The First to Fall

Thoughts

  • Social deficit? Or social defi…nitely-don’t-care?

    Don’t get all worked up. This is just me thinking out loud.

    I have problems with social settings. I really do. But I often find myself wondering if it’s less a deficit in social awareness, and more a different motivational structure (a different why, not a failed how). Let’s pull this apart.

    The standard narrative is that autistic people struggle to social cues. But, hell, I do read them…especially the negative ones (derision, exclusion, mocking). What I don’t do is monitor them constantly as a way to regulate my behavior. Because I don’t think my behavior is rooted in alignment with other people…it’s rooted in functional or internal need.

    When I was a kid I got bullied a lot. A psychologist might say that I failed to perceive signals from the group that would have allowed me to integrate successfully…and that bullying is a sort of result of failed integration. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not that I failed to perceive the signals that led up to being punched in the face…it’s more like those signals weren’t previously relevant to my goals. I had a different value hierarchy, maybe.

    Your average neurotypical person is conditioned to constantly scan for social matching, conformity, “sameness” (gestures, interests, tones). They seek safety in blending in…self-protective group behavior built on the belief that sameness = acceptance.

    I don’t do that…thing. Not by choice, anyway. I act based on what makes sense to me in the moment…functionally or internally. I’m constantly baffled by people’s need to ‘check in’ with each other. I really don’t know what that’s all about. It seems an awfully wasteful use of limited energy considering what else you could be doing. But I digress. People seem to think I act “differently” to stand out. BUT I HATE STANDING OUT. I act…based on needs. Not social mirroring. And I guess it only becomes “wrong” to me once someone points it out (over a lifetime, of course, I become able to anticipate what others think is wrong and sort of shape my behavior according to some invisible and shifting standards that I wish I’d never become aware of).

    In any case, this confuses people. They think or say something like, “But you could tell we were uncomfortable!” Right, probably. But I didn’t prioritize your discomfort over my own need…or, it didn’t register with me as something needing immediate modification (until you named it, punished it, or laughed at it).

    This is where the mythology of “mindblindness” fails…I’m not blind at all. Think of me as being non-compliant with unspoken conformity protocols…until I’m forcibly reminded. Then I mask, try to adjust, do my best to match your shifting standards and needs…but it’s reactive, not internalized. Please hear me when I say: I don’t mask because I want to be same (but don’t know how)…I mask because I’ve learned (the hard way) that you demand sameness.

    Let’s say I’m right about this. Let’s say that, as an autistic person, I don’t actually have a problem reading social cues at all…I simply don’t allocate any time or energy to the task because, on some fundamental level, the cost/reward ratio doesn’t add up for me.

    Then that would open the door to a radical reframing of how autism is interpreted within the predictive processing (PP) framework (which I’m a huge fan of).

    In the dominant PP interpretation (e.g. Pellicano & Burr, Friston, Van de Cruys, Clark), autism is characterized by:

    1. High precision prediction errors (Autistic brains assign more weight to sensory data (bottom-up input), and less weight to prior beliefs (top-down models)…which leads to a reduced ability to generalize, filter noise, or tolerate uncertainty.)
    2. Low tolerance for ambiguity (Unexpected outcomes cause larger error signals in the autistic brain, leading to discomfort, rigidity, or repetitive behavior.)
    3. Excessive demand for model updating (Because priors aren’t stick enough (i.e. I leave my model of the world more open to adjustment to real-time data), everything feels novel, and the brain is constantly working to remodel the world.)

    From this lens, autism is seen as a kind of overactive reality-checking mechanism…hypersensitive to mismatch between prediction and perception.

    But back to me. What if I can perceive social cues, but don’t automatically adjust behavior to match, and only respond when the consequences are made explicit? Well, then maybe it isn’t about being overwhelmed by error. Maybe it’s about being uninterested in minimizing certain kinds of social prediction errors (until they become functionally relevant).

    In standard PP, error minimization is assumed to be globally prioritized (that’s my understanding of it). But what if I simply don’t care about being socially in sync unless it affects my access to something I need? So I don’t treat social mismatch as important prediction error?

    That would mean some sort of hierarchy of predictive concern. Maybe my brain isn’t trying to minimize all errors…only the ones that interfere with internal coherence or functional outcomes. Maybe social expectations only matter once they constrain resources, safety, or autonomy. That would mean autistic perception may not be about error overload, but about prioritization mismatches (neurotypical brain treats social alignment as a high-priority prediction task but autistic brain treats functional clarity, pattern integrity, or sensory truth as higher priorities).

    I’m almost definitely wrong…but if I’m right….if I’m right!!:

    Autistic predictive systems don’t globally overweight prediction errors. They assign selective precision to biologically or perceptually grounded domains (e.g. sensory input, moral consistency, physical logic)…and lower precision to social expectations unless those expectations become explicit and consequential (like a punch to the head or being fired from a job). A different optimization strategy…more ecological/biological than performative. And “severity” would be the slider on that scale.

