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title:: Books / 12 Rules for Life - Contradictions - Supremacy as Virtue id:: 62a4e148-79b6-4af4-89df-92cda1f08773 collapsed:: true - Dominance hierarchy is the base setting of nature. You can’t fight it. Lobster. Low status just know not to fight high status via built in biological mechanism. Low status produces stress and anxiety which further lowers your status in the dominance hierarchy. You must fight back. Rise up. But then who loses? Who then gets to be at the bottom? - JBP is talking to winners disguised as a message to all. Message for winners to lose their dominance over losers. A sleight of hand supremacy diktat disguised as virtue. The few on the left are not entirely bonkers to label this #whitespremacy - Realization - jbp is most right on how the world works, in fact on how the game is played by our own minds. This however does not automatically gets you to truth. For the truth lies beyond the game and could not be found in it. In fact, the game of life the distraction from Truth. - For Truth, game over is the ultimate winning #advaitya - I voice in me urged me to become dangerous. To grow the monster. So I can fight one. - “main daru peeta hoon taki mujhe bevdon se dar na lage” - sid, 2006 - I developed strength of character - Block Reference - Block Reference - #@saie needs to walk a similar path - Progsum - **Status, Serotonin and Well Being** #dominanceHierarchy id:: 62a4f10f-da4a-4131-81a0-1db4d86b768e collapsed:: true - observed (back in 1921) that even common barnyard chickens establish a “pecking order.” - The determination of Who’s Who in the chicken world has important implications for each individual bird’s survival, particularly in times of scarcity. - The birds that always have priority access to whatever food is sprinkled out in the yard in the morning are the celebrity chickens. After them come the second-stringers, the hangers-on and wannabes. - When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia. Because territory matters, and because the best locales are always in short supply, territory-seeking among animals produces conflict. - Over the millennia, animals who must co-habit with others in the same territories have in consequence learned many tricks to establish dominance, while risking the least amount of possible damage. - Sometimes one lobster can tell immediately from the display of claw size that it is much smaller than its opponent, and will back down without a fight. The chemical information exchanged in the spray can have the same effect, convincing a less healthy or less aggressive lobster to retreat. That’s dispute resolution Level 1. - If the two lobsters are very close in size and apparent ability, however, or if the exchange of liquid has been insufficiently informative, they will proceed to dispute resolution Level 2. With antennae whipping madly and claws folded downward, one will advance, and the other retreat. Then the defender will advance, and the aggressor retreat. After a couple of rounds of this behaviour, the more nervous of the lobsters may feel that continuing is not in his best interest. - If neither blinks, however, the lobsters move to Level 3, which involves genuine combat. - Disputes that have escalated to this point typically create a clear winner and loser. The loser is unlikely to survive, - ==**If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.**== id:: 62a4f10f-a9af-49e6-a2c3-dc002e9f356b - A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: **serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter**. - In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters. - You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder. - Its victorious opponent, on the other hand, is more likely to win. **It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies**, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent. Block Reference - once they have learned, the resultant hierarchy is exceedingly stable. **All a victor needs to do, once he has won, is to wiggle his antennae in a threatening manner, and a previous opponent will vanish in a puff of sand before him.** - ==**The female lobsters identify the top guy quickly, and become irresistibly attracted to him.**== #thegame collapsed:: true - Instead of undertaking the computationally difficult task of identifying the best man, the females outsource the problem to the machine-like calculations of the dominance hierarchy. - Furthermore, he’s large, healthy and powerful. It’s no easy task to switch his attention from fighting to mating. (If properly charmed, however, he will change his behaviour towards the female. This is the lobster equivalent of Fifty Shades of Grey, the fastest-selling paperback of all time, and the eternal Beauty-and-the-Beast plot of archetypal romance. This is the pattern of behaviour continually represented in the sexually explicit literary fantasies that are as popular among women as provocative images of naked women are among men.) id:: 62a502c3-10da-4f81-bd3f-870973950546 - It should be pointed out, however, that sheer physical power is an unstable basis on which to found lasting dominance, as the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal has taken pains to demonstrate. collapsed:: true - Among the chimp troupes he studied, males who were successful in the longer term had to buttress their physical prowess with more sophisticated attributes. Even the most brutal chimp despot can be taken down, after all, by two opponents, each three-quarters as mean. In consequence, males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the troupe’s females and their infants. The political ploy of baby-kissing is literally millions of years old. - **dominance hierarchies have been an essentially permanent feature of the environment to which all complex life has adapted.** collapsed:: true - The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence. - Block Reference - We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. **Dominance hierarchies are older than trees. The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions.