I had to think very carefully about your reply.

In the past I've learned things from responses on tribe, even changed my opinion on things I once held as true. I am not someone who will just simply dig my heels in and use rhetorical sophistry to defend a position I've don't really believe in out of pride... or out of some desire to define myself by my opinions. So I really had to think about what you wrote and reflect on it a lot before I responded, you seemed to be right about a lot of things about humanity, manners by itself didn't seem to be enough.

I needed to go deeper and really reflect.

And I did, Loki.

and well this is what I've come to understand from that serious reflection on our dialogue:

Human beings have an essence that at times can be the shit throwing monkey that is competitive for dominance, we also have an essence that at times is cooperative and seeks love and connection with one another. There is a dynamic tension between these forces within us. Philosophers may argue that the essence of human beings down to it's core is fundamentally a struggle for dominance, or to seek love, and tries dismiss the other side of it as if it exists only in the shadow of the other. But this is not true, being someone who feels rather affectionately towards animals and also working with profoundly mentally retarded and violent individuals (who need love and connection as much as anyone else) I can say that both natures exist the way a light-switch has both an on and off position. If the nature of the light switch was only the on or off position it would not be a light switch anymore.

What varies then is the conditions by which the switch is flipped. I know you think of repression and other forms such as sublimation as a bad thing, certainly history is full of people who at the very least posture a position of how people should behave and do otherwise. The classical example of the priest and the altar-boy, the conservative politician with the young intern, the Elmer Gantry style televangelist with a sordid sexual affair all would seem to equate outward repression of normal human behavior with hypocrisy, stone throwing, "do as I say and not as I do" kind of tyranny that gets any normal child mad at a parent who they will never truly obey.

But the essence of the human being is the same, across race, across time, across region. There is no fundamental difference in the essence of people on Wall Street who on the surface would seem to behave with fear and greed as their only motivators who feel selfishness is a virtue, and the essence of people in a Kibbutz who put connection and sharing with their community above themselves as a daily way of life. There is no difference in the humanity of people in America's most violent ghettos among Gangstas, and Amish farmers. There is no difference in the human essence between tax revolt Nativist fundamentalist Christians with a pick yourself up by your bootstraps, "I've earned what I've got, and I'll kill you if you take it from me for lazy poorer people" and cosmopolitan Danish people who seem to love the socialized features of their society.

But if the essence is no different, the conditions under which the switch is thrown and the cuddling monkey in the grooming huddle starts to hurl guano is different in each case, and that is a matter of socialization. Manners is part of that conditioning, I realize it is something larger than merely manners, perhaps the term might be sensibility. Keep in mind that the repression is on both sides of the coin.

For instance among the Gangstas, their childhood training involved every bit as much repression of their nature the Amish, just at the other position on the switch. It is not a lack of socialization that causes a gangsta to walk around "hard" and regard everyone else with suspicion and a readiness to kill in their circles over the slightest perception of disrespect, it is socialization. At an early age children are taught to repress the desire for connection, taught to be ashamed of their softer emotions, part of what makes them human is repressed with only a few socially accepted outlets where they can allow that part of themselves to flow naturally as in the case of with romance with as many women as possible. Even this has it's limits, something deep within one's naturally altruistic nature has to be repressed to care for a dog and use it in a fight, or take a woman that loves and trusts you and play deliberate games with her mind and addictions to get her to walk the streets and give you all the money she gets from her many indignities. Not to say there aren't codes of manners and such that pop up out of necessity to keep some organizations roughly coherent, there are times when out of strategy or fear the jockeying for king of the mountain pauses... people do repress even the side of themselves they are conditioned to feel most proud of and identify themselves with. A newly budded young thug is not going to be able to take on the guy who handles the entire flow of coke, all of his cronies, and everyone else down the chain from there in the first year of being a thug. He has to play the game, move up the chain, with a combination of aggression but also some finesse, and even enduring occasional slights and disrespect from above that he'd never swallow from anyone else to remind him of his place. Eventually he might end up close enough at the top to kill the top guy and take the reigns, with all those around him mining underneath him as they smile and do what he tells them to do, at least on the surface.

