religion

Riffing On Graeber on Debt

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If “reactive violence,” (Wrangham) is cash only, you try to take from me, I hurt you now and stop the theft, then punishment is like credit? They get to hurt you first, steal your stuff  and pay later? So the way credit allows the banker’s friends to spend money they don’t have, punishment  allows the freedom to act for criminals that they didn’t used to have when faced with chimpanzee aggression?

So punishment is what allows the theft, the advent of our punishment schemes makes crime possible, not the very opposite, as the practitioners claim? Punishment schemes offer credit to the criminal, they can pay later – and if they take over, or change the law, or simply escape, pay never. Authority, like the bank, just gives it to them, for a promise to pay it back.

Hmmm . . . one feels a need to account for collateral in this scenario – later, don’t forget. Hold it, it’s you, your body, innit. Never mind.

OK, this is what I intuited, this is where this was always going – David talking about debt as having moral connotations, as treating debt as morality – backwards, I think, just like when he was on the right side of it about cash, that no, credit predates cash and barter – I’m gonna say, no, credit also predates a punitive morality?

He’s talking about how debt is framed as a moral matter, but I need to as always, try to turn that around, that morality is framed as a debt, this madness of punishment, like crime is a loan, not a theft, not really proscribed, you can do it, you just have to be able to afford it, later.

  • the above, Tweeted at Wengrow already, Sept. 4th.

A money  loan is artificial, made up money, and crime and punishment is . . . artificial, made up immunity? Where crime isn’t stopped, its causes not addressed, you just have to pay for it later. I mean, we don’t punish the crime, do we, we don’t even address poverty or grievance, we only punish people. The crime has immunity now, as long as it is “paid for?” Plus of course, the banker’s friends means the jailor’s friends, some never have to pay it back and others pay double to compensate. Pad the numbers, make a bogus case that it’s a working “system.”

But let’s back up, imagine a bit.

The world is, as the Davids say, going along, people owing each other in minor ways, the bonds of community, it is a world of credit, natural communism in a group of group living animals, which surely means morality, as David said, we allow for some small imbalances with people we live with, these are the social bonds, this surely is morality, when we are keeping track, when we are vigilant and aware of abuses, we have all agreed to suffer small things for one another, when you cause me to suffer larger ones or a preponderance of small ones, this is a moral matter, accepted and not, right or wrong.

A few weeks with the Davids and what was that crap about volunteering for an ambush raid being the “roots of morality,” like the primatologists say, surely the roots of morality are more like, “You always take the best berries! Stay in your own spot!,” social debt, sharing stuff. You don’t mind they do it once, so much. So life contains “morality,” along with social credit and debt, always, that is to say, primates track who is altruistic and who is selfish, and to use this data and avoid or foil the selfish, this must be prerequisite to punishing them, but is that a step with a beginning?

Certainly the boss allows what he likes and puts an end to whatever he doesn’t, and surely a beating that isn’t a murder must be a lesson, if there is authority, there is punishment, so this too has always existed for humans. I think the apes have it all, they can still respond with reactive violence, they won’t sit still for abuse, but they hold some grudges, meaning they have a measure of proactive aggression as well, which means authority, kings and class, retribution.

I suspect their kings are line of sight only, as the Davids said they often have been for us too. He has the power to punish, but no system of crime detection or reporting, and when he’s out of sight, it’s either communism again, or the biggest guy in view is your proxy king instead. This remains common between all of us group primates, apparently. I think it’s a commonality I’m looking for here between the net of social sharing, debt and the dark side, selfishness, or crime. The idea that as we are one another’s banks with our extended networks of debts and favours and that we abstracted this to cash and transferable credit systems – I want to see the dark side of this, the networks of abuses and retributions that we abstracted to law and punishments, is that stating it right?

Positive networks of distribution of life, food and goods, and parallel negative networks of distribution of death and deprivation, yin and yang?

Not sure yet.

Not yet. This is in-group “morality,” the communism, the management of cheaters, and there is something different about simply killing cheaters and what we properly call punishment, I mean the dead cheater learns no lessons, the cheater is killed because no-one wants to have to punish him all the time. It is a reaction to cheating, but these killings are proactive, grudges build, and it is done to improve the future for the group, and the living learn the lessons.

This scenario must be a prerequisite for non-lethal punishment schemes, this example for the rest, and the thinking about tomorrow too – just in a one-sided, half blind way, I think the future is not so easily manipulated, and the magic deterrent of the example is compromised and complicated by the reality of the violence and trauma.

I think this prerequisite is and has been for many societies, a good place to stop. In a sense, dealing with cheaters is meta, it’s sort of cheating too, we are all above the fray watching when we have these conversations, and of course we’re really not, our biology is immersed in it – so as soon as you touch it, you stop, normally.

Again, the big orange book suggests we usually have. Deal with the overstepper, then shut up about it and carry on sharing, isn’t that the gist?

None of this seems to be taking me where I want to go.

All of this logic seems fine and eternal. It looks to me like if there were only the in-group, we may never have been in any danger of the modern, police state, 1984 world. If there is only us, it becomes hard to imagine why we would throw out this convention. Ah, perhaps this was the situation for some of the groups the anthropologists pulled that idea from, were the Inuit in conflict, at war with anyone, when Rassmussen heard the stories of how they took the people out who got too big for their britches? Breeches? Perhaps civilization only appears where land disputes do not, you’d keep the big bastard if there was a war and you needed that sort, is Antisocialization Theory, sort of.

I’m going to stop until I can find another angle, this isn’t going anywhere new, I’m starting to bore myself.

Sept. 4th., 2023

The idea of punishment as credit, that crime can exist on credit before the price is paid under a punishment scheme, so a child steals their brother’s cookie, owns it and eats it on “moral credit,” until Mom seeks to rectify matters and rebukes the child, likely with a slap, or a forced removal from the play place, that is to say, ah, this may be fun, Mom has purchased the child’s moral debt? and paid the aggrieved party with their vengeance, perhaps even replaced the lost cookie, and now Mom is carrying the thieving  child’s moral debt, ha! – compounded with her own, for hitting a child?

LOL, no, this is tricky enough, must we begin compounding immediately?

Let’s go with holding the child’s debt – after all, Mom’s not me, she’s probably normal, she doesn’t think her slap is wrong, like I do. I mean, you know, slapping people is wrong, but punishment is not, it’s complicated. But it happens. So let’s try it with simple interest first.

So, child borrows some rights to property from their sibling, incurring the moral debt until Mom demands “payment,” with a slap, this payment being suspension of some of the child’s rights to bodily safety and autonomy and now the parent is carrying this breach, this moral debt as part of their general moral accounting, I guess we’ll just say moral debt, for who is rich in this sense, where is the resource of moral money mined? I expect the whole scheme is a deficit financing one, it is all certainly secondary economy stuff, there is no mother lode of goodness to exhaust. Just like the money economy, the system ultimately runs on nothing. Wait – OK, maybe there is something there –

what if when capitalism looked good for one minute when all the Turtle Islanders had been wiped out and there was a motherlode of resources for it to fake its success with, but also, this was when the euros discovered entire continents full of goodness to exhaust along with the forests and everything else, I mean of course this is the case, it is people we mine for this commodity, and I said it before I saw it – our rights are the commodity. The resource.

As we were saying, where we left Mom, mining the more powerful or aggressive of her children for it over a cookie.

