Psychology

AST Genes

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AST is conversion therapy for NT people, and they all believe it will work for anything, because it does “work” for them – poor definition of “works,” as always, of course, but it does something for them, it sets those epigenetic options. For the NT, abuse is indeed a stimulus with a predictable (if misinterpreted and unconscious) result.

The ABA argument, it’s my argument about spanking and police, same for same, except complicated by the fact that the abuse does seem to “work” for the NT, to the NT. I worry that the ND seem to agree with the NT about that, that the NT’s system “works” for them, and only fails the divergent, and I am certain that this is not the case (or, again, that “works,” means something we could all live better without).

So now I’m thinking that AST is a behaviour and a genesuite, just one not everyone has, but it’s one that is self protective and self-propagating and seems destined to drift through the entire population rather than be selected out, a successful mutation. What do they call one that saturates, that leaves no organism untouched, I forget, is there a name for that? I worried AST was one such when I thought it was universal, before neurodivergence entered my mind and the equation, and now, perhaps I worry less, and it seems the whole world will end before this saturation would ever be reached anyhow. But no, AST perhaps doesn’t require saturation, it has a strategy for the “non-compliant” (sorry, horrible term, “their” term, AST’s term – I know, another three letter acronym’s term, ABA’s. I don’t say it as a cop or a nurse, AST’s “strategy,” not mine) already, same strategy it has for everything.

Not an endorsement.

Perhaps there is some room between, I keep coming up against this with AST, that I am describing something that is both “biological,” and “behavioural/cultural”, the space between, where these things interact, meaning not all common problematic genes drift to saturation, that in the space between random and universal, perhaps there is sometimes a control mechanism, even for a trait that violently imposes itself upon the world?

AST is the control.

I have said, it’s both, genes, and the environment, which, we control our environment, so “environment” is “behaviour” to AST, it is both, genes and behaviour, that it is in the behaviour . . . phase? Aspect? The behaving time, no, just in the behaviour, in the behaving that we get to attempt to exercise some free will and make adjustments. Ah, I guess it’s been some time since I’ve spelled this out for myself, but it was always the point of AST, that if we behave less violently, we will become less violent, if people generally get less rough with one another, with their kids mostly, the next generation will grow up less prone to violence. AST simply endeavors to prove the old adage that violence breeds violence and tries to make it matter to people – even your violence. Even your dear old mother’s violence breeds violence.

Is all this not contained in the phrase “there is environmental control of genes?” Imagine knowing this soundbite and ever saying again, “Bah. Human nature.” Folks are very compartmentalized.

I’m having this odd idea, all genes aren’t selfish, not as selfish, perhaps most are selfish in an enlightened, sustainable way, but that our fellow Dr. Dawkins has perhaps been reading mostly the AST genes, I mean, if he has managed to explain our unsustainable human ways with genes at all. I hate to throw out work, perhaps it only wants a bit of a tweak, and to be said from a different angle, in a different context. I’m having a lot of random thoughts as neurodivergence makes its way though my mind, into all the places – one just now, that if the AST genesuite is not present or available in the autistic, is it in there still anyway, inactive and not activatable – as some of that “junk DNA” we hear about? Is one individual’s junk maybe working in another? A known thing, in general DNA terms, I guess?

I suppose if AST is a genesuite, then the NT world will frame this as the divergent lacking something, but I assume they have searched for autistic genes and come up empty – I wonder if anyone has thought to turn the search over, look for the gene that makes the difference in the NT, my AST genes, which probably include things they have called “warrior alleles,” among an unknown number and types of others. Perhaps one or more of those sort of alleles that have been suggested could be viewed as markers for AST, correlations. Over my head, of course. That would be too easy and too clear, that is not real life in the world of genetics, I don’t think.

And anyway the point isn’t to find the evil gene and weed it out, the point is to stop activating it, and perhaps identifying something about these genes will help us see when we’ve managed to set the option the other way – but if we never learn any of the details and simply stop with the forever socialized abuse, stop intentionally choosing the bad option, that will solve the problem.

I only worry that it needs a gene to make people see it, some sort of proof from the microscope. Again, it’s obvious to this now obviously divergent mind, as soon as I learned of the environmental control of genes, having already had some insight about punishment and abuse being identical, there it was, I don’t know how humankind suspends their disbelief about it, but again, that’s the whole point, most folks don’t see the simple logic in it that I do, we are so different, you and I, we really are.

Jeff

April 11th., 2022

I suppose this is a continuation of this one, in the personal blog:

Late Boomer

The Definition of Horseshoe Theory Insanity

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First, the meme, the social media political version: that’s where Left and Right, in their extremes meet as authoritarian dictatorships, the idea is, you go too far Right, you get a dictatorship, you go too far Left, same thing, and they point for the Left ones, to China, and past Russia, which, apparently still and always a dictatorship, but today a far Right one? I guess they leapt the gap in the circle, the open end of the horseshoe?