The Amish might represent a different end of the spectrum of humanity, perhaps not any more desirable than the gangsta life. But it's interesting to note that there are "hierarchies" of elders, or reputation, of respectability even among their apparent egalitarianism. The voice of some does count more with everyone else than the voices of others in the meeting house. There are still the same human impulses to rivalries. But the outcome is different. In the gangsta culture a rivalry may mean "I'll kill him before he kills me", in Amish culture it might be "I'll take pains to humble myself to him, be more gracious to him, treat him with that much more affection than people I like to demonstrate that I am the one more worthy of respect than he" even though the repression of that other side of human nature is so deep that even this decision cannot be made with consciously frank intent.

So here I illustrate two extremes of what socialization can do to people who are every bit as human as the other and modify the outcome of their daily exchanges. It's not merely manners, it's what is considered worthy of shame. A gangsta might feel deep shame at having feelings of remorse over having had to kill a rival when he sees the grieving family, and perhaps he was a childhood friend, perhaps it was viewed as necessary. He might even feel shame at not killing his rival and allowing his rival to cut into his sales territory in his neighborhood openly and to the jeers of others in the same circle that one has gone soft... is a "punk" and have them ask you "are you going to let him do that to you?" goading you to do something out of shame so that you become ashamed of your desire not to take life. It is every bit as repressive as an Amish person feeling shame for even having a competitive or jealous feeling about another Amish where maybe they had only said something mildly edgy or critical "in light jest" where the community reacted with scorn.

But there is a huge difference in what the socialization of these very similar human beings produces. In one case you may have people selflessly helping one another to raise a barn for someone that burned down, no demands for money, no insistence they should have had insurance. In another case you have have people stripping a body in the street of cash and drugs, ready to fill the vacuum of a dead gangsta's position in a street of crumbling buildings nobody will bother to fix. You have children playing safely and gently in security in one community, and beating the crap out of one another to toughen each other up for an adulthood of violence in the other.

Now I don't wish to have the above examples set the ground for some straw man argument of a "false dichotomy", nor is it my point that if you abandon manners totally we will be like the gangstas unless we choose to become like the Amish. Nothing could be further from the truth of what I'm trying to argue, though I do not believe there is in every case a middle ground and in this case specifically don't have an idealized notion of what a middle ground could or should be (at this time). I will however make the point that you cannot get away from repression of a human tendency because when any human tendency manifests another natural human tendency must be repressed. If one may seek to be the dominant shit throwing monkey, one must first break out of the grooming huddle, stop all the hugging and cuddling, get up to the top of the hill, and take a crap with a hand ready to scoop and fire.

Socialization is merely what we decide as a group what is the right time to load, scoop, and throw and what is a right time to be cuddly. It is a matter of education in children as they form "impulse control". I see it all of the time where I work, where people don't have the faculty of impulse control, where no amount of conditioning could dismiss the need of a staff by one person's side to keep them from lifting and breaking furnishings over the heads of other people (when they were just being a happy cuddly person a moment before and felt a flash of envy at another client getting some attention they wanted) nor would any amount of conditioning stop another client from scooping urine and feces out of the toilet with his hands to rub it all over his face like a fresh mountain stream unless there was a staff to stop him. Impulse control. You use it, I use it, without it problems arise, when people get good and drunk enough not to remember what they did their lack of impulse control might have them in the drunk tank, in bed with someone they would despise otherwise, etc.

There has been much connection between people who are over-socialized and going along with authority, through media geared to teens. The idea of rebelling from social norms as a teen is proper, normal, even healthy as a stage to go through. Even Amish make concessions for this time in youth and they are a tightly wound bunch so even they have the wisdom to know when and where to lighten up. Authoritarian regimes normally talk about how they are there to enforce norms, restore and bring back old values, putting on a parental role, normally they do the opposite. For instance, the republicans had unchallenged power at one time promising to restore family values to their constituents, yet the content of television and mass media even with their control over all three branches of government became increasingly raunchy through their salutary neglect of whatever was making money and giving campaign contributions. Most talk about morality and manners are by people who lack both and want others to act in that way. There are plenty of good reasons why somebody like yourself could see any appeal towards social norms, manners, "decency" as a bad thing.

