The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
There are Governments, lobbyists and others who are citing harms caused by bad management of the epidemic locally, and of the pandemic globally, to argue for opening up whilst community transmission is still very much active, which amounts to worse management, rather than arguing for best management that achieves zero community transmission.
Zero Community Transmission was dismissed as and 'not credible' by the English PM, and 'impractical' in the UK Parliament this week
This is untrue - Zero Community Transmission is protecting the health and welfare and the economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. They are pragmatic States.
Zero Community Transmission is a series of practical, common sense measures that are not by any measure extreme, and which avoid repetitive cycles of open and shutdown, as well as reducing the possibility of variants emerging from within virus laden communities.
I, and many others, would appreciate it if you could publish this letter to correct this misinformation coming from the UK Government, and others.
Yours sincerely
Corneilius Crowley
Please withhold my address and phone number from publication.
Some misanthropic governments, malign lobby groups and misinformed citizens are using the harms caused by deliberatelybad management to argue for worse management rather than for better management and this is lethal. It is venalavarice exhibited those who should behave better, given the duty of care inherent in the position of power they occupy. An old story, perhaps, corrupt Governments imposing malign policy upon entire peoples under the guise of help yet does it have to be this way?
#BodgJoh #BodgeJohnson
Associating the success (and by extension, failure) of a public health response with an appeal to an exceptional national character can be dangerous. It can make learning from others less likely, and make changing course, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, a painful – perhaps impossible – process.
Ordinary people who are using the harms caused by deliberately bad management to argue for worse management rather than better management are misinformed, some are mislead and there are others, a minority who are content to remain wilfully ignorant.
1.8 billion people and their economies are being protected by zero community transmission strategies, and have been for over a year.
The news media, the government and their sponsors and blinded supporters and the 'freedom' mob (who pretend to themselves they oppose the Governments bad policy) are all refusing to follow the Science, and what they are doing is arguing for worse management, whilst deliberately ignoring the evidence, the science and the lived experience of 1.8 billion people?
1.8 billion people in China, Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, Finland, Norway and a bunch of other countries following the science and the best public health practice is a huge evidence base.
Zero community transmission is a series of mostly fairly straightforward policies, they are not extreme actions, they are common sense, science led actions that suppress a virus in a community and then maintain a situation where community transmission is not allowed to erupt.
The key elements of best public health outbreak management in no particular order include:
1. generalised mask wearing, 2. general attention to hand hygiene, 3. physical distancing where necessary, 4. localised person to person contact tracing, 5. fullest support to anyone who has been in contact with a known case to quarantine, 6. testing for presence of the virus and for antibodies on a community level around outbreaks, 7. fullest support for treatment of symptoms in isolation, away from the community, 8, Fever clinics to protect general hospital systems. 9. tightly quarantined borders, 10. full support for all workers if and when they need to isolate, 11. clear timely information available on outbreak status to citizens in their locality, 12. clear and consistently science grounded communications from Government and Health Authorities 32. and an absence of profiteering - meaning the profit is the outcome for the whole community or population.
In essence chasing down the virus as a behavioural dynamic supported by national and local governance and health systems.
This is what Governments and 1.8 billion people are doing across East Asia and Oceania and it is working.
These actions are all being done without a vaccine - it's great that a number of vaccines have been developed and are helping, yet they are not the solution to a virus that mutates in order to over come barriers placed in it's way.
The solution is to stop the transmission of the virus. A virus that does not meet human host dies. Slowing transmission down is not that. Stopping transmission achieves that goal.
How could people I personally know ally with the UK Ruling Faction and ignore that evidence?
How could people I personally know appeal for opening up without the better management?
What kind of myopia is that?
New Zealand, Vietnam and Taiwan and UK had the same Science and Evidence on February 2020 - NZ, Vietnam and Taiwan chose to follow the science, closely.
UK decided to ignore the Science.
The different outcomes are VERY clear.
www.zerocovid.uk for more information on what zero community transmission science is.
I argued for zero community transmission back in March 2020 and again in April 2020, without understanding the role that slow spread and variants were going to play - now we know more about variants and the fact that they are part of the same problematic behavioural dynamic.
