How Big is the Arena of Your Mind?
By Edwin L. Young, PhD
October 24, 2003

In my picture gallery, you will see my logo, the Duplex Pyramids. You might ask what this has to do with Dennis Kucinich. First, I want to take you on a brief mind-journey. Imagine that the top, inverted pyramid represents the external world and the bottom pyramid represents the internal world of your mind. Imagine that, in the middle, where the pyramids touch, represents immediate, face-to-face, interpersonal interaction. Now, consider that for everyone there is an arena within which their minds are typically focused.

The arena for some is very small. These people typically focus just on their immediate interpersonal interactions. They may also indulge in a little preoccupation with recent incidents with people. They may also think a bit about what they are going to do with friends in the near future.

The arena for some is slightly larger. These people focus, externally, on issues at home; work; or even their neighborhood. They might also focus, internally, on their own personality; feelings; and goals, but they also might give serious consideration to these same things in friends and relatives.

Then there are people who focus, externally, on broader issues like their city government; how organizations with which they are affiliated are designed and function; the place where they work; their children’s’ school; the quality of TV programming; homeless veterans in their town; and other external things that are not necessarily, directly involved with, but which, as responsible, caring, citizens, they do have concerns. They may also think deeply about how these external factors are influencing the quality of the inner life of those subject to these external aspects of their world. For example, they might wonder if their local institutions are causing people to feel fearful for their safety; overprotective toward their children; pessimistic about their future; feel and impotent anger about the social injustice of the policies of these local institutions; or even be making some people develop an egocentric, narcissistic, exploitative orientation to life.

And then, there are people with even broader external and deeper internal mental arenas. These people may tend to focus, externally, on things like the direction that our nation’s foreign policy is taking us; the inevitable effect of the very nature of corporations on the deterioration of our natural environment; the way loop holes in our tax codes that permit off-shore bank accounts to escape taxes; how the policies of the FCC are allowing mergers of media corporations with the result that the programs and content of TV, movies, radio stations, and newspapers are all controlled by a handful of media moguls. Some of these people also focus, internally, on how these external factors are influencing things like the disintegration of the family; turning children into widgets on an assembly line; developing a population of people with a sense of alienation toward others; how this personal isolation and alienation is causing a propensity to resort to the law to handle social problems; how the trend toward litigiousness is preventing people from learning ways to develop the social skills and human understanding necessary to handle conflict situations; how governmental and corporate propaganda is creating belief systems among the people that make them susceptible to approving the waging of wars against so-called ‘evil’ nations; and many other ways that anonymous global corporations and heads of state are shaping the our values, morals, opinions, decisions, and personalities even without our awareness.

Finally, there are the few who focus on the structure of nations and the structural relations between nations. They are aware of such things as the balance of power among nations; trade policies and imbalances; monetary policies of nations; the exploitation of the natural and human resources of underdeveloped countries by powerful global corporations; the schemes that giant weapons producing corporations use to foment wars among unsuspecting factions in nations; the way small, obscure think tanks do research and planning for and collaborate with top government officials and heads of international corporations to achieve global domination. These few, brilliant, people with extremely broad and deep arenas of the mind are also, usually, aware of the long histories and cultural evolution of the nations of the world and how intransigently loyal the populace of each is to their unique culture with its traditional conventions; beliefs; institutions; economic way of life; type of government; and view of the nature and future of the world.

For a person to be president of the most influential and most militarily and technologically advanced nation in the world, the arena of their mind must encompass and integrate all of these things. The arena of their mind must encompass the all of the levels of the top pyramid, form the most global level to the most immediately present and from the deepest and most enduring level of people’s inner world to the most immediate, fleeting, and most susceptible to short-term opinion change.

Such a highly evolved person’s mind is one thing. Their heart is another thing altogether. The danger is that, with the gift for spin today’s politicians have, it is extremely difficult for most people to discern who among them possesses the mental arena with that required breadth and depth and at the same time possesses a truly honest, caring, and socially responsible heart. That is ‘the’ question. My answer is Dennis Kucinich!

Pass it on as you see fit,

Ed