evolutionary psychology

Shaking the Jar

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Trigger warnings, hard doom and gloom.

Fighting got you here, and I know you can’t hear this, but fighting won’t get you out of it. Yet, you persist.

There’s always some happy peacenik saying that, you say, yet all of our history is written by people that never stopped fighting, it worked for them – this from people who think the dinosaurs “failed,” or something by only existing for half a billion years, creatures who have been around for point zero, zero, something percent of that amount of time saying this.

While the fighting and the competition have destroyed the environment and it all collapses as it has many times before for perhaps various reasons, it would appear that the New World Order myth is playing out, that someone has decided that the coming disaster means only some few will be able to continue, and so death and mass death are suddenly legal, saith the Power, and we will not fight the plague, rather we shall mandate it, and we shall not slow the wars nor the genocides because these and many, many more must perish to get to a sustainable level of humanity and none of this is theoretical because climate collapse is here and there is going to be no food next winter, and every person who dies this year will not be starving and migrating and rioting next year.

So by their logic, they must keep doing exactly what they have been doing to bring about the disaster, fossil fuels and war . . . which tells me that the “sustainable number,” will shrink and shrink until it is gone altogether. They simply cannot stop, they simply can imagine no other direction in which to go. It will be bloody Penn and Teller Get Killed, Last Man Standing sort of bullshit.

Whereas if you could imagine anything else, these billions of people could be put to better use, what we need is terracing of the land, anywhere and everywhere, to catch the rare floods for use and to recharge the aquifers, and much of this and much farming ought to be done as manually as possible, perhaps in small scale, again, even this, if it’s a machine, fossil fuel project, will shrink that number. Those two things and not much else ought to be a suffering and shrinking humanity’s only projects for the next . . . going forward, let’s say. Well, included but perhaps worthy of mention, as well as shutting off the nuclear plants in a controlled fashion, if it’s not already too late for that, if we are not already beneath that level of operation.

I can’t say for sure that the choice is quite so stark, or that there is any hope no matter what we do, but I do think this is how we should think about it – keep fighting until there’s nothing left, or give that stupid shit up and start to limit the coming damage by working for each other instead?

Jeff

Nov. 12th., 2023

The Spank-o-Matic – Brain Size

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There has been a lot of thought and talk about human cranial capacity, I think something new went around quite recently.

I wrote a joke/pseudoscience blog once about how the cranial size was related to bipedalism, that a massive dome kept the babies from falling out early – I know, it was a joke. Well, mostly, anyway. The idea was that the brain that filled the skull/plug was mostly just filler, not really functional, after all creatures do most of what we do with brains smaller than ours by an order of magnitude. If the whole mass was IQ, we’d all be a lot harder to confuse with the rest of the fauna around here and nobody would vote for any of these assholes.

Ha.

But I have a new joke/pseudoscience reading, in line with Antisocialization Theory.

In the Punishment Cult, everything is backwards, we do bad things to make people good, every evil humans have ever imagined has been perpetrated to steer the victims towards some good, what almost kills you makes you “better,” somehow, injuries are “strength,” health isn’t “strength,” somehow.

So you saw the title.

All that grey matter, the impressive volume of the human brain (smaller now than in antiquity, but let’s not complicate matters), this is the toilet in the American Embassy in Australia in the Simpsons universe, the Swirl-o-Matic, or whatever it was, that arranges for the appearance of no Coriolis effect, that in the damned American Embassy, the water swirls this way and not that way – that way, of course being the automatic and natural way.

All that machinery between your ears is just to turn the world upside down and make you work against it, against yourself, against everything good and natural.

OK, not funny, this one. Maybe not pseudo either.

Jeff Sept. 29th., 2023

Retraction

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I am sorry, I have just taken another run at learning what “Allistic,” means, and this time I found it, it’s “other, ” that “allo,” means, Allistic is “Otheristic” – and that’s proper already, close enough, never mind my foolishness about giving the typical neurotype a meaningful name.

I mean, they are are not meaningful names, “Selfistic,” Otheristic,” it doesn’t really work, “istic,” is “pertaining to or concerned with a quality or trait,” and “self,” and “other,” are not qualities or traits, the syntax doesn’t really add up – but names are rarely meaningful, self-explanatory, they are usually simply names, made up words for a thing. You’d never know what a tree was from analyzing the word, “tree,” either.

So it’s good, “Allistic,” is good and I’m sorry.

I think I’m going to let this sit for a bit and then delete those silly posts.

