Showing posts with label Robert Sapolsky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Sapolsky. Show all posts

Peace is more than the absence of War, Peace is healthy relationships across all human cultures.

The culture you and I were all born into is not a healthy human culture...

Study the lives of ordinary people as they are affected by the decisions of empires that pass over their land.
Examine how the lives of the most vulnerable are adversely impacted by the decisions of the most powerful is the real honest history.

Then you will see it’s less about the celebrated political leaders and states than it is about hierarchy of wealth and power cultures and the layers of violence they deploy, and that the populations traumatised are in reality a single, global historical and extant demographic.

The native peoples everywhere colonisation happens, the Jewish people in Europe and Russia, the Irish, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Armenians, the Aboriginal peoples, the Palestinians, the Royhingya, the Cambodians, the Africans, the native Americans north and south, and so many more,  so many more, the impoverished everywhere and their children.

State and their wealthy rulers exploit people, they rarely nurture people.
We must change that, you and I, with our families, our neighbours, our communities in our polities - we must change all of this, for the bullies will not.



Egalitarian peoples of the Amazon Forest.

This culture into which I and you were born has is a systemic cultural hierarchy of wealth and power and layers of violence to maintain that power, through deliberately created structural Power disparities. 

Be it kings or plutocrats, communism or capitalism, theocracy or warlords - it’s the same pattern.

It’s not normal healthy human behaviour. That much is clear. 

We are not evolved to be bullied or to become bullies. If we were it would not cause us so much distress and ill health.

Bullying is learned. And the most interesting thing is that the vast majority of people are not prone to bullying, indeed we suffer terribly when we are bullied.

We all grow up somewhere and we all internalise many aspects of that somewhere- this is a natural process. Internalising the love of parents, siblings, community, language, immediate environment and habitat is a natural process.

People born into Christianity internalise its values, people burn into Judaism internalise its values. 

People born into Capitalism internalise its values.

People born into a traumatised family internalise those values, even when there is no malicious intent in the parents or their community.

People born into egalitarian cultures internalise the values of their culture.

And so it goes.

One of the most toxic thought forms is that this current condition - hierarchy of power - defines ‘humanity’ as a species, when it’s really just a culture.

The violent hierarchy system aka The Dominator Culture is understood to be no more than 15,000 years old.

Prior to that we were mostly egalitarian, matrilineal and peaceable. Integrated into our environment, our shared spaces, shared with plants and animals, shared with deep insight, respect and gratitude.

The task before us is to reclaim our natural healthy relationships and behavioural dynamics - it’s not a question of ‘evolution’, as often suggested by New Age ideology and other ideologies associated with religions that hold ideas of Satan or any other supernatural Evil Force.

It is a question of healthy natural relationships, between adults and children, between systems of governance and peoples.

-----

Here's an excerpt from Robert Sapolsky's book 'Behave' which takes a deep, well informed look at human behaviour and the biology of our behaviour and makes note of what is known as 'lateral violence' - what happens when people of one strata feel under intense pressure and feel important to make appropriate effective changes aka disempowered. I highly recommend all my readers to get a copy of 'Behave', and read it many times, dipping in and out - it's an astounding work, covers a lot of ground, very readable, informative and Sapolsky's writing, like his lectures, is quite naturally entertaining, at ease with deep knowledge without hubris or arrogance, and I think it carries a profound message about human behaviour and human cultural variation that all of us would gain something from.

