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Think Tank
An informal space to explore and integrate thoughts and information

         

         ON DEMOCRATIZATION OF MORALITY: THE POPULARITY MYTH

 

     If a person's values are incompatible with your own, why should iit matter if they dislike you, disapprove of you, or attempt to make you feel inferior? How can it even be possible to feel badly when rejected or disdained by a person representing values you do not even respect? Why is it that some people feel a need to be  liked and valued to the extent that they take little objective  consideration of who they are liked BY and WHY as long as they ARE liked and treated in a favorable way?

     Value and love of favor oblivious to objective value considerations smacks of insecurity, immaturity, and often of lack of integrity. Yet it is a rather popular way of thinking, feeling,and reacting in our society. In addition to issues of morality often being decided upon that which is subjectively considered in favor of the self's desires, it is also the case that morality these days is often decided by popular vote as if numbers or popularity had something to do with distinguishing right from wrong. Unfortunately, popular vote or any reference to a popular vote does not always entail fair, honest, or intelligent  representation of the issues or people involved, not to mention lack of honesty,  fairness, and intelligence in interpreting, commmunicating, and referencing the results of such votes official or unofficial.

     I find it somewhat amazing that most of us are aware of possibilities for misrepresentations of reality and pertinent morality and yet it is often the case that such real misrepresentations are often met by many with subjective acceptance and the corresponding expected reaction right on cue. It is rather common to forgo objective consideration of what exactly is being presented, how, why, and any truth of reality in comparison. It is as if a large portion of society has accepted subjective feelings or mere claims are the same as fact and truth of objective reality.

     A common tactic in disagreement is to limit, fictionalize, and even outright falsify the discussion process or the information involved, to stuff the ballot box in favor of one side. This type of strategy can occur at all levels and breadths of communication be it one on one between personal or professional contacts or in group settings such as internet communities, companies, the media, and the government.  

     The fact is that claims of morality and value, and our subsequent value of those claims as a reflection of ourselves and our self worth has sadly taken place of value of a more objective brand of morality less volatile to the tide of personal opinion and dislike of perceivers. For my own part, I balk at such democratization of morality and intellect. I prefer to think for myself and to do what I know is right. A good, decent, right behavior or thought is not necessarily going to be a popular one and even if it is, it is not likely to be popular with all persons. Frankly, I would far rather be good than appear good.

                   

                     THE DESPERATE NATURE OF TROLLISM

They are a penny a million on the internet. They can be found in any internet forum, chatroom, IM application, email, SPAM, and even in guestbooks. They are internet trolls, attention and attachment control freaks trolling for the easiest kind of attention to get: negative attention. They lust after a powerful feeling of imagining themselves as having some powerful emotional influence on the hearts, minds, and self-esteem of other people they cowardly use as hit-and-run objects for their own vicarious emotional needs. Rather than risk their frail egos in intelligent, mature, rational conversation and interaction with other human beings on the internet with security, responsibility, decency of  charactar, integrity and good will, the troll and person of deliberately problematic character seeks mainly to hurt, confuse, frustrate, and anger. It might be said that winning, or even the mere illusion of it, no matter what is sacrificed, is the goal. The feeling of power is what is sought by the troll.

For the troll, negative emotional attention holds the attractive promise of easily obtained personal emotional attachments with the internet other. A basic spirit of dishonor, pain, anger, and insecurity is displayed by the troll because that is a reflection of reality of the troll's own personal experiential core. To the troll, bonding is a desperate process of forcibly distributing and sharing misery, of attempting to manipulate and force others to share in the painful, angry prison of the troll's own emotionally subjective experience of reality. If the troll is busy attacking others with negative games, lies, and deliberately hurtful comments to the exclusion of more realistic, honorable, mature, and objective interaction, the troll does not have to examine its own life, character, and motivations. It can all be about the evil of the other the troll is always devoted to attacking and claiming to expose, while yet attempting to refuse to explore the self's moral poverty and lack of basic accountability to others. Fortunately for the rest of us, trolls and those of harmful and bad character in general do tend to expose themelves quite clearly in their public displays of what they are willing to say and do in pursuit of immediate gratification of their emotional hunger and power and insecurity deficits. Trollism is an addiction in that even base morality is sacrificed to maintain the perverse gratification the behavior brings.

The basic tool of the troll is deceit and reliance on common acceptance of mythical scripts, either whole or partial, with the associated elements of hypocrisy, manipulation, and blaming, the latter of which is charactarized by refusal of any rational acknowledgement of any personal responsibility or publicly expressed remorse, guilt, or shame for the troll's own actions and motivations. Personal obsessions with targeting others or spaces to exert power and control and attempt to maintain negative attachments and avoid being ignored or dismissed is also a constant feature of the troll. It would also seem likely that due to the basic format of subjective, rigid, deceitful, manipulative, addictive thinking exhibited in trollism behaviors and communications, that many indulging in such trollism are also likely to have some sort of substance or process addiction history since such addiction problems tend to share very similar thinking and interaction process formats. Based on these typical characteristics of the basic troll, it seems feasible to consider trollism as possibly being an internet manifestation of the borderline or narcissistic personality, or an aspect of OCD at the very least.

Trolls and trollish behaviors: the con artists who try to change our idea of reality in order to momentarily feel better inside themselves. They will always be with us. The best that we can do is to see them for what they are, why they are, and not value what they stand for other than their value as real human beings.

