Showing posts with label hierarchy. Show all posts

Premium Science and Humane Compassion - Robert Sapolsky on the Neuroscience of Transgender people.

Premium Science and Humane Compassion - Robert Sapolsky on the Neuroscience of Transgender people.

If I see or experience something and I don't KNOW what it is I have three choices.

1. I admit I don't know what it is.

2. I seek information, data, measurements etc to try to understand what it is. I then test that information, data, measurements for veracity.

3. I make something up.

The first two options are science.

The last option is dishonesty.

What will inform my dishonesty?

Deep Science made readily understandable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGBYYcH7CS8

Robert Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinology researcher and author. He is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences, and neurosurgery at Stanford University.

Sapolsky has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Klingenstein Fellowship in Neuroscience.

He was also awarded the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Young Investigator of the Year Awards from the Society for Neuroscience, the International Society for Psychoneuroendocrinology, and the Biological Psychiatry Society.

Deep Compassion.

In this conversation, Robert shares scientific research related to the neurobiology of transgender people with the goal protecting the rights of transgender people via the creation of informed policies.

This discussion is what I call a rational conversation, it avoids the elements we see all too often in what is called debate - it is a win/win discussion rather than a win/lose war of words. The purpose of the conversation is to arrive at a place where the participants and the audience are enlightened and reassured.

Democracy is trapped in an old paradigm - the struggle for Power

We all know the meaning of the term 'office politics' as an indication of power struggles within person to person relationships within an office. Those relationships are inherently adversarial.

Currently every Democracy in place is an adversarial system, with a Government and an Opposition, which renders political discourse to the level of a debate, with a win/lose dynamic that attracts the most effective linguistic bullies who impede rational discussion at every turn. This amounts to Cognitive Warfare.

Election 2024

The recent 'debates' in US and UK Elections are prime examples of this dynamic being deployed to evade the evidence, reinforce bias and opinion, targeting people with emotionally charged cognitive warfare and this exposes the central lies of the Hierarchy of Wealth as Power Cult that dominates our legislatures.

We do not have any egalitarian polities operational at this time, and I suggest that we need such polities, and rapidly. The harm caused by adversarial relationships within Governance structures and between States is beyond measure. It is utterly toxic, and it is not healthy human nature. It is a cultural imposition - hierarchy of Wealth and Power is not a dynamic every baby is born for, it is not the nature of a healthy relationship between adult and child.

We have never studied the neurology of extant egalitarian peoples, left alone their psychologies.

The academic and medical scholarship is rooted in the study of people living within violent hierarchy cultures.

Normalisation and habituation and internalisation of all of that is not healthy biological behaviour, it is not adaptive, it is a coping strategy that is doomed to fail to deliver healthy humane behaviour as a cultural marker.

The psychological environmental movement is in its infancy and is struggling to be cared for and fed in such manner that it might grow, mature and nurture the world from which it has emerged.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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Royalty, Monarchy and Babies - a Poem by an iconoclast.

Crown Jewels of Austria

on Royal Babies -

I make a distinction between the Institution and the person.

The babies born into the institution are always exploited to maintain the institution. The Institution of Monarchy is inherently adverse and corrupt - a hierarchy of power and wealth is an unhealthy cult, wherever it has emerged, it has caused more harm than any of the goods claimed can ever redress.

I wrote this poem to articulate my understanding of this.

_ Royal Babies _

Being born

Into a Family

that dictates

the parameters

of your entire life

in order to

meet the needs of

a thousand year old

Hierarchy of Power,

Wealth and Violence.

That

Is not an easy place to end up.

The person is not the Institution.

The Institution exploits the person.

Abolish the Institution,

free the family,

free their children,

free the people

and

let us

keep it humane

and

just.

Remember this :

when we dehumanise the person,

we maintain the divide.

Elevating or degrading a person for institutional purposes is the same thing - it is dehumanisation. Given the vast harms of violent hierarchies the reality is those harms are not in any way redressed by any of the claims of good done - they only way to solve those harms is to admit them fully, admit the need for accountability and reparations and admit the inherent corruption of Hierarchy of Wealth and Power, dismantle them and build egalitarian, democratic, deliberative, responsive governance structures that meet the needs of the people.

The Problem of Adversarial Politics.

The Problem of Adversarial Politics - Bullying as a modus operandi.

a brief overview

Adversarial dynamics and struggles for power tend towards bullying as an underlay for the flooring of 'debate' - the point is to win, rather than to arrive at an accurate understanding that informs and reassures all involved.