I mean, I’ve been saying they did that straight away, at least with Stalin, I’ve had the stance that all dictatorships are far Right, that Right means authoritarian.

But that’s too simple, a bit of a leap for us, isn’t it?

And also, these nations would argue, and some still do call themselves communist, despite existing as hierarchies complete with leaders and police and such . . . so it’s better to say that Left or Right, antisocialization theory gets us all. It is more meaningful, it’s a thing we can move on with and build on, if we see that laws and punishments drive people towards conflict and war, whether the laws were drafted by communists “for the collective good,” or by capitalists, to “protect the powers and structures of civilization,” that it is not the particular ideology reflected in the law that does this, but rather the bludgeon behind law generally that does.

That the means do not justify the ideological end, that rather, this is a real, causative, scientific world where one thing leads to another and so the means create the end, of course, and the bludgeon of punishments always create the same ends: conflict, crime, police, war.

This is Horseshoe Theory: same bullshit, regardless of the ideology of the parent with the rolling pin or the cop with the baton, a beating is a beating is a beating.

I think, given the situation, that humans do this social control thing, that the beatings are not likely to stop soon, that the collective nations will slide to the Right, that the current Chinese communism is very different from Marx’s dream, I mean, I think the beatings create the situation here, I think no society can stay collective if folks are hurting each other, I suspect collectivism requires a rejection of antisocialization generally, we can’t have it both ways. So called “social control” controls one thing only, and results in the same thing, always: this human that you see now.

All the violent social control has already been applied, and this is you: look at the world. That’s what it does. East vs West, equally, identically at war, police everywhere.

There’s a meme, “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” and I have one, same, I don’t know how to explain to you that the means are the ends, that the means make the ends, that you can’t simply apply one kind of means and ask for different ends, whatever ends you say.

I mean, I know you know it about golf, as a sports metaphor.

Jeff

March 22, 2022

This is Hell

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Hi, welcome to Hell. First time?

Well, this is Hell, and I’m Jeff, I’m the demon assigned to remind you constantly that it’s nobody’s fault but yours that you’re here. I’m sorry, for what it’s worth; this is Hell and no-one is happy, not you, not us, not even management.

I mean, logically. This is the afterlife. I know, I know, you thought this was life. So did I for a minute there but hear me out. You’ll see how that couldn’t possibly be the case.

First, I don’t know that you believe in all that, the premise, I didn’t really believe it either, but that was when I thought this was life. From here, I need to re-evaluate, it’s not quite the same leap of faith from here! From here, it’s not such a hard case to make. If you are a Christian sort, if you do approach life from this premise, judgment, Heaven and Hell, then perhaps I am not altogether wittingly making a serious argument and if so, I apologize in advance for failing at that level. If like me, you are more of just a north American and a cultural Christian, call it metaphor if you must, but it’s more than that too.

Hell is where you go if you’ve been bad, right?

And weren’t you born bad, didn’t the judgment happen before, as part of the same premise? You know what I’m talking about, Christian Original Sin, or the generic nasty Human Nature.

I understand that for the Christians, Jesus solves this riddle, this isn’t Hell, it’s more like Purgatory, you were created and judged as bad, you can’t perhaps just choose good yourself and override your Maker, but you can choose Jesus, who forgives. For the cultural Christians – and Christian believers are cultural Christians also, they can perhaps see the picture I’m trying to paint for the purely cultural ones too – that for the unsaved, there isn’t an escape, you’re bad and either forgiven or not, and if we accept the judgment and decide that we were created as bad, no choice – then by this cultural Christian premise and context, this is not our life, where there is free will and we get to choose from good and evil, this is the logical afterlife, where our choices have already been made.

And we do, mostly, almost universally, accept the judgment. While the modern, smart-assed materialists consider the escape, salvation to be ridiculous religious fantasy, that they have moved beyond sacrifice and spirits, they almost to a person accept and endorse the rest of the premise, up to the point where we all fail judgment except that some escape, this is not where we are alive and free and making meaningful moral choices.

 And it’s not Heaven, is it?

I see more prisons than I would expect in Heaven, for starters.

I imagine much less violence in Heaven, but rather than seeing people with the hate removed and love and peace in their hearts, the reward for having done the impossible and been good, rather, I see an elaborate system of moral gaslighting that absolutely insures violence forever repeating, an insanely complicated system of “morals” and laws in which violence is a sacred cure and not one of the crimes at all. When there is a fire, our world and Hell look identical, an all encompassing system of punishment and pain – plus fire.

I imagine we don’t have to be strong in Heaven, that Heaven doesn’t have all the awful things we have to be strong for, I like to think it’s a good life in Heaven even if you do weaken. I assume nothing tries to kill you and so makes you stronger in the sweet by and by. This is not that, is it?

Not even close. Just make the fires of Hell the obvious metaphor for violence and it’s all true, even the forever part, because there is no end to the foolishness of fighting violence with violence, fire with fire and the effort is the very definition of Hell and gives no hope of an ending ever. In this premise, born bad, all the judgment and punishment, all the hate and strife is for naught and none of it makes anyone better, in the end, you are still human, still born to be bad, and endless violence for nothing, that too is a definition of a mythical place, also not Paradise.

