corporal punishment

Forced Idealization, Updated

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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

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.

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2017/04/28/its-a-childs-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:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2021/12/01/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:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2018/06/28/sub-contracting-abuse-brainstorming/

Variations on the theme . . . not mandatory:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/04/27/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.

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2019/10/27/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:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2021/11/19/overview-the-ast-insight-map-part-two-childhood/

the next:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2021/12/03/overview-the-ast-insight-map-part-four-maturity/

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Introduction

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I

The Myth of the Regrettable Hero

This is a change, this blog is previously published, under the second title, perhaps in the middle of part two, I’ve just been confused about where it belongs. I announce in what is now the second one, part one, that I am beginning, well, this must come first, first as the mission statement, but also that the content simply precedes, there is some past event before we meet our fist modern baby.

The mission? To debunk the Human Nature myth and write a new beginning, a new origin story, where we are innocent and do not deserve the nightmare we have created for ourselves and everything else.

OK.

It comes up regularly, a few times a year I try to imagine how all this human nonsense began, how we chimps learned to spank and war. I was on about it again in the very latest blog, part two of the current series, trying to convince myself that the details of the First Spanking, the beginning of our human invention, self-antisocialization, don’t matter, declaring that it happened, accept it, move on – ha. There’s always some point where every crackpot fails, isn’t there.

Actually, it matters greatly in one sense, not in particulars, but in the sense that it was an accident, this might be the entire point of my whole deal, the kernel of innocence I require to write my new origin story. Something like this, an “innocent,” or accidental First Spanking, First Abuse story, and our difference, our uniqueness, our Fallen State, if you will, is only a response, our response to abuse that, hey, perhaps as today in a sense, abuse no-one really meant to do? That response being scar tissue, desensitization, perhaps the repetition of repression as per Alice Miller and such.

I mean, not that infanticide is innocent (one of my guesses, and continuing from the latest blog), I only mean accidental in that the effect, that rather than being dinner, some kid grew up to be a tough one – but any other situation where some little proto-human got a hard time from their parents will do, perhaps mental illness was involved, of course I don’t know . . . but the point is, some accidental First Abuse story – myth – might make us innocent, might make all the trouble a regrettable reaction we’re allowed to talk about and work through, instead of our own, baked in original pro-active badness for which we say nothing can be done.

I need a myth of perhaps demonic/divine/trickster possession, where a parent is unaware of or unable to stop some abuse and watches with tears and regret and confusion as the child grows up as a warrior, perhaps plunging their peaceful life into war. Ah, mixing my mythologies, but perhaps then some story of seven generations of sacrifice and piety restores this family and this countryside to peace.

Dreamer.

Oh, wait. Ooh. What if it was like my story, one parent terrorizes the kid in secret? I mean, elements of both, madness, or duplicitous marriage? A Medea tale!

I really want to contract that out, I am no classicist, plus, it sounds painful.

So, the point I would correct is that all is pro-active, that it begins with an act of evil (why reading the book of knowledge is an act of evil in one such story is a question for another blog) out of no-where, out of Adam’s choice – hey, did the authors have some similar goal, in making it Eve’s idea, trying to make Adam innocent? Seems an odd back eddy of intent, when the point seems to be Original Sin, none are innocent. Hmmm. Whups, another time, again – some First Ancestor’s act of will, pulled from their backside, meaning, no explanation necessary, beyond his own qualities, inherent evil and whatnot.

It’s a defiance story for the believers; for me the point is, it’s one Authority, or this guy just decides to be his own authority, God’s will, Man’s will, all will, will, will. No damage, no reaction, no life history, no context, no psychological compulsions anyone earned in life, just the Nature you were born with (which, of course is classical Platonic nonsense, Natures aren’t a real thing). We are presented with Man, having no explanation for himself and thinking and acting like he’s a god, like he needs none. Like so many say nowadays – a man wrote that crap, and a comfortable one, the boss.

Who didn’t write it – a child, a wife, a slave, someone who knows that will for them is meaningless, that their own will is almost no force in their lives at all – the vast majority of humans. I mean, ‘children,’ that’s more than a majority, no matter the adjective, that is all of us. We were there at the beginning too, we children.

Mixed feelings writing this, happy to have gotten here ever, I suppose, sad it took me this long to clarify this point. Ha! This point –

We haven’t Fallen. We were pushed. Meaning, like in Good Will Hunting, it’s not your fault. Abuse is self propagating, and classic chicken and egg – both exist now, it’s quite academic. You are not the born bad creature hurting people, you are the poor, innocent kid getting hurt, why not? – the egg, I suppose if that was supposed to be a metaphor.