  • Human self-domestication, Pathological Demand Avoidance, and “self-control” walk into a bar…

    I’ve been circling something for a while now…trying to find the thread that runs through human self-domestication, self-control, and this term people throw around, PDA.

    I think it comes down to:

    Who (or what) is in control? and
    How do we decide what counts as a legitimate signal?

    Self-Domestication

    Over thousands of years, humans slowly became tamed. Depending on who you ask, they either tamed themselves (social pressure and mating preferences) or they tamed each other (slavery and control of reproduction). I’m of the latter opinion, but the point here isn’t the process, but its consequences…like less reactive aggression, more social tolerance, tighter symbolic governance, and the gradual internalization of rules. We stopped punching each other and starting performing for each other.

    Domestication was physical (smaller faces, softer jaws, reduced sexual dimorphism), but the the real shift was behavioral. We began outsourcing our regulation…from our gut/instinct to law and role. We made and obeyed rules…and over time became people who needed rules. You might say control became internalized (caged from the inside?).

    And I think this is where something like “self-control” shows up (and wearing a halo, no less).

    “Self-control.” Anyone with a brain should find that term suspicious. It splits the self in two: some sort of wild part that has to be restrained, and a righteous part that does the restraining? (what weird fucking animals we are) Honestly, I think it’s just a theological concept dressed up as psychology. And like most civilized “virtues,” it smells like bullshit once you sniff past the incense.

    Here’s what I think “self-control” really is: the cognitive costume of domestication.

    Think about it. It’s what supposedly lets us suppress emotion, delay gratification, comply with symbolic norms, and function in environments totally divorced from our biology…schools, offices, courtrooms, churches. Self-control sure as hell doesn’t mean living wisely…it’s about sitting still when your body says move, smiling when your nervous system screams no, and nodding along when everything inside says get the fuck out.

    In a natural system, “regulation” evolved to keep us alive (avoid cliffs, dodge snakes, read the tribe’s mood, etc.). But what is regulation in civilized systems? In modern society? It’s self-suppression in the name of some symbolic performance.

    Now enter “PDA” (Pathological Demand Avoidance). Or as I prefer to think of it…one of many glitches in the domestication software.

    Here’s the narrative: PDA is often seen in autistic and ADHD individuals. It’s marked by an intense resistance to demands (even “reasonable” ones) along with panic, shutdown, or rage. Notice the language: it’s “pathological” and it’s “avoidance.” Some smart people have suggested we change the P to “persistent,” and I think that’s a good start. But what about avoidance? Is resistance to control really “avoidance?” Defiance? Oppositional? I don’t think so. I think it’s a nervous system that reacts to control like poison…civilization-induced anaphylaxis.

    What if PDA is part of a broader biological resistance to domestication that still rattles the bars?

    Let’s go back to human self-domestication (which I’d argue is synonymous with the process we call “civilization).

    Civilization built a) systems and b) people who fit them. It selected for internal submission…people who could smile through exploitation, obey without understanding, perform without protest. And over time, the organism (us) adapted to control (because it survived).

    Great…it’s adaptive then….what’s the problem?

    The problem is that not all control is created equal.

    In living systems, control is ecological. Emergent. Immediate. You overhunt, food disappears. You act like a jerk, the group boots you. You walk through stinging nettles to take a pee…you learn. The feedback is timely, proportionate, local, and meaningful. And it regulates your behavior in ways that support life.

    Compare that to the feedback in our civilized systems.

    You break a dress code and lose your job.
    You poison a river and get a bonus.
    You speak truth and get punished.
    You conform and get promoted.

    This isn’t feedback…it’s symbolic distortion (bullshit mostly). Consequences are delayed, inverted, or entirely fake. We no longer act based on what is…we act based on what signals approval.

    What are you up to today? Are you going to school to pass tests that mean fuck all? Filing a report that no one will read? Obeying rules that no one really understands? Working a job that’s killing you…because your health insurance depends on it?

    It’s control as abstraction / simulation and it severs feedback from function. And when a system loses real feedback, it can’t adapt anymore. It can’t course-correct. I can only punish, delay, distract. (This is how collapse happens.)

    I’m rambly and angry today…

    PDA isn’t rebellion for its own sake. It isn’t resistance to structure. It’s resistance to unlinked structure…to rules with no grounding, demands with no meaning, performances with no reality beneath them. To papers with numbers on them. To digital clocks and alarms and metrics and schedules….

    It’s an involuntary response to any sort of control that bypasses sense and body and consequence.

    And yeah, I get it…some people will say I’m romanticizing resistance or prehistory…that “nature controls too,” and I’m just pissed off at society.

