That’s what I’m calling you, I guess. That’s Antisocialization Theory.
Like a rubber band airplane. Your momma winds you up, and your lieutenant sets you free. Then you go off and do the predictable thing, what you’re designed and built to do, spending the energy they put into you.
Jeff
Apr 14th., 2023
That will be ableism, to you, internalized ableism. Perhaps internalized racism, internalized sexism, internalized “gender-ignorance,” internalized hetero-neuro-normative whatever, you name it, I feel my marginalization as an Autist, so I’ll say ableism. It’s not a huge point, because my point that it’s not about any particular marginalized group, we are not responsible for our own disenfranchisement – and words like “ableism,” always name the hate after the victim.
“Anti-Asian hate,” a year or two ago, it’s all-victim, perpetrator-free crime. The news won’t even tell Asians who to watch out for, just don’t be Asian. But ableism.
Thinking ableism is “about” disabled people is agreeing with your enemies.
I know; “about,” and “because,” are complex, and the limitations of language hinder us, I’m trying to solve some of that.
Abuse “because,” we’re disabled, that’s their line – and it’s internalized ableism if it’s ours. It’s not because of us.
Having to abuse everything and everyone, this is some “them,” we’re talking about, a trait of some “theirs,” not everyone except theirs. It’s not like the haters single out your marginalized group, it’s obviously the other way about, they single out one group to keep and marginalize the rest with one broad stroke.
The community on Twitter is forever saying, “nothing about us without us,” and that’s great – but to the haters, it was never “about” us in the first place, they don’t know who we are. We say, they need to start seeing/thinking something about us, but again, they don’t know what we are and they don’t much care, they do it to everyone, it’s a function that really doesn’t look past “Other,” it really doesn’t spend any cognitive energy on things with that designation (what does @autismsupsoc call that, fast and dirty Allistic processing?). That would seem to be the point of the designation, no processing resources for you.
Black people wonder, “what’s wrong with being black?” and the LGBTQ+ community wonders, “what’s so wrong with not breeding?” and the ND community wonders, “what’s so wrong with thinking differently?” and of course the answer always, collectively and individually, is nothing!
Of course, nothing!
I mean, everything has its upsides and downsides, I guess, but nothing, nothing about any of these labels is something anybody needs to bloody do anything about! This trait of wanting to do something about people, though, can we please, before the end of eternity, talk about that? Obviously, that is a problem.
Black and brown folks talk about white people, the Non-Binary talk about cis people, the ND talk about the “neurotypical,” which describes nothing but their perceived numbers, and I don’t deny the Venn diagram is basically one big circle for all of those things, especially around here, but it’s just not the point.
It’s not white peoples’ skin colour that’s the problem any more than it is anyone’s skin colour, is it, and it’s not cis peoples’ breeding habits and it’s not “neurotypical” peoples’ commonness, is it? The hate isn’t “because,” of diverse types of people – and so it’s not “because,” of the simple existence of the haters either, something has gone terribly wrong with them, of course, this is what I’m saying too, but I can’t abide ending the conversation there, naming and blaming isn’t enough.
That we have already been trying for some generations already, the Good Fight is keeping us morally occupied but it’s not solving the problems. Anyway, to say it’s because of who they are, their natures or some such, that’s their crime and their error, isn’t it?
Can we not escape the same lethal ideology of the worst human sorts?
I won’t be caught parroting that, and I’m here to beg you not to be either. There are real world reasons for things, not natures, and the more people insist upon these natures, the worse those people behave.
As I said, there are reasons, there have to be – sometimes I think it is not in my Autistic neurology to accept a noun as an answer to “why” anything, and “because they are, racist, haters, Nazis, white, cis, NT, all these are nouns – and because they simply are doesn’t satisfy me. Nouns are “whats,” and this Autistic needs a verb.
“Why,” is an action question, you “neurotypical” weirdos. Not only is “because those people,” wrong, it’s not even grammatically sane, you couldn’t be right no matter who you named. “Why,” demands a verb.
Of course I had to make my own, it’s “antisocialize.”
The extreme antisocial nature of racism, sexism, etc., this is a noun we all know, hate, but creating hate requires action, a verb, despite what they told us in Sunday school, and despite what your high school science teachers who also attended your Sunday school told you too. You weren’t conceived with a load of hate already on board. They, we, are making the hate.
