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.