"In good conversation, there is neither victor nor vanquished - there is only better informed and reassured participants."

quote from Tim Field.

https://www3.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol1_1/Burton.htm

"The party political system is historically adversarial. It evolved out of past feudal landlord and commoner confrontations.

It became even more politically divisive with industrialization.

It retained consensus support and remained viable as long as its authorities were in effective control.

The hierarchie's political adversaries and grass roots activists could be criminalised and exiled. Poverty and poverty based crime could be contained by criminalising the impoverished, building more jails and by 'transportation' of the convicted poor and many more impoverished people as indentured workers to build colonies on foreign lands, at the expense of the native peoples.

But with communications that help to establish a separate culture for the under privileged, and with the availability of weapons, effective control of the alienated became ever more difficult.

With economic growth in industrialisation and their democracies there has evolved a dominant middle class. Its members have no desire to be caught in the cross fire of any historical we-they confrontation.

The press, radio and television and, more recently, social media have brought to its attention the absurdities of party political debate as a decision making process.

Furthermore, the members of the dominant `capital' and `labour' parties are now seen to be in conflict largely for personal career reasons, not because of policy differences.

There is a growing consensus that the problems civilization face must be tackled by less adversarial processes in which analysis and reason prevail."

Political Grooming and 'wedge' politics are designed to exacerbate the adversarial dynamics.

Use of dehumanising language targeted the perceived adversaries and marginalised groups within society is evident everywhere.

The 10 stages of Genocide - Sprouts Schools

The term 'sheeple' is a good example of that process, in that it inspires a sense of superiority among those who would use the term to describe others, who are deemed inferior.

We are all familiar with political and vernacular use of the words animal, cockroach, rat, vermin, monster, ape, snake, infestation, parasite, alien, savage and 'hate marches' as weapons.

The lack of humane understanding, the lack of empathy and the reliance on incomplete or inaccurate 'information' bias and curated bigotry are all stimulated by the term 'sheeple'.

This is one example familiar to me within my own situation and I cite it here because so many among my contemporaries, left and right, feel it is fine to use that term. I have always been appalled by that term.

I find that when I challenge it, I experience push back, dismissal and derision and an unwillingness to explore the meaning of use of such terms.

'Sheeple' is no less dehumanising than 'towel heads' or 'faggots' or 'dykes' or any number of similar terms.

Debate or Discourse?

Adversarial dynamics and struggles for power tend towards bullying as a underlay for the flooring of 'debate' - the point is to win, rather than to arrive at an accurate understanding that informs and reassures all involved.

"In good conversation, there is neither victor nor vanquished - there is only better informed and reassured participants."

How bullying works: projection and scapegoating.

Written by Kitty S Jones

https://politicsandinsights.org/2015/01/22/how-bullying-works-projection-and-scapegoating/

"Very few people, when put to the test, have the integrity and moral courage to stand up against bullying, harassment, abuse, threats and corruption. The targets of adult bullying are selected often because they DO have the moral courage to challenge; many people will pass by on the other side.

A target of adult bullying is most often chosen because of their strength, not their weakness. Research shows that targets of bullying tend to have highly developed empathy, and sensitivity for others, a high degree of perceptiveness, high moral values, a well-developed integrity, a strong sense of fair play and reasonableness, a low propensity to violence, a reluctance to pursue grievance, disciplinary or legal action, a strong forgiving streak and a mature understanding of the need to resolve conflict with dialogue.

Often, targets of bullying are independent, self-reliant and “different” in some way. Weak people often disingenuously confuse these hallmarks of character with weakness.

Bullies aim to inflict psychological injury more often than physical injury. Their main aim is to control, discredit, isolate and eliminate their target.

The word “victim” also allows disingenuous people to tap into and stimulate other people’s misconceptions and prejudices of victimhood which include the inference that the person was somehow complicit in the abuse. (See just-world fallacy and victim-blame narrative).

I use the word “target”, which is also accurate because bullying involves the intentional singling out of a person or group for abuse.

Bullies, who have no integrity, are vindictive, aggressive, demanding, and regularly violate others’ boundaries; displaying aggression does not respect peoples’ rights, and a bully’s “requests” come with a negative consequence if the course of action demanded by the bully is declined.

A bully’s bad behaviour is entirely his or her responsibility, they intend to cause their targets harm, to undermine them and damage them socially, emotionally, psychologically and sometimes, physically. And they often do."

