Super-Allists, or Actuarial Psychology, Part Two

The problem ones have social gifts and rational disabilities, not the other way about. I am postulating, in lieu of our sociopath CEO’s a sort of a super-Allist.

“Normal,” to the point of disorder.

I want to revisit the definitions of the antisocial neurotypes mentioned in the first, psychopathy and APD and say that from my own social . . . situation, OK, disorder, from my perhaps asocial neurotype, I want to say that a psycho- or sociopath being charming and succeeding socially doesn’t look different than anyone else being charming and succeeding socially. Honestly, when Allists are speaking among themselves and charming and succeeding with one another, I don’t always understand it, so it doesn’t necessarily always seem authentic and organic to me.

I suppose if there were a sociopath in the group saying the same things and responding appropriately and succeeding in the group, I wouldn’t see any difference at all. And . . . not sure this is cool to say, I’m uh . . . I don’t see how anyone would, I mean if I could grok how anyone knows the difference, I suppose I could do it too. If they are saying and apparently feeling the same things, what is different?

Social success is social success, everyone has to fake it – and you don’t build it for yourself. If a predatory psychopath has a lot of social success, that’s on their whole group, not just them! “Social success,” is not an individual achievement, is it?

Ah there it is, popped up and surprised me – our “psychopath CEOs,” are hypersocial if they over-achieve, more social than the regular Allists, who all seem hypersocial to my sort to begin with. If this is “cold, calculating manipulation,” then their whole crew is almost as good at it as they are, I mean, then cold, calculating manipulation is what brings social success, at least in that group.

But the point, already made without saying so, I’m afraid, is that a monster’s social success is as real as anybody’s, and it comes from their social group – so was everybody, “pretending?” And if so, what’s the difference between that and everyone not pretending, if they’re all doing and saying the same scripts?

I want to shut up and write a book instead. In my world, this is an automatic pop-psych Number One best seller, and I’m giving it away to nobody for free.

Jeff

Nov. 22nd., 2023

Shaking the Jar

Trigger warnings, hard doom and gloom.

Fighting got you here, and I know you can’t hear this, but fighting won’t get you out of it. Yet, you persist.

There’s always some happy peacenik saying that, you say, yet all of our history is written by people that never stopped fighting, it worked for them – this from people who think the dinosaurs “failed,” or something by only existing for half a billion years, creatures who have been around for point zero, zero, something percent of that amount of time saying this.

While the fighting and the competition have destroyed the environment and it all collapses as it has many times before for perhaps various reasons, it would appear that the New World Order myth is playing out, that someone has decided that the coming disaster means only some few will be able to continue, and so death and mass death are suddenly legal, saith the Power, and we will not fight the plague, rather we shall mandate it, and we shall not slow the wars nor the genocides because these and many, many more must perish to get to a sustainable level of humanity and none of this is theoretical because climate collapse is here and there is going to be no food next winter, and every person who dies this year will not be starving and migrating and rioting next year.

So by their logic, they must keep doing exactly what they have been doing to bring about the disaster, fossil fuels and war . . . which tells me that the “sustainable number,” will shrink and shrink until it is gone altogether. They simply cannot stop, they simply can imagine no other direction in which to go. It will be bloody Penn and Teller Get Killed, Last Man Standing sort of bullshit.

Whereas if you could imagine anything else, these billions of people could be put to better use, what we need is terracing of the land, anywhere and everywhere, to catch the rare floods for use and to recharge the aquifers, and much of this and much farming ought to be done as manually as possible, perhaps in small scale, again, even this, if it’s a machine, fossil fuel project, will shrink that number. Those two things and not much else ought to be a suffering and shrinking humanity’s only projects for the next . . . going forward, let’s say. Well, included but perhaps worthy of mention, as well as shutting off the nuclear plants in a controlled fashion, if it’s not already too late for that, if we are not already beneath that level of operation.

I can’t say for sure that the choice is quite so stark, or that there is any hope no matter what we do, but I do think this is how we should think about it – keep fighting until there’s nothing left, or give that stupid shit up and start to limit the coming damage by working for each other instead?

Jeff

Nov. 12th., 2023

T Baby – A History of Illness

It’s a cliché, that somebody notices an Autistic child or younger person and that’s how the parents find out it’s in the family, that one or both of them are Autistic too, that’s what happened to me, with some wrinkles, the younger person was an adult, and the family communication has not been great.

On a personal level, it answers everything, my being Autistic, or nearly everything, explains much about my life that no amount of reading and learning from the neurotypical world has been able to. Personal matters aside, the concept of neurotype answers a lot about the world too.

So I had one child that seemed like me, and they’re one of us and now I know I am, and they tell me they all are, my ex also, and I admit my ex requires some sort of explanation, and there are a lot of reasons to think they’re Autistic, in fact it’s possible that the only person on Earth who could possibly think they aren’t is me. Apparently, though, Autistics do Allistic stuff all the time as a part of their masking, so despite I may feel ostracized and hated on for my differences as though my ex and kids were neurotypical, it can always be that one’s haters are masking Autists, so who knows.

I guess it’s true that their family seemed . . . stridently white and normal, like they tried too hard, maybe. It always seemed phony and a little desperate, I suppose it could have been masking – but either way, real or feigned, it’s neurotypicality hating me either in person or by remote control. It seems a distinction without a difference from this side of the DEP.

We’ll pause here for the ‘illness,’ stuff this is supposed to be about:

But looking back on my life with this new understanding, I see now that I spent my first nearly ten years in meltdown, with the other kids pushing me over into it if I wasn’t already, but there’s more, I had my own stress driving me to meltdown, health problems and pain – that I have finally processed and verbally confirmed with a sibling to be the result of the most famous toxic drug in history, the morning sickness pill, Thalidomide.

There was a gut deformity, which they described to me back then as an “umbilical hernia,” but which was later revealed to have been extra parts. Seems the umbilicus was a live piece of bowel and was not atrophying and wouldn’t heal, didn’t stop bleeding, or presumably, hurting, and after a month of life there was an abdominal surgery. I can’t say my bowel troubles are due to the drug, or the surgery, but they exist, and I think they’re on the Thalidomide baby list of problems.

I don’t know why they didn’t tell me, why it wasn’t part of the conversation with me forever, why no-one ever said, “you know you’re a Thalidomide baby, right?” It surely wasn’t a secret during my early life when I was an always crying pain the ass, couldn’t have been. I can see why there was never an assessment or an Autism diagnosis though – they already knew what was wrong with me, I guess. Not sure about the secret, or the knowledge of it even, maybe, because we missed the class action suits. Gawd, Mom could’ve used some money, I was a full time job and I wasn’t the only kid. Well, I guess there was no money until decades later? Still, of course, still.

