Peacemaking

Never Forgetting

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Proposition: the “good” people assume good things will come, good things will happen, that people try to be good, that of course good is the direction we are going, because of course no-one wants to be bad, and the good people are simply wrong, that what we do doesn’t take us in the “good” direction at all.

“Always remember,” and “never forget” – these are predicated on this reversal – and look who remembers, look who won’t forget.

We say “always remember,” on this idea, that if we “remember,” we won’t do it again, because of course no-one wanted to do that, we want to be good! Right? We say “always remember,” ostensibly to stop the next iteration of the death wish – and then we beat our children, to make sure they’re good, make sure they “always remember” about violence.

All the same things are in place, all the competition and inequality is all still there, people are still motivated as they have ever been – why would “never forgetting” all the eternal inherent conflicts of human life change anything – again, it only does if we are making moral progress. It only makes any sense if the holocaust and all pogroms and wars were accidents that happened because people simply “didn’t know better then,” or just what, forgot how to live in peace, if it was a memory problem or a learning problem in the first place?

If it were a passive accident of forgetting to start with.

What a fully blind, idiot child’s idea that is. Come on. Sorry, God, I forgot not to mass murder, like Steve Martin, I forgot mass murder was a crime? But I’ll remember this time! Never forget!

There’s supposed to be a learning that you don’t forget, isn’t there? Did we find a solution last time, did we learn, and that’s what we’re never to forget? Remind me – what was it again? Don’t follow the thug who will kill your family if you don’t? Did we learn that one? WTF. I see swastikas, I see Hitler’s cursed haircut – it worked. They remembered.

Humanity talks shit.

Your peace talk is shit. Your war talk is science, takes math to hit a target – and your peace talk is blind fucking fantasyland, you are not even trying. At all. You put peace in a box labelled “fantasy,” and then say “always remember.” Then you ritually beat your children, tell them it’s “good,” and lie to one another about “remembering” not to do that again.

When did folks start talking about not beating kids? I suppose there were always a few, the Quakers, they say, like that, but I suppose it’s been at least my whole life, at least one human lifetime, maybe two since psychology started tiptoeing around that. And it’s the same, just talk. I’m an oddball, on some spectrum, I suppose, my life is an endless series of misunderstandings because I take things literally and seriously and I seriously tried to not use force on my kids. No-one understood, and the ex simply forced them behind my back, nothing worked out – but the ex and everybody else, they “always remember” their own abuse. And it helps their kids not at all, they “remember,” and they repeat. Is that what you mean to do about the holocaust?

Look at these millions of deaths. Now – never forget!

Just the trauma. No lesson. No answer to the problem. Look and remember. And again, they fucking did, because humanity is not automatically naturally good. It’s not that we’re automatically naturally bad either, this false binary that we all accept is bullshit. What looks “natural” about us to you? We are unnaturally bad. That is the lesson, the only lesson, the opposite of humanity’s denial and blindness.

I swear to God – forget, already.

Stop “remembering” and bloody well learn something new, for God and humanity’s sake. “Something new” – again, more than one human lifetime ago, psychology noticed that abuse damages people, like before Hitler was born, maybe. Learn that, and then always remember and never forget that, then maybe we’ll see an end to it.

Jeff

July 19th., 2021

The Progress Meme

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Proposition: the “progress” meme suggests that all bad things are aboriginal to us all, in all of our pasts, and so natural, evolved, and to be expected, while only the latest fashions are “good” and “moral.” In this way, perhaps the concept annihilates itself, by placing all bad things in “nature” and making all good things “artificial.”

Someone on Twitter expressed how sad it was to ponder all the closeted people of the past with never a glimpse of freedom of sexuality – my words – and absolutely, but this view is a little like history is only the history of our colonies, sad to ponder anyone around here for the last few hundred years, certainly – but there have also been times and places, even now, where they would cry for us. But then, the view expressed wasn’t unheard of, that it’s sort of a binary, present good, past bad.

The progress meme, right?

I’ve been chasing this idea all my stupid life!

Suddenly strikes me as fascist propaganda, this awful, bigoted past – when it is only lately, a hundred or two years that this brutal, near global conformism has been doing this, thinking it has to kill practically everyone. Isn’t the present nightmare all of more relevant, salient, and right in front of our faces?

Right? But, to the point, wouldn’t these Nazi sorts want you to think that about the past? That hating you is natural and forever? Normal? Even if it’s a few thousand years, all of Bible times, all of history or something – that’s still all modern propaganda more than it is “nature,” is what I’m saying.

