Tag: anthropology

More basic anthropology and how that affects news and politics

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Yesterday I discussed the basic principle of consanguinity and how that affects societies that practice it.

To continue in this vein, today I want to describe how some very basic anthropological concepts apply to Europeans.

Yesterday we saw how large groups of clannish people from consanguineous cultures are all but guaranteed to cause problems in Europe, which historically eradicated consanguinity and most clans.

But that leaves open the question of why Europeans are blind to the inevitable problems that will arise when consanguineous clannish cultures migrate into Europe in large numbers.

In the news this morning, I found this article: ‘Cover-up’ over Cologne sex assaults blamed on migration sensitivities.

Here are some quotes from it:

Politicians and police were facing mounting questions on Wednesday over how a crowd of some 1,000 men “of North African or Arab appearance” was able to mass around the city’s main train station on New Year’s Eve, with roving gangs allegedly assaulting dozens of women with impunity.

and

There has been widespread condemnation of the city’s police force after an official press release on New Year’s Day described the celebrations as “peaceful”.

…questions are being asked over why it took five days for the media to report the incidents.

So why did that happen?

The basic anthropological reason is Europeans are extremely sensitive to feelings of shame.

This is so because European communal bonds are built on the ideas of fairness and universal morality that developed after clans were eradicated in Europe.

These ideas have existed in European populations for so long that those populations have evolved to rely on them for social cohesion. This is an example of the co-evolution of genes and culture.

Co-evolution of genes and culture is a feature of all societies. It almost certainly accelerated during the past 3,000 years since the advent of large-scale agriculture.

In European society, this sort of co-evolution encouraged the emergence of a strong sense of shame or guilt. These emotions emerged because shame, public shaming, and guilt are used to police European post-clannish, universal morality.

Now we can answer the questions posed above from the linked article.

Why did police allow the large crowd of rowdy men to gather? Because they were ashamed to do anything because if they had, they might have been criticized for being “racist.”

The police not only did not break up the crowd to protect German women, they further falsely described the celebrations as “peaceful” in a press release.

How could German police feel more ashamed of a word (racist) than of not protecting German women?

The answer is their natural tendencies and professional requirements to protect German women (or anyone) were overruled by the dictates of their consciences.

Their brains malfunctioned so much that the police protected themselves against false imaginary accusations instead of doing their jobs by protecting actual women.

I say malfunctioned because in a larger context that is surely a malfunction.

But within German or European culture, actions like theirs have not so far been seen as malfunctions, except sometimes after the fact.

The Rotherham sex scandal in England is another example of widespread fear among police and officials of being shamed. There are literally hundreds of other examples throughout Western Europe.

These examples show how a culture that evolved in response to the absence of clans developed a sense of moral shame that is poorly adapted to the present world.

The actions of European politicians who have allowed these problems to develop and of the press that consistently hides these same problems can be explained in the same way the actions of police in Cologne have been explained.

Some very basic anthropology and how that affects news and politics

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A well-known difference in world cultures is the degree to which members of a culture marry close relatives. This is called consanguinity. The map below shows rates of consanguinity across the world. Click on the image to expand the map and see the numbers better.

Cultures with high rates of consanguinity tend to be clannish. This means that a basic organizational unit of the society is a clan made up of closely related members. Clans are usually hierarchical and demand primary loyalty from their members. And this generally results in nations with weak state institutions, corruption, and lots of fighting among clans.

Young males in clans generally learn from an early age that violence is the best way to settle disputes because that is how it has been for centuries and because there are no alternatives like a fair and effective legal system.

Clannish societies also engage in crowd behaviors such as those that occurred in Cologne on New Years Eve. To an anthropologist, attacks of that nature should not be surprising. They are a fairly normal aspect of clan-based behavior and psychology. Germans, though…

…have been shocked by the scale of the attacks, involving many groups of drunk and aggressive young men.

Witnesses and police said the men were of Arab or North African appearance. (same link as above)

Being shocked by something so predictable says a good deal about German idealism. Do they really think that just breathing the air in Germany will change the psycho-sociologies of migrants that have developed over thousands of years?

Displaying amazing ignorance of the root cause of what is happening in Cologne and many other parts of Europe, the Mayor of Cologne herself actually said

…that [German] women should adopt a “code of conduct” to prevent future assault at a crisis meeting following the sexual attack of women by 1000 men on New Year’s eve. (link)

When your ideals stubbornly do not match reality, it’s time to change your ideals.

Europe used to be a clannish society. But the Catholic Church banned consanguinity during the Middle Ages. Banning consanguinity was a deliberate and premeditated way to destroy the clan structure of much of Europe.

After that ban, a different sort of society evolved in Europe, based on strong state laws and a universal morality that sees other people as being largely “the same as” oneself and thus deserving of fair treatment.

