Why are humans so fucked in the head?
Posted on: June 23, 2009 - 11:37pm
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Why are humans so fucked in the head?
No, I'm serious. Read this or at least skim through most of it. It makes you think.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
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... i dont even think its possible to skim a wall of text that long O_O
What Would Kharn Do?
That was......interesting.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Against my better judgment, I read it all. I'll add informative and disgusting to "interesting".
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Well, I knew SOME OF THAT before reading, but didn't realize how horrible people really were. I assumed it was more like isolated incidents throughout history, instead of the standard.
And LOL @ calling children "enemies." That's gold. Funny how they'll put so much focus on the 5th Commandment but ignore the rest.
Its too much to read, is there a youtube video about it anywhere?
You can skim through it. Really.
Do you have that much of an aversion to reading?
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
Interesting read. What stands out for me is the assertion that it has only been in the last century or so that we have been changing our ways. If that be the case, then evolution cannot account for what is going on culturally. Indeed, all of that behavior must still be inherent in us and modern civilization should be viewed as the aberrant case.
Taken together, it really runs to my assertion that Man is a wild animal.
=
Who would claim that mankind is not a wild animal? o.O
A lot of animals have been lobbying for us to be removed from the list of 'wild animals' as we give the wild animals a bad name.
True story.
How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais
Evolution isn't nice.
I sometimes marvel that people are so shocked to learn that humans do the same things other animals do. The thing that makes us particularly nasty is our big brains. Other animals practice infanticide just as regularly as humans, but it takes a big brain to invent a god who wants it to be a societal ritual complete with torture, humiliation, and all the other uniquely human atrocities we can think of.
Nature is very unkind. One of the most horrifying things I've seen is footage of a mother killer whale teaching its child about hunting seals. The pair kept the poor seal alive for nearly a half hour, tossing it about, slapping it with their tails, submerging it, and letting it try to run away, only to catch it again and repeat the whole process. They seemed genuinely bummed out when the thing finally died.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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I've seen that too. It's true that animals can be just as malicious, but we humans are more creative and precise about it.
Nature is unkind, but I agree that it is fascinating that recently although much atrocities still exist, in general we treat each other so much better.
As I was walking around my neighborhood, I kept thinking of the way we treated children back in the day. I then looked around me and noticed the smiling mothers, the happy kids, the playgrounds, the sensitivity to children.
Why the dramatic change? It seems that physicians and doctors have mostly always known that beating and torturing children is wrong, but the practices continued in every culture nonetheless.
So why now have we begun to change so much?
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that we have progressed scientifically. Remember that genuine scientific psychology is in its infancy. We only started objective, empirical study of the human animal in the 20th century. It was the 1970s before scientists started applying evolutionary theory to human behavior in earnest.
It's an indication of how incredibly powerful our evolutionary impulses are. It may seem callous to speak in these terms, but consider that humans give every indication of having the evolutionary drive to selectively practice infanticide. There are many birds who feed only the strongest of their offspring, starving the weak to death. I forget which shark it is, but there's one variety whose young fight each other in the womb so that only the strongest (who ate his siblings) is born. Apes routinely kill and eat infants. The fact is, humans probably did, too, at some point.
Now, for the tiniest speck on our timeline, we've mostly abolished the practice of selective infanticide. It remains to be seen what impact this will have on our evolution if we keep it up and manage to survive our own population explosion. (Both of these possibilities seem slim to me.) Consider, though, that we still do practice infanticide -- we just do it in utero instead of waiting for the thing to be born. It's certainly far less cruel than how it's been done in the past.
I've wondered before if abortion wasn't our instinctive response to the rational conclusion that our childrearing practices were... questionable. Was it inevitable that we would start killing our offspring in the womb when it became illegal to kill them after they were born? I can't (yet) justify this as more than my own educated guess, but I believe this is an inescapable part of human nature. We kill some of our offspring, and always have. Calling it good or bad is kind of silly. It just is.
