Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Spoiling

Rhetoric

Redefinitions – 10. Rhetoric

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this word, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26^th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Rhetoric”

I’m up to Number Ten in the blog, I think, I’m jumping a few, I suppose I could renumber, but I have a few started already.

This one is mostly to say and demonstrate: you know all this already.

The existence and the common understanding about rhetoric proves the matter, doesn’t it? You know you have a default. You know about the things that are so deep and unquestioned that no-one even has to say them. You know that all we have to do is lay out a problem, mention a name or a type and the rest is understood.

All I’m saying is your defaults, what you “understand,” are not universal truths. There are real world reasons and causes for what you can and cannot understand. I know no-one puts these two memes together in the same place at the same time, for obvious reasons, the reasons being that if you think “mention a name and we’ll hurt/kill them,” doesn’t have a real world cause, then you think that is a created thing – and “our murderousnesss comes straight from God and creation,” well, that is a well worn trope – but science it ain’t. Your defaults are not God’s defaults, they are a matter of your genetics, what sort of creature you are, and your environment, and the interplay between them.

So you thinking that way, that violence is automatic and created, you having this default is indicative of your environment and the sort of creature you are: for this creature, at this moment, with this makeup, “problem,” + “identity” = violence, every time, often enough that the creature’s evolved language doesn’t require the words to be said. You see where I’m going. Genetics.

How is that OK?

How is this creature ever to crawl out of this muck?

I get it, this is the creature that has survived so far, with these genes, but really? “Survived this far?” Does that soundbite come from the same folks who think that hundreds of millions of years of dinosaur life – three times, no less! – was a “failure,” because they’re dead now? If we don’t make it through the coming years, we can count ourselves in mere thousands. “So far.” Bloody visionary, ain’t it?

I’m saying there’s a gene for that and we do have the option to feed that bad wolf a little less, part of which would be to see that simple equation as the “our problem,” it is and not accept this awful default as the way it is and the way it ought to be. That’s the opposite of evolution, where creatures see what they ought to be and become it.

Jeff

Oct. 23^rd.,2022

#WEAKTOGETHER

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Redefinitions – 10. Resilience

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this word, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26^th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Resilience”

I spend a lot of ink on strength, and of course, “resilience,” isn’t so different, but I suppose the difference is only that resilience knows it’s lost at least one fight already? Ah – resilience acknowledges an objection we perhaps all have at some age, that there is always someone stronger and we are going to lose some. “Strength,” as in the infantile magical state of safety we likely first fell in love with loses power as we learn the world and also loses its critical necessity when we lose a battle or several and realize we still need to live and carry on afterwards. Then we are going to need the sort of strength that even losing cannot debunk – resilience.

Maybe you can be strong again.

If you read the preamble once, or have ever read me before, you know what that serves, what we want your strength for, whatever you can muster again, the war effort still needs you. If you can’t march, perhaps you can teach. If you can’t do that, can we use your image, then? If all else fails, your failure can terrorize someone. I know, like in Fear and Loathing: I go too far.

Mostly, resilience doesn’t mean back to battle, only back to work! When I did this before, I took this tack, I suppose it’s still the one I like, give the objection for you, and then try to answer that.

How can that be bad? Strength and resilience are bad? So you advocate for weakness?

Yes, yes, bloody Hell, yes, I advocate for “weakness,” because there’s a lot of people in that word, all of us at both ends of life and most of it in between. Resilience is what is called “victim burdening,” like, bare bones, context free, whatever it is, whatever your hurt was, it is on you to bounce back strong from it. There are no plans to slow whatever hurt you, you fix this problem by somehow overcoming it, or failing that, at least by making it harder to see.

Interestingly, the autism community (inasmuch as the first batch of random autistics I’ve started to follow on Twitter are a “community’) says this a lot, insisting this is the only path autistics understand and can work with regarding themselves, to address the causes, that we do not seem to respond with the desired strength, that only addressing the causes seems meaningful to them, I mean us. I wish to make the point to us, and to the neurotypical, that it’s not really “working,” for them either, that the world is not really working at all, rather, it is forever falling apart in violence.