Corbyn - making an example

Jeremy Corbyn and the false anti-Semitism, ‘friend of terrorists’, ‘communist spy’, ‘protest politician’ and ‘he’s unelectable’ charges laid against him present a recent and very well documented example of this dreadful behavioural dynamic. It’s sole purpose was to prevent a genuinely honest politician with a track record for integrity, honesty, empathy and a good understanding of the issues facing the body politic and society at large from gaining the position of Prime Minister, with a majority in the House of Commons.

That bullying campaign was perpetrated within the Labour Party by a group who were aligned with Blairism (and its wars) and this was replicated throughout the News Media and online, through social media micro targeting campaigns, funded and supported by those concerned with Wealth Extraction and their power to protect Wealth Extraction from accountability for the avoidable harms it refuses, repeatedly, to avoid.

Healthy Governance - avoiding avoidable harms.

The function of a healthy governance system is to maintain and support the population in living well and at peace.

Part of that process is the deployment collective resources to avoid avoidable harm and to prevent preventable harms.

There are harms that cannot be avoided and there are harms that can be avoided.

War can be avoided. War can be prevented.

However as we see, again and again War is not avoided and we know too well that within war the murder of civilians and the destruction of civil infrastructure which form the essentials for ‘living well’ - schools, health care facilities, housing, roads, utilities - which are the basic human right of a civilian population caught in the crossfire of warfare - tends not to be avoided, more often than not by conscious choice. The destruction is intentional, not accidental.

Collateral Damage : A euphemism designed to throw a veil over the realities of warfare.

We cannot stop a violent hurricane from causing destruction - we can however build infrastructure designed to withstand the impact of such natural catastrophes. We could deploy resources to protecting the affected people’s welfare, supporting them in the recovery process.

Resilience

Rather than raw personal human resilience, we could choose to build in resilience as an infrastructure policy and thus offer more effective and efficient support for the people made vulnerable by the storm.

Likewise, regards Climate Disruption, we cannot stop the process underway because it is the result of a few centuries of build up of Carbon Dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere that will take centuries to reverse. We can reduce or stop further pollution yet the effect of such action will take decades to be felt.

What we can do is design resilience into infrastructure, social care, wealth sharing, aid systems and so on to offer best support and protection of the people made most vulnerable by Climate Disruption - that would be a matter of avoiding avoidable harms in the near, medium and long term.

Bullying in politics is lethal.

Bullying in politics undermines all these objectives and more by at attacking the proponents of equitable industrial, social and economic policy as a method of defending the status quo, a status quo born of adversarial violence as described in the beginning of this piece.

This thing of being alive is lovely - which is why we must confront the bully culture.

This thing of being alive is lovely.

Ordinary people, people like you and I, and especially the low income workers, who make most of the real wealth in this world, through daily toil: every hour of our lives is equally precious. And yet the largest proportion of the wealth we generate is extracted and accumulated and used as a tool to dominate us. The poor are a permanent externalised cost of that extraction process. I think of that as a fundamental and abominable insult to the very gift of life itself.

“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

The story of how life moved from bacteria to plants, to animals, to forests and plains full of living creatures, all the way to people singing songs, laughing with children as we play and learn together, crying when we hurt, seeing, tasting, hearing, running and sleeping to awaken again, and everything else that emerges from being alive and human and loving and sensitive. How lovely it is to be a warm friendly, loving sensitive humane being! No machine, no invention can ever match that!

Humour me, and stop right now - gaze at your hand, close it as you take a gentle breath in and as you exhale feel your hand and fingers, breathe into your hand and fingers. Do this again, and close your eyes, and then move, move your fingers gently, and feel how utterly strangely wonderful this ability to use a hand really is. Then grip something tightly, with all your strength and relax to hold it ever so gently, finding your lightest touch possible. Such a range of capability, such potential for finesse.

Isn't it amazing?

I do this and I think of the millions of years of evolution that went it to making this possible and I am filled with awe and gratitude. I am excited by this thought, this feeling. I think I did nothing to make this possible. How did I, this consciousness, arrive with this incredible set of capabilities? How lucky am I to be so gifted? Are we not truly blessed?

I am more often than not quietly in awe and gratitude for being alive, even though some days I am deeply depressed, or insanely angry, or confused or frightened, or just meh! A toothache is horrible and there are many other pains that are harder to bear, that take the delight out of the moment.

Justice is rooted in sensitivity

Nonetheless, I know that this thing of being alive is oh so precious, for me and for you and for every baby born, for every person who lives, every being that lives - and this, this feeling is why I detest the bully cult so much - how dare they (whoever they are) intrude upon that feeling, impinge on that sensitive life in others, and disturb it, taint it, trample all over it for their power, wealth and pomp. How dare they! That is the seat of my feeling of injustice, at it's most visceral. Before words, the feeling. Babies know this. Infants and toddlers know this. All young children know this. Innate.