"STRATIFIED VERSUS EGALITARIAN CULTURES"

```'Another meaningful way to think about cross-cultural variation concerns how unequally resources (e.g., land, food, material goods, power, or prestige) are distributed.— Hunter-gatherer societies have typically been egalitarian, as we’ll soon see, throughout hominin history. Inequality emerged when “stuff”—things to possess and accumulate—was invented following animal domestication and the development of agriculture. The more stuff, reflecting surplus, job specialization, and technological sophistication, the greater the potential inequality. Moreover, inequality expands enormously when cultures invent inheritance within families. Once invented, inequality became pervasive. Among traditional pastoralist or small-scale agricultural societies, levels of wealth inequality match or exceed those in the most unequal industrialized societies.

Why have stratified cultures dominated the planet, generally replacing more egalitarian ones? For population biologist Peter Turchin, the answer is that stratified cultures are ideally suited to being conquerors—they come with chains of command.— Both empirical and theoretical work suggests that in addition, in unstable environments stratified societies are “better able to survive resource shortages [than egalitarian cultures] by sequestering mortality in the lower classes.” In other words, when times are tough, the unequal access to wealth becomes the unequal distribution of misery and death. Notably, though, stratification is not the only solution to such instability—this is where hunter-gatherers benefit from being able to pick up and move.

A score of millennia after the invention of inequality, Westernized societies at the extremes of the inequality continuum differ strikingly.

One difference concerns “social capital.” Economic capital is the collective quantity of goods, services, and financial resources. Social capital is the collective quantity of resources such as trust, reciprocity, and cooperation. You learn a ton about a community’s social capital with two simple questions. 

First: “Can people usually be trusted?” A community in which most people answer yes is one with fewer locks, with people watching out for one another’s kids and intervening in situations where one could easily look away. 

The second question is how many organizations someone participates in—from the purely recreational (e.g., a bowling league) to the vital (e.g., unions, tenant groups, co¬ op banks). A community with high levels of such participation is one where people feel efficacious, where institutions work transparently enough that people believe they can effect change. People who feel helpless don’t join organizations.

Put simply, cultures with more income inequality have less social capital.— Trust requires reciprocity, and reciprocity requires equality, whereas hierarchy is about domination and asymmetry. Moreover, a culture highly unequal in material resources is almost always also unequal in the ability to pull the strings of power, to have efficacy, to be visible. (For example, as income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.) 

Almost by definition, you can’t have a society with both dramatic income inequality and plentiful social capital. Or translated from social science-ese, marked inequality makes people crummier to one another.

This can be shown in various ways, studied on the levels of Westernized countries, states, provinces, cities, and towns. The more income inequality, the less likely people are to help someone (in an experimental setting) and the less generous and cooperative they are in economic games. Early in the chapter, I discussed cross-cultural rates of bullying and of “antisocial punishment,” where people in economic games punish overly generous players more than they punish cheaters.* Studies of these phenomena show that high levels of inequality and/or low levels of social capital in a country predict high rates of bullying and of antisocial punishment.—

Chapter 11 examines the psychology with which we think about people of different socioeconomic status; no surprise, in unequal societies, people on top generate justifications for their status.— And the more inequality, the more the powerful adhere to myths about the hidden blessings of subordination—“They may be poor, but at least they’re happy/honest/loved.” In the words of the authors of one paper, “Unequal societies may need ambivalence for system stability: Income inequality compensates groups with partially positive social images.”

Thus unequal cultures make people less kind. Inequality also makes people less healthy. This helps explain a hugely important phenomenon in public health, namely the “socioeconomic status (SES)/health gradient”—as noted, in culture after culture, the poorer you are, the worse your health, the higher the incidence and impact of numerous diseases, and the shorter your life expectancy.—

Extensive research has examined the SES/health gradient. Four quick rule- outs: 

(a) The gradient isn’t due to poor health driving down people’s SES. Instead low SES, beginning in childhood, predicts subsequent poor health in adulthood.

(b) It’s not that the poor have lousy health and everyone else is equally healthy. Instead, for every step down the SES ladder, starting from the top, average health worsens.

(c) The gradient isn’t due to less health-care access for the poor; it occurs in countries with universal health care, is unrelated to utilization of health-care systems, and occurs for diseases unrelated to health¬ care access (e.g., juvenile diabetes, where having five checkups a day wouldn’t change its incidence).