The noun that refers to knowing this function I have designated Antisocialization Theory, or AST for short, and the dominant folks of this world have it the worst, but most of us have it. It’s what is internalized, AST, the hurt and the need, the hurt from people hurting one another when they think someone needs it and the belief, born of the need, that someone does. Rather, AST describes the process of internalizing negativity generally, regardless of the flavour, and how it changes us, antisocialization is the process of acquiring our internalized hate – I mean the feeling of hate.
Ah!
The specifics, who we’re to hate, and the whys and wherefores of our applied hate, these are perhaps merely informational, a part of our general socialization, certainly they would be considered to be, if we felt that all people have enemies and conflict were inevitable – but the emotional effect, antisocialization, this sets that default. If you were spanked, hate is natural and inevitable to you, and you’ll need to know where to put it.
The same logical structure exists in the positive, your prosocialization would derive from your emotional experience of feeling loved, and so being loved would be natural and necessary for you, but the general socialization of your society and environs likely specifies who and what to love . . . ah, something sort of new, isn’t it.
I’ve been calling “socialization” a general, inclusive heading, the name for all of it and saying it’s made up of positive, neutral and negative socialization – now maybe classic “socialization,” can just mean informational, period, who and what – but the pro- and anti- versions mean something else, something emotional, antecedent to any specifics, the template, the blank forms, so to speak.
Wow, I do believe something moved there.
If only anyone knew, huh.
So the theory is, if you want your kids to experience love, love them and they’ll want that, and if you think you need them to hate, hate on them a little, beat on them a little, and they will want that too, and we know they will find their own people and things to love – and that is the AST theory of racism, etc., that they will find their own things and people to hate too, society provides mates and enemies.
You can “teach,” racism, but you don’t have to. Spank them, show them the systemic racism, and they’ll figure it out, their hate will find its niche. Same for ableism, sexism, too, spanked people and relatively consequence-free targets for them.
This is AST, and this is what we need to fight and to change, that second thing, the “hating on your kids a little,” meme. All of our disenfranchised identities can lobby to be on the “prosocialized for,” list alone, in competition for this decade’s entry, or we can try to solve the problem at its root, with simply deciding we don’t need that, we would rather our kids weren’t hate-ready before they can even speak.
That’s the battle, and it’s the same battle, no matter who you are, stop the spanking, stop the hate.
Simple!
Jeff April 9th., 2023
. . . all great ideas, Mrs. Marx and Engels, Drs. M. L. King, Gabor Mate, Alice Miller, Mr. Cavoukian – Bell Hooks, just names from my personal logos, but so many great humanists, all with a terrific idea about how things ought to be, about love over hate, too many to name them all, so many good folks trying, so many apparently obvious rhetorical questions posed, why wouldn’t we choose love?
If I have readers, you know what I think: spanking and it’s mythological excuse, “Human Nature,” is why. But today’s question isn’t that, it’s “why would this be rhetorical?”
All good things hit this wall.
We would choose love – but goddammit, I have forever been choosing love and receiving hate and I’m sorry, but it’s not love I got too much of and not love I need to void myself of, is it? If you didn’t want this from me, why did you do that?!?? We would, but, kind of thing, right? But not for them, or something, right? Surely there is someone out there who deserves some of the limited resource of my mercy.
I’m trying to tell you, you ask, “why choose hate?” like it’s rhetorical, like there’s no answer, like we’re not really looking for an answer.
I woke up today with a thought that is childishly simple, yet still unfortunately true of a world of adults. You know the old saw, a child says in anger, “You made me feel X,” you know, X equals sad, mad, something awful and at some age we start saying, “other people don’t make you feel things, your feelings are yours.”
It’s a bit of gaslighting, doesn’t matter what I do to you, you are responsible for your own feelings, but it has a sort of truth, we do need to own our feelings enough to control them some and such, but it has just occurred to me for the umpteenth time, that isn’t this just what every sort of hate, every “ism,” is, the hated groups are blamed for the feelings of the haters, the haters hate everyone but themselves and it’s everyone’s fault but theirs, all their hate.
But you know what? It’s not so simple, this gaslighting. Rather, there are multiple levels, a ruse within a ruse, and while we gaslight one another in the here and now, that we aren’t responsible for one another’s new and current feelings, we are also closing off any conversation about anyone creating feelings in anyone – about antisocialization, in a word. Nobody affects nobody, apparently.
