psychology – Page 122

All Of Us Carve A Niche Out Of Nature With Violence

Humans are part of Nature, and therefore human nature is also red in tooth and claw

The Internet is full of people trying to score points from each other in the eternal game of oneupmanship that all social species engage in. In the West, with our heavily Jesus-based culture of masochism, we demonstrate that we are better than other people by showing how much violence and injustice has been done to us in the past. The more we are like martyrs, the better.

Our cult of victimhood impels us to emphasise how badly our ancestors suffered at the hands of The Man, whether these ancestors be women, lower classes or other races. It also impels us to emphasise how our own ancestors did no wrong, unless they were misled by some enemy without or betrayed by an enemy within.

It’s as if each one of us holds the power to act as an instrument of karma, and past injustices done to us give us the right to do injustices to other people. And like so much of modern society, it’s absolute horseshit.

Native people often describe an idyllic past in which they all lived in peace and in perfect harmony with Nature, but the truth is infinitely more violent. Although many native peoples had sophisticated cultural strategies for minimising the carnage of warfare (such as ritualising it), it’s clear from any scientific perspective that all human groups are guilty of using violence, and must be.

This can be proven by simply looking around at the laws by which Nature operates. The price for being peaceful is not to suffer persecution – it’s to be dead. A will to engage in peaceful conduct is not necessarily going to be reciprocated by other people, and almost certainly will not be by wild animals, and if it isn’t, there might not be much one can do about it.

It is impossible to occupy any niche in Nature without violence, because for every niche one might occupy within Nature there is another organism willing to use violence to drive one out of it. This is true of whatever level of the Great Fractal one wants to look at it on.

There are no creatures out there that can survive without preying on either other creatures or on plants. Any creature that wishes to attend to its own basic metabolic needs is forced to conduct violence against other life to get energy or nutrients.

This is not only true in the immediate food-gathering sense but in the long term mating sense as well. Males of sexually reproducing species must attract their females through demonstrating a capacity for resource acquisition, and this is done through acquiring and defending a territory, which is almost impossible to do without violence.

In order to build a house, a person has to cut down trees in the forest to clear a space, destroying the habitat of all of the creatures that dwelt within. But more importantly, in order to defend that space against the forms of life that would occupy it, that person has to be ready to kill.

All manner of parasites, like bugs, spiders, weevils etc. have to be killed for the sake of food security and to avoid destruction of property; all vermin like mice and rats have to be killed for similar reasons; larger animals have to be killed lest they destroy the property; humans have to be killed lest they take over and try to enslave one.

Almost wherever the reader is sitting in the world right now, someone was killed for it at some point in the past. Someone will have died so that someone else could secure rights to that land, even if it was before recorded history. For your ancestors to have carved out a niche in this place, where food has to be hunted and agriculture demands the destruction of ecosystems, someone and (not or) somethings had to be killed.

All of us are descended from killers. Every single one of us. There’s simply no other way to occupy a niche within Nature in the first place. If being descended from peaceful people awards some sort of moral superiority when it comes to discussing political issues, there are none of us still living who can claim it.

Anyone claiming that their ancestors were peaceful by nature or that they are genetically disinclined towards violence is a liar.

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Ethnomasochism

In abnormal psychology, masochism is known as a paraphilia that is characterised by “the derivation of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain or humiliation by oneself or another person” (Merriam-Webster). The depictions of masochism in films such as Secretary and books such as Fifty Shades of Gray are, while dramatised, essentially accurate.

Some masochistic individuals have displaced this ordinarily individualistic sentiment with a collective one. It’s common for Jewish men to engage in Nazi roleplay with hired dominatrices, for example. Central to this is the idea that an individual can derive pleasure from being called a “filthy Jew” or similar by a dominatrix, as long as they are able to identify with the race that is being derided.

Ethnomasochism is essentially masochism taken to the collective level of the race. Instead of begging to be whipped by a woman on account of personal transgressions, the ethnomasochist invites abuse on account of the collective transgressions of those sharing a skin colour with them.

It’s becoming common to encounter ethnomasochists on the Internet, especially on social media. They can be found wringing their hands about the past crimes of people of European descent, stereotyping all European colonists as rapists, thieves and murderers.