The symptoms of chronic trauma are not a disorder.

People who cause trauma, who deliberately expose others to avoidable harms, are a disorder. People who expose others to chronic stress in order to accumulate wealth and power are a disorder.

Social systems that deny these simple truths are disordered. The symptoms presenting in people who have been harmed are not a disorder. They are symptoms, understandable symptoms.

George Bush and Tony Blair are disordered. As leaders or presenters or spokespersons of the institutions of competing militarised powers, they are a disorder. They are a dysfunctional psychology in action.

If they were indicted and put on trial, that would probably go a long way to helping all those harmed by their actions come to better terms with their lived experience, especially if the outcome was to prevent future wars. Most survivors do not want what happened to them to happen to anyone else, ever.

And for me it's not about punishing Blair and Bush et al. although I understand that drive, to hit back, to see that the person who has harmed shares the pain in some way - for me it primarily is about preventing future harms by showing that we, the grass roots, are willing to intervene and forcibly impede those who would initiate and prosecute war or harm causation. Holding them to account and putting them in prison is a matter of health and safety more than it is a matter of punishment. A warning. Don't you dare even think about initiating such action!

It is also true that to indict Bush and Blair is, for so many people, already too late. The vast harm they and those institutions they were embedded has caused is already done, and cannot be undone. Millions are suffering, un-necessarily. Their precious lives have been trampled upon and desecrated. How do we face that? What do we need to do to ease all that suffering?

The past is finished, the future is always unfinished.

How we move in the present matters because here is where we determine the potential of the future. That we recognise what happened in the past and confront it matters in the present because it must be done in the present, it cannot be put off until tomorrow, or the day after, or next week, next month. It must be done in the present.

Part of the difficulty is a general sense of fatalism. Part of the difficulty is that few, if any, will acknowledge that we live within a violent hierarchy cult that has caused millennia of harm, that is causing immense harm today, that appears to be on a trajectory of more harm into the future, we are led to believe by it's size and ubiquity that it is indeed inevitable, there's a deterministic attitude associated with how this history is regarded, how it is understood. Understandable, from the individual perspective. How can I an impotent single human do anything about this?

In spite of all that it does not have to be this way, at all. It is this way, yet it does not have to be, into the future. The future is unfinished. There are more of the decent folk than there are bullies and barbarians. With solidarity the odds are in our favour.

Who pays the price?

1. Externalised costs means that ALL accumulated wealth from industrial culture is toxic, without exception. In war, who pays the price?

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2021/08/externalised-costs-much-more-than.html

2. Because of point 1. the bulk of what we call profit is in fact a cultural and social material deceit.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2019/12/profit-and-deceit-stripping-it-down-to.html

3. Governance of the shared commons implies duty of care which in turn demands an evidence based approach to all activity and policy that affects the shared commons.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-metric-for-governance-uk-election-2017.html

Any activist that is not integrating these three elements is failing to address reality as it really is.

Poverty is a weapon system.

It’s an open secret that a lot of people in work mostly think poor people are poor because they are inferior. This is a core component of Industrial Social Conditioning.

"The Poor Will Always Be With Us."

That is a lie upon which concentrated wealth and power is founded.

It is also built into every hierarchy religion, it is a lie built into mainstream psychiatry, mainstream psychology and mainstream marketing. The only reason 'the poor will always be with us' is because the system mandates that poverty must be maintained as a whip that is used to keep workers working for industries that cause harm as they operate to accumulate wealth and power into the hands of a hegemonic class, the Ruling Class.

And for those of us who are poor we are made to feel a cloud of shame while the others are destroying the environment and looking down on us.

So the problem is clearly laid out.

Life is utterly amazing and precious, bullies undermine that at every turn, it doesn't have to be this way.

We understand it and thus the next question is how do we resolve the problem?

How do we end the culture of bullying?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Choice and Freedom: Wear a mask, be kind, stay safe, stop the spread, spread the Love.

Choice and Freedom

If I am free to choose, and if my choice causes harm to another person, a harm that they then cannot avoid, what then, of their freedom? My choice has removed their freedom to be free of harm.

What of mine?

You - yes... you, the person who might be reading this and might be thinking, "I will not wear a mask! My freedom to choose matters!"

I guarantee that you did not come up with the freedom of choice agenda about wearing/not wearing a mask, in this epidemic and global pandemic, all on your own - someone whispered it into your digital ear.