                    

                     BASIC  NEUROPSYCHOLOGY  OF  HAPPINESS 

The human fetal brain begins as a female brain template. During gestation that female brain may  reorganize to form a male brain if the genetic code supplies such instructions. Male and female sex hormones secreted to the fetal brain also play a role in   how typically male or female the developing brain actually becomes in the end. It is not uncommon to find males and females with qualities atypical of their particular gender. Physical females with overexposure to male hormonal influences tend to exhibit particular mental and emotional traits that are predominantly associated with the average male, such as a preference of priority for the objective and rational over the subjective and emotional. Both males and females do use both, but typical males and females do tend to subscribe more highly to one or the other along highly gender divided lines. The average male oriented brain that has not been over exposed to female hormones is charactarized by a smaller and more efficient limbic system than the average female oriented brain. The average male does have feelings and can feel them deeply, but feelings and emotions for the average male do tend to be less of a priority of conscious attention than action and mental thought.

The limbic system hot and cold tags incoming stimuli. Hot tags identify stimuli with priority in the satisfying of needs and desires. Being in a personal relatonship with someone who fulfills some of our personal desires or needs creates bonding through chemical and electrical pathways of the limbic system.  Intimate touch and sexual orgasm are experienced in the brain as mini-seizures that send out powerful chemical and electrical signals that help build bonds and create attachments. Women tend to have more extensive and hot limbic systems and thus their limbic systems tend to create such atachments far more easily, faster, stronger, and far more pervasive than men on average. On one hand, this does mean women can benefit from being naturally predisposed to creating and maintaining a greater amount of socially bonded supports of richer, broader qualities. On the other hand, this also means that a woman may have a more difficult time dealing with the loss of an attachment at first, and a woman's limbic system is more susceptible to increased hot activity which can result in mood impairments such as mood swings or depression. Envision the limbic system overheating, over working with hot tagged stimulation, either real  or simply perseverated on.  This increased activity or hot tagging in the limbic system can often follow in the wake of assaulted or destroyed chemical and psychological bonds which are formed in the limbic system.

Neurotransmitters to include dopamine and seritonin are involved in the setting and monitoring of an individual's natural state of happiness.  Some people simply are naturally more happy or unhappy than others from the beginning. For the healthy person, the mind remembers this base mark of happiness/unhappiness and it resets itself to this range after each stress encountered in life. It is through this mechanism that the average healthy person is able to live life without being pitched into the extremes of emotional stress or experiencing mood swings.

The prefrontal cortices tend to be highly active in happy people, while those experiencing depression and sadness exhibit decreased prefrontal cortical activity. Decreases in PFC activity can sometimes be complicated by temporal lobe disturbances which can result in anger/aggression management problems, and disturbances of the cingulate gyrus, the brain's gear shift, which can result in rigid, obscessive, or compulsive thinking. PFC activity is responsible for lively, rapid thinking and idea generation, sometimes displayed in the aptitude of ideaphoria, which is a function of intuitive thought. Not only is high PFC activity a good indication of happiness, and by default, a good indication that the brain's CEO of critical thinking, impulse control, and decision making is working well, but such optimum operation also results in external rewards due to good, fast, broad thinking and choice making and those external rewards also bring happiness, so the person is less prone to feeling at the mercy of a cruel world, bad people, or fate and life itself.

 

                      GENETICS  OF  HANDEDNESS 

The right-handed bias in humans is considered to be a genetically fixed charactaristic,  a charactaristic that separates one species from another. For example while parrots have a left bias, and cats and monkeys have a nearly 50/50 bias, humans are the one species that has a high right bias that is unique in the animal kingdom. Roughly nine out of ten humans are naturally right-handed.

Handedness in humans is genetically right biased, but with non-gentically determined "blips" here and there of left-handedness. Left-handers are not genetically different from right-handers, nor do they reflect any left-handed genetic codes from parental lines. The consensus of various twin studies is that less than 76% of identical twins share the same handedness, which is not what one would expect if genetics were the basis, and the same 76% figure for the fraternal twin population confirmed the growing idea that left-handedness was not an inherited trait.

However, the qualities of mixed-handedness (ambidextrous) and being strongly right or left handed has is indeed inherited from parental genetics. In addition, while left handedness blips may occur in families, even within those families, the right-handed bias still tends to prevail when the family is surveyed as a whole. If both parents are right-handed, their chance of having a male child is greater. If at least one parent is left-handed, the chance of having a female child goes up 17%.

In light of the pervious note, consider that current scientfic data do suggest that men are more likely to be left-handed than women. It has been theorized that this might have to do with differences in brain processing structure organization of the two genders in relation to the two hemispheres of the brain. While the typical female template organized brain processes in a global manner that utilizes both sides of the brain in a connected and flowing manner, but is usually right side dominant, the typical male template brain is organized to process  in a left side dominant manner that is not very bglobal at all and is highly compartmentalized in basic nature.

Men outnumber women in problems with stuttering. Stuttering can often indicate tension resulting from a crossed domiance hand-eye pattern, especially if the person is highly sensitive to the auditory (not a favored, easy sensory mode of input and can thus be easily be overloaded) and/or their vocabulary interest, knowledge,  and thus pursuit of building it and using it is hampered by a lack of interest in the abstract, which is usually shown by a favored interest/focus in the concrete and/or in an aptitude for structural visualization (as opposed to abstract visualization).

Eve was said to have been constructed from Adam's left rib. Historically the left has thus been associated with female, the irrational, the less able or desirable, bad or sinful, while the right has been associated with male, good, able, rational. However, each side of the brain actually corresponds to the opposite side of the body in general bias and both sides of the brain and body form the unique whole of the amazing creature called MAN.



 






TO THINK IS TO BE HUMAN