Personal

AST and the Cause

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I need to place us in context. When you talk about the medical model, the school model, I’m melting down. Those models are the parenting model, and abuse is the social model, the parenting model. Everyone needs to be anti-spanking, anti-punishment or things don’t change for anyone. Spanking is abuser-making, and acceptance can be difficult for the hurt. We must be allies to all children, even to the children of the masters of the universe, or we simply grow a new crop of abusers.

We are not the only group who is abused, many groups are abused, and all appeal to be exempted from the flood of abuse, I mean, rightly so, of course.

But this is not our problem – wait.

I mean, we didn’t make this problem.

It may indeed be our problem to solve – that’s one theory, right, that the diversity of the human brain is the adaptability of the human species, that it is some divergent mind that is always finding the new way forward. In that sense, perhaps this is indeed our job to solve it – but still, the problem isn’t part of us. It is very much part of general society, isn’t it? There is some dominant group, always, and all smaller groups get the smelly end, always, right?

Isn’t that the real problem?

Honestly, I have always felt it was my problem to solve, see something, say something, and I seem to be the only one who sees it. Again, it may indeed be autistic people’s problem to solve, and . . . and I’m sorry. I diverge from the divergent too, I guess. It seems unpopular to imagine a larger problem, I mean, that makes some sense,  the Cause is already an umbrella, it is the whole conversation for its members, of course. I’m sorry. The universe is an onion, and the layers are connected. If the conversation ends somewhere, that line isn’t real and true, it’s a social construction at best. The universe and life do not stay in-category.

Meaning, you can’t really speak the truth when you must “stay on topic.” If we abused ourselves, we would be the topic, not the case, or not the relevant case, we seem to be the topic when we are not the problem here, every group does. Again, we are not the only abused group.

I spent my life on the attempt to understand this larger, all-group problem. I knew I was odd, I just thought I was clever and lucky, I had an insight, a gift or a curse of some kind. I had done it, pretty much had my understanding of the problem before I had a child get diagnosed ASD and then it started to sink in about me. But not before I gave myself a rare, autistic level understanding of abuse and the mythical Human Nature. It’s been a good theory, things get clearer, more things get explained – finding out I’m autistic hardly hurts it, it’s that good. Worried me for a bit there, I admit.

It’s an answer to “why the abuse?” the question every group, and frankly every person asks but only rhetorically – really, no-one is surprised. That’s the Human Nature myth: no matter how badly they behave, no explanation is really required. ABA torture of children? Meh, dumb doctors. No reason! They just don’t know any better, and when people don’t know, of course they torture children! This is the explanatory power of Human Nature, no horror is “unnatural.” Of course.

The answer is punishment turns bad to good.

They think it’s good, threats and force, they think when their children survive it and go off to war, looking for strangers to kill, that this is “good.”

It’s what “punishment” means, bad is good, a deterrent is magic that turns bad abuse to good . . . good what? Teaching? – but it colours all identical looking abuse forever. Wars are advertised to “teach them a lesson.” The NRA tried to bring the primary schoolers’ behaviour into their defense about Newtown. Not kidding. The bad guys already know what I try to tell the libchallengeds, that we have already bought the false principle and can therefore buy it in almost any sick form whatsoever.

Not kidding.

I want us all to remember, we are asking for an end to our abuse – and their entire system is abuse, they do it to their own children on the regular. We are never going to reach smug happy abuse survivors that their abuse is a problem, they are proud of how strong it has made them – strong means mean. Aggressive and insensitive. Your “problem” is their one size fits all solution, discipline and strength, and here’s the rub – we have to stop them doing it to themselves first, or they are never going to hear anyone.

I climb the walls listening to people speak as if the abuse happens by accident, and people only have to be told. It is our entire system. It is going to take more than a leaflet campaign.

We want to do this not just to save ourselves, but everyone. The ways that we want to teach, the ways of treating us and dealing with us, people need to learn that for everyone, and that means understanding that the bad stuff happens from error and will, not by accident or automatically – and not because of anything about us as a group, but because it is the forever policy of mainstream human society. The magical Human Nature ends all inquiry, and if we are not allowed to question why the abuse, then we are not being effective, we are simply pulling babies out of the river and not minding that society throws all of its babies in the river and more importantly, not stopping it.

I’m autistic and I know it now – but spanking is still the First Cause of all human problems. It is our job to fix it, perhaps, because the abuse fails to convert the same number of the ND to its cause than it does the rest of the world, and that immunity is our superpower, maybe.

Jeff

May 2nd., 2022

The Abused Ape Theory – Mission Statement/Premises

Jeff/neighsayer2 Comments

That’s a change. When I started, I toyed with the other version as my title, my catchphrase, before I settled on Antisocialization Theory, ‘the Abusive Ape Theory,’ like that, like the Aquatic Ape Theory, with the connotations of that theory’s history – and it turns out that it’s the whole point that that isn’t it, that the entire order of operations, the natural order of causality is that the abused ape child precedes its abusive caregivers. At least that’s the change I’m going to make, a rule for AST (antisocialization theory in short) that says the child’s experience precedes and breaking it will mean we have left the bounds of AST.

