Mighty Civilization...

I am simplifying of course.  I could write a full sized essay on this. 

One of the bigger problems with civilization and now globalization is the amount of information that is available.  For a single person to become truly educated about what is really going on would require numerous undertakings, all of which are extremely time consuming and cannot be done by every single individual obviously.  All hail the 40 hour work week!  So naturally, people look to others for their information.  Technology and the massive amount of information being accumulated every day, makes it impossible to know everything, even if one narrows their research down to a single subject.  The universe is simply too complicated.  Contrast this with how we actually evolved to live, in small bands, fully social, fully in tune with nature and our surroundings; civilization has disconnected us from our bond with nature, we are no longer fully human, but only partly so.  We live afraid, violent and hungry versus safe, happy and full.  Living in a small band, in nature, the ideas of Darwin would never have mattered to us at all.  But here in the civilized world it matters greatly because the ideas of others influences how we see the world around us, their ideas directly affect the way in which society determines how we should live our lives.  The ideas of scientists and religious leaders affect how we think and feel we "should" be.  Here lies the problem; if they are wrong, then we are wrong, which means we are conflicted internally and thus not living our lives properly.  They are almost always wrong, because when they do their research they are biased by their own beliefs, egos, personalities and their own inability to step out of society.

The next step in this problem is the blending of genius with ignorance in the same individual.  I will use Darwin as an example.  Darwin was a genius in figuring out that evolution is not guided by some intelligent design, but at the same time he was incredibly ignorant when it came to the socialization of human beings.  Because he was genius, people would listen to whatever he said and take it as true, often times, even if it had nothing to do with the subject of his genius.  Let's say you go to a medical doctor, if he is good at curing you of flu, would you ask him for marital advice?  When that same doctor could be going home beating his wife and kids, he might not know a damn thing about a good marriage but because he can cure the flu, he gets placed on this pedestal, as if he knows so many other things about life.  The very much happens in this capitalist society here in America.  If someone is successful i.e. rich, then they get put on a pedestal; Donald Trump talking of running for president is a perfect example.   Darwin being a genius in one thing (figuring out an aspect of evolution), means nothing about his knowledge of human social life, yet this did indeed happen, because some of his speculations were taken blindly.  In fact, his intense study of this subject makes it obvious he would have been neglecting other aspects of his life.  Think of how much life you miss out on going to that 40 hour a week job.  All hail the mighty GDP!

From Sex at Dawn…

"Charles Darwin was certainly not unaffected by the erotophobia of his era. In fact, one could argue that he was especially sensitive to its influence, inasmuch as he came of age in the intellectual shadow of his famous--and shameless--grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who had flouted the sexual mores of his day by openly having children with various women and even going so far as to celebrate group sex in his poetry.  The death of Charles's mother when he was just eight years old may well have enhanced his sense of women as angelic creatures floating above earthly urges and appetites.

Psychiatrist John Bowlby, one of Darwin's most highly regarded biographers, attributes Darwin's lifelong anxiety attacks, depression, chronic headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and hysterical crying fits to the separation anxiety created by the early loss of his mother.  This interpretation is supported by a strange letter the adult Charles wrote to a cousin whose wife had just died:  "Never in my life having lost one near relation," he wrote, apparently repressing his memories of his own mother's death, "I daresay I cannot imagine how severe grief such as yours must be."  Another indication of his psychological scarring was recalled by his granddaughter, who remembered how confused Charles had been when someone added the letter "M" to the beginning of the word OTHER in a game similar to Scrabble.  Charles looked at the board for a long time before declaring, to everyone's confusion, that no such word existed.

A hyper-Victorian aversion to (and obsession with) the erotic seems to have continued in Charles's eldest surviving daughter, Henrietta.  "Etty," as she was known, edited her father's books, taking her blue crayon to passages she considered inappropriate.  In Charles's biography of his free-thinking grandfather, for example, she deleted a reference to Erasmus's "ardent love of women."  She also removed "offensive" passages form The Decent of Man and Darwin's autobiography. 

