Category: Psychology

Day of Wrath, 5

Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind

In recent decades several historians without any link to the deMausean school have written about thirty books on histories of childhood. I will mention only a couple of those published in 2005: When Children Became People by Odd Magne Bakke and Growing Up: The History of Childhood in a Global Context by Peter Stearns. DeMause has iteratively complained that books of this sort are presented to history students as if childrearing in the past had been as benign as Western childrearing in our times. Stearns for example is author and editor of more than forty books, but he attempts to absolve the parents by claiming that infanticide had an economic motivation; when it is well documented that in some periods infanticide was more common in well-off families.
Psychogenesis is the process of the evolution of empathy, and, therefore, of childrearing forms in an innovative group of human beings. In a particular individual it is an evolution of the architecture of his or her mentality, including the cognition of how the world is perceived. A “quantum leap” in “psychoclasses” depends on the parents’ breaking away from the abusive patterns in which they were educated; for example, stop killing their children: a prehistoric and historic practice that deMause calls “early infanticidal childrearing.”
A fascinating essay by Julian Jaynes throws light on how, by the end of the second millennium before our era, a huge alteration occurred in human mentality. In 1976 Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes calls “breakdown” the transit of bicameral mind—two chambers or brain hemispheres—to modern consciousness. The transit is relatively recent, and it represents a healing process from a divided self into a more unified or integrated one. Jaynes describes how society developed from a psychological structure based upon obedience to the god’s voices, to the subjective consciousness of present-day man. Like deMause’s psychohistory, Jaynes’ model caused many of his readers to see mankind from a new perspective. He elaborated a meta-narrative purporting to connect the loose pieces of previously unconnected fields—history, anthropology, ancient texts, psychiatry, language, poetry, neurology, religion, Hebrew and Greek studies, the art of ancestral societies, archaeological temples and cuneiform writing—to construct an enormous jigsaw puzzle.
Jaynes asked the bold question of whether the voices that people of the Ancient World heard could have been real, a common phenomenon in the hallucinated voices of present-day schizophrenics. He postulated that, in a specific lapse of history a metamorphosis of consciousness occurred from one level to another; that our present state of consciousness emerged a hundred or two hundred generations ago, and that previously human behavior derived from hearing voices in a world plagued with shamanism, magical thinking, animism and schizoidism.
In the Ancient World man had a bipartite personality: his mind was broken, bicameralized, schizophrenized. “Before the second millennium B.C., everyone was schizophrenic,” Jaynes claims about those who heard voices of advice or guides attributed to dead chiefs, parents or known personages. “Often it is in times of stress when a parent’s comforting voice may be heard.” It seems that this psychic structure of a divided or bicameral self went back to cavemen. Later in the first cities, the period that deMause calls “late infanticidal childrearing” (Jaynes never mentions deMause or psychohistory), the voices were attributed to deities. “The preposterous hypothesis we have come to is that at one time human nature was split in two, an executive part called god, and a follower part called man. Neither was conscious. This is almost incomprehensible to us.” Preconscious humans did not have an ego like ours; rational thought would spring up in a late stage of history, especially in Greece. However, orthodox Hellenists usually do not ask themselves why, for a millennium, many Greeks relied on instructions coming from a group of auditory hallucinating women in Delphi. To explain similar cultural phenomena, Jaynes lays emphasis upon the role that voices played in the identities, costumes and group interactions; and concludes that the high civilizations of Egypt, the Middle East, Homeric Greece and Mesoamerica were developed by a primitive unconscious.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind describes the theodicy in which, three thousand years ago, subjectivity and the ego flourished. For the common man consciousness is the state of awareness of the mind; say, the conscious state at walking. Jaynes uses the term in a more restricted way: consciousness as the subjective universe, the self-analyzing or self-conscious mind; the “I,” the will and morality of an individual, as well as the development of the linear concept of time (which used to be cyclic to the archaic mind, perhaps due to the observation of the stations of the year). The man who left behind his bicameral thinking developed a more robust sense of the self, and Jaynes finds narrative evidence of this acting self in the literary record. He examines Amos, the voice of the oldest Old Testament text and compares it with the Ecclesiastes, the most recent one. Likewise, Jaynes scrutinizes the Iliad looking for tracks of a subjective self, and finds nothing. The Homeric heroes did what Athena or Apollo told them; they literally heard their gods’ voices as the prophets listened to Yahweh’s. Their psyches did not display brightness of their own yet. (If we remember the metaphor of my first book, the mentality of ancient man was similar to what astronomers call a “maroon dwarf”: a failed star like Jupiter, not a sun with enough mass to cause nuclear fusion so that it could shine on its own.) Matters change with the texts of Odysseus’ adventures, and even more with the philosophers of the Ionian islands and of Athens. At last the individual had accumulated enough egocentric mass to explode and to shine by itself. Jaynes believes that it was not until the Greek civilization that the cataclysm that represented the psychogenic fusion consolidated itself.
By Solon’s times it may be said that the modern self, as we understand it, had finally exploded. The loquacious gods, including the Hebraic Yahweh, became silent never to speak again but through the bicameral prophets. After the breakdown of divine authority, with the gods virtually silenced in the times of the Deuteronomy, the Judean priests and governors embarked upon a frenetic project to register the legends and stories of the voices that, in times of yore, had guided them. It was no longer necessary to hallucinate sayings that the god had spoken: man himself was the standard upon which considerations, decisions, and behaviors on the world rested. In the dawning of history man had subserviently obeyed his gods, but when the voice of consciousness appears, rebelliousness, dissidence, and even heresy are possible.
Through his book, which may be called a treatise of psycho-archeology, Jaynes follows the track of how subjective consciousness emerged. His ambitious goal is to explain the birth of consciousness, and hence the origin of our civilization. Once the former “maroon dwarfs” achieve luminescence in a group of individuals’ selves, not only religious dissent comes about, but regicide, the pursuit of personal richness and, finally, individual autonomy. This evolution continues its course even today. Paradoxically, when the West reaches the stage that deMause calls “helping mode” in child-rearing, it entails ill-fated consequences such as Caucasian demographic dilution and the subsequent Islamization of Europe (as we will see).
Although Jaynes speculates that the breakdown of the bicameral mind could have been caused by crises in the environment, by ignoring deMause he does not present the specific mechanism that gave rise to the transition. Due to the foundational taboo of human species, explained by Alice Miller in my previous book and by Colin Ross in this one, Jaynes did not explore the decisive role played by the modes of childrearing. This blindness permeates The Origin of Consciousness to the point of giving credibility to the claims of biological psychiatry; for example, Jaynes believes in the genetic basis of schizophrenia, a pseudoscientific hypothesis, as shown in my previous essay. However, his thesis on bicameralism caused his 1976 essay to be repeatedly reprinted, including the 1993 Penguin Books edition and another edition with a 1990 afterword that is still in print.
In the bicameral kingdoms the hallucinated voices of ancient men were culturally accepted as part of the social fabric. But a psychogenic leap forward gives as much power to the new psychoclass as the Australopithecus character of 2001: A Space Odyssey grabbing a bone. “How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?” The conquest of the Inca Empire was one of a handful of military confrontations between the two states of consciousness. A deMausean interpretation would lead us to think that it was a clash between the infanticidal psychoclass and an intermediate state of ambivalent and intrusive modes of childrearing. The Spaniards were clearly up the scale of “psychogenic leaps” compared to the Incas.
This reading of history is diametrically opposed to Bartolomé de Las Casas, who in his Apologética Historia claimed that in some moral aspects the Amerindians were superior to the Spanish and even to Greeks and Romans. Today’s Western self-hatred had its precursor in Las Casas, who flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In identical fashion, in the 21st century it is irritating to see in educational TV programs an American in Peru saying that the Incas of the times of the Conquest “were much smarter than the Spanish.” The truth is that the Incas did not even know how to use the wheel and lacked written language. They literally heard their statues speak to them and their bicameral mind handicapped them before the more robust psyche of the Europeans: something like an Australopithecus clan clashing with another without bones in their hands. The Spaniards were, certainly, very religious; but not to the point of using magical thinking in their warfare stratagems. According to a 16th-century Spaniard, “the unhappy dupes believed the idols spoke to them and so sacrificed to it birds, dogs, their own blood and even men” (this quotation refers to Mesoamericans, the subject-matter of the next section). The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa believes that his ancestors were defeated due to a pragmatic and basically modern European mentality in contrast to the magical thinking of the natives; and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes wrote that the conquest of the American continent was a great triumph of the scientific hypothesis over the indigenous physical perception.
Jaynes overemphasizes that the prophets of the Old Testament literally heard Yahweh’s voice. Because the minds in the Ancient World, like present-day schizoid personalities, were swarmed with sources of hallucination, humans still lacked an inner space for retrospection and introspection. Bible scholars have debated at length about what could have caused the loss of prophecy gifts in the Hebrew people after the Babylonian exile. I would say that the elimination of the sacrificial practice of infants meant a leap toward a superior psychoclass, with the consequent overcoming of the schizoid or bicameral personality.
But going back to Jaynes: Formerly terrestrial and loquacious, the later mute gods were transported to a heaven, making room for human divination: the consultation of human beings that (for having been raised by more regressive parents I may infer) still heard the fateful voices. Even though the divine voices made themselves unnecessary for the new kind of human, praying continued to a god who was incapable, centuries ago, of communicating through divine voices.

