Newsflash: humans are the most brutal, sadistic creatures to ever crawl out of the muck. We only got to this point in history by being ruthless murders with instinctual homicidal tendencies. Our history is defined not by our good deeds, but by the wars we've fought, the people we've tortured, and the civilizations we've raped and pillaged.
These child-soldiers are not warped beyond what is human, they are human. They experience life and death in a manner our comfortable, homogenized-milk-drinking minds wouldn't be able to comprehend....it is we "civilized" humans who are warped beyond what is "human."
Humans vs Homo Sapiens
Actually no, this is a holdover from our biological past. The same as for other killer species, notably wolves and chimpanzees. This is what it means to be homo sapien NOT human. There is a massive difference between homo sapiens and humans. Language, thought, consciousness. Non-human homo sapiens are exemplified by feral children, stone aged cultures, and a few incredibly primitive tribes in the Amazon.
Trying to lay it all on our being human is as stupid as trying to credit our having genitals or two eyes to being human. Utterly fucking ridiculous. Or alternatively, the same as trying to say that information, knowledge, decision-making and thinking (things that software can do) are what it means to be a Being. Utterly fucking ridiculous.
This is what you get with magical tihnking morons who are incapable of thinking in terms of logic and syllogism, but instead think in terms of excerption, association and correlation. Humans have toes? Then toes must be what it means to be human!
Moderns vs Primitives
Furthermore, Europe hasn't had a war in 50 years. Neither has China. Technically, China hasn't had an (external) war in a lot more than 50 years. And in the 18th or 19th century there was a great century of peace for Europe. Peace is definitely possible for moderns. Even if primitives are in a near constant state of war.
The first thing you learn in The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind is that consciousness is inhibitory. Paying attention while doing something doesn't prime the action, it inhibits it. That's why when you learn typing and make typos then you try to very carefully do correct actions ... that's counterproductive. Anyways, consciousness is inhibitory .... and it is fully capable of inhibiting the subconscious impulse for aggression, murder and death. At least, for those nations that actually have higher consciousness.
Primitives without consciousness don't even make any excuses for war. They just go to war because they feel like it. Because they're in a "killing mood". Conscious beings need an excuse so that slows down the pace of warfare. The more conscious people are, the better the excuses have to be, which again slows down the pace of warfare. In primitive tribes, half the population dies of homicide / suicide. In World War 2, even with ridiculously effective weapons, less than a fifth of the population of Europe died.
Higher Mode Childrearing
It isn't an accident, it isn't happenstance, that the way we moderns raise children "correctly" just "happens" to reduce aggression, irrationality and warfare. We do not fucking like those things. They are not productive. And we want and plan to eradicate these things from our psychological makeup.
We go to extreme lengths to care for babies and raise children with ridiculous amounts of attention and care for no other purpose than eradicating irrationality and neurosis and psychosis and aggression in general. Of which warfare is the most quintessential example.
We moderns raise children so they will have the widest possible emotional flexibility and adaptability. And so they will have principles. All things which severely inhibit warfare. Because it "just happens" that nations which don't go to war prosper better than those who do.
You see, moderns want their children to prosper, rather than to "follow in their footsteps" or "obey their elders". And since war is adverse to prosperity, it follows by inescapable logic that moderns want their children to not go to war. Something that wasn't true even 50 years ago, but nevertheless is the culmination of a consistent trend over the millenia.
Affordance Of Consciousness
Furthermore, the observer effect (inhibition of the effects of abuse by recognizing it as abuse) which together with two genders produces a ratchet in childrearing modes (the child of two parents will effectively be raised in the higher of the modes the parent was raised in) ... is a product of consciousness. Consciousness which is the essence of what being human means. Therefore, being human means that we naturally FALL straight towards peace. We're just taking a long time falling because the nature of homo sapiens is incredibly brutal.
