“cycles”

With the strokes of my keyboard, with three little words, I sweep away your Human Nature. People get worse.

Your Cosmic Cycles, your Eternity, your World Without End, your Happily Ever After and your Total Control Dystopias, all of it done, over. Good God, will you open your eyes, will you ever grow up?

The universe is what, fourteen billion years old?

That is arguably a long time, but it is absolutely not “eternity.” It’s what we call a number, and they do get even bigger. In fact they get so big that whatever your idea of eternity, it must always be a fart in a tornado whatever it is, any actual eternity finds you adorable. It is only fourteen billion years in an unknown number of years or an already calculated number of billions of years, perhaps the universe will “end,” like we imagine it “beginning,” and if and when that happens either that finite number of years will have to have been our definition of eternity, or there simply can be no eternity in a universe that ends, ever.

I don’t think reality has eternities or infinities – let alone do I think human lives have any foreverness to them, “world without end,” Nietzsche’s eternal cycles, – everyone is the same, Human Nature, no, the “Wheel of Life,” I’m sorry, no.

No.

Time passes, things change. Stop the stupid search for constants and universals and notice when things change, that’s what bloody matters, so you can adapt.

I will speak about a particular scale of change, of perhaps a century long “cycle,” and I don’t want to use the word – is it, “sub-cycle,” if we understand that after a full turn you are in a different place within larger cycles? Never mind, it’s still problematic. I’m stuck with it, perhaps I’ll just carry on with the irony quotation marks, I will speak about a century long “cycle,” the Antisocialization Theory (AST) of War.

First I will sketch the broad terms of the AST theory of war – and then, this is today’s project, a thing I haven’t tried yet, I will try to demonstrate the truth of the title with some history. Predictions may follow, but those may not be new.

The Antisocialization Theory of War.

AST in the short term.

It begins within a lifetime, there is a function that plays out, a play that happens almost consciously, at least the script is spoken about, and perhaps I have a Special and a General Antisocialization Theory, where the general one refers to the whole “cycle,” of something like four or five generations with its unwanted and seemingly inevitable disasters and the smaller, special one that is nearly conscious, the way we seem to like it working day to day.

I wondered about spanking and punishment, it seemed to me that people got “worse,” not “better,” that the kids around me were immediately embittered and many started using violence themselves right away, and so I didn’t believe what the grownups said was going on and eventually I started wondering what making us worse actually did for us and so I came to the Antisocialization theory of war: people are charged with bad feelings by their abuses, or in their language, “made strong,” and so “our people,” are strong and can thrive.

It means we are charged with stored rage and violence, held from the immediate response most animals have and we have the hierarchy, the leadership that decides when and upon whom we can unload it – in a war, or an apartheid. Taking our lumps makes weapons of us. This is Warrior Society, where we antisocialize ourselves and begin fight training young, as soon as we can do anything that invites a punishment and this antisocialization is not only psychological, but epigenetic. An environment of spanking selects an option on our warrior genes, the “stronger,” one, which I say a little ironically, as euphemism.

AST in the long term.

In the General Antisocialization Theory, because evolution, things do not reset in every generation as the popular, “Human Nature,” would have it, and the people we apply this genetic warrior engineering to have adapted permanently to the abusive environment to a degree and so things change, people get worse. Easier to send into a fight, and more difficult to keep out of one. Less worried about spanking.

Either we apply the same amount of pressure to a generation more ready to accept it and so we actually make ourselves even worse, or worse faster each pass, or perhaps to a degree we get the same results looking like we are gentler, having “made some progress,” and spanking them a little less hard or often – ah, That’s sort of new! – but a change took place and perhaps the growth of our antisocialization is a logarithmic matter, as things are. In the larger frame of the general theory, it’s a ”cycle,” a matter of perhaps four or five generations of human life. I call the Second World War the culmination of the previous cycle and the beginning of the next, I think of it as a global meltdown where all bets are off and society disappears in a sort of a jubilee, like all moral debts are wiped clean and when we simply cannot carry on, we stop, look around, swear it all off and start again.

The progression, getting specific

We say, “Always Remember,” and “Never Forget,” then, when, “never forget what, and always remember what,” is so obvious no-one needs to say it and everyone is poor, so people revert to the automatic charity of poverty and start helping one another. Many realize and acknowledge that their nations were as evil as the enemy, and engaged in the same business, and wish for and work towards peace.

