abuse

Redefinitions 2 – AST vs Popular Memes, Social Life

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Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 2. Social Life

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of Conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of Conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST “Social Life”

On the one hand, I am a contrarian and everything rings wrong to me, and no-one will say the thing I try to debunk, things unsaid are more difficult to disprove. In this light, knowing it’s weak at this stage of our lessons, I say: we think “social,” means the positive thing, perhaps “prosocial.” It’s the generic word, it encompasses all things, prosocial things, antisocial things, and neutral things, I suppose, asocial stuff, but you might not pick that up in casual conversation.

Antisocial is a problem, prosocial is rarely spoken, we use “social,” for that, social, in it’s street level, social sort of use and meaning, means positive interaction, our social world is our community, friends and family, like that. Being social is interchangeable with being sociable, generally. Again, it is always my sense, my interpretation of a social meme that I am forever trying to critique, and I lose everyone right there, I think, no-one will take the responsibility for a conflation like this, not enough to defend it, and certainly no-one can promise to change such a vague thing.

Will you allow it, may I continue, making my case against “we think “social” is all good?”

LOL – it’s the court of the internet, silence indicates assent and I’m not listening, Princess Bride meme.

But there’s the dark side to being social, we are prosocial to our friends and antisocial to enemies and probably strangers. To “be social” is to draw the line and arrange people on one side of it or the other. It is to choose, to . . . loaded word, discriminate, meant literally and technically, generically, not the specific meaning today in our current conversations about racism and hate. The sorting function. I mean, it’s the thing, the same thing, the very thing, and if we could stop it all, we’d stop that too.

There is another conflation, a smaller one I need to mention, about the term, “social creature,” and variants. I think when we talk about the wildebeest or a herd animal, it means the positive thing, “social creature” for herds seems to mean they all get along, except you know, for the rut and whatnot. For us, it’s all of it, we are more properly a “group social” creature, perhaps, get along with some, in conflict with others. For the group social animal, “social,” means all of it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Cool?

We are having trouble separating things, our social life is structured with the group problems, structured around the situation, the conflict, and our lifestyle now requires the out-group, the enemy, and our best prosocial morality is predicated on an evil, antisocial Other. The movie trope is true: lacking a real enemy, like after Cyrus’ foes were all assimilated, not sure he did this, but we do – we create them, out of thin air. Every moral lesson needs a bad guy.

In this sense, it is AST’s position that our rough controls, the rules (threats) and punishments make us more antisocial, better adapted for a life of conflict. AST is ironic, or rather life without it is, in that the deterrents we apply to make us “good,” are weak, virtual things, while the threat and abuse of actual punishments make us “bad,” all day long, antisocial. I think the social consensus no-one has to defend is that yes, this is what we do, to be strong, to defend from other nations, yes, this means life and that is our foundation for our morality.

I get it.

But they tell the same story. Yours is a one-group morality and has zero control on war. Causes them all, in point of fact. Look how in its extreme versions, it shows up as a death cult instead.

There’s a genetic component, environmental control of genes that help in the event of an abusive environment, so called fighting genes or something similar. AST’s position is that we have hacked these genes, providing the environment to control the genetic choice – through discipline, through the ritualized abuse we call spanking.

This looks like a positive feedback loop to me, select a gene, activate it, select it again . . . which I worry is also the AST Theory of Conflict, that this feedback loop goes to thermal runaway in the world every ninety years or so. Ouch. Sorry.

Jeff

April 29th., 2022

Redefinitions 1 – AST vs Popular Memes, Human Nature

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc.

Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 1. Human Nature

AST, a Definition

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of Conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” – not an accident and not irony, this word choice, we are always seeing this – to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of Conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first entry:

AST and “Human Nature”

First – fooled ya, there’s no such thing, AST doesn’t have that. AST needs a reason that humans do bad things, while “human nature” would seem to state that no matter what horrors we perpetrate, no explanation is required: of course genocides. Whaddayamean, “why?” “Human Nature!”

“Natures,” – “essences,” aren’t a thing, not a meaningful actual thing. It’s a made up premise from thousands of years ago. I mean, sure it’s the foundation of all human society and law, but that doesn’t make it true, that’s just the twin fallacies of consensus and tradition. I have a speech about language and neural pathways, that your neural pathways don’t change every time you learn a new word, that mostly new words only re-label old paths – and “genetically determined” or “genetic legacy,” is the new label for “human nature,” which perhaps is a new label for Original Sin.

This function makes it hard to change. We know about things that grow and change, so we surely have a circuit to understand evolution, but I guess it’s not yet the superhighway the “human nature” one is? It’s hard to change, our thoughts want to use the main road or something.

