Human Nature

No Theory

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

That’s what people got.

The end is nigh, temperatures will rise, and the fascists are coming again – we can see something coming and with experience we can guess what it is, but it is coming because we have no theory to explain ourselves and therefore no theory upon which to science ourselves out of anything.

Human Nature, whaddayagonnado – this from our fucking theorists.

I am exhausted with all the verbose analyses, the names for attitudes, the recent history of what passes for “thought,” the big words . . . all the bloody detail – when you have no basic theory.

No-one is paying anybody to solve the problem, to come up with a theory – let’s turn that upside-down, antisocialization theory style, shall we? The powers that pay for research have decided to starve a theory out of existence. I do this on my own time and money, I know – I do nothing here, on my own time and money, pretty much.

The money that directs research and society is protecting the whaddayagonnado episteme. They have to believe people are crap and deserve the poverty and death they give them all day long, don’t they, so it’s Human Nature at the universities, and probably something religious or cultish at home.

And if your Nature is bad, then abuse is harmless, what is it hurting, a sinner or a chimpanzee, who cares? Who sees? Not God and not chimpanzees! And since no amount of harm matters since evil is already your Nature, any single digit percent apparently gained from the deterrents, any upside at all – abuse only threatened – is all good. This is the theory of all punishment, all the way to ABA torture, honestly, isn’t it this line of thinking that goes all the way to the death “penalty,” which surely teaches zero percent?

You got no theory and we’re helpless as the world ends because the Kochs prefer a platonic essence to science, but honestly, “Nature, essence,” – it’s pretty complex. Every horrible thing anyone ever did is “explained,” by it, the coming end is supposed to be explained by it – and there’s nothing simple or pure about it, every adjective ever applied to people is in the definition – so it’s a catch-all, if it happened to or by a human, it’s Human Nature. Circular, meaningless. But somehow it ends all conversations.

If somehow, evil wasn’t just natural, then we might feel like we had to do something about it, huh. Then a whole lotta human behaviour might have to explain itself. How many explanations have you missed? How many times have you heard, “ . . . bah, Human Nature?” How many lines of inquiry die there every day, and still we wonder at ignorance if we notice it. The best novels don’t depend on it, you feel like all was provided – but real life can settle for it! That’s not as important as writing a great novel! I know, it’s a joke. Sort of. But we don’t settle for “atomic Nature,” or even probably “chimpanzee Nature.” When we are scientists we are materialists, we want to know specifics, details; when we are talking about ourselves, it is generic language and “Natures.”

So again, this “Nature,” with absolutely everything in it – what creates that? Are we to assume some real causes in the world cause it all, love and hate, fat and thin, tall and short? It is not kind of obvious that each of these pairs of things require at least two causes and not a single Nature?

It is the ultimate in data compression loss, isn’t it? Everything is in there, but all static, whatever goes into the Human nature box doesn’t need a specific cause? People simply “are (insert adjective here),” regardless of anything in this coarse reality! Come back with the weak “dual Nature,” and I will simply break people down into more weight classes, seriously – “OK, how about TWO causes for everything under the sun?”

Seriously?

I’m sorry, I heard that one from a lovely man at a terrible time for them, “perhaps a dual Nature,” but they aren’t the first or the only one to suggest it.

You got no theory because clearly, someone wants it that way and has placed the indiscriminate filter of Human Nature on everything we might like to know. You got no theory because this situation obliterates all causality. By pushing all of our self knowledge through this black box and deleting the tracking data for human behaviour, we set the stage to be gaslighted about anything and everything.

“Human Nature,” the meme, the myth, the lie, not the Nature, is the root of a lot of troubles. Again, if we are to science our way out of the coming end, the firrrsssst thing you gotta do isss get ridda that bear. He’ssss gummin’ up the whole project!, of course I mean lose that “Human Nature,” business that deletes all your data. We gotta get materialist on our own asses.

And dash it all, that is the project.

Jeff

Feb 16th., 2023

Redefinitions 18 – AST VS Popular Memes, Rhetoric

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Spoiling

Rhetoric

Redefinitions – 10. Rhetoric

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this word, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Rhetoric”

I’m up to Number Ten in the blog, I think, I’m jumping a few, I suppose I could renumber, but I have a few started already.

This one is mostly to say and demonstrate: you know all this already.