I plan to proceed as though there were an open marketplace where ideas compete for proximity to reality and therefore usefulness, and try a setup where it doesn’t begin with an adult Adam and Eve, or with the Elders, or with the  old man God who we acknowledge as a ritualized symbolic actual old man, the meta-alpha, where it doesn’t begin with full grown humans created or released from some mythical bondage, like the Raven story from around here – unless that place of bondage is childhood, then that metaphor might fit. Origin stories that begin with adults, that’s been tried, AST wants to try the other side of that choice, make sure we haven’t missed something.

It’s a chicken and egg story – the chicken and egg story, the reason we love that story – and the chicken came first. Until that chick was hatched, it was a proto-chicken egg, perhaps an odd looking one, but until the chicken inside came out and started acting strange, there were no chickens. When we arrived in the world, our progenitors, our caregivers were already here and every child’s story begins with that – but our story does not begin with all the characters’ back stories. Our story begins, when we, the child, begin to sense things, less literally, when we open our eyes and start reading it.

Antisocialization Theory intends to take this view, that life’s causality begins when our experience begins, with the experience of receiving abuse, prior to perhaps all understanding of anything, after all, slaps and deterrents exist specifically because the little ones ‘lack language and reason,’ these tools are directed at the lizard brain, directed at parts that predate all of human experience, so that is the start. In terms of uniquely human origins, again, AST starts with uniquely human experiences, meaning not feeding, or predation, or reproduction, things many creatures share, but rather social control, punitive abuse.

I’m not sure how I would respond to an objection that finds ‘human nature’ precedent to the lizard brain, to pain receptors, these things, while classifiable as ‘nature,’ absolutely predate humans. I understand that from a social point of view, on the social measure, our parents’ ideas or something come first, as though they didn’t have parents and as though we can’t simply carry that on back to the beginning . . . which, again, AST posits, insists: the chicken exists first.

In a human life, the child exists first.

Perhaps, all the origin stories themselves are infantile, baby stories of the adults we first saw, upon finding ourselves in this life. Perhaps in this corner of mythology, we never grow up and take the other view, never look with adult eyes instead at our infant selves for origins. If we were looking from our grownup selves, I imagine that is where we would start.

Jeff

Dec. 25th., 2021

Goes to this one next, logically:

https://abusewithanexcuse.com/2021/12/06/first-impressions/

First Impressions

Jeff/neighsayer7 Comments

You know I’m trying to solve the world’s problems, humanity’s problems, and there’s some guilt I’m not working the food bank, but I have issues, I don’t work well with others, and also the first problem I saw was what I’m always on about, “spanking,” (although anybody would have called what I saw more than that) and I was a kid, I wasn’t going to be working anywhere. The whole thing seemed, I’m sorry, stupid to me, and I have spent my life trying to find smarter thinking, solve it that way.

I must have thought, if I’m five and I can see how dumb these guys are, maybe I can help. Now I’m sixty-one and I think I’ve almost got it, but of course I’m sixty-one and I know no-one wants my answer, maybe any answer.

Too bloody bad, you’re getting it!

Lately, I’ve found a bit of a foil, someone with the skills to argue a large part of my answer, the Human Nature meme, from the dark side so to speak, I mean a bright soul who has seen some things, and there’s an idea I mentioned before but they helped me get another inch along with it.

I’m always on the Human Nature bit, and I’ve suggested before that a baby’s first human is Mom, and her Nature is likely the baby’s first idea of human nature – a schizoid conversation, ‘Natures’ are a Platonic abstraction, not actual things in the real world – but more generically, a baby’s first impression perhaps tells them who people are, who they are . . . OK, ‘first impression’ is a meme of the same age and accuracy as ‘Natures,’ we have had nine months of impressions before the world sees us, I mean ‘early impressions,’ don’t I.

Most of which, hopefully, are prosocializing, loving and nurturing, before what I am suggesting, the trauma of the first slap or something, and it’s also possible a kicking foetus gets a retaliatory blow sometimes, perhaps the first negative impression isn’t after nine whole months either.

But what sort of struck in conversation with my friend, what seemed to bite this time through it, was the idea that the baby’s impression probably really is of something along the lines of a simple binary nature, it’s not a bad working hypothesis for an infant, good/bad, love/hate, life/death, you have to say, the kid seems to have good priorities to form an opinion on the matter. I’ll argue now, after sixty years of life, but with a baby’s data at hand, that is some solid science on their part. Our part, of course.

I would that an education meant correcting the infantile binary ‘natures’ meme.

What hit me so firmly in this conversation was that the baby learns a Nature – from what was, for the mother an entirely contingent act.