Enough, I already know I’ll be repeating much of this function in forthcoming entries, particularly the ones dealing with those who would help us become more resilient, the good folks of psychology.

Jeff

June 19^th., 2022

#WEAKTOGETHER

May 26^th., 2022, making changes to the common section, the AST definition.

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Redefinitions – 9. Strength

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this word, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26^th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Strength”

OK, I did a lot of this in the “Abuse” entry, mostly in individual terms. I suggested that a hurt baby sees the disparity of the adult’s strength and smartly processes that if they, the baby were stronger, they could have escaped it, fought back or defended. It was too brief, but I offered that a more worldly, older person who is aware of the social control, rules, etc., may not see personal strength as a workable solution on first thought, but that this seems logical to me for an infant. I have said elsewhere that I think perhaps we all make that assessment along with a more general one about Human Nature with our first spanking, again, a smart decision about how to move forward for an infant who has encountered roughness from the world straightaway, likely from its own parents.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s the baby’s smartest move – but it’s a forced play, these decisions are forced upon the infant. These are good, smart decisions to cope with an abusive environment – and all must make them. It’s a system of forced philosophies, a rough, unforgiving world, strength, evil human natures and such, because we create the environment. We force this early, mode-setting choice of opinion on our babies.

Strength, or the love of it, is inescapable, ubiquitous, in human society, a forever, never achieved goal. No awful thing exists that doesn’t have the awful “silver lining” of the resultant “strength,” someone is supposed to gain from it. It’s posited as a sort of progress amid literal setbacks.

This, I believe, has been our “successful” group conflict strategy for a very long time, I mean, the living consider it successful. The victims of conflict and war might argue, if they could, but the living seem to approve, sadly, even the most damaged of them. We traded in quality of life for this life of strength, and we are told to be happy we’re alive, and that the dead would trade us for our life under this threat – it’s shut up and be happy you have a life, just like shut up and be happy you have a job.

Economics. Shut up, you too profit from the war.

Keep controlling those kids so your leaders can more easily do so, and we shall be a strong nation, with an angry population no-one wants pointed at them. A strong nation, the sort that disturbs the other nations’ sleep and spurs them on also, to more and more strength, so worrying us, etc., ad infinitum. This Red Queen’s game of people trying to become stronger than, hold on, checking . . . people, this is madness when we look at it in long perspective, of course. But it is madness by Bobby Jones’ definition, because it is something we do repeatedly, hoping for different results some day, something we do all the time. The strength of nations is our moral ceiling. Yes, we’d all like peace, but let’s be realistic. I think “realistic,” in these conversations means “conforming with my infantile, forced upon me view of “reality.”

I’ll spell it out, I never remember, that is literally a writer’s entire job: strength is bad, strength is hurt, desensitization, and violence. Strength is the direct result of abuse, according to this train of thought I am on, antisocialization theory, strength is stored anger: treat a human unfairly, and give them no outlet, and watch healthy anger slowly ferment into social “strength,” read war and conflict, hate and strife. A society that openly creates more and more of it is up to something, it’s a terrible non-accident looking for a place to happen, and it’s a positive feedback loop as stated above, it goes until the “accident” happens.

Getting long, but I hate to miss a chance to say, I despise the “strong” hashtags, the stay strong message in general, when are people supposed to cry or mourn?

People ought to be horribly ashamed that every time they say it, they are condemning and denying every young, sick and old person on earth, turning their back on everyone who needs them, including themselves, both coming and going in and out of this life.

Jeff

June 13^th., 2022

#WEAKTOGETHER

May 26^th., 2022, making changes to the common section, the AST definition.