You did not originate that thought yourself. I know this. You know it too.

Thinking is more than having thoughts. It involves following those thoughts through, and examining them in depth, testing them against what you already know to be true.

Hierarchy, and Hitler was a Lefty!

Hitler was a violent Hierarch. The organisation he headed up had Socialist in it's name. Everyone knows the Nazi ideology was anti-socialism. Stalin was not a socialist either, he was a military dictator. Churchill was also a military dictator, albeit guided by a military committee.

Perhaps within a hierarchy of violence system, everyone is a fascist, by default.

Not because they want to be, but because there are no truly egalitarian operations happening within this system. No place to be egalitarian.

We all pay rent to someone.

Perhaps that's really difficult to really look at.

Every Hierarchy of Power and Violence is just that, whether we call it Nazi, Communist, Democracy, Monarchy, Gang, Abuse Family, Religious State, Empire, Federation or Union.

It's all the same blood spattered room, just a different pattern of wallpaper.

Hierarchy systems have to condition the people to habituate to being exploited, to see the system as normal.

No child left behind.

Everyone must be educated! Self education is considered a threat, so much so that education is mandatory in many countries, truancy is a crime.

Perhaps everybody within a hierarchy system who seeks to reform the system with a better hierarchy is a deluded fascist, deluded in that hierarchies always produce people who want to topple the hierarchy, which creates an inevitable tension that causes those in charge to exercise violence to maintain their version of the status quo. For your own good, they say to the people at large.

Egalitarian cultures are healthy cultures, the biological default is trust..

“In other words, the default state is to trust, and what the amygdala does is learn vigilance and distrust.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

The context of this statement by Sapolsky is that we are sensitive, vulnerable babies who learn by experience, that our behaviour is mostly learned. Very little of our behaviour is predetermined. And the science suggests strongly that the default state, the base line of healthy behaviour resolves around trust.

“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.”

― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Cults and Clubs.

Hierarchy cultures are cults - they have to dominate every child's mind and psyche, they have to habituate everyone to the 'normalcy' of hierarchy...

Left/right is just a set piece, a clever ploy, a distraction that is meaningless in that it does not lead to the kind of healthy change we need, it impedes learning and healing.

Marx's theories would still have led to workers destroying the planet.

NeoLiberalism is destroying the planet just as assuredly as Chinese Socialist Capitalism is.

Perhaps.

To me it does not make bio-logical sense to 'create' a species that is dysfunctional.

It makes more sense to say that a functional species placed under chronic stress will become dysfunctional.

Fact: an aboriginal body in a rain forest is as evolved for egalitarian relationships as my body in London.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways

"We citizens of a modern democracy claim to believe in equality, but our sense of equality is not even close to that of hunter-gatherers.

The hunter-gatherer version of equality meant that each person was equally entitled to food, regardless of his or her ability to find or capture it; so food was shared. It meant that nobody had more wealth than anyone else; so all material goods were shared.

It meant that nobody had the right to tell others what to do; so each person made his or her own decisions.

It meant that even parents didn't have the right to order their children around; hence the non-directive childrearing methods that I have discussed in previous posts. It meant that group decisions had to be made by consensus; hence no boss, "big man," or chief."

The difference is the culture.

In terms of sensory capacity, in terms of the capability to be loving and of being loved, in terms of creativity and intelligence required to build shelter, to find food, the energy and effort to care for children and elders we are precisely and beautifully evolved, and bio-logically adapted for healthy relationships.

The difference is the culture you grow up within, and what it tells you about how you 'should' behave and what to expect.

I live in London, the cultural center of a hierarchy of power and violence.

No such hierarchy persists in old growth rain forest.

Peter Gray, again, explains it another way: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/freedom-learn/201105/human-nature-teaching-ii-how-hunter-gatherers-taught

"As I explained in that earlier post, hunter-gatherers had faith that their children would, on their own initiatives, learn what they needed to know, and so they did not worry about their children's education or attempt to control it.

Moreover, hunter-gatherers held strongly to the values of personal autonomy and equality. They believed that it is wrong for anyone to try to control another person's life, either in the short run or the long run, even if that other person is a child. Hunter-gatherers believed that it is presumptuous for anyone to think that they know what is best for another person."

For most of us habituated to hierarchies of power systems thinking, this is all idealist and dangerous nonsense. But is it?

Obviously any transition from where we, in this Industrialised Hierarchy of Power and Violence culture, are towards a culture approaching that degree of mature kindness is going to be a rather large undertaking, yet that does not mean it is impossible, does it?