Another thing to consider: In most post-industrial parts of the world, the average number of offspring has drastically dropped over the last century or two. The U.S. average is less than two now. Except for places where the Catholic Church still has a stranglehold, most of Christianized culture has taken the command to be fruitful and multiply a bit less literally. In post-industrial civilization, children are an economic liability, and this is a relatively new development in human history. To put it into plain numbers, prior to the industrial revolution, the relative value of a single child was quite low. Without the helping hand of a wetnurse or mother, a significant percentage of children would die anyway from disease. It's kind of hard for us to comprehend, but when you have seventeen children, it's a little easier to shrug off the death of an infant.
Modern medicine probably has something to do with the big picture, too. For 99% of human history, a sickly child was a lost cause. When you're talking about living or dying on a limited food supply, it's easy to understand why some children would be killed as a favor to the whole family. In the same way that a bird starves the weakest chicks so that the strongest can have the best chance of survival, mothers were forced to make similar decisions. Our big imaginitive brains turned out to be pretty bad for us in this case. Where a mother bird appears not to develop psychological dysfunctions when she kills offspring, humans seem to have an almost unlimited capacity for getting fucked in the head.
Though this topic is pretty repugnant, it's also really fascinating on a lot of levels. We've not lived long enough in a post-industrial environment to see any evolutionary changes, so it's really difficult to tell how our drastically altered parenting behavior will change us. We've also meticulously avoided asking scientists to answer some of the more disturbing questions about ourselves. We like our cultural lies. We like to believe that having kids is the most wonderful thing that will ever happen to us, and that humans are designed to be blindly and fervently devoted to the well being of their children. I think a lot of people are afraid of what we will find if we examine these ideas too closely.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Oh I agree. It seems like we like to pretend that humans are naturally good and kind to offspring due to maternal instinct, and a lot of us live in the delusion that most parents have nothing but good intentions. It's part of our nature to be cruel, for whatever reason, and I think it's a fascinating topic too.
I always sigh when I see a family who clearly isn't ready about to have kids. They live in a fantasy world in which children will improve their lives, when in reality having kids can alter life for the worse since it adds an enormous amount of stress. The cycle of child abuse is often neverending.
I wonder if the article was correct in claiming that every child was abused in some form before the 19th century or so. I have to wonder if there were not parents a lot like the ones in today's post-industrial socieities: more calm, gentle and loving. Otherwise, how did we....do anything? It sounds like life sucked big time back then.
Science definitely had a huge impact. Once we starting thinking out of demons, spirits and devils, that is. The hallucinations and delusions of mothers seemed to be a push to abuse.
*Our world is far more complex than the rigid structure we want to assign to it, and we will probably never fully understand it.*
"Those believers who are sophisticated enough to understand the paradox have found exciting ways to bend logic into pretzel shapes in order to defend the indefensible." - Hamby
When we look around the animal kingdom, we are confronted with an uncomfortable truth: Childbearing is generally not good for the parents. In many species, the parent dies immediately after childbirth. Humans are lucky enough to live well beyond childbirth, but there are still a lot of negatives associated with it.
I don't like the feel of hyperbole in the claim. The author would have been better served if he said that behaviors currently considered child abuse were nearly ubiquitous across all cultures. That is certainly true.
Again, it's a good idea to forget that we're talking about people for a minute and pretend we're zoologists describing some other species. Remember that from an evolutionary point of view, our discussion is concerned with the reproductive fitness of the species. Despite experiencing significant stress before sexual maturity, most males and females reproduced successfully during this period. There's no particular evolutionary advantage to eliminating these stress-inducing behaviors by the parents, so we shouldn't be surprised that they stuck around for so long.
If anybody doubts the power of knowledge and critical thinking, this topic alone should be enough to convince them. Only since we as a species became smart enough to recognize the illogic of our evolutionary drives have we begun to experience significantly more happiness and less pain. We have the ability to pursue personal happiness through predicting the future. The discovery of the scientific method has upped our chances of success significantly.
I'm pretty sure life has sucked for most humans throughout history. But have you watched nature documentaries about life on the African plains? It probably sucks balls to be dying of thirst when the only water for a hundred miles in any direction is filled with mud and excrement, and happens to be the home of twenty starving crocodiles. Life in general sucks for a lot of animals. How much must it suck to be a fish and get one of those parasitic worms on your eye. Nothing to do but hurt until you die.
