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.
Climate Disruption - The word 'Change' is a Euphemism.
'Climate Change' is a deliberate Euphemism.
It's akin to saying punching someone in the face and breaking a nose and some teeth, drawing blood, tearing flesh and causing concussion is changing a face - it is a destructive disruption of the face, a deliberate disruption.
Climate Change is not the same as Climate Disruption.
I fell foul of the euphemism of Climate Change for over a decade. Did you also fall for this deliberate abuse of language?
In 1985 Carl Sagan testified to the Congress of The United States Federal Government on The Greenhouse Effect. Here is part of his testimony, under oath, to tell the truth as he understood it.
What stikes me in this clip is his assertion that effective global action must come from a place of amity between all States, and that such amity was not present, and as such is a hinderance to effective action on prevention, protection and repair of harms caused. Climate Disruption demands the ending of the Militaristic competing powers dynamic, if we as a human culture are to meet the challenges ahead. Mr. Sagan was 110% correct.
I was truly unaware. I did not know.
That lack of knowledge and understanding meant that as the 2000s rolled in I included the possibility that Climate Change was driven by the variations associated with the activity of the Sun, as much as that industrial activity Sagan referred to.
It meant that I considered other long term variations as potential drivers of the changes our scientists and others are measuring and which we are now living through.
It meant I was unable (unwilling) to focus in on the fact that it's not precise to say 'human activity' is driving Climate Disruption, that in fact it is industrial activity at scale, grounded in externalising costs from material resourcing through production, consumption and end of life disposal, as the base of it's profitability that is driving climate disruption. Industrial profit evades the responsibility of mitigating harms caused by it's activity in order to be profitable. We must all pay the price. Collective responsibility.
Permaculturists are not driving climate disruption.
Not all humans are engaged in industrial activity. 360 million indigenous, non developed people alive today (current estimates) are not involved in driving industrial activity, indeed their cultures and ways of living with the lands they inhabit are facing extinction as a direct result of industrial expansion, which is always seeking access to more cheap raw materials and cheap labour as a means to an end - maximising Wealth Extraction.
I think we need to use the term 'Disruption' because it is more accurate and helps focus the mind on what is being done. Since the 1980s when the issues of pollution, environmental degradation and CO2 adverse effect on the atmospheric homeostasis were confirmed, that disruption could no long be said to be accidental. It is deliberate.
The meaning of the disruption and it's impact was ignored in favour of Wealth Extraction.
It is that the chosen behaviour of ignoring and otherwise evading the costs imposed by industrial practices (and the costs of environmental degradation, warfare, racism, misogyny, poverty) that is key to a grounded understanding of the situation, an understanding that we need to fully grasp.
Manipulation of public perceptions is evil.
Yet again we see the evidence that Externalising Costs is the industrial cultures practice this falls under - 'we don't really care about the costs imposed, how those afflict people, or the environment, we are continuing to extract wealth, and will use all power at our disposal to continue to do so, including manipulating people's perceptions.'.
I spent some time worrying about my 'carbon footprint, and castigating car drivers (I detest the combustion engine) for their much larger 'carbon footprint. I was an early adopter of recycling and repurposing plastics in my home. Yeah. I did not understand that I was being manipulated into a meaningless action designed to give the Oil Wealth Extraction Oligarchs more time to extract more oil from the ground and more wealth from us all.
Climate Change is not the same as Climate Disruption.
Disruption is intentional. It is intentional when one knows ones behaviour is causing a disruption. When a forest is cut down, so that Farming Corporations can grow beans to feed cattle, the environment is disrupted. They know this. When a Oil well leaks oil into the environment that disrupts the environment. They know this. When Plastic Particulates are littering our rivers and oceans, our snow capped mountains, and can be found on our blood and our food - that is disruption. And they know this. They knew all this long before anyone else. They had the science to prove it. And they did nothing to reduce the disruption.
When war is waged, that is disruption. They know this and still they do it.
Misogyny is disruption, Racism is disruption. They know this and still they do it.
So our work is to prevent the disruption. And then help the disrupted areas to recover.
This is not work to do by half measures, and it is work all of us need to become fully engaged with. It will not impoverish us, it will enrich all our lives. Failure to do so will betray all our descendants.
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.
Why? The Oligarchy are at War against Healthy Democracy.
I wrote this as a short explanation of Healthy Governance - if it existed at all healthy governance would regulate toxic industry and excessive wealth extraction.
It's just basic common sense. However currently the worlds political and economic system is controlled by a toxic combination of owners of industry operating working with a wealth extraction oligarchy, who use that wealth as a political utility and as a weapon.
They understand that climate change has changed everything - the externalised costs that underpin excessive wealth extraction cannot be allowed to continue to undermine our stability as a species.
They know this.
However they are unwilling to cede their power or change their behaviour, and they are placing the species in great danger.
The SARSCOV2 virus, and indeed Climate Disruption, is telling us that if we do not co-operate and work for each others mutual aid, we are lost.
To carry out such a policy - effective, continued suppression of community transmission of the virus, so that people can work, live, play and not spread the infectious pathogen SARSCOV2 - requires that the State supports the population's Right to Health with economic support, logistical support and local empowerment to operate the find, test, trace, quarantine and isolated treatment.
It also requires that the State works with the population as partners, equals in the effort. Ruling over a population will not deliver the social cohesion necessary to supress the virus.
This means the Industrial, Finance and Corporate Services sector must also support the people.
Debt relief, mortgage rest, and other measures to abolish poverty are necessary to deal with the virus, and indeed, to deal with climate change, air, land and sea pollution and other system level problems.
All of these are Democratic Socialist Strategies.
These are humane strategies, designed to avoid avoidable harm to the people.
The West's Governance systems are dominated by the NeoLiberal Free Market ideology Oligarchy.
They know that if a policy to protect the population's Right to Health was enacted, if humane strategies, designed to avoid avoidable harm to the people were implemented they would in all likelihood succeed.
The lived experience of a population who saw a more humane policy stance functioning well, improving all our lives, that would bring the spell of the NeoLiberal Free Market Ideology to an end.
The Free Market claim to be the best possible economic system would be seen as the falsehood it is.
Welfare systems and Health Care systems do not collapse, they get taken down.
A well funded, properly resourced healthy health care system caring for a healthier population is a sustainable reality, a practical solution.
Which is ironic, because once again, they cannot but confess by their behaviour who they really are and what they are really like and how much disdain they hold for us ordinary people - by refusing to suppress the virus in the community, they have proved that the NeoLiberal Free Market Ideology will not protect the people's right to health, and that by choice, it does not support the people in a wide range of important areas.
This is why the Wealth Extraction Grouping dominate our legislatures, making healthy governance impossible. They fear accountability, above all else.
The thing to understand its that healthy governance tends towards prevention rather than towards punishment. There is nothing to fear in facing accountability in a healthy way, for harms caused. Loss of power is not a healthy rational fear. A sense of superiority and entitlement is not healthy nor is it a rational sense of self to internalise. Inciting hatred is not a healthy or rational way for a human to behave.
All they have to lose is their dysfunctional behaviour characteristics and behaviour patterns. Why the fear?
Don't they know who we really are?
I wrote a blog exploring a metric for genuinely healthy governance, based on evidence, nurturing community and environment, preventing harm.
