My extrapolated, speculative theory of neurodiversity ought to turn the existing human origin story on its head.

It’s difficult, maybe impossible to express it, but I cannot stop trying.

First, the existing view is new, since Wallace and Darwin, kind of thing – and in the sense that the existing origin story isn’t that, but the same as since we started keeping any sort of history – that’s new too, in this conversation, in deep time where our species is hundreds of thousands or millions of years old.

The current view, looking back, is new, in terms of our species’ existence. Stretch it to the neolithic revolution, still new, relatively.

You would have to convince me that this present view of a progressive trajectory existed before then, during the tens of thousands of years when we were all sort of Indigenous the world over and not building big permanent cities, and I can’t imagine how you would. Perhaps it existed intermittently, during the empire parts of the cycle the Davids identified in The Dawn of Everything, but it didn’t rule always and forever. I don’t suppose we know how far into the past that pattern extends either.

But that’s step one, everything we think about the deep past is new, coming from modern minds.

New thought:

in creation stories, we arrive fully formed, human-hairless, and this suggests what I’m getting at: that the current origin stories tell of the creation of the new human, fully formed, suggesting that the story is recent, not an ape man story, that this mythical creation takes place in literal modern times, while upright, hairless, story telling people already inhabit the Earth.

For me, it is as easy to imagine these stories as describing the arrival of a type of person, the modern sort, rather than all people. Saying it is “the people,” like all the people – this is one thing this modern sort continues to do ever since also.

This idea, that creation stories take place during literal times, is borne out by the fact that every human group has its own, and generally does not credit their creator with making all the other peoples. They have their own, so this must be the case, that these stories all somehow acknowledge a creation event while acknowledging the existence of other peoples at the same time?

Ah, like Adam and Eve’s kids finding wives from somewhere, right?

I’m sorry, it’s a stretch.

But if anyone does build an Autistic origin story, it isn’t going to be compatible with the existing framework, a good version of this attempt is going to be a leap too.

But for me, the Allistic origin story, with the patriarchy and the rough Nature, has always been too much of a stretch, a leap this Autistic mind has never been able to make.

But whether their origin stories acknowledge creation as a neurotype event or not, the point is, the origin stories (and so the law and the philosophy and the science) are new and Allistic, our origin stories are only the Allistics’ origin stories.

This is a sliver, a thin slice of the logic from the other side here, but it’s long enough to pretend to draw a conclusion, at least, and then we can argue about that.

It ought to turn the human story on its head because it makes everything they claim as the way of the world forever not that at all, and it makes the mad human lifestyle not at all sustainable over three million years but rather as having destroyed the world in no time, since the neolithic revolution.

It ought to make clear what the problems are and stop burying them in an invented eternity.

Allistic “forever,” is NO TIME AT ALL, and if we were allowed to see it , we would see a new thing that isn’t working, at ALL.

I am about one beer from saying that spanking hails back to the neolithic revolution, and that seems radical as fuck, but farming changed lifestyles massively, didn’t it, and . . . and it sort of has to be that way, everything dates to then.

If not then, even earlier.

OK, not yet. There isn’t much about spanking in the Dawn of Everything, and a great sense that it wasn’t a thing on Turtle Island.

Twelve thousand years old in the Euro’s “Old world,” but hardly thought of here, is a little difficult, but . . . maybe? There are big differences. Speculation, to be sure.

That’s a new one, I think there’s an idea that spanking and childhood generally are far newer than that, even as recent as the enlightenment, this is the reachiest reach I will have made yet, how could it possibly be?

Ah, The Dawn of Everything again – what if it wasn’t a thing for the Turtle Islanders and what if the enlightenment they started meant that for the first time anyone in Europe bothered to NAME children and childrearing, and abuse?

Not proof, obviously.

But maybe?

I could be like a TV producer sort about it, like Ancient Aliens, refer you to “many legends,” that suggest something happened suddenly around twelve thousand years ago, of course there was a great leap in global warming and floods, inundation of any possible coastal cities, and there was the agricultural revolution and people have theorized many things to explain something sudden, from creation stories, to alien visitors to the far more reasonable and common weird magic that happened, “due to increased population/city size,” with no agreed upon mechanism for that.

I have seen talk of another sort of mind in or before ancient times, the “bicameral mind,” and this is closer to saying “a neurotype event,” like I’m trying to make happen.

It would seem self evident that if the common sort of mind changes, that the world would change subsequently, so perhaps, rather than thinking some Autistic savant created the agricultural revolution, it makes more sense to think that the population of Allistics passed some tipping point then, and people gave up their freedoms for something else – security from one another, they’ve always said this was it forever, maybe more so this recently – and started building fences and whatnot.

I suppose I’m talking about the same event the Chalice and the Blade was about too. Of course some of these things are more recent than that twelve thousand years. Was a long time ago, reading that one, I don’t remember the timeline.

