Month: January 2018

Feminism – updated

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It’s never going to work.

 

I mean, not the way we understand it, not the way it’s framed.

 

I’m going to give you a bunch of theory – OK, that seems a stretch, a bunch of my theorizing, how’s that – but this is really from the gut, from personal experience. It’s not going to work out, because it sure as fuck hasn’t worked out for me. I know, I’m a dude, it wasn’t supposed to work out for me, I mean it hasn’t worked out for me or for the women in my life either.

 

They apparently hate a feminist man more than the chauvinists they so properly hate, we only confuse them or something. Plus, it’s safer to hate on a guy whose strategy is not to use violence, isn’t it?

 

A violent, misogynist man, a guy who fights and wins and so dominates his household is a clear problem, and his victims are clearly wronged, but the opposite strategy – letting the ladies win the fights – is even less popular. Now I’ve made my wives and daughters the dominants, the winners, the responsible and the guilty ones. I’m back to warrior society: the women hate a man who abuses his physical superiority, but no society has any use for a man who won’t fight.

 

I literally complained to a gay woman about a misogynist acquaintance of mine, a Trump fan, a Hillary hater, and a fellow who believes himself to be an alpha male, and watched this woman choose this fellow over me. I was the whiner or something, she knew I’d lost the battle with my girls, she knew I considered myself feminist, but her empathy was with the traditional male, his role was normal, at least. It’s the old Hulk problem, of course, we all want a big strong murderous friend, but can’t he leave me alone? Whereas this little guy leaves you alone, but he hasn’t killed anything the whole time you’ve known him.

 

I chose not to win at all emotional costs, I didn’t want to live with that steady hum of hate from the women, the would-be feminists, so I didn’t. I feel I’ve been sold a bill of goods, however; I did what the ladies in my life seemed to be asking for, and at this point in my life, I will say, the hate does not seem to have been lessened, that the evolved emotions and behaviours around gender conflict are perhaps not so easily talked away. This is decades away and an entirely different conversation, but like a lot of less articulate men, I’m having trouble forgetting being forever passed over as a young suitor for exactly the rough and tough types that are the bad guys in today’s conversation. I told myself then that all those girls who ignored me would learn it the hard way eventually, but here I am decades later, and they still seem to like me less than the proud and the brave.

 

The tough guys will slap you around, but if pussies like me take over, it’s some other social group’s bad guys you’ll have to deal with, and better the devil you know than the one you don’t, right? To bring that back down to Earth, I think that’s a fair description of the mindset of the wives of the alt-Right, the wives of the KKK and the Nazis. No? Of course, those are extreme, highly visible examples, but this sort of basic conflict underlies far less obviously sinister situations as well – yours, mine, etc.

 

That’s the situation, if we want to deal up gender roles, we had better learn to understand our roles, we had better learn to see the warrior society and take a more comprehensive approach. As for me, I’m doomed. I won’t have the traditional role, and the feminist dream is over, there’s no place for me anymore. Reporting from just outside humanity, I’m

 

 

Jeff

Jan. 31st., 2018

“Navel-gazing”

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Oh yes, I hate everything, I trust nothing and no-one, no doubt due to some seriously hard feelings – but I guess I must have opted to keep the hard feelings and jettison everything I had learned for the crucial first many years of my life instead. Probably the wrong way around in hindsight, but I was pretty young. Am I going to have to take responsibility for that decision, if that’s what it was? Before we’re done I think science may give me an excuse – but it’s certainly not appropriate to describe these sorts of internal events by way of Murphy’s Law, is it? I mean besides the fact that it’s borderline racist. Of course, that’s the nature of the beast, not just for me, hard feelings and little or no hard data. That’s all of us, and almost completely. I am either a fool or wise one, because it’s just that much more complete with me.

 

My point, the real point of this fantasy is this, though: everyone who remembers their childhoods, everyone with a “normal” pattern of life and learning “just knows” how to raise their children, and few question the system they were brought up in, other than in terms of degree of ‘strictness.’

 

I think I forgot my indoctrination, somehow brainwashed myself. I forgot how to raise kids, something we’ve all seen our entire lives, all day long.

