'The latest research on the effects of environment and genetics on personality...'

'“We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse.” Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack—fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance—impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk-taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy. “It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they’re after,” Buckholtz said. Added Zald, “It’s not just that they don’t appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns.”'

'"The shadow," wrote Jung (1963), is "that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious" (cited in Diamond, p. 96). The shadow is a primordial part of our human inheritance, which, try as we might, can never be eluded. The pervasive Freudian defense mechanism known as projection is how most people deny their shadow, unconsciously casting it onto others so as to avoid confronting it in oneself. Such projection of the shadow is engaged in not only by individuals but groups, cults, religions, and entire countries, and commonly occurs during wars and other contentious conflicts in which the outsider, enemy or adversary is made a scapegoat, dehumanized, and demonized. Two World Wars and the current escalation of violence testify to the terrible truth of this collective phenomenon. Since the turn of the twenty-first century we are witnessing a menacing resurgence of epidemic demonization or collective psychosis in the seemingly inevitable violent global collision between radical Islam and Judeo-Christian or secular western culture, each side projecting its collective shadow and perceiving the other as evil incarnate.'

'The narcissist ultimately starves for love because he or she can never get enough in the present to compensate for the past. -- Pathological narcissism is related to narcissistic rage: a furious, reflexive, unrelenting need to repay any perceived slight or insult. Neurotic narcissism starts out as normal narcissism, a healthy, natural childhood need for attention and appreciation which, when continually frustrated, becomes fixated and pathological. Neurotic narcissism stems from inadequate, insufficient or traumatic parenting and resulting narcissistic injury, especially prior to five years of age, during what Freud called the pre-Oedipal period. Children at this tender age find any serious lack of attunement and attention – or certainly, any outright abuse, neglect or emotional, if not physical, abandonment – an insult, a psychological injury, a traumatic psychic wound which distorts perceptions of both themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. When children experience parents or caretakers as unloving, rejecting or hostile, they respond to this narcissistic wounding by creating a shell-like false self – which replaces, protects and conceals the unaccepted, unloved and damaged true self – presenting instead a persona (Jung) based on what they perceive the parents and world want them to be. A great deal of what pathological narcissism in adults disguises is unresolved infantile anger, resentment and rage about not being recognized, accepted, and loved for who we are. This anger – along with feelings of being unlovable and unworthy of love – is buried beneath the false self. It is repressed, but not forgotten, nor forgiven. Narcissistic rage from the past tends to be re-stimulated by intimate relationships in the present. In romantic relationships, feelings are inevitably re-injured, and the childhood anger suddenly resurfaces – with a vengeance.'

'Porn intensely focuses our mental and physical attention, uncovering specific emotions eroticized much earlier in life. Through our sexual fantasies, we attempt to master feelings of powerlessness, shame, guilt, fear and loneliness that have followed us into adulthood. Suppose our parents, teachers, or clergy used excessive shame or guilt to teach or control us. To deal with our resultant anger, we encode the shame in our fantasies, becoming aroused when thinking of ourselves as naughty or engaging in secret or forbidden sexual acts. We feel excited, for example, when punished or disciplined for supposed misbehavior, by being tied up and forced to have sex. Forced to surrender sexually to a dominant aggressor, we allow ourselves to enjoy the sex while escaping from the guilt that has haunted us through life. On the other hand, some of us respond to underlying guilt and shame by sexualizing the idea of becoming the aggressor, perhaps delving into themes of incest or other extreme sexual behaviors to attach pleasure to unthinkable acts. Eroticizing feelings of inadequacy lead to fantasies with themes involving submission, humiliation, verbal abuse or extreme adoration of a partner. We are aroused by being treated as if we are useless, unworthy or weak. Yet, by inviting our own humiliation, we become in charge of it and through the sexual pleasure we receive weaken the impact of childhood pain. Some of us on the the other hand, counteract feelings of inadequacy with ideas of grandiosity in which we imagine ourselves as important, powerful or irresistibly sexy. We invent fantasies in which we are admired, adored, paid for sex, recreating ourselves as competent, powerful and attainable.'

