Part One: The Bio-Survival Circuit
60309 postsposted 8th Jan '09
Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.
Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.
Any mammal hooks the bio-survival circuit to the first imprinted bio-survival object: the teat. Bio-survival and orality are deeply blended in all mammals, including domesticated primates (humans). This is why, despite the Cancer Terror, and estimated 30,000,000 Americans still smoke cigarettes... Other chew gum, bite their fingernails, gnaw their knuckles, scrunch pencil stubs, eat more than they need. Some chew their lips, gobble tranks and uppers, even munch their moustaches. What goes on in the bedroom is known to the Kinsey Institute and anyone who has seen a porn film.
How important is this oral imprinting? We read of a baby giraffe whose mother was accidentally killed by a jeep immediately after birth. The neonate, following hard-wired genetic programs, "imprinted" the first object that roughly fit the giraffe archetype -- the jeep itself. He followed the machine around, vocalized to it, attempted to suckle from it, and, when adult, tried to mate with it.
Similarly, Konrad Lorenz tells of a gosling who accidentally imprinted a ping-pong ball and spent his adult life, indifferent to female geese, attempting to sexually mount ping-pong balls.
Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that opium and its derivatives return us to the "safe space" on the bio-survival circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates may trigger neuro-transmitters1 characteristic of breastfeeding.
1 Neuro-transmitters are chemicals which alter the electro-colloidal balance of the brain and hence change the perceptual field. Brain-change agents.
In summary: the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother isn't present, the closest substitute in the environment will be imprinted. For the orphan giraffe, a four-wheeled jeep was chosen to stand in for the four-legged mother. The gosling who could not find the round, white body of the mother-goose fixated a round, white ping-pong ball.
The "wiring" of this circuit, in primitive form, occurred in the first organisms, between three and four billion years ago. In the modern human, this structure remains in the brain stem and in the autonomic ("involuntary") nervous system, where it is interconnected with the endocrine and other life-support systems. This is why disturbances on this circuit act "all over the body at once" and generally take the form of physical symptoms rather than "mental" symptoms and usually get referred to the M.D. instead of the psychiatrist.
It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always traumatic for the newborn -- creates a bad imprint, in our language. Our child-rearing methods are also far from ideal also, adding bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general violence of our societies to date -- including wars, revolutions, civil wars and the "undeclared civil war" of the predatory criminal class in every "civilized" nation -- keeps the first circuit of most people in an emergency state far too much of the time.
In 1968, a U.S. Public Health survey showed that 85% of the popuolation had one or more symptoms that we would call bad first-circuit imprinting or conditioning. These symptoms included dizzy spells, heart palpitations, wet palsm and frequent nightmares.
This means that 85 out of the next 100 people you meet should be regarded as, mroe or less, "the Walking Wounded."
This is the first level of meaning in our brutal, cynical proposition that most people are almost as mechanical as sci-fi robots. A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals2 of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to observe, judge or decide anything very accurately.
2 We especially refer to adrenaline and adrenalutin, which signal the whole organism to prepare to fight or flee.
It must be emphasized that this circuit, being the oldest in evolutionary development, is the most mechanical, and the most rapid. One is not conscious of time at all on the bio-survival circuit. Observe the speed of your dog's reaction at the first sound of an intruder: the threatening bark, and the movement of the whole body to alert status, is automatic. Then the dog starts taking in other cues, to determine how this particular intruder should be treated.
As Robert Ardrey reports the remarks of primatologist Ray Carpenter, to understand this part of your brain...
Imagine that you are a monkey and you're running along a path past a rock and unexpectedly meet face to face another animal. Now, before you know whether to attack it, flee it, or to ignore it, you must make a series of decisions. Is it monkey or non-monkey? If non-monkey, is it pro-monkey or anti-monkey? If monkey, is it male or female? If female, is she interested? If male, is it adult or juvenile? If adult, is it of my group or some other?... You have about one fifth of a second to make all these decisions, or you could be attacked.
The bio-survival program first attaches to the safe space around the mother (oral imprint), and then with age moves further and further out, exploring what is safe and what is not. Without hard-wired genetic programs (i.e. automatic programs) this second stage would be impossible, and no mammal would ever leave the teat. The hard-wired programs act automatically (UNCONSCIOUSLY) because if you had to stop and think out each situation, you would be eaten by the first predator.