Wear a mask, be kind, stay safe, stop the spread, spread the love.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Who to Vote for in a Warring State?

"The fact is that we (the adult world) do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children. We are like managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow, London, Peking and Paris and all the other capitals of the world". ~ John Holt

Peace is more than the absence of War

Who to vote for?

John Holt, a world renowned educator and author, makes a pertinent observation of the power dynamic of Schools in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

“School tends to be a dishonest as well as a nervous place. We adults are not often honest with children, least of all in school. We tell them, not what we think, but what we feel they ought to think; or what other people feel or tell us they ought to think.

The fact is that we (the adult world) do not feel an obligation to be truthful to children. We are like managers and manipulators of news in Washington, Moscow, London, Peking and Paris and all the other capitals of the world.

We think it is our right and our duty, not to tell the truth but to say whatever will best serve our cause – in this case, the cause of making children grow up into the kind of people we want them to be, thinking whatever we want them to think.

We have only to convince ourselves (and we are very easily convinced) that a lie will be ‘better’ for the children than the truth, and we will lie. We don’t always need even that excuse; we often lie only for our own convenience.”

- 1964, from a talk by John Holt who carried out thousands of hours of acute observation of children in schools across America.

How much does this still resonate, in 2017, in the UK?

I think the public and official discourse around War (and much else besides) as it exists in the UK 2017 General Election - or any national election, and even each bye-elections - for Parliament reminds me somewhat of this “dishonest and nervous place.”

Who to vote for in a warring State?

One way of placing the election in context, I would suggest. For any democratic election, any time, anywhere when States wage war as a 'last resort' tool of 'foreign policy'.

Rather focus’s the mind, don’t you think?

The fact that this is not a central question in this General Election, given that the powers of ‘defence/offence’ and ‘foreign policy' (keep the diamond mines British!) are being handed over to an elected person in this Election is troubling. It’s irrational, though those who would, for whatever reason, wish to avoid the issue, it might appear a rational avoidance.

How can you vote for that?

Indoctrination is the very dark 'art' of convincing someone that the external value presented is intrinsic, internal, part of the person.

It requires that the target loses touch with what ought to be emergent, the natural sense of self, and replaces that with an externally driven identity through which loyalty and submission to the indoctrinating system, are assured.

It's rude, and it is also a toxic mime of 'Education'.

In a healthy Society such abuse would be impossible, unthinkable.

Warring States. The unthinkable, the intolerable, the unacceptable.

The USA, UK, France, Russia and their allies The Saudi’s, the Qatari’s and the Israeli’s.

2017. The UK General Election.

War Policies?

What are the war policies of the active candidates?

More importantly, what are your (my readers) War Policies, and will anyone support those?

This democracy is a veil.

It looks good, and yet the wind of honesty passes right through it, does not fill it's sails, and the fantasy ship is but a barge of mechanised death, decorated like a General’s breast pocket with gaudy baubles and pomp, going nowhere, because it is aground.

The mist is strong, and the tide is out. And its return is inevitable.

The tide will come back in.

Nature cannot be dominated indefinitely by anything that emerges out of it’s mystery of Life.

Healthy Internalisation?

I think that the natural healthy version of internalisation is honesty and living practice, experience and learning gained by observing healthy adults and being respected and treated humanely at all times..

I feel that it is innate, that it is a default setting of the natural child. It is a sensitivity to be able to learn, and it is also a vulnerability.

The art of learning through time and experience, sense and environment... the natural child who is secure will recognise aspects of self in all areas of life and living things, which can then meet the externals, the content of the child’s habitat and make sense of them, and then model them and internalise them so they are in RAM mode available, so to speak.... once internalised they do not have to think using the intellect to grasp the meaning of what is being observed or interacted with in their world.

This is also useful for anyone living closely with plants and animals, in a dynamic environment, as part of a co-operative collective.

It is a evolved mode of information gathering, data acquisition and storage as part of optimal human biological health.

Mirror Neurons existence and operation supports this view: what we see we can also sense, we can imagine within our minds, we can learn from the actions of others, we can practice in our minds.

We feel into the world, we model it and we move it within ourselves.

This is learning.... responding to what is changing, availing of new information to meet those dynamics and remain sustainable, nurturant.

Healthy Governance - An Alternative Metric

I think of Healthy Governance as being the practical realities of administering a communities shared resources for the equal benefit of all members of that community and the habitat within which or from which that community emerges.

In the case of developed States, and Governance this relates to taxation, which is collected from all, in one way or another, and is the community shared resource – it does not BELONG to the Government, they hold it in trust.