The existence and the common understanding about rhetoric proves the matter, doesn’t it? You know you have a default. You know about the things that are so deep and unquestioned that no-one even has to say them. You know that all we have to do is lay out a problem, mention a name or a type and the rest is understood.

All I’m saying is your defaults, what you “understand,” are not universal truths. There are real world reasons and causes for what you can and cannot understand. I know no-one puts these two memes together in the same place at the same time, for obvious reasons, the reasons being that if you think “mention a name and we’ll hurt/kill them,” doesn’t have a real world cause, then you think that is a created thing – and “our murderousnesss comes straight from God and creation,” well, that is a well worn trope – but science it ain’t. Your defaults are not God’s defaults, they are a matter of your genetics, what sort of creature you are, and your environment, and the interplay between them.

So you thinking that way, that violence is automatic and created, you having this default is indicative of your environment and the sort of creature you are: for this creature, at this moment, with this makeup, “problem,” + “identity” = violence, every time, often enough that the creature’s evolved language doesn’t require the words to be said. You see where I’m going. Genetics.

How is that OK?

How is this creature ever to crawl out of this muck?

I get it, this is the creature that has survived so far, with these genes, but really? “Survived this far?” Does that soundbite come from the same folks who think that hundreds of millions of years of dinosaur life – three times, no less! – was a “failure,” because they’re dead now? If we don’t make it through the coming years, we can count ourselves in mere thousands. “So far.” Bloody visionary, ain’t it?

I’m saying there’s a gene for that and we do have the option to feed that bad wolf a little less, part of which would be to see that simple equation as the “our problem,” it is and not accept this awful default as the way it is and the way it ought to be. That’s the opposite of evolution, where creatures see what they ought to be and become it.

Jeff

Oct. 23rd.,2022

#WEAKTOGETHER

The Double-Bind Formula

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I’m feeling nostalgic. Here’s a post I might have made ten or more years ago, back to childrearing.

The double-bind proves the matter, the noise cancels out when Mom and Dad make conflicting demands, make it impossible to do the right thing, the ostensibly right thing, and all that is left is antisocialization. We know it’s a game played upon the subservient person or the child, an unwinnable game for us when we are subjected to it.

But do we know it’s the entire point of all the punitive abuse?

That it’s not some game outside of what is presently a parent’s job, but possibly the most important and causative thing we do? Not an endorsement, important, I didn’t say in a good way. The impossible bind is antisocialization theory in a nutshell, that fairness and actual equality are not the point, the point is that you are altered by the experience, not for the nicer. The naked, public humiliation of the impossible bind only works to embitter us even more, or faster.

Jeff

July 3rd., 2022

Rough Drift

Jeff/neighsayer1 Comment

Not a typo, I’m trying to be clever.

Diversity is the first half of evolution, you don’t get selection without providing options, right? The most common versions of traits and genes, we assume are so because they match the most common environments, they have had the broadest success, but species appear to retain some diversity so that when that common environment changes, other traits and genes have their chance to shine and species carry on, changing in relation to the environmental changes, not necessarily quickly enough or without some serious trouble, but that’s the idea.

If they’re here, they did that, that species does that, right? If something had happened that a species had no capacity to deal with, then those ones are not here. Diversity is flexibility, which is viability when you know that environments change.

The human neurodivergent population knows this about themselves, that they are perhaps spare parts to some in the current environment, but crucial future spare parts for the species.

Personally, my mission in life seemed obvious at maybe six years of age, it seemed plain as day to me that the lifestyle of abuse and control I was born into couldn’t possibly be sustainable and I am spending my life ‘explaining shit to people’ about it, as young Master Hunting didn’t want to, I mean, if anyone is listening. And I mean, I didn’t know about neurodiversity until, well, now. I thought they had the same brain as me and were simply in error, and I could explain it to folks.

Hey, I think that’s nostalgia. It did look much simpler back then, and I just felt smart. I knew I was the odd one out, but perhaps from a more extreme stupidity, I never dreamed that it was me that was disabled. I was looking at adults raging out on little children, I never dreamed it was me that was broken in all of it. My moral outrage ruled me, even when I’d step on a hundred rakes, at least I wasn’t beating children. The whole world was disabled, they couldn’t seem to understand the simplest morality. I still feel the need to say this every day: everything is a crime except that, except hurting people who can’t fight back, on purpose. Only irresistible violence is not a crime to normal people.