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

childcare/school

Redefinitions – 8. Evolution

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

New, May 26^th., 2022: there seems to be a cyclic aspect to the life of conflict described, we see societies forever moving towards authoritarianism and war, followed by a relative peace and the slow buildup of bad feelings again, as the chaos fades and the social control is re-established, and . . . grows, relentlessly, towards conflict again. AST makes the point that this is a positive feedback loop, that a violent environment gets more so, that the people make adaptations for it that make it all worse in the next year and the next generation.

This feedback loop is not occurring in the wild violence of the chimpanzee, of the past, which, as we all perceive, is still waning in the human world. This is a feedback loop of the violence we like and do on purpose. Back to the “human nature” myth, why would a static nature have feedback loops and cycles?

AST, “Evolution”

Abuse among the in-group makes us “strong,” that is, ready for a fight, predisposed to the primate group conflict human lifestyle, this is AST. The human nature myth says no, you were born that way, and social abuse doesn’t, cannot, hurt you, right, I mean not some “normal” amount of it anyway? The negative human nature idea and antisocialization theory are opposites, myth vs science, static vs alive and evolving.

Between Augustine and Wallace/Darwin, it was Christian Original Sin, the sin was in you, this was the explanation (not easy leaving the irony quotation marks off of that), and since then for some, it’s your “genetic legacy” (sorry, impossible with that one) as a descendant of something like a chimpanzee. I have said repeatedly that if the trouble were a chimpanzee trait, then chimpanzees would have destroyed the Earth and we would have been redundant. It is not the chimpanzees that are doing so much wrong, is it.

To the negative human nature meme, evolution is something that happened in the Myth Time and has ceased today, not unlike creation. I suppose origin stories have always been myths, asking about our origins is asking for a myth?

The brain path for “origins” is in the fiction department of your brain?

Ha. The questions are all in the rhetorical section.

This is the effect of the human nature idea. It is authoritarian and it is not taking questions at this, or any time. Evolution and AST are answers to questions no-one was allowed to ask seriously in the first place, and people don’t seem to have anyplace to put a serious answer. Origins? – fiction department, rhetoric section, fourth aisle. Have a nice day.

Evolution doesn’t fit the existing brain path, and it gets pared down in the attempt, and the end result is basically a creation myth in new words. So, rather than any evolving to do, it’s, sorry, it’s our “genetic legacy,” read undeserving sinner. These apes aren’t ready for evolution. The myth of an evil Human Nature does not provide solutions. Period.

Evolution oughtn’t require “natures.” I’m embarrassed. That shouldn’t need to be said, but there it is, when creatures, when a species doesn’t exist, and then does, and then morphs off again into something else again – what is a “nature?” Creatures that cling to a past way of life are called fossils. I will go so far as to say that since we have begun living from the bad attitude about ourselves, since we became passive things in our own evolution by denying it and preferring the creation stories, it seems to have stopped, we seem to be holding ourselves back, and trending towards conformism rather than innovation.

Jeff June 1^st., 2022

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

Redefinitions – 7. Relatedness

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “relatedness”

One thing about this theory is that it appears to contradict relatedness theory, social relatedness theory, maybe even the selfish gene. I don’t hide anything, even when I should, I naively believe in truth and science and if there is something going to hurt AST from the past, we’ll deal with it right now. The authors of those theories don’t agree or appreciate AST, at least not yet. Please, don’t ask me about the circumstances, but I said, “Human child discipline is to make soldiers,” and I suppose it just sounded nuts to them. Their very own and also biology’s general theory now, relatedness, says we treat our own people well and others poorly – I seem to have the whole bloody kit and kaboodle upside down and backwards, don’t I.

Of course, that theory basically only counts one thing as mistreatment, the discontinuance of the gene, to wit, early death. It really doesn’t have anything to say about non-lethal abuse; if you survive to breed, you were “unaffected,” protected by your selfish genes. I’ll refer you back to the ‘Abuse’ entry: this is the early disappearance of three quarters of our pain in biological theory, and the severed joint where psychology should attach to it. I know: nitpicker.

