Abuse with an Excuse

Antisocialization Theory is what the bad guys understand intuitively and that alone might be enough to have them always winning, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re paranoid enough. The power imbalance wouldn’t be quite so great if the good guys didn’t flat out refuse to understand it. There’s the antisocializing crowd and then there’s the secret or unconscious antisocializing crowd, the straight up authoritarians and the liars. Sure, the liberals.

Apparently.

There is the violent father who teaches his sons how to fight with real life examples and seems to know he’s doing it and wants tough sons, and then there are the parents who “spank” as a “deterrent,” to “teach you right from wrong,” who say they want good and gentle sons. There is basically no-one who doesn’t hit their kids. Well there’s the ones who don’t bother but also do not protect the kids from the rough meritocracy of the schoolyard or the streets. A reminder, abuse in childhood sets genetic options. All three groups’ children get tough enough.

They are all the same along this vector. The divisions are an illusion. The roughest find the most tentative to be lacking and the nice folks find the rough ones to be “going too far,” but I assure them all here and now, it is all the same system, the same forces at play, and they are all wrong for the same reason, for choosing the bad over the good, degrees not entering into it.

It’s the point Stone and Parker missed in the South Park where they said America wanted to have it both ways, to always be at war and also always be the good guys begging against it, I mean it wasn’t all bad but it did sound like Americans on both sides of the war debate were getting everything they needed and everyone was basically having a good time, had that Western cynicism to it like all that mattered to anyone was whether they were able to manipulate themselves into a moral feeling, like nobody really wants an actual better world.

I have to give it up to the kids, South Park left itself open to the new generations’ accusations in this way; there is a better moral of the story available for that.

You know me, or if not you will now: all part of your gaslighting, as if we all had the power to make the world whatever we want – I mean of course, as if only of a few of us didn’t. The few in power apparently don’t really want a better world, they think theirs is pretty OK and if they ever have doubts they can just look out the window, but the point is most of us do, damnit. The bad guys know how to create their world, and the good folks “don’t understand” how it’s done and try to create our world with the same tools and plans on ourselves that they use on us, meaning abuse, moral abuse.

The good folks are collaborators and abusers and the only reason they’re the good guys is because they think they are. You know this, deep down. The bad guys know this.

If they were serious, there would be good guy scientists. There would be a progressive evolutionary psychology. There would be a “strong” political candidate and a weak one, not a strong scowling one and a strong smiling one. I go too far, I know, but violence would be a crime, something they discouraged, rather than the official, approved response to crime, something that is actively encouraged, even for crimes that weren’t violent.

By the way, baring your teeth is aggression. That humans think it’s friendly is sick, another proof that there are no practising good ones. I have searched some, for the evolutionary theory of smiling, there doesn’t seem to be one, I suppose someone thinks concealed teeth are concealed weapons, like the handshaking story, but not me. That leaves aggression as expected and not requiring explanation, I see it darkly, the other way about: you are not welcome around our fire if you can’t chew your own food or bite someone’s ears off, if you can’t show your weapons. But I don’t put much stock in that, it sounds the same, based in violence rather than reason. Today, the point is more that it’s still something of a mystery, the human smile. I suspect it’s part of the same sort of denial, that it must remain a mystery for the same reasons antisocialization generally does, but it’s only intuition at this point, that one sort of parent makes a snarling attack to teach his kids to fight, and the other makes a smiling “correction.” I imagine in real life it’s one of those grey areas, some from column A and some from column B.

Someone get back to me if I’m wrong, if it’s been answered, the smile, please? Don’t leave me hanging.

Jeff

Sept. 5^th.,  2020