Gawd, the propaganda is so obtuse, so horrifying simple and false. The flighty sounding talk about self-knowledge isn’t always high level, it’s basic as can be too: if you don’t know yourself, you can’t know anything, even your own thoughts, speech, and actions may not be you, how would you know? If the world clearly seems a certain way to you, you have to ask yourself, why is this what my mind looks to see? Why have I evolved the sense of that certain way? If the world is clearly a struggle and a fight to your mind, then you were evolved to see fighting, you have genes for fighting.
It follows that of course we have other genes with other concerns as well, and the current and long time social narrative is that these others have to live around the fighting. The current and long time idea is that you “have the fighting genes,” end of story, it’s static, created Human nature in new words, we are still and forever dealing with them, but of course what is missing from the conversation is the environmental control of genetic expression. If our other genes and other concerns wish to change anything about the fighting, we need to take that argument a level deeper, and undermine the gene, find a way to stop selecting it.
If we could adjust the environment away from abuse, our children would be slightly less under its control, and this would give their children a better chance to do the same. This was my parenting plan – you want to make God laugh? Never mind, it’s still my theory.
Come on, this was easy, it’s obvious. The minute I heard of epigenetics, this was all sitting there, obvious.
There are fighting genes in humans, and there is epigenetics, and there is spanking: the gene, the control mechanism, and us working it like an oar, making sure from approximately birth, that the environment is a fight, ensuring the activation and repeated selection of the war genes. Plain as day, I have had trouble expressing this because I assumed it was obvious and simple and everyone knew, I swear to God. How do we not? Do you not?
I mean, this obvious truth is buried under a ton of flummery.
Freud’s drives are just the static Nature broken down into components, balancing them seems to be all that can be done and I guess most people manage it well enough? Primatology too, just talks about the past, the “making of our Nature,” or something, it looks away from our this-minute evolution too. Any system of human parts and components comes out of the static meme, the meaningful parts are behaviour and genetics, not the structural hardware.
What if your baseline “Human Nature,” was a moving thing, a foundation of shifting mud? (the following I wrote a few days ago on Twitter.)
What if?
What if there were those “warrior genes?”
What if there were? What might the world look like?
Well, you’d expect war – check.
You might expect some rape, warrior genes selecting themselves – check.
You might expect a military sort of social organization, an hierarchy of authority – check.
You might expect that a creature with such genes admires and promotes strength and aggression – check. Ask me if you don’t believe me. It’s most of the blog.
You might expect a development that turns adorable babies into aggressive adults – check. Again, I’m always writing this.
You would expect that individuals lacking the selected for aggression would be pathologized and/or marginalized, perhaps killed – check. (Won’t make you ask: all the “gender critique,” can and should be seen as patriarchy, warrior patriarchy and they don’t really care if boys love boys, but they care terribly if boys love at all and hate insufficiently. This would seem to be the obvious aim of male circumcision, so we do things for this reason.)
Enough?
Show me something about people that says we DON’T have and live from our warrior genes.
Every argument you have for a nasty Human Nature would support warrior genes, wouldn’t they?
Has this book been written yet?
😘
(back to live on Saturday.)
I suppose if the book existed I would have found it by now. I want to write it, but I’m doing this instead.
I’m jaded; I don’t have the hope that we will do this, see our own making, and I have to say, it means all that nineteenth century talk about consciousness is rubbish, that if we don’t see this first level deep into ourselves, we cannot claim to have it. We remain beasts indeed, as long as we do not take this step.
Jeff
May 13th., 2023
Abuse with an Excuse 