When I describe this, the champagne fountain of abuse that is human life, I’ve coined a term, and Antisocialization Theory posits it as emotion, that there is a great public reservoir of bad feelings, of resentment and pain and frustration that the group maintains, to unleash in times of war or such, that our leaders can aim at a target and fire like a gun, and this is an odd mixture of psychology and economic imagery, isn’t it. Perhaps this idea is a better fit, not about the feelings we have when our rights are embattled, but about the rights themselves, or the economy around their acquirement and distribution, that is to say, the theft and resale of our rights.

Were I some sort of a moral economy police detective, and our mother here had committed some awful crime, I would have to note her moral indebtedness and ponder some kind of redemption as a motive. Sorry, never mind, too much Agatha Christie.

But on a less individual scale, this is the case and what I’m always saying that we all have this sort of motivation, we are pretty much all compromised in this way, every spanked person feels the truth of it, knows intuitively that it is they who feed the system, that it was their rights that they had stolen from no-one else, their born-in rights that were taken.

We are born pat and exploited into dearth immediately, and doomed to mining our own children for a resource we all need, some rights. Of course we try, we’re decent people. We wouldn’t just take what we needed from an innocent baby. Of course we wait until they take an extra cookie or something.

OK, I’m moralizing, I’ll try to stop.

But this is working, I think, our moral world is a facet of, a side of our economic world, isn’t it? The inner and outer technologies of resource extraction and speculation are all one, yin and yang, and they surely rose in the world together, but my point is, economy first, morality second. Morality uses all the terms and processes of economics, “paying” for your crime – with more crime, the abuse of punishments, like paying your line of credit with more credit.

Morality is modeled after debt, it’s no surprise if debt is treated as a “moral matter,” since it is the original moral matter, and the situation would be more accurately stated that humans have applied a (toxic, sure) model of economics to deciding how they should live, that we use economics in lieu of morality as a model for life.

Ah, damn. Pithy. Sorry.

Jeff

Sept. 6th., 2023

Alone Again, Neurologically

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My mindset, my understanding, Antisocialization Theory, my apparently innate actuarial sense, all these I cannot separate from my life’s path, from what in arithmetic or math would be the Order of Operations, meaning which parts of a complex problem we solve first. The OOO is a standard, so that math is the same every time you do it, and of course the metaphor doesn’t extend that far, only in that with the order in which I learned anything and made my solutions, I have indeed found a different, non-standard answer from most people’s answer.

Of course, in theory there is no official OOO standard for human life, but from where I have found myself, it sure looks like there must be, rather it is so ubiquitous there has been no need to document it, like most people never read a walking or a breathing how-to book.

Stubborn Autistic child, little Aspie supremacist that I must have been, my own developmental issues never suggested to me that maybe my sense of outrage over the “spanking,”  around me – anyone would grant that as euphemism – was part of my . . . I’m going to generically say, backwardness. No matter what a classical idiot I may have been, this was obvious, what this violence was doing to the kids around me and they weren’t “learning right from wrong,” at least they weren’t being pushed to the “right,” side.

And that’s where we leave each other, the world and I, you and I almost certainly.

All those beaten kids joined that world, near as I can see, learned their lessons, joined the mass error and everything is wrong in the world from when we were all children, you and the world have proceeded from this wrong turn forever and I cannot even talk to you. In your world, deterrents are real things that are supposed to change the world for the better while the actual abuse of the punishments are written off as unintended consequences and are not supposed to change the world.

I had two ideas, one, that human minds simply have this mad bias, part of the warrior mentality, the majority human mindset is often, if in other conversations, spoken of as geared to primate group conflict, and two, that the abuse makes fighters of us, an epigenetic effect – this is Antisocialization Theory, which I imagined to explain humanity in general, when I thought I was a one-off freak about it.

Part of my OOO is that I had forty years to ponder it before I ever heard of Autism, AST was supposed to explain us all. Well, except, me, with my saviour complex about it. Things are quite different for the undiagnosed aspie. I say this as a slur, not as an out of date diagnostic term, but to describe an undiagnosed Autist with the processing to mask and pass themself off as “smart and weird and arrogant.” It is easy to see that it would be difficult to keep up the arrogance of the classic disliked aspie person if you had grown up with any sort of a diagnosis, with doctors around trying to repair you all your life, but I had no such support.

I’m sure I was a well known R-word as a child in the sixties, but once I went to school and found my IQ, I forgot all of that. Since I won a few awards in grade one, I’ve basically been an undiagnosed arrogant aspie prick with a better idea about everything you ever thought or did. Apparently Dad used to get fired on the regular for knowing how to do it better than every boss too, or thinking he did.

The point of all that is just to say, I never believed the ball busting, never believed all the adults or anybody else that “I” was the problem, like, I never spent a minute of my life thinking “normal people good,” and me bad, or normal people good and Autistics bad. I have a low self image against some abstract absolute in my mind, but against humans, no, no, sorry, not so much. I don’t believe in your mad cult of punishment and, maybe because, I don’t have that low self image we’re all supposed to have, like we all deserve it. So I don’t see the world the same way up as you do, I don’t think the group knows better than I do.

That means Mom, teachers, doctors. I learned my school lessons, I take doctors seriously regarding medicine – but I give them all a nasty aspie supremacist snort if they try to tell me about children or authority or power or life.

I always felt normal and logical within myself, and it was always “everyone else,” who didn’t, and so still, I don’t see Autism as a medical problem, certainly not as any sort of a poisoning – I don’t even think “Autism,” is the salient collection of traits that needs a word, well everything needs a word, but not as much as the majority collection of traits needs a word, well it has a word, Allistic, but it needs a definition.

I am getting further from my goal here, perhaps it’s time to stop infodumping, cut my losses and run to the end, see how far I’ve missed by.

I have yet to detect any minds that seem to echo mine in a year and some online, the Autists speak the language of the punishment cult same as regular folks do, I mean of course all the usual limits of knowledge apply, no-one can learn what is always hidden, what is beyond the deconstructionist horizon, what is outside of the present episteme. Raised in it, heard it all day long forever and naught else, no blame, Geezuz. Gaslit to death about it, we all are.

But they think “Autism,” is a thing, and sort of accept the normal as normal, as not needing to be nailed down and defined, and they talk about psychology, which for me, it’s all just Allistic psychology to me now, warrior society psychology, written to keep you strong and with nothing to say about a little parental discipline. They speak, like all marginalized groups, of their specific persecution, as though they have an enemy that only persecutes them, as if the persecution is about them.

Of course that’s what the persecutors say, “Autism,” is a problem – but they do say that to everybody, don’t they? Of course it is persecutors in general that are the problem, but again, you all speak their language, not mine.

Don’t you.

This arrogant prick is alone in all the world, pretty much always has been, and it’s getting old. Just get it, humanity.

Yes, the reference is Mendosa, on South Park.

Jeff

Aug. 31st., 2023

Theory of a Theory of a Mind

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It’s a term I thought I stopped hearing for years, but it’s back, ‘theory of mind,’ for a few reasons, mostly to do with neurotypes and Autism in particular.

I’ve read that in the bad, black and white days of yesterday and still in the hospitals of today, that they accuse us of lacking one altogether, and this is another way of saying that they lack or refuse the concept of neurotype, that their, “theory,” explains and predicts only a single mind, or a single type, in all the universe.