Jeff

June 22nd., 2023

If There is a Way

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Contents

Introduction, the problems                                                                                     1

            AST, Jeff’s Bag of Premises

                        addiction, a personal metaphor                                                                2

                        resilience, a dearth of fear                                                                         3

                        resilience, a lack of understanding                                                           4

            Desires

                        old, strength                                                                                               5

                        new, everything else                                                                                   6

             domestication                                                                                             7

Introduction, the Problems

It is 2023 by the current measure, since the last great peak we acknowledge, and we’re mostly all plugged in, we know the problems, plague, climate collapse, war, fascism and some mass death wish that comes with it. By and large, we seem helpless; even if we say the climate thing is “unprecedented,” those last few things, we have done these exact things before, and still no-one seems to have any idea why or how to stop them.

The reasons humans do what they do appear to be a mystery to them.

It is clear that the plan is collapse, and to hope to crawl out of the rubble afterwards for another try, “resilience,” don’t you know. Strength and resilience are always and forever the plan for the humans, and this is one of the problems, it’s clear that no-one in power fears the future enough to change it or understands the species they rule over well enough to change anything, for reasons I hope to show. With self knowledge, rather with the lack of it, it’s all one and the same, isn’t it, not knowing yourself and not seeking that knowledge.

If we wanted it, we may have had it long ago, and if we had it, we’d know to want it, but we don’t and we don’t.

This is a problem, we need to learn new desires, which means we somehow have to set our own goals, imagine new desires and then develop the taste for them – it all rings of the psychology of addiction, doesn’t it? This is not a coincidence and we do presently regret our desires, the things we do chase, and we do berate ourselves for it, bemoaning our Natures when we have a moment’s peace to do so. Presently however, it’s illegal to have the desires we need to have, peaceniks are traitors, and we regret any inconvenience, but the awful Nature is the law. This is truly the state of things.

This is a problem today and we need to understand that conflict as a solution was never going to last forever, that the Earth is dying and so are we, if we do not change that law.

That’s my overview, the problems are the huge things we all know about, coupled with some present aversion or inability to rise to them.

And don’t get me wrong, we need to change that. We couldn’t have become this nightmare ape if God hadn’t rather unadvisedly left us to create ourselves, if that weren’t our job and no-one else’s. Imagine you’re alive five or ten million years ago, you’re a wild creature yet to morph into chimpanzees, bonobos, any number of apes living and gone, and our whole group, living and gone – would this sound possible? Of course it wouldn’t, but it clearly was. I guarantee we had different desires then and we changed those, because that’s how evolution works, you are what you want and need to be and it’s never “finished,” while the world is alive and changing. Of course we can change that or we wouldn’t be here.

No creature would.

Or, you know, carry on. Human Nature, whaddayagonnado.

I wish to be remembered for this one if for nothing else, my pinned tweet: If the dinosaurs had made excuses about “Dinosaur Nature,” there would be no birds.

AST, Jeff’s Bag of Premises

addiction, a personal metaphor

An addiction to abuse, that is one way to look at it, I mean, self medicating with the weed all my life, it’s not my favourite choice of metaphor, but there is no denying it has it all, it is clearly one, there is the upside that it makes it possible not to think about the problems, it has the part we are chasing and the part chasing us, and the “strength,” seems worth abusing our babies for, because it has the same “no go,” areas in our thinking, areas that we think are survival. If I’m not high, I’m very depressed and at risk, so it really doesn’t matter what damage weed does to my life, I imagine it would be over without my pain killer.

And if we are not “strong,” some other group of humans will wipe us out and it really doesn’t matter what damage the abuse does to my kids or anyone else if that happens – it’s the same all or nothing sort of thinking, except in my individual case it’s something like delusion and in “society’s” case it’s obviously “reality,” what is wrong with you? Of course in both cases there is an element of choice, and in both cases, we make it real whenever we want. If I ran out of weed and offed myself the next day, it would be both, a choice made real. If we became a more peaceful group of humans and some warlike bunch saw weakness and tried to wipe us out, that would be the same, humans turning that choice into reality.

If I got off the weed and lived, I would be leaving my delusion/bad choice and rejoining society in reality, it would be an addiction success story – and if modern humans encountered a group of humans not engaged in world domination and didn’t wipe them out, we would be leaving our “reality”/bad choice and rejoining the global society of creatures in actual reality.

That would be another addiction success story, if we did that instead of say, mining lithium, or clearing the Amazon for wood pellets.

I’m afraid this description works!

Seems important to note that the “reality,” referenced in this section is only another human group’s addiction to abuse and conflict, that the difference between my delusion and human “reality,” is that “reality” is not mine but some other human’s delusion. Ah, Laing, isn’t it.

If it’s not, it should be.

resilience, a dearth of fear

Counting on your resilience and your strength, this is warrior talk, don’t worry about the pain, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger stuff – a straight up warrior fantasy meme, untrue almost of almost everything that might have killed you, it’s probably only true if you’re like me and think lifting weights might kill you, LOL.

That I’ve said a million times, though and I’m having a secondary thought about it at long last, OK, again at long last, that this meme is the paradigm of punishment at play, not of trauma. It is exactly and maybe only punishment that does that, doesn’t kill you and makes you stronger, isn’t it? Ha – think a thought for thirty years, sometimes it sprouts a second one.

