A-Void by Babak Govan (phonics readers txt) 📕

“healthy” and “unhealthy.” In other words, they are socially constructed. We need not reach far to identify this behavior. Until the mid-1900s, there was widespread compulsory acceptance that Caucasian males were superior to all others, effectively banning women and minorities from voting. Dissent meant you were “wrong.”

Frantz Fanon termed the pathology that we ascribe to persons when it is their society that is ill, “sociogeny.”17 It is the practitioner, and not the patient, who is ill.

Section VI

Humans in the Wild and Transhumanism

The first thing that the human species has to do … is to explore human nature, to find out what are the possibilities open to it (including … its limitations).… This process too will begin by being unpleasant, and end by being beneficent.18

In an imaginably distant future, the Earth will die. Humanity must survive long enough to colonize new homes in our Universe. We must learn from our journey. If we are to postpone our extinction, the only starting point is to acknowledge our limitations so that we can limit them. We must understand our nature—inherited animalistic behaviors—rather than deny their influence. We must awaken from this nightmare.

1 “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953, edited by J. Strachey.

2 “The brain, knowing that a person can’t live forever, rationalizes a future, other-dimensional world in which immortality is possible.” Quoting P.J. Farmer, C.A. Pickover, The Loom of God: Mathematical Tapestries at the Edge of Time, 1997.

3 “[E]xistence precedes essence.…” From J-P. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1945.

4 A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942.

5 “The Self,” R.F. Baumeister, Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by D.T. Gilbert, S.T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, 1998.

6 “Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Attributional Bias,” A.H. Mezulis, L.Y. Abramson, J.S. Hyde, and B.L. Hankin, Psychological Bulletin, 2004.

7 “A Dual-Process Model of Defense Against Conscious and Unconscious Death-Related Thoughts: An Extension of Terror Management Theory,” J. Pyszczynski, J. Greenberg, and S. Solomon, Psychological Review, 1999.

8 “The Human Pedigree,” V. Deak, Scientific American, January 2009.

9 “An Interview with Stephen J. Gould,” N.A. Campbell, Biology, 1993.

10 S.J. Gould, Full House, 1996.

11 W.R. Ashby, Introduction to Cybernetics, 1956.

12 “The true way of looking at things is ‘multiplicity’.… Each point of view differs from every other; and all are valid.… What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once.” From F.J. Hoffman, Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas, 1946.

13 S.A. Rathus, Essentials of Psychology, sixth edition, 2001.

14 “Does Stress Damage the Brain?” J.D. Bremner, Biological Psychiatry, 1999.

15 J. Dollard, L.W. Doob, N.E. Miller, O.H. Mowrer, and R.R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression, 1939.

16 K. Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, 1994.

17 F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by C.L. Markmann, 1965.

18 J. Huxley, “Transhumanism,” From In New Bottles for New Wine, 1957.

A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942.

In so doing, they force their fantasies on the exhaustive history of the Universe. Amazing discoveries of extinct Homo species barely make the news headlines, even when it is likely that at least one such cousin lived among us until the 1800s before existing no longer. In such grandiosity, most Violent Humans are unaware that our species may not have arisen if not for an extraterrestrial body colliding with Earth. Its plume exterminated the dinosaurs and allowed for this speciation.

“[E]xistence precedes essence.…” From J-P. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 1945.

Ivan Pavlov observed that an organism required but unable to discriminate between highly similar sounds, shapes, messages, or other stimuli, or required but unable to solve problems, experiences a “breakdown” characterized by high levels of anxiety, repetitive unproductive behaviors, disorientation, disorganization, extreme emotional displays, hysteria, apathy, and catatonia. If the experimenter returns the organism to an original discrimination task it had passed successfully, it would then fail to discriminate again. As insanity brews, eventually so many clowns play in the circus that the ringmaster is no longer identifiable.

“Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Attributional Bias,” A.H. Mezulis, L.Y. Abramson, J.S. Hyde, and B.L. Hankin, Psychological Bulletin, 2004.

“The Self,” R.F. Baumeister, Handbook of Social Psychology, edited by D.T. Gilbert, S.T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, 1998.

Those who adapt to environmental changes survive. To adapt, we must possess more variety than does our environment. Thus, the Law of Requisite Variety states, “[O]nly variety … can destroy variety.”

“The brain, knowing that a person can’t live forever, rationalizes a future, other-dimensional world in which immortality is possible.” Quoting P.J. Farmer, C.A. Pickover, The Loom of God: Mathematical Tapestries at the Edge of Time, 1997.

“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1953, edited by J. Strachey.

The Violent Humans spare no behaviors in their quest for self-enhancement, from subconsciously preferring the letters of their own names to plastic surgery. For most, success is their doing, whereas they blame failures on others or on their circumstances; for others, the opposite is true. They pay more attention to information that supports their own views than information that disputes it.

We must first exist before we gain any ability to give meaning to our own existence. Beyond the faith we create in it, afterlife has no certainty, and placing all bets on it is “philosophical suicide,” because doing so undermines the experience we have here, our will to strive passionately to make that experience wonderful and lengthy.

We must first exist before we gain any ability to give meaning to our own existence. Beyond the faith we create in it, afterlife has no certainty, and placing all bets on it is “philosophical suicide,” because doing so undermines the experience we have here, our will to strive passionately to make that experience wonderful and lengthy.

The Violent