Anger
– in American politics and deep in the mind itself.
“This
week’s episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the word ‘anger’.” It sure
feels like that to me this week. Four things especially come to mind: (1) the
exchange on anger from Donald Trump and governor Haley and all its many ripples
and echoes (a phenomenon worth discussing in itself!); (2) the deeper
discussion of anger in the human mind, including both brain and noosphere, at
the Quaker discussion last Sunday (which included views from the Friends
Conference on Religion and Psychology, a major outlet for Jungian thought); (3)
Obama’s last State of the Union speech, intended in great part to damp down
Anger; and (4) issues in Democratic debates which also reflect the anger issue.
I see this as just one picture, but where to begin to do justice to all angles?
Let me
start with the Quaker perspective, as it provides a kind of foundation and may
be more novel to most people now.
I. 4
views of anger discussed at Quakers ********************************************************************************************************
Many
people assume that anger is just a negative emotion and should be repressed or
removed. (I suppose the State of the Union speech was influenced by the tacit
assumption of that. When Trump complains about political correctness, part of
his frustration is with the way our culture OFTEN – certainly not always! –
grounds itself in that assumption). None of us on Sunday accepted that naive
view. In a way, it was a continuation of our previous discussion of “peace of
mind” which I discussed in another recent blog. It often happens that people go
to extremes – in not liking fear or pain, they may even cut out the nerves
which deliver pain, succumb to addictive pain-killing drugs. “Don’t shoot the
messenger” is one of the very most fundamental maxims of sanity. It is also
fundamental to authentic dialogue and to the hope of collective sanity in the
noosphere (“in the spirit” where a level of sanity is possible not attainable in
mundane human social organizations). I gave a five star review of the book of
that title on Amazon (easily found by clicking there on me as reviewer name).
On
Sunday, we discussed four deep ways of thinking about what anger is, and what
its proper role is – the “neural network” view (as in the fundamental seminal
book on Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, RLADP,
edited by Lewis and Liu, from IEEE and Wiley), the Jungian view, the Freudian
view, and the high Confucian view.
Ia. The
Confucian View..................
Confucianism,
like Buddhism (and Christianity and Islam and Daoism for that matter), is a
complex zone of thought within humanity, which has a lot of variety of good
things and bad things, deep things and shallow silly things, honest things and
corrupt things – they are all like that. I was very happy this week when the “
friends’ book store” section had a copy of Fairbank and Goldman’s NEW history
of modern China, a beautiful paperback for 25 cents – and even more happy when
I saw how Fairbank, the leading Sinologist in US academia, learned a lot in the
decades since I pored over his earlier book and attended his wonderful teas for
the Harvard East Asian research center. (I have sometimes told the story of how
a newspaper story about Mao and a discussion with a fellow student drastically
changed my view of the human mind in spring 1967; that same student was
probably the one who brought me to the Fairbank meetings.) The new book is far
more sensitive to the complex reality of China than what I remember of the
older book; the two sentences summarizing Daoism are really striking in how
well they summarize a picture which it took me many years of visits to China to
learn.
However,
in discussing Confucianism, he summarizes a view by American scholars which is
incredibly inaccurate and black-and-white, a result of projecting their own
assumptions about the nature of like and the mind onto another group of people.
In essence, those American scholars assume that all Confucianism is 100%
mundane materialism, with no spiritual element at all. Having discussed this
with the leaders of the prime Confucius Institute in Qufu, and read a couple of
books by Fulan Yu, and visited many Confucian sites in China, I know that this is a very huge and serious
omission!! But even in China, practitioners of Chinese medicine often talk
about “qi” as if it were nothing but some kind of medical phlogiston running in
channels of water in the body; they often are unaware of the higher forms of qi
(like “charisma” or “spirit” or “dao water” or “grace” or “mana”) which have
been very fundamental to Confucianism. Still, speaking for himself (not for
American scholars), Fairbank notes that a major fundamental aspect of
Confucianism concerns HUMAN POTENTIAL, a fundamental fact of life much more
reliable than the more specific and local short-term issues Chinese people had
to cope with in past centuries under the rule of warlords and emperors. In
Qufu, they told me I heard the true story from my old high school friend from
Taiwan, who said that the word “integrity” is the real foundation of
Confucianism, not the recipes for when to wear pink underwear (as stated in the
Virginia state textbook on world history). They said the proper word for
integrity in Chinese is “zhengqi” or “zheng qi”; the word zhengqi means
integrity, a telling of truth by the self to the self, but “zheng” and “qi”
refer to “correct channeling or direction” and “qi”. Zhengqi IS zheng qi, to
make it real; this is not like the common old story where “ a seahorse is not a
horse.”