“Genetic legacy,” is antithetical to evolution, it’s used where “human nature” would be used, when it’s time to say “that’s just the way it is,” – when evolution is supposed to mean nothing “is” the way it is for long, everything is becoming something and stopping being something else, ‘natures,’ and ‘determinations,’ are exactly not the point. An evolving creature doesn’t make excuses about what it “is,” it actively adapts, it reaches for the next thing to be. That’s what happens when a real creature adapts to actual reality.

It’s not so clear that’s us, I admit. But the false binary, formerly “human nature,” vs the blank slate is now presented as “genetics” vs the blank slate, and they have their proof, it’s not a blank slate, I get it, there are specific genetics in place – my answer is, yes, not blank, yes, an operating system – still not a “nature,” still not a static thing, still not an excuse! And there is environmental control of genetic options! Even if the genesuite was static (it’s not), are every one of its options “just the way it is?”

The language is not bad, but the thought isn’t up to it.

AST doesn’t need to bust the “natures” myth, Darwin did that, or he tried, we’re still trying. Like I say, change is hard. The problem is, it’s never busted, no-one loses it, “human nature” is our last idea, still there, underneath all of our education, the last stop as our minds trail off, faced with evil we cannot otherwise explain, “bah, human nature.” AST doesn’t stop at rhetorical roadblocks, AST has a rule, no “human nature.” You must explain the behaviour, with science, here on earth, no matter that it’s evil, of course, especially because it’s evil.

AST hates to make threats, but “human nature” seems to keep producing global violent meltdowns and insists there’s nothing for it, don’t even try. That myth is just going to let us kill everything, ourselves not least. You need AST. OK, that’s not enough to get anything, but that, I’m afraid that really is “just the way it is,” LOL.

More to come.

Jeff

April 28th., 2022

No Spanked Atheists

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I wrote this on Twitter, didn’t think I was “writing,” or something, but it’s as least as good as most of the entries here. It’s the same, but there’s a little something new, I think.

Another Human Nature Thread:

An evil (avaricious, violent) Human Nature – is the fascist position on the question of Human Nature, or the question of ‘why are we humans this way.’ I mean, it’s everyone’s, but it’s theirs too. If you believe in it, you are on the same side of the question as they are, you are fascism ready in that sense, you – we, it’s almost ubiquitous – have the first prerequisite, the foundation.

It is religion. “Natures” are not a thing. It is the ubiquitous human religion, the foundation  of all things uniquely human, this . . . faith. “Human Nature,” it is our moral judgment of ourselves that enables all the evil we do to one another.

The Human Nature Question has faded – but not because Natures aren’t real. They’re still not, but it’s because we have our answer, the whole human world is on one side of a debate. What is on the other side?

The Tabula Rasa? All the causality, all the science is now in support of the only model anyone has. Evolution is just “how we got this Nature.”

No science, no institution seeks a reason why we should be this way, they have one already, Human Nature – why poke and prod?

I have read many,  many books, trying in vain to prove the negative, trying to find the author that doesn’t in the end, give it up to Human Nature. Brilliant people who “tried,” but never could go back to that first error and correct it, is all I’m finding. Maybe Trivers doesn’t say it. Bob seems comfortable in an unmoored conversation, I think he’s careful not to require it, but I’m not sure he’s fully replaced it. Maybe. I’m not smart enough to be ahead of him, obviously. Mad hubris to make it a question.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, the full denial of Natures, in colour and Dolby, you know, fleshed out, what it means. It’s what Pinker maybe said he was after in the Blank Slate, but if he succeeded about the brain, he never approached the larger question. It was clear in the only mention of child-rearing that he was minimizing the power of it, made some analogy about dropping your phone, sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn’t.

As with specific religions, the question is this rule – an evil Human Nature – or real world causation? We are all living in the world of the rule now, can you see it, try it on? I know it seems like an obvious truth, people are awful, they certainly can be, but it is all empirical, it has to be, because we know platonic Natures aren’t a real thing. Truth, as Tim Rice said speaking as Pontius Pilate (I’m obsessing over JC Superstar at the moment), may simply be unchanging law, artificial, human made law. We have “eternal questions” because the gaslighted always do and always will, when we cannot apply reason and causality to our problems.

Let’s call this the end of the good part, the shareable part.

Of course, it’s hard not to believe it, hard not to accept the dogma of it, hard not to agree about an evil Human Nature when you are a spanked baby, when the source of life and love starts attacking you long before you can defend yourself. I think this experience provides the bias for believing it, and then we all share and amplify it all our lives, prove it to one another all day long. The lessons ring true, because the infantile experience is preverbal, buried, but sits waiting, a truth that has “always been there.”