We post-industrial humans are really amazingly lucky. When you consider how many trillions of life forms have lived and died, it's staggering to realize that not only did we luck out enough to be human, we also are alive during the tiny, tiny portion of human history in which science facilitated long, healthy, happy lives!
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Some small part of me still thinks that, at some point, one of these people sticking their finger up a baby's ass daily had to think...
"Man, I might be crazy!"
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When we look at nature critically, it belies pretty much all the theist arguments for a good and loving creator. It is certainly an elegant and intricate "creation," but it sure seems as if there's a lot more pain than pleasure throughout the whole animal kingdom.
If a god were to come up with life as we know it, he could only be described as a sadistic son of a bitch.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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lolwut
Peppermint, my dear, don't believe every essay you read. I mean, not one parent prior to modern times? Are you joking? We can set 'modern times' as... what? I imagine nobody would object to the Roman Empire being considered 'too modern' to be included in the author's alleged study? Or the Inuit civilization in North America? Is the renaissance 'too new'? The mediterranean during the classical age of antiquity?
I mean - if you really want specifics - right off the top off my head, we have the example of Christiaan Huygens ("the world is my country, science is my religion " ) who, by almost every reliable account, was brought up in a loving household.
...So what's the prize I just won? Man, I hope whatever it is can be played on my Xbox.
Generally speaking, more affluent individuals treated their offspring with better care (throughout history and even today). The aristocracy in classical times reared their children benevolently on average, scholars did the same, military families certainly would not have (on average; again, no doubt there are many cases of abuse one can specifically point to) thrown their children to the wolves (figuratively or otherwise). I mean, how the Hell do you think the Legio Roman remained the most formidable and well disciplined fighting force the world had ever seen for so many centuries? It wasn't by being filled with retarded youngsters who were resentful towards their upbringing and bitter towards their country.
WHAT!?!?!?
This is such a crock of shit. It's on par with what VenomFangX parrots from Answers in Genesis. First, which classical scholar is going to include in their philosophical writings (few of which actually reflected on their own actual backgrounds) references to what interactions they had with their father? For fuck's sake, even if it were wholly true of (say) the state of Athens, where most of the scholarly work was done, what about in Sparta, where boys were raised to be soldiers by the soldiers fathers from an early age? Or does that somehow not count?
(Sure enough, look at the source: 16. Barry S. Strauss, Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990; Beryl Rawson, Ed., Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
So the author takes one look at one book dealing explicitly with Athenian culture, and portrays it as representing all cultures in Classical times. What good, objective reporting.
)
Alright. I'm done. Halfway through and it's revealed itself to be on par with the works of Ken Ham, so I'll leave it alone. Some texts are hardly worth the effort to debate.
No doubt that in times past, we weren't as good at protecting and nurturing those in our care as we are now. No duh. The notion that all parents were barbarians (no excusing the author - they implicitly state this, even offering a reward for finding one instance where a parent was not) is ludicrous, as is exemplified by our ability to slowly make progress forward.
EDIT: What annoys me most is that you can just smell the smug Christian values argument hidden between the lines here. "See? We were all savage barbarians back then, who were cursed with original sin and worshipped false Gods and tried to learn things (the essay repeatedly bashes scholars in particular). But then JEEBUS came, and we saw the light, and now we're SAVED, and blah blah blah blah." Fucking spare me, cupcake.
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
Hamby, I have to say that the animal analogies are something of a red herring. I mean, does a mother pigeon or an infant orca or shark have the mental faculties to understand the ethical implications of what it's doing? Fuck no. It's like calling a pine tree a 'bad parent' because it doesn't intervene when one of it's saplings is about to be trampled underfoot.
We haven't had nothing but barbaric parents until 'modern times', unless 'modern times' stretches all the way back to when we were hunting game on the African plains (and even then, I bet you could find an appreciable percentage of concerned parents, even if they didn't have the faculties to appreciate what being an ethical child-rearing parent means).
- Leon Trotsky, Last Will & Testament
February 27, 1940
I can't take this seriously. None of us gives a fuck about starving children of the world, it just doesn't touch us at all. We carpet-bomb, starve, plunder and pillage the shit out of nations (including their children), we even drop nukes on them. We rationally and democratically decide to torture millions and go around saying - well, we voted for them, have to ride it out... Someone mentioned animal cruelty while teaching a cub hunting - are you fucking kiding me? We practically create wast armies of animals, torture and slaughter them with no learning intent at all.