But I look at it in a different way. I feel deeply that totalitarianism feeds off people not having an internalized way of relating to one another harmoniously as an excuse for imposing itself on people and justifying it's own existence and need for power. You do not see a lot of police allocated to Amish neighborhoods, when they visit it is cordial if not friendly, perhaps it's a minor traffic violation with a horse and buggy and a car... who knows. The state doesn't have the excuse or justification to impose itself around people who already regulate their own behavior, people having the internal self discipline through good socialization that they provide for themselves in a community where they do not cause harm to one another... or escalate things to the point to where harm could be caused... don't even need a government at all really or any of it's features... saving maybe a military to prevent outside invasion of hypothetical marauders. On the other side where people only repress their desire to act cooperatively and kindly to one another, where shame is felt only for being too soft, and where human beings have conditioned themselves to be excellent predators on one another in a variety of ways... as in the most dangerous ghettos... are there not some citizens in these places pleading for more policing to keep their block safe? Are there not networks of block associations of citizens ready to call the police? Are not the police though like an overly brutal force, more like a group of occupying soldiers from another country? How is their morale? Do they think they can change anything? Is the feeling of an officer just before retirement in the worst parts of the south Bronx who's been shot at and lost comrades in blue any different from a soldier occupying Iraq or Afghanistan if they did a 40 year tour of duty? Don't they just pull up to a block with paddy-wagons and on foot officers and start piling people innocent and guilty on a whole block in for interrogation, arrest, and processing.... with threats... with torture even?

So if I see gaps in this country's socialization, which is rather poor, where even in white collar suburbia kids are left to raise themselves with very little sense of community in many places... very little culture... very little opportunity for socialization with parents. And the TV tells them the same socialization messages about their nature that is soft being something to ashamed of, that they must be hard, selfish, cruel, and that this is power. If we see now suburban middle class kids joining gangs or behaving in ways similar to gangstas, dropping out of high school in record numbers, etc. or else only concerned with getting rich quick and as selfishly as possible to stay in a white collar life... some wanting to be the next Bernie Madoff. Do you seriously expect to see as the socialization which regulated people's behavior crumble to see less police? I see a hidden danger here, I see a possibility of a government that will increasingly find excuses to exercise more and more power, as the middle class is stressed and shrinks and the fabric of it's communities as stretched to breaking I see a generation they will produce that will live more like urban poor, and will be policed like the urban poor.

And I think it's preventable. But not through government action. Not through religion even. Perhaps through intellectual fashion though, a generation and it's values. A possible point would be for the next younger generation to rebel literally against the status quo of the last "me" generations going back to the baby boomers and think of themselves more as a "we" and demand a sense of community with a focus on harmony among themselves... but not in the superficial way the hippies did. It will take more than burning man events to do that, though the fact that a temporary city can form with a younger generation with limited violence and limited capitalism sounds like a nice springboard to at least inspire with.

LOKI POSTED : don't find attributions of intent, moral condition, psychological integrity, or intellectual capability at all compelling with regard to, for instance, people on the Audubon page shrieking and pulling out their hair because your bird sighting upset their beliefs. They could all be PhDs and TV judges and Norwegian wildlife Buddhas. They probably were. That's the point, I guess, that I'm dancing around:

that is utterly, utterly human behavior. We are apes. When our type of apes' beliefs are disturbed, the majority of us begin to scream and become violent. In text, our ape brains are even freer than our civilized bodies, because civilization hasn't ever been able to civilize the mind. It's like water. Look at Japanese comics.


RESPONSE: Some minds are civilized . There is NO deterministic factor which prevents the mind being civilized .And NOT all people are like unto apes .