(d) Only about a third of the gradient is explained by lower SES equaling more health risk factors (e.g., lead in your water, nearby toxic waste dump, more smoking and drinking) and fewer protective factors (e.g., everything from better mattresses for overworked backs to health club memberships).

What then is the principal cause of the gradient? Key work by Nancy Adler at UCSF showed that it’s not so much being poor that predicts poor health. It’s feeling poor—someone’s subjective SES (e.g., the answer to “How do you feel you’re doing financially when you compare yourself with other people?”) is at least as good a predictor of health as is objective SES.

Crucial work by the social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham added to this picture: it’s not so much that poverty predicts poor health; it’s poverty amid plenty—income inequality. The surest way to make someone feel poor is to rub their nose in what they don’t have.

Why should high degrees of income inequality (independent of absolute levels of poverty) make the poor unhealthy? Two overlapping pathways:

A psychosocial explanation has been championed by Ichiro Kawachi of Harvard. When social capital decreases (thanks to inequality), up goes psychological stress. A mammoth amount of literature explores how such stress—lack of control, predictability, outlets for frustration, and social support—chronically activates the stress response, which, as we saw in chapter 4, corrodes health in numerous ways.

A neomaterialist explanation has been offered by Robert Evans of the University of British Columbia and George Kaplan of the University of Michigan. If you want to improve health and quality of life for the average person in a society, you spend money on public goods—better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. But the more income inequality, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average and thus the less direct benefit the wealthy feel from improving public goods. 

Instead they benefit more from dodging taxes and spending on their private good—a chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As Evans writes, “The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be the disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have [available to them] to mount effective political opposition” (e.g., lobbying). Evans notes how this “secession of the wealthy” promotes “private affluence and public squalor.” Meaning worse health for the have-nots. –

The inequality/health link paves the way for understanding how inequality also makes for more crime and violence. I could copy and paste the previous stretch of writing, replacing “poor health” with “high crime,” and I’d be set. Poverty is not a predictor of crime as much as poverty amid plenty is. For example, extent of income inequality is a major predictor of rates of violent crime across American states and across industrialized nations.

Why does income inequality lead to more crime? Again, there’s the psychosocial angle—inequality means less social capital, less trust, cooperation, and people watching out for one another. And there’s the neomaterialist angle— inequality means more secession of the wealthy from contributing to the public good. Kaplan has shown, for example, that states with more income inequality spend proportionately less money on that key crime-fighting tool, education. As with inequality and health, the psychosocial and neomaterial routes synergize.

A final depressing point about inequality and violence. As we’ve seen, a rat being shocked activates a stress response. But a rat being shocked who can then bite the hell out of another rat has less of a stress response. Likewise with baboons—if you are low ranking, a reliable way to reduce glucocorticoid secretion is to displace aggression onto those even lower in the pecking order.

It’s something similar here—despite the conservative nightmare of class warfare, of the poor rising up to slaughter the wealthy, when inequality fuels violence, it is mostly the poor preying on the poor.

This point is made with a great metaphor for the consequences of societal inequality.— The frequency of “air rage”—a passenger majorly, disruptively, dangerously losing it over something on a flight—has been increasing. Turns out there’s a substantial predictor of it: if the plane has a first-class section, there’s almost a fourfold increase in the odds of a coach passenger having air rage.

Force coach passengers to walk through first class when boarding, and you more than double the chances further. Nothing like starting a flight by being reminded of where you fit into the class hierarchy. And completing the parallel with violent crime, when air rage is boosted in coach by reminders of inequality, the result is not a crazed coach passenger sprinting into first class to shout Marxist slogans. It’s the guy being awful to the old woman sitting next to him, or to the flight attendant."

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

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meh! - election blues. no caps.


December 13th, a Friday, a UK General election, a result. Meh!
  
A moment in time, which will pass.  They all do. That is why chronic suffering is so intolerable, because it does not pass, it fluctuates. We are not designed for that.
 

And so..

The work continues.

It is so disheartening that so much solid work by decent people is being undone by public lies and propaganda. for such low rent goals.

A 67.2% turn out.

2.8 million students in higher education, accruing debt, as they are offered zero hours contracts and must pay rent to service older generations private wealth .

A third of UK adults of all ages, classes, genders and demographics have no interest in voting, largely because they sense a deep corruption which repells them, the feel a distance that is an abyss, and so they veer away. They do their best to get by, and they do their best to deal with what ever hierarchical circumstances throw at them.

