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. 16^th., 2020

So I heard about this morality business and I thought, “Hey, that sounds good,” see what I did there, and so I looked into it, and . . . oh.

Turns out, morality thinks it’s exempt, doesn’t apply to it, apparently.

Did the lights just get dimmer?

The following italicized 248 words are pathetic, I would delete this blog if there were nothing in it, and if I were the sort trying to pretend I’m something other than the broken fool I really am, I would anyway. Seriously talking about what’s not in the book when I’ve listened to someone else’s synopsis of page one. I’m sorry. I’m going to leave the mess here, see if there’s anything to salvage afterwards, see you on the other side.

I want to learn, but I try and I hit a wall immediately, I found a podcast, one of the Open Yale courses, Philosophy and Science of Human Nature and she starts with Plato as the basis of all western thought on the matter and it’s wrong immediately, She has Socrates saying that some things are only valuable instrumentally, meaning for what they bring, not for themselves and then lists a nation’s appearance of strength as one such thing, the deterrent, she said, ” . . . it doesn’t matter that you are dangerous, only that you seem dangerous.”

Of course it’s true that in a conversation about deterrents your actual, real world dangerousness “doesn’t matter,” and of course that is the only place in the universe that such a thing wouldn’t matter.

Of course I’m cherry-picking this, but again, this is episode one, and she said Plato and his Republic are the basis of everything and I don’t imagine this is the last we hear about nations’ actual strength, surely all of western thought isn’t concerned with virtual deterrents rather than actual strong nations?

I don’t usually use such sarcasm, but this is a special case. I’m looking around and if I never get another scrap of data about this, I am going to have to assume this really is the case. Strength is left out of her list of Socrates’ things that have value in themselves, so it only makes the one appearance, as merely virtual.

Yeah, not much. I’ll just try to describe my emotional state when I wrote this childish rant.

I’ve always done this, I must be a born teacher, I am always running some process of elimination game on you all, scanning for what’s not there, listening for what you don’t know, maybe I can help fill you out, and listening to this Yale Open course, it’s directly about human nature, and it’s where I started and I have moved on. I know it’s an exercise in proving a negative, I am mining the culture for my idea, to make sure it’s new, and my usual take – what is missing here? – finds it missing in every sentence! Not just that, but I am introduced to Plato and his thought as foundational, so missing here is terrible, world destroying news. I knew it before, if antisocialization were present in the Greek foundation of all things western, then this knowledge would be all around me already, but I suppose it was a different matter, thinking I was really seeing it, rather, hearing it myself, with my own ears.

It’s bloody torture, I can only take so much, so I break off and write instead, in a terrible regressed emotional state. I hate that I am obligated to read and learn what is wrong, that I have no venue in which to teach what is right, frustrated I couldn’t just go over to Plato’s house and set him straight.

I’ll keep listening, but this is what I saw as the core of the problem from here and now, and here is the core of our thought about it. There aren’t going to be any pleasant surprises, are there.

OK, the second half of the lecture, the fellow with the mirrors bending us towards fairness “when we’re being watched,” I love this stuff, OMG, as though it’s about the eyes and not the social control that comes when we’re observed, again, always the gaslighting, this is “psychology:” there is nothing bad in the world, only in you, you behave differently when you’re being watched, not “if someone sees me they are going to hurt or kill me,” no.

I’m mad at you all.

Psychology is the psychology department of abusing you, nothing else.

Jeff, Sept. 4th., 2020

The italicized 111 words below are an awful embarrassment, and I’d love to just delete the entire blog and pretend it never happened. I read it all wrong, I thought it was about the real Socrates and not Plato’s fictive one, and so everything I said is moronic and I look like an infantile git. Again, I’d love to pretend that isn’t the case but it’s too late for that.

I’m still confused, surely this argument is about something else than literal eternal souls, but I haven’t found out what that is yet, I’ll have to keep learning.

I read the Death of Socrates. The man made a reasonable etymological argument about eternal souls and declared it to be literally about eternal souls. I heard no irony or self awareness about it. It’s like what I do at my worst. Pathetic.

Is there no-one else?

LOL. Of course there is, but Socrates, hooey! Doesn’t speak well for his student either, does it? Well, the shadows on the cave wall, that’s more like it, I guess.

This is me about everything, it’s all like that, nothing is true unless it’s at least one step removed. It was probably a fine argument about our concept of eternal souls, Socrates’ final denial.

More likely only an example in an argument about arguments or something. I failed at exactly the point here, at looking that one level deeper! That’s funny even if it is me.

The same applies, the extra layer of complexity, hugely, to human nature. There is no one human nature, all agree on that, all serious people seem to agree on that – but there is one fairly universal opinion of human nature, and that is what seems worth discussing to me, so I do, bloody endlessly. It would have been a self-joke, me cussing Soak-rates out, if I had gotten the right Socrates anyway, because I am that guy, a walking talking off-putting question that is really a judgemental lecture. I might have looked a little better, but I’m working on that, and progress is inevitable.

I know, no-one cares, work harder.