Plus Gawd knows I could have had my health troubles tested for and diagnosed, I bet some of it could have been more treatable. My GP watched my goiter grow and heard me complain and never guessed hyperthyroid, I didn’t learn it until he retired. If I had known I was a victim, it would have been on my “watch for,” list.

So I haven’t seen anything to suggest all Thalidomide victims share a neurotype, that there is one, I mean I don’t think either Tylenol or Thalidomide “create a neurotype,” so I’m still just Autistic in the head and a Thalidomide baby in my gut, my thyroid, and my little AA fingers. My feet are small too. I can’t say that all the appendages were affected, it’s possible that my un-poisoned destiny included a larger member, but apparently I’m within the “normal,” range, and I don’t have to tell you how well within, ha.

Generally, as it would seem with the severely affected, the effect is increased further from the core, my legs get shorter all the way down, and my torso belongs on some fellow of average height. Pure, dumb guess about how it works, just from looking at myself and knowing about the limbless folks and extrapolating – I don’t know that.

A quick investigoogling says there are no documented second generation problems for the children of the Thalidomide babies, this is good news, but I’m not sure how new or good this information is. A paper trashed “Lamarckism,” that doesn’t sound very new. Also, to my mind, the man is having his comeuppance, to say his function doesn’t exist is to say evolution doesn’t exist, basically.

He got trashed by people who had only learned of evolution yesterday, and mostly, people still aren’t really processing it today, see my last many blogs.

Never mind that for now, so far so good, my kids are probably not suffering from Thalidomide – but I’m going to keep looking, and let them know, pending new data.

There is one statistic that is interesting and problematic – they say some thirty percent! – of Thalidomide kids show up Autistic, this is bothersome, I still don’t see how poisoning causes neurotypes. I have to tell myself that the framing of neurotypes is backwards to explain it, that poisons do not create anything, but some of them perhaps damage Allism, is the proper context and the point. Hmm.

In my framing, the Thalidomide damage to my Allism . . . looks heritable, since I have Autistic kids? I mean, my father may have been, my ex may be . . . so my case can’t mean anything, but if 30% lose their Allism through Thalidomide poisoning, and that loss remains, the “Autism,” is heritable? It’s all rather complex.

Again, speculative, never mind, the community will see this as a betrayal, but that statistic isn’t mine and I did not say anything “causes Autism,” I said maybe things hurt Allism – if you have ever read me, you know I see “normal folks,” as the whole problem, and if something harms Allism – please, take it. Tylenol, not Thalidomide, Good Lord.

I mean if your Allism were all that gets harmed, of course.

Then, fill your boots, LOL. OK, fine, it’s a gonzo science blog after all, let’s do this.

Honestly – the statistic is probably garbage and those thirty percent are something, but not necessarily Autistic. I’m remembering the supposed rodent studies and Tylenol – “Autism-like symptoms,” which were simply passivity and/or stupidity, and the “appearance of Autism,” is probably meaningless. I still like my theory, but it is quite possible that this statistic regarding Thalidomide is bogus and no support for it – and the same with Tylenol, of course, those studies I’m already convinced are bogus and no support for my framing, because they are no support for anything.

I suppose all I can really say about it is that the Allists have their framing ready, Autistics are broken, so something is causing them and it should be stopped – unjustifiably, I think, at least contextual only – broken for what? Do we know the  Purpose of Humanity, so that we know when it is being impeded?

 I’m guessing that the Thalidomide scrutiny launched the Tylenol theory, got the idea out there about chemical cause for ‘retardation,’ which included Autism back then, but . . . hey, this was always their less conscious framing perhaps, something is hurting my Allism? (It’s the “strength,” remember, something is hurting their fighting readiness, is the point for them. It’s an existential thought.)

It’s what they are trying to say, but Allism isn’t allowed to be a thing, it’s supposed to be everybody, Human Nature, donchaknow – so now it’s the “Humans,” vs the “divergent,” which means the “pathologized,” instead of just the differences between types, something is harming “Humanity,” not just Allism. It is fantastically frustrating, attempting to speak across neurotypes, I almost understand the Allistics resorting to force about it, reason across the gulf seems impossible, but call it intuition if you must, call it prognostication – but from my side and my neurology, the opposite framing is more intuitive, that Allistics are problematic, so something is causing them and it should be stopped. I mean, functional for what? Do we know the Purpose of Humanity, so that we know how to achieve it?

Just saying, it seems like the Allists think the purpose is fighting, and they think that this is what “Humans,” think, not just Allists, that is to say, they don’t think they think it, they just think it’s the way it is. This is why that no matter what happens, it all seems beyond their ability to stop it, it’s not their mindset, something that could change, it’s “the way it is,” something that cannot. Hmm. Seems like a bit of detail I usually fail to find, that. It’s OK, isn’t it?

IF – only if, I am not convinced it’s even possible let alone has ever occurred, but IF – if you could take a child with no family history of anything but Allism and poison them in vitro in such a way as to produce an Autistic child – do we really claim this level of science, that we have “created,” an Autistic mind? Or would it be a million times more likely that your poison simply derailed the creation of an Allistic one, leaving behind an evolved and pre-existing OG neurotype? Do we think our crude poisons can create entire neurologies, or do we think those already existed and the poison killed something else, as poisons do?

Ha, what this sounds like, where this bit goes – that we think sometimes we can accidentally poison the brain slug that drives us to conflict and war, the warrior neurology as a brain parasite. Again, not saying this has ever happened that we “made” anybody Autistic. I’m only saying if we ever did, I couldn’t assume we broke that person, it would make more sense to me that broke the Allistic process only, and that the Autistic that results is an intact, pre-existing form that is a complete human being.

Again, if and only if any of the statistics regarding higher incidence rates of “Autism,” due to drugs are real and true does any of this logic matter – and even then it only matters to me inasmuch as it makes the case for Allism as a neurotype and a problem and not as the Gold Standard of Humanity.

I do think something created all of the neurologies, of course, but also of course I don’t think it is something as simple a s a poison that creates Allism, it is a very complex combination of things including all the complexity of biological evolution and much human behaviour besides, complete with biological deceptions – but a poison is defined as a simple answer for the complexities of life, isn’t it. It can probably work this way around, some poison or other can probably destroy particular neurologies, why not? At least it looks that way to my neurology.

I’m starting to think it sounds like “Awakenings,” like when I shone briefly in school and eventually fledged, that must have looked like a damned miracle. And I don’t remember those early tough years very well, like it happened to someone else. I think Autistic meltdown maybe explains that memory loss? What happens in trauma stays n trauma or something. My whole unhatched life I worried it was trauma I was blocking out, but there has been damned little corroboration about any trauma that the Allistic world would recognize, it’s all been fog of war stuff, sort of unknowable, the rumour of trauma only. Overload and meltdown makes far better sense.