"I think of Healthy Governance as being focused on the practical realities of administering a communities shared resources for the equal benefit of all members of that community.
Healthy governance sets the context of governance as operating within the dynamic of a shared responsibility of duty of care for one another. In that regards healthy governance has to be evidence led at all times. Opinion and belief are insufficient to meet the responsibility of duty of care.
Healthy governance sets the global context of governance as nurturing, caring for and stewarding of the habitat within which the community lives and from which that community draws living materials and other resources.
In the case of States, and in relation to healthy Governance we can apply this metric of care to taxation, which is collected from all, in one way or another, by the State, and is therefore a primary community shared resource. Healthy governance will determine that that resource is deployed with wisdom and equity to nurture the whole population."
The Oligarchy refused to take the correct action because they feared that they would lose traction.
Democratic regulation of toxic industry in order to prevent avoidable harms, which is also a rational and healthy policy stance if enacted would Wealth Extraction - which Wealth Extraction Grouping would oppose on every footing.
When Greta Thunberg said "I do not want to believe that!..(You are evil)" she was on the cusp of the most honest expression of the political truth of our era. We all were. We still are.
Even when a human does monstrous things to another, repeatedly, aware of the harm he or she is still human, what they do is monstrous, they are not monsters. They are human beings, they are people... we all are.
Solidarity among the people, the families and communities and language groups and faiths and cultures has to be deeper than any other political loyalty on the menu. We must really love each other to do this. A lot more.
Billionaires funded Cambridge Analytica and Trump and Brexit.
The majority of Covid and Climate misinformation networks are funded by the Wealth Extraction Oligarchy.
So too so much of our News Media, Magazines and Publishing Corporations, through advertising revenue, and though direct ownership, and then there are their networks of pseudo-intellectual think tanks and a range of NGOs, large and small, all driven by the Oligarchy lobbies...
They know if democratic regulation to meet climate change happens, they will lose the ability to extract wealth firstly be by being forced to pay externalised costs. Then through a reparations process, to account for the harms caused to date, their entire wealth might be reduced to less than needed to exercise such great power to such adverse effect, and they would become disempowered.
Royalty no more. Elites not more. Just people with more than enough to get by on. But no.
They prefer war to the loss of that long held capacity, intent and ability to extract the Wealth they need by exploiting populations, deploying a significant part of that wealth as a weapon to maintain a dominant position in political establishments and legislatures, and thus protect Wealth Extraction. At a terrible costs to humanity and our shared environment.
This is not a conspiracy, it is not a theory - it is simply describing what is happening.
Brexit is about unilaterally breaking from international treaties, by grooming a population.
For the Oligarchy, the Wealth Extractors Freedom from the 'tyranny' of sensible, evidence based regulatory policy designed to reduce harms caused by industry is their goal.
To achieve that they must break social democratic solidarity and sow layers of belief based emotionally charged divisions across the available electorates.... when ordinary people hate each other driven by fear, anger, distress, chronic stress, the Oligarchy retain their power.
To protect the Hoard, the Herd must take it on the chin, again and again and again.
Suppressing the virus requires fully resourced pro-social human centred policy, which if the population experienced it, would be another example that would undermine the obviously false Neoliberal free market claims about the 'Free Market' being the best of all possible economic systems.
So we - the ordinary folk with little material power, you and I, and everyone else we meet, day to day, we must pay the price, so that the Oligarchy don’t have to carry the cost of avoiding avoidable harm...
Climate Change is entirely a matter of avoidable harm not avoided - they knew 50 years ago fossil fuel was going to alter the climate and they did nothing. They externalised the costs. They must be held accountable for that. What they did was criminal in intent, lethal in outcome and they persist.
That must cease. That state of affairs cannot be permitted to continue.
Social belief divisions
Anti-mask, anti-suppression of the virus, Covid Hoax, Lab Virus bio-Weapon, Global Tyranny Conspiracy obsession, pro-Brexit, anti-State, Freedomeers, Woo Woo New Age, Libertarian, Racist, Misogynists, Nationalists, - ,all emotional belief based - are all enrolled through the Oligarchy grooming operation which has found a series of psychometric keys into their emotional hooks associated with quite understandable distrust, anger, fear, knowledge gaps, beliefs, biases....
These different groups are all forming adversarial belief position divisions within the electorate - the available population who are entitled to vote and who, if they voted together could remove the oligarchy political establishment in our legislatures and councils, and instead elect honest, evidence based men and women who would write laws to protect the people from the excesses of the Wealth Extraction Class.
They are not at war with Russia, but with us, their citizens, over Climate Change and Covid.
That's the struggle we are in.
Solidarity and evidence, and grass roots political organisation and action, and the taxation stream of democracies are the powers the grass roots can muster.
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.
A friend of mine described William Shatners comments on Bezos' master plan to move polluting industries into space: "That's boldly going nowhere, Jim!"
Here's a short segment of William Shatner speaking prior to his brief journey into the edges of space on Blue Origin, Bezos's reusable rocket.
Interviewer to Shatner : "For the kids watching today, do you have any words for them?"
Shatner : ".. Well... Seriously the truth of the matter is this whole blue origin thing is based on the idea of building industry above the Earth.... and taking this pollution out of this planet .. out of the immediate planet.. and putting it up there.. That's got to be the future the Earth and and the Earth is is dependent on that .. and the youth.
The two work hand in hand and so it's very important that the young people today know that this, that up there, is the future and to work towards that.. for the improvement of the Earth."
"I think people don't understand it, or most people don't," Bezos told "CBS This Morning" co-host Gayle King in an exclusive interview after he landed back on Earth Tuesday. "When you get into space and you can see the Earth's atmosphere, it's so thin and fragile looking. So we do have to take care of this planet. And right now it's just true that our civilization is — we pollute the planet.
This sounds fantastical, what I'm about to tell you, but it will happen. We can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space," he said.
It will take decades to get there, Bezos acknowledged, but he cited the technological advances that have happened since the Wright Brothers took their first flight in 1903.
If you told somebody, 'One day there will be a 787,' it would seem fantastical. But that is what happens. And we do need to move heavy industry off Earth. Because this is the best planet. We've been to all the planets in this solar system with robotic probes — this is the good one," Bezos said.
Bezos is off loading the problem, continuing the toxic behaviour, doing it somewhere else - in space - rather than changing the behaviour.
The truth is that the top 20 industry sectors would be loss makers if they paid their full externalised costs.
If they paid for all the damage they do, they'd not be profitable.
They make profits by causing harm instead of avoiding that harm in the first place. They estimate that it would be cheaper (for them) to build the infrastructure to move industrial production into space, than to change the way industrial production operates on Earth so that it does not cause so much harm. Why do they think this way?
Billionaires Wealth is built on a huge deceit. Billionaires Wealth and Power is rooted in the practice of externalising costs. They use their wealth as a political weapon to prevent democratic regulation of their wealth extraction and sequestering systems.
An externality is a cost or benefit caused by a producer that is not financially incurred or received by that producer. An externality can stem from either the production or consumption of a good or service. Someone else pays the price.
Environmental degradation, the poverty inherent by maintaining low wages to maximise profits, the social disruption caused by political interference and corruption in democracies, clearing indigenous people's from land in order to develop it, waging wars for resources, climate change, air pollution are all externalised costs of industrial production, wealth extraction and political dominance.