It is clearly ensconced in the sort of creationist thinking that doesn’t allow that rats and cats and elephants have “minds,” either, again, a “theory,” of a unique phenomenon lacks the usefulness that we associate with our better theories. This is an aspect of arrested development, this theory struggles to be born, right, a “theory,” of mind would need to be a theory of minds, plural, wouldn’t it? This one doesn’t travel, doesn’t carry. It lacks other useful applications.

The concept of neurotypes means a theory of minds, plural. That’s what is required. The theory of mind, in some hands, as it stands is something of a two edged sword.

When it’s a good thing, it helps us connect, when our minds do work in parallel, and that’s how it’s good and why everyone needs it, but when it’s bad, when your theory of mind obscures the obvious workings of a different sort of mind as simply not working –

Functioning zoos do not enforce human standards of thought upon the animals, they couldn’t work, they would simply be the abuse parades of the recent past when the animals withered and died. Modern zookeepers and normal people the world over have theories of multiple minds for their animals – only in institutions for humans is a “theory of mind,” the very opposite, a theory of violent conformism.

One theory of one mind, and some awful mandate to make this obvious lie happen and today it is people that wither and die.

I would decertify the entire medical industry for their refusal to prosecute human sciences and the sciences of the mind with any seriousness, but in particular, no-one without a multiple theory of minds would be involved in any of it, or education either. They are officially not giving humans the credit and respect they automatically and unconsciously give their dogs.

Jeff

Aug. 6th., 2023

Retraction

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I am sorry, I have just taken another run at learning what “Allistic,” means, and this time I found it, it’s “other, ” that “allo,” means, Allistic is “Otheristic” – and that’s proper already, close enough, never mind my foolishness about giving the typical neurotype a meaningful name.

I mean, they are are not meaningful names, “Selfistic,” Otheristic,” it doesn’t really work, “istic,” is “pertaining to or concerned with a quality or trait,” and “self,” and “other,” are not qualities or traits, the syntax doesn’t really add up – but names are rarely meaningful, self-explanatory, they are usually simply names, made up words for a thing. You’d never know what a tree was from analyzing the word, “tree,” either.

So it’s good, “Allistic,” is good and I’m sorry.

I think I’m going to let this sit for a bit and then delete those silly posts.

Jeff

June 22nd., 2023

If There is a Way

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Contents

Introduction, the problems                                                                                     1

            AST, Jeff’s Bag of Premises

                        addiction, a personal metaphor                                                                2

                        resilience, a dearth of fear                                                                         3

                        resilience, a lack of understanding                                                           4

            Desires

                        old, strength                                                                                               5

                        new, everything else                                                                                   6

             domestication                                                                                             7

Introduction, the Problems

It is 2023 by the current measure, since the last great peak we acknowledge, and we’re mostly all plugged in, we know the problems, plague, climate collapse, war, fascism and some mass death wish that comes with it. By and large, we seem helpless; even if we say the climate thing is “unprecedented,” those last few things, we have done these exact things before, and still no-one seems to have any idea why or how to stop them.

The reasons humans do what they do appear to be a mystery to them.

It is clear that the plan is collapse, and to hope to crawl out of the rubble afterwards for another try, “resilience,” don’t you know. Strength and resilience are always and forever the plan for the humans, and this is one of the problems, it’s clear that no-one in power fears the future enough to change it or understands the species they rule over well enough to change anything, for reasons I hope to show. With self knowledge, rather with the lack of it, it’s all one and the same, isn’t it, not knowing yourself and not seeking that knowledge.

If we wanted it, we may have had it long ago, and if we had it, we’d know to want it, but we don’t and we don’t.

This is a problem, we need to learn new desires, which means we somehow have to set our own goals, imagine new desires and then develop the taste for them – it all rings of the psychology of addiction, doesn’t it? This is not a coincidence and we do presently regret our desires, the things we do chase, and we do berate ourselves for it, bemoaning our Natures when we have a moment’s peace to do so. Presently however, it’s illegal to have the desires we need to have, peaceniks are traitors, and we regret any inconvenience, but the awful Nature is the law. This is truly the state of things.

This is a problem today and we need to understand that conflict as a solution was never going to last forever, that the Earth is dying and so are we, if we do not change that law.

That’s my overview, the problems are the huge things we all know about, coupled with some present aversion or inability to rise to them.

And don’t get me wrong, we need to change that. We couldn’t have become this nightmare ape if God hadn’t rather unadvisedly left us to create ourselves, if that weren’t our job and no-one else’s. Imagine you’re alive five or ten million years ago, you’re a wild creature yet to morph into chimpanzees, bonobos, any number of apes living and gone, and our whole group, living and gone – would this sound possible? Of course it wouldn’t, but it clearly was. I guarantee we had different desires then and we changed those, because that’s how evolution works, you are what you want and need to be and it’s never “finished,” while the world is alive and changing. Of course we can change that or we wouldn’t be here.

No creature would.

Or, you know, carry on. Human Nature, whaddayagonnado.

I wish to be remembered for this one if for nothing else, my pinned tweet: If the dinosaurs had made excuses about “Dinosaur Nature,” there would be no birds.

AST, Jeff’s Bag of Premises

addiction, a personal metaphor

An addiction to abuse, that is one way to look at it, I mean, self medicating with the weed all my life, it’s not my favourite choice of metaphor, but there is no denying it has it all, it is clearly one, there is the upside that it makes it possible not to think about the problems, it has the part we are chasing and the part chasing us, and the “strength,” seems worth abusing our babies for, because it has the same “no go,” areas in our thinking, areas that we think are survival. If I’m not high, I’m very depressed and at risk, so it really doesn’t matter what damage weed does to my life, I imagine it would be over without my pain killer.

And if we are not “strong,” some other group of humans will wipe us out and it really doesn’t matter what damage the abuse does to my kids or anyone else if that happens – it’s the same all or nothing sort of thinking, except in my individual case it’s something like delusion and in “society’s” case it’s obviously “reality,” what is wrong with you? Of course in both cases there is an element of choice, and in both cases, we make it real whenever we want. If I ran out of weed and offed myself the next day, it would be both, a choice made real. If we became a more peaceful group of humans and some warlike bunch saw weakness and tried to wipe us out, that would be the same, humans turning that choice into reality.

If I got off the weed and lived, I would be leaving my delusion/bad choice and rejoining society in reality, it would be an addiction success story – and if modern humans encountered a group of humans not engaged in world domination and didn’t wipe them out, we would be leaving our “reality”/bad choice and rejoining the global society of creatures in actual reality.

That would be another addiction success story, if we did that instead of say, mining lithium, or clearing the Amazon for wood pellets.

I’m afraid this description works!

Seems important to note that the “reality,” referenced in this section is only another human group’s addiction to abuse and conflict, that the difference between my delusion and human “reality,” is that “reality” is not mine but some other human’s delusion. Ah, Laing, isn’t it.

If it’s not, it should be.

resilience, a dearth of fear

Counting on your resilience and your strength, this is warrior talk, don’t worry about the pain, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger stuff – a straight up warrior fantasy meme, untrue almost of almost everything that might have killed you, it’s probably only true if you’re like me and think lifting weights might kill you, LOL.

That I’ve said a million times, though and I’m having a secondary thought about it at long last, OK, again at long last, that this meme is the paradigm of punishment at play, not of trauma. It is exactly and maybe only punishment that does that, doesn’t kill you and makes you stronger, isn’t it? Ha – think a thought for thirty years, sometimes it sprouts a second one.

One of my more recurring soundbites: in the Punishment Cult, the path to Good is through the Bad and only through pain is there learning.