The longer the virus has to play within any given population the more likely it will generate variants that survive what ever we throw at it. Especially within countries that have medically advanced treatment for AIDS and other immune disease states, where the virus can live within a human body for months on end.
"These questions are especially important at a time when environmental pressures, such as expanding herd immunity, vaccine-induced immunity, antiviral therapies, and public health intervention strategies, may — through selective pressure — promote virus survival and escape."
Landing a lander on Mars whilst bombing Yemeni villagers is not progress, just as landing a man on the Moon whilst bombing Vietnamese villagers was not 'progress'' - there is an argument that it represents a technical progress, but that is all it represents, at best, and to hold it up as human progress or cultural progress is nonsense, irrational and an avoidance of the realities we all must face.
Man on the Moon 1969
Vietnam 1969
Yemen 2020
Mars Lander 2021
A poem, by Gil Scot Heron, might find resonance today in Yemen or Libya or Syria, and indeed within the United States even still, where Racist violence by Police is as common as pie.
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I was already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wasn't enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
Whitey's on the Moon by Gill Scott Heron 1970
I was 14 years old, 1973, when I realised the tech spin-offs of war were not worth the harms that war causes. To claim the benefits is to ignore the meaning of the harms.
Infamously Madelaine Albright dismissed the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children over the course on a decade of warfare against Iraqi Ruler, Saddam Hussein, who was elevated to power by American influence on Iraqi politics "We think, we think It was worth it!" was her thoughtless commentary, when questioned about those deaths, the cost to Iraqi civil society and it was indicative of the cult she was a member of.
Madelaine Albright - "I think this is a very hard choice" - a choice made for the Iraqi children and their parents, not by them.
The culture of Violent Hierarchy, the culture of competing industrialised militarised powers as the dominant culture among modern human societies, is a cult. Generalised acceptance of any cult is typically based on false beliefs, misinformation, gaslighting and disinformation. I know this from personal experience, having been hooked into a number of cults in my life time.
Cultish Beliefs.
The Malthusiams of Boris Johnson are likewise cultish beliefs which are directing the disastrous management of the Corona Virus epidemic sweeping across Britain in successive waves - he obviously believes the costs of the 130,000 (and rising) fatalities, the 250,000 long covid cases, the disproportionate burden borne by disabled people are a price worth paying 'to protect the Economy' (which it clearly is not doing).
Those who in the UK compare the costs of the 'successful' Mars lander operation against the budget of the deliberately 'failed' UK Test and Contact Trace mission are missing the point.
Comparing one success of the abuse system against another failure of the abuse system, without calling to mind that it is an abuse system, without acknowledging in full the harms caused by the abuse system and without putting the harms front and foremost for attention, accountability and prevention is irrational, it is a non sense.
Crowing over the success of one element of the abuse system to highlight the failure of the other is illogical, dismissive and deeply, profoundly disrespectful and callous..
The same 'family' system that landed the lander on Mars is waging illegal, amoral wars that are killing families, destroying communities, crushing entire civilian infrastructures of whole countries.
The same 'family' system that landed the lander on mars and photographed the landing from above the lander, in live real time, from the drop modules angle, an 'amazing feat' which 'has never been seen/done before' is engaged in wars that cause wholesale slaughter, and is deliberately mismanaging epidemics that are killing hundreds of thousands of people.
The UN called for a total ceasefire of wars in April 2020. Their call for common sense was ignored by the primary war mongers.
"Freedom!" people cry. "We have such great Freedoms!"
Others claim: "Our Freedoms are being imperilled! Don't wear a Muzzle!"
Both of these are lies. Cultish lies.
In the UK and USA there is no public domain discussion of zero community transmission strategy. We know that News Media in co-ordination with the political hegemony of the ruling faction are censoring any discussion of zero-covid strategies. There is no freedom. The temporary need to stay indoors is not a loss of freedom, as some idiots claim. It is common sense. Stopping the spread is spreading the love.
There are lobbyists who are deploying the harms caused by bad management to argue for opening up, which is worse management, rather than argue for better management as in a zero community transmission strategy. They too talk non sense, they adopt an irrational and holly unjustifiable position.
