The
Emotional
Prison

Individual and Societal Health
in the Philosophical-Psychology Domain

Before delving into the conception of the Emotional Prison’s objective properties and subjective characteristics, which may seem to bring a level of metaphysical abstractness and uncertainty (as well as a mentalist or phenomenological view of behavior) into the equation, it is important to establish some further grounding points: First, to maintain the necessary psychological model flexibility, the term Emotional Prison and the subcategorizations Levels One and Two allows and/or tolerates a neutral position regarding epiphenomenalism. Oxford Reference defines epiphenomenalism as “an approach to the mind-body problem that is a form of dualism and one-way interactionism, assuming as it does that mental experiences are real but are merely trivial by-products or epiphenomena of one particular class of physical brain processes, real but incidental, like the smoke rising above a factory, so that physical processes can cause mental experiences but not vice versa.”¹ This built-in toleration of epiphenomenal neutrality is strategic. As a positioned natural law, the theory of Emotional Warfare is premised as weakly emergent (maintaining relational mind-to-matter capacity or weak downward causation), while the Philosophy of One Divide works more broadly from its strategic metaphilosophical position. This allows some folk-psychology terminology and notions about the mind to operate alongside the platform while understanding the general premise of modern arguments that minds (similar to notions of a true self) are at bottom “useful fiction.”² This toleration and affordance provided by the platform could be considered a meta-strategic move — a strategy within a strategy.

Secondly, this refinement of the original foundational framework and philosophical literature aims to bring the first eight Building Blocks into a coherent whole, establishing concrete understanding of Emotional Warfare’s gestalt and its metaphysical attributes by moving non-observable theoretical terms into observational language and/or empirical language, e.g., separating metaphysics from science or separating metaphysical questions from scientific questions, as demonstrated by the sociohistorical progression of philosophy and psychology, which I have outlined as intellectual transitions. To varying degrees, these transitions share philosophical parlance with Kuhn’s notion that, as summarized by Bird, “the methods developed in one era may indeed generate knowledge, including knowledge that some previous era got certain matters wrong, or right but only to a certain degree. A naturalized epistemology may add that science itself is in the business of investigating and developing methods. As science develops we would expect its methods to change and develop also.”³

This central aim of helping readers understand the Building Blocks as a coherent whole — which, in a purposive manner, incorporates separating metaphysics from science and using empirical language to elucidate the Blocks’ axioms and interconnectedness — allows the One Divide methodology a metaphysical neutrality, which I capture via the Philosophy of One Divide’s dual metaphysical anchoring. This attribute of the platform will come into full focus through the construction of the emotional paradigm(s) and recreated emotional paradigm(s) intergenerationally, individually, and interpersonally generated in the Building Block of the Emotional Prison, which contains the metaphysical anchor points denoted as the Emotional Prison Level One and Level Two.

In summary, I have purposively chosen the language Emotional Prison (Levels One and Two) for accessibility and universality in practical and sociopolitical application, and as a strong intellectual conduit that funnels metatheoretical and clinical information for efficacious explanation and utility in a multitude of settings or philosophical-psychological fields and subfields.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn asserts that there are “important shifts in the meanings of key terms as a consequence of a scientific revolution.”⁴ However, from a Kuhnian “normal science” perspective, the terminology of the Emotional Prison and of all the Building Blocks, beyond their individual and combined attributes, algorithmic sequencing and algorithmic information, creates a lexical and taxonomical network generated by the sociohistorical traditions of the philosophy of science, within the intellectual transitions in the domain of philosophy that have informed and built the foundation of modern (and future) psychological understandings. This taxonomy captures a law of nature that both describes and governs the natural world. Consider the tension between regularity theory and necessitarian theory involving laws of nature:

Within metaphysics, there are two competing theories of Laws of Nature. On one account, the Regularity Theory, Laws of Nature are statements of the uniformities or regularities in the world; they are mere descriptions of the way the world is. On the other account, the Necessitarian Theory, Laws of Nature are the “principles” which govern the natural phenomena of the world. That is, the natural world “obeys” the Laws of Nature. This seemingly innocuous difference marks one of the most profound gulfs within contemporary philosophy, and has quite unexpected, and wide-ranging, implications.

