The Psychopolitics of Trauma
astralcodexten.com
astralcodexten.com
Ancient warriors didn't get PTSD because they fought the "normal" way that we'd evolved to fight: hand-to-hand (and of course there were arrows).
Not sitting in a trench for months in awful weather, suffering disease and exhaustion while you wait to be bombed, or ordered to charge into machine guns and mortars with little chance of even encountering the enemy before you die in the mud.
Not living in a base among a potentially hostile populace where anyone could shoot you in the back, or lay a bomb for you, or box you in traffic and machine gun the whole vehicle to Swiss cheese.
The "you vs your opponent, fighting to the death" is not the traumatic part; it's the constant waiting for a pervasive, effectively invisible force that kills off or grievously injures your comrades one-by-one (losing friends until you finally stop making them in order to keep the pain at bay), and you're powerless to stop it because all the weapons are so huge and deadly and attack from range or concealment, at all hours, and your own personal strength and training - although they help - aren't going to count for much against it.
Just because it's not described doesn't mean it didn't exist. It's an example of survivorship bias as well, because nobody writes about the ones that died miserably.
I think one element to recognise is that politics is the fundamental way we make collective decisions. It is extremely important, both in a rational sense and (with humans being social animals) emotional sense.
The article focuses on the irrational or pathological aspect of toxic politics, and that is definitely relevant. But also important is to recognise that a strong emotional response is not irrational, even if the resulting thoughts aren't. The outcome of the political process _does_ seriously affects our lives.
I think that be acknowledging this, it's easier for us to notice and mindfully accept our emotional reactions to politics, see through the filter of our experience, and therefore make more informed decisions — and ultimately that's our only way out of a trapped prior.
"the moment God crapped out the 3rd caveman a conspiracy was hatched" -- all decisions are eventually politics.
Might as well just pick a card from a shuffled deck…
Might as well just pick a card from a shuffled deck…
And many who actively served in WWI and WWII didn't either.
At the heart of trauma is helplessness. That is why it tends to cement in childhood when you are truly helpless. You don´t have your own home to run to, or your own money to buy food etc. And, you're small and weaker than so called "adults".
If a soldier didn't feel helpless while defending their country there's a good chance they haven't developed trauma.
Trauma then is a form of disregulation in the nervous system, a conditioning, a form of imprint where the nervous system routinely "triggers" in sympathetic activation, fight/flight/freeze.
I was always told in my family that my great-grandfather was "never the same again" after he came back from WWI, and I think PTSD in some form is the most likely explanation.
Edit: The quote is followed by "Everything about this claim is still controversial(...)"
So might be some form of survival bias at play.
Why would you say that?
There were a lot of minor conflicts in the middle ages. Not everything was as big as the crusades.
Compare that to the ancient battlefield where you had a spear in hand and your friends at your side. You’d have a lot more sense of agency and if things looked really bad you could run away or surrender. Of course if your opponent was rounding up and executing all of the prisoners then you would feel pretty helpless waiting for your turn, but then you wouldn’t live to tell the tale of your trauma.
For about the previous two centuries, the typical soldier's experience was endless marching and then standing in formation with hundreds of others, shooting very imprecise guns at similar enemy formations and hoping that none of the hundreds of enemy bullets hit you despite a complete lack of cover.
Sounds pretty helpless to me.
Ah, the good old psychologization of politics ("those disagreeing are not just wrong, they're crazy or at least mentally affected"). Stalinist USSR would be proud.
The idea that this might be a charged political question for a reason didn't cross their minds, or that there might be valid subtleties like:
Is scientific fact a matter of consensus?
Is something a "consensus" if those disagreeing are excluded (while still being scientists with credentials and everything) - which also means those that potentially disagree have reasons to hide appear as agreeing?
Consensus is not really required in hard science judgements where you can just measure things or do an experiment and be done with it. So this is not that cut-and-try then, but depends on interpretation of lots of data points and theories?
Can scientists ever consent on something that's nevertheless wrong?
Does it still count as disagreeing if you agree on climate change being a problem but disagree on the identification of the main causes?
Does it still count as disagreeing if you agree on climate change being a problem but disagree on the solutions proposed?
