a neotenous new year to you
“Growing young …
is a process that has played
a fundamental role
in the evolution of the human species
& in the development
of every human being who has ever lived.
Moreover, its significance & its ramifications for the future of each of us & of humanity in general are so staggering that an understanding should be part of everyone’s equipment.
Yet as a scientific principle it is known to only a few scientists; others – the vast numbers of human beings whose lives might be changed by the application of this principle – are ignorant of it.
the truth about the human species is that
in body, spirit, feeling & conduct
we are designed to grow & develop
in ways that emphasize
rather than minimize
childlike traits;
we were never intended to grow “up”
into the kinds of adults
most of us have become”
In this work that I do, my passion is about healing often via the medium of human truth/honesty. I feel the two are intimately connected, & stagnation & apathy are the price of avoidance.
This article is mainly comprised of the words of a man called Ashley Montagu from his book Growing Young (1981).
It contains immensely healing concepts. I have chosen excerpts that I hope speak to the missing part of you that is calling for healing.
That part is the child.
The child is & always has been, the direct target of Western trauma. That is why now, as adults we are pretty damn useless – because we were …
… ‘taken out’, as children.
Nations rise & fall by what they do to their children – you were one once – why did what happened to you, happen?
At the opening to this article we found these words.
“the truth about the human species is that in body, spirit, feeling & conduct we are designed to grow & develop in ways that emphasize rather than minimize childlike traits; we were never intended to grow “up”.”
“Why would that be”, you ask, “Whatever traits they have, I (surely) already have too”?
Take a look:
Curiosity is one of the most important; imaginativeness; playfulness; open-mindedness; willingness to experiment; …
… flexibility; humor; energy; receptiveness to new ideas; honesty; eagerness to learn; & perhaps most pervasive & the most valuable of all, the need to love. All normal children, unless they have been corrupted by their elders, show these qualities every day of their childhood years.
They ask questions endlessly … They watch & listen. They want to know everything about everything. They can keep themselves busy with the simplest of toys …
… they play games endlessly …… They accept change without defensiveness. When they try to do something & fail, they are able to try to do it another way, & another until they find that it works. They laugh … from sheer exuberance & happiness.
Unless they suspect they may be punished for it, they tell the truth; they call the shots as they see them. And they soak up knowledge & information like sponges; they are learning all the time; …
… every moment is filled with learning.
Apart from you yourself who of course still retains all these traits (denial is a BIG part of trauma), how many adults do you know who live like that?
Surely you have noticed they live like this:
They tend to stop asking those questions that will elicit information … Most adults draw back from the unfamiliar … Nor can most adults content themselves with simple playthings enriched by the imagination …
… Most adults have lost, too, the ability to laugh from sheer happiness … Most adults have lost their ability to tell the simple truth; many appear to have lost the ability to discern a simple truth in the complex morass they live in.
Perhaps the saddest loss of all is the gradual erosion of the eagerness to learn …
… This hardening of the mind – psychosclerosis – is a long distance from a child’s acceptance & flexibility & open-mindedness.
There are many ways, (all taken advantage of) to kill the child.
“Childhood was seen as a difficult period that was unfortunately necessary for the production of mature, no-nonsense adults, & the entire effort of the education & training of children was …
… aimed at making adults of them as soon as possible … Imagination was frowned upon – feared, even – curiosity was derided (“Curiosity killed the cat”), free playfulness & humor were discouraged …
… open-mindedness was thought to be heretical, & honesty was often considered simple rudeness. As for the most precious of all childlike qualities, the eagerness to learn, it was accepted by adults only so long as the subject of the learning was …
… a “proper” one.”
Why would something so fucked up as the education system be created?
“Anthropologists, psychologists, other social scientists & even some educators have begun to recognize that children are not simply small imperfect-adults who must be dragged as early as possible into the adult-behaving world. We know that children are developing human beings …
… who will continue developing all their lives if they are not prevented. And now we begin to see that the goal of life is to die young – as late as possible.”
Can the attributes of the child really be so important?
“In 1926 [Louis Bolk] pointed out that … adult humans exhibit many physical traits that are …
… also features of the human fetus. This is not so true of other animals. He listed flat-facedness, minimum body hair, large brain size, structure of hands & feet, the form of the pelvis, & a number of additional physical characteristics that change in other animals but that in human beings persist into adulthood. Bolk called this principle “fetalization“. Fetalization was effected by the retardation of the rate of development.
