Fabric

Fabric

Hi! Happy Wednesday! 06/20/2018

This essay is for Charleen Adams. I'm motivated to write this for a few reasons:

1. Dominance and Jordan Peterson.
2. Your Father's day tweet about the dysfunction there.
3. The tweet below about dominance.

Introduction

We don't know each other, I just follow you on Twitter based upon a single retweet by Steven Pinker. Evolutionary biology interests me and that is your chosen field. Well met!

Fabric, noun: 1. the latent influence instinct, genetics, hormones, and all internal biological influences have on our thinking.

Culture, noun: 1. instinct replacement.

Instinct is built into all animals including humans. I redefined the word culture for the purposes of this essay only to focus on the aspects of culture that are instinct replacement. Given instinct doesn't directly influence our waking moments to the same overwhelming degree as other animals then culture can be thought of as instinct replacement via a set of proscribed behaviors we must follow to survive.

Free will is an illusion that holds up best when we are wilfully or blissfully unaware of how biology such as hormones for regulating sex, hunger and other bodily functions also influence our thinking. I'm thinking particularly of an experiment I read about in  "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" where Spanish judges were monitored for probation judgements before and after lunch. I think they monitored something like fifty judges who's job it is to do nothing all day but review and recommend probation judgements. Turns out if the judge reviewed a case right before lunch there was a marked drop in granting probation.

The influence on being well fed on amenable people has long been documented as well as all the other influences like sexual tension. And yet people still argue free-will. In any case the word fabric was coined here for this essay to capture our internal, biological influences.


I'm going to break this essay into two parts, first a case study about my own life and second analysis as it applies to dominance.

I am yours truly. I was touched by our Father's day tweet because like you I "had" a father. My father was an rotten person and so no surprise also a rotten father. The thing that drives me nuts with "family at all costs" public promoters is the unanswered question: is a shit for a father better or worse then no father? Somehow all fathers are good for the family promoters.

Part 1: Mybrid Wonderful Case Study

I had the early childhood experience of having two very crappy parents. I've often joke with people by saying, "who's going to marry an asshole, except another asshole?" Of course we all know nature has another more likely scenario out of the box: abuser and abused. My Mom, however, did not fit the abused personality at all. Instead they were birds of a feather and one thing they both agreed upon is the emotionally torturing of yours truly was great fun because I cry at the drop of a hat. Always have, always will.

I was born an alpha male. Just like every male on my Dad's side. Most of my uncles, cousins and my grandfather on my Dad's side are alpha males. Another way of putting that is we are all bullies and assholes to some degree. Over time some of us took measures to counteract our innate nature and mellowed out. This is the first point to make about dominance: while we don't have absolute free will we do have enough of it to overcome even some of the strongest built-in character traits.

So, I was born and alpha male and I was also born beta male,  born hyper-sensitive. Ha ha. Nature doesn't give a shit. It just goes on about its merry way every day. In fact, I was born with large array of neurological conditions. The last time I saw a neurologist he pulled up my records, took one look, and then said, "Okay, rather than me reading this why don't you just give me your history." After thirty minutes he said, "okay, wait, let me just read it."

Lesson number one: For any single thread of the fabric there exists an entire fabric. Dead men tell no tales and in science the dead men are the variables or threads not being studied.

My parents agreed upon a parenting approach for their four kids that goes like this: cage them means the least amount of work for us. Just don't let us out of the house. My mother justified this by constantly punishing us for things known and unknown alike. She commonly used, "I'm punishing you the first time because if you ran into the street and got hit by a car then you don't get a second chance." But really she just had an running list of punishments to justify in her mind and ours why we were not allowed out of the house.

The only reason I bring this up is because as an alpha male my environment imposed upon the motivation to learn passive aggressive behavior. Fortunately my hyper-sensitivity worked to my favor and paid off with big rewards: I was able to stay off the radar, or what I called the secondary radar. The primary radar is what my parents used to punish you, what they called bad behavior. The secondary radar is when my siblings would rebel and then it became a battle of wills. I never rebelled and so I only received the primary punishment and never had to deal with deeper emotional punishment.

Lesson number two: the environment. 

Yes I was born with two opposing dominant emotional states: alpha male and hyper-sensitivity. But my environment of being a prisoner during my entire childhood resulted in expressed reactions to that environment that realized one much more than the other in my  hyper-sensitive traits, or beta-male traits, were used extensively and alpha traits not at all.