Ib.
The Modern Neural Network and Freudian interpretation of the Confucian View
............................
In my
paper at www.werbos.,com/Mind_in_Time.pdf,
I give and overview and citations to my neural network explanation both of
zhengqi and of Freud’s core concepts of psychodynamics. In essence, both brains
and the noosphere (the specific spiritual reality of which our individual
“souls” are parts), streams of feedback are essential to the learning process
which determines what behaviors and beliefs and perceptions we actually
learned. Today’s “deep learning” AI systems all calculate this kind of feedback
by using a method called “backpropagation” or “reverse adjoint method,” which I
developed and published long ago (see www.werbos.com/Mind
for links to some of the papers). Of
course, there are many Beltway Bandit types who try to maximize revenue by
making it sound as if the math all came from the local psych department in the
previous week, but common sense might suggest that new mathematics might come
from another source, and that it might hook up to other new mathematics
important to0 really understanding it (like the RLADP book). Still, even though
IEEE and INNS have both recognized my primacy here via the Pioneer Award and
Hebb Award, my 1974 PhD thesis (reprinted by Wiley but also at researchgate)
went on to suggest that MODULATED backpropagation – backpropagation with some
scalar multipliers introduced very carefully at various levels in the flow of
information – is what the brain actually uses. I developed this new algorithm
simply by TRANSLATING Freud’s theory of psychic energy INTO mathematics, and
then proving the relevant general theorem to go with it.
The
discovery of backpropagation is an important example of how creativity works in
science. Instead of just ignoring that fuzzy old mystic old psychiatrist Freud,
I tried to understand and then ARTICULATE or TRANSLATE the key issues into
workable, functional mathematics. The idea of TRANSLATING between images in the
mind, words, and mathematics is really crucial here. If we are CONSCIOUS and
STRATEGIC about translation (and abut listening and understanding), we can
solve problems in a straightforward way which undisciplined, less conscious
people (like the new AD/ENG at NSF, listening to Lamar Smith) could never solve
in millennia of funding.
In an
effective intelligent system, whether a brain or a noosphere, the feedback
signals or “qi” or “psychic energy” which drive our actions sometimes need to
be positive and sometimes need to be negative. Some things justify hope, and
some things justify fear. Some things have positive value to us, and some
things have negative value to us. (A technical note: “value” here is NOT like
the “value function” of RLADP. I am very
sorry about the screwed up terminology which certain people forced on the
research community. Economists will tell you that “value” and “price” are more
like “marginal utility” – but my papers on the web explain all that.) An
intelligent system MUST have both hopes AND fears, and it must also have BOTH
positive and negative feedback signals.
So – I
didn’t discuss that math at Quakers. Simply: “yes, we MUST have both positive
and negative flows of feeling, regardless of whether we call them “affect” or
“qi” or “psychic energy.” Some things we just don’t like, for good reason. When
bad things happen, we always have negative flows of emotion to respond to them,
properly, and it is a lie and a violation of integrity to pretend we don’t.
When millions of people get hurt by bad folks in the Middle East.. sanity does
NOT mean burying your head in the sand!. Sanity of zheng qi requires that we
get direct our negative emotions TO THE RIGHT THING!!! Don’t shoot the
messenger.