Starting to see, demographically at least, by the numbers, this is my disability.

Crucial future spare parts for the species.

The dominant culture, and perhaps the current dominant genetic option, doesn’t think so. It’s rather conformist, hold on, that’s really not strong enough, it’s rather selective, in the deadly, evolutionary sense. Only intuition perhaps, sadly informed by a lot of Twitter propaganda, but I am fighting an awful creeping sense that the dominant thing, mainstream society, neurotypicality is a bad mutation, violently taking over the species by drift, and by fighting diversity, it is setting up to go extinct with the next crisis . . . but that the ‘next crisis,’ is it also, already here. I’ve tried to say, the fighting genes and our social strength are a conundrum. The genetic response to this hazard – humans – wait.

That’s the point, we are the primary hazard that humans face now, not tigers or freezing, and I suspect typicality describes the genetic response to that most typical hazard – strength, social control, “defensive” violence, this is the conundrum. The neighbors response, genetic and behavioural, is our environmental hazard and ours is theirs. This awful drift can be seen, heard, and felt whenever all humanist gains are jettisoned for the next war: if it doesn’t help you win a fight, lose it.

Right?

I think all genes are not “selfish,” but I worry that there are genes operating in error, that the defensive gene is also the genocide gene, that whatever genetic combination it is that wins the wars will sacrifice the crucial, God-given diversity to do it. That even if billions survive the next decades, if they are billions of warriors, that this was a genetic bottleneck where much of what was good in us is lost, because what almost kills you leaves you broken, not “stronger.”

Strength is weakness. Diversity is life.

You know what I think, that all this genetic talk is not determinism, I think the lifestyle change would change the gene options, and I think it’s a two step function, you have the gene options, so our power is to arrange not to activate the troublesome ones, not to create the environment that needs them activated and selecting themselves – stop the violent social control, most importantly stop “spanking” which is a word that means “creating an abusive environment for a child to set his genetic fighting options to “on.””

“Strength,” in the bad gene’s words.

I swear.

Jeff

June 30th., 2022

The Philosophy of AST

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

AST is not a philosophy of First Causes, or absolutes, its basic premise is a rather high-level observation that works, despite an entirely fuzzy world in which anything, any word can be twisted into various shapes or viewed from various angles.

To wit, it begins with the observation that punitive abuse of humans that is supposed to improve us has real world effects and an improvement in overall behaviour is not one of them, that bad behaviour and all of its associated pain and suffering abound in the human world, more so than in the worlds of other creatures, who do not practice this self abuse.

I mean, those philosopher folks are right, idealism and all, we really can’t know “things,” “in themselves,” and all that, only the echoes of our minds and senses and all, but I’m sure there’s a school that points out that when these things only exist in our minds, that in those cases that we can. I think everything in my statement of AST’s loose “basis,” are those sorts of things, our behaviour, abuse, pain, “the human world,” all constructs and as such, all proper fodder for thought. Idealism can make none of those things disappear, can it?

AST won’t be dragged down into the minutiae of either genetic chemistry or philosophical idealism. All these things exist.

Absolutes, First Causes, these are likely unknowable – after all, you and I are not God, are we? The limits of the universe are not our limits anyway, so AST dispenses with the idea, let God worry about absolutes – and as for the opposite, the supposed impossibility of relativism, AST thinks it has an answer for that too, my argument about direction. Again, from the premise, AST’s First Observation, we see a direction – which, in a limitless, relativistic universe is really all there is, since we are all moving in time, as evidenced by the sense of gravity, says Einstein – and we do, we have the data with which to fill the only data field, we see the direction, we see what our abusive control does. Well, I do, anyway.

OK, AST – Antisocialization Theory – has some definitions it prefers too, mostly it argues that “strength,” is not an unassailable boon. Strength as sacred, this is the top moral thought of a social group, of a village, or of a nation, and the Earth is all dying together, all at once, we need to crash through that glass ceiling to a morality that doesn’t make the Earth a toxic battlefield. We need to define a morality for all of us, for the world. Group preservation will be the end of everything.

