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That is because using economic, legal, educational, political, business management, or similar casual forms of analysis to explain sick mental behavior is inadequate (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 5).
Such casual analysis is akin to using baseball or football techniques to analyze a mass murder.
In the series America's Shame Memos (cf. America's Shame Memos - #2, America's Shame Memos - #3 , America's Shame Memos - #4, America's Shame Memos - #Next, America's Shame Memos - #Last) we took a look at the shameful social dementia that affected government officials who seemed to have lost their minds.
Today we are going to tie that into "pleasure" and the cultural amygdala, and show that social dementia of this sort is accomplished by the rewiring of the cultural amygdala of the public, just as toxoplasma gondi ("Toxo") rewires the amygdala of rodents:
The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior... Toxo instead has developed this amazing capacity to alter innate behavior in rodents... If you take a lab rat who is 5,000 generations into being a lab rat, since the ancestor actually ran around in the real world, and you put some cat urine in one corner of their cage, they're going to move to the other side. Completely innate, hard-wired reaction to the smell of cats, the cat pheromones. But take a Toxo-(Hypothesis: Microbes Generate Toxins of Power - 6). When we use only a naive part our decency-leaning minds to contemplate and analyze some of what our government has done in recent years, we are going to fall short of understanding the demented reality being played out.
infected rodent, and they're no longer afraid of the smell of cats. In fact they become attracted to it. The most damn amazing thing you can ever see, Toxo knows how to make cat urine smell attractive to rats. And rats go and check it out and that rat is now much more likely to wind up in the cat's stomach. Toxo's circle of life completed.
"Complex" Is An Understatement
... part of my lab has been trying to figure out the neurobiological aspects. The first thing is that it's for real. The rodents, rats, mice, really do become attracted to cat urine when they've been infected with Toxo. And you might say, okay, well, this is a rodent doing just all sorts of screwy stuff because it's got this parasite turning its brain into Swiss cheese or something. It's just non-specific behavioral chaos. But no, these are incredibly normal animals. Their olfaction is normal, their social behavior is normal, their learning and memory is normal. All of that. It's not just a generically screwy animal.
You say, okay well, it's not that, but Toxo seems to know how to destroy fear and anxiety circuits. But it's not that, either. Because these are rats who are still innately afraid of bright lights. They're nocturnal animals. They're afraid of big, open spaces. You can condition them to be afraid of novel things. The system works perfectly well there. Somehow Toxo can laser out this one fear pathway, this aversion to predator odors... Toxo preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala... Toxo knows how to get in there.
Next, we then saw that Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety... It knows how to find that particular circuitry... Meanwhile, there is a well-characterized circuit that has to do with sexual attraction. And as it happens, part of this circuit courses through the amygdala, which is pretty interesting in and of itself, and then goes to different areas of the brain than the fear pathways... Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. And you get males infected with Toxo and expose them to a lot of the cat pheromones, and their testes get bigger. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out. Totally amazing... So what about humans? A small literature is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive... And then the truly astonishing thing: two different groups independently have reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding... Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they start having a proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately averse to, like having your body hurdle through space at high G-forces. Maybe this is the same neurobiology... On a certain level, this is a protozoan parasite that knows more about the neurobiology of anxiety and fear than 25,000 neuroscientists standing on each other's shoulders... But no doubt it's also a tip of the iceberg of God knows what other parasitic stuff is going on out there. Even in the larger sense, God knows what other unseen realms of biology make our behavior far less autonomous than lots of folks would like to think.
The behavior of sociopaths or psychopaths is not like the behavior of our good neighbor, who we analyze using the simple social norms of our culture.
Thus, we are going to fall short in our civic duty analysis if we use that methodology to analyze government before we vote in an election, because these mentally defective rulers are on a different planet than we are, so to speak.
Sociopaths and psychopaths fit in to society because they know us better than we know them, thus, the sadist for example has, like us, been molded and shaped by certain types of submission to culture.
Submission which acts as camouflage ("law abiding citizen") for them.
The camouflage-like behavior used by toxoplasma gondi, as well as by human psychopaths, is beginning to become a scientifically recognized dynamic:
Most of the time, we try to avoid inflicting pain on others -- when we do hurt someone, we typically experience guilt, remorse, or other feelings of distress. But for some, cruelty can be pleasurable, even exciting. New research suggests that this kind of everyday sadism is real and more common than we might think.(Science Daily, "Everyday Sadists Take Pleasure in Others' Pain"). The various media practices of analyzing psychopathic behavior as some form of "politics" can explain why American torture is still bragged about in public by past Vice President Dick Cheney and his cohorts:
...