I did.

Those who believe the pretence that the media is a genuine democratic actor vote for the system, every time. They take pride in voting.

I did.

The voters may make the mistake of choosing Left or Right in the belief that that position brings change, progress and improvement for themselves, automatically,

I did that too.

I have done all of that. I remember what it was like to be socially conditioned to 'think' along provided lines, not realising I was mostly repeating what I had been told to learn.

"Corbyn is a Communist!" No evidence, just a belief.

Those who are dedicated to others do more than vote; they work with others, they devote time to organise ways to help others, and they always vote for more humane policies if those are on offer, and they seek always to end war, poverty, misogyny. and abuse of power. They don't always vote. They frequently lobby on behalf of those they support in their work, they become advocates. They give because the need is there.

There are so many of you. Angels.

Exhausted Environmentalists, Collapsing Care and Nursing Staff, Struggling Teachers,  Volunteers, Food Banks an expanding 'market',  the 135,000 British children and their parents in Temporary Accomodation, the 14 million adults out of 49 million, 1/3rd of the adult population in low or no income, the disabled, the traumatised, the broken and vulnerable who are already dealing with chronic stress, pushed to further and further stress, leading to lethal outcomes caused by DELIBERATE inadequate support coupled with authoritarian sanction regimes and public humiliation via 'entertainment' media.

The 13,000 children abandoned when Kids Company was closed down in 2015. The spike in knife crime and the surge in gang activity that followed had nothing to do with that, of course.

Good work destroyed by lies.

Julian Assange dying by official neglect in a Jail Cell, falsely imprisoned, in solitary 23 hours daily, for reporting the honest truth.

Tony Blair and all the MPs who voted to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, all walking free, all drawing State Pensions.  The Tax Payer is rewarding every MP who voted for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan with a hefty cash award, until they die.

And who thinks Jeremy Corbyn is a problem?

Trump was elected. Chosen. And marketed, heavily by political grooming gangs.

Johnson was elected. Chosen. And again, marketed, heavily by political grooming gangs manipulating vulnerable people...

"Get me Roger Stone."

Dirty Tricks.

Why does a population of millions submit to the manipulations of a few tens of thousands of people, loosely organised as a ruling minority?

What Power did The Bible and a few prelates who ordained the King or Queen exercise in the Middle Ages?

It's hardly surprising that Lord of the Rings resonates with an ancient futility.  It ends well, albeit with a warning. It could so easily get worse again. Written within a culture that was profoundly warlike, an Imperial Culture with a 'glorious' History, soaked in blood. Epic.

We know The Hobbit is a fantasy.

Justin Beiber is a fantasy.

Jeremy Corbyn 'the reslover of all our problems' is also a fantasy, a caricature that denies the collective responsibility. No such person exists.


 It is also an allegory, a dream, an approved folk myth.

The movie version  however, co-opts that fantasy to sell-on (Value Added) a particular Abrahamic Fantasy.

That Fantasy is that you can beat Violent Hierarchy by Good Violence.

Avatar.

No such thing. They are the same thing.

Violence is not a fire to be fought with, using violence. That is a way of maintaining the fire at it's most destructive. Again, clever co-opting of the caricature maintains the status quo.

They could not co-opt Corbyn, so they had to manipulate, lie, deceive and bluster fully, totally supported by the News Media Corporations, large and small, 24/7 and convince enough vulnerable people that Corbyn is a 'communist', or an 'anti-semite' without reference to policy on either side.....they devoted inordinate resources to the task.

88 percent Misleading vs 0 per cent Misleading.

Jeremy Corbyn is politically way, way, way ahead of the mainstream of the British Political Class who unfortunately pretend to not understand the nature of War at all.

The British Establishment and all the political parties are unwilling to bring Blair to account. They will not let that happen. They oppose it.

As in they do understand it, of course they see it, and they pretend not to.

They fully know the crime they have committed.

Palestine, The Amazon, 'Australian' Aboriginal peoples, Iraqy, Libya, Syria, Yemen.

He's no Hobbit.

He is one of many people, across our society, who sees what the structure is. And we are largely people with little material power, until we organise.......

The workers in steaming factories took on owners with troops, and gave us so much.

That is why he wants to rein the oligarchs in, why he wants to abolish poverty, because that is what it will take, in practical terms, for the human people as organised groups, to start to seek ways towards behaviour that heals the violence.

The harm caused is intolerable.

That is what drives Jeremy Corbyn.

Human Kindness and Common Sense as a policy advisor.

It is disheartening to look and see the kind of society this really is. 

He did that a long time ago.

Without understanding, it appears terrifying.

Understanding it is far, far more terrifying.

And yet, it is absolutely necessary, to look into this abyss because we really do need to understand, to know, forensically, what it is.