Some other really basic differences between societies are the way women are treated (see the above) and how the truth is treated.

In Europe and European-derived cultures, the truths people believe in are open and ideally should be shared with others without prejudice. The scientific method is a good example of this. Europe did not keep its science and technology secret.

This is not the case in many other cultures. In many parts of the world codes exist that define what can be said or not said to “outsiders.” And in many of those societies it is considered right and proper to lie to “outsiders” in order to gain an advantage over them. If you allow large numbers of people like that into your society, you are going to have problems.

The ideas expressed above are so basic to human social psychology, it’s long past time to stop being ignorant of them or pretending they are more malleable than they are.

A voice they don’t want you to hear

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The string-pullers on TV and in DC don’t like diversity of views, especially when they can’t control them.

And they  don’t like the people expressing those views for a similar reason—they say things you’re not supposed to hear.

This explains both the popular appeal of Donald Trump and the barrage of attacks he faces daily.

James Kirkpatrick describes it well:

The rise of Trump isn’t “fascism,” but long overdue resistance and self-defense from an occupied people tired of being treated like enemies of the state in the country they built.

You have to go to alternate media sites to get reasonable analyses of American politics today because mainstream media is all about controlling the message, controlling what you hear.

Kirkpatrick’s essay is well worth reading in full:  Trump’s “Fascism” Is Just White America Finally Hitting BACK.

Kirkpatrick on Obama:

But even as the lying Main Stream Media shrieks about the imminent Trumpreich, there is an eerie silence as Barack Obama’s Occupation Government engages in actions which would be termed “fascist” if directed against non-whites and non-Christians. Chief among them was Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s declaration to a group called the “Muslim Advocates” that her “greatest fear” was the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric.” Lynch said the Justice Department would “take action” against those who engaged in speech that “edges towards violence.” (same link as above)

It’s ironic that it takes someone who is very rich to actually speak for a huge segment of the American people who are not, but that’s how it is.

Washington and Jefferson were rich. A rich person with good intentions can do a great deal of good.

I don’t see Trump as fascist or dangerous, but rather as the first candidate in decades who may actually do what he says.

Two essays about White people

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The first essay discusses rising death rates among middle-age Whites and sort of concludes that they deserve it. When I saw the piece was by Barbara Ehrenreich, I clicked on it immediately because I usually enjoy her work. Not this time. I think the essay, Dead, White, and Blue The Great Die-Off of America’s Blue Collar Whites, is terrible. If you read it, I urge you to look at the comments, many of which refute her points very well.

The second essay, The Nation Publishes Ethnically Motivated Anti-White Hate Propaganda Screed, is a response by Guillaume Durocher to an essay that appeared in The Nation magazine.

Durocher’s piece reads somewhat like the comments following Ehrenreich’s. A basic point is that White people as a group have needs and interests and that they should be allowed to speak about them without being called “supremacists.” (At the time of this posting, there are no comments under Durocher’s essay.)

I have written about White identity on this site once, making the point that:

I see nothing wrong with White identity or White identity groups, especially defensive identity groups that want to conserve and promote the values and culture of White people, who can be defined as people of predominantly European extraction.

The issues discussed in Durocher’s and Ehrenreich’s essays are well-worth thinking about and discussing with friends. I doubt they will be settled soon or that they can be reasonably summarized in a few sentences. I raise these issues because they are important and controversy can be a good thing, especially when it is resolved peacefully through words.

___________________

Edit 12/07/15: National Data: November Jobs—Americans Lose Ground As Immigrant Job Displacement Ties Obama-Era Record

On Freudianism and the assertion of interpersonal meaning

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Freudianism is an extreme example of the assertion of meaning where there is none, or very little.

It is extreme for two reasons: 1) because it is scientifically groundless and 2) because so many people believed it.

Communism, many religious beliefs and practices, fads, styles, ethnic myths, many “historical” misinterpretations, and much more are examples of false meanings that are asserted and believed by large numbers of people.

You could say that pretty much all human culture is a similar stew of strongly asserted falsehoods mixed with some facts.

Freud was an interesting writer and his ideas were and are worth considering, but they should have remained minor points in the history of psychology and never become “meanings” that influenced the entire Western world.

In this respect, Freudianism is an excellent sociological or macro example of what individuals do psychologically, on micro and meso levels with themselves and others.

Humans are extremely prone to append or assert meaning where it does not belong either because there is no “meaning” in that context or because the “meaning” being asserted is incorrect.

Freudianism shows how powerfully and massively wrong we often get meaning and how wrong our analyses of human thought, emotion, and behavior can be.

At the macro level of trends like Freudianism, we can and should have asked for evidence.

At the micro and meso levels of human psychological understanding we can and should ask for evidence or confirmation from the person or persons about whom we are asserting psychological meaning.

If you do this frequently with a trusted partner, you will begin to see that many of the “meanings” you append to that partner and to yourself are false.

