When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions we discover something.
Egalitarian life was generally peaceful, beautiful, healthy, grounded in solid attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduced incidence of lost tempers and general violence
.
This will trigger some people within a culture where self regulation is dysregulated more often than not.
Social Behavioural Characteristics of different cultures.
source : www.violence.de
Societal Social Behavioural Characteristics.
Different modes of society exist, ranging from egalitarian collectives to hierarchies of power.
Egalitarian behaviour is healthy.
Hierarchy behaviour is unhealthy.
People bully because they learn to bully
People demonstrate love because they learn to love.
Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.
Healthy behaviour is a biological norm.
That is why egalitarian cultures exist, and have always existed.
Biology would not create a species designed to be unhealthy.
Healthy peoeple do not abuse their power disparity over others, especially not over their own children, family, partners... they will use that power disparity to nurture, care for and protect, to demonstrate healthy bonding and love as a lived experneice.
Bullies always seek as much control over the bullied as possible, to the point that it is unhealthy for both bully and the bullied.
In cultures where socio-econimic status is thing, wealth gives a person more material power to than other persons who have no wealth. A man with a sword and a man with a stick.
Vast wealth creates a much larger power disparity. A president commands an Army, and a civilian living in the pathway of the war that army is prosecuting is utterly powerless, and must flee.
This is not healthy behaviour.
Great Wealth as an institutional agency controls populations.
States, Dictators, Kings and Queens, Presidents and Prime Ministers have access to material power - through the institutions they dominate and through alliances with Oligarchy. It is access to those that allows them to transmit and project their 'power', without them they are ordinary folk, impotent in the face of immense power.
The ordinary citizen is rendered utterly powerless by the structure.
The power disparity is close to that of parent and infant.
All of this control is to remain in a powerful position, to maitain the power disparity - it's a fractal of existential insecurity.
If I do let go it will all fall to pieces, and they will eat me alive.
The person or Institution is unwilling, unable to let go of that material capability to exercise power to retain power. Thus they resist all attempts at healing, they resist all attempts to confront their abuses, they cover up, mask, deflect, distract...
Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.
Or put it the other way.
Healthy behaviour is the biological norm.
That is not to say that disease does not exist.
Which begs the question.
In cultures where socio-econimic status is thing, wealth gives a person more material power to than other persons who have no wealth. A man with a sword and a man with a stick.
Vast wealth creates a much larger power disparity. A president commands an Army, and a civilian living in the pathway of the war that army is prosecuting is utterly powerless, and must flee.
This is not healthy behaviour.
Great Wealth as an institutional agency controls populations.
States, Dictators, Kings and Queens, Presidents and Prime Ministers have access to material power - through the institutions they dominate and through alliances with Oligarchy. It is access to those that allows them to transmit and project their 'power', without them they are ordinary folk, impotent in the face of immense power.
The ordinary citizen is rendered utterly powerless by the structure.
The power disparity is close to that of parent and infant.
All of this control is to remain in a powerful position, to maitain the power disparity - it's a fractal of existential insecurity.
If I do let go it will all fall to pieces, and they will eat me alive.
The person or Institution is unwilling, unable to let go of that material capability to exercise power to retain power. Thus they resist all attempts at healing, they resist all attempts to confront their abuses, they cover up, mask, deflect, distract...
Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.
Or put it the other way.
Healthy behaviour is the biological norm.
That is not to say that disease does not exist.
Which begs the question.
Why do or how do some people learn to become bullies?
Before we go on i want to place two scientifically proven understandings before you, that are uncontested, incontrovertible data.
- disrupted child-mother bonding is more common in communities that are traumatised or subjected to chronic stress, and in cultures that are violent hierarchies than it is in healthy egalitarian communities.
- disrupted child-mother bonding is more common in communities that are traumatised or subjected to chronic stress, and in cultures that are violent hierarchies than it is in healthy egalitarian communities.
- example - Trump, his infancy and childhood, plus the culture of his fathers corrupt businessm within the culture of U.S. which is a hierarchy of power and violence. He is someone who is unable to regulate his emotional outbursts.
- example - The vast majority of people in prison for violent crime have experienced childhood trauma, abuse that was never resolved.
These are people whose ability or willingness to control their emotional states is profoundly damaged.
Angry, violent, abusive, manipualtive, traumatised people.
And there are many more who are not in prison, whose damage goes 'un-noticed' and yet it is the object and subject of humour in sit-coms, rom-coms, heroic war movies and there is enough of low level loss of self regulation to generate a psychotherapy industrial complex that deals with the results of the psycho-marketing industrial complex that manipulates that loss of self regulation.
Self Regulation of Emotional State.
Living in the real world, a human organism has to be able to master his or her emotional states - for example, climbing a tree to access something entails taking the risk of the climb. That risk is something to be feared, yet one needs to control the fear to do the climb safely. It's not fearlessnes, it's the ability to self regulate the emotional state in order to get things done, to avoid falling.