Some of these implications involve accidental truths, false existentials, the correspondence theory of truth, and the concept of free will. Perhaps the most important implication of each theory is whether the universe is a cosmic coincidence or driven by specific, eternal laws of nature. Each side takes a different stance on each of these issues, and to adopt either theory is to give up one or more strong beliefs about the nature of the world.⁵

The theory of Emotional Warfare and its elemental Building Blocks satisfy both theories in one capacity or another, capturing both the “way-the-world-is” and the “way-the-world-must-be,” and both what is and what is not known about the world or the universe. As such, the terms Emotional Prison and its Levels One and Two work dynamically to articulate the intra-interplay of Emotional Warfare’s Pattern(s) and their effects both as a description (i.e., regularist view) and in terms of governance (i.e., necessitarian view), as the Emotional Prison houses the causal-deterministic properties and attributes that are bound to and derivative of Emotional Survival. In this symbolic meaning-making gesture, this Block maintains metaphysical neutrality via its unique dual focus (or anchor points) and through its structuring as an intellectual conduit that tolerates epiphenomenal neutrality, allowing for a folk-psychology perspective and universally accessible phraseology by means of “useful fiction.”

With that established, the Emotional Prison is defined as the psychological or functional mental state of being stuck in one’s False Self agency and efficacy — and therefore entrapped within or psychologically governed by Emotional Warfare’s interplay as well as the repeated cycle and underlying cycle(s) of self-abandonment found in the Building Blocks of the EBSS and Perceived Security — without access to the True Self and emotional freedom.

This Block is the culmination and ultimately the gestalt of all the Building Blocks that comprise the Pattern(s) of Emotional Warfare. It advances — or simply moves beyond — common tropes describing inner conflict and phrases such as “fighting against oneself,” “battling oneself,” “being one’s own worst enemy,” or in general, “feeling trapped.” These concepts are often presented or metaphorically and/or symbolically expressed in folk psychology, in cognitive behavior therapies, and in psychoanalytic approaches that use terminology such as “being imprisoned” by ego-centric desires (consider the intellectual transitions such as from Plato’s tripartite model to Freud’s tripartite model). They also appear in Jung’s archetypal shadow and collective unconscious and phenomenological notions that involve another or others (e.g., Hurssel’s “Other”). All of these approaches describe the friction points between the private and public self-narratives, self-concepts, or projected self-images that are part of the gamification of identity.

The key to the Building Block of the Emotional Prison is its full interconnectedness with all of the previous Building Blocks. Vital anchor points in the preceding Blocks tether the Emotional Prison to physicalist views (or the natural sciences) and discipline-oriented technical concepts (e.g., descriptions of brain structures, neural networks and how they fire, psychological diagnosis, etc.) in a manner that accommodates (or tolerates, depending on one’s philosophical stance) phenomenological or mentalist positions.

This accommodation comes from approaching this domain with the understanding that the brain, whose operation is imperfectly descriptive, turns its own mental modeling capabilities inward, creating the ability for introspection (i.e., meta-cognitive moves) and providing access to imprinted (and/or reinforced) internal data. Stepping into a more generalizable, nontechnical understanding for a moment, experiences and lessons imprint in the brain in ways that make them easy to access. As is well understood, the brain has an innate pattern-seeking orientation (e.g., recall Mattson’s hypothesis that superior pattern processing is the neurobiological foundation of human sociocultural evolution) and it acts as an information-processing device.⁶ It houses all of the previous Building Blocks and operates by means of mental models it establishes, applying those models to sensory input that informs intrapsychic perceptions of a “self” (e.g., a private self) and to sensory perceptions relating to external stimuli (e.g., awareness of one’s own public self and social awareness or the perception of another self or other selves). As generally understood and accepted, both of these involve the brain’s approximate — “quick and dirty” and/or schematic, as opposed to precise — processing of information and the subjective experience of that processing. That experience or the brain’s model of it is understood as consciousness; consider the global workspace theory of consciousness (GW),⁷ the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT),⁸ Graziano’s mechanistic theory of consciousness,⁹ the attention schema theory, and the ongoing philosophical questions aimed at understanding the origins of consciousness, as well as the ongoing evolution of the human brain itself, which recent research verifies — for example, two genes thought to regulate human brain growth have continued to evolve under natural selection until recently and perhaps are still doing so today.¹⁰ Incidentally, this type of research works alongside the idea that Emotional Warfare is symbiotic with the evolution of homo sapiens and of the human brain and its functionalist attributes as demonstrated through the nine Building Blocks. (*For further discussion of the ongoing evolutionary developments of Emotional Warfare within the human species, see the Emotional Warfare Essay Collection, Vol. 1, Appendix D, “Evolution of Emotional Warfare and the False Self: Addressing Modern Advancements in the Fields of Psychology and Neuroscience.”)