Etty's prim enthusiasm for stamping out anything sexual wasn't limited to the written word.  She waged a bizarre little war against the so-called stinkhorn mushroom (phallus ravenelii) that still pops up in the woods around the Darwin estate.  Apparently, the similarity of the mushroom to the human penis was a bit much for poor Etty.  As her niece (Charles's granddaughter) recalled years later, "Aunt Etty…armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves," would set out in search of the mushrooms.  At the end of the day, Aunt Etty "burned them in the deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire with the door locked--because of the moral of the maids."

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Holy crap! Now, if you are like me at all, in ability, to see how these few written things would not even scratch the surface of the day to day dysfunctional life of these people and what was going on with them in their relationships with one another, you would know, it was completely jacked as I like to say.  I could write quite a bit more about Darwin and his weird relations with sex and women.  Truth is, he knew very little of either, in relation to what was healthy.  These people back then were completely dominated by the corruption of Christianity in terms of what sex should be, clearly.  It is still happening today.

Darwin was not the only one.  William James was a famous American philosopher, and he without any doubt figured out some pretty profound philosophical ideas.  But here is what he thought of women.  From the book "The Metaphysical Club: A story of ideas in America," by Louis Menand.

"That there is always more than one way of considering a case is what James meant by the term (which he introduced to English-language philosophy) "pluralism."

 "This confirmed a little better to James's general position on the difference between the sexes, which was that woman is "by nature inferior to man.  She is man's inferior in passion, his inferior in intellect, and his inferior in physical strength"; she is, very properly, her husband's "patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass, his cook, his tailor, his own cheerful nurse and the sleepless guardian of his children."  But their inferiority, James thought, is precisely what makes women attractive to men, so that any "great development of passion or intellect in woman is sure to prejudice" male attention.  "Would any man fancy a woman after the pattern of Daniel Webster?"  He consequently opposed serious education of women, a doctrine that had disastrous consequences in the case of his youngest child and only daughter, Alice. "

For all James' "genius," he treated his own daughter this way.  Imagine having to have been his wife!  He was also a racist but I wanted to keep this note short.  Imagine what he could have done with his "genius" had he been able to step out of society and see clearly. 

How many millions of people go to church and assume that just because the man is a preacher he actually knows about God?  Going to theology school doesn’t teach a person about spirituality or God.  One learns about these things through personal experience and through learning one's Self, through constant and diligent seeking.  Give me a man who thinks he knows God because he went to school and I will show you a goddamn fool; it won't take me five minutes to have him saying "I know it cause I have faith!"  Fools on the pulpit!  Faith is forged in thought, not belief. 

Scientists and religious leaders are exactly the same.  They spout what they say as truth, when it is only a smidgen of the truth, and everyone just blindly follows suit, if not directly, then indirectly, due to the weight of society on the individual.

Shame on us... Part 2

I would like to use a personal experience to expound on this concept of using shame as a social tool. There has only been one time in my life where I was able to live in an environment where everyone knew everyone else, and that was in prison.

I did the bulk of my time in the Booneville Correctional Center. This is where the state of Missouri places all the younger offenders who have less than 15 year sentences; the majority of the inmates were under 25 years old with less than 8 year sentences. The way this prison is set up logistically is not the typical style in which most prisons are; it is not like the ones you see on TV. The main difference is that there are no cells. In B.C.C. most of the housing units hold approximately 100 inmates. The only housing unit that had cells though, was 8house, which was the segregation house, aka "the hole." This is where inmates go who are being punished, because the worst punishment that can be placed on an individual is solitary confinement. In 8house one is only allowed out of his cell two times during any given week and that is to shower, which means an inmate gets out of their cell maybe 30 minutes in a week. The only other human contact is when food is provided through a slot in the door or when a correctional officer is walking down the hall doing head counts and he acknowledges through the door to make sure you are still alive. Oh yea, there is always a bible in the cell too, just in case someone gets bored, but I am not going to go there right now. There is of course the constant sound of all the other inmates in their cells going as crazy as I was whenever I was in there; the noise never stops in there, not ever. Sometimes one has a cell mate, depending on the reason for segregation, but other than that, it is a very lonely place.