Together, these results suggest that sadists possess an intrinsic motivation to inflict suffering on innocent others, even at a personal cost -- a motivation that is absent from the other dark personality traits.
The researchers hope that these new findings will help to broaden people's view of sadism as an aspect of personality that manifests in everyday life, helping to dispel the notion that sadism is limited to sexual deviants and criminals.
Buckels and colleagues are continuing to investigate everyday sadism, including its role in online trolling behavior.
"Trolling culture is unique in that it explicitly celebrates sadistic pleasure, or 'lulz,'" says Buckels. "It is, perhaps, not surprising then that sadists gravitate toward those activities."
And they're also exploring vicarious forms of sadism, such as enjoying cruelty in movies, video games, and sports.
The researchers believe their findings have the potential to inform research and policy on domestic abuse, bullying, animal abuse, and cases of military and police brutality.
Dante’s graphic description of the torment inflicted on the latter symbolically evokes scenes of terrible forms of torture. Unfortunately, such torture has and is still to some extent being used in the world today. Of late we witnessed examples of brutal persecution in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons. Prisoners, not only, were subjected to physical abuse, somewhat reminiscent of the aforementioned punishment, but were also subjected to acts of sexual perversion. The leaked photos of the torture incidents in Abu Ghraib unveiled episodes of sodomy, rape, and an over indulgence of voyeurism. The photos also revealed that those who partook in the execution of these actions seemed to be enjoying the power that the exercise of torture gave them.(Torture as an Extension of the Desiring Machine, emphasis added). Some forms of analyzing violence promulgated in media outlets is also a way of "educating" the public spectators by using the seducing spectacle treatment:
The importance of gladiatorial games should be obvious from the time and finances devoted to them. It is inadequate to attribute this solely to pleasing the crowd or for earning and the status of the sponsors, or to regard the games as ostentatious overtures to munificence and benefaction, even though they do play a role. Such explanations alone would not explain, for instance, the fact that the massive Colosseum, site of many such games, was initiated by Vespasian, the emperor who is reputed to have been the most economical of all [1]. Such games must have served much more important purposes.(Violence and the Romans: The Arena Spectacles, emphasis added). In the series about The Cultural Amygdala, we explored the radical variations in perception among cultures concerning mass violence conducted on one's own populace.
One such purpose is the education of Roman values, notably strength/courage (fortitudo), training/discipline (disciplina), firmness (constantia), endurance (patientia), contempt of death (contemptus mortis), love of glory (amor laudis), and the desire to win (cupido victoriae). In other words, in the absence of common military pursuits, gladiatorial games became the means of teaching Romans virtus, since the gladiatorial fights effectively demonstrated soldierly values and illustrated military ideas by punishing cowardly gladiators and rewarding courageous ones [2]. Indeed, it is through what is regarded in modern times as sadistic, i.e. witnessing the spectacle of men fighting to their deaths, that such values are conveyed.
This is supported by a passage in Pliny's panegyric to Trajan (Panegyric xxxi.1) in which he praised the emperor who first satisfied the practical needs of the citizens and the allies, and then gave them a public entertainment, nothing lax or dissolute to weaken and destroy the manly spirit of his subjects, but one to inspire them to face honourable wounds and look scornfully upon death, by demonstrating a love of glory and a desire for victory even in the persons of criminals and slaves. In other words, Pliny viewed the gladiatorial show as an educational experience of morality and virtue. The fact that the performers were outcasts strengthened this educational element by the implicit idea that if even such people could provide examples of bravery, determination to win glory and victory despite impending death, and even more so, contempt for death itself, then so could real men (viri)[3] .
Not only that, we tied the mass murder to media spectacle by utilizing a very disturbing yet revealing documentary:
Congo is a man who appears to live in an eternal cinematic fantasy. He's always dressed sharp—inspired by his Hollywood heroes John Wayne, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley. What exactly inspired him to murder a thousand people is never quite explained. The only slight ever mentioned that he takes from the communists was their desire to block screenings of his beloved American films. Tapping into this love of cinema, Oppenheimer offers him the opportunity to tell his story by making a dramatic film in which he's the star of his own story.(Hypothesis:The Cultural Amygdala - 2, emphasis added). Like the mass murdering psychopath who has a nice family and goes to church, these psychopaths among us know our "language" and have known how to deceive us for many decades (The Deceit Business).
The morning pundits of McTell News stumble through the destruction done on 9/11, the destruction of Afghanistan, the destruction of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the Orwellian spying of the military NSA, along with the cutting off of food stamps and unemployment insurance to those in need, as if they were all simply economic or political anomalies.
They miss the elephant in the room, never figuring out the massive sickness within our government and culture, as they extol our cultural virtues to a fairly horrified world around us.