Many of their children grow up with traumatized parents, but the general atmosphere is of wanting and needing peace and these children grow up on these values, in theory – but perhaps only in theory. I’m a white man born as one of the last of the Baby Boomers on Turtle Island and in practice, the generation after the war was still an environment of spanking and our parents may have spoken to us about peace, but they brought the wooden spoon and the belt when they talked about it, and we thought they were brutes and many of us got brutalized. Before I was born and through my youth, perhaps the second generation since the war, at least publicly, things improved, they built schools and hospitals, and the Human Rights laws improved somewhat, but life at home did look a little timeless and children didn’t gain many rights.

Gonzo, or Autistic science

“People get worse,” is not a social judgment, it is evolution and genetics, not that those last two are really two different things. When the environment, both material and social gets worse, evolution makes us worse to survive it by way of modifying our active genesuite.

We want that, as far as that goes, I mean, sort of forgetting that we are the environment we want that for, but yes, immediately, creatures want that.

You want that, that when the environment gets worse, that you will be able to do the awful things you might need to do if it gets very bad. Evolution is you wanting to survive and making choices that make that easier, and evolution is real and your genes and you really change. I go as far as Lamarck’s guess and say you as an individual change heritably within your lifetime because we know children change during their lifetimes, that they take different developmental paths depending on the environment they detect, this is epigenetics. It’s a different change, epigenetic choices are not assumed to be immediately heritable and they aren’t, full blown in a single generation – but if there is no daily change, where is the epochal change?

Zero plus zero equals zero, doesn’t it?

I mean, I don’t think the epigenetic change is all of the long term evolution, and I expect they have already proved that it’s not – but logically, both things are happening and logically during the same period of life, when the environment is being sussed out and adjusted for, same as the short term options. This, or there is no long term evolution, no? I cannot escape an intuition that to deny Lamarck is to deny evolution, to place evolution somewhere other than in this present, living reality.

That is to say, something I say a lot, that it is to place the word, “evolution,” in a creationist sentence, when it happened before but not anymore, like all the creation stories our species has. You know, not to “deny,” evolution exactly, they just want to put it on hold until they can study it some more – before they make it policy. I’m sorry, but I’m serious.

A billion zeroes equals zero, if we don’t evolve always, we never do – and we do, so it’s an always on sort of a feature. A billion ones is, well I’m no mathematician, but it’s a lot! Change over time requires that something actually changes during the time. The time is not the cause.

It is something like an accelerant that to a large degree we are presently both the evolving creature and the environment, that we create our environment and then adapt to it, this is called positive feedback and it is lethal without controls in place wherever we see it. It is my opinion and maybe part of the theory that we are well into feedback runaway mode here, near the end of the “cycle,” because unfortunately, we are also supposed to be the control, apparently.

The point of all this is spanked people change, abuse changes us, and not for the “better behaved,” like Mom said. And “stronger,” is not another word for “good,” like Dad said. People get worse.

Spanking is the environment we set up for children to adapt to and they do, and we assume they only adapt superficially and that their children will be exactly the same sort of people, require exactly the same environment, world without end.

No. No. You changed them. You created an environment to change them and it worked. Your parents changed you and you changed your kids and your kids will change their kids and somewhere between them and your great grandchildren there will be the Antisocialization Jubilee, another global berserking after four or five generations from the Nineteen Forties through the Twenty Twenties, every generation readier for war than the one before.

The good ol’ days

Your parents having survived the big one, considered it unthinkable and we consider war horrible, but every generation things swing away from war as the scourge of our species towards a generation who starts to think of it as a solution, and to think of people as a problem requiring that sort of a “solution.”

I’m planning to give you a list of quotes and speeches with dates to show the progression, although research is not easy for me, I resent the rubbish I have to pick through and cannot keep at it for long.

But this is the great truth behind many other popular memes like, “the good ol’ days,” suite of talk., the “back in our day, we didn’t see this,” stuff, Ockham’s razor: you really didn’t see that stuff then.

There really are many ways in which today is worse than yesterday and to deny that wholesale is rather obvious gaslighting. The razor says, often as not you saw what you thought you saw. While there is the popular NT psychology meme, that the nostalgia is simply for our childhoods when we had fewer worries, it ought to be needless to say that childhood is not all bliss and everybody doesn’t necessarily want to go back to their most vulnerable, powerless time.