They will describe a world history in which all races lived in harmony until Europeans started spewing out of Europe like demons out of the mouth of Hell, bringing misery and suffering to all they encountered, for no other motivation than the pure malice their stony hearts held for all life. Usually this comes with a demand that white people collectively make up for the crimes of their race by means of some kind of reparations.

In other words, white people are bad boys that need to be punished.

One can almost guarantee that the sort of person who is an ethnomasochist is also privileged, middle-class and holds deep Marxist sympathies. Chances are high they have a micropenis or are impotent when unable to live out some race-based humiliation fantasy, such as getting cucked by a “black bull”, and chances are also high that they hold much contempt for white working-class people, who they are happy to stereotype as ignorant, violent and lazy (sound familiar?).

To this end, we can define ethnomasochism as “the derivation of sexual gratification from being subjected to physical pain or humiliation by oneself or another person on account of belonging to a particular, despised race.”

Ironically, this movement is actually more racist than normal people are. White people who have a fetish about seeing their girlfriends railed by black men are very, very similar to men who have a fetish about seeing their girlfriends railed by dogs. Part of the thrill comes from the degradation implied by having sex with a creature that’s less than human.

Moreover, a person can only feel shame on account of belonging to a particular race to the degree that they identify with being a member of that race (i.e. to the degree that their identity excludes other races). So it’s only possible to feel ethnomasochistic sentiments about the past crimes of the white race if one identifies strongly with one’s skin colour to the exclusion of other personal qualities – which is the definition of racist.

Curiously, it’s impossible to cure ethnomasochism by subjecting a person with it to hearing a non-white person talk about how they think there’s nothing wrong with white people, or how they were glad for European colonisation because it saved them from the vagaries of Nature, or from cannibalism or ceaseless tribal warfare, or because it gave them an opportunity to engage with the modern world and the wealth of accumulated wisdom going back to before Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Lao Tzu and Confucius..

Because the ethnomasochist is racist, they will often assume that non-white people do not have the intelligence to reason their way to original conclusions, and thus their opinions are irrational and therefore can be rejected in favour of the anti-white narrative.

The cure for ethnomasochism is reading a history book, because an appreciation of history will tell you that the whole world is terrible and always has been, whether or not white people showed up. All non-white races have treated each other with horrific disregard at various points because that is human nature when exposed to the environmental challenges presented by planet Earth.

The Distinction Between Real Medicine and Corporate Medicine

Medicine is a highly profitable industry

Most people visit their doctor under the impression that medicine is a singular, monolithic discipline and that all doctors learn and practice the same things at medical school. This is a similar level of trust to what was once given to priests, who doctors have now replaced. As with priests, this is a level of trust that is no longer justified, because an ever-increasing number of doctors have rejected real medicine in favour of a corporate imitation of it.

The purpose of real medicine is described in the Hippocratic Oath. In this oath the physician vows that “I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm.”

Corporate medicine is different. The purpose of corporate medicine is to make money, usually as a direct consequence of the fact that sick people are also very anxious and anxious people can be easily parted with their money, as long as you can convincingly reassure them.

The logic of profit maximisation leads to a number of negative outcomes for the patient.

For example, consider the following moral dilemma. A doctor is treating a patient who is suffering from a disease that can be easily cured by two medicines. Medicine A has a 95% efficacy and generates $100 in profit. Medicine B has a 90% efficacy but generates $200 in profit. Which is prescribed?

In real medicine, Medicine A would be prescribed all the time, but this is not always the case in our societies, and sometimes it is never the case. If Medicine B generates more profits, then there is always an incentive for the doctor writing the prescription to let the balance of their judgement fall in favour of Medicine B.

Sound implausible? A 2016 study by ProPublica showed that pharmaceutical companies only have to buy American doctors a few meals to have a significantly higher chance of getting their brand of pharmaceutical prescribed, and those doctors being paid $5,000 or more are the most likely of all to do so.

In real medicine, a substance is medicinal if it alleviates the suffering of the patient. In corporate medicine, a substance is medicinal if it creates a profit for the shareholders of the manufacturer of that medicine.

So in the case of cannabis, because no profit can be made from the substance there are no pharmaceutical company representatives who are telling doctors about how useful cannabis products are, and so these doctors (who show little interest in keeping up with new research after they have graduated) don’t know anything about them, and engage in no mechanism that might inform them.