Allan N. Schore is an American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology. His research has focused on affective neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, trauma theory, developmental psychology, attachment theory, pediatrics, infant mental health, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and behavioral biology
What he is presenting in the video below is an over view of the scientific learning and clinical experience of the past 40 years, in this field, which is telling us more about how human neonates and babies and infants and toddlers develop emotional self regulation, sense of self and other social keys in the first 1000 days of life, starting at conception.
In the language of neurobiology, enodcrinology, epigenetics, nurtition, physiological and psychological development as it relates to mother-child
So yes, starting from conception.
What happens at the biological level?
We see now that the human brain is designed to be organised by how the person (a developing foetus is a person) experiences being alive.
Environment and experience plays a major role in brain development, more so than genetics alone.
“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.”
― Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
The epigenetics (the way that portions of the parents genes are switched on or off or disrupted by their lived experience) of the parents lived experience is passed through to the child, through genetic transmission. So even without any direct experience, the child carries markers of the changed genetic coding of their parents lived experience prior to conception.
At the same time, the lived experience of the mother is the ennvironment within which the foetus and the new brain develops, given those conditions which of course vary from mother to mother, from culture to culture. Both develop within a cultural environment, that affects both child and parent.
Thus we see that brain development being elastic, that fluidity gives the developing human brain the widest scope for learning. There is very little in behaviour that is 'programmed', most of our behaviour is learned. We write the pathways of experience as we go. Experience programs us, yet not all is hard wired, it can be modulated, attenuated.
Because the human brain never stops learning or growing.
Think of it as a small brain growing inside the mother, relating to the mothers brain. Learning all the time. Developing all the time. Everyday in the womb becoming ready for the next stage, which is not a from scratch state. Hearing starts at 18 weeks, which means that listening starts soon after. That is to say paying attention to the sound, with a focus.
The sounds of the mothers body, the sounds of life close by, a washing machine, a waterfall, thunder, laughter, crying... someone inside is listening, a little person is learning, developing, reacting and responding.
A baby in the womb can be soothed, as much as the baby can be disturbed. The baby can respond to the mother. A biological conversation, in the language of hormone cascades, neurological pathways plays between both mother and child.
The new-born babies recognises the mothers voice, and those of close family members, the new born feels everything any adult would feel, yet has no language. Communication is by empathy, connectedness, skin to skin.
The caring of the mother initiates further emotional development of the child as a separate autonomous being, and her care sustains that development for as long as it takes the child to mature, healthfully. This is the bioligical mandate for healthy development.
There are key experiential inter-relational dynamics between mother and baby, and later on between any care giver and child, that are essential to nurture the development of the child's emotional maturity, at the earliest stage possible.
Biologically this makes sense. As a thought experiment, try to imagine a group living on an ice flow, or in a desert, or a rain forest having to move about with a few children throwing tantrums, screaming in rage, running off in all directions, refusing to co-operate?
It doesn't happen in healthy communities.
So here is Allan Schore, and he puts it so much clearer than I could...
These are people whose ability or willingness to control their emotional states is profoundly damaged.
Angry, violent, abusive, manipualtive, traumatised people.
And there are many more who are not in prison, whose damage goes 'un-noticed' and yet it is the object and subject of humour in sit-coms, rom-coms, heroic war movies and there is enough of low level loss of self regulation to generate a psychotherapy industrial complex that deals with the results of the psycho-marketing industrial complex that manipulates that loss of self regulation.
Self Regulation of Emotional State.
Living in the real world, a human organism has to be able to master his or her emotional states - for example, climbing a tree to access something entails taking the risk of the climb. That risk is something to be feared, yet one needs to control the fear to do the climb safely. It's not fearlessnes, it's the ability to self regulate the emotional state in order to get things done, to avoid falling.
Allan N. Schore is an American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology. His research has focused on affective neuroscience, neuropsychiatry, trauma theory, developmental psychology, attachment theory, pediatrics, infant mental health, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and behavioral biology
What he is presenting in the video below is an over view of the scientific learning and clinical experience of the past 40 years, in this field, which is telling us more about how human neonates and babies and infants and toddlers develop emotional self regulation, sense of self and other social keys in the first 1000 days of life, starting at conception.
In the language of neurobiology, enodcrinology, epigenetics, nurtition, physiological and psychological development as it relates to mother-child
So yes, starting from conception.
What happens at the biological level?
We see now that the human brain is designed to be organised by how the person (a developing foetus is a person) experiences being alive.
Environment and experience plays a major role in brain development, more so than genetics alone.
“The brain is heavily influenced by genes. But from birth through young adulthood, the part of the human brain that most defines us (frontal cortex) is less a product of the genes with which you started life than of what life has thrown at you. Because it is the least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience. This must be so, to be the supremely complex social species that we are. Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortext from genes.”
― Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
The epigenetics (the way that portions of the parents genes are switched on or off or disrupted by their lived experience) of the parents lived experience is passed through to the child, through genetic transmission. So even without any direct experience, the child carries markers of the changed genetic coding of their parents lived experience prior to conception.