The memories haven’t suddenly appeared, but at least that empty space has some context now.

This, as usual, is not going according to plan and where I wanted to go next is not where this leads, so I’m going to stop here and sit with this for a bit and post this in the science blog, worry about the personal stuff another day.

Good luck out there.

Jeff Nov. 9th., 2023

Actuarial Psychology

Carrying on with the idea of Allism as a neurotype with a short spike for actuarial matters, and of Allistic psychology as almost exclusively a matter of the self and not society, I wish to extrapolate something, specifically that we should see problematic personality types along a different vector than the psychology of individuals.

I will need to start with the dictionaries and definitions – it does sound like “sociopathy,” already draws this distinction from psychopathy, I need to check that, plus we’ll have to do Autism/Allism again. Alphabetically, I suppose.

Allism

 – this is understood to be the majority or “normal,” neurotype, often interchangeable with “neurotypical,” but “Allism,” has etymology, “Allo,” is from the Greek for “Other,” and I believe the inference is that it describes a mind that connects with and is concerned with others, with the people around us, but I don’t think we have a list of Allistic traits as such, a definition as such, it is most often explained simply as the absence of, or opposite of Autism.

If there is any list of traits and features, it is most often gleaned through the looking glass, approved Allistic traits are to be found in their pathologized mirror traits among the neurodivergent, such as the name shows, “Autistic,” means self defined or involved, so “Allistic,” means connected, more of a group orientation.

Just Me:

For my part, I have extrapolated things already, and I have theories about Allism in and of itself, I have spent my life trying to understand them, I never knew what I was, but I guess I always knew I wasn’t one of them. For me, Allism is a version of humanity with a “specific set of skills,” yes, meant exactly like the action movie meant it, Allism is humankind’s warrior neurotype, and war is a group activity.

While peace looks more like parallel play.

Autism

 – ha, I only have my own, I’m having a hard time writing down the usual definition for you. “Aut,” is the Greek for self, as in automatic and autonomous, so Autistic is “self –“ self directed, surely self-stimulation created this meme, self involved, in the simplest terms, we don’t listen and do what we’re told, we think we’re supposed to listen to our own minds or something, at least this is why we’re a problem and a thing, we’re not much good in a group project.

There are a lot of health problems that seem to come with it, and they are part of the working definition of Autism, notably verbalization and sensory issues, and as the brain runs the body, that does seem to be a part of one’s neurotype.

Just Me:

For my part, I need to turn the entire edifice upside down and say, yes, “a part of one’s neurotype,” but that this statement in not directional, and that the presence of much variance does not make a type, rather that that the adherence to a specific set of traits is what makes a type, and so Autism is less of a specific “type,” than Allism is, that rather perhaps what we call “Autism,” is many types, perhaps the label “Autism,” or maybe “neurodivergence” in general is the whole gene pool and Allism is the emergent, specific, purpose built “type.” With a rather obvious purpose, mentioned above. A purpose that I would hope humanity will some day abandon.

OK, I’d better crack open a dictionary for these Allistic psychology terms, my intuition is probably wrong.

Psychopathy

 – from the N.I.H (USA):

“Psychopathy is a neuropsychiatric disorder marked by deficient emotional responses, lack of empathy, and poor behavioral controls, commonly resulting in persistent antisocial deviance and criminal behavior.”

–  from somewhere high on Google’s list, place called PsychopathyIs:

“Psychopathy  (sai · kaa · puh · thee) is a common mental disorder. It is characterized by personality traits that include reduced empathy and remorse, a bold and daring personality, and difficulty inhibiting behaviors.

People with psychopathy may deceive, manipulate, exploit, threaten, steal from, or physically harm others. At the same time, they may seem outwardly friendly and well adjusted. This ‘mask of sanity,’ described in the quote above, can make psychopathic people very hard to identify.

Psychopathic traits vary across the population from mild to extreme. In other words, psychopathy is a spectrum disorder, like other well-known spectrum disorders such as autism and anxiety. Severe psychopathy can cause significant impairment and affects approximately 1% of children and adults in the United States today.”

– from Psychology Today (and Good Lord, they’re catty):

 “Psychopathy is a condition characterized by the absence of empathy and the blunting of other affective states. Callousness, detachment, and a lack of empathy enable psychopaths to be highly manipulative. Nevertheless, psychopathy is among the most difficult disorders to spot.

Psychopaths can appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack any semblance of conscience. Their antisocial nature inclines them often (but by no means always) to criminality.

Just Me:

– I’ll summarize: perhaps what makes it not the majority type is that psychopaths apparently don’t let public opinion bother them or change their behaviour, one might almost apply the “Aut,” syllable to that, but again, for me, I think that just makes them not, or less Allistic, going with what other people think seems to be an Allistic feature.

As an Autist, I clench at the word “empathy,” but perhaps it’s appropriate for psychopathy to say it isn’t there or is attenuated. For my “just me,” section, I will say that this language is all psychological and ahistorical, or asociological, I mean it refers to people in the present tense, people are used, people are hurt – as often with what I think of as Allistic psychology, there is no attention paid to the future, to the ongoing cause and effect, the reverberations of this hurt through time, I mean, a classic movie psychopath doesn’t worry about the pain the knife causes the victim, and this is the psychological definition – but he doesn’t worry about the future either, about the altered lives that didn’t end, about his victim’s children, he doesn’t worry about generally adding to the misery of humanity and bringing the next apocalyptic reset a little closer. I think?

There’s some of my Antisocialization Theory in there, that you can’t just keep adding to the misery forever, that there is a cycle to it, a point of critical mass and an explosion, or implosion, a reset, the Antisocialization Jubilee like a world war or a total collapse. An actuarial idea, I suppose.

The classic psycho lacks empathy AND actuarial sense, maybe? That ought to have stopped him too. The two things are surely related and connected, and mostly move through the world together . . . or not?

One may be rarer than the other, in some sense perhaps instead they exist in inverse proportion, even, perhaps me and my friends can be tight and caring about one another as we wage war on the world, then we’d have empathy and not be psychopaths, pass for “normal,” and lack only the actuarial empathy – and destroy the world?

But perhaps I digress and I’m so far behind I only think I’m leading. Back to the dictionary.

Sociopathy

OK, I’m out of date, it’s called Antisocial Personality Disorder now – but maybe only the name has been updated, it just sounds like “psychopathy, only just the bad kind,” more impulsivity, more violence, less disguise. The following excerpts are a little contradictory, it seems a good definition is still a matter of debate.

from the Mayo Clinic:

“Antisocial personality disorder, sometimes called sociopathy, is a mental health condition in which a person consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others. People with antisocial personality disorder tend to purposely make others angry or upset and manipulate or treat others harshly or with cruel indifference. They lack remorse or do not regret their behavior.