Whups, almost ten minutes, I haven’t said it – and this is all on you, you did this to yourself.

I mean, it’s your premise, isn’t it?

Have a nice eternity, fool. I’ll be right here.

Jeff

Feb. 12th., 2022

No Spanked Atheists

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I wrote this on Twitter, didn’t think I was “writing,” or something, but it’s as least as good as most of the entries here. It’s the same, but there’s a little something new, I think.

Another Human Nature Thread:

An evil (avaricious, violent) Human Nature – is the fascist position on the question of Human Nature, or the question of ‘why are we humans this way.’ I mean, it’s everyone’s, but it’s theirs too. If you believe in it, you are on the same side of the question as they are, you are fascism ready in that sense, you – we, it’s almost ubiquitous – have the first prerequisite, the foundation.

It is religion. “Natures” are not a thing. It is the ubiquitous human religion, the foundation  of all things uniquely human, this . . . faith. “Human Nature,” it is our moral judgment of ourselves that enables all the evil we do to one another.

The Human Nature Question has faded – but not because Natures aren’t real. They’re still not, but it’s because we have our answer, the whole human world is on one side of a debate. What is on the other side?

The Tabula Rasa? All the causality, all the science is now in support of the only model anyone has. Evolution is just “how we got this Nature.”

No science, no institution seeks a reason why we should be this way, they have one already, Human Nature – why poke and prod?

I have read many,  many books, trying in vain to prove the negative, trying to find the author that doesn’t in the end, give it up to Human Nature. Brilliant people who “tried,” but never could go back to that first error and correct it, is all I’m finding. Maybe Trivers doesn’t say it. Bob seems comfortable in an unmoored conversation, I think he’s careful not to require it, but I’m not sure he’s fully replaced it. Maybe. I’m not smart enough to be ahead of him, obviously. Mad hubris to make it a question.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, the full denial of Natures, in colour and Dolby, you know, fleshed out, what it means. It’s what Pinker maybe said he was after in the Blank Slate, but if he succeeded about the brain, he never approached the larger question. It was clear in the only mention of child-rearing that he was minimizing the power of it, made some analogy about dropping your phone, sometimes it breaks, sometimes it doesn’t.

As with specific religions, the question is this rule – an evil Human Nature – or real world causation? We are all living in the world of the rule now, can you see it, try it on? I know it seems like an obvious truth, people are awful, they certainly can be, but it is all empirical, it has to be, because we know platonic Natures aren’t a real thing. Truth, as Tim Rice said speaking as Pontius Pilate (I’m obsessing over JC Superstar at the moment), may simply be unchanging law, artificial, human made law. We have “eternal questions” because the gaslighted always do and always will, when we cannot apply reason and causality to our problems.

Let’s call this the end of the good part, the shareable part.

Of course, it’s hard not to believe it, hard not to accept the dogma of it, hard not to agree about an evil Human Nature when you are a spanked baby, when the source of life and love starts attacking you long before you can defend yourself. I think this experience provides the bias for believing it, and then we all share and amplify it all our lives, prove it to one another all day long. The lessons ring true, because the infantile experience is preverbal, buried, but sits waiting, a truth that has “always been there.”

Over and ouch. Can I get an Amen?

A couple of notes, because I like this rant enough to repeat it. One, I meant it in the most obvious, surface, unsophisticated and literal way, but “seems comfortable in an unmoored conversation” would be a lovely, Mark Twain polite way to call someone crazy, wouldn’t it? Not what I was doing, though. I’ll say, it’s an aspiration that someone might ever say it about me.

And that was new for me, the base religion idea. I want to get expansive – this is a way that “atheism is a religion too,” if it accepts the nasty Human Nature as a matter of no dispute, this is a way that there really aren’t many atheists, especially in foxholes, where the evidence overwhelmingly supports such an assessment. I mean, I suppose that to be an atheist or a materialist in this sense, a non-believer in our abuse deserving Natures, perhaps means even more than matters of immaterial beings, I mean of course it does.

Hmmm . . . good morning.

That was new too, about the Human Nature Question. You know they SAY the question dried up in their hands and blew away, disappeared into a million smaller questions, more meaningful and concrete questions – this is basically saying that the Nature is in the details, the Nature – the impossible, not a real deal thing – is behind many, many questions, and as I say, when they too run out of facts, nearly all of them pull Human Nature out in the end. Eternal recurrence, like Moe throwing Barney out of the bar, they turn around and there it is behind them. And the judgment remains, it’s no longer Selfish Man, but it’s the Gene now, and surprise – still selfish.

Who predicted the Generous Gene? Who would believe it? Our belief in our undeserving Natures is behind the science that identifies genes. The Question has not changed or morphed – we just stopped asking it, because when only one answer is permitted the question soon disappears. Maybe people used to know it was religion, but now it’s bloody science too?