The entire succession of [Old Testament] works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from The Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent.

Jaynes’ book is dense, closely argued, and despite its beautiful prose often boring. But the chapter on the Hebrew people titled “The Moral Consciousness of the Khabiru” is must reading. If he is right, it was not until the fifth century before the Common Era when the bicameral mind began to be seen as the incapacitating disorder that is presently labeled as psychosis. In contrast to the mystic psychohistorian Robert Godwin, I am closer to Jaynes in that one of the most persistent residues of bicameralism is our religious heritage.
Jaynes, who died in 1997, may be the proverbial author of a single book, but many people continue to read The Origin of Consciousness. Tor Norretranders, a popular author on scientific subjects, expanded the bicameral hypothesis in a book published a year after Jaynes died, The User Illusion, and he cites more recent investigations than those collected by Jaynes.

Popperian falsifiability
Despite the book’s popularity and the fact that Jaynes taught in Princeton University and did archaeological work, his colleagues did not pay him much attention. Many academics reject theories that have been presented through literary books. It is understandable that a book with such lyric passages has been ignored by the dry science taught in the psychology departments; by neurobiologists, and by evolutionary theorists. Jaynes, basically a humanist, had not presented his theory in a scientific or falsifiable format.
Adepts of social sciences grant such authority to the hard sciences that, when they run across a text that emphasizes the humanities, they want to see everything translated to the language of science. They do this in spite of the fact that, in the reign of subjectivity, hard sciences are incapable of producing something truly significant. Notwithstanding this scientific demand, I concede that if we humanists make claims that could be interpreted as scientific hypotheses, it doesn’t hurt to present them in such a way that they may be refuted, if per chance they are wrong. Consequently, I must make it very clear that the trauma model is falsifiable.
For instance, it occurs to me that, if the model is correct, in the Israeli kibbutz children cannot be easily schizophrenized. The cause of this would be, naturally, that in the kibbutz they are put farther away from potentially schizophrenogenic parents than the children in nuclear families. Something similar could be said about Jaynes’ ideas. His hypothesis can be presented in falsifiable form always provided that the presentation is done through a deMausean interpretation of it, as we will see almost by the end of this book.
Once it is conceded that even humanists who venture into foreign lands can present their theories in falsifiable form, I must point out that very few academics, including psychologists, are willing to delve into the darkest chambers of the human psyche. To them it is disturbing that prehistoric man, and a good deal of the historic man including their ancestors, had behaved as marionettes of hallucinated voices or nonexistent gods. Jaynes’ ideas represent a serious challenge to history as it is officially understood and even more to religion, anthropology, and psychiatry. He seems to postulate that a scant connectivity of the two brain hemispheres produced voices, and that the changes in consciousness caused the brain to become more interconnected through the corpus callosum. In case I have interpreted him correctly, I am afraid it is not possible to run tomographs on those who died millennia ago to compare, say, the brain of the bicameral pythoness against the brain of the intellectual Solon. Let’s ignore this non-falsifiable aspect and focus on hypotheses that may be advanced by epidemiologists in the field of social sciences. Studying the changes of incidence patterns of child mistreatment through history or contemporary cultures is a perfectly falsifiable scientific approach.
In the book reviews of The Origin of Consciousness available on the internet it can be gathered that the experience of many readers was as electrifying as a midnight ray that allowed them to see, albeit for a split second, the human reality. If the ultimate test for any theory is to explain the most data in the simplest way, we should not ignore the psychohistories of Jaynes and deMause. If they are right, the explanatory power of an unified model would help us understand part of the human mystery, especially religion and psychosis.

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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will publish here the section on schizophrenia theorist Silvano Arieti. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Tags Religion

Child abuse Day of Wrath (book) Lloyd deMause Psychohistory Psychology

Day of Wrath, 4

The history of childhood and its Newton

John Bowlby advanced the fundamentals for understanding attachment; Colin Ross did the same for mental disorders in human beings, and I will keep his class in mind to explain psychohistory.
But Ross is a physician, not an historian. In the following pages I will show the deeper reasons why parents have abused their children since time immemorial. The perspective to our past will open up in the widest possible way: a framework of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years of what has occurred in my family and in all other families of the human and pre-human species. My autobiography will disappear and it will only reappear in my next book, not without having shown first the psychogenic theory of history.
Lloyd deMause (pronounced de-Moss), born in 1931, studied political sciences in the University of Columbia. After his university studies he borrowed money to establish a publishing house that consumed ten years of his life before again taking up his research work. While Freud, Reich, Fromm and others had written some speculative essays on history on the basis of psychoanalysis, such essays may be considered the Aristotelian phase of which today is understood as psychohistory. In 1958, the year in which I was born, Erik Erikson published a book about the young Luther in which he mentioned the surging of a new research field that he called “psycho-history” (not be confused with the science-fiction novels of Isaac Asimov). After a decade, in 1968, deMause presented a sketch of his theory to an analytical association where, unlike Freud and his epigones, he focused psychohistory into the diverse forms of childrearing. After the West abandoned colonialism, and endured for its behavior an absurd handover to other nations and ethnic groups, it became a taboo to focus in the dark side of non-Western cultures. By choosing a frowned-upon research area in academia deMause had to make an intellectual career independently. The drive of his research was always what the children must have felt in the most diverse cultures of the world. As we saw, the mammal, and even more the primate, are so at the mercy of their parents that the specific forms of childrearing cannot be dodged if we are to understand mental disorders. But it is precisely this subject matter, the forms of childrearing and infantile abuse, what conventional historians ignore. In his essay “The independence of psychohistory” deMause tells us that history qua history describes what has happened, not why, and he adds that history and psychohistory are distinct fields of investigation.

Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian’s conceptual world.

DeMause does not care that he has been accused of ignoring the economy, the sociology and the use of statistics. “The usual accusation that psychohistory ‘reduces everything to psychology’ is philosophically meaningless—of course psychohistory is reductionist in this sense, since all it studies is historical motivations.” The statements by deMause that I like the most are those in which he says something I had been maintaining for many years before reading them, when I told myself in soliloquies that, if we have to be objective to understand exact sciences like physics, only by introducing subjectivity we could understand the humanities:

Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad—the maddest of all being the historian’s belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it—our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors.
Psychohistory is a science in which the researcher’s feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors. The usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most “science” simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.
I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped.

DeMause adds that, when he talks with a typical scholar who only uses his intellect, he runs into a stare of total incomprehension. “My listener usually is in another world of discourse.”
The publication of The History of Childhood in 1974 marks the turning point in the field that deMause created. Putting aside the idealizations of previous historians, the book examines for the first time the history of Western childhood. But the daring exposé of an entire rosary of brutalities on childhood, like the ones mentioned in the preface of this book, moved Basic Books to break the contract it held with deMause to publish The History of Childhood. The process by which from here on contemporary psychohistory was born is fascinating. In this section I will recycle and comment on some passages of one of the articles by deMause, “On Writing Childhood History,” published in 1988, a recapitulation of fifteen years of work in the history of childhood.
DeMause had taken courses at a psychoanalytic institute and put to the test the Freudian idea that civilization, so loaded with morals, was onerous for modern children; and that in ancient times they had lived in an Eden without the ogre of the superego. The evidence showed him exactly the opposite, and he disclosed his discrepancies by criticizing the anthropologist Géza Róheim:

I discovered I simply could make no sense at all of what Róheim and others were saying. This was particularly true about childhood. Róheim wrote, for instance, that the Australian aborigines he observed were excellent parents, even though they ate every other child, out of what they called “baby hunger” [the mothers also said that their children were “demons”], and forced their other children to eat parts of their siblings. This “doesn’t seem to have affected the personality development” of the surviving children, Róheim said, and in fact, he concluded, these were really “good mothers [who] eat their own children.”

Most anthropologists did not object to Róheim’s extraordinary conclusions. In his article deMause called our attention to a very distinct reading by Arthur Hippler on Australian aboriginals. DeMause had already consolidated his publishing house, and in the Journal of Psychological Anthropology he published an article in which Hippler, who had also directly observed the aboriginals, wrote:

The care of children under six months of age can be described as hostile, aggressive and careless; it is often routinely brutal. Infanticide was often practiced. The baby is offered the breast often when he does not wish it and is nearly choked with milk. The mother is often substantially verbally abusive to the child as he gets older, using epithets such as “you shit,” “vagina to you.” Care is expressed through shouts, or not at all, when it is not accompanied by slaps and threats. I never observed a single adult Yolngu caretaker of any age or sex walking a toddler around, showing him the world, explaining things to him and empathizing with his needs. The world is described to the child as dangerous and hostile, full of demons, though in reality the real dangers are from his caretakers. The mother sexually stimulates the child at this age. Penis and vagina are caressed to pacify the child, and clearly the action arouses the mother.

Keeping in mind what Ross said in the case of the second girl, we can imagine the transfusion of evil that these infants, children of filicidal cannibals, would have internalized; and how could this have affected their mental health. I believe it is appropriate to continue quoting excerpts from the deMause article: it is very instructive to understand psychohistory and how it contrasts with the postulates of anthropologists and ethnologists. Once the observations by Hippler were published, an enraged defender of Róheim responded:

I am indeed much more sympathetic to Róheim’s accounts, precisely because he does not rush to the conclusion that deMause does. Australian Aboriginal culture survived very well, thank you, very much for tens of thousands of years before it was devastated by Western interference. If that isn’t adaptive, what is?

The description that Hippler and Róheim give of this aboriginal culture seems the worst of all possible nightmares for children. But for Western anthropologists to avow condemnatory value judgments is the ultimate taboo. Some of them even accept the Freudian theory that the historical past was less repressive for childhood, and that Western civilization was a corrupter of the noble savage. But they avoid the fact that Hippler and Róheim themselves observed barbarities towards the children that would be unthinkable in the civilized world, like eating them. (Other sources that confirm the veracity of claims of filicidal cannibalism appear later.) However incredible it may seem, anthropologists and ethnologists do not condemn these cannibal mothers. Under the first commandment of the discipline, Thou Shalt Not Judge, the emotional after-effects of childrearing are ignored, such as the clearly dissociated personalities that I myself saw in the Ross clinic, and even worse kinds of dissociation.
In the academic world Róheim was not as well known as Philippe Ariès, an historian who collaborated with Foucault and an author of a classic book on the history of childhood, L’Enfant et la Vie Familiale sous l’Ancien Régime. Ariès started from the Freudian premise of the benignancy of the milieu towards children in past times. Just as with Róheim, Ariès didn’t deny the beatings, the incest and the other vexations against children described in his book. What he denied was that such treatment caused disturbances. “In other words,” deMause writes mockingly, “since everyone whipped and molested children, whipping and molesting had no effects on any child.” Ariès has been taken as an authority in the history of childhood studies. DeMause not only rejected his assumption that there were no psychological after-effects; he inverted Freud’s axiom. His working hypotheses are simple: (1) within the West the forms of childrearing were more barbarous in the past, and (2) compared to the Western world, other cultures treat their children worse. These hypotheses, which broke the tablet laws of the anthropologists, would give birth to the new discipline of psychohistory. For the academic Zeitgeist the mere talk of childhood abuse, let alone of soul murder, was against the grain of all schools of thought in history, anthropology and ethnology, which take for granted that there have been no substantial changes in parental-filial relations.
The academics could not deny the facts that fascinated deMause. As we saw above, Róheim did not deny them; in fact, he himself published them. Ariès also did not deny them. The tactic that deMause found among his colleagues was the argumentum ex silentio: without historical trace of any kind, it was taken for granted that children were treated in a way similar that in the West today. The following is a splendid paradigm of this argument. In 1963, ten years before deMause started publishing, Alan Valentine in his book Fathers and Sons, published by the University of Oklahoma, examined letters from parents to their children in past centuries. He did not find a single letter that transmitted kindness to the addressee. However, in order not to contradict the common sense that in the past the treatment a man gave his sons was not different, Valentine concluded:

Doubtless an infinite number of fathers have written letters to their sons that would warm and lift our hearts, if we only could find them. The happiest fathers leave no history, and it is the men who are not at their best with their children who are likely to write the heart-rending letters that survive.

