Human Nature

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

The Brain Science of Not Grokking Evolution

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How Thoughts are Formed:

For how things work, how thoughts are formed in the brain, we have some idea of the materials involved, much detail regarding chemical processes – and a lot of analogies.

In some contexts, the brain has pathways, in the context of depression and addiction, we speak of getting caught on a looping path, or of progressively falling into the same patterns of thought, thought to indicate the overuse of a single “pathway.” I have been trying to use this one lately, I have used it a fair bit, and I wanted to for the current blog, but you can’t prove anything starting with a single dubious analogy, can you, I need to at least diversify, if I can’t transcend it.

In Pinker’s brain science tomes, we have modules, or demons, little portions of thought, an addition demon, a subtraction one, one for fighting and one for flight, one for putting a thing on top of another thing, a lot of multipurpose generic thought segments or components that we string together to make a thought or a sentence or a life. He postulates that we also possess a completely unmoored “universal processing” module by which we are able to reason through new situations that our species has never evolved for, citing mathematics and such as evidence of its existence, but this as well as a million other less universal ones, not instead, I think. Perhaps we are born assuming it’s all the universal one, and perhaps we think much of our ideology comes from there, but I’m here to show a major way that this is not the case, that ideology is more basic, made up of simpler demons, using the modules of the brain in the same way everything else does.

I know Freud and other psychologists have their analogies as well, and some folks assign not only identities within the “personality,” as Freud did, but assign them voices too and speak of internal parliaments, but this is a different breakdown, each voice a whole person and we might still be left wondering how each of their thoughts are formed. It doesn’t map onto Pinker’s modules, which are functions, not whole voices. Too, we may wonder how the “ego,” forms its thoughts, etc. the same way.

I’m sorry – only two, modules and pathways?

“Pathways,” has a quirk, an understood one, I don’t think there is a cursor tracing thoughts from point A to point B, away from one ear and towards the other, if it’s a “path,” it’s not spatial but temporal, chemical processes happening over time to take us from one metaphorical “place,” to another. I think I was wrong to use this model so much, “module,” may serve my purposes better after all, but it isn’t a bit temporal, doesn’t seem to move at all!

Perhaps I will change it up, perhaps I’ll be as generic as possible, but you know what is a module of speech or thought that moves is Dawkins’ “meme,” and perhaps the meme is not the module or the pathway, but the product of that structure? The thing I am trying to name in the brain is the collection of cells and processes that produces a meme, say the addition meme, or the flight meme, or the “maybe it’s behind something,” meme – touch the module, it gives you a meme with which to build your thought or your sentence.

It’s difficult, all these things overlap, the modules analogy I’m making mirrors parts of speech, a sentence is a series of components, subjects and objects and verbs, and a thought is a series of modules or pathways mirroring subjects and objects and verbs. We can say, “the dog chased the cat,” and we have modules or some building block or other of thought for each thing, a brain part or process to match each of “dog,” “chased,” and “cat,” and these units can be refitted for wolves and sheep and even Russia and Crimea – analogies prove the point, that there are forms for things, one size fits all memes that we apply to many things and boiler plating these is how sentences and thoughts are created. Ah, here’s a thought, sometimes when a situation does seem new and we have to choose a meme to understand it, apply existing memes to a new thing, we make a poor choice, and that is not the best or most appropriate module for that situation.

This is the point here, however, so before I launch into it, I’d like to produce an example you already know. You know, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

And why stretch it? I’ve already invoked the dreaded wolves and sheep? – nah, no, that’s too fraught. A simple one – ah, “shark infested waters?” I think a lot of us have heard this one lately, that creatures do not “infest,” their own homes! That perhaps “infestation,” is the wrong meme to apply to this situation. Of course it’s  . . . interested. The person calls that an infestation is trying to say the ocean is their home, but the wrong, interested meme gets past us often enough, doesn’t it?

How Thoughts are Protected:

Or, how language maps to thoughts: the word is not the meme.

The word is the label for the meme, in your language, and in your time and place. A rose by any other name. Every culture with a language that knows a rose has a different word, but the rose – and the mental meme – have their own reality beyond the word, and this is the point, if we re-named the rose something else, the flower and the mental meme would not change. Were we to learn that a rose is in fact not a plant but an alarmingly complicated chameleon, then perhaps the thing and the brain unit for “rose,” would have to change, but it doesn’t work the other way about, the word is only a label for the meme in your brain, which is only some bit of brain language for the object.

This is why new, politically correct language is not a meaningful endeavour: labels are not only not the thing, but they are not even the representation of the thing in your brain, only a label for that and changing the word does not, as we hope, change anything inside the brain, indeed, just as saying it in French would not. This argument goes to identities and genders and everything else we try to fix with new language, but I am not going to iterate all that, I am going to go to what I think is the mother of all the PC language failures, “consequences,” in childrearing, followed by perhaps the father, evolution.

