Abuse with an Excuse

I’ve worked it all out – so now I can die.

OK, maybe not myself, but I’ve worked the rest out.

I’ve read some folks the wrong way. I’ve thought I was inventing things and made up words for them and used others’ words my own way, with my own meanings and disrespected their meanings . . . I’d apologize, but they don’t know about it, I haven’t hurt them. Maybe I irritated Trivers, to my eternal shame and worry, but probably not about business, theory, probably just from being a crazy ignorant pain in the ass. So, for nothing.

As much as I dislike the concept, I want to wrap myself in some no harm no foul, sort of reasoning, that if my misunderstandings produced fruit, and if they never knew about it, or weren’t impressed when presented with it, then that is life, right, the life of many nobodies and a few of the people we list in our bibliographies – years or decades of embarrassing failure and if we remember them, success in the end? The upshot, the general theory seems complete to me, I don’t see logical obstacles, I don’t see conflicting science.

I’ve been suspicious all along that I am not first but last, the idiot child screaming his discovery of some awful, simple truth that the rest of the village has long since decided there is no upside in talking about. It sometimes can seem to me that every author I have read, every author I have approached knows it all already and has chosen not to talk about it. Paranoia suggests that AST is something the military and leadership already knows and uses and if anyone ever heard me trying to tell the great unwashed about it I would be approached by the men in black and silenced, and that this apparatus has already spoken to all of academia.

Probably nothing so interesting, of course. Just silence, all of language and culture is against me, making it difficult. You don’t expect that screaming child to be right, and what he’s screaming about we already have an answer for, it’s human nature, kid, and it sucks, please shut up.

My message is not the EP message, not the Bible’s message, not the cognitive backdrop of “human nature,” none of that, rather it is this: the evil we call human nature is entirely optional. Not human nature, but the human choice. We’re not sure about free will because we are pretending not to have the choice. Innateness means we have no obligation to change.

I mean of course human nature is optional – otherwise, why are there still chimpanzees? OMG.

I looove doing that!

That is a title and the perfect click-bait Tweet, isn’t it?

Seriously, though, if nothing is optional, wouldn’t they be here with us if all this were on rails? What is evolution if not options, the unfolding of options? I accuse them of determinism. Their theses say no, but their conclusions say yes. Options taken long ago, choices made in the past cannot be undone, enjoy the ride, I hear the ending is going to be spectacular. I’m sorry.

This is true, when discussing vague natures and shadowy options. But what if we thought we knew a specific choice? Are we so sure they’re all gone and never to be offered again? The choice of discipline, of punishment, we make these choices all day . . . oh, Hell, everybody, ONE MORE TIME! For God’s sake . . .

Sorry again.

Where was I? Worked it all out, ignorance and impertinence, no obstacles or conflicts, the military uses my theory all day long . . . I guess that’s as far as I got before my internal autocorrect took over, sorry about that. OK.

Well, that’s a point. When the military uses something, that’s tried and true, they are not a new invention. I used to work telephone systems, office systems, and when I could, I worked 9-1-1 and police, ambulance, because folks who deal in life and death seem able to focus and buy the phone system that works, not deploy things until they work – whereas the world of business is the world of illusion, where often they make more money sabotaging themselves by shorting labour or something and suing you for it. The reality factor, believe it or not, is important to me.

The point is, the military knows what abuse and deprivation do, they charge a soldier’s batteries for his job – inconsideration up to and absolutely including death. While the militaries of the world practice this eternal formula, the public is told some original sin mythology about how they were already bad by their churches and also by biologists or anyone who denies free will. I’ve said it before, I  expect I will again, evolution is the new creation. Creation is what that circuit in your brain is called, it’s what has history and prehistory, what evolved in every culture ever, so if you are a human, evolution becomes nothing but the new way we were “created,” past tense being no accident. Of course, now you no longer carry Adam’s primal sin, but animal violence. Ah.

That was an accusation of a personal failing in the past, one of the sort I opened by apologizing for, now it’s a universal of human evolution! That is quite an upgrade, I guess I haven’t done nothing today after all! If modern science and evolution is trying to occupy the same space religion and creation did, then it is going to have the same shape and it’s going to have to answer the same questions, and if it walks like a duck and all of that, then you must expect people to treat it like a duck, throwing bread and lead at it and such, stuffing it with dried fruit – all the usual stuff, is what I’m saying.

Sorry, human nature, whaddayagonnado, is what I’m saying, either way, that excuse hasn’t moved at all. Where am I at?

Worked it all out, apologies, no obstacles or conflicts, the military uses my theory all day long, creation and original sin are sort of built in, like Kant’s time and space. This is a good tool, thinking about the evolved brain circuit you’re employing, auditing your new thoughts against the existing circuits, to check the newness, and maybe a sanity check is possible too. In that spirit, what is AST, then? First, is it the same old creation/OS pathway or circuit?