Philosophically speaking, considering the workings of the brain through the lens of natural law allows descriptive articulations to capture the human experience of the Pattern of Emotional Warfare’s visceral and emotional effects (on both individual and collective levels) while remaining tethered to the scientific and to the clinical and practical usefulness necessary for a universal and unified platform to operate effectively. The conception of the Emotional Prison works in practical and sociopolitical domains by avoiding a metaphysical abstractness that can involve suppositions — which aren’t tied to secure naturalistic anchor points — so it does not float too far into the mysterious, mystical, or ineffable, becoming useless and unhelpful to improving the human condition.

In this manner, the seemingly formless and yet qualitatively evidentiary pervasiveness of Emotional Warfare’s Building Blocks and their attributes takes shape within the purposefully generalized terminology and detailed theoretical conception of the Emotional Prison, which is designed to encapsulate all of the attributes in a symbolically understandable and technically contextualizable way. This allows the brain to quickly model the ideas and come to understand them with more refined technicality and accuracy, taking into account the cognitive spectrum that humans operate within and the continued evolution of the human brain.

Consider One Divide’s widened form of realizer functionalism here; as outlined in the Essay Collection, Vol. 1, it is grounded in physicalism (or materialism) while accommodating — via the intellectual conduits that each Building Block provides — the subjective or intersubjective facts or perspectives involving areas generally considered inaccessible to science, working alongside the view that nature comes in a hierarchy of levels (i.e., a natural teleology), with each level’s function dependent on the structure or form of the level below. For further reference to my word choice in the Emotional Prison’s Levels One and Two, and for greater philosophical distinction, consider Lycan’s homuncular functionalism or his hegemony of representation.¹¹

The Emotional Prison’s two levels are (1) inward or intrapsychic, and (2) outward or intersubjective and/or interpersonal. Both of these contribute to the interplay of Emotional Warfare in a manner that can be described, putting variations and nuances to the theory of functionalism aside, as a dualistically metaphysical form of functionalism.

Before moving more deeply into the conception of the Emotional Prison, it is important to note that my specific use of the functional expression Emotional Prison as an integral component of Emotional Warfare’s Pattern also signifies the intellectual constraints on any finite rational agent (e.g., the human person), affecting whether or not they can reach conclusive empirical or fully factual theses on issues pertaining to the metaphysical. In the conceptualization of the Emotional Prison and its dualistically metaphysical functionalism, I account for the metaphysical with full, practical, and pragmatic awareness of post-metaphysical views, as well as the concerns of individual psychological health and well-being and additional social attributes of the individual such as rationality in relation to participation in the public sphere, which includes ethics and public and/or civil engagement (consider Habermas).¹²

The Building Block of the Emotional Prison, Level One and Level Two, not only brings the field of Emotional Warfare into physical space-time through the temporal (i.e., observable) human person and the actions of the individual and between people, moving the Building Blocks of Emotional Warfare as abstract objects toward concrete understanding, but establishes the inextricable linkage between the theory of Emotional Warfare and the Philosophy of One Divide. This linkage creates two focus territories: (1) the hyper-focus of the theoretical framework of Emotional Warfare and its Pattern(s) on the individual human person, while remaining consistent with modern theory, and (2) the Philosophy of One Divide’s overarching focus on the collective human species. Together, these two elements make a comprehensive philosophical psychology and psychopathology framework that spans collectivism and individualism.