Why not? Well, origin stories have purposes, which is my whole point, and us all being told we’re the Man makes certain things happen, enables certain things, makes other things less likely, right? I’m afraid my likely divergent mind has determined that no less is required, and without refocusing our view of the beginning, without noticing that we are that hurting child, nothing gets better, and contrary to popular belief, it really, really needs to.

You are the victim here, and you don’t need to defend and deny and bluster and sputter, none of it. It wasn’t your grown up original sin that created us, it was your pain as an innocent victim that did that. Why not?  It’s not your fault.

It’s not your fault. And that matters.

Ha. Don’t do this to me, Man!

But it’s not! Let it go.

Jeff

Nov. 25th., 2021

Updated and re-titled,

Dec. 1st., 2021

The next:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part One, the Miracle of Birth

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Two, Childhood

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

So, the control begins early, and it’s a slippery slope from bite the teat, lose the teat to bite the teat, take a nip or a slap, and by toddlerhood the parents have slid down it, and “spanking” is for two year-olds, because they aren’t talking and reasoning yet but they are starting to get loud and also to get up and run.

This is where I have more questions than answers, I’m afraid. I try to imagine this age and how we deal with the kids in early stages of human prehistory, and I don’t have much luck, there are many blind alleys provided by my own random logos: first, I thought we would get strict around the fire, but of course long before that we and our babies lived high in the trees, with danger always even closer. The still wild primates, they hang onto the kids until the kids are old enough to understand, is that right?

Then I think, maybe things changed when we built the fence, the village wall? Maybe the kids could roam a little before they understood anything and not get predated for it? Then Mom’s hands start doing other things and the time formerly spent carrying them about until they understood language and dangers got reallocated and a “more efficient” sort of control crept into our lives? Ha – I never hate these just so stories when I first jot them down, this one seems reasonable at the moment – but it doesn’t matter, just so stories don’t matter however reasonable they seem.

I want to quit trying to draw this picture. Frankly, these stories hurt more than they help, these are myths, aren’t they, and if we say they happened in our deep past – the Before Time, same thing – then they gain the respectability of tradition and necessity. I am not looking for a “reason” we beat our children, not a reason that the world can just decide is a good reason, or a good enough one.

Somewhere along the line, we started this behaviour. My attempts to uncover the evolutionary accident that made it a selected for behaviour jumps past an answer to get to a question – we need to think of it as a selected for behaviour, rather than a logical and inevitable one, that’s not the same thing. I often try to make the point that how is a thing inevitable for only one of a million species? But I end up seeing the sense the other way about, from why would it be selected for, why would the effects of child abuse be selected for, and when the effects of horrific, illicit abuse are considered, then the effects are clearly what a moralist might call “bad” effects, anger, frustration, madness, aggression, poor cognition.

So the question is now, why that would be selected for, and I’m afraid there is some crossover with the EP boys and their game theory, but that would be selected for the same reason those twelve angry, mad, aggressive lads in the Dirty Dozen were – the fight, war, conflict.

Again, a reason perhaps – not a good reason. I don’t push my just so stories, or I try not to, but I do imagine that the two behaviours are one and that spanking coincides with more organized group conflict than the chimpanzees engage in, that the two phenomena arose together. The accident has to have been that someone discovered the magic, that a tough life at home makes for a tough adult on a raid, somehow, somewhere, somewhen. After that I fear it’s just drift, the sort of behaviour that takes over the species.

But there are more meaningful questions than what exactly brought about the First Spanking (another just so I have tried is that it was simply failed infanticide, why not, but again, doesn’t matter), like what does “modern” Indigenous or aboriginal child rearing look like?

In the purely WEIRD books I have cracked, I see Chagnon’s portrayal of Yanomami childhood, a warrior society in childhood, and I know and don’t disagree with the criticisms of the tone of it all, the apparent bias. I don’t take that as what “traditional childhood” is or was, or not necessarily, and I think if children live that way, the adults are guilty of not fixing this situation.

Maybe, though. It was a little that way when I went to school too. So maybe all his awful portrayals are real but limiting them to brown people in the forest was the lie. I must admit, from what I see of humanity today, it seems likely to be the dominant thing today in the world that kids are tempered into adults by either peer violence or adult violence. But today seems like everything has gone terribly wrong.

Could it really have been this way for a million years or whatever?

It sounds nightmarish, dystopian forever.

A huge dream of mine, of this project’s is to discover the childrearing that was perhaps hinted at in the Chalice and the Blade, the childrearing before the age of wars, to discover a version of human childrearing that does not send them straight to war and conflict.

