🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (15 tweets)
a quick run-and-gun: 1. i remember reading some anecdotes about monkeys behaving in all sorts of nuanced ways socially that seemed to be more complex than how lots of contemporary people are capable of (via Dunbar's Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language)
2. how could it be that monkeys & baboons seem in some ways more emotionally sensitive and intelligent, cunning, crafty than many humans? my suspicion: humans are surely perfectly capable of this too, but civilization systematically anaesthetises this capacity. we school it out
3. a notable recurring exception to this general sort of rule is that people who experience varying kinds of trauma, or people who are inherently misfit, neurodivergent, etc, experience "shock" – are shocked out of the programming of civilization. you unplug from the matrix
4. while it's extremely sad and bleak etc, i've always also been struck by how alert street kids are. part of it is literal trauma yes– and they are also, so much more capable than we tend to assume kids can be. there are parts of the world you can see children raising babies
bunch of jumping off points here... - hyperagency is a trauma response - existence might be intrinsically traumatic lol - civilization is systematic agency-dampening (potty training) – there's an agency-respecting ideal, but in practice >90% of the time autonomy is disrespected
have to be more precise, introduce degrees. "existence is intrinsically traumatic" is a bit of a jokey frame-shift rather than a precisely useful statement, loads of people exist, and not many people develop hyperagency...
@ultimape yea https://t.co/DwKeeMqgYF
@visakanv One way to explore this is to look a queuing norms and how they form across different social circumstance and regions. Their history and how they form etc.This is partly due to school, but they exist in a larger milieu of Schelling points of bureaucracy dictating behavior.
@visakanv Basic queuing seems to be for access to shared resources shows up in toilets, certainly. But you can also see it in stuff like queuing up for access to the baker's oven and fees charged for market stalls in a bazar.https://t.co/Q9k56jMdhQ
@visakanv Needing to fit in to a centralized system that doesn't tolerate deviance seems to be largely the factor that drives the systematic anaesthetization.Civilization itself can still run without this aspect, but we don't seem to do that way anymore.