I recall reading an interview with a psychiatrist once where he claimed that any patient that didn't recognize and respect status, hierarchy and authority; that had an inclination towards social justice, was incontrovertibly autistic.
At the time I just thought, for fuck's sake, you're just a self-important nerd that's medicalising people you feel threatened by, that you can't smugly dominate.
I still think that, but I believe there's more to it. I think that, while most people are strongly neurobiologically hardwired for status, hierarchy, power, tribalism, and group-identity conformity, for others that wiring is a lot weaker, and it manifests itself as greater independence and individuality, and less need for belonging and external validation.
They have a hard life though, because society is like an immune system that tries to expel deviance and anomalies. However if it wasn't for these people humanity would still be living in caves: there is no progress without deviation, and the fact is, whether at the bottom or the top of the social hierarchy, most people just want to conform, belong, be loyal to the tribe, and do things the way they've always been done.
Which is why the mental health system is so destructive. All sorts of people with all sorts of problems have a brush with psychiatry, but a significant subset are independent, creative individualists that have gone off the rails. Put them in an environment populated by clinicians and staff that are unreconstructed authoritarian conformists with a monomanical lust to level autonomy and idiosyncracy, and the outcomes are certainly not going to resemble healing and individual flourishing.
In fact there's been enough social psychology experiments done in the past that show even "good" people in bureaucratic and institutional environments can turn into power mad sadists.
There's also been studies that show the ruling class have an unusually high saturation of narcissistic and psychopathic personalities. Hardly surprising, given their preoccupation with power, control, and domination. Working as a market gardener just wouldn't deliver the same thrill.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. (GB Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, No. 124).
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion (Wilde).
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. (Wilde, The Critic as Artist)
I think that the population is far more diverse than you envision. There is a whole spectrum of innate behaviour or tendencies in the population. It is very difficult to tease out the nature vs.nurture causes. For centuries we have been immersed in a socioeconomic system, i.e capitalism, that materially rewards and culturally supports antisocial behaviour so this clouds our analytical perspective. We have also been subject to a system of propaganda (i.e. economics) that is meant to justify and glorify this behaviour. The material and cultural results lead to and supports egomania, narcissism that makes people believe that they deserve to dominate others (and nature), that it is their destiny, i.e elitism, western exceptionalism. Of course feudalism preceded capitalism and we had brutal warlords turn into monarchs.
Wise words to consider. “Philosophers who have examined the foundations of society, Rousseau said, have all felt the need to return to the state of nature, but none of them ever got there.” Sahlins p. 75, 1972
Lord of the Flies is fiction of course, plausible, but not evidence. If it were ethical to run that experiment, the results would likely be all over the place, primarily because we have agency. In any case we cannot change Nature, so we must focus on socioeconomic and cultural systems that constrain these destructive antisocial tendencies, and support constructive nurturing and healing. Perhaps then people can be free.
ONe of the main reasons it is difficult to sort nature vs nurture is because so many researchers are devoutly committed to the idea that nature is all, i.e. positivist reductionism. It's almost impossible to talk to them. Agreed we are subject to indoctrination from birth but it only amplifies what we want to hear.
How would you verify/prove whether a) the drive to dominate is the fundamental drive of conscious beings, or b) the drive to dominate is an unsophisticated expression of the fundamental drive to develop more agency?
I don't see domination as the "fundamental drive of conscious beings," it is somewhere down the list. Once the others are satisfied (food, shelter, company) then it comes into its own. Domination is one of the possible expressions of agency. However, it is the most dangerous so it gets more attention.
By fundamental drive I mean the opposite of the functional hierarchy of needs; I mean the primary motive to which all other needs and functions are instrumental. We do not conquer the world at the risk to life and despite pain only to fill our belly; we eat breakfast for a higher purpose, and inferring from your writings it is evident you identify the dominant purpose of conscious beings in domination of others.
We can also conceive of a conscious machine that feel no hunger and does not reproduce, or a person with a mutation which results in no sex drive and no sense of hunger. And yet we can imagine these agents still motivated to act towards some primary goal, that motivates their existence. On your account both the conscious machine and the sexless human will still ‘get out of bed’ and seek to conquer the world. Why do you think that?