Anyways, back to the regular housing units at B.C.C. They are open units, like a military barracks. Just bunk beds going down the two long walls of a room, with small lockers between the bunks. Shared bathrooms and showers; shared almost everything. Typically the person with the bottom bunk gets his locker along the wall near where his head would be and the top bunk has his locker out at the end of the bunk where ones feet are. This means at any time, one can stretch their arms out to either side of their own bunk and touch the neighboring bunks. It is tight quarters, and some of these guys lived together like this for years. There were guys who had been bunkies for years. Each housing unit was designed a little different; sometimes a room would only have 20 to 25 inmates, with 4 to 5 rooms per housing unit while other housing units would have 50 to 60 inmates per room. This is obviously an environment where everyone knows everyone intimately. You cannot imagine all the shenanigans that go on in such a hyper masculinized community.

When I was first released from prison I used to complain bitterly about being out. People would always look at me like I had lost my mind because I was often heard saying "I would rather be in prison!" People never understood this, not even my wife at the time, and we had always been really close. You see there are some major social differences between a close quarter environment and one where no one is held accountable, aka our current society. One of my biggest complaints back then was all the lying everyone does. On the outside people tell lies like it is going out of style, everywhere I went (and this is still true today, I just have gotten used to it, unfortunately!) people would just say whatever they wished, to get their way, to appease others, because they were afraid to tell the truth, the list is endless. You never know who is going to stab you in the back. But you see this never happens in prison, not in B.C.C. anyways. In B.C.C. a liar is shamed to the point that his physical person is in jeopardy if he chooses to lie, you see in a hyper masculinized society nothing is more shameful than being beat up and made to look weak. Sounds counter intuitive huh? The one place where it's nothing but 'criminals' and yet no one lies. You see, in there, if you are caught up telling lies, within a day or two, everyone else knows about it. You should see what happens if word gets out that a pedophile is in town, the whole prison knows within a matter of a day, it gets passed along like wild fire through all the ranks, which means a couple thousand individuals know within hours.

This is important to realize. All those inmates in B.C.C. were for the most part ignorant; none of them were consciously initiating these rules of conduct. A great many of them could not even read. There was not some master mind controlling us, or a leader calling the shots, decreeing that no one lie. It was a simple fact that no one wants to be in the presence of a liar and the main difference between prison and being out of prison, is in prison one can be and usually is immediately punished for lying.  It is critical when your surroundings are dangerous because one needs to be able to depend on the word of another. Now, one might argue that no one wants to be subjected to violence either, and this is true, but the majority of inmates were raised violently themselves and are hyper masculinized to top it off, so violence is natural to them. Society made us violent, not prison.  It’s true too, that if violence is used outside of the social norm, if it violates 'prison etiquette', consequences immediately follow. To just go beat someone up for no reason, gets you beat up, if for no other reason, than just on principle alone. When everyone knows your business, you cannot offer up lame excuses, you are always held accountable for what you do.

The worst thing to have happen in prison is to lose allies. In a close social network, allies are the most important thing a person can have. And breaking any of the social rules strips one of allies immediately. You are a liar? Then get away from me! You just beat that guy up for no reason? Then get away from me! You’re a pedophile? Everyone get him! The skinniest guy in B.C.C. was a guy we called 'chicken' and it was rare to see him in the chow hall; this individual usually went without food because he was a pedophile. Those with no allies are the ones preyed upon the most by the majority. All humans everywhere establish a pecking order which means the lowest guy on pole gets pecked the most. It is the immediate gratification of social wrong doing. It is a much better way to live. I can honestly say for the first 5 or 6 years that I was out of prison, prison was 100 times less stressful socially. In there, one knows the rules and they know the rules will be followed no matter what. Out here, it’s totally hectic, completely stressful, chaotic, and utterly dishonest. The rules seem to change with each new individual you meet because with millions of individuals free of a social network, they go unchecked.