The cursed idea of the deterrent is that you make bad things to force people to choose good things, and so every horrible thing you do becomes good, a “deterrent.” It turns good and bad upside down. So it’s not that we’re insufficiently afraid of the disaster, it’s that we only imagine some good from it, ultimately. Bad is good, in the punishment cult, and surely the end of the world will finally teach us a lesson. We’ll figure out a better way after that. Ah, yes, punishment is the war to end all wars myth too, if we cause enough pain, if we finally reach some mad limit, then we’ll learn.

No. Not an endorsement.

We are not in the Solutions section just yet.

resilience, a lack of understanding

In the Punishment Cult, pain “doesn’t hurt,” and it “makes people choose good,” so there is no sense to be made of anything.

We see ideas and thinkers come and go, different political and economic “systems,” and none of them think punishment or oppression or abuse “hurts,” and they all force their “radical new system,” the same way, with soldiers and abuse and indoctrination and none of that “hurts,” so none of them know why nothing ever works out. The police force capitalism, the poor aren’t happy, the police force communism, the proles aren’t happy, they’ve tried everything, and they’re all out of ideas.

One father beats his child Christian, one beats his communist, and no-one notices all are abused, broken, and not in love with “the system,” whichever one it was.

It seems our alien overlords, the modern Illuminati, the G20, whoever has any power to direct society also do not understand that it doesn’t matter in what direction we are pushed, that we are harmed by the pushing whatever the direction, that it is the pushing that forms our unwanted desires. So they keep pushing, talking about their system and their laws and they push until our simple response to abuse finally rears its ugly head in a non-ignorable way, hopefully a revolution, usually a war or an internal one, a pogrom and/or an apartheid, or some combination of them all.

You start with a “religion of forgiveness,” and you give it a push and in a few generations they must join the religion of forgiveness or face retribution again: the push has its own agenda.

But nobody knows why because our simple response to abuse doesn’t exist, remember, the punishing push doesn’t hurt you. Not in the Cult. This is sort of full circle for me, that was the parenting thought that I first rejected, what the Hell do you mean, “it doesn’t hurt us?” It seems our leaders really believe it, though, and so they are probably as mystified as Dad about it, as I say, they keep pushing, so to repeat, they are not afraid enough of the future – but they also can’t change its direction because they are blind to the obvious driving force behind this repetitive disaster, the social push, the ubiquitous control and abuse of authority in all its forms that we bring to bear upon everyone, starting when they were just little children.

“I push them Left, I push them Right, nothing works.”

Whatever is a Master of the Universe, an Illuminate to do?

Desires, old, strength

Every step along the way, like when we left the trees for the savannah, this involved learning to want to be out there, when previously that had been someplace we didn’t want to be. There was something out there we had learned to want, we didn’t, then we did. We don’t remember what it was exactly, good folks working through all that now, reverse engineering our journey, I saw a new one very recently that brought that example to mind – but we read it like some automatic process of science, like it happened without our knowledge or participation. Of course we adapt because we want to, we want to continue despite losing the old resource or method.

Most people with cars got off their horses and bought a car because they wanted it, not because anyone forced them, generally long before horses got outlawed on city streets or anything. The giraffe wasn’t forced to grow that neck forever, they wanted the high leaves. Sure, some of both, a spectrum. You can be forced to eat gruel despite that you wanted to eat, there is room for manipulation in it. But I live among humans and I know what they want, I know the overarching ubiquitous goal of strength, we are a primate who exists in a state of group conflict and our desires are crude and obvious: all goes for the war effort, all else is a liability.

You want to be “stronger,” and that goal was achieved, a long time ago.

You are strong enough, please stop. It’s an arms race, a Red Queen’s race, an open ended escalation that has run its course and it is time to learn to want something else. Every human group is forever getting stronger and we readily admit any advantages are always temporary leaps in tech, soon available for all and the escalation continues. It may as well have never begun for all it changes regarding our relative positions, but we have all become monsters together chasing it, the monster under our bed is literally Dad, downstairs, drunk and raging out and we know not to let him hear our feet touch the floor.

Ouch, right.

Of course the public response is the exact opposite of that, fascism is something like conscious evolution, where they identify our species’ major malfunction and then run with it, play to your strengths, kind of thing. We have literal They Live messaging, “Be Strong,” everywhere you bloody look. The hashtags, I’ve said before. What used to be a bit of a rite of passage and a grownup secret, the shameful strength, is now hawked on every street corner, on billboards.

And yes, the “conscious evolution,” trend. We are not in this place because we are in denial of some “true,” evolution, we are here because of what we pursue, not because of what we choose not to. From what I understand the expression references a business ideology, teaches pack hunting or something, for competition. I’m just going to put this out there, unfiltered gonzo take –

nothing evolved “for competition,” what possible evolutionary advantage does a species gain competing with itself? What is an ecological niche but an area where there is less competition for a resource, and do all creatures not gravitate towards one? Territoriality, too, evolved so that most creatures don’t have to, didn’t it? Is there “competition for territory,” or is territory freedom from competition? The conflict and competition of primate life has never been the good part, and I’m here to say, chase something else, competition is one of the bad desires, if it had an upside, it’s run its course and more. We could apply some wildlife management and zoo wisdom and arrange to live without it if we wanted. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Which brings us to –

Desires, new, everything else

Ah, time to dream.

Why not start with the lie? Why don’t we, just for a first test shot, aim at the world we say we have, the one that used to be on television, the one we teach our children about in school?

We know the good things, education, democracy – group rule, that means, consensus rule – health – peace. All these sorts of good things taken together, this is the dream, isn’t it? All those things that get tossed for the war effort. I will say, the dream is a deliberate, conscious world, I mean, we already like those things, we already approve, we even make a great show of creating and maintaining those things as much as possible already.

The dream is just that any of it actually worked, right?

Dreams are the desires we wish we had, right, while we struggle in the chains of the desires we act upon, the ones we were born into. This is conservative “realism,” the desires we are given, while desires of our own are only fantasy – again, human “reality,” consists of other humans’ desires. The point is all these kinds of motivations exist already and things are nonetheless less than optimal, and having the good dream isn’t changing things like we hoped. It has always been the point of AST that adding good isn’t good enough, we need to stop adding bad too.

It hurts us, Dad, and Teacher and Officer, and Plato and Moses, the abuse you say “doesn’t hurt us,” you’re full of it, it does and you need to stop, my goodness, does no grownup ever say that out loud? It creates the bad desires – like magic, out of nothing at all. We decide to add pain consciously and voluntarily, bring pain that didn’t exist previously into the closed system of the world. It is a bad desire and it makes for bad desires and it leaves our hopes and dreams on the back burner forever.

We are shooting our dreams in the foot forever being “strong,” and “competitive.”

domestication

You know about the domestication business, right, the fox farm?

Too quickly, there was an experiment with fur foxes where they selected for an even, more manageable temperament (they would reach into a fox’s cage wearing a stout leather glove and the foxes who attacked or cowered were left out of the breeding group, while the calm foxes would be included) and in no time, a few generations, the selected for foxes developed domestic traits, doglike things, spots, floppy ears, barking, affection. I believe they fund the ongoing research by selling foxes as pets that really are pretty well suited as pets. It spawned a whole thing about domestication, and self domestication, and made the point that genes and traits are connected to other traits and genes in many ways. There is talk of human self domestication, and a good case, but today I’m going the other direction.