Vulnerable Peoples Lives Matter.
Vulnerable people such as the disabled, people with 'learning disabilities', people with chronic disease are subject to 'rationing' of healthcare resources and doctors are ordered by Government to adopt 'do not resuscitate' orders as a rationing policy for these vulnerable people, who cannot dissent let alone consent to such a decision, simply because the Government of the day refuses to adopt a zero community transmission strategy.
Between 24 January and 20 November 2020 in England, the risk of death involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) was 3.1 times greater for more-disabled men and 1.9 times greater for less-disabled men, compared with non-disabled men; among women, the risk of death was 3.5 times greater for more-disabled women and 2.0 times greater for less-disabled women, compared with non-disabled women.
We do not, as ordinary people in England, have the freedom to prevent the State, the Government and the News Media from ignoring the science. We do not have the freedom to prevent the State, The Government and the News Media from deliberately ignoring the proven established public health mandates for handling an epidemic, just as we have no freedom to prevent the State from engaging in war and pursuing deliberate harm causation policy.
Boris Johnson lied in Parliament about the efficacy of zero community transmission, which we know is protecting the lives and economies of 1.8 billion people across East Asia and Oceania. It's not rocket science, it is best public health epidemiological science. He claims his policy is led by data, not dates and yet he coerces 10 million school children to attend unsafe schools on an arbitrary date even as community transmission is well above levels recorded prior to the first lock down two weeks short of one year previous.
Johnson lies in Parliament.
Tony Blair is still a free man.
Tony Blair also lied in Parliament.
When Prime Ministers lie in Parliament why must millions of innocent people pay the price?.
Progress? What Progress?
Landing a lander on Mars whilst killing hundreds of thousands of citizens with bad management of an epidemic is not progress. Removing Saddam Hussein at the cost of 600,000 Iraqi lives was not bringing democracy to Iraq, it does not represent progress.
We need to have one - progress - without the other - avoidable harms to vulnerable citizens -to be able to say that we are a safe and functional Democracy. That would indeed represent human progress.
We need to be able to land a lander on Mars and not be waging war, not be deliberately mismanaging an epidemic to be a safe and healthy Democracy.
This system is a cult. It is not a culture, it is barely a society, it is a nasty, violent hierarchical cult. we the ordinary citizens are caught in it's grip, stuck between a wall and a hard place, doomed by the cult's desire to retain, maintain, enhance and project it's power above all other considerations. I do not blame ordinary people - we are all victimised and dehumanised by this situation.
When a person has internalised the cult, that person cannot see it for what it is.
When a person has de-colonised from the cult, that person can see it for what it is.
The within all studied Hierarchy of Power Cultures the lived experience of child abuse is more common than rare. This is a true statement - a significant portion of our population, generation after generation, in homes, schools, institutions and in the community, experience chronic abuse as children, and many people as adults live with a constant background of abuse.
Racism, Misogyny, Xenophobia, Structural Poverty, Able-ism and other layered socially instituted generic hatreds are very much common behavioural characteristics of this culture into which I was born.
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.
Those abusive behaviours are exceedingly rare and more usually unknown in healthyegalitarianpre-conquest cultures. They do emerge in previously egalitarian cultures post conquest, as an outcome of the trauma of collision with conquest, hierarchy cultures.
These abuse behaviours are common to all Hierarchy cultures, apart from Racism which is specific to Euro-Christian White Colonial Slavery Culture and which persists to this day. "White People did not exist before 1681!"
This chart reflects the compilation and statistical analysis of a wide ranging surveys of many hundreds of different cultures that looks at a spectrum of behaviour from Egalitarian to Hierarchically Violent. A key variant that is found to be a predictor of the nature of any given culture is the way the culture relates to children.
This chart, prepared by James Prescott, is in large part drawn from the work of Robert B Textor in "A Cross Cultural Summary"
"It presents a series of some 20,000 statements, grouped according to a list of standard cultural categories, that describe which of a large number of variables (all more or less conventionally dichotomized) are associated beyond chance expectations with which other dichotomous variables, in the 400-culture sample assembled by George P. Murdock for the Ethnographic Atlas.