What
if something bad (like theft of a billion government dollars for something
useless like the recent Ares rocket and its reinvention as SLS) was caused by a
whole network of things, including a person who executes the theft (caused by a
mix of greed and willful ignorance and lack of integrity), a set of lobbyists
who pay him PAC money and local support, a phenomenon of coalition politics
among such lobbyists driven in part by leadership from oil money, and lack of
memory of how the American Republic was supposed to work from founders like
Washington, Jefferson and Free Quakers? In such complicated cases... the
mathematics says we should distribute “credit” all around, and be aware of the negative
valence of all the variables which led to the outcome, but focus our energy on
whatever strategy we can think of to make the real outcomes better. We don’t
let up, but we FOCUS our energy where it can do some good. At Quakers, I
probably said something simpler like: “Don’t hate the slave-owner but hate the
whole SYSTEM of slavery, and focus on what It takes in reality to change the
whole SYSTEM, in the most benevolent way we can that could actually work.”
Elementary
stuff, but, like translation... the kind of elementary stuff we need to work to
remain conscious of at all times. Remembering the basics is ever so fundamental
here.
All
this is related to a great, clear readable book on what causes human success
and failure, in the empirical study by George Valliant... but today I should
move on. Well: one point. One of the greatest, commonest FAILURES of the mind
to attain sanity is what Valliant calls “the defense mechanism of denial.”
Because human brains have only recently evolved the ability to use words at
all.... it is no surprise that they lie to themselves a lot when they use
words. In a way, zhengqi or sanity means “being true to yourself,” the exact
opposite of lying to yourself. The discipline of sanity is a discipline of
always consciously working to avoid lying to oneself, to be aware of
temptations to fall into denial... which, as Valliant shows, destroys the
values we truly care about. I add this as I start to write below, about
American politics, where pathological denial is one of the most pervasive
problems.
Ic.
The Jungian View with connections to ancient Egypt
It was
a great pleasure last Sunday to learn more about Jung’s view, from a leader of
that tradition. I know a lot about the ideas of Freud; for example, I once
worked a lot with Karl Pribram, whose review of Freud’s deepest concepts gets
much deeper than the many other sources I have read. But with Jung... it has
not gone so deep.
I was
very happy to learn last Sunday that core, high Jungians pursue a basic concept
of “wholeness” which can be seen as a kind of synonym for zhenqi or Freudian
“sanity” (at least when we consider TOTAL sanity, including not only the
mundane level but then extending to “Alchemical Marriage” and beyond). Having
three different views of the same thing can be useful if we learn to fuse the
three or four different viewpoints; this is like fusing the images from two
eyes, which is basic to really seeing in three dimensions.
I was
also intrigued to hear that core Jungians view “archetypes” (the psychological
realities behind ancient “gods”, for example) as a positive force for the
development of human potential and human wholeness. I had earlier heard of a
warning from Jung, that folks who play too much with the real archetypes risk
being blown away by energies they cannot easily control. (In ancient days I had
effects like that, unintentionally, on a few girlfriends, before I learned to
better control my energies. Oh is that a long and real story! Easy to look back
on from a quieter less torrid height, as I approach prostate surgery, nothing I
am proud of but nothing I rage against... like the old Chinese notion of four
seasons..) Recently, when I came back from India, I had a tricky dealing with
their monkey god archetype (a reality in the noosphere, just as Santa Claus and
the devil are a psychological realities)... and I have mostly tried to avoid
confusion by avoiding such things... but the Jungians have a point, that all of
the noosphere has its proper role as part of us. “There is that of God in everyone,”
say the Quakers, and I suppose I need to work on thinking of archetypes as well
that way. But even so, they and I need to be especially careful to avoid
confusion... the kind of confusion which even little learning machines can
experience, when they waste time oscillating over feedback signals which have
not been well modulated or properly sparsified.