I don’t believe relatedness theory addresses abuse at all, and so it does not explain abuse or damage – let alone explain the even worse treatment we withhold for the Other. I believe relatedness theory depends upon the myth of an evil human nature in that it is assumed that we will naturally abuse and kill the Other by default, in fact, it is obvious that it doesn’t think it needs a reason, in fact – it is self evident in that its authors clearly think any good treatment within the group is what requires explanation.

That’s what they “explained.”

The authors of relatedness theory expect violent chaos, except, look, the selfish gene wants to live! I think the last time I mentioned them, I was guessing that they were one of the few that didn’t predicate upon an evil Nature – but I have corrected myself here. It really doesn’t work at all without it, I mean without the evil human nature or a better theory of abuse, relatedness theory lacks a villain – and again, its authors clearly thought kindness was what required an explanation. They don’t think it needs a villain; the villain is “understood.”

I look forward to a world where villains are a little less understood, where the villains are required to be explained instead. For the record, AST explains the lot of it. It’s not hard, there’s three quarters of the world’s data is sitting right there, free, nobody’s using it.

Jeff

May 13^th., 2022

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

bullying

Redefinitions – 12. Bullying

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “Bullying”

The above definitions sort of glosses over the main thing, I added “ordeals,” and “etc.,” in a less than honest way, really, I think of it as the first law, the first punishment, and that is the ordeal; it’s spanking, in a word, that begins the entire process and the rest may not happen without it. That’s what I really think. I was just trying to soft-soap you.

“Spanking” is the term for authorized abuse of children, the word for hurting children with the justification of punishment and authority, and I think we’re mostly all subject to it, and we are mostly all carrying this social default level of abuse.

AST defines “spanking,” a few ways, one different one being that it is abuse applied before . . . wait, before “epigenetic maturity?” Is this a thing yet? – before the genetic options have all been set, is what I’m after.

AST defines spanking as abuse during childhood, as epigenetically functional abuse. I think AST – as sort of our dark side personified – has hacked the genesuite, and is setting an option, the fighting option of our genes, by providing a dependably abusive environment at the time when the options are being set, childhood.

AST sees bullying as functionally identical, same as in the ‘Abuse’ entry, the innocent and the guilty are all engaged in the same enterprise. Biology doesn’t read your stupid laws.

When we are abused, we are abused and science would not divide your abusers into “innocent abusers,” and “guilty abusers,” would it, not science that cares about you and the abuse. But society labels bullies, vilifies bullies, for mirroring the exact behaviour exercised on all of us, for the exact behaviour they were taught, and not only taught generally, but taught with pain, with trauma.

Never mind criticism, never mind anger at the gaslighting – it’s just never going to bloody work, is it? Punishing and “fighting bullying?”

At the same time?

Never.

Never, never, never. Ever.

Jeff

May 10^th., 2022

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

bullying

Redefinitions – 6. Empathy

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “Empathy”

We’ll go with the same format again, the Psychology Tobay definition first: empathy is an emotion we experience when we see suffering; we get it, we know how it feels, we feel it some ourselves. It is love in practice, an empathic person feels your pain, it is one of the positive things in life, and with more of it, the world would be a better place.

LOL.

I mean, I’ve heard the reverse, some famous mouthpiece called a very famous person an “empathic bully,” a few years ago, like he feels you and so he knows exactly how to hurt you and push you. (Ah, one for the list, another entry: “bullying,” adding now.) Mostly, though, empathy is good, we say, most folks don’t want to use it against you.

I’ll start my critique from the same place as last time too, pragmatism: you don’t think the bad guys empathize with each other? You don’t think racism is a bunch of people “getting it,” about each other, “supporting,” other people who share the same feelings? I think the hate groups are empathy gone wild.

AST thinks empathy is the bad thing.

I think it’s the “free with,” version, the automatic version, the “I don’t have to think and it doesn’t really do anything good” version. Empathy is when you share the feeling because you share the life and fully understand the circumstances. Empathy is when you feel bad when something bad you’re familiar with happens to someone like you. I’m sorry, it is.

Sympathy is the one you want.

