Face to face

   The mind's check for faults, its internal sanity check, is talking to other people.  If the interaction goes smoothly the brain is reassured that there are no conflicts to its own functioning.  This is a further use of mirror imaging, seeing if the brain receives the feedback it expects form its own internal model.  This will produce strongly reinforcing behavior in a group.  It is also the  reason why dealing with disruptive people is so stressful.
   The reinforcing nature of social interaction is used by dictatorships to control societies.  When people at the end of the nazi era in Germany said they must have all been insane they were not kidding.  People were convinced to say "heil hitler" instead of "good morning."   It was successful because everyone else was doing it.  Once a social norm is induced it is strengthened by conformity.  In North Korea, probably close to one hundred percent of the people are psychotic, a combination of fear of punishment initiates the insanity and it is reinforced by the conduct of others.  Psychosis is the inability to recognize, properly characterize or reach a rational conclusion from information available.  In North Korea people really do believe that Kim Jong Il is the world's greatest political leader.  Starvation, failed policies and gross incompetence are put into an "other" file of the brain, information that is ignored because it is unnecessary.  The brains of the people actively shunt aside information that is unfavorable to the regime, it has become an automatic reflex.
   The process of modern society has been to lower levels of psychosis.  In the Middle Ages people did not question teachings and doctrine, their brains actively prevented it.  Fear of being burned alive as a heretic induced the entire society coming to believe in the rightness of the doctrine.  It may well have started with the demand from a central authority for compliance to insure control, but eventually the people self reinforced the doctrine by attacking and alienating anyone who would question it.  People did not question divinity or virgin birth, it really had become unthinkable.  What the nazis showed was how quickly it could be achieved, which is what makes the process so scary.
   The use of reflection from another person to confirm the functioning of a brain is why therapy was eventually developed.  The brain does not fully trust itself, so it wants to be reinforced.  A person who can recognize and articulate mental dysfunction will still be stressed by it, talking to someone else and receiving confirmation and reinforcement can actually get the brain to relax.  This is really the whole theory behind cognitive therapy.
   The need for visually reinforcing  and confirming mental pathways is prevalent among psychotics, they have a constant need for meetings.  An employee submits a report estimating costs at $300 000, the supervisor calls the employee to his office and asks what the estimate for the cost is, he is told, $300 000, now he is satisfied because he has seen the report writer say it.   Everyone's time has been wasted and nothing has been accomplished since it was already in the report, but the manager needed to be reassured and have his hand held.
   Among adults, there appears to be a dense set of connections in the brain, to introduce new information, the new fact must be introduced and placed into a holding center of the brain, the existing connections must relax and the new item introduced into the structures and then new connections made to it.  If the brain is panicking, it constantly checks the new item, being unsure of it, and rejecting its introduction.  Even at best, it will take the brain a long time to absorb the information.  It takes a long time to introduce information so it takes a long time to make decisions.  People who are poorly socialized are slow to make decisions because their brains panic and yet they are the ones promoted to senior positions, guaranteeing chaos and incompetence.
   They also produce the endless demands to go to meetings over long distances to fulfill their need for reassurance.  It is all pointless, because their brains are very poor at mirror imaging, they are not good at holding conversations with other people  and are poor at judging others intentions.  All the reasons for having a meeting are defeated by their own brain's inability to follow the actions of others and yet they still have the need to do actions from which they cannot profit.
   They also are limited to judging people by simple, external characteristics; a nice suit means an impressive person, being tall says the person has high status, if a person gives slow thoughtful answers he is not good at his job, if a person does not seem fully confident in his answers or is nervous he is lying.  That makes the person who has been put in charge a useless brainless moron who bothers people.
   This also produces reporters asinine fixation with interviews, if the person is seen saying it that must confirm what he said.  The wretched refuse of journalism schools do not understand and cannot seem to comprehend the importance of checking facts, there brains skip at complex comparisons and, so, they do interviews and pretend that that is news.  The wanting to be a reporter tends to come from the mind's  inability to do mrror-imaging with others, the mind cannot be sure of other people's motives because it cannot conform to trying to think like that other person, the mind's response is to dig into other people's lives, be a gossip and busybody.  There is a nice version of this where people with similar disruption take an active interest in other people and genuinely try to help them.
   This also affects business.  If someone wants a relatively small loan, as for a house, obtaining it is open to all people.  But for major financing, say a business loan of $10 000 000, the poorly socialized will be advantaged because banks, like all other institutions tend to be run by the poorly socialized.  That means that the person screening and approving major loans will tend to trust people like himself, the poorly socialized over all others. The problem with that is that the poorly socialized  are unscrupulous and are more likely to cheat on bank loans, or anything else.  Their brains make excuses for failing and they will blithely walk away form non-payment.  Once again, poor socialization benefits the least qualified.
   Major funding sources are controlled by the poorly socialized because the people who run them, and who can acquire large amounts of capital are advanced by others who are poorly socialized.
   Henry Ford was a poorly socialized schizophrenic.  He was also fully psychotic.  Schizophrenia refers to the amount of skipping, derailment that the brain undergoes in its workings, psychosis refers to a disruption in the ability to organize information and make decisions, they are related but not the same.  Being schizophrenic, or even psychotic does not preclude a person's ability to perform useful work or make original contributions, they are not the same as incompetent or incapable, although they inevitably entail some inability, some areas where decision making will be disrupted.
  Henry Ford went bankrupt twice before he finally made money making cars.  Notice that after two bankruptcies he was not deterred from asking for more money, many people after a single bankruptcy are nearly suicidal, feeling that they had completely failed in not living up to an obligation to repay the money.  Also notice that he was given more money, the lenders were dysfunctional.  Now, the Model T was a brilliant idea, a simple car with high ground clearance for poor roads.  Building it on an assembly line after a few years was also a worthy achievement,  But Henry Ford was nuts.  He refused to have an accounting department, and dismantled the accounting department  his son, Edsel, started.  When Ford died, in 1945, no manager of a Ford factory knew how many right front fenders, or how many rear axles, he had in stock.  It was a lunatic way to run a business.  When the Model T was in production,  Ford refused to build any other type of car under the Ford name, although he did buy Lincoln and built cars under that nameplate.  When the Model T stopped production Ford closed his factories and produced no Ford cars for six months until the Model A was ready for production.  It was insane, but he got his chances for business because he was insane.  A sane well-adjusted person would probably  not have been able to raise the money he needed.
   Owing to who controls money, gambling risks are rewarded rather than competent management risks.  Someone poorly socialized will more easily raise money for a venture with little chance of success than a fully sane person who has a project with manageable risk.