Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is a total cultural shift.

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

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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 healthy egalitarian pre-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 book Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology and 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.

Source : Office for National Statistics 2019

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. 

I have also been inspired and informed by the written work of superb researchers in the areas that my experience drew me to - people such as Alice Miller, Judith Herman, Robert Sapolsky, Vincent Felletti, Carl Rogers, Oliver James, Sue Gerhardt, David B Chamberlain, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Allan Schore, David Smail, Suki Pryce, Rutger Bregman, James W Prescott, John Bowlby Colm O'Gorman and many, many others - there is a list on the side bar of this blog, an incomplete list, and it gives a flavour of my 'scholarship' which has been and remains an informal, self directed process of study and learning.

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.

Peace is more than the absence of war.

9 September 2014 - United Nations Statement

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.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2010/10/two-poles-of-society-everything-in.html

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.

Kindest regards
 
Corneilius

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

The Human Species is fine, it is the Culture that is the problem.

I have been thinking, reading, writing about hierarchically violent social and cultural behavioural characteristics for 30 years, dipping into the best work I could find, work done in the past, work being done today by serious, hardworking scientists, clinicians, practitioners and by trauma survivor populations.  This study is as much a study of myself and my lived experience in this culture I was born into. There are personal elements to this pursuit as well as global concerns. Being a survivor informs my study. These are my biases.

What I have learned is this:

When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions, how it relates to our emotional state, our mental and physical health we discover something. It is 'designed' or 'evolved' through natural selection for optimal health. Being a bully or being bullied is not optimal health on any possible measure.

Egalitarian life was/is generally peaceful,  humanely beautiful, physically healthy, grounded in solid emotional attachment and matured healthy affective state self regulation which reduces incidence of lost tempers and general violence because egalitarian culture nurtures the default setting of trust which is the basis of co-operation. 

“The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history."

Pytor Kropotkin was correct.

.

This will upset quite a few people within this culture where self regulation is so dysregulated more often than not, where bullying is deemed as a normal if unsavoury behaviour, where hierarchy of power and wealth is assumed to be natural to the human condition, where competition and war fare is accepted as natural behaviour.

They are not. They are entirely cultural dynamics.

The roots of life.

When we look to cellular life, we see the origins of complex life in the union of two different entities, for their mutual benefit, in the process known as endosymbiosis.

 
When we pay attention to the the discovery that our human digestion is dependent upon 1000 species of bacteria for it's efficacy, we see co-operation as a core element of how our bodies function.  Even our moods are dependent upon the activity and health of bacteria in our gut.

Fungi and Forests mutual aid community. Ants, Trees and Bacteria working together.

https://slate.com/technology/2020/01/darwin-competition-collaboration-evolutionary-biology-climate-change.amp

In a fascinating article in The Slate - What if Competition Isn’t As “Natural” As We Think?

"Scientists are slowly understanding collaboration’s role in biology, which might just help liberate our collective imagination in time to better address the climate crisis.

Darwin’s legacy aside, though, one critical takeaway from all this is that we must learn to recognize the impulse to naturalize a given human behavior as a political maneuver. Competition is not natural, or at least not more so than collaboration.

This insight could hardly come at a more opportune time. With our climate crisis mounting, we dearly need new ways to think about our relationships to the diverse entities that share our planet.

Far too many environmentalists assume that people, driven by innate self-interest, are bound to harm ecology, that we will inevitably clear-cut, extract, consume, so long as it gives us an advantage over the next guy.

This leaves us deeply disempowered, with few solutions to climate change outside limiting humanity’s impact through some kind of population control.

When competitive self-interest is revealed to be a mutable behavior, the causes of climate change come into greater clarity: not human nature, but an economic system that demands competition, that distributes resources such that a tiny elite can live tremendously carbon-intensive lifestyles while the rest of us struggle for a pittance.

Leaving competition behind, we can also imagine richer solutions: climate policies that problematize the tremendous wealth of the few, that build economies concerned with collective well-being and sustainability"

The default mode of healthy human species specific social behaviour is trust.
Unhealthy behaviour is not a biological norm.

The default mode of healthy human species social behaviour is emotional trust, which is initiated in utero, developed through birth, infancy and toddler-hood, maintained into childhood, youth and adulthood through loving, bonded relationships where power disparity is rarely, if ever, abused, where empathy, compassion and insight prevail. 

Co-operative culture is probably the default behavioural setting for the human species.