I mean seriously, do you even doubt for a second that we are the most vicious fucks that ever walked the earth - one and all?
Now that that is established, can't really go any lower than that and be outraged more, can we? So why not focus on all the maddening good stuf that some people seem to go around doing, instead of crying crocodile tears?
Start here: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06192009/watch.html
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
Don't misunderstand my intention. I'm not suggesting that man's capacity for moral thought doesn't make our experience of childrearing qualitatively different than a shark's. I'm suggesting that much of what you and I consider "obvious morality" are remarkably recent discoveries. I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between that very bleak essay (which makes some remarkable leaps of logic in some places) and the rosy idea that parents have always been loving and devoted in a modern sense.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Loving and devoted in a modern sense a recent discovery? So the feelings people have today are somehow unreal, assuming that if they were real they would have to be a product of a lengthy evolutionary pressure?
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
No, the feelings people have today are roughly the same as they have been for our entire evolutionary history, but the environment has changed significantly. Never before have we been privy to modern empirical data about what parenting behaviors do in the long term. We have real feelings, and apply real learning to them, and the results are better than having real feelings and applying superstition and folklore to them.
It's pretty simple.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Okay, I'm new to this thread but crap ClockCat, could you please eliminate your wall of text and shorten your replies, it took me twenty minutes just to skim this post !!!
Our society dictates that every adult should like children and desire to have their own child. Many people force others to come to showers to give them gifts for successfully fornicating. Then, when the little flesh sac arrives, everyone is expected to ogle the damn thing and talk about how wonderous it is. That's just the beginning. (I hate children if you haven't realized it yet.)
Then, the sac of crapping flesh becomes a child. They are brought into restaurants, stores, and public in general. There, they make noise and irritate everyone who does not share genetic material with them. Yet, we aren't allowed to do anything to them. We must rely on their parents to shut their wailing, gaping, whining holes and to keep them still. This rarely occurs; thus, the general populace must simply walk around these insane dwarves and accept their existence.
Clearly, I am not the only one who feels this way. Watch a crowded restaurant's reaction when some breeder brings in five kids.
"Tis better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." -Lucifer
I agree completely. Unruly children bring out the killer instinct in me.... seriously.
Gosh, Nero. Would you take it as a compliment if I told you that I hope to grow old enough to be as crotchety as you some day?
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Yes, I totally agree with Nero and PDW.
I fucking HATE the reverence new parents expect others to have for their little 'miracle'.
Shut your horrible little brat up or leave!
How can not believing in something that is backed up with no empirical evidence be less scientific than believing in something that not only has no empirical evidence but actually goes against the laws of the universe and in many cases actually contradicts itself? - Ricky Gervais
I do take it as a compliment, but you should know that being this crabby is an inborn trait. So, aspire but don't be disappointed if you maintain a pleasant streak.
"Tis better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." -Lucifer
I had the foresight to pay a doctor to cut on my testicles a few years ago, so I have the distinct pleasure of knowing that anytime there's an annoying child in my viscinity, I can walk away without fear of an injunction.
I've said before that I don't necessarily think humans ought to go extinct -- though I also don't fault anyone who does. I'm not a humanist, but I'm not an um... animalist or plantist... either. That is, I just don't think there's an inherent right for anything to be here. If we humans can figure out how to stay alive without blowing everything up or driving all our food extinct, so much the better for us, I say. For that to happen, somebody has to pop out babies.
Having said that, I think 7 billion ought to be the population at which we have a collective moment of reflection and just state the obvious: Childbirth is neither a miracle nor a great gift to humanity. You show me any three billion people on earth, and I'll show you three billion people who could die childless and the human race would be fine without their offspring.
Let's call it what it is. If a person believes having a child will make their life happy and complete, fine. They might be right. I know several people who really love their kids and seem to be perfectly fulfilled and happy being parents. Kudos to them. But the thing is, their kids are awesome TO THEM. I just don't believe society has any obligation to kiss their asses for doing something to make themselves happy.
