Month: May 2019

Beyond Evolution VS Creation

Jeff/neighsayer3 Comments

New idea (sort of), that what Darwin, what evolutionists are up against is not some offense that we are “just animals,” but rather what I’m up against, the mimic meme, the great social myth that humans are different because we’re nicer, that our special development isn’t just a special version of mean.

This is our species’ false origin story now, maybe always, that we rose above the animals through “cooperation,” or “altruism,” and in that sense a “morality handed down by a god or a godly messenger” would fill the same purpose in one of those forms, in any given sentence in one of those arguments -the myth that we dominate this world because we are better and not because we are worse. I think the offense evolutionists face has the same flavour as the offense voiced in opposition to permissiveness, to leniency and the advance of liberalism generally, and that’s the larger context for it, not so much whether humans are partly divine, or whether there is a god or not – but whether our lifestyle, the social order, supported by these rationalizations is right or wrong. I don’t mean capitalism, or the patriarchy, for me, all these serve the human warrior society; capitalism means money may abuse, patriarchy means men may abuse. I mean the abuse itself, not who or what is allowed to do it, but that someone always is. That little factoid gets flipped upside-down in this false backstory of ours, that is what’s supposed to make us better.

(New readers may have some confusion. For me “abuse” includes all abuse, socially sanctioned punishments included, because punishment is a technology that includes the application of abuse. Punishment, in our world, is supposed to make us “better,” while abuse, punishment’s major component, has been shown quite robustly to make us “worse,” at least in the eyes of the law, educators, medicine, etc.)

Perhaps something here explains that while evolution generally had popularity, even its adherents had resistance to Lamarck, to the idea that we create ourselves, and that that resistance is still alive and fighting, apparently. If it’s the great machine, OK, we say, fine, evolution, and we are still created beings, formed by forces larger than ourselves and beyond our control. We are still not self-aware or self-responsible in this state, and there is still the room for and a need for God, despite the apparent conflict. Indeed, this would seem to be the creature we see in the news and any dreams we may have of great human destinies do tend to fade with experience and age. We can be managed in certain ways, but humanity cannot apparently be reasoned with.

That’s the mimic meme too, not just some parent, beating their child to “make them good,” but the larger, social idea that it has worked, and that we are good, again, that we have won the tournament against the rest of the world and bent it to our stupid, stupid will – because we are “good,” altruistic, cooperative, empathetic . . . a lovely list of words, to be sure. Evolution is acceptable if we are horrible but powerless in the process, and evolution may be acceptable if we have had a hand in it, but if that’s going to be the story, we had better look “good” in that story, or first, who wants to hear it, and second and more importantly, what good does saying it do? We’re not supposed to tell a child they’re bad, only that their action was bad, because we don’t want them to take it to heart, so how do you tell apes that their bad actions have the unfortunate effect of making them bad? Talking about abuse still, always.

I tell myself I don’t write for children. I know I’m looking for dangerous places to be – honestly it’s all just talk now, I’ve already ruined my real life by taking this issue on with my child-rearing – looking for dangerous things to think about. I hope I’m not making anyone crazy with this, but I’m operating at a very young age in my cynicism; I’m still clinging to the idea of truth above all. If I didn’t have that delusion to chase, I’m afraid I wouldn’t have anything at all.

I think I understand about crackpots now, about people that get obsessed over a viewpoint. For me, this is the heart of the matter, of all matters, and so any talk at the higher levels in these matters, cultural, political, religion vs atheism, all seem secondary, but I’m sure a lot of people have their own idea of where the heart of the matter is. I’m willing to allow that matters have more than one heart, an unknown number, no doubt, but honestly, this is the one I’ve found, and frankly, whether it’s big enough to explain all that I think it does, I can’t have the certainty I’d like about that – but it’s big enough to keep me busy for awhile yet, I think. Honestly, I am staring into the abyss, I’m not trying to share that part, but you probably see. I need something that I can fool myself is important, to keep me busy, you know what they say about idle hands.

At least until I get some sense somebody else has gotten the idea, that I’ve been able to breathe life into this meme, and see it thriving and reproducing out there in nature.

 

 

Jeff

May 25th., 2019

 

Here’s a Part #2

Beyond Evolution VS Creation, Continued

Here’s Part #3

Psych 101 Or Beyond Evolution VS Creation, Continued, Continued

 

 

Motivating the Great Unwashed

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

IF the racist bell curve were a real thing, then what it would mean is this: that 49% of white people are below average and 51% of black people are below average. I don’t buy it, just IF.

