I’m sorry, I’ve been wasting all of our time, I’m a mess. I’ve deleted parts two and three, having taken anything worth anything and put it in the fourth one – but now I’m leaving that and restarting yet again. I’m not having much luck.

The original idea was that what humans call “morality,” is a construction modeled after debt, with all of that economic language and none of its own. I think my first urge here was to try to use this economic model to show the illogic of punishment, that crime isn’t, or oughtn’t be something you can purchase, that punishment schemes aren’t as logical as monetary ones.

Like, what’s the money, then, when we “pay,” our moral debts, what’s the currency, that sort of thing came to mind immediately. This is the sort of thing that I needed to work out, I  . . . only intuited, if I’m being honest. We’re not there yet.

Actually, I suppose the plan is to build this model in an attempt to prove the existence of abuse and antisocialization to regular, modern people with little to no actuarial sense, to expand this economic model of morality to show how antisocialization must exist even if they don’t see it, or else things don’t happen, like the cycles, the world wars and the moral jubilees maybe don’t happen – a demonstration like how the math about the mass of the known universe proves the existence of dark matter despite that no-one had so much as guessed it, let alone seen it.

I have used the dark matter analogy before, a lot; it’s good as far as it goes.

I mean, we all know when we lose, no-one needs to prove that ire exists – but I have something to prove about it, Antisocialization Theory, basically that space for ire is a limited resource, that after four generations of it, the system breaks down and requires a disastrous reboot.

I wasn’t all that clear about the goals in my previous attempts, I hope that’s why I’ve been going in circles.

 Let’s start again, since my point was it’s a bad model, maybe there is no bloody cash or no credit or something huge – if it had all the elements it might be a good model, right? The glossary wasn’t the place to start, then we’re pushing our guesses, that’s all backwards, thought is a chain, you can’t push it. I used to know that.

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Below were five more pages about a child taking their sibling’s cookie, which again, I must be trying to push the chain, trying to take you somewhere instead of just telling you where it is. They’re gone for now, those nasty kids and their sugar bombs, LOL, I mean those pages.

I keep setting out with an exchange, where goods move unequally and so emotion does too, that we trade our morals, or our reputation to cheat someone for their goods and that in turn they have cheated us for our righteousness (or would have if morals and reputation meant what they ought to or used to, or what we pretend they do).

It’s obvious and simple to show that the cheated for material goods person is aggrieved and angered – antisocialized – but isn’t the cheated out of their morals person also antisocialized, I mean isn’t the antisociality of the winners and profiteers of the world as much or more of a problem than the brooding masses of poor losers? Put it this way: when the revolution comes, then the anger of the poor is going to be a problem. But in the supposed economic or political peace in the meantime, it is the rich whose lack of love destroys the world.

Counterintuitive perhaps, but it seems plain that both sides of an unequal deal are antisocialized and antisocial, that both are participating in a sort of a crime, or maybe an actual crime, that the materially impoverished are angered, but that “morally impoverished,” sort of means angry too.

Moral currency is grievance, it’s terrible to have too much of it, but terrible also to have none, then you have no moral power? Perhaps it is self image, self respect, self love – but same, it would have to be an evil thing either way, to have too much of it or not to have enough – other love, same problem in reverse terms. None of it is enough to explain the world we see, this is not the dark matter yet. Perhaps it is not enough under a scheme of only simple interest, perhaps the winners’ grievances add up to nothing over a single lifetime or generation but compounded over time . . . ?

Into class and privilege, and the rancor becomes dogma . . . ? No, not the scale I’m after either, I don’t think. It’s a species-wide problem, or it’s nothing, I think. There’s an eddy there, but class is not my focus. In Antisocialization Theory, everyone is both a victim and a dictator, class is an effect as much as it is a cause, and not a primary cause. The interest of our antisocialization compounds and accrues in us all, and all together to a degree, in all classes. It’s hard to keep it out of my mind, though, I’ve been watching old BBC Agatha Christie stuff, it all drips with the decadent derision of the British upper class.