AST, so, you feel bad, you blame someone, but Psych 101 says your feelings are your own, from some other trauma, not from the person in front of you, so now you feel bad and it’s not their fault, it’s you, and “some other trauma,” of yours, and trauma is always some sort of accident, Psych 101 knows your abuser had their own trauma, so no-one tried to make you feel that way, it’s a . . . choice, ultimately, how we respond to a tragic accident. Why not choose love?
Uh, because it was a trauma and not an orgy?
These haters really don’t create all this hate themselves, is all I’m saying, the haters’ parents do, their caregivers do, their preachers, teachers and coaches do. Contrary to your memes, we can’t just make our own hatred from thin air and we’re not born with an unlimited supply, and of course somebody else makes you feel that way!
I want to say, of course we make each other feel things when we interact, but that’s not the point, the point is they were made to feel that way as a part of their upbringings, and it’s a feeling that doesn’t go away, somebody else makes you feel that way for life.
Your mom, your dad. Your people do that.
Why not choose love? It’s not bloody rhetorical, there’s a real world, living reason, and it’s because of the way they have made us feel, as I tried to express above. If we do not choose love, it is because we have been made to feel something else. Feelings are . . . real, materialistic, they are born and die here, in this world. Your bad feelings happened here, and the source is knowable.
I’m trying to tell folks: we can’t get there from here, but if we stop hurting our kids, maybe they can see more from there, maybe they can “choose” love a little more often than we did.
Jeff
March 23rd., 2023
I’m ashamed to say, I don’t think I ever realized the book burning of the German Nazis in the 1930s and ‘40s meant children’s books, I wasn’t thinking when I learned of it as a child, as children’s books, I was imagining adult sexual stuff, political stuff. Of course it was all of it, and it is presently in America too, all of it.
I am sorry to be a downer, but seeing it today about children, it’s . . . it’s so awful that I need pen and paper to comprehend it all at once, good Lord.
I’ve had the most miserable insight about it, which, Tweeting it isn’t clearing my buffer, I haven’t written a blog in months, I finally have a personal thing to work through this year, but I have to for this, it’s making me. The insight:
For years I’ve been making the point that spanked, abused children grow up angry, looking for a fight they’re allowed to have – psychology says this causes all sorts of personal problems, and much biology seems happy to let psychology have the point and the branch of knowledge – but Jeff’s version of biology says, from Sapolsky, that personal problems, sure – but mostly deflection. So some grow up sad, some addicted, but in the simpler world of the past there were fewer options, and still the main, evolved and socially constructed option is to grow up strong and angry, loaded, ready to be discharged when appropriate. Eighteen year old boys and young men seem to display it the most, they are perhaps allowed to the most, it is the evolved thing, as I said, so it is literally normal. It is normal, and war is normal, and apparently police states are normal.
Armchair revolutionaries like myself, we see a tedious, repetitive world of wars and young men getting into fights, this is the human condition, life is tears because of all the hate and violence that we cannot seem to solve for. An abused, angry young man, perhaps doesn’t worry so much, his overwhelming sense, his genes and his abuse are screaming at him, fight! We see a solution in a fight when that’s who we are. The world may suck, but if I fight, I can make myself some space.
But the Nazis, and the books, good Lord. I see a world of endless wars that one only leads to the next, I see war and fighting as the problem, the eternal scourge of humanity, I think this defines liberals or progressives – they see some final solution. They somehow do not see past the next fight, they somehow do not connect their desire to fight to every other warrior in our fractured histories’ identical sense of a violent “solution,” forever – “gonna be different this time,” (Talking Heads) sort of thing: always deluded, pretending they are not looking for final solution number ten thousand.
So the books.
Holocaust denial, slavery denial. CRT denial.
They are arranging to make sure their kids think a violent solution is new, that this generation is trying something never tried before. You censor historical hate, and then you say here’s the brand new solution, T just invented it! I mean, you beat them spare, then you utterly control their knowledge so that they have no idea of the real world, to make misinformed hate soldiers of your own children. How much do they hate their own children, this is impossible for me to grasp, I your mother, want you intentionally wrong and stupid and to maybe die young in a fight or a war after never being allowed a moment of freedom, OMG.
It’s like a scene in a movie, an ultimate intimidation: if I will zombify, parasitize, and weaponize my own child, imagine what I will do to you.
The more I learn about it, the more I learn that hate and war destroy everyone equally, both sides are cast into the very same Hell. What do they think they are saving the world for after they destroy their own children?
I guess that’s an ending, metaphor not intended. Damn.