Look at the big picture. You have empathy now and look at the world. We talk about it like it’s going to save the world, like we just invented it yesterday. The monkey’s empathy isn’t working, Woody!

Sympathy is the active thing. We are not changing the world by only understanding what we understand without even having to try. The application of sympathy indicates a positive motive and effort, of caring first and then seeking to understand, in order to care effectively.

I’m sorry, but empathy is none of that, it’s rather empty in comparison. A shared feeling for a shared circumstance is sort of the opposite of trying to stop whatever is causing the pain. Most folks aren’t going to tear down the shared lifestyle to fix the shared pain – it’s just the infamous thoughts and prayers, much of the time. With sympathy, perhaps the problem isn’t in-group, perhaps the system causing the pain is not your system to protect and you really can work for a real change.

The difference, caring first, sans understanding, this is the difference between sympathy and empathy, and it’s also the very difference between AST and the status quo of our warrior society, which punishes first and understands second, if ever.

Hmmm. Doesn’t feel comprehensive, but that was the idea.

Jeff May 10^th., 2022

Update:

Ah.

“AST thinks,” isn’t the point, is it? I’ve left AST out of the logic, this isn’t a proper part of the series, you wouldn’t need AST to put empathy in better perspective is all I’ve shown here!

But this is another AST hack on ourselves, this, this morality we have that ends at the border, this business that we love our own and only make constant war on some Other and this is morality, basically if you love anyone, the few hundred in your village but not the nearly eight billion outside, you have reached the peak of human kindness. It is part of AST that we are embittered, violent and dangerous, but talk about our empathy, part of our antisocialization that we focus on the positive and turn a blind eye to the rest.

Oh. I think I know which one I want to write next.

Jeff May 12^th., 2022

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 5. Anger

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “Anger”

OK, the first several have been long, I fell into trying to do too much at once as always. The idea wasn’t to present several long ideas in lieu of one, it was supposed to be brief, alternate definitions to counter the social narratives around a word or an idea, or to counter the Psycholoby Today sort of psychological or scientific definitions. Some may perhaps be good and proper definitions and I simply wish to add a qualifier.

So, anger is defined many ways, lately as an emotion, and as such involuntary, and a theory has evolved about anger’s usefulness, anger is our unfairness detector, it is an evolved response that gets us out of bad situations with some adrenalin and a suspension of peace and perhaps reason. If they fear our anger, we get respect.

This one would fall under the latter category, I at first thought, I pretty much agreed. Quite logical. So my only critique was – how’s that working out for you?

How is using your good and natural anger improving your life?

My answer is that some good and natural things have been hacked against us (sure, by ourselves) and that anger is one such, and rarely saves anyone under the human system, perhaps “anymore.” Generally speaking, we don’t really get the chance to use it to escape our circumstances. The law and order nuts  will  lock you up if you try, mostly. You will become unemployed, mostly.

Right?

So, I will project what I see to be the rest of the social narrative now: “Anger is a good and evolved emotion for our safety and interests, but we don’t approve anymore, it’s an unfortunate legacy of the past that we are trying to move beyond, blah, blah, blah . . . “

You know what? Species don’t grow out of emotions, so no.

Self defense doesn’t require anger. Good fighters know they are more effective cool and thinking straight, don’t they? – I’m sorry, don’t ask me about how to fight, I shouldn’t speak – but is an animal “angry” to fight you for food? This theory, “unfairness detector, for use to get us out of trouble,” I’m sorry, again, reasonable as can be . . . but it’s the opposite of antisocialization theory, which is not suspended just because it’s us feeling the feelings. It can’t be true, I’m sorry.

It’s the exact opposite of the actual, boots on the ground truth.

It has been a very long time indeed since your personal anger solved your life, we have had rulers and bosses for quite a while already. Your personal anger has another use, it isn’t created and tolerated and everywhere because it serves you. It was never meant to be turned on your oppressors, it comes from your oppressors to be used against their enemies. That is AST, as stated at the top of each of these.