If the motive to dominate is innate to all human beings then it is (by definition of health) healthy and normal, not a problem. If domination is not a primary motive but a primitive, irrational misapplication of a more fundamental aim, then it can be fixed, by identifying the error in human reasoning and realising our motivation towards a more fulfilling outcome.
The drive to dominate comes with testosterone; it is thrilling, exciting, to be on top and miserable to be downtrodden. A sexless being would not have it although the eunuchs of the Ottoman courts certainly enjoyed a good intrigue. A conscious machine (I presume you mean robot) would not try to dominate unless programmed to do so, as we are programmed by hormones. When personality factors synergise with this particular drive, then there is trouble. As we see all around us today.
A machine that is fully programmed, deterministically, is therefore not conscious, does not ‘act’, and has no ‘intentions’. Reduction to ‘programming’ implies determinism which, I argue, implies contradiction, but this is not obvious. If the alleged motivation and intentional action is fully determined by the prior state of the world then the result merely happens as a consequence of events independent of the alleged intention, therefore is not ‘done’ by an agent. The concept of intention established a distinction between ‘mere happening’ and ‘doing’; agency is a causal discontinuity by definition.
If one were to deny, by definition, that intention/agency is a causal discontinuity, then one would be committed to the idea of thing-in-itself determining consciousness, therefore an idea that is not an idea, therefore contradiction.
Psychiatric Trainees these days, who refuse to enlighten themselves or believe in God Almighty or in their own humanity are guilty of heresy, hubris and are individual terrorists. God Save and protect Dr McLaren for he saved my mental health working along-side money hungry narcissists who are atheist trainee and consultant psychiatrists'. Thank you for your humble and courageous stewardship mentor, inspiration, brave advocate in this horrifyingly corrupt world. #SOS
I recall reading an interview with a psychiatrist once where he claimed that any patient that didn't recognize and respect status, hierarchy and authority; that had an inclination towards social justice, was incontrovertibly autistic.
At the time I just thought, for fuck's sake, you're just a self-important nerd that's medicalising people you feel threatened by, that you can't smugly dominate.
I still think that, but I believe there's more to it. I think that, while most people are strongly neurobiologically hardwired for status, hierarchy, power, tribalism, and group-identity conformity, for others that wiring is a lot weaker, and it manifests itself as greater independence and individuality, and less need for belonging and external validation.
They have a hard life though, because society is like an immune system that tries to expel deviance and anomalies. However if it wasn't for these people humanity would still be living in caves: there is no progress without deviation, and the fact is, whether at the bottom or the top of the social hierarchy, most people just want to conform, belong, be loyal to the tribe, and do things the way they've always been done.
Which is why the mental health system is so destructive. All sorts of people with all sorts of problems have a brush with psychiatry, but a significant subset are independent, creative individualists that have gone off the rails. Put them in an environment populated by clinicians and staff that are unreconstructed authoritarian conformists with a monomanical lust to level autonomy and idiosyncracy, and the outcomes are certainly not going to resemble healing and individual flourishing.
In fact there's been enough social psychology experiments done in the past that show even "good" people in bureaucratic and institutional environments can turn into power mad sadists.
There's also been studies that show the ruling class have an unusually high saturation of narcissistic and psychopathic personalities. Hardly surprising, given their preoccupation with power, control, and domination. Working as a market gardener just wouldn't deliver the same thrill.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends on the unreasonable man. (GB Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, No. 124).
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion (Wilde).
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. (Wilde, The Critic as Artist)
I think that the population is far more diverse than you envision. There is a whole spectrum of innate behaviour or tendencies in the population. It is very difficult to tease out the nature vs.nurture causes. For centuries we have been immersed in a socioeconomic system, i.e capitalism, that materially rewards and culturally supports antisocial behaviour so this clouds our analytical perspective. We have also been subject to a system of propaganda (i.e. economics) that is meant to justify and glorify this behaviour. The material and cultural results lead to and supports egomania, narcissism that makes people believe that they deserve to dominate others (and nature), that it is their destiny, i.e elitism, western exceptionalism. Of course feudalism preceded capitalism and we had brutal warlords turn into monarchs.