It is probably hard to see how this creates a much less stressful environment if one has never experienced it. Your probably envisioning all the violence, or thinking you would be getting raped all the time or something. But in B.C.C. they had to have a good reason to do violence without being punished themselves. In prison one can go about their day, routinely, without the fear of being back stabbed, or lied to, or cheated by those that are in close quarters, as long as one has an ally base anyways. Imagine waking up tomorrow, and not having to worry about anyone lying to you? Now of course there are exceptions to this rule, and I am not saying that lying didn't happen; it does not matter where you are there are always people of low character, but at the same time everyone knows those rules too, and if they don't, they learn them really fast. Even the seemingly dumbest of human beings tend to be incredibly smart socially; it is the reason why we have "superior" brains in relation to the rest of the animal kingdom; we are highly social beings. In these tight living quarters, the rules are all well known by all, and followed strictly. 'Prison etiquette' as I used to call it, is much like what you see on TV if you watch Italian Mafia movies. Violence is condoned and being weak is shamed, which means socially it is acceptable to be violent and it is extremely unacceptable to be weak, or maybe it is better to say "soft." It also means that all the social groups within a housing unit has a pecking order too.  To try and explain all of these rules in this note would be extremely complicated. The idea that I want to get across is that this way of socializing is extremely effective and comfortable. Imagine a society where people rarely lie, can you even do it? Liars should be sent to prison, it would break them of the habit real fast.

I bet the alcoholic down the street beating his kid at night would not being doing that if we all knew about it. But we don't because his blinds are drawn, he works a full time job, he goes to church on Sunday, we still see him at the park watching junior play baseball, he is a 'productive' member of society. Tucked away safely in his house he can commit any atrocity he wishes and we will never ever know. The pedophile can just move to a different town or city and no one knows they have a pedophile in their midst preying on their children. If these individuals were shamed everywhere they went, they would cease that behavior, and their own brains would do it for them due to the shame. (I don’t remember the book now, but I have read about this, the experience of shame will cause the brain to change, to rewire to avoid the shame) I know so many people in this small community in which I live who do not handle business, that do not take care of their children, and yet everyone just goes about their business like it doesn't happen. This would never happen in prison because that individual would be made to answer for their wrong immediately, or better yet, he would never do it at all because he would know everyone else would know what he was doing. Messed up huh? And yes, one can say, rapes happen in there still, and many other violent things, but these things were put in there by society, these things happened to the inmates first, and that is why they end up in prison in the first place. It is possible though, that the social environment of the Booneville Correctional Center was healthier than the one in which I find myself living now, safer even. I have no idea who the people living in the houses next to me are, I can't count how many people have stabbed me in the back. I know for a fact it is way more stressful living out here than it was in there. Always has been.

But, damn, I like girls!

Shame on us...

Synchronicity is difficult to comprehend sometimes, difficult to see, most probably do not even know about it, or believe in it…but I see it often in my life because of the books I come across. I have lost count now of the times that I have formalized a thought in my mind and then come across it shortly after expressed in a book. It happens to me constantly, as if to say, “See Benjamin you really are figuring it out all on your own.” Not saying people and events have not helped me along the way, but that is exactly what synchronicity is. A critical thinker might say, "but you picked out the book Mr. Stevens, how is that synchronistic?", and I would say, "Not always sir, this book was given to me, without my seeking it consciously." The critical thinker then asserts that in a universe so big, with so many events happening at once, randomness is eventually going to have meaning, so a coincidence is just that; random. But when one starts to see it happen repeatedly, this notion of random coincidence cannot be maintained. To have this happen to me with the books I read over twenty times at least, just in the past year alone, it cannot be chalked up to randomness.