We select humans on the exact opposite criteria as the fox farm did, I think, if they bite, they’re great soldiers, and if they cower, they make a terrific workforce. Dad wants a fighter, Mom would like a passive one, perhaps.

The calm ones, meh, keep at ‘em, most will bite eventually – Chagnon again, sorry.

The point of invoking the fox farm was that we select for the flight or flight response for ourselves, but also it was that if you select a trait, sometimes you get a whole suite of traits, you shake up the whole spiky ball of traits, and I guarantee that strength, warrior mode, is an entire different ball of traits than the creature who would live our better dreams. I’m saying, the “strong” human doesn’t really correspond with the calm fox, not usually, I think a strong person is more like the biter, and the quietly strong person who doesn’t start any fights is an ideal, the model, more a part of the dream than the current set of actual, functioning, rough desires.

I think, like the foxes, if we stopped selecting the fighters and the flyers, as they did with the foxes, we might see a miraculous transformation, stuff we never dreamed. The fox farm grabs our imaginations for exactly that reason, right?

Though I am failing forever to express it, just hearing of the foxes made my vision seem possible, and I intuited something like, “You can’t think that from here,” meaning you can from just over there somewhere, change yourself and your new brain can have new thoughts – even if you only change one thing, sometimes. Plus again, the speed of the results in the foxes, only a few generations! One is tempted to have hope or something.

And so I advocate for what I do, against the abuse of childhood and against the Red Queen’s Race of conflict, and I wonder, dream really, of what great thoughts a less abused generation might be able to access that we cannot.

I mean, I say, “stop spanking,” but it means so much more. You can’t “stop spanking,” without first completely revolutionizing pretty much everything else about human life. If you’re not going to spank, your kid is not going to do that thing you like, not automatically. You’re going to have to convince them – and that requires some revolution, because that requires living a defensible life, it would require you making that thing you like something worth having in the first place. But I mean, if that happened it would only take one generation.

Do what you can, as much as you can. You are one of the unknown number of generations it would take, it seems obvious we are not a controlled experiment and it would take us longer than it took the foxes, so more than a few. Perhaps we can hope in terms of the Turtle Island meme, seven generations, and new thoughts, better desires awakened in each of them, spurring us on, making it easier with time.

It’s me plan.

Jeff

June 8th., 2023

Sorts and Purposes

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It takes me a very long time to come to the point, in fact, before I bury it again, let’s begin with it: the purpose of the Autist is to explain the Neurotypical to the Neurotypical.

We are a mirror, instructive by contrast. What a neurotype cannot see of itself, it can of another type, and vice versa. The Autist, familiar with their own mind, learns what a Neurotypical mind is by listening to them describe ours, the one we know – by a process like arithmetic we can glean what sort of mind theirs is.

It would seem the reverse is not happening, the Neurotypical, familiar with their own minds, rarely learns what an Autistic mind is by listening to us describe theirs, the one they know, and applying the addition or subtraction of our perceptions – thus my partially tongue in cheek new term for the most common, or dominant type – robust. They are not so easily given to introspection, the implicit reverse logic and the opportunity to audit themselves this way doesn’t seem to occur to them.

I think it’s a neurotypical trait, the darkest side of which is conformism, a sort of a policy that other sorts are not equal and comparable. It’s not an insult, it’s a requirement for their very typicality and dominance, isn’t it?

But it’s exactly my point.

This is exactly the sort of thing that everyone else knowing it doesn’t mean jack. They have to know it, somehow, I mean they have to know it’s only a neurotypical trait, rather than God’s Universal Bloody Will, right?

And that impossible job is ours.

It is not our job to explain to the genetically unconsciously xenophobic about all the different sorts out there, that is obviously impossible, they aren’t even interested.

It is our job to explain to them how their way of life is killing the planet and that they won’t survive it either. Right? I may be new as an Autist who knows it, but I am not new as a human being and the framing is always theirs and it is always wrong, and the abuse is always named after the victim, and the abuser has no name, it’s just . . . typical. Because with names comes shame. They are not going to do it themselves. If you have seen the quality of what they call “research,” regarding Autism, you know, they are never going to classify themselves in their system of faults and treatments.

Our job – and I’m tired of doing it alone, honestly.

Jump in any time, Kids.

Jeff May 26th., 2023

Gonzo Science – Your Fighting Genes

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Gawd, the propaganda is so obtuse, so horrifying simple and false. The flighty sounding talk about self-knowledge isn’t always high level, it’s basic as can be too: if you don’t know yourself, you can’t know anything, even your own thoughts, speech, and actions may not be you, how would you know? If the world clearly seems a certain way to you, you have to ask yourself, why is this what my mind looks to see? Why have I evolved the sense of that certain way? If the world is clearly a struggle and a fight to your mind, then you were evolved to see fighting, you have genes for fighting.

It follows that of course we have other genes with other concerns as well, and the current and long time social narrative is that these others have to live around the fighting. The current and long time idea is that you “have the fighting genes,” end of story, it’s static, created Human nature in new words, we are still and forever dealing with them, but of course what is missing from the conversation is the environmental control of genetic expression. If our other genes and other concerns wish to change anything about the fighting, we need to take that argument a level deeper, and undermine the gene, find a way to stop selecting it.

If we could adjust the environment away from abuse, our children would be slightly less under its control, and this would give their children a better chance to do the same. This was my parenting plan – you want to make God laugh? Never mind, it’s still my theory.

Come on, this was easy, it’s obvious. The minute I heard of epigenetics, this was all sitting there, obvious.

There are fighting genes in humans, and there is epigenetics, and there is spanking: the gene, the control mechanism, and us working it like an oar, making sure from approximately birth, that the environment is a fight, ensuring the activation and repeated selection of the war genes. Plain as day, I have had trouble expressing this because I assumed it was obvious and simple and everyone knew, I swear to God. How do we not? Do you not?

I mean, this obvious truth is buried under a ton of flummery.

Freud’s drives are just the static Nature broken down into components, balancing them seems to be all that can be done and I guess most people manage it well enough? Primatology too, just talks about the past, the “making of our Nature,” or something, it looks away from our this-minute evolution too. Any system of human parts and components comes out of the static meme, the meaningful parts are behaviour and genetics, not the structural hardware.

What if your baseline “Human Nature,” was a moving thing, a foundation of shifting mud? (the following I wrote a few days ago on Twitter.)

What if?

What if there were those “warrior genes?”

What if there were? What might the world look like?

Well, you’d expect war – check.

You might expect some rape, warrior genes selecting themselves – check.

You might expect a military sort of social organization, an hierarchy of authority – check.

You might expect that a creature with such genes admires and promotes strength and aggression – check. Ask me if you don’t believe me. It’s most of the blog.

You might expect a development that turns adorable babies into aggressive adults – check. Again, I’m always writing this.

You would expect that individuals lacking the selected for aggression would be pathologized and/or marginalized, perhaps killed – check. (Won’t make you ask: all the “gender critique,” can and should be seen as patriarchy, warrior patriarchy and they don’t really care if boys love boys, but they care terribly if boys love at all and hate insufficiently. This would seem to be the obvious aim of male circumcision, so we do things for this reason.)

Enough?

Show me something about people that says we DON’T have and live from our warrior genes.

Every argument you have for a nasty Human Nature would support warrior genes, wouldn’t they?

Has this book been written yet?

😘

(back to live on Saturday.)

I suppose if the book existed I would have found it by now. I want to write it, but I’m doing this instead.

