Why Anger by Design?

Anger and other emotions are natural responses to the environment. Emotions are an important part of the mind, which is composed of an organism’s total reaction to the environment. Culture is an individual’s or group’s total interaction with the environment.

Design refers to the purposeful manipulation of our emotions by individuals and groups that desire to control our behavior; their motives can be selfish or sincere, or some of both. Our friends or close associates may reward feelings of loyalty and security, but at the cost of our desire to explore a wider world. We are often coerced into choosing one group over another, or are expected to embrace one belief system against all others. The price of belonging may be that we are expected to do harm or perpetuate group violence against people whom we don’t know.

Top Male hierarchies vary in degrees of applied cruelty. Thugs like Saddam Hussein are easy to identify, but perhaps more frightening is the ease with which developed nations denounce human rights abuses and then carry out the destruction of entire nations. Violence is justified by any lie available: nation building, security, provocation, patriotism, religion – any excuse that maintains the hypocritical stance that 'they' are worse than we are. Propaganda magically erases the crime of war. War is always a contest between Top Males: the deaths of one’s own soldiers are a noble sacrifice, but the deaths of the enemy soldiers and civilians don’t count. Life is disposable in the male quest for power. The idea of nationbuilding is a convenient tool of male domination.

The average American is trapped between the magical belief that because the Constitution ‘says so’ (words have magic power), he or she automatically has rights. This is naive: rights do not exist within real families, real religions, real businesses, or real nations. Rights in the Constitution are political goals that must be continually negotiated for, fought for, and expanded to include women, children, and lesser males. The Founding Fathers were enlightened individuals, but they were still a hierarchy of Top Males that fought bitterly over the distribution of male power, especially how much power an elected Top Male ought to have. The president initially had little power. This restraint was meant to prevent Top Male abuse: the idea was to ‘share the wealth’ within the class of free white males. That’s what opportunity means.

In no way did the founders envision an expansion of the hierarchy to include lesser beings such as women; black males were granted rights long before women. Contrary to the belief that we offer equality to women, the British monarchy, which we fought to shake off, has accepted female Top Males, whereas we have not elected a female president. In fact, the United States clings to the Stone Age model of social control in a time when so-called backward nations are moving to more pragmatic and natural systems. This male obsession with total power prevents problem solving in critical areas: any practical or productive response to real-world problems is blocked. The productivity, ideas and creativity of one-half the population is ignored and excluded. Male religion – monotheism, has a stranglehold on education, foreign policy, economics, social policy, and human reproduction. Male egomania promotes the dangerous destruction of nature.

The very people who are harmed most by social violence often unthinkingly support Top Male social structure through monotheistic religion, the utterly unfounded concept of race, and crimes against humanity; the desire for the powerless to identify with power, however corrupt, sidelines ethical behavior. Children are raised on the archaic and unshakeable helplessness that results from enshrining male despotism as the God-given law of the universe. Top Male control came from the Stone Age and keeps us imprisoned in the Stone Age.

This concept is fundamental to the ideas developed in Magical Thinking in America.

The terrifying power of the father creates fear in the infant-child, fear that becomes a god. Unbearable helplessness is dealt with by the "my dad can beat up your dad" taunt evident in this poster, although comparing Thor to Jesus is incorrect: Jehovah is the equivalent of Thor. Boys react to the father's power with envy, an emotion that is manipulated for profit by the American entertainment industry. The deadly combination of primitive emotion and unlimited power that is presented as the ideal use of male strength is a perversion of nature. The proper role of the male is to provide a safe environment for the community, especially its children.

xxxx

The supernatural mind is based in the universal fear of death and a child’s vulnerable status at birth, a dependent psychological state that continues into adulthood. Magical thinking remains the bedrock language for explaining the environment for most humans, and directs government and cultural institutions, even in developed countries. Magical thinking results in a supernatural dimension that exists exclusively in the brain, but which is projected onto physical reality and is experienced as arising outside, and superior to, the individual. This is due to the very large and important presence of the parents, who are literally the models for gods: they can and do shape the thought process of a child.

XXXX

Supernatural power is believed to override the laws of nature in the form of miracles; parents do indeed perform miracles from the infant’s point of view, supplying (or not supplying) every need. They literally hold the sword of life or death over the child. Myth is filled with examples of fathers killing their children, especially males.

Magical thinking is a socially acceptable state of delusion, paranoia, and confusion that arises from this initial life or death vulnerability of the human infant. If the child is introduced to a greater physical reality and taught the skills needed to be a competent adult, the infantile state of dependence remains. This emotional state manifests as fear, magical thinking, and the inability to grasp a stand-alone natural reality. Only the mirage of a supernatural dimension exists for the incomplete adult. The sheer preponderance of magical thinkers in the United States indicates that parents rarely achieve the goal of raising children to full adulthood, despite free education and a technologically sustained culture.

The result is that abstract thinking produces wonderful new technologies but dismal economic, political, and social theories, which are based on invalid magical relationships. Magic cannot manifest as physical changes to reality; it is supernatural. The presentation of social and educational theory as being math-based does not make the assumptions valid. Superstition cannot sustain a technical and democratic society.

