#64. The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse [evolutionary psychology, population]

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

A drill hall of the Apocalypse?

If you are:

• amused by abuse of trust
• amused by subversion

you may have what might be called "subversion complex" (SC). Other evidence of this may be:

• hacking
• pedophilia
• enjoyment of sick jokes
• trust issues

Social role of  the trickster

I conjecture that the evolved role of SC (tricksterism) is to harden a population against natural disasters such as famine and pestilence. In this regard, persons with SC are analogous to white-hat hackers, or penetration testers, that the military or a large corporation may keep on staff to harden their systems against hacking for real by outsiders. Spontaneously formed, cooperating groups of persons with SC would be analogous to corporate "red teams" or "tiger teams."

Tricksterism as a subroutine of the human swarm intelligence

SC is probably transmitted intergenerationally by child abuse. The prevalence of SC in a population may rise with increasing population density because of adult carriers encountering and victimizing solitary children more frequently. If the SC prevalence rises high enough, carriers encounter each other often enough to form social groups ("red teams") that cooperate in subversion to amplify their social effect. This is adaptive, because the risk of famine and pestilence to a population increases with population density. <06-19-2020: this can be called a "macro-homeostatic effect," or maybe a "population homeostatic effect," but is usually called "the hand of God.">

There may also be a complimentary subversion-victim complex (SVC), also induced by childhood abuse, but involving a milder disturbance that spares the victim's ability to influence and harden a network of friends against adversity. <03-27-2020: This may be where priests come from.>

An SC carrier or red team of same will appear to the victim to:

• accurately imitate the essential features of microbial pathogens
• accurately imitate the essential features of a famine
• "not be doing a very good job" of killing the victim, because their evolved role is essentially instructional.

Of value would be a psychometric test to detect SC and SVC, but the test authors will need to do much field testing to bullet proof the SC test against cheating.

Schizophrenia may be a disease of persons with SVC who fail to learn fast enough to defeat the threats posed by their local "red team." 

The evolved emotional reactivities underlying tricksterism

05-14-2020: The toxic factor that induces the SC/SVC may be unavoidable stress experienced in childhood. This factor is also linked to depression. In adulthood, the dynamic would be between the Till Eulenspiegels (SC) and the control freaks (SVC). The angrier the control freaks get because of the tricks of the Tills, the more fearful the Tills get because the control freaks signal their desire for disproportionate retribution. However, the Tills have learned that by cleverly subverting the control freaks, thus making them look feckless and by implication, no real threat, they can reduce their own anxiety levels, resulting in negative reinforcement of the subversion behavior (and a vicious interpersonal cycle). <05-17-2020: These emotional reactivities underlying full-blown SC may also underlie the cultural phenomenon of humor.>

06-09-2020: The victims of Till Eulenspiegel's tricks were often craftspersons, which supports the present theory because such people are in the best position to devise technological solutions to external threats to society, which are one possible output of the SC/SVC adaptation that led to its selection in evolution. Recall that both Jesus of Nazareth and Paul the Apostle were craftspeople (carpenter and tent maker, respectively). However, the worst mass murderer in Canadian history to date was also a craftsperson (denturist). Keep calm and make something.

12-24-2020: Evolution has raised up a number of supporting roles for the builder-trickster interaction: the humorist, the madman, and the suicide. The humorist makes the trickster role appealing to young people and serves as recruiter. The madman runs to the police with tales of nonexistent persecution, thereby obfuscating attempts by the tormented builder to explain his problem and be believed, and get help, due to a poor signal-to noise ratio, thereby allowing the tricksters to do their work unimpeded by social controls. The suicide obfuscates the question of whether someone has been murdered. If the tricksters decide that some builder must be murdered to keep the party going, they just have to pin a suicide note on the body to get away scot-free.

12-25-2020: The final stage in the builder-trickster program is making public the findings of the builder, for which an attention-getting emotional explosion will be needed, e.g., the crucifiction of Jesus, or the Gabriel Wortman massacre. However, this is probably simplistic. <01-26-2022: Other mechanisms for propagating design improvements can be imagined, such as the emulation of high-status individuals.>

A biological precedent for penetration testing?

Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. Presumably, one of these becomes active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defenses of the latter have become weak due to some somatic mutation. The red team-blue team strategy seems to be too good a trick for nature to miss (TGTNM).

A field observation

06-18-2020: Don't assume that all persons with SC are necessarily grinning and leering all the time. I strongly suspect that the ones who have done time are unsmiling, taciturn, and given to complaint--and still up to their tricks.

