Did you ever see a blind man cross the road, trying to make it to the other side?

I’m sorry, I mean, did you ever see a vast herd of creatures living their lives in relative peace, in fear of the lions but not of their own? Have you ever seen mothers and fathers loving and protecting their children, and one another’s children? Can you imagine rolling back the clock and seeing them throughout the history of life, long before we came along to argue about it?

Then I ask you: how does anyone’s aggression get a pass, how is any sort of violence “just the way it is?”

Moral things like the protection of children and peaceful coexistence, of driving around the blind man, have existed in the world, among creatures for a very long time, before us, before mammals.

Humanity did not invent them. We should stop looking for the proof that we did.

“Donated aggression,” that’s the state of their search so far, right?

Short version, they look at costs and benefits (which won’t find actual altruism, so we’re in a technical world, looking for ‘elements’ of morality) and creatures paying costs for their kids, for folks other than themselves, this is the start of altruism and the next step is altruism beyond our genetic interest that they try to explain and a famous example is of chimpanzees risking themselves in conflict and so solidifying a position in a group. This is altruism, if we risk life and limb to help each other take life and limb. I’m not certain – that may be new behaviour – but raiding parties are not the morality we were looking for, come on.

I believe that they are finding the “morality” we have, the one that makes the world what it is today, and that’s sort of fine, we need to find the human difference – but “altruism” and “morality,” these words don’t make it across into life with their technical meanings. You call that “morality,” folks think killing is morality. That example is a tale of conflict and pressure, and not a moral choice but a capitulation to conflict.

But the point again, the one we are looking for is not a new invention. Choosing peace, respect, and security, some animals have done this before and surely some will again when we’re part of that deep past.

There are new things we have brought into the world but being nice is not likely to be one of them. I suspect the chimpanzee research touches on it, I’m sure my thesis could use their data. Donated aggression, aggression as a commodity, it is part of my view also – I just don’t call that “moral.” For the record, again, I know this definition, moral, slips in and out of it scientific meaning when I use it, that in a technical sense it doesn’t mean “good,” or “right,” that these are the social connotations – but this conflation isn’t only mine, it’s everyone’s and it’s the point of this rant. The idea that it can be parsed out and discussed technically, well, I think that has created the upside-down nature of their answer, altruism is a gang murder in a border skirmish. You separate that, you’ve lost reality.

Trading violence for the security of the group, again, this is the morality we’ve found, but not the one we want. The function there is an evil threat, kill for me or I send you to the wolves – placing people between a rock and a hard place here is the big picture, the laboratory, while the altruism shown is  barely visible, it’s like building the giant collider to show us what tiny little electrons do. Think of the ongoing story of the Rat Park, if you know it – there were parameters in the experiment’s setup that were not accounted for in the description, and the further we step back from it, the bigger the context becomes and the smaller the meaning of the result. Long story short, it was an experiment that “proved that rats choose addiction at such a rate,” and time let us all see that it only proved that rats alone in a concrete and steel prison choose addiction at that rate.

The “with us or against us” aspect of the gang murder altruism matches the bare solitary confinement of the rat in my analogy – I don’t think, as I’ve said, the altruism arranged in this scenario is the stuff we are looking for, not if it’s in service of the ultimate inconsideration of murder. The one we’re looking for would be when one of these chimpanzees becomes aware of a lone stranger and lets it pass, wouldn’t it?

I imagine it happens. In fact, if that recruitment scenario ever played out at all, it must have started that way, one would think. I don’t imagine you can show up during the fight and expect anyone to know whose side you’re on, the chimp in question must have already been known and tolerated. It’s not because it isn’t there that we’re not talking about this and going with the violence instead.

I’m feeling like a male, EP swine for using the example, but I’ll remind myself and you, I’m calling it out, I use it as an example of what’s wrong, not what’s right. Still, I’m a fool if this scenario was made up nonsense in the first place, which I am starting to suspect.

The human difference is not that we are more moral than our bestial cousins, rather the other way about; we made a difference, and we can’t have invented living and letting live – so the difference we made was in the other direction. We are different, we are like this because we invented immorality. We invented abuse.

