Gut Instinct
Your gut processes all your feelings until it doesn't and you can't shit anymore. It can only take so much unfiltered poison: plastics, metals, heartache, shame.
You can't imagine how it feels to not be conscious of your stomach. You stopped breathing all the way in and out too long ago to remember, afraid of any fat showing, spilling out, disgusting those around you.
Overriding that gut instinct so many times, you nearly severed the connection. If you choke down your own gag reflex and smile through shrieks and apologize after being attacked and shrug off the second man in two months to chase you down a subway platform, it's no surprise your gut stopped trying to communicate.
Society can be measured by the space between your instinct and your conditioned response. The bigger that gap, the stronger the influence of institutions that shape and constrain human behavior. If I acted on every impulse I had to fight back, scream out, tell the secret then I'd have died ages ago. This is not a normative claim; the inverse is also true: if I acted on every impulse I had to hit, cheat, or lie, I'd have hurt a lot more people.
According to Carl Jung, instincts are unconscious and purposive actions that influence behavior, often without the individual being aware of the psychological motive behind the action. Instincts aren't normatively charged, then; they are sources of information. In the same way that conscious thoughts aren't normatively charged -- we simply think consciously only about those things that are able to be understood as such. We are losing information when we lose access to our instincts. So in tuning out our awareness of instinct, we've drowned out a critical source of data, and blunted our instruments for detecting it.
Perhaps we can separate out the quantity of instinct from the quality of instinct? We have created a world where the primary information we receive from the world around us comes through 'conscious thought' and not through embodied knowledge. But we know that pretty much all animals on earth operate entirely from instinct. And much – perhaps most -- of our behavior is driven by instinct. It is a societal failure that we categorize this source of knowledge as 'inferior' simply because it is 'animal’ in order to circular-argument into our anthropocentric claim to moral hierarchy. This claim is based on a premise that humans are the only rational creatures on earth who are endowed with free will, and we have a claim to rule over others on the basis of merit. That claim is based on a factual assertion that completely disregards the fact that creatures significantly more intelligent than humans along many spectra [ability to follow directions, ability to see color spectra outside human possibility, the ability to locate objects through sound] are clearly extraordinary, and yet are understood by us to be guided 'purely by instinct' while we are superior because we’re 'self-governing' and ‘driven by choice and not impulse.’
Jung identified instincts like hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection, and creativity as fundamental human drives. These are not learned but are genetically inherited, and they shape behavior. He also proposed that instincts have a "psychic counterpart," which he called archetypes. These are universal patterns of thought and behavior, such as the Mother or the Wise Old Man. Yet a being is nothing except a collection of perceptual faculties. Our parents' DNA, home environment, and our designation as a human species determines our physiology, which in turn informs what our faculties are with regard to sight, cognitive processing types and speeds, what pitches and volumes we can and cannot hear, our empathic capabilities, and so much more. And these faculties determine how we process the world around us, thus creating the choice architecture from which we always decide.
I simply do not believe that humans have evolved so far beyond all other species on earth that we are no longer guided primarily by instinct. In dulling our senses to the information the earth is trying to offer us, we dig our own graves.