If the concept includes its opposite, and most do, if as I’m trying to say here, “progress” must be predicated on an awful, “natural” past and so destroys itself, reinforcing the validity of the awfulness as “natural,” maybe even evolved – then that is the entire point. The point after that is that if the concept has all that, logically and inherently – then you bloody well know it too. Your brain does. The harder we scream “progress” at ourselves the louder our brains hear “the bad things are natural.” We only talk about the side of things we can or want to – but your brain knows everything, the totality of all the concepts. Right?

Philosophers? Right?

 . . . where this is heading: the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people he exists. Right? “Awful is natural,” you can hear the fictional bastard whispering it; I mean, your brain can.

I am quite certain this wheel has already been invented, I expect it’s well known that the toxic manifest destiny grows out of something like “progress,” be it only their vapid Christian “spiritual” progress. But this is not the point, what we think of others, what thoughts “progress” produces about other peoples, but the thoughts that the progress meme engenders regarding ourselves. The very suite of “progress” ideas that makes the Indigenous less than human to some people allows those same people the “lapse” into ancient, brutal war behaviours themselves.

Well, again, this is the totality, the dark side of the concept, so to everyone caught in the progress meme – well again, not to everyone perhaps, until we look – but to all of our brains. The status quo lives in this function, somehow. It’s already in your brain, so it’s not as shocking as it seems it ought to be, perhaps.

I am going to need some time to integrate this idea, the progress meme has ruled my life, and now I see it’s what ironically let’s us never change and grow and clearly we need to stop thinking about futures and destinations and goals and just settle down and try to live as though this might really be it, all there is.

Jeff

June 26th., 2021

Justice, Ever

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The only justice is if we, as a people, we as a species, understand why we do what we do and so then we can make changes.

If we allow hate and conflict to remain completely unchallenged, I don’t mean on the battlefield but everywhere else, in the libraries, then what are we talking about, what are we hoping for? If we don’t know why it is, what changes are we planning to make?

All this wokeness is depressingly for naught if we don’t apply our science to the hate and the conflict, if we think it doesn’t need it. If we think it’s un-sciencable, if we consider it foundational in a way nothing in nature is, if we think it is somehow exempt from real world causation. If we for some reason don’t want to know.

I’m talking about how all conversations about changing the world end, with a sigh and the rule: human nature.

Society – warrior society, a society that runs on hate and conflict – tells science it’s not allowed to follow the hate and abuse exactly the way T told Mueller not to follow the money. It’s Human Nature, we already have this answer, shut uppa you mouth! You can talk about it, sure, you may tend to the sick and injured – over there in the “soft,” human sciences – but don’t be bringing that weak nonsense into the real world where hate and abuse are our premises, like Kant’s time and space.

In real life, we hate. Babies want to be everyone’s friend, but grown-ups kill. This is what the Right means by considering themselves the adults, the “practical” ones, and honestly, I have the meme also, I consider myself aligned with the Left and the babies . . . but today, the point is that it is more that all are following false principles, refusing to grow up and face themselves. Bison Boy looks like a child, and if he were carrying Pelosi’s head, I tell you – still a child, still unaware, still founded in foundationless myth he swallowed whole at an early age. Violence perhaps only defines a maturity of body.

Follow the science of humans, any one of them: psychology, anthropology, bio theory, genetics, pick one, choose them all – follow them to the bottom, it’s Human Nature.

A moral stop light. Go no further! (Shoutout to Tom Waits in the Fisher King.)

This is abdication of their role. Go to a biologist and ask them about “whale nature,” or “ant nature,” and they will ask you why you are trying to cancel their job and natural science altogether. Science has reasons, not natures. Humans are exempt from science – well, human science, I guess. But that is the relevant kind to you and me, isn’t it?

The only justice for anyone, ever, is humanity troubleshoot itself for the first time, learn where the hate enters our lives – so that our children don’t keep killing the natives, FFS.

If you won’t admit why you did it, how can you say they won’t? “Human nature” doesn’t count, you know the bastards had – have – reasons. Real world, human reasons. Unsavoury AF, yes, but reasons. Lies, of course – but lies to hide reasons. When you can’t stop a thing, there are reasons, damn it, what is the matter with you?

When you want to change a thing, I mean if you really do want to change it, you have to know the reasons for it and deal with them. You don’t say “that’s just the way it is.” That is what the people who do not want to change it say. And that’s what human nature means.

Justice is when we stop saying Human Nature and start saying “because” something. Then there is something to change!

If you say Human Nature, your hope and your promises and your apologies are fucking empty.