It does seem plain that if you structure your systems around profit, that someone is righteously disgruntled with each and every transaction, and that inasmuch as the economy moves or breathes at all, people are being angered. A growing economy, the apparent goal of it, means a growing rage in the people. Suggested in a previous one, I think, perhaps it is only antisocialization that grows at all, perhaps ire is what the metaphor of growth is really about.

Again, if you can supposedly “grow the economy,” simply by relaxing safety and environmental regulations, what resource has actually grown but abuse and hard feelings? “The economy,” is one of goods and services going in one direction and bad feelings going in the other, and these are one thing, a single economic system, and the goods and money come faster, the faster we spend our humanity for them. OK.

Now how do I not devolve into my usual, invisible to normal people rant about Human Nature? I know you won’t follow anyone past it. You are perhaps allowing me this metaphor, but in the end, that’s all “spending humanity,” can be, metaphor, and of course no-one thinks it ever runs out, or that we might need to make more, or spend it more slowly, and abusers never worry about it until the abused snap and make them notice.

And then the French Terror too, was just “Human Nature,” and not bad feelings created on purpose for profit for decades. Sure, they asked for the Revolution, sure, it was, “untenable,” and “anyone could see, now,” but why the people gotta be so angry about it? The whole point of Antisocialization Theory has always been to try to explain to normal people that the wrong is real, that the pain is real, that it matters that we have created a world that runs on pain, and that, as Graeber said too, it’s optional, we could choose to make a different world.

But knowing this does involve accounting for abuse and bad feelings as real, and people as changeable. Ah, here’s something. Antisocialization Theory – AST for short – breaks the chicken and egg standoff about whether humans are born good or bad, and whether we are pre-programmed or tabula rasa – we are born partly programmed, partly writable, and life moves and abuse is real – so on at least one vector, aggression or something like it, whatever level of blank your tablet is, if you raise kids with the crowd among humans, with an average amount of spanking, your kids’ tablet will have more aggression on it than yours did.

I don’t think it even matters if you’re gentler than your father, it’s an “is there abuse,” thing (an epigenetic detection and response), not, an “is it getting less,” thing, and if it’s “yes, “ for several generations, people’s tablets get less peaceful, until some reset, a war or something. Ah, that’s a thing, for the child advocate folks, isn’t it.

It ain’t blank, but we are still writing, every minute. There’s these little things called evolution and genetics, there is not a little thing called a “nature.” A “Nature,” can only be a moving target in the real world, it’s more like just a personality.

Antisocialization is real, it matters, and it grows – and that’s a terrible combination of attributes to ignore. When the Revolution and the Terror come, that is not the People, “losing control,” and “reverting to their Natures,” that is the People being controlled to develop just this personality, because we are changeable – and the bosses of the world were “in control,” making it all happen, apparently on purpose, the whole time.

Just try to stop them!

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Wait, so my complaint is . . . morality is modeled after debt, but worldly debt is a surplus of hard feelings, A is B, B is C, so A is C, morality is hard feelings . . . somehow, I mean, moralists preach very hard feelings, morality has horrible dreams. Moralists would have you burn in Hell forever as payment for some crime that probably won’t last that long. If only the Devil paid dividends, if our bad feelings forever in Hell paid interest, then perhaps the living could take a little holiday once in awhile, LOL.

Hey, jokes aside – is this business of “paying,” in the afterlife intended to make the payment of moral debts all sound virtual? If I can keep paying my moral debts forever in the mythological world, then is that supposed to mean, “paying your debts,” is virtual, just metaphor, there isn’t a real cost in this one either, i.e. our pain isn’t real, doesn’t matter? This is a law enforcement version of, “Sure, I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them.” The payment of your moral debt isn’t real, the years of relative torture in prison isn’t real. I mean, it certainly doesn’t actually exist in the world, causing its own problems or anything, it was a solution, remember?