 

My super power is that my mutation makes me something other than human, so that I can study humans. It’s hard to get a clear view of yourself, so the universe has created me, your dark, magic mirror, with a simple tweak of the ol’ DNA along with the abusively engineered life to epigenetically activate it, starting with my drop-date – double Scorpio. Ha.

 

The DNA tweak is part of the metaphor, of course – but not perhaps all a joke, either. Mom was on some morning sickness drug or something I need to get the name of for you, it’s not Thalidomide, which I would remember. I can’t recall if it’s the same drug that was associated with my sisters’ adult cervical cysts and possible cancers. I wasn’t a flipper baby, but really, there was some deformity. My umbilical wouldn’t die and stop bleeding, so a surgery found it still completely hooked up to the bowel with some bit of intestine that is not supposed to be there. “Umbilical hernia” was the term, but I’m having trouble relating that to the longer description they gave us and I just gave you, so it’s not clear to me, like everything else about my past because I either flushed it or I never wanted to know. So, I’ve got that part of the science fiction/super hero back story going for me too.

 

“Affliction,” in the classical sense, I think. In Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, Stevenson invoked a ‘sense of deformity’ to repel and horrify us about his monster, and I remember that stung a bit, I took that sort of personally.

 

I don’t mean to raise the issue of deformity in order to return to it later, I really am not planning a sci-fi or fantasy ending to this project! I offer it only in full disclosure, because to leave such a physical humiliation – I have never had a belly button, my scar was always a ‘zipper’ – out of the ‘outsider’ narrative I’m using as my biography would be to destroy the point. I’m simply leaving no embarrassment out, or I hope so anyway. It’s also bloody mythical, isn’t it? Having no navel makes you non-human, maybe not even mammalian. The symbolism of the lost connection is powerful. No?

 

The deformity thing is true. It’s the ‘visitor’ narrative that is the fantasy. Readers, you’re my double check for that. Someone let me know when I’ve let slip that I can no longer tell the difference, OK? That last story has me wondering a little. Wow. I need to let that sort of dissipate, catch my breath. That is fucking weird. Back in five.

 

That little insight sort of rocked my world, thirty, forty, fifty years late. I better check!

 

Yup, still the zipper. I should be relieved, right? Relax Jeff, you’re not completely delusional – just not apparently placental. Well, you can’t have everything, can you?

 

Further to the weirdness of my deformity, father in law had it too! Umbilical hernia they said, and he too, the zipper, the erasure of his placental origin, the sign! I see my future in this situation, my marriage in his, that in my wife’s family, the breeding males must have their primal connection wiped from history, the bridge between mother and child, between man and woman must be destroyed.  I fear I have inadvertently let myself glimpse the impossibility that my own demise could ever be a trauma to the women I’ve betrayed all my brothers for.

 

Where was I?

 

Continuing with the conscious part of the fantasy, I’m on the outside looking in at our species, at least as far as breeding goes. That is what will have to pass for my super power in this fantasy: I don’t “just know” a lot of regular stuff about “discipline” and I don’t trust another human to figure it out, so I have to do it from scratch. I know, not much of a super power at first glance, but it depends, doesn’t it? Mostly it depends on whether what everybody else knows is true or not. Short answer, yes . . .

 

Long answer?

 

No.

 

The long answer is this here blog.

 

Where everyone else saw some normal and proper version of childrearing in use, at least among the majority of their own peers, I saw chaos and a system designed not to help children develop normally through their growing years but to bend and break us all into the shape required for us to match the bent and broken shaped container our society and our families have made for us (Shout out to Takingthemaskoff, a powerful voice everyone needs to read). I saw madness calling itself reason and I saw a need for a new approach, because I either missed the lesson, never believed it enough to memorize it, or managed to un-learn it somehow, but where others saw parenting as a known and understood thing, I didn’t trust them and their system, I rejected authoritative parenting carte blanche. If what they said matched anything that the grownups in my life even might have said, then no, no, no!

 

Jeff

Aug/September 2016

“Lazy”

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No-one is lazy, nothing is lazy. It’s always slander, and almost always baseless.

“Lazy” is what a writer or a thinker says when his argument has run out of steam, and it’s always some sort of bigoted “reason” applied to some group of people that we will allow it for. Voters are too “lazy” to research the issues and the candidates, most people are “lazy” and don’t plan for the future – it’s not that other people are slaving away upwards from forty hours a week to muddy the issues and manage what we get to know about candidates, it’s not that “less lazy” people take every penny poor people have before they can even afford to go to the doctor, again, as their paid job, all day long.