It surely happens, that awful episode of M*A*S*H, where we suffocate a baby for silence in the presence of a predator or an enemy – I don’t see how a blow or a denied meal or some such deprivation is ever so necessary. We can say reasoned or compulsive, we can say “it happens,” I don’t think we can ever say it’s not contingent, we can’t ever say it had to be so, when would people die if someone didn’t hit a child. So there is the magic, where the contingent becomes the inherent, caregiver makes a choice, baby learns ‘what a human is.’

I’ve been saying the human nature myth is simply wrong, makes the wrong thing of us, but this made me realize that it’s both, it’s where the lie becomes the truth, where the myth and the truth intersect. The story of baby’s first negative experiences could be read either way, someone “proved” a lie to that baby, and now it thinks the contingent is immutable, or someone showed that baby the truth, I mean it really happened, didn’t it?

Not quite there yet? OK, maybe it’s not ‘the truth’ just because one baby ‘learned’ it, but there is a great assistance from other fallacies, namely consensus. If it really happened to everyone . . . then what? Plato was right, infants are right?

Yes?

Both these truths?

At the same time, as Elvira Kurt’s mother would say?

Jeff

Dec. 6th., 2021

A Place, and a Place to Talk

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The commons, limits on private ownership, especially of media, land, air, and water

If a place is not my place, if the land is not for me, if I can’t have water, all this because it is someone else’s place, what has gone wrong? If people with places feel OK about it, if that seems normal, if having a place seems like the normal human condition – well, I’m human! Or I was until something cost me my home. Generally, some disaster happened, natural disasters sometimes, human ones more often, even if it is merely that we have too many children for our land to support and we ourselves force our children off it like any stranger. I haven’t actually done that; it sounds awful. I got the boot twice instead, long story, but usually, in my comfortable white life, people at least can help their kids get set up when we do it, or they don’t fully migrate and can stay in touch.

I mean, it is “normal” to occupy and defend land, so humans all do that, or it isn’t. Kids don’t get it, don’t expect it, that they would be born homeless and what seems to be the normal human existence would be denied to them, and this is my point, my theme today – aren’t they right not to get that? If we think having a place is normal, then they are correct and there is something wrong.

And shouldn’t we, instead of forcing a counterintuitive unreality upon the world forever, simply work to make it that way, more that way? We absolutely should be working to make the world into what a happy child naturally expects! What a kid naturally thinks – that is our evolution and our genes talking. We naturally think what we have naturally evolved to think.  It’s true for a crocodile or a cow or a row of corn. Isn’t that the environmental principle, you have to have what nature made you have to have? When you build a zoo, you have to provide what the creature’s evolution has made it need, you don’t argue with that and expect success.

For the record, we totally argue with that regarding ourselves, and our success is debatable. We can do things other creatures can’t – on the other hand, we do things that other creatures don’t do for good and evolved reasons.

If a young child can see what’s right, how can a whole world of adults not?

Wait, there is a failing here, a tendency I need to check, this sounds like every person always had a place until, I don’t know, some level of recently, and that may be a myth, placelessness may be as old as humanity also . . . I mean, that’s why I said “if,” I suppose, if you think having a place is normal, then it’s up to you if this conjecture is on track or not, I guess. Full disclosure, I think it’s popular to think and say, that the normal, aboriginal human condition includes having a place. I think I’ll get away with it, proven or not. Most of us want a place, certainly landowners will tell us it’s normal, and territoriality is not strange or unusual, not only with us. Territory is food and water.

I’m not saying I have an answer, but we should be trying to create a world that matches our organism, shouldn’t we, is this not obvious? We are working hard and apparently consciously to “overcome” something – what?

The food chain? Life?

If it’s normal and acceptable that humans have a place, if adults think so, if children are born expecting it, then private ownership is a newer thing than our evolution. If you expected a place to live – then our evolution was socialist, wasn’t it? Is this irony? The rich, entitled man, university educated, certain that his land is his and no-one else’s, this is my proof: evolution made us socialist, because he feels like having a place is all right and proper, perfectly acceptable.

I am capable in my contrarianism to turn anything in the world of illusion on its head. If we find a decent principle, we can audit our modern madness some. Did I not just prove that most our history and prehistory must have been more socialist and less competitive than the mainstream position has it?

No secret, I believe what we call human nature is particular to us – but nature it is not. The entire human deal is that we have learned how to do and be unnatural, isn’t it? Not asking, teaching. If I put the book together, the working title is Human Unnature. What we reference when we say “human nature” about something regrettable is our new, manufactured self, our socially engineered selves who overcame what was natural.

I haven’t nailed it all down yet, but it seems to be the human dream and the human magic to do just this, to be “free” of environmental constraints . It puts me in mind of a current events story, a zookeeper has lost an alligator and he feels the animal was old and unhealthy and extremely unlikely to survive on its own, he’s very worried. But the beast is “free,” it must have wanted to be – and this seems to me to be us all over, we are Icarus – Icarian, do we say that? I guess so, Word doesn’t mind – why would you want to be free of the Earth, the only place there is?