The variables examined and intercorrelated in this largely computer-written survey are all those employed in 38 published or completed cross-cultural studies, plus those that have been coded for the Ethnographic Atlas.
The volume is, I would say, easy to use. The compiler has carefully and explicitly described all of his procedural decisions, as well as providing a brief but thoughtful introduction to some of the principles of statistical cross-cultural research.
In short, as Harold Driver says in a dust jacket blurb: “There is no longer any excuse for tossing around unconfirmed and impressionistic generalizations, when thousands of sound propositions, based on world-wide samples, are now available in this impressive compilation.’’
I would put this injunction even more strongly: any ethnologist who assumes a correlation between two variables that have already been the subjects of cross-cultural study will henceforth be professionally remiss if he does not check his assumption in the pages of this volume.
But useful as such checks will be, particularly to exploratory comparative studies, the reader of this volume should remember that failure to find statistical support for some assumed causal relationship does not necessarily mean he should abandon his assumption."
Review by Melvin Ember, Hunter College, in American Anthropologist 1969 p.918
In other words, this is a serious compilation and survey of cultural characteristics. The charts are accurate representations of social or cultural behavioural characteristics. This is solid, grounded evidence.
The recent work of Robert Sapolsky, Behave : Humans at our worst and best and previous work by E. Richard Sorenson from the bookTribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropologyand the work of Allan Schore in the neuroscience of emotional self regulation and development in the first two years of life, all confirm this overview - the default state of the human species is trust, we are egalitarian by our evolutionary development. There are many others whose work confirms this thesis.
The following assertion is no longer in the realm of hypothesis.
Our Human bodies, brains and minds are perfectly evolved for love, connection, trust, creativity, bonding, healthy attachment with grounded individual autonomy, as a core part of a functional collectivist socially nurturing dynamic, not in spite of it.
Because we are evolved to adapt to a wide range of habitats, and because we are as infants sensitive and vulnerable, and thus ready to learn about our new world, it is the case we must learn the behaviours that function best within the egalitarian trust default state, from our parents, siblings and wider community without direct instruction, (our brains are evolved to learn by experience, rather than being genetically programmed to generate behaviour) and it is the case that these fundamentals are distorted by childhood trauma that remains unresolved and/or chronic stress that afflicts a culture that persists over generations.
Back to the future, here and now...
Child abuse statistics for England and Wales in 2019
Just a quick glance at the statistics in England and Wales, for example, reveals the following :
Of the 6,971 convictions for child abuse-flagged cases in the latest year:
81% (5,668) entered a guilty plea
19% (1,301) were convicted after trial
fewer than 1% (two) were proved in absence
Around one in five (21%) child abuse-flagged prosecutions in the latest year were unsuccessful in securing a conviction, equating to 1,843 prosecutions.
To put that that into a more informal perspective, if the details of each conviction were read out in the daily 6pm News, it would average out at 19 cases per day, 365 days of the year. That would jump to 25 a day, for a 5 day working week. A further 20% of cases do not achieve a conviction - that is not to say the defendant was acquitted, proven innocent. One in twenty cases reported lead to a charge, or summons. Even that sorry statistic does not cover the full extent of abuse of children across England and Wales.
In 2019 a total of "around 227,500 identifiable child abuse offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019. It is important to note that some of these offences occurred more than a year ago. For example, where data were available from the Home Office Data Hub, 34% of sexual offences against children recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019 occurred one year or more ago. This includes 21% of cases which occurred 10 years or more ago."
Comments by one of the statisticians add weight to the assertion that child abuse is more common than rare across this culture.
"By its very nature, child abuse is often hidden from view and many cases don’t come to the attention of the police or the courts. Of identifiable child abuse offences recorded by the police in the year ending March 2019, 1 in 25 resulted in a charge or summons. Of cases that did lead to a prosecution, 4 in 5 resulted in a conviction. We see similar trends in figures for sexual offences. Of course, both crimes are particularly sensitive in nature and some have occurred a long time in the past making them more challenging to investigate.” Meghan Elkin, Centre for Crime and Justice, Office for National Statistics
Add to these crimes of abuse against children, violence perpetrated against women and other instances of violence between adults that litter our newspapers, fill our courts and cause immense distress. One in five school children in English Schools reported being bullied on school premises in surveys carried out in 2018 - 2019. The bullying follows the vulnerable online at a similar rate. Rape and sexual harassment are background threats every women is aware of.