Human Nature is a myth, the bad guys’ myth.

Justice is truth.

Jeff

June 26th., 2021

Racism – the Invention of Hate

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  1. AST

Antisocialization theory is the idea that hatred is taught and learned, the same as love is, the same as everything is. Socialization is an accepted idea, a real and obvious thing in the world, and so prosocialization and antisocialization are also, established principles (in the world of scientific principles, whether you, mere human, know it or not). Antisocialization theory is the idea that antisocial traits are nurtured, and that any tendency towards antisociality and violence requires a scientific explanation in the here and now, in life history, and not be accepted as some default.

AST, my acronym for antisocialization theory, starts from the idea that nature and evolution do not have defaults or natures, and that all things can and must be accounted for. I have noticed others’ efforts to understand altruism and morality; the bad things are always some background, the premise behind it all, the setting, not requiring a back story of its own.

Antisocialization theory is science and therefore does not define abuse by what is legal, or by the stated purpose for it, it defines abuse as a choice to hurt someone, that the act of abuse is deliberate hurt, not accidental hurt. Of course it thinks that accidents antisocialize, embitter people also, but antisocialization is generally deliberate, the hurt has a rationale. People report feeling “punished” when they suffer a rare trauma, when they are one of the very few shark attack victims or something, because that is usually the way we get hurt, intentionally.

By this definition, the altogether legal and normal minor abuse that adults do to their children all day long qualifies. The pat on the bum was deliberate, the lessons, the things taken away . . . in adult punishment situations also, prison sentences and executions, all deliberate, all abuse, somebody hurts somebody, on purpose.

Please, I know the story. I am not a child or a Martian. The “reasons” are ubiquitous, inescapable, how could anyone dream I had simply never heard them? I am teaching here, not asking.

Antisocialization theory is the theory that if so much hurt happens through deliberate actions, that the hurt is being selected for, that the hurt is the desired result of all that stimuli. Again, I know the story, I understand deterrents. AST is the idea that when deterrents fail, that this phenomenon occurs in the real world, and that there is real causation around it, before and after. Specifically, repressive blindness before and an antisocial population after (which, also before). AST and its author find it odd and rather amazing that human science manages to work around this, finding science in the virtual thing, the deterrent, but none in the actual spanking/beating/prison sentence.

When we break a rule, science and reason turn their backs on us along with everything else that does. We have a lot of talk and science around when we do what we’re told, but really none for what happens to us when we don’t – but we do have a little science about trauma and the damages of abuse – I suppose someone must be studying the accidents, the collateral damage. The good news is it applies, and we know generally, that a tough life makes a tough human being, meaning insensitive and aggressive.

2. Conflict

So that’s why, that’s what the rules and punishments produce. Sure, the deterrents produce the good things, perhaps, I’ll allow it, but the abuse when the deterrent fails, that’s what produces all the bad things, and we produce them because we love them, we think we need them, we produce them on purpose through our purposeful actions. An angry young man is exactly what the generals want, what warrior society loves, and so abused angry young men are probably not accidents, and their abuse angers them quite reasonably and logically.

The controlled, deterred human makes beautiful porcelain things, the abuse behind the control makes us smash them. The controlled human is civil to our community, the abuse behind it makes us abuse other communities. This is the causality, the true story of group life, this is why it’s “prosocial at home and antisocial at the border,” because we are tortured and wound up at home but forbidden to act out there and sent out to get our release from the neighbors, from someone else. We do not smash our own porcelain, generally, is the idea. This is all group conflict. This is what men and nations call “strength,” their reserve of artificially created or stored anger, and our “strength,” is always and forever the reason for someone else’s.

Again, this is all human group conflict: at home, we take the shit and out and about, we give it.

3. Race

This is racism, race and cultural markings, dress and custom, these signify “not at home,” mode for pre-charged, abused people. These foreign things are what your frustration was arranged for, why it was created, what your antisocialization is for. NOT an endorsement. But this is racism.

There is nothing “wrong” with the other community/race/person, they are perfect for their role, to complete the circle and resolve our abuse. Again, today’s target, American blacks, did not kill Christ, and they do not “own the banks,” none of that was really the point about the German Nazis’ targets, it was simply that they were targets, viable, legal targets for the overly controlled at home Germans’ stored rage.

I see the word all day, “racism,” it’s the scourge, it’s the problem, it’s what you shouldn’t have, and of course I agree . . . what I don’t see is what I offer here, a scientific look at what it is and what function it serves, I mean not from anyone but the Nazis themselves. It seems the bad guys want science to authorize their hate and the good guys worry that it will or something, so they try to keep them apart, science and racism.