Ha! Back up a few, this is the way in which science is merely another church again, if it proceeds from the fictional side of the Human Nature Question.

AST is the next “correct” theory because it makes sense of the previously mysterious and of conflicts in common wisdom. I’m an atheist, I am supposed to say it is NOT just another religion or a church, I know the public discourse – but AST is such a better theory, such a better context, that it explains it all, both sides of a popular debate that is deadlocked by myth.

A better theory.

Jeff,

Feb. 8th., 2022

Steal This Blog

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Don’t misrepresent me, I’ll spend my remaining years and my pension fighting you if you turn it around on me. I’ve had quite enough of that in real life, plus I live on the internet.

But represent me with something close to faithfulness, share me, quote me, plagiarise me, please! Mention my name, but honestly, if you want to impress someone and it might, if it helps – sure, tell them you invented the word ‘antisocialize.’ It would be like sock accounts and supportive bots, it will magnify the message.

Use my word, the more you think it, the more you see it, the more you say it, the more real things get. I mean, mention my name if they ask, but it’s not going to get you any points, I’m the smallest of nobodies, and I’m sorry for what happens if you mention my name to someone who happens to know me too! I’m best as nobody anyways.

I’m saying, Antisocialization Theory is free to the public, like insulin is supposed to be. I want to say “open source,” but I cannot, as near as I can tell no-one but the founder here understands the project and open sourcing will have it infected with “strength” instantly. The extreme curation must continue, as I say, twist my words with entirely normal social memes like strength and resilience and I will fight you to the end!

But if you get it, share it.

A socialist, in the broadest, most generic sense, a cooperative society must eschew strength, we must love the weak and the unable. Strength is division and conflict and Hell and my hashtag is #weaktogether. Strength is cruelty and morality is strength and it’s all gaslighting because in the end we know the result is far from any moral paradise, more like the reverse.

Human beings invented morality and in no time at all destroyed the world. “Strength” is what you need to do hard things, bad things. This is long perspective, with the details wiped away, thinking straight requires that, you have to compare the details against the whole – and the whole says your sacred strength is the cause of the disaster, not a prophylaxis, because nobody loves weakness and no-one is weak and the strong are doing all the work anyway, by scientific definition, work and force and strength are nearly synonymous.

Jeff

Dec. 6th., 2021

Perceptions

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There are two ways people view the world, the troubles of the world, one is something like software, culture, education and the other denies all of that, culture and education, the first I would call secular and perhaps liberal, perhaps progressive and the other I would call religious, despite that perhaps few really believe the whole religion, but these are the folks who think people cannot and do not change. I’m not saying these are two well defined camps, most folks probably believe something between, some combination of the two, education helps, but basically there’s not much for “human nature.”

Surely I’m not the only one sees the trap of it?

As always, if there be readers, please, if you know of someone who has already invented this wheel, please, tell me.

I think we are caught between these two paradigms, frozen into powerlessness.

As always, something is missing, the third leg of the table is not described. Education helps, but not apparently enough, or we can’t pre-educate them to want it, we can’t force it on anyone, and to what degree we believe the second thing, a flawed or evil human nature, it means we know the first thing cannot work. We do it anyway, it seems like the only thing, seems to work a little, we are playing the long game, but again:

If we know the other thing, then we know that isn’t it – these principles are opposing, and cancel each other out, but we haven’t identified the third possibility, that there is another explanation, the larger context in which the apparent conflict changes.

I am convinced that were the mechanism of antisocialization more visible, if we stopped discounting it, we could see the falsity of the second thing. As long as this isn’t allowed to be visible, as long as our never ending punishments and threats are exempt from the causation of reality, we shall be trapped in this endless bait and switch: education, yeah, doesn’t work, human nature.

It is a terrible thing to see, once you see the game, you can’t believe in the long game of progress anymore. The long term application of a small pressure, in the absence of no opposing force – no reason for the evil human nature, no causation resulting from our rough social control – that’s a plan, albeit a slow one, but once you see the opposing force, once you realize our long term tiny progress of education is up against threats and violence that begin in infancy, well, then we can see an imbalance in psychological, emotional and social power.

I’ll take your tiny hope – but I offer a bigger one, a real one: stop the violence, stop the social control, stop the spanking. If your kid won’t go down the coal mine without a beating, here’s a new idea: he doesn’t go down the coal mine. Spoil your magic trick, did I? I’m not saying the world wouldn’t change radically. Isn’t that the idea? Eventually somebody will figure out a way to do what we use the coal for without beating anyone – if we stop just settling for that, if we stop pretending the beating isn’t hurting anything. I know.

We think some beatings are OK, makes you strong, that way our team wins the rugby and our country wins the war, and I’m telling you, the thing that makes you win the war makes you fight the war, makes you need the war. The way we think it ends, a “war to end wars, a battle to end battles” – don’t you think it’s time we tried something else? That hasn’t worked out in a few thousand years, maybe ten. Again, the thing that makes you win the war makes you fight the war, makes you need the war – this is quickly obvious when punitive abuse has causality, when human nature requires an explanation.