    Maybe. But have you ever asked yourself what the purpose of the control is? Or what the quality of it is?

    Does it really keep you alive…or does it keep you in line? I’d say ecological feedback is the only feedback that teaches you anything real.

    When we resist a meaningless demand, we’re not being defiant…we’re being awake (even if we don’t know it). We feel some distortion and some lie behind the request. We’re not okay performing a role that destroys something real. To me, that’s a sign that some part of the original organism (human) still exists and resists and still rings the alarm when the world goes insane.

  • Domestication and the Warping of Sexual Dimorphism

    Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: Civilization didn’t just domesticate us. It domesticated us differently, depending on whether we were born male or female.

    In our pre-domesticated state, humans showed moderate sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes in size, shape, and behavior). Men tended to be larger, stronger, and more prone to take risks, compete, and throw punches over territory or mates. Women carried broader hips for childbirth and bore the energetic costs of gestation, nursing, and food gathering. Nothing too extreme. It was a functional division…not a caste system.

    Then came the leash.

    If you want to understand what happened next, look at what domestication does to animals across the board…the males change more.

    You get smaller bodies, smaller brains, softer jaws, lower testosterone, and a whole lot more docility. You don’t need to fight other males for access anymore…you just need to behave. Domestication tamps down that volatile, high-testosterone edge and replaces it with social compliance. The women change too, but less dramatically. Domestication is hardly an equal-opportunity employer.

    What happens when this process is scaled up across hundreds of generations of humans?

    Let’s take one of my favorite little detours: the Y-chromosome bottleneck…an evolutionary funnel that occurred around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Despite the population growing, genetic evidence shows that only a tiny handful of men were passing on their genes (think roughly 5 out of every 100 men). Why? Because systems of coercion (slavery, war, patriarchy) turned reproduction into a rigged game. And those systems selected hard for one thing: control.

    Control doesn’t love testosterone. It doesn’t want unpredictability, brute force, or guys who flip tables when they lose status. It wants compliant, trainable males who can navigate symbolic ladders, defer to hierarchies, and follow rules. Over time, the male phenotype got reshaped: smaller, less aggressive, more socially performative. Instead of fighting for mates, men competed for power within abstract systems (religion, wealth, reputation).

    Women didn’t experience this reproductive bottleneck, and therefore weren’t domesticated in a biological sense, the way men were. At least nowhere near the same degree. But they were domesticated culturally. Their roles were dictated by ideological control…veils, chastity cults, arranged marriages. inheritance laws, and lineage games. Woman as symbol. Woman as vessel. Woman as territory to be defended and exchanged. Arguably, as men become more civilized, women were controlled every more tightly (as was anything men saw as a “resource”).

    And so sexual dimorphism got scrambled…intensified in the weirdest way possible. Physical differences shrank but role differences widened incredibly (differences that we still take for granted and fail to associate with domestication). Men became public actors, enforcers of systems they didn’t design. Women became private property, repositories of symbolic purity and repositories of symbolic purity and reproductive value. Both became performative shells…flattened into scripts civilization could use.

    Now forget the anthropology textbooks for a second. This process we’re talking about…what’s happening on a psychological level? What do these changes mean? How do they feel? How do people begin to experience life differently?

    Testosterone in utero shapes everything from brain lateralization to threat response. A civilizing system selecting against reactivity (for tameness) is selecting against certain kinds of minds…minds that question, that bristle, that break rules when rules break people. And so, over generations, you get men who are more verbal, more deferent, more emotionally masked. And because we live in the end product of that, we call it “progress”…as if there were a master plan to arrive at us, and…here we are! But you first need to acknowledge (at least) that there was no such plan, and that tameness was never anyone’s goal, it was simply something that the system rewarded. If you acknowledge that, we can have a conversation.

    And though women may not have been suppressed biochemically…they were certainly suppressed. Their suppression was the visible one. Mythological. Ideological. Institutional. They don’t need to be reshaped from the inside out when they can be controlled from birth to death by symbols, stories, and ceremonies.

    “Civilization made us peaceful.”

    “Civilization turned brutish men into cooperative citizens.”

    Right. These are nice Matrix-y narratives. Fairy tales. Statements that have just enough truth to squeak by as overarching explanations.

    But what did civilization do? Where was intention? What was it trying to do? (and still trying) It neutered rebellion. It privatized violence. It engineered predictable humans. Manageable ones. And because we are those humans, we call the end product “better,” and the process itself, “progress.” Against all evidence, we insist that life in civilized systems is happier, healthier, safer, and sustainable. Insanity. An insanity made possible by the changes made to us by domestication. By the civilizing process. It bred a species capable of living in complete contradiction to the signals around it.