** It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. - when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious and weak. id:: 62a49665-35bf-4249-8430-d0ed6a9b44e5 - Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency - The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status. id:: 62cc9dec-b231-4e98-8063-153ed0e7bc62 collapsed:: true - If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion, particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must be ready to survive. - Thus the mantra Block Reference - Stress collapsed:: true - Unfortunately, that physical hyper-response, that constant alertness, burns up a lot of precious energy and physical resources. This response is really what everyone calls stress, and it is by no means only or even primarily psychological. - When operating at the bottom, the ancient brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an uncontrollable chain of negative events, which will have to be handled alone, as useful friends are rare indeed, on society’s fringes. id:: 62cc9dec-d4fc-4630-aa61-08facfaa2357 - When you don’t know what to do, you must be prepared to do anything and everything, in case it becomes necessary. id:: 62a4aad6-7920-44e1-98be-e508612ade54 - - - People, like lobsters, size each other up, partly in consequence of stance. - If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if you are losing. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently. - Your nervous system responds in an entirely different manner when you ==face the demands of life voluntarily.== collapsed:: true - You respond to a challenge, instead of bracing for a catastrophe. You see the gold the dragon hoards, instead of shrinking in terror from the all-too-real fact of the dragon. - You step forward to take your place in the dominance hierarchy, and occupy your territory, manifesting your willingness to defend, expand and transform it. - So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. **Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others.** Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence. #Sid Vicious - Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back. id:: 64b824c6-2600-465e-9c18-be7476eddea6 - Pareto distribution id:: 62a4899a-2a30-4e4c-a5da-4a545e7c407c collapsed:: true - It’s winner-take-all in the lobster world, just as it is in human societies, where the top 1 percent have as much loot as the bottom 50 percent - A tiny proportion of musicians produces almost all the recorded commercial music. Just a handful of authors sell all the books. A million and a half separately titled books (!) sell each year in the US. However, only five hundred of these sell more than a hundred thousand copies.12 Similarly, just four classical composers (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky) wrote almost all the music played by modern orchestras. - This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal. The basic principle had been discovered much earlier. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words), among many other things. Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.” - Architecture of nature id:: 62a4947f-9997-4c3b-8dbe-ac738399c3d6 collapsed:: true - It is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative. When something evolves, it must build upon what nature has already produced. New features may be added, and old features may undergo some alteration, but most things remain the same. It is for this reason that the wings of bats, the hands of human beings, and the fins of whales look astonishingly alike in their skeletal form. They even have the same number of bones. Evolution laid down the cornerstones for basic physiology long ago. - Nature is not simply dynamic, either. Some things change quickly, but they are nested within other things that change less quickly (music frequently models this, too). - Leaves change more quickly than trees, and trees more quickly than forests. Weather changes faster than climate. If it wasn’t this way, then the conservatism of evolution would not work, as the basic morphology of arms and hands would have to change as fast as the length of arm bones and the function of fingers. - It’s chaos, within order, within chaos, within higher order. The order that is most real is the order that is most unchanging—and that is not necessarily the order that is most easily seen. - The leaf, when perceived, might blind the observer to the tree. The tree can blind him to the forest. And some things that are most real (such as the ever-present dominance hierarchy) cannot be “seen” at all. - And this brings us to a third erroneous concept: that nature is something strictly segregated from the cultural constructs that have emerged within it. The order within the chaos and order of Being is all the more “natural” the longer it has lasted. This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected—and to shape life. - - Bureaucracy and authoritative power, monster - Sometimes people are bullied because they can’t fight back. Even the toughest of six-year-olds is no match for someone who is nine. But just as often, people are bullied because they won’t fight back. - children who cry more easily, for example, are more frequently bullied #me - In my clinical practice I often draw the attention of my clients who think that good people never become angry to the stark realities of their own resentments. - Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power. Such people produce powerful undercurrents of resentment around them which, if expressed, would limit their expression of pathological power. It is in this manner that the willingness of the individual to stand up for him or herself protects everyone from the corruption of society. id:: 65119c15-8d70-42a3-85d9-84bf400bfaf8 - #@Raju Matta - There is ==very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character.== This is one of the most difficult lessons of life. id:: 62c9f235-de96-476f-847e-1675232a66f4 - When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and **see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases.** They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that **they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too.** id:: 62c9f081-3c29-4db9-a7dc-dc5bf15f6683 - They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. id:: 65119c15-d213-42d8-a92f-ed2de89ebff2 - - Stories collapsed:: true - monkey in jar - There’s an old and possibly apocryphal story about how to catch a monkey that illustrates this set of ideas very well. First, you must find a large, narrow-necked jar, just barely wide enough in diameter at the top for a monkey to put its hand inside. Then you must fill the jar part way with rocks, so it is too heavy for a monkey to carry. Then you must scatter some treats, attractive to monkeys, near the jar, to attract one, and put some more inside the jar. A monkey will come along, reach into the narrow opening, and grab while the grabbing’s good. But now he won’t be able to extract his fist, now full of treats, from the too-narrow opening of the jar. Not without unclenching his hand. Not without relinquishing what he already has. And that’s just what he won’t do. The monkey-catcher can just walk over to the jar and pick up the monkey. The animal will not sacrifice the part to preserve the whole. - Highlights -