The importance of this slow development, or retardation, was seen by J.B.S.Haldane, as a major evolutionary trend in human beings. In 1932 he underscored the fact that the essential feature of the latest stage of human evolution has not been the acquisition of new features but rather …
… preservation of embryonic & infantile traits that had been developed when the organisms were in the womb sheltered from violence … [he] further proposed that if human evolution is to continue along the same lines, “it will probably involve a still greater prolongation of childhood & retardation of maturity.”
Konrad Lorenz, German ethologist, writing in 1950, maintained that by far the more important features in the history of human evolution are not physical but behavioural. He drew heavily on the ideas of German sociologist Arnold Gehlen … that the unique & outstanding human trait is that of remaining in an unending state of development. The speciality of humans is nonspecialization, versatility, they have remained free to change as change is required …
… by whatever environment they encounter; they are able to develop special traits to meet special needs.”
But am I wasting my time & energy
trying to get through to
frozen adults
who worship their
prison of adulthood?
Frozen women imprisoned in their skin.
Calcified men who live in fear of emotion.
“It is a curious fact that humans are the only creatures who weep … during emotional distress or joy … Indeed, at every point, at every stage, in every sector of human history, the outstanding characteristic humans have been called upon to exhibit has been sympathy, fellow-feeling, cooperation …
… the crying adult becomes a child, & thereby tends to induce caring responses. Even callous males may find it difficult to resist a weeping female. Emotional weeping in grief & sympathy constitutes a homeostatic mechanism designed to …
… restore the organism to equilibrium. We often weep tears of joy at some celebration or reunion of those we love. The Andaman Islanders make weeping an essential part of every social ceremony. When friends meet after a separation of a few weeks or longer, they greet each other by sitting down, one of the lap of the other, with arms around each other’s necks, weeping & wailing for two or three minutes, till they are tired.”
“The emotional distress of which weeping is usually the external manifestation demands a delicacy of response of a peculiarly human kind …
… It is, therefore, probable that weeping has exercised a humanising effect upon humans as individuals, as persons & also upon the human group as a community … it seems likely … the flow of tears – has played a powerful role in the evolution of humans as compassionate creatures … in such cultures, in which weeping is considered normal, healthy behaviour, there seems to be a great deal more human warmth, reflecting a more sensitive involvement in humanity in general.”
Interestingly, biology itself suggests we are meant to be allowed to weep …
“The very fact that humans possess prominent noses suggests that they might do well to weep, or at least humidify them more often”
Just how fucked up could a world become when it has emotionally killed its children?
“that extraordinary genius …
… William Kingdon Clifford (1845 – 1879) pointed out that the first condition of mental development is “that the mind should be creative rather than acquisitive“… a race that is “plastic & capable of change, may be regarded as young & vigorous, while a race which is fixed, persistent in form, unable to change, is as surely effete, worn out, in peril of extinction … it is quite possible for conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress …
… is impossible“
I see … so your saying quite, quite, quite fucked.
But I just don’t have time for all that childish shit, I have WORK to do – it’s a nice sentiment – we’ll get round to it when the important things are sorted.
“The extent to which the child has played a role in the development of humanity has been severely neglected. The true worth of a people, it has been said, is that seen through the eyes of its children. Awareness of the true nature of the child & of the …
… important role the child is capable of playing in the furtherance of mental health – indeed the very survival of our species – is … a requisite first step.”
“Among non-literate people children are generally greatly valued & cared for …
… The devaluation & debasement of children seems largely peculiar to the cultures of the modern world.
… non-aggressive, cooperative behaviour is …
… characteristic of fetus, infant & child. In the evolution of humankind there is little doubt that nonaggressive behavior has been at the highest selective premium … That human beings have always been capable of anger, rage, & violent behavior can scarcely be doubted, but such behavior is usually the reaction to specific environmental conditions …
… not the spontaneous expression of internally generated effects.”
Stop it I don’t want to change my thinking – this would be too hard to do. How can caring for children matter so much. They’re tough & anyway they have to “LEARN”.
“It is of more than ordinary interest to note that four scientists without any knowledge of one another’s work (in three cases at least), arrived at precisely the same conclusion … concerning the length of the gestation period: …
… the idea that the human infant when born has completed only half its gestation, the other half having to be completed outside the womb … Babies must live in an atmosphere very different from that of ordinary everyday living, & its main principles of isolation & security closely resemble gestation itself …
… It is indeed an exterior gestation.”