Over and ouch. Can I get an Amen?

A couple of notes, because I like this rant enough to repeat it. One, I meant it in the most obvious, surface, unsophisticated and literal way, but “seems comfortable in an unmoored conversation” would be a lovely, Mark Twain polite way to call someone crazy, wouldn’t it? Not what I was doing, though. I’ll say, it’s an aspiration that someone might ever say it about me.

And that was new for me, the base religion idea. I want to get expansive – this is a way that “atheism is a religion too,” if it accepts the nasty Human Nature as a matter of no dispute, this is a way that there really aren’t many atheists, especially in foxholes, where the evidence overwhelmingly supports such an assessment. I mean, I suppose that to be an atheist or a materialist in this sense, a non-believer in our abuse deserving Natures, perhaps means even more than matters of immaterial beings, I mean of course it does.

Hmmm . . . good morning.

That was new too, about the Human Nature Question. You know they SAY the question dried up in their hands and blew away, disappeared into a million smaller questions, more meaningful and concrete questions – this is basically saying that the Nature is in the details, the Nature – the impossible, not a real deal thing – is behind many, many questions, and as I say, when they too run out of facts, nearly all of them pull Human Nature out in the end. Eternal recurrence, like Moe throwing Barney out of the bar, they turn around and there it is behind them. And the judgment remains, it’s no longer Selfish Man, but it’s the Gene now, and surprise – still selfish.

Who predicted the Generous Gene? Who would believe it? Our belief in our undeserving Natures is behind the science that identifies genes. The Question has not changed or morphed – we just stopped asking it, because when only one answer is permitted the question soon disappears. Maybe people used to know it was religion, but now it’s bloody science too?

Ha! Back up a few, this is the way in which science is merely another church again, if it proceeds from the fictional side of the Human Nature Question.

AST is the next “correct” theory because it makes sense of the previously mysterious and of conflicts in common wisdom. I’m an atheist, I am supposed to say it is NOT just another religion or a church, I know the public discourse – but AST is such a better theory, such a better context, that it explains it all, both sides of a popular debate that is deadlocked by myth.

A better theory.

Jeff,

Feb. 8th., 2022

Perceptions

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

There are two ways people view the world, the troubles of the world, one is something like software, culture, education and the other denies all of that, culture and education, the first I would call secular and perhaps liberal, perhaps progressive and the other I would call religious, despite that perhaps few really believe the whole religion, but these are the folks who think people cannot and do not change. I’m not saying these are two well defined camps, most folks probably believe something between, some combination of the two, education helps, but basically there’s not much for “human nature.”

Surely I’m not the only one sees the trap of it?

As always, if there be readers, please, if you know of someone who has already invented this wheel, please, tell me.

I think we are caught between these two paradigms, frozen into powerlessness.

As always, something is missing, the third leg of the table is not described. Education helps, but not apparently enough, or we can’t pre-educate them to want it, we can’t force it on anyone, and to what degree we believe the second thing, a flawed or evil human nature, it means we know the first thing cannot work. We do it anyway, it seems like the only thing, seems to work a little, we are playing the long game, but again:

If we know the other thing, then we know that isn’t it – these principles are opposing, and cancel each other out, but we haven’t identified the third possibility, that there is another explanation, the larger context in which the apparent conflict changes.

I am convinced that were the mechanism of antisocialization more visible, if we stopped discounting it, we could see the falsity of the second thing. As long as this isn’t allowed to be visible, as long as our never ending punishments and threats are exempt from the causation of reality, we shall be trapped in this endless bait and switch: education, yeah, doesn’t work, human nature.

It is a terrible thing to see, once you see the game, you can’t believe in the long game of progress anymore. The long term application of a small pressure, in the absence of no opposing force – no reason for the evil human nature, no causation resulting from our rough social control – that’s a plan, albeit a slow one, but once you see the opposing force, once you realize our long term tiny progress of education is up against threats and violence that begin in infancy, well, then we can see an imbalance in psychological, emotional and social power.

I’ll take your tiny hope – but I offer a bigger one, a real one: stop the violence, stop the social control, stop the spanking. If your kid won’t go down the coal mine without a beating, here’s a new idea: he doesn’t go down the coal mine. Spoil your magic trick, did I? I’m not saying the world wouldn’t change radically. Isn’t that the idea? Eventually somebody will figure out a way to do what we use the coal for without beating anyone – if we stop just settling for that, if we stop pretending the beating isn’t hurting anything. I know.

