Human:Nature
This is a broad category, inclusive of any global behaviors.
We are every bit as natural as Blue-Green algae or Pterodactyls but we can’t accept that. We hold unshakable convictions on what people are and how people should behave yet in the face of perpetual disappointment we are mystified. Perhaps humans are like every other animal: Living out an innate strategic script with limited degrees of freedom from it.
Or: Why it’s sometimes OK to hate your neighbor.
The apparent flatness and hard edges of the world we see masks a strange, fluid, flickering dimension between humans. There is no accurate measurement of this dimension except perhaps for our ability to imagine it. Since it isn’t our nature to imagine things this way it takes a little effort.
Please imagine an odd idea; imagine that:
Interaction is embodiment
Imagine that people who engage in any way become a corporate organism for that period. These virtual organisms can flash into existence and straight out again with a speed like subatomic particles in a cloud chamber.
Begin: “Hey, is the Courthouse this way?” “Yeah, just a couple more blocks!” And we’re done. Imagine that exchange as a very short lived individual, existing like a burst of flame.
But two other beings might meet up and eventually celebrate 70 years of marriage, and they were a sort of organism too. In marriage we have some beliefs about this corporate organism that run very deep. “One flesh”. It’s a pretty weird sounding idea to sanctify but it’s honored by religious people and atheists alike. Completely secular people get married with every intention of honoring a mystical contract that defines them as a dual entity. That’s because this idea is deeper than science or religion, it’s core human. This composite organism is the couple’s life together… and I mean IT IS the time and energy they share.
Families also have a special status as a kind of group self. When you think of your own family, you can easily feel the very real lines of connection flowing between you like living tissue and often pulling and kinking in uncomfortable ways. We know that we somehow OVERLAP and that this is one of the most important things about us. Our loves and friends and families are a kind of Venn diagram. But the center of the Venn is you. Subjectivity and individual experience define this thing. Continue reading
Natural does not equal good. “Natural” includes violence toward outlanders and controlling women’s lives. I suspect “100% Natural” is a phrase Hitler would have liked.
Some questions we ought to ask:
- Why is there war? Why does xenophobia appear in every culture? Why does everyone have a culture? Why does virtually every culture come with a religion? Why do most cultures/religions form defensive barriers against each other?
- Why is it so common for people (men and women) in so many different cultures, to feel that they have a vote in how women should dress and behave, but almost never show that kind of concern about men? (The general exception being harassing effeminate men).
- Why are the young predictably liberal, and the old generally conservative?
- Why are liberal and conservative political stances universal within technological societies but always relative to local cultural details? (“I treat my slaves gently, they last longer that way”: Is that a progressive or conservative statement?)
- Why are people predictably kind to the rich and famous…but cruel to the poor? (Spoiler alert: It’s because we’re self-interested bastards who do it automatically.)
Woman arrested in Chicago in 1922 for too much exposed skin.
All of these behaviors are core hardwired human group traits that support a strong and stable primate hive. These behaviors aren’t beautiful or right philosophically, they are bits of scripting preserved by the natural selection of group behaviors. These are traits that helped us out-compete the good, the bad and possibly the ugly, over the last 200k years.
We are virtually blind to our nature as a species because we are so busy being individuals of our species. We are neurologically immersed in the matrix of these behaviors to the extent that they are not noteworthy. We feel like peripheral players at best to the great events of our time even though these movements are composed entirely of peripheral players. The larger picture is composed of us “pixels” forming the colors, shapes, and gradients, with our massed actions. And just as a cloud doesn’t exist without micro-droplets, human events don’t exist without us in our drifting collective groups. Every notable trend in our world emerges from the scaling up of the actions of individuals who generally feel no personal control over what is happening around them: Most people feel they are just tagging along trying to keep up and figure things out. The mirror of current events is too broad for us to recognize ourselves. It’s as if the sky was a mirror where we could see our city reflected but not our own little face peering up from it.