    Docile males and constrained females. All marching toward a cliff’s edge to the beat of someone else’s drum. Marching peacefully. Unless they’re dropping nuclear bombs on each other. Or gassing each other. Or exterminating every other species. Or poisoning air, water, and food. Nice men and women.

  • Domestication at the Top (When Wolves Build Kennels)

    If civilization is a long, grinding process of domestication (that’s my argument), selecting for docility, compliance, and symbolic performance…then what’s going on with the people at the top?

    Because they sure as hell don’t look tame, do they? They build empires, command armies, rewrite laws the rest of us have to follow. They don’t defer…they conquer.

    Are they exempt, then, from this domestication process?

    Let’s rewind to the Y-chromosome bottleneck…that strange stretch of human history, 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, when genetic data tells us most men stopped passing on their genes, and a tiny handful of “winners” (guys like Genghis Khan) took it all. We’re not talking about cooperative foragers here. These are men who were clearly strategic, coercive, and absolutely fluent in domination.

    But not in the old-school neanderthal way. Apparently, punching you way to power doesn’t scale. These men had to be able to read rooms and redraw maps…think founders of priesthoods, inventors of kingship, codifiers of laws, and masters of narrative, ritual, and symbolic control (bullshit).

    They weren’t “submissive” in the normal sense, but they were domesticated in a different way. They were hyper-adapted to symbolic systems. Law, religion, custom, money…these weren’t just ideas to these guys, they were weapons. Far more effective weapons than fists.

    Let’s sketch out a hypothetical profile for one of these bottleneck assholes.

    He dominates by strategy instead of brute force. He’s hierarchically fluent (can operate within or redesign pecking orders). He can tolerate the the horrors of oppressing others (especially if someone else is doing the dirty work). He’s emotionally detached. And he shows great capacity to scale coercion through symbols, structures, and beliefs.

    He’s not the village psychopath….worse, he’s the village priest.

    But there’s a twist. That system he builds to extract compliance from others? It eventually tames him, too.

    Why?

    Because once the machine is running (once you’ve got states, kingdoms, priesthoods, inheritance lines) you don’t need wild visionaries anymore. You need clerks, protocols, safe hands. Even the sons of kings get domesticated. They’re raised in bullshit, married for alliance, and punished for improvising.

    A conqueror’s grandson is a functionary. The great-grandson is essentially a clerk.

    The same hierarchy that rewarded strategic aggression begins selecting for ritualized obedience…symbolic performance…following rules. The alpha male is a bureaucrat in a velvet robe now, parroting the very scripts that once gave him power. Eventually, even elite males are just well-dressed livestock, performing authority within a system they no longer control.

    So no…elites were hardly immune to domestication. They may instigate it. They certainly perpetuate it. And they seem to benefit most from it in the short-term. But they’re clearly the biggest “victims” of their own process, in the end. The smallest brains. The most disconnected from reality. Bloated pale bodies riddled with civilizational disease.

  • The Great Culling: How Civilization Engineered the Modern Male

    Somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, something strange happened to the human genome. Specifically, the Y chromosome.

    Over a 2,000-year stretch, human genetic diversity experienced a massive contraction. At one point, only about 1 in 20 men were reproducing. That means 95% of male lineages vanished…poof…gone. Most men alive today descend from a shockingly narrow slice of the male population that lived during that window.

    So…what the hell happened?

    Civilization happened.

    Not in the TED Talk sense…with aqueducts, murals, and democracy, but in the REAL sense…with hierarchy, slavery, and reproductive monopoly.

    The dawn of social stratification. More specifically, the sorting and discarding of people under systems of control. Yet more specifically, men controlling and flattening each other, themselves, women, and their environments with castes and dynasties, priesthoods and palaces, slavery and statehood, patrilineal inheritance, and elite polygyny (harems). And a certain kind of man systematically slaughtering every other kind of man.

    This wasn’t a simple population dip (women were still passing on their genes)…it was a selection event. And it coincides with when the process we call “civilization” was going into hyperdrive. Let that sink in for a moment. The selection event, where the genetic lines of 95 out of 100 men ended….wasn’t random. It was engineered by emerging systems that rewarded a very specific type of man…and erased the rest.

    Let’s be clear about what this means.

    When only a tiny elite of men get to reproduce (thanks to war, rape, slavery, or sheer status monopoly), you get a collapse in Y-chromosome diversity. Genetic drift goes wild. Founder effects explode. Suddenly, the behavioral and physiological traits of those few “winners” echo through the generations.

    What kinds of traits? What did the 5% of men still reproducing have in common?

    Well, to survive a slave system (on either side of the equation), you need emotional suppression. To survive a caste system? You need to be obedient to the hierarchy. A priesthood? Symbolic fluency (be good with complex bullshit). To reproduce in a monarchy? Performative loyalty.

