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.
Emotional Intelligence is one of the most beautiful aspects of being a genuinely healthy evolved human being, a person. Kindness prevails and supports a state of Thrivival. Thrivival is so much more than mere Survival.
It takes almost no effort to submit to a violent hierarchy, to get by. That said the distress of living under a violent hierarchy generates chronic stressors that make life still very difficult indeed, with reasonable cause of anxiety, sadness, despair all of which require great effort to manage.
It takes immense effort to stand up to a violent hierarchy in order to thrive well.
That effort is made less of a burden when the majority of the population take it on as their task. This is a numbers game, We do have the numbers.
We need to de-numb ourselves, and that will require we care more for each other, even for strangers in our midst.
All is born of woman, no harm shall come to the children.
Kropotkin was correct in his insights, which aligned with those of Darwin : Mutual Aid is the healthiest state of the human species. The Egalitarian Psychology of Human Evolution is our oldest state. This video, from Radical Anthropology, examines aspects of this. Well worth a viewing and reviewing as it presents substantive evidence of our egalitarian roots as a marker of health for our species.
Jerome Lewis on Egalitarian Cultures Child Care and Gender Relations.
It is really important, I think, for Western civilians to understand that egalitarian culture is an expression of our most healthiest evolved state as a species. Egalitarian culture demands active daily effort to maintain the egalitarian frameworks and sensibilities, and it is not a 'romantic utopian' task - it requires emotional intelligence, robust fitness, constant care, courage and empathy.
The author at a protest march sometime ago.
Warfare is rooted in institutionalised child abuse and the adverse impacts of warfare harm children, leaving a trace of distress and traumatisation that lingers for generations.
Wealth-as-Power
We live within a Wealth-as-Power Cult that is emotionally damaged, immature and insecure. This is where the violence we are all witnessing comes from. Wealth-as-Power can only exist through the intentional and deliberate exploitation of entire populations. This is unjust. It also generates dissent and resistance, precisely because it is unjust.
The people who operate Wealth-As-Power know this and that renders them ever insecure. They cannot sleep sound at night knowing that the unjustness of their cause may generate emergent solidarity amongst the exploited which might hold them accountable for the many avoidable harms they have caused, and are causing and intend to cause, as they pursue the Power to maintain Wealth Extraction, most often by force or manipulation.
Trump
When the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martín laughed with Trump as he made a joke about the Irish housing crisis that is harming millions of Irish people, he presented his lack of emotional intelligence, his lack of courage and clarity. At the same time he pushed back on Irish economic activity with the USA, citing the example of Ryan Air and others who are Boeings largest international clients.
In some ways he played Trump during the visit, in order to protect Irish interests, in ways that show he is more mature than Trump, yet that is quite a low bar. Indeed he did not confront Trump over issues in Ukraine and Palestine. Walking on eggshells.
Playing each other is toxic
I believe we need political leaders who do not stoop to playing each other. we need forthright, honest, capable political leaders and legislators and parties that will do the work required to hold those who cause avoidable harm accountable, as a process of prevention of further avoidable harm.
Both men represent Wealth-as-Power, Patriarchy and the continuation of the avoidable harm causation. Neither man proposes practical solutions to de-escalation of conflict. Martín is avoiding bring in the Occupied Territories Bill in the Irish Dáil, in spite of the demands of the majority of the Irish citizenry.
Micheál Martín wants the Irish State to drop its Neutrality Status to enable the sending of young Irish men and women to war zones as active combatants, rather than as peace keepers. This is unconscionable and incredibly stupid. We need to end warfare in order to build the cooperation to meet the challenges of Climate Disruption, and to end the injustice of competing warring state. We Irish do not need to escalate warfare, we need to stand to bring it to an end. This is true for the vast majority of humans alive today.
Emotional intelligence starts in utero, is matured in infancy and practiced throughout a healthy life within a healthy community. This is a biological mandate for optimal human health as individuals and as collectives.
Sarah Blatter Hrdy wrote a book called 'Mothers and Others' to present a hypothesis concerning the development of alloparenting as a key dynamic in the evolution of egalitarian humanity. Allan Schores work confirms that hypothesis.
An egalitarian family group in a river, at ease with their environment.
The emotional mature Corbyn and the emotionally immature Starmer. One seeks to nurture, the other to dominate.
This is a true representation of the hearts and minds of these men.
Starmer is intentionally removing social care supports for young people to drive them into low paid work, or worse, to drive sufficient numbers into the military as he gears up for escalation of warfare. He knows exactly what he is doing, he knows the avoidable harms this will cause and he continues nonetheless.
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
Robert Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University.
Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience.
He was also awarded the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Young Investigator of the Year Awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology, and the Biological Psychiatry Society.
Deep Compassion.
In this conversation, Robert shares scientific research related to the neurobiology of transgender people with the goal protecting the rights of transgender people via the creation of informed policies.
This discussion is what I call a rational conversation, it avoids the elements we see all too often in what is called debate - it is a win/win discussion rather than a win/lose war of words. The purpose of the conversation is to arrive at a place where the participants and the audience are enlightened and reassured.
Democracy is trapped in an old paradigm - the struggle for Power
We all know the meaning of the term 'office politics' as an indication of power struggles within person to person relationships within an office. Those relationships are inherently adversarial.
Currently every Democracy in place is an adversarial system, with a Government and an Opposition, which renders political discourse to the level of a debate, with a win/lose dynamic that attracts the most effective linguistic bullies who impede rational discussion at every turn. This amounts to Cognitive Warfare.
Election 2024
The recent 'debates' in US and UK Elections are prime examples of this dynamic being deployed to evade the evidence, reinforce bias and opinion, targeting people with emotionally charged cognitive warfare and this exposes the central lies of the Hierarchy of Wealth as Power Cult that dominates our legislatures.
We do not have any egalitarian polities operational at this time, and I suggest that we need such polities, and rapidly. The harm caused by adversarial relationships within Governance structures and between States is beyond measure. It is utterly toxic, and it is not healthy human nature. It is a cultural imposition - hierarchy of Wealth and Power is not a dynamic every baby is born for, it is not the nature of a healthy relationship between adult and child.
We have never studied the neurology of extant egalitarian peoples, left alone their psychologies.
The academic and medical scholarship is rooted in the study of people living within violent hierarchy cultures.
Normalisation and habituation and internalisation of all of that is not healthy biological behaviour, it is not adaptive, it is a coping strategy that is doomed to fail to deliver healthy humane behaviour as a cultural marker.
The psychological environmental movement is in its infancy and is struggling to be cared for and fed in such manner that it might grow, mature and nurture the world from which it has emerged.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.