'"It's not that the upper classes are coldhearted," said UC Berkeley social psychologist Jennifer Stellar, lead author of the study published online on Dec. 12 in the journal, Emotion. "They may just not be as adept at recognizing the cues and signals of suffering because they haven't had to deal with as many obstacles in their lives." Stellar and her colleagues' findings challenge previous studies that have characterized lower-class people as being more prone to anxiety and hostility in the face of adversity. "These latest results indicate that there's a culture of compassion and cooperation among lower-class individuals that may be born out of threats to their wellbeing," Stellar said.'

'How does addiction change the brain? According to Dr. Gabor Mate, it's a difficult struggle for hard core drug addicts to kick their habit because their brains are impaired. In a new book, he looks at the common roots of addictive behaviours and what can be done about them. It's called "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction".' -- "Drugs are not addictive to a person not predisposed to become addicted. Predisposition is set according to early stress. ...most substance abusers were themselves abused as children. Early experiences powerfully shape the brain, plus they create the lifelong emotional pain that the drug then comes along to soothe. The trauma is passed on from one generation to the next because the parenting styles are inherited – not genetically – but biologically, and behaviorally, and psychologically, from one generation to the next. If we want people to make the choice to give up their addiction, we first of all have to de-stress them. When people's cortisol levels are high they're much more likely to use the drug to try to soothe their stresses. We're talking about people who were emotionally traumatized and have a deep sense of shame about their very existence."

'Anderson and colleagues suggest that this association between early childhood experiences and teen obesity has origins in the brain. The limbic system in the brain controls responses to stress as well as the sleep/wake cycle, hunger and thirst, and a variety of metabolic processes, mostly through the regulation of hormones. "Sensitive parenting increases the likelihood that a child will have a secure pattern of attachment and develop a healthy response to stress," Anderson said. "A well-regulated stress response could in turn influence how well children sleep and whether they eat in response to emotional distress -- just two factors that affect the likelihood for obesity." Obesity may be one manifestation of dysregulation in the functioning of the stress response system.'

'It became evident that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence were far more common in an obese population than was comfortably recognized. We slowly discovered that major weight loss is often sexually or physically threatening and that obesity, whatever its health risks, is protective emotionally. Ultimately, we saw that certain of our more intractable public health problems such as obesity are often also unconsciously attempted solutions to problems dating back to the earliest years but hidden by time, by shame, by secrecy, and by social taboos against exploring certain areas of life experience. -- Putting it plainly in regard to obesity, we have seen that obesity is not the core problem. Obesity is the marker for the problem and sometimes is a solution. This is a profoundly important realization because none of us expects to cure a problem by treating its symptom. -- The general principles underlying the unconscious, compulsive use of food as a psychoactive agent are common to any of the addictions. Whether we are talking about the next mouthful, the next drink, the next cigarette, the next sexual partner, or the next dose of whatever psychoactive chemical we might buy on the street, the concept is equally applicable: It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.'

'BACKGROUND: Traumatic experiences in early life are risk factors for the development of behavioral and emotional disorders. Such disorders can persist through adulthood and have often been reported to be transmitted across generations. METHODS: To investigate the transgenerational effect of early stress, mice were exposed to chronic and unpredictable maternal separation from postnatal day 1 to 14. RESULTS: We show that chronic and unpredictable maternal separation induces depressive-like behaviors and alters the behavioral response to aversive environments in the separated animals when adult. Most of the behavioral alterations are further expressed by the offspring of males subjected to maternal separation, despite the fact that these males are reared normally. Chronic and unpredictable maternal separation also alters the profile of DNA methylation in the promoter of several candidate genes in the germline of the separated males. Comparable changes in DNA methylation are also present in the brain of the offspring and are associated with altered gene expression.'

'In the first functional MRI brain scan study to investigate the impact of physical abuse and domestic violence on children, scientists at UCL in collaboration with the Anna Freud Centre, found that exposure to family violence was associated with increased brain activity in two specific brain areas (the anterior insula and the amygdala) when children viewed pictures of angry faces. Previous fMRI studies that scanned the brains of soldiers exposed to violent combat situations have shown the same pattern of heightened activation in these two areas of the brain, which are associated with threat detection. The authors suggest that both maltreated children and soldiers may have adapted to be ‘hyper-aware’ of danger in their environment. Dr McCrory said: “Even though we know that maltreatment represents one of the most potent environmental risk factors associated with anxiety and depression, relatively little is known how such adversity ‘gets under the skin’ and increases a child’s later vulnerability.”' -- Repetition Compulsion

'A radical theory about the origins, power and popularity of Harry Potter versus Star Wars versus Lord of the Rings.' -- "If you cannot leave an abusive relationship – or you will not leave an abusive relationship – you will leave reality."