I get that.

But they control their kids, same as anybody else.

They say racism is awful and wrong and all that, but then they do all the social control stuff that makes so many people need an outlet. Don’t play with fire kid, but hold on a minute, where do you think you’re going without your matches, kind of thing. Don’t hate anybody, but here’s an ass kicking for you to sit on forever.

Jeff

Dec. 16th., 2020

The Next Step

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Is socialism, otherwise known as politics, the science of people getting along.

For human beings, competition is supposed to be sport, not real life. “Conservatism” means conserving brutal competition, there have been conservatives complaining for three hundred thousand years that we never should have left the jungle, that what was wrong with being a chimpanzee?

Left means politics, group rule, the future, and science.

The Right means none of it.

I know, the Right claims “morality.”

Morality, sorry to tell you, is nothing but a violent response to unwanted behaviour. Morality is violence. Take away the violence from morality, what have you got? Probably just running, right, fight or flight? So morality is aggression, aggressive violence, an aggressive, violent response to unwanted behaviour – and as others have said, in other contexts, that can’t fix itself, can it?

But all you abuse victims believe it can, don’t you? What do you do when you see someone who is in your power doing something wrong? As far as we can go is that it “doesn’t work,” right? It’s “morality,” how can it be wrong?

In this sense, today, there is no Left, not yet. Who doesn’t believe in morality? There is only Right and Righter. Of course, vote less Right, but don’t they all run on morality, morality and “strength?”

When politics was devised to assist the weak, the young, the sick, and the old? Strength also is not politics, again, politics is the science of getting along. Strength and morality, these are the science of war, of warrior society. I have named this branch of science antisocialization theory, because that is what is accomplished in the real world by aggressive, violent morality.

It is a fault of mine that I see no small solutions, that it all looks rather futile to me from here, where most of our efforts to effect improvements only involve more of the moral violence; I haven’t been much help feeding the poor, doing what I can, not as much as I should. On the other hand, I maybe just don’t see mirages and there aren’t small solutions. Do you really think we have all the basics right and all this 1984 style psychopathy is some matter of some small tweaking? Something basic is upside-down and this morality thing is it.

Not “human nature,” but humanity’s entirely artificial response to something in human nature. Unless you’re among the worst of them yourself, you know, the sorts that talk the loudest about right and wrong and morality are the scariest ones of them all. That is not a “perversion.” That’s what morality is. Again, you know more is worse, right? So that’s the next step, realizing that morality is wrong and that we can do better. It starts at the very beginning, when we are first born into this world, and no-one hurts us “for good.” I’m serious.

The next step in evolution, the only move to get us through this selection event of what is likely the end of the world, is this: don’t spank.

Jeff

Sept. 21st., 2020

More about Circuitry

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I’ve said that when we discuss human origins, that it’s the evolved “creation myth” circuit we employ, and so we wind up in the same conversations, using the new idea in the same old way. I’ve also tried to describe a circuit, a neural highway for the Nurture Assumption, by any number of names, the reason, whatever it is, that we employ our social control, that we either are rough on our own children or that we allow the older children unfettered access to be.

Maybe this is another one, or some aspect of the same ones here:

Our nightmares are some totalitarian slave system but our dreams are a good job and to contribute to society and that sounds like two ways to talk about the same circuit too, betrayed by a similarity of format, same as the innate/adaptive argument I’m making. This sounds like philosophical tool, an audit for “new” ideas – is the format the same, does it sound like the same factory may be making the “new” product? Ha! Same supply chains? Same market? Wait, yes! Can it be/is it being sold to the same market, the same pool of the same brains with the same circuits? Ha again – if they don’t have trouble adapting to it, maybe there is no adaptation required, and if it doesn’t offend and terrify us, it’s probably nothing new.

Of course, dual memes like that, different sounding takes on the same general, possibly preconfigured memes, this is always the opportunity for groupness and group conflict, , you know, we believe in evolution and adaptation, while they believe some rubbish about innate “natures.” Again, probably the same circuit in both of our brains . . . it’s almost interesting, same hardware, same firmware, maybe all the way out to software, and still we find a way to make a division out of it – in the virtual reality world of our beliefs! Which, sadly, is enough, any excuse for our reason to be, the group and its conflicts.

