Winston, thanks for your erudition. I was visiting a family back in 2013 here in the UK, a short visit before they departed on holiday and I Iooked after their house and pets. They were a very alternative-minded lot, with talk of spiritual entities and aliens and hidden motherships off-world. The wife was a channel for these alien beings and, well, I needn't go on. Suffice to say, amid all this talk, there was the teenage son. Sitting in the living room on his laptop playing ultra-violent first-person-shooter video games. This was his main occupation and when not involved in simulated cold-blooded murder, was acting out anger and teenage rage. It was such a stark contrast to all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and ungrounded fantasy, I felt he was a counterbalance to his parents. All in all, it was somewhat shocking to be around.
Wow, sounds like a very interesting case study for a psychologist! You may be right in that the teenager was acting out against the world of the alien abducted parental minds.
Good thesis I think - the masses have gone crazy because the leadership have been body snatched by psychopath aliens. I think the mothership is under the mountains in Davos. (and seemingly Clark Kent has forgotten his calling and continues to write propaganda for The Daily Planet). What a mess!
"As I’ve been surveying the work of Iain McGilchrist and the nature of the left hemisphere of the brain, it becomes clear that a bias toward one side of the brain can change culture and culture can change the bias toward a particular side of the brain."
There is an interesting paper that relates to this: "The Culture Cognition Paradox." If you put it in a seach engine you will also find other related writings.
The parable of The Tower of Babel may be a metaphorical/allegorical way of trying to explain the same concept. Different cultures have different "languages".
Yes interesting isn't it. McGilchrist does touch on language in The Master and His Emissary (no doubt he does in his latest work but I'm just not up to there yet) and the different ways language alters our perception of the world - or is it our perception of the world dictates our language - or both! Given the Tower of Babel it is probably language dictates our perception.
I purchased McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things" based on Winston's thoughts about his work. It is a hefty set of books, and I look forward to following Winston's observations.
Without intending to undermine Winston's hypothesis, I want to mention another potential factor regarding violence in western culture. I suspect there is a much higher incidence of "fetal alcohol effect" and "fetal alcohol spectrum disorder" than is commonly understood. I cannot prove the links here, but in terms of salient "active shooter" cases in young males, one can posit that FAS frequently plays a role.
FAS causes permanent structural damage and lack of development. I suspect there are cases of relatively "high functioning" people (i.e. able to minimally interact with others, feed and dress themselves) who nonetheless have permanent brain damage that would earn a sociopathy diagnosis--but as a direct result of FAS. Under this hypothetical, the violence in our culture is not the cause, but perhaps a means to a violent end. Obviously that is only a small subset of people in western culture, and is not an alternative to what Winston posits here.
Good on you for getting the book! It's a serious few volumes isn't it!? I've been reading and reviewing for work. I should probably do a bit more for this substack. Difficult however to keep my two lives separate and this on incognito!
If you ever wanted to pitch in and offer a summary or thoughts on any part of the book I'd love to have you featured on this substack!
Interesting thesis regarding FAS - I'd have to research as to what impact FAS has on IQ, and exactly what sort of brain damage results. There seems to be a particular neural architecture associated with sociopathy - does that line up with a damage pattern of FAS? Not sure. But sounds like a line worth looking deeper into.
Thank you, I will keep that in mind. After watching McGlichrist's numerous interviews about the book, it is clear he takes great care to describe the "wholeness" of concepts--a right brain province. So I'll see whether I can find a gestalt.
Regarding fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, I'm no expert, but I will try to understand more. The affliction is often overlooked. Some FASD sufferers have a "normal" appearance, but they are developmentally incapable of functioning in the same way as someone without the disorder. Yet, they are expected to participate in society in a way they can never achieve. That seems pernicious for the sufferer and society.
Did a very quick PubMed search (I mean 15 min fast). Seemingly, for the developing foetus, it's a complexity of immune system activation (through the TLR4) involved in dysmyelination of oligodenrocytes as well as suppressing their differentiation and apoptosis of their precursor cells - Which is really interesting because the right hemisphere has the most white matter (myelination) for fast global communication within the hemisphere and so I suppose it's the more damaged if dysmyelination is a key factor. Living out of a more functional left brain, as you can appreciate from reading McGilchrist, could manifest some schizophrenic, autistic, and other antisocial traits, but not sure it's enough to produce a sociopath. But again, I spent such a brief look I'd have to actually read a number of key papers to get a feel for the disorder. Let me know what you find out!
The HighFunctioning DarkTriad and it’s relationship to the Light’erTriad supermajority goes a long way to explain hostile collectivism and the consolidation of wealth, power, and control in the world today.
Doubling in the last 15 years in the west, hmm, what changed?
Oh yeah way more vaccines. And autism has been climbing too!
So this policy of making a vaccine for every invented virus and medicines for every invented disease is toxifying people. Some cannot detox from it and lose some brain connections and/or functions. Like Phineas Gage, who was a nice guy until a railroad spike damaged his brain, toxicity or a spike to the brain can change a person drastically.
But I guess they'll just make a pill to fix the problem they created with all of this "cool genetic editing"
Yep the whole vaccination madness is totally out of control and is responsible for so much damage. Had someone recently telling me that without vaccines we'd all be dying of (insert the list of 19th Century diseases). I told him that all those diseases had dramatically decreased with better sanitation, nutrition, etc, before the introduction of vaccines - he didn't believe it - some sort of anti-vax conspiracy he guessed!