DeMause found the fallacy of the argumentum ex silentio everywhere, even among the same colleagues who contributed articles to his seminal book, The History of Childhood. For example, when deMause made a remark to Elizabeth Wirth Marwick about these kind of letters, and also about the diaries that parents wrote, Marwick responded that only the bad left a trace in history. Most historians agreed with her. DeMause had started to study the primary sources of these materials. Marwick was only one among two hundred historians that deMause had written to for his book project, of which he worked with fifty. He claims that in all of them the argumentum ex silentio appeared at the time of reaching the conclusions to which the evidence pointed out to.
The reasons were, naturally, psychological. An Italian historian delivered to deMause the draft of a chapter that began by saying that he would not consider the subjects of infanticide and pederasty in ancient Rome. DeMause had to reject it. Other would-be contributors went further. At the beginning of this book I spoke of the torment that swaddling with tight clothes has represented for babies. John Demos, author of a book about the family in American colonists, denied that the European practice had been imported into American soil despite the evidence that deMause had collected and published (in a television history program even I saw a drawing of an Anglo-Saxon swaddled baby). As regards other kinds of abuse in American childhood, Demos used the argument that bibliographical evidence in letters, diaries, autobiographies and medical reports was irrelevant; that what mattered were the court documents.
The problem with this argument is that in colonial times there were no organizations for the protection of childhood, which originated in nineteenth century England and which have become much more visible since the 1980s. Demos did not only argue from the basis of lack of court documents against the thesis that parents abused their children more in colonial times. He also argued that “had individual children suffered severe abuse at the hands of their parents in early New England, other adults would have been disposed to respond.” Demos’ conclusions were acclaimed in his time. But just as in his argument about court documents, this last conjecture suffers from the same idealization about the past of his nation. If other adults were unwilling to respond it was simply due to the fact that in those times the social movement of infant protection had not yet arisen.
Once deMause discarded all those who argued on the basis of the argumentum ex silentio, nine historians remained. Even while the contributors were delivering their articles, some of them showed reticence about publishing all the evidence they had found. Before publication the nine contributors—ten with deMause—circulated their articles among themselves. Most of them were shocked by the first chapter written by deMause, whose initial paragraphs became famous in the history of psychohistory:

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us.
That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sandbox of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.

Once the initial impression was past, some of the contributors were reluctant that their articles should appear beside the initial chapter by deMause, and, as I previously mentioned, Basic Books broke its contract. However, since deMause was already the owner of a publishing house he decided to publish it himself.
Although the contributors finally accepted that their articles would appear under a single cover, the history journal reviews were very hostile. Even a magazine like New Statesman derided deMause: “His real message is something more akin to religion than to history, and as such unassailable by unbelievers. On the other hand, his fellow-contributors to The History of Childhood have much useful historical information to offer.” Some reviewers were impressed by the body of evidence on child abuse in past centuries, but they supposed that future investigations would place such evidence on a much more benign context. “Ariès for one,” wrote deMause, “remained convinced that childhood yesterday was children’s paradise.”
The initial chapter of the book edited by deMause was titled “The Evolution of Childhood.” DeMause claims that of the published reviews on this chapter, translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese, no reviewer challenged the evidence as such; only his conclusions. “Yet not a single reviewer in any of the six languages in which the book was published wrote about any errors in my evidence, and none presented any evidence from primary sources which contradicted any of my conclusions.” As we will see in “A Critique of Lloyd deMause” his theories are not exempt from error. Far from it! There are errors: lots of them. But these critics who rushed to judge him falsely did not see the real faults of his model. With regard to the published reviews, deMause wrote:

Since it was unlikely that I could describe the childhood of everyone who ever lived in the West for a period of over two millennia without making errors, it was extremely disappointing to me that the emotional reactions of reviewers had completely overwhelmed their critical capacities. No reviewer appeared to be interested in discussing evidence at all.

There were nonetheless magnanimous reviewers like Lawrence Stone, who in November of 1974 wrote in New York Review of Books about “the problem of how to regard so bold, so challenging, so dogmatic, so enthusiastic, so perverse, and yet so heavily documented a model.” But the majority adhered to the conventional wisdom, as did E.P. Hennock in a specialized magazine:

That men in other ages might behave quite differently from us yet be no less rational and sane, has been a basic concept amongst historians for a long time now. It does not belong to deMause’s mental universe. The normal practices of past societies are constantly explained in terms of psychoses.

Once more, the evidence as such is put aside to proclaim the conventional wisdom, which is taken for granted. In a review published in History of Education Quarterly, Daniel Calhoun wrote that deMause’s approach resembled a regression to 19th century concepts, an antiquated evolutionistic morality for Calhoun. As we will see in a later chapter in refuting Franz Boas, reality is the exact opposite: the Boasian school represented a gigantic regression compared to nineteenth-century anthropology.
At present studies of the history of childhood continue to emerge from deMause and academic historians alike; for example, the study by Colin Heywood. But it is precisely books like Heywood’s, which accept the historical evidence of abuses of childhood but differ from deMause’s conclusions, that have convinced me that deMause has found a gold vein that still has substance for much exploitation. DeMause ends his retrospective article of 1988 by pointing out that, despite the rejection by the academy, The History of Childhood, the books of Alice Miller and other popular authors who advocate the cause of the child are widely read by an important niche of society. In a nutshell, the main finding of psychohistory is that academic history fails to recognize the profound role that the love, or hate, of the parents for their children plays in the future developments of mankind.

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The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, next time I will publish here the section on Julian Jaynes. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it: here.

Day of Wrath (book) Psychology

Day of Wrath, 3

A class with Colin Ross

The best explanation of the trauma model of mental disorders I know appears in the book The Trauma Model by Colin Ross.

The problem of attachment to the perpetrator

Attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby, is one of the most fruitful platforms with which to explain human psychological development. Evolution always chooses its available mechanisms for its use, and since every living creature has the imperative to survive, hominids developed an unconscious structure to maintain the illusion of parental love even when there really is none.

Perhaps the most popularly accessible way in which we can imagine presenting what attachment is, is through a modern fairy tale: Artificial Intelligence produced by Kubrick but directed by Spielberg. I’m referring to the scenes in which the father, Henry, warns the mother, Monica, not to imprint their adoptive son David with the program of affective attachment, if she is not completely sure that she will want to reciprocate the love that David would profess, since the program is irreversible (“The robot child’s love would be sealed—in a sense hardwired—and we’d be part of him forever”). After some time Monica reads to David the seven magic words that imprint him (“What were those words for, Mommy?”).

The platform which Ross is standing on in order to understand mental disorders is what he calls “the problem of attachment to the perpetrator.” We can visualize the enormous emotional attachment the human child feels toward the parent by remembering the veneration that, despite her conduct, Leonor and Josefina always professed to their mother, María [my grandmother, my godmother and my grand-grandmother respectively: the subject of an unpublished chapter in this Spanish-English translation of my book]. Such attachment is the problem. In The Trauma Model Colin Ross wrote:

I defined the problem, in the mid-1990s, in the context of the false memory war.