Jeff

Feb. 28^th., 2024

Pascal’s Wager, you know, it’s like risk/reward in golf, the odds get worse as the rewards or the punishment gets greater, how does it go again, “Sure, the odds of the Christian salvation story are not good, but the price, should it be true and you didn’t choose it, is terrible, eternal,” something like that?

It is predicated on the idea that it is highly unlikely that what you believe can make you live forever, but what if? You don’t want to be the only one sitting at home in your urn on the mantle when everyone else is flying around enjoying their lute lessons, do you? Ha – it’s social, conforming stuff about the afterlife.

Well not really, of course.

But people do appear to make the choice, I suppose some need the reward, or fear the punishment more than others?

I would like to adapt that, from Christianity to everyone, exactly like I have adapted their Original Sin for everyone as the Human Nature myth.

Most people take the long shot in a version of Pascal’s Wager.

You know what I’m going to say, if you’ve read one of my rants, you’ve read them all. We take it every time we provide a deterrent, every time we solve our problems with abuse. Most people bet the world that their deterrents are “virtual,” and not really hurting anybody, not really affecting anything, but it’s a landscape of fear. It changes everything.

If you haven’t heard that term, it’s worth a look.

Short and sweet, when Yellowstone Park was all herbivores, the herbage didn’t have a chance, and much smaller life dependent of the sweetest of it was not thriving, not coming back, but the re-introduction of wolves and grizzly bears changed the herbivores’ lifestyle, they weren’t free to be out in the open eating the only the best stuff  and balance was restored. Landscape of Fear. I think it’s an episode of Nature or some such. National Geographic, maybe.

It makes, vast, forever changes to your lifestyle. From diet to habitat to everything. It is the furthest thing from virtual because reality is not virtual and reality doesn’t have buttons that don’t do anything, nothing is virtual. What you lose are the same things the elk lost in Yellowstone: free, open spaces, and the best food, the sun on your hide. The freedom to go where you like. Security for your children.

I don’t really know, or at least it is not my place to talk about what the Christians lose betting on Pascal, but they don’t win the prize that is offered, I don’t take that bet so I don’t see the reward, so I say this, that they do not win the prize for making the gamble. If they live well, I hope they win the prizes we get for that. But I assure you, we win no prizes in the everyone version of the game. OK, stupid prizes, as they say, war is not much of a prize, is it? From yesterday’s blog, about Nature and Nurture being a dodge:

The creation of deterrents is like some kind of rebellion against evolution, the plan of deterrents is that we make people and things better, by intentionally adding stress and fear to the environment everywhere they turn. “Deterrent,” is literally another word for environmental danger. A world of deterrents is a world of predators and a life based in terror, in the fight or flight response, in our amygdalae.

Morally, developmentally, every way, this is evolution in reverse, to simpler forms, to a life, “rough in tooth and claw.”

I suppose under the duress of the grizzlies and the wolves, the elk are never going to have enough leisure time to develop written language and pottery and under the iron rule of ourselves we are never going to have our utopias and reach the stars. It’s not balance when you do it yourself, apparently, the humans living from their amygdalae has not produced balance or the restoration of the environment, oh, gawd, did I have to say that? I’m sorry, I usually err on the side of brevity, I usually try not to waste your time.

Obviously, the fact that humans live in the fear while simultaneously dishing it out is different than it is for the elk and the bison. Like Sapolsky says, there is never a stress free time for us when we know the predator has just eaten or something. But, getting back to simpler matters, how is the deterrent of an actual spanking or an actual prison sentence any more virtual than the deterrent of an actual pack of wolves?

It is not, or the way it can be is a matter of your neurotype, a matter of how you process that information, maybe. Evolution, for good or ill, operates with or without your understanding though, and none of these things are virtual, and so the odds of winning the Punishment Cult’s version of Pascal’s Wager – wait, what is the tease, what is the reward? What is it in lieu of eternal life in this analogy?

If we believe in Human Nature, that we are born flawed and need to be controlled and directed and so we are controlled through the deterrents and then, what?

Civilization?

Don’t tell me it’s supposed to be peace? Because that isn’t working out.

I know, mere survival. Not peace so much as strength and victory.

About that, I’m sorry to tell you, that isn’t working out either.

Also from yesterday’s exploration:

It means everything, whether we see life as evolution or deterrents and punishments, if you believe in the latter, you make the environment worse, and the reality of evolution changes you to match. If you believed in evolution, you would see rewards instead, and that good things make good people.

In theory, you would build good things, make the environment better, easier for people, remove the fear wherever possible – certainly stop creating it all day every day your bloody self – and watch people adapt to be better, kinder, and smarter instead. Or, you know, gamble it all for a shitty life during wartime, why not.

You do you.

Jeff

Jan. 10^th., 2024