A few
months ago, the great Progressive Spokesman David Brin really blew up at me, in
a way worse than anything I have seen Trump do to people on TV, because of
Great Sin of saying something nice about Orson Scott Card. Card himself has
written newspaper editorials about Obama which substantially violate my
standards of zhengqi and honesty, saying untruthful extreme negative things... but he has also written very deep and useful
things. As with Ayn Rand, the Bible, Freud, and Karl Marx, one can get great
benefit from Card’s work, if one studies it carefully and focuses on learning
positive things. (I said that to Brin, and that’s what put him over the edge!)
In 2015, for example, I read Card’s “light entertaining teenage fantasy”, the
Gatekeeper trilogy... which helped me understand and appreciate the Egyptian
Book of the Dead much more than I ever was able to before. Many years ago, I
noticed when H. Spencer Lewis, author of the Rosicrucian Manual, said: “To get
a firm foundation here, you should all make sure to include the Tibetan and
Egyptian Books of the Dead in your preparatory homework.” By 2015, I knew the Tibetan side at a level
few Tibetans ever do, but the Egyptian one had always left me cold and
unappreciative. Orson Scott Card really brought it to life. In essence, the
Egyptians, like the Jungians, REMEMBER that the noosphere is not ONLY made up
of individual souls of animals like us. As in the brain, there are not only
“neurons” but “matrix” in the noosphere, and nerves which connect to outside
physical reality. But there are neurons
“like us” and also neurons like memory prototypes, like powerful cells for
associative memory and other such assemblies – actually made up of neurons (as
Card stresses at the end!). They are a part of who we are, and important to our
achievement of spiritual self-consciousness, which I think of as the third
level of zhengqi. (Mundane sanity is level one, and “Alchemical marriage” is
level two).
A
related matter – Annie Besant, who was Mahatma Ghandhi’s spiritual teacher (see
the photograph of Ghandhi’s library and accompanying text in a previous blog
post, also talked about “thought forms” in one of her books). It is essentially
just another consistent image of the same thing. Was ba what got Ghandhi
elected? We did track that... though I apologize to Arvind for my always being
elsewhere lately...
Id.
Quick Comment on Level Three Zhengqi, noosphere wholeness
Before,
in discussing Teilhard de Chardin’s view of the noosphere, Quakers reminded me
of the very embarrassing and fundamental problem in his understanding of
evolution. The local forces which Teilhard discusses would ultimately produce
entropy, not evolution. Watching the state of the world today... the risk of
entropy killing us all is very, very real. In my view, the EXISTENCE of the
noosphere is unquestionable, given the huge empirical database in the totality
of human experience and the lack of coherent alternative explanation... but
Teilhard’s explanation for it simply won’t work. To find an explanation that
works... and goes a bit further... I see no alternative except to assume there
must exist MANY noospheres, just as there exist many planets even in our own
galaxy. And I do not repress that memory. This year I resolved to try to
remember the core experience I had at rest on a cruise ship last month – living
at the fulcrum of four great forces of nature, the sun, the ocean – the ocean
of life ,
the
stars of our galaxy, and my wife. Let us always remember the stars and the
galaxy in our mind, how real and how huge and how old they are...
Noospheres
can exist and have decent lifespans only if their biological evolution in their
niche of dark matter (or more? who knows...) has included evolution of
something like the p52 cycle which explains the unusual longevity of human
bodies. I have resolved not to say too much about the human biology here, even
though my present health situation certainly reminds me of that and more. (I
look at Congress and say “Hey, I really am planning to die for their sins!”) But
what are the internal inborn filters in the noosphere, which give it some hope
of greater wholeness and longevity than what we would expect from the terribly
depressing conflicts and Mickey Mouse insanity we see all around the earth at
present? I am just beginning to see in more concrete terms what is entailed..
it sure as hell is not so trivial as the hermeneutics of a bunch of
.color-blind hired ulemas or talmud writers, working for corrupt Abbassid
pleasure seekers... (though some of those Abbasid women were also great forces
of nature to respect, just as much as the monkey god)....What is entailed...
clearly links to the issue of zhengqi for the noosphere itself, that is what is
fundamental here. And that is a matter of seeking a level of Truthfulness when
in the noosphere... full truthfulness in the noosphere... the one ultimate
commandment which will drive whether we
all collectively live or die, not only as a species but as an entire planet’s
worth of consciousness and soul.