The dumping of waste into landfills, or into the ocean is another externalised cost - chosen to save time and money rather than make the effort to prevent the waste or develop functional recycling of materials as an integral element of the whole industrial process which might eat into profits extracted.
3. The Elephant in the Room: The Deceit of Profit.
"Of the top 20 sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they paid those costs or invested in prevention of the harms, as things stand today. All that accumulated wealth is based on a fundamental deceit.
Climate Change is just one element of the adverse toxic impacts."
So when some politicians talks about GDP, and extolling the virtues of growing the GDP, increasing productivity and profits, know and understand that he or she is either deluded or knowingly lying, or both, and really ought to be disqualified from any role in governance, anywhere.
Brexit is fundamentally a retrograde movement, a reactionary reflexive strategic attempt to stop history, to revert to the old authoritarian rule by wealth, Empire modality of hierarchical organisation of society. Brexit is both a denial of the need for change that toxic practice has thrust upon us and a rejection of the responsibility to future generations that defines adult maturity.
That it is typified by lies and gaslighting and immature adults behaving badly is indicative. Johnson calling on the Earths nation's leaders to 'grow up' at the UN is exactly that. Immature gaslighting. It's not easy being green when you are a liar!
His lies are not to be dismissed as merely lies, or buffoonery - they are part of a political weaponization, a war of words, of unilateral treaty breaking, of destabilising democratic regulation, a struggle that is central to where we are, and where we will be in the near, medium and distal future.
What does the political industrial wealth group that represents accumulated wealth aka Capital. fear most, as we walk into dealing with Climate Change, Pollution, Environment Degradation as existential threats to Humanity?
Democratic Regulation that demands they pay the externalised costs, directives that urge that they invest their wealth and energy into prevention of further harms and the demands of helping populations at risk to find adaptive strategies that protect their health and well being?
For example Shell are being held to account in Holland, Exxon are being sued for lying about their knowledge that CO2 emissions were causing Climate Change. There are many other cases, precedents are being set. If it is citizens who are bringing these cases, and succeeding, it will be democratic Governments elected to continue that work that bring it to fruition. And it certainly is necessary. The problems are real, and they will not go away so they must be resolved.
Absolutely they do.
5. Sovereignty has no meaning on the individual level. Brexit is about breaking treaties unilaterally. Brexit is about evading EU and other international regulation of finance. Brexit is about setting up privatised economic zones free of democratic state 'tyranny' - the word the Accumulated Extracted Wealth Political Oligarchy use to describe any form of democratic regulation of industry and of wealth.
Free Marketeers fear democratic regulation. In impedes their ability to extract wealth. Without that wealth they are ordinary people with no power, because they have no ideological ground, and without that wealth as a weapon, without the pimping and pomposity, they are impotent and ordinary. They have no ideas worthy of the attention and loyalty of the human population.
6." Income distribution at current levels means that close to half of the working population in both the USUK would be unable to survive without external aid. Most regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, most view providing the help as an intrinsic part of a civilized society - To a market fundamentalist, though, these people are simply not worth what it costs to keep them alive. Their existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden."
The cutting of the £20 uplift is instructive.
7. The same logical dynamic applies to the prevention of toxic outputs from industrial processes, from raw materials to end of life disposal, from clothes to food, from housing to transport. Preventing those harms is not cost effective, it cuts into their profits. Therefore it is impractical, inefficient. Easier to ship it into space, says Bezos! He's wrong, of course.
The Free Marketeers object to being made to prevent the toxicity because it interferes with their Wealth Extraction, which is what gives them their political power - without that vast wealth, they would be unable to influence politicians, corrupt legislatures, use mass media to indoctrinate and groom entire populations. Their Wealth is the source of their power, they have no ideological or moral standing without that wealth which they deploy as a weapon.
8. These people feel entitled to `rule' the larger population in part because they view their success as proof of personal and collective superiority. They are psychologically addicted to power and are unwilling to cede any of the power they have gained, even if that means causing harm to billions of people.|
This is where we really are.
9. William Shatner did not come up with the idea to dump industrial pollution into space, disguised as 'space tourism'. He is being used, exploited as cultural fantasy icon, to fashion a veil, to groom generations into the idea of space tourism.
He's only repeating what Bezos has already indicated, back in July 2021, after the first launch.
10. So to push back we need the knowledge of what can be done to re-engineer industrial process so that it prevents toxic harms and instead outputs nutrients and enhances our environment.
And we need to bring robust democratic regulation and legislation to enable this trajectory, and that must include solid evidence based legislation and robust class actions against those who resist making these essential healthy changes because they want to retain the power to extract wealth, to hoard wealth and to use wealth as a political weapon to preserve their power, against the best interests of the global population and our shared environment.
11. This will be a serious, difficult and protracted struggle, and we must do it well, we must be wholly evidence based and we must fully commit to it and be determined, for the sake of all our children and their children to follow, to move it through to completion over a few generations. The main reason I think this is possible is this: most people are decent, our species is bio-logically set for an egalitarian default setting for our social organisation.
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.
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 mature 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."
We can do it. it won't be easy, and it can be done.
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.
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century.” Aneurin Bevan
Deaths per million, August2021: does not include cases of long covid or the many other avoidable harms caused by deliberate mismanagement, which is a political choice taking precedence over public health best practice. source
Where we are right now, in the UK.. just the raw truth! Watch this, then read on.
🧵This is a very important video about the pandemic. Dr. Richard Horton is Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet , a United Kingdom–based medical journal. He's an honorary professor at the London School of Tropical Med, Univ. College London & University of Oslo pic.twitter.com/AClabFsAeP
Why are so few people of the Press/News media and government in USUK not taking into account the experience and lessons learned by China, New Zealand, South Korea and the other countries operating Elimination of Community Transmission strategy, and reporting on the successes, and the problems they encounter, and how they resolve those problems?
When they do comment, why do they appear to deliberately portray these strategies inaccurately and describe them as meaning eradication or Zero Covid, and thus dismiss what is already being done, what is proven to prevent the harms associated with mitigation and 'living with the virus' as 'impossible' or a 'fantasy'?
New Zealand is looking like it's suppressing and eliminating Delta - they are cautiously optimistic. They reveal the efficacy of a caring government, a caring population working together to stop community transmission even as Morrison of Australia, the Murdoch press beloved, tries to denigrate their efforts.
Reports and political commentators often describe those countries as living in isolation', as if they are cut off from the rest of the world. This is clearly not the case. A quarantined border is still allowing human traffic through, even if it limits tourism - consumer goods continue to be shipped across borders. Tourism is a luxury business, it is not a necessity. Indeed internal tourism has increased in pretty much every country, circulating money within economies. For a short term set back, Tourism could be supported to help eliminate community transmission and prevent immense avoidable harms. Instead the tourism industry has become a primary vector of the virus.
As Elimination Strategy functions to leap into action whenever a cluster emerges, usually due to an imported variant, invariably a variant that emerged in the reckless countries, the pundits of USUK et al are quick to crow about how ineffective elimination strategy is, falling silent when the clusters are controlled, and the community transmission is stopped.
The denial and the dismissive attitudes seem to me to be about protecting USUK and other reckless Governments from public scrutiny and close attention, to shield them from an open critical analysis of their deliberate, repeated mismanagement and the huge economic costs of avoidable harms they have deliberately not avoided.