And the social narrative about how it’s a “good” emotion, well, yes it is, to our leaders, to the powers that be, to them, your anger is very good indeed, while they remain cool and thinking straight.

Jeff

May 8^th., 2022

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

attention

culture, tradition

control

Redefinitions – 4. Abuse

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “Abuse”

Thinking that if you’re new to the series, at least I hope you read the immediately previous one, “punishment,” they’re really one idea. Thank you.

I try to make the point that the two things, “normal” punishment and outright abuse are the same function, that they both use the same currency, and our designations of what is good and what is bad in it don’t mean anything to the basic science, to the currency, which is pain, and our rather annoying but unavoidable way of letting it change us. The “we all agree” victims, they get some clarity that they were changed, but the rest of us, we are the damaged three quarters people, hurting, but still talking about “deterrents.”

Our parents, the teachers, the preacher, everyone would have us think we have been “deterred,” but not altered, and of course this is only supportable if they never had to “prove” the deterrent to us even once, and only believable in a world that has zero interest in three quarters of the downstream consequences and either likes them or cannot see them.

For the record, it’s sort of half and half, we “don’t like” war, but we worship our warlike “strength.” I am trying to break that down for us.

It’s abuse victims that suffered for a lack of “strength,” and likely fixated upon it as  an answer, a solution to their situation at a very young age; it doesn’t seem like something that would look so magical to an older person who already knows about society and police and life and wouldn’t maybe jump to a personal “strength” to solve their real life problems. It’s an abused child’s “go to,” is what it is.

It’s also what Bad Cop Parent already admitted he was doing to us behind the woodshed: here’s your solution kid, personal strength – knowing you will likely grow out of it regarding him, and probably also that he successfully programmed you for life, with a speech that he made that added up to your consent for the whole thing. You sign the form, when you are the parent and start making the same speech.

Call it a spectrum, if you must. A spectrum with the most extreme abuse at one end and nothing but love and food and healthcare at the other and all of life between, but then know that the abuse begins immediately off of the love terminus and increases steadily to the terrible end, where it is all of it and from there the love starts from nothing and increases in the other direction.

But that the power is on the dark side.

That the love on this graphic is a weak thing, the far less powerfully causative thing. I was thinking of the proportions of dark matter, I liked the metaphor and the symmetry, which is what, 85% to 15 % bright matter? – but a trained psychologist told me their rule of thumb, they mentioned an author, I forget, is five to one. Wait, that’s pretty close isn’t it? LOL I was thinking 80/20, I wrote it before I looked at it and saw that is four to one, ha. Hey! Was that Jim Morrison’s Five to One? Probably, huh. Whups. Sorry, back to Bullet, already in progress.

OMG, The old get old and the young get stronger! Stop it!

Where were we. Right.

That it is mostly a graph with one thing on it, abuse, and where there is less of it – this seems to be the secret – even far less, it is nonetheless the causative thing, that the opposing force is . . . nothing. Sort of.

This is why I keep saying “science, damnit!,” because in science, many things exist in a simple gradient, a molecule of abuse won’t make the change, let’s say kill you, but a teaspoon makes you sick and half a litre kills you – hey, this might work.

We talk like Big Tobacco or Big Oil about ourselves, sure it’s toxic at half a litre, but a teaspoon doesn’t hurt! No. We’re sick, and that teaspoonful is the only thing that happened to us. Then we invent creationism, God and Human Nature to explain the effect of the teaspoonful and get rich selling the stuff. We really do, we sound just like that, no wonder the swine get away with it, they’re using our own stupid defense on us. We are Big Abuse, and we are too big to fail.

Proof, you want something new, OK. I tweeted it the other day, but recent and me, still new enough: corrupt, evil, often racist judges rarely face justice, someone said, and I hadn’t gone quite this far before, I mean, I say “spanking is not about teaching, it’s about antisocialization,” a lot, but I guess . . . I guess it means AST calls “justice,” a lie.