What
does that have to do with Jesus’ two Great Commandments, which John Kerry
rightfully reminded us of in a debate a few years ago against pharisee
pseudo-Christians
like what
Jesus once warned us about (“Many will come claiming to speak in my name...”)?
In fact, there is a lace in the New Testament where Jesus offers us a
RELATIVELY hopeful view of the future... where he says that in later days the
Spirit of Truth is what can really save us. At a deep level in the human
mind... maybe these are a kind of archetype, each articulating realities beyond
the archetype itself... the spirit of truth and the spirit of love (and
life)... well, it is crucial, again, to always remember what the fundamentals
really are. Myself, I have always been a bit more of an avatar of truth than of
love, but I do treasure my friendship with Yeshua of That Family, who has
dedicated his life to channeling the equally important “spirits” of peace of mind
and love. I have been more like the core yang, and he like the yin, but sanity
entails a proper balance and cooperation of the yin and the yang. In my older
life now.. for various reasons (e.g. the normal shift with age from what was
insanely high testosterone to lower testosterone ,
see footnote at end), this year of my life I need
to balance things out a bit more ... a week of anger for the world, perhaps,
but a year of benevolence for me.
II.
Anger in Politics -- especially US politics *********************************************************************************************************************************
OK, I
am sorry that that was complicated, but these are important issues and it is
important to bring them together. To be fully truthful – one should have some
idea what anger is, before talking too much about it.
As the
press has said, anger has become a really powerful force in the “American lobe”
of the noosphere lately. It is powerful, important, to be respected, and also
very dangerous – exactly what Jung said about archetypes, though this anger is
a vast current of feeling, not an archetype.
There
is so much anger out there. Where to begin?
First,
Trump does have an important valid point: that suppression of well-justified
anger and fear really gets in the way of actions needed to grow and survive.
His making up with Governor Haley is almost a textbook example of how some hope
may exist for humans. (Though Haley is Indian American... it amuses me that
Haley is also a name from my mother’s Irish family, the folks who owned the bar
where the Constitution was written. My father mentioned how they passed on the
bar bills to him, signed by folks like Madison, which he then passed on to the
Poor Richard Club of which he was a member and/or the Philadelphia Historical
Society.)
What
is there to be upset about? My other recent blog post, “global strategic
intelligence meets historical dynamics” gives some summary. There is a lot to
be upset about, from many directions, and our very survival is at stake. As
Trump says, failure to channel strong negative energy against those bad things,
to try to change them in a serious and determined way, would be a failure of
sanity. It would be like the “affect free deadened schizophrenia” which many
Freudians talk about, which is a valid diagnosis for many people in DC --- not
just in the bureaucracy but in some lobby organizations which falsely claim to
support human freedom or American interests. When Trump inaugurated his
campaign with an appearance by Carl Icahn, discussing the need for a new Teddy
Roosevelt, and played the music “We’re not going to take it..” be sure that I added my energy to that, and
was certainly not alone.
But:
there is the matter of truthfulness, and the issue of who could actually take
on the legalized corruption in Washington. Trump has not said much about that
topic, and there is a lot of fuzzy vision, untruthful channeling of energy, and
– above all – signs of confusion in his book, which do not look workable at
this point. Yes, we need to fight our way out of the box... but not like that
character in the new Star Wars movie who smashes his own headquarters in
uncontrolled rage. Yes, people want
strong action... but if anger is channelled in the wrong direction, it can
cause a lot more harm than good. We need it, but we need it channeled where it
does more good than harm.