If I am read at all, you know, I think the ability to have your place and your water and deny the dispossessed it all is created through abuse and its desensitization. Not under any illusion that I’ve proven the matter – yet! – but I don’t hold our aggression and our tendency to violence as naïve or intuitive, I think it’s part of the unnature. If not for that, we would be trying to match our world to our evolved selves, naturally and obviously, as the indigenous the world over have been trying to do. Of course, with land goes everything, water as we’ve said, game, resources, fuel. I don’t have to pull the idea of the commons from anywhere on myself, it’s very well developed, despite that it’s been losing the battle for a long time.

It’s not news that the air waves are a part of the commons either, and they were partitioned and regulated as such for their first hundred years or so . . . but issues of private ownership haven’t gone away, or they’re back.

It seems so unbelievably obvious and clear in the case of social media, that it is a talking space and should be free to all, would this not be your intuition also? Same as land, above – isn’t it normal, doesn’t every human expect to have a talking space, like around the fire, like in the Great Hall? Granted, the campfire, the Longhouse was a small space, and largely just for the extended family group a lot of the time, a world of strangers listening, arguing and threatening in that space is new and strange, I guess. But even after I’ve blocked everybody Right of Gandhi and used all my privacy settings, there are still some site owners’ rules about what I can say to my friends and family and I have to worry about who that is and what they’re up to.

I mean, you couldn’t plan a coup in the Great Hall, authority is always listening, fully free speech is a unicorn, a perfect vacuum  – but again, authority listening, I’m used to that, and ostensibly, we’re supposed to have some kind of group rule. “Authority” is supposed to be something of a consensus – but the private owners of the social media sites? While I’ve been censured a few times for angry speech online, policed on the privately owned Twitter, entire other sites are full of the most dreadful hate, so where is the law? If my speech is harmful, who decides, Jack of Twitter, while private rich person Jack does nothing to police Reddit or Parler? Or God knows what straight up German Nazi named sites there are?

I think the talking space belongs to the people or the king, the government. It sure as Hell shouldn’t be owned and policed by individuals. Commons. I mean, I’m not sure there is a solution for the disaster that is social media, I’m only sure that it is weird and wrong that we should have to go to some rich person’s house to talk and do it however they say we should, and after that, there are sites where the owner allows the worst of everything. Fair to say, they are not curating the public talking space safely.

We surely did not allow talk in the longhouse to descend into blows every time, there is supposed to be a sense of community and good will in the talking space. Bothering me right now, that surely, we hype ourselves up for war in the Great Hall, in our group’s private talking spaces. I’m not sure social hate is a thing we have ever been able to constrain, again, as humans, raised on pain and threat. Again, there is everything wrong with social media, everything that is wrong with people with a thousand watt Marshall, I’m certainly not anyone to re-engineer that madness safely. And, generally, I do not find solutions for individual aspects of our human problems, I don’t see solving one miserable rough thing while a million other miserable rough things go on, it all has to move together, as Pinker would cheer us up that it is doing already.

I think we’ve missed it, the Earth will die and all the bad things happen if we only become conscious at the rate we have been, even if Steven is right.

So, it’s a world sized Gordian knot and it all has to loosen at once, and here I am saying, it all moves with spanking and abuse. Less hurt people will find solutions that destroyed children like us are unable to. Still, maybe late with this. Honestly, my hope is that someone finds my blog afterwards, like when he finds the statue of Liberty in the Planet of the Apes, and we make a better start.

Jeff

June 7th., 2021

A Loving God

Jeff/neighsayer6 Comments

I’m sure one or several of the famous polymaths has worked through all of this three hundred years ago, but one, just in case, and two, I can’t hear other people. I don’t understand anything I haven’t personally pulled from my personal backside.

A just, loving God or God concept

I’m sure I heard it growing up, but to a degree now, I see I just sort of decided that myself, chose a better God than the imperious alpha male of the bible. I don’t believe there was a time I was enamoured of Jesus, his sacrifice, or the NT more forgiving God, but that must be a part of it, that I think I saw a trend, the Bible God was getting nicer – and so I went straight to the end, with “logic,” or what I thought was. If God is everything and all that, then it’s better than that, all the way better than that.

You could call me something of a martyr type, I try to sacrifice my selfish needs for peace and a better life for all, I mean don’t we all, that much Christianity I have, absolutely, but I don’t think there’s rules and forgiveness or sacrificial payments operating between humanity and some small concept God, a sort of forgiveness business deity. If we are to spend any time talking about God, let’s make it something finer, perhaps that is what I would have said if I were more able, many years ago.

Today I would say a universal God, a God for all of humanity, one that doesn’t pick sides in our fights and wars, one that loves us all and wants us all to be happy, not a warrior god who wants us to be not so much happy, but strong.