'How much longer do I have to bang every emotionally distant man in a 12-mile radius before I come to terms with the man who I unconsciously picked up demented ideas of intimacy and sexuality from? Come on already! So my dad left when I was 19, ran off with a girl who could have been my sister, and blamed the whole thing on me through a series of passive-aggressive letters over the next several years. It's not that complicated! Sleep around a lot in your mid-20s, experience an epiphanic moment of clarity, put to rest your lifelong male-acceptance issues, and move on already! People do it every day, right? But I've nailed plenty of dudes (and I mean plenty), and where's it gotten me? Unresolvable Sexual Tension City, that's where! Even when I let coworkers finger me in the back of the supply closet, that crazy old hollow feeling won't go away. And it's not through lack of effort on my part, that's for sure! I've got a rash on my ass from all the carpet burns!'

'The human mind keeps track of situations that we have encountered in the past to help us deal with future situations. The unconscious memory, without our knowing, helps us understand and deal with situations in the present that we have dealt with in the past. Parataxic distortion and our unconscious mind make us act the same way in current situations as we did in past without even realizing it. When a person uses parataxic distortion as a defense mechanism it is to protect one from the feeling or consequences from a past event. These events are stored deep inside the brain and kept open to be drawn from if needed. A person may not even remember a certain event but will act a certain way to protect from an outcome with the use of parataxic distortion. The use of distortion at this level is always pathological and makes coping with reality possible for the individual. The grossly reshaping of reality in order to cope with internal struggles makes an individual seem irrational and insane to people of the outside world. Parataxic Distortion as a defense mechanism starts in childhood and continues through adulthood if not properly treated. The major problem with using this distortion as a defense mechanism is that the individual will create a non-realistic world that nobody can help with or understand.'

'For the second year in a row, more American soldiers—both enlisted 'men and women and veterans committed suicide than were killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Excluding accidents and illness, 462 soldiers died in combat, while 468 committed suicide. A difference of six isn't vast by any means, but the symbolism is significant and troubling. In 2009, there were 381 suicides by military personnel, a number that also exceeded the number of combat deaths.'

'The shocking science about the long-term effects of corporal punishment, essential viewing for every parent.' -- "Changing from how you were parented to how you are parenting is one of the most difficult – and essential – things in the world."

'Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are both excellent sources of entertainment, but they also offer a complex and interesting dissection of a man who learned to use his own fear against criminals.' -- "Kids generally – even if they're not directly responsible for some terrible event – personalize the event and take responsibility for it." -- "...Bruce Wayne is the mask."

'Childhood maltreatment, it is thought, causes changes to the brain, immune system and some hormone glands - some of which are still present in adulthood. One possible mechanism is what is known as epigenetic changes to the DNA. While there is no change in the genetic code, the environment can alter the way genes are expressed. Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, said: "It may seem obvious that traumatic events in our lives can make us depressed, but this study highlights how particularly damaging such traumas can be when experienced during childhood, when our brains are still developing. "We should all be concerned at how abuse and neglect creates a painful legacy that can last a lifetime, increasing our chances of experiencing repeated episodes of depression and reducing the effects of those treatments that are available to us. "Yet we should not lose hope. Research such as this can point the way to better treatments and preventative measures."'

'...people first become hypervigilant and paranoid as catacholamine imbalances and serotonin depletion lead them to expect attack, then engage in sacrificial restaging rituals that are usually both sadistic – inflicting the trauma upon others – and masochistic – destroying your own wealth and even sacrificing your own lives. The result is a feeling of relief that we have survived the apocalypse in our heads plus a feeling of triumph produced by the manic opioid surge. Thus our early traumas become wired into separate emotional memory module and become projected onto the historical stage in such a manner that they appear to be happening to the group rather than being internal, creating group-fantasies so intense and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a life that is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called "society." These group-fantasies are dissociated and seem to have a life of their own, a life we term "social" or "political" or "religious."'