Parents deliberately and consciously inhibit irrationality to the same level that they've achieved themselves. And it is the nature of consciousness to inhibit irrationality. Hammers are uniquely suited to hammering nails and that is what we deliberately use them for. Consciousness is uniquely suited to inhibiting irrationality (including warfare) and that is what we deliberately use it for.
Summary
So on a trivial and superficial level, that stupid stupid comment seems correct and profound. But when you examine it and tear it apart, it is the exact opposite of the truth. It is the biological nature of homo sapiens to be a brutal killer species. It is the psychological nature of humans to deliberately go counter to their biological nature in order to be peacemakers. Between them, it is psychology that triumphs.
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9 comments:
What do you think of Pinker's latest book, "The Better Angels of our Nature"?
I don't think anything about any books by philosophers, psychologists or cognitive scientists because I despise their works and the imbeciles that author them. With very few exceptions, everything that sounds profound turns out to be trivial or FALSE.
The Origin of Consciousness is one of those exceptions. Another is an essay (not book) on the word 'fuck' being overlearned emotion. A third is an essay on disgust by I don't know who.
What do I think of Pinker? He sounds like a batshit insane fucking imbecile. In his wikipedia page it says he believes that language is an instinct. This is batshit fucking insane.
Google also found an essay of his on disgust where he ALSO calls it "instinctive" and "hardwired". Something which is not MERELY batshit fucking insane but contradicts all empirical facts!
Gorillas do not have disgust. In fact, only conscious beings are capable of disgust. Disgust is the emotion you feel when you're confronted with your own mortality. Animals that don't have a concept of their own deaths are incapable of disgust.
What do I think of Pinker? I think 2 strikes, no fouls, no hits. All in 90 seconds. So you can see why I'm not interested in Pinker's books.
Keep in mind that I think Noam Chomsky ALSO is batshit fucking insane. So I don't give a fuck about their little manufactured "opposition" to each other on the subject of language. BOTH Noam Chomsky AND Steven Pinker know FUCK ALL about language. Or ANYTHING ELSE about the human mind.
On the subject of human language, I have just about proven Julian Jaynes' conjecture that verbs evolutionary came before nouns. You see, when you break down all 5-10k verbs in English, it turns out that about 80% of them are built out of as little as three dozen concepts. And these three dozen concepts are incredibly abstract and primitive.
My point is, language just isn't as complicated as the imbeciles think it is. There is a central core to language which is just INCREDIBLY simple. And I'm pretty damned sure this central core evolved first. Why? Because this central core is so simple that a calculator could implement it.
Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker and every other professional philosopher, linguist, on and on, they all have a vested intest in bloviating and mystifying incredibly trivial crap. Their careers are founded on concealing how stupid they are and how little they understand about subjects which I find easy to revolutionize and trivial to explain.
I do not trust them. I do not pay attention to them.
I don't see the attraction of books written by philosophers at all.
Consider the following:
"We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end."
or
"We shared a moment of mutual understanding. String enough such moments together and you have a relationship."
My understanding of the human mind is such that I can actually decompose such statements into mathematical formalisms and then prove or disprove them as theorems.
The second statement is a profound result. One that I can almost see how to prove but haven't managed yet. The exact nature of value upgrading, of which bonding between people is a manifestation, is incredibly important to value theory.
The first statement is a half-false trivial result that is trivially proved off of the definition of a Being in value theory. It's also a complete dead-end. Once you realize what it actually means, and how little it means, there is nothing further to be said about it.
The difference between psychology as I understand it and psychology as everyone else does is that between 21st century mathematics and 1st century mathematics. And your question is like asking a 21st century set theorist what he thinks of the latest treatise on geometry by Aristophanes.
"These child-soldiers are not warped beyond what is human, they are human."
That comma should be a semi-colon.
Do you have any further information on the fact that half of primitive deaths are by homicide or suicide?
It's in one of Lloyd deMause's books. Just google his site.
Thank you.
This blog is hella gay, bro!
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