The behavior of large human groups is almost opaque to us in the same way that a cell knows nothing about the particular body it devotes every moment to supporting. We plug away at our daily business in much the same fashion. For many decades science fiction writers have explored the issues of robots and their programming and the nature of free will. I think it’s one of those ideas that is compelling because it echoes something deep and unresolved in ourselves, a bit like a profound but confusing dream. In a world where the first semiconscious robot has yet to ask if we want fries with that, the subject is clearly ourselves. Are we…free? Continue reading
A Meta-Strategy
Every organism has a survival strategy. Survival strategies are species and subspecies templates for living. They describe a specialized role within an ecological niche. Their roles are defined by exploiting a particular angle on making a living and by the adaptations of their bodies toward this goal. The amazing anteater for example makes a living…anyone? Anyone? Correct, eating ants. And has adapted in an amusingly specialized way with powerful claws for ripping into nests and long sticky tongue.
That is a deep, deep commitment to eating ants. But not really any deeper a commitment than most other species: The overall species strategy is a highly specialized job with a body increasingly adapted as a tool to do that job.
Virtual Speciation
But not us. We are constantly looking for new angles to play and new ways to play them. In pursuit of that goal, we may vary our focus, lifestyle, and ecological niche. But except for phenotypic variations based on local weather, our bodies don’t adapt. We don’t specialize via our bodies, we specialize via technology: A spear is a 7-foot long claw that can fly. Well sewn clothing is a thick warm pelt, opening our way toward the ice caps. Horses turn us into ten-foot-tall monsters moving at the speed of antelopes. Farming is a “Game of Life” survival cheat code the levels us up. Sufficient change in technology equals a virtual shift of species with an altered template for life.
Virtual Evolution
Our technology transforms us personally and as social animals. The rules for hunter-gatherers are not the rules for farming villages. We reorganize ourselves in a bottom-up that unpacks itself through the individual daily actions of each human playing the new game. Pyramids and kings pop into being from the right tools and population sizes. Each shift redefines the group size that we consider to be: Us. Ourselves. Are we 50 people, a thousand people, a million people? Ask the tools, they make the rules.
Virtual Ecosystem
When the human community becomes large enough and complex enough it becomes a virtual ecosystem unto itself. The specialized work of individuals mirrors the variety of organisms in a wild ecosystem. Enough complexity makes a self sustaining virtual ecology. AT least until the robots throw us all out of work.
Cultural Variation as a strategy
Every human group that can define as “US” creates culture. That culture expresses local traits with one unique voice. Varieties of approaches to mating, religious dogma, openness to outsiders, etc. equal a real-time experiment in how successful these traits are as a human survival strategy. The values for these different traits emerge from the tension force within the community. Authoritarianism is a strategy, so is liberal democracy, so is theocracy. Winning could mean stability or expansion. I call this expansionist trait “Virality”. One culture may make it’s people happy and healthy but virally dominant cultures can take them over.
(That’s draft one. As usual, if you found this intriguing check back once in a while. I do update and re-write.)
Remote Control
We know it as we speak, we handle words instinctively like tools we’ve used a thousand times. Every time we use words to make someone angry or to comfort them we are producing chemical reactions in their body. Admittedly, our physical presence plays a part in intimidating or calming, but in a low sensory telephone call, or a zero sensory letter, the disembodied words can still bring horror or joy. Naturally most words aren’t used to flood the listener with stress hormones. A great book can grow a world around the reader. A great comedian can pull happiness and relief from a crowd of thousands who share the mood like blood circulating in a body. And of course there are those who can move crowds past restraint into activity and even violence.
Many words cause changes in our minds and bodies but the context generally defines our reaction. There are words that build up enough charge from the way they are generally used that they often elicit an emotional bump. Please don’t be offended at the following content, it’s only here for demonstration purposes, you filthy fucking whore! Sorry, but I wanted you to pull up short. Did you feel that? It’s easy to find these words, just ask yourself what you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying. Feel what happens in your stomach and in your nerves as you read: Cunt, Nigger, Slut, Kike, Slant Eyes. Was it stress, fear, shame? Probably it was. These words are obvious hooks that make it hard not to react. The connection between words and chemicals is right there, requiring no further test. 
