Crawling out of the age of Savagery - One generation at a time

Nadine Burke Harris is doing a great job promoting the most important social issue of our time. Child abuse: Its impact, prevalence, and near overwhelming importance. But frustratingly, most of us do not want to go where Nadine is trying to take us, and may I say that is our shame.

The result, is that we see people still circumcising their young boys, putting kids through bad birthing practices (unnecessarily), farming out kids to daycare centers too young, hitting children in anger in the name of 'correction', pushing kids to live in scholastic ambition by threatening them with rejection if they don't, and depriving children of privacy and freedom because we twist ownership with love...etc.

We do all of this and more, because we believe we already know how kids should be brought up. And when people "already know" they will not even think to test their assumptions. They don't need to.

Today, we now know some facts. Facts that serious research over decades has made plain. Nadine Harris is a champion on this topic, and that is why I like to link to her talks. She brings attention to the issue of adverse childhood experiences (ACE's) in the right way, and on the right level, to impact people today which is anything but easy. You always have to start where the open people are at, or you'll lose them before you get anywhere at all. And again this is what Nadine does, and very well.

Anyway, what Nadine points to is how trauma from childhood leads to high-stress over-reactions during childhood and later in life as well, which in turn damages our wellbeing and our health - badly. It knocks literally decades off our lives.

What Nadine expresses is true, but the picture of the impact of trauma is more complicated than what her looking-glass is thus far telling us. From here I would like to model what really goes on with trauma, on a psychological level.

Second-level versus First-level psychotherapy:

What makes trauma, trauma, is a pain so great that it's experientially blocked outright. By definition, we don't feel trauma. This blocking of great pain is the reason why it continues to affect us later, even once the original traumatic event has long gone. Repressed trauma acts like a constant force on the mind, making the past drive our present. It imprints itself because the traumatic information cannot be updated due to the mechanics of repression.

Let me give you an example of a Vietnam war veteran. The war veteran, once home and safe, still feels like he's living in a dangerous context. He still feels like there might be a sniper out there just around the corner, waiting to shoot him. Intellectually he knows that the threat is no longer there, but he still can't help feeling this way nonetheless. So his traumatic past is pushing him around in his present. However, if his defense system is working well he will not feel his fear directly. He will act in a way that keeps the perceived threat under control. He will ultimately act like he's still in Vietnam...

Now, if that same war veteran sees a shrink, the psychologist will probably help him to boost his defense system, so that he doesn't over-react to his perceived threats. This way his heart palpitations and periodic gross stress-responses will be subdued. That's all good and well, except what we're looking at with this game is what I call second-level psychotherapy; which is controlling over reactions, though not getting to the root cause of them. If second-level psychotherapy is working well, the war veterans' over-reactions will calm down. He will then only tend to over-react in his sleep (night terrors)...

However, we can see from this example that the war veteran is still living in the past - because he still feels the snipers are out there. Second-level psychotherapy does not touch this. It only touches the over-reactions (at best) and it's notoriously high maintenance...those over-reactions keep on coming back. First-level psychotherapy is what touches this. First-level psychotherapy moves in the opposite direction of second-level psychotherapy. Rather than boosting defenses, it carefully weakens them so that the real fear (repressed traumatic fear) can be brought to consciousness, for emotional processing.

Note, the prior-repressed pain must be felt to be resolved, otherwise the brain literally doesn't know what it's dealing with. Think about it: How can the brain process information if it doesn't even know what it is? When you feel a repressed trauma you're actually feeling it (and therefore knowing it, and potentially dealing with it) for the first time. It's specifically the original repression of the trauma which created the enduring problem. It's the reason why the past was not left in the past.

With first-level psychotherapy you don't just relieve the over-reactions, you also get rid of the emotional delusion itself that was driven by original repression. In turn you get rid of the need to act-out, and you get rid of the constant tension created by the repression as well. Alas, it's the only way we can really leave the past in the past. You must feel it.

-Are you interested in this possibility? I recommend Arthur Janov's Primal Center to learn more. If getting to Los Angeles is impossible, I recommend purchasing France Janov's legacy programme, online. [Note: I am in no way professionally associated with Arthur Janov's Primal Center. I have no financial incentive in promoting their therapy or their educational products].