Find me the roots of that, please.

Those will be somewhere both before and after this, on the one hand, those chimps are plainly already living in full blown group conflict, c/w intrigues and prices to pay and so there is a history to glean, but they haven’t taken some step or steps that we have just yet, they haven’t turned into us, or not yet. I think we may not see it the other way about with them, like we do with us. This example, is kill for us and you can join, we do this too, but have we observed chimpanzees pushing, rather than pulling for that, I mean threatening rather than offering? Do they have the concept, kill for me, or I hurt you?

Do I have to stop if I don’t know this?

It’s sort of my whole deal, punishment is our unique madness, but it doesn’t have to be perfectly black and white. Maybe there are roots for that to be found in primatology, but basically, this is my thesis, that punishment/abuse is our invention, the human . . . wrinkle – ha: kink. Our weirdness. And that this is not meaningful because it makes us “moral,” but the reverse, that this is not indicative of morality as such, but of our workaround for it, our way out of it.

When we are abused, we feel we have an excuse.

Of course, you’d have to agree abuse even exists first. I only see it this way anymore: you’d have to lose the human nature myth. You’d have to want a reason why we go wrong, you’d have to not think we are simply born wrong. You’d have to have some small measure of faith that this world is real and that what we do matters, that what we do is what makes it this way.

It is also difficult to feel that way when you’ve suffered abuse. Oh, it never ends. Screw it, send.

Jeff

Feb. 15^th., 2021

What if I gave it up, what if I stopped fighting it and said, yes we are this large, intelligent, competitive ape after all? Aggressive, even?

I’m always trying to say we’re not, we don’t have to be, we’re not automatically or necessarily, for all you know I look around me and see a different bunch of them than you do or something, what safe, white, little world do I live in anyway – I don’t, I see it. I mean, I do live in such a world, but I can see out. It verges on dishonesty the way avoid acknowledging it, maybe. I’m sorry, sweetness and light ain’t cutting it these days. If I were preaching to the choir, even the choir wouldn’t know what to say to me.

We are. We evolved to be this way, so we are.

We oughtn’t be, is all I’m saying.

It’s in our power not to be, is what I’m saying, that evolution means never-ending, ongoing self-creation, and what happened tens of thousands of years ago is only still with us if we do the same things, make the same choices today – and so after that, it becomes a matter of information, of making informed choices. We are the environment now, most of what modern people must negotiate in life is modern people and so the environment we live in we chose, we provided both the selective pressure and the adaptation to it. With the right information, putting our choices in the right context, in theory, we could make ourselves, our today natures, more sustainable.

We could dial down the aggression and the competition.

Sure that war ape is us, but that was self creation, and it is time for another, corrective self creation. If your aggression becomes a data point instead of part of the manipulative question, then we could see what’s going on and try to do something different – of course, psychology, everyone knows a way to avoid dealing with your troubles is to simply write yourself odd as born bad. Everyone knows that that is always the lie that needs to be disproven at the personal level, and it is at the species level too. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

There aren’t fixed natures in evolution, nothing is non-negotiable and for every rule, some clever creature makes a living breaking it. We know there are successful non-aggressive creatures, and so aggression and competition are not necessary and foundational: everything in nature needs an explanation, and so does human aggression. I’m not going to try to make the explanation today, my views are not secret about it, today, the point is that I am accepting that the state of affairs today is that we are aggressive and competitive right now.

I give up. I admit it.

This is the life that is available for human being today, and it is not our natures forever, but this is a level of “default” for a human born and raised today, and this is the point, the political point of today’s rant – “competition” is not a system, not a human enterprise at all, but only the lack of a human system or solution, only a capitulation to the current animal default that we have unconsciously evolved to be.

