Loretta Graziano Breuning – författare

Do you feel like people are putting you down?The frustration can ruin an otherwise good life. It feels real until you know how the mammal brain works. Animals seek the one-up position to get more food and mating opportunity. Natural selection built a brain that seeks the one-up position as if your life depends on it. You seek it too. This book shows you how to make peace with this frustrating impulse.

SEROTONIN AND SOCIAL POWERThe mammal brain rewards you with the good feeling of serotonin when you gain a position of strength. But the serotonin is soon metabolized and you have to do more to get more. This is why people are so busy seeking social power.Serotonin is not aggression. It’s the calm pleasure of knowing you can meet your needs. Imagine a chimpanzee who dominates its group mates. The chimp may share bananas, but everyone know who’s in charge.We don’t intend to think this way, but our neurochemicals are controlled by brain structures inherited from earlier mammals. When you understand the social rivalry of the animal world, you can navigate the social rivalry in your world. This book shows you how:

Our appetite for social power is as natural as our appetite for food and sex. In fact, social comparison is more primal that food and sex because an animal always compares its strength to others before reaching for a reward.It’s not easy being mammal! You may say you’re for “equality,” but if you filled a room with people who said that, a status hierarchy would soon form based on how hard each person insists. That’s what mammals do! If you're upset about this all the time, you will ruin your life. You can learn to accept yourself and others. You can enjoy life as a mammal among mammals.

n the human world, we give this primal impulse many names: pride, ego, self-confidence, assertiveness, competitiveness, arrogance, one-upping, status, power, importance, dominance, manipulativeness, being special, as well as getting respect, approval, or attention. We see it critically when others seek social power, but when we seek it ourselves, or our herd-mates seek it, we think we’re just trying to survive.The mammal brain cannot process language so it can't tell your verbal brain why it feels this way. Your mammal brain and your verbal brain are literally not on speaking terms. When you understand the mammal brain, you can find your power over your serotonin.The point is not that we should seek social power. The point is that we do, and we suffer over minutia as a result. You can learn to stimulate your serotonin without being a jerk. But you have to get real about your impulses to do that.Mammals live in groups for protection from predators, but group life is frustrating. You see others get better mating opportunity and foraging spots. It feels like a threat to your survival, which triggers cortisol (the stress chemical).Your brain strives urgently to relieve cortisol and stimulate serotonin. It loves whatever works. “Junk status” works. You may find yourself addicted to habits that boost your social power in the short run but harm you in the long run. This book helps free you from such addictions. 

You care about the greater good, but you want to define it for yourself. What if you disagree with the politically correct view?

You fear ridicule, shunning and attack, so you tell yourself it’s not worth it and find a way to conform. Until one day you can’t.

I was politically correct until the day I heard myself lie about a simple fact because the truth didn’t sound progressive. I froze– in the middle of a lecture to 150 students. Enough! I decided to take back my brain. I gave myself permission to see what I see and know what I know instead of living in fear. It cost me, but the benefits outweighed the costs. Here is the story of my transition. You can do it too.

This book shows you how:

What do I mean by Political Correctness?     I do not mean the hot-button dramas that fill the headlines. They are just tribal solidarity rituals. I mean the belief that we are suffering under a “bad system.” Political correctness trains you to feel victimized by bad guys running the bad system, and to fight them by following the leaders of political correctness. If you follow, you get to be one of the good guys and share in the rewards that these leaders control. If you don’t follow, you are labelled a bad guy and excommunicated.

This message is so pervasive that we take it for granted. I only questioned it after decades of noticing a gap between the facts of my life and the politically correct dogma. I saw that the good guys are not all good and the bad guys are not all bad. I tried to overlook the inconvenient facts because I feared excommunication. But when I had kids, I saw how harmful it is for children to be taught that they’re powerless victims. I did not want my kids to blame their frustrations on bad guys and “the system.” I wanted them to believe in themselves instead of just following the lead of political correctness.

It’s hard to leave the world view that has shaped your life. I searched for alternatives, but after all I’d been through, I could not embrace another preconceived belief system. I looked for answers that fit reality as I’d lived it. My search led to amazing research on the social behavior of animals. This showed me that political correctness is biological. The brain chemicals that make us feel good are inherited from earlier mammals. They reward us for behaviors that promote survival in the state of nature. Political correctness stimulates your reward chemicals in primal ways.

I’m not saying we’re hard-wired. On the contrary, our neurons are not connected at birth. We connect them from life experience, and these connections make us who we are. Early experience wires you to expect rewards and pain in ways that happened before. Political correctness wires you to expect rewards and pain in specific ways. It’s hard to re-wire yourself after the neuroplasticity of youth, which is why people cling to political correctness even when they see its flaws.

I finally ripped off the PC goggles and looked at the world without them. You can say I haven’t escaped political correctness because it’s still there. But I have stopped filtering reality through the lens built by the gatekeepers of political correctness. I have learned to focus on the pleasure of my own choices instead of on solidarity with suffering. You can rip off the PC goggles and enjoy your own choices too. You’ll be glad you did!

Our happy chemicals are inherited from earlier mammals. They reward you for behaviors that promote survival in the state of nature. Humans have always struggled to manage these impulses. Here''s the history of today''s struggle that you haven''t heard.

Contents

1. The Joy of Revolt

2. The Religion of Revolt

3. What Harm Can in a Little Revolt Do?

4. Overlooked Information

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