To be radical does not mean anything other than to go to the roots of any given problem, honestly, and to apply our native human intelligence to resolve the problem. A bodge job will not do.

Those who break things are not radical.

Those who build, can chose to take a radical approach.

If they do so then they move from radical to rooted.

If propaganda and lies can inform so many people's decisions, especially when we can access accurate information at will, then we have to understand that, absolutely we have to know what this is, and then design a solution.

My opinion about any particular propaganda is irrelevent.

My theories, likewise. Those might be starting point towards a discourse on social conditioning such that adults readily believe easily debunked lies, and that this afflicts all of us.

What are the facts about conditioning : how from within the womb, and from infancy onwards, growing up within a bully hierarchy system that is extremely violent will alter emergent behaviour and body biology, and not in ways that promote human biological health, rather most often in ways that we know cause degeneration across all bio-social-psychological physiologies...

Living in a bully setting causes more disease, illness, unhealthiness than any other factor.

We MUST understand social conditioning within a bully social system accurately if we are to resolve it - it's harsh work, to understand conditioning, not least because it WILL bring up our own conditioning for healing, in the process, and that is not easy work for anyone.

There is no magic self-help tip on this one.

No drug to bring you relief.

No workshop to balance this.

God cannot resolve this one. 
Faith will not touch it. 
It's not the work of any Guru either. 
----  that said there are people studying this issue with serious dedication, whose insight is valuable and reliable ---

Here's my brief outline.

In essence it resolves around attachment: how the interaction between infant and caregiver influences the brains development, how ANY chronic stress introduced and maintained over the caregiver will undermine that child's brains development, and it will afflict their behavioural homeostasis negatively in ways that will persist for life. In this culture, this Society, and in any culture or family, this is a life sentence imposed through no fault of either parent or child - poverty, war, famine, social disruption, indoctrination, violent hierarchy - these are all events of the civilised, almost unknown in egalitarian cultures.

These characteristics of the civilised alter all childrens lives, ever after.
 
For me it is kinda obvious that it has to be stated clearly that there is huge variety in how people respond or react to circumstance and events, and there are patterns we can observe across populations, and we have to be very careful to understand that no individual is the pattern.

Stereotypes cause harm. Lies cause harm.

At the individual level there is so much detail that surrounds their behaviour, that the pattern will never fit without blocking other data.

The population level pattern is a rough guide, policy demands more depth at the application level, the delivery level.

And the corporate and religious news media business is deliberate in keeping that detail away from the population that consumes it.

Here are some of those themes.

Trauma informed care.

Intergenerational Trauma Behaviour Alterations.

Bullying in Politics.

Victors Histories that dehumanise the victimised, either as a noble sacrifice or as a neccessary execution of a Devil, the ultimate enemy, all wrapped in pomp and sentiment.

Bibles, Torahs and Qurans as grooming tools.

Anti-Semitism.

Racism.

These are all languages of disease.

Humanity is not a disease; this culture that is dominating so much of Humanity is.

The Hierarchically Violent Industrial Militarised Competing Power Culture.

It afflicts almost every living group on Earth.

It's a lot of people, yes - it is not all Humanity, by a long shot.

Two different things, and thus we must learn about our Humanity in order to confront the culture that indoctrinates, that tells children what to think with a sanction reward dynamic at play.

Bullying little children.

Boris and Donald. What happened to you?

What happened to me?

What happened to you?

What happens?

"The psychology of any given family, community or society is revealed and perpetuated in how that family, community or society relates to and treats the most vulnerable - the infants and toddlers, the children, the pregnant, the vulnerable. Change that and you alter everything."

It cannot be expressed any clearer than that.

A healthy human psychology does not punish children, period.

Trying not to punish those adults who harm us is never going to be easy, and I think it's less about forgiveness than it is about revenge, which is merely contining the cycles, and that it really ought to be about prevention into the future.

To that end I would reccomend 'Behave' by Robert Sapolsky

What current verifiable scientific clinical and practical understanding of the biology of behaviour tells us about our behaviour. Evidence over theory.

Behave: it's a superbly written book, easy, fluid, a rich river of information, with dips into detail where needed. A solid reference work, it consitently rewards dipping into. Amazing. Critically important information that changes almost everything.



I would also suggest you peruse the work of Allan Schore on human brain development from conception through to  birth, infancy, toddler, child, youth, adult and onwards amd the importance of attachment as a biological stimulus to healthy brain development..



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0sKY86Qmzo













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.