One of my more recurring soundbites: in the Punishment Cult, the path to Good is through the Bad and only through pain is there learning.

The cursed idea of the deterrent is that you make bad things to force people to choose good things, and so every horrible thing you do becomes good, a “deterrent.” It turns good and bad upside down. So it’s not that we’re insufficiently afraid of the disaster, it’s that we only imagine some good from it, ultimately. Bad is good, in the punishment cult, and surely the end of the world will finally teach us a lesson. We’ll figure out a better way after that. Ah, yes, punishment is the war to end all wars myth too, if we cause enough pain, if we finally reach some mad limit, then we’ll learn.

No. Not an endorsement.

We are not in the Solutions section just yet.

resilience, a lack of understanding

In the Punishment Cult, pain “doesn’t hurt,” and it “makes people choose good,” so there is no sense to be made of anything.

We see ideas and thinkers come and go, different political and economic “systems,” and none of them think punishment or oppression or abuse “hurts,” and they all force their “radical new system,” the same way, with soldiers and abuse and indoctrination and none of that “hurts,” so none of them know why nothing ever works out. The police force capitalism, the poor aren’t happy, the police force communism, the proles aren’t happy, they’ve tried everything, and they’re all out of ideas.

One father beats his child Christian, one beats his communist, and no-one notices all are abused, broken, and not in love with “the system,” whichever one it was.

It seems our alien overlords, the modern Illuminati, the G20, whoever has any power to direct society also do not understand that it doesn’t matter in what direction we are pushed, that we are harmed by the pushing whatever the direction, that it is the pushing that forms our unwanted desires. So they keep pushing, talking about their system and their laws and they push until our simple response to abuse finally rears its ugly head in a non-ignorable way, hopefully a revolution, usually a war or an internal one, a pogrom and/or an apartheid, or some combination of them all.

You start with a “religion of forgiveness,” and you give it a push and in a few generations they must join the religion of forgiveness or face retribution again: the push has its own agenda.

But nobody knows why because our simple response to abuse doesn’t exist, remember, the punishing push doesn’t hurt you. Not in the Cult. This is sort of full circle for me, that was the parenting thought that I first rejected, what the Hell do you mean, “it doesn’t hurt us?” It seems our leaders really believe it, though, and so they are probably as mystified as Dad about it, as I say, they keep pushing, so to repeat, they are not afraid enough of the future – but they also can’t change its direction because they are blind to the obvious driving force behind this repetitive disaster, the social push, the ubiquitous control and abuse of authority in all its forms that we bring to bear upon everyone, starting when they were just little children.

“I push them Left, I push them Right, nothing works.”

Whatever is a Master of the Universe, an Illuminate to do?

Desires, old, strength

Every step along the way, like when we left the trees for the savannah, this involved learning to want to be out there, when previously that had been someplace we didn’t want to be. There was something out there we had learned to want, we didn’t, then we did. We don’t remember what it was exactly, good folks working through all that now, reverse engineering our journey, I saw a new one very recently that brought that example to mind – but we read it like some automatic process of science, like it happened without our knowledge or participation. Of course we adapt because we want to, we want to continue despite losing the old resource or method.

Most people with cars got off their horses and bought a car because they wanted it, not because anyone forced them, generally long before horses got outlawed on city streets or anything. The giraffe wasn’t forced to grow that neck forever, they wanted the high leaves. Sure, some of both, a spectrum. You can be forced to eat gruel despite that you wanted to eat, there is room for manipulation in it. But I live among humans and I know what they want, I know the overarching ubiquitous goal of strength, we are a primate who exists in a state of group conflict and our desires are crude and obvious: all goes for the war effort, all else is a liability.

You want to be “stronger,” and that goal was achieved, a long time ago.

You are strong enough, please stop. It’s an arms race, a Red Queen’s race, an open ended escalation that has run its course and it is time to learn to want something else. Every human group is forever getting stronger and we readily admit any advantages are always temporary leaps in tech, soon available for all and the escalation continues. It may as well have never begun for all it changes regarding our relative positions, but we have all become monsters together chasing it, the monster under our bed is literally Dad, downstairs, drunk and raging out and we know not to let him hear our feet touch the floor.

Ouch, right.

Of course the public response is the exact opposite of that, fascism is something like conscious evolution, where they identify our species’ major malfunction and then run with it, play to your strengths, kind of thing. We have literal They Live messaging, “Be Strong,” everywhere you bloody look. The hashtags, I’ve said before. What used to be a bit of a rite of passage and a grownup secret, the shameful strength, is now hawked on every street corner, on billboards.

