The Psychology of a culture is revealed and perpetuated in how they relate to and treat their children and in how they relate to and treat the most vulnerable people within their society. Heal that and we can heal everything.
Emotional Intelligence is one of the most beautiful aspects of being a genuinely healthy evolved human being, a person. Kindness prevails and supports a state of Thrivival. Thrivival is so much more than mere Survival.
It takes almost no effort to submit to a violent hierarchy, to get by. That said the distress of living under a violent hierarchy generates chronic stressors that make life still very difficult indeed, with reasonable cause of anxiety, sadness, despair all of which require great effort to manage.
It takes immense effort to stand up to a violent hierarchy in order to thrive well.
That effort is made less of a burden when the majority of the population take it on as their task. This is a numbers game, We do have the numbers.
We need to de-numb ourselves, and that will require we care more for each other, even for strangers in our midst.
All is born of woman, no harm shall come to the children.
Kropotkin was correct in his insights, which aligned with those of Darwin : Mutual Aid is the healthiest state of the human species. The Egalitarian Psychology of Human Evolution is our oldest state. This video, from Radical Anthropology, examines aspects of this. Well worth a viewing and reviewing as it presents substantive evidence of our egalitarian roots as a marker of health for our species.
Jerome Lewis on Egalitarian Cultures Child Care and Gender Relations.
It is really important, I think, for Western civilians to understand that egalitarian culture is an expression of our most healthiest evolved state as a species. Egalitarian culture demands active daily effort to maintain the egalitarian frameworks and sensibilities, and it is not a 'romantic utopian' task - it requires emotional intelligence, robust fitness, constant care, courage and empathy.
The author at a protest march sometime ago.
Warfare is rooted in institutionalised child abuse and the adverse impacts of warfare harm children, leaving a trace of distress and traumatisation that lingers for generations.
Wealth-as-Power
We live within a Wealth-as-Power Cult that is emotionally damaged, immature and insecure. This is where the violence we are all witnessing comes from. Wealth-as-Power can only exist through the intentional and deliberate exploitation of entire populations. This is unjust. It also generates dissent and resistance, precisely because it is unjust.
The people who operate Wealth-As-Power know this and that renders them ever insecure. They cannot sleep sound at night knowing that the unjustness of their cause may generate emergent solidarity amongst the exploited which might hold them accountable for the many avoidable harms they have caused, and are causing and intend to cause, as they pursue the Power to maintain Wealth Extraction, most often by force or manipulation.
Trump
When the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martín laughed with Trump as he made a joke about the Irish housing crisis that is harming millions of Irish people, he presented his lack of emotional intelligence, his lack of courage and clarity. At the same time he pushed back on Irish economic activity with the USA, citing the example of Ryan Air and others who are Boeings largest international clients.
In some ways he played Trump during the visit, in order to protect Irish interests, in ways that show he is more mature than Trump, yet that is quite a low bar. Indeed he did not confront Trump over issues in Ukraine and Palestine. Walking on eggshells.
Playing each other is toxic
I believe we need political leaders who do not stoop to playing each other. we need forthright, honest, capable political leaders and legislators and parties that will do the work required to hold those who cause avoidable harm accountable, as a process of prevention of further avoidable harm.
Both men represent Wealth-as-Power, Patriarchy and the continuation of the avoidable harm causation. Neither man proposes practical solutions to de-escalation of conflict. Martín is avoiding bring in the Occupied Territories Bill in the Irish Dáil, in spite of the demands of the majority of the Irish citizenry.
Micheál Martín wants the Irish State to drop its Neutrality Status to enable the sending of young Irish men and women to war zones as active combatants, rather than as peace keepers. This is unconscionable and incredibly stupid. We need to end warfare in order to build the cooperation to meet the challenges of Climate Disruption, and to end the injustice of competing warring state. We Irish do not need to escalate warfare, we need to stand to bring it to an end. This is true for the vast majority of humans alive today.
Emotional intelligence starts in utero, is matured in infancy and practiced throughout a healthy life within a healthy community. This is a biological mandate for optimal human health as individuals and as collectives.
Sarah Blatter Hrdy wrote a book called 'Mothers and Others' to present a hypothesis concerning the development of alloparenting as a key dynamic in the evolution of egalitarian humanity. Allan Schores work confirms that hypothesis.
An egalitarian family group in a river, at ease with their environment.
The emotional mature Corbyn and the emotionally immature Starmer. One seeks to nurture, the other to dominate.
This is a true representation of the hearts and minds of these men.