It is not been adequately understood how very immature the human newborn is, & how long his immaturity lasts …
… Owing to this failure on the part of civilised peoples, the needs of the human infant during this precarious period of his development have simply not been recognized“
If this has been understood for such a long time, we have to question Western trauma birthing.
“Contemporary obstetrics, with few exceptions, still treats pregnancy & childbirth as if they were diseases …
… on the assumption that it is better to treat it as such in order to be prepared for the complications that may develop … An event that should be approached as a celebration & a ceremony is transformed into a technological medical procedure in which virtually every human need is outraged.”
We can begin to see how trauma in the West is systematically & cold-bloodedly begun at birth.
Then this ongoing trauma creates a people who are simply not capable of paying the hefty emotional costs required in the nurture of healthy human beings.
In many ways we are emotionally bankrupt.
For his adequate healthy development the human infant requires, beyond all else, a great deal of tender loving care. Health at the very minimum is the ability to love, to work, to play, & to think soundly …
… Love is the active process of conferring survival in a creatively enlarging manner upon the other, the communication to the other, by demonstrative acts of profound involvement in his welfare, giving him all the support, sustenance, & stimulation that he requires …
… for the fulfillment of his potentialities for being the kind of human being that you are being to him, that he can depend on you whenever he is in need, that you will never commit the supreme treason of letting him down when he most stands in need of you …
… It is in this way that one learns to love, simply by being loved.
You may think these are scary times & love must take a back seat as we focus on ’survival’ …
In the evolution of humanity love has played a highly important role. Except, however, for rare thinkers such as Charles Sanders Pierce & Petr Kropotkin, the roles of love & cooperation in human evolution have been wholly neglected. In an unloving & alienated world wracked by strife & violence, such an idea appeared both unreal & ludicrous. There can be, however, little doubt that …
… no early population of human beings could have survived had it not been for the dominant role that love & cooperation played in holding them together.
It is, in a very real & not in the least paradoxical sense, even more necessary to love than it is to live, for without love there can be no healthy growth or development, no real life. The neotenous principle for human beings – indeed, the evolutionary imperative – is to live as if to live & love were one.
“Wow I never thought about it like that before”, you say.
Not only females, but males also, will often gather round the mother & infant & beg to be allowed to hold it. This is almost a universal response among humans, except in some parts of the world there is what amounts to an unspoken tabu on males displaying anything resembling the interest in children customarily exhibited by women. This is …
… especially the case among the English speaking peoples of the world, in which the dehumanised & dehumanising gender role the male is expected to play calls for an abstention from behavior that is considered feminine.
Once again, we find practices that further (& further) remove a race of people from equilibrium & herd them into trauma.
In many nonliterate cultures …children are seldom out of the arms of some adult or older child. A great deal of cuddling goes on from the earliest days of life … Lorna Marshall writes of the gatherer-hunter Bushmen of Botswana:
The !Kung never seem to tire of their babies. They dandle them, kiss them, dance with them, & sing to them. The older children make playthings of the babies. The girls carry them around … The boys also carry them, give them rides & drag them on karosses (a favorite game).
There are so many ways we do not see children or their value.
“We have often had descriptions of the unconditional love that infants receive in nonliterate societies from their parents, but though evidence is abundantly available it is seldom mentioned that children are also a great source of love for other children …
… not only their siblings, but all children.”
Try this on for size – though it might make you feel a little uncomfortable at first.
“The subtle alchemy by which love is transmuted in the child into what it most requires for bodily as well as well as behavioral development may defy complete explanation … caring for the infant consists primarily in satisfying his needs. Such caring constitutes the commencement of the socialization of the person, preparation for participation in the social group. As the child matures & socialization continues …
… the child becomes more & more dependent rather than more free, & this social binding continues throughout life. It is this social bonding of early life that the person is designed to maintain, indeed to grow & develop, in all the days of his life.”