People with antisocial personality disorder often violate the law, becoming criminals. They may lie, behave violently or impulsively, and have problems with drug and alcohol use. They have difficulty consistently meeting responsibilities related to family, work or school.”

from Psychology Today (and again . . . bitchy, I guess, LOL):

“Sociopathy refers to a pattern of antisocial behaviors and attitudes, including manipulation, deceit, aggression, and a lack of empathy for others. Sociopathy is a non-diagnostic term, and it is not synonymous with “psychopathy,” though the overlap leads to frequent confusion. Sociopaths may or may not break the law, but by exploiting and manipulating others, they violate the trust that the human enterprise runs on.”

Just Me:

For my two cents’ worth, again, it’s all present tense, clearly this person doesn’t seem to be worried about what sort of world they are creating with their behaviour, and . . . I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, or maybe me and others of my type, but the speaker, the folks telling me about it don’t address the world of tomorrow either, the way psychology reads to me, mainstream psychology, Allistic psychology only ever sounds like a personal matter, interpersonal at most . . . I’m sorry, I know I’m not landing this thought, but let’s leave it there for a moment. If I can tie the whole thing off, it will because we got there with this bit, leaving this dangling forever is not an option.

If you’re seeing this, we got through it, hang in there.

-OK, sort of. For this, what the hey, I’ve already said it elsewhere. Allism has an attenuated or missing actuarial sense, and I am calling the psychology they have developed “Allistic Psychology,” because it somehow never translates into sociology or what people’s behaviour does to the world, it seems stuck on one’s personal pain, the social aspects, reaching no further than something specific about our parents or our kids. One has the sense that abuse is rare, a minority issue for most, because it is never spoken of in bigger, cultural terms, at least in the future.

Regarding the ‘Psycho and Sociopath CEO’ Theory

I think I hit it already, on route, that it’s a separate matter, whether you have empathy and whether you have actuarial empathy, the vision for the people of the future, right? Empathy is nice, in its way, but it is at best, not enough. We are still creating circumstances that no amount of mere empathy is going to fix, our empathy is extremely short sighted if it can’t deal with a plague, or pollution, climate change, etc., if it seems to be no prophylaxis for conflict and war.

What I really want to get at, only hinted at off the top, is the idea that psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder are not the most useful and productive ways to think about the most callous of our leaders and CEOs, that this pop psych meme isn’t helpful.

I mean, what are we to do, run our Earth-consuming money making machines with more heart? Somehow keep the psychotics out of the destroying the world for money industries? Keep them out of the army?

I think if it were a matter of any minority so small as psychopaths, fixing the world’s problems would be pretty much doable, our problems, I’m sorry, I suppose this is hard to hear when unlike myself you spent your whole life thinking you were normal and that’s good – our problems are because something is terribly wrong with most humans. Even if it were only that we’re too wild or stupid to control a few psychopaths and let them trash the world and kill us all, there would still be something terribly wrong with all of us for that, and it isn’t only that.

I mean really – oh, perhaps I oughtn’t be writing just now after all – stupid wins, doesn’t it? Never mind, that’s not going anywhere. Ha.

The point – the corporate and military worlds are very social, very human, social structures, meaning there are a lot of group dynamics going on, and it’s all about friends and enemies – I think those friends sort of take most neurodivergent people out of the picture as leaders, probably the psychopaths and APD folks too, mostly. I think the leaders are not socially disabled, but perhaps they even have superpowers in that area, and so this theory about a percentage of people with antisocial disorders being our CEOs and leaders is . . . I know, bizarre, but read me, I do this a lot – backwards, totally.

My neurodivergence means something, damnit. Yes, upside down and backwards.

The problem ones have social gifts and rational disabilities, not the other way about. I am postulating, in lieu of our sociopath CEO’s a sort of a super-Allist.

“Normal,” to the point of disorder.

More to come, probably.

Jeff

Nov. 3rd., 2023

The ‘lism, Part Two

Allism, the majority neurotype, is humankind in warrior mode.

It’s a set of options that optimizes the human animal for its group conflict, which is the standard explanation for the size of our brains, our supposed intelligence, the learning curve of conflict – and that’s problematic, isn’t it, it’s a thing that evolved because the environment changed – but the environment was us, so the environment changed because we changed too. It adds complexity, human social environments do not appear in the fossil record, and while the evidence of conflict is almost the only evidence we have, stone weapons and broken skeletons, that is all there could be, really, so it doesn’t prove much. We don’t get to look and say the equivalent of see it was wet here then and dried out over centuries, we have no corroboration, no physical trace of past social environments, no evidence for social change that would oblige us to explain how it shaped us.

I mean, even if we wanted to, which, this would be us searching for actuarial evidence and knowledge about ourselves – and for most, “Human Nature,” has already answered, made these questions irrelevant – people don’t change. Sure, maybe apes did, mindlessly, in response to the climate, etc., but “people,” don’t, and certainly not for each other. We are apparently controllable, but not changeable.

Again, I’m trying to shout and I think I sound like Goldblum, you’d think I was talking about the menu when I said in the first part, “ . . . the “Human Nature,” in which the Allistic finds us lacking and themselves lamentable but inevitable is really only one neurotype, and one with an off switch . . . ”  – I suppose it’s a different conversation, but this is not really an abstraction, “Human Nature,” – the whole world is structured around, it, I mean politically and legally.

“People don’t change,” is fucking law, despite the obvious falsity of it.

If law acknowledged causality in human affairs, it would disappear. With no static “Nature,” to simply control, a policeman is only hurting people and causing all the same problems as the criminals – which is exactly the case, in my mind. Sigh.

I’m not getting closer to the point, so let’s just teleport there and start again.

“Autism,” isn’t a thing; it’s only an attempt to define “non-Allism,” – but Allism, ironically to an Allist, is a thing, a discreet, heritable, definable thing, with specific traits and functions. It’s counterintuitive, because the numbers are sort of backwards, but Allism is a genetic thing, a variance, a sort of a mutation – while what we call “Autism,” is probably the whole gene pool. No?

So tell me, what are the Autistic traits and functions?

Isn’t every savant different?

Isn’t there a great deal of variety within what we call “Autism,” Autists who work and succeed, and Autists who can’t get out of bed? At some point, you have to give up explaining how everything is “Autism,” except a few things that are part of a much narrower spectrum, and name the narrow bit instead, Allism. Again: what if we are the whole gene pool?

The Allists, with their “Human Nature,” do not speak for humanity.

I mean, they speak, boy, do they speak – but they are not speaking for humanity.

It’s almost the reverse, what they speak for.

But this is the Big Picture: the human gene pool has neurodivergence, which means we always have traits that we can draw upon when the environment changes, active neurotraits and neurotraits in store for what may come, diversity is evolutionary  capital, the more you have, the safer your species is – and Autism is maybe not just one part of it, but it is us trying to name neurodiversity itself with a single label – when the structure is far more clear, simple and true when we say Allism is the label, the individual, discrete thing within the diversity.