Anyone trying to base any sort of policy and budgeting that discriminates by race is prioritizing the inferior 49% of whites over all blacks, defying their own logic immediately, Charles Murray distributing public resources to these inferior whites and depriving the superior blacks, because “superior/inferior,” wasting our tax money in exactly the way he’s arguing that we shouldn’t be. Considering the demographic proportions in America, he’s wasting almost six times the resources, trying to educate the bottom half of the larger white population!

So we know Charles is in that group, he’s just trying to elevate himself, because if things were a meritocracy, that sort of logic would keep you out of the good schools. Of course, that’s whose interests are to prioritize their group, their “people,” the inferior ones want to enjoy the benefits the superior ones have acquired. “Racists are stupid” isn’t just anecdotal, because of course the less intelligent members of the dominant race are motivated to be all in on race, on their group’s dominance. That’s just science.

A fine place to drop the microphone, but it raises the question – is there something the modern liberal society does to counter that motivation, something we do to motivate the whites in the other direction? I mean, we try to talk and teach, but do we do anything to actually motivate them in the other direction? It’s a new thought, but I must say, nothing is coming to mind!

And what might that be? Now we have to start to examine whether an actual meritocracy isn’t also inherently cruel, that a white meritocracy is what threatens the less gifted and drives them to their group attachments, race attachments . . . it’s always the false dichotomy, the false choice, isn’t it? Somebody has to get the shitty end of the stick. Do you want it to be your kids?

I don’t buy that either, nobody has to get the shitty end of the stick.

Fuck that guy and his shitty stick. I’m sorry, that’s where it all goes for me, all of our problems are the same one problem.

 

 

Jeff

May 24th., 2019

Directions, expanded

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

Just an update, I’ve tried to stretch this for clarity.

I wasn’t going to write this blog – and I didn’t. It’s just a Twitter rant. But it’s a clarification, certainly an important part of antisocialization theory.

 

  1. Sorry for teasing, if anybody was. I’m afraid this trailer signified the end of my output for now. Anyway, like a lot of it, I’ve already laid this idea out before. But rather than send you back to an earlier, dumber me, I’ll give it to you in point form, Twitter style. /more

(This referring to a teaser tweet from a few days ago with the following text)

Well, I’m almost sixty.

I guess it’s time I stop all this infantile radicalism and start spouting some long-winded lullaby about some stupid middle of some boring road. Have we met? LOL, you’ve met me now! I can’t imagine anything that would capture me better than that with all the time and ink in the world.

How about some compromise between Man the Rational Animal and Man the Meaningless, lost in relativism and adaptations to adaptations to we don’t even know what anymore?

Shouldn’t need our teeth for that. Grab your cardigan, put the kettle on for a nice Ovaltine and watch this idiot finally stop trying to tear the world down for some rebuild that he should have known since statutory adulthood was never coming.

(Then on to Point Number two. From here, I’ll try to expand, stretch out the shorthand to something someone can follow.)

 

  1. The point of antisocialization theory is that our punishments schemes and abuse push our personalities in a DIRECTION, and perhaps that direction is the opposite direction to where our schemes push our behaviour for the most part, meaning we LOOK better, but we FEEL worse. /more

What I’m after here is the idea that while use of punishments does control some behaviours, making life better and safer at home within our group for the most part, where our most egregious individuals are controlled, exiled or killed, there is a cost and a downside, and that is that each of us are participating in fighting him and so to some degree the violence we are trying to stop him from we are now all involved in.

It’s hard to imagine that we have a technology that makes this negative energy (these negative causes and effects) disappear, energy doesn’t disappear, it is converted, moved – stored, perhaps in this case, the individual murderer’s violence is traded for our group violent control, we lose a murderer and we all become police, jailers, executioners, and share the load of some violent constant, nothing created and nothing lost. This goes to conscious evolution, and self-domestication. I don’t think you can beat yourself passive. I think if we are domesticated, we are also the slavers as well as the domestic labour pool, it has to be a process of splitting, and for us to be getting more sheep-like, we must also be getting more wolf-like. It would seem that the existing state of evolutionary psychology is focussed upon the success of our conscious efforts and our growing sheep-like traits, they are writing books to explain our decreased violence and our ability to work together.