But that’s what we call the direction, strength. That’s the goal, a goal is a direction, in the absence of absolutes. That is our data point. AST sees the direction you are going, I see what you are making of yourself, and I see you insisting nothing you do matters, that you were made this way by something else, but I can see your feet moving and the way you are heading.

In this sense, AST is probably disqualified as philosophy, that it computes using constructs as facts (as the social facts they are), and probably removes it from science proper for the same reasons – but science it is, because it deals with observable phenomena, and doesn’t need to overstep – I should point out that AST’s enemy, the equal and opposite meme, Human Nature, not only also has no good philosophical grounds, rather it’s the assumption underlying most schools, forever unanalyzed, but that Natures themselves have long been the object of ridicule, “essences,” indeed. Human Nature, like AST, is considered “observable,” but the first part, the essence, obviously can’t be. That is only an ancient and much loved circular bit of nonsense. AST, in the real, relativistic world, begins with no such embarrassing error, requires none. Inasmuch as directions exist in nature, “Natures,” cannot.

Jeff

June 25th., 2022

Redefinitions 10 – AST VS Popular Memes, Resilience

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Redefinitions – 10. Resilience

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this word, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Resilience”

I spend a lot of ink on strength, and of course, “resilience,” isn’t so different, but I suppose the difference is only that resilience knows it’s lost at least one fight already? Ah – resilience acknowledges an objection we perhaps all have at some age, that there is always someone stronger and we are going to lose some. “Strength,” as in the infantile magical state of safety we likely first fell in love with loses power as we learn the world and also loses its critical necessity when we lose a battle or several and realize we still need to live and carry on afterwards. Then we are going to need the sort of strength that even losing cannot debunk – resilience.

Maybe you can be strong again.

If you read the preamble once, or have ever read me before, you know what that serves, what we want your strength for, whatever you can muster again, the war effort still needs you. If you can’t march, perhaps you can teach. If you can’t do that, can we use your image, then? If all else fails, your failure can terrorize someone. I know, like in Fear and Loathing: I go too far.

Mostly, resilience doesn’t mean back to battle, only back to work! When I did this before, I took this tack, I suppose it’s still the one I like, give the objection for you, and then try to answer that.

How can that be bad? Strength and resilience are bad? So you advocate for weakness?

Yes, yes, bloody Hell, yes, I advocate for “weakness,” because there’s a lot of people in that word, all of us at both ends of life and most of it in between. Resilience is what is called “victim burdening,” like, bare bones, context free, whatever it is, whatever your hurt was, it is on you to bounce back strong from it. There are no plans to slow whatever hurt you, you fix this problem by somehow overcoming it, or failing that, at least by making it harder to see.

Interestingly, the autism community (inasmuch as the first batch of random autistics I’ve started to follow on Twitter are a “community’) says this a lot, insisting this is the only path autistics understand and can work with regarding themselves, to address the causes, that we do not seem to respond with the desired strength, that only addressing the causes seems meaningful to them, I mean us. I wish to make the point to us, and to the neurotypical, that it’s not really “working,” for them either, that the world is not really working at all, rather, it is forever falling apart in violence.

Enough, I already know I’ll be repeating much of this function in forthcoming entries, particularly the ones dealing with those who would help us become more resilient, the good folks of psychology.

Jeff

June 19th., 2022

#WEAKTOGETHER

Redefinitions 9 – AST VS Popular Memes, Strength

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

May 26th., 2022, making changes to the common section, the AST definition.

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Redefinitions – 9. Strength

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this word, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Strength”

OK, I did a lot of this in the “Abuse” entry, mostly in individual terms. I suggested that a hurt baby sees the disparity of the adult’s strength and smartly processes that if they, the baby were stronger, they could have escaped it, fought back or defended. It was too brief, but I offered that a more worldly, older person who is aware of the social control, rules, etc., may not see personal strength as a workable solution on first thought, but that this seems logical to me for an infant. I have said elsewhere that I think perhaps we all make that assessment along with a more general one about Human Nature with our first spanking, again, a smart decision about how to move forward for an infant who has encountered roughness from the world straightaway, likely from its own parents.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s the baby’s smartest move – but it’s a forced play, these decisions are forced upon the infant. These are good, smart decisions to cope with an abusive environment – and all must make them. It’s a system of forced philosophies, a rough, unforgiving world, strength, evil human natures and such, because we create the environment. We force this early, mode-setting choice of opinion on our babies.