The point is I’m wrong, or I’m just making it up as I go along – the legal, ruling God is that other guy. I’m shocked and horrified and I don’t understand, but he is the law to many people and so fighting is not only not proscribed but approved for all things, we must fight all bad things, fight for good. Our friends, our family, our nation – our group – they need us to be strong, to ready and able to fight for them.

I have this silly idea that violence and the fight are humanity’s eternal curses, but God and humanity believe otherwise, all the good things are presumed to be found only on the other side of a fight, that if we do not fight, bad things happen. To be clear, today, I think it is the conflict, warrior life that requires a violent, judging God. Today, I think that it is abuse victims that fantasize about power and vengeful entities, and that warrior gods are the projections of beaten children.

Too forgiving, is a way to see it, the warrior deity doesn’t curse you for war, for the fight, and people firing the bullets and giving the beatings are forgiven while victims, by definition, were not and paid the full price.

My intuition tells me a good and loving god would forgive the abusers some – but not forever. This society’s paternal entity seems to work for the sinners and they can apparently do no wrong, no wrong He can’t overlook.

Perhaps my intuition is philosophical, perhaps I’ve internalized the idealism after all and I have come to believe that we cannot cognize the world, only our concepts of it, and I deal with God at that level, he is our creation – all sort of intuitive, accidental. I have spent my life railing against the idealists, but it seems clear that at least in terms of the invisible and fictional things, that it has to be the case that the concept is the operative thing and not the thing “itself.”

It seems intuitive that the God you have gives you the society you have or the other way about, depending on his literalness or not, that this connection is there whichever way you think it works, clear as day. I want a loving God, so that’s my God – but I am redefining forgiveness for myself, again, I’m not so sure a loving God would forgive all this human evil. At some point forgiveness given forever is permission. I find myself believing, insisting, perhaps, that a loving God would want us to find a way out of it all, that a loving God could want more than to keep “forgiving us” for being the worst creature on Earth.

Don’t make me pull out the heavy artillery and remind you that much of the world is dying at the moment, under our watch.

Again, though, my intuition isn’t it, not presently.

OK, this part is difficult; it’s stopped me a few times.

I am, I have always been living in a projection I create. I live theoretically, I have always held a model world in my mind, an entire other world that starts with, “Well, if things made any sense, then this would be X,” and honestly, I try to address that world wherever possible, wherever there is an overlap, whenever my world of reason can win for a moment, I try to help that happen. When the external reality makes sense for a minute, these are wins, I find that the times actual reality conforms to what should be reality are rare and precious. I know it’s mad, and difficult to say, but much of observable human reality I judge to not be, I judge it to be “fake,” sort of.

Everything that has happened didn’t “have to” happen. Everything doesn’t happen for good reasons and a detailed history of the world wouldn’t prove anything about anything because most of it was mad, deluded nonsense that made people do what they did. The very real holocaust happened for bullshit reasons, and to this day that is still all we have on the subject, the myths, the lies and slander, autocracy explained as popularity, we are told people back then “believed” this or that – none of which is science or even philosophy, it’s simply a list of mad data points. The entire enterprise was bullshit, most agree, the pogrom was simply a unifying technique for him, a public works project to keep them busy and threatened for the war, expediently created and leveraged hate in the population – yet, despite the bullshit premise for the whole deal, we analyze it to death and talk about the “depths of human nature.”

I’m here to tell you, that shit wasn’t natural at all. Do not study it like it were a functioning ecosystem or some such foolishness. Of course I mean unless you do it my way.

Yes, people died, but for what mad reason? What phony causality explains it? Yesterday’s lies are today’s facts and science?

People talk about everything that is or was as though it must be, or must have been, life is all random possibility in the future, but set in stone in the past. I watch golf on TV, it’s mostly calm and green, and when a players fails at the shot they attempt, the announcer says, “Oh, they couldn’t do it,” and it drives me a little spare because of course they could. I’ve seen them “could” before! They didn’t, fine, but they could have. It’s a small example of language being strange, but blown out of all proportion, the same meme we apply to wars and massacres. History tells us why we couldn’t not. It happened, so it couldn’t not have and here’s why, here are all the things that made it inevitable – many of which are lies, propaganda, mad, magical myths about the other’s demonic physiology – couldn’t not happen, what with them having horns and all, is what we apparently believe.

I know, not in the minute to minute details – but that’s what it adds up to.

One more time, seems logical to me, in the more reasonable reality I try to keep in mind, that it wasn’t inevitable, the player could have made the shot, that the massacre or the war may not have happened . . . but all these possibilities are more likely in the facsimile world, under my loving God, while in this reality, these things show up as obvious and natural.

It is odd, reading this, what I wanted to show as intuitive, perhaps aboriginal, an idea of a loving god, one that favours no people, but I will happily shift to defend the idea as above all others as well, as being an idea that transcends most human thought and has some hope to stop the fighting before the house burns down, as the biggest of ideas, with human and Earth’s future as it’s long considered goal.