And yes, the “conscious evolution,” trend. We are not in this place because we are in denial of some “true,” evolution, we are here because of what we pursue, not because of what we choose not to. From what I understand the expression references a business ideology, teaches pack hunting or something, for competition. I’m just going to put this out there, unfiltered gonzo take –

nothing evolved “for competition,” what possible evolutionary advantage does a species gain competing with itself? What is an ecological niche but an area where there is less competition for a resource, and do all creatures not gravitate towards one? Territoriality, too, evolved so that most creatures don’t have to, didn’t it? Is there “competition for territory,” or is territory freedom from competition? The conflict and competition of primate life has never been the good part, and I’m here to say, chase something else, competition is one of the bad desires, if it had an upside, it’s run its course and more. We could apply some wildlife management and zoo wisdom and arrange to live without it if we wanted. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Which brings us to –

Desires, new, everything else

Ah, time to dream.

Why not start with the lie? Why don’t we, just for a first test shot, aim at the world we say we have, the one that used to be on television, the one we teach our children about in school?

We know the good things, education, democracy – group rule, that means, consensus rule – health – peace. All these sorts of good things taken together, this is the dream, isn’t it? All those things that get tossed for the war effort. I will say, the dream is a deliberate, conscious world, I mean, we already like those things, we already approve, we even make a great show of creating and maintaining those things as much as possible already.

The dream is just that any of it actually worked, right?

Dreams are the desires we wish we had, right, while we struggle in the chains of the desires we act upon, the ones we were born into. This is conservative “realism,” the desires we are given, while desires of our own are only fantasy – again, human “reality,” consists of other humans’ desires. The point is all these kinds of motivations exist already and things are nonetheless less than optimal, and having the good dream isn’t changing things like we hoped. It has always been the point of AST that adding good isn’t good enough, we need to stop adding bad too.

It hurts us, Dad, and Teacher and Officer, and Plato and Moses, the abuse you say “doesn’t hurt us,” you’re full of it, it does and you need to stop, my goodness, does no grownup ever say that out loud? It creates the bad desires – like magic, out of nothing at all. We decide to add pain consciously and voluntarily, bring pain that didn’t exist previously into the closed system of the world. It is a bad desire and it makes for bad desires and it leaves our hopes and dreams on the back burner forever.

We are shooting our dreams in the foot forever being “strong,” and “competitive.”

domestication

You know about the domestication business, right, the fox farm?

Too quickly, there was an experiment with fur foxes where they selected for an even, more manageable temperament (they would reach into a fox’s cage wearing a stout leather glove and the foxes who attacked or cowered were left out of the breeding group, while the calm foxes would be included) and in no time, a few generations, the selected for foxes developed domestic traits, doglike things, spots, floppy ears, barking, affection. I believe they fund the ongoing research by selling foxes as pets that really are pretty well suited as pets. It spawned a whole thing about domestication, and self domestication, and made the point that genes and traits are connected to other traits and genes in many ways. There is talk of human self domestication, and a good case, but today I’m going the other direction.

We select humans on the exact opposite criteria as the fox farm did, I think, if they bite, they’re great soldiers, and if they cower, they make a terrific workforce. Dad wants a fighter, Mom would like a passive one, perhaps.

The calm ones, meh, keep at ‘em, most will bite eventually – Chagnon again, sorry.

The point of invoking the fox farm was that we select for the flight or flight response for ourselves, but also it was that if you select a trait, sometimes you get a whole suite of traits, you shake up the whole spiky ball of traits, and I guarantee that strength, warrior mode, is an entire different ball of traits than the creature who would live our better dreams. I’m saying, the “strong” human doesn’t really correspond with the calm fox, not usually, I think a strong person is more like the biter, and the quietly strong person who doesn’t start any fights is an ideal, the model, more a part of the dream than the current set of actual, functioning, rough desires.

I think, like the foxes, if we stopped selecting the fighters and the flyers, as they did with the foxes, we might see a miraculous transformation, stuff we never dreamed. The fox farm grabs our imaginations for exactly that reason, right?

Though I am failing forever to express it, just hearing of the foxes made my vision seem possible, and I intuited something like, “You can’t think that from here,” meaning you can from just over there somewhere, change yourself and your new brain can have new thoughts – even if you only change one thing, sometimes. Plus again, the speed of the results in the foxes, only a few generations! One is tempted to have hope or something.

And so I advocate for what I do, against the abuse of childhood and against the Red Queen’s Race of conflict, and I wonder, dream really, of what great thoughts a less abused generation might be able to access that we cannot.

I mean, I say, “stop spanking,” but it means so much more. You can’t “stop spanking,” without first completely revolutionizing pretty much everything else about human life. If you’re not going to spank, your kid is not going to do that thing you like, not automatically. You’re going to have to convince them – and that requires some revolution, because that requires living a defensible life, it would require you making that thing you like something worth having in the first place. But I mean, if that happened it would only take one generation.