Even though it sounds mystical this is why I believe that humans of our state of development could not have been functionally mute, ever. We couldn’t have been ourselves and slowly developed language. Language is innate because it must be. That is circular thinking on the face of it, but I don’t mean it as a place to sit contentedly. I mean that it’s tangled up with something about the evolution of species that we have developed no foundation for. The reason I can feel so certain is that humans, but without language makes as much sense as a fully functioning car, but without an engine.
Words are the catalytic enzymes of the human domain.
This is so obvious as to be invisible. Words (and language) are the answer to the question “How will these complicated primates get their complicated business done?.” Language points to the human foundation of society. Language is about humans as a group, and about the group as organism. Innate language ability is the “human genome” of thinking and relating.
And species wide, our many languages speak to the same issues. That is, no language is alone able to discuss some angle on reality that others are not. No one language holds a surprising- one of a kind function that others can’t touch. If it’s difficult to imagine what that kind of exception would even be, that may point to why it doesn’t exist. It’s not in our presets for communication. The fact of innate language with a common range points to some underlying structures: A library of recombinant symbols and memes the we use both to interpret and explain.
And that’s up next in this category.
“The Human Memeome”.
Imagine being a starling in one of those massive dark clouds they create when swarming; Intensely focused, eyes forward, keeping up, swooping madly. So involved in this doing that we never look around and say: “What the heck are we doing?”. That would be doing it wrong. Interrupting automatic behavior is kicking yourself out of the game and likely paying some price for it.
There are many times in human life where it’s almost impossible to opt-out of preset behavior flows. The thing is, our sense of autonomy and free will often mask the inflexible and robotic within us. Imagine yourself walking into work, greeting familiar people. How much could you change the way you do that?
First, dress differently. Change your stride, your expression, and tone. Say surprising things, speak uncomfortable truths, use no templated behavior. In a meeting, don’t laugh with the group. Laugh without the group. Choose body language that conflicts with those around you.
It sounds like protracted, fingernails on the chalkboard misery, doesn’t it? It sounds like exhausting resistance to the flow. It sounds like asking for trouble. Please imagine how hard it would be for you to actually do that. You are feeling the enormous power and weight of automatic behavior, it is a tidal force that sweeps us along with it wherever it goes naturally. It is a hurricane gale if you walk against it. There’s enormous stress in clashing with social expectations.
But walking into work isn’t just waltzing past a few strangers, it’s a series of complex, patterned encounters.
Relationships with family, friends, and workmates quickly become codified. They develop a pattern that eventually becomes almost impossible to alter. If you pay close attention you can feel yourself in these moments of interaction morphing instantly into a modified version of you, especially adapted to this specific person. In their company, you have a well-understood way of greeting, a style of listening and a way of holding yourself. Buried in the same file are your ways of seeking information from them, making jokes, expressing camaraderie, or concern, etc. etc. You probably have different versions of these things prepared for many specific people. You don’t think about it. You didn’t plan these things… they grew automatically from your chemistry and relationship as the two of you worked out how to be with each other.
I’m just pointing out how much of life is evoked, context-driven behavior. It’s something observable that we all do, it’s global, it’s innate human behavior. In groups, we subconsciously monitor the environment for a sense of what it’s proper to be doing right now. We react instantly to signals during social interaction and display appropriate poses and expressions to answer those signals.
This constant flow of social mirroring and signaling doesn’t usually feel difficult or threatening. It doesn’t usually even feel like something we are doing. Not until there’s an uncontrollable breach in your display. Imagine throwing up, farting loudly or faceplanting in your nice clothes on your way into the conference room with “the team”. Inside us a sudden horror movie shriek, as we feel ourselves plummet into the social shame basement. We instantly begin emergency repairs with fevered apologies, explanations, and attempts to signal a return to normal. Shame is never more than a stupid comment or a burp away, and shame burns. It burns more than seems reasonable or proportionate. Shame hurts because, in spite of our apparent confidence, there is human machinery in us that cares a whole lot about what people think.
