Riffing, Part Six –Morality as Debt – Summary and Project on Hold

Ah, I’m getting them mixed up a bit, but basically, the last one is about the hard feelings from the normal, money economy of normal life, that’s only halfway there, isn’t it, don’t I need to do one just about morality and punishment and maybe conformity. I think it will involve that cookie thief again, but we don’t have to do the role playing, don’t have to extrapolate it all from them, maybe.

So, Part Five shows the emotional flow in the money economy, which is surely intrinsic, part and parcel, this is not analogy at all but the actual facts of the matter. We need to try to draw the moral “economy,” now, where the goods are not literal goods, but this virtual currency with which moral and not financial debts are settled.

I want to make excuses; I’m finding this difficult and every tiny step is taking me real time, but if I can make a second step, then perhaps Part Five will have been a good first one. Gawd.

But how to proceed? Same, posit some generic “exchange?” Well, I didn’t really posit anything did I, I just jumped in and started making pronouncements. AST is that way, it’s the nether world, it needs my set of presuppositions, my Autistic set, and that’s what I try to do when I start like that, warn you you’re not in Kansas anymore and force you to just jump in – or not, I guess. So let’s do that. Welcome to the other side.

Of course moral exchanges are unequal, I mean if an exchange is equal, morals or reputations are not altered? Scanning the last one, I see it was as I started saying in this one, about the normal economics of life, goods and services, food and labour up until the French Revolution and then I switched to crime and punishment.

I suppose the flow of bad feelings from the money economy also happens in the moral economy, that some good flows in one direction and hard feelings in the other. Perhaps there’s something in determining what the “goods,” going the other direction are supposed to be. I haven’t apparently read it or understood until this moment, but I’ve already said, haven’t I that when we pay our debts, we pay by having bad feelings. Why, is that what we stole when we transgressed, someone’s bad feelings, left them stranded on the high moral ground?

Ah, the book is here. I should stop talking and try to learn something instead.

Jeff

Sept. 23rd., 2023

Tangents – Thoughts about Hate and Neurotype(departing from Morality, Part Five)

Hey, I’m sorry. I’m mocking your neurotype, that’s not cool, I know. I’m trying to cheat a little, shock you into listening. This is the thing that normal folks have a hard time seeing, I’m sorry, I ought to know it’s not going to help insulting you about it. Let’s pick the parental version apart a little.

“Sure I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them,” is clearly OK in the majority neurotype brain, isn’t it, and I suppose I can try to understand, I mean, it “doesn’t hurt them,” not more than it does every other kid, it really “doesn’t hurt them,” developmentally – compared to every other kid, and you can look around you and see this much is true. It’s true, in a way, in a socially understood, Allistic, comparative way, if not so much in my self understanding, Autistic way, where comparisons aren’t so much the point and everyone hit and hurt the same way is different than everyone not hit and hurt the same way. The ”same,” part, again, is Allistic, that’s the point of everything in group life, same is important, and hurt isn’t all bad, makes you strong – while us all being in the same boat is no comfort to my less social mind, and everyone being hurt is infinitely worse than if no-one were, despite the company.

It looks like the social mind is at odds with the sociological mind, with the actuarial sense, and this is some prioritization in the evolution of the Allistic human, one I would review, but it would seem we’ve lost the Administration password, another convenient thing about the human in Allistic mode, is it thinks it’s perfect or something.

Don’t you find that amazing about the haters of the world, that they can be so harsh in their discriminations, it’s like white men think white men are gods or something, and heterosexuals think they’ve invented a free eternal power source. From my neurology, I don’t understand how you form sentences from such attitudes, like there is nothing wrong with men, or nothing wrong with white men, or nothing wrong with people if they’re straight – have the haters ever met any people at all?

Who have you ever met that made you think, “That’s it, no more people, this guy is perfect?” And how old are you? I really don’t get it, I’m as arrogant an aspie prick as you’d ever care to meet, but I do not worship myself as flawless, and I would not populate a world with nothing but my weird self.

We’re all some awful flawed Human Nature, never to be cured in this world – but in the next conversation there would be no problems at all if only they were all white and straight and male – sorry, I’m mocking again, I think? Can you tell? The presupposition in all the hateisms seems to be something just that unrealistic, doesn’t it? Not so much? I think it’s along the lines of a disability, like neurotype stuff, if you need a gene for hate for some reason, then you won’t be needing this one for self-critique, that would be counterproductive for both these genes, right?

Sorry.

Jeff

Sept. 16th., 2023

Riffing, Part Five –Morality – the Economy of Stolen Rights

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.

__________________________

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!

___________________________

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. 15th., 2023

Riffing, Part Four – Less AND More about Economics as Morality

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. 9th., 2023

This is Hell

Hi, welcome to Hell. First time?

Well, this is Hell, and I’m Jeff, I’m the demon assigned to remind you constantly that it’s nobody’s fault but yours that you’re here. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth; this is Hell and no-one is happy, not you, not us, not even management.