Such cultures - Egalitarian or Co-operative cultures - do not appear to have any generation gap, they do not bully children, they do not go to war, they do not rape or steal, they do not create and maintain power hierarchies, and as the study of endocrinology and neurology reveals, our bodies are superbly adapted to that healthy state as our normative state. 

That said, the study of such cultures shows that conflict resolution is standard practice, after all we are human and we can be moody, we can wake up feeling out of sorts, we can become insecure, angry, jealous or envious and those feelings can and do lead to misunderstandings which can then become a point of conflict. 

If conflicts cannot be resolved, then trouble brews, and the longer it brews, the deeper it's impact on our bodies and minds.  Chronic stress is a dis-ease vector and a killer.

The Bully is not a bio-logical behavioural default.

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0020106

This paper outlines a cultural shift observed in a wild population of Forest Baboons. It indicates the element of culture as a learned, brain to brain transmitted behavioural dynamic or milieu that can be passed from generation to generation, learned from infancy (possibly prepared in utero by the conditions of the mothers lived condition) through direct experience and liminal absorbtion.

"Reports exist of transmission of culture in nonhuman primates. We examine this in a troop of savanna baboons studied since 1978. During the mid-1980s, half of the males died from tuberculosis; because of circumstances of the outbreak, it was more aggressive males who died, leaving a cohort of atypically unaggressive survivors. 

A decade later, these behavioral patterns persisted. Males leave their natal troops at adolescence; by the mid-1990s, no males remained who had resided in the troop a decade before. Thus, critically, the troop's unique culture was being adopted by new males joining the troop. 

We describe (a) features of this culture in the behavior of males, including high rates of grooming and affiliation with females and a “relaxed” dominance hierarchy; (b) physiological measures suggesting less stress among low-ranking males; (c) models explaining transmission of this culture; and (d) data testing these models, centered around treatment of transfer males by resident females."

Here we see a clear example of a culture shift, a change in behaviour that emerges across an entire population of primates.

What this suggests to me is that the concept of the Violent Alpha Male as a biological archetype is more likely a projection of the hierarchically conditioned mind, a bully culture, rather than an inevitable, biological default or archetype.

Wolves in captivity are not wolves in the wild.

The term Alpha Male was coined to describe 'what happens in wolf packs'. However that 'observation' was crafted from within a prison, and blown apart as a theory in the wild. It originated from a study of male wolves in a zoo enclosure, an entirely un-natural set-up. Wolf packs are families, with Mom and Pop and their litter.  Wolves do not hang out in all single male groups ever. That never happens in the wild. One way to look at the study claiming Alpha Male wolves as an archetype is to think of a bunch of males in a prison. What kind of culture exists there?

When the same researchers went into the wild, they tried again, but did not spend much time observing in detail or taking blood samples, stool samples etc and stuck to the Alpha Male theory. Then some years later they returned to the wild, and this time spent a lot more time, gathering a lot more detail, until they finally understood that wolf packs were families, and in place of an Alpha Male they had Father Wolf, Mother Wolf and the family, and the children all had different characters, different skill sets and abilities and they all worked as a team using those differences to maximise their success. 

Culture is, as it turns out. a mammalian dynamic, and co-operation prevails.

Co-operation is normative to all and often between species.

The concept of a 'Struggle for Survival' biological competition as the archetype of biology is a dystopian fairy tale, the  projection myth of an insecure bully culture. No such thing exists. It's a way of looking at the world, rather than an observation.

The way our endocrine system functions proves this beyond all reasonable doubt. We get stressed when we get bullied, and when it becomes chronic that stress causes a wide range of physiological distortions and breakdowns. We are not 'designed' for chronic stress. It happens, yes, and it hurts and harms us long term.

Occasional stress is normal to all biology because the habitat is a dynamic environment, where changes occur, accidents happen and things can go wrong. If follows that being able to cope with the stress and return to homeostasis or balance is essential - and we see this all the time. Recovery and healing happens.

This is confirmed knowledge, tested profoundly. This is not belief.

We do not need to hang on to our negative beliefs about 'Humanity'  or the 'Human Condition'- they are just beliefs, and they confer no accuracy of perception.

The Biology Never Lies.

Biology does information rather than belief. 

Evidence matters.

Me matters. The Personal matters.

I think that for me, it started out with the evidence of my own subjective experience. Learning to be less subjective required that I step away a little from myself so that I could see the subjective rather than be overwhelmed by it all. I did not realise I was reeling from the trauma of my childhood, and when I did, in my late 30s, I started to very slowly develop more empathy for the child I was in the situation I was in. Very slowly.