Why isn't anybody kissing my ass for saving the world from the tons of waste my non-existent offspring will not produce? I'm saving the freaking world, and nobody gives me a place in line or a tax break.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
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Are you confusing rational with sentimental again?
Why aren't otters extinct? Go on, you know why: lots of people find them cute. Sharks, on the other hand, are scary and have big sharp teeth, so we kill them just like we're decimating all the rest of the fish. They're not cute, so fuck 'em.
We don't do what's best for us, and you know it. It's a habit.
Sort of like the above article's habit of quoting its own author. Or citing psychoanalysts instead of historians. I still found the chapter scary, but the analysis was way off base.
It's pretty funny that you guys went from child beatings and prostitution to "they annoy me in restaurants", though. I mean, yeah, noisy kids annoy everyone in restaurants (to be fair, it's the inconsiderate parents who are really annoying -- what the fuck do kids know?) but would beatings really help? There are plenty of kids who get beaten and they're still loud and annoying. I don't know if prostitution would solve that problem, either. Pretty sure no.
It would be awesome to have a restaurant that was "kid friendly" as long as your kids were "adult friendly". I'm spoiled, because I don't have any friends with bratty-ass kids. (It's amazing how not being a douchebag rubs off on children.) But it would still be nice to go to a place where the waiters said, "Okay, pal -- your kid just screamed twice and you did nothing like it was all cool. It's not. Hit the bricks."
While we're bitching about restaurant no-nos, for nice restaurants, people wearing ball-caps should simply be beheaded. Maybe the visibly retarded should be warned before a beheading, but seriously, how difficult is it to take your fucking hat off? Put on a jacket, and take off your trucker hat. The chef just made you a $75 steak; show some respect.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Yes, I can get behind this. You are suggesting that we behead the retarded. That I appreciate. If one can actually tell from their physical appearance, say Downs Syndrome, that the person is retarded, one will warn the person before lopping off the old cranium. For those who are able to hide their retarded nature, no warning will be given. Yes, this is excellent. So, we should smack other people's kids around for being loud or in any way obnoxious, and we are going to behead the mentally handicapped.
The only this world scenario could get better for me would be to allow me to watch Rush Limbaugh slowly starve to death while every group he practices his hate against eat from a trough in front of him.
Wow, for the first time in a long time, I feel warm all over!
"Tis better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." -Lucifer
You want his gigantic ass to starve, you're going to be waiting a long time. Or is that part of the fun?
"Hi Diane, and welcome back everybody, to Rush's Cage Fasting, where we put Rush Limbaugh in a cage and watch him starve. So far, the man has begged for cheeseburgers and his mother, but he's receiving neither, to the delight of the largely unsympathetic crowd."
"That's right, Bob. I saw a couple of people reading in the audience. I bet Rush isn't used to that kind of company."
"No kidding, Diane. Earlier, some men in the front row were taunting Limbaugh by kissing one another, and he offered to suck their dicks in exchange for fried chicken."
"Rush sure is hungry, and we're only on day 2! I just saw someone psych him out with an infant --"
"He was this close to eating a baby -- I saw that, too, Diane."
"Well, Bob, it's going to be a long haul. Something tells me his Shamu ass isn't going to fade away any time soon, so this is Diane Huggintree and Bob Forewood saying goodnight, and sweet dreams."
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Very nice. Yes, the slower the better. Rush puts the lotion on his skin or he gets the hose again.
"Tis better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven." -Lucifer
Ah-hahahah! Man, you wouldn't be making a suit. With Rush, we'd be making a reclining lounger.
I'm in. Best use of Rush Limbaugh ever conceived: we turn him into leather furniture.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
Will... seriously... I think I want to have your baby.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Its society that is changing people, the system that says money is more important that happyness. financial circumstance can turn a mouse into a monster!! it is the evolution of our world (the human perception of the world) that is wrong. it runs deep and cant be fixed by modern polotics, we need to take it to the next level (not that there is a defined "next level"
. the zietgiest needs to change!! the world parception needs to change and the poeople who have the money (you could call them the "1%"
are good at lobbying and making sure the people have less power than money its self.
Don't know what just happened then, i just let it all out!!