Abuse with an Excuse

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