Strength, or the love of it, is inescapable, ubiquitous, in human society, a forever, never achieved goal. No awful thing exists that doesn’t have the awful “silver lining” of the resultant “strength,” someone is supposed to gain from it. It’s posited as a sort of progress amid literal setbacks.

This, I believe, has been our “successful” group conflict strategy for a very long time, I mean, the living consider it successful. The victims of conflict and war might argue, if they could, but the living seem to approve, sadly, even the most damaged of them. We traded in quality of life for this life of strength, and we are told to be happy we’re alive, and that the dead would trade us for our life under this threat – it’s shut up and be happy you have a life, just like shut up and be happy you have a job.

Economics. Shut up, you too profit from the war.

Keep controlling those kids so your leaders can more easily do so, and we shall be a strong nation, with an angry population no-one wants pointed at them. A strong nation, the sort that disturbs the other nations’ sleep and spurs them on also, to more and more strength, so worrying us, etc., ad infinitum. This Red Queen’s game of people trying to become stronger than, hold on, checking . . . people, this is madness when we look at it in long perspective, of course. But it is madness by Bobby Jones’ definition, because it is something we do repeatedly, hoping for different results some day, something we do all the time. The strength of nations is our moral ceiling. Yes, we’d all like peace, but let’s be realistic. I think “realistic,” in these conversations means “conforming with my infantile, forced upon me view of “reality.”

I’ll spell it out, I never remember, that is literally a writer’s entire job: strength is bad, strength is hurt, desensitization, and violence. Strength is the direct result of abuse, according to this train of thought I am on, antisocialization theory, strength is stored anger: treat a human unfairly, and give them no outlet, and watch healthy anger slowly ferment into social “strength,” read war and conflict, hate and strife. A society that openly creates more and more of it is up to something, it’s a terrible non-accident looking for a place to happen, and it’s a positive feedback loop as stated above, it goes until the “accident” happens.

Getting long, but I hate to miss a chance to say, I despise the “strong” hashtags, the stay strong message in general, when are people supposed to cry or mourn?

People ought to be horribly ashamed that every time they say it, they are condemning and denying every young, sick and old person on earth, turning their back on everyone who needs them, including themselves, both coming and going in and out of this life.

Jeff

June 13th., 2022

#WEAKTOGETHER

The Myth of Control

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Yes, it’s what they want.

No, they can’t have it.

Their “methods of control” are simply not, they are only abuse. They are not some authoritarian magic that gives you anything you ask for. They are a stimulus that produce a predictable response – fighting.

No actual stimulus in the real world produces “whatever you say you want it to,” and who or what are you that I have to say that?

Yes, your mom and your dad wanted “control.” Yes, the government wants “control.” This is a single vector in the world, a single stimulus produces a single response, a single cause produces a single effect, and what is actually produced in these “control” scenarios is one thing, fighting.

What sort of a broken child are you that you think there is some magic you can say or do to get you anything you want? This isn’t Bewitched. Sorry, kids – this isn’t Harry Potter. Magic isn’t real.

Your mom, your dad, the police, the government, I’m sorry, they’re just wrong, absolutely wrong and mostly just lying to one another and to us all that anything about any of it “works” to produce anything at all but humanity’s endless strife. They don’t say “strife,” of course; they say strength.

Morons, all. What do you need “strength” for? Harmony?

We have applied this control – and this is us, “controlled,” – a global meltdown.

There is one path of actual causality in the social control, and it is that violence breeds violence. The true effect of tossing coins in the wishing well is that the water becomes metallic and less drinkable, and the details of your wishes do not enter into it. I . . . . I cannot speak to you. The conversation has moved on, the conversation reality is having, and you have opted out. I feel like a squirrel would understand this, but a human being cannot.

If you cannot see this, what conversation are we going to have about your wishes?

Jeff June 9th., 2022

Redefinitions 8 – AST vs Popular Memes, Evolution

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

May 26th., 2022, making changes to the common section, the AST definition.

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Redefinitions – 8. Evolution

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Evolution”

Abuse among the in-group makes us “strong,” that is, ready for a fight, predisposed to the primate group conflict human lifestyle, this is AST. The human nature myth says no, you were born that way, and social abuse doesn’t, cannot, hurt you, right, I mean not some “normal” amount of it anyway? The negative human nature idea and antisocialization theory are opposites, myth vs science, static vs alive and evolving.

