168 A Programmer’s Guide to the Mind
condemned and oppressed by „the establishment.‟ Therefore, he will feel
unresolvable guilt. Who created this mental network of condemnation? The
teenager. Will he see the deficiency of his method? No, because he is still
trying to destroy the enemy. As a general principle, when today‟s gods are
mentally suppressed, then they turn into tomorrow‟s devils; their emotional
strength survives intact and the mental network associated with them goes
underground, as an undesired multiple. The result is a vicious circle in
which rebellion breeds rebellion.
Fourth, the rebellious teenager will try to escape from this mental
condemnation by belittling his parents. Remember that his primary goal is
to free himself from the emotional glare of childhood—he wants to escape
from the source of his emotional 'facts,' so that he can think for himself. He
tried suppressing these memories, but they only returned with greater force.
Therefore, he will now tackle the problem head on, and attempt to
eliminate the emotional glare of his childhood. Seeing his parents as the
source of childish memories, the rebellious teenager will do anything in his
power to lower the emotional status associated with his parents. Whenever
he finds inconsistencies, character flaws, childishness, insincerity, or other
shortcomings in his parents, he will identify with these experiences, pull
them into his internal world of Mercy thought and attach them to his
network of parental memories. In this way, he will try to convince Mercy
strategy that his parents are idiots who are not worthy of respect.
This will lead to the fifth stage of confusion. Suppose that the
rebellious teenager manages to reduce the strength of feelings associated
with his parents. He may have won the battle, but I suggest that he has lost
the war. By destroying the emotional significance of his parents, he
succeeds in throwing his entire mind into the threshold of uncertainty.
Remember that emotional 'beliefs' can only survive as long as the source of
those 'beliefs' has sufficient emotional status. Therefore, as the teenager
reduces the emotional status of his parents, every emotional 'fact'
associated with his parents will become uncertain, simultaneously. The
teenager will find that he no longer has a basis for evaluating truth, for all
of the childish 'beliefs' upon which he might base Perceiver analysis have
fallen into question. In other words, the teenager may have been rebelling
from his childhood memories, but they still formed the basis for his
thinking. They gave him purpose by giving him something from which he
could rebel. Now he has cut this foundation out from under himself.
Finally, the confused rebellious teenager will respond to his mental
chaos by searching for a new source of emotional 'truth.' He used to focus
on achieving mental freedom; now his goal will be to regain mental
stability. Obviously, he cannot go back to his parents. He no longer
respects them, therefore they can no longer act as emotional sources of
'truth.' What he will discover is that his emotional trauma is shared by
other teenagers—they understand him, they feel with him. The result will
be the formation of a teenage counter-culture, in which groups or gangs of