We think some beatings are OK, makes you strong, that way our team wins the rugby and our country wins the war, and I’m telling you, the thing that makes you win the war makes you fight the war, makes you need the war. The way we think it ends, a “war to end wars, a battle to end battles” – don’t you think it’s time we tried something else? That hasn’t worked out in a few thousand years, maybe ten. Again, the thing that makes you win the war makes you fight the war, makes you need the war – this is quickly obvious when punitive abuse has causality, when human nature requires an explanation.

Jeff

Jan. 11th., 2022

The Abused Ape Theory – Mission Statement/Premises

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

That’s a change. When I started, I toyed with the other version as my title, my catchphrase, before I settled on Antisocialization Theory, ‘the Abusive Ape Theory,’ like that, like the Aquatic Ape Theory, with the connotations of that theory’s history – and it turns out that it’s the whole point that that isn’t it, that the entire order of operations, the natural order of causality is that the abused ape child precedes its abusive caregivers. At least that’s the change I’m going to make, a rule for AST (antisocialization theory in short) that says the child’s experience precedes and breaking it will mean we have left the bounds of AST.

I plan to proceed as though there were an open marketplace where ideas compete for proximity to reality and therefore usefulness, and try a setup where it doesn’t begin with an adult Adam and Eve, or with the Elders, or with the  old man God who we acknowledge as a ritualized symbolic actual old man, the meta-alpha, where it doesn’t begin with full grown humans created or released from some mythical bondage, like the Raven story from around here – unless that place of bondage is childhood, then that metaphor might fit. Origin stories that begin with adults, that’s been tried, AST wants to try the other side of that choice, make sure we haven’t missed something.

It’s a chicken and egg story – the chicken and egg story, the reason we love that story – and the chicken came first. Until that chick was hatched, it was a proto-chicken egg, perhaps an odd looking one, but until the chicken inside came out and started acting strange, there were no chickens. When we arrived in the world, our progenitors, our caregivers were already here and every child’s story begins with that – but our story does not begin with all the characters’ back stories. Our story begins, when we, the child, begin to sense things, less literally, when we open our eyes and start reading it.

Antisocialization Theory intends to take this view, that life’s causality begins when our experience begins, with the experience of receiving abuse, prior to perhaps all understanding of anything, after all, slaps and deterrents exist specifically because the little ones ‘lack language and reason,’ these tools are directed at the lizard brain, directed at parts that predate all of human experience, so that is the start. In terms of uniquely human origins, again, AST starts with uniquely human experiences, meaning not feeding, or predation, or reproduction, things many creatures share, but rather social control, punitive abuse.

I’m not sure how I would respond to an objection that finds ‘human nature’ precedent to the lizard brain, to pain receptors, these things, while classifiable as ‘nature,’ absolutely predate humans. I understand that from a social point of view, on the social measure, our parents’ ideas or something come first, as though they didn’t have parents and as though we can’t simply carry that on back to the beginning . . . which, again, AST posits, insists: the chicken exists first.

In a human life, the child exists first.

Perhaps, all the origin stories themselves are infantile, baby stories of the adults we first saw, upon finding ourselves in this life. Perhaps in this corner of mythology, we never grow up and take the other view, never look with adult eyes instead at our infant selves for origins. If we were looking from our grownup selves, I imagine that is where we would start.

Jeff

Dec. 25th., 2021

Goes to this one next, logically:

First Impressions

First Impressions

Jeff/neighsayer7 Comments

You know I’m trying to solve the world’s problems, humanity’s problems, and there’s some guilt I’m not working the food bank, but I have issues, I don’t work well with others, and also the first problem I saw was what I’m always on about, “spanking,” (although anybody would have called what I saw more than that) and I was a kid, I wasn’t going to be working anywhere. The whole thing seemed, I’m sorry, stupid to me, and I have spent my life trying to find smarter thinking, solve it that way.

I must have thought, if I’m five and I can see how dumb these guys are, maybe I can help. Now I’m sixty-one and I think I’ve almost got it, but of course I’m sixty-one and I know no-one wants my answer, maybe any answer.

Too bloody bad, you’re getting it!

Lately, I’ve found a bit of a foil, someone with the skills to argue a large part of my answer, the Human Nature meme, from the dark side so to speak, I mean a bright soul who has seen some things, and there’s an idea I mentioned before but they helped me get another inch along with it.