Clearly we have a problem that is being experienced at the cultural level, rather than being a question of few bad apples.
Adverse Outcomes for Survivors
I am a survivor of protracted severe childhood abuse and bullying by adults and other children. In my adult life I have endured poverty, destitution, loss, depression and severe psychological distress. This is typical for many of the people who have endured childhood abuse, bullying and other adverse situations.
I have to and do take a certain amount of responsibility for the choices I have made, the errors I have made, the flaws in my behaviour and attitudes - nonetheless, the larger part of my distress was caused to me by others, and exacerbated by the lack of supportive or protective structures within this culture.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones.
The trauma of war is caused by a few who launch the war, and the many who endure do so under the greatest of strains, and largely do so unreported, whereas the people agencies that initiate and prosecute war have daily headlines to urge their case.
"Given the situation I was born into, the culture and society as it is set up and everything that I experienced, the things that should have happened that did not, and the things that should not have happened that did, it is no wonder I feel the way I do."
In the process of getting through all of that I have spent a lot of time examining my own life. I could say that I was trying to put together the pieces that were broken, reclaim the parts of me that I had lost. I have been on a journey survival, a path of self directed learning about myself, in this life, in this culture, for 40 years. I am 61 years old.
My gradual understanding of and the integration of my lived experience has been buoyed up the many decent kind people I have met along the way. In spite of the culture, most people are pretty decent and I have been fortunate to meet mostly decent people, and to have siblings whose love and kindness have helped me weather the storms of my life. time and time again.
My study has ranged over many subjects including biology, history, geography, anthropology, paleology, neuroscience, endocrinology, biochemistry, economics, studies of civilisations, technology, the history of writing, architecture, agriculture, horticulture, permaculture, behavioural psychology, evolutionary psychology, war fare, medicine, child development, trauma studies, linguistics, religions, shamanism, animism, power relationships, herbalism and music and more..
I have been taken in by a number of cults, and have assumed entire belief systems and lived those until I inevitably came to a point where the real world evidence undermines some aspect of the belief, and I am forced to drop the belief, and return to a confusing, painful reality, sometimes with a bump, sometimes with the greatest sense of relief and liberation.
In the end we all seek liberation from oppressive situations that dominate our lives.
Freedom is not as some would have it taking the liberty to do as one wants, not least as others around us suffer - freedom exists only in entire populations not being oppressed, bullied, hated, shot at, bombed from the air, impoverished, poisoned or polluted by agencies and powers far greater than the individual, greater even than the communities we all live within.
Underscoring that peace is more than just the absence of war, United Nations officials stressed the need for concerted efforts to achieve the common vision of a life of dignity and well-being for all.
“We know that peace cannot be decreed solely through treaties – it must be nurtured through the dignity, rights and capacities of every man and woman,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his remarks to the High-level Forum on the Culture of Peace, convened by the General Assembly. “It is a way of being, of interacting with others, of living on this planet.”
In September 1999, the Assembly adopted, by consensus, a resolution on the Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace. Since then, it has met annually to discuss the issue, as well as how to advance this noble goal.
Mr. Ban said that peace means access to education, health and essential services – especially for girls and women; giving every young woman and man the chance to live as they choose; and developing sustainably and protecting the planet’s biodiversity."
My 40 years of enquiry, of honest effort and exploration of this lived experience, which we all share, for better or for worse, has taught me much.
Delivering remarks on behalf of Assembly President John Ashe, Vice-President Isabelle F. Picco said the desire for a culture of peace knows no boundaries and is inherent in the hearts of all people.
“It transcends gender, culture, religion, faith and belief, and unites the rich and poor, the old and young, East and West, North and South around a common desire.”
She added that the post-2015 development agenda that Member States are currently working on must be rooted in a culture of peace.
“Peace as an overarching theme must be woven throughout the goals and underpin the targets,” Ms. Picco stated. “And our new agenda must be backed by the political will, commitment, partnerships and financial support to help usher in a new era of peace on a global level.”