I think they’re ignoring the dark side. I accuse them in my heart of leaving human pain, misery and mental illness to the “blank slate psychologists” they say will never solve anything. I worry that for them, just as for parents, none of which ever went to parenting college, this punishing business is a magic bullet, no cost, no downside. I say this a lot, and if any of them think I’m wrong, none of them are engaging me about it. Of course, I’m no-one and unpublished. Social media is a place to talk, not necessarily a place to be heard; I can’t know any of them have read my complaints.

Frankly, as things have been, group conflict almost always being our biggest problem, my “dark side” is a feature, not a bug, makes us strong and we’re still here, not selected out. But if it’s a feature, why can’t we talk about it? Conscious evolution is going to require that we don’t have huge areas we aren’t conscious enough to talk about.

 

  1. There’s a lot of stuff to say and fight about there, but for now, this: abuse produces more crime, and discipline produces more effective armies, and so the DIRECTION pain drives our personalities in is towards fighting, violence, defensiveness, aggression. /more

Just to clarify, violence is a large component of all those vocations, the common factor. When attempting to engage in science, we try to get beneath social constructs like dividing violence into criminal and law enforcement violence, because there are common elements that predate ideas like law and crime, things to know about it beyond the current value attachments. Abuse is a component of both criminal abuse and military discipline.

 

  1. “Abuse,” when I say it in these contexts, includes punishment and discipline, because those things include the use of abuse. But, addressing this question, we have a PRINCIPLE, a near species-wide behaviour, that pushes us in a particular DIRECTION, so – /more

By this I mean to agree with Richard Wrangham and any before him that have traced the progress of our civilization and seen the role of our majority rule, punishments and capital punishment, I agree that yes, this is a human trait, perhaps universal. People know the power of punishment, for me, people know the power of abuse. I agree, we all know the power of conscious punishment to reach some of our conscious goals. I believe myself, that we also unconsciously know the power of abuse to reach our perhaps less conscious goals. And maybe this less conscious part is the less malleable part, and so the more universal part.

I think where our conscious efforts take us, Wrangham probably tells this story very well, but being conscious and overt, perhaps this is flexible, sort of steerable what we teach, what we punish for, what crimes we designate and what behaviours are mandatory, and cultures certainly vary. But abuse, this provides direction, pretty thoroughly documented by all sorts of social science, and while things are being debunked, the whole general direction isn’t likely to be. That direction is violence, fighting, and it springs organically from the application of abuse, regardless of the lesson intended. Statistically, I mean, by Big Data.

 

  1. – so determining initial conditions, like some “human nature,” with its connotations of innateness, isn’t either the point, possible, or necessary. We know what DIRECTION we’re swimming. We know where we’re TRYING to go, where we are working to TAKE our natures to. /more

Hmmm . . . this bit’s clear enough, maybe . . .

 

  1. So much for origins and innateness, but also the more nuanced position of endless relativism, of adaptive fictions and constructed realities – again, maybe we can SAY we don’t know which way is up or which DIRECTION we’re swimming, but look at us: /more
  2. When you see all the salmon struggling in the same direction, maybe they don’t have a clear idea what it is, or maybe they wouldn’t tell us and give away their ancestral homeland to us predators, but they’re all swimming the same DIRECTION and so we can glean it. /more
  3. You must know where I see us all swimming to: strength, discipline, and never-ending war and strife. This adaptive behaviour works for the last group standing, I suppose, and we’ll be down to that soon enough if we don’t see where we’re trying so hard to get. /done

This is where the rubber meets the road for me, that we talk about either our static “natures” getting us into this pickle, or the never-ending conflict is an accident, some default we fall into because we’re just not trying hard enough or something – when I’ve had this insight that it’s what we do the most, the things that we never let up on for a second that have brought us to this state of affairs, and those are our punishments, and again, I think we can’t beat ourselves passive.

 

 

  1. you ever get tired and sad and give up and try to beg off and NOT write something brilliant? SMFH. 🤓🤣🤣🤣

 

Jeff

May 12th., 2019

The Extreme Case

Jeff/neighsayer4 Comments

My main point is, all the pain we administer to one another, legal or otherwise, all hurts us, angers us, and statistically drives us to violence and group conflict. Abuse does this, and the abuse component of our intended deterrents also does this, because pain is pain like water is water and things like pain and water have real world properties beyond our desires for them.

