At the base of Primordial Psychology there is a first phase: cleaning the mind. But cleaning the mind of what?
We live inside a reality we have built out of our own experience. It is not “absolute” reality: it is a reality that is subjective, partial, filtered. As children we each form an image of the world, and we keep building on that image ever after.
The books you’ve read, the experiences you’ve lived through, the environment you grew up in, the information handed to you by family, school, friends, authorities and the media have all shaped your habits, your convictions, your beliefs and your expectations. The problem is that, once installed, that reality tends to confirm itself: every day, in ordinary life, the brain looks for the things that prove it right.
Cleaning the mind means beginning to tell apart what you have chosen from what you have simply absorbed. And to see how deep that “absorbing” goes, there’s a story worth telling.
The five monkeys experiment
The story goes like this. Five monkeys are shut in a cage. In the center, a ladder; at the top, a bunch of bananas. The moment one monkey climbs up to grab them, the experimenter sprays all the others with ice-cold water. After a few attempts the monkeys learn the lesson: whoever tries to climb is dragged down and beaten by the rest, who don’t want to end up under the water again. No one climbs anymore.
At this point the experimenter starts replacing the monkeys, one at a time, with new ones. Each newcomer sees the bananas and tries to climb — and each time is blocked and beaten by the others, including the ones who were never sprayed and don’t know why they’re doing it. This goes on until none of the original monkeys are left in the cage: not one has ever seen the cold water, and yet they all keep stopping the others from climbing the ladder. The rule has been passed on, but its reason vanished along with the group that learned it.
It’s the perfect metaphor for a phrase we all know: “that’s how it’s always been done.”
How true is it? Parable versus proof
Here I have to be honest with you, because honesty is exactly what “cleaning the mind” demands. This experiment, in the form in which it circulates — the ladder, the bananas, the ice-cold water, the beatings, the chain of replacements — is not a documented experiment. It’s a parable.
The real study it usually gets attributed to, run by the primatologist G. R. Stephenson in 1967, was far more limited. Stephenson conditioned rhesus monkeys to fear and avoid an object — using an air blast, not cold water, and ordinary objects, not a banana — and then let a naive monkey watch a trained one behave fearfully toward it. Some of the observers picked up the avoidance just by watching. It was tested in pairs: no ladder, no bunch of bananas, no water sprayed over a group, no beatings, no multi-generation chain. The effect wasn’t even especially robust — with female monkeys, Stephenson found the opposite result. The spectacular version we all know was popularized decades later, notably by the management book “Competing for the Future” and by the essayist Michael Michalko, and from there it became a staple of corporate training.
I point this out because the monkey story should be used for what it is — an effective image — and not passed off as scientific proof. It would be ironic to tell a false story precisely to push people not to believe things without checking them.
And yet, careful: the phenomenon the parable points at is real, and that’s what the actual research shows. Human beings conform to the group even against the evidence of their own eyes. In Solomon Asch’s famous experiments (1955), a person placed among confederates who unanimously gave an obviously wrong answer ended up giving the wrong answer too about a third of the time, rather than break with the group. There’s even an experiment that comes startlingly close to the parable’s structure: Jacobs and Campbell (1961) had confederates impose an arbitrary norm on a group, then replaced them one by one with new participants; the norm kept being passed down for several “generations,” long after no one was left who had received the original instruction. And real monkeys conform too: a study of wild vervet monkeys showed that newcomers abandon their own food preferences to adopt the group’s — even males migrating from one troop to another switch habits to fall in line (van de Waal, Borgeaud and Whiten, 2013).
The parable exaggerates. The mechanism it points to — conformity and the blind transmission of rules — is documented.
The inherited cage
We are not so far from those monkeys. We inherit rules, traditions and prohibitions from generations that are no longer here, and often we don’t even know the reason behind them. They’re rules we sometimes don’t agree with and didn’t choose, yet we defend them anyway — not because anyone is forcing us, but because “that’s how it’s always been done.”
This is exactly what, in the model, I call the inherited cage, and it’s part of a wider field: the Intersubjective Mental Matrix, the collective reality inside which we learn to see. At a certain point the limit no longer needs a visible external authority: the group itself keeps it in place.
Careful, again, not to fall into naivety — on either side. Not every tradition is a cage: many of them carry real knowledge and real bonds. The problem is rules defended as necessary once their function is gone. And, on the other side, it would be just as naive to deny that organized interests, advertising and propaganda work every day to make certain behaviors feel “normal” and “desirable.” Mental manipulation and propaganda are not fantasies: they are real levers. It is also how the boundary of what a society considers “normal” shifts, little by little: the Overton window. Recognizing this isn’t conspiracy thinking — it’s simply refusing to look the other way.
Cleaning the mind
This is why the first phase of Primordial Psychology is cleaning the mind: not filling it with new techniques, but making the rules that inhabit it open to question. Seeing as rules what we took for truths. Telling apart what is really ours from what we have only inherited and repeated.
I want to be precise, though, so as not to promise too much. This “seeing” opens a margin; it doesn’t perform the transformation on its own. Recognizing an inherited rule isn’t enough to dissolve it: a person can see it clearly and go on obeying it. Seeing is the first step; the concrete work of transforming the programs belongs to Mental Reprogramming. And the one who sees, chooses and acts is not a “true self” hidden under the culture: it’s the person, with a slightly clearer mind.
These are themes I first took on in 2010, in my university thesis — the Theory of Reality — and that I’m still working on. Not in order to step out of the world, but to learn to inhabit it with a little more clarity: to see the ladder, the bananas and the ice-cold water for what they are, and to decide, in the margin we have, which rules to keep passing on and which to let go.