I saw Tweets from somewhere in Africa recently that called the system of child abuse a colonial thing, suggesting things were different there and that perhaps they know how. I imagine the Indigenous all over feel that way, and it’s true to a huge degree – but to what degree, and what is the other model, if there is one – I’ve asked before, if any reader has an idea, please, tell me.

Chagnon’s – Meade’s? – story would seem to serve a purpose like the Clovis People rules about human habitation in the Americas – to lie and say there was nothing good we replaced with our awful systems, the cursed terra nullius. So I’m still looking. It’s possible that Chagnon has thrown out the baby of Indigenous childrearing wisdom with the bathwater of his colonial bullshit and documenting warrior behaviour is what you are going to document when you invade to do it. They may not have been living that way until the threat of us came along, we document their natural immune response to our invasion and call them savages for defending themselves.

Ah, I learn as I talk, sorry.

So I would like to think there is another way, but OTOH I think we activate warrior genes with this behaviour and we wouldn’t have just gotten those yesterday or anything. – So again, his racist mistake perhaps wasn’t in describing this lifestyle – it was the boys growing up fighting and any boy who wouldn’t fight would be goaded until he did or died – or even ascribing it to unindustrialized, brown people, but in not including us all, if he suggested our boys don’t do that and we are not a warrior society also.

But I would like to learn that I am being the same negative cynical bastard he maybe was and both things are true, it’s everywhere, but it’s only everywhere because war makes it that way, that child abuse exists as much as a response to a state of war as a prerequisite for it that we always carry with us. Again, suggested already, they go together, hand in hand, child abuse and conflict, as of course do chickens and their eggs, neither is really “first.” It seems the nature of evolution that as an environmental hazard’s likelihood increases, a creature has a mechanism to activate its genetic options to evade it – it’s just really sad that we are caught up making genetic adjustments for a growing hazard – war – which, also us.

Maybe that’s a chapter.

Jeff Nov. 19th., 2021

the preceding:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part One, the Miracle of Birth

the next:

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

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part One, the Miracle of Birth

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

It’s the Meaning of Life, isn’t it, Monty Python?

I’ve been following this train of thought for a long time now, and frankly, I never could follow yours, or the usual thoughts about these things I think about, I mean. While I struggle publicly to make the point, while I complain that I am forever failing at it, honestly in the privacy of my own thoughts, I think I have a system, I think I have the key and it all falls into place – or it would if I could find the language, or would in a world that would allow things to fall into place.

This sense of totality, it is surely false, I mean everyone else’s is. It occurs to me that if I think I have closed any circles, then I need to draw that. I suppose it’s going to be a series.

I’ll try chronologically first, with the newborn?

The baby arrives and if it is human, it is subjected to forms of control, bite the teat, lose the teat, sort of thing, if the parents have these ideas of control and deterrents, and if they do, there are punishments and deprivations for the child to match every bit of its growth, every increase in its powers to affect. As the child emerges from primordial preverbal life into speech and culture, it meets a powerful, all judging, all punishing god that controls its parents, and all this is familiar, and was always there for the powerless human child, it has no reason to doubt it and all the usual reasons not to question the all powerful beings telling them about it.

This is Christianity, probably all the bible religions, and I suppose probably all of them, and any effect we ascribe in human life and history to the churches is all downstream of human infanthood, which comes first chronologically and logically and no-one would follow and fund these institutions if everything important about human life wasn’t part of the same sad function. And if a child were raised this way, with the control from the beginning and no such punitive god was offered, they would be likely to feel the same way, and perhaps replace the all powerful god who set it all in motion with “society,” or perhaps just the dominant social groups. You see?

Both groups, the science Democrats and the religious Republicans, victims, coerced into a way of life by some large insensate entity, that what or whoever that is, sure isn’t their own parents!

Huh, that might have been sort of new, which suggests I drop it and run before I go back to repeating myself. Cheers.

Jeff

Nov. 7th., 2021

The introduction:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2021/11/25/the-myth-of-the-regrettable-hero/

the next:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2021/11/19/overview-the-ast-insight-map-part-two-childhood/

Racism – the Invention of Hate

Jeff/neighsayer6 Comments
  1. AST

Antisocialization theory is the idea that hatred is taught and learned, the same as love is, the same as everything is. Socialization is an accepted idea, a real and obvious thing in the world, and so prosocialization and antisocialization are also, established principles (in the world of scientific principles, whether you, mere human, know it or not). Antisocialization theory is the idea that antisocial traits are nurtured, and that any tendency towards antisociality and violence requires a scientific explanation in the here and now, in life history, and not be accepted as some default.

