One of My Little Social Theories.

Young people, the hope of our collective-subconscious future.

Constance 'Dusty' Miller

This is just one of my little social theories.

The pendulum theory of social development is explained here.

If you think about the times we live in, we see news stories about some new fringe element and we wonder what motivates them. According to theory, whatever they’re doing is in reaction to mood or climate. There is a social context, it’s different for all of us as we live in different places. However, it is just as difficult to escape our surroundings, our circumstances, as it is to escape our upbringing, our expectations, or as it is to escape from behind iron bars, or even from our own home in the case of certain psychological phenomena.

Swings of the social pendulum stem from ‘the mentality of the masses’.

The masses are educated essentially by the environment, and in the state of the here-and-now, these updates are instantaneous. That’s why so many people get what passes for the daily news from social media sites such as Facebook. Part of my job involves reposting stories, and a good percentage of those stories come from posts by people (friends) on fb. This all becomes part of a collective, common narrative.

There was a sexual revolution in the ‘60s. There was a reaction to it—for example the purity or abstinence movement.

As often as not, there is a disconnect between stated moralities and actual behaviours, and there is difficulty in getting good data in social studies when the most personal questions are being asked and the most personal and private behaviours are being studied. What’s interesting about such studies, is that while the decision to participate in a study might involve some soul-searching and questions of privacy, the fact is no one really cares who actually got interviewed, observed, interrogated for the Kinsey or Masters and Johnson studies.

They are as forgotten to history as the average tween twerking in front of her mirror and iPhone for eventual upload to XXNN videos (link NSF) in the hopes of making a little money for clothes and cosmetics.

And there is your sexual revolution, come full circle: these days both legal and underage girls, and no doubt boys as well, are all too eager to utilize the utmost in modern technology to basically expose themselves to an unknown but potentially global audience. It has become a personal rite of passage. Interestingly, they have as much chance of being remembered as the subjects of the avant-garde sexual studies of the fifties and sixties, where sex was approached with the mores of a scientific investigation, rather than from the point of view of dogma, revealed truth and universal condemnation.

The pendulum theory is of course just theory—a simplified model, a way of looking at the real world that might teach us something new without being necessarily carved in stone.

People say one thing and do another. This has always been a weakness with social studies. 

They know what their attitude should be in a politically-correct sense, and at the same time they know very well what their prejudices are. Then they just go ahead and do what they want, just as people have done for millennia.

The contradictions push that pendulum back and forth, to where some people are willing to shoot doctors who perform abortions and others are willing to risk their lives to perform said abortions. Throw in a little hate and you’re on your way to the races. What’s at stake almost seems secondary, once moral lines in the sand have been drawn and folks are prepared to do battle in the name of God, or in the name of women’s rights, the right of the fetus. In the right or in the name of whatever the flavour of the day is.

Over the course of time, the social pendulum moves back and forth. Right now it’s in a certain position in your town and mine and you can see the net results of that by looking around you. Everything you see around you is a message of sorts—a data point, often absorbed purely by subconscious means.

You won’t even know its happening.

Because of the collectivity of the system, and the number of autonomous individual decisions being taken, under the social model, no one of us is ever necessarily wrong in a choice or decision. One would think that the outcome, collectively, as a social decision, can never be wrong.

Theoretically, this is the outcome that we have made, all of us pushing and shoving and working together in a global, collective sense. It also works the same way in smaller systems, as in the school, town, family or other more primitive community.

END

Dusty's a little bit insecure, but her new book, The Spy I Loved, is available free from iTunes.

-- ed.

Woman: Programmed.

Programmed.

Dusty Miller

Much of what we think of when we think of gender is superficial. Girls have long hair and boys have short hair. Men wear pants and women wear skirts. It is only seen as a cultural choice, a social evolution over time, when viewed from afar—like from a country where the dress code is much different.

We tend to think of social and sexual roles as natural. Even the trappings are seen as natural.

What they are, is socially-accepted.

Anthropologists describe a sexual contract, a division of labour between the sexes, the rise of language and the nuclear family. Much history has passed, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the age of iron and steam.

Skipping over all of that brings us to the modern family. When little kids are growing up, Christmas is a big thing, perhaps the biggest thing of all. Kids are taught their social roles from a very early age.

The little boy gets a little blue hammer, a building set. The little girl gets a pink dolly.

The little boy gets a plastic jet airplane. The little girl gets a toy stove, one that bakes a little cake and everything.

The messages received are not just about gender, they are about social role.

Little boys will tell little girls, “You can’t play with jet planes.”

The little girl asks why and they tell them, “Because you are a girl.”

They’re not very old when they figure this out.

They even know enough not to ask for the wrong gender orientation of toy—a little boy so rarely asks for a dolly, and the little girls so seldom ask for jet airplanes or tool sets.

At first, the little girl doesn’t have a problem with her new tea set. After all, she can now bake a cake and sit with kitty and her dollies, and they can all have a nice little tea party.

There is always this jealousy between siblings, isn’t there? And little Johnny better respect that tea set, or that little oven, or there will be hell to pay.

That’s hers.

And that other stuff is his.

It is only when the little girl sees the little boy with his jet airplane that she even perceives that such a thing exists. She hasn’t been exposed to too much of that so far.

Because it is new, she wants to play with it. That part is truly instinctive, and a kitten or puppy will do the same thing for the same reasons. They are exploring their environment. They are exploring the possibilities and the hazards of their environment.

When a little girl gets a dolly, and everyone is making a fuss over her, and her brother is strafing the cat or something with his new jet airplane, and then the dolly pees on her, (Wow! Isn't that great?) she gets a certain message.

“Mommy. It peed on me.”

“That’s a good girl. Better get used to it…”

Yeah. Learn how to feed it and care for it and bathe it and comb its hair and dress it...the list goes on.

Much of woman’s role is imposed by biology and evolution. The rest is imposed by culture, tradition, and the passage of time itself. Much of what we think a woman is and should be is programmed. 

Cultural programming stems right from birth.

It is imposed by the needs and prejudices of the day, but that isn’t necessarily to say that it is carved in stone or forever unchangeable.

Of all the animal kingdom, homo sapiens exhibits the greatest differentiation within species of any creature. All deer look alike, with very little in the way of individual characteristics. They rely on smell and not appearance to identify one another, sound as well. We know our parent’s voice and so do they.

The same becomes even more true the further one goes down the evolutionary ladder. Adult humans are big, small, dark and fair, heavy and light, ranging in skin colour and facial and cranial features that would be remarkable in salmon or mice or snakes. There may be deformed ants, but ones with big noses and no chins, or fat ones working alongside skinny ones would be remarkable. What is remarkable is their sameness—not the other way around.

Many other creatures exhibit social characteristics, humans have developed it to a remarkable degree.

It is for social reasons that we have seen the evolution of so many cultural modes.

And variety, as they say, is the spice of life.

It is also the spice, and arguably, the goal or end result of evolution.

END

Sexual and Other Imprinting.