This culture - Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture - is an unhealthy culture.
The invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the polluting of our air with exhaust particulates that find their way into our beloved babies wombs are all adverse outcomes of absolutely unhealthy behaviour.
Abuse on a colossal scale.
The Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture can be described as a complex post traumatic stressed disordered culture, as a hierarchy of violence and power culture, and as a trauma generating culture that normalises aspects of unresolved post trauma coping mechanisms as normative behaviour. It is a culture that sustains unresolved trauma as part of its internal engine and it's lurid mythos. The Gods as they are portrayed, behave like vengeful anti-social bullies. They are very much alike human beings with more power than they can safely handle. They are, of course, projections of the bully mind and culture.
One might well say it is an un-natural culture. No baby is born to become a bully, nor is any baby born to be bullied. Bullying is a distorted behaviour that distorts those who are bullied in turn. Chronic stress imposed by the presence of bullying absolutely undermines the natural default development of children and adults.
Allan Schore on the evolutionary biology and psychology of emotional self regulation as it develops.
We are by our evolutionary default egalitarian, bonded, securely attached, empathic sensitive beings/creatures who live as social puppies, in loving relationships that are able to weather the variations of a changing and dynamic habitat. This is our evolutionary default.
Snow blizzards, rain storms, sunny droughts, day or night, floods, tsunami's, volcanoes and general natural changes and so on - when we survive we survive largely because of luck and because of our attachment to one another, our intelligence and quick wits, our creativity and our fraternity.
This is proven to some extent by the story of the Aboriginal people's of Australia, 80,000 years of continued thriving communities. It is the oldest narrative of the human species. Pre-historical. And there remains a core of Aboriginal people who live in those old ways, who retain the social behavioural characteristics of the healthy human culture, in spite of oppression and the conquest culture's denial of their validity. Indeed there are an estimated population of 360 million indigenous, undeveloped people's across Earth and they are all at risk of extinction entirely due to this culture I was born into.
Our default is trust. until we are subjected to chronic traumatising stressors. Then everything becomes distorted. This is the historical narrative. I have written about this before, outlining a theory that the Hierarchy culture is the result of an egalitarian culture that was traumatised, and for what ever reasons, was unable to resolve the trauma, and remained in fight or flight reactive mode which engendered normalising controlling behaviour patterns.
Our problem of healing is not an evolutionary problem - we are more highly evolved for good health and love than anything else.
Our problem of healing is not a matter of personal flaws and failings.
Our problem of healing is a cultural problem.
David Smail in his book "The origins of Unhappiness : a new understanding of personal distress" -
"It is the main argument of this book that emotional and psychological distress is often brought about through the operation of social-environmental powers which have their origin at a considerable distance from those ultimately subjected to them.
On the whole, psychology has concerned itself very little with the field of power which stretches beyond our immediate relations with each other, and this has led to serious limitations on the explanatory power of the theories it has produced.
To illustrate this, typical cases of patient distress in the 1980s are examined. The decade when the right-wing of politics proclaimed there was no such thing as society gave rise to psychological distress across social classes, as long-standing societal institutions were dismantled.
This is as much a work of sociology, politics, and philosophy, as it is of psychology. Fundamentals of an environmental understanding of distress are outlined. A person is the interaction of a body with the environment."
In other words, David Smail understood that the impact of the behaviour of those who wield immense institutional and material power upon those who do not amounts to a disparity such that decisions that cause grevious harm to entire populations are made, with dreadful frequency, and little accountability.
No wonder people are distressed.
As I like to put it "Given the kind of family, community and culture I was born into, and everything that happened to me, it is no wonder that I feel the way I do."
Another way to put it is to say that a lot of human distress is often the outcome of things that should have happened not happening and things that should not have happened, happening - by agency of other human beings.
The Fruedian and Jungian Psychiatric and Psychoanalytical models are all deflections from this fundamental observation. There are no archetypes of abusive or distressed behaviour lying dormant within the human psyche. There is no genetic disposition to distress, other than we all suffer when we are chronically bullied, and that chronic state can trigger epigentic changes that alter our biology, that can throw it out of balance.