I mean, for old people, this is not news, I think it was part of the whole idea, Adam Smith’s explicit idea that capitalism would be conceived this way, as a system our aggressive animal selves could function within – the wording was something about channeling “Man’s natural greed and avarice” as a constructive force, somehow, all will be motivated to succeed and survive – tomayto, tomahto. But it’s an idea based in permanent natures being a real thing which they are not, and there is no “going with it” that isn’t also creating it, I mean, going with what, with who?

It’s us!

You may say you’re “going along,” but I am “going along” with you, aren’t I? When you’re going along, you are also simply going. Everybody can be going “along,” and if so, we are all going, I mean rolling along, competitively treating most of our own species as an enemy and lamenting that they in turn, treat us that way. “Going with the flow” of some “nature” and agreeing to live in constant strife and violence. Warms one’s heart, doesn’t it, there is something we can all agree on after all, the inverse of the platitude, that struggle, fighting, is life.

And having agreed, it becomes “good,” the new good, somehow fighting and the taking of life is good, because . . . here we insert the secret, the mystery, the bit I am spending my life futilely trying to get to, there is a logical connection I cannot make yet I am fighting relegating it to intuition. I am sure it is there, because this is a matter of the world, not just my human mind, it happens, I can’t quite explain it, but we can all see it. We employ fighting when we are trying to fix things, trying to make things better, from a pat on the bum to the violence and ravings of the fascists.

About the latter, however, I cannot from here, understand what problems they hope to solve, what is so wrong in the world that some uber-can model of a police state is better?

I can sort of see the spanking, it’s everywhere, after all, if a spanking stops something worse, mass murder – what evil does the mass murder avert? What is worse? It is clear, what I said above, life is a fight, because peace threatens them somehow, going from peace to war is a solution, somehow. These crazies wave their guns and there is no enemy, no threat, no armed people but them!

The point, I almost missed again – the human list of unwanted behaviours and crimes does not include violence. It’s a solution, on the positive side of the ledger. The police respond to crime with violence, and if violence were a crime, we would all see they add one to every one they find, we would all see how even the good guys propagate violence endlessly. But it’s not, it’s sacred or something.

And so, we are doomed.

Jeff

Feb. 1^st., 2021

Antisocialization, that’s the word, my word.

I’m making a slight shift in focus, I’m going to stop trying to elaborate the definition and just push the word. It should explain itself; it’s made of known words.

It’s a secret or something, hiding behind negative ideas of “human nature.” It seems to have not been previously coined rather pointedly, like we hid it behind the human nature myth for a reason. I suspect the secret is safe, despite my efforts to out it, perhaps it always will be.

I have the concept, and not the sort to make anything easy for anyone, I will start offering caveats and problems with it on the theory that if it’s problematic, then it’s a little more real for us all. There is still a “problem of evil” to negotiate, maybe. I have moved the source of the evil, I have said you weren’t born with it – but basically I’ve said it’s a process very like photosynthesis: we pull it out of the air, create the evil from nothing, and so you may not have been born with it but you’ve got it now. All of us, oaks and maples alike, shoutout to Rush. Ah – a minor breakthrough there, the “human nature myth.”

I’ve been arguing it literally, telling myself I have disproven the matter with science and logic and that has been done pretty thoroughly with Creation and hasn’t made a dent with half the world, has it? You can’t beat a myth with reason – so now I want to do and end-run around all that, just get the word on record – into dictionaries – and let the world inform the science, stop trying to teach the teachers, wait for teachers that grow up with the word and so have to reconcile the myth. The myth has had free reign, the myth has been writing the science.

Without my word, the myth has had no opposition.

I would like to make a campaign, ask people to lobby for it, submit this word to the dictionaries, work it into your conversations, criminals aren’t “hardened” by prison abuse, but antisocialized, we’re not talking about steel, but people.

There’s a reason this word isn’t internalized and everywhere – and it’s the same reason we fight, the same reason we have smelted the world for our fights. There’s a reason – ah, right, the problem – there’s a reason we don’t like this word, don’t want this word, because it means the evil is in us, and it means our people put it there. Of course it is us, exactly “our people” who would have to change, and you can’t make a change when you don’t even have the word.

Jeff

Feb. 4^th., 2021