Most
of the other Republican candidates either showed too little qi of any kind
(like Rubio?), too much bland smiles like Obama’s State of the Union speech, or
else energy misdirected in ways that would be harmful. As in: “We should show
whose boss by showing how loyal we are to Cheney’s plans for American
leadership, loyal to friends like sharia imams...” It is very sad to me how little appreciation
there was for the sane and nuanced approach of Kasich, who has a will to work
with the Saudis but ALSO to have open eyes about where money comes from to finance
the Moslem Brotherhood, and the need for balance. It reminds me that I took
only one year of university study in international relations, for the M.Sc at
LSE, where many old hands of the Empire laughed at the insane unending naivety
of US “experts” in that field, who fail to appreciate such basic principles as
the Balance of Power. How can anyone deplore the rise of ISIL in Iraq without
realizing that the decision by Bush to support China and the Moslem Brotherhood
to overthrow Saddam Hussein and give them a new base was the core of the
problem, and that their new plan for a war between US and Israel versus Russia
and Iran would be the very worst possible disaster a new President could get us
into? If the US picks the kind of president likely to make that kind of
incredible mistake (full of huffing and puffing and uncontrolled ego
delusions)... the US will not be the only nation whose very existence will be
put at risk. Some folks think that Trump was the craziest person on the stage
last night, but I’d say that the soul-deadened schizos who would quietly and
confidently create that kind of war are really the craziest. When folks like
Christie assume they know what is going on.. and yet are 180 degrees out from
knowing which way is up... their anger ends up worse than merely being frozen.
So –
speaking of freeze, what of the Democratic side?
It was
fascinating to see Obama, first, wisely realizing that this was not a proper
time for a laundry list of legislative proposals. But then: “let’s calm them
down.” I certainly remember my year on the hill, when PR departments of all
kinds of offices felt that their job was to be sensitive to concerns of the
public, and then, instead of making things actually better, do their best to
make it seem they are already successfully doing everything which could be
done. Saying “all is well” is such a
common theme. It reminds me of how the press in China has so often been ordered
to make everything look good (so as to save face and avoid losing the mandate
of heaven?), which stands in stark opposition for Mao’s call not to neglect
self-criticism and Jesus’s plea “before you remove the splinter from your
brother’s eye, first remove the beam from your own.” I was especially pained,
in this effort at soporifics, to hear such great praise for the breakthrough
represented by I-Corps, something I know something about. In the end,
Truthfulness, human potential and real creativity in the US has long depended a
whole lot on the US university system – “the last bastion of true free speech”
and the envy of the world. Obama has cheered on reorganization of the NSF, the
prime funding source of US universities, devised by Lamar Smith, reallocating
money and attention from tough cutting edge “disruptive technology” to
translational work... not unlike what TYny Tether did to DARPA or Carly Fiorina
to Bell Labs. Tech transfer is certainly important, but if one pursues it by
destroying the tech itself and by funding political favorites to waste time in
useless cheerleading... it is more of a disaster than the world knows.
Republicans and their lobby supporters can take credit for it, but Obama ...
was playing golf? Believing their fairy tales? Whatever. I certainly remember
attending an NSF workshop in the Gateway Hotel, hearing loud chanting from
people paid to attend ICorp revival meetings next door. Just like Bo Xilai! It
is Not that singing patriotic songs is bad, but it gets to be.... empty...
when... IN PARALLEL... the real content is lost. But ... I have promised not to
post the data on what matters, the content side, which goes very far. In my
view, the legacy of Vannevar Bush has been as important to the US as that of Teddy
Roosevelt and those earlier good folks...
And
so: Trump said Hilary was “schlonged” in 2008, which is better expressed as “burned.”
She was also burned by Benghazi – where folks in the Cheney world killed us,
and she was guilty of not having controlled them early enough. But when someone
is bittern by rats, the constructive solution is not to elect the same rats (or
their puppets) as president!