In order to defend myself against the attacks by hostile colleagues, I sought solid ground on which to build fortifications. It seemed like the theory of evolution offered a good starting point. What is the basic goal of all organisms according to the theory of evolution? To survive and reproduce. This is true from amoeba on up to mammals. Who will dispute that all organisms want to survive and replicate? This seemed like safe ground.

Dragonflies, grasshoppers, salamanders and alligators do not have families. They do not send cards on Mother’s Day. Things are different if you are a bird or mammal. Birds and mammals are absolutely dependent on adult caretakers for their survival for a period after birth, which ranges from weeks to decades depending on the species. For human parents, it seems like the period of dependency lasts over thirty years. In some species, if the nursing mother dies, the child dies. But in others, including elephants, if the nursing mother dies, a female relative takes over the care of the young one, and the child survives. In elephants there is a built-in Child Protective Services, and there is a sociology of attachment.

Attachment is like the migration of birds. It is built in, deep in our brain stems and DNA. The infant bird or mammal does not engage in a cognitive, analytical process to assess the cost-benefit of attachment. It just happens. It’s biology. The fundamental developmental task of the human infant is attachment. You will and you must attach. This is true at all levels of the organism. You must attach in order to survive biologically, but also in order to thrive and grow at emotional, intellectual, interpersonal and at all possible levels.

We know the consequences of failure to attach from several sources. The first is the third world orphanage. Orphan babies may have an adequate intake of protein, carbohydrate and fat, and may have their diapers changed regularly, but if they are starved for love, stimulation, attention, and affection, they are damaged developmentally. Their growth is stunted at all levels, including basic pediatric developmental norms.

In the text quoted above, I have eliminated all the ellipses, as I have done with the other quotations below. Ross goes on to explain the body of scientific evidence on the effects of abuse in the offspring of primates: “The Harlow monkey experiments, for instance, are systematic studies of abuse and neglect. Little monkeys cling desperately to their unresponsive wire-and-cloth mothers because they are trying to solve the problem of attachment to the perpetrator, in this case the perpetrator of neglect.” He also mentions experimental evidence that profound neglect and sensory isolation during early infancy physically damage the brain in a measurable way: “The mammal raised in such an environment has fewer dendritic connections between the nerve cells in its brain than the mammal which grew up in a ‘culturally rich’ environment.” It is in this context that Ross states that it is developmental suicide to fail to attach, and “at all costs and under the highest imperative, the young mammal must attach.” He then writes:

In a sense, we all have the problem of attachment to the perpetrator. None of us have absolutely secure attachment. We all hate our parents for some reason, but love them at the same time. This is the normal human condition. But there is a large group of children who have the problem of attachment to the perpetrator to a huge degree. They have it to such a large degree, it is really a qualitatively different problem, I think. These are the children in chronic trauma families. The trauma is a variable mix of emotional, verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

The locus of control shift

For psychiatrists Theodore Lidz, Silvano Arieti and, in a less systematic way, Loren Mosher [cited extensively in the previous section of Hojas Susurrantes], in schizophrenogenic families not only one but both parents failed terribly. If the problem of attachment to the perpetrator is a cornerstone in understanding the trauma model of mental disorders, there is yet another one. Though the number one imperative for birds (and in previous times, the dinosaurs) and mammals is to attach, in abusive families the child makes use of another built-in reflex: to recoil from pain. Ross explains what he calls “The locus of control shift” (in psychology, “locus of control” is known jargon):

The scientific foundation of the locus of control shift is Piaget and developmental psychology. We know several things about the cognition of children age two to seven. I summarize this as “kids think like kids.” Young children are self-centered. They are at the center of the world, and everything revolves around them. They cause everything in the world [“locus shift”] and they do so through magical causality. They do not use rational, analytical, adult cognitive strategies and vocabulary.

Imagine a relatively normal family with a four year-old daughter. One day, the parents decide to split up and dad moves out. What is true for this little girl? She is sad. Using normal childhood cognition, the little girl constructs a theory to explain her field observation: “Daddy doesn’t live here anymore because I didn’t keep my bedroom tidy.”

This is really a dumb theory. It is wrong, incorrect, inaccurate, mistaken and preposterous. This is how normal kids think. But there is more to it than that. The little girl thinks to herself, “I’m OK. I’m not powerless. I’m in charge. I’m in control. And I have hope for the future. Why? Because I have a plan. All I have to do is to tidy up my bedroom and daddy will move back in. I feel OK now.”

The little girl has shifted the locus of control from inside her parents, where it really is, to inside herself. She has thereby created an illusion of power, control and mastery which is developmentally protective.

Ross explains that this is normal and happens in many non-abusive, though dysfunctional, families. He then explains what happens in extremely abusive families:

Now consider another four year-old girl living in a major trauma family. She has the problem of attachment to the perpetrator big time. What is true of this little girl?

This other girl is powerless, helpless, trapped, and overwhelmed. She can’t stop the abuse, she can’t escape it, and she can’t predict it. She is trapped in her family societal denial, her age, threats, physical violence, family rules and double binds. How does the little girl cope? She shifts the locus of control.

The child says to herself, “I’m not powerless, helpless and overwhelmed. I’m in charge here. I’m making the abuse happen. The reason I’m abused is because I’m bad. How do I know this is true? Because only a bad little girl would be abused by her parents.”

A delicious exemplification of the locus of control shift in the film A.I. is the dialogue that David has with his Teddy bear. After Monica has abandoned him in the forest David tells his little friend that the situation is under his control. He only has to find the blue fairy so that she may turn him into a real boy and his mom will love him again…

In contrast to fairy tales, in the real world instances of the locus of control shift are sordid. In incest victims, the ideation that everything is the fault of the girl herself is all too frequent. I cannot forget the account of a woman who told her therapist that, when she was a girl, she took baths immediately after her father used her sexually. The girl felt that since she, not her father was the dirty one and that her body was the dirty factor that aroused the father’s appetite, she had to “fix” her little body. But there are graver cases, even, than sexual abuse. According to Ross, in near-psychotic families:

The locus of control shift is like an evil transfusion. All the evil inside the perpetrator has been transfused into the self, making the perpetrator good and safe to attach to. The locus of control shift helps to solve the problem of attachment to the perpetrator. The two are intertwined with each other.

Although Silvano Arieti made similar pronouncements half a century before, these two principles as elaborated by Ross are the true cornerstones to understand the edifice of Hojas Susurrantes.

As I mentioned in the previous section, when I visited the clinic of Ross in Dallas as an observer, I had the opportunity to observe the therapies undergone by some adult women. I remember a lady in particular who said that if her husband hit her it may be because she, not her husband, behaved naughtily. In his book Ross mentions cases of already grown daughters, now patients of his psychiatric clinic, who harm themselves. These self-harmers in real life exemplify the paradigm of the girl mentioned by Ross: evil has been transfused to the mind of the victim, who hurts herself because she believes she is wicked. In the previous section I said that in the film The Piano Teacher a mother totally absorbs the life of her daughter, who in turn redirects the hate she feels toward her mother by cutting herself in the genital area until bleeding profusely: a practice that, as we will see in the next section, is identical to the pre-Hispanic sacrificial practice of spilling the blood of one’s own genitals among Amerinds.