It’s very challenging to observe this our constant monitoring and mirroring of every group we are in, the way we change stance and attitude, distance, angle, facial expression and tone of voice. How we adjust our clothing and body language. Every person is a signal and we morph ourselves like camouflaging cuttlefish at every public moment to send the correct signal. This unconscious, automatic behavior can interact with conscious choice but it does so as little as possible.
Social interaction is a seamless matrix of automatic behavior, making it all but invisible. Anything you notice has to stand out against a contrasting background and human behavior IS our background. Your entire life in proximity to others is shaped by these autopilot primate rules of engagement. The pressure they exert is surprising.
This video is from Candid Camera long ago but it’s amazing. Watch these people completely mess with the minds of innocent strangers.
This really makes us look like puppets, doesn’t it? And you have to wonder what weird behaviors have us turning in circles and taking our hats off and putting them right back on again except that nobody is pretending in order to prank us. Famous old-school psychological tests showed that most people would deny the evidence of their own senses if others claimed to see something different and that many “decent people” would willingly torture an innocent person if simply pressured to by an authority figure. This is what Arthur Koestler meant when he said that more of mankind’s horrors come from self-negating behaviors than self-asserting behaviors. Being cooperative is a certain number of steps from just following orders.
(“So Bob, what line of work are you in?” “I frighten mice, like my Father and Grandfather before me..”)
Scientists taught white mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms.
The offspring of these frightened mice were never subjected to this cherry blossom trauma but mysteriously, they also feared the smell.
More amazing still, the grandchild generation of the original trauma mice, also never subjected to the treatment, reacted with fear.
This is the classic cited example of Epigenetics or Soft Inheritance. The traumatic experience memory is passed along not by DNA, but by methylation changes on the DNA. It’s the DNA equivalent of working memory between generations.
In the old synthetic theory, without soft inheritance:
Two squirrels are living at the same time, in the way, way back when. Along comes a saber-tooth cat. Both squirrels run but the faster one survives and the slower one doesn’t.
Ergo->Faster squirrel genes move one step forward and thanks for playing, slower squirrel genes!
And now, with epigenetics:
Same time, way, way back when. Two squirrels again, different scenario. One squirrel has a close encounter with the saber-tooth cat and gets away, badly shaken but alive. The other squirrel was obliviously examining his nuts in a tree nearby. He never saw the cat, and he is unaffected. Squirrel number 1 has babies and they are born with a fear of cats or at least an extra sensitivity to “something moved!” Squirrel number 1 has enhanced his reproductive status by communicating a mission-critical message to the next generation and the one after. They are literally BORN with more “street smarts” than squirrel number 2’s offspring.
What does it mean if a creature inherits some of the important EXPERIENCES of at least two generations of its ancestors and possibly more? This breakthrough model is fascinating because it describes a form of parental teaching of life lessons to the young in species that can’t archive data or tell stories. Instead, they attach a little chemical post-it note to their genes saying “Beware of Cat”.
If asked “how could the genes know “Cat”? I’d answer “The same way they knew about cherry blossoms.” It’s staggering to think of the sophisticated mechanisms involved and questions rise like mountains in the near distance. Actually, it’s one question, repeated.
1. Something terrifying happens and a sort of snapshot of the event is taken within the organism. How?
2. Which (snapshot) captures details of the experience. How?
3. Ranking some as meaningful. How?
4. And retaining them. How?
5. Before initiating a process that hands this information off to the sex cells for the next generation. How?
6. This new generation “knows” this life lesson as if they’d lived it themselves. But How?
We have now reached the “Talking out of my ass” section.
The thing that gives me shivers (of excitement) is the list of things that must take place for this to work.