Of course, the imprint is made by chance -- by the circumstances at the moment of imprint vulnerability. (Recall the gosling who imprinted the ping-pong ball.) Some imprint bravery, inquisitiveness and the exploratory drive; others imprint timidty, infophobia (fear of the unpredictable) and withdrawal, of which the extreme case is the sad imprint called autism or childhood schizophrenia.
All of which is robotic, until one learns how to reprogram and reimprint one's own brain circuits. In most cases, such meta-programming skill is never acquired. It all goes by in a flash, on mechanical auto-pilot, in zero time. "I just found myself doing it," says the soldier as heis being court-martialled for cowardice or decorated for bravery.
Of course, on top of the hard-wired imprinting of the bio-survival circuit comes "softer" conditioning. This allows the safe-space perimeter to be generalized outward from the mother's body to the pack or tribe -- the "extended family."
Every social animal has, in addition to the Darwinian "instinct" (genetic program) of self-preservation, a similar "instinct" to protect the gene-pool. This is the basis of altruism, and social animals could not survive without it.
Wild dogs (and wolves) bark to warn the rest of the pack that an intruder is coming. Your domesticated dog identifies you as a pack-leader; he barks to warn you that an intruder is coming. (He also barks, of course, to warn the intruder that he is ready to fight for his territory.)
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed "anomie" or "alienation" or "existential anguish" about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call "money".
Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for bio-survival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. "You can't live without money," as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.
Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishment to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare's day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal. ("Banished!" cries Romeo, "the damned use that word in Hell!")
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security, exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror.
Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool. Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety and anomie combined with terror. The conservatives, of course, vaguely recognize this and ask for "local charity" to replace State Welfare -- i.e. they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not genetically related at all.
On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off ("exiled") for some minor infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total.
Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich's "Consciousness III"). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communities.
Back in the real world, the tickets called "money" are the bio-survival bond for most people. Anti-Semitism is a complex abberation, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the "Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism has declined in America, the "Bankers' Conspiracy" lives on in a new form. Now the villians are the old New England WASP families, the "Yankee Establishment." Some Leftists will even show you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way anti-Semites used to show Rothschild geneaologies.
Extreme cases -- persons who take their heaviest imprint on the first (oral) circuit -- tend to be viscerotonic, because this imprint determines lifelong endocrine and glandular processes. Thus, in extreme they are "baby-faced" in adult life, never lose their "baby-fat", are plump and round and gentle, etc. They are easily "hurt" (threatened: terrified) by disapproval of any sort, because in the baby-circuit of the brain, disapproval suggests extinction by loss of the food supply.
We all have this circuit and need to exercize is periodically. Cuddling, sucking, hugging etc. and daily playing with a) one's own body b) another's body and c) the environment, are perpetually necessary to neurosomatic-endocrine health. Those who deny such primordial functions because of rigid imprinting on the Third (rationalistic) or Fourth (moralistic) circuit tend to become "dried up", "prune-faced", unattractive, "cold", and muscularly rigid.
The baby-functions of playing with one's own body, another's body and the environment continue throughout life in all animals. This "playfulness" is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls "self-actualizers".
Introduction
Part Two: The Emotional-Territorial Circuit
Part Three: The Semantic Circuit
Part Four: The Socio-Sexual Circuit
Part Five: The Circuits and communication
C.
quoteAny multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.
Any mammal hooks the bio-survival circuit to the first imprinted bio-survival object: the teat. Bio-survival and orality are deeply blended in all mammals, including domesticated primates (humans). This is why, despite the Cancer Terror, and estimated 30,000,000 Americans still smoke cigarettes... Other chew gum, bite their fingernails, gnaw their knuckles, scrunch pencil stubs, eat more than they need. Some chew their lips, gobble tranks and uppers, even munch their moustaches. What goes on in the bedroom is known to the Kinsey Institute and anyone who has seen a porn film.
How important is this oral imprinting? We read of a baby giraffe whose mother was accidentally killed by a jeep immediately after birth. The neonate, following hard-wired genetic programs, "imprinted" the first object that roughly fit the giraffe archetype -- the jeep itself. He followed the machine around, vocalized to it, attempted to suckle from it, and, when adult, tried to mate with it.
Similarly, Konrad Lorenz tells of a gosling who accidentally imprinted a ping-pong ball and spent his adult life, indifferent to female geese, attempting to sexually mount ping-pong balls.
Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that opium and its derivatives return us to the "safe space" on the bio-survival circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates may trigger neuro-transmitters1 characteristic of breastfeeding.
1 Neuro-transmitters are chemicals which alter the electro-colloidal balance of the brain and hence change the perceptual field. Brain-change agents.
In summary: the bio-survival circuit is DNA-programmed to seek a comfort-safety zone around a mothering organism. If a mother isn't present, the closest substitute in the environment will be imprinted. For the orphan giraffe, a four-wheeled jeep was chosen to stand in for the four-legged mother. The gosling who could not find the round, white body of the mother-goose fixated a round, white ping-pong ball.
The "wiring" of this circuit, in primitive form, occurred in the first organisms, between three and four billion years ago. In the modern human, this structure remains in the brain stem and in the autonomic ("involuntary") nervous system, where it is interconnected with the endocrine and other life-support systems. This is why disturbances on this circuit act "all over the body at once" and generally take the form of physical symptoms rather than "mental" symptoms and usually get referred to the M.D. instead of the psychiatrist.
It must be stressed that we are still in a primitive stage of evolution and conditions on this planet are quite brutal. Radical pediatricians insist, with good evidence, that childbirth by conventional means in a conventional hospital is almost always traumatic for the newborn -- creates a bad imprint, in our language. Our child-rearing methods are also far from ideal also, adding bad conditioning on top of bad imprinting. And the general violence of our societies to date -- including wars, revolutions, civil wars and the "undeclared civil war" of the predatory criminal class in every "civilized" nation -- keeps the first circuit of most people in an emergency state far too much of the time.
In 1968, a U.S. Public Health survey showed that 85% of the popuolation had one or more symptoms that we would call bad first-circuit imprinting or conditioning. These symptoms included dizzy spells, heart palpitations, wet palsm and frequent nightmares.
This means that 85 out of the next 100 people you meet should be regarded as, mroe or less, "the Walking Wounded."
This is the first level of meaning in our brutal, cynical proposition that most people are almost as mechanical as sci-fi robots. A man or woman entering a new situation with the anxiety chemicals2 of a frightened infant coursing through the brain stem is not going to be able to observe, judge or decide anything very accurately.
2 We especially refer to adrenaline and adrenalutin, which signal the whole organism to prepare to fight or flee.
It must be emphasized that this circuit, being the oldest in evolutionary development, is the most mechanical, and the most rapid. One is not conscious of time at all on the bio-survival circuit. Observe the speed of your dog's reaction at the first sound of an intruder: the threatening bark, and the movement of the whole body to alert status, is automatic. Then the dog starts taking in other cues, to determine how this particular intruder should be treated.
As Robert Ardrey reports the remarks of primatologist Ray Carpenter, to understand this part of your brain...
Imagine that you are a monkey and you're running along a path past a rock and unexpectedly meet face to face another animal. Now, before you know whether to attack it, flee it, or to ignore it, you must make a series of decisions. Is it monkey or non-monkey? If non-monkey, is it pro-monkey or anti-monkey? If monkey, is it male or female? If female, is she interested? If male, is it adult or juvenile? If adult, is it of my group or some other?... You have about one fifth of a second to make all these decisions, or you could be attacked.
The bio-survival program first attaches to the safe space around the mother (oral imprint), and then with age moves further and further out, exploring what is safe and what is not. Without hard-wired genetic programs (i.e. automatic programs) this second stage would be impossible, and no mammal would ever leave the teat. The hard-wired programs act automatically (UNCONSCIOUSLY) because if you had to stop and think out each situation, you would be eaten by the first predator.
Of course, the imprint is made by chance -- by the circumstances at the moment of imprint vulnerability. (Recall the gosling who imprinted the ping-pong ball.) Some imprint bravery, inquisitiveness and the exploratory drive; others imprint timidty, infophobia (fear of the unpredictable) and withdrawal, of which the extreme case is the sad imprint called autism or childhood schizophrenia.
All of which is robotic, until one learns how to reprogram and reimprint one's own brain circuits. In most cases, such meta-programming skill is never acquired. It all goes by in a flash, on mechanical auto-pilot, in zero time. "I just found myself doing it," says the soldier as heis being court-martialled for cowardice or decorated for bravery.