I’m jaded; I don’t have the hope that we will do this, see our own making, and I have to say, it means all that nineteenth century talk about consciousness is rubbish, that if we don’t see this first level deep into ourselves, we cannot claim to have it. We remain beasts indeed, as long as we do not take this step.

Jeff

May 13th., 2023

The Double Masking Problem – no, sorry: The Shadow Empathy Problem

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Written on Twitter:

I seem to have had a non-standard experience. I didn’t know, didn’t know to mask, I just got high and went into the breach numbed and otherwise as my weird self. It’s true there wasn’t any social success.

I suppose there were times when small talk seemed easier. Hyperlexic, if I couldn’t produce any small talk, I sometimes said so, talked about that: I’m sorry, I wish I had some small talk for you. I’m here. ❤️

I suppose I’m always wishing I could STFU.

It’s either this or I am just still brutally unaware.

I’m trying to find it, that’s why I’m talking: you know the NT version of “the mask?” That’s the one my people were talking about the whole time, what is not “the shadow,” is “the mask,” the mask is what people allow themselves to see about themselves, our FB selves, while the shadow is our dark side, the things we will not acknowledge, and everyone has one, they say, it is filled with Freud’s dark drives and the seven deadly sins, and aspects of ourselves that we use as insults for others. Basically, your shadow is that bad penny, evil Human Nature’s bad side. Your (NT psychological) mask, is your cherry-picked personality – OMG, hey, it is so good to think in text! #ActuallyAutistic , everyone come in, check this.

NTs have one theory of masking as part of their theory of mind, and Autists have an entirely different one as part of ours, wait for it – so we see them masking, conforming, our theory of mind says: “there’s something more going on underneath, surely they understand more than they’re saying they do.”

But when THEY detect an Autistic  masking, what does THEIR theory of mind tell them?

What is behind a mask in their minds?

THE SHADOW.

Oh my gawd, this is the DEP, they see us masking, and what is behind our mask in their theories is everything they have already decided they hate about themselves.

For real, y’all. This has truthiness from here to Timbuktu, I believe it already. Ouch. (I can bounce this off of someone IRL, one who was and is very into shadow work and such.

I’ll get back. ❤️ )

“Empathy,” was close, that’s part of it, what is buried in our shadow we lack empathy for (repression, per Alice Miller); the shadow is all that is repressed in us, the blind spot.

But these are not two individual versions of the same phenomenon, these masks.

In theory, Autistics have a psychological mask also, of course, repressed things – but it’s not that mask we get caught out at, NT people don’t bust each other or anyone for the shadow’s mask. It is not two psychological masks passing in the night, not a different bunch of micro-empathies from otherwise identical systems like a language problem, but a two theories of what an Autist’s mask is covering problem. The NT only knows the shadow and projects and assumes the worst.

I got Autistic therapists here, right? Surely they know the shadow and the whole world is here before me? The big takeaway, I guess, Autists, get yourself a counsellor that has done their shadow work, one that has the chops to understand their own reactions to people, I’d want to know they had the idea.

Jeff May 4th., 2023

The Brain Science of Not Grokking Evolution

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How Thoughts are Formed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Thoughts are Protected:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human Nature Meme:

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

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

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

And I’m afraid we do. A lot.

Jeff

April 28th., 2023

New, July, 2024:

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

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

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

I’ll be looking for more to lose too.

Jeff

No, YOU Have a Genetic Component

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I’m so used to being misunderstood, to being the intellectual black sheep, Jeff against the world, that post hatching and having found a type for myself, I find myself rejecting it and its assumptions like I always have with NT world’s; it’s a habit and a survival mechanism and maybe a whole neurotype and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.

All my life I have been battling a broken neurotype, not mine.

It stresses me out, it’s got me pacing and even hand flapping a little, when I hear the charlatans’ noise about “curing” Autists, but our responses also do not satisfy me, I feel that while we are putting up an argument, that we get dragged into accepting some portion of their premise, and I want to lead you in, but you know what, let’s go straight to it, I’ll name it. More than that Autists are not a thing to repair or to prevent, I need to go further, nothing falls into place for me if “Autism” is a thing, at all. It’s not the monster I have identified and wrestled all my life, that was . . . the other thing.

Here’s my premise.

“Autism,” isn’t a thing, I mean it’s a thing, everything is a word, everything is a thing, a vacuum is a thing, but it’s also nothing: space is a “thing,” that is also nothing, whereas matter, now that’s a thing, a thing that isn’t just the absence of another thing. Autism is a thing like space is a thing; whereas . . . I need a better word, for it, please work with me that these are close, whereas Neurotypicality, Allism, being “normal,” – now these are things. Like matter is a thing.

Being normal is a thing, and it is not also just “nothing,” like the word suggests. That’s just the consensus fallacy, if it’s everywhere, it’s nothing – this is backwards, NTs, if it’s everywhere, that’s more like everything than “nothing,” isn’t it? Not asking, or not asking NTs: it is more like everything. Like we’re having the discussion about air again: if it displaces something else, it’s matter, it’s not “nothing,” even if it is everywhere. Even if it is invisible to you.

When the charlatans go to environmental causes, Tylenol, that’s horrible and stupid, Autists haven’t been poisoned, and poisons don’t create neurotypes, but that’s not my area, plenty of good folks are fighting those folks, thank goodness (and also I have had a run at them recently already). What I think I need to answer today is when they start talking about genes. That’s close to a logic I am already looking at, and I have already been developing a genetic theory about that other thing. “Autism,” “has a genetic component,” they say, and . . . duh?

Doesn’t everything alive and all of behaviour “have a genetic component?”

Of course it does, and to say it about “Autism,” is as obvious as it would be to say it about anything, and to say there is “more than one gene involved,” is also true of everything and equally obvious, and I predict that they cannot even say it is associated with any “group of genes,” not yet, they will say, and none of those statements suggest that “Autism” is a genetic . . . unit of any sort. A single gene might, as in some diseases, a group of them might, I think there are things associated with more than one gene, but these have not been identified for “Autism,” and so they have not ‘yet,’ shown the genes to say that “Autism,” is a genetic . . . phenomenon.

OK – I have seen this idea, a group of genes, and I think they will argue, I think they will say they have identified a “number of genes,” now – I don’t think I’m out of date, I think I’m arguing, I’m saying I don’t believe them. This blog is about how I don’t think “Autism” is thing in itself and that there is no such logical grouping. It’s a dispute, not my ignorance – I think. It does get a little circular, both their argument and mine, and I’m not sure there’s any way around all of that with these sorts of constructs. My point is, that it is less circular when we see it the other way around: I am predicting that we can indeed find a “group of genes,” but for NTness, not Autism. Such puzzles always carry an extra level of difficulty when you’re looking at them upside down, trying to prove the negative rather than the positive in the situation.

Their language is doomed to vagueness and complexity, we see it progress: a gene, no, a group of genes, well, a variable number of genes, along with environmental things (like Tylenol) also, well, environment (like Tylenol) and a variable number of genes and also life history (like a lack of “discipline”) . . .

You know what, here, let me flip that over for you. That’s what we’re here for.

Of course, I can’t show you any genes for anything, so, while proof is lacking for “Autistic genes,” at this date, let’s look at some theory, shall we?

What does a genetic . . . entity look like? How do we recognize genes, what sort of attributes do genetic things have?