I need a metaphor.

It’s like “Autism,” means “not a tree,” and “Allism,” means tree?

I try to say “Autism” is a bush, but no, some Autists are vines, says the community, and it’s sort of fair, fine, we are everything but trees, everything but the tall, strong, can’t see the forest for ‘em trees – so the trees are the thing, the creation, the genetic machines that build themselves out of the gene pool . . . no, I’m sorry, it doesn’t work, really every species of “tree,” created itself out of its previous species’ possibly diverse gene pool, the analogy wouldn’t be “trees,” it would be a single tree species against its genetic backdrop . . . and no easier, no help, we know less about that than about our own backdrop. Let’s try a different tack, go with Jurassic Park, life finds a way.

Is ”Autism,” trying to be a thing? Do Autists select other Autists and seek to outbreed and outlaw other sorts? Not so much, Autism just happens to us and many of us don’t even know about it – but it can’t but help my argument that Allism is the living, genetic thing that it does these things, selects for itself and actively tries to limit the spread of other sorts. On the one hand, it gives us the label – but in many other ways, it wears its label loudly and proudly. They are “just normal,” but rather staunchly so. “Trying to be a thing,” this is a definition for life, for a living thing in evolution – so Allism passes this test and maybe Autism does not?

So why is this hard to say, who am I arguing with? Society knows it is conformist.

We wouldn’t be having this conversation if not for a power differential, if one neurotype didn’t get to declare itself “just normal.” Society knows it is conformist; it just doesn’t know there’s any other way to be. The Allists are apparently everywhere, and they are apparently in charge, so saving anyone or changing the world isn’t about Autistics, or ADHD folks (or POC, or LGBTQIA+), or anyone but them, about their type’s superpowers and disabilities, the rest is . . . I’m sorry, secondary. It wouldn’t matter so much that you’re any sort of challenged, aren’t we all, wouldn’t matter if you were drunk – if you weren’t driving the bus.

Apparently, the only people allowed to drive the bus are the ones who have no idea that they’re disabled.

Hold on, let’s have another restart.

Two weeks later – not happening, what do we say on Twitter, screw it, send. Ha.

Jeff

Oct. 12th., 2023

The ‘lism

Allism, the majority neurotype, is humankind in warrior mode.

A type is a set of options that customizes the human being for particular uses, particular environments, “neurotype,” refers to the customization, the model, perhaps of the brain, and the majority one is by definition, the one that exists for the majority environment. Look at the world, you ought to be able to infer how most people’s minds are working.

It’s conflict – so that’s your neurotype. I’ll point out: authority is conflict, and it’s ubiquitous. Where there isn’t actual fighting, it’s because the conflict is entirely one sided and somebody is doing what they have been bloody well told.

I feel like that should be all caps or something, not delivered Jeff Goldblum deadpan, conflict is everywhere, but you know, you do you.

You know it yourself, you are generally telling everyone about it yourself, your priorities are not a secret. No-one is in a better position to see it and point it out to you than the original non-Allistics, the Autists by which you avoid defining yourselves, we see it starkly, neurotype VS neurotype, where Allistics try to convert Autistics by entirely Allistic methods, army basic training, or simple torture: Allistics pathologize passivity – this should result in more than a discussion of the relative truth of Autistic passivity, it should make clear that the speaker is aggressive, how else would this work?

If it were aggression that were proscribed, then you’d know that the passive were in charge, in the majority.

The Allistic type is aggressive. If the passive were in charge, the aggressive would be singled out for treatment instead, but that’s not the way it is because the majority neurotype is aggressive and so the boys that fight look good and normal to them and the boys that don’t appear to be a problem. This is why in the past, girls and women have been under diagnosed with ASD compared to boys and men, because passivity is less pathological in girls in this society at this time. Own it, this is you. Strength is essential for life, right? This is obvious.

To you.

The opposite has always been true for me, strength has always looked like life’s greatest threat to me. Obvious – but I never knew I had a neurotype, I did not appreciate the purpose built limitations of my own reasoning. Neurotype is a meta concept, it’s not easy, and until I learned about Autism and neurotypes I could not see the way different things can be built-in obvious to different people. I’m saying, I’m certain that most Allistics haven’t imagined this strength orientation to be anything but obvious to every possible mind, it just appears as a universal truth to them, it’s throughout their science, Nature, rough in tooth and claw and all that – again, as my view of strength as a world destroying scourge did and does to me.

The Neurodivergent, we Autistics, the ADHD, the BPD, etc., we are forced to learn a theory of more than one mind, of neurotype, and this information is vital to our navigating the world, we must learn our type and how it differs from “the rest of the world’s,” but the rest of the world never does, they are aggressive and so conformist. They’re in charge and they don’t have to know themselves if they don’t feel like it, and they don’t. But science must move on, with or without them. There is a structure to all this whether they know it or not. The science and the answers are sitting right in front of us all, in plain view, depending on the brain behind your eyes.

Warrior mode explains a lot. Honestly, you (I’m addressing this rant to the Allistic, or more properly to all who share the Allistic view) just call it Human Nature, but the world is not Plato’s metaphor and Natures, essences of things are not how anything works; the “Nature,” doesn’t exist – but the idea, “Human Nature,” this very much does exist, as a rule in the Allistic mind. The fact of this idea’s ubiquity is a hard truth with disastrous consequences for the world. It is a rule that insures we stay in warrior mode, because it is part of warrior mode to get stuck in warrior mode. A warrior with a short attention span or a queasy stomach for it is not effective, a warrior must be stubborn about it, right to the end. So you don’t call it a mode, and you don’t imagine ways that it could anything but the way it is. Warrior mode is all in.

But it is.

There are other modes, the divergent demonstrate this, and they who have ears to hear may infer what they like, draw the connections they see.

Human Nature is not a “Nature,” those aren’t real – so “Human Nature,” is a neurotype, or the concept is part of a neurotype, I want to say an early, basic part of the thinking of the type, that sets the mode: if you believe in a static “Nature,” then you bring a different attitude into life than if you worried that everything you did pushed the people around you in some direction or other. In warrior mode, you don’t worry about personal development, you are dealing in existential matters, and if people changed, you wouldn’t need to be here. In warrior mode, there is only today and tomorrow, there isn’t room for any seven generations.

“Not worrying about personal development,” manifests in half of Allistic speech, here are popular examples:

What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them.

They need to learn about the real world.

People don’t change.

You are not what happened to you, you are your reaction to what happened to you.

If I don’t do it, somebody else will.