Of course, on top of the hard-wired imprinting of the bio-survival circuit comes "softer" conditioning. This allows the safe-space perimeter to be generalized outward from the mother's body to the pack or tribe -- the "extended family."
Every social animal has, in addition to the Darwinian "instinct" (genetic program) of self-preservation, a similar "instinct" to protect the gene-pool. This is the basis of altruism, and social animals could not survive without it.
Wild dogs (and wolves) bark to warn the rest of the pack that an intruder is coming. Your domesticated dog identifies you as a pack-leader; he barks to warn you that an intruder is coming. (He also barks, of course, to warn the intruder that he is ready to fight for his territory.)
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed "anomie" or "alienation" or "existential anguish" about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call "money".
Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for bio-survival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. "You can't live without money," as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.
Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishment to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare's day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal. ("Banished!" cries Romeo, "the damned use that word in Hell!")
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security, exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio-security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror.
Welfare-ism, socialism, totalitarianism, etc. represent attempts, in varying degrees of rationality and hysteria, to re-create the tribal bond by making the State stand-in for the gene-pool. Conservatives who claim that no form of Welfare is tolerable to them are asking that people live with total bio-survival anxiety and anomie combined with terror. The conservatives, of course, vaguely recognize this and ask for "local charity" to replace State Welfare -- i.e. they ask for the gene-pool to be restored by magic, among people (denizens of a typical city) who are not genetically related at all.
On the other hand, the State is not a gene-pool or tribe, and cannot really play the bio-survival unit convincingly. Everybody on Welfare becomes paranoid, because they are continually worrying that they are going to get cut off ("exiled") for some minor infraction of the increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic rules. And in real totalitarianism, in which the bogus identification of the State with the tribe is carried to the point of a new mysticism, the paranoia becomes total.
Real bonding can only occur in face-to-face groups of reasonable size. Hence, the perpetual attempt (however implausible in industrial circumstances) to decentralize, to go back to the tribal ethos, to replace the State with syndicates (as in anarchism) or affinity-groups (Reich's "Consciousness III"). Recall the hippie crash-pad of the sixties, which lives on in many rural communities.
Back in the real world, the tickets called "money" are the bio-survival bond for most people. Anti-Semitism is a complex abberation, of many facets and causes, but in its classic form (the "Jewish Bankers' Conspiracy") it simply holds that a hostile gene-pool controls the tickets for bio-security. Such paranoia is inevitable in a money economy; junkies have similar myths about who controls the supply of heroin. Thus, as anti-Semitism has declined in America, the "Bankers' Conspiracy" lives on in a new form. Now the villians are the old New England WASP families, the "Yankee Establishment." Some Leftists will even show you charts of the genealogies of these WASP bankers, the way anti-Semites used to show Rothschild geneaologies.
Extreme cases -- persons who take their heaviest imprint on the first (oral) circuit -- tend to be viscerotonic, because this imprint determines lifelong endocrine and glandular processes. Thus, in extreme they are "baby-faced" in adult life, never lose their "baby-fat", are plump and round and gentle, etc. They are easily "hurt" (threatened: terrified) by disapproval of any sort, because in the baby-circuit of the brain, disapproval suggests extinction by loss of the food supply.
We all have this circuit and need to exercize is periodically. Cuddling, sucking, hugging etc. and daily playing with a) one's own body b) another's body and c) the environment, are perpetually necessary to neurosomatic-endocrine health. Those who deny such primordial functions because of rigid imprinting on the Third (rationalistic) or Fourth (moralistic) circuit tend to become "dried up", "prune-faced", unattractive, "cold", and muscularly rigid.
The baby-functions of playing with one's own body, another's body and the environment continue throughout life in all animals. This "playfulness" is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls "self-actualizers".
Introduction
Part Two: The Emotional-Territorial Circuit
Part Three: The Semantic Circuit
Part Four: The Socio-Sexual Circuit
Part Five: The Circuits and communication
C.
I have 2 kids & live in St. Catharines, Ontario
Nikki_24 postedWhich name is cuter???2 min ago
Bananas Moma (Team Yellow postedisnt heeeee hottttttttt?24 min ago
amy ♥ postedHow old do babies have to be to use....24 min ago
~*Peyton's Mommy*~ postedFall Baby *Voting*24 min ago
Madison's Mommy♥ postedStay at home mommys please! And anyone else that has an opin33 min ago