I’m always on the Human Nature bit, and I’ve suggested before that a baby’s first human is Mom, and her Nature is likely the baby’s first idea of human nature – a schizoid conversation, ‘Natures’ are a Platonic abstraction, not actual things in the real world – but more generically, a baby’s first impression perhaps tells them who people are, who they are . . . OK, ‘first impression’ is a meme of the same age and accuracy as ‘Natures,’ we have had nine months of impressions before the world sees us, I mean ‘early impressions,’ don’t I.

Most of which, hopefully, are prosocializing, loving and nurturing, before what I am suggesting, the trauma of the first slap or something, and it’s also possible a kicking foetus gets a retaliatory blow sometimes, perhaps the first negative impression isn’t after nine whole months either.

But what sort of struck in conversation with my friend, what seemed to bite this time through it, was the idea that the baby’s impression probably really is of something along the lines of a simple binary nature, it’s not a bad working hypothesis for an infant, good/bad, love/hate, life/death, you have to say, the kid seems to have good priorities to form an opinion on the matter. I’ll argue now, after sixty years of life, but with a baby’s data at hand, that is some solid science on their part. Our part, of course.

I would that an education meant correcting the infantile binary ‘natures’ meme.

What hit me so firmly in this conversation was that the baby learns a Nature – from what was, for the mother an entirely contingent act.

It surely happens, that awful episode of M*A*S*H, where we suffocate a baby for silence in the presence of a predator or an enemy – I don’t see how a blow or a denied meal or some such deprivation is ever so necessary. We can say reasoned or compulsive, we can say “it happens,” I don’t think we can ever say it’s not contingent, we can’t ever say it had to be so, when would people die if someone didn’t hit a child. So there is the magic, where the contingent becomes the inherent, caregiver makes a choice, baby learns ‘what a human is.’

I’ve been saying the human nature myth is simply wrong, makes the wrong thing of us, but this made me realize that it’s both, it’s where the lie becomes the truth, where the myth and the truth intersect. The story of baby’s first negative experiences could be read either way, someone “proved” a lie to that baby, and now it thinks the contingent is immutable, or someone showed that baby the truth, I mean it really happened, didn’t it?

Not quite there yet? OK, maybe it’s not ‘the truth’ just because one baby ‘learned’ it, but there is a great assistance from other fallacies, namely consensus. If it really happened to everyone . . . then what? Plato was right, infants are right?

Yes?

Both these truths?

At the same time, as Elvira Kurt’s mother would say?

Jeff

Dec. 6th., 2021

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Four, Maturity

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This is a blog just to say human social maturity precedes sexual maturity, and we only wish folks like Freud had their finger on it. Honestly, don’t go, ha.

It’s a Child’s World

Man, I just couldn’t get anything said a few years ago, I found the one I was looking for, and that was it, but I read it and I got nothing from it, looks like we’re doing it again. Like I was being careful not to offend anyone or something, working hard to not say it – perhaps I have changed.

It starts with a few, I’m going to say facts. Data points.

One, human sexual maturity comes sometime after ten years of age, usually well after, a few years, sometimes seven years after, rarely at nine or younger? Two, after weaning, the children spend their days among children, the older ones raising the younger ones. This seems true to me, I got it from the Nurture Assumption, a tome with a bad point but a lot of information from a lifelong writer of science textbooks and I think her picture of the traditional human situation was pretty normal, she cites well known names, as in part two, among others.

Another name for sexual maturity, is of course, adulthood, and puberty is the end of human socialization, I mean science knows, every year is less important, we are more malleable every year than we will be in the next one. If our teachability is less every year by almost any rate at all, there isn’t much left after an average of twelve or thirteen years. Sure, it can be a lifetime of learning, but you are working and learning some grownup thing, while the kids are still outside teaching each other society.

I think maybe learning doesn’t slow to a trickle after puberty but significantly, perhaps instead teaching ends after puberty, when we age out and leave the children’s group, and then again, when the babies age out of the nest and into the group outside as the cycle rolls on.

To whatever degree any of that is true, human life, human culture is decided and propagated in childhood, and this is important, it seems to me – so it’s pre-pubescent, human society is sexually immature. Freud is wrong that it’s all about sex and whole branches of biology are missing it that it’s all about reproduction, that the violence serves the reproduction of our genes, no, this is not the order of causality, our entire life is written out before sex enters into the conversation. It’s the other thing, like the EP boys say, sort of, except it’s bloody horrible and not at all the way things ought to be – it’s the fighting.

It certainly does seem that evolution finds little use for self-awareness beyond the fight or flight response, beyond knowing when to eat and when to run, I mean maybe not always or even usually, but it is very much my contention that our social evolution involves a lot of unconscious stuff, and I don’t mean drives or animal things, I mean social things, rules and strategies we keep unconscious, weird to say, consciously, on purpose, things that exist at a level between animal imperatives and conscious, directed thought.