I’ve been learning philosophy in a podcast, and that’s every damn philosopher’s answer about regular people too, why we don’t think more. They’re living lives of contemplation, but regular folks are – OK, intellectually – “lazy.”

Of course, it’s understood, at least since the industrial revolution, right? “Lazy” is bad, sloth is one of the seven deadly sins. This when all these lazy plebes’ constant labour before and after that amplification of it has all but destroyed the world. It’s amazing that it could need to be said, but it wasn’t those lazy gorillas did all that. “Work” isn’t all good, not by a long shot. We didn’t wipe this environment out on our vacations. We do that at work.

That podcast, Philosophize This, by one Stephen West, is a good overview/history of philosophy, but I swear, if we run all things philosophical and/or psychological through a filter of biology and evolutionary thinking, then we can really start to learn something. Case in point, Stephen describes a version of human nature, a story to explain human laziness, that if we live beside a stream, we tend not to use a distant stream for our water, that of course, we go to the handy one. In this blank slate, philosophical conversation, this shows laziness to be our default condition – but biology has a different take.

That is not laziness, that is evolution, survival. We need water, but to walk for miles spending calories for calorie free water makes no sense. This sort of “laziness” is demonstrably selected for and survival critical. Clearly, the person whose take on human nature is alluded to above, has a stake in someone else’s output. Perhaps he has a food stand between the streams.

Beware of the “lazy” label, it’s always a dodge, a slander thrown out in lieu of an actual argument. Lazy is good, the world needs more lazy. It’s the Hippocratic oath, a huge part of first doing no harm.

 

Jeff,

Jan. 23rd., 2018

Personal Circumstances, Part #2

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Personal Circumstances, Part #2

 

Oh my God, how many times have I written that? This must be the third identical dry heave on the subject, I saw one from half a year ago and it brought half a memory of an earlier one . . . I am just not getting there, not dredging up the last toxic bit of bile. I’m fucking looping, is that a verb now? I spend half my year getting ready, working up the courage to face this task, work through this, figure it out and when I finally decide I’m feeling strong enough, I go back to the toilet to try again. Then I document my spasms and my view of the world from there.

I think I’m planning a Part #2 every time, but I never do, because it’s going to be toxic. That was my life plan, that’s what good Christians do, we absorb pain and nastiness, take it into ourselves and out of circulation in the world; the idea isn’t to groom it, grow it and unleash it. The idea is to grow a cyst or a pearl around it, quarantine it, and take it out of the world permanently when we die. It’s supposed to be strength and will doing what it can to alleviate evil and suffering in the world, it’s not supposed to be Frankenstein and his monster or Teller and his bomb. Now, I don’t recall Victor saying that he must create it or die himself, or Teller either, and I am a very patient sort of a person, but I’m afraid I don’t see a future for myself, I don’t see more than one solution for my pain and angst at this point and my life all day long consists of the awareness that I’m just delaying, holding out for as long as I can.

That, and the moral consideration that so long as the lights are on and I’m consuming resources, my ungrateful life is raising the sea levels and killing poor people the world over.

Hmmm. Does it bother anyone that in this metaphor, my personal sadness and my worldview/philosophy are interchangeable? This must be my major malfunction here, right? To me, it’s all one, but there can’t be another human being out there that isn’t saying, ““warrior society” and divorce? Really?”

I can make the case with “rational” babble, it’s what I do all day, “yes, the state of the world hurts, the human condition hurts,” but the world wants details, right? Make it personal, or no-one else will feel it, I know. It is going to be my life’s crusade if I make one, to merge the two, because public is personal, and our personal problems are too common not to be public ones, but not today.

Part #1 was January 10th., what seemed like a productive day, I was exhausted after writing it in the morning, which made me falsely imagine I was getting somewhere with it, and despite a bone weariness, I got a few errands done in the afternoon and even took a walk, although I gassed out and cut it short. I hadn’t realized the repetition of that blog yet, and I was telling myself that I needed to push forward, and that probably I needed to go to a dark place, let out some of the nasty stuff I wasn’t admitting I was thinking. It’s always something you’re afraid to say, to yourself or whomever, that is the problem, right? So, I was brooding on that overnight, hoping I’d be able to write my way through something in the morning.

