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“I got it,” he said. The guy in the otherwise empty classroom snapped his dark brown fingers like he was Einstein, having finally pieced together the proper equation with an E and an M and a C in it. “You’re c-c-c-culturally black.” He leaned back into his chair, crossing his arms and nodding approval at his own ability to maintain an insane worldview in which white people simply had to be more privileged than minorities, even if that meant turning me into one—despite my pale skin and a set of baby-blues that would get a nod from Sinatra.

Tyrone was a black guy seven years my junior. He had a stutter like a faulty version of one of those heart-shaped quarter beds in stuffy velvet wrapped honeymoon suites. He was veteran, having been some non-deployable MOS in the Air Force that allowed him to do a four-year stint basically in the backyard of the town in which he had grown up, where he happened to have been raised by a white lady who adopted him, who happened to be an unmarried psychologist—hence the major we both shared.

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I recently finished a novel by B. F. Skinner, who is perhaps the most famous behavioral psychologist of all time. If you’ve ever taken so much as a survey course in psychology, you will have heard his name—likely with the term “operant conditioning” following closely behind. Skinner spent over half a century exploring the ways in which, with the right incentive structures, you can turn animals into regular circus performers—manipulating them into conducting the most odd and unexpected acts.

He trained rats to solve puzzles and play a version of rodent basketball. He trained pigeons to make art and to square off against each other in pigeon ping-pong matches. He proved against a shadow of a doubt that with enough patience and knowledge of a creature’s reward systems, you could compel it to do just about anything, regardless of how bizarre and unnatural. You probably know all of this, though.

What you might not know—what your overpriced textbooks and underwhelming professors didn’t teach you—was that Burrhus Frederic Skinner was also an inventor with a penchant for putting living things into boxes as well as a utopian novelist who would (in the book’s preface) place Karl Marx beside Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius in a list of “great men who are said to have made a difference in human affairs.” More importantly, you are almost certainly unaware of the extent to which B. F. Skinner’s work is leveraged against you on a daily basis.

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I NEED A HERO:

Everyone loves a hero. It’s the reason people will shell out twenty bucks to sit through a three-hour movie in sticky, vinyl-wrapped chairs that haven’t been properly cleaned in God knows how long. It’s one of the reasons that guys lose track of hours, or even days, after a new Fallout, Diablo, or some other video game drops. It’s why my sons harangue me to read just one more chapter—then another—of a good book, and it’s likely the reason I almost always say yes. If there’s a story that’s deeper than the Hero’s Journey, I haven’t found it yet.

Deep stories serve a purpose. They grip us. They reach down right into our nether regions and grab us by the archetypes. When they let go, we walk a little funny at first, but we emerge slightly changed as a result. That’s because the Hero’s Journey is more than just a story to enjoy—it’s an adventure by proxy. It allows us to travel alongside a fictional character in abstraction and, somehow, to return with gold/wisdom/talismans of our own without ever having to step physical foot onto a proper pathway.

Humans need heroes. They always have. The Sumerians and Babylonians had Gilgamesh. The Greeks had Odysseus. Tolkien brought the post-war world the small-but-mighty hobbits and—when I was a kid—Rowling penned a staircase-dwelling orphan that happened to take us all to wizarding school, and save the world in the process. These stories didn’t find success so much as they filled a need—they satisfied a cultural hunger. Without them, a culture becomes emaciated, thin, weak, and easily pushed over in the direction desired by whoever is doing the pushing.

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More often than I care to admit, I’m struck by the absurd realization that human beings are civilized versions of chimpanzees. I’ll be sitting at an outdoor restaurant eating with my family, talking about things, and watching water fountain jets set to popular music, when a couple of women will walk by holding stiff-sided shopping bags. Then a thought will appear in my head, unabetted and unwanted: that shaved primate just bought a new pair of designer jeans. I’ll look around as if expecting to see someone else having the same thought at the same moment, but thankfully, no one ever does.

Then, a waiter will walk past, carrying a basket of freshly baked bread, and set it down in the middle of a neighboring table. I’ll continue to watch for a few more moments as every pair of eyes at the table dart to the bread. Just for a moment, you can see the primate flash across the faces of a few of them—that desire to grab, to get, to gorge—but none of them, at least this time, give into it. They’ve learned to suppress their simpler urges, which is no surprise. They are at a restaurant, after all, and we rightly kick the people who don’t learn to push down their primate urges out of our civilized-great-ape game—or at least that’s what a functioning society does.