There is nothing 'wrong' with the person, there are only distressed persons and a distorting culture within which the person is forced to live, a culture that is very distressing.
Robert Sapolsky in "Behave : The Biology of Humans at our best and our worst"
“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.”
It all comes down to culture, in the end.
Sapolsky writes “culture” is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means."
A Hierarchy of Violence culture is a behavioural dynamic, not a genetic dynamic.
We need to abolish poverty and end war as a priority for the mental health and physiological well being of Humanity, and that must include a cessation of all invasion of lands occupied by older indigenous cultures, as the essential preparatory steps, even before we approach the issues of pollution, environment and climate change.
Free Speech is a Responsibility, it is neither an automatic Right to a free-for-all nor is it a Privilege.
The Responsibility: that when speaking to the commons, the shared space between us all we speak truthfully, transparently and honestly, we speak to the commons and be attentive to be evidence based, to be as good a listener as a speaker and to acknowledge what is verified, reliable and true as such, and to also acknowledge beliefs as made up, as guess-work at the very best. This responsibility is absolutely critical in any matter that concerns the welfare of millions or billions of people who share the commons. It is a fundamental humane duty of care, and cannot be abrogated.
Free Speech is not a right to promote beliefs over evidence in action on matters concerning the shared commons, the welfare of people and their lives.
Free Speech is not a right to groom, manipulate or exploit others through use of language and various logical fallacies.
Lots of very clever abusive people hide behind Free Speech - the correct way to deal with that is to identify what is being done, name the precise tactic, the logical fallacies, the half truths, twists and spins and show how they inform the agenda that is being driven, and to do so in full transparency.
This blog is a REALLY useful in helping with this.
"Very few people, when put to the test, have the integrity and moral courage to stand up against bullying, harassment, abuse, threats and corruption. The targets of adult bullying are selected often because they DO have the moral courage to challenge; many people will pass by on the other side.
A target of adult bullying is most often chosen because of their strength, not their weakness. Research showsthat targets of bullying tend to have highly developed empathy, and sensitivity for others, a high degree of perceptiveness, high moral values, a well-developed integrity, a strong sense of fair play and reasonableness, a low propensity to violence,a reluctance to pursue grievance, disciplinary or legal action, a strong forgiving streak and a mature understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue.
It is vital, therefore, that all decent humane people who wish to participate, contribute and engage with the deliberations on how we deal with matters that concern our collective welfare (and our individual well being) are educated to become adept at this process of confronting the tactical arsenal that bullies, ideologues, demagogues, populists and others with malign intent bring when they present their theses in the public domain, such that they are clearly identified, their tactics exposed, their activity inhibited, disabled and prevented in the first instance, thus protecting the commons from avoidable harm.
Our collective safety and sanity demand nothing less.
Everything we are seeing suggests, yet again, that the only viable strategy is zero community transmission. If the virus cannot meet a new host it cannot learn new tricks, and it dies out. Simple enough.
Complex to organise, yes. But not complicated. Prevents death and long term chronic disease? Yes! Reduces variants? Yes!
Expensive? Yes. (ish) Cheaper than cycles of open/lockdown? Yes! Worth it? Yes! Safe? Yes!
Compare the outcomes for New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea with those of UK, USA, Brazil, France or Germany.
Stopping the Spread is Spreading the Love.
Can we please unite behind a workable zero community transmission strategy, now that the evidence is tragically and so shockingly clear?
"Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to some false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias."
This is something I have suffered from throughout my life - it leads to assuming personal traits where the outcome was actually a matter of luck, and little else.
The survivorship bias is uttterly toxic to this situation, (SARSCOV2 spread and COVID19 Disease) and is the basis os most of the ConTheory narrative - it is also the basis for assesments of the British Empire as a 'good thing all things considered' aming other things.
Discounting the lived experience of those who do not survive, (death by covid19 is terrifying, painful and often lonely) and those who survive and who are traumatised, or exposed to lives of chronic illness thereafter must be opposed at every turn.
To mask or diminish the reality and meaning, the qualitative data of those lived experiences is simply unacceptable behaviour.