If it weren’t, I think we would all imagine some strict code among judges to police one another or something, but instead they remain and exist as bad judges the court staff all know about until retirement or death, and so to the system, clearly, “justice” isn’t the point, the point is how I and AST see it: abuse and punishment are the same in their true, little considered effects of terrorizing and so “strengthening” the population. The innocent and guilty all antisocialize the same.

They are all going to get angry and strong, the innocent and guilty alike.

To the deeper function, antisocialization, humanity driving itself to more and more aggression, it really doesn’t matter if they’re innocent. Half the laws are made up anyway, right? Bill Murray, Meatballs, say it with me: It just doesn’t matter! It just doesn’t matter! I’m sorry, it doesn’t. To suggest it does is to suggest hurting the guilty ones is good for all of us, good for society, and I’m sorry, that particular Elvis has left the building.

That is buying into the excuse, the justification for a world of abuse.

AST says all that is nonsense. Harming the guilty harms us all as much as harming the innocent does, AST finds violence and harm to be bad things, crimes in themselves, unlike regular old bro science, which seems to say, “if they call it a deterrent, it doesn’t count.”

I feel for abuse victims, I’m one, we all are, I just feel for the ones that don’t seem to know they are, and I am trying to solve the problem for the no-one can know how many are to come, born into this system where abuse is normal and legal, and downright bloody mandatory. Don’t read me backwards, I minimize nothing, I am not trying to normalize extreme abuse, I am trying to do the opposite, to re-weird all abuse, spanking and police, because the “normal” bad stuff carries the worst along with it.

To my mind, fighting the worst and ignoring “spanking,” is fighting myself, pulling in both directions, missing the principle. If we accept any abuse, we’ve accepted the false premise and we’re asking for it all, and it’s not really an accident. It’s predictable, with decent science.

Jeff

Cinco de Mayo, 2022

Still having problems finding a way into AST for folks, this will be attempt number I don’t know any more, another series, I suppose. The plan is to keep them short and manageable, hope to make the point with a barrage from many angles. I’ll start with the definition for AST – here’s the first, it means Antisocialization Theory – and then how it alters the narrative of a number of topics.

AST redefines everything, but we’ll try to show how, specifically, for this list of ideas:

human nature

social life

punishment

abuse

anger

empathy

relatedness theory

evolution

strength

resilience

etc. Oh, forgot some (and this will be a feature):

racism

trauma and healing, psychology

Redefinitions – 3. Punishment

AST, a definition:

AST is the theory of our hurt, the human science of not deterrent and socialization, but of abuse, punitive and otherwise, and our antisocialization, which long word means exactly what it sounds like it means: to have been made antisocial. It is about the dark side of our social control, the stuff we supposedly don’t want to happen, beyond that the person maybe did what they were bloody well told.

The AST Theory of conflict states that the failures and ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life, and its author can get very expansive, imagining it to be the post powerful and destructive force driving us.

The central idea is that structures and ways of being within the human social group – laws and punishments, ordeals, etc., –  add up to pain and trauma for the individual, while laws prohibit simple reactive violence and simple revenge, and so the individual is “charged” with bad feelings, antisocialized and looking for a fight they are allowed to have. The group’s leadership – administrators of the law – can then exploit this reservoir of anger, point it at someone and allow the citizens the “freedom,” not an accident and not irony, this word, we are always seeing this, to deflect and unload their frustrations.

AST asks you to note, that our own people frustrate us, and exploit our frustrations at will in this system, using us to abuse some Other, some human group in a war or a pogrom, or an apartheid. That is what I call the AST theory of conflict, weaponized by our own, to be discharged in some group conflict.

Hmm. Not sure if that will be the one I use every time, but I like it for our first few entries:

AST, “Punishment”

OK, “ostensibly unintended consequences of our rough control are deeply and vastly consequential in human life,” I said, didn’t I. Of course the biggest failures are easy to see, we all agree it’s the case for people whose abuse went beyond all idea of control or teaching. Outright, illicit abuse we all see as abuse, we count the downsides of that, at least within the lives of the people and those around them, and intergenerationally, within families, even in whole communities we can see the effects quite often.