I’ll still call it naïve, however, because no-one is trying to beat the idea of a universal loving God into me, while the other, the one people’s warrior God is forced everywhere it exists.

OK.

Jeff,

May 27th., 2021

The Stupid Search for Morality

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Did you ever see a blind man cross the road, trying to make it to the other side?

I’m sorry, I mean, did you ever see a vast herd of creatures living their lives in relative peace, in fear of the lions but not of their own? Have you ever seen mothers and fathers loving and protecting their children, and one another’s children? Can you imagine rolling back the clock and seeing them throughout the history of life, long before we came along to argue about it?

Then I ask you: how does anyone’s aggression get a pass, how is any sort of violence “just the way it is?”

Moral things like the protection of children and peaceful coexistence, of driving around the blind man, have existed in the world, among creatures for a very long time, before us, before mammals.

Humanity did not invent them. We should stop looking for the proof that we did.

“Donated aggression,” that’s the state of their search so far, right?

Short version, they look at costs and benefits (which won’t find actual altruism, so we’re in a technical world, looking for ‘elements’ of morality) and creatures paying costs for their kids, for folks other than themselves, this is the start of altruism and the next step is altruism beyond our genetic interest that they try to explain and a famous example is of chimpanzees risking themselves in conflict and so solidifying a position in a group. This is altruism, if we risk life and limb to help each other take life and limb. I’m not certain – that may be new behaviour – but raiding parties are not the morality we were looking for, come on.

I believe that they are finding the “morality” we have, the one that makes the world what it is today, and that’s sort of fine, we need to find the human difference – but “altruism” and “morality,” these words don’t make it across into life with their technical meanings. You call that “morality,” folks think killing is morality. That example is a tale of conflict and pressure, and not a moral choice but a capitulation to conflict.

But the point again, the one we are looking for is not a new invention. Choosing peace, respect, and security, some animals have done this before and surely some will again when we’re part of that deep past.

There are new things we have brought into the world but being nice is not likely to be one of them. I suspect the chimpanzee research touches on it, I’m sure my thesis could use their data. Donated aggression, aggression as a commodity, it is part of my view also – I just don’t call that “moral.” For the record, again, I know this definition, moral, slips in and out of it scientific meaning when I use it, that in a technical sense it doesn’t mean “good,” or “right,” that these are the social connotations – but this conflation isn’t only mine, it’s everyone’s and it’s the point of this rant. The idea that it can be parsed out and discussed technically, well, I think that has created the upside-down nature of their answer, altruism is a gang murder in a border skirmish. You separate that, you’ve lost reality.

Trading violence for the security of the group, again, this is the morality we’ve found, but not the one we want. The function there is an evil threat, kill for me or I send you to the wolves – placing people between a rock and a hard place here is the big picture, the laboratory, while the altruism shown is  barely visible, it’s like building the giant collider to show us what tiny little electrons do. Think of the ongoing story of the Rat Park, if you know it – there were parameters in the experiment’s setup that were not accounted for in the description, and the further we step back from it, the bigger the context becomes and the smaller the meaning of the result. Long story short, it was an experiment that “proved that rats choose addiction at such a rate,” and time let us all see that it only proved that rats alone in a concrete and steel prison choose addiction at that rate.

The “with us or against us” aspect of the gang murder altruism matches the bare solitary confinement of the rat in my analogy – I don’t think, as I’ve said, the altruism arranged in this scenario is the stuff we are looking for, not if it’s in service of the ultimate inconsideration of murder. The one we’re looking for would be when one of these chimpanzees becomes aware of a lone stranger and lets it pass, wouldn’t it?

I imagine it happens. In fact, if that recruitment scenario ever played out at all, it must have started that way, one would think. I don’t imagine you can show up during the fight and expect anyone to know whose side you’re on, the chimp in question must have already been known and tolerated. It’s not because it isn’t there that we’re not talking about this and going with the violence instead.

I’m feeling like a male, EP swine for using the example, but I’ll remind myself and you, I’m calling it out, I use it as an example of what’s wrong, not what’s right. Still, I’m a fool if this scenario was made up nonsense in the first place, which I am starting to suspect.

The human difference is not that we are more moral than our bestial cousins, rather the other way about; we made a difference, and we can’t have invented living and letting live – so the difference we made was in the other direction. We are different, we are like this because we invented immorality. We invented abuse.

Find me the roots of that, please.

Those will be somewhere both before and after this, on the one hand, those chimps are plainly already living in full blown group conflict, c/w intrigues and prices to pay and so there is a history to glean, but they haven’t taken some step or steps that we have just yet, they haven’t turned into us, or not yet. I think we may not see it the other way about with them, like we do with us. This example, is kill for us and you can join, we do this too, but have we observed chimpanzees pushing, rather than pulling for that, I mean threatening rather than offering? Do they have the concept, kill for me, or I hurt you?

Do I have to stop if I don’t know this?