I write in the morning, before the pain killing effect of marijuana accumulates and stiffens me up, body, heart, and mind, and I don’t know why everybody else writes, but one big reason for me is, that’s the way I can see my own thoughts. Promises made to ourselves in silence, no-one can hold us to. It’s a dangerous way to learn about race and such on Twitter, writing to see your thoughts and finding out they’re shit sometimes, but Twitter is sort of amazing. There’s a lot of bile, but if you’re really trying, someone will appreciate it. Total honesty almost works as a life strategy in that place. Anyhow, I was trying to get to a dark place, planning to write this part yesterday morning when I got a phone call, a crisis call, very possibly a suicide call from a good old friend who was absolutely on the edge – and guess what sort of a speech I had loaded up. Not only did I paint a horrible picture for the guy, who responded that he’s driving around with a rope in the trunk, but I said it, spent any righteousness I may have had about it by basically trying to murder a friend with it – and lost it.

Toxic AF, that’s me. I wanted to purge some negativity, truth above all, no fear, push through, and before I put my two fingers to the keyboard, I’ve already killed someone. I spent the whole day knowing this would be the end, that I would never be able to say anything to anyone ever again, before he answered his phone just before dinner, and it’s not over yet. He’s a lot closer to the edge than I am. It’s a serious addiction thing, as serious as it gets, and he’s been in the rehab system already, so, head in the clouds self-appointed situation analyst for the world that I am, I thought I’d get back to basics and try to cut past all of his learned stuff from the rehab industry, and say, “Man, we’re addicts because we’re not happy, that’s the thing, that’s about as specific and scientific as it gets. And if we’re not happy, then there is nothing and no-one making us happy and we need a new life, right?”

I have this idea that when we feel trapped and that there’s no way out that there is something we’re hanging onto, something we’re protecting, that of course we have locked at least one of those locked doors ourselves, in this case, I’m bitterly divorced, I think he’s trapped in a loveless marriage, and hanging onto that for some reason. I guess if he overdoses while still married, he never had to be as alone as me. Stay alive, my friend, please, don’t let me be writing how I pushed you over and don’t let my readers have to be reading it. He responded with what I think is a normal meme from psychology and rehab culture, that it’s not up to other people to try to make you happy. To which I freaked out.

“So, what, they’re not supposed to care? Are we not supposed to try to make them happy? We are not our brother’s keeper, every man for himself?”

And then it’s worse, if only for me at this point, and maybe you, going forward. I’m sorry. If you read my main blog, you know I see things as quite a bit worse along this vector, that I see human beings as discipline-obsessed warrior groups, and not only are other people “not responsible for our happiness,” but quite the reverse. We are responsible, charged with making one another miserable. “We are not responsible for the happiness of others” sounds like a nasty truth we’re avoiding, and so we want to think that’s the bottom, the worst of it, but the truth is rarely only one step away. So, now we’re in my trap, alone in this second layer, and I’m pissed off. I haven’t yet clued in that my man is on the precipice, or quite so close.

“Addiction is about happiness, and the world, the warrior society is geared up to piss us off, the whole world creates the situation, but rehab tells you it’s just you, and figure it out yourself.”

Of course, rehab is my friend’s only fucking hope, I am a toxic, insensate monster.

. . . 1:00 pm, he’s OK.

. . . morning again, January 13th., and I can’t believe it but it’s true, what I’ve been trying to get at, what I’ve been looking for, I said to my friend when he absolutely didn’t need to hear it, and now I can’t fucking remember it. It was some connection from my warrior society argument, that the human world’s majority function in terms of our happiness is to destroy it rather than create it and . . . women. His wife, my wife, both of our daughters. It’s what’s in the dark place for me, I think, women and my ambivalence about them in my life, but although I can make the “logical” case for a connection, it’s what I think I do, in that blind passionate moment where I was steamrolling the whole world including my friend’s immanent suicide to express myself, I think I found the personal connection for a second . . . and it’s gone. I can’t seem to re-create it in my mind since, and he’s not going to remember it, or I hope not for his sake.

