Nothing begins with knowledge and reason.

Experience is the foundation of understanding, not knowledge.

Both of my parents grew up poor, in what were called cold-water flats. Thus, a large part of their primary motivation in life had always been to not be poor. Primary motivation is ingrained in us from our childhood and is what guides our primal instincts.

As a result of my parents’ hard work, their children did not grow up poor. As a result of growing up in a completely different environment, their children developed different primary motivations in life.

Because money was not a real issue in our household, our primary motivations were created from our specific emotional environmental pressures. Being the youngest of three, the emotional pressures placed on me were different from the emotional pressures placed on my sister, the oldest, and both were different from the pressures placed on my brother.

Since my parents are average people in our culture and society, they were not aware of their primary motivations and how they affect our lives, nor were we raised with such awareness. Like many others, we only felt the pressure to do certain things without fully understanding why, or how any of it could even be achieved with our own particular motivations.

The one thing I know for certain, through the experience of growing older with regular interaction with my family, is that people with different primary motivations perceive the options before them differently, make different choices, and, in the end, manifest different worlds around them.

Without consideration of such different, and largely disparate primary motivations, great conflict is often created from simple primal reflexes.

My parents divorced when I was young because my father grew up in a cold-water flat with a mother who coddled him, while my mother grew up in a cold-water flat that was explosively violent.

Experience is the foundation of understanding, not knowledge. And past experience is our motivation, not reason.