The dark matter is in there. Society weighs twenty times what it ought to if deterrents stayed virtual, if the pain wasn’t real.

Hey, maybe that’s a place to tie it off, 1,800 words.

Debt, the First 5,000 Years is coming, should be here in a week, they say, so maybe three, probably customs.

Jeff

Sept. 15^th., 2023

I’ve got an agenda.

I’ve had an insight, born with, perhaps about saving the world and humanity by stopping punishment, that for some reason most people see no harm in abuse as a way of life. So, no subterfuge, that’s what this project is about, to prove that proposition to humanity: part of my insight is that the entire world is on the wrong side of this issue, that everything anybody ever wrote was in support of this way of life, that the world is ending and we never even guessed, never doubted it once.

The new part, since being rocked by Graeber’s story about most people seeing debt as inseparable from morality, is going to be the examining the role this association or conflation has in it all, in creating our situation, debt and morality.

I’m still waiting on Graeber’s book on the subject, eager to see his full insight about it, but my take is usually unique enough, I’m not seriously worried about stumbling upon his brilliance, my angle is sure to be far lower and far less credible. He’s maybe a little gonzo – whereas I’m a know nothing fool only thinks he’s that close to normal. I think they say his is an economics book and I surely can’t do that.

Having clarified that, I set myself some tasks, and even the order in which I must perform them, and it’s going to need a little economics. To repeat, in case one of these gets any attention at any point:

The thesis is that morality is an invention, modelled after the forever communist economy of credit group animals live in, with bonds of favours and debts, that morality evolved from the measuring of these favours and debts, that it is this measuring and weighing of goods and favours was abstracted to become law and order with punishment being a sort of a currency.

The tasks, I was working on a glossary, element for element, a translation table from economics to morality.

People are my natural resource.

Human rights are the goods, what is extracted from them and exchanged.

Credit (wow, was forgetting credit, this will help) is when someone tramples your human rights until punishment takes theirs? Moral debt. Punishment.

Collateral in moral systems is you, your body, your freedom, your labour. Sounds universal, but still a factor when there are people lacking so much as the freedom to crime, when even their bodies are already spent and accounted for and even that basic collateral isn’t there for them, prisoners, the disabled. The Other generally, in this life of group conflict. Think “driving while Black.” Our meatbags are only collateral if they decide we’re a person.

Interest – interest on moral debt, I believe is antisocialization. The morally bankrupt are antisocial, thoroughly antisocialized, compounded into default. Again, when we take another person’s rights, we lose something of ourselves, perhaps by capitulating and agreeing, which means realizing that we don’t have rights that others can’t simply take, so we lose thinking we owned ourselves when we take from another. I‘m not sure yet, the mechanics here are giving me fits. I’m trying to make science of it, but it always sounds like emotion and art.

Cash? – David was clear that societies often have a very clear set of equivalencies, take a person’s eye, you owe them exactly this many goats and I’m thinking that perhaps if you were a poulter who took an eye out they could convert goats to birds for your invoice – but that no such trade, this many goats for this many chickens ever took place, that this sort of barter is not part of the development of society, which makes some surface sense, what does a goatherd want with chickens, he collects goats, doesn’t he?

So chickens and goats are not transferable, but either of them will buy you an assault that half blinds someone. Crime is like cash, sort of universal. LOL, sorry. A bit of a funny, but not exactly not the point either. I think crime – overstepping, theft of rights – is the cash and the credit, certainly when we talk about punishment, when we are talking about paying for a crime with an assault that’s what it is.

Cash – is crime, abuse, as in overstepping, and punishment is credit – you can borrow the crime for a time. Hey, that is a bit of progress, isn’t it?

Know what, Imma stop right there, quit while I’m ahead, because I think the next step is the real life scenario again, and those have been, well, humiliating. We’ll let that ruin the next one.

Jeff

Sept. 9^th., 2023