False macro meanings like Freudianism can be corrected through science. At the micro or meso levels of the individual, wrong meanings can only be corrected through a practice like FIML.

In the future we may be better able to understand micro and meso levels of interpersonal meaning through the use of brain scans, but even brain scans need interpretation and will be difficult to use during real-time, interpersonal interactions.

See Micro, meso, and macro levels of human understanding for more on what is meant by these levels.

Les Brigandes – Antifa

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Antifa means “anti-fascist,” which is a European term with a severe PC SJW connotation. Or at least that’s how I understand it from an American point of view. For an English translation, be sure the CC/subtitles feature has been enabled. ABN

Update 7/17/19: The version with English subtitles was removed from YT. Could not find a replacement.

Good discussion on government corruption and how and why it is covered up

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There is a lot of information on the nuts and bolts of corruption in the US government in this video. The discussion includes James Corbett, Sibel Edmonds, Wayne Madsen, and Peter B. Collins.

The posted title of this video is Pedophiles Run the Government and No One Gives a Damn. I don’t care for this title because pedophilia in itself is not morally wrong unless acted on. As for why no one gives a damn, well, we do, but know they have us cornered. All societies everywhere in history have been cruel or corrupt. There is nothing humans can do, given present technology, to change this.

Hero worship, entrainment, academia, and culture

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I confess that I look at the Daily Mail almost every day.

It lets me feel that I am in touch with something common—common people and common emotions generated by uncommon people.

Today I learned that Taylor Swift earned $1million a day this year…, making her the highest paid musician in the world. I also read about the much more ordinary safest diner in the most dangerous neighborhood in America, a story about a guy who is not afraid to live and work in Detroit and how he is supported by his tough clientele, many of whom get murdered.

These two kinds of stories typify the contents of the Daily Mail and reveal something about how humans think and feel.

Taylor Swift’s primary audience is teenage girls and younger. They worship her. Jovica Trpcevski, the owner and cook at John’s Grill, is more like us as are his clientele, though Trpcevski also commands loyalty and allegiance from his “fans.”

All of us at one time or another follow some celebrity, musician, author, thinker, religious figure, or news analyst or are impressed with or proud of some local person who is doing something we can’t.

Swift’s audience illustrates hero worship, or whatever it is, in its most basic form. The developing young brain is captivated by music and the style of someone more mature and cannot get enough. Trpcevski’s fans are older, wiser, and more jaded, but are still capable of a similar bond, a similar entrainment of the brain on a social or local community vibe.

This is what people do. We adulate and follow other people, usually famous people. Trump is better at getting that entrainment than Jeb. Chomsky was better than Skinner. For many today, the Buddha is doing it better than Jesus.

The followers of others—including Trpcevski’s fans—also conform to each other. They form groups whose members imitate each other as much as their star.

And it’s not just teens and tough guys who do it. Academics do it as much as teenage girls and with far worse effects. The toxicity of the PC atmosphere in American academia should be obvious to anyone who has gone near it.

…the image of a cowering cuckold is far more appropriate for the vast majority of academics than that of a dashing rebel against the establishment.

That quote is from Liberal Bias in Academia: Will Being Self-Conscious About It Help? The answer to that question is no because:

“…academics censor each other… they create a climate of conformity where if you want to get on in an academic career, you don’t stick your neck out and you don’t say anything controversial.”

Students pick up on this and begin to follow suit. Before long, debating, challenging and wrestling with ideas and truth claims becomes obsolete, replaced by a classroom full of silent witnesses who refuse to contest the academics teaching them…

“Then there’s no need for external restraints on academic freedom because academics are doing it for themselves – they’re restricting their own academic freedom.”

Students who don’t conform are self-selecting themselves out of university. (Ibid)

No hope for academia, most religion, most culture, most anything. It’s what we do.We conform and restrict our own freedom due to biological and social pressures. It starts early and often lasts a lifetime.

I do think we can break the spell by understanding that we learn from the Swifts and Trpcevskis of the world and from the others who are learning from them along with us. But after we learn, we can move on and think for ourselves.

Possible signs of intelligent alien life discovered

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Astronomers have discovered a star that shows possible signs of having an alien structure around it.

The structure could be caused by a neighboring star pulling a string of comets close to it, but “this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence,” one of the astronomers said. See here: Astronomers may have found giant alien ‘megastructures’ orbiting star near the Milky Way.

Another possibility is that the scientists have found a Dyson sphere or Dyson cluster, “a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures most or all of its power output.”

Dyson spheres or clusters, if they exist, are built by civilizations far more advanced than ours.

Here is a study on the phenomenon: Planet Hunters X. KIC 8462852 – Where’s the flux?

And another article: The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy.