Some
people plan to vote for Sanders rather than Hillary because they feel Sanders
is more angry... expresses their anger. But in fact... I have observed Hilary
enough to believe she is actually a hell of a lot MORE angry with the kind of
people who have personally burned her, mistreated her and hurt the US as a
whole in all the ways Sanders complains about and more. Will she be effective
enough to root out the criminals in the system? Maybe, maybe not, but she has a
much better chance of getting into the world of hard reality than Sanders. Will
she be truly sensitive and respectful and listening enough in communicating
with all the many other people she needs to communicate with around this world,
or will she be what Putin most fears (“Oh, no! Not the mother in law to the
world!”). Well, she shows a lot more listening ability than those other characters,
except when Kasich and Trump have good moments (hard for me to predict). She
would have some very good help in those areas – better than what Sanders might
fall back on if he gets frustrated (which would be predictable).
Some
parts of the right wing, as deadened and complacent as they are, are back to
wanting to push Sanders, as they once pushed Obama, in belief that he would be
easy to defeat and no problem in any case. I hope they wake up to reality on
both counts. Between a smiling Rubio (let alone Jeb) and an angry Sanders...
caveat.
=============== clarification on testosterone
Oops! In
a politically correct world, perhaps I should not even use the word
testosterone since, like the words “God” and “soul,” it is so often so grossly
misunderstood that one cannot even be truthful using it! If people hear things
you do not mean to say... unfortunately, the most truthful thing to say out
loud is sometimes nothing. But this blog does not pretend to be so politically
correct, and when I use the word testosterone I am referring very simply to the
actual physical hormone, known very well to anyone who studies the brain.
Let me
just say that no one should extrapolate here to imagine I was saying anything
else. I did not mean to use the word as a euphemism. In truth, when I was 7 or
8 years old, a local doctor injected me with testosterone or a testosterone, in
response to something which did not require it. (Poison ivy or hernia, I forget
which.) Extreme levels of that hormone have many effects, but having been
raised in a Catholic household and later close to AngloSaxons proud of their
moral values, I did not really express the most obvious manifestation until
graduate school, when I was taken by surprise by an incredibly effective
seduction technique used by a woman I was planning to marry in any case. I
suppose that one of the major consequences before that was a great tension
between the strong conscious “ego” and the “unconscious,” though the word “unconscious”
or “subconscious” does not give anything like a correct picture of what went
through my mind back then in that part of life.
I am
very grateful for the conversations I later had with a beautiful world-class
endocrinologist on some of the technical details and social science
connections. Maybe I would have married her if I had met her at a better time,
but testosterone can stimulate delusions of that kind in the male brain if one
is not careful. Real testosterone is friendly, as was Jesus, in dealing with
females at least, but that also tends to protect one from the coldest dead
affect as well.. like some of the cold fish on display in parts of government. It
is more like liquid eyes than like plug-ugly athleticism (and in fact it tends
to inhibit growth of the long bones, much shorter in my case than close male
relatives)... but yes, there is no question that Trump also exhibits many of
the consequences (a mix of benefits and risks) of high testosterone levels. My
endocrinology friend reported that testosterone levels tend to be highest in
professions like engineering.. but there are other professions in DC which tend
to attract softies, more and more as the years have progressed. (There is data
on that.) The caste system substantially complicates all that, and it is
extremely unfortunate how that has started to mess things up in DC as well. (Looking
at Haley, my first question was: WHICH GROUP of Indian does she represent? They
are ever SO diverse!)
Sometimes
I think back to the time when I was undergraduate, and read an article in New
York Times magazine about progesterone used in pregnancy back in those days,
Since the male half of the babies ended up more or less neutered, it is not
surprising that the practiced ended fast. But it intrigued me to hear how
babies of BOTH sexes ended up with an average 20 points higher IQ, presumably
because of how the hormone stimulated the motivational system which underlies
human learning. Maybe it was only PARTLY a coincidence that my learning of math
and science suddenly became so Faustian starting when I was 8. (Lots of
stories... like an attractive babysitter who left me her paperback book “algebra
made simple.”) I have wondered...now that people can IDENTIFY gender in the
womb?.... And the image of females with a combination of high IQ and high
hormones together... certainly left a
powerful, enduring imprint on my “subconscious mind” (what a misnomer!). As with the research on decorticate cats... it
has an enduring impact even past prostatectomy and age... but no longer the
kind of serious risk that improperly channelled qi can sometimes have.