1.8 billion people, c.23% of global population being protected by elimination of community transmission strategies across such a wide variety of economies and cultures is a huge evidence base.
The USUK mismanagement teams dare not speak of it, honestly.
Freedom and being realistic
Even the 'Freedom!' crew who are highly critical of USUK Government are denying the evidence of China, New Zealand and the other countries, who have experience far less restrictions on their lives citizens of mitigation strategy countries, let alone the adverse health and mortality impacts. Death by Covid is not freedom. 10% of positive cases enduring long Covid is not freedom. So much for freedom.
Seems to me to be that they are one the same side as the super spreader governments they proclaim against. The spreaders of misinformation are also spreaders of the virus.
Fatalism is understandable
Dr. John Campbell, a youtuber medic who does a decent job of reporting on the evidence from around the Earth, avoids political observations like the plague. So he dare not mention elimination, which he did early on, suggesting UK was insane to not learn from China and East Asia. Now he has abandoned all mention of elimination strategy, and is reliant on vaccine efficacy to get us through to a better situation.
I imagine he’s being ‘realistic’ accepting there’s no way to dislodge this English Government and just getting on with it.
I get it. He has no option but to get on with his job, which is providing the best information he can find, from the perspective of a medic, a nurse.. Nothing will change, people need best info in order to make better decisions for themselves. Crack on.
But I see that as a form of fatalism, and I simply cannot accept that - and just as I still want to see Blair and the others indicted for war crimes, and even though I know I can’t do that myself, I refuse to let go of the need to see justice done correctly, in full, not so much as punishment but as a preventative - and so I still hold that elimination strategy is feasible, supported by vaccines, and the best way to reduce the avoidable harms that 'living with the virus' mythology leads to.
Stop causing avoidable harm. Is it really so much to ask?
IndependentSAGE is also on youtube, they broadcast a live briefing every Friday afternoon looking at the data, trends and issues, with a Q&A session for press and the public. They are a team of eminent and respected scientists in all the various fields that are affected by Covid, and they are firmly for elimination strategy, rather than 'living with the virus' or 'herd immunity'.
IndependentSAGE have produced an informative timeline comparison which lays out the Scientific, Epidemiological and Public Health advice offered to English Government and compares it to the actual policy carried out by the English Government.
The situation in England is now that there are close to 25k new PCR confirmed cases daily, going by Government statistics. ZOE records c. 55k new cases. Current estimates suggest that around 10% of positive cases are likely to contract Long Covid. We don't know how many asymptomatic cases that have not been tested are out and about in the community, people who are probably unaware of their status as potential vectors of infection. The existing test and trace systems are inadequate to the task assigned them.
Daily hospitalisations are currently running at around 750 in England.
Death by Covid is Horrific
There were 207 Covid deaths in England's hospitals yesterday. How do people die from Covid? Breathlessness, breathing pain, oxygen depletion, headaches, inflammation, secondary infections, organ failure, sepsis: a parade of pain and increasing disability.
This is the thing few people are willing to look at but health workers are forced to see. Death by Covid is very painful indeed, the process is disgustingly awful. There’s no dignity, no peace only suffering often in utter isolation.
The person knows long before they die that they are in deep trauma, unlikely to survive, and that is it's own unique terror - the medical staff spend their days watching frightened people die awful deaths.
Clap, clap, clap for heroes and no preventative action by government or citizens.
Is there a substantive pay rise in recognition of the extra burden NHS staff are bearing? Is there funding for extra staff to ease the work load of burned out medical staffers? No way. Not with this English government populated by those wealthy enough to take £40,000 holidays, add swimming pools to luxury homes during the summer break, spend hundreds of thousands refurbishing the prime ministers flat as they withdraw £20 'uplift pandemic support' per week from people receiving Universal Credit, which supports as many low paid workers as unemployed people, a benefit employers take profitable delight in.
The situation is similar to a war, with the braided generals at home, sitting in comfort and their combat troops in the trenches, engaged in the reality of combat, who see what it is really like, and then the patriotic civilians who just do not know and cannot therefore understand what war really is at all but who are encouraged to speak about ‘our boys and girls’ and ‘bravery and sacrifice'.
War is always avoidable.
Every death by Covid is pretty much avoidable. Stopping the uncontrolled spread of the virus in the community is feasible, and it does not need lockdowns, other than when the strategy fails - and we know why strategy fails. Each and every death is a horror movie that goes on for days and days and days. Witnessed by medical staff who are powerless to do much more than manage death, and whose insight, wisdom and knowledge is given almost no hearing in offices where Government policy is decided.
And what of our Schools, as they reopen this Friday, and are predicted to become super spreader events, with our children exploited as vectors of spread to attain herd immunity, intentionally so?
Must we accept that future for them?
As a culture, Climate Change, Environmental Degradation, War, Poverty are all Externalised Costs which our children must bear the brunt of, they will pay the price.
This then is the question of our era, in a dark metaphor.
"Have we spent our lives filling our children's shoes with shit, before telling them to go for a long walk?"
"You say you hear us, and that you understand the urgency... if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe."
I have to say, she'd better believe it. We all should, really.
It is not a negative approach to acknowledge harmful behaviour as harmful. It is, in fact, a hugely positive step as it is the first step towards resolving the problems caused by the harmful behaviour.
Our collective, cultural and individual refusal to admit, to acknowledge, to accept and integrate the evidence all around us, to understand what the corruption, the bloody wars, the environmental destruction really means - the evidence that our rulers and their sponsors are engaged in evil behaviours - is our weakest point.
We dare not go there.
We will not be able to generate the international co-operation needed to create and apply adaptive strategies that help meet the evolving dynamics of climate change, that cease harmful toxifying industrial and agricultural practice, that start the processes of repair and recovery until we confront and cease the war mongering. This is clear. All war is evil, all war is abuse of power.
We install eco-lightbulbs hoping that will be enough. We recycle, we re-use, fingers crossed. We hope and we pray. We drive a Tesla car. Faint hope. Delusion.
Everyday evil is not dramatic, it is banal. It wears a suit, a neatly ironed shirt, sports boyishly tousled hair, wears a charming smile to mask lying eyes. Evil is looking at a bank balance or a power advantage and judging that to have more value than a human life, than the environment, than the well being of others. That decision is evil. Adopting that stance and maintaining it is evil.
Evil is normalised.
Evil is normalised, so much so we do not see it. In order to see evil, we must know what it is.
Evil is consciously allowing, enabling or otherwise permitting avoidable un-necessary harm in order to maintain wealth advantage and power disparity over others. Externalised costs are the very definition of evil. Somebody else pays the price.
It is evil to test cosmetic formulations on captive animals in order to assess how much of the toxic compound can be used, or what toxicity levels one can get away with human use of the product.
There is no need whatsoever to use toxic chemical compounds in any products for use by any person, except for profit. Those tests are protecting future profits, rather than protecting human beings. The captive animals bear untold and intolerable suffering, for shareholder gain. That is evil behaviour.
Excellent, honest and insightful interview with MP Clive Lewis, an Afghan War veteran who shows more humane leadership in this segment, than Sir Keir Starmer has shown since he joined the Labour Party.