You’ll see that many of them are simply direct references to “Human Nature,” or simply rewordings of it, it really does encapsulate the entire suite of thought, even better than Christian Original Sin did, I mean it doesn’t leave anyone out, atheists and scientists can all share it too. It encapsulates and codifies not only the absence of actuarial logic but repeats endlessly that there can be no such thing as actuarial logic. People don’t change.

I have liked to say that it’s when we are, “spanked,” and told that it is not, “bad,” that it does not, “hurt,” us but makes us, “better,” that “we,” must believe or it doesn’t stop, but now I think the ground must be prepared for such basic logic, that indeed I heard it too and remained unconvinced, so that it is perhaps not that “we” are told and convinced, but that we were told and many of you were pre-wired to be convinced. Certainly, I would be surprised to hear of anyone who remembers having a different thought before and changing it.

I mean, I think my actuarial ideas are the same ones I was born with, no-one changed my mind from a previous thought – I’m painting myself into a corner here, I still think the spanking forces a change – just not from as clear a stance as I have, I think maybe the Allistic brain doesn’t have to make the complete one eighty from actuarial operation to Human Nature, I suspect it is born somewhere between and spanking alters the path forward in development, it doesn’t reverse things completely.

Obviously, war is a social matter, an extreme social environment, where in-group and out-group disparities couldn’t be more stark. Social discretion is part of warrior mode.

Ah. I suppose I have assumed that lesson to be part of the spanking too, that when your own brain registers “Ow! That hurts!” and then we are in the scenario at the top of two paragraphs up, trying to make the spanking stop, but our parent is telling us, “This is not bad, this is good, this will make you better,”  then the lesson is to ignore the obvious self-preservation logic of your own brain, ignore the obvious reality that point of hitting is to hurt and instead focus on the social reality of this human telling you that their words are more important than all that reality.

The spanking and the lesson shift you from rationality towards social thinking, away from your own processor towards others – what “Allistic,” means, right.

Theory-wise, it makes some sense for a type to have this capability, and it would seem like a magic power if we could simply turn it on and off by spanking or not, like if we knew that was how it worked, we could turn it on when the aliens attack and turn it off again after, it’s a brilliant genetic option . . . again, assuming war is ever “necessary,” except because of your own selves’ aggression. But as the Davids said, we seem stuck. The soldiers have taken control of the government, so to speak, and they only know one sort of project.

There is indeed an off switch, but you are smarter than Vader’s engineers, you left it off the plans, but this is hope, it is not an ubiquitous Nature that you are this way, and you are only born half so bad, suggesting that within you, long dormant, may yet be that other wolf, the good one.

But this is what Allistic means, warrior mode, which is a sort of hyper ability for conflict / something of a disability to worry about the living, and a hyper sense for social discretion / diminished sense of external realities. It’s not “Human Nature,” these problems, not every “Human,” has them, some have more actuarial sense and less aggression, some see real problems in the world beyond the competitive success of their group – the existence of Autistics and other sensitive sorts proves that everything about the “Human Nature,” in which the Allistic finds us lacking and themselves lamentable but inevitable is really only one neurotype, and one with an off switch at that!

OK, the actuarial disability, the hyper sociality, those are the big two . . . ah. Not the same level of importance maybe, but the language stuff, the empathy and the eye contact, non-verbal “communication.” Here I want to depart sounding smart and scientific, if I ever achieved it, and just say, “non-verbal communication,” is authority, you are simply to obey, what feedback is necessary?

Generally, what was unsaid was only that, “shut up and effing do it.” But also, besides authority, it is otherwise warrior stuff, ninja, green beret stuff, silent running, so no-one knows what you’re up to. Weird to think of the whole population thinking that way, but if you’re all one neurotype, which let’s face it, means mostly common superpowers, but it means that you’re all disabled mostly the same way too.

I mean, sure there’s non-verbal communication, but it’s not non-verbal because that’s the most efficient sort of communication or the sort with the most resolution, I mean it’s not non-verbal, “to communicate,” that you could do out loud. Obviously it’s non-verbal to leave listeners out of the conversation, limit the sharing of the information.

Loose lips sink ships, don’t you know, knowledge is power, because life is war for the warrior.

Jeff

Oct. 5th., 2023

Riffing, Part Six –Morality as Debt – Summary and Project on Hold

Ah, I’m getting them mixed up a bit, but basically, the last one is about the hard feelings from the normal, money economy of normal life, that’s only halfway there, isn’t it, don’t I need to do one just about morality and punishment and maybe conformity. I think it will involve that cookie thief again, but we don’t have to do the role playing, don’t have to extrapolate it all from them, maybe.

So, Part Five shows the emotional flow in the money economy, which is surely intrinsic, part and parcel, this is not analogy at all but the actual facts of the matter. We need to try to draw the moral “economy,” now, where the goods are not literal goods, but this virtual currency with which moral and not financial debts are settled.

I want to make excuses; I’m finding this difficult and every tiny step is taking me real time, but if I can make a second step, then perhaps Part Five will have been a good first one. Gawd.

But how to proceed? Same, posit some generic “exchange?” Well, I didn’t really posit anything did I, I just jumped in and started making pronouncements. AST is that way, it’s the nether world, it needs my set of presuppositions, my Autistic set, and that’s what I try to do when I start like that, warn you you’re not in Kansas anymore and force you to just jump in – or not, I guess. So let’s do that. Welcome to the other side.

Of course moral exchanges are unequal, I mean if an exchange is equal, morals or reputations are not altered? Scanning the last one, I see it was as I started saying in this one, about the normal economics of life, goods and services, food and labour up until the French Revolution and then I switched to crime and punishment.

I suppose the flow of bad feelings from the money economy also happens in the moral economy, that some good flows in one direction and hard feelings in the other. Perhaps there’s something in determining what the “goods,” going the other direction are supposed to be. I haven’t apparently read it or understood until this moment, but I’ve already said, haven’t I that when we pay our debts, we pay by having bad feelings. Why, is that what we stole when we transgressed, someone’s bad feelings, left them stranded on the high moral ground?

Ah, the book is here. I should stop talking and try to learn something instead.

Jeff

Sept. 23rd., 2023

Tangents – Thoughts about Hate and Neurotype(departing from Morality, Part Five)

Hey, I’m sorry. I’m mocking your neurotype, that’s not cool, I know. I’m trying to cheat a little, shock you into listening. This is the thing that normal folks have a hard time seeing, I’m sorry, I ought to know it’s not going to help insulting you about it. Let’s pick the parental version apart a little.