Pulling ourselves out of the age of savagery:

Levels of child abuse in times past--for all cultures--were almost beyond imagination. Killing, copulating, mutilating children was once so commonplace that it was not even culturally taboo. How was it that we were once so deeply sick? I don't have a time machine but I can make a logical speculation...

It's only a matter of time that a given group of humans will expand out to the limits of the given resource base. Then what? From here the tribes have two choices. You can watch your children starve or go to war in brutal competition. Inter-tribal brutality then leads to massive trauma, which in turn creates sick and violent cultures...eventually, as a norm. Because humans are extremely intelligent they have the ability to survive in spite of their then-created madness, and so the inter-generational trauma-chain goes on. Brutality is basically the historic way of maintaining the balance between population and available resources. (Yes, we can do a lot better).

The western world in particular has come farthest, in pulling itself out of the age of savagery. Modern western society is the most humane of all cultures, and the least repressed. It's also the most intelligent and successful of human cultures because it's the least oppressive, abusive, and traumatised...

However! We still have a long way to go, and we're still much too bull-headed in our resistance to learning what we need to learn. Science is clearly ahead of our culture today, because the latter continues to put tradition ahead of facts. But we will get there - and we are indeed getting there. Maybe in another 50 to 100 years we will have a society with nearly no serious trauma and its problematic effects - or even a whole world with no serious trauma. But we do need to keep on keeping on with this.











Psychotherapy is great. It can ultimately do a lot, but more importantly is can teach us a lot. It can help to bring light on what does and does not matter. Though no force will do more for our species as a whole than prevention, and this is where we need to focus before anything else. My included video is about prevention.

Mobile Robots in the Real World_A practical example

The following is a basic example of how mobile robotics can and will replace human labour, for countless operations:

1. A small truck breaks down on the side of the road. It has a flat tyre.

2. A special vehicle repair service is alerted. Two small mobile robots (that work in unison) are sent to the truck. The robots are riding on a driverless platform.

3. When the robots reach the truck, they walk off the platform and approach the flat tyre.

4. A drone attached to a mobile robot detaches, and explicitly scans the immediate environment around the wheel. The 3D map developed by the drone is then uploaded to the robots.

5. A robot then scans the QR code on the truck, so the robots can know exactly what they are dealing with.

6. The programme for the robots to replace this particular trucks wheel is then immediately downloaded.

-The program has already been developed by the trucking company that made the vehicle. Using remote controlling, the wheel replacement sequence was prior acted-out and recorded, and put on a master robotics server. In effect, the robots only need to press the 'reply' button to know exactly what to do to replace the wheel.

7. The robots come across an unidentified component on the wheel, which stops the robots. The robots in turn dial-up a human remote-controller. The remote-controller then observes the problem --in this case let's say it's a stripped bolt-- and in turn over-rides the robots, and actively manipulates them, online, to attach a different gripper-tool to remove the stripped bolt.

-The remote-controller can do this quickly due to ultra-fast (almost no latency) 5g Internet technology, and also with the robots built-in boundary detection systems which effectively removes human clumsiness.

8. The remote-controller then hits a continue icon, which orders the robots to continue the wheel replacement sequence. The remote-controller then addresses a new task requiring human over-ride from a different robot, in a different location within the city (the remote-controller does not waste time waiting for anything).

9. After replacing the wheel in full-automation mode, the robots then post the broken wheel to an appropriate facility, via a driverless platform.

-Human intervention required 7 minutes (~$2) of remote human labour. Everything else was fully automated.

Ends.

The effect would be that traditional car breakdown services go bankrupt, because they cannot compete with new (and probably international) start-up's based online, that use human labour only when and as required, because the cost savings from automated systems are overwhelming.

The technology for all kinds of Internet-based services is already here. We're just waiting for driverless platforms to be distributed, which opens up the economic feasibility of moving into mobile robotics.



Ultimately, there will be no material need for anyone to leave their homes to get anything done in terms of living and working. The impact of mobile robotics will become even more extreme, when infrastructure is specifically built with easy robotics facilitation kept in mind.

From this point, the level of automation achievable will be remarkable. Progressive leaps in automation will only be a software upgrade away, and the demand for expensive on-site human labour will steadily fall away.