Everything that follows that is in quotes is from Sex at Dawn.

If we lived in a society where we were made to feel shame for being jealous about our sexual relations, it would be rare indeed for someone to be jealous.

"Human nature is made of highly reflective material. It is a mirror--admittedly marked by unalterable genetic scratches and cracks--but a mirror nonetheless. For most human beings, reality is pretty much what we're told it is. Like practically everything else, jealousy reflects social modification and can clearly be reduced to little more than a minor irritant if consensus deems it so."

"So is jealousy natural? It depends. Fear is certainly natural, and like any other kind of insecurity, jealousy is an expression of fear. But whether or not someone else's sex life provokes fear depends on how sex is defined in a given society, relationship, and individual's personality. First-born children often feel jealous when a younger sibling is born. Wise parents make a special point of reassuring the child that she'll always be special, that the baby doesn't represent any kind of threat to her status, and that there's plenty of love for everyone. Why is it so easy to believe that a mother's love isn't a zero-sum proposition, but that sexual love is a finite resource? Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins ask the pertinent question with characteristic elegance: "Is it so very obvious that you can't love more than one person? We seem to manage it with parental love (parents are reproached if they don't at least pretend to love all their children equally), love of books, of food, of wine…why is erotic love the one exception that everybody instantly acknowledges without even thinking about it?"

Hmmm, sounds familiar to other ideas I have put out there, about only loving one person.

Our society breeds jealousy into us, keeps us from getting in touch with our true selves; it keeps us immature.

Those of you, who know me well, know I tend to be rough around the edges. It is not uncommon for me to be called an asshole. But yet, I am also one of the happier individuals you will meet, even when I am suffering, I just don't use being 'nice' as a social tool very much. As I have said before pedophiles can be nice! Does this mean that they are? Anyone can be nice, it is our actions that matter, and my actions are always in line with my inner self, to look out for those around me, to increase their awareness. I try to be virtuous and being nice is not a virtue. But I have been applying this concept for a long time now, using shame. Those who have known me the longest know I have been advocating shame for a long time. I have always 'known' this concept was true, that shame is the way to go. It is not a bad thing to make someone feel shame, even though this society in which we live disagrees, which would be the reason most would disagree.

Whenever someone criticizes me, I do not get upset if what I was doing was in fact a good thing, but if it wasn’t I will naturally feel shame. One would not feel shame, regardless of what another might say, if what was said is not true. But by being direct and telling people the truth; one is much more likely to change their behavior. But by being nice and only worrying about their feelings, they simply stay immature. Hearing the truth does not hurt anyone, hearing the truth does not make the situation worse. What makes the situation worse is the fact that people don't move past their feelings and they fail to realize what is really going on. If someone is doing something harmful, tell them, inform them, and let them feel some shame for what they do. It is how humans socially curb bad behavior. All of these emotionally evasive techniques people use under the disguise of being nice is really just apathy. Just turning your head is apathy. If you truly care about someone, you would do what is best for the situation in its entirety, not just the one individual being reproached. There is a much bigger issue than that one individuals feelings of shame, which is natural anyways, shame is natural, and should be felt when one is doing something harmful to themselves and thus to their community. If a group of individuals shames someone for what they do, they will stop doing it; that is a fact. Don't be mad at someone because they are brave enough to say things to your face, take a look in the mirror, they might be right. One does not have to be mean to shame someone, it can be done with tact, but it must be done. This is a critical social aspect of being human. Love is much more than a feeling, and sometimes one must make another feel shame, because if you truly love someone, you would not want them harming themselves or others by being selfish or apathetic. If a person cannot handle the truth, then point out to them their need of introspection into their lack of awareness. Grow up. Apathy is bad folks, it is utter selfishness and human beings are not meant to be selfish, it is a cultural bias to think one should only look out for their self.