- There’s got to be a threshold of some kind. How intense does the experience need to be to “make the cut”?
- There must be a mechanism that takes these “Must know” memories out from all the other memories and decides to engrave them on gametes.
- There must be some crazy-ass coding that allows methylation changes on DNA to communicate details like the smell of cherry blossoms. That would be a highly specific molecule banging into the olfactory brain possibly for the first time ever, and setting off the fire alarm…through code.
- Also, the code is obviously not a complete memory falsifying the experience of the animal receiving it, but close enough that when the real world and this knowledge construct line up, it causes an autonomic emergency deja vu.
I think the “Camera” that could take that memory snapshot is perception/working-memory and the developing chemicals would be concentrations of fight or flight stress hormones that “develop and burn-in” the image. It could also be triggered by something less obvious, like the moment of relief at reaching safety, with the adrenaline fading and your little squirrel heart going like mad. That could prompt a rewind and transcription of the last minute of memory. Who the hell knows?
2, 3 & 4. I imagine the salient details are the Bold and Italic sensations of that experience, the ones that loom and glow in memory as you look back on it, momentarily experienced again. Long term memory is the most economical way to retain this information and would occur naturally. Perhaps mentally reliving the event (including within dreams) a critical number of times prioritizes passing it forward.
5. I got nothing.
It seems certain to me that many classic human knee-jerk fears like spiders, toadstools and snakes are among our deeply reinforced examples of this process. And that brings up some issues closer to home. Presumably, every human baby is born with some of these “presets”. It seems like the nearly global ones must become default elements of our standard inheritance. Is there some process that triggers the elevation of a methylation memory to DNA proper? Is there some tipping point of reinforcement that causes that? Like if PARENT has a trauma experience coded and CHILD does too, (as their own direct experience, not passively) would the two copies being present in CHILD pass on the message to GRANDCHILD with more urgency? For example, could two doubly reinforced people merging their four copies at the moment of conception cause a crossover to DNA inheritance? That question is kind of rhetorical, I’m just shaking my head at the amazing possibilities of this system.
Other random questions:
- Could that kind of double reinforcement play a part in paralyzing phobias?
- How long does it take from trauma to rewritten gametes? If the survivor conceived the next day would the information be ready?
- Men replenish sperm at a rate that shows tremendous optimism, and a woman’s eggs are more or less archived, or at least they travel like a slow and stately parade in comparison to sperm. Does this mean these memories are sex-linked?
- Since our gametes are so different would there have to be separate mechanisms to do the encoding? Do eggs get these “critical updates”?
- Are there equivalent positive messages about life success, not just skin-of-our-teeth escapes? It makes some sense to me that success heuristics belong in the system too, but would be harder for us to demonstrate experimentally. Perhaps that’s more of a learn by observation thing. Animal parents can demonstrate life skills but can’t demonstrate how to avoid a monster attack.
- Can these messages be annotated in the trip from say, a grandparent to a grandchild?
- Could separate, different messages from different parents ever blend and synthesize into something unique?
- Is there a decay time for these messages? Do they fade across generations if not reinforced? Is there a mechanism protecting normal healthy species behavior from being dangerously rewritten or overridden by these alerts?
In summary, we are talking about an evolutionary mechanism which fills a couple of the gaping holes in Darwinian theory.
A Tautology for a Theory: “Survival of the fittest” is a fugue idea, chasing its tail. The fittest can only be described by their survival. The Darwinian mechanism is really about the elimination of gene-pool competitors leaving “the fittest” still standing and reproducing. Kinky!
Time: There is no mechanism for the fittest to develop their adaptive advantage except endless friggin’ time and lucky mutations. Evolution has happened much faster in reality than jives with Darwin’s crawlingly slow “change through random accident and mutation” story. Instantly this makes much more sense than calling upon eternity to explain your mechanism.
Random Changes: Random mutations have been studied constantly since the theory launched. In an experiment replicated many times, random mutations have been generated in thousands of generations of fruit flies in the lab by radiation. Not a single lucky mutation resulted. No change in that population resulted.