Things that perhaps blur the lines between the unconscious and simply lying or playing silly bugger (a Britishism for feigning stupidity and/or ignorance).

Returning to teaching, Sapolsky said on video that he and his peers are a competitive, alpha wannabe bunch and he talked about the stress of it, and if academia is a tournament of the most aggressive and loudest and scariest, then most jobs and professions are. My thesis here is that the strength tournament of boyhood stays in place for life in all matters – not an endorsement. I confess, if I read someone else saying that, I would assume it was indeed written with weird, violent glee and approval. I feel I must always clarify, I’m saying this is what is wrong, this is what is wrong with the “way it is,” this is what I would change, this is an argument to human life, not just an explanation I’m making – and if this is the case in the place where we think the brainiest little dweebs ought to rule, if that is the dynamic in the place we set aside for rational thought and the development of real knowledge, and if we don’t set it aside for that, then we don’t set it aside for nuthin’, and I mean sex and reproduction and all that too, Freud. The selfish gene.

Sorry to say, humans are historically aware enough of the selfish gene to have invented their solution for it, genocide. If Richard is suggesting humans don’t get human groups, then who has been fighting? Why does every ten year-old with a television know the phrase “you and your whole family?” A bit of a pet peeve of mine, this was some sort of revolution, the science that echoes the world we all see every day anyway? Violence wins again, if there was a fix for violence we wouldn’t be ruled by some version of the bloody Sopranos.

If we are more like an extrapolated bonobo, then maybe sex and breeding win, but we seem more like the other team. It remains to be shown that the bonobo love of loving requires a lot of violence to make it possible, which is what using the selfish gene to defend the patriarchy and a world of conflict is saying. You read all the popular science today, there is no way out, of course things are this way because of this and this and this, sorry about that, we had a good run, didn’t we?

Didn’t a few of us, I mean?

I mean, of course we’d rather talk about sex, there is maybe some point in talking about sex. Violence ends all conversations.

We do talk about sex, of course, bloody endlessly, and there are options, options aplenty – it’s the faux taboo, there is no taboo regarding talking about sex, I mean there are conflicts, we don’t tell everyone what our partners like and such, but even the most conservative societies talk about it enough to have a lot of rules, explicit rules and such. Ha – Dune is back, and honestly, a little bit of Dune stayed with me all these years, specifically, “a feint within a feint,” and maybe a third feint, and this is the context in which talking about sex is a taboo, like what the Hell is telling you you’ll go blind if not talking about sex? Sex is subject to a lot of control and rules, many rightly so, of course, many not, and that requires a lot of talk. Repressing sex is like not thinking of the word banana, you have to keep a filter for the proscribed thing in place twenty-four seven and whether sex is a free thing or not, it is on our minds in one way or another.

You know what we don’t debate all day, what doesn’t have a lot of options?

Fighting. Strength. And of course, the real thing is the thing you can’t even talk about. You hear it everywhere, all day long, I mean far more than you hear exhortations to be heterosexual, or to follow a particular church, or racial prejudices, be strong! Strong for cancer, strong for random massacres, strong to withstand random road crashes that take a whole community’s children.

There are those, many, who see all the strength as patriarchy, strength is the male principle, and sure, there is some of that, but as far as I can tell we are as obsessed with strong women as men, and even strong children, weakness is . . . wow, I’m always hedging, but I think I’m going to say ‘never’ this time, weakness is never encouraged. I mean, they might break you, but we talk about the broken only in terms of strength too. Nobody wants to tell a victim, or hear from one, that they’re weaker now.

Broken and alive we call strong.

They are even talking about the plague that way, ‘survivors’ not sufferers, I mean, ‘they,’ in this case doesn’t necessarily indicate the actual opinions of actual people, but this is all part of it, the propaganda is only a stretch from the dark side of normal, and fascism is only a stretch from the normal primate hierarchy of ‘peacetime.’

Social, all of it, conflict, territory, hierarchy, violence, normally my point is, social and not rational, but today the point is social – not sexual. Again, the Freudian and biology order of operations that puts replication ahead of all as the explanation fails to explain why this could only be the case for a single species among so many – and the standard answer, that we are more complex, social evolution . . . well, everything else is also incredibly complex, isn’t it, like perhaps we didn’t think when we made that argument a hundred years ago.