So, this happens to me now, either marijuana is finally having the desired effect of wiping my memory out, or it’s because I’m crazy now, or psychological blocks are in effect that always have been, surely some combination of these and more unseen things besides, I can’t get there from here. Not a solution, just a new attempt, we’ll jump in at the end, try to work backwards. Straying into the sterile, I’m afraid. I’m trying to find my way back.

Women can be warriors! Women can do anything men can do except for specific physiological things that define the sexes, reproductive things, and men sure can’t do what women can in that area either. I’m not globalizing, not defining roles, I only mean this at the level of sperm, egg, and zygote. Women can do any human role except grow and ejaculate sperm, and men can’t do lady reproductive stuff, not news. Women can be warriors, and they are, and they have been – and if someone magically turned all the world’s beer to chlorine tomorrow, a lot more of them would be. It’s warrior society, is what I’m saying. If all the men disappeared tomorrow, women would be fearsome defenders of their homes and their children, game theory would still apply, and fighting would ensue where resources came into conflict.

We can see the world in positive or negative light, and of course, as a complex mix of both, etc., but if we can view humanity in a dark light, then I’m, sorry, but it’s not some few of us, the power elite – and it’s not just half of us either, the males. It’s all of us. If we’re walking out on that limb, making value judgments of our species, if that is in any way useful to do that, then let’s not explain our species by the behaviour of half or fewer of its members. If life on Earth for humans is a fairly constant state of détente or war, there are not half or more of the humans actually creating peace. Succeeding at it, I mean. We’re trying, but if what you got is detente at best, our efforts to make war are outstripping our efforts to stop it, and I’m sorry, but God has left us in charge. All the energy spent on both sides of this debate, war or peace, that is human effort. We have to understand that we create the human world.

And women are creators, powerful ones. The ladies’ efforts are not washed away in a flood of testosterone, their power stolen by men, they are creators, and this world is as much women’s’ creation as anyone else’s. I know we all want peace. Women want peace. This is where I invoke my consequences mimic meme, mothers trying to civilize their children by un-civilizing force; our intentions are peace, our behaviours are war. Now this.

It’s our behaviours, this is what I’m trying to get at.

“Male aggression” is not a thing in itself, not some Socratic essence; aggression is a strategy and a behaviour. If men disappeared tomorrow, women would get aggressive really quick, because that is human behaviour, to act believing that the best defense is a good offense. Is this not the so well received feminist message of Wonder Woman, women can be warriors? It’s part of my worldview, that in this fantasy, men disappeared or the Amazons’ land, that the girls get beaten as hard as the boys are in male dominated warrior cultures. I think that’s human behaviour, I think “the best defense is a good offense” is almost the human motto, and a good offense is guaranteed through systemic child abuse.

I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, someone show me an all female peaceful society, I want that world, but the women are raising the kids now, in this world, and it’s not working out. Ah, maybe this is it!

And they’re trying the same tactics with me.

Eureka. This will be my take-off point tomorrow.

Jeff

Jan. 13th., 2018

While the geneticists are telling us the old Nature/Nurture debate has been made obsolete or been solved, depending who you talk to, I just went ahead and solved it. Part #4

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Now that’s a long title, but it’s a great Tweet, isn’t it?

This is convergence, this little essay, for me this is where all the major threads in my mind come together: the ancient classic dialogue, human behaviour, child discipline, and yes – even trolling.

OK, that wasn’t bad, but this is just the bullet point brainstorming stage right now.

  1. A note about “things”
  2. A note about the “Nature” thing
  3. Trolling and narrowing the argument
  4. The “Nurture” thing, the Abusive Ape Theory
  5. Warrior society’s fears, head on, a lethal mutation (too late, we already have several)
  6. Liberals’ fear of science, dark hints
  7. The “Deep Roots of War” thing
  8. Self-actualization

Whups, turned into a Table of Contents. Maybe that’ll work.

 

4. The “Nurture” thing, the Abusive Ape Theory

 

I asked my self this question, “what is punishment,” or more accurately perhaps, “what is up with this punishment business?” (Side note: I want to say, ‘punishment bullshit,’ because that’s how I talk and how I write, but I didn’t ask myself this aloud. Turns out, my inside thinking voice prefers English. I’m surprised too.) This maybe twenty-five years ago, maybe a few more. For the first two decades or more I was convinced that punishment/discipline/consequences were identical to their illicit cousin, abuse, and that they therefore most likely were responsible for the same sorts of effects – which, yes, I’m still there – but during that period I thought it was some sort of accident, or I blamed cultural things, Leviticus and whatnot, for bringing about this state of affairs.