Galapagos finches have fitness-enhancing beaks but no practical way to acquire them. Deprived of support from randomness and eternity, Darwin is an empty lab coat. We have reached a happy upgrade to our thinking.
Evolution is sophisticated, multilayered, and complex. It stacks the deck in any way it can. It behaves at the very least, as if strategic. We are arriving at theories that mirror the subtlety of reality. We are finally getting better at this.
It’s hilarious how much cultural “values”, the dos and don’ts, are exactly like the preferences and peccadilloes of a particular person. These Japanese “no-no”s sound like a description of things that one random person might have very strong feelings about… but in fact, a whole country is ready to be very disappointed in you.
You have your likes and dislikes; your quirks and peccadillos. Put enough of them together in a somebody and you have a personality. You and your love have a relationship, with predominating moods and flavors, things you both love and hate, as recognizable to both of you as each others faces. That is the personality of your relationship and you could almost call it a culture of two. You and your family have a kind of extended self, absolutely made of individuals, but having a corporate nature. Again, moods, styles, activities, and traditions: The personality of your family: The culture of us, ourselves.
Your town and state have cliches and classic types, local foods, music, religions, sports, and jokes. Your area may even have unique social faux pas. You have your classic regional moods, so well defined that Hollywood can set a story in your area as shorthand for the tone of the movie. Your country likewise has these same locally famous traits but pulled from many distant points and due to this diversity, the warmth of these traits is much more diffuse. Americans from Maine might enjoy funny Florida cliches but they don’t evoke the tenderness of good old home-cooked cliches. These taste of home because they are the personality of your region: The self that you are actually a piece of even when parted. If you have been away a long time from the place that is unquestionably your home, odds are that the sight of some hideous local billboard or despised local celebrity might well thrill you and soften your heart. This is you, a tiny particle of that place sensing the correct SELF of belonging and yearning toward it.
Culture is personality flowing bottom-up from a community. It’s the basket holding that composite soul together and in place. It is also the background that makes outsiders visible against it. It’s the recognizable border between us and them. Humans produce culture as naturally as spiders weave webs. The tension force within the culture creates the tone of inclusion tempering exclusion and vice versa. Tension force determines the “temperature” of how cold or warm the welcome is to outsiders.
I don’t associate warm with progressives and cold with conservatives as a political bias, but in this context, conservatism means suspicion, standoffishness or even hostility. Conservatives play the role in the cultural ecosystem of tightening the borders while progressives loosen them. And it isn’t always about a literal border, the border can be about how purely insiders display their cultural loyalty. It can be about disapproving of behaviors becoming less hidebound to cultural authority (often acted out by grumpy old people). Either wing, without the other, is dangerously out of balance. Either wing, deprived of this balancing opposing force, becomes a runaway monster seeking enemies within when it can’t find them without. That’s how desperately important opposition really is. When deprived of it the isolated wing has a panic attack and seeks everywhere for enemies to counter itself. The steady opposition between a healthy left and right results in a cooperative outcome: A tension force that protects the community from the weaknesses of each. This is the community organism as a healthy individual with a well-balanced nature.
Donald Trump is the perfect president for this moment, in fact, it’s uncanny.
Obviously not in a good way.
I talk a lot about complexity on this blog. Complexity changes things in incremental ways until there comes a POP of some new emergent thing which is categorically different than all the things it is made of. In fact, that IS Emergence. You can not look at any organism without seeing just such a result. As usual, I’m asking you to put up with me talking about things that appear crushingly obvious.
But listen, single-celled organisms lived contentedly, I’m guessing, for a multiple BILLION years without once feeling the desire to fuck. Suddenly fucking became a fad, a craze. Everybody was sharing genetic material and things got WEIRD. Suddenly there were strangers moving in all around with a bunch of different characteristics. The good old simple ways were gone. Sex was the first sacrifice of autonomy and the first cooperation of individuals making something new and sharing risks and benefits. That’s right. They were cells with benefits.