This application of  . . . code, I guess, this level of interpretation protects evolved, inherited memes, after all the brain and the person must function in the absence of language too, the  brain couldn’t maintain anything if it could all simply be talked away. I guess where this is heading is if we want to change anything, we don’t change the part of the code everyone sees but leave the new symbols matched to the same old things, meaning use it in all the same places and sentences as the old word, you take control of the mapping – we don’t ask people who may still think of a shark’s existence as an infestation to learn to say “shark inhabited,” if we know they still want to kill them all, we work to educate, remove the fear, and the language follows. We would locate the error by which this person thinks they own the ocean, correct that, and they will stop saying “infested,” when they realize it’s not their kitchen and sharks are not cockroaches and they would apply a more appropriate meme, shark country, or something.

Again, unless someone has an interest in it, then sharks are cockroaches, or ants?

If you felt you had to be in the ocean, though, and had to be exactly where the sharks are hungriest and most numerous, though, perhaps you would say, “infested.” We apply the meme that brings us results, like survival (I don’t mean survival from sharks so directly, it’s not the sharks made this necessary for you, but your employers, I mean to say, “survival of our employment”). The wrong meme is probably not often an accident; you’d think natural selection would either select an accident or weed those out. It’s a form of tech, or engineering, manipulating this layer of thought and existence to our own ends. But it also keeps us at bay when we try to change language for some social improvement, lets us think we’re changing things while the brain keeps everything running to the evolved status quo.

It’s been a long time since I typed this one, about how we stopped saying “punishments” for children after Dr. Spock and started saying “consequences,” instead, and changed almost nothing, punishment already means consequences, it’s only a little more passively voiced this way, and of course, some huge percentage of people still self report spanking, eighty-five or something. Literally the same hands on the same bottoms, different code symbol, same mental meme, same external world and actions. Gentle parenting would have us move from the cause and artificial effect meme both the words reference and to a different function altogether with no contrived “effect,” at all and then neither word would apply.

A teaching meme, perhaps instead. D’ya think?

New words are a dodge, a trick played on us by our species’ memory, by the bureaucracy of biology, where we simply replace the puppet leader figure and none of the machines of state. We live life, thinking the code is the message, blissfully unaware of the formatting beneath, in the evolved memes.

OK, if that was the mother – fitting, I think – then evolution is perhaps not the father, but the great granddaddy of language to meme failures, at least today.

It doesn’t belong among the origin stories at all.

The Human Nature Meme:

The Human Nature idea, with it’s coresident one of creation, is an extension of to quote an archaic term, Man the Maker, or Bob the Builder, using a too-modern one: there isn’t a thing, you make the thing, now there’s a thing, generally with a made-for purpose. This is what we have applied to our species and to the world, we are here, so perhaps something made us, so perhaps we have a purpose (a single, specific purpose, like an axe) and we were made to be this and so we are this. You make an axe, it’s an axe until someone unmakes it. Tools would seem to be the meme for this single purpose, or “Nature,” idea, the Nature of an axe is such and such, and it goes to, “So Grasshopper, what is the Nature of you?”

This is where I get lost, it has this aspect, for sure, the “Natures,” meme, of inferring a single vector, an essence, a single idea like a tool – but on the other hand, people reference if for anything and everything. This “essence,” apparently has the entire gamut of human behaviour in it, from the best to the worst . . . I can’t square it, clearly, “Natures,” are the wrong meme for a living, complex thing like us. Evolution is much better.

But it’s just a word, a symbol. If we just replace “creation,” and “Human Nature,” with “evolution,” we are not changing anything, even in our minds.

And I’m afraid we do. A lot.

Jeff

April 28th., 2023

New, July, 2024:

I’ve had to delete the rest of this, it was not right, we’re moving on, sorry.

It said creation was the older story and evolution the new one, and we don’t think that anymore, now we think evolution was known and Indigenous and natural forever, and creation stories are the new thing. Much of it would still work in proper context, but that context for me now is Neurotype, and it’s all very different.

So that’s it for now, just the language lesson.

I’ll be looking for more to lose too.

Jeff

Automaton

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That’s what I’m calling you, I guess. That’s Antisocialization Theory.

Like a rubber band airplane. Your momma winds you up, and your lieutenant sets you free. Then you go off and do the predictable thing, what you’re designed and built to do, spending the energy they put into you.

Jeff

Apr 14th., 2023

Internalized AST

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That will be ableism, to you, internalized ableism. Perhaps internalized racism, internalized sexism, internalized “gender-ignorance,” internalized hetero-neuro-normative whatever, you name it, I feel my marginalization as an Autist, so I’ll say ableism. It’s not a huge point, because my point that it’s not about any particular marginalized group, we are not responsible for our own disenfranchisement – and words like “ableism,” always name the hate after the victim.