“Sure I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them,” is clearly OK in the majority neurotype brain, isn’t it, and I suppose I can try to understand, I mean, it “doesn’t hurt them,” not more than it does every other kid, it really “doesn’t hurt them,” developmentally – compared to every other kid, and you can look around you and see this much is true. It’s true, in a way, in a socially understood, Allistic, comparative way, if not so much in my self understanding, Autistic way, where comparisons aren’t so much the point and everyone hit and hurt the same way is different than everyone not hit and hurt the same way. The ”same,” part, again, is Allistic, that’s the point of everything in group life, same is important, and hurt isn’t all bad, makes you strong – while us all being in the same boat is no comfort to my less social mind, and everyone being hurt is infinitely worse than if no-one were, despite the company.

It looks like the social mind is at odds with the sociological mind, with the actuarial sense, and this is some prioritization in the evolution of the Allistic human, one I would review, but it would seem we’ve lost the Administration password, another convenient thing about the human in Allistic mode, is it thinks it’s perfect or something.

Don’t you find that amazing about the haters of the world, that they can be so harsh in their discriminations, it’s like white men think white men are gods or something, and heterosexuals think they’ve invented a free eternal power source. From my neurology, I don’t understand how you form sentences from such attitudes, like there is nothing wrong with men, or nothing wrong with white men, or nothing wrong with people if they’re straight – have the haters ever met any people at all?

Who have you ever met that made you think, “That’s it, no more people, this guy is perfect?” And how old are you? I really don’t get it, I’m as arrogant an aspie prick as you’d ever care to meet, but I do not worship myself as flawless, and I would not populate a world with nothing but my weird self.

We’re all some awful flawed Human Nature, never to be cured in this world – but in the next conversation there would be no problems at all if only they were all white and straight and male – sorry, I’m mocking again, I think? Can you tell? The presupposition in all the hateisms seems to be something just that unrealistic, doesn’t it? Not so much? I think it’s along the lines of a disability, like neurotype stuff, if you need a gene for hate for some reason, then you won’t be needing this one for self-critique, that would be counterproductive for both these genes, right?

Sorry.

Jeff

Sept. 16th., 2023

Riffing, Part Five –Morality – the Economy of Stolen Rights

I’m sorry, I’ve been wasting all of our time, I’m a mess. I’ve deleted parts two and three, having taken anything worth anything and put it in the fourth one – but now I’m leaving that and restarting yet again. I’m not having much luck.

The original idea was that what humans call “morality,” is a construction modeled after debt, with all of that economic language and none of its own. I think my first urge here was to try to use this economic model to show the illogic of punishment, that crime isn’t, or oughtn’t be something you can purchase, that punishment schemes aren’t as logical as monetary ones.

Like, what’s the money, then, when we “pay,” our moral debts, what’s the currency, that sort of thing came to mind immediately. This is the sort of thing that I needed to work out, I  . . . only intuited, if I’m being honest. We’re not there yet.

Actually, I suppose the plan is to build this model in an attempt to prove the existence of abuse and antisocialization to regular, modern people with little to no actuarial sense, to expand this economic model of morality to show how antisocialization must exist even if they don’t see it, or else things don’t happen, like the cycles, the world wars and the moral jubilees maybe don’t happen – a demonstration like how the math about the mass of the known universe proves the existence of dark matter despite that no-one had so much as guessed it, let alone seen it.

I have used the dark matter analogy before, a lot; it’s good as far as it goes.

I mean, we all know when we lose, no-one needs to prove that ire exists – but I have something to prove about it, Antisocialization Theory, basically that space for ire is a limited resource, that after four generations of it, the system breaks down and requires a disastrous reboot.

I wasn’t all that clear about the goals in my previous attempts, I hope that’s why I’ve been going in circles.

 Let’s start again, since my point was it’s a bad model, maybe there is no bloody cash or no credit or something huge – if it had all the elements it might be a good model, right? The glossary wasn’t the place to start, then we’re pushing our guesses, that’s all backwards, thought is a chain, you can’t push it. I used to know that.

__________________________

Below were five more pages about a child taking their sibling’s cookie, which again, I must be trying to push the chain, trying to take you somewhere instead of just telling you where it is. They’re gone for now, those nasty kids and their sugar bombs, LOL, I mean those pages.

I keep setting out with an exchange, where goods move unequally and so emotion does too, that we trade our morals, or our reputation to cheat someone for their goods and that in turn they have cheated us for our righteousness (or would have if morals and reputation meant what they ought to or used to, or what we pretend they do).

It’s obvious and simple to show that the cheated for material goods person is aggrieved and angered – antisocialized – but isn’t the cheated out of their morals person also antisocialized, I mean isn’t the antisociality of the winners and profiteers of the world as much or more of a problem than the brooding masses of poor losers? Put it this way: when the revolution comes, then the anger of the poor is going to be a problem. But in the supposed economic or political peace in the meantime, it is the rich whose lack of love destroys the world.

Counterintuitive perhaps, but it seems plain that both sides of an unequal deal are antisocialized and antisocial, that both are participating in a sort of a crime, or maybe an actual crime, that the materially impoverished are angered, but that “morally impoverished,” sort of means angry too.

Moral currency is grievance, it’s terrible to have too much of it, but terrible also to have none, then you have no moral power? Perhaps it is self image, self respect, self love – but same, it would have to be an evil thing either way, to have too much of it or not to have enough – other love, same problem in reverse terms. None of it is enough to explain the world we see, this is not the dark matter yet. Perhaps it is not enough under a scheme of only simple interest, perhaps the winners’ grievances add up to nothing over a single lifetime or generation but compounded over time . . . ?

Into class and privilege, and the rancor becomes dogma . . . ? No, not the scale I’m after either, I don’t think. It’s a species-wide problem, or it’s nothing, I think. There’s an eddy there, but class is not my focus. In Antisocialization Theory, everyone is both a victim and a dictator, class is an effect as much as it is a cause, and not a primary cause. The interest of our antisocialization compounds and accrues in us all, and all together to a degree, in all classes. It’s hard to keep it out of my mind, though, I’ve been watching old BBC Agatha Christie stuff, it all drips with the decadent derision of the British upper class.

It does seem plain that if you structure your systems around profit, that someone is righteously disgruntled with each and every transaction, and that inasmuch as the economy moves or breathes at all, people are being angered. A growing economy, the apparent goal of it, means a growing rage in the people. Suggested in a previous one, I think, perhaps it is only antisocialization that grows at all, perhaps ire is what the metaphor of growth is really about.

Again, if you can supposedly “grow the economy,” simply by relaxing safety and environmental regulations, what resource has actually grown but abuse and hard feelings? “The economy,” is one of goods and services going in one direction and bad feelings going in the other, and these are one thing, a single economic system, and the goods and money come faster, the faster we spend our humanity for them. OK.

Now how do I not devolve into my usual, invisible to normal people rant about Human Nature? I know you won’t follow anyone past it. You are perhaps allowing me this metaphor, but in the end, that’s all “spending humanity,” can be, metaphor, and of course no-one thinks it ever runs out, or that we might need to make more, or spend it more slowly, and abusers never worry about it until the abused snap and make them notice.