In his brief class Ross showed us why, however abusive our parents, a Stockholm syndrome elevated to the nth degree makes us see our parents as good attachment objects. The little child is like a plant that cannot but unfold towards the sun to survive. Since even after marriage and independence the adult child very rarely reverts in her psyche the locus of control shift to the original source, she remains psychically disturbed. For Lloyd deMause, this kind of super-Stockholm syndrome from parents to children and from children to grandchildren is the major flaw of the human mind, the curse of Homo sapiens that results in an alter ego in which all of the malignancy of the perpetrator has been transfused to the ego of the victim. In a divided self this entity strives for either (1) substituting, through the locus of control shift, the unconscious anger felt towards the parents on herself with self-harming, addictions, anorexia or other sorts of self-destructive behavior, and/or (2) harming the partner or the next generation of children. In either case the cause of this process is the total incapability of judging and processing inside ourselves the behavior of the parent: the problem of attachment to the perpetrator.

___________

The objective of the book is to present to the racialist community my philosophy of The Four Words on how to eliminate all unnecessary suffering. If life allows, the following week I will publish here the section on the discoverer of psychohistory, Lloyd deMause. Those interested in obtaining a copy of Day of Wrath can request it through Amazon Books.

Tags Trauma model of mental disorders

Autobiography Psychology

Psychological Rubicon

Open thread

Caesar paused on the banks of the Rubicon

In “Iceland – Normie Land” I confessed last week:

When I lived in Normie Land this was the path, my steppingstones that helped me to cross the psychological Rubicon:

1st stone: Robert Spencer and other online counter-jihadists (late 2008)

2nd stone: Larry Auster, who went beyond counter-jihadism onto stepping a racial and anti-feminist stone (but he was Jewish)

3rd stone: Jew-wise white nationalism, especially the webzines under the watch of Greg Johnson in the late 2009 and 2010 (in the following years I became disillusioned because of some ethno-suicidal traits of Johnson & the broader WN movement)

At the other side of the river I found the very solid ground of National Socialism.

And which was the path of your psychological Rubicon?

Manosphere Psychology Real men Sexual "liberation" Women

White Sharia

Unlike most white nationalists, Andrew Anglin has been telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about women. He’s even better than the MGTOW complainers because MGTOWers are not racists. Below, a few excerpts from Anglin’s article today on the Stormer:

What I am “claiming”—which is in fact simply explaining an objective reality, based on accepted science—is that women have no concept of “race,” as it is too abstract for their simple brains. What they have a concept of is getting impregnated by the dominant male.

Believing in “racially aware women” is a furry-tier sexual perversion. A woman is hardwired to breed with whoever she perceives as dominant in the society, as she wishes to give birth to dominant children. That is simple, mainstream, accepted evolutionary biology—not to mention painfully fucking obvious.

In a natural society, all women wanted to fuck the dominant warlord tribal chief. Because that would produce for them dominant, warlord children, who would protect them, feed them, house them and clothe them when they were too old and unattractive to have a male protect them for sexual reasons. This is the biological instinct of women to produce the most dominant male offspring—that instinct does not recognize race.

And we now have a society that has elevated the brown man to the status of dominant male. So the increasing female desire is to fuck the brown man. This is not complicated and it is not controversial.

The female sex drive is primitive and obsolete. Having been sexually liberated, they are leading our race to oblivion…

Primitive, obsolete female sex drive needs to be controlled with brutality.

I wish there was another way.

But there isn’t.

Manosphere Psychology

War of the sexes, 25

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

“We live in an insane society that tells us both
that women are totally equal in every way to men.”

—Andrew Anglin

In “Regarding arrogance” the blogger said that he is constantly accused of being arrogant: precisely what I am. But arrogance is not a vice unless you are wrong. Remember Vesalius, who always scorned the followers of Galen with manners of superiority because he was right. The blogger is right about patriarchy. I am right about what I write in my books. We will continue to be arrogant unless proved wrong.

In another video, “She’ll never love you—confirmed” the blogger quotes a female commenter: “As a woman I can confirm all of this. I am in a relationship… After two years he was always nearly broke… After that I felt less romantic feelings for him.” The blogger comments: “Hypergamy instinct is a by-product of the maternity instinct.” In our case, the instinct is not hypergamy. It is having cute little riding hoods as our delicious dinner, a consequence of the drive to reproduce.

The blogger mentions those women who don’t care for their fiancés’ finances as they are still very young and don’t think in marriage, which is not the case of the above-quoted woman. “Fell out of love” is a women’s phrase. They stop loving us when we don’t grow economically and they look at other opportunities. “Their love for you is conditional. That is how hypergamy works… create environments for the family.”

A critical note

The blogger mentions podcasts talking with his colleagues. In one of them, “Is MGTOW ready to evolve?” he tells his pals that trans-humanism and bio-technology can produce a more egalitarian society, making women more intelligent and strong.

He is crazy of course. Even one of his colleagues told him that that could create more problems than the problems we have today. The blogger doesn’t seem to realize that those stronger and more intelligent women would never need us again! Like many sci-fi idiots, the blogger believes that trans-humanism will solve our problems. He really is a degenerate, as I said in a previous entry about his porn addiction, and it is incredible that he doesn’t foresee the bride of Frankenstein that his egalitarian bio-technology could potentially create.

In the podcast, another of his pals showed much better common sense. He felt nostalgic about his childhood in a farm and confessed that those memories validated what he still fells about life. Trying to solve gynocentrism the blogger, on the other hand, would create humanoid monsters like those we saw in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner!

This is one of the problems endemic with disenfranchised whites. The post-WW2 narrative has been so toxic for the West that even smart westerners have become degenerates. Just see the many videos that the blogger has devoted to sex toys.

Non-degenerates would instead be fighting for an ethnostate that makes women submit to the will of their husbands as in The Village, a 2004 film that features the image of the little yellow riding hood I embedded above. That, not pornography, would be the solution. A pity: since approximately at 1:15 of that podcast the blogger was right about the “zombie apocalypse” we will see on the streets after the dollar crashes.

Tags Degeneracy

Arthur Schopenhauer Manosphere Men Psychology Women

War of the sexes, 24

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

“Women in their hearts think that men are intended to earn money so that they may spend it.”

—Schopenhauer

Commenters of the blogger’s channel often complain that Not All Women Are Like That (NWALT). He counters that the exceptions prove the rule. The blogger then advances a good litmus test to those women who claim they are traditional gals and anti-feminists: Why don’t you fight to abolish marriage rape laws?

In the last entry I labeled the blogger a degenerate. In “Guide to WALT” he says that the reason guys are taking refuge in videogames and porn is the high risk involved in dealing with today’s women: you can be accused of rape and then obliged to prove your innocence. Presently, the word of a woman is so sacred that it means you are presumed guilty.

Regarding NWALT women, those who still comply to real traditionalism, they generally come from very religious backgrounds, where you have to actively work for your own salvation. But most women don’t take religion as seriously as to fear in eternal damnation. Their hypergamy program, which is hardwired, takes control. They always want to get into a higher caste or social group, discarding their husbands. Remember that hypergamy = materialism + opportunism + selfishness. All women have the potentiality to act on their hypergamy program at any time. “Once the woman gets married she can use the State in order to extract the resources from her husband and she has no incentive to continue to be a NWALT.”