“This view of development of the person cannot be too strongly emphasized … The conventional view of the socialization of the person as developing toward greater & greater autonomy or individuality is seriously misleading …
… Of course every person has a unique personality in the sense that it is never identical to that of any other. Such differences are important … It should, however, be understood that every one of those differences has developed under the influence of specific socializing factors, & were it not for the creative action of those socializing factors, the functional-structural differences that characterize each person would not exist…
Every person is socially bound to the group in which he has been socialized. In a sense the “individual” is a myth … in any evaluation of a human being as a social organism it should be clear that he is as organically bound to others as if he were one of a number of cells comprising a colonial organism. Even physically & physiologically, humans are neither dissociated nor do they carry on a separate existence in any but an arbitrary sense. Even the emotionally arid psychopath is unable to do without others.”
“In the land of “Rugged American Individualism,” in which the focus in the conditioning of the child has been to turn him into a person who conforms to the stereotype of ….
… the “successful individual,” large numbers of persons are produced who, in the midst of the lonely crowd, live in an isolated narcissism that eventually leads to a chill … There are millions of them, & the damage they do underscores the myth of the individual …
… namely that it neglects to teach the moral obligation of independent thought, the responsibility to challenge unsound ideas & conventions, the right to protest, the bounden duty to object. This is an essential aspect of health. Blind submission to a group has always utterly vitiated personal development & progress in humanity.“
The enforced emotional isolation in the lives of every person in the West, is I think at the heart of our sickness – we do not know how to connect & so we suffer the most abysmal turmoil, alone.
“In the concept of “the individual” we have created separateness where separateness does not exist – where, in reality…
… the genuine condition is relatedness … a creature apart from a social group is little more than an organic being … The person is to a large extent a set of social interrelationships. As Bogardus has put it, “As a result of intersocial stimulation he moves up from the biological level. The interstimulation that occurs between him & the members of the group … explains him more than any other method of approach can do”.”
“Both the fallacy of absolute individuals & the excess of individualism, wrote the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, are vicious.”
“And as Gutking put it, “To think in terms of absolute individuals – absolute individuals are but things – is the outgrowth of our obsession with acquisitive urges. To think in terms of relations is human & paves the way toward the solidarity of mankind.”
“The important point for us to recognize is that the “individual” represents a reaction or response pattern that makes him part of a whole of which he always remains an integral & important constituent … The person is a product of a field of biological & social forces, & every person constitutes a part of that field all his life.”
“Each acts as he does, not because he is an independent individual, but because he is a dependent-interdependent person, bound to his social group by ties that impel him to maintain his relationships according to the requirements, in each case, sanctioned & demanded by the group. This does not mean the person is without free will … but it is a will that functions largely within the limits & conditions determined by his own past experience within the culture of his own social group.
None of this implies that the group is superior to the person. The obligation of the group, at whatever level, is to the person, to do everything in its power to maximise his potentialities …
… & preserve his integrity as a person, a unique person. The obligation of the person to the group is to contribute toward the development of himself & of other persons. The person is not to be conceived of as living for the group, or the group solely for the person; each serves the needs of the other.”
The long history of endemic horror that has pervaded the Western world concerning the nature of the child is only today being very slowly corrected. There are still millions among us who believe that children are naturally depraved … This view of the child, to which many still subscribe, was an article of faith among the Calvinist-Puritan ancestors of contemporary believers:
“The Young child which lieth in the cradle (is) both wayward and full of afflictions: and though his body be but small, yet he hath a great heart, and is altogether inclined to evil . . . . If this sparkle be suffered to increase, it will rage over and burn down the whole house. For we are changed and become good, not by birth, but by education ~Robert Cleaver and John Dod, A Godly Form of household Government, 1621
It is time for change – for our own good.
It is time for healing.
I’m seeing again & again how possible that is. But we need to see how screwed our civilisation has been & begin to acknowledge the terrible emotional traumas that we, the lucky ones in the West, have endured in, & often because of, isolation.
“If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it — the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.” ~ William Kingdon Clifford
I think when we start to see our own blockages, we begin to heal our world(s).
I was on the Celtic Rebel‘s radio show last Sunday
looking at the traumatising of the WestHe’s done a brave write-up -
which includes a link to the show.
living wild
Right, I’ve had enough of seeing a scary monster ice-cream sitting on top of my blog … it’s time for a change.
And while we definitely need to see what’s malignantly hidden,
we also have to put our energies into
reclaiming our wildness.
In Auckland right now, the Pohutukawa trees are ablaze – sometimes called the New Zealand Christmas tree, they vibrate with life even when hanging off the edge of a cliff, which incidently, is one of their favourite locations.