Evolution of the trickster

09-27-2020: Modern human populations may have two (independent?) axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control freak. The first may sub serve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may sub serve building. Any built thing must serve in a complex world in which many constraints must be simultaneously observed. Thus, after the initial build, a long period of tweaking must typically follow. The role of the tricksters is to powerfully motivate this tweaking before the complacency of the control-freak builders leads to disaster. <03-12-2021: This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens.><12-02-2022: The tricksters can also make mistakes, causing damage that cannot have a silver lining in any possible world, and moving to correct this is a natural role of the builders. If you are a builder, ask this: “What is the best use of my indignation?” It is to keep to a strict harm-reduction approach.>

A tangent about our evolutionary context

Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time <12-21-2020: i.e., Homo erectus*> before the ice age** forced some of them to become champion builders (initially, of shelters and warm clothing). <12-31-2020: "champion environment modifiers" may be closer to the mark than "champion builders"> It is an interesting fact that physically, humans exceed all other animals only in long-distance running, which can be read as dispersal ability. Our carelessness with preserving the local environments and our propensity for overpopulation can be read as typical r-selected disperser behavior. <12-21-2020: The r-selecting niche was probably big game hunting. H. erectus sites indicate consumption of medium and large meat animals. Overhunting would have occurred routinely, due to the slow reproduction rates of large animals and the high hunting efficiency of H. erectus due to tool use, so that dispersal of the hunters to new habitats would likewise have been routine.>

* H. erectus: lived 2 million years ago to 100,000 years ago. H. sapiens: earliest fossils, 300,000 years old. Evidence of behavioral modernity: 100,000–70,000 y ago.

** that is, the Pleistocene ice age, itself a sequence of 5 successive continental glaciations (by oxygen isotope evidence) separated by temperate periods, starting 2.6 million years ago and thought to be not over yet. Over the past 800,000 y, continental glaciation has happened rhythmically on a 100,000-y cycle due to astronomical factors (Milankovitch cycle). Selection for building skill may therefore have occurred in multiple successive episodes over the course of the Pleistocene.

#43. A Discovery of Hackers [population, evolutionary psychology]

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

9-07-2018: I was saving this for the Sunday before Halloween, but decided that it couldn't wait. The basic idea of this post is that the hacker phenomenon is psychologically and sociologically akin to what was once called witchcraft. Let me hasten to clarify that I am talking about witchcraft the social phenomenon, because I don't believe in anything supernatural. However, the height of the witchcraft hysteria in Europe occurred during the sixteenth century, when there were no computers. (I focus on Europe here because my ancestors came from there as did those of most people I know.) It was, however, a time of unprecedented scientific advance, and if science paced technology then as now, quite a few new technologies were coming into knowledge for the first time.

I suggest that the defining toxic ingredient in black-hat hacking is new technology per se. We should therefore expect that with time, computer hacking will spread to new-technology hacking in general and that the computer-centric version must be considered the embryonic form. This is bad news because there has never been so much new technology as now, but at what point in history has this statement not been true?

Belief in and persecution of witches is so widespread across human cultures that it must be considered a cultural universal. Scholars focus on the persecution part, blithely assuming that there is absolutely nothing real driving it, and that the subject people of the study are, by implication, a bunch of blithering idiots, and sadists to boot. I find this stance elitist. Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. These people all have brains in their heads built to the exact same design as our own, and the role of education may be overrated when cultural universals are in play.

I suggest that the defining idea of the witch/technology-hacker (tacker) is viewing new technology as a possible means to increased personal power. To produce a tacker, this idea must be combined with a mad-dog rejection of all morality. 

A technology ideal for tacking/witchcraft must be usable without the identity of the agent coming into general knowledge, and is thus sociologically similar to the ring of Gyges mentioned in Plato's Republic. The anonymity conferred by the Internet makes it one of our worst rings of Gyges, but just wait. More will be discovered in other realms of technology as the hackers branch out, perhaps in unholy alliance with the currently popular Maker movement. Makers, wake up! It's not too early for a manifesto!

How common are Gygean technologies? Hard to say, but it may help to list some.

• Ionizing radiation was known from the work of Roentgen in 1895 (x-rays) and Villard in 1900 (gamma rays) and for the first time, a means to destroy healthy, living tissue silently and through walls solid enough to conceal all signs of the agent, had become available. (See my blog "Journalist's Progress," at (Link under reconstruction)https://xrra.blogspot.com )
• The lead pencil, introduced in the sixteenth century already alluded to, was originally made with actual lead metal (instead of graphite and clay mixtures), which we now know to be insidiously neurotoxic, especially to children--knowledge to warm the heart of any proper witch.
• In the time of Christ in the Middle East, the Roman occupiers knew of ten or so plant-derived poisons, including opium. The very concept of a poison could have been new in those days, and poisons are the classical hard-to-detect weapons. If the weapon is hard to detect, so is the agent. A crypto-technological explanation for some of the events of the New Testament seems possible.

Gygean weapons are doubly "invisible" when based on new technology because these modi operandi are not yet on any body's radar, so the first x number of people who spot them are likely to be disbelieved and their sanity questioned.