Apply that metric to policy.

What are the implications of administering a community shared resource?

- it must be evidence based, as a duty of care

- adverse outcomes must be avoided, and where they occur, by accident or lack of foresight, or due to changes beyond human agency, they must be remedied immediately.

- long term health and safety is as much a priority as short term health and safety

- The policies must be proven to nurture the whole community, in a balanced and healthy manner.

This metric applies also to the seas, waterways, lands we inhabit. These too are shared community resources, and not just for us humans of developed societies.

We share this Earth. Fact.

Healthy Governance.

For me, this old politic of competing powers is immature, it is a diseased way of conducting matters, and utterly toxic.

I cannot participate in current political discourse because this fundamental truth is being ignored, denied, avoided across all mainstreams, and beyond.

The system is bullying that has become institutionalised, and I cannot vote for it to continue.

Who to vote for in a Warring State?

Interview with Inger Skjelsbæk who works with PRIO. The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) conducts research on the conditions for peaceful relations between states, groups and people.

Researchers at PRIO seek to understand the processes that bring societies together or split them apart. We explore how conflicts erupt and how they can be resolved; we investigate how different kinds of violence affect people; and we examine how societies tackle crises – and the threat of crisis. We document general trends, seek to understand processes, and inform concrete responses.

"We focus a lot more on conflict than we do on what peace actually is. What is it that creates well-being? What is it that makes you feel at ease in your own skin, in your own life, in your own sociopolitical context? What does it take? All narratives about who you are and what your prospects are, and how that impacts your well-being, depend on how these stories are reinforced or challenged by the communities you live in. If peace is just the absence of war, then you have peace lots of places. But if peace is also well-being and resilience to conflicts, then it is more challenging."

Healthy Governance is an immense challenge facing us, and we had best do what we can to ensure our children's children do not have to do what we did not do, when we could have.

Who to vote for in a warring State?

Kindest regards

Corneilius

"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"

*If you like this post, if you found the themes resonant, if you agree in part, would you be kind enough to let others know about it? I would really appreciate that. You could drop a comment too, if you felt the urge. Or not. I will moderate contributions, and block any that are abusive. For obvious reasons. Thank you for reading.

The Grooming Culture of Hierarchical Power in Industrial Militarised Cultures.

If I have a personal feeling or sense of identification towards a celebrity, a flag, a state, a company or any other entity that is presented to me for consumption, then I have probably been successfully groomed.

"The grooming (gaslighting) of human vulnerability is one of most vile things any human being can do to another."

These are all internalised values - referring to the fact that the values originate from outside us, and we take them in, we integrate them to such extent, largely through habituation, that they become part of who we sense ourselves to be.

No more Heroes.

No more Saints.

Organised Religion, and Hierarchies of Power, Violence and Wealth are all grooming experts.

They have to be.

Bullies retain dominance by violence or deceit, by creating artificial power disparities, and exploiting them.

Grooming Gangsters.

Brexit and the recent US Elections were both adept well resourced grooming exercises where evidence was routinely ignored on all sides, and people were deliberately triggered on both sides, on all sides, in order to exploit the people's emotional reactions for political advantage.

Gammon vs Traitor, Boomer vs Millennial, Alpha Male vs Feminazi, Alt-Right vs Leftie, Capitalist vs Communist.... we all fell for it, didn't we? We used these terms in our conversations, and spat them out as petty hatreds that allowed us to vent our frustrations at our political impotence.

Healthy human beings do not do this, nor do healthy egalitarian cultures do 'celebrity.'

Lady Gaga speaking for Hilary Clinton. Really?

It was a performance, an epic moment of careful grooming.

I thought and felt that it was utterly appalling. I felt that it was ugly behaviour being normalised because few were willing to call it ugly.

Internalisation.

It might be a difficult thing to do, it was for me, to separate and remove these internalisation's that become part of one's sense of self, but I know this - they are undermining my true self, my emergent self and they are not healthy.

As a good friend put it, "Identity pegged to the pathology of an illusion."

All dehumanisation is based on grooming. All grooming is dehumanised.

All celebrity likewise.

The existence of the British Monarchy is a prime example of grooming strategies utilised by a power structure.

Take a good look at why the Parliament brought the Monarchy back. (To unite the nation.... to give the ordinary folk, who were in much distress, something to rally behind, to shut them up) or refer back to Magna Carta and the reasons behind the deal made, which both sides abrogated as soon as they could, for very different reasons. Magna Carta had nothing to do with the rights of ordinary humans.

The King as a necessary uniting device.

"For God, King and Country."