Wise words to consider. “Philosophers who have examined the foundations of society, Rousseau said, have all felt the need to return to the state of nature, but none of them ever got there.” Sahlins p. 75, 1972
Lord of the Flies is fiction of course, plausible, but not evidence. If it were ethical to run that experiment, the results would likely be all over the place, primarily because we have agency. In any case we cannot change Nature, so we must focus on socioeconomic and cultural systems that constrain these destructive antisocial tendencies, and support constructive nurturing and healing. Perhaps then people can be free.
ONe of the main reasons it is difficult to sort nature vs nurture is because so many researchers are devoutly committed to the idea that nature is all, i.e. positivist reductionism. It's almost impossible to talk to them. Agreed we are subject to indoctrination from birth but it only amplifies what we want to hear.
How would you verify/prove whether a) the drive to dominate is the fundamental drive of conscious beings, or b) the drive to dominate is an unsophisticated expression of the fundamental drive to develop more agency?
Why not (b)?
I don't see domination as the "fundamental drive of conscious beings," it is somewhere down the list. Once the others are satisfied (food, shelter, company) then it comes into its own. Domination is one of the possible expressions of agency. However, it is the most dangerous so it gets more attention.
By fundamental drive I mean the opposite of the functional hierarchy of needs; I mean the primary motive to which all other needs and functions are instrumental. We do not conquer the world at the risk to life and despite pain only to fill our belly; we eat breakfast for a higher purpose, and inferring from your writings it is evident you identify the dominant purpose of conscious beings in domination of others.
We can also conceive of a conscious machine that feel no hunger and does not reproduce, or a person with a mutation which results in no sex drive and no sense of hunger. And yet we can imagine these agents still motivated to act towards some primary goal, that motivates their existence. On your account both the conscious machine and the sexless human will still ‘get out of bed’ and seek to conquer the world. Why do you think that?
If the motive to dominate is innate to all human beings then it is (by definition of health) healthy and normal, not a problem. If domination is not a primary motive but a primitive, irrational misapplication of a more fundamental aim, then it can be fixed, by identifying the error in human reasoning and realising our motivation towards a more fulfilling outcome.
The drive to dominate comes with testosterone; it is thrilling, exciting, to be on top and miserable to be downtrodden. A sexless being would not have it although the eunuchs of the Ottoman courts certainly enjoyed a good intrigue. A conscious machine (I presume you mean robot) would not try to dominate unless programmed to do so, as we are programmed by hormones. When personality factors synergise with this particular drive, then there is trouble. As we see all around us today.
Full details are in the books. Cheers, JMcL
A machine that is fully programmed, deterministically, is therefore not conscious, does not ‘act’, and has no ‘intentions’. Reduction to ‘programming’ implies determinism which, I argue, implies contradiction, but this is not obvious. If the alleged motivation and intentional action is fully determined by the prior state of the world then the result merely happens as a consequence of events independent of the alleged intention, therefore is not ‘done’ by an agent. The concept of intention established a distinction between ‘mere happening’ and ‘doing’; agency is a causal discontinuity by definition.
If one were to deny, by definition, that intention/agency is a causal discontinuity, then one would be committed to the idea of thing-in-itself determining consciousness, therefore an idea that is not an idea, therefore contradiction.
One could alternatively argue from Russell’s paradox: https://substack.com/@michaelkowalik/note/c-83069607
I accept that we may continue to disagree on this point.
Psychiatric Trainees these days, who refuse to enlighten themselves or believe in God Almighty or in their own humanity are guilty of heresy, hubris and are individual terrorists. God Save and protect Dr McLaren for he saved my mental health working along-side money hungry narcissists who are atheist trainee and consultant psychiatrists'. Thank you for your humble and courageous stewardship mentor, inspiration, brave advocate in this horrifyingly corrupt world. #SOS