I’ve thought of four things that we associate with a genetic . . . effect, and they are, in no particular order,

One, heritability: genes explain heritability, our children inherit our genes and our lives, to some degree. It has been dramatically explained how genetic behaviours appear in separated families, most poisonously in the twin studies. Heritability that survives family and cultural disruption, we know this is a genetic matter.

Two, epigenetics: an epigenetic effect is a sure positive sign, if not not always present, but when we see differences in development with the same genes in different environments, we know some gene is taking a cue from the environment and choosing an option.

Three, sameness: when we share a gene, we share a trait, not one for one necessarily, but species share a whole lot of their genes while all of life share a few, almost. “Species,” means a high level of shared genes, and when we see shared attributes, especially across diverse environments, we know we are seeing shared genes. Accordingly, the more uniform a given group is, a given species, the less variability it displays, this indicates a higher percentage of shared genes than perhaps another, highly variable “species,” has, and the more variable species has more genes that they don’t all share – think perhaps species with mountain and lowland versions – but the more they are all the same, the more we know their genes are too.

To phrase it for use here, I want to say that the more uniform a group is, the more “genetic,” it is, that is to say the more it would be accurately defined by defining the gene, or as I’ve been saying, the genetic . . . something. Genetic overall effect, I suppose. I mean, I don’t only want to say it. I think it’s a fair example of how we use the soft term, “genetic,” in conversation, and I try not to want to say untrue things, of course don’t we all. We will judge for ourselves, I guess, but if you don’t agree, things will look more circular later, I’m afraid. I’m trying to set it up, but with a change of viewpoint, not by dispensing with the truth, I hope.

Inasmuch as ninety-some percent of shared genes makes a species and a hundred percent makes you an identical twin or a clone, more similar means more “genetic,” – ah, there it is. It means more of the “genetic component.”

That ought to do it! It just takes me a bit sometimes.

Four, evolution: when a trait or an effect is growing or shrinking, being selected or deselected over time, when evolution is happening, it happens in your genes, if we see polar bears fading to tan, we know there are grizzly genes, they are converging. When we see species getting bigger or smaller or changing how they use the environment, we know their genes are changing too.

OK. Caveats.

Some of my reasoning will rest upon reasoning that as far as I can see, is only mine; I will be expecting you to accept AST, Antisocialization Theory, my idea that humanity drives itself to more and more antisocial behaviours by way of its attempts at social control, my idea that no-one traumatizes humans except humans, that we are horrible and destroying the world because we treat ourselves horribly and for no other reason. It’s the materialistic ideological opposite of “Human Nature.” It’s all I ever talk about, see the blog.

I will attempt to give you a way around it where possible, but I’m nothing if not holistic, and it won’t really work without it. Nothing works with the Human Nature myth gumming up the science, and cynic that I am, you know I think that’s the point of it.

Alright let’s apply these criteria and find out who’s a genetic . . . whatever and who isn’t, shall we?

One, heritability.

“It runs in families,” sure it does, of course it does, wait – what does? “Autism?” So, “Autism,” “runs in my family?” Again, yes, sure it does – but it’s not the only thing that does. I’m pretty sure my family has a non-Autistic streak too. The rest of them aren’t blank molds, waiting to be coloured in, they’re not “nothing,” if they’re not Autistic, are they? More like everything, if you count them. If we don’t just leave them out of our equations. Hmm.

I’m afraid I’ve just talked myself out of “Allism,” as my term, I’ll go back to my generic, “NTness,” again, because my point is it’s the concrete thing – and Allism is defined as simply “not Autistic,” that’s not a definition for my thesis, obviously they can’t just define each other that way, and I’m going the other direction, where it is “Autism,” whose definition will simply be “not NT.” With a better word some day, I hope. My apologies to the community, that word is not going to work out anymore when I’m finished revamping the entire movement and the world. To say, “Allism runs in families,” instead is merely a grammatical tautology, not my point at all. We should find a way to say NT to mean something more specific, but that’s a bridge too far just now.

NTness it is.

The point of this is that this is not a grammatical tautology, but a real one, there is some real, heritable thing being passed along that isn’t Autism, some genetic . . . structure that is its own thing, and again, isn’t “nothing,” or “Human Nature,” or any sort of a functional default that is necessarily good or “natural,” or just the way God planned it. But either way – if it’s only grammar to you, it’s still clear that both neurotypes “run in families, Autistic and not Autistic.” If it’s only grammar to begin with, it’s still grammatically true. Logically, if “Autism runs in families,” so does the other thing, or there would be nothing but “Autism.” Right?

For me, there are two possible genetic things in this conversation, both possibly actual, heritable things in the world, and perhaps it’s one or the other, or perhaps it’s both. So, that’s One Point each. Both things look genetic, based on their heritability, to me, “Autism,” and “NTness.”

It’s a One-All tie at this point. They could both be genetic . . . forms of order by the first test.

Two, epigenetics.

Now, this is all overview, I am not a biologist, and when I say “genes,” or “alleles,” or even if I name one as I’m about to do, know that the names and the details don’t mean much to me, that this is all theory and someday your details will catch up. I won’t be held to some genetic detail from 2020, this is all made from macro observations, no minutiae is going to invalidate it for me.

This seems to be a feature of some genes, or some genetic effects, that they have options, depending on what they detect about the environment, that affect an organism’s development. I believe some genetic diseases or conditions come on during development as genetic options are settled, isn’t that right? Classic epigenetic effects are things like . . .wow, Google seems useless, nothing but cancer, and it seems confused with mutation. Things like a foetus sensing its mother’s malnutrition and adjusting how the person processes proteins for their life, this is an example, the Dutch Winter Babies – I’m not sure anyone’s proved that this extends beyond the womb, but wouldn’t it?

If a one year-old senses its own famine and had any developing left to do, can we assume some things are adjustable well into development? I would think so, I mean I do think so, I’m quite certain this is the case but that I am not in that business and am having a little trouble finding the proof for you. The idea is central to AST, I must have seen it somewhere. Oh, there it is – identical twins have the same genes to start, and epigenetics, response to environment, is understood to be responsible for any differences between identical twins at all, which clearly exist.

AST has it that the so called warrior alleles operate that way, and I think that’s my example, everyone thinks that – it’s just a poor example because it’s exactly my thesis, AST’s premise that some genetic effect like the warrior alleles happens for people, and that no-one makes the environment one to activate those alleles, I mean set the worse option, but us. This environment is called, “spanking.” It has a special name, it’s not just “hitting,” or “beating,” and it’s only called that when we do it to humans in childhood, during development, because it is epigenetics.

We see the effect, as I said in a recent blog, when children, born sweet and helpless become hard and aggressive as they age to “maturity.” Spanking sets the options of your warrior alleles to “war.” At least it does for most people. I have been trying to make this case for years; if I haven’t convinced anyone yet, it must be impossible. For me, this is the epigenetic effect that rules human life.

We must pause to admit that the “warrior alleles,” have suffered the same process as “Autistic genes,” that at first it was “the psychopath gene,” then the name change and the caveats, depending on other factors, then only in extreme abusive environments, along with or without many other genes, etc., etc., it is difficult to say anything with any power in this complex business. But the less extreme function seems clear and independent of microscopic detail, how people grow up to “be strong,” more reliably than that they grow up getting more sensitive. If you don’t see it, you probably think nothing and no-one is strong enough, which makes my point in an even more powerful way.

To some of us, at least.

