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 3^rd., 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 30^th., 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 25^th., 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 9^th., 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. 8^th., 2022