I suspect the difference with us – and there is one, we have broken the bonds of nature in ways to destroy it all, a thing other creatures have apparently never done, escaped correction and deselection, at least until now – is not based in genes and breeding which is not unique to us, but in the opposite, in the violence, in the advent of our breeding-defeating in-species violence.

But it’s much more fun to talk about sex, or, alternatively, if you can see the violence, to love the horror, like these young monsters of the New Nightmare, and to rave about glory and such garbage. Violent solutions, sure.

But what you are not allowed to do is see it clearly, for what it is.

Jeff

Nov. 30th., 2021

the preceding:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Three, Contracting Out

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Three, Contracting Out

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Here’s me first getting the idea of the human workaround, our system to have more abuse than we might want to give our own children. It starts a bit slow, but since I’m thinking out loud maybe it’s clearer, you can see the steps I often fail to show.

But it’s here below, in short form. Don’t torture yourself.

The germ:

Sub-contracting Abuse – Brainstorming

Variations on the theme . . . not mandatory:

Abuse, Driver of Inequality

This has the idea in it and an example of ‘workarounds for Nature.’ I’m embarrassed, there’s some stupid petulance in here about a great person, and I’m an idiot. It has more of the foolishness than the good stuff, but the good stuff, unfortunately seems important.

Workarounds

The idea is, folks want to be nice to their kids, but our lifestyle seems to require humans that have learned a lot of hard lessons – so we have institutions, professional teachers and childminders to deliver them. Unrelated adults are utilized for this, allowing many parents to live in line with relatedness theory, bringing a prosocial mix to their children and their childrearing, while still insuring that most people are tempered for the rough purposes of the group. I mean, it’s what the children’s group does too, and it too is many times larger today in many places than in the deep past and full of entirely unrelated kids.

You know, that needs a name.

I have already coined the antisocialization theory of war, this isn’t quite on the same order, let’s see, it’s a workaround to defeat a natural, evolved trait, specifically social theory, so it’s an ‘anti’ again, like antigravity, antidepressants, and surely not antisocial, so it’s anti-relatedness? The antisocialization theory of surrogacy?

Maybe, I don’t hate it immediately. OMG, why do I love these moments, this is my problem, that I love to say the opposite of what everyone wants to hear –

It takes a village – to brutalize a child, when social theory says the parents alone might not have the stomach for it.

– this view of life – mine, not Darwin’s, though his includes mine if anyone knew it – this view of life turns everything upside-down. But put those two things together, this is what you get, all the common wisdom that is supposed to keep us peaceful is all in place, and we are not peaceful, it’s all like this, and means the opposite of what we think it does. Was ‘it takes a village’ supposed to mean it takes that many to control a child? That many to teach empathy? I’m afraid the sad, dark outlook of AST is what explains it, it takes those more unrelated people to abuse, to grow a useful, ‘mature’ human – oops, that’s leaking into part four, that ‘maturity’ for us is a matter of our antisocialization and not really a breeding thing at all.

I say it often, I need to, it’s not happy – but at least things make some sense from here.

I think maybe we’ll go with that accidental segue, the links are long, this was intended as a cliff notes version.

Jeff

Dec. 1st., 2021

the preceding:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Two, Childhood

the next:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Four, Maturity

The Missing Word and Social Media

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It is exactly our social world that is conflict and groupness, I mean all the strife is not coming from the rational side of our house, is it? We really shouldn’t have this sort of media, it’s madness considering what real people do, certainly it’s crazy to let those people multiply their voice with bots. Morally, I really need not to be there, it’s a terrible compromising thing. I have all but given up that I can use my tiny voice to affect anything there (here . . . ) and what is keeping me there now is not the chance to help anything or anyone, but just that it’s the only place I get any human connection or interaction at all, I feel I must come to the evil meetings or wither and die  of loneliness.

I’m afraid social media is the car we will drive ourselves off the cliff in, and most folks won’t automatically know my reasoning, my complaint about it, because for that you need a word that isn’t in the dictionary and you’ve never been taught: antisocialization – antisocialize, as a verb. It means what it sounds like, ‘to make antisocial,’ and you’ve had to scramble a bit to complain, use a lot of single-emotion words, anger, embitter, sadden, perhaps ‘shut down,’ if that hasn’t gone the way of having ‘hang-ups’ yet! No-one has gathered those together under my heading, negative socialization, put the long way.

We talk about ‘socialization’ in a general, generic way usually, ‘all the things,’ and sometimes we hear ‘prosocialization,’ they have indeed created the umbrella term for the bright side of things.

But we have suppressed the verb for the dark side, and so set it free to do as it pleases.

