All four auto-self types contribute to our successes and well-being, but this article and the 2Selfs Revolution book focus on auto-behaviors and auto-contexts because our previous inability to understand and manage them is playing a decisive role in the West’s current demise from greatness. Fortuitously, conquering our auto-behaviors and auto-context also provides the breakthrough we need to restore greatness to so many of our social systems and make crucial improvements to some areas of personal responsibilities – to resurrect the greatness of the West.

 

Auto-Behaviors: These are automatic behaviors (habits) we compulsively exhibit or actions we uncontrollably fail to take in a timely manner.

• Many professions already manage auto-behaviors including psychotherapists and transformation coaches.

• Comfort Imperative: A major advance from 2Selfs Theory is in identifying and modeling the Comfort Imperative, which causes us to seek pleasure but more importantly to escape discomfort at any cost to our future successes and well-being.

  • Unfair Fights: When thinking-self intentions engage in battles with auto-self drives, an unfair fight ensues because the auto-self overwhelms the thinking-self over any extended period.

  • Evasion Gimmicks: We automatically take actions to escape discomfort, so we all have a suite of evasion gimmicks (see the 2Selfs Revolution book for a list) we use to enable us to ameliorate our discomfort while pretending we are not undermining our successes; the next topic is an example.

  • Simplistic Solutions: When discomfort exceeds people’s tolerance level, the Comfort Imperative causes them to succumb to seduction traps often in the form of simplistic solutions that satisfy the desire for successes without producing the successes desired.

  

Auto-Contexts: These are hidden assumptions and beliefs, which serve as contextual frameworks that appear in many forms and control the way we view and understand the world about us and how we go about solving problems.

• You likely already have some idea about auto-contexts in the form of “paradigms,” “worldviews,” or “mental models.”

• This is the area of the biggest breakthroughs of 2Selfs Theory because it models auto-contexts way beyond anything that has previously existed.

• Our failure to understand and manage auto-contexts is the reason for much of our under-performing in business and is a major source of the breakdown of our Western political systems we are currently experiencing.

• Auto-contexts are responsible for problem-solving foundations, certainty illusions, innovation deathtraps (culture lock), a second form of constructed “truth,” and the supraevolution process, which are outlined below; among other properties, auto-contests also create the power of political branding and values maintenance, all of which the 2Selfs Revolution book explains.

  • Problem-Solving Worldview Foundations: Worldviews are a form of auto-contexts that provide the foundation that determines (enables or blocks) our ability to understand whole classes of problems and to solve problems effectively within each class.

  • Certainty Illusions: These are a side effect of auto-contexts that make us certain we are correct even when we may be dysfunctionally wrong. Sometimes certainty illusions are constructed wrong initially and other times they start out providing helpful certainty but the environment changes making them dysfunctional, and we don’t notice the difference. This is a main mechanism responsible for innovation deathtraps.

  • Innovation Deathtraps: Culture change creates discomfort and the auto-behavior-based Comfort Imperative causes most people and organizations to abort auto-context reconstructions to escape that discomfort. However, businesses and other organizations normally do not even get to that point because the auto-context-based certainty illusion creates a level of confidence, often based on prior successes, that the current path of a company is certainly correct even long after the changed environment has rendered it dysfunctional.

  • Constructed “Truths”: When we consider an assertion to be “true,” we intuitively assume that it corresponds to something “out there” (i.e., outside of our mind). This is the correspondence verification form of truth that we verify through thinking-self activities such as science, formal logic, and examining historical documents. However, a second, certainty construction form of “truth” provides an overwhelming experience of “truth” that is independent of any correspondence with the world out there (i.e., outside of our internal mental states) and is often opposed to known facts (which we refer to as certainty delusions).

  • Supraevolution: “Supra” is a prefix meaning “above,” “over,” or “beyond the limits of, outside of.” Therefore, supraevolution refers to an evolution layer above our biological evolution. It creates the (auto-context-based) worldview foundation for problem solving and values maintenance among many other fundamental properties. The Science/Enlightenment Revolution was the West’s last overarching supraevolutionary ascent. We are now in just the second top-level supraevolutionary descent of the West, which the 2Selfs Revolution book identifies as the Manipulation Devolution. The only visible way to reverse this supraevolutionary descent and resurrect the greatness of the West is to launch a new supraevolutionary ascent – the 2Selfs Revolution.

• Auto-contexts automatically emerge through repeated thoughts accompanied by strong feelings.

• 2Selfs Worldview, which provides the contextual framework (problem-solving foundation) to understand auto-self activities, will automatically emerge through repeated successful use of 2Selfs Theory.

  

Auto-Skills: We execute these rapid, automatic activities without thinking-self understanding or involvement.

• Includes sports, music, language, nonverbal communications, image processing (shapes, locations, motions), and public speaking skills.

• Many professions already help people with these including sports coaches and music teachers.

  

Auto-Expertise: We exhibit this when we see solutions to problems holistically without going through a long analysis process.

• Also known as “intuition,” “gut,” “insight,” and “acumen.”

• Automatically and imperceptibly emerges after many successful thinking-self-managed solutions to similar problems.

• Not contributing to West’s mega-descent. More work can create additional opportunities.

 

You will learn in the (2Selfs Revolution) book that the 2Selfs Revolution (which will take us to 2Selfs Age) is the alternative to the Manipulation Age into which we are currently descending.

 

We now transition from a general introduction of 2Selfs Theory to an example of how 2Selfs Theory empowers us to understand and manage a specific auto-self-controlled topic in a more powerful and useful way than was possible before the advent of this robust, general model of the automatic mode of the human mind.