Witches have always operated in the zone of perceptual blindness to abuses that transiently opens up after the introduction of any new technology. The psychological invisibility of weapons based on new technology is probably the factor that led witches to become associated with magic. 

Moreover, since the technology is unprecedented in human evolution, the levels of resentment that become inducible in the victims are potentially unprecedented and unphysiologically intense, leading to grotesquely disproportionate punishments being meted out to discovered witches, and this for strings of crimes that would have been extremely serious even considering strictly proportionate punishments. I suspect that the historical accounts of witch-burnings have all been cleaned up for a squeamish readership.

Why were a majority of European witches female? At the height of the anti-witch hysteria, the Black Death was raging and the local human population was probably having trouble keeping its numbers up. On general adaptationist assumptions, all kinds of social forces would have been working to reduce women to baby-making machines, whatever their endowments or aptitudes. This would have created an inevitable push-back in the most intelligent women to reclaim some of their personal power, and witchcraft would have seemed an attractive option for doing this.

Today, the hackers (soon-to-be tackers) are mostly male and the demographic challenge is too many people, not too few. Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents imply that people will become more aggressive if forced to live at higher population densities, and such a relentless increase in aggressiveness may be driving the current reemergence of the witch/tacker. 

It doesn't help that organized religion, the traditional great enemy of witchcraft, is withering on the vine in this country, probably due to the intellectual fallout from Darwin's theory of evolution combined with the failure of the public to understand that a scientific world-view is never finished.

9-08-2018: Proposed definition of "witch": a person in moral free fall under the corrupting influence of technologies that lend themselves to secret abuse for the increase of personal influence.

#38. The Fallacy of Justice [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

4-04-2018: In my treatment of evil and criminality so far, I have tried to show that they sub serve either dispersal or preemptive population reduction, both valuable biological processes that tend to prolong the survival of species. 

The algorithms for achieving these ends would have been created over time by some form of evolution, with probably a large component coming from a hypothetical, fast form of evolution I call post-zygotic gamete selection (PGS), where gametes -- individual cells -- are effectively the units of selection. In general, the smaller the unit of selection, the faster the adaptation. PGS may have accelerated evolution to the point where it could be detected by simple record-keeping technologies, which may have led to the first record-keeping peoples eventually realizing that "someone is looking out for us," leading to the invention of monotheism.

The genetically inherited parts of our behavior enter consciousness as emotions, and can therefore be easily identified. The main outlines of civilization are probably due to the inherited behavior component, and not to the reasoning, conscious mind, which is often just a detail-handler. How could civilization rest on a process that can't even remember what happened last weekend?

Thus, humans have a dual input to behavior, emotion and reason. The above arguments show that evil and criminality come from the emotional input. Yet the entire deterrence theory of justice assumes the opposite, by giving the person a logical choice: "You do this, we do that, and you won't like it. So you don't do this, right?"

I'm not so sure. People commit crimes for emotional reasons. As usual, the criminal's reasoning faculties are just an after-the-decision detail handler. The direction that this detail handler then takes is fascinatingly monstrous, but this does not mean that crime begins in reason.

Conclusion: the deterrence theory of justice is based on a category error.

Religion, with its emphasis on emotion, was all the formal "law enforcement system" anyone needed up until only about 200 years ago, at the industrial revolution. We may be able to go beyond where religion takes us by means of a disease model of criminality.

It does make some sense to lock criminals up, because with less freedom they cannot physically commit as many crimes. Many prisons become dungeons, however, because of the public's desire for revenge. However, all revenge-seeking belongs to the dispersal/depopulation dynamic and is thus part of the problem. A desire for revenge may follow a crime very predictably, but logically, it is a non-sequitur.

4-30-2018: A more nuanced theory of crime prevention is possible, where logical and technological constraints on behavior complement efforts to reduce the motivation for committing crimes at the source: the individual's perception of the fairness of society. However, I originally wrote as I did because I don't think that the former is the squeaky wheel at the moment.

#17. Hell's Kitchen [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Ever since the assassination of JFK in '63, people of my generation have been wondering why the Americans kill off their best and brightest. It's not just the Americans, of course. The same thing happened to Gandhi and Our Savior no less.

I think a homey kitchen metaphor nails it. Once you have emptied the milk carton of all its milk, you can use it to dispose of the grease. That is, by the logic of "The Insurance of the Heart," once tremendous acclaim has been conferred on someone's name, the physical person no longer matters for the purposes of enhancing the name their descendents will inherit, and so can safely be used to draw the fire of the genetic undesirables; the resulting tremendous indignation will confer bad odor on the name of said undesirable for quite long enough to eradicate their meh genes in all copies.

Thus, Booth's genes were eradicated to make way for Lincoln's, and Oswald's genes were eradicated to make way for Kennedy's, without overall change in population density.

If the intermind could be said to have thoughts, this is what they would be like. Clearly, it's not God.