In “Regarding hypergamy and generalizations” the blogger continues to defend himself against the accusations in the comments section of his videos. He is being accused of making broad generalizations and the commenters claim that it is a logical fallacy. He counters by giving a speech on statistics showing, again, that the exception confirms the rule.

He then uses a cartoon of a couple under the shadow of a tree, the girl saying: “I’ll love you forever and ever until something better comes along or I get bored.” In other words, women are always looking for an ever better deal. He adds that since the 1940s the polls show that women have confessed that wealth is the fundamental factor that attracts them to men. In a more recent poll, no single woman wanted to get married with a man who made less money than her. This proves that we are wired very differently: we don’t care the least bit about how much they make a year. In fact, we would rather she doesn’t make a penny, so we may have within our property the little riding hood of our dreams.

The blogger claims that stats also show that women are more capable to cheat on their husbands (I would have to check and see if he got his statistics alright) and adds: “There is no morality in nature [cheating, opportunity, etc.], only survival.”

Taking of being wired in different ways, he says we even have a different set of values. We men are interested in justice. Women are prepared to dispatch justice for what is convenient for them and the family (caring). “You cannot rule a society based on ‘contextual justice’,” the Newspeak term that the feminists use.

In a nutshell, women are more selfish than men. See Schopen’s epigraph above. The blogger concludes: “She deserves that money because she is a woman; because you have it, because she needs it more than you.”

Egalitarianism Manosphere Psychology Sexual "liberation" Women

War of the sexes, 23

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

“What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization, an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.”

—Camille Paglia

Treating men and women as equals, the blogger says, can only hurt men. “This retardation of equality needs to stop.” As he has said in previous entries, gender equality is absolutely impossible due to sexual dimorphism in human beings favoring men. Exactly the same should be said about race: but the folks at the manosphere are only halfway regarding egalitarianism.

Alas, the blogger’s worldview is not only partially cooked. Not being a follower of the 14 words, he is a degenerate. He has many videos that I won’t watch about porn, sexual robots and sexual toys. This is one of the problems with the manosphere in general. Without the moral compass of the 14 words, partially awakened whites kill their time in self-debasing ways.

But the blogger’s observations about the whys of the Empire of the yin that we are suffering still merit citation. In his video “social intelligence is bullshit” he responds to some critics of his video “Men are smarter than women”: guys who advance the argument that women have “emotional intelligence,” presumably to manipulate us. The blogger counters with a thought experiment: If a woman waked up with the body of a guy she would loss all of her power over us! It is not emotional intelligence what they have to manipulate, but merely their fuckable little bodies.

Old and young women

The blogger adds that when women reach the age of 50 they become invisible. They usually cannot manipulate us as they used to do. The reason is obvious: their bodies are now unfuckable. Even before their forties they are no longer little reds riding hoods. Lycanthropes no longer drool while seeing them. Older gals are not even fertile anymore. In the words of the blogger, “Social intelligence is not intelligence at all. It’s merely female difference, specifically, young attractive female difference.”

All of this bullshit of social intelligence and emotional intelligence are pure gadgets to assist the self-esteem of inferior humans: women. The blogger’s exact words once more: “Women are basically retarded children. They have to be shielded from reality, the reality of sexual dimorphism.”

Remember de Tocqueville: equality is a slogan based on envy. Ultimately all of these pious self-delusions do not help women. They are the same kind of delusions that career women suffer: those who, in their forties, start looking for a husband clueless that we wolves don’t find them palatable anymore. This is what Nietzsche wrote in “Old and Young Women”:

Why do you steal along so furtively in the twilight, Zarathustra? And what do you hide so carefully under your cloak?

Is it a treasure that has been given to you? Or a child that has been born to you? Or do you go on a thief’s errand, you friend of evil?

My brother, said Zarathustra, it is a treasure that has been given me: I carry a little truth.

But it is naughty, like a young child; and if I do not hold its mouth, it screams too loudly.

As I went on my way alone today, at sunset I met an old woman, and she spoke thus to my soul:

“Much has Zarathustra spoken also to us women, but never spoke he to us concerning woman.”

And I answered her: “About woman, one should speak only to men.”

“Talk also to me of woman,” said she; “I am old enough to forget it presently.”

And I obliged the old woman and spoke thus to her:

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one answer—it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man?

The real man wants two different things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

The warrior does not like fruits which are too sweet. Therefore he likes woman—bitter is even the sweetest woman.

Woman understands children better than man does, but humanity is more childish than woman.

In a real man there is a child hidden: it wants to play. Up then, you women, and discover the child in man!

Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine like the precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come.

Let the beam of a star shine in your love! Let your hope say: “May I give birth to the overman!”

In your love let there be courage! With your love you shall attack him who causes you fear!

In your love let there be honour! Little does woman understand about honour otherwise. But let this be your honour: always to love more than you are loved, and never to be second.

Let man fear woman when she loves: then she makes every sacrifice, and everything else she regards as worthless.

Let man fear woman when she hates: for man in his innermost soul is merely bad; woman, however, is evil.

Whom does woman hate most? – Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: “I hate you most, because you attract me, but are too weak to draw me to you.”

The happiness of man is, “I will.” The happiness of woman is, “He wills.” “Lo! Lo! Now has the world become perfect!” Thus thinks every woman when she obeys with all her love.

The woman must obey, and find a depth for her surface. Woman’s soul is all surface, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.

Man’s soul, however, is deep, its torrent thunders in subterranean caverns: woman feels his strength, but does not understand it.

Then the old woman answered me: “Many fine things have Zarathustra said, especially for those who are young enough for them. Strange! Zarathustra knows little about woman, and yet he is right about her! Is this because with woman nothing is impossible? And now accept a little truth by way of thanks! I am old enough for it! Swaddle it up and hold its mouth: otherwise it will scream too loudly, the little truth.”

“Woman, give me your little truth!” I said. And thus spoke the old woman:

“You go to women? Do not forget the whip!”

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Tags Degeneracy

Egalitarianism Feminism Islamization of Europe Manosphere Patriarchy Psychology

War of the sexes, 21

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

The biological origins of patriarchy and feminism

In many sexually reproducing species, says the blogger, for males their reproductive success is limited by the access to females, while females are limited by the access to resources. Resources usually include nest sites, food and protection. In some cases, the males provide all of them. The females dwell in their chosen males’ territories through male competition. (If you want to argue that these animal behaviors are human social constructs you are an idiot.)

In his video “The biological origins of patriarchy and feminism” the blogger introduces the paradigm of our closest simian cousins to illustrate his point: the bonobos and the chimpanzees.

The chimpanzees make wars and are violent with the females. The blogger inserts clips of Sean Connery playing a James Bond slapping women in several films. The bonobos on the other hand are pacifists. Like the hippies they make love, not war. Studying the species closest to us humans will prove to be illuminating.

The liberal Briton Richard Wraugham, who studies the chimps in situ, says: “Chimpanzee society is horridly patriarchal, horridly brutal in many ways from the females’ point of view.” In order that an adolescent chimp is promoted to the adult category he has to subdue all the females. “They get beaten up in horrid ways.”

