. . . here’s the previous one
https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/05/26/beyond-evolution-vs-creation/
Carrying on, I don’t have the full vision and I’m sure I never will, twisted, limited, antisocialized little beast that I am, but what it seems to start with is simply that we teach the tendency to warrior society from Day One, that everyone hears about it in broad daylight, not in the mean streets or in secret society meetings – or in silence in our timeout chairs.
The only reason violent political “rhetoric” activates “unconscious violence” is because we’ve all agreed to be unconscious about it as a matter of social policy.
Violent groups, nationalist causes talk about their “race” or their “religion,” and the good folks argue about these premises, but the truth is they are just that, premises, and they serve perfectly to support human warrior lifestyle, even, or especially if they are false or socially constructed. Unfortunately, the socially evolved warrior society pre-dates all of that and includes us all, so these various flavours of it, the extremist groups are not censured for their warrior goals as such, violent rhetoric is legal and moral, depending on its targets. So it’s never “should we kill people or allow people to die?” it’s always should this group of people be targeted or be protected? In warrior society no-one questions that we should kill or allow to be killed somebody. Society began as warrior society probably, and we don’t seem able to imagine one that isn’t; the end of war sounds like suicide, the end of everything.
Wow, you are really some sick swine if that’s what you think! Kidding, I know – laying down your shield is what sounds like suicide – never mind we usually pick up and put down the shield and the sword together – that old truth does not put the lie to mine. This must be one of Aristotle’s logical fallacies, that when there is a reason provided to explain an accusation, that is proof of the charge, not an alibi! If you always have a reason to be warlike, then you are one warlike dude, which, in a way, is all I’m saying. If it adds up to that, to “peace is death,” though, well, Mr. Spock and I call bullshit; this “reality” ain’t logical.
Repeat, more clearly: organizing ourselves for a war is legal and moral, it’s always going on – it’s what human society is. We argue about the other guys’ premises, but we somehow do not argue about the arrangement that has us settling for group conflict as an unavoidable and unstoppable way of life. Leave the Jews alone, say the Good Guys, back off the Blacks, we say – but isn’t it about time someone got tough with the Chinese? Try to write a speech that doesn’t include being tough on somebody: we don’t even have the language for it. This is our world, our life – we need to allow ourselves to know it, at the very least. Badly. The arc of the human universe bends towards group conflict and we need our people to hear about it from us, as the problem – not when a fellow is eighteen and being recruited into the army or the street skinheads where it’s some big secret they’re sharing with him and the answer to the world’s problems instead of the eternal senseless scourge anyone who’s been involved in it knows it to be.
It’s a tendency, as I tried to say softly above, trying to sneak it by you.
A tendency that affects more areas of life than just voting. Humanity and the Earth have not come to these dire straits because of something some minority “other” is doing sometimes – that’s exactly the problem right there, the fact that we always think some version of that. We don’t seem to have the language to articulate that it is common or ubiquitous things that need to change, that our trusted consensus is killing us, but that’s what is happening. We cannot grasp that it is we and our friends who are the problem. I mean, in theory, but . . . no, really? Aren’t they what we’re hoping to protect?
We quite explicitly will not grasp that it is our parents, our caregivers who are the problem, that they tried hard to make us “good” and it succeeded, but that “good” means good for warrior society, good for a society organized around othering and war. We need to have a conversation out loud and in daylight, about what “good” all of our well-intentioned caregivers are actually doing, because if we are all as good as we self report, then I guess we don’t have any of these world destroying problems, right? I mean we need to break it down, what do we mean by “good,” and what does it look like in reality? It doesn’t look good, is what I’m saying. It looks like what you’d expect, considering what we do to make it “good,” though.
You know what we do to make people “good,” don’t you?
You know there are two schools of thought about this, just like climate science, and they are the same two schools, right, science on one side and religion and fascist anti-intellectualism on the other? You know science says the deterrents and punishments don’t make you good and the more of it you get the worse you are, right? All of humanity are operating on the level of climate science denial about social forces like abuse – along with the majority of the scientists. OK, sometimes I say “science says” when it’s only my science, as far as I can see, a large part of the problem being our scientists are drawn from the same pool as the rest of us. We need to bring this into consciousness, we are being such violent morons about this! Of course we are all convinced of it physically, usually before we learn the damned language our parents speak, it is unconscious because it is repressed. Now, I know, I am using the language of psychology here, but I will say, they are all drawn from the same tainted labour pool also, and their function is assimilated by our warrior way of life and is not likely to put an end to it either. I am trying to find the language required to help us speak about this, and all languages are sourced from others – psychology has some great ideas. It wouldn’t be any use to society – to the warrior society – if it didn’t.
It may seem a bit of a fine point, that it seems the concept behind Christian Original Sin would be helpful, the warning that we are evil when left to our own devices and that we need Jesus, God, something to ameliorate that, and if all were as we like to say, we could say that articulating it was a good, moral attempt to help people – again, a warning – if it were true that would almost certainly be the case anyway. But it weren’t true, if it were, God forbid, a lie, or an adaptive fiction, to put it in biology terms? If it happened to be that humankind was not in fact born this way, that prehistory and history showed that we have become this way over time, if it happened to be that most people were not born this way but become this way with education and experience in the human world? Don’t get me wrong, I’ll repeat the warning. I have children. Be careful out there, kids, there is plenty of evil shit going on.
I’m just saying, it’s not that God made us all evil by default, and babies are probably as innocent as they look – it’s us doing that. Right here, right now, maybe not quite as bad as yesterday, but still bad enough. We all try to make our kids and our criminals “good,” that isn’t just you and your genius circle of friends, every human society tries to do that and declares its success, and they all have masses of armed soldiers to prove it. Their idea of “good?” That’s your idea too. This is not a local problem, here or there; this is the human false origin narrative and it is ending badly, everywhere at once.
Unfortunately, because we are such dangerous crazy bastards whose answer to everything is abuse and violence, we cannot seem to concern ourselves with any other threat than social ones, human ones, and if Mom wants her SUV, then rising oceans it shall be, because who’s gonna fight with Mom?
Great. Finish it with an anti-Mom joke, that should fill the ol’ collection plate! Oh well, done for now. Of course we’re not taking Dad on either, if we’re still scared of Mom.
Jeff
Aug. 3rd., 2019
Here’s the next one
Abuse with an Excuse 
title’s a complete miss, sorry
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