Level One: Inward Emotional Warfare (IEW)

The person doesn’t realize that they are trapped in a False Self, that Perceived Security is ultimately self-defeating, or that the Hidden Agenda will not give them what they need — both are malnourishing to the goal of the True Self state of being that has yet to be optimized or known (to either the individual or others). Because Perceived Security does not actually address the needs of the True Self, the True Self eventually begins to push for its own wishes — emotional freedom and authenticity in the person’s individualized positive (+) energetic qualities of the masculine (A) and feminine (B) emotional traits — through its own voice, no matter how seldom the person has heard it or how subtle the message is. In response, the False Self wages Emotional Warfare against the True Self through an individualized False Self strategy of Inward Emotional Warfare that takes the shape of a self-induced language game — which includes combinations of both false positive (e.g., self-inflation techniques or egoic self-concepts, grandiose narrative identities, narcissistic notions, etc., which may generate Perceived Security) and direct negative feedback loops that reinforce the False Self’s utilization of EBSS of the Inflated A and/or Inflated B, all taking place in the fluid, multidynamic manner that the EBSS’s flexible binary spectrum allows. This game, adding behavioral complexity to both the psychoanalytic entanglement and gamification of identity, utilizes predictive or familiar emotional positions and psychological states grounded in past and present events or situational dynamics to prevent the intuitive True Self from gaining executive power or functioning or a level of cathexis in the decision-making process and thereby pushing the reactive False Self out.

The mental state of the Emotional Prison Level One, which houses the interior, intrapsychic conflict of the individual, produces physiological and visceral effects — and can be caused by them (e.g., brain injuries, psychosis, cognitive impairment or decline), or conversely by physiological and visceral effects caused by another or others through the intra-interplay of Emotional Warfare and various Tactics. See Level Two for more contextualization of this notion. The Emotional Prison Level One is responsible for negative psychological attributes and emotional cycles (and the generation of false positives or ego inflation) within the individual and for the inner speech and ongoing dialogue between the True Self and the False and between the voices that house and reflect the characteristics of the EBSS, Inflated A and Inflated B. The depth of an individual’s Emotional Prison Level One (or, philosophically speaking, the thickness of the Emotional Prison’s walls constructed within the interior emotional realm or psyche that the brain produces) is directly related to the unavoidable Broken Trust event and subsequent levels of Emotional Desperation that the False Self, as an internal and outward-facing coping/defense mechanism seen in tandem with the brain’s information- and/or sense-processing system, is always operating and reacting to (whether unconsciously, unconsciously, or consciously, and whether in the natural physical world that contains material objects or its substrate, e.g., elements within the natural world that are atomically or subatomically categorized).

Level Two: Outward Emotional Warfare (OEW)

The person realizes the private True Self is trapped by a False Self and tries to break out and live publicly in the True Self, but meets opposition from others, who find their own Perceived Security threatened by the person’s efforts to live authentically — or outside of the deterministic emotional paradigms that are either self-constructed or imposed around the person. These others — those people who comprise the social forces (and house the same elemental Building Blocks of Emotional Warfare) and give voice to existing language games and/or maneuver within language games to speak of “what’s to come” (consider the justification systems, rationalizations, and/or forms of storytelling that supply political rhetoric, sciences, religions or ideologies, justice systems, etc., as well as “reinforcement” in Darwinian and Skinnarian paradigms or in views held in the connectionist neural model networks) — then wage Emotional Warfare against the individual to varying degrees, usually forcing them back into the Emotional Prison Level One. (The overall effect of the Emotional Prison Level Two on the individual is dependent on the person’s emotional fortitude or psychological constitution and the depths of their Emotional Prison Level One — potentially contributing to and/or producing physiological and visceral effects.) This sociopolitical friction point between Level Two and Level One can occur between individuals or, on a larger scale, sociologically, politically, economically, and so on as the individual navigates the social structures or cultures that define and/or shape conceptions of the ways of being, self, identity, and even society that are deemed to be normal or not normal, acceptable or not acceptable — and that determine one’s level of acceptance, belonging, status, and identity. It is important to note that the individual and the collective — and the Emotional Prison Levels One and Two — are interdependent; neither the individual nor society is a closed system. Here in Level Two, working in tandem with Level One, is where Emotional Warfare Patterns’ interplay between the individual and another or others (or society) takes shape both on and within the field of Emotional Warfare. This friction point between Level One and Level Two inhibits individual autonomy, adds to the paradox of security versus freedom (the dichotomy between individualism and collectivism and within the approaches of humanistic and social psychology), and gives Emotional Warfare a place in the concept of intersectionality, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.”¹³