Regularly, an abuser will have called it punishment or some such, but over a certain line, we all know it’s abuse and we know it has downstream consequences that go on and on. People need therapy and such, a lot of extra love to find their way back to life, and still, effects escape into the stream of time and affect the next generation. We know about the bad feelings, the powerlessness, the anger, the ideations, the need to deflect, all bad things, no-one should be left to feel these awful things, feelings are involuntary and it is abuse to create the crime that induces them.

We know this.

However, I noticed and so AST speaks about the missing cause, the missing feelings, the perhaps less intense bad feelings we all get from the abuse that doesn’t cross our “line.” I intuit that this is a quarter at least of all causality in human affairs that is simply missing, but you know what, I’ve never actually tried to draw it, let’s try a truth table of sorts:

Ha – did I say one quarter, not three?

There are two sides to life, too, the personal and the public.

It seems to me that in human life, as I said, personal abuse stories are told, personal causes and effects are hashed out, but social life is rarely invoked as a cause, we do not talk about society causing abuse, it’s all personal. When it comes to abuse, we are on our own, no-one is planning to restructure society for that.

It’s a “personal journey,” donchaknow. How much of psychology.

So we count one of two sets of effects for outright, illegal abuse, the personal one. Public effects of extreme abuse? Is that a thing?

I’ll have you note, we count neither side of the second thing, no personal remedy is coming for your “normal” punishments, and we certainly don’t talk about negative effects on society from law. So there it is: we ignore three quarters of the information and causation for our self-analysis. And so, Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of Man? We don’t! And we clearly don’t want to know.

Three quarters.

No wonder I avoided drawing it out for so long. Ouch.

There is interplay, extreme abuse easily hides among “normal” abuse, as I said, when I was young, a screaming child brought no curious saviours, it was normal to spank and normal to hear a child screaming. We were surely only hearing lessons, not beating or more. But . . . rationally, scientifically. You can’t use a “deterrent” and then declare it harmless! If it’s harmless, prithee, where is the deterrent?

Punishment makes us quite stupid. It’s not harmless, simple. See? Saved you from that very stupid trap right there.

The harm, the fact of the actual implementation of the supposed “deterrents,” that is half of our possible knowledge regarding ourselves, much of our bad feelings and much of our anger and aggression, this is what AST cannot seem to get through humanity’s thick skull. Calling most of it “legal,” or “normal,” doesn’t stop the cause and effect, you poor, stupid, abused apes!

Meant with love, harsh truth for my fam, I mean unless you happen to be rich. Then adjust the list accordingly.

Calling most of it “legal,” or “normal,” doesn’t stop the cause and effect, Mom! That isn’t better, is it. Harsh truths are harsh, no way around it. Teacher? No, don’t go after Mom, don’t go after teachers . . . cops are an extreme, obvious case. I’m looking for something a little less ham-handed, but really, it’s all of us, in most of our roles, isn’t it. AST tries very hard not to engage in Us and Them stuff. It’s pretty much all of us. The exceptions aren’t affecting the world much, at least not right now.

I’ve talked about this word too long, I have completely forgotten how this conversation is supposed to begin, but punishment is abuse, with a social waiver, “good” abuse, we say, and we only count its downsides in the most extreme failures, while the downsides are, well, I’ll get expansive again. The downsides are we look so bad, anyone would believe some god made us awful on purpose, among other things.

The downsides are pain, propagated endlessly, a huge, repressed and ignored reservoir of anger and pain we all carry that, as I say in the Conflict Theory, drives us forever to hatred and war.

OK. Breaking the “short” rule a little, we’ll stop.

Really, this one and the next one, “abuse,” are one idea, I hope if you don’t read the whole series, at least you don’t read this one without seeing the next one, the other half of this thought. Thanks.

Jeff

May 3^rd., 2022