It seems that perhaps it fails for some? For many Autists in particular? Can we not be counted upon to get “strong?” This is my AST view, that this is the DEPT, this is what is so wrong with us, we cannot be trusted because we are apparently no damned good in a fight.

Not sure I can continue. This is a controversial point, I’m not sure anyone is going to follow me so far. There is a lot of talk online about Autistic sense of fairness and justice and on the other hand the ones who would “cure” us are quick to say we resist the training. Look, I guess I can’t speak for all Autists, maybe any of them, I am pretty new, and as I said at the start, I’m not a very good follower – but it never changed me. I am as opposed to spanking today as I was when I was one year old.

I don’t think I have that warrior allele thing in nearly the same measure as normal people do, and I suspect a lot of us Autists are like this. Can you see where I’m going? I think NTness displays the epigenetic effect of people growing up strong and mean, and I’m not so sure “Autism,” has that.

I think we’re at Two to One now. In this sense, NTness is a genetic . . . function, and “Autism,” lacking this attribute, may not be, at least is not proved to be by this logic.

Three, sameness.

Which has diversity, which conforms?

Am I done? It’s tempting. More than tempting, why insult you? Maybe in the LSD halcyon days of the sixties I would have had to but . . . you have media, right? Enough said.

Three to One. Next!

Four, evolution.

AST again: I think we’re getting worse, I mean something is. I don’t agree with the existing conversation, I don’t think we’re “better,” than the chimpanzees because I think we have a chance to know better and we never take it. We don’t rule and kill the whole world because we are “better,” than any damn thing, try this – the chimpanzees probably don’t kill as many chimpanzees as we do anyway. We are worse, and getting worse all the time, and we don’t take any responsibility for our horrible selves and talk about “Human Nature,” insisting, promising, to never change. For hundreds of years now, maybe thousands of years, wars keep getting bigger. Standing still in the river of life changes you, and trying not to change only means you are choosing the worse option when the world changes, and suffering a reduction in your viability and quality of life.

It’s not just me and AST that thinks so, it’s the same meme that we are Fallen, that we have gotten worse, perhaps the biologists have a slightly less negative view, they say that we retain the nastiness of the chimpanzee and have only extended their destructive capabilities, not that we are getting worse within ourselves, only that we are not getting better. That’s better, huh.

This is my long held, and long considered from every side that I can imagine worldview, AST, that we keep making ourselves worse, in an act of misguided self-directed evolution, and it’s about the species in general, but:

 . . . but I didn’t know about “Autism,” that my mindset may not be a one-off, but a type, and I wasn’t aware of the Indigenous Critique either. It is amazing to learn that my self-taught understanding of the world that few of my white friends understand or agree with happens to line up with a common Autistic set of traits, but far more amazing that it does with the pre-European North American way of life.

I have been thinking and speaking about an “NT gene suite” for some time now, as opposed to at least my Autistic genes, and honestly, Wengrow’s talk about the Indigenous Critique is an evidence I never dreamed of, too bloody good to be true! You mean there are modern people, whole civilizations, practically within living memory, compared to the long story of evolution I thought I was telling, that didn’t have this problem, at all?!?!?

The Indigenous Critique of “Europeans and their culture,” and my complaints about my life’s difficulties communicating with NT people, they are identical. The Indigenous life the Dawn of Everything describes is exactly the life I pine for, exactly what I would have designed for us all – the life I bloody need. I’m trying not to tell you what it is, this is getting long and I’ve barely begun the book myself, everyone should read that book. And it existed, this life?

Really? Bloody Hell.

Is it really too much to assume some previous state, as those enlightenment pundits did, before all of this? Having watched this toxic thing take over North America, and likely other places, can we not assume it began somewhere and took us over at some point, maybe not so far back as caves and fire? Again, again, if it’s “nothing,” because it’s everywhere or will be soon, you’d say no, but that’s crazy, it’s everywhere, or almost, so it’s something, very, very something. I had been talking about an aggressive gene and genetic drift, and good Lord, if the European Age of Expansion isn’t just that.

Drift counts as “evolution,” doesn’t it? One of evolution’s most powerful vectors, isn’t it? You’re free to disagree, of course, but I think the main thrust of humanity is evolving, not in a positive way, it is adapting to an environment that it makes worse and then it adapts to that – this is a positive feedback loop, thermal runaway, and it is all going to burn. AST suggests that the 21st. century looks exactly like the 20th. century and that this cycle of meltdowns may be the final stage, to be repeated until we do adapt in a different direction, or for as many cycles as this planet can survive it.

Of course I’d love to be wrong about that.

But the other side of the question, this factor – are Autists evolving?

It will be Four to One by me, if not. What do we know?

Not much, to be sure. We’ve only had the word for a hundred years, and we’re still fighting about the definition; I don’t have a lot to work with. We exist, so we are being selected for, somehow, someone is breeding with us, although I expect that nobody knows yet if we are on the wax or the wane or holding steady, and nobody can say we are getting more or less Autistic, for the same reasons. We lack data for evolutionary change happening among Autists at the moment, of course, we haven’t got much of a snapshot yet, but is there anything?

I think maybe I’ll touch genetic similarity after all, not having to make the case for NTness, but just to talk about its relative absence in “Autism.” I won’t be using quotation marks going forward in my life for that, it just helps make the particular point in this blog, that we’re analysing that term.

But there is something about the other health issues, “morbidities” associated with us. There is a word, for illnesses that occur together, “comorbidities,” and technically it’s fine if you have more than one, but I’m seeing an argument that says to use such a term around “Autism,” sounds like “Autism,” is one of them, like “people with EDS often have the comorbidity of being “Autistic,” might pass too, so we’re looking for other terms, less negative, “co-occurrences,” like that.

But, terminology aside for the moment, it’s like, uh . . . it’s a little like “Autism” is a prophylaxis for disorders and problems that at least from an NT, bro-science evo point of view, “should” get people selected out. Again, some talk about “curing,” us for these issues, but somehow we are here, still getting laid and breeding, despite them. No? I mean, on the theory that we aren’t a new thing in the world, and I don’t think any but the most hardline creationist sorts think that.

What I’m suggesting is that the “number of genes along with environmental factors, etc.,” associated with “Autism” seem to be shared with a lot of problem genes, and no force is taking advantage, the leopards aren’t eating us, we are still here despite some liabilities. I have this sense that somehow, our side of the gene pool is un-curated, we are either too small to worry about or too big to fail or something. All this, is my only tiny stab in the dark evidence that perhaps “Autism,” is not presently evolving, that it is not showing that trait that some genetic . . . things do.

With that ephemeral bit of reasoning, and no evidence either for or against to speak of, it seems equally right or wrong to declare one way or the other – but well. This is my blog, and that is the declaration I am here to make: go forth, prove me right, prove me wrong, get us that data, this is science, Laddie, that’s the whole idea.

So, argue, criticize, of course, but I’m at Four to One now, and I expect readers are at Two, Two and a half, maybe Three to One, and I would call that a win.

Conclusion: at this point, I will say that “Autism,” could be something along the lines of a genetic “disorder,” but the data is not in to say so, and it could very well not be a genetic . . . occurrence, while NTness absolutely is one, meeting all the basic criteria.

I will re-iterate, I end most of my stuff with this point, I think, that it is not some small minority of weirdos or their disabilities that are forever at war and driving this planet off three different cliffs simultaneously. That is some typical disability, clearly. Which again, is not “nothing.”

Oh, hey, midnight, so it’s Sunday. Let’s post.

Jeff.

March 19th., 2023