Here’s an example of how the mind has an internal pandemonious squabble generator, or, depending on how you wish to describe it, a competition among memes.

I was thinking about the career destruction of a colleague. Whether or not his technical capabilities were the strongest possible is beside the point. He had a very well-paid position for 20 years, and could have remained in it indefinitely. Yet he “chose”, finally, insubordination—he mouthed off to his boss. (To be sure, he does not remember things this way—thinking that the firing was out of the blue—but others do. And, of course, it is not always clear how to separate sass from cogent commentary, especially since his modus operandi had not really changed in 20 years.) Why did it come to this?

I suspect that part of him wanted to get the axe. The internal “discussion” must have been along these lines: “Look, we’re 55 years old, we’ve said all we can say here, and we’re not getting any younger. Sure, there’s a ‘living’ here, but is this all there is to life? Do we really want our legacy to have ‘peaked’ some time ago on, to be sure, a fairly low summit, so that we’ll just, now, slouch off into eternity? No! A thousand times no!”

“Okay,” says another voice, “we’ve had this discussion before. I’ve tried to get you to understand the security issue. We’re safe here, and well fed.”

“Yeah—safe, fat, and dumb. But for how long? What if our hill crumbles in a flood or seismic catastrophe or something. These things do happen, you know. Why should we suppose that we are immune?”

“We’ve been safe so far, so Somebody up there must like us. Why don’t you just shut up, schmuck?”

“‘Schmuck’, you say? I say, let’s try to win one more for the Gipper! Maybe we don’t have a specific peak to climb, but if we don’t get out and look for one, we’ll never get off the hill we’re on. We’ll never find another, you…you schlub!”

“Oh, please….”

“Well, then, forget the last argument, which, if you don’t understand the logic of by now, you’re a hopeless old geezer with head thrust mightily into the sand—and, worse, dragging me down with you. Try this: It’s now or never. If you think I’m going to the grave without checking out the next valley over, doing some major exploring, leaving my mark high up a new tree or two, well, you can just rot in your cell for all I care. You may have kept us in beans up so far, but now you’re a coot and a has-been. Not only that, but now, at last, I’ve got enough of the others on my side to out-vote you. Right, gang?”

A sound, generally of approval, though with a noticeable twang of dissent.

“Okay, okay. You won’t listen to me, so we’ll do it your way, for now. But, in fact, I still have some clout. Indeed, you still need me, in important ways. Let’s compromise.”

“Huh? How? You’re obviously just saving face.”

“Perhaps this is so.” And in a oratorical voice: “Listen to me, my friends. Our colleague sees the stars, but there are still tigers in the grass, waiting to take us down from the back, and snakes to sink fangs into heels. I will acquiesce. We will abandon warm hearth and cozy home. But an all-out and blind charge downhill is a race into oblivion. Let us take a few weapons with us. Specifically, this must look, to the outside world, like a forced retreat—a mission of challenge and courage—not a final picnic of autumn. In this fashion, perhaps we can talk the world into paying for this fool’s expedition. Do we have a deal?”

It is important, for evolution, to develop mechanisms to get kicked off peaks. The usual way of looking at things is that each organism, during its lifetime, achieves its local peak and stays there, come hell or high water. Its descendents, though, have to find their own peaks. Some of them, through “luck” and “skill”, find higher peaks. Yet, what is an organism? Humans, like other supposed monolithic “organisms”, are really more like collectives. This is an especially appropriate description of the mind, the parts and patterns of which act and evolve many orders of magnitude faster that the genome. In the cultural “fitness landscape”, it is important to find a multitude of peaks within a single person’s lifetime. At a young age, this happens daily, or even hourly. At an older age, security and collective welfare issues become dominant, and exploration slows (for most of us). Yet—and, I believe, this is the basis for midlife crises—that voice may only be muted and not dead. Even older, more ossified organisms can, in dire straights, scramble for new peaks. But the need to do so is a hard sell unless one gets evicted from snug quarters, or the mountain itself gets blasted away. Hence, the occasional need for sabotage: If the outside world doesn’t do the job, let’s loose the internal saboteurs. This, I believe, is what happened in my colleagues case.