“Anti-Asian hate,” a year or two ago, it’s all-victim, perpetrator-free crime. The news won’t even tell Asians who to watch out for, just don’t be Asian. But ableism.

Thinking ableism is “about” disabled people is agreeing with your enemies.

I know; “about,” and “because,” are complex, and the limitations of language hinder us, I’m trying to solve some of that.

Abuse “because,” we’re disabled, that’s their line – and it’s internalized ableism if it’s ours. It’s not because of us.

Having to abuse everything and everyone, this is some “them,” we’re talking about, a trait of some “theirs,” not everyone except theirs. It’s not like the haters single out your marginalized group, it’s obviously the other way about, they single out one group to keep and marginalize the rest with one broad stroke.

The community on Twitter is forever saying, “nothing about us without us,” and that’s great – but to the haters, it was never “about” us in the first place, they don’t know who we are. We say, they need to start seeing/thinking something about us, but again, they don’t know what we are and they don’t much care, they do it to everyone, it’s a function that really doesn’t look past “Other,” it really doesn’t spend any cognitive energy on things with that designation (what does @autismsupsoc call that, fast and dirty Allistic processing?). That would seem to be the point of the designation, no processing resources for you.

Black people wonder, “what’s wrong with being black?” and the LGBTQ+ community wonders, “what’s so wrong with not breeding?” and the ND community wonders, “what’s so wrong with thinking differently?” and of course the answer always, collectively and individually, is nothing!

Of course, nothing!

I mean, everything has its upsides and downsides, I guess, but nothing, nothing about any of these labels is something anybody needs to bloody do anything about! This trait of wanting to do something about people, though, can we please, before the end of eternity, talk about that? Obviously, that is a problem.

Black and brown folks talk about white people, the Non-Binary talk about cis people, the ND talk about the “neurotypical,” which describes nothing but their perceived numbers, and I don’t deny the Venn diagram is basically one big circle for all of those things, especially around here, but it’s just not the point.

It’s not white peoples’ skin colour that’s the problem any more than it is anyone’s skin colour, is it, and it’s not cis peoples’ breeding habits and it’s not “neurotypical” peoples’ commonness, is it? The hate isn’t “because,” of diverse types of people – and so it’s not “because,” of the simple existence of the haters either, something has gone terribly wrong with them, of course, this is what I’m saying too, but I can’t abide ending the conversation there, naming and blaming isn’t enough.

That we have already been trying for some generations already, the Good Fight is keeping us morally occupied but it’s not solving the problems. Anyway, to say it’s because of who they are, their natures or some such, that’s their crime and their error, isn’t it?

Can we not escape the same lethal ideology of the worst human sorts?

I won’t be caught parroting that, and I’m here to beg you not to be either. There are real world reasons for things, not natures, and the more people insist upon these natures, the worse those people behave.

As I said, there are reasons, there have to be – sometimes I think it is not in my Autistic neurology to accept a noun as an answer to “why” anything, and “because they are, racist, haters, Nazis, white, cis, NT, all these are nouns – and because they simply are doesn’t satisfy me. Nouns are “whats,” and this Autistic needs a verb.

“Why,” is an action question, you “neurotypical” weirdos. Not only is “because those people,” wrong, it’s not even grammatically sane, you couldn’t be right no matter who you named. “Why,” demands a verb.

Of course I had to make my own, it’s “antisocialize.”

The extreme antisocial nature of racism, sexism, etc., this is a noun we all know, hate, but creating hate requires action, a verb, despite what they told us in Sunday school, and despite what your high school science teachers who also attended your Sunday school told you too. You weren’t conceived with a load of hate already on board. They, we, are making the hate.

The noun that refers to knowing this function I have designated Antisocialization Theory, or AST for short, and the dominant folks of this world have it the worst, but most of us have it. It’s what is internalized, AST, the hurt and the need, the hurt from people hurting one another when they think someone needs it and the belief, born of the need, that someone does. Rather, AST describes the process of internalizing negativity generally, regardless of the flavour, and how it changes us, antisocialization is the process of acquiring our internalized hate – I mean the feeling of hate.

Ah!

The specifics, who we’re to hate, and the whys and wherefores of our applied hate, these are perhaps merely informational, a part of our general socialization, certainly they would be considered to be, if we felt that all people have enemies and conflict were inevitable – but the emotional effect, antisocialization, this sets that default. If you were spanked, hate is natural and inevitable to you, and you’ll need to know where to put it.

The same logical structure exists in the positive, your prosocialization would derive from your emotional experience of feeling loved, and so being loved would be natural and necessary for you, but the general socialization of your society and environs likely specifies who and what to love . . . ah, something sort of new, isn’t it.