Of course you don't get grants or fill politics-adjacent papers by being subtle about such things.
This is not true. Hard science judgements still require consensus and one experiment does not prove all that much.
Only a trivial one. Which is not really challenged.
Nobody really questions the value of the acceleration due to gravity down on Earth, or whether a body with mass X and another with Y will both fall at a rate R in a vacuum for example. And if they do, a simple experiment will show them otherwise.
That one people can more easily check: they can go an the tower of Pisa (or a high building) and drop things.
The latter requires either taking the assertion that it's a sphere without question, or understanding the impact a non-spherical earth would have on things like visible orbits and so on. The math might not be novel (they already knew them since antiquity) but they're not trivial either.
And of course basic empirical checks also favor a flat Earth. Short of checking out and calculating orbits, or getting into some big mountain, the most basic observatiosn is that the ground appears flat - which is a good approximation to what is the actual case, given that limit of the curvature at such small dinstances being quite "flat".
The bleaker truth about evidence, facts and politics is that people are arguing for a preferred outcome, and will, to a greater or lesser extent, simply turn to rationalization (sometimes of a quite irrational type) if the evidence does not support their preferred outcome.
"Hard science" still has quite a lot of disagreements in it. The questions you cited had consensus forming quite a long time ago and are trivial now. That does not mean there was no period of consensus forming or that we do not need that consensus forming for actual current scientific questions.
Science is not limited to yesterdays questions.
You argue that consensus is not really required in "hard science judgements". While I haven't studied proper philosophy of science, I'd say "measure things or do an experiment and be done with it" is, precisely, among the best ways to produce/allow consensus; or rather, the capacity of 'hard' science(s) to reason about a series of phenomena in such a way that consensus is 'easy'. One could argue that precisely the phenomena that 'hard' science inspects lends itself more to be inspected under a strict scientific method, too.
I'd say that any 'fact' is dependent on consciousness and intersubjectivity; yet at the same time, some things are more factual than others. Gravity as a phenomenon is more factual than, say, the Stendhal Effect. One can be more and better reproduced under more stringent conditions, thus having more predicting power and being more likely to be 'true' regardless of who interacts with the phenomenon, or reasons about it and its implications.
Yes, this is my point. The question of, for example, measurements of gravity (at the basic Newtonian level for non-relativistic speeds) is more factual and less nuanced than the question of "climate change" or the question of "quantum explanations of gravity".
Reducing these more nuanced (or "less factual") issues to "people who don't think those are clear and settled are mentally affected" is a psychologization of dissagreement, turning it into a pathology.
It's worse when the proposed solutions / policies are also bundled with the facts (so you need to accept both to be "within the consensus").
The scientific concept of gravity (as I remember it from high school) involves two bodies and the distance between them. I can't measure that at all, so someone could claim gravity does not exist, but things fall because of some other reason.
What I think it's more important is the system's complexity. Describing gravity as "two objects, bigger one attracts smaller one" is simple. Climate system is very complex and even if you describe "CO2 (a transparent and 0.04% part of the atmosphere) causes a warming of couple of degrees" sounds harder to picture.
In the end, Newtonian gravity's complexity can be boiled down to a few formulas, and those describe the phenomenon (and are quite simple). Something like climate change causes, progress, rate, and so on, even with many basic assumptions taken for granted, is still a huge and multivariate issue.
One can see that "weather's getting warmer", but it could be a process repeating every N centuries or millenial, and we're just at that point, others might argue the effects are not as dire as argued, or the rate not as fast (e.g. many public climate doomsday predictions have failed to arrive when the dates came and went). Or one might totally disagree about the proposed solutions (or with who and how gets to implement and impose those solutions, another can of worms).
That's more like string theory level nuance (which theoritical physicists still debate variants off, and some hardcore scientists even believe is speculative crap, and which in any case is nowhere near settled), than Newtonian gravity level nuance.
As a practical matter there are people who will shout "climate change" as a cover for status plays. And unfortunately they seem to have determined that a high status display is making energy expensive. These people are much more of a risk than anything the climate is likely to throw at us.