Twenty years of war upon Afghanistan, so much violence, nothing to show for it except the prospect of more violence.
Honest history in all our schools would go a long way towards preventing the grass roots population from being manipulated or groomed into accepting war as a tool of State policy, and would undoubtedly help to reduce Xenophobia, Racism and Misogyny.
Hypocrisy
Blair, a proven liar and war criminal walks free, on a generous state pension, whilst Julian Assange, an honest journalist, rots in a prison cell, held under false charges.
Afghanistan never needed the USUK or NATO to guide it's progress.
As Naomi Aldort wrote: "Our children do not need us to shape them, they need us to respond to who they are."
The same applies to sovereign countries. Conquest, NeoColonialism, and the urge to force other cultures to adopt the culture of a dominating State is a negative malign influence, and undermines global efforts at peace and co-operation.
The truth about the Establishments hatred of Corbyn is this : the evidence of the past 20 years implicates a significant cohort of the English Establishment, as war criminals, who prosecuted those awful horrific wars, and who knew what they were doing was both amoral and illegal, though it did enable a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary tax payers to already obscenely wealthy oligarchs who donated heavily to the politicians, buying influence. That is evil behaviour.
Lowkey has a spot on take here.
That is a dishonourable legacy.
Evil is human action, human behaviour, more, nothing less. That means it is tractable, it is something we can confront, challenge and impede, and indeed prevent. Here Rory Stewart lays out a perspective that criticises the action of one American president, without taking the whole into consideration. He even suggests maintaining a foreign military presence in other people's lands is a virtue. It is not a virtue.
"Biden can't say the Afghans are cowards. He left them behind."@RoryStewartUK tells @OliDugmore western leaders have only themselves to blame for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/qJEPY77no1
It is an evil. But Stewart's eloquence masks the evil, by pointing at just one aspect of the evil. He is correct that the way this withdrawal has been handled has exposed Afghanistan's civilian population and civil infrastructure to greater risk than need be - but he does not acknowledge that the USUK/NATO presence in Afghanistan is also a much greater evil.
The unexciting banality of everyday evil.
War is almost always about someone making a killing.
$10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defence contractors on September 18, 2001 — the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks — and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295.
"Several commentators address this dynamic in the 2005 documentary “Why We Fight,” about a warning that President Dwight Eisenhower issued about the military-industrial complex. Former CIA contractor and academic Chalmers Johnson states, “I guarantee you, when war becomes that profitable, you’re going to see more of it."
Concentrated Wealth is the most powerful political collective among the developed nation states.
War is not cheap.
The political power of Concentrated Wealth is based upon externalising costs.
Somebody else pays the price. Leveraging power to dump the costs onto others is evil.
Boris Johnson's behaviour evil. Read a list of his decisions that burdened others with the cost of his egoic avarice.
Tony Blair's behaviour is evil. There were no WMD in Iraq, and even if there had been, the War of Aggression against Iraq would still have been amoral, and illegal.
Jacob Rees-Mogg behaviour is evil. Food banks are indeed graciousness, yet the policies that created the need were one's he pursued, with others for a decade. Uplifting indeed!
The behaviour of Taliban 1.0 was evil. Theocracy always is.
The behaviour of the Saudi Regime are evil. Theocracy always is. Others pay the price.
The behaviour of the Vatican is Evil. Theocracy as a political hegemon always is. They protect their power at immense cost.
The grooming of 'Incels' as a violent political misogynist movement is evil. Grooming always is.
behaviour of NATO is evil. War is dishonour on every measure. Nobody wins in war. War is a losers enterprise.
Nigel Farage's behaviour is evil. Grooming always is. Exploiting vulnerabilities in other people is evil.
Keir Starmer's behaviour is evil. Sending children into schools, to spread the virus, in spite of the available evidence proving that it was unsafe to do so. No ifs, no buts.
Jacinda Ardern's behaviour is not evil. She places empathy at the centre of her policy decision making.
Donald Trump's behaviour is evil. The art of the steal, the grift, the con, the grooming of vulnerable people.
Obama's behaviour as an American President prosecuting multiple wars is evil. Drone warfare expanded, killing more and more civilians. Funding violent militia in Libya and Syria. Supporting war against Yemen. And he is charming, urbane has a wide smile. So what?
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's behaviour is not evil. Empathy for the vulnerable modulates her policy deliberations. She seeks to prevent harm.
Darren Grimes behaviour is evil. Grooming other people through their vulnerability always is.
Noam Chomsky's behaviour is not evil. He has always spoken truth to Power, properly researched and ruthlessly accurate, he has never faltered.
Katy Hopkins's behaviour is evil. Grooming always is.
Patrick Fagan's behaviour is evil. Grooming always is. A psychologist who misuses his knowledge to exploit vulnerable people.
Gabor Mate's behaviour is not evil. He presents the evidence of socially induced trauma's adverse affects on vulnerable folk, to raise awareness and suggest ways to recovery and prevention. He does this diligently.
Most ordinary folk, most of humankind are not evil.
Most of us ordinary folk are caught in the cross fire of systemic evil, and most of us are trying out very best to get by, doing the best we can by ourselves and their families. Most of us ordinary people are innocents thrust into this mess by accident of birth. There's also a significant cohort who are actively trying to counter evil, attenuate the impacts of evil, a constituency of helpers and protectors and healers and pragmatic activists.
And yes, there are evil folk among us too.
The US and UK Military Command (one could argue - all military commands) are, at best, at a rather long stretch, and I am being really, really generous here, decent enough people who are manipulated by evil people, if not evil in and of themselves.
If, at best, they are decent people manipulated by evil, then they are not that intelligent, they are not that brave, they are not really courageous nor are they worthy of their status. They enable the evil rather than challenge the evil. Whose freedoms do they wage war for?.
These people and these powerful hierarchy of violence organisations are all examples of liars and lies that are institutionalised to permit avoidable harms to happen, which do not prevent harm at source, which do so for their personal and institutional gain.
I do understand that for combat veterans this is a huge problem.
Imagine the trauma of extensive violent combat, tour after tour of shocking violence, carrying that, enduring that because you believe you were serving a decent cause? But it was a lie.
To admit that you were manipulated and groomed into performing the most horrific acts of violence, repeatedly, under the pretence that they were fighting for 'freedom' would be too much to bear, alone.
To turn to civilians who praise 'the sacrifice of our brave men and women' and say 'you are being misled by really evil people' who misled me and convinced me to do intolerable harm to others, my hands are bloodied, my spirit is tainted, my mind seared with agonising violence, my heart is broken.
To say to civilians, to those who love you, that your praise is a denial of what really happens, your concept of our bravery is a lie, your desire to believe in that lie no longer protects us - that is too much to bear.
For us civilians to hear that, to bear the burden with the combat veterans, to accept some shared responsibility for that immense sorrow, to admit that our brothers and sisters never fought for our freedoms, to admit we too were manipulated and exploited, and to understand that we too must sit with the trauma, the pain, the sorrow, the grief and then we must resolve to take action to prevent this from ever happening again.
That is courage above and beyond anything we know of.
There is immense grief here. Immense loss. Unspeakable pain and sorrow, masked by stoic perseverance and resilience, obscured by coping and mere survival - all of which is exploited wilfully by really evil people and really evil organisations.