And then the French Terror too, was just “Human Nature,” and not bad feelings created on purpose for profit for decades. Sure, they asked for the Revolution, sure, it was, “untenable,” and “anyone could see, now,” but why the people gotta be so angry about it? The whole point of Antisocialization Theory has always been to try to explain to normal people that the wrong is real, that the pain is real, that it matters that we have created a world that runs on pain, and that, as Graeber said too, it’s optional, we could choose to make a different world.

But knowing this does involve accounting for abuse and bad feelings as real, and people as changeable. Ah, here’s something. Antisocialization Theory – AST for short – breaks the chicken and egg standoff about whether humans are born good or bad, and whether we are pre-programmed or tabula rasa – we are born partly programmed, partly writable, and life moves and abuse is real – so on at least one vector, aggression or something like it, whatever level of blank your tablet is, if you raise kids with the crowd among humans, with an average amount of spanking, your kids’ tablet will have more aggression on it than yours did.

I don’t think it even matters if you’re gentler than your father, it’s an “is there abuse,” thing (an epigenetic detection and response), not, an “is it getting less,” thing, and if it’s “yes, “ for several generations, people’s tablets get less peaceful, until some reset, a war or something. Ah, that’s a thing, for the child advocate folks, isn’t it.

It ain’t blank, but we are still writing, every minute. There’s these little things called evolution and genetics, there is not a little thing called a “nature.” A “Nature,” can only be a moving target in the real world, it’s more like just a personality.

Antisocialization is real, it matters, and it grows – and that’s a terrible combination of attributes to ignore. When the Revolution and the Terror come, that is not the People, “losing control,” and “reverting to their Natures,” that is the People being controlled to develop just this personality, because we are changeable – and the bosses of the world were “in control,” making it all happen, apparently on purpose, the whole time.

Just try to stop them!

___________________________

Wait, so my complaint is . . . morality is modeled after debt, but worldly debt is a surplus of hard feelings, A is B, B is C, so A is C, morality is hard feelings . . . somehow, I mean, moralists preach very hard feelings, morality has horrible dreams. Moralists would have you burn in Hell forever as payment for some crime that probably won’t last that long. If only the Devil paid dividends, if our bad feelings forever in Hell paid interest, then perhaps the living could take a little holiday once in awhile, LOL.

Hey, jokes aside – is this business of “paying,” in the afterlife intended to make the payment of moral debts all sound virtual? If I can keep paying my moral debts forever in the mythological world, then is that supposed to mean, “paying your debts,” is virtual, just metaphor, there isn’t a real cost in this one either, i.e. our pain isn’t real, doesn’t matter? This is a law enforcement version of, “Sure, I hit them, but it doesn’t hurt them.” The payment of your moral debt isn’t real, the years of relative torture in prison isn’t real. I mean, it certainly doesn’t actually exist in the world, causing its own problems or anything, it was a solution, remember?

The dark matter is in there. Society weighs twenty times what it ought to if deterrents stayed virtual, if the pain wasn’t real.

Hey, maybe that’s a place to tie it off, 1,800 words.

Debt, the First 5,000 Years is coming, should be here in a week, they say, so maybe three, probably customs.

Jeff

Sept. 15th., 2023

Riffing, Part Four – Less AND More about Economics as Morality

I’ve got an agenda.

I’ve had an insight, born with, perhaps about saving the world and humanity by stopping punishment, that for some reason most people see no harm in abuse as a way of life. So, no subterfuge, that’s what this project is about, to prove that proposition to humanity: part of my insight is that the entire world is on the wrong side of this issue, that everything anybody ever wrote was in support of this way of life, that the world is ending and we never even guessed, never doubted it once.

The new part, since being rocked by Graeber’s story about most people seeing debt as inseparable from morality, is going to be the examining the role this association or conflation has in it all, in creating our situation, debt and morality.

I’m still waiting on Graeber’s book on the subject, eager to see his full insight about it, but my take is usually unique enough, I’m not seriously worried about stumbling upon his brilliance, my angle is sure to be far lower and far less credible. He’s maybe a little gonzo – whereas I’m a know nothing fool only thinks he’s that close to normal. I think they say his is an economics book and I surely can’t do that.

Having clarified that, I set myself some tasks, and even the order in which I must perform them, and it’s going to need a little economics. To repeat, in case one of these gets any attention at any point:

The thesis is that morality is an invention, modelled after the forever communist economy of credit group animals live in, with bonds of favours and debts, that morality evolved from the measuring of these favours and debts, that it is this measuring and weighing of goods and favours was abstracted to become law and order with punishment being a sort of a currency.

The tasks, I was working on a glossary, element for element, a translation table from economics to morality.

People are my natural resource.

Human rights are the goods, what is extracted from them and exchanged.

Credit (wow, was forgetting credit, this will help) is when someone tramples your human rights until punishment takes theirs? Moral debt. Punishment.

Collateral in moral systems is you, your body, your freedom, your labour. Sounds universal, but still a factor when there are people lacking so much as the freedom to crime, when even their bodies are already spent and accounted for and even that basic collateral isn’t there for them, prisoners, the disabled. The Other generally, in this life of group conflict. Think “driving while Black.” Our meatbags are only collateral if they decide we’re a person.

Interest – interest on moral debt, I believe is antisocialization. The morally bankrupt are antisocial, thoroughly antisocialized, compounded into default. Again, when we take another person’s rights, we lose something of ourselves, perhaps by capitulating and agreeing, which means realizing that we don’t have rights that others can’t simply take, so we lose thinking we owned ourselves when we take from another. I‘m not sure yet, the mechanics here are giving me fits. I’m trying to make science of it, but it always sounds like emotion and art.

Cash? – David was clear that societies often have a very clear set of equivalencies, take a person’s eye, you owe them exactly this many goats and I’m thinking that perhaps if you were a poulter who took an eye out they could convert goats to birds for your invoice – but that no such trade, this many goats for this many chickens ever took place, that this sort of barter is not part of the development of society, which makes some surface sense, what does a goatherd want with chickens, he collects goats, doesn’t he?

So chickens and goats are not transferable, but either of them will buy you an assault that half blinds someone. Crime is like cash, sort of universal. LOL, sorry. A bit of a funny, but not exactly not the point either. I think crime – overstepping, theft of rights – is the cash and the credit, certainly when we talk about punishment, when we are talking about paying for a crime with an assault that’s what it is.

Cash – is crime, abuse, as in overstepping, and punishment is credit – you can borrow the crime for a time. Hey, that is a bit of progress, isn’t it?

Know what, Imma stop right there, quit while I’m ahead, because I think the next step is the real life scenario again, and those have been, well, humiliating. We’ll let that ruin the next one.

Jeff

Sept. 9th., 2023