And then more complex cooperations in the form of more and more complex organisms began to cover the world. But each new multicell organism and lifestyle was a gamble and a loss of autonomy. And there were cells that said “Hell No!” They stuck to the good old proven ways as they have to this day.
Cooperating to build something more complex is the story of evolution. Human beings in their journey to now have reinvented their understanding of “My Group” over and over. This redefining requires flexibility toward the borders of the self. If someone creepy and unattractive asks you to share life’s journey, you pull away, securing your borders. You might say “No thank you” or “Back the hell off!”. Because in so very many ways you don’t want any sharing or blending with them. But even a new friend who takes too much for granted about how good friends you are will elicit at least a bit of the same response. We are scornful when someone suggests an “Us” that we feel is a bad fit. Who we are with is who we are…at least that is it feels inside us, and how we will behave operationally for the life of the contract.
And for people in times of change when the community is being redefined, and always becoming larger and more complex, there is a similar issue triggering acceptance or rejection. At such times there have always been people who balked and rejected the change as not only wrong for them but wrong for everyone. Their gut tells them it’s crazy and wrong. These are conservatives, basically. The tides of human change are strong enough that conservatives are mostly pulled into these new arrangements against their better judgment. Then within one generation, the new situation will be the one they are defending from change and radical new relationships that redefine that SELF.
Communities of people actually ARE some sort of organism, certainly in the sense that bees are. I believe a couple or a family or a town and so on, pop into existence at some level as an autonomous meta-being brought into existence literally by the interaction of the parts. And that when we are busy performing these parts, we have great difficulty perceiving this truth.
And I have a belief system weirder than that. I will admit a little shamefully that I call it reality weather.
Even I am agnostic about this but it’s something I perceive. It is the shifting and scaling up and scaling down of issues and moods and events in the human world. It was visible in the new nations rush to world war one. It’s visible in the wildfire of fascism (and other isms) in the 1920s and 30s. It’s there somehow visible around the sixties and seventies. I think it’s there in mild times as well, but we don’t notice a quiet sunny day. Yep, it sounds dangerously close to astrology but it’s not. I have no dogma around it and I assert no understandable cause. But there’s something there. And we’re in some heavy damn reality weather right now in case you hadn’t noticed.
So why is Trump the perfect president for right now? Because he is absurdly unaware of anyone other than himself. Because he would never have any relationship where he blended and shared with another person. His wives are things. Other people are things. He can’t even hold the concept of what our government and nation mean as a collective and why he shouldn’t just rewrite everything to please himself. He’s that selfish.
Literally the only thing he wants to build is a structural impediment to cooperating and synthesizing at higher levels. A wall. He is the reverse Santa Claus of trust in each other and in our institutions. His mission is to Grinch-ishly take down as much of our system AND faith in that system as possible before the clock runs out.
Every country chooses leaders in a semi-conscious way that mixes the issues of the day with a tribal totem. Trump was chosen to represent the part of America that doesn’t want to blend, or share or care or change. The Trumpenproletariat. As such, he is an embodiment of not letting ourselves synchronize with others at higher levels of complexity. He symbolizes pure self-assertion and rejection of relationship and cooperation. Any place beyond the borders of our nation has become a rejected OTHERNESS. Just as it also has in England, Turkey, Russia and elsewhere. And all just about simultaneously. As a country enters this kind of period of self-assertion and push-back it reaches into a bag of domineering regressive nationalistic bastards and places the biggest one on its head like a horrible tiara. It doesn’t last forever and it can unfold in surprising ways. The United Nations and the European Union owe their existence to the 360-degree horror of WWII. That’s probably not a comforting thought right now but don’t assume the worst. To some degree, optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy, as long as we back it up with action. Stay cool and take a reality umbrella, it’s really coming down out there.