Good Lord, the gaslighting. This is what I’m fighting, the “bliss,” of childhood.

These are competing memes, the world without end and the good old days, and the one that isn’t framed as the mythological “forever,” is the one that is actually possible – and anyway, why not “the good old days?” It ought to be fifty-fifty, what’s so impossible, that things might not just automatically get better? People rattle off that blissful ignorance line as if the world getting worse was ridiculous, impossible. No-one objects to you saying, “the bad old days,” because that’s progress – but in the days of yore, you could drink the water and see the stars. Some things get better, some get worse, these are of course generalizations – but generalizations are usually plausible, true much of the time or they wouldn’t be generalizations – they are not to be scoffed at and turned into personal attacks about how you just want to be a baby again.

The AST of war, summary

But that’s the antisocialization theory of war, that the abuse of spanking and law changes people for the aggressive so that they can be wielded in a conflict and these downsides accumulate over time and generations until some global, uncontrollable melee. Each generation is born a little more ready for it than the last.

People are charged with violence, aggrieved as babies and further all through life, but forbidden by law to kill their boss – the modern, peacetime enemy – or anyone else and we hold that charge of bad feelings – antisocialization – until the state or some leader changes the law and gives us an enemy upon which to let it all out. Punitive laws make us a weapon for our superiors, and they can wield it for a few generations, but violence has its own logic and the Jubilee is coming.

I think I’m repeating myself. On to history.

The progression, an American framing

Sigh. Do I even know the start?

Was there a peace movement, immediately? Or did America just switch enemies the day the war ended? Was it the Boomers, or the depression era’s kids who were the first to imagine a kinder world? I worry that I’m wrong, that perhaps the idea of peace had been scrubbed from the world for the adults of WWII. Ah, you know what, I’ve only been seeing the end/beginning of the “cycle,” I haven’t put any thought to the middle, or the trough if it’s waves– I suppose it must be halfway between?

The adults in the mid-eighties, forty years, halfway from 1945 to 2023?

Actually, that’s good and expected isn’t it? We peaked, and then Friedman, Thatcher, and Reagan happened, right? And it’s more logical, the warriors do not suddenly transform themselves into saints when the war ends – but I suppose they try to transform their kids that way.

OK, I did know after all. The war generation created the cold war, it was their kids who got tired of it. But I wasn’t complete about it, I planned to show us having learned our lessons immediately and then an eighty year progression – but I had forgotten the whole first half of the “cycle,” and the speeches are going to have improved for a few decades first, aren’t they? Gawd knows, Kennedy sounded positive much of the time – and before him, Eisenhower’s speech in Nineteen sixty-one about the military industrial complex, even presidents had happy dreams then, maybe. I was maybe eleven weeks old when the speech happened, two years old when JFK got shot.

Sigh again. That is prose, not proof.

Billy Joel did better, LOL.

Let’s set up a frame:

Hoover in the ‘20s, then

FDR through the depression and the war, then

Truman through ’53, then

Eisenhauer, sorry, Eisenhower through the ‘50s

Kennedy, then

LBJ through 69

Nixon to ’74, then

Ford through ‘77

Carter through ’81, then

Reagan in the ‘80s, then – ha! Then

Dubya and the modern era.

Ha! Damn, I think I’m finished! He who hath ears to hear, LOL.

The progression, some history

If Eisenhower was worried about the military industrial complex in ’61, then I suppose it is safe to assume that Truman was not and the complex got eight years ahead of Ike before he got there to worry about it. It sounds like it grew alarmingly under Ike as well and he made this warning as he was leaving office. Sixteen years, a generation maybe since the war, during which time all the Boomers were born and the war machine was growing – frighteningly, to a world leader.

I suppose his fright opened the Flower Decade for white people, his fright is a humanist sign coming from a president, one of the good parts of the “cycle,” at least he was speaking towards peace while the less good parts started right away, sixteen years or ten thousand years before, depending what you’re tracking. This wise speech happened before the Cold War even approached its peak? I think?

Then Kennedy?