It’s the beginning of the end of Europe

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This opinion piece by Noah Klieger published in Israel’s Ynetnews is worth reading. His points are strongly and briefly stated and well worth considering.

The Europeans are failing to realize that Muslim refugees will lead to the complete disappearance of their countries’ tradition, culture and progress and to the establishment of an Islamic rule across the entire continent. (Source)

I myself am dismayed at Merkel’s encouraging more migrants to come to Germany (and then asking other European states to share the problem). Hers is a moralistic position that vainly encourages migration while neglecting the points Klieger makes.

The kinder and morally sounder option for Merkel and other European politicians would be to discourage the migrants and spend money helping them in Turkey and other parts of the Middle East (where a Euro will also buy much more than in Europe).

Hungary and other former Soviet-block countries that don’t want to accept the migrants have very recent memories of losing control of their nations and cultures to alien peoples and ideologies and they don’t want to do it again.

The highest virtue in Buddhism is always wisdom. Wise compassion does not mean destroying your society in the name of “helping” others. It means caring for your society while doing what you can to help others without bringing greater harm to yourself.

The sexualization of women in China

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In the West, the term sexualization is normally used in the negative. It is normally considered a bad thing to sexualize women, children, and I suppose men or animals when that happens.

Westerners see sexualization as a form of “objectifying” or “pornifying” people, reducing whole persons with complex psychologies to little more than objects of sexual pleasure.

I have no argument against the term when used that way in the right context.

Sexualization in China, however, (as an idea not the term) has a very different context than in the West, particularly the sexualization of women.

In the West, women benefited from various long traditions that worshiped them, Romanticized them, restricted men to one wife (not the case in China), prevented cousin-marriage, and sexualized them in the sense that they were and are considered beautiful and desirable by most men.

This is not the case in China. In traditional China, women were treated more as chattel, as son-makers, as workers, slaves, servants, or prostitutes. Few were deeply appreciated and openly admired for their physical beauty. There was no concept of Romantic love or deep pair-bonding between a man and a woman as in the West.

So if you come across a story about a Chinese pageant that sees models compete for best cleavage as I did today, it is best to understand it in a different context than you would in the West, for these pageants have a different purpose than they do in the West, at least in part.

Of course, some aspects of the Chinese pageant may be even raunchier than in the West, but at least one aspect has the purpose of overcoming Chinese cultural features that have for centuries deeply under-appreciated women by what are now modern standards.

There has been an effort for some time in China to raise the level of appreciation Chinese men have for women by portraying women as beautiful and desirable through media exposure and beauty pageants. Less than thirty-five years ago all women in China wore the same Mao clothes and before that dress was mostly traditional staid clothing that covered and de-emphasized female physical beauty. Confucius was not a sensualist.

The sexualization of women—even through cleavage contests—is serving to raise the standards of the whole society for when women are desired they will be valued and not be so much abused.

The above comments can be disputed in many ways, but the gist is correct. My information on the propaganda of creating a “modern” sense of the beauty of women comes from discussions in China many years ago with people who I believe knew what they were talking about. These efforts began in the 1980s and 90s with the new policies that opened China to the world.

I am sure the pageants mostly run on their own steam now, but the need is still there. To this day many women in China and Southeast Asia are kidnapped to feed the amazingly large industry of bride-selling in China. Buying a kidnapped “bride” and chaining her to a bed so she can produce a son, obviously, is not based on appreciating her beauty. That whole villages support the practice shows that it is deeply entrenched in the culture.

To me it seems a bit odd that the beauty of Chinese women is promoted by using Western lingerie and other styles, but it is easiest to import something and that is the state of a lot of world culture today.

More on TV

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Cultivation theory:

In its most basic form, cultivation theory suggests that exposure to television, over time, subtly “cultivates” viewers’ perceptions of reality. Gerbner and Gross say: “television is a medium of the socialization of most people into standardized roles and behaviors. Its function is in a word, enculturation”

Institutional process analysis:

This investigates how the flow of media messages is produced and managed, how decisions are made, and how media organizations function. Ultimately, it asked: What are the processes, pressures, and constraints that influence and underline the production of mass-media content?

A good example of institutional process analysis:

According to the Jewish Journal, Kohan’s “refusal to limit herself in her show’s creative content has made moral ambiguity a Weeds trademark. No topic is too grim, no character too depraved.” In giving her the scope to explore these depraved characters, and to mine them for humor and ask questions, Kohan claimed that Weeds allowed her to get in touch with her Jewish identity, noting that, “For me, the essence of my Judaism is to ask questions — ask why, ask more. And in a way, the show allows me to follow that path of Judaism.” (Source)

Obviously, the people who produce TV shows have a significant influence over the effects of those shows on audiences. TV is worth thinking about because, as cultivation theory states, it is a dominant factor in the process of enculturation for all who watch it, and especially for those who watch it without analyzing its effects.