It’s sort of my whole deal, punishment is our unique madness, but it doesn’t have to be perfectly black and white. Maybe there are roots for that to be found in primatology, but basically, this is my thesis, that punishment/abuse is our invention, the human . . . wrinkle – ha: kink. Our weirdness. And that this is not meaningful because it makes us “moral,” but the reverse, that this is not indicative of morality as such, but of our workaround for it, our way out of it.

When we are abused, we feel we have an excuse.

Of course, you’d have to agree abuse even exists first. I only see it this way anymore: you’d have to lose the human nature myth. You’d have to want a reason why we go wrong, you’d have to not think we are simply born wrong. You’d have to have some small measure of faith that this world is real and that what we do matters, that what we do is what makes it this way.

It is also difficult to feel that way when you’ve suffered abuse. Oh, it never ends. Screw it, send.

Jeff

Feb. 15th., 2021

Capitulation

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What if I gave it up, what if I stopped fighting it and said, yes we are this large, intelligent, competitive ape after all? Aggressive, even?

I’m always trying to say we’re not, we don’t have to be, we’re not automatically or necessarily, for all you know I look around me and see a different bunch of them than you do or something, what safe, white, little world do I live in anyway – I don’t, I see it. I mean, I do live in such a world, but I can see out. It verges on dishonesty the way avoid acknowledging it, maybe. I’m sorry, sweetness and light ain’t cutting it these days. If I were preaching to the choir, even the choir wouldn’t know what to say to me.

We are. We evolved to be this way, so we are.

We oughtn’t be, is all I’m saying.

It’s in our power not to be, is what I’m saying, that evolution means never-ending, ongoing self-creation, and what happened tens of thousands of years ago is only still with us if we do the same things, make the same choices today – and so after that, it becomes a matter of information, of making informed choices. We are the environment now, most of what modern people must negotiate in life is modern people and so the environment we live in we chose, we provided both the selective pressure and the adaptation to it. With the right information, putting our choices in the right context, in theory, we could make ourselves, our today natures, more sustainable.

We could dial down the aggression and the competition.

Sure that war ape is us, but that was self creation, and it is time for another, corrective self creation. If your aggression becomes a data point instead of part of the manipulative question, then we could see what’s going on and try to do something different – of course, psychology, everyone knows a way to avoid dealing with your troubles is to simply write yourself odd as born bad. Everyone knows that that is always the lie that needs to be disproven at the personal level, and it is at the species level too. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

There aren’t fixed natures in evolution, nothing is non-negotiable and for every rule, some clever creature makes a living breaking it. We know there are successful non-aggressive creatures, and so aggression and competition are not necessary and foundational: everything in nature needs an explanation, and so does human aggression. I’m not going to try to make the explanation today, my views are not secret about it, today, the point is that I am accepting that the state of affairs today is that we are aggressive and competitive right now.

I give up. I admit it.

This is the life that is available for human being today, and it is not our natures forever, but this is a level of “default” for a human born and raised today, and this is the point, the political point of today’s rant – “competition” is not a system, not a human enterprise at all, but only the lack of a human system or solution, only a capitulation to the current animal default that we have unconsciously evolved to be.

I mean, for old people, this is not news, I think it was part of the whole idea, Adam Smith’s explicit idea that capitalism would be conceived this way, as a system our aggressive animal selves could function within – the wording was something about channeling “Man’s natural greed and avarice” as a constructive force, somehow, all will be motivated to succeed and survive – tomayto, tomahto. But it’s an idea based in permanent natures being a real thing which they are not, and there is no “going with it” that isn’t also creating it, I mean, going with what, with who?

It’s us!

You may say you’re “going along,” but I am “going along” with you, aren’t I? When you’re going along, you are also simply going. Everybody can be going “along,” and if so, we are all going, I mean rolling along, competitively treating most of our own species as an enemy and lamenting that they in turn, treat us that way. “Going with the flow” of some “nature” and agreeing to live in constant strife and violence. Warms one’s heart, doesn’t it, there is something we can all agree on after all, the inverse of the platitude, that struggle, fighting, is life.

And having agreed, it becomes “good,” the new good, somehow fighting and the taking of life is good, because . . . here we insert the secret, the mystery, the bit I am spending my life futilely trying to get to, there is a logical connection I cannot make yet I am fighting relegating it to intuition. I am sure it is there, because this is a matter of the world, not just my human mind, it happens, I can’t quite explain it, but we can all see it. We employ fighting when we are trying to fix things, trying to make things better, from a pat on the bum to the violence and ravings of the fascists.

About the latter, however, I cannot from here, understand what problems they hope to solve, what is so wrong in the world that some uber-can model of a police state is better?

I can sort of see the spanking, it’s everywhere, after all, if a spanking stops something worse, mass murder – what evil does the mass murder avert? What is worse? It is clear, what I said above, life is a fight, because peace threatens them somehow, going from peace to war is a solution, somehow. These crazies wave their guns and there is no enemy, no threat, no armed people but them!