    You simply don’t need egalitarianism, independence, or sensitivity to injustice. In fact, those traits will get you killed (or at least reproductively erased). It’s naive to think that a process like this just weeded out bodies…it weeded out minds.

    Over generations, civilization reshapes the species to favor male behaviors that reinforce civilized systems (status-seeking, dominance within rules, emotional control, strategic conformity). We call this “civilized” behavior. It sounds great, because it implies that the only alternative is (and was) resource-seeking, dominance without rules, little to no emotional control, and constant rebellion. But before we even explore whether that’s true, let’s acknowledge the fact that “civilized” behavior is nothing but system-optimized behavior, filtered through thousands of years of brutal selection.

    Meanwhile, female mitochondrial DNA (passed maternally) shows no such bottleneck. This means women kept reproducing across a much broader spectrum of lineages. The narrowing came from the top down, not the bottom up. Elite males reshaped the species by erasing vast swaths of it. A bit different from the civilizing / human self-domestication story you hear, isn’t it? The nicer people in the cave cooperating to get rid of the bullies? That happened, but the majority of the domestication story isn’t there. It’s in shackles, pits of bodies, chastity belts, slave raids, human sacrifices, and all manner of horrors.

    And it changed everything.

    It disrupted ancestral balances…between empathy and assertiveness, “wildness” and restraint, autonomy and obedience. It’s not something interesting side note. It altered hormonal profiles, sexual dimorphism, and the developmental timing of traits like aggression and cooperation. Civilization didn’t just change how we live…it reprogrammed what we are.

    And it looks a fuck of a lot like animal domestication. Bottlenecks, Enclosures. Selection for traits that serve the system, not the organism.

    The domestication of plants, animals, and people has implications that, when not accounted for in just about every important conversation we have in just about every field, results in the biggest example of decontextualization I can think of. Not acknowledging the maladaptively high level of attenuation of the modern human when discussing psychology, anthropology, history, sustainability, etc….means solutions simply aren’t found. The entire thing becomes self-referential.

    We’re not aware of what we are. We’re a domesticated phenotype…biologically tamed, groomed to perform in systems of symbolic order, no matter how insane that order becomes. And we try to find solutions within those insane systems. Solutions to the systems themselves, within the rules of the systems. It’s dizzying.

    We’re still living in the domesticating system. We operate inside its psychological architecture. And we carry the genetic consequences of a civilizational edit that decided which kinds of men would carry forward, and which kinds wouldn’t.

    The modern man isn’t just a descendant of random survivors. He isn’t a product of “survival of the fittest.” He’s the product of selective obedience. He’s a creature designed (quite literally) to fit the cage.

  • The Genome in Chains

    Biomass: the total mass of biological material in a given space.

    I’ve always liked that concept. You hear it in permaculture a lot…this plant produces more biomass, ecosystem edges teem with it, generate biomass to regenerate a landscape, etc.

    Biomass is life, quantified.

    Sometimes I wonder if you could look at human genetic material the same way. Imagine the total weight of the human genome…billions of copies, stretching across continents and centuries…stacked like cordwood. What percentage of that mass, that genetic biomass, came from people who were free? Not politically free…biologically free. Emotionally free. Cognitively free…

    Not much.

    How much of the DNA currently in circulation came through bodies that were coerced, owned, bred, conscripted, suppressed, raped, or systematically tamed?

    My guess? Most of it.

    Let’s talk some bleak history.

    Chattel slavery wasn’t a one-off horror…it was a civilizational feature for thousands of years. From Sumer to Rome to the cotton fields of Georgia…it was a foundation.

    Female reproductive coercion…rape, forced breeding, marriage as transaction…was the norm.

    Serfdom, debt bondage, child labor…also not freak events. These were normal life for most people, for most of human civilization.

    Throw in conscription, arranged marriage, and forced settlement. All designed to control reproduction and to channel genes in service of a system (not the individual).

    And then there’s caste, colonization, and mass incarceration…all of which reshaped survival odds, mating patterns, and the filtering of traits.

    And when I ask, What made it into the gene pool? I’m not just asking about biology…I’m asking about systemic conditioning. Because the traits that made survival possible under the conditions I listed above…obedience, emotional detachment, suppression, tolerance for unreality/contradiction…got passed on. They had to. That traits that didn’t? Coherence. Sensitivity. “Wildness.” Embodied distress in response to insanity. These got culled. Not completely, but enough to shift the signal.

    Civilization is domestication…by volume. It tames populations. It edits the genome the same way it edits forests…selectively…for yield…for compliance.

    We’re left with a species that wears its captivity in its genes. Shaped by submission…adaptation to cages. A genome that might just be a palimpsest of captivity.

  • Human Self-Domestication–Passive Drift or Violent Control?