Jeff

Jan. 11th., 2022

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Four, Maturity

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This is a blog just to say human social maturity precedes sexual maturity, and we only wish folks like Freud had their finger on it. Honestly, don’t go, ha.

It’s a Child’s World

Man, I just couldn’t get anything said a few years ago, I found the one I was looking for, and that was it, but I read it and I got nothing from it, looks like we’re doing it again. Like I was being careful not to offend anyone or something, working hard to not say it – perhaps I have changed.

It starts with a few, I’m going to say facts. Data points.

One, human sexual maturity comes sometime after ten years of age, usually well after, a few years, sometimes seven years after, rarely at nine or younger? Two, after weaning, the children spend their days among children, the older ones raising the younger ones. This seems true to me, I got it from the Nurture Assumption, a tome with a bad point but a lot of information from a lifelong writer of science textbooks and I think her picture of the traditional human situation was pretty normal, she cites well known names, as in part two, among others.

Another name for sexual maturity, is of course, adulthood, and puberty is the end of human socialization, I mean science knows, every year is less important, we are more malleable every year than we will be in the next one. If our teachability is less every year by almost any rate at all, there isn’t much left after an average of twelve or thirteen years. Sure, it can be a lifetime of learning, but you are working and learning some grownup thing, while the kids are still outside teaching each other society.

I think maybe learning doesn’t slow to a trickle after puberty but significantly, perhaps instead teaching ends after puberty, when we age out and leave the children’s group, and then again, when the babies age out of the nest and into the group outside as the cycle rolls on.

To whatever degree any of that is true, human life, human culture is decided and propagated in childhood, and this is important, it seems to me – so it’s pre-pubescent, human society is sexually immature. Freud is wrong that it’s all about sex and whole branches of biology are missing it that it’s all about reproduction, that the violence serves the reproduction of our genes, no, this is not the order of causality, our entire life is written out before sex enters into the conversation. It’s the other thing, like the EP boys say, sort of, except it’s bloody horrible and not at all the way things ought to be – it’s the fighting.

It certainly does seem that evolution finds little use for self-awareness beyond the fight or flight response, beyond knowing when to eat and when to run, I mean maybe not always or even usually, but it is very much my contention that our social evolution involves a lot of unconscious stuff, and I don’t mean drives or animal things, I mean social things, rules and strategies we keep unconscious, weird to say, consciously, on purpose, things that exist at a level between animal imperatives and conscious, directed thought.

Things that perhaps blur the lines between the unconscious and simply lying or playing silly bugger (a Britishism for feigning stupidity and/or ignorance).

Returning to teaching, Sapolsky said on video that he and his peers are a competitive, alpha wannabe bunch and he talked about the stress of it, and if academia is a tournament of the most aggressive and loudest and scariest, then most jobs and professions are. My thesis here is that the strength tournament of boyhood stays in place for life in all matters – not an endorsement. I confess, if I read someone else saying that, I would assume it was indeed written with weird, violent glee and approval. I feel I must always clarify, I’m saying this is what is wrong, this is what is wrong with the “way it is,” this is what I would change, this is an argument to human life, not just an explanation I’m making – and if this is the case in the place where we think the brainiest little dweebs ought to rule, if that is the dynamic in the place we set aside for rational thought and the development of real knowledge, and if we don’t set it aside for that, then we don’t set it aside for nuthin’, and I mean sex and reproduction and all that too, Freud. The selfish gene.

Sorry to say, humans are historically aware enough of the selfish gene to have invented their solution for it, genocide. If Richard is suggesting humans don’t get human groups, then who has been fighting? Why does every ten year-old with a television know the phrase “you and your whole family?” A bit of a pet peeve of mine, this was some sort of revolution, the science that echoes the world we all see every day anyway? Violence wins again, if there was a fix for violence we wouldn’t be ruled by some version of the bloody Sopranos.

If we are more like an extrapolated bonobo, then maybe sex and breeding win, but we seem more like the other team. It remains to be shown that the bonobo love of loving requires a lot of violence to make it possible, which is what using the selfish gene to defend the patriarchy and a world of conflict is saying. You read all the popular science today, there is no way out, of course things are this way because of this and this and this, sorry about that, we had a good run, didn’t we?

Didn’t a few of us, I mean?

I mean, of course we’d rather talk about sex, there is maybe some point in talking about sex. Violence ends all conversations.

We do talk about sex, of course, bloody endlessly, and there are options, options aplenty – it’s the faux taboo, there is no taboo regarding talking about sex, I mean there are conflicts, we don’t tell everyone what our partners like and such, but even the most conservative societies talk about it enough to have a lot of rules, explicit rules and such. Ha – Dune is back, and honestly, a little bit of Dune stayed with me all these years, specifically, “a feint within a feint,” and maybe a third feint, and this is the context in which talking about sex is a taboo, like what the Hell is telling you you’ll go blind if not talking about sex? Sex is subject to a lot of control and rules, many rightly so, of course, many not, and that requires a lot of talk. Repressing sex is like not thinking of the word banana, you have to keep a filter for the proscribed thing in place twenty-four seven and whether sex is a free thing or not, it is on our minds in one way or another.