If the Taliban are evil, they are no more or less so than the USUK and NATO organisations they have been waging war with for the past 20 years,
The only way to cease war is to wage peace, and peace is more than the absence of war.
Peace can only start with the absence of lies. We must face the truth, which is simple, complex and is also complicated. None of this will be easy. Doing nothing is not easy either.
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.
What Climate Change, Air Pollution, Plastic Pollution and COVID19 tell us is this - they carry the same message - the only reliable way to protect our shared environment, all our people and our economies is to co-operate across all sectors, openly, honestly and transparently.
We must work with all the available reliably tested evidence before us to solve problems and develop healthier behaviours that repair the damage and prevent further harms.
The apparent short-term costs of taking corrective action fade into insignificance compared to the medium and long term costs of failing to do so, on every meaningful measure.
We must do what can be done, without fear or favour, for all our children's futures, and we must do it diligently, every day.
All industrial and political systems currently operating rely upon externalised costs at every stage from extraction of raw materials through production, consumption and on to end of life disposal, as the primary source of their profitability.
The top 20 Industrial sectors would be 'loss leaders' if they paid for the 'natural capital' they exploit.
Somebody else or some other organism or environmental system pays the price, often with a degraded quality of their lives, often with their lives, of the profits accrued.
All the harms we see are - water pollution, environmental degradation, air toxicity, climate change - are largely the accumulated externalised costs of the existing Industrial Political System.
Until we acknowledge this and then legislate to prevent externalised costs, and legislate to encourage regenerative practices, we are adding on more harm, and these problems will continue to grow.
We can resolve this situation, and we should.
It's not Rocket Science. It is Behavioural Science. It is Economic Science.
The short term costs of correcting the error are well below the long term costs of allowing the error to continue.
What Climate Change, Air Pollution, Plastic Pollution and COVID19 all tell us is this : they carry the same message - the only reliable way to protect the shared environment, the people and our economies is to co-operate across all sectors, openly, honestly, transparently and work with the available tested reliable evidence to solve problems and develop healthier behaviours.
Every moment of division, every moment of denial and every act of exploitation is lethal. No question.
*Please feel free to copy, and post (email it to your local media, your local politicians and government officials, places of worship, schools etc)..
All industrial production systems currently operating or envisaged rely upon externalised costs at every stage from extraction of raw materials through production, consumption and on to end of life disposal, as the primary source of their profitability. This means that toxic outputs from industrial processes are not mitigated, let alone prevented. They are accepted, normalised, hidden away until they impress upon us by presenting as problems, and they are integral to the profitability of the Industrial Competing Powers system.
Ordinary people, especially the low income workers, are the people who do the work that makes most of the real wealth in this system, largely through daily toil, and the wealth workers generate is extracted and accumulated, and withheld, often by force and structures of Power. We have direct evidence of this in recent times from an 1982 Cabinet Discussion Paper written post Falklands War, when the establishment was feeling particularly confident.
The poor are a permanent (deliberately so) externalised cost of Wealth Extraction. Poverty and homelessness are both externalised costs of the Wealth Extraction. Resources are deliberately withheld from those who genuinely need them, as part of driving people into low paid work (to maximise profit taking) and destitution is maintained as a cultural whip..
The destruction of indigenous pre-conquest culture was an externalised cost of conquest. Conquest is always a business proposition, in that it requires massive investment and a demand for returns greater than the investment, in blood and treasure.
Chronic stress of industrial extraction and business working practices - mining, deforestation, repetitive assembly work, boring work,low waged shop and hospitality staff, military service - is an externalised cost of the imposed work ethics that demand 'productivity'.
What does 'externalised' mean? It means that somebody else or some other organism outside the transactional economics of the extraction, manufacturing, production, sales, consumption and disposal dynamic pays the price, often with a degraded quality of their lives, or even often with their lives, in order that the maximal profits are generated, and hoarded.
All the harms we see are - pollution, environmental degradation, air toxicity, climate change, habitat loss, species extinction, poverty, war fare, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, social and national divisions and hatreds - are the accumulated externalised costs of the existing Industrial Militarised Hierarchy of Competing Powers, a cult system and its behavioural dynamics.
It is a cult. It is a toxic delusion to call it 'civilised'.
It certainly does not have to be this way. This activity and this cult does not define the Human species. It is a cult, an aberration, an abomination. It is not natural, optimally healthy human species behaviour by any measure.
What ever your stance, unless you are willing to engage with this simple fact, and actively seek ways to resolve that problem, by understanding precisely what those externalised costs are, and how they impact us all, and what we must do to prevent those costs arising or at least pay for them to be resolved, in full, our work on these issues is futile.
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.
Kindness is ancient. Kindness makes us humane. Kindness is big. Being humane is a thing. Being humane is the biggest thing. We cannot be fully human if we are not also humane.
When we study the evolution of the human neuro-endocrine system and how it functions we discover something. It is optimised for a peaceful life, with occasional moments of stress. It is not optimised for constant, chronic stress.
Egalitarian life, as it happens, is generally peaceful, healthy, grounded in solid emotional attachment and mature affective state self regulation which reduced incidence of lost tempers and thus prevented general violence - peaceful people tend not to have short fuses. Peaceful people are patient.
We use the word Humanity and most often it is with a positive connotation. "Show some Humanity!" "Show some empathy, kindness, compassion, understanding." We urge one another to be more kind with these sentences.
And, as we know, there are those who think Humanity is the problem. "Humanity is destroying the environment" they will say. "Humans are a parasite, a plague" some people say.
Some religions hold the view that there exists innate badness, amorality, bestiality and that only adherence to the ways of the Religion can counter these dynamics. I think that that is a dehumanising perspective, the suggestion that the human being without the religion is inhumane, a lessor being, somehow tainted. How unkind is that of those who claim that their sacred texts espouse human kindness and morality at its very best.
Then there is active de-humanisation - taking away from a person or a group their humanity is the precursor to all forms of abuse, exploitation and manipulation. The other person or group becomes an object, a thing less than human.
Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, Racism, Xenophobia, the hatred of Zionists towards the Palestinian People, a hatred that does not have it's own name. A hatred that is not encapsulated in Islamophobia because it is about people and their land tenure, their ancient embedded polity, their language, it is about generations of families and communities who are all Arab ethnicity - it is directed at Jewish, Christian, Secular and Muslim Arabs. Zionists are historically European or Caucasian.
A world view that abolishes kindness towards an entire nation - just as the Europeans in North America extirpated the Native land tenures, their polities and their cultures. They even stole their children, so that the children might forget their mothers and fathers language.
One culture deems itself superior to another, such that they can inflict mass trauma without flinching. How unkind is that?
Humanity is not the problem.
The truth is that it is a particular culture that is destroying the environment, waging war, seeking profit over the welfare of people rather than Humanity per se. A culture that is unkind, even as kind people may well live within it and exercise as much kindness as they possible can. All birth location is accident of birth. No baby chooses to be born one or the other.
There's too many people, claims Johnson and his father Stanley, and that is the problem as they see it.
And yet these men of wealth and privilege, they are fine, at ease within the extractive, exploitive, predatory culture that they represent. Their culture is not the problem, as they see things. Both are noted for their lack of kindness, among other things.
Our default state is trust. Our bodies and our minds are evolved for kindness, not for bullying.