When a person tries to explore any of the Building Blocks’ interconnected attributes, the False Self will instinctually react, out of its drive for self-preservation. If the individual can recognize and work through the False Self’s resistance as they explore each of the Building Blocks and move toward a life of balance and a unique emotional equilibrium — security in freedom — the person will find meaningful answers and an individual and collective truth (similar to, but distinct from, Jung’s collective unconscious).¹⁴ They will discover a separation of the physical and spiritual worlds rather than a disparity between them, revealing a dual agency and the distinction between the purposes of the True Self and False Self. This allows the person to operate within a Reversed Cycle, which occurs when one is governed by the positive energetic qualities, traits, and attributes of one’s True Self’s agency, rather than a repeated cycle, where one is governed by the negative energetic qualities, traits, and attributes of one’s False Self’s agency. (Note: One Divide’s utilization of a Reversed Cycle concept and use of “positive” terms are not to be confused with “positive psychology” or the idea of positive thinking as found in generalized psychotherapeutic approaches or self-help genres.)

Ultimately, within the full contextualization of the Philosophy of One Divide, this leads to acceptance of the principle of True Self agency and the deontological imperative as a means to an end — that is, to evolve beyond False Self agency. With widespread awareness and application, this will move society away from conflict and toward human unity.

As first outlined in Book 3, Identification of the Pattern of Emotional Warfare (2015), a key to understanding the identification process for the Pattern of Emotional Warfare is to have an open and unbiased worldview of mankind’s obsession with Perceived Security and of the complexes of psychoanalytic entanglement and the gamification of identity that are central to the evolution of Emotional Warfare within the human species. Seeing this clearly, one begins to see how the need for Emotional Survival is the instigator of all human conflict and of Emotional Warfare. With this perspective, one can begin to comprehend how, one day, people could perhaps end or at the very least greatly diminish their obsession with Perceived Security and subsequently their use of Emotional Warfare — and thus human conflict — through the widespread awareness of Emotional Warfare and its Pattern(s). However, one often uncovers a natural bias, which leads to prejudices when looking at another’s or others’ behaviors or attempting to identify the Emotional Warfare user and their underlying Pattern of Emotional Warfare. Additionally, by following the theoretical and scientific principles presented throughout the Philosophy of One Divide to their logical conclusions, one discovers that as all people share a divide, they also all share an Emotional Prison. And, because of this, they become participants (consciously, subconsciously, and/or unconsciously) in each other’s Emotional Prisons Levels One and Two as their False Selves seek out Perceived Security from one another. In simplest terms, people bump up against and become entrapped in one another’s Patterns of Emotional Warfare.

While the Philosophy of One Divide’s principles outlining the Building Blocks that comprise the Pattern(s) of Emotional Warfare are laid out in a very specific fashion, Emotional Warfare’s interplay is ever changing. It evolves just as people continue to adapt to the ever-changing world; as conceptions such as emotional intelligence and social intelligence become more integrated into the intersubjective and socio-subjective realms, so too does Emotional Warfare itself. In this context, conceptions such as emotional intelligence and social intelligence are inadequate; however, when combined with the theory of Emotional Warfare, they are advanced to establish a full spectrum and the abstract intelligence needed to attain the self-expertise that is provided through the Emotional Warfare education and psychotechnology platform. To combat Emotional Warfare on intra- and interpersonal levels and reduce human conflict (even in life’s challenging moments), people must also adapt, gaining crucial emotional and social skills and learning about Emotional Warfare rather than conforming to the interplay of its Patterns, in a manner that conceptions of emotional and social intelligence alone will not accomplish. This evolutionary adaptability is not only a vital element of physical and emotional survival but an absolute necessity in today’s emotion-based world, required to ensure that forward progress creates meaningful change in humanity.

To achieve the individual Reversed Cycle and a greater sense of collective ONEness, many determinate factors surrounding each person — and their introduction to One Divide’s principles and education about Emotional Warfare and the interplay of its Patterns — must be factored into the equation, though Emotional Warfare remains the common denominator. Aside from the individual’s ability to invest the necessary time and energy to achieve a Reversed Cycle, there are inherent constrictions in their logistical access to the information, ability to comprehend the material, curiosity about and willingness to embrace new insight that may differ from the traditional views, emotional fortitude to transform negative habits into positive habits, capacity both to honor and to challenge their cultural identity or ideology when needed, and so on. However, this realistic view of the constraints is more inspiring than daunting. Whether philosophically or psychologically speaking, if there is courage, there is always hope — and stepping beyond pure logic, there are always possibilities.

