Paradically we cooperate with each other to subsist, only to compete when the real 
living is done; yet competition is exciting romantic and paradoxically worrying and we 
we teach each other it's what really matters.Whereas once we traded the neccessites 
of life and now we trade insults and feign affection. 

p 434 "Preoccupied as we are with ends, in all senses of the word, we organise our actions around imagined extrapolations of the consequences they will produce; we weave marvellously elaborate and beautifully obscure stories to find purpose in our lives. 

mebo is an alliteration for a "marvellously elaborate and beautifully obscure" idea.

Symbolic analysis (awareness) is the basis for a remarkable level of self determination. We use virtual reference to build up elaborate internal models of possible futures ... giving us capacity to generate independent adaptive behaviours. We pick out tiny fragments of real world processes and arrange them as buoys to chart an inferential course that predicts physical and social events. 

The price we pay for this is that our symbolically mediated actions can often be in conflict with motivations to act that arise from more concrete and immediate biological sources. 

Our compulsions to act that rise from purely or mediated physiological sources could be called bottom up processes for producing action; these are comparitively predictable. But symbolically mediated compulsions are far more (chaotic and) susceptical to the influence of tiny initial differences in starting assumptions or ways of dividing up experiences and qualities symbolically - this because symbolically mediated models of things, whether theories, stories or just rationally argued predictions all exhibit complicated non linearity and resursive structure as well as nearly infinite flexibility and capacity for novelty due to their combinitorial nature. 

Little of our reasoning is so precise as to be called deductive yet the way that certain beliefs compel others can have nearly this force. Ideologies, religions and just good explanations thus exert a sort of inferential compulsion on us that it is hard to resist because of their mutually reinforcing deductive and inductive links. Our end directed behaviours are in this way often derived from such "compulsions" 

One might say that thinking in symbols is a means whereby formal causes can determine final causes. The abstract nature of this source makes for a top down causality, even if implemented on a bottom up biological machine." 

There is the considerable tension between the top down and bottom up states of mind. The one speculative and arrogant, the other biological and humane.. .