He appeared to talk positively, appeared to be a liberal move for America, as I say, positive, first half of the “cycle?” On the other hand, of course it looks like Eisenhower’s fears came to life and killed him, which it would be odd to say it made America depressed forever afterwards, some might say we grew up – but that’s what my unauthorized portmanteau is for: it further antisocialized us.

I mean depression was a lot of it. Ha – in another bit of mixed messaging from history, LBJ looked like a step towards the conservative after sexy JFK, but it was LBJ said the thing about deflection – just let them persecute someone beneath them and they will not burn the White House down again, something like that – and LBJ that signed the human rights legislation, so in the sixties, some of the good parts of the “cycle,” made it into law and sometimes even into reality.

Nixon was a setback and Carter was a breath of fresh air – everyone already speaks about the back and forth, the oscillations – but you have to a long way into the past to find a president as straight up, old time good as Carter. People get worse but not everybody, not all the time, especially during the good part of the “cycle.” Carter, in this metaphor of presidents, was the peak of the good wave – unfortunately, most of this scenario has us tracking the peaks of the bad wave, and we would have to describe Jimmy as the bottom of the trough, which is awkward.

But you’re smart, you can deal; ignore it if you must.

Then trouble, the “cycle,” had gotten as good as it was going to get on this turn and we switch literally from presidents to actors, from actual good to merely the appearance of it.

Since before the war, the cliché was still candidates promising to keep you working and fed – a chicken in every pot, Hoover’s offer from the bad part of the previous cycle, so pretty much a custom. It was still alive in the sixties as “a pot in every chicken,” if I recall – and with Reagan we saw a shift to complaining about “welfare queens.” Gone were the government’s promises of managing the economy and keeping you employed and fed, now, after the “cycle,” turns, you are breaking your promise to them by not creating your own work somehow. The apology of poverty welfare is gone for the accusation of poverty welfare instead.

In the fifties and sixties, Canadians promised healthcare, got elected on it and gave it to themselves, and in recent years American Democrats have to distance themselves from the expense of giving people healthcare, it’s taking it away that is an election promise on this side of the “cycle,” apparently. Lately America did get some eventually, but it seems too little too late and the healthcare and the nations do not seem long for life.

Tax rates. Rich people used to help pay for people, and lately despite they can afford it, they do not expect each other to and no-one else does either. Believe it or not, I think even rich people used to be better. They get spanked too, plus they have something to lose if they rebel, so it’s an important part of the antisocialization theory of war that rich people aren’t born evil either but are subject to childrearing and get worse every generation from the abusive pressure the same as everyone else, and perhaps they are the more important part, considering the resources they command, the multiplier of their power.

People get worse

Really, if I were not socially disabled, were I an activist, this might be my axe, that we must somehow stop the most dominant from their self abuse and so erode the cause of their unhealthy need for power, that is to say, stop rich people’s child abuse. It’s a monster factory. Of course, we all ought to stop. By my own theory about them and theirs, if only one stops, some strong abuse survivor merely murders and replaces them.

There is no “them,” in Antisocialization Theory, not even the bloody rich, so there sort of is no activism. You tell people to “do something,” they’ll start a fight, so the activism is to not activate that. I’m a de-activist. I just want to talk. Let me ask you a question:

Always Remember what?

Never Forget what?

OK, that’s two questions.

But I think it was “Not to follow evil orders,” right?

I hate to think about how long that lasted – but we didn’t have a global communist revolution, so not long. If that was it, no wonder they didn’t commit to it by writing the whole idea on the statues.

Think about it and it’s an impossible order, “Don’t follow orders,” isn’t it. I would suggest we turn it around – Don’t give orders. It’s still a logical mobius strip to say it, but at least it might be possible to obey it without breaking it. We shouldn’t pile on a person for following orders – but maybe we should swarm the first guy who tries to give them and make him stop.

Every anthropologist has some story about how people used to do that, but people get worse. Evolution, don’t you know.

I think that’s what it ought to be, people get worse.

Always Remember, People Get Worse.

Never Forget, People Get Worse.

You are not “resilient,” as in unchangeable – resilience is you adapting, getting worse. Human Nature is not a permanent thing, it is a fragile, responsive thing, we change. Human Nature today is different than Human Nature yesterday and Human Nature tomorrow depends upon our choices yesterday and today.

If you keep choosing the static Human Nature and the fictional eternities, you will keep getting worse.

Jeff,

Jan. 20^th., 2024