Starmer is intentionally removing social care supports for young people to drive them into low paid work, or worse, to drive sufficient numbers into the military as he gears up for escalation of warfare. He knows exactly what he is doing, he knows the avoidable harms this will cause and he continues nonetheless.
Corneilius
Thank you for reading this blog.
"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."
This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.
A basic principle or axiom of living organisms as species is the fact of biologically optimal healthy behaviour as the evolutionary norm for the entire species, behaviour which adds to the fecundity of life, incrementally, day by day, week by week, year by year, millennia by millennia. This is not a random outcome.
The River Lee in Cork, Ireland
If I take the human species out of the picture of life on Earth, and consider what is done, what happens across biological life, and ask the question : what is the purpose of life, the answer I get is to nurture more fecundity into the shared environment, adapting to the dynamic changes inherent to the variables of wealth, climate, altitude, topography, soil, geological change, occasional asteroids, water quality and type and many others.
Bacteria do this. Worms do this. Bears do this. Flies do this. Spiders do this. Ants do this. Wolves do this. Elephants do this. Trees do this. Fungi do this. Every living organism does this. Chimpanzees do this. Ducks to this. Ostriches do this. Sea Slugs do this. Coral Reef does this. Forests to this. Grasslands do this. Deserts do this.
What then, is the purpose of another species, the human species, in all of this?
To nurture the shared environment through naturally evolved optimally healthy behaviour.
As mammals, we are formed in the womb, where all our needs are met. We are born vulnerable, and for 18 months minimum all our needs must be met by our family and community. Indeed it is also the case that as we grow, become youth, become adults and then elders, all our needs are met by the behaviour of ourselves and our community, living as we do within the total environment.
We feed on plants and their fruits, we feed on other mammals, on fish, on insects.
The care of children indicates a necessity for empathy and kindness, mastery and robust physical health, psychological balance and intelligent creativity.
The care of adults and elders indicates a necessity for empathy and kindness, mastery and robust physical health, psychological balance and intelligent creativity.
In my view the purpose then is to live well, to nurture one another and our shared environment.
Every behaviour that undermines or impedes this is clearly unhealthy.
The fact that when behaviour that undermines all this is prevalent we suffer deeply, we are distressed, we live in a state of chronic stress that presents as disease or illness. We are not adapted well to being bullied, exploited or enslaved. We may well cope with being forced to endure those conditions, but we are not well adapted to them. This tells me these conditions are counter-evolutionary.
Being a nurturant species demands cognitive kindness as a social norm, a cultural norm, a societal norm.
Our purpose here is to be kind, to be loving, to be robust and this requires psychological and physiological health, for which we are quite well evolved.
The immense variation of our shared world, in terms of geographical variation leads to a rich and diverse expression of our ways of living, adapting to each variation as we walked across this Earth.
None of this ignores the facts of suffering due to loss, accident, environmental disaster and occasional disease and ill health. Our innate sensitivity is imbued with vulnerability.
I do not propose an ideal utopia so much as suggest there is a biologically optimally healthy norm, from which Hierarchy of Wealth as Power culture has always deviated, because inherent to the institutionalisation of a hierarchy of wealth as power is the exploitation of a larger healthy vulnerable population by a smaller violent, hardened psychologically unhealthy population.
Given that this is our purpose, the problem of how we confront the unhealthy behaviour of hierarchies of Wealth and Power can be addressed as a matter of recovery of biologically optimal health behaviours as individuals, families, communities, cultures and as a species.
How do we recover our evolutionary biologically optimal human behavioural dynamic? That is not our purpose, that is our task, our challenge that is the path to returning to our purpose.
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.
Here is the re-write. I think Ian might have appreciated this re-write. I will never know.
"Woke Up!"
"Woke Up And Make Peace, With Us."
I come awoke
With a gift for Humankind
Some're still asleep
But the gift don't seem to mind
Rise from the oppression
Woke has got your back
Bringing down the bullies
Nurturing your mind....
You look so self-possessed
I won't disturb your rest
It's frightening when you're sleeping
and wide awake is best.
Wake up and make Woke with us,
Woke up and make Peace
Wake up and make Woke today.
I don't want to make you
I'll let the heart take you
And you'll wake up and make WOKE!.
I woke up in the morning,
in a VERY peaceful mood, I know Earth built my home.
and it's very, very good. Air, Rock and Water Sunshine giving light.. I'm woke and awake And I know that WAR is SHITE!
I come awoke
In a thorny morning mood
And have a proper niggle
At the haughty rabid dudes.