How many millions have gone to their deaths, and worse, have participated in slaughter of innocents, with that call reverberating in their minds?

This kind of institutional grooming enables the few to gather the resources of the many, and then claim they are somehow better than then many (because they have hoodwinked them with violence and craft) and so ought hold that wealth to themselves, no matter what the cost to the majority.

The New Age.

New Age Grooming - take the concept of a personal 'spirit animal', for example.

Who claims a slug as theirs, or a rat, or a pigeon or any of the common animals in urban areas? The animals we live with?

Who?

Spirit Animals in animist cultures were about the animals those people lived with, animals they observed, animals the knew well, and the idea of spirit animal as part of their understanding of those animals and themselves in that situation. Totally inappropriate to the urban dweller in the industrial civilisation.

Useless, other than as an entertainment.

And people make lots of money out of it.

"Everything happens for a reason!"

Exploitation. But let's not mention that, let's pretend it is The Universe moving in mysterious ways. God. Learning to live with abuse drives people out of their minds, their hearts, their souls.

It is also a distraction from the issues, personal and communal, that we face.

That distraction is essential to avoid the awareness of exploitation.

Infatuation, 'pulling', seduction, any gift that has an expectation of an outcome, any lobbyists bribe, the ethics of predatory sex, pick up merchants, etc ... all grooming.

Grooming is one of the core dynamics of this 'civilisation' - those who refuse are murdered in their millions.

Grooming is a behaviour pattern known only in hierarchically violent societies.

Grooming gangsters.

The vast majority of pre-conquest cultures that were/are egalitarian hold the autonomy of the person/spirit to be utterly sacred.

They saw and understood that living organisms are all autonomous - they grow their own way.

They understood that they could hunt and eat, but not interfere with their lives apart from that, without causing serious damage to that species and to their own sustainability.

No healthy society hunts prey to extinction, neither do natural predators.

If it does happen there is always a chronic stressor interjecting.

Always.

Most were gardeners, then gatherers, then hunters. In that order, which is logical

You know your world, You see plants and seeds and you assist that to assure food supply, the rest is working with the seasons.

The image of the savage wild hunter, the alpha male 'ug ug' man competing for position, with females seeking the best competitor is also a culturally dishonest narrative, a mater of grooming, there is no reliable evidence for that assumption.
Grooming is targeting known vulnerabilities to enable exploitation.

Trump excelled in this election in that regard.

So too Nigel Farage.

Jimmy Savile. Cyril Smith. Tens of thousands of clerics.

Media advertising geared to what is called 'aspirational marketing' where the message is if you buy this you will be cool, or if you don't you won't.

Grooming.

The objection to the marketing we see every day in the Tube system is a genuine concern. Is your body 'beach ready'?

Seduction and Education : role reversals in an Institutional setting.

The original meaning of the word seduction is to 'lead away from'... Trump seduced millions. Farage seduced Millions. Blair seduced millions.

In an ironic contrast 'educare' the root of 'Education' means 'to be present at the birth of', as in the role of a good mid wife.

The healthy midwife does not alter the child's psyche. Education, when it is compulsory, totally alters the child's psyche. It is a seduction.

It is a seduction, bur with coercion behind it. Reward, sanction, test, failure.
Alice Miller noticed that there was no commandment, amongst the ten that Christianity acclaims, which directed folk to honour the child. A serious omission indeed, and this omission is at the heart of the issues we are dealing with.

To honour the child, one must never break the child's boundaries or usurp his or her true self and autonomy.

"All is born of woman, no harm shall come to the children."

The entire structure of hierarchical power rests on the breaking of these lines, those boundaries as a normative.
Austerity cuts are hitting Women and Children across the world, as people are being groomed to accept it as necessary, by dehumanising the vulnerable, lying about the outcomes and dismissing the evidence.

This too is grooming.

ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE - all child abuse is war.

Examine the grooming of the British people who did not want to go to war in WWI, or the American people either for that matter.

Examine the grooming in Hitler's Germany, observe it in Japan at the same time.

Colin Powell with a vial of white powder, an authority shouting 'Boogie Man!"

We who are serious about contributing to the welfare of all our contemporaries and all our descendants must get to grips with this, at the personal, institutional and collective levels. Rapidly.
We will only find the truths in this by ruthlessly honest reflection. It cannot be explained in ways that replace it being experienced.

Our attachments and unresolved insecurities will block that.

So don't be too hard or harsh on ourselves, let us take the time to go deep, as we take action.

It is a life's work.

It is good work.

It is love in action.

And so it goes.