Part of my 'learning' is the lived experience, examined in hind sight, often with less than 20/20 vision. 

The lived experience of surviving long term abuse as a child, and dealing with the invisible affects as they emerged, whilst living in a bully society. I am not alone in this, not at all unique.

Part of my 'learning' has been muddling through, barely coping with depression, heartache, shame, self loathing, bullying, confusion, loss, despair. Part of my 'learning' has been resilience, dogged persistence, withdrawal and the creation of an inner fortress, a form of denial in that I understood I had grown up traumatised yet I pretended it did not afflict me as much as it had, because I could not remember much, because I was not ready to deal with it. Millions of people endure this learning across the bully culture. It's all quite sad, and it's painful.

Part of my 'learning' has been reading, studying and learning from what others had to present, by way of evidence and insight. Part of my 'learning' has been through counselling and the heartfelt advice and support of close friends. Millions of people are going through this every day.

Crucially when I began to see the Social Material realities of where I was born into for what they were  - as a culture so much larger than I - I began to realise that I was, we all are, living in a bully social system. Millions of people are grappling with this realisation emerging in our lives.

I began to understand more of why I had been made to live through all of that, how everyone is living through all of that.

This awareness among the population is  growing : the Hierarchy of Power culture is inherently toxic, and it has no natural mandate.

It is sustaining a traumatising chronic stress dis-ease dynamic.

I will repeat my basic theme. The Human Species is perfectly evolved for healthy attachment, bonding, co-operation, creative intelligence as part of 'natural' behavioural dynamics of a species living in and on Earths surface. I am perfectly evolved for the co-operative culture but have been conditioned by the lived experience of growing up in this dominator culture.

As a neo-nate my brain was ready for the egalitarian lived experience yet it met the hierarchy of wealth and power experience and that changed the trajectory.

In my case, I was born a month premature, as a Rhesus baby endured a full blood transfusion without anaesthetic and started life in an incubator for two months. A whole range of biologically mandated expectations, needs that are core to the building of behavioural and neurological pathways were never met even as the doctors and nurses fought to save my life. The NHS saved my life. I am ever grateful for that State funded co-operative movement.

That was just the start. 

This hour long video presentation of a lecture by Allan Schore examines what we call attachment theory, informed by advances in scientific ability to observe detailed processes within our brains, our endocrine systems and our bodies as we grow. 

What Schore calls the brain-to-brain relationship is revealed in some detail and lends itself to the understanding of brain development and affective state self regulation in utero and in infancy that is the world of carer and child, mother and infant in those earliest, most intimate relating to one another experiences, so much without words, so deeply limbic and yet absolutely crucial to the future emotional condition of the adult to be.  

It is important to understand that even though we do not remember the detail of our experiences as neo-nates and infants. all of that experience is written into our bodies. That means much of what determines our adult emotional state is hidden from our awareness, is 'sub-conscious'. Cultures roots lie in the mists of vague memory.

Allan Schore gives a presentation on aspects of emotional development, in terms of the brain-to-brain dynamics and neurobiology of the interaction between carer, most often the mother, and the cared for infant.



Whatever the situation, the behavioural dynamic of healthy egalitarian culture has to be learned, by experience and exposure, each generation learning from the previous. Trauma and chronic stress and oppression tend to distort this learning, Violent cultures intervene in the learning - we call it 'education' set within an authoritarian hierarchy system called school - to assure the concepts of authority and it's right to exercise violence for the preservation of social order is habituated to. Sparta being the classic example.

More is being understood about this, by more and more people, as research into the biology of behaviour has made huge progress in the past 30 years.

Learning all the time.

This work that is being undertaken, diligently and seriously by many brilliant and committed people, away from the spotlights, the stages, the accolades of celebrity, work that is seeking to understand, contextualise and heal social violence, oppression, hierarchy and abuse of power is beyond any single life time; it was there before, and will be there after I or any of my readers have been long forgotten, because it is a historical process of recovery.

As is often the case the leaders of the Dominator culture have dismissed the profoundly healthy humane realities of  the older egalitarian cultures - which they call primitive or barbarian -  cultures which form the bulk of human lived experience.

They dismissed the default biologically mandated modality for co-operative human culture because it poses a threat to the Dominator culture. We can see this today in the prevalence of what is known as Free Market Fundamentalism. A culture that pretends that human society does not really exist, that meritocracy is the natural state and that those who are wealthy are innately superior to those who are poor, whilst they ignore the fact that their wealth is precisely what generates poverty for so many others.  A bully cult.