Still,
even without such injections... there is a new wave coming into the world,
which I hope I live to see. Lack of predictability does not diminish curiosity.
=============== clarification on testosterone
Oops! In
a politically correct world, perhaps I should not even use the word
testosterone since, like the words “God” and “soul,” it is so often so grossly
misunderstood that one cannot even be truthful using it! If people hear things
you do not mean to say... unfortunately, the most truthful thing to say out
loud is sometimes nothing. But this blog does not pretend to be so politically
correct, and when I use the word testosterone I am referring very simply to the
actual physical hormone, known very well to anyone who studies the brain.
Let me
just say that no one should extrapolate here to imagine I was saying anything
else. I did not mean to use the word as a euphemism. In truth, when I was 7 or
8 years old, a local doctor injected me with testosterone or a testosterone, in
response to something which did not require it. (Poison ivy or hernia, I forget
which.) Extreme levels of that hormone have many effects, but having been
raised in a Catholic household and later close to AngloSaxons proud of their
moral values, I did not really express the most obvious manifestation until
graduate school, when I was taken by surprise by an incredibly effective
seduction technique used by a woman I was planning to marry in any case. (When she broke off that engagement, it was certainly the darkest and most painful period of my life, depriving life of color and requiring at times that I operate my body like a puppet to forcibly keep it alive, motivated by curiosity.) I
suppose that one of the major consequences before that was a great tension
between the strong conscious “ego” and the “unconscious,” though the word “unconscious”
or “subconscious” does not give anything like a correct picture of what went
through my mind back then in that part of life.
I am
very grateful for the conversations I later had with a beautiful world-class
endocrinologist on some of the technical details and social science
connections. Maybe I would have married her if I had met her at a better time,
but testosterone can stimulate delusions of that kind in the male brain if one
is not careful. Real testosterone is friendly, as was Jesus, in dealing with
females at least, but that also tends to protect one from the coldest dead
affect as well.. like some of the cold fish on display in parts of government. It
is more like liquid eyes than like plug-ugly athleticism (and in fact it tends
to inhibit growth of the long bones, much shorter in my case than close male
relatives)... but yes, there is no question that Trump also exhibits many of
the consequences (a mix of benefits and risks) of high testosterone levels. My
endocrinology friend reported that testosterone levels tend to be highest in
professions like engineering.. but there are other professions in DC which tend
to attract softies, more and more as the years have progressed. (There is data
on that.) The caste system substantially complicates all that, and it is
extremely unfortunate how that has started to mess things up in DC as well. (Looking
at Haley, my first question was: WHICH GROUP of Indian does she represent? They
are ever SO diverse!)
Sometimes
I think back to the time when I was undergraduate, and read an article in New
York Times magazine about progesterone used in pregnancy back in those days,
Since the male half of the babies ended up more or less neutered, it is not
surprising that the practiced ended fast. But it intrigued me to hear how
babies of BOTH sexes ended up with an average 20 points higher IQ, presumably
because of how the hormone stimulated the motivational system which underlies
human learning. Maybe it was only PARTLY a coincidence that my learning of math
and science suddenly became so Faustian starting when I was 8. (Lots of
stories... like an attractive babysitter who left me her paperback book “algebra
made simple.”) I have wondered...now that people can IDENTIFY gender in the
womb?.... And the image of females with a combination of high IQ and high
hormones together... certainly left a
powerful, enduring imprint on my “subconscious mind” (what a misnomer!). As with the research on decorticate cats... it
has an enduring impact even past prostatectomy and age... but no longer the
kind of serious risk that improperly channelled qi can sometimes have.
Still,
even without such injections... there is a new wave coming into the world,
which I hope I live to see. Lack of predictability does not diminish curiosity.