And I argued with people, in real life while we raised our kids, and for a few years online, while producing the early years of this blog and other blogs where the site has since passed on. The persistence of the normal attitudes around it were frustrating, and that people didn’t seem to have a clear definition of “punishment” at all was also irritating, like the language didn’t exist in which to have the conversation. All this against my background of popular psychology type thinking and very little real education . . . I don’t think I was aware yet that I was stonewalled, that further learning wasn’t forthcoming along this train of thought when some online argument challenged me to read Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker.

After a very traumatic reorganization of pretty much everything in my brain rolled out, I was able to bring a little more science to the problem, and by keeping basically the goals of social science in mind and not much else from it, and trying to see both sides of that disciplinary aisle, I have this, the Abusive Ape Theory (not married to the name, but I like the homage to the Aquatic Ape Theory), Antisocialization Theory, and the Consequences Mimic Meme – and I’m delusional, capitalizing my own stuff. But who else is gonna do it?

Really, it’s all there, it’s all out there, there is likely some hundredth monkey thing going on, everyone can know this, today, and I expect many do. All the pieces are out in public view.

The Abusive Ape Theory is the idea that we are an ape that abuses its children, leveraging epigenetic effects to said abuse and so we have created ourselves in the Deep Roots of War image, an ape that systematically desensitizes and traumatizes itself for a group-supporting effect of increased aggression and violence, one that supports our intergroup conflict. Dad says he was toughening us up, Twitler says we will be strong, all of this is the abuse that we feel during the genes’ epigenetically active years, and we adjust our internal configurations accordingly, to be less contented, rougher, and perhaps, as the psychologists say, to continue the pattern.

Antisocialization Theory is simply the apparently dark side of socialization theory, the latter being the idea of us all adapting to our given circumstances and society, learning the rules, customs, taboos, values, etc., of the humans and environment we live in and among. In one sense, it simply refers to the nasty stuff we learn, who to hate, how to fight, but in the more important sense, our antisocialization is the one that matters, because it’s the one with measurable, documented effects. It was Rich Harris who exhaustively laid out the socialization researchers’ hundred year long attempt to prove that parents create traits that they consider desirable in their children, and the near utter failure of it. This, while the mountain of evidence for the less “desirable” traits produced from abuse threatens to block out the sun. Abuse is our lever, the one that does something.

What it does is stress us out, make us angrier and more violent, and the only way to release stress is to spread it around. When a person is so stressed and damaged from too much or too chaotic abuse that they cannot function well in the private sector, the military is waiting for them, and that is as near the aboriginal function of antisocialization as you can get. I think also, though, modern armies don’t need every able bodied (and disabled-minded) male, a smallish percentage is enough – but we are all engaging in the function, and I haven’t repeated this for a year maybe – most of our pre-configured ready-made soldiers are just out there walking our streets, not some enemy’s, getting themselves and all of us into trouble. Yes, we’ve been socialized, both prosocialized and antisocialized, but just like in the movie series, it’s the dark side that has the power. It’s something like irony, to be sure, but if the definition of “nurture” in the context of ‘as opposed to “nature”’ is something the parents do to induce a trait in a child, then it’s a misnomer, because the traits we are able to actually effect are not the traits one induces with any “positive” “nurturing.”

I’m sorry to say, but the proof of the Nurture Assumption’s true underpinnings is that we can indeed modify a child’s development – just not in a “positive” way, and not in positive language. These days, it seems the biologists want to tell us all that there is no “nurture,” that it’s all “nature” – and for some reason, the profundity of real and documented negative effects is another conversation or something, parents can’t “affect” their kids. Abuse is somebody else’s job. The upshot, maybe I’ve never actually said it before, or for a long time –

We can’t teach a child mathematics by beating him and then teach him history the same way. You teach math by teaching math, you teach history by teaching history, and you teach beatings by teaching beatings. You cannot beat a child while expounding about history and pretend he won’t learn the beating – this stuff, this is maybe the worst of the blank slate magical sort of thinking there ever was, the idea that we can. Tell you something else too, Dr. Pinker – it predates Rousseau and all this blank slate atheism, this ‘beatings to produce nearly every imaginable and so often even mutually exclusive effects’ idea. This magic, one size fits all tool idea about abuse, this exists in inverse proportion to your dad’s idea behind the shed, though.