If they can blaze with life in precarious situations …
… then why the hell can’t we?
?
?
Enjoy.
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p.s – apologies for not replying to the later comments on the last article – I was away for a wee while & when I got back I was ill & just didn’t have the strength – sometimes it’s easier just to move on than go back (unless of course, you’re on the wrong road) – but all comments were much appreciated & full of insight.
very best to all
Ad-versive
Here follows a short article because the upcoming quote made me think & remember:
“According to … Advertising Age, the major publication of the advertising industry, “Only eight percent of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind; …
… the rest is worked & reworked deep within the recesses of the brain, where a product’s positioning & repositioning takes shape”.” Can’t Buy My Love ~Jean Kilbourne
Onz upona time this ice cream gave me a hell of a fright.
No, it had nothing to do with size.
It was because it vaulted out of a bus shelter & straight into my peripheral vision.
Had I not been such a lady or I might have said:
“Arghhh … what the fuck was that?”
If you’ve done those magic eye 3-D pictures …
… you’ll have had a similar kind of experience where the image suddenly jumps out at you from the page.
I was so shocked at being assaulted by an ice cream that I went back with my camera & took his picture.
It is a ‘him’.
It was not as easy as I thought it would be, to get people to see the monster – to blur their eyes enough to stop SEEING an ice-cream because that’s what they were being told it was.
And anyway who expects to find something demonic in an ice cream?
When my son got it, he told me that the face reminded him of the Gentlemen from the Buffy series:
“The Gentlemen were …
… bald, pale humanoids that never spoke but were always grinning maliciously through metallic teeth … They did not walk, but instead hovered about a foot above the ground, standing perfectly straight.
“Can’t even shout.
Can’t even cry.
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows,
knocking on doors…
They need to take seven
and they might take yours…
Can’t call to mom.
Can’t say a word.
You’re gonna die screaming
but you won’t be heard.” ―Girl in Buffy’s dreamThe sound of a human voice was fatal to the Gentlemen, so upon arrival in a new town they stole the voices of every inhabitant through a …
… magical box. This forced silence had the added benefit of none of their victims were able to scream for help as the Gentlemen cut their hearts from their still-living bodies“
How wonderfully coincidentally strange that that poem should link the Gentlemen to ice-cream:
“You’re gonna die screaming“
Come on … lost your voice? Sound it out!
“You’re gonna d-ice creaming“.
Well really! If you’ve got no voice, you won’t be screaming.
That’s not the only place I’ve seen ice cream linked to horror & death.
Understanding that the English language is a tongue of supreme mind-fuckery, the twin sounds of ice cream & I scream, should really be leading to questions.
Here follows the other bus-stop reason I originally wrote about the demon ice cream.
A completely harmless, though highly coloured gelato-ensemble.
Nowt wrong with that surely?
Well you have a couple of choices.
- call me a looney & then bugger off
- blur your eyes & see for yourself
Cherchez la skull
Now ask why you would someone put a skull in an ice cream ad?
These are I /eye tricks -
so they’re stylised -
but they’re there -
quite clearly there.
Why are they there?
It’s all very well to look for subliminal sex tricks, but what if there’s a lot more going on.
A lot about trauma & a lot about death.
“Only eight percent of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind; the rest is worked & reworked deep within the recesses of the brain, where a product’s positioning & repositioning takes shape”.“
This isn’t meant to be a scary monster article – rather just a suggestion to look more curiously at the shapes of mindfucks ads because once you’ve seen something, I think a lot of their dirty magic is broken.
Additional … One last thing I left out of first draft. The first ‘monster’ ice cream is really, really big so that’s why there’s a whale, right?
Let the thesaurus double-speak:
… and even more.
Thanks to all commenters for inspiring extra thoughts:
“Even as little children, we screamed for ice cream… I forgot about that. I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.” ~ Joanne
“I can’t stop thinking about this “ice cream/ i scream” thing. For starters, why is that always the go-to reward in TV shows or movies?” … “what is the deal with the creepy ice cream truck driver? I’m not sure if this is common in NZ, but here in the US, many neighborhoods an ice cream truck that goes around in the summer playing creepy music (usually nursery rhymes, I think) to lure the children over to buy ice cream. “ ~ Kathy
… plus a little something from Rebel Country:
