This is pinned to the top of the blog, the newest ones start just after this short one. Cheers.
The entire thing is an argument for reality, for the world of struggling people and the world of everything else over the world of words, the world of false stories and amoral commands. It starts with “the Word,” as an example of myth and a metaphor for our mad tendency to prefer what we say a thing is over what it is.
Thrown in is some gonzo evolutionary biology and a complaint that evolutionary psychology follows older modes of thought and fails to bring psychology to the supply side of things, fails to analyse the alpha or the elders, fails to question their desire for power and control. OK, not quite that clearly, but it does! LOL
I spend a lot of time trying to explain where we might have gotten a positive nurture, or a positive punishment idea, just to show it can’t be done because the proof was in fact negative . . . that in fact the social control of punishing wrongdoers is negative. The mimic meme tries to explain how we abuse ourselves bad while thinking we’re deterring ourselves good, and how the badness must have been a selectable thing in the past. Again none of it this clearly, but more thoroughly.
I want to shorten that part, tear it out and do it again – but I know I’ll just type it all back in from memory. Maybe some day. But bear with me, I think the cheese is there, if you make it through, brave reader.
Antisocialization theory is a definitions chapter, trying to explain how the negative nurturing and the abuse of punishing operates and how it is a strategy we have to be bad and bring pain, not “our natures,” and so that all the bad things we write off to our evil natures are in fact a choice we make, and as such, within our control.
The AST Theory of War says we create repress and store bad feelings as a group selected function, to enhance our own aggression for the group conflict life we lead, that any roughness about our lives charges our frustration etc. for war and that it is a small matter to exploit this reservoir of anger, and this is what the spankings are selected for. There is some more gonzo science, a bit of genetics.
The first two thirds makes the case that we are not born evil, that in fact we hold a worse moral position, that we are actively choosing the evil, for conflict, say for defense if you like, but the ending says that proves that our choices are real and matter, that this state of affairs was not inevitable and we can make other choices – and they will matter too.
Basically, I’m saying anyone who says we are on rails and “human nature,” sorry, we can’t turn around, is stuck in the old creation story, has missed the whole point of evolution which is adapting to problems and changing. If they say, sorry, it’s war and capitalism because you’re still a chimpanzee, they have missed evolution altogether, haven’t they?
This work says that we can and need to evolve. It says that is not vague and out in space, it says not spanking and cutting back on our social control would be that evolution, exactly that evolution that what we have now is because we’ve been dishing out abusive punishments already for a long time – not because God thought you should be born evil.
And certainly not because of your “genetic heritage” as a chimpanzee. I checked into it. They are not doing this shit, world wars and destroying the Earth, it’s us.
Jeff
Aug. 29th., 2020
Here’s the long – 29,000 words, 55 pages – version:
Abuse with an Excuse 