Winston, thanks for your erudition. I was visiting a family back in 2013 here in the UK, a short visit before they departed on holiday and I Iooked after their house and pets. They were a very alternative-minded lot, with talk of spiritual entities and aliens and hidden motherships off-world. The wife was a channel for these alien beings and, well, I needn't go on. Suffice to say, amid all this talk, there was the teenage son. Sitting in the living room on his laptop playing ultra-violent first-person-shooter video games. This was his main occupation and when not involved in simulated cold-blooded murder, was acting out anger and teenage rage. It was such a stark contrast to all the spiritual mumbo-jumbo and ungrounded fantasy, I felt he was a counterbalance to his parents. All in all, it was somewhat shocking to be around.
Wow, sounds like a very interesting case study for a psychologist! You may be right in that the teenager was acting out against the world of the alien abducted parental minds.
Could that be the case globally in our situation?
Good thesis I think - the masses have gone crazy because the leadership have been body snatched by psychopath aliens. I think the mothership is under the mountains in Davos. (and seemingly Clark Kent has forgotten his calling and continues to write propaganda for The Daily Planet). What a mess!
Aliens aside, the ungrounded lack of reason and plain fantasy will suffice.
"As I’ve been surveying the work of Iain McGilchrist and the nature of the left hemisphere of the brain, it becomes clear that a bias toward one side of the brain can change culture and culture can change the bias toward a particular side of the brain."
There is an interesting paper that relates to this: "The Culture Cognition Paradox." If you put it in a seach engine you will also find other related writings.
The parable of The Tower of Babel may be a metaphorical/allegorical way of trying to explain the same concept. Different cultures have different "languages".
Yes interesting isn't it. McGilchrist does touch on language in The Master and His Emissary (no doubt he does in his latest work but I'm just not up to there yet) and the different ways language alters our perception of the world - or is it our perception of the world dictates our language - or both! Given the Tower of Babel it is probably language dictates our perception.
Maybe they mirror each other.
I purchased McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things" based on Winston's thoughts about his work. It is a hefty set of books, and I look forward to following Winston's observations.
Without intending to undermine Winston's hypothesis, I want to mention another potential factor regarding violence in western culture. I suspect there is a much higher incidence of "fetal alcohol effect" and "fetal alcohol spectrum disorder" than is commonly understood. I cannot prove the links here, but in terms of salient "active shooter" cases in young males, one can posit that FAS frequently plays a role.
FAS causes permanent structural damage and lack of development. I suspect there are cases of relatively "high functioning" people (i.e. able to minimally interact with others, feed and dress themselves) who nonetheless have permanent brain damage that would earn a sociopathy diagnosis--but as a direct result of FAS. Under this hypothetical, the violence in our culture is not the cause, but perhaps a means to a violent end. Obviously that is only a small subset of people in western culture, and is not an alternative to what Winston posits here.
Good on you for getting the book! It's a serious few volumes isn't it!? I've been reading and reviewing for work. I should probably do a bit more for this substack. Difficult however to keep my two lives separate and this on incognito!
If you ever wanted to pitch in and offer a summary or thoughts on any part of the book I'd love to have you featured on this substack!
Interesting thesis regarding FAS - I'd have to research as to what impact FAS has on IQ, and exactly what sort of brain damage results. There seems to be a particular neural architecture associated with sociopathy - does that line up with a damage pattern of FAS? Not sure. But sounds like a line worth looking deeper into.
Thank you, I will keep that in mind. After watching McGlichrist's numerous interviews about the book, it is clear he takes great care to describe the "wholeness" of concepts--a right brain province. So I'll see whether I can find a gestalt.
Regarding fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, I'm no expert, but I will try to understand more. The affliction is often overlooked. Some FASD sufferers have a "normal" appearance, but they are developmentally incapable of functioning in the same way as someone without the disorder. Yet, they are expected to participate in society in a way they can never achieve. That seems pernicious for the sufferer and society.
Did a very quick PubMed search (I mean 15 min fast). Seemingly, for the developing foetus, it's a complexity of immune system activation (through the TLR4) involved in dysmyelination of oligodenrocytes as well as suppressing their differentiation and apoptosis of their precursor cells - Which is really interesting because the right hemisphere has the most white matter (myelination) for fast global communication within the hemisphere and so I suppose it's the more damaged if dysmyelination is a key factor. Living out of a more functional left brain, as you can appreciate from reading McGilchrist, could manifest some schizophrenic, autistic, and other antisocial traits, but not sure it's enough to produce a sociopath. But again, I spent such a brief look I'd have to actually read a number of key papers to get a feel for the disorder. Let me know what you find out!
The HighFunctioning DarkTriad and it’s relationship to the Light’erTriad supermajority goes a long way to explain hostile collectivism and the consolidation of wealth, power, and control in the world today.
Doubling in the last 15 years in the west, hmm, what changed?
Oh yeah way more vaccines. And autism has been climbing too!
So this policy of making a vaccine for every invented virus and medicines for every invented disease is toxifying people. Some cannot detox from it and lose some brain connections and/or functions. Like Phineas Gage, who was a nice guy until a railroad spike damaged his brain, toxicity or a spike to the brain can change a person drastically.
But I guess they'll just make a pill to fix the problem they created with all of this "cool genetic editing"
Yep the whole vaccination madness is totally out of control and is responsible for so much damage. Had someone recently telling me that without vaccines we'd all be dying of (insert the list of 19th Century diseases). I told him that all those diseases had dramatically decreased with better sanitation, nutrition, etc, before the introduction of vaccines - he didn't believe it - some sort of anti-vax conspiracy he guessed!