Not endlessly enough yet. It’s not that we believe in Christian original sin, not even that we liked Hobbes or think that we’re still half-chimpanzee, in fact it’s not some positively held thought at all. It’s what we don’t seem to think.

Mainly, we don’t seem to think that hurting kids matters much as long as they learn the lesson. Some story like original sin may attempt to illustrate or explain this attitude, that the kid was wrong already or something, but it doesn’t matter, the myth came second and the upshot is we don’t seem to worry about it. Many young parents have big hopes of not spanking and otherwise hurting their own kids, they’re young, the memory is still fresh, but nearly all fail, somehow in the press of life the dream loses priority, things must happen, schedules must be met. This priority loss can go pretty far, all the way to where it seems a trivial matter to many folks, we all had it, we all survived it, relax, you’re not alone.

The trivial appearance of spanking is a camouflage, like carrying your expensive camera in a grocery bag so no-one thinks to steal it. The premise here belies the triviality, if it were, you would expect half of these young parents to escape it and for that to also be a trivial matter, of course the first part isn’t the case and the second part wouldn’t be, not in this world we’re in now.

I personally thought I had escaped and I thought it was difficult and I was one in a million, but it turned out it was all delusion and I was none in a million, non-existent, I had been faked out like a rat pressing a lever it learned when the researcher has it turned off. It was so non-trivial to my ex that she did it in secret and convinced the kids to keep the secret too. They were adults when I learned the truth. This blog was supposed to have real life answers for you about it, but the experiment was cynically destroyed like Bill Murray at the beginning of Ghostbusters not caring about the real psychic he’d found, and me and my kids along with it. Anyway. It’s that non-trivial. Non-negotiable with anyone so ridiculous as the father or I assume anybody else.

Just an example. I’m sure you have your own story about how not spanking isn’t as simple as it sounds, don’t you? OK, wait, I know some won’t.

Some folks never doubted, many folks grew up knowing it had to be done, and those folks may imagine that there is a world of folks out there not spanking, and who find it easy not to spank, in fact, it’s probably ascribed to laziness, this theoretical non-spanking crowd’s negligence – well, I’m here to tell them, no, there is no such population, that every human group says this about every other, that we all do it. They say the same about you.

Even the hippies, I think.

So it’s not about human nature, good, bad, or complicated; it’s about a behaviour that betrays some mute core belief about human nature. Again, all agree, your “nature” isn’t even a thing. But your unspoken attitude, your more than words attitude, now that’s a thing.

An addressable, knowable thing. So I expect we’ll keep shrugging and not thinking “human nature,” and never bringing the science to ourselves, as always. This virus knows us better than even COVID does.

Jeff

Sept. 2^nd., 2020

But never mind these little ones, go to abusewithanexcuse.com and read About So Don’t Spank and So Don’t Spank, but be warned that one’s awfully long. Worth the walk, though.

I keep reading, listening these days, looking back, and everybody has something to say and no-one believes there is anything new and folks keep sending me back to this or that great mind and it’s all great fun but nobody gets it, ideas of human nature come before all of that. All of it. Plato and Moses already had ideas about people, they all did. I mean, I get it, you really can’t proceed without one. I’m not saying don’t have a thought for that, of course I’m just saying don’t have an unexamined thought for it.

You never look at it, you never account for it in your thinking, then you are the slave of this thought, as are we all and victims of it also. You never look at it, you probably think there’s only one possible thing there. This is not consciousness: a human sitting, wondering, what am I? and in denial of the answer it is already operating from. Again, you really can’t move without one, what do you do when you encounter a human in the world? How many do you suppose you would have to meet before you realized you wanted some kind of policy about it?

Of course you have one. Wondering about it is like a child screaming because someone “stole their nose.”

Aggression is the policy. That’s a policy, which of the fight or flight options is automatic, the first response, flight is some creatures’ policy and fighting is others, really large bears and people, mostly. When it’s not the crazy abundance of the salmon run, inasmuch as bears are territorial, they seem to have a negative idea of bear nature and tend not to tolerate bears themselves. Ha – that is why the bear is our brother, the same bad attitude, our brother, like we were all raised by some overarching abusive parent, divided and conquered, territorial and with a low opinion of our own kind.

Derailing my own dialogue with the heartbreaking scene of a mother bear violently one day driving her child away. If we worried about their psychology, I guess we would assume every bear is completely broken and confused for life.

You want to say aggression is not so much a matter of choice, that policy is too soft, a policy would still be a decision and the response often too swift for any such process, I know. I don’t mean then, again, that’s why the policy, so you don’t have to lose milliseconds thinking about it. The decision happens not there in the moment, we decide upon the policy elsewhere, every elsewhere. Everyone signs on to the company policy or they can find another job. It’s a policy in every sense except the absolute unconscious immediacy of its application, I’ll admit, that looks a little magical, but in every sense, including that it is not arrived at through a process of consensus, but that authority sets the policy.

With a spanking. Straight through to the old bits, the fast bits of the brain.

