Month: May 2017

The Abusive Ape Theory, in Pill Form

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I’m a moron, because it took me my entire fucking life to figure it out, but I’m going to see if I can fit it into a tweet.

The “consequences” parenting construct is the child-rearing model for warrior societies, possibly meaning for human societies, albeit with exceptions. The efficacy of our consequences has always been debatable, but the evidence of the effects of abuse are clear, and it is these effects that human parents can and do create in our children. This is the power of nurturing and of parenting. This process I call antisocialization, our socialization to the dark side of things, our fears, our hate, and our violence. The truth behind the “consequences” social meme is that we are self-actualized warriors, that we discipline our children for reasons that some of our fathers told us: we deem ourselves to be too nice, and we have learned that abuse toughens us up. In genetic terms, we have learned to operate our own epigenetic levers, the ones that respond to adverse, abusive environments. Antisocialization Theory says that Christian Original Sin is a part of the “consequences” social construct and that in reality, humans know themselves to be too nice by our natures to compete with the neighbors, that indeed, we are born sinless.

Jeff

May 19th., 2017

Is This Thing on?

Jeff/neighsayer8 Comments

I seem to have a couple of readers, that’s nice.

I’m getting a few views, enough that on a good day it doesn’t seem pointless, like my idea is getting out there, albeit very slowly. I never expected more. If it was going to be a popular idea, it wouldn’t have been with me, because if an idea is popular, then its transformative power is already in play. It seems clear to me that if anything is going to change we need some new ideas, and those aren’t usually welcome, so long and slow – that is what success was always going to look like.

It’s such a leap of faith, though, folks. I can’t tell if I’m getting through at all. Can some of you please check in, just let me know you exist, let me know if you’re thinking about it? Please? I thought that I was planting a seed in some heads, just some little spark that would grow if it were real . . . will anyone confirm or deny? Is it sticking, at all?

“Is this thing on?” is what I’m saying.

Is this idea not interesting, not emotional, provocative, incendiary – loaded – like the same conversation is when I’m having it with parents? Not . . . fun?

I try to sound authoritative. I don’t think anyone listens if you’re asking questions, if you come from a place of not knowing, and frankly, within a very narrow set of definitions, I feel I am authoritative . . . but as a human being, I’m lost here, folks. I’m alone, and a human being alone is some kind of not right, a social animal alone is failing some kind of sanity test.

Reader, if you are some sort of smart scientist, I’m counting on you to let me know where I’m at, OK? Am I in a blind alley, it’s all been done and debunked? Or is there something here and I’ve got you thinking about it? I don’t want to have some dramatic moment of despair where I give up and burn it all down and then find out later some brilliant folks were taking it up and running with it, that it was catching on after all. I’m feeling the drama. I sense a Romeo and Juliet sort of ending coming, I want to be wrong about it.

Talk to me?

Somebody?

 

Jeff

May 2nd., 2017

The Terrible Secret: Fascism is Easy

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

It is just too easy, what the USA is doing, what the present demagogue administration is doing, way too easy. Everything leans their way.

Love is what struggles in this world, unfortunately. Hate is like money; once you have enough of it, it snowballs. That’s what’s going on in the world today: fascism is when prosocial sentiment loses too much ground and antisocial feelings are fed back and so amplified. It’s a runaway situation, an out of control feedback loop. It’s nearly impossible to stop, and the easiest wave to ride any politician ever had. Even a moron can do it. In fact . . . on second thought, no-one needs me to finish that sentence.

‘Pro’ means love, and ‘anti’ means hate, of course, and ‘socialization’ means our adaptation to the rules, values, hopes, fears, loves and hates of our society, meaning of the people around us. That’s the noun, the sum of our social adaptations. But it’s a verb, too.

It means the process of making those adaptations, of learning the rules, of internalizing the feelings and principles of our people. As a verb, prosocialization means learning love, safety, and support, and is correlated with those nearest to us, and is accomplished through loving touch and other senses, while antisocialization means learning about hate, fear and conflict, mostly concerning people outside the family or the group. Finishing the analogy, antisocialization is also accomplished through a form of touch, but there remains a large difference: the ones who prosocialize us to themselves with loving touch are the very same ones, nearest to us, that antisocialize us to the other, with pointedly unloving touch.

In an even simpler view, when someone touches us in a way that makes us feel good, we do and we are happy and healthy, and when someone touches us in a way that makes us feel bad, we do and we are unhappy and tending towards unhealthiness. It is the opinion of this fool that we are antisocialized by our loved ones as an inoculation against the other, that antisocial feelings and attitudes are something we have decided is necessary to keep our group safe in a world of hostile groups and limited resources. That we all have two groups to think about, the in and the out, us and them, and that one is all about competition and the other only half about love too – perhaps this explains why it’s so easy for the politicians to ride the wave when the loving quarter of our lives begins to shrink.

Antisocialization is a way to describe that shit flows downhill, or that the simplest, and perhaps the only way to unload stress is to unload it on someone else (Robert M. Sapolsky, paraphrase), and fascism is the political party for antisocialization. By pushing our society beyond the tipping point, fascists mobilize for war, because everything a fascist regime does hurts us, frightens us, and drives us mad. However passive we may be, stress us out, and we edge somewhat nearer to violence and war. Easy, so horrifyingly easy to do, and why the least educated among us are the most gleeful – even they can sense the inevitability of it, of the victory of violence and hate. This is what the bully knows: he can’t lose, he knows that eventually he’ll drive even the most liberal of the elites to lose his mind and join the fight – or some fight. The insight that prompted this bit of drivel was that these fascists are so well aligned with the dark side of humanity that it co-opts any bit of negativity that isn’t nailed down and so any critique of what is left of the opposition seems likely to destroy it completely. It’s one of the ways in which it seems there is nothing to be done, no way out. Fascism is a tsunami of antisocialization and even lifeboats can become hazards, dangerous projectiles when the sea goes mad.

It’s not very hopeful, but we need to understand it. I’m afraid my Antisocialization Theory predicts that indeed there is nothing for it by this point, that fascists will simply double down and fight until there aren’t enough of them left to fight, just like they did in WWII. I dearly wish we could just cut to the chase, that millions of innocents aren’t going to die before we even begin fighting these fascists, but then, I could be wrong; I sure don’t want to be the swine who starts it by trying to stop it!

But I’ll say it now, and repost this once in awhile, just to say I told you so.

I told you so.

 

Jeff

May 1st., 2017