    I don’t know why, but I started with a view of self-domestication as a kind of passive and benign drift that came with sedentism, agriculture, and symbolic sociality (i.e. we domesticated plants and animals but were, in turn, domesticated by them). But I’ve been reading James C. Scott recently, and he points out that early states (and much of the “civilizing process”) were neither passive nor benign. At the very least, human domestication wasn’t just self-domestication. It was also (largely, even) the domestication of other humans.

    In Against the Grain, Scott shows beyond a doubt that civilization depended on enclosure, grain taxation, raiding and enslavement to maintain labor populations, and that flight and resistance were common responses. Civilization was never attractive…it had to be enforced.

    Slavery is the foundation of civilization.

    And when this becomes clear, you see that rather than some sort of soft selection for docility, the domestication of humans is the product of millennia of deliberate constraint of movement, enforced labor routines, punishment of disobedience, and breaking of wild behavior. These are textbook domestication techniques…and, yes, they were applied to humans.

    If slaves, captives, and conquered populations were the ones who had to survive in early states, then compliance, emotional suppression, and symbolic fluency would have been necessary for survival. Over generations, these traits could be biologically and culturally selected (and feedback sensitivity selected against). This is what captivity breeding looks like.

    The “self” domestication that gets talked about (the one that doesn’t involve slavery, castration, rape, harems, etc.) probably only occurred among the elite. As the systems they built (for domesticating a labor population) gained internal momentum, rewarded behaviors that served them, and punished deviation (even in elites)…they became autonomous. And to maintain their position, the elite had to perform their role, suppress feedback, and inhabit their own abstraction. Some sort of hyper-domestication (powdered wigs?) where they weren’t just compliant, but enslaved by the structures they created to dominate others. This might explain why civilization doesn’t produce sovereign elites…it produces Donald Trumps. Actors, symbol manipulators, technocrats, surrogates. Hollow men.

  • So what is “neurodivergence,” really?

    We know it isn’t a disorder.

    Based on everything we know about human self-domestication, it’s hard to argue with the theory that neurodivergence is a retention of traits that were less attenuated by domestication…preserved in pockets where selection for tameness (compliance, suppression, abstraction) was weaker or more variable. And that during times of civilizational incoherence (when systems break down, contradictions multiply, symbolic structures fail), less “domesticated” people seem to appear in greater numbers (despite always being there), or become more visible because the gap between civilization and reality widens, or finally start to make sense, because their traits are adaptive in collapse.

    Let’s build this…

    Domestication selects for neural crest attenuation (compliance, docility, symbolic fluency, sensory tolerance).

    But not all populations or individuals experienced this equally (geographic, cultural, environmental diversity produced pockets of lower attenuation…these groups retained more feedback sensitivity…emotional reactivity, moral alarm, sensory intensity, literalism).

    Civilization pathologizes these traits (labels them as autism, oppositional defiance, “hyper-sensitivity,” etc.).

    But during periods of systemic incoherence or collapse, these individuals become more noticeable. Their “maladaptive” traits now map reality more accurately. They begin to show up in number…not because they’re new, but because the system’s illusions are failing.

    Fast-forward to 2025, and you have an apparent “epidemic” of neurodivergence.

    The explanation seems simple to me. We have greater exposure to feedback-inverted environments, a reduced ability of symbolic systems to contain contradiction (literal minds become more visible), more diagnostic categories and more surveillance (capturing traits that were overlooked), and a spike in environmental toxicity and noise (which dysregulates people with low attenuation).

    We don’t fit civilization because we weren’t (as) shaped by its full domestication loop.

    Why the hell is this so controversial or offensive? Clearly, some dog breeds retain more wolf-like traits. Clearly, some animals resist captivity better than others. And clearly, some humans retain more ancestral (feedback-sensitive) traits. Why? There’s only one explanation…and it’s the same one that explains why any “minority” trait persists. Their lineages were less selected for it (tameness), or more recently disrupted from (feedback-rich) contexts.

    For fuck’s sake, neurodivergent traits aren’t “new conditions.” They’re old configurations that make sense, especially in systems that don’t.

    So, what’s next?

    In evolutionary biology, we have to challenge the assumption that domestication is purely beneficial or benign. We have to reinterpret human evolution not as progressive refinement, but as selection for attenuation. We have to connect neurodivergent traits to ancestral or undomesticated configurations (if you insist). And we have to invoke runaway selection, neural crest theory, and feedback-driven adaptation when we do it.

    In neuroscience and developmental biology, we have to leverage the neural crest hypothesis to explain multi-trait shifts in domesticated species. We have to run with the theory that neurotypical traits are a developmental cascade triggered by early suppression feedback responsiveness. And we have to embrace the fact that what we classify as “autism” or “ADHD” probably reflect less attenuation of limbic, sensory, or integrative functions.