It is not hard to see really. If we all knew one another, way less fucked up shit would be going on because your ass would be utterly embarrassed by everyone whenever you did something selfish, mean, stupid, or ignorant. The shame would keep us all in check.

All those people who claim greed, self interest, war, and violence are part of human nature said that because that was how they were. They failed to step out of their societies and see themselves for what they really are; a highly social, loving and caring human being that was educated and raised by a greedy selfish society.

I made the text bigger for emphasis.

"Despite how it's been spun by economists and others arguing against local resource management, the real tragedy of the commons doesn't pose a threat to resources controlled by small groups of interdependent individuals. Forget the commons. We need to confront the tragedies of the open seas, skies, rivers, and forests. Fisheries around the world are collapsing because no one has the authority, power, and motivation to stop international fleets from strip-mining waters everybody (and thus, nobody) owns.

Toxins from Chinese smokestacks burning illegally mined Russian coal ledge in Korean lungs, while American cars burning Venezuelan petroleum melt glaciers in Greenland. What allows these chain-linked tragedies is the absence of local, personal shame. The false certainty that comes from applying Malthusian economics, the prisoner's dilemma, and the tragedy of the commons to pre-agricultural societies requires that we ignore the fine-grain contours of life in small-scale communities where nobody "could have escaped public scrutiny and judgment," in Rousseau's words. These tragedies become inevitable only when the group size exceeds our species' capacity for keeping track of one another, a point that's come to be know as Dunbar's number. In primate communities, size definitely matters. Noticing the importance of grooming behavior in social primates, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar plotted overall group size against the neocortical development of the brain. Using this correlation, he predicted that humans start losing track of who's doing what to whom when the group size hits about 150 individuals. In Dunbar's words, "The limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." Other anthropologists had arrived at the same number by observing that when group sizes grew much beyond that, they tend to split into two smaller groups. Writing several years before Dunbar's paper was published in 1992, Marvin Harris noted, "With 50 people per band or 150 per village, everyone knew everybody else intimately, so that the bonding of reciprocal exchange could hold people together. People gave with the expectation of taking and took with the expectation of giving." Recent authors, including Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling The Tipping Point, have popularized the idea of 150 being a limit to organically functioning groups. Having evolved in small, intimate bands where everybody knows our name, human beings aren't very good at dealing with the dubious freedoms conferred by anonymity. When communities grow beyond the point where every individual has at least a passing acquaintance with everyone else, our behavior changes, our choices shift, and our sense of the possible and of the acceptable grows ever more abstract."

"In Hierarchy in the Forest, primatologist Christopher Boehm argues that egalitarianism is an eminently rational, even hierarchical political system, writing, "Individuals who otherwise would be subordinated are clever enough to form a large and united political coalition, and they do so for the express purpose of keeping the strong from dominating the weak." According to Boehm, foragers are downright feline in refusing to follow orders, writing, "Nomadic foragers are universally--and obsessively--concerned with being free of the authority of others." Prehistory must have been a frustrating time for megalomaniacs. "An individual endowed with the passion for control," writes psychologist Erich Fromm, "would have been a social failure and without influence."

"Despite no solid evidence to support it, the public hears little to dispute this apocalyptic vision of prehistory. The sense of human nature intrinsic to Western economic theory is mistaken. The notion that humans are driven only by self-interest is, in Gowdy's words, "a microscopically small minority view among the tens of thousands of cultures that have existed since Homo sapiens emerged some 200,000 years ago." For the vast majority of human generations that have ever lived, it would have been unthinkable to hoard food when those around you were hungry. "The hunter-gatherer," writes Gowdy, "represents uneconomic man."

No one likes it when I say it, so let some people with a Ph.D. behind their name say it. Doesn't really matter to me, true is true. Our society is fucked up. It is ruled by greedy selfish people with no clue as to what life is really about and as a result the masses follow suit. Just saying.