Doctors who practice corporate medicine are never pleased to hear that their patients have given up drinking alcohol or smoking tobacco for the sake of using cannabis. Alcohol and tobacco not only produce massive profits for corporations and therefore the potential for kickbacks to doctors (unlike cannabis) but they also make people sick, which means that they can be sold other medicines. Cannabis, by contrast, cannot be profited from.

The easiest way to tell if your doctor is acting to alleviate your suffering or simply to make money off it is to ask them about the medicinal value of cannabis. Because cannabis can easily be grown at home, there is no real way for doctors to make money off it. Therefore, a doctor practicing corporate medicine will play down the positive effects of cannabis, even going as far as to deny that there are any, and they will play up the negative sides.

Of course, cannabis might not be any good for your condition but from listening to the doctor’s answer to your question you will be able to determine if they have kept up with new information in the medicinal field.

Could Psilocybin Therapy Become Mainstream Within A Decade?

The path blazed by Western psychonauts over the past 60 years may soon lead to mainstream psilocybin therapy

The media appears to be taking tentative steps to recondition a herd that has been brainwashed to fear alternative states of consciousness and to despise those who explore them. Some months ago, an article about a psychiatrist’s efforts to optimise a playlist for a magic mushroom trip was doing the rounds, and other pieces since then have seemed to normalise them. Could psilocybin become a mainstream therapy within a decade?

For half a century, the conventional psychiatric wisdom was that psychedelic drugs do nothing but cause psychosis. They have no therapeutic benefit, and nor do they have any spiritual benefit. This is why psilocybin, like cannabis and LSD, was made a Schedule I drug in America, meaning that it was officially considered to have no medicinal value.

Despite this, a number of studies have hinted at the medicinal benefit that would explain why psilocybin has been used medicinally and sacramentally for thousands of years. An April 2016 paper in Pharmacological Reviews accounts for a modern understanding of psychedelics, abandoning the perspective that they are tools of the devil. This paper lists in detail the extant research on psychedelic drugs in therapy.

The effect that is foremost in attracting the interest of researchers at the moment is the ability of psilocybin to reconcile a dying person with the inevitability and inescapability of their own death. The end-of-life experience is often characterised by extreme anxiety, particularly in Western culture, with its near-total absence of any genuine spirituality and with the corresponding belief that the death of the physical body is the end of consciousness. This anxiety is associated with intense suffering, hence the call for research in this area.

Many of the psychonauts reading this will know that psilocybin is excellent for assuaging end-of-life anxiety, which, let’s not forget, can strike a person at any age. One does not have to be dying to suffer from death anxiety – one only needs a moment to contemplate the fact that one’s body is inevitably going to expire, as does everyone’s.

An intense psychedelic experience often has the effect of separating the consciousness of the user from the sensory input of the physical body entirely, and sometimes, when this occurs, the user realises that their consciousness could have dreamed up the illusion of being born into a physical body and that this is in fact a much more logical and likely explanation for everything than the idea that our brain somehow magically generates consciousness.

This line of thinking is characteristic of the psychedelic experience, and commonly leads to the conclusion that the true essence of a person is in fact consciousness, not the body, and that this consciousness is the prime material of reality and survives physical death. Once this conclusion has been reached, a person is liberated from death anxiety, and consequently from the suffering associated with it.

This doesn’t mean that bringing in psychedelic therapy will be straightforward.

The main difficulty is that the spiritual enlightenment associated with psilocybin drug use leads naturally to the realisation that the integrity of one’s physical body is not the most important thing in life, as it is temporary by its very nature, and this leads to one losing one’s fear of death.

This is great for the psychedelic user, as it liberates them from a terrible source of suffering, but it’s terrible for the politicians and the control system, who rely on that fear of death and physical pain to manipulate the cattle into doing their bidding.

After all, a fully psychedelicised population is not going to obey an order to invade an innocent country, destroy the local government and install a central bank, and nor will they willingly obey orders to put peaceful people in cages for actions that harm no-one else. They will be much more resistant to bullshit and to lies from authority figures, which, to those authority figures, represents a loss of control and this is to be avoided at all costs.

This is, indeed, why psychedelics have been opposed by both religious and secular authorities almost as soon as they were discovered.

It’s possible that some limited inroads into our collective ignorance around psychedelics might be made with a liberalisation of the laws around psilocybin, but for it to become a mainstream therapy a lot of ignorant, brainwashed idiots have to lose influence in the discussion. This will take a long time.