Intent in Influence

The conscious and subconscious influences on our innate intentions.

Everyone is influenced; in our minds, our bodies and our souls.

Easily convoluted, interpersonal influences remind me of the ways social psychology barely scratches the surface on how much we persuade each others thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. This brings me to wonder, what portion of our active intentions can be distinguished as purely innate?—especially in that of which we’ve successfully convinced ourselves we are, or, on the other hand, the parts of us which we reject.

In the book, Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks detailed the militant black resistance during the civil rights struggle and how it positively impacted class consciousness when white-supremacy continued to shift a cultural influence on oppressed peoples. Here she shared, “Passive acceptance of internalized racism intensified with legal racial integration and the concomitant demand that black people who want to succeed ‘assimilate’ the values and beliefs of the dominant white culture…all classes began to buy into capitalist consumer thinking, which equated worth with material status and spread the message that ‘you are what you buy.’” The subtle persuasion in the righteous dominance of white-supremacist culture inspired many to internalize prescriptive racism. Ever since the 19th century, social environments and institutions rooted in mindful deception have succeeded at convincing the general public that entire peoples are undeserving of active recognition of their unique realities, their historical battlefields or the acknowledgement of its persistent residual affects. Moreover, 20th and 21st-century Americans were further propagandized into suppressing their innate instinct, submitting to the negative impacts of lawful institutions which passively acknowledged the repercussive realities of cultural diasporas. It becomes my beliefs that this as a system which pacifies the masses by using two crucial tactics: persuasion and convincing.

Convincing is key and persuasion is critical, influencing both the psyche and the emotions of an individual. Intuition, a simultaneous feeling and knowing rooted deeply in our instincts, is faced in battle with persuasive intent. Through the act of persuasion, in tandem with the act of convincing, many are propagandized into compromising their personal values and innate intentions with capitalism consumer thinking and white-supremacist culture while contrarily living a reality rooted in struggle or diaspora. Our habits of internalization concerningly determine much of the foundational morality we willfully identify with. In the same breath, it is the institutions of power which persuade the people they serve to convince themselves that they are deserving of how they’re being treated. This is an imperative manipulation tactic in controlling and desensitizing one to institutional ignorance, as their motive is that we succumb to subconsciously adopting capitalist-consumer individualist identities, believing our purpose is to maximize wealth for the national economy. In the same chapter, bell hooks confronted how the radical anti-capitalist movement deescalated anti-white supremacy protests at that time due to seemingly positive changes, such as job opportunities and achievements in equal education, all which quickly revealed their own institutional biases, demonstrating cultural reenactments of white supremacy personal politics. It was and still is, the persuasive gestures of powerful institutions’ propagandizing facades of hope which breadcrumb, and keep people oblivious to their own internalized white supremacist beliefs and the ruthless conditions being influenced and reinforced by institutions upholding merit in capitalist-consumer assimilation.

Equally as considered, there is a daunting spiritual vulnerability involved with conceding to the fact that we are infiltrated in ways we lack control of, enable or overlook. Sharing the journey of decolonizing her mind, in the poetry book, Homebody, Rupi Kaur says, “i was trying to fit into a system / that left me empty”, “capitalism got inside my head / and made me think my only value / is how much i produce / for people to consume / capitalism got inside my head / and made me think / i am of worth / as long as i am working”. There exists valuable influences of capitalism, sure, but we must always ask ourselves: at what unquantifiable cost? Influences have infiltrated our personhood to an extent we can’t even begin to realize. Our physical world has no security. Yet, how naively syncopated any soul must be, to settle at rhythm within a seat of hypertension indefinitely assimilating a normalcy. So deeply seated one could never know a difference, nor see the need to cultivate any positive products of the unresolved. How does instinctual discernment triumph in the light of such a subconsciously influenced identity? An essence of innate spiritual will is lost in the presence (and continued supporting) of beliefs which were built on persuasive evils.

In a similar essence, our memories are capable of influencing the ways we digest our present experiences. Memories of which hold impersonal energies we can subconsciously agree to carry on for as long as the rest of our lives. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts reminded us, “If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to here and now.” Furthermore, words coupled by the processing tendency to go back on thoughts, has inured human emotional-memory correspondence: a subconscious method used in order to associate the most accurate words to describe present experiences. Emotional nostalgic influences cause people to categorize feelings by comparing them to their inventory of emotional memory. The subconscious comparison of the past/future to present, for framing, is too a persuasive infiltration of our unique experiences and can misleadingly inform our belief systems.

I’ve conceded on the immutable reality of words, each lacking the pure distinct vitality of true lived experiences. They cannot wield their powerful functioning into vitality, as there never seems to be enough life in words for them to breathe through the ink. Words can carry a ginormous weight to encompass the experiences of the living when words themselves are finite, fixed and defined and life is infinite and flux in design. Comparing memories or any similar unique emotions to one another in attempt to define it accurately is a false certainty. The statement, “you just had to be there,” is the perfect example of how we as a culture passively acknowledge the dichotomy in the permanence of words and impermanence of experiences. Between this, one can easily intellectually misalign with their intuition by subconsciously adopting infiltrating energy and succumbing to a conditioned identity rooted in fear. Influence of institutions directly infiltrate ones innate intent and intuition, in order to puppeteer a widespread capitalist-consumer culture to further dominate colonized identities. Through subconscious persuasion and convincing, propaganda has bred a result of many people united in struggle individually suppressing their innate intentions, and being influenced into inheriting personalities reflecting individualism, fear, and projected resentment or identities entirely rooted in systemic racism.