human species has been a long and slow process after tens of thousands of years of our ancestors living in survival mode. For most of the troubled history of human civilization, people have been ruled and dominated by absolute monarchs, priests, despots and tyrants by fear, threat and terror. Rule by Amygdala. During times of war, famine or natural disaster or economic and environmental collapse it is the amygdala that rules and everyone scrambles for survival and then watch things get ugly.
Whether you were in Medieval Spain or living among the Mexica, your life would have been completely run by the collective amygdala of the culture you lived in and the sense of threat and imminence of death you were living under would have kept your own personal amygdala big, healthy, strapping and throbbing.
Trauma liberates the amygdala while impairing the brain's higher functions. It can take years to rebalance the brain for trauma survivors, who whether like me you are a survivor of childhood abuse, or whether you live in Colombia and are just beginning your long and delicate recovery from the collective trauma that was inflicted on your country by half a century of civil war.
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