Literary / Arts
Primal Mind Primal Games: Ambitious but Important
Sam Margolis, Victoria
Volume 29 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: September 26, 2015
“I am in awe of people and always have been,” begins Hifzija Bajramovic, who, along with Paul H. LeMay, wrote Primal Mind, Primal Games. Indeed, the authors exude admiration and great hope for the potential of not merely the individual but humanity as a whole. The book’s subtitle, “Why We Do What We Do,” could just as easily be replaced with “Why We Could Do Better.”
“I am in awe of people and always have been,” begins Hifzija Bajramovic, who, along with Paul H. LeMay, wrote Primal Mind, Primal Games. Indeed, the authors exude admiration and great hope for the potential of not merely the individual but humanity as a whole. The book’s subtitle, “Why We Do What We Do,” could just as easily be replaced with “Why We Could Do Better.”
Life presents an endless stream of challenges, the authors assert, and anyone who lives in Victoria or Vancouver amidst the current housing craze can attest. In the modern world and in the present location, we are confronted with attempting to rise above and not be numbed by the simplistic platitudes of corporate reality shows which pit “winners” versus “losers” or the “masters who don’t care” greed that has gripped pockets of southwest British Columbia during the current real estate hysteria. And the authors strive and succeed in providing mechanisms by which we can do so.
We start out with the three sorts of behaviour that are present in people to varying degrees: fighting, appeasing and assuming a posture to denote defeat. Not all positions are black and white, and we may have bits and pieces of each within us. Moreover, these categories, and the subcategories therein, i.e., upper appeasing and lower fighting, are found not only in the individual but in the collective. The example of the former Yugoslavia is cited, a country which, following the Second World War, transitioned from a defeatist mindset, to appeasing and then to fighting.
Though written by experienced experts in their field, this is far from an academic book, replete throughout with modern cultural references to help connect the behaviours – from Jack Nicholson films to Rolling Stones lyrics, from Malcolm Gladwell to the spine-tingling music from Jaws. Hence, it is a book that is very accessible to the lay reader.
Nonetheless, this is weighty stuff; the authors themselves recommend that book be read in stages. Our surroundings, the events which can suddenly be thrust upon us out of nowhere, our abilities to adjust to stress and to make sense of the world, are merely some of the challenges that make us such complex entities, and make the reader think how much further we need to go before we can fully understand human psychology. No surprise, then, that chess, the most intricate of games, is featured throughout in the imagery of the book.
The authors in the second half of the book bring up the message of slowing down, wanting to get off, trying to fathom and ultimately achieve harmony in the all-too-perplexing universe in which we find ourselves. A westernized version of mindfulness is put forward as one means to achieve sanity and aspire to better things: I am here. I am now. I am.
Despite all the evidence before them, and the evidence that they themselves present – from the corporate mean-spiritedness personified by the televisual business superstars to the heinous dictators history – there is a constant sense of optimism within the pages. The authors, one surmises, had a lot of fun writing this book, and the reader, despite the seriousness and complexity contained between the covers, will find their enthusiasm infectious.
Sam Margolis, Victoria