AST, my acronym for antisocialization theory, starts from the idea that nature and evolution do not have defaults or natures, and that all things can and must be accounted for. I have noticed others’ efforts to understand altruism and morality; the bad things are always some background, the premise behind it all, the setting, not requiring a back story of its own.

Antisocialization theory is science and therefore does not define abuse by what is legal, or by the stated purpose for it, it defines abuse as a choice to hurt someone, that the act of abuse is deliberate hurt, not accidental hurt. Of course it thinks that accidents antisocialize, embitter people also, but antisocialization is generally deliberate, the hurt has a rationale. People report feeling “punished” when they suffer a rare trauma, when they are one of the very few shark attack victims or something, because that is usually the way we get hurt, intentionally.

By this definition, the altogether legal and normal minor abuse that adults do to their children all day long qualifies. The pat on the bum was deliberate, the lessons, the things taken away . . . in adult punishment situations also, prison sentences and executions, all deliberate, all abuse, somebody hurts somebody, on purpose.

Please, I know the story. I am not a child or a Martian. The “reasons” are ubiquitous, inescapable, how could anyone dream I had simply never heard them? I am teaching here, not asking.

Antisocialization theory is the theory that if so much hurt happens through deliberate actions, that the hurt is being selected for, that the hurt is the desired result of all that stimuli. Again, I know the story, I understand deterrents. AST is the idea that when deterrents fail, that this phenomenon occurs in the real world, and that there is real causation around it, before and after. Specifically, repressive blindness before and an antisocial population after (which, also before). AST and its author find it odd and rather amazing that human science manages to work around this, finding science in the virtual thing, the deterrent, but none in the actual spanking/beating/prison sentence.

When we break a rule, science and reason turn their backs on us along with everything else that does. We have a lot of talk and science around when we do what we’re told, but really none for what happens to us when we don’t – but we do have a little science about trauma and the damages of abuse – I suppose someone must be studying the accidents, the collateral damage. The good news is it applies, and we know generally, that a tough life makes a tough human being, meaning insensitive and aggressive.

2. Conflict

So that’s why, that’s what the rules and punishments produce. Sure, the deterrents produce the good things, perhaps, I’ll allow it, but the abuse when the deterrent fails, that’s what produces all the bad things, and we produce them because we love them, we think we need them, we produce them on purpose through our purposeful actions. An angry young man is exactly what the generals want, what warrior society loves, and so abused angry young men are probably not accidents, and their abuse angers them quite reasonably and logically.

The controlled, deterred human makes beautiful porcelain things, the abuse behind the control makes us smash them. The controlled human is civil to our community, the abuse behind it makes us abuse other communities. This is the causality, the true story of group life, this is why it’s “prosocial at home and antisocial at the border,” because we are tortured and wound up at home but forbidden to act out there and sent out to get our release from the neighbors, from someone else. We do not smash our own porcelain, generally, is the idea. This is all group conflict. This is what men and nations call “strength,” their reserve of artificially created or stored anger, and our “strength,” is always and forever the reason for someone else’s.

Again, this is all human group conflict: at home, we take the shit and out and about, we give it.

3. Race

This is racism, race and cultural markings, dress and custom, these signify “not at home,” mode for pre-charged, abused people. These foreign things are what your frustration was arranged for, why it was created, what your antisocialization is for. NOT an endorsement. But this is racism.

There is nothing “wrong” with the other community/race/person, they are perfect for their role, to complete the circle and resolve our abuse. Again, today’s target, American blacks, did not kill Christ, and they do not “own the banks,” none of that was really the point about the German Nazis’ targets, it was simply that they were targets, viable, legal targets for the overly controlled at home Germans’ stored rage.

I see the word all day, “racism,” it’s the scourge, it’s the problem, it’s what you shouldn’t have, and of course I agree . . . what I don’t see is what I offer here, a scientific look at what it is and what function it serves, I mean not from anyone but the Nazis themselves. It seems the bad guys want science to authorize their hate and the good guys worry that it will or something, so they try to keep them apart, science and racism.

I get that.

But they control their kids, same as anybody else.

They say racism is awful and wrong and all that, but then they do all the social control stuff that makes so many people need an outlet. Don’t play with fire kid, but hold on a minute, where do you think you’re going without your matches, kind of thing. Don’t hate anybody, but here’s an ass kicking for you to sit on forever.

Jeff

Dec. 16th., 2020

The Next Step

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Is socialism, otherwise known as politics, the science of people getting along.