You know what we don’t debate all day, what doesn’t have a lot of options?

Fighting. Strength. And of course, the real thing is the thing you can’t even talk about. You hear it everywhere, all day long, I mean far more than you hear exhortations to be heterosexual, or to follow a particular church, or racial prejudices, be strong! Strong for cancer, strong for random massacres, strong to withstand random road crashes that take a whole community’s children.

There are those, many, who see all the strength as patriarchy, strength is the male principle, and sure, there is some of that, but as far as I can tell we are as obsessed with strong women as men, and even strong children, weakness is . . . wow, I’m always hedging, but I think I’m going to say ‘never’ this time, weakness is never encouraged. I mean, they might break you, but we talk about the broken only in terms of strength too. Nobody wants to tell a victim, or hear from one, that they’re weaker now.

Broken and alive we call strong.

They are even talking about the plague that way, ‘survivors’ not sufferers, I mean, ‘they,’ in this case doesn’t necessarily indicate the actual opinions of actual people, but this is all part of it, the propaganda is only a stretch from the dark side of normal, and fascism is only a stretch from the normal primate hierarchy of ‘peacetime.’

Social, all of it, conflict, territory, hierarchy, violence, normally my point is, social and not rational, but today the point is social – not sexual. Again, the Freudian and biology order of operations that puts replication ahead of all as the explanation fails to explain why this could only be the case for a single species among so many – and the standard answer, that we are more complex, social evolution . . . well, everything else is also incredibly complex, isn’t it, like perhaps we didn’t think when we made that argument a hundred years ago.

I suspect the difference with us – and there is one, we have broken the bonds of nature in ways to destroy it all, a thing other creatures have apparently never done, escaped correction and deselection, at least until now – is not based in genes and breeding which is not unique to us, but in the opposite, in the violence, in the advent of our breeding-defeating in-species violence.

But it’s much more fun to talk about sex, or, alternatively, if you can see the violence, to love the horror, like these young monsters of the New Nightmare, and to rave about glory and such garbage. Violent solutions, sure.

But what you are not allowed to do is see it clearly, for what it is.

Jeff

Nov. 30th., 2021

the preceding:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Three, Contracting Out

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Three, Contracting Out

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

Here’s me first getting the idea of the human workaround, our system to have more abuse than we might want to give our own children. It starts a bit slow, but since I’m thinking out loud maybe it’s clearer, you can see the steps I often fail to show.

But it’s here below, in short form. Don’t torture yourself.

The germ:

Sub-contracting Abuse – Brainstorming

Variations on the theme . . . not mandatory:

Abuse, Driver of Inequality

This has the idea in it and an example of ‘workarounds for Nature.’ I’m embarrassed, there’s some stupid petulance in here about a great person, and I’m an idiot. It has more of the foolishness than the good stuff, but the good stuff, unfortunately seems important.

Workarounds

The idea is, folks want to be nice to their kids, but our lifestyle seems to require humans that have learned a lot of hard lessons – so we have institutions, professional teachers and childminders to deliver them. Unrelated adults are utilized for this, allowing many parents to live in line with relatedness theory, bringing a prosocial mix to their children and their childrearing, while still insuring that most people are tempered for the rough purposes of the group. I mean, it’s what the children’s group does too, and it too is many times larger today in many places than in the deep past and full of entirely unrelated kids.

You know, that needs a name.

I have already coined the antisocialization theory of war, this isn’t quite on the same order, let’s see, it’s a workaround to defeat a natural, evolved trait, specifically social theory, so it’s an ‘anti’ again, like antigravity, antidepressants, and surely not antisocial, so it’s anti-relatedness? The antisocialization theory of surrogacy?

Maybe, I don’t hate it immediately. OMG, why do I love these moments, this is my problem, that I love to say the opposite of what everyone wants to hear –

It takes a village – to brutalize a child, when social theory says the parents alone might not have the stomach for it.

– this view of life – mine, not Darwin’s, though his includes mine if anyone knew it – this view of life turns everything upside-down. But put those two things together, this is what you get, all the common wisdom that is supposed to keep us peaceful is all in place, and we are not peaceful, it’s all like this, and means the opposite of what we think it does. Was ‘it takes a village’ supposed to mean it takes that many to control a child? That many to teach empathy? I’m afraid the sad, dark outlook of AST is what explains it, it takes those more unrelated people to abuse, to grow a useful, ‘mature’ human – oops, that’s leaking into part four, that ‘maturity’ for us is a matter of our antisocialization and not really a breeding thing at all.

I say it often, I need to, it’s not happy – but at least things make some sense from here.