It sounds a bit funny to say, but the bureaucrats who made Nazism and Communism function weren't unusual monsters, they were people made up of the same stuff as the current crop that governs us except with ideologies that didn't work out in practice. The risks of going in to the energy grid with a new ideology that sounds good are really quite high. They're perfectly capable of letting millions of people suffer horribly rather than admit a mistake.
People have sniffed big chunks of that out, they are very tuned to status games, but it is so hard to articulate without sounding crazy they don't bother and just end up looking silly when people keep bashing them with ever more evidence that the temperature is rising.
If only bachelor's degrees could be gotten in six weeks
That said, I also might be speaking from the privileged position of not having as many triggers about this topic as many others. I can't tell you how many people I've met for whom completely innocuous-seeming things - such as a person going out of their way to separate some recycling from their garbage - can set off quite the tirade about "wokeism" or whatever. I have to have sympathy for these poor souls. They've clearly been through a lot
A different time, a woman passing by felt the need to stop and scold a friend who had said a non politically correct joke, explaining that he could only laugh at them because he's a privileged white male. He's a privileged white male immigrant whose school time included training to run into bomb shelters because there was a war going on. And the woman was a white non-immigrant.
People who scold you for saying words such as "ghetto" or "retard" will then say "lame".
I've met so many of these people. They're so boring and entitled.
In general I think anyone not minding their own business when nobody is getting harmed is boring and entitled. On both sides of the woke fence.
I work in an area where DEI is emphasized more than even at a University in general. I've never found it to be particularly onerous and often find it interesting.
When people act like these often banal things (often more or less explicitly directed towards shielding the organization from liability) are compelled speech in front of a firing squad, I have to wonder whether they've really done any. Incidentally, I've seen old white guys say all sorts of stuff at these trainings. I've never heard of anyone getting fired or pushed out of a position.
Imagine this article was written by a Trump supporter. Flagged in a heartbeat.
>is that in college a bunch of people tried to cancel me for something I’d intended to be an anti-racist joke, but which apparently didn’t come out that way. Former friends turned against me, I got a few death threats,
Then again, a Trump supporter would never have this viewpoint. The author is identifying something rather unique to their side of politics.
> Suppose that outrage addiction is, in fact, trauma addiction. That means the media ecosystem is a giant machine trying to traumatize as many people as possible in order to create repeat customers, i.e. trauma addicts. Combine that with the explicit, confessed desire on both sides to “trigger” the other as much as possible, and you have a lot of very clever people all trying to maximize one another’s trauma levels. On the external level, that looks like weaving as strong a narrative of threat and persecution as possible and trying to hit people in their psychological weak points. On the internal level, it means making sure they replace their normal ability to update with a series of triggers that make them replace reality with pre-packaged stories about how the other side is innately evil and everything they do is for specific threatening and evil reasons.
There are many contexts, including education and workplaces, where discussion of politics is discouraged to varying degress, ranging from cultural norms to strict policy. This both results from and in turn exacerbates a tendency to politicize certain topics for tactical reasons
A really stark example I saw in 2021 was a shift in tone about vaccination for COVID-19, where we went from the Trump administration trying to reassure the public that the crisis would be solved by accelerating vaccine development, and then as the rollout of vaccination programs were taken over by the Biden administration, a sudden shift on the right to intense skepticism of vaccination (as well as every disease control measure of any kind), which has resulted in a lot of demands that people be allowed to put e.g. colleagues at work or school at risk because things like vaccination requirements amount to "political acid testing". This whiplash-inducing form of position-switching for political advantage is characteristic of the Republican party (see also their recent strange reversal on funding additional aid at the US southern border, seemingly because their presidential hopeful wants to campaign on this being an ongoing crisis that the current administration is doing nothing about), but they're not the only ones guilty of demanding silence or deference to people's contrarian positions on a vast array of topics in many contexts on the basis that they're "political", often after creating the situation where they are political hot topics themselves
Ie, they can reason fine and know what they are saying makes no sense, but the situation is one where the speaker believes a technically correct answer conflicts with their best long term interests.
It is like fashion. The point isn't that anyone thinks there are new innovations on how to look good every decade or so - the point is to keep making arbitrary changes to figure out who is in the in group. The political equivalent of fashion means believing things that don't make sense.
I mean, you could be entirely satisfied with how society works, but that also strikes me as irrational.