Do what you can, as much as you can. You are one of the unknown number of generations it would take, it seems obvious we are not a controlled experiment and it would take us longer than it took the foxes, so more than a few. Perhaps we can hope in terms of the Turtle Island meme, seven generations, and new thoughts, better desires awakened in each of them, spurring us on, making it easier with time.

It’s me plan.

Jeff

June 8th., 2023

Sorts and Purposes

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It takes me a very long time to come to the point, in fact, before I bury it again, let’s begin with it: the purpose of the Autist is to explain the Neurotypical to the Neurotypical.

We are a mirror, instructive by contrast. What a neurotype cannot see of itself, it can of another type, and vice versa. The Autist, familiar with their own mind, learns what a Neurotypical mind is by listening to them describe ours, the one we know – by a process like arithmetic we can glean what sort of mind theirs is.

It would seem the reverse is not happening, the Neurotypical, familiar with their own minds, rarely learns what an Autistic mind is by listening to us describe theirs, the one they know, and applying the addition or subtraction of our perceptions – thus my partially tongue in cheek new term for the most common, or dominant type – robust. They are not so easily given to introspection, the implicit reverse logic and the opportunity to audit themselves this way doesn’t seem to occur to them.

I think it’s a neurotypical trait, the darkest side of which is conformism, a sort of a policy that other sorts are not equal and comparable. It’s not an insult, it’s a requirement for their very typicality and dominance, isn’t it?

But it’s exactly my point.

This is exactly the sort of thing that everyone else knowing it doesn’t mean jack. They have to know it, somehow, I mean they have to know it’s only a neurotypical trait, rather than God’s Universal Bloody Will, right?

And that impossible job is ours.

It is not our job to explain to the genetically unconsciously xenophobic about all the different sorts out there, that is obviously impossible, they aren’t even interested.

It is our job to explain to them how their way of life is killing the planet and that they won’t survive it either. Right? I may be new as an Autist who knows it, but I am not new as a human being and the framing is always theirs and it is always wrong, and the abuse is always named after the victim, and the abuser has no name, it’s just . . . typical. Because with names comes shame. They are not going to do it themselves. If you have seen the quality of what they call “research,” regarding Autism, you know, they are never going to classify themselves in their system of faults and treatments.

Our job – and I’m tired of doing it alone, honestly.

Jump in any time, Kids.

Jeff May 26th., 2023

Gonzo Science – Your Fighting Genes

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Gawd, the propaganda is so obtuse, so horrifying simple and false. The flighty sounding talk about self-knowledge isn’t always high level, it’s basic as can be too: if you don’t know yourself, you can’t know anything, even your own thoughts, speech, and actions may not be you, how would you know? If the world clearly seems a certain way to you, you have to ask yourself, why is this what my mind looks to see? Why have I evolved the sense of that certain way? If the world is clearly a struggle and a fight to your mind, then you were evolved to see fighting, you have genes for fighting.

It follows that of course we have other genes with other concerns as well, and the current and long time social narrative is that these others have to live around the fighting. The current and long time idea is that you “have the fighting genes,” end of story, it’s static, created Human nature in new words, we are still and forever dealing with them, but of course what is missing from the conversation is the environmental control of genetic expression. If our other genes and other concerns wish to change anything about the fighting, we need to take that argument a level deeper, and undermine the gene, find a way to stop selecting it.

If we could adjust the environment away from abuse, our children would be slightly less under its control, and this would give their children a better chance to do the same. This was my parenting plan – you want to make God laugh? Never mind, it’s still my theory.

Come on, this was easy, it’s obvious. The minute I heard of epigenetics, this was all sitting there, obvious.

There are fighting genes in humans, and there is epigenetics, and there is spanking: the gene, the control mechanism, and us working it like an oar, making sure from approximately birth, that the environment is a fight, ensuring the activation and repeated selection of the war genes. Plain as day, I have had trouble expressing this because I assumed it was obvious and simple and everyone knew, I swear to God. How do we not? Do you not?

I mean, this obvious truth is buried under a ton of flummery.

Freud’s drives are just the static Nature broken down into components, balancing them seems to be all that can be done and I guess most people manage it well enough? Primatology too, just talks about the past, the “making of our Nature,” or something, it looks away from our this-minute evolution too. Any system of human parts and components comes out of the static meme, the meaningful parts are behaviour and genetics, not the structural hardware.

What if your baseline “Human Nature,” was a moving thing, a foundation of shifting mud? (the following I wrote a few days ago on Twitter.)

What if?

What if there were those “warrior genes?”

What if there were? What might the world look like?

Well, you’d expect war – check.

You might expect some rape, warrior genes selecting themselves – check.

You might expect a military sort of social organization, an hierarchy of authority – check.

You might expect that a creature with such genes admires and promotes strength and aggression – check. Ask me if you don’t believe me. It’s most of the blog.