'...the human brain at birth is not fully developed. The abilities a person's brain develops depend on experiences in the first three years of life. Studies on abandoned and severely mistreated Romanian children revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain and marked emotional and cognitive insufficiencies in later life. According to very recent neurobiological findings, repeated traumatization leads to an increased release of stress hormones that attack the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroy existing neurons. Other studies of mistreated children have revealed that the areas of the brain responsible for the "management" of emotions are 20 to 30 percent smaller than in normal persons. In the absence of positive factors, affection and helping witnesses, the only course open to the mistreated individual is the disavowal of personal suffering and the idealization of cruelty with all its devastating after-effects.'

'"Let me be clear: I do not want to start a thermonuclear war. But knowing that I could at any moment, and that it would be so easy, well, it almost feels like I'm being tested or something." "Did you know that if you sort of put enough weight on the button with your fingertip, you can feel a little slack there before it actually clicks?" Obama added. Historians have noted that a strong desire to press the button is not uncommon among U.S. presidents. After just one year in office, Jimmy Carter wrote in his diary, "You don't leave a man alone in a room with a button like that," and two years later the pages were simply covered with the word "button" over and over again. In 1974, Richard Nixon rapidly pressed the button 12 times just prior to his resignation, but Pentagon officials had already disconnected its triggering mechanism. At press time, large-scale nuclear explosions had been confirmed in Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Washington D.C.'

'Repressed fear ... is the fear a very small child has of its parents. They pay for such self-betrayal with depression, suicide, or severe illnesses leading to an early death. The assumption I proceed from is this: for most people the idea that they were not loved by their parents is unbearable. The more evidence there is for this deprivation, the more strongly these people cling to the illusion of having been loved. They also cling to their feelings of guilt, which provide misleading confirmation that if their parents did not treat them lovingly then it was all their own fault, the fault of their mistakes and failings. Depression is the body's rebellion against this lie. Many people would prefer to die (either literally or symbolically by killing off their feelings), rather than experience the helplessness of the little child exploited by the parents for their own ambitions or used as a projection screen for their pent-up feelings of hatred.'

'Most of us were mistreated as children and had to learn to deny this fact at a very early stage in order to survive. We were forced to believe that we were humiliated and tormented "for our own good," that the beatings we received did not hurt and were harmless, that such treatment served to protect the community (as otherwise we would have turned into dangerous monsters). ...most people are not prepared to question and abandon preconceptions of this kind. Instead they chant this perverse litany: "My parents did their best to bring me up properly, I was a difficult child, and I needed strict discipline." Obviously, people who have been brought up to believe this cannot conceivably feel indignation about cruelty to children. Since their own childhood, they have been dissociated from their true feelings, from the pain caused by humiliation and torment. To feel their indignation they would need to get back in touch with that childhood pain. And who will want to do that?'

'...in contrast to our conscious mind our body cannot be deceived by intellectual arguments. It is the guardian of our truth because it carries within the experiences of our whole life and makes sure that we can live with the truth of our organism. With the help of symptoms it forces us to acknowledge this truth, not only emotionally but also mentally, to provide that we can live in harmony with our "inner child", once disrespected and humiliated. A child has no other choice than to idealize and to love his persecutors, to hope they will eventually change and to cling to them, because there is nobody else. Especially the most seriously abused children cling a lifetime to their parents if they have not experienced a successful therapy. The adult however, whose health is suffering as a consequence of the early mistreatment, does have the choice. Even if our parents should change, nothing can heal the early trauma unless WE have changed. Our symptoms are the child's unheard language.'

'...a tyrant will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he either encounters no resistance at all or is able to nip that resistance in the bud. ...the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it as long as one denies the suffering it involved. As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties inflicted by parent figures and a striking indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to cruel treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belonged to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil...'

'We loved our parents, so we believed them when they told us it was for our own good. Most of us still believe it and go around asserting that one cannot bring up children without slaps and smacks - in other words, without resorting to humiliation. And then there is no way out of the vicious circle of violence and denial of the humiliation inflicted on them. The need for revenge, reprisal, punishment lives on within them. The rage suppressed in childhood is transformed into murderous hate. Religious and ethnic groups are only too willing to provide the ideologies justifying the cultivation and projection of that hate. Humiliation is a poison that is difficult to exterminate because it is used for extermination and the production of new humiliation that fuels the proliferation of violence and masks the underlying problems. To get out of this vicious circle we must face up to our own truth. We WERE humiliated children, we WERE the victims of our parents' ignorance, of their histories...'