For human beings, competition is supposed to be sport, not real life. “Conservatism” means conserving brutal competition, there have been conservatives complaining for three hundred thousand years that we never should have left the jungle, that what was wrong with being a chimpanzee?

Left means politics, group rule, the future, and science.

The Right means none of it.

I know, the Right claims “morality.”

Morality, sorry to tell you, is nothing but a violent response to unwanted behaviour. Morality is violence. Take away the violence from morality, what have you got? Probably just running, right, fight or flight? So morality is aggression, aggressive violence, an aggressive, violent response to unwanted behaviour – and as others have said, in other contexts, that can’t fix itself, can it?

But all you abuse victims believe it can, don’t you? What do you do when you see someone who is in your power doing something wrong? As far as we can go is that it “doesn’t work,” right? It’s “morality,” how can it be wrong?

In this sense, today, there is no Left, not yet. Who doesn’t believe in morality? There is only Right and Righter. Of course, vote less Right, but don’t they all run on morality, morality and “strength?”

When politics was devised to assist the weak, the young, the sick, and the old? Strength also is not politics, again, politics is the science of getting along. Strength and morality, these are the science of war, of warrior society. I have named this branch of science antisocialization theory, because that is what is accomplished in the real world by aggressive, violent morality.

It is a fault of mine that I see no small solutions, that it all looks rather futile to me from here, where most of our efforts to effect improvements only involve more of the moral violence; I haven’t been much help feeding the poor, doing what I can, not as much as I should. On the other hand, I maybe just don’t see mirages and there aren’t small solutions. Do you really think we have all the basics right and all this 1984 style psychopathy is some matter of some small tweaking? Something basic is upside-down and this morality thing is it.

Not “human nature,” but humanity’s entirely artificial response to something in human nature. Unless you’re among the worst of them yourself, you know, the sorts that talk the loudest about right and wrong and morality are the scariest ones of them all. That is not a “perversion.” That’s what morality is. Again, you know more is worse, right? So that’s the next step, realizing that morality is wrong and that we can do better. It starts at the very beginning, when we are first born into this world, and no-one hurts us “for good.” I’m serious.

The next step in evolution, the only move to get us through this selection event of what is likely the end of the world, is this: don’t spank.

Jeff

Sept. 21st., 2020

More about Circuitry

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I’ve said that when we discuss human origins, that it’s the evolved “creation myth” circuit we employ, and so we wind up in the same conversations, using the new idea in the same old way. I’ve also tried to describe a circuit, a neural highway for the Nurture Assumption, by any number of names, the reason, whatever it is, that we employ our social control, that we either are rough on our own children or that we allow the older children unfettered access to be.

Maybe this is another one, or some aspect of the same ones here:

Our nightmares are some totalitarian slave system but our dreams are a good job and to contribute to society and that sounds like two ways to talk about the same circuit too, betrayed by a similarity of format, same as the innate/adaptive argument I’m making. This sounds like philosophical tool, an audit for “new” ideas – is the format the same, does it sound like the same factory may be making the “new” product? Ha! Same supply chains? Same market? Wait, yes! Can it be/is it being sold to the same market, the same pool of the same brains with the same circuits? Ha again – if they don’t have trouble adapting to it, maybe there is no adaptation required, and if it doesn’t offend and terrify us, it’s probably nothing new.

Of course, dual memes like that, different sounding takes on the same general, possibly preconfigured memes, this is always the opportunity for groupness and group conflict, , you know, we believe in evolution and adaptation, while they believe some rubbish about innate “natures.” Again, probably the same circuit in both of our brains . . . it’s almost interesting, same hardware, same firmware, maybe all the way out to software, and still we find a way to make a division out of it – in the virtual reality world of our beliefs! Which, sadly, is enough, any excuse for our reason to be, the group and its conflicts.

Jeff

June 25th., 2020 mostly. Intro

Sept. 19th., 2020

Deterrents

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deterrents hurt. Deterrents are threats, and frighten us, engage the defense systems, deterrents are antisocializing all on their own, let alone when they fail and the threat becomes an horrific reality. An environment of deterrents is a dangerous, stressful, abusive environment. I guarantee we have environmentally controlled alleles for that, or rather, we have the capability, it’s in our gene suite, and I guarantee we set our lives up to activate them. For years I’ve been arguing that if it were only deterrents, if they worked, that would be fine, but of course that’s stupid, half-measures. Remembering Sapolsky, it is exactly threat and not violence that lasts too long and wears us out from the stress. Laws and deterrents are relentless.

Jeff

June 25th., 2020