Perhaps my largest iteration of this is that societies that are hardest on children are the most fearsome at war, illustrated by parables like the Spartan mother who kills her son when he returns home with a wounded back, suggesting he had retreated. The real-world display of this principle is that that the current Spartans, the current world empire with an unbeatable military is the last country of the former First World that is not signing the UN Rights of the Child Charter, America.

The extreme case is that the Nazi and/or neo-Nazi groups are filled with angry young men, abused by their mothers, fathers, and their surrogates and directing their anger to strangers from other cultures, strangers with different skin tones or churches.

I was busy on a project, replacing the tuners on my guitar recently and didn’t change the TV channel all day and wound up watching one of the expose/infomercials about American white supremacy groups and the police who infiltrated them. At one point, an officer tells us he messed up, potentially ruined his cover by starting a story with “When I was in college,” – a major red flag in that world – and scrambled to cover it with the story that his dad had made him go, he’d gone one year and gotten booted for some racist violence. That got him through, because his dad made him do it, and he hated his dad for it, he hated his dad . . . they all understood that. And they all agreed that brown people and Jews would pay the price, that hunting down their own white fathers isn’t how it works.

If that isn’t the power of antisocialization theory working like bloody magic, wind them up and let them go, and they never seem to make the connection.

Enough, isn’t it?

 

Jeff

May 10th., ,2109

Directions

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I wasn’t going to write this blog – and I didn’t. It’s just a Twitter rant. But it’s a clarification, certainly an important part of antisocialization theory.

 

  1. Sorry for teasing, if anybody was. I’m afraid this trailer signified the end of my output for now. Anyway, like a lot of it, I’ve already laid this idea out before. But rather than send you back to an earlier, dumber me, I’ll give it to you in point form, Twitter style. /more

(This referring to a teaser tweet from a few days ago with the following text)

Well, I’m almost sixty.

I guess it’s time I stop all this infantile radicalism and start spouting some long-winded lullaby about some stupid middle of some boring road. Have we met? LOL, you’ve met me now! I can’t imagine anything that would capture me better than that with all the time and ink in the world.

How about some compromise between Man the Rational Animal and Man the Meaningless, lost in relativism and adaptations to adaptations to we don’t even know what anymore?

Shouldn’t need our teeth for that. Grab your cardigan, put the kettle on for a nice Ovaltine and watch this idiot finally stop trying to tear the world down for some rebuild that he should have know since statutory adulthood was never coming.

(Then on to Point Number two)

 

  1. The point of antisocialization theory is that our punishments schemes and abuse push our personalities in a DIRECTION, and perhaps that direction is the opposite direction to where our schemes push our behaviour for the most part, meaning we LOOK better, but we FEEL worse. /mo
  2. There’s a lot of stuff to say and fight about there, but for now, this: abuse produces more crime, and discipline produces more effective armies, and so the DIRECTION pain drives our personalities in is towards fighting, violence, defensiveness, aggression. /more
  3. “Abuse,” when I say it in these contexts, includes punishment and discipline, because those things include the use of abuse. But, addressing this question, we have a PRINCIPLE, a near species-wide behaviour, that pushes us in a particular DIRECTION, so – /more
  4. – so determining initial conditions, like some “human nature,” with its connotations of innateness, isn’t either the point, possible, or necessary. We know what DIRECTION we’re swimming. We know where we’re TRYING to go, where we are working to TAKE our natures to. /more
  5. So much for origins and innateness, but also the more nuanced position of endless relativism, of adaptive fictions and constructed realities – again, maybe we can SAY we don’t know which way is up or which DIRECTION we’re swimming, but look at us: /more
  6. When you see all the salmon struggling in the same direction, maybe they don’t have a clear idea what it is, or maybe they wouldn’t tell us and give away their ancestral homeland to us predators, but they’re all swimming the same DIRECTION and so we can glean it. /more
  7. You must know where I see us all swimming to: strength, discipline, and never-ending war and strife. This adaptive behaviour works for the last group standing, I suppose, and we’ll be down to that soon enough if we don’t see where we’re trying so hard to get. /done

 

you ever get tired and sad and give up and try to beg off and NOT write something brilliant? SMFH. 🤓🤣🤣🤣

 

Jeff

May 4th., 2019