Jeff
Sept. 27th., 2022
I’m feeling nostalgic. Here’s a post I might have made ten or more years ago, back to childrearing.
The double-bind proves the matter, the noise cancels out when Mom and Dad make conflicting demands, make it impossible to do the right thing, the ostensibly right thing, and all that is left is antisocialization. We know it’s a game played upon the subservient person or the child, an unwinnable game for us when we are subjected to it.
But do we know it’s the entire point of all the punitive abuse?
That it’s not some game outside of what is presently a parent’s job, but possibly the most important and causative thing we do? Not an endorsement, important, I didn’t say in a good way. The impossible bind is antisocialization theory in a nutshell, that fairness and actual equality are not the point, the point is that you are altered by the experience, not for the nicer. The naked, public humiliation of the impossible bind only works to embitter us even more, or faster.
Jeff
July 3rd., 2022
Not a typo, I’m trying to be clever.
Diversity is the first half of evolution, you don’t get selection without providing options, right? The most common versions of traits and genes, we assume are so because they match the most common environments, they have had the broadest success, but species appear to retain some diversity so that when that common environment changes, other traits and genes have their chance to shine and species carry on, changing in relation to the environmental changes, not necessarily quickly enough or without some serious trouble, but that’s the idea.
If they’re here, they did that, that species does that, right? If something had happened that a species had no capacity to deal with, then those ones are not here. Diversity is flexibility, which is viability when you know that environments change.
The human neurodivergent population knows this about themselves, that they are perhaps spare parts to some in the current environment, but crucial future spare parts for the species.
Personally, my mission in life seemed obvious at maybe six years of age, it seemed plain as day to me that the lifestyle of abuse and control I was born into couldn’t possibly be sustainable and I am spending my life ‘explaining shit to people’ about it, as young Master Hunting didn’t want to, I mean, if anyone is listening. And I mean, I didn’t know about neurodiversity until, well, now. I thought they had the same brain as me and were simply in error, and I could explain it to folks.
Hey, I think that’s nostalgia. It did look much simpler back then, and I just felt smart. I knew I was the odd one out, but perhaps from a more extreme stupidity, I never dreamed that it was me that was disabled. I was looking at adults raging out on little children, I never dreamed it was me that was broken in all of it. My moral outrage ruled me, even when I’d step on a hundred rakes, at least I wasn’t beating children. The whole world was disabled, they couldn’t seem to understand the simplest morality. I still feel the need to say this every day: everything is a crime except that, except hurting people who can’t fight back, on purpose. Only irresistible violence is not a crime to normal people.
Starting to see, demographically at least, by the numbers, this is my disability.
Crucial future spare parts for the species.
The dominant culture, and perhaps the current dominant genetic option, doesn’t think so. It’s rather conformist, hold on, that’s really not strong enough, it’s rather selective, in the deadly, evolutionary sense. Only intuition perhaps, sadly informed by a lot of Twitter propaganda, but I am fighting an awful creeping sense that the dominant thing, mainstream society, neurotypicality is a bad mutation, violently taking over the species by drift, and by fighting diversity, it is setting up to go extinct with the next crisis . . . but that the ‘next crisis,’ is it also, already here. I’ve tried to say, the fighting genes and our social strength are a conundrum. The genetic response to this hazard – humans – wait.
That’s the point, we are the primary hazard that humans face now, not tigers or freezing, and I suspect typicality describes the genetic response to that most typical hazard – strength, social control, “defensive” violence, this is the conundrum. The neighbors response, genetic and behavioural, is our environmental hazard and ours is theirs. This awful drift can be seen, heard, and felt whenever all humanist gains are jettisoned for the next war: if it doesn’t help you win a fight, lose it.
Right?
I think all genes are not “selfish,” but I worry that there are genes operating in error, that the defensive gene is also the genocide gene, that whatever genetic combination it is that wins the wars will sacrifice the crucial, God-given diversity to do it. That even if billions survive the next decades, if they are billions of warriors, that this was a genetic bottleneck where much of what was good in us is lost, because what almost kills you leaves you broken, not “stronger.”
Strength is weakness. Diversity is life.
You know what I think, that all this genetic talk is not determinism, I think the lifestyle change would change the gene options, and I think it’s a two step function, you have the gene options, so our power is to arrange not to activate the troublesome ones, not to create the environment that needs them activated and selecting themselves – stop the violent social control, most importantly stop “spanking” which is a word that means “creating an abusive environment for a child to set his genetic fighting options to “on.””