Jeff

June 25th., 2020 mostly. Intro

Sept. 19th., 2020

Deterrents

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deterrents hurt. Deterrents are threats, and frighten us, engage the defense systems, deterrents are antisocializing all on their own, let alone when they fail and the threat becomes an horrific reality. An environment of deterrents is a dangerous, stressful, abusive environment. I guarantee we have environmentally controlled alleles for that, or rather, we have the capability, it’s in our gene suite, and I guarantee we set our lives up to activate them. For years I’ve been arguing that if it were only deterrents, if they worked, that would be fine, but of course that’s stupid, half-measures. Remembering Sapolsky, it is exactly threat and not violence that lasts too long and wears us out from the stress. Laws and deterrents are relentless.

Jeff

June 25th., 2020

Foucault Anthropology

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

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

Jeff

June 2020

Who You Are

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I tried this before, sorry for the repetition. I’m deleting the two previous efforts.

Convictions and diagnoses are labels and get used like identities, who you are is defined by your hospital or police record. That bites, but it’s a clue.

They talk about changing “your behaviour,” and “behaviour modification,” but we don’t reward behaviours or punish behaviours, do we, we reward and punish people, so that’s what we change, obviously. Has a bad behaviour, say theft, “changed?” Is theft not theft anymore? We change the people, and the modified people have at least one fewer behaviour, is the theory. It ain’t exactly comprehensive, but it’s the theory. Of course, we are only changed negatively, that’s what science has to say on the matter, whether it tried to say it or not. The rest is folk wisdom, old wives’ tales.

Like Pavlov and Skinner, their work was like pointing out that trees can be used to build things while we drown in the higher level effects of global logging practises, simple, basic, true enough, but willfully ignorant. I have a new catchphrase, a paragraph for every blog for the foreseeable future: “We can increase desired behaviour, we can decrease unwanted behaviour . . . ” the optimism! Yes you can, all you have to do is create systems of aversion and hurt and decide that those are not unwanted behaviours, or not in fact behaviours at all, not subject to scrutiny themselves.

Meaning, we can “improve behaviour” this way only if our own behaviour doesn’t count, meaning in no real world context whatsoever – folk wisdom, as I said. Fantasyland, a highly controlled experimental environment, potayto, potahto.

Convictions and diagnoses become who we are, not because we committed the crime or caught the illness, but because we all know we’ve had the treatment – and we know how human “treatments” work. We all have that much science in us. We might not understand someone’s original malfunction, but we intuitively understand what we did to them to “fix” the problem. I mean, there are new ideas in treatment, and some success – but the human experience forever of “treatment,” of intervention, is what Ms. Rich Harris reported, there aren’t improvements, what is produced is not what you wanted. Our forever experience of intervention is some form of an ass kicking, and of course that’s the priority experience, what sticks.

I don’t think this shady bit of reasoning proves anything, and specifically not this, but I’ll say it anyway, because everything points this way for me: we control behaviour with damage. Every behaviour we kill means a circuit in our brain that we killed and another we reinforced and our cumulative brain damage in the one area and overgrowth in the other is what causes all of our problems.

And you can’t fix that with law and order, law and order is the cause. It is my opinion here at abusewithanexcusedotcom that the abandonment of speech and reason and resorting to rewards and punishments, physical means, takes resources from something like the frontal cortex and regressively redistributes them to the lizard brain.

In terms of identity, one way to know who you are is to make you into a known thing. If you’ve been “raised right,” we maybe think we know who you are, if you’re a veteran, maybe we think we’re nailing you down, and if you are a survivor, if you’ve had the treatment, we have a better idea of who you are, because we think we know what being raised right means (in a very fluid, social way) and we think we know what having been a warrior means and we think we know what any treatment you received did to you. You may have been an unknown before, not so much now, again, because we all have that much science in us, we all know it was not our behaviour or our illness that was modified, but ourselves, our person.

Of course, using this half-logical vector to identify a person to stigmatize the person is gaslighting, the logic says whatever that identity means to us, we forced it on them, it is our shame, not theirs. Folks would have to know this sort of reasoning, though. Again, Antisocialization Theory is mercy, when all else is cruelty, a social environment where cruelty is to be expected. I say the identification of survivors as damaged is a sad truth to be changed, not a thing to be denied and argued, this is society’s crime, let’s not deny that we are victims and let’s not let the systems causing the damage off the hook for it.

This sometimes feels like the end of I Am Legend – let me help you! Admit your victimhood so we can focus on your tormentors, stop acting tough. If you don’t press charges,  no-one is going to stop the bad guys.

Jeff,

Sept. 13th., 2020

Morality Isn’t (improved)

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

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

Did the lights just get dimmer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m mad at you all.

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

Jeff, Sept. 4th., 2020