The point, I almost missed again – the human list of unwanted behaviours and crimes does not include violence. It’s a solution, on the positive side of the ledger. The police respond to crime with violence, and if violence were a crime, we would all see they add one to every one they find, we would all see how even the good guys propagate violence endlessly. But it’s not, it’s sacred or something.

And so, we are doomed.

Jeff

Feb. 1st., 2021

My Word

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Antisocialization, that’s the word, my word.

I’m making a slight shift in focus, I’m going to stop trying to elaborate the definition and just push the word. It should explain itself; it’s made of known words.

It’s a secret or something, hiding behind negative ideas of “human nature.” It seems to have not been previously coined rather pointedly, like we hid it behind the human nature myth for a reason. I suspect the secret is safe, despite my efforts to out it, perhaps it always will be.

I have the concept, and not the sort to make anything easy for anyone, I will start offering caveats and problems with it on the theory that if it’s problematic, then it’s a little more real for us all. There is still a “problem of evil” to negotiate, maybe. I have moved the source of the evil, I have said you weren’t born with it – but basically I’ve said it’s a process very like photosynthesis: we pull it out of the air, create the evil from nothing, and so you may not have been born with it but you’ve got it now. All of us, oaks and maples alike, shoutout to Rush. Ah – a minor breakthrough there, the “human nature myth.”

I’ve been arguing it literally, telling myself I have disproven the matter with science and logic and that has been done pretty thoroughly with Creation and hasn’t made a dent with half the world, has it? You can’t beat a myth with reason – so now I want to do and end-run around all that, just get the word on record – into dictionaries – and let the world inform the science, stop trying to teach the teachers, wait for teachers that grow up with the word and so have to reconcile the myth. The myth has had free reign, the myth has been writing the science.

Without my word, the myth has had no opposition.

I would like to make a campaign, ask people to lobby for it, submit this word to the dictionaries, work it into your conversations, criminals aren’t “hardened” by prison abuse, but antisocialized, we’re not talking about steel, but people.

There’s a reason this word isn’t internalized and everywhere – and it’s the same reason we fight, the same reason we have smelted the world for our fights. There’s a reason – ah, right, the problem – there’s a reason we don’t like this word, don’t want this word, because it means the evil is in us, and it means our people put it there. Of course it is us, exactly “our people” who would have to change, and you can’t make a change when you don’t even have the word.

Jeff

Feb. 4th., 2021

Get Used to It

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They are a half-step from just saying “normalize this,” aren’t they.

I get the positive, world of illusion theory, of course I do, “letting it sink in” is supposed to provoke outrage, it’s supposed to hurt to deeply realize the truth of some of these ongoing crimes and that pain is supposed to spark us to action.

I get that, and if it works, I am all with it. But does it, mostly?

Haven’t we been saying it the entire time and losing all the way along?

I think the outrage, the spark and the fight belong sometime before letting it sink in, I think we fight it, reject it, defeat it, so that we do not have to let that toxic stuff sink in. Allowing the crime to sink in is defeat. Again, it’s normalization, isn’t it, what is “normalization” other than getting used to something, internalizing the idea, finding a way to live with it?

I’m pretty sure it’s the bad guys telling us to let the bad stuff sink in.

The good guys would make a stand and declare all this crime unthinkable and fight to keep it that way. “Pain sparking us to action” is the whole social control punishment idea I spend my life debunking. Pain does not bring good things, does not make people strong and upright, it hurts people, breaks people.

Bad things “sinking in” is exactly my word, antisocialization, makes the evil a small part of us, makes us sad, angry, ever that much closer to violence and war. Again, I have a new tack – simply meditate upon the word, imagine it’s a real thing and that there is no proof that we were born evil and aggressive, that no control group ever existed to make that sort of conclusion – learn the word and the truth will become . . . available, when perhaps it wasn’t from here, where we’re at now.

Jeff

Jan. 25th., 2021

The Law and Order to Mass Murder Pipeline

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The Law and Order to Mass Murder Pipeline

That’s a way to express the function I try to draw attention to, that punishment and social control are violence, and so propagate violence rather than mitigate it.

The Plague lays all things bare.

When your crime that we all rationalize means you deserve sometime away becomes a death or disfigurement sentence, because “criminals don’t deserve public health,” your career in criminal justice has gone from wanting to help people, to accepting that hurting some is a way to help most . . . to killing them, if it means giving them the same protections as the un-convicted. A good childhood urge, perhaps suggested when your parents spank you and explain it, becomes an adult reality in . . . I’m going to say futility, that’s far enough, I have some empathy. A grownup exercise in futility, which, when the environment changes, quickly tips over into an overly adult exercise in deciding who lives and who dies.

This is a radical position, but if anyone is setting prisoners free to isolate, it hasn’t made the news. This radical position is everywhere. Far, far too many people have been radicalized by law and order.

Jeff

Jan. 17th., 2021