Being both alpha and beta male to such a stark degree makes one crazy or curious. I became the later. So it is that in my late teens I started exploring self-help books. Unbeknownst to me is that the late 1970s and early 1980s was to be a golden age of self-help books. I had so much material for which to understand my internally conflicted emotions.

At some point I came to the realization that I can either be defined by my fabric or I can make an entirely abstract definition of myself and that is who I would be. As soon as that thought popped into my mind I chose the latter. Then I went on to list all the things I am and that is how I define myself.

I think this is as close to the definition of free-will that most people intuit as we can get. We can create from thin air a completely abstract, artificial definition in our mind of who we are and hold on to it.

How does this play out? Well, I'm just as susceptible to the fabric influences as everyone else. Except when I use my brain.

Lesson three: training oneself to overcome and manage the fabric.

Jefferson recommended counting to one-hundred, for example, to manage anger. Washington would wait for his daily one-on-one  meeting with his secretary to exhaust explicatives for up to an hour .

For myself the most marked example is also anger management. I have completely removed anger from my day-to-day life where previously I had it. How?

1. Training of meditation and visualization.
2. Chemical control, no alcohol.
3. Good sleep.
4. Exercise.

Visualization in some ways helped the most. For example, one trick of visualization and anger management is to internally replace the environment. For example, I would get angry at the way people drive the same as most people, especially if someone cuts me off. I found two visualization techniques that eliminated this. First, I frame driving like I'm the captain of an airplane. My primary job is safety and then destination. Obstacles that put my life and others at danger are to be avoided. Second I think of driving as a car video game where the cars in the game are programmed to aggressively crash into you. Success and reward comes from avoiding the crash. Reprogram the reward to replace anger.


I no longer get angry with the normal array of influences in my life. However, having said that, I realize many people cannot achieve this level of anger management, the fabric is too compelling. For example many of my relatives are alcoholics and alcohol as an uninhibitor will allow whatever your fabric dictates to gush forward.

I will close this case study of myself on intelligence and free thought. I have always tested in the top three-percent of my class until I got to UC Berkeley, where I dropped to the top five-percent. I won the intelligence lottery.

Intelligence heavily influenced when I made my artificial abstract list that defines who I am. I was able to discern there where things that were opposite my fabric, things that my fabric had no direct influence on, and things that aligned with my fabric.

The single-most dominant fabric trait that aligns with how I define myself in the abstract is free-thinking. As Spock says, each according to their own gifts. The gifts that I chose to align the most with are intelligence and free-thinking.

For the record, while one can mitigate things like anger one cannot grow a new limb. By that I mean there are two aspects to Spock's insight. First, what's possible and second what's emotionally fulfilling. My array of neurological disparities prevents physical potential to enjoy sports say. I cannot grow a new limb.

Part II: Analysis

The one thing that annoys me the most about fabric first thinking is that we have a brain. Jordan Peterson with his lobster analysis is just the latest. The bloke who wrote "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" is yet another. Steven Covey's, "Seven Habit of Highly Successful People" is yet a third. And the list goes on.

I'd hate to see you fall into that trap. Dead men tell no tales and in science the dead men are the factors not being studied, like direct, active mitigation by humans via training to manage the fabric.

Steven Pinker does a good job his book,  "The Language Instinct",  of putting the fabric, or instinct, in its proper place. Yes, language is an instinct. But that instinct influence has long been actively manipulated and especially with the advent of technology, the printing press, where reading and writing have extended language capability well beyond anything our language instinct could do.

The same applies to dominance theory.

There is a trope in popular culture about one person playing checkers while another is playing chess, the mastermind. What does this mean? The chess player not only managing their own fabric but that of the other persons.

As someone essentially held prisoner for seventeen years I learned to read even the smallest of verbal and non-verbal cues from my jailers. Since they were my parents, especially my mother, they knew that I knew that they knew that I knew that they knew that I knew. I think the only thing that saved me from my mother and father is how easy it was to make me cry. They could make me cry at the drop of the hat. For example, I loved to read as a kid. I would get completely lost in thought. My father would come up behind me while I was reading on the couch and smack me on the back of the head and say, "That's for nothing, wait'll you do something." I'd cry, he'd get off. It was also a "I know you know that I know" thing. He knew I was manipulating them both by making myself the smallest emotional target possible via passive behavior of reading.