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Studying personality psychology is as useful as it is annoying. It’s useful because it allows you to realize that people actually differ in how they view and experience the world. It’s annoying because it requires you to reconsider that the chatty Kathies of the world who claim to enjoy horrid things like corporate Christmas parties and small talk aren't full of shit. Somehow, in a way that I can never fully understand, the Kathies are telling the truth.

That’s because the world manifests itself differently for people with different personalities—same world, different worldviews. To an extrovert, it's a place of social opportunity and novel experiences. To a disagreeable person, it's a place to compete for what you want. Creative people see it as a place to make new things, even if it requires breaking the old ones. Conservative people disagree, seeing it as a place to maintain what we’ve been given. All of them are right—some of the time.

It seems to me that a functioning community is built of opposing personalities. Introverts oppose extroverts. Creatives square off with conservatives. Optimists have pessimists. Leaders have followers—and so on. However, instead of this oppositional nature justifying endless in-fighting and calamity though, it can have a balancing effect on society as a whole. The problem is when it becomes imbalanced.

SOCIETY AS A ROWBOAT:

Human beings are both individually conscious and social creatures, which means we exist at two levels simultaneously. We are singular entities, completely separate from other people, as well as members of a community. As a result of this, we have to learn to cycle between the individual and the collective—something that we rarely do well. More often, we find ourselves pegging the needle to either extreme. It can take decades for a person to learn to how do this well. It takes a community longer still but how long does a society take to get the balance right? Centuries? Millennia? A better question might be how long does it take for a society that has by some miracle managed to balance the individual and the collective to devolve into something akin to a dysfunctional rowboat—the crew working against one another, lacking a shared destination, and destined to sink?

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Let me borrow your internal movie maker for a bit. I’ll give it back, I promise. I want you to envision a war room. Put it inside a tent. There should be a huge map sprawled on top of a big table surrounded by hard men. What type of warriors are they? Horse-riding Samurai? Anglo-Saxons in heavy, jingling mail? Modern Spec-Ops guys kitted out in plate carriers and FAST helmets? It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they’re all gathered around, analyzing the enemy’s position, and that at least one of them is smoking a pipe.

Picture one of the men closer to the table—preferably not the pipe smoker—pressing a dusty finger onto the map. He might be pointing at a gate, a tunnel, or any building in particular. It doesn’t make much of a difference, so long as he’s indicating a spot that an enemy would have a hell of a time defending, monitoring, and/or restricting access to. Now, imagine him speaking up, probably in a higher-pitched voice than you might have otherwise expected.

“Here’s the weakest point in the enemy’s position—the place where they’re the most vulnerable.” A few heads nod. There are a couple of grunts of agreement as the others see it, too. So, he carries on. “Then, by all means—and at all costs—we should avoid it because, you know, vulnerability is strength.” The room goes quiet.

I picture him standing up a bit taller, convinced that what he just said is both profound and useful. In my mind, he’s smacking fruit-flavored gum while everyone else in the tent is trying to wrap their heads around the nonsense that came out of his mouth. Finally, someone breaks the silence—it’s the guy with the pipe.

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You can fit somewhere in the ballpark of fifty baby Gordian worms (commonly referred to as horsehair worms) onto the average pinhead. They’re so small that Mayfly larvae, which are tiny themselves, accidentally ingest them while hanging out—doing larvae stuff—in the water—where both creatures start out their life. Once a baby Gordian gets swallowed, it burrows down into the Mayfly’s insides. There, it waits, content to not become too much of a bother. That’s because Gordian worms aren’t after Mayflies. Instead, like Machiavelli himself, they play the long game.          

Mayflies aren’t considered adults until after they gain their wings—which, if the old adage holds up, occurs just about every time a homeless person pisses through a sewer grate (every time a sewer grate rings, a mayfly gets its wings, or so the legend says). Once they become winged, which can take up to two years, they escape from the water and fly into the air as free as can be for the next day or so. Then they die—o…

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