“Strength,” in the bad gene’s words.
I swear.
Jeff
June 30th., 2022
AST is not a philosophy of First Causes, or absolutes, its basic premise is a rather high-level observation that works, despite an entirely fuzzy world in which anything, any word can be twisted into various shapes or viewed from various angles.
To wit, it begins with the observation that punitive abuse of humans that is supposed to improve us has real world effects and an improvement in overall behaviour is not one of them, that bad behaviour and all of its associated pain and suffering abound in the human world, more so than in the worlds of other creatures, who do not practice this self abuse.
I mean, those philosopher folks are right, idealism and all, we really can’t know “things,” “in themselves,” and all that, only the echoes of our minds and senses and all, but I’m sure there’s a school that points out that when these things only exist in our minds, that in those cases that we can. I think everything in my statement of AST’s loose “basis,” are those sorts of things, our behaviour, abuse, pain, “the human world,” all constructs and as such, all proper fodder for thought. Idealism can make none of those things disappear, can it?
AST won’t be dragged down into the minutiae of either genetic chemistry or philosophical idealism. All these things exist.
Absolutes, First Causes, these are likely unknowable – after all, you and I are not God, are we? The limits of the universe are not our limits anyway, so AST dispenses with the idea, let God worry about absolutes – and as for the opposite, the supposed impossibility of relativism, AST thinks it has an answer for that too, my argument about direction. Again, from the premise, AST’s First Observation, we see a direction – which, in a limitless, relativistic universe is really all there is, since we are all moving in time, as evidenced by the sense of gravity, says Einstein – and we do, we have the data with which to fill the only data field, we see the direction, we see what our abusive control does. Well, I do, anyway.
OK, AST – Antisocialization Theory – has some definitions it prefers too, mostly it argues that “strength,” is not an unassailable boon. Strength as sacred, this is the top moral thought of a social group, of a village, or of a nation, and the Earth is all dying together, all at once, we need to crash through that glass ceiling to a morality that doesn’t make the Earth a toxic battlefield. We need to define a morality for all of us, for the world. Group preservation will be the end of everything.
But that’s what we call the direction, strength. That’s the goal, a goal is a direction, in the absence of absolutes. That is our data point. AST sees the direction you are going, I see what you are making of yourself, and I see you insisting nothing you do matters, that you were made this way by something else, but I can see your feet moving and the way you are heading.
In this sense, AST is probably disqualified as philosophy, that it computes using constructs as facts (as the social facts they are), and probably removes it from science proper for the same reasons – but science it is, because it deals with observable phenomena, and doesn’t need to overstep – I should point out that AST’s enemy, the equal and opposite meme, Human Nature, not only also has no good philosophical grounds, rather it’s the assumption underlying most schools, forever unanalyzed, but that Natures themselves have long been the object of ridicule, “essences,” indeed. Human Nature, like AST, is considered “observable,” but the first part, the essence, obviously can’t be. That is only an ancient and much loved circular bit of nonsense. AST, in the real, relativistic world, begins with no such embarrassing error, requires none. Inasmuch as directions exist in nature, “Natures,” cannot.
Jeff
June 25th., 2022
Yes, it’s what they want.
No, they can’t have it.
Their “methods of control” are simply not, they are only abuse. They are not some authoritarian magic that gives you anything you ask for. They are a stimulus that produce a predictable response – fighting.
No actual stimulus in the real world produces “whatever you say you want it to,” and who or what are you that I have to say that?
Yes, your mom and your dad wanted “control.” Yes, the government wants “control.” This is a single vector in the world, a single stimulus produces a single response, a single cause produces a single effect, and what is actually produced in these “control” scenarios is one thing, fighting.
What sort of a broken child are you that you think there is some magic you can say or do to get you anything you want? This isn’t Bewitched. Sorry, kids – this isn’t Harry Potter. Magic isn’t real.
Your mom, your dad, the police, the government, I’m sorry, they’re just wrong, absolutely wrong and mostly just lying to one another and to us all that anything about any of it “works” to produce anything at all but humanity’s endless strife. They don’t say “strife,” of course; they say strength.
Morons, all. What do you need “strength” for? Harmony?
We have applied this control – and this is us, “controlled,” – a global meltdown.
