There is no real awareness that Behavioral Science even exists, until we have eliminated the faith in impressions, which in their turn generate impulses.
This is very simply done, so that it’s just a question of if you want to become a fledgling scientist, or remain a very expert and experienced fool.
Watch a person, preferably an adult, in a video-clip, making sure (the first few times) it isn’t of a person you have an emotional investment in.
It doesn’t have to be a video you have made. It can even be a clip of an actor acting out his part, if you have nothing more spontaneous.
Then review the footage you have selected using only your conscious. Look at it in your memory, in other words, so that now you have seen it twice: once with your eyes and once with your “inner eye”. You can do this “inner eye” review again a few times, if your memory is willing.
And be sure to take this step, from one single viewing by eye, to a next review trusting your memory. Shorten the footage as required if you find it’s too difficult. (Soon you’ll be working magic even with still images, so short is good.)
And only when you feel that you have reviewed the footage in memory, perhaps more than once, do you go on to the next step, which is to see the actual footage again with your eyes.
What this is about is Learning More. Behavioral Science is the science of Learning More, from the same thing. Einstein said that a crazy person is one who repeats the same thing expecting new results. He had no business teaching psych!
Will memory allow us to learn more by mental review? Or is memory the impossibility of learning more by review; does memory simplify the footage and at the same time consider it completely understood, so that you just want to go on from there as if you have been perceptive?
The more often you find yourself seeing more when you see (by eye) a segment of footage a next time, the more you begin to understand how society operates. It operates by going on from having made an impression.
Society loves crowding, confusion, distraction. How do you study one person in a crowd? In a crowd he can more easily make an impression, because there are so many people, all addicted to the crowding, eager to make impressions.
It’s like a poor dancer. Put him on the stage and his lack of grace and choreography becomes obvious. But any fool can seem like a dancer on a crowded floor.
Crowds of people are an unnatural social complication. We are a family ape species. Passing dozens or hundreds of people on your way someplace is not good for the social acumen. Population is actually ugliness, and ugliness is actually population!
See each ugly individual and it’s rather the same as seeing the ugly crowd as a whole. Any one of the ugly people is the head of this monster. The ugliness is how useful it is to have it impossible to really devote attention to each other, and how useful it is to be the one least likely to be noticed until you switch on your high beams and go into your most energetic act.
A lovely person, which is a natural one, has no such option as to decide to be noticed only when he (or she, of course) demands to be. No matter how inconspicuous the lovelier person tries to be, everyone else has to fixate on him. Take a context: shoplifting, for example. The lovely person is never being ignored! Conversely, the ugly person has to shout, “Hey, buddy! I’m shoplifting here!”, so he becomes a kleptomaniac.
This means ugliness is bliss! It is self-indulgence mania, leading to needing the “help” of every “expert”. It is making problems, which in turn makes “experts” who hope you are never cured of self-abuse because they all rely on repeat business.
Ugliness is a congenial inability to resist impulses, which are the consequences of impressions. Reading deception is reading ugliness while an effort is being made to dissemble or mask it. One is lovely always, but one is ugly only until one turns on the charm. That’s power! I became this ugly, but no one has ever seen me ugly!
Demanding attention strategically is like a President: “Hi, this is me!” (coked to the gills for the occasion like a pop-idol; no piss-test in this race; cocaine is like when a midget on the basketball Court is wearing four-foot elevating shoes: sure he fits in! Dunk it, Stretch! “Paranoid Arrogance” is how BS describes the behavioral signs).
Helplessly attracting attention leaves no room socially for turning that attentiont on and off at will. The Lovely person is unique in not having this Power! —and so he tends to not realize that everyone else does have it.
An ugly person is by nature rejected by a lovely one, and must fight the awareness of this snub by exploiting an impression of the lovely person. Obsessively seeking that impression keeps the distinction from asserting itself. Usually the impression serves as a voodoo doll, effigy of contempt, or a surrogate for dominant mounting.
Loveliness is most human, and can be most elaborately trained and educated, but ugliness is power; and power is all about applying will to how comparisons are made, so that they are not made by the measure of humanity or neurological health. If you are Lovely and I am ugly, then, I decide that I indulge in the pleasure of you; you satisfy me. And this is done through an image I insist on having of you. My vanity could not survive encountering you otherwise.
(Only when we become true scientists —as opposed to exploiters with licenses; if you want repeat business it pays to be utterly inept— of behavior do we truly make a distinction that precludes others from entertaining images or impressions of us, which is from dominating us. Hower disciplined and lovely we are, we are not different enough from the ugly, in other words, when we can permit the images to eclipse us socially —as what leads the other to his behavior— , and arguing it or fighting over the image being made of us and the attendant behavior won’t serve.
Only becoming spontaneously perceptive of deception and image-forming actually transcends ugliness. The process of rendering the lovely person into the submissive image is realistic enough when it works in practice; ugliness is power, if it is dissembled. It is saying, “You can’t detect my ugliness! That it is physically manifest isn’t enough for you to catch on to it! You are prepared to allow the physical to be contradicted! You watch for the flattery while I am utterly invested in insulting and debasing you!”.
In other words, a perfect lamb does not really trump a defective hyena in a lamb-skin. Only the science of perceiving what is being betrayed by the physical does so.
Leaning the opposite way of the herd needs a door that opens to extend far beyond exploitation, and this is that science at the very cutting edge. The Buffalos were all lovely! You can tell by the stuffed skins in museums! Fat good it does!
Wealth and power do not constitute the only form of social insulation. “A bit hard on the eyes!” —ready to turn on the charisma in brief spurts thereby transmuting the nightmarish jiggling fat into a social steamroller.
The neurosis exhibited when people can’t stand to be alone together, but must have the music and the television going, is about making impressions. Talking is another way to produce a crowding effect when closeted with each other. We might even find that the need to devote private time to tea-rituals and sexual intimacies has the same root.
The more “quality” (as in being rested, refreshed: rest is water on the wilting discovery process) time we devote to reviewing a clip that we have previously consciously disposed of as “seen”, the deeper into the psyche of the person we naturally tend to go (once we have become aware that it isn’t about conscious observation, that it isn’t about remembering the upgraded awareness of the person: only impressions want to accumulate into a mentally retrievable file, so that conditioned memory is where “gulling-delight” establishes things in others).
Is it possible to relate senility to traumatic amnesia? Consider what must happen if we devote more time to impressions, and hence to impulse. If it is one of the impressions contained within the sea of impressions that it is safe to live this way, then what happens (repercussion) is inexplicable and surprising, actually shocking, trauma after trauma.
(And most experts thrive on this and encourage the impulse. Which dominates: that the blind need leaders, or that leaders need people to be blind? The classy version of Southern grits and eggs; “Y’all come back now, heah!”)
The desperation grows with each damage, the gambles grow bolder as the mind becomes slower to acknowledge repercussions, more impulsive. Stifling fears degenerates into liberating new impressions ( leading to more impulses).
It is actually a miracle of sweet, un-traumatic, and unaging living to discover the depth of human repugnance; to actually take the mind (the perception) beyond surprises, beyond impulses.
The Psychology of Perception 