I mean, logically. This is the afterlife. I know, I know, you thought this was life. So did I for a minute there but hear me out. You’ll see how that couldn’t possibly be the case.

First, I don’t know that you believe in all that, the premise, I didn’t really believe it either, but that was when I thought this was life. From here, I need to re-evaluate, it’s not quite the same leap of faith from here! From here, it’s not such a hard case to make. If you are a Christian sort, if you do approach life from this premise, judgment, Heaven and Hell, then perhaps I am not altogether wittingly making a serious argument and if so, I apologize in advance for failing at that level. If like me, you are more of just a north American and a cultural Christian, call it metaphor if you must, but it’s more than that too.

Hell is where you go if you’ve been bad, right?

And weren’t you born bad, didn’t the judgment happen before, as part of the same premise? You know what I’m talking about, Christian Original Sin, or the generic nasty Human Nature.

I understand that for the Christians, Jesus solves this riddle, this isn’t Hell, it’s more like Purgatory, you were created and judged as bad, you can’t perhaps just choose good yourself and override your Maker, but you can choose Jesus, who forgives. For the cultural Christians – and Christian believers are cultural Christians also, they can perhaps see the picture I’m trying to paint for the purely cultural ones too – that for the unsaved, there isn’t an escape, you’re bad and either forgiven or not, and if we accept the judgment and decide that we were created as bad, no choice – then by this cultural Christian premise and context, this is not our life, where there is free will and we get to choose from good and evil, this is the logical afterlife, where our choices have already been made.

And we do, mostly, almost universally, accept the judgment. While the modern, smart-assed materialists consider the escape, salvation to be ridiculous religious fantasy, that they have moved beyond sacrifice and spirits, they almost to a person accept and endorse the rest of the premise, up to the point where we all fail judgment except that some escape, this is not where we are alive and free and making meaningful moral choices.

 And it’s not Heaven, is it?

I see more prisons than I would expect in Heaven, for starters.

I imagine much less violence in Heaven, but rather than seeing people with the hate removed and love and peace in their hearts, the reward for having done the impossible and been good, rather, I see an elaborate system of moral gaslighting that absolutely insures violence forever repeating, an insanely complicated system of “morals” and laws in which violence is a sacred cure and not one of the crimes at all. When there is a fire, our world and Hell look identical, an all encompassing system of punishment and pain – plus fire.

I imagine we don’t have to be strong in Heaven, that Heaven doesn’t have all the awful things we have to be strong for, I like to think it’s a good life in Heaven even if you do weaken. I assume nothing tries to kill you and so makes you stronger in the sweet by and by. This is not that, is it?

Not even close. Just make the fires of Hell the obvious metaphor for violence and it’s all true, even the forever part, because there is no end to the foolishness of fighting violence with violence, fire with fire and the effort is the very definition of Hell and gives no hope of an ending ever. In this premise, born bad, all the judgment and punishment, all the hate and strife is for naught and none of it makes anyone better, in the end, you are still human, still born to be bad, and endless violence for nothing, that too is a definition of a mythical place, also not Paradise.

Whups, almost ten minutes, I haven’t said it – and this is all on you, you did this to yourself.

I mean, it’s your premise, isn’t it?

Have a nice eternity, fool. I’ll be right here.

Jeff

Feb. 12th., 2022

Racism – the Invention of Hate

  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

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

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

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

Foucault Anthropology

Late night thought: we did not eliminate the alpha, we socialized his power, all the men have it, that’s what Wrangham describes, that’s the patriarchy – but that’s Foucault isn’t it, distributed power, socialized alpha power, I’m saying, but the thing is, I think for evidence that the alpha is not gone, rather everywhere instead, is that the world has been destroyed at the hands of the tyranny of cousins, that in fact what they’ve wrought is the same destruction the alpha does. “Foucault anthropology” again: whatever relief and freedom chimps ever get from their alpha, for whatever reason, he’s occupied abusing someone else, humans do not, the socialized, everywhere alpha has time for all of us, all the time. The technological gains, the knowledge, the culture, the civilization, it all seems to be better and different, not alpha destructiveness, it was a lot of literal construction . . . but if it all ends soon, if the air gives out or something, in hindsight, we will have to say it all served nothing but somebody’s destructiveness. Won’t we?

That either he’s not gone, he’s everywhere, throwing his violent tantrums, or that he did in fact provide some check, some form of organization that at least left us selectable by the rest of the biosphere . . . weird, this may be worth pursuing. On the one hand, it does seem an alpha function to hold us back from progress, to protect his position that way, and it seems incredibly clear today in America where the oppressed citizens are asking for better treatment from the authorities and it is the police and the authorities that are rioting, having a proper alpha tantrum, and lagging behind the public’s anti-violence morality. On the other hand, if he had held us back a lot more, we would still be relatively harmless apes? I’m not getting to it, but there’s something in there. D’ya think?

Jeff

June 2020