Ex. 20:5 – “I,(…) am a jealous God, punishing the children for the father’s sin, to the third and fourth generations …”
Stress hormone causes epigenetic changes
Epigenetic Influence of Stress and the Social Environment
Grandma’s Experiences Leave a Mark on Your Genes
The first two links are scientific papers and the third is a popular article from Discover magazine. They are all quite readable though and worth a look. If you search epigenetics in this blog you’ll find a number of related articles.
Scientists taught white mice to fear the smell of cherry blossoms. (“So Bob, what do you do for a living?” “I frighten mice.”)
The offspring of these frightened mice were never subjected to this cherry blossom trauma but mysteriously, they also feared the smell. More amazing still, the grandchild generation of the original trauma mice, also never subjected to the treatment, reacted with fear. Now further studies are not only confirming these results but showing that deprivation and stress alter inheritance multi-generationally. It affects both physiology and neurology.
The evidence is in. Pain and suffering flow across time. Cruelty keeps jumping forward like a skipped stone. We don’t know authoritatively how many generations forward these effects can travel but 3 and 4 generations are documented using an animal model. And rather than just imagining separate generations of inherited fear, and the many influences on the phenotype of those people, imagine how many poor choices their inheritance initiated. Imagine the effects flowing into the places they live in and their families and friends. Consider the implications for large communities who have suffered trauma almost collectively. In some places and times that could mean whole generations where virtually everyone is bent and twisted by the suffering of their parents and grandparents. How often will behavior born of trauma result in fresh trauma to another?
There is nothing parents love more than their children, and every parent fears passing along something bad to their children. Our new knowledge means that anyone suffering a serious trauma, or having survived desperate stressful times, can be certain that some effects will be passed to their children from the moment of conception.
It makes an act of profound cruelty almost unimaginably important and scales up the guilt accordingly. In the form of random violent crimes for example the effects are stark enough: One innocent victim becomes how many? 3? 6? Don’t forget the 3rd generation…perhaps 18 people? And the 4th generation as well; let’s say 35 people affected by that injury. They don’t even know, they can’t know who they might have been instead, because that crime made them what they are. They might be more fearful, or angry, or just less hopeful than the hypothetical person without the trauma. We don’t know, but it’s safe to say they are bent AWAY from their strength and happiness.
Now consider:
- Soldiers returning with PTSD
- Black America
- Poor America
- Syrian survivors
When a child grows up shaped by a parent with trauma and then lives in poverty and anxiety, we have lost a well-functioning citizen 20 years in the future. And we’ve lost their offspring 40 years in the future. 
Epigenetics makes a simple, compelling case for the auto-perpetuation of misery and poverty and violence. It makes a case that democracy builds failure into its future by doing too little to alleviate it. A starving, fearful child is a crime against the future and her community and in a sense, the whole world but we are awfully good at feeling peaceful about that crime.
20% of American children grow up in poverty. It’s certain that many of them are second and third generation poverty. Poverty is Hydrochloric acid for optimism and aspiration. How is this not a self-perpetuating sinkhole of damaged and downgraded people?
“Those people are just like that.” is the kind of statement you might hear people say related to race or culture or class. The poor have been viewed forever as inherently flawed, undeserving, and unfit based on the sordidness and chaos of poverty everywhere. It’s probably more accurate to say people can be that way when they and their parents have been ground into emotional hamburger and left to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. There’s a chance that we are living out a dystopian science fiction story where in all cultures, regardless of race, a whole class of people, less happy, strong, and confident is being bred through societal neglect. Any limits to the number of generations this damage is “paid forward” is irrelevant because the suffering of each new generation is likely enough to paint over their hopes of the foreseeable future. Big social programs have been deemed failures when they didn’t produce results in “Political time” but perhaps bringing generational trauma to an end is the work of a couple of generations and therefore almost impossible to convince taxpayers to support. And perhaps our famously cheap and nasty social programs wouldn’t soften the blow enough anyway.
Yet the import of this knowledge places responsibility on our shoulders once we know.