In another geographical place that we can watch in the blogger’s video, a blonde zoologist observes the bonobo behavior. She says that it is almost a paradise of sex. They do it in every conceivable way, even among the males and even pedophilia. The blonde asks what happened to produce such a pacific relationship between the sexes. She argues that the solidarity among female bonobos makes them capable to dominate the males. Then the liberal Wraugham says in the blogger’s video: “It was impossible for early humans to travel in groups around together as bonobos do, and therefore for females to form alliances and dominate the males in the way that happened in bonobos. A little bit of difference in climate history, a little bit of difference in food history and we might have evolved to be a totally different, less violent, more sexual species.”

In “Guide to human society and egalitarianism” the blogger reproduces the pic of a huge male gorilla and says that they fight among themselves to see who among them will conquer access to all the females (tournament mating). In this social system the females are practically the property of the males. “In patriarchal society women are expected to be obedient and submissive at all times.” The blogger makes a point with the hyenas: the polar opposite of the chimpanzee. Even the lowest ranked female hyena dominates the highest ranked male!

Between those extremes of matriarchy and patriarchy there is a third group of animals with almost no sexual dimorphism: the extremely elegant swans for example. “Humans,” says the blogger, are somewhere in-between a tournament and a pair-bonding species.”

The chimps have a more pronounced physical dimorphism than the bonobos, even though both have a common ancestor. The key to understand the bonobos is abundant resources and the lack of environmental threats. The blogger says that there is little sexual dimorphism in birds because they can easily escape the predators. Being able to fly means, additionally, that it is relatively easier to obtain fruits or insects while the other animals have to work harder to obtain them. The chimpanzees, unlike the bonobos, share the forest with the gorillas. The latter control all food on the ground, forcing the chimps to gather on the trees. The chimps avoid the gorillas as far as they can. This competence for limited resources in a hostile environment has moved chimp society towards patriarchy.

In bonobo society such competence does not exist. Bonobos are egalitarian and gynocentric. It is untrue what the blonde zoologist said above because among the bonobo violence comes from the females. They join forces and attack a male by biting his fingers and penis. The chimps may beat and rape the females, but don’t dismember them. In the supposedly egalitarian bonobo society bonobo males are dismembered if they get out of line.

In the bonobo society the females even mate with the weakest males because it is easier to control them, and bite the penises of those who resist their Diktat. Due to this sexual selection, with time the male bonobos shrank anatomically in generations. The blogger says that if chimps faced male bonobos the former would kill them all, and the females’ trick of trying to bite off the penises wouldn’t work. (The blogger adds a drawing clearly showing how the male chimp is anatomically more robust than the male bonobo.) Having the bonobo paradigm in mind, the blogger tells us: “That my friends is the central flaw in egalitarianism and gynocentrism. It literally and consciously breeds weakness.” In other words, if the chimps failed to behave the way they do they would die.

Egalitarianism is essentially gynocentric. Women are the limiting factor in reproduction. If a man wants to reproduce, he has to acquire women one way or another. He can beat and rape a woman into submission… or engage in courtship like bonobos do. The inequality of sexual reproduction makes true gender equality impossible.

Speaking of feminist laws in the US, William Pierce said that pursuing the equality dream is destructive for the white peoples. The blogger again:

Whether you call it feminism, egalitarianism or gynocentrism, it is unsustainable and will eventually destroy society.

To understand the West’s darkest hour we must keep in mind that to reach a gynocentric society two things are required: abundance of resources and absence of external threats. Both will be inverted in the aftermaths of the crashed dollar, and the subsequent black chimp-out in America’s big cities.

The flaw of the anti-white system is that the welfare state has produced a milieu of false abundance. After the end of the World Wars and the Cold War, “with all the threats neutralized the West could safely purge itself from masculinity” said the blogger, just as in the bonobo society. The flaw with the social engineering of bonobo-izing humans is that this “solution” drives the West toward weakness: gynocentrism undermines a society’s defenses which will guarantee its collapse sooner or later. To boot, unlike the bonobo Congo paradise Western economy is founded on a bubble that soon will pop, according to Austrian economics.

When you purge and attack masculinity from a culture you may eliminate the rappers and the violent murderers but you also eliminate the leaders, the inventors, the geniuses.

Chimps can create new tools, but not the bonobos. The blogger also says that gynocentric societies are more primitive than the patriarchal: there is no invention. There are only a hundred thousand bonobos in the world and, in a natural state, only in a specific area of the Congo. There are 300 percent more chimps than bonobos, and they live in five African countries. They evolved to the able to do it because they can triumph in hostile environments. In their garden of Eden the bonobos have survived by sheer luck.

Back to the white race. There are two ways that a gynocentric society can collapse. The good one is by entering again a patriarchal state. The bad one is being conquered by a more masculine culture. I have already quoted Will Durant in other article but it merits re-quoting:

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use of organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to selection of quality. She does not care that a high rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate a civilization culturally high [emphasis added] and she sees that a nation with low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group.

Writing about Muslims vs. Europeans Durant then said that there is no humorist like history. Presently the Muslims are gradually outbreeding whites in a Europe that will soon become Eurabia. In order that the human bonobos of today go back to their chimp ways of yore we must be expelled from the false Eden that presently we inhabit. The good news is that Winter is coming…

Tags Feminized western males

Alexis de Tocqueville Egalitarianism Feminism Manosphere Men Psychology Sexual "liberation" Women

War of the sexes, 16

Update: The following text is rough draft. The series has been substantially revised and abridged, and the section by the YouTube blogger Turd Flinging Monkey is available in a single PDF: here.

______ 卐 ______

“The desire for equality becomes more and
more insatiable as equality increases.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

In his “Guide to feminism” the blogger explains that the first wave of feminism was women’s suffrage; the second wave equal pay, and the third wave hatred of patriarchy. He reminds us that, once women were “liberated” in those three waves, they never accepted responsibilities like going to war to risk their skin: they merely demanded “rights” —a Newspeak term that in Oldspeak means exactly the opposite: privileges. The blogger defines feminism as “a hypocritical ideology for mentally-retarded children with penis envy that resent their biological inferiority and would never be satisfied no matter how much legal, political, social and economic superiority is granted to them over men.”

The feminist epitomes the Orwellian sentence that everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. Affirmative action was not enough for her: like the coloreds she now wants equality of income and equality of opportunities. To boot, through the divorce courts the feminist is oppressing men, in addition to pushing for an exception of the law regarding her claims of rape: men must be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Presently, as we are continuing to pander or going along with her desires, the West is heading toward the cliff. Imagine for a minute forcing gender quotas on a basketball team or in one of those international chess tournaments formed by four boards each nation. These hypothetical teams of males with females, whether they compete for physical or intellectual ability, would lose big time in the real world.

Let’s think about de Tocqueville’s epigraph above. My working hypothesis is that Christian ethics is the devil of the white race. Given the Christian insistence of regarding all souls as “equal in the eyes of God,” cognitive dissonance has been the axis of the escalation of both anti-racism and Western feminism. Races and genders are unequal. But because of the laws of cognitive dissonance, the liberal mindset is condemned to escalate egalitarianism as reality never stops fact-checking the liberal.

The blogger says: “Women are biologically inferior to men and they know it even when they deny it.” I would add that only by falling into an ever-amplifying downward spiral of male bashing the feminist is able, through the mental gymnastics of cognitive dissonance, to self-bamboozle herself into believing that they are just equal to us.