Flash forward twenty-years and am I'm dating someone who's intelligence is in the top one-percent. I was dating up. I love dating women smarter than I am. Anyway, for all of her intelligence she was emotionally undeveloped and that was her attraction to me, she was dating up emotionally. One day we reached peak "dating up" zenith when she got frustrated and asked me to "just be myself" with her. We had just come from a dinner party. She was practicing reading people in the room and then adjusting behavior accordingly.

And in this case that behavior was dominance. Women practice dominance, just at a passive aggressive level. Specifically when it comes to appearance. What I found interesting is that while she dressed independently in apparel and wore no make-up then she still knew all the brands like Gucci, Armani, Maybelliene etc. She knew the make-up application practices, the shoe brands, oh the shoe brands, the watches, the hair styles, and the whole nine years. Further she knew the pecking order of who should be dominant based upon adherence to appearance.

When I pointed out to her that by keeping up with the mountain of fashion information she was playing the same game, just from the sidelines, she got angry. She demanded that when I was with her that I just be "me" and quit analyzing her and managing her. To which I replied, "That's a silly comment" and thus ended the relationship.

Culture is instinct replacement and from my perspective by far the largest negative impact this has is on women. Women feel compelled to implement the rules of culture as a matter of fabric more so than men, possibly without evidence stated as being due to reliance on passive aggressiveness. Women make up the majority of the people in the pews on Sunday even though they are abused the most by following the rules. Perhaps this is because rules are field upon which passive-aggressive behavior best plays out. It is hard to manipulate a rule if there are no rules.

        "Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to do it right." -Kurt Herbert Alder


Culture as instinct replacement is compelling naturally. Dress for the occasion is still very compelling culture behavior. Imagine a lawyer going to court and not wearing a suit-and-tie. Culture and dress-code as instinct replacement is regressive. I say regressive because culture is unthoughtful behavior, monkey-see-monkey-do behavior. Everyone must wear a suit. Leveraging dress-codes is a common  trope in Hollywood. How many TV episodes and movies have used the device of someone grabbing a doctor's coat and clipboard to pass themselves off as a doctor?

Culture is programming that must be adhered too.

Lesson four: culture as instinct replacement is then fabric replacement.

For a free-thinker such as myself culture is anathema. It is perfectly natural for people to find meaning and comfort in culture and these prescribed behaviors, but not for those such as myself.

So lets put all of our lessons together and make some observations.

1. Fabric influences our thinking.
2. Culture is a fabric replacement that influences our thinking.
3. There are thousands of fabric threads from our biology and culture at any given time influencing behavior and the array appears to be random across the gamut.
4. Thinking training can be used to manage fabric.
5. Nature's mix of fabric threads is distinct to the individual.
6. As a researcher  such as yourself someone managing fabric may not appear any different than someone under the influence.


Sometimes we cannot dispose of fabric the way I disposed of anger. Once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. However, biological factors can be managed. Even though I was able to dispose of anger I was never able to dispose of its precursor: frustration. Someone such as yourself may observe my frustration displays as dominance. What you may not have observed is oft times I express myself to people beforehand like a judge before a jury where I tell people that I am prone to frustration displays upfront, just ignore them for my sake and yours.

Life is complicated. Pinker gets it. You read Pinker. Hopefully you continue to follow in Pinker's path and not that of the single-minded, fabric oriented, Peterson's of the world.

When it comes to dominance life has moved on. Management is acutely aware that most "decision" meetings are a farce and that the decisions are a forgone conclusion. Generally speaking the person at the top of the management pecking order, or their surrogate, has decision authority and their mind is almost always made up before the meeting has started. Dominance display is really just a platform for the alphas to vent their spleen, buy in, be placated, and move on.

As a player, as someone who adjusts my communication based upon circumstances and personalities, I can attest that convincing a room is non-starter. In real-time there are just too many competing interests and since you can only support one interest at any time the opportunity for real debate is generally near zero. That means if you want to assure yourself the decision you want then you need to have the votes lined up before the meeting takes place. One needs to passively, aggressively line up the votes. This is called lobbying.  That kind of passive-aggressive behavior will never show up in real-time experiment measurements of the meeting itself.

I hope this helps Charleen!

All the best!
-Mybrid


Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!