I think maybe we’ll go with that accidental segue, the links are long, this was intended as a cliff notes version.

Jeff

Dec. 1st., 2021

the preceding:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Two, Childhood

the next:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part Four, Maturity

The Missing Word and Social Media

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It is exactly our social world that is conflict and groupness, I mean all the strife is not coming from the rational side of our house, is it? We really shouldn’t have this sort of media, it’s madness considering what real people do, certainly it’s crazy to let those people multiply their voice with bots. Morally, I really need not to be there, it’s a terrible compromising thing. I have all but given up that I can use my tiny voice to affect anything there (here . . . ) and what is keeping me there now is not the chance to help anything or anyone, but just that it’s the only place I get any human connection or interaction at all, I feel I must come to the evil meetings or wither and die  of loneliness.

I’m afraid social media is the car we will drive ourselves off the cliff in, and most folks won’t automatically know my reasoning, my complaint about it, because for that you need a word that isn’t in the dictionary and you’ve never been taught: antisocialization – antisocialize, as a verb. It means what it sounds like, ‘to make antisocial,’ and you’ve had to scramble a bit to complain, use a lot of single-emotion words, anger, embitter, sadden, perhaps ‘shut down,’ if that hasn’t gone the way of having ‘hang-ups’ yet! No-one has gathered those together under my heading, negative socialization, put the long way.

We talk about ‘socialization’ in a general, generic way usually, ‘all the things,’ and sometimes we hear ‘prosocialization,’ they have indeed created the umbrella term for the bright side of things.

But we have suppressed the verb for the dark side, and so set it free to do as it pleases.

For the dark side, we get nouns, ‘human nature.’ No verb is required, nothing makes us antisocial, right? Born that way, so relax, make yourself at home, have fun, hit somebody (Rickles, to Sinatra) – there is no word and so no crime for what it does to them on the inside.

Ouch. I can say it, I can think it – still hurts. Eesh. Writing is terrible, you see your own awful thoughts and you can give yourself gut-punches. Oof.

But the point of today’s rant/sermon is that there is also no word for what is so wrong that everybody does on social media and that is share the bad news and endlessly repeat examples of the disparity of the white supremacist society in America and Canada and the whole white world, we don’t all of us seem to get that it is all antisocializing, that bad news from good people is bad for you. That because this word and this function doesn’t exist in our society, we don’t seem to worry that all are antisocialized from the constant trauma and when the bad people pull a stunt specifically to antisocialize everyone (terrorism) that all the good folks spread the terror, we must all think people are already as bad as they can be or something.

Perhaps I would tweak other words’ meanings as well, we say ‘terrorism’ as the establishment’s way of labelling what the other side calls freedom-fighting, and antisocializing terrorism is different, maybe I don’t suppose it looks positive to anyone. I mean it all comes in the same package anyway, usually.

I’m not mad at y’all, it’s not your fault, it has been oh so carefully hidden from us this word, this function, this reality, starting with, stop me if you’ve heard this one – I hit him, but it doesn’t hurt him.

OK, stopping. I know you’ve heard it.

Because this function is dark in our lives, both sides of the political spectrum, inasmuch as there are two sides, which is debatable, both sides spread the trauma, albeit with different labels, the mad Right share the Rittenhouse verdict with glee and the normal folks (I can’t say “Left,” as they self-identify, I won’t propagate the myth of the Overton window) share it with disgust, and so there is no-one on social media who hasn’t experienced this crap news and repeatedly. One crows: see the supremacy and one cries, see the supremacy and for the life of me I cannot understand why we would share our losses as thoroughly as they share their wins, don’t we know that’s what the enemy does in war, broadcast your losses and fears at you, to break your spirit?

Don’t we know that we are apparently willingly providing a huge proportion of the “loud enough, often enough” part of the Nazi’s motto?

Again, I’m sorry – we sort of do, but antisocialization isn’t a thing, there isn’t the language. Everything about the human world tells us not to worry about that, everything tells us that we can’t ever be strong enough, and that’s the only word we give ourselves for the whole deal, the mindless Red Queen’s game of “strength.” “What doesn’t kill you,” right? Wrong.

They don’t broadcast that stuff at you in the trenches to make you stronger, and I have such a hard time with this – it’s science that it works the same when we do it, when Rachel Maddow does it, when your parent does it. Science, I tells ya. Rational world stuff, I swear to God.

Why not?

So stop, don’t hate share, don’t “warn” each other like the enemy loudspeakers do. If you have something helpful and must reference some awful thing from the other side, describe it yourself, use your own words – much of what is outrageous and makes us want to hate share has been carefully psychologically engineered, worded just so. Don’t help them spread those bullets. Use your own words. Acknowledge the losses once, try to learn, and then stop and move on, please.

But then, I’m just different, I suppose, and doomed to simply blowing against the wind forever.