There's no reason to believe that this progression will not happen quickly. Again, all we are waiting for to start this revolution off is the implementation of driverless platforms, which will be the critical economic driver that makes the mass-implementation of mobile robotics make sense.

                                                  -Andrew Atkin

Note: There is also the possibility of location-based searching.

So, once you have gone through an operational sequence with a robot (let's say opening an industrial door), the video and robot command sequence is saved along with the location, down to about 1-foot accuracy. Hence, when another robot later comes to the door, you can command a video search based on the location, and the door opening sequence will be presented.

It will simply allow us to avoid unnecessary command repetition, and allow robots to move more quickly as they smooth-out their operation.

This would allow us to rapidly develop a 'hive mind' effect, and it would also be highly practical for developing certain kinds of training videos for people, etc.

The Myth of the Public Sector

Take a look at our public hospitals. Public is a nice sounding term because it sounds like "ours", as opposed to some greedy shareholder who only wants to rip us all off...right?

But take a step closer. That public hospital pays people who take home a private wage, pays private contractors to maintain the basic infrastructure, and supply and maintain all the equipment. Sure that hospital may be tax-payer funded, but behind the impression of "public" lies an enterprise that might as well be described as private, nearly as much any other.

The people who run and supply a public hospital are as driven by personal interest as much as you and I. In fact I would argue that calling a hospital public is pretty much just a PR thing. At the heart of it, everything in the for-profit world is private.

To be practical, I think the best way to describe the public sector would be "the protectionist sector", because the moment competitive pressures are removed everything starts to get political and commercially twisted. The (so-called) public sector begins to write their own cheques - because they can. They win for the wrong reasons.

From here, the private interests in the public operation can and will find the rationale to be paid more than what a competitive market would normally allow, while believing that they deserve it and more. People won't usually know how privileged they are, after spending their working lives on the inside of a protected bubble. And hey, everybody deserves at least $100,000 a year, right, especially if they're doing God's work?

So how is it that, so often, gross over-payment for comparative under-performance can happen in the public sector? Why is it tolerated? Crony capitalism, of course. When the public sector unionises it becomes politically powerful, and in turn it inherits the capacity to fund and influence politicians. And so naturally, elected officials will then make private decisions - not public decisions - at the point where it makes political sense to do so. It's the unions job to make sure it makes sense - that is what their members pay them to do.

So this is what protectionism is about. At base, it's about screwing the wider society because you can. Though, of course, it's all poetically rationalised to the wider society. PR is extremely important for the public sector. A public backlash that could swing the polls to an anti-protectionist political party is the greatest terror, of course. Hence the public always need to be reminded of how incredibly important doctors, nurses and teachers are, etc.

In New Zealand the process is so transparent that Labour, the union-leftist party, has openly sold itself to key New Zealand unions within the public and private sectors. The select unions now have direct official influence over the governing Labour party (observe). You heard me right. New Zealand is now run by crony capitalism officially. Lucky for Labour almost no-one will read this article. Alas, the mass-ignorance in the Western world today has become almost dangerous.

The best solution to protectionism--in fact the only solution--is to openly privatise our establishments, as much as practical and possible. The waste, false privilege, and lost opportunities in innovation is almost depressing in the public (protectionist) sector. The public sector sees innovation more like a threat than an opportunity. It's the private sector that has no choice but to innovate, to maintain market share.

There is of course a place for state run services in highly specific areas, but that absolutely does not include areas such as health, where the focus on efficiency and performance should be paramount. These guys should be whipped hardest by commercial discipline, more than anyone else. Having an under-performing and over-paid health system, hostile to innovation, is obviously not in the public interest. [link of interest]

Of course we can look at tax-payer funding for the poorest of people, but the funding should go to private enterprises - not protectionist enterprises.

Really, all we have to do is bust that self-interested big-money-driven delusion that there's such thing as a public sector. There isn't. It's a very private world made up of very private interests, irrespective of the political cosmetics. And we've got 200 if not 2,000 years of hard evidence, demonstrating that nothing delivers for people better than the natural controls provided by free and accountable markets. In the free market world, no one gets unless they equally give.

                                                   -Andrew Atkin