Revolt against the bullies
Get them when they lie,
What happens is truth wins,
It's also very goooood.
I'll go and get the info,
And make some tea and toast
You have another sleep, love
It's you that needs woke most
Woke up and make Peace with me
Wake up and make Woke
Woke up and make Peace with me
I don't want to make you
I'll let the fancy take you
And you'll wake up and make Woke!
Woke up and make Peace with me
Woke up and make Peace
Woke up and make Peace with us
Woke up and make Peacee (PC, lol!)
Woke up
Woke up
Woke up
Wake up!
-- That's it.... lolz. ~ Some history on the term Culture Wars, as a context to this rewrite..
In American usage, "culture war" may imply a conflict between those values considered traditionalist or conservative and those considered progressive or liberal. This usage originated in the 1920s when urban and rural American values came into closer conflict.
This followed several decades of immigration to the States by people who earlier European immigrants considered 'alien'. It was also a result of the cultural shifts and modernizing trends of the Roaring '20s, culminating in the presidential campaign of Al Smith in 1928.
In subsequent decades during the 20th century, the term was published occasionally in American newspapers...
A wider, deeper context.
If we are to be honest we have to admit that's not just that there are 'culture wars' - is that we live within a War Culture.
'Culture War' is a term the Authoritarian Wealth Extraction Element(AWEE - they are taking the piss) crafted to push back against Critical Race Theory, Feminism, Equity Economics, Environmentalism, Climate Disruption being revealed and a range of other learnings that confront the AWEE with the harms they are causing to people and place, for profit.
The War Culture is waging wars for profit. Russia vs Ukraine, Israel vs Palestine, USUK vs Iraq, NATO vs Afghanistan, NATO vs Libya, NATO vs Syria, Saudi vs Yemen, propaganda abounds as 'truth is the first casualty in war'...
As ever, look towards those pouring funds into the weapon supply for the Culture Wars.
Why are we fighting?
~
Woke is basically the status of consciously, intentionally not being a bully, of desiring de-escalation of conflict leading towards peaceful resolution, of standing on empathy and evidence over sentiment and belief in matters of Governance.
Seems like a good idea.
We workers, parents, students and communities really, really want decent, honest and transparent healthy governance that nurtures all people and our shared environment as a long term sustainable form of social organisation, a system of governance that avoids avoidable harms as it's basic theme - eliminating pollution, environment degradation, waste and wealth extraction, all driven by exploitation.
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.
The only way for the English people, the adults in the country, to start to repair the damage of the past 20 years (and more) of war mongering by the English Establishment, the Ruling Class who direct these wars, is to indict Blair and to indict all those who prosecuted the War of Aggression against Iraq.
The lies about WMD and the grooming promise of Democracy vs the solemn oath that British Combat Troops make, which was exploited at their expense.
“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
We need to be ruthlessly politically ethical and honest about all that flowed from that.
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.
And yes, I know. I know. That's not going to happen any time soon. The Establishment will oppose and resist that, of course they will. Criminals do not voluntarily walk into the dock. That does not change the facts - the resolution of the problem remains the same. Indict our own war criminals if we want to encourage world peace. Lead by example.
If we want Peace, then we must at least prevent war. Chucking a few war criminals into jail would be a good move in that direction. 'Just saying!'
Look at him: he is guilty, he is culpable and responsible for so much avoidable harm and he knows it. We all know it. He's not the only one. They all need to be held to account, and we all need to understand how we let this happen, collectively. How do we become so politically weak that we cannot impede our government when they are about to commit the worst possible crimes a state can commit? What does this say about the health of our polity?
"Sitting in the dock at The Hague"?
Some day, it must happen.
Peace is more than the absence of war.
How better to help the people of Afghanistan than to indict Blair, to own up to the awful crime that the English State perpetrated upon the Afghani people and to make appropriate reparations to the Afghani people for the damage our political class have inflicted upon them?
It is also, given the days we are living in, absolutely critical to understand that there is no way to generate the international co-operation necessary to meet the challenges of Climate, Environment, Racism, Misogyny and Poverty without confronting war making and bringing it to an end. That means we must account for the harms caused and make it very, very clear that we will prevent further abuses of that nature into the future. It means we must demonstrate the ability to wage justice as a co-operative action.
This task will not be taken up by the Ruling Class who see war as a political utility and a cash cow - it must be us, you and I, and our neighbours, our brothers and sisters across the Earth.
Peace is more than the absence of war
It must be us, the people who are always caught in the crossfire, who always pay the price who extract the price of accountability from the abusers.