Who's Who in the Science Hall of Fame, National Library of Scotland

For names and works go to: www.nls.uk/biographies
.
The importance of this collection of white males (who do deserve their fame) is not that it doesn't include women or members of minority groups. The significance is that today no individual is excluded from a career in science by reason of these restrictions. Social situations can and do change. Magical action, such as constructing lists on the basis of gender or race, does not solve past, present, or future issues of discrimination. The real impediment is the lack of quality K-12 education in the United States, which is necessary to prepare all students for successful adult lives. One does not magically become a scientist, engineer, or mathematician. Education is required.
.

The traditional domination by males of scientific and technological pursuits can be traced to the Stone Age male hierarchy, which has denied education to outsiders. Science is 'secrets of the universe' stuff; powerful stuff, and its control perpetuates male dominance. The tragedy for humanity is that 50% of the brains of our species have been excluded from discovery, invention, and problem-solving. This percentage is increased by the majority of males, who have no function other than as expendable labor, as tools to subjugate other humans, or to be sacrificed in war.

The scientific community today consists of members from cultures the world over who have adopted the premise of a shared physical reality that can be discovered by means of the scientific method: observation, data collection, a tentative hypothesis, the design and implementation of experiments that yield confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis, and formulation of a theory that explains and predicts all related observations. Work must be reviewed by the scientific community and withstand its challenges. Revision or demotion of ideas is always on the table. The scientific method is not culturally dependent. When we say that a culture has been westernized, we mean that it has taken on a scientific point of view, at least in part.

Science serves a different purpose than myth; it explains phenomena using physical laws and mathematical models. The unknown is assumed to be continuous and coherent with the known; if it is not, then previous conclusions must be reviewed. Scientists are confident that the unknown will eventually be understood, because this has been the pattern of discovery in the past. Scientists routinely and accurately predict outcomes that demolish those of so-called prophets, whose garbled forecasts never come true.

The supernatural dimension is totally outside physical reality. It exists exclusively in the human brain. Supernatural beliefs actually defy reality. Believers worship aberrations commonly known as miracles, which don't occur. People imagine the most mundane coincidences to be miracles.
Attempts to prove that either religious belief or scientific knowledge "wins" miss the point. The two types of thinking cannot be reconciled as is often claimed. These languages of thought co-exist in the human brain, but this is due to the nature of the evolution of the brain, which is an additive process; our brain retains and builds on animal brains from their earliest appearance. (More later.)

Magical thinking is the default mode of the human brain. Magic thinking does not describe how the universe works. Belief in a supernatural origin of the universe and its contents, including life, requires the overthrow of the very processes that are fundamental to the universe – this is a human fantasy. . The goal of science is to accurately describe how the universe does works. The recognition that a mathematical system of physical forces underlies the universe is supported by the universe itself.

Mankind has ventured into the void, from sending rovers to wander Mars, a planet that has a geologic history of its own and looks remarkably like parts of earth, to the Hubble Space Telescope, which helps us to "see" the early universe, to probes that are sending earth their farewells from the boundary of the solar system. The human (and animal) instinct for mathematics has led us in our exploration of our expending environment, not religious magic.

Human technical talent clearly outstrips our social development, which is stuck in a Stone Age male hierarchy maintained by violence and magical religions. Male domination has trapped humanity in cycles of brutality, mass murder, war, cruelty, and destruction. Man is a killer whose favorite prey is his own species.

God's actions are mysterious because he doesn't exist.

The ideas that succinctly and accurately describe nature are mathematical statements, and these form the basis of science. Our understanding of nature hasn't come from the average person, but from individuals who desire to discover the underlying causes of what can be observed in nature, individuals who have often risked their lives to step outside socially sanctioned myth. Risking personal attack, ridicule, exile, or death, a miniscule number of human beings have provided others with improved living conditions, often with little thanks from the beneficiaries. Religious people who scorn the work of scientists are invited to return to the Stone Age, and to do without the products of science and technology, especially medical care. They are invited to endure horrific infections, skin diseases, gangrene, blindness, and death from a broken bone or uncontrolled bleeding, or perhaps slow starvation. Add extreme punishments like stoning, burning, and amputations for minor offenses, and having to endure slavery and the never-ending hatred for females. Have a Nice Day!

Americans seem unable to "get" the distinction between religion and science. Christians trot out scientists who attend church or profess belief in a supernatural being as proof that their god exists, when what this demonstrates is that the human mind can entertain any idea that can be thought, without regard to its correspondence to reality. Scientists are prone to the same magical hoarding that buries the archaic mind in a dungeon of nonsensical ideas.

The poverty of the male imagination is astounding.

Men have ruled the world for 3,000 + years, but have they done a good job? The results are disastrous for the majority of human beings, and the future of millions of species is bleak. The invention of increasingly destructive weapons and the reliance on inefficient and toxic technologies, combined with the escalation of violence to a state of permanent war, serves to perpetuate irrational ideas enshrined in male religions, including those of patriotism and nationalism.
.
Would women have done any better? How can we know? A crucial turn in the path toward the present ecological destruction of our planet, is the male (imaginary) overthrow of nature and the inextricably linked hatred of women. Women's contributions to the intellectual health of the species have been blocked by brutal means. Reduced to her biological functions, and labeled as categorically evil by the pathologic mind of the Old Testament male, the female half of the species was reduced to perpetual slavery, no better in fact or concept than a domesticated animal. This rejection of female intelligence is possibly the most colossal act of stupidity in all human history.

.