Jeff

Nov. 27th., 2021

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Introduction

Jeff/neighsayerLeave a comment

I

The Myth of the Regrettable Hero

This is a change, this blog is previously published, under the second title, perhaps in the middle of part two, I’ve just been confused about where it belongs. I announce in what is now the second one, part one, that I am beginning, well, this must come first, first as the mission statement, but also that the content simply precedes, there is some past event before we meet our fist modern baby.

The mission? To debunk the Human Nature myth and write a new beginning, a new origin story, where we are innocent and do not deserve the nightmare we have created for ourselves and everything else.

OK.

It comes up regularly, a few times a year I try to imagine how all this human nonsense began, how we chimps learned to spank and war. I was on about it again in the very latest blog, part two of the current series, trying to convince myself that the details of the First Spanking, the beginning of our human invention, self-antisocialization, don’t matter, declaring that it happened, accept it, move on – ha. There’s always some point where every crackpot fails, isn’t there.

Actually, it matters greatly in one sense, not in particulars, but in the sense that it was an accident, this might be the entire point of my whole deal, the kernel of innocence I require to write my new origin story. Something like this, an “innocent,” or accidental First Spanking, First Abuse story, and our difference, our uniqueness, our Fallen State, if you will, is only a response, our response to abuse that, hey, perhaps as today in a sense, abuse no-one really meant to do? That response being scar tissue, desensitization, perhaps the repetition of repression as per Alice Miller and such.

I mean, not that infanticide is innocent (one of my guesses, and continuing from the latest blog), I only mean accidental in that the effect, that rather than being dinner, some kid grew up to be a tough one – but any other situation where some little proto-human got a hard time from their parents will do, perhaps mental illness was involved, of course I don’t know . . . but the point is, some accidental First Abuse story – myth – might make us innocent, might make all the trouble a regrettable reaction we’re allowed to talk about and work through, instead of our own, baked in original pro-active badness for which we say nothing can be done.

I need a myth of perhaps demonic/divine/trickster possession, where a parent is unaware of or unable to stop some abuse and watches with tears and regret and confusion as the child grows up as a warrior, perhaps plunging their peaceful life into war. Ah, mixing my mythologies, but perhaps then some story of seven generations of sacrifice and piety restores this family and this countryside to peace.

Dreamer.

Oh, wait. Ooh. What if it was like my story, one parent terrorizes the kid in secret? I mean, elements of both, madness, or duplicitous marriage? A Medea tale!

I really want to contract that out, I am no classicist, plus, it sounds painful.

So, the point I would correct is that all is pro-active, that it begins with an act of evil (why reading the book of knowledge is an act of evil in one such story is a question for another blog) out of no-where, out of Adam’s choice – hey, did the authors have some similar goal, in making it Eve’s idea, trying to make Adam innocent? Seems an odd back eddy of intent, when the point seems to be Original Sin, none are innocent. Hmmm. Whups, another time, again – some First Ancestor’s act of will, pulled from their backside, meaning, no explanation necessary, beyond his own qualities, inherent evil and whatnot.

It’s a defiance story for the believers; for me the point is, it’s one Authority, or this guy just decides to be his own authority, God’s will, Man’s will, all will, will, will. No damage, no reaction, no life history, no context, no psychological compulsions anyone earned in life, just the Nature you were born with (which, of course is classical Platonic nonsense, Natures aren’t a real thing). We are presented with Man, having no explanation for himself and thinking and acting like he’s a god, like he needs none. Like so many say nowadays – a man wrote that crap, and a comfortable one, the boss.

Who didn’t write it – a child, a wife, a slave, someone who knows that will for them is meaningless, that their own will is almost no force in their lives at all – the vast majority of humans. I mean, ‘children,’ that’s more than a majority, no matter the adjective, that is all of us. We were there at the beginning too, we children.

Mixed feelings writing this, happy to have gotten here ever, I suppose, sad it took me this long to clarify this point. Ha! This point –

We haven’t Fallen. We were pushed. Meaning, like in Good Will Hunting, it’s not your fault. Abuse is self propagating, and classic chicken and egg – both exist now, it’s quite academic. You are not the born bad creature hurting people, you are the poor, innocent kid getting hurt, why not? – the egg, I suppose if that was supposed to be a metaphor.

Why not? Well, origin stories have purposes, which is my whole point, and us all being told we’re the Man makes certain things happen, enables certain things, makes other things less likely, right? I’m afraid my likely divergent mind has determined that no less is required, and without refocusing our view of the beginning, without noticing that we are that hurting child, nothing gets better, and contrary to popular belief, it really, really needs to.

You are the victim here, and you don’t need to defend and deny and bluster and sputter, none of it. It wasn’t your grown up original sin that created us, it was your pain as an innocent victim that did that. Why not?  It’s not your fault.

It’s not your fault. And that matters.

Ha. Don’t do this to me, Man!

But it’s not! Let it go.

Jeff

Nov. 25th., 2021

Updated and re-titled,

Dec. 1st., 2021

The next:

Overview, the AST Insight Map – Part One, the Miracle of Birth