It must be us, the people working together as a humane polity, who unite in solidarity for our children, for their children and for all their futures as much as we would do it for our own present.
It must be us who take the democratic legislatures and our judiciaries back from the oligarchy and it must be us who set those institutions and the various arms of the State to serve our people's needs - to build peace, to establish stability, to start the repair of the damage done and to alter our systems of production and consumption systems so that they facilitate the prevention of further harm, be it preventing war or adapting to climate change, cleaning up pollution, repairing degraded environments, enriching our soils, cleaning our rivers, abolishing poverty and destitution and caring for all our vulnerable people as their needs dictate.
Peace is more than the absence of war
The prevailing profit system is built on deceit and externalised costs. WMD lies, and the costs born by the civilians whose cities, towns and villages have been made into combat zones. They did not invite the war, it came to them, unbidden. They paid the price. The cost in horrific deaths, disgusting maimings, devastating displacement, mass trauma and deep psychological distress is beyond all measure - the externalised costs associated with the profits of war supply logistic industrial production and consumption.
The War Against Terror shovelled vast wealth into the hands of a minority, who dominate our polities, and who continue to accrue wealth and power at our expense. Obviously they do not want us to hold them to account.
Peace is more than the absence of war
Enough already!
We all understand the grasp the oligarchy and the powerful have on the news media, on the current economic settings, on our democracies, our institutions and our public spaces. They mean business, and their business is mean, the inhumane desire to grasp power and exclude us from sharing it to improve all our lives. At times their ubiquity, size and aggressive resistance to healthy change suggests a fatalistic appraisal - they are too big to challenge, they have been around for too long, we cannot change them. All of this is true.
We cannot change them. They will not volunteer to change. We can, however, disempower them. That we certainly can do when we work together, and they know this - that is why they devote so much energy to division within our grass roots population. The future is always unfinished. Fatalism about the future is an error of judgement, and a logical fallacy.
And that is precisely why we must work ahead, and work together, from an evidence base. We must take up the work of confronting this situation in spite of their degree of control and influence, we must press ahead without their co-operation.
I think that to do that we must better understand the dark arts of political grooming, economic sabotage, political corruption and manipulation as they present at every level, from the personal to the institutional.
Neoliberals, bullies, authoritarians and dictatorships rely upon fatalism and logical fallacy narratives as psychological weapons that dissuade an oppressed and exhausted yet potentially active population from taking the necessary steps to build social and political solidarity.
Peace is more than the absence of war
We must erase that fatalism with the awareness that our unfinished futures are indeed opportunities, that we can change the situation by our collective efforts precisely because the future is unfinished. Nothing is set in stone, other than stone itself and even stone is weathered to become sand and soil.
The power of the oligarchy, their normalisation of war, their ubiquitous wealth and their interference in our democracies are not inevitable, immutable, immovable. That power is not carved from the rock. That power is not mountains high nor is it oceans deep. That power is human artifice. That power is temporary. That power is not eternal. The power structures do not define the human species and they do not illustrate the human condition, even though they do mark out this cult that claims to be a culture.
Peace is more than the absence of war
We can set them aside. We must. That is our vocation as humane beings, as parents to the next generation, this is our true vocation as neighbours, as friends and family and as a species. To craft a peaceful civilisation worthy of the gift of life.
The future for all our children is way, way, way bigger than the ruling class and the old, sordid bully cult.
It is for the citizens of each and every state to do this work within their own polities, as the first step.
Clean our houses, put them in order. We started to discuss this within England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with diligence, hope and seriousness back in 2006, within The Power Inquiry.
"After eighteen months of investigation, the final report of The Power Inquiry is a devastating critique of the state of formal democracy in Britain. Many of us actively support campaigns such as Greenpeace or the Countryside Alliance. And millions more take part in charity or community work. But political parties and elections have been a growing turn-off for years.
The cause is not apathy. The problem is that we don't feel we have real influence over the decisions made in our name. The need for a solution is urgent. And that solution is radical. Nothing less than a major programme of reform to give power back to the people of Britain..."
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.
A few insights into the problems posed by wide spread misunderstanding of human social behavioural dynamics.
1. There are no Races, only language groups. Skin colour does not predict language, language is a local emergent phenonemon, and varies vastly acorss the planet, apart from where a language is spread by conquest or occupation.
2. There exists a pre-historical and historical material spectrum of social organisation, ranging from egalitarian through to hierarchically violent, with the varying behavioural characteristics associated with each.
3. Almost all behaviour is learned. Environment and experience modulate all body systems. Culture and experience dictates behaviour.