There is one path of actual causality in the social control, and it is that violence breeds violence. The true effect of tossing coins in the wishing well is that the water becomes metallic and less drinkable, and the details of your wishes do not enter into it. I . . . . I cannot speak to you. The conversation has moved on, the conversation reality is having, and you have opted out. I feel like a squirrel would understand this, but a human being cannot.
If you cannot see this, what conversation are we going to have about your wishes?
Jeff June 9th., 2022
Having a lot of thoughts just now, discovery, and some folks that seem to speak my language a little, having insights. Almost moved on before I got this one down:
That kids idolize or idealize their parents isn’t automatic.
That’s abuse too. And simple mental arithmetic. A scenario.
A child is doing something a caregiver doesn’t want, or not doing something the caregiver does want, perhaps the child is very young, preverbal, and so the parent resorts to simple pain deterrents, or fear, a raised voice, a slap, or perhaps the chid is verbal and the parent is just that sort of a person – but generally in psychological conversation and I agree, younger is more important, more causative, more impressionable, so perhaps it’s a baby, simply trying to move about out of its dirty napkin during a change, which would cause a terrible mess, and the caregiver uses a sharp word or a look, maybe a slap to turn the child away from its idea.
Perhaps not the best example to say it’s an argument, that rolling about is the baby’s “idea,” and it’s an argument, but inasmuch as it is, and surely better examples happen every day, in so much, the infant has an idea, maybe a feeling, surely both, and the caregiver has another idea, another feeling, surely both and they’re in conflict: that’s what it is, or what it was, until the caregiver turned it into a fight, with perhaps mild but still threats and violence.
The baby’s argument is “wrong,” and the adult is having no more, and making their argument the policy, and their argument is the world they both live in now. And the baby has an internal problem now, an internal conflict.
There are bad feelings, and we sort of address those in many conversations, but my insight last evening was the baby’s reason, the baby’s logic – how does it deal with the forced situation, that it is already wrong in the world? It wants to be right, needs to be right, especially with Mom, and the path to getting right with Mom, the only logical path to anyone being right, to there being any sense in the world is to accept, OK, I’m wrong, but Mom and Dad are right . . . this is very much a forced play on the child’s mind. Sanity, continuance, demand that they move their sense of self away, give it away to the caregivers.
I always cringed when I heard or read that, that our idealization of our parents causes our problems, and now at last I’ve sat down with a pencil and worked it out.
Of course, like everything, it’s ball-busting, blame the child, blame human nature, blame anybody but the brute who forced it. As though we all just willingly ignore our own inner voices in favour of our parents, why, because they are just so impressive?
Of course not. Come on.
Jeff
April 21st., 2022
UPDATED
I am asking Twitter, trying to ask the world here – is my premise true?
Is our parental idealization considered to be automatic, a cause rather than an effect of our troubles? It occurs to me that I can think of at least one psychologist on my side of this with me, and of course it’s another weirdo, don’t get me wrong, I loved them: R. D. Laing. The disaster has already happened.
If so, if R.D. and I are wrong and alone, and most of the world of psychological help is rolling along talking as though it was your choice to idealize your father (and so your fault when reality disappoints), then I have a question – why? What’s the rationale – evolved? Again, I’m still three years old – why?
There are great swathes of science speaking in the other direction, self preservation and Dunning Kruger Syndrome both say that we automatically think more highly of ourselves, that the mental gymnastics we do is to protect and promote the self, that we must think well of ourselves in order to deserve our share of the mammoth, better than someone who settles for life (or death) without a share.
But the very first thing we do in life is give all that up to our parents?
Perhaps that’s my overreach, perhaps to idealize is not to give up oneself. I think that’s in the balance of this debate too: if it’s built in, then maybe not, but if it happens how I suggest in this blog, then it is more self splitting than it is idealization.
But I’m asking. Someone educate me – do they say why we idealize, if it’s automatic? Let me guess, game theory, we are dependent upon them for life, we will go off and get ourselves eaten if we are allowed to do what we want? I don’t like those answers anymore, but rather than credit it with a detail argument, I’ll just ask: does it get better when we grow up?
Automatically? Or not until therapy? Aren’t we here talking about it because it’s a big source of our problems rather than our safety? Also – this safety adaptation would not seem to protect us from our parents, would it? Rather the opposite, so I’m not buying it. I’m afraid I’m stuck with my dark side, AST explanation, and it’s all very sad but at least it’s a step closer to reality.
Jeff April 24th., 2022
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
Abuse with an Excuse 