I don’t think I see a creation moment, but I’m not blind to some kind of innateness, I mean that’s the magic of genetics, a thing can be alien and not innate, and then add evolution and it can be, so, innateness at our timescale seems to be a thing, but at evolutionary time scale, innateness’ material form, genes, come and go – innate to you, kind of thing. Might not mean innate to the species, it may be a thing that is coming on, or on its way out. So, in the middle of a changing creation, that is not creationism, I don’t think. And original sin, forget it. It’s free will that I would emphasize in these matters, so . . .

So no, I don’t think it’s the same circuit. Is that the problem?

If AST is not the same shape and doesn’t do all the same things, doesn’t answer all the same questions, it’s not an argument? Just a different conversation? Wait, we’ll get back to that – if it’s not that circuit, what circuit is it? That answer might help this one.

Is it the pain/damage/fear circuit? Well, no, it leverages that one, but  pain avoidance as an explanation for the ubiquitous dispensation of pain doesn’t work for me. It’s involved, for sure.

Is it the nurture one? Do we all think we have a circuit for that? What else?

I have argued that this is the nurture that is real, the nurture that works, the nurture that shows up in the lab: abuse. So, yes, I have been thinking that it’s one, I suppose. There is still some good/bad talk we can have around this negative nurturing but applying a stimulus and getting an effect – antisocialization, not “goodness,” but still – that would be the circuit I am trying to interpret, or reinterpret, I think. What else? Nothing coming to mind, I just find myself building some house of cards about how the circuits are interconnected, some imaginary structure like Freud’s, but the questions do sort of answer each other, cancel out, don’t they?

AST doesn’t answer questions creation and OS do, like “How can all this not be our fault,” and “what can I think so that it doesn’t bother me to hurt my kids as a parent, or hurt my little friends, as a member of the children’s gangs?” I’m sure there are good things those ideas do for us too, I guess, but these are the big accusations they are always invoked to answer. Ah, and ha! – aha! – original sin/the beast within, “born bad,” this is an inverter circuit, the one that turns the output of the nurture circuit upside-down.

Ooh! I just peed a little. I’ve been on the lookout for something like that. Thinking a little more on that, whether we’re innately good or bad, whups sorry, that’s the input, isn’t it. But invert the input, you reverse your output, like if you thought it was cold, so you turned up the heat, that’s an inversion or a reversal if it was actually too warm in the first place. The inverter circuit is the one that tells you all that heat you’re experiencing has other sources, that it’s not just you, messing with the thermostat.

And maybe I think this was the new thing 300,000 years ago? An inverter circuit? It feels to me in this moment like the closest thing to explaining the human difference, but I’ll try not type too long about intuitions.

AST does answer some of nurture’s questions, “how can I change my kid,” and even, if you turn it upside-down like I did, by not doing it, “how can I make my kid better?” So that’s the circuit – and I have long since answered the biologists’ motto that there is no such creature. There is simply no such positive creature, the entire function is as real as anything you can stub your toe on if you simply stop prattling on about enhancements and start acknowledging harm and damage.

I mean, it doesn’t matter what you do to your kid, some say, as long as you don’t . . . have rules and consequences and teach them right from wrong, I mean hurt them. As long as no-one does that, you can’t affect them. And we prove that negative all day every day. Whups, autopilot again.

Worked it all out, apologies, no obstacles or conflicts, the military uses my theory all day long, the suggestion that AST is something the powers would like to keep for themselves, that they may not wish to “discover” or teach it, creation and original sin are sort of built in, evolved brain pathways or circuits. AST is my new name for whatever the “nurture” circuit is trying to express – and “born bad” ideologies are the expression of an “inverter circuit,” that makes us think good is bad and vice versa.

Which might explain why we think punitive abuse is “good.” Needs development, this inverter circuit idea.

Update: “Why are there still chimps?” did not bring the clicks I anticipated. Ha.

Hmmm. That might be enough for one blog.

 

Jeff,

Aug. 13^th., 2020

 

Update:

OK, so original sin/the beast within, “born bad,” I’ve decided there is a circuit for this, but I expected one. I suppose I should try to make a case. We think it’s a Christian thing, we think Paul or Augustine invented it or something, but it’s not just words, not just a slogan. Try writing a new one, if you think it’s just words, see what kinda traction you get – that’s what I am trying to do. “Traction” sounds like sarcasm.

I’ve been saying it’s “biology,” which, yes it’s something living things do, that’s not very descriptive. A lot of folks like “cultural” – if you mean cultural, as in a step above bodily functions but still biology based, OK, we can talk. If you mean cultural as opposed to biology or nature, then no, not “just” cultural. Like I say, try to make a new one. Fashion doesn’t touch these sorts of things, they never go out of style.

Unfortunately, it’s a protected thing, we only talk about it by its Christian name, I don’t think there is a science term for this assumption of innate evil or violence, is there? We talk about it like it’s only Catholics that try to beat the devil out of their kids, but I think if we look, it will be a human universal. Wait, checking Brown’s list – I don’t think I found punishment on it before, so I’m not hopeful.

Yeah, none of it. But they should be, and if you ever heard of me, they are going to be, they are now, punishment and the assumption of innate evil that drives it, by a better name.

 

Jeff

Same day.