Jacinda Ardern is kind. Kindness is real human strength.
Kindness is political.
Boris Johnson is unkind. Here is speaks, in Greenwich, February 3rd 2020, aware already that a global pandemic is underway. He accuses the kind of being in a panic. He claims superiority, as a super man, an economic Uber Mensch, fighting against the medically irrational to champion sales and trade, profits and power.
"And in that context, we are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric, when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage, then at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion, of the right of the populations of the earth to buy and sell freely among each other."
Note that Johnson makes no reference to human harms, death and damage from severe disease in this speech. How unkind. "And here in Greenwich in the first week of February 2020, I can tell you in all humility that the UK is ready for that role. We are ready for the great multi-dimensional game of chess in which we engage in more than one negotiation at once and we are limbering up to use nerves and muscles and instincts that this country has not had to use for half a century."
He underlined that part of the speech. " I can tell you in all humility " He prefers international chess play to caring for the people. And 14 months later, the harms he said he would have avoided, have fully materialised.
He rushed us all headlong into those harms - and he has not had the courage, the gumption to put his hand up, to stop the train wreck, to do the right thing. How unkind. Kindness is political.
He receives donations for holidays and wall paper, and much else besides. His fawning associations with oligarchs many hundreds of times wealthier than either he or his father as he seeks out their 'kindness' is abhorrent in a normal person, but in a leading politician in the Highest Office it is unkindness of a profound quality.
Let me be direct, because I am angry and saddened - Boris Johnson is a weakling, a petty bully pimped up by high office. He is not alone. The Cabinet and Party are with him, all the way. They prefer their power to the welfare of the people 'they serve' - so unkindly.
Boris Alexander Johnson is unkind, even as he wishes public debate to be 'kind and civil'. What kind of man is he?
Boris Johnson Tackles children.
Watch as he leans into the child, hanging on to his prize. He cannot control himself.
Boris Johnson Tackles Adults.
Watch as he chooses to bend down and head butt the other player, then pretends it was an accident.
Johnson betrayed his wife, and mother of four of his children, while she suffers from cancer, by conducting a 4 year affair with a young American woman. How unkind is that? How cruel and callous, how utterly selfish! And then in addition there is the corruption. Channelling hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax payers money to his younger lovers ill fated and repetitively faulty business ideas. How kind of him! What a waste of tax payers money!
Kindness is political.
Obama was charming. His political action was unkind. Not much of a difference, really, if you were one of the many innocent people harmed by US Foreign and Domestic Policy during his 8 year stint as President and Chief of Staff. Poverty expanded, Drone Warfare and War in Syria and Libya expanded, as did the wealth of billionaires, under his 'leadership'.
Bullies twist arms, bullies with charms.
Kindness never hides behind a flag, a uniform, a monument or a temple the way patriarchy rooted power and cruelty does. Boris Johnson is unkind. Cressida Dick is unkind. Kindness is political.
Evolution and Kindness.
In terms of our long evolution as a co-operative animal, a social species, one of the key elements in the development of the social brain and all the social complexity, diversity and beauty that flows from that is the shift from the single parenting typical of most primates, to what we call alloparenting.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy - Anthropologist, Primatologist, Authord of 'Mothers and Others'
That is to say that the evolution of our bigger brains dealing with more complex relationships over longer time frames is inextricable from the evolution of shared parenting, multiple bonded relationships, among hominids. Kindness again. Group kindness is a thrivivalist behaviour. One needs a much more complex brain to live well through shared mutually nurturant relationships as a social group, a social species. Kindness is evolutionary!
Some would say that, politically, kindness has the potential to be revolutionary. Jacinda Ardern is revolutionary, it could be said - and not a guillotine or an AK47 in sight.
Thriving Children.
For all mammals and for all primates the mother is the primary carer of her children. There are some species that share the care, to varying degrees - the majority do not.
In all species of primate the infant stays close to the mother for extended periods of time, physically close, attached, in touch, body to body. Mammalian and primate infants are vulnerable and they need that constant care and protection while they are growing. Human infants are among the most totally vulnerable, and our vulnerability lasts for a long time.
Mothering is expensive.
Every mother knows how much resources, effort and time is needed to adequately care for, nurture and protect a baby, an infant, a toddler and a young child. It takes the meaning of full time job into the realm of 24/7/365. How many hours are there in a week? Parenting requires all of them. Some estimates value unpaid mother work at $10 trillion dollars annually.
According to Oxfam, the unpaid care work done by women and girls has an economic value of $10.8 trillion per year and benefits the global economy three times more than the entire technology industry.
"Women are supporting the market economy with cheap and free labour and they are also supporting the state by providing care that should be provided by the public sector," the report notes.
The unpaid work of hundreds of millions of women is generating massive wealth for a couple of thousand (predominantly male) billionaires. "What is clear is that this unpaid work is fuelling a sexist economic system that takes from the many and puts money in the pockets of the few," the report states.
Kindness exploited is political.
Single parenting is so much more difficult than alloparenting. Still, single parenting is, within the existing industrial culture, somewhat easier than partially shared parenting with a partner who is abusive, negligent, distant or disinterested. If only because such partners need caring for as well, and in effect the mother is caring for two - an infant and an immature adult, or worse a dysfunctional and possibly dangerous 'partner'. Stress levels way above any normal healthy background level. Those women who opt for single parenting deserve societal support as much as possible, and to be honest, a lot more is possible than is being provided for now. That needs to change.
Shared child care is evolutionary economics.
Egalitarian and peasant cultures of all kinds are rooted in extended families. Industrial culture has atomised the community, and the presence of extended family care is becoming rarer. Double and Single parenting is a lot more difficult than living with an extended family to share the care
For humans, in evolutionary terms, shared parenting is the bio-logical norm. Children are cared for and nurtured by the community. In egalitarian cultures this is a very well documented dynamic. The evidence base for this is immense. Egalitarian relationships are loving relationships. The children in egalitarian communities form deep bonds with many adults, as much as with each other. The community cares for and nurtures all the children. Children form many healthy attachments.
Attachment Theory
In looking at the relationships that are formed between mother and child in the 1960s, at a time when the nuclear family was very much the majority structure in industrialised cultures, some interested scientists carried out experiments with monkeys, where, unfortunately for the subjects, they mistreated baby monkeys to varying degrees - by separating them from the mother, and then providing a range of fake mothers in the form of a structure (wire cage, wooden body, furry body, furry body that rocked, warm furry body that rocked and so on and a feeding method, a bottle with a teat) designed to mimic the presence of a mother.
What they found was that the baby monkeys would vary in their behaviour as sociable animals, with the least mothered presenting with the most anti-social behaviours. The less warmth with which they were raised, the more defensive their behaviour, the weaker their self regulation, the greater their aggression. These awful experiments were not accurate, in as much as animals in zoos and laboratories are not going to present behaviour that they would do in the wild. Those experiments were de facto torture. Fortunately these experiments were not frequent, and not repeated. That said animal experimentation is still a massive practice of unkindness.
It is a mark of this culture that in order to prove that something is toxic, or harmful that our scientists are driven to experiment with animals - when in fact there is no need to do so, when we know that most of the novel synthetic compounds being tested cannot be broken down by any known biological process, when in this case it is obvious that disruption to any infants relationship with the mother is going to cause problems for that child.