    In anthropology and archaeology, we have to reframe the civilizing process not as moral evolution, but as feedback severance and systemic control. Otherwise, we’ll continue to idealize it and our endpoint will be collapse. Again. And again. We have to challenge the dominant narrative of the “agricultural revolution” and the idea that domestication was progress. We have to recognize the fact that cultural and cognitive diversity in prehistory was shaped by differential exposure to domestication pressure.

    In psychiatry and psychology (it’s hard to be nice here), we need to reinterpret diagnostic categories as misread adaptive traits in maladaptive systems. We need to frame neurodivergence as a mismatch with an incoherent system, not as dysfunction. We need to challenge (or just burn) assumptions about “normalcy” and “functionality” in the DSM framework. And we need to wipe the slate clean and open the floor to all questions regarding moral injury, masking, and performance pathology.

    In systems theory and cybernetics, we need to look at feedback inversion as the main civilizational process. We need to apply runaway selection and closed-loop dysfunction to human cognition and culture (as painful as that will be). And we need to define neurodivergent distress as diagnostic error signals in failing systems.

    In cognitive science (and philosophy of mind), we need to challenge predictive coding’s assumption that accuracy is the goal…it needs to be acknowledged that civilization selects for predictive stability over truth. We need to demonstrate the link between literalism and feedback sensitivity to uncompromised model updating. And, come on, we need to admit that what we call “neurodivergent” cognition is closer to epistemological integrity (reality).

    In collapse studies/political sciences, we need to recognize that what we call “civilization” consistently suppresses the very traits that can correct its course. We need to see that collapse isn’t an anomaly, but the endpoint of systemic feedback suppression. And we need to say this: “Neurodivergent people are early responders in this collapsing feedback loop we find ourselves in.”

  • The Domesticated vs. The Wild

    Let’s have some fun. Imagine you’re an alien scientist, looking at domesticated humans and animals and their wild counterparts. You have no historical context…just the before-and-after. And your objective is to figure out what kind of selective pressure would explain the shift.

    You look at physical changes and note significant brain shrinkage and facial neoteny. You look at behavioral changes and note reduced reactivity (including reactive aggression) and increased compliance. You look at neurological changes and note less vigilance and more dependence. And you look at cognitive changes and note a greater tolerance for contradiction or command. Now you need to reverse-engineer the pressure that accounts for those changes.

    You’d conclude that attenuation was being rewarded not for survival, but for something like a tolerance of constraint. Reduced reactivity to imposed conditions that would normally trigger avoidance, protest, flight, or rupture.

    In domesticated (civilized) animals and people, it’s clear that attenuation is being rewarded for enabling them to do certain things. Namely, remain in proximity to unpredictable others, function under external control, inhibit instinctual responses to pain, crowding, or contradiction, and perform behaviors for social approval or symbolic reward…not direct need fulfillment.

    What if you were pressed to take a shot at describing the environment that produced such a pressure?

    If you had no cultural context and just observed the shift, you’d infer something like the following: a system that imposes artificial constraints, limits autonomy, suppresses immediate feedback, and rewards non-disruption. A system that rewards animals that don’t bolt at loud noises, humans who don’t resist moral contradiction, and minds that prioritize external signals (orders, rules, appearances) over internal ones (intuition, emotion, sensory experience). One that filters out traits that protest, question, disrupt, flee, or grieve.

    Your hypothesis might be something like, “Attenuation was being selected for to enable life inside an imposed system that contradicts natural feedback.” Of course, that’s the very definition of captivity, domestication…civilization.

    Now, you’re handed the conventional narrative. The history and anthropology books. The studies. You’d feel validated somewhat as you read the theory of human self-domestication…a process that “weeded out aggression” in favor of cooperation, social harmony, and prosocial behavior. But you’d also feel something was off. That this framing is deeply incomplete (and dangerously flattening). Because there’s no mention of the actual trade-offs.

    Let’s look at the conventional framing of human (self) domestication and see what it gets right.

    Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that early humans began to select against reactive aggression, especially in small bands where group (coalitionary) punishment could be used to ostracize or kill bullies. Over time, this likely contributed to facial feminization, reduced sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes), and more juvenile (neotenous) behavior…hallmarks of “domestication syndrome.” Also, a reduction in testosterone-linked traits, stress-reactivity, and impulsivity…which likely made groups more stable/cohesive.

    What’s this framing missing?

    For one, I think it confuses (or leads people to confuse) submission with peace. Just because someone isn’t fighting back doesn’t mean the system is just. A domesticated animal isn’t peaceful, necessarily, it’s conditioned or selected not to protest. Likewise, a “civilized” human isn’t necessarily cooperative…they’re trained to suppress resistance. In other words, to the extent that we eliminated (reactive) aggression…we eliminated resistance to coercion.