You might expect a development that turns adorable babies into aggressive adults – check. Again, I’m always writing this.

You would expect that individuals lacking the selected for aggression would be pathologized and/or marginalized, perhaps killed – check. (Won’t make you ask: all the “gender critique,” can and should be seen as patriarchy, warrior patriarchy and they don’t really care if boys love boys, but they care terribly if boys love at all and hate insufficiently. This would seem to be the obvious aim of male circumcision, so we do things for this reason.)

Enough?

Show me something about people that says we DON’T have and live from our warrior genes.

Every argument you have for a nasty Human Nature would support warrior genes, wouldn’t they?

Has this book been written yet?

😘

(back to live on Saturday.)

I suppose if the book existed I would have found it by now. I want to write it, but I’m doing this instead.

I’m jaded; I don’t have the hope that we will do this, see our own making, and I have to say, it means all that nineteenth century talk about consciousness is rubbish, that if we don’t see this first level deep into ourselves, we cannot claim to have it. We remain beasts indeed, as long as we do not take this step.

Jeff

May 13th., 2023

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 Landscapes of Fear

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I’m learning the term on an episode of NOVA , “Nature’s Fear Factor.”

I’d heard the story of how it was first studied, the wolves in Yellowstone took some prey, but changed all the prey’s behaviour and protected some of the plants the prey eats, restoring the habitats in Yellowstone in a way that surprised us all, but I hadn’t heard any theory around it.

Now that I have, it’s clear that it’s exactly the same argument I am making about humans, that there is more to life and evolution than selection. There is now the landscape of fear as an established evolutionary fact and factor rolling out across the world of animal biology. Perhaps that’s the simplest way to say it, or aspect of it, although I haven’t heard Sir David or I guess Elder David (Suzuki) say it, that apex predators serve to protect the food of their prey, maybe preventing extinctions, and certainly acting as a control, as they point out.

I hadn’t had the roundness to put “acting as a control” in context before; one needs to hear the details at least once, the nuts and bolts of it, I suppose. If I’m being kind to myself.

The picture of elk eating and so controlling willows and wolves eating and controlling them, it’s organized enough . . . but then, do the apex predators control themselves through their territoriality and antisocial ways, yes they do, wolves and bears and lions and such do appear to serve this function on their own species as well, fending or killing off the other wolves before all the elk are gone, just as they fend or kill of the elk before the forests are gone. Of course you know where this is going, of course that’s us too, our only control on ourselves is us.

I guess this is a call for war and death, because it seems in that function we have failed, let the world down and given up any control and allowed ourselves to drive all the prey to oblivion. It would be if I were that sort, but I’m not so I will point out that control and death are not synonymous and humans show an amazing capacity (for animals) to control themselves by another means, namely birth control. It is inconvenient that we tend towards traditional forms of control and resist this method, as a social animal somehow, as an antisocial one, we find advantage in ourselves breeding uncontrolled and when we see a need for control we think we need an army of our own children to control some “other.”

It seems lions and I suppose tigers and bears all lack this social rule and follow the larger biological rule of territoriality and when even a mother bear’s cub reaches a certain age or size, it is subjected to this control: find your own space. In this way the world is not covered in bears and other things exist, there are still berries and salmon and honey in the world. I’m not saying we have to run game theory on our kids like they do – but we have to do something, control ourselves; we are the apex predator and we need to grow up and realize that no-one is doing that for us.

But we’re not just wrong or bad. This is happening, so there must be reasons. This is every animal’s, every predator’s world, none of it is new, so it’s not that we don’t have a strategy to control ourselves and not eat ourselves out of house and home. We have one, hinted at already, but controlling the other, in a larger, group game of territoriality has somehow morphed into breeding more and more soldiers on our own crowded territory in order to fend off the other and create some space. It’s an irony that tends not to leave anyone the time or peace in which to appreciate it.

My thing, my argument with the world is that we may blame that other, or our fear of them for everything, but this is our strategy. Their existence may be a “scientific fact,” but all this that we do about it is contingent, in Foucault’s sense, not written in stone. Birth control, again, the apparent alternative, is already sort of available. The problem with the old strategy, the group territoriality, is it has a dark side, an unconscious component that carries on uninterrupted and all of our conscious moral interventions simply attempt to mitigate the inevitable results of that less conscious behaviour.

I suppose the idea breaks down for us, because we have become our whole world in that way, humans are our predator, but also one of our prey. Perhaps the same reversal, our crowding inside our castles to try to control some enemy’s crowding of the habitat, means exactly the same reversal of the effect of the landscape of fear our predator selves creates, that our prey selves are not forced away from overgrazing, but forced into it instead.

I’ll wrap up, but I feel I’ve missed it, or at least that there’s more to learn from this newish idea. I expect I’ll be back to it.