One Divide: Universal and Unified Method

A Language System for Individual and Collective Human Transformation:
Evolutionary Wisdom and Moral Philosophy

The informational architecture of the Emotional Prison and its subcategories (Level One and Level Two) provides the deeper meta-theoretical design supporting the dual basis and utility of the One Divide/Emotional Warfare platform: the same method that is used to understand intrapsychic Inward Emotional Warfare (IEW) is applied to the interpersonal, sociological, or sociopolitical realms of the human experience, Outward Emotional Warfare (OEW).

One Divide steps outside the subjective and experiential to examine the universal. The platform can therefore require a deep philosophical shift in thought process about one’s biological and psychological constitution. It is a practical self-governing policy designed to improve not only one’s individual condition and character — the positive (+) masculine (A) and feminine (B) emotional traits of the True Self — but the overall human conditions that affect the majority. These conditions metaphorically, and distinctively, produce the conceptualization of the One (emotional) Divide and the objective premises of the universal and unified Method. The Method, crucially, addresses the functional theory of Emotional Warfare not in terms of diagnosis per se (e.g., he or she has Emotional Warfare) but rather in terms of experience (e.g., he or she is experiencing, practicing, and/or suffering Emotional Warfare and its Pattern(s)).

True Self / False Self

Agency and Efficacy and Free Will

In any linguistic context, whether within the human person, person to person, or in the domain of professional psychology (i.e., practitioner to person), in the Philosophy of One Divide’s psychological model, it is the True-Self-to-True-Self connection that is intuitively felt and recognized, whether intersubjectively between two people or in a singular human person’s reaction to something that is pursued and captured by another’s true intent. True intent here refers to an authentic manifestation of something (e.g., intellectual achievement, personal growth, secular humanistic or spiritual development, art, nature, respectful interaction, acknowledgement, etc.) that leads to the incremental building of True Self efficacy, which is established via the One Divide Method.

All of this loses its meaning and context without juxtaposition with False Self agency: I define and describe the False Self state as a coping/defense mechanism that the Method seeks to largely eradicate or remove in terms of governance or executive function, ensuring it is not where one’s psychic energy or cathexis is centered in a self state of being, though it will always remain to some degree as a vital survival element, whether on the physical lower level (e.g., the neurophysiological functionality of the limbic system or the amygdala) or on the metaphysical or mentalist higher level (e.g., the intrapsychic emotional realm or psychological system).

However, it is the True Self state and adaptive behavior, intent, efficacy, and agency that takes control (or has the cathexis) of executive decision making — even in instrumental behaviors and/or decision-making processes for pursuing, attaining, and maintaining vital resources for physical/biological demands or interrelating emotional survival needs — when one becomes aware of or gains an explicit understanding of Emotional Warfare and its Pattern(s) through the Method. Doing so establishes an intrapsychic “unity” centered on a contemplative sense or pre-reflexive to reflexive state of awareness that reaches toward an elevation of self-awareness or of consciousness through combined knowledge acquisition. (*For an explanation and deeper exploration of cathexis, see Book 6: Emotional Warfare Essay Collection, Vol. 1, Appendix D.)

Free Will Potentiality

One Divide embraces free will, as established in Book 4 (2017), but also understands it as entrapped in the deterministic, functional-causal patterns captured within the intra-interplay of Emotional Warfare — until the individual frees their True Self. Thus, the potential for free will belongs to the True Self, and the full extent of this potentiality cannot be realized as long as it remains bound within the thresholds of Emotional Warfare and the interplay of its Patterns. This is illustrated in Sample 1 below. Working with William James’s contributions, which “assimilated mental science into the biological disciplines and treated thinking and knowledge as instruments in the struggle to live,”¹⁵ the architecture of One Divide’s principles and the supporting concepts and theoretical framework of Emotional Warfare are structured to make the fullest use of psychophysics and to defend and embrace free will.