Everyone has problems, right? I mean, right around the kitchen table, correct in our personal lives. Well, do you believe it or don’t you? You believe it enough, right? Who doesn’t believe it? So it’s science, a job for science. Otherwise, what? Sure, it’s everybody, but never mind everybody, let’s talk about you? Everyone has problems, but how about me and my problems talk to you and your problems, in private? That should fix it, huh. Who needs science?

Failing anything else, I’m all for therapy, or talking as one might call it. I’m just saying science doesn’t have to fail at it, that there’s some rule says it must and that rule has got to go.

No-one liked their spankings, right?

That’s science, damnit. I assume if the everywhere presence of spanking doesn’t seem to call for science to you, then I imagine you also do not worry about the traumatized and suddenly abandoned young bears, that you simply label them as aggressive and carry on, with some vague but extremely useful idea about awful bear nature and not worry about why it would be that way, I mean who really cares about the absent gentle bear society, who cares how they treat each other? How they treat us is the somewhat more salient thing. Evil bear nature, bear original sin, whatever, as long as you remember the gist, LOL, us, but apparently also smaller bears. (Perhaps bears are on my mind, I was traumatized recently by a video on Twitter where a person harassed a bear and their phone recorded the bear eating them. The bear’s num-num-num noises were of course horrifying.)

Is this a model, doesn’t matter what made the bear antisocial, doesn’t matter what made Dad antisocial? The bear doesn’t say that, but Dad kinda does, doesn’t he? It’s true enough, again, in the moment, the bear or Dad’s back story isn’t the main thing.

I mean, unless you’re a creature that prides itself on being able to ponder the past and peek into the future. Unless maybe this incident wasn’t the first one or wasn’t ever going to be the last one. I swear, the damned bears would get this. As bad as their world losing moment must be, at least it’s over, bears haven’t got an entire pyramid of bears over them constantly threatening their every selfish move. I bet they know they’re hard to get along with and maybe they’re even allowed to know why, unlike some species I know.

Don’t we all agree, again, personally, that we are hardened, made aggressive, I mean don’t you blame someone for your own frustrations, maybe your own anger? Or is it bears that give you grief, is my one reader an Alaskan hermit, someone who escaped human society and then somehow forgot why? Every one of us, either pissed or something beyond it, depressed personally, to me this ought to be science. It seems clear that even if I solve my own problems, that doesn’t solve everyone else’s, clearly, even if I can feel better, fixing me is just putting out one fire and someone is setting us all alight. Putting out fires is not science, science learns where fire comes from, I mean usually. I should point out that in this case science hardly even wants credit for the firefighting, it holds psychology at a distance of plausible deniability, so that apparently if you even think of looking into the matter of who is starting the fires, biology wants anything to do with you only in the most restricted of circumstances.

It’s been too long since I’ve said it maybe: my gonzo science says that idea we have about punishments and deterrents is wrong, that it is exactly these efforts that cause human problems, that these efforts were evolved to increase our aggression and success in conflict and that this strategy has worked too well, look, everywhere, someone winning some conflict that probably never should have come up, that our strategy is conflict first because of our systems of moral abuse, not in spite of them.

It may be science that we have such systems, but these systems are not science, and mainstream science endorses them, unconscious of it all, falling back on bad old human nature in more scientific terms, aggression. I just heard the Pavlov stuff again in this torturous podcast, the exultation, “We can increase desired behaviour, we can decrease unwanted behaviour . . . ” the optimism! Yes you can, all you have to do is create systems of aversion and hurt and decide that those are not unwanted behaviours, or not in fact behaviours at all, not subject to scrutiny themselves.

Nowhere in the history of western thought is there a hint that punishment is a behaviour in itself, it always presents as a natural law. I’m all the way back to Plato’s Socrates, I suppose Plato missed it and that was that, for all the world will tell me, I was the first person to have this thought, and that is not possible, ridiculous, except show me someone. Maybe they never wrote it down. I’ve seen elsewhere that Plato was rather obtuse and authoritarian, I already knew I wasn’t going to find it there, I didn’t know that all anyone had to do to ignore it forever afterwards was follow tradition that leads back to him, I thought it was philosophy, I wasn’t thinking about it as law.

I don’t know how true the chain is there, “western thought” reads like a progress story, one building on the next, but if it’s all flawed then the narrative is lost, isn’t it? They weren’t building on one another, they were refuting one another, starting again every century, but we apparently don’t think punishment is a behaviour that warrants an explanation today, same as then. That bit survived all revisions, didn’t it? Until now, I fantasize, until now, when I earn my place atop all those flawed western thinkers, the one-eyed idiot savant king of the blind, with my only thought!

I understand there are mechanisms in place, something keeps this from our sight, and I find that suggestive that it is a behaviour we think we need and depend on, a thing we hold dear, so dear that we ourselves are not allowed to know about it so we can’t accidentally stop it, like breathing and digestion, they are safe from our thoughts, or the lack of our thoughts. Survival-level dear to us, but look, it’s not working, our aggression has gone from saving us from the neighbors or getting us their stuff to the world is burning, there is no place to run, and we and the neighbors are all going to suffer and die together in a broken world.

It’s time, now or never, face it already.

Jeff

Sept. 12^th., 2020