Between Augustine and Wallace/Darwin, it was Christian Original Sin, the sin was in you, this was the explanation (not easy leaving the irony quotation marks off of that), and since then for some, it’s your “genetic legacy” (sorry, impossible with that one) as a descendant of something like a chimpanzee. I have said repeatedly that if the trouble were a chimpanzee trait, then chimpanzees would have destroyed the Earth and we would have been redundant. It is not the chimpanzees that are doing so much wrong, is it.

To the negative human nature meme, evolution is something that happened in the Myth Time and has ceased today, not unlike creation. I suppose origin stories have always been myths, asking about our origins is asking for a myth?

The brain path for “origins” is in the fiction department of your brain?

Ha. The questions are all in the rhetorical section.

This is the effect of the human nature idea. It is authoritarian and it is not taking questions at this, or any time. Evolution and AST are answers to questions no-one was allowed to ask seriously in the first place, and people don’t seem to have anyplace to put a serious answer. Origins? – fiction department, rhetoric section, fourth aisle. Have a nice day.

Evolution doesn’t fit the existing brain path, and it gets pared down in the attempt, and the end result is basically a creation myth in new words. So, rather than any evolving to do, it’s, sorry, it’s our “genetic legacy,” read undeserving sinner. These apes aren’t ready for evolution. The myth of an evil Human Nature does not provide solutions. Period.

Evolution oughtn’t require “natures.” I’m embarrassed. That shouldn’t need to be said, but there it is, when creatures, when a species doesn’t exist, and then does, and then morphs off again into something else again – what is a “nature?” Creatures that cling to a past way of life are called fossils. I will go so far as to say that since we have begun living from the bad attitude about ourselves, since we became passive things in our own evolution by denying it and preferring the creation stories, it seems to have stopped, we seem to be holding ourselves back, and trending towards conformism rather than innovation.

Jeff June 1st., 2022

Redefinitions 7 – AST vs Popular Memes, Relatedness

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

Redefinitions – 7. Relatedness

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “relatedness”

One thing about this theory is that it appears to contradict relatedness theory, social relatedness theory, maybe even the selfish gene. I don’t hide anything, even when I should, I naively believe in truth and science and if there is something going to hurt AST from the past, we’ll deal with it right now. The authors of those theories don’t agree or appreciate AST, at least not yet. Please, don’t ask me about the circumstances, but I said, “Human child discipline is to make soldiers,” and I suppose it just sounded nuts to them. Their very own and also biology’s general theory now, relatedness, says we treat our own people well and others poorly – I seem to have the whole bloody kit and kaboodle upside down and backwards, don’t I.

Of course, that theory basically only counts one thing as mistreatment, the discontinuance of the gene, to wit, early death. It really doesn’t have anything to say about non-lethal abuse; if you survive to breed, you were “unaffected,” protected by your selfish genes. I’ll refer you back to the ‘Abuse’ entry: this is the early disappearance of three quarters of our pain in biological theory, and the severed joint where psychology should attach to it. I know: nitpicker.

I don’t believe relatedness theory addresses abuse at all, and so it does not explain abuse or damage – let alone explain the even worse treatment we withhold for the Other. I believe relatedness theory depends upon the myth of an evil human nature in that it is assumed that we will naturally abuse and kill the Other by default, in fact, it is obvious that it doesn’t think it needs a reason, in fact – it is self evident in that its authors clearly think any good treatment within the group is what requires explanation.

That’s what they “explained.”

The authors of relatedness theory expect violent chaos, except, look, the selfish gene wants to live! I think the last time I mentioned them, I was guessing that they were one of the few that didn’t predicate upon an evil Nature – but I have corrected myself here. It really doesn’t work at all without it, I mean without the evil human nature or a better theory of abuse, relatedness theory lacks a villain – and again, its authors clearly thought kindness was what required an explanation. They don’t think it needs a villain; the villain is “understood.”

I look forward to a world where villains are a little less understood, where the villains are required to be explained instead. For the record, AST explains the lot of it. It’s not hard, there’s three quarters of the world’s data is sitting right there, free, nobody’s using it.

Jeff

May 13th., 2022