Evidence of a community grounded in healthy attachment relationships where affective state self regulation is matured by the time each reaches toddlerhood - presenting as healthy cultures that experienced no generation gaps, no organised mass warfare, no widespread sexual abuse of children or adults, cultures that thrived through healthy relationships with one another and with their habitat, for many, many tens of thousands of years, and in significant numbers

I mark my life by the quality of the relationships within which I am embedded - are they nurturant or are they destructive?

I ask the question - why not a nurturant culture? What is impeding the development of such a culture?

This work is not an evolution, and it is certainly not a revolutionary process, it is a process of recovery of healthy relationships. The evolution of the co-operative species and our culture has already been long complete. The linear model of 'progress' is in adequate to this task which all of us face going forward in our lives.

Dominance is the language of the bully. 

Coping is the language of the bullied, who cannot escape.

Revolution is the language of the status quo.  Exchanging one Power for another.

Healing is the language of healthy human behaviour.

Reducing Power disparity abuse is a prerequisite for healing and recovery from trauma.

The defining indicator, a predictor if all other data is unavailable, of a bully culture is how the institutions, the social structures and the adults relate to and treat the children. Authoritarian control, punishment/reward dynamics to assure compliance, children as projections of parents desires and perceived needs.

The defining indicator of a egalitarian culture's character is how they relate to and treat the children. Autonomy and loving, shared responsibility.

It really is a matter of existing and imposed power disparity, and who uses or abuses it under what conditions.

It has nothing to do with 'species' and everything to do with culture.

Humanity is not the problem, it is the solution.

Healing is possible, to a large degree.

Healing and recovery are biological mandates.

We live in a traumatising and traumatised culture.

The Trauma transmission is layered - Violent Hierarchies study the effects of poverty and violence on a population, to know how to exploit people's pain to maintain loyalty to the system, and to be able to continue to wage war. That is deliberate. They cause trauma deliberately.

The lived experience - ordinary folk whose lives are afflicted by the actions and behaviour of Power, ordinary folk who are caught in the crossfire of war, economic sanctions, impoverishment, who have to flee on foot, who are offered no genuine support (veterans, refugees, the no income, low income poor for example)

People are mostly are just doing the best they can to keep a lid on that chronic stress burden, so that they can look after themselves and their children.

Nonetheless there will be varying degrees of trauma behavioural transmission, and epi-genetic changes that disrupt development and behaviour, that are NOT the fault of those people, there is no malice there, and it must be understood that dynamic will impact every person affected in profound and long term ways.

The malice emerges as powerful States refuse to acknowledge this, because they are engaged in a competitive power struggle dominated by the most powerful military states, who seek dominance, globally. Obama 'twisting arms'.

I know of Indigenous groups who protected their native lands by defending with spears and arrows, guile and forest skills, who faced down Loggers, Miners, Farmers, Oil drillers and others who had guns, and no problem with using them to kill.

Decades passed and people were murdered on both sides.

Then, eventually when the defence of their lands and cultures ceased being 'operational', when they had manage to slow down the intrusions and find external international and national support for legislation to protect their lands, they withdrew and they deliberately went through a slow multi-generational healing process, so that they do not carry the wounds forwards... they did not want to become like the invaders, numbed through their own wounds.

They chose, as a community of adults, to heal. That is a fine example of biological conscious awareness and courage. That is highly evolved healthy human behaviour.

Those same groups are still facing invasion, assimilation and violence : they are stressed to the limit, because their shared habitats are under still threat, and yet they offer insight, they offer wisdom rather than seeking revenge.

The Human Species is fine, it's the culture that is the problem.

You are NOT your culture.

I am not the culture.

Therefore I will not let it be a trap that robs me of my sensitivity and humanity.
I will not let it undermine my determination to nurture the world around me, to nurture all people, our shared habitat, the common environment. Determination goes where hope falters.

Co-operation is what allowed our human species to thrive, more than any other single factor - and the evolved level of cooperation is based on healthy attachment bonding as a core element of psychological and social arrangement.

The natural society is grounded in the natural child's needs being met in full.

Bullying disrupts that and is the at the root of much harmful behaviour.

Dominator cultures are wiping out Egalitarian cultures.

If we want a future as a species, it has to be Egalitarian.

The work then is to confront the bully cult, disarm it, recover healthy relationships across all our cultures. This is doable


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