Jeff

Oct. 26th., 2020

60 today

Variations on “Proactive Aggression”

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More stuff resulting from the EP book, the Goodness Paradox, from June.

Of course you can’t eliminate proactive violence by the application of proactive violence – so there is something else going on. We only say we’re combatting proactive violence and aggression by doing this, but really, doing this, waging this battle, does something else for us instead. Without drawing all the lines and trying to prove the matter, I will simply say that despite these efforts at “morality,” we still seem to organize ourselves on the authoritarian/alpha model and the “crime” and “immorality” we are battling do not seem to be disappearing from the world. Only the reactive stuff did. As I think Wrangham says, capital punishment was our proof against the bullies of the world in the smaller societies, in the past . . . are we not doing that anymore? Is that we call “murder” now, and it’s not for most people to do?

It does seem to be the plot of every movie, the tension between on the ground justice like that and either the modern ideal of the law, or a corrupt law enforcement. We are all wrestling with this problem in some way. His examples of small society executions did sound pretty corrupt. Seems to me that the winners in that scenario are the meanest ones, not the nicest ones. It’s horrible to ponder this stuff as “the roots of morality,” mostly because it means the tree is not what it’s supposed to be either.

OK, so the proactive alphas have beaten and supplanted the reactive alphas.

One – yeah, no kidding;

Two – oh, I forget. Moving on.

OK, I accept the self domestication, and less completely, the necessity of complex language for it – suspicious of the details, but the big picture doesn’t conflict with anything I can think of, anything real, anything I believe that I can think of. I was stupidly ignorant of the depth of language’s existence, most of a million years, I did not know that and I’m fairly surprised, honestly. Not sure what I thought, but now it seems that it must have only been a hundred or two thousand I was guessing. I’ll admit I had drawn a blank on the age of tool use also, which might have given me a clue. I know that is beyond the million year mark.

Waking up another day, and . . . we have a problem, Doctor.

I am worried that we really are conflating reactiveness with alphaism, that alphas may “react” a lot, but it’s not unthinkingly or uncontrollably, it’s just their policy – their winning policy. They say it, write it explicitly, you must react to everything, you cannot allow any insubordination, it’s in the Art of the Deal, guaranteed. Wrangham gives too much credit to this reactiveness. It’s the reason chimpanzees can’t compete with us and organize for a proper temple or a war, of course – but alphas are organization, not reactive chaos. They are a simple, crude organization, to be sure, and yes indeed, the alpha works to destroy more complex forms of organization, so maybe it’s chaos relatively to better organization schemes, but it’s not Jacob’s Ladder, not completely.

I have to check – he may have already said or is going to more clearly, that humans really do not have alphas, genetic alphas? I would still suggest that their system is always accessible and that the modern world is full of alphas by choice, cultural alphas or something. And again, a totalitarian, capital punishment dealing coalition is still rather authoritarian, one could say the alpha functions and rewards are simply being shared some in these egalitarian societies. But the upshot would be that reactive aggression is long gone and now it is simply the way we characterize the aggression of the other, an accusation against those whose proactive aggression we do not like – and pretty much all of the aggression and violence that means anything is of the proactive sort, both the crime we fight, and the aggression and violence of the crime fighting effort. I’m feeling like I often do, like this brilliant person is making a brilliant try, making an elegant case, for someone who isn’t seeing the main thing . . . not fair, and I know he keeps showing me otherwise, maybe . . .

Is reactiveness exactly autonomic mode, the fight or flight response? Again, if so, to test for both responses and call it all aggression seems weird. And are we talking about selection against the animal’s, uh, I want to say “survival instincts,” but it seems archaic, survival systems, its defense systems?

If civilization begins with disabling your defenses, then that makes my whole punishment is mostly just abuse idea a little less outlandish, doesn’t it? And absolutely, of course. Of course our abuser complains about our “reactive aggression,” don’t they? Ha! Suddenly I’m angry, my BFAM is now the enemy! “ . . . thus making cooperation possible,” my ass!

Thus making abuse and slavery possible, you mean. Proactive aggression, remember? Do you really find cooperation easy to come by? Must be nice.

I hope I’m being my usual infantile, think I’m inventing the world self here, I’m really hoping – and hopeful, honestly – that this is Wrangham’s point also. I guess it’s just that a great deal of these books is the author telling you everything that led up to here in this conversation, and I’m reacting to that before I let him tell me his news. So hold on there, Jeff – isn’t this exactly what you were looking for, exactly the science and evidence you’ve been looking for to support your thesis? This is exactly the point in the conversation where AST enters the world and should enter our conversation about it, I think.

. . . but it feels like some structural shift is looming, somehow. He’s talking about selection, call it cooperation, call it slavery, whichever, it was selected for, somehow outcompeted other hominid organizational schemes . . . eesh. You don’t mind saying “cooperation was selected for,” do you? Who wants to say the other thing was?