At the same time, the lived experience of the mother is the ennvironment within which the foetus and the new brain develops, given those conditions which of course vary from mother to mother, from culture to culture. Both develop within a cultural environment, that affects both child and parent.
Thus we see that brain development being elastic, that fluidity gives the developing human brain the widest scope for learning. There is very little in behaviour that is 'programmed', most of our behaviour is learned. We write the pathways of experience as we go. Experience programs us, yet not all is hard wired, it can be modulated, attenuated.
Because the human brain never stops learning or growing.
Think of it as a small brain growing inside the mother, relating to the mothers brain. Learning all the time. Developing all the time. Everyday in the womb becoming ready for the next stage, which is not a from scratch state. Hearing starts at 18 weeks, which means that listening starts soon after. That is to say paying attention to the sound, with a focus.
The sounds of the mothers body, the sounds of life close by, a washing machine, a waterfall, thunder, laughter, crying... someone inside is listening, a little person is learning, developing, reacting and responding.
A baby in the womb can be soothed, as much as the baby can be disturbed. The baby can respond to the mother. A biological conversation, in the language of hormone cascades, neurological pathways plays between both mother and child.
The new-born babies recognises the mothers voice, and those of close family members, the new born feels everything any adult would feel, yet has no language. Communication is by empathy, connectedness, skin to skin.
The caring of the mother initiates further emotional development of the child as a separate autonomous being, and her care sustains that development for as long as it takes the child to mature, healthfully. This is the bioligical mandate for healthy development.
There are key experiential inter-relational dynamics between mother and baby, and later on between any care giver and child, that are essential to nurture the development of the child's emotional maturity, at the earliest stage possible.
Biologically this makes sense. As a thought experiment, try to imagine a group living on an ice flow, or in a desert, or a rain forest having to move about with a few children throwing tantrums, screaming in rage, running off in all directions, refusing to co-operate?
It doesn't happen in healthy communities.
So here is Allan Schore, and he puts it so much clearer than I could...
Alice Miller
In 1986, Alice Miller published "For your own good :The Roots of Violence in Child Rearing"
In this work she traced the childhood of Hitler, and the childhoods of other well known 'cases' - a serial killer (Jurgen Bartsch) and a heroin addict (Christiane F) and looked at the cultural background in Europe at that time, and the history of child punishment.
She examined the early childhoods of these three subjects, and drew correlations and causative lines from those, put into the wider social material context of Christian Europe as a war like culture, where traditional parenting was authoritarian, and adult to child sanction or punishment was the norm.
Miller looked at the history of Parenting as transmitted in books, from old and ancient manuscripts to the printed press and traced a line of instruction, from Sparta (spare the rod, spoil the child) to Vienna (Frued, and the Oedipus Complex) in 1880s, to middle class parenting books in the 1930s.
The traditional view was based around the concept of breaking the wilfulness of the child - that child willfulness was seen as the gate through which the Devil or Evil or Badness could enter and corrupt the child, and it was the parents Christian responsibility to make sure that never happened because such people could disrupt the established order. Society demanded that the parent dominate the child's will, and 'rear' the child, 'raise' the child to be a good citizen.
This is a culture where Christianity is ubiquitous, and the vast majority truly believe and are influenced by the Christian psyche.
Thus for them, to fail to 'raise' the child to be a good Christian would put the entire social order out of balance.
Freud's betrayal.
Freud, for what ever reasons, placed the dangerous element within what he assumed was the child's innate lust or competition for the opposite sex parent. It was a quality of the child. A biological norm.
He made that up, obviously. He had no science or meaningfully observed and measured data, it was merely his plagiarism of Greek Mythology projected onto a crime no one was willing to acknowledge, not even he himself, in spite of the little evidence that he did have. That crime was upper middle class fathers sexually exploiting their own daughters.
His client base was the daughters of upper middle class families, who came to his psycho-therapy sessions and told their stories. They told him what they had experienced.
When Freud presented a paper on this, his contemporaries rejected it, and him, outright.
Freud retreated, and wrote a new paper, which is known as The Aetiology of Hysteria, in which he put the 'blame' on the child...
Freud was doing what his culture told him to do. Loyalty, fit in, do not disturb the established order.
He followed orders. Creatively.
Alice Miller argued that the way a culture treats the children feeds into the willingness across a population to 'follow' Authoritarian leaders, not least because the unresolved anger, pain and dispair of lived experience that remains unresolved generates a pressure that is intense albeit largely unconscious, and bullies, those who seek to exercise power over others know how to tap into that to manipulate a significant part of the population, enough to control the majority...
Within this the vast majority peaople remain basically decent, albeit prone to being manipulated by demagogues.
Then a significant percentage will become bullies, at what ever
Brexit, and the age divide, the parenting divide reflects this dynamic in part.
A generation raised in War and traditional Christian values vs a generation raised in relative peace and secular values grounded in Human Rights.
It's a part of the dynamic, not it's whole.
Blaming the victim is a core aspect of the division to conquer dynamic.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.
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