On the other side of our split personalities, we know what we’re doing, Dad knows he’s toughening us up. Certainly, the abuse of boot camp shows that the army knows that the purpose of abuse and discomfort isn’t to make us more peaceful. This brings us to the Mimic Meme.

Mom seems to think that when she whoops you, you’re supposed to get more peaceful, doesn’t she?

LOL.

So, antisocialization, that is beating a child to grow him up as a soldier, while let’s call it the “consequences” idea – that’s beating a child to turn him into . . . whatever Mom wants, is that right? Obedient soldier, for starters, I guess, and then obedient everything else after that? Obedient concert pianist, obedient foot masseur? Of course, it’s “good” child, “good” grandchild, student, soldier.

Both these memes, both these functions are out there, we beat ourselves violent and perhaps don’t know it, and we fail to beat ourselves into excellence and maybe don’t see that either . . . point is, we mean two completely different things by that one word, “good.” In half of life it means good about everything, good piano playing, good food, etc., but in the other context “good” means violence.

A mimic meme – a term I’m surely stealing and perverting – I will define by example. It’s when we tell a child, “Don’t make faces or one day, your face will freeze in that position.” We don’t believe the explanation, but if the child does, he stops making faces at the family at the next table, no bench-clearing family fights ensue at Applebee’s, peace is maintained – a real life benefit from a false meme, the idea that sometimes, peoples’ faces just freeze in mid expression, permanently. This is what the “consequences” idea is, one of these useful lies.

We tell a kid not to touch the lamp, he touches the lamp, we whoop his ass, maybe he never breaks the lamp, maybe he does, but he’s learned his beating, and we didn’t “abuse him to make a soldier of him,” we only taught him not to touch the lamp. That’s the consequences mimic meme, we can beat a kid for years, kids all live under this threat, so they are absolutely intractably antisocialized by it – but we have done nothing to propagate violence or war, we are simply teaching them how to live indoors and not break our stuff, right? And a house full of unbroken stuff sure looks like peace and civilization, so who’s to argue? Your face didn’t freeze like that did it?

It’s a good thing you listened to me then.

. . . (surprisingly) to be continued.

(I thought I’d lost the will for a bit there.)

 

Jeff

Jan. 5th., 2018

ABUSE WITH AN EXCUSE ON A POST-IT NOTE

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

 

The kind of “bad” we are born isn’t sin, it’s just what we see when we see a baby, a mammal baby, a human baby: helpless, sweet, loving. Folks have lived in competition forever, so those are “bad” traits, we need soldiers. Soldiers need discipline, so we beat our children. This “abuse” makes all humans that much meaner, like an arms race, and the tribe that doesn’t beat its children and leaves them at some default level of nasty loses on the battlefield.

Prosocial is “sin” to the warrior society, a threat to security. What I love is, peel it away, we don’t think “original sin,” we don’t think we’re evil, in fact we know ourselves to be less capable of war than we feel we need to be, for our security, and the proof is we know how to fix it. Abuse works for that, while psychology has searched for a hundred years for “positive influence” from parents and found zero. Abuse’s evidence is plentiful. That’s my case, except, epigenetics. There are genetic responses to abuse, and the point of that is, with abuse, we get control.

This is Nobel prize shit, BTW. Don’t anybody try to steal, I’ve been publishing online for years already. Spread the word if you like, but mention my name. LOL

It’s Jeff,

Nov. 26th., 2017

 

Forgot the headlines:

Original Sin, solved – we’re born “bad” alright, bad soldiers, way too nice

The Nurture Assumption, solved – Nurture “works” – but it’s a beating, is all

The Deep Roots of War, solved – epigenetics, we are self-created things. If you want out of a hole, the first job is to stop digging.

Three eternal questions, a philosophical trifecta.

I’m sorry.

 

Jeff,

Nov. 27th., 2017