'...the only thing beaten children learn is to fear their parents, not to drive carefully or stay out of trouble. They will also feel guilty and learn to play down their own pain. Being subjected to physical attacks they are defenseless to fend off merely instills in children a "gut" conviction that they obviously merit neither protection nor respect. This false message is then stored in the children's bodies as information and will influence their view of the world and their later attitude toward their own children. Such children will be unable to defend their right to human dignity, unable to recognize physical pain as a danger signal and act accordingly. Even their immune system may be affected. In the absence of other persons to model their behavior on -- enlightened or knowing witnesses -- these children will see the language of violence and hypocrisy as the only really effective means of communication.'

'In childhood, acceptance and expression of ... rage would have involved severe punishment or total abandonment, and the fear of these consequences lives on in the adult children. But as soon as they realize that they are no longer in danger, they will be able to understand the situation they were in as children and to rebel inwardly against the cruelties perpetrated on them, instead of continuing to forgive them "generously." The reality of childhood will never go away. Even if these parents were suddenly all transformed into angels, the memories of their cruelties, their hatred, their rejection remain... The task devolving on the adult children is to free themselves of those memories, not by forgiving and forgetting, but by accepting the logical response to torture, the experience of rage they have denied themselves for so long. The only thing that can help us to relinquish our blindness and spare our children the same fate is the courage to accept this truth.'

'Revelation of the Method concerns mind control in the last stages and at a high level. When you tell someone what you are doing to them - murder, mayhem, kidnap, rape, you name it - and they do nothing to stop you or protect themselves, you have created a doubly enslaved subject.' -- How many fingers, Winston?

'The spectacular economic and political progress of much of the world in the 20th century was an achievement of the improvement in childrearing modes of the families that reduced child abuse, as more caring mothers began to give their children love and respect, plus were also able to reduce the jealousy of their spouses so fathers could be closer to their children. Yet because most 20th century families still abused their children, the improvement in industrialization during the century produced periodic "growth panics" during which adults re-experienced their parental abuse, and men went on more and more destructive wars to restore their masculinity and "get respect" from other nations. Plus of course the technological improvements soon led to a tremendous increase in the ability to kill others during wars, so that wars in the 20th century killed over 180 million people, mostly civilians—culminating in the current global-annihilation possibilities of nuclear nations.'

'At the beginning of our lives we were, as very small children, totally dependent on our parents. And we believed, we HAD TO believe, that we were loved by them. Even when we were abused we couldn't realize this. ...transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. We can ... strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever. ...the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW its whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this.'

'Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. -- Freud reported observing a child throw his favorite toy from his crib, become upset at the loss, then reel the toy back in, only to repeat this action. Freud theorized that the child was attempting to master the sensation of loss 'in allowing his mother to go away without protesting', but asked in puzzlement 'How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? Traumatic repetitions could be seen as the result of an attempt to retrospectively "master" the original trauma, a child's play as an attempt to turn passivity into activity: 'At the outset he was in a passive situation ... but by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part.''

'What could be happening when people don't trust your feelings?' -- "Where you don't have a methodology for determining truth from falsehood, you must have a hierarchy... If you're not obeying reality then what are you obeying? Well, you're just obeying whim. And in the absence of an objective methodology, personal domination is inevitable. Happiness can either be the achievement of a positive or the withdrawal of a negative. If you're sharing your innermost thoughts with people who are negative towards you, I would say – just as the person is playing out something negative from their childhood – you are also playing out something negative from your childhood. This would fall into the category: My parents rejected my emotional state. You may be reproducing the pain of being rejected – in terms of your joy – by the person who was in your life who was negative towards joy. If you need somebody to confirm [your emotional] state, it's probably because they have too much power over you."

'...the comic's style of relating to people may partly mirror their early adventures with their mother. ...he or she becomes an expert in "reading" his or her mother, and then later learns how to "scan the world in a very sensitive way, looking for contradictions to decode and reconcile, hunting out cues as to how to win approval and support." ...comedians are obsessed with instability. ...this focus on inconstancy may represent an effort at mastery, and that the comedian seeks to adapt to a threat that was of painful