For the dark side, we get nouns, ‘human nature.’ No verb is required, nothing makes us antisocial, right? Born that way, so relax, make yourself at home, have fun, hit somebody (Rickles, to Sinatra) – there is no word and so no crime for what it does to them on the inside.

Ouch. I can say it, I can think it – still hurts. Eesh. Writing is terrible, you see your own awful thoughts and you can give yourself gut-punches. Oof.

But the point of today’s rant/sermon is that there is also no word for what is so wrong that everybody does on social media and that is share the bad news and endlessly repeat examples of the disparity of the white supremacist society in America and Canada and the whole white world, we don’t all of us seem to get that it is all antisocializing, that bad news from good people is bad for you. That because this word and this function doesn’t exist in our society, we don’t seem to worry that all are antisocialized from the constant trauma and when the bad people pull a stunt specifically to antisocialize everyone (terrorism) that all the good folks spread the terror, we must all think people are already as bad as they can be or something.

Perhaps I would tweak other words’ meanings as well, we say ‘terrorism’ as the establishment’s way of labelling what the other side calls freedom-fighting, and antisocializing terrorism is different, maybe I don’t suppose it looks positive to anyone. I mean it all comes in the same package anyway, usually.

I’m not mad at y’all, it’s not your fault, it has been oh so carefully hidden from us this word, this function, this reality, starting with, stop me if you’ve heard this one – I hit him, but it doesn’t hurt him.

OK, stopping. I know you’ve heard it.

Because this function is dark in our lives, both sides of the political spectrum, inasmuch as there are two sides, which is debatable, both sides spread the trauma, albeit with different labels, the mad Right share the Rittenhouse verdict with glee and the normal folks (I can’t say “Left,” as they self-identify, I won’t propagate the myth of the Overton window) share it with disgust, and so there is no-one on social media who hasn’t experienced this crap news and repeatedly. One crows: see the supremacy and one cries, see the supremacy and for the life of me I cannot understand why we would share our losses as thoroughly as they share their wins, don’t we know that’s what the enemy does in war, broadcast your losses and fears at you, to break your spirit?

Don’t we know that we are apparently willingly providing a huge proportion of the “loud enough, often enough” part of the Nazi’s motto?

Again, I’m sorry – we sort of do, but antisocialization isn’t a thing, there isn’t the language. Everything about the human world tells us not to worry about that, everything tells us that we can’t ever be strong enough, and that’s the only word we give ourselves for the whole deal, the mindless Red Queen’s game of “strength.” “What doesn’t kill you,” right? Wrong.

They don’t broadcast that stuff at you in the trenches to make you stronger, and I have such a hard time with this – it’s science that it works the same when we do it, when Rachel Maddow does it, when your parent does it. Science, I tells ya. Rational world stuff, I swear to God.

Why not?

So stop, don’t hate share, don’t “warn” each other like the enemy loudspeakers do. If you have something helpful and must reference some awful thing from the other side, describe it yourself, use your own words – much of what is outrageous and makes us want to hate share has been carefully psychologically engineered, worded just so. Don’t help them spread those bullets. Use your own words. Acknowledge the losses once, try to learn, and then stop and move on, please.

But then, I’m just different, I suppose, and doomed to simply blowing against the wind forever.

Jeff

Nov. 27th., 2021

In-group Preference

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In-group “preference,” I mean.

I really want to make the point that the “science” in EP is a lie, to the degree that they misrepresent the difference between one’s treatment within and without the “in-group.” What I’ve seen and read says anti-social to the out-group and prosocial to the in-group, and this is not a true function. Aggression and antisocial things rise and fall, come and go within and without the group together, and not the reverse.

Representing the treatments as opposite does us all a terrible disservice.

Game it out – bad out and good in – so when it gets really very bad out, war at the borders, then it gets really, very good, prosperity and parties for the folks on the “inside?” Of course not, bad out, bad in, all must sacrifice in war – but true also to have a war, mistreat your own citizens, bad in, bad out as well, again, it all goes together, they are two sides of a coin. Today, perhaps in America we fear the rise of a violent Far Right, not because the Far Right’s leaders are coddling and rewarding them, but because the Far Right’s leaders are feeding them to the plague.

But it doesn’t matter who shakes the jar, my point is, it is always “our own” shaking the jar. Orwell missed one, Abuse is Strength. This is our trap, that war is the excuse for abuse and strength within, and abuse and strength within are the eternal causes of the scourge of war, and one of the reasons for that is the fascist control of science, which, EP is often just one of those euphemistic names, like “anti-vaxxer.”

Jeff

Modified Nov. 25th., 2021

(Tweeted 95% last week)