I’ve been calling “socialization” a general, inclusive heading, the name for all of it and saying it’s made up of positive, neutral and negative socialization – now maybe classic “socialization,” can just mean informational, period, who and what – but the pro- and anti- versions mean something else, something emotional, antecedent to any specifics, the template, the blank forms, so to speak.

Wow, I do believe something moved there.

If only anyone knew, huh.

So the theory is, if you want your kids to experience love, love them and they’ll want that, and if you think you need them to hate, hate on them a little, beat on them a little, and they will want that too, and we know they will find their own people and things to love – and that is the AST theory of racism, etc., that they will find their own things and people to hate too, society provides mates and enemies.

You can “teach,” racism, but you don’t have to. Spank them, show them the systemic racism, and they’ll figure it out, their hate will find its niche. Same for ableism, sexism, too, spanked people and relatively consequence-free targets for them.

This is AST, and this is what we need to fight and to change, that second thing, the “hating on your kids a little,” meme. All of our disenfranchised identities can lobby to be on the “prosocialized for,” list alone, in competition for this decade’s entry, or we can try to solve the problem at its root, with simply deciding we don’t need that, we would rather our kids weren’t hate-ready before they can even speak.

That’s the battle, and it’s the same battle, no matter who you are, stop the spanking, stop the hate.

Simple!

Jeff April 9th., 2023

“Choosing” Love

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 . . . all great ideas, Mrs. Marx and Engels, Drs. M. L. King, Gabor Mate, Alice Miller, Mr. Cavoukian – Bell Hooks, just names from my personal logos, but so many great humanists, all with a terrific idea about how things ought to be, about love over hate, too many to name them all, so many good folks trying, so many apparently obvious rhetorical questions posed, why wouldn’t we choose love?

If I have readers, you know what I think: spanking and it’s mythological excuse, “Human Nature,” is why. But today’s question isn’t that, it’s “why would this be rhetorical?”

All good things hit this wall.

We would choose love – but goddammit, I have forever been choosing love and receiving hate and I’m sorry, but it’s not love I got too much of and not love I need to void myself of, is it? If you didn’t want this from me, why did you do that?!?? We would, but, kind of thing, right? But not for them, or something, right? Surely there is someone out there who deserves some of the limited resource of my mercy.

I’m trying to tell you, you ask, “why choose hate?” like it’s rhetorical, like there’s no answer, like we’re not really looking for an answer.

I woke up today with a thought that is childishly simple, yet still unfortunately true of a world of adults. You know the old saw, a child says in anger, “You made me feel X,” you know, X equals sad, mad, something awful and at some age we start saying, “other people don’t make you feel things, your feelings are yours.”

It’s a bit of gaslighting, doesn’t matter what I do to you, you are responsible for your own feelings, but it has a sort of truth, we do need to own our feelings enough to control them some and such, but it has just occurred to me for the umpteenth time, that isn’t this just what every sort of hate, every “ism,” is, the hated groups are blamed for the feelings of the haters, the haters hate everyone but themselves and it’s everyone’s fault but theirs, all their hate.

But you know what? It’s not so simple, this gaslighting. Rather, there are multiple levels, a ruse within a ruse, and while we gaslight one another in the here and now, that we aren’t responsible for one another’s new and current feelings, we are also closing off any conversation about anyone creating feelings in anyone – about antisocialization, in a word. Nobody affects nobody, apparently.

AST, so, you feel bad, you blame someone, but Psych 101 says your feelings are your own, from some other trauma, not from the person in front of you, so now you feel bad and it’s not their fault, it’s you, and “some other trauma,” of yours, and trauma is always some sort of accident, Psych 101 knows your abuser had their own trauma, so no-one tried to make you feel that way, it’s a . . . choice, ultimately, how we respond to a tragic accident. Why not choose love?

Uh, because it was a trauma and not an orgy?

These haters really don’t create all this hate themselves, is all I’m saying, the haters’ parents do, their caregivers do, their preachers, teachers and coaches do. Contrary to your memes, we can’t just make our own hatred from thin air and we’re not born with an unlimited supply, and of course somebody else makes you feel that way!

I want to say, of course we make each other feel things when we interact, but that’s not the point, the point is they were made to feel that way as a part of their upbringings, and it’s a feeling that doesn’t go away, somebody else makes you feel that way for life.

Your mom, your dad. Your people do that.

Why not choose love? It’s not bloody rhetorical, there’s a real world, living reason, and it’s because of the way they have made us feel, as I tried to express above. If we do not choose love, it is because we have been made to feel something else. Feelings are . . . real, materialistic, they are born and die here, in this world. Your bad feelings happened here, and the source is knowable.

I’m trying to tell folks: we can’t get there from here, but if we stop hurting our kids, maybe they can see more from there, maybe they can “choose” love a little more often than we did.

Jeff

March 23rd., 2023

No Theory

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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

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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

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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