It has been in other creatures, though, right, sort of, castes of bees and ants – do you suppose the ants abuse the aphids? There’s a matter of freedom, maybe, ha. I’m not confident in that declaration. Things analogous to slavery, perhaps. OK, I’m confident, just not in a documented way. Ha. It’s an abysmal thought, are we, what’d he say, twelve thousand generations down a road of selecting ourselves for slavery?

It brings me back to the only positive I ever find in it all, if we selected this, we are self-created things and so proven capable to create or recreate ourselves and we could always just do it again. Brings me back to authority again, the alpha and the alpha coalitions, they like it this way. As always, the firssst thing we gotta do isss get rid of that bear. He’ssss gummin’ up the whole project! Sorry. And yes, doggone it, he is the project, but he’s problematic, he stands for the fight. If you fight him, his kind is winning. If our counter argument to his proactive aggression is proactive aggression, as Wrangham said, we are still selecting for him. Ah. Brothers again, walking the same mobius strip of hopelessness. Sigh.

Again, he’s said as much, domestication itself implies slavery. One could have pulled the slavery idea from what he said about cooperation, it’s just the other side of a coin.

Peaceful domestication, even slavery, as long as we get a life, get to breed, this I do not think would be enough in itself to set me against the world, all of that . . . without what I see as a lot of unnecessary violence and war. Because of that, I reject the human strategy – well, war and the destruction of the home planet. OK, war, destruction of the home planet and a system of constant, ubiquitous child abuse, except for THOSE THREE THINGS . . .

LOL. OK, I hear you, executions promote morality, sure. All I’m saying, all I think I might have to add to the conversation is, part of the selection problem, is the downsides of the moral murder, we aren’t selecting it out, and we have all agreed we will not have thieves in our midst, but murderers are not a problem. When we opt not to select it out, we go blind to its downsides, three of which I have already suggested. We look after those three, maybe we want to keep the slavery. I do love those pyramids!

Speaking of the pyramids, those were genius, weren’t they? You know why they’re still here? They’re giant piles of rocks. What are you going to do to “tear them down,” move the pile? That is an awful lot of work for reactors and disorganizers. Genius. Those folks knew something about human nature!

Pastoralists do not abuse their flocks. We could abuse our domesticated selves less, I mean if we really are, if we’re not afraid that we’ll all just up and flee our jobs if we stop cracking the whip on ourselves. Ah! There’s something new maybe! Try this:

Reactive aggression is on the downswing, almost finished it with us, and for a long time that has meant less aggression, less violence generally, sure . . . but has the other sort been on the rise? History has been a long process of adding laws, adding restrictions to behaviour, has it not? Prehistory for humans was a long reduction in senseless proximity fighting, surely, in some way, proactive aggression, beyond predation and feeding, was new at some point and has been growing since something like an inception, in longish terms?

Do we expect some counter-force, some reason it hasn’t simply been growing more and more prevalent, and wouldn’t anything just keep growing? I submit to you, that in one way or another, we are utterly obsessed with it, that this moral murder scenario has indeed grown and swallowed all of our lives. Unfortunately, with so many of us about, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t “working,” that whatever we are selecting ourselves for is enabling our outcompeting every other animal on Earth.

So the argument is that we do something that doesn’t “work” as well, on purpose.

Which, environmentalist hat on now, is exactly it, we are too good at this, too good for our own good, we have found a way to kill anything and everything and even dear old Mother earth. We need to be worse, less successful, weaker. We are much too strong; “strength” is social-ese for science-ese’s “proactive aggression,” I think.

Bringing it a little ways back towards earth, I’ll come back to his conundrum, we can’t select ourselves out, we can’t unselect for unselectors, but we try, don’t we? It’s an obsession, as I say, we are forever making plans to bring some kind of pressure to stop some form of violence, and our plans all seem to depend on some sort of proactive violence. It is in fact, my contention that if it ever worked, if we managed to put a halt to all crime and misbehaviour for a time, that subsequent generations would remain vulnerable and subject to it, because socially approved, civilizing proactive aggression would be the lifeboat for all bad things, and even if all unauthorized violence ended, it would still be inherited, mother to child, elders to youngers, as always, in the authorized version.

This is where I might interject my AST and say something about constantly losing this attempt must be working out for us, somehow, all things either having been selected for or coming along as part of a package with something else that was, there must be some net perceived upside for it. I can’t imagine that human proactive violence is a side effect of domestication syndrome, it doesn’t seem to be for all the other animal cases. It’s just supposed to have been a catalyst for ours, right?

In fact, other than as our trigger, I kind of think it’s a different conversation. What I meant when I started with “try this” – so the scourge of reactive violence is way down, and I questioned whether the frequency or effect of the proactive violence was rising still, and this would be my idea for why –

Jeff

June, 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