    And it fails to distinguish between types of aggression. Reactive aggression (fight-or-flight, self-defense, boundary enforcement) was suppressed. Moral aggression (anger in response to injustice, betrayal, or cruelty) was pathologized (too sensitive or oppositional). But instrumental aggression (cold, planned, goal-oriented violence) is clearly rewarded in civilization. To the extent that it “succeeds,” it always has been.

    And the conventional explanation for human self-domestication doesn’t seem interested in what was lost. It treats the process as a moral victory. But I don’t think it was “bad behavior” that got weeded out…it was the ability to react honestly to harm. Domestication selected for attenuated perception, emotional buffering, and following symbolic rules…not any kind of inner peace. It reduced reactive violence while it reduced truthful response to violence. And I think the intention (of those driving the domestication process) was in the latter, with the former being largely inadvertent.

    Because we know that selecting for one behavioral trait (like tameness or compliance) cascades into structural, cognitive, sensory, and emotional changes. We know this. Traits aren’t modular. They’re entangled…especially when they involve the neural crest.

    The neural crest hypothesis of domestication (2014, Wilkins, Wrangham, Fitch) suggests that domestication syndrome in mammals is caused by mild deficits in neural crest cell development during embryogenesis.

    The neural crest contributes to all sorts of things…facial morphology (jaw, teeth, skull), adrenal glands (stress response), pigmentation, autonomic nervous system, peripheral nerves and glia, and parts of the limbic system (emotion, reactivity, threat detection).

    If you select for tameness (or, in humans, for docility/compliance), you’re not just changing a particular behavior…you’re reconfiguring the organism’s whole developmental trajectory. And here’s what you get:

    • Smaller brains
    • Flattened faces
    • Lower stress reactivity
    • Blunted sensory input
    • Neoteny (more juvenile traits retained into adulthood)
    • Reduced startle or protest response
    • Delayed or diminished emotional signaling

    Where does that show up in humans? Increased social pliability. Extended childhood dependence. Lower physiological sensitivity. Greater performance tolerance under contradictory or symbolic norms.

    In other words, your “modern human” wasn’t just bred to be nice…it was bred to feel less and to respond less to what would once have been danger, injustice, or disorder. That isn’t a linear trade. It’s a network-wide reorganization of the system (what Bateson would call a change in the system’s pattern of constraints).

  • Compliance vs. Resilence (to Incoherence)

    I know the civilizing process / civilized systems select for both…but are they really the same thing? Are they both forms of attenuation (of feedback sensitivity)?

    Compliance is the willingness / tendency to conform to external demands, rules, or expectations (regardless of your internal state or of the environmental logic). It’s a behavioral adaptation. Your behavior becomes externally guided, socially enforced. You’re rewarded for obedience, predictability, and following rules. The more compliant you are, the better you’ll function in hierarchal or symbolic systems. But this adaptation (necessarily) suppresses agency, spontaneity, and moral resistance. I think of compliance as a way to survive within incoherence, by submitting to its logic…even when it contradicts reality.

    Resilience to incoherence is a bit different. I see it as the ability to tolerate cognitive dissonance, sensory overwhelm, moral contradiction, or systemic absurdity (without breaking down). Unlike compliance, this is a cognitive/emotional adaptation that’s internalized over time. You get rewarded for emotional detachment (“thick skin”), optimism, and stability. This adaptation enables prolonged function under conditions that would distress a more sensitive person. But the the adaptation (becoming resilient) suppresses emotional fidelity, sensory reactivity, and ethical boundaries. Think of it as the dampening of error signals…it allows the dysfunctional systems you participate in to keep running even when they no longer map to reality.

    They both suggest selection for high attenuation (reduced capacity to detect, register, and act on biologically meaningful feedback). That includes sensory attenuation (tolerating noise, crowds), emotional attenuation (suppressing distress, grief, anger, empathy), moral attenuation (compromising truth for harmony or success), and relational attenuation (roleplay instead of reciprocity).

    So I see attenuation as being the core functional trait being selected for in civilization. Not intelligence, strength, or adaptability, but attenuation…especially in domains that would otherwise threaten systemic continuity. That’s the falsifiable hypothesis I’m running with. That civilization (as both a process and a system) is runaway selection for attenuation.

    But attenuation is relative, isn’t it? I can’t say something is “attenuated” without specifying what signal or input has been diminished, and relative to what baseline/context.

    So in the context of domestication/civilization…what signals are being attenuated (and compared to what prior or natural baseline)? I listed some above and I keep adding more.

    Again, it’s not that “civilized” or “neurotypical” people are less capable in general. But we need to acknowledge that they’ve been conditioned (or selected) to attenuate very specific categories of feedback (categories that threaten the coherence of symbolic, hierarchal, or artificial systems they depend on). It isn’t hard to see when you think of how and why we domesticate animals…attenuation is the system’s way of silencing disruptive signals (and only “adaptive” in relation to a system in which truth is inconvenient).

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