Nonetheless, those experiments and the consequences or 'evidence' of disruption of child-mother bonding formed the scientific germ of the idea of that became Attachment Theory.
The theory stated that the degree of nurturance or disruption of child-mother bonding in infancy - that vulnerable stage - determined the sociability and adult behaviour of the adult to be. One aspect of the theory looked at the setting within which mothering occurs, and took note of external stressors that might impact attachment bonding. A stressed mother can undermine healthy attachment, through no personal fault of her own, simply because she has to endure stresses imposed by external events and actions of others.
Some portrayed this as 'blaming mothers' and used that as a distraction tactic, a way to trigger emotional reactions that led people to reject the ideas of attachment theory.
Attachment Theory was lauded for a brief period, and then fell into relative obscurity, not least because some of it's proponents were suggesting that the troubles of civilisation are behavioural in origin - violence, hierarchies of power, war fare, misogyny, addiction - and have their roots in disrupted child-mother bonding.
This was a bridge too far for the existing psychology and psychiatry industry. Such an assertion, without substantive evidence, challenged the establishment (and everyone else, truth be told) in ways that patriarchy minded authorities rejected, quite forcibly. It questioned their claims on certain universalities of Human Nature and The Human Condition. That was a challenge too far. Attachment theory questions the 'bad seed' world view of behaviour, the idea that some people are born evil.
Attachment Theory 2.0
50 years on, and Attachment Theory has been subjected to and informed by a lot more detailed research. Neuroscience, endocrinology, developmental studies, bio-chemistry, trauma studies, anthropology and other scientific disciplines have gathered a lot of new evidence, using ever more precise technological developments, allowing better measurement, observation and statistical analysis.
Science can describe with ever greater detail and intimacy the processes of brain development from within the womb, through birth and infancy, toddlerhood and onwards. Science can describe with great accuracy how experience and environmental factors have effects that are invisible, that happen beneath the skin and within the skull, yet which lead to outcomes in behaviours that are all too visible and easy to misconstrue.
Current scientific understanding can describe the biology, the bio-chemistry of what is happening within the brain and the body during the development of the emotional self.
Allan Schore describes the biology of affective state self regulation within the context of the carer-brain to infant-brain relationship, and as body to body embodied minds relating to one another, as a dynamic of carer to cared-for, irrespective of gender or biological relationship. Both brains are altered by the experience. Brains are designed to build through experience and as organs our brains are the least constrained by genetics.
“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.”
Whilst there are key dynamics between every mother and her infant child, the development of healthy self regulation is modulated by all carers and the more loving carers a child has, the better it is for that child and consequently the adult the child will become. In essence shared care is an evolutionary dynamic that has altered our brains and our behaviour, for the better, and it underpins our co-operative, egalitarian nature.
Extend that across a population and we can suggest a way to prevent distress emerging in future populations by nurturing the earliest relationships that extended families can provide. Kindness in policy is indeed political.
What is now well established is that the development of affective state emotional self regulation is key to sociability and to competence in learning, and that it is, in healthy conditions, a matter of right brain maturation which is largely complete by age two.
That bears repeating - affective state self regulation is largely matured by age two, in all healthy human children and it is entirely dependent upon the quality of the relationship and interactions of all the adults or carers in that child's life.
The 'terrible twos' is a cultural symptom of distress, not a biological marker.
As I understand it, this is when the infant becomes a walker, and is capable of independent exploration of the new world she or he is in, and the last thing the new explorer needs is a shortened fuse. The care and kindness that earliest empathic parenting is delivered with sets the child up for life and equips the child with affective state self regulation that is necessary for adult life. Beliefs about innate behaviour need to be challenged, especially when they inform public policy discussions.
"“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 cortex from genes.”
In a typical human extended family, child care is shared. That is the norm for all studied egalitarian cultures. That is also the norm in most older pre-industrial sedentary cultures. In peasant families, siblings care for younger sibling;, babies and infants are held by mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and grand parents. This care is typically loving, replete with those little kindnesses that inform life long bonds of friendship and support.
The Nuclear Family and The Factory
In the development of the Industrial Factory and the creation of a worker culture The Protestant Calvinist Religious ideology - the work ethic - was used as a tool of social engineering, and it was deployed to reshape entire communities, to integrate the nuclear family as a universal human characteristic. Christianity does not speak of the relatives of Jesus. The model of the nuclear family suited the factory owners.
In addition because contraception was not used, serial pregnancies were normal outcomes, infant mortality was high, and child care was shared by siblings, aunts and grandparents, and so they all lived within easy reach. This helped build resilient factory system communities out of the destruction of the older peasant communities. The men went to work, and the women collectively cared for the children and the men.
General schools for the workers children were invented to indoctrinate successive generations, and to train future factory workers. Personal development was deliberately ignored as a subject worthy of the educators efforts. Workers children need not study the classics, or Law or philosophy, or the Arts.
Poverty is a structure.
Poverty was and remains a standard status for a large part of the population within inequitable hierarchy of power social systems, as is the concentration of wealth and power in a smaller class who dominate all others. The children born into either do not chose that situation. We call this accident of birth.
. The existence of poverty is unkind, it is a structural and cultural unkindness. It absolutely imposes chronic stress on the families of the poor. The life expectancy of the poorer is always shorter than those of the wealthier. The impact of structural unkindness is meaningful. Thus social solidarity and kindness among impoverished people's and their families is a matter of survival and provides some of the resilience necessary for survival. In the large families typical of impoverished people's child care is to a degree shared by siblings
Nannies and others.
In wealthier families child care is often handed to employed nannies and tutors. Being too busy being rich and powerful to parent, they devolve care for their children to others. Private boarding schools are an expression of class. Nannies are an expression of power. The devolved authoritarian who must deliver the well rounded adolescent who will inherit the dynastic mantle.
In wealthy industrialised countries, where the nuclear family is common, where the tradition of men as bread winners rooted is in the factory system, the bulk of the work of caring falls upon the mother - this is true even in households where both parents are workers earning a wage. In those households, child care is farmed out. And we see the outcome of that in the greater incidence of anxiety and distress among every class within industrialised cultures. A population that is overworked, underpaid, that is working to build economies and working to service debt and neglecting the familial nurturing space is profoundly impacted. Kindness needs people, kindness needs time and space. Kindness is large brained. Unkindness is small minded.
Kindness is political.
Right now, as the pandemic of SARSCOV2 and it's disease CODIV19 rolls out across the Earth's countries, we are seeing the impact of lack of kindness across the developed world, were some nations have rejected zero community transmission strategies for dealing with an epidemic, with intolerable human costs and associated economic costs, all of which is met with continued denial of shared responsibility. That is unkind. That is an institutionalised lack of kindness at scale.
Other countries have adopted zero community transmission, and have avoided all the costs and harms, and that represents a form of institutional kindness. Indeed, Jacinda Ardern is explicit about this, and has been since before her first election into office as New Zealand's Prime Minister.
Kindness is political. Callous disregard is also political.
If we want a healthier future for all our children, and for all their children, then we had better start acting with political kindness in mind at every part of our culture. The bullying is lethal, the bullying is toxic nonsense and in evolutionary terms utterly, utterly irrational. We must bring it to an end, with kindness as our primary ethic.