4. We humans thrived for millions of years because we were biologically healthy - that means secure attachment bonding, robust sense of self within strong kin relationships, co-operative effort and autonomy plus the sensory capability to read the environment, accurately, and adapt to change accordingly.
5. We, typing these words, live within an Institutionalised Hierarchy of Violence.
6. That Hierarchy has had the gall to rename the 'natural' world and it's processes as both separate from Humanity and Civilisation, (to objectify and commodify) to utilise it as a scapegoat, (onto which it projects it's own brutality, lust and position in the power chain), whilst also suggesting their hierarchical behaviour is as 'natural God given aggression', weaving into Darwins vague observations the ideology of survival of the most violent as a natural dynamic, repositing it as survival of the fittest State, Military, Corporation. This institutionalised objectifyication has a history, and no pre-history. The Warrior Gene. It's all false assumption.
7. Most of us have been educated and indoctrinated to one degree or another, by the Hierarchy, and to that extent that we have internalised that 'education' we are divorced from some of our healthiest human perceptions.
And because indoctrination is always psychologically invasive, and because infants, toddlers and small children have no defence agaiunst such invasive practices, not least if practiced and enforced at home, where the child's psyche ought be wholly safe, respected, honoured the process becomes unconsciously transmitted down the generations as 'normal behaviour'. It gains momentum, traction with each successive generation.
8. That's a lot of shit to deal with, plus the war! (the fact of war has a huge impact on social relations world wide)... I think of the billions of people who have been exploited, indoctrinated into furthering the expoloitation. I think of them, and the bullies who have the power to bully millions of people at a time. I know who I hold most responsible.
9. The problem is the industrial culture, not the people - the people are all subjected to indoctrination and to work requirements. Both are problematic, both are imposed to benefit the hierarchy. The industrial militarised hierarchy are problematic. The problem is bullies seek power, and gain it, with relative ease because they have designed the system thus.
10. The problem is technical in as much as who becomes involved in policy decision making with regards to shared communal resources of any kind.
example : Any group that has persisted on undeveloped land for unknowable times must be seen as the legal stewardsor inhabitants of that land. They must also be understood - they see and experience themselves as part of that environment, not on it, or in it.
Any entry into those lands has to be for the local societies to determine, at every level, in all apsects.
11. It is absolutely the case that White European Empire and Conquest has a long and bloody History, and has been the primary driver of extinction of human societies and culture within the past 600 years....
12. White people often object to critiques that lay out the human cost of that expansion, because they have internalised so much of the cultural identities provided via indoctrination that any critique of the culture FEELS like a personal attack.
White Elites manipulate that to the hilt.
So too, do all bullies. It is a standard bully tactic.
There are no archetypes, no Races, only living human beings, in a specturm between natural and institutionalised societal dynamics.
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Here is what one group of pre-conquest societies offer as an insight to their needs...
Kametsa Asaike ‘Living Well’ Agenda for Development Central Asháninka del Rio Ene
1. To live like Asháninka Sanori 2. To live eating what we know. 3. To live secure and serene in the territories we have always lived in. 4. To live in peace, without suffering from Terrorism 5. To live better, producing [cash crops] in order to buy what we require. 6. To live healthily using our own medicine and also well attended by the health post and the mobile medical brigade. 7. To live with education that will help us improve and empower us as Asháninka. 8. To live well with an organisation that listens to us and defends our rights.
I came across this through a good friend, who has just finished a Masters Thesis on the issue of 'sustainable development models' being activated by Climate Conscious NGOs whose own relationships reveal contradictory behaviour...
Philanthropic behaviour that is claimed to be one thing, at face value, yet upon examination from the perspective of the 'un-developed' society and other material ecological criteria we see repeatedly failure to listen to those people, to see them as 'equals' or to engage with them as land tenure holders...
The urge to assimsilate, to Chritianise, to impose socio-economic status as a measure of well being: such help which is all invasive, no matter their claims to be for the benefit of the target groups.
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They understand logging as Terrorism, mining as Terrorism, not least because the methodlogy of both demands disturbing the ecological balance, and clearing the land of those who inhabit it....by force or by deceit.
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In my opinion, all areas inhabited by pre-conquest cultures, or pre-industrial cultures must be ceded to those communities that are truly native. extant, thriving...
Across the world, Aboriginal societies are at best afforded flimsy tenure of the surface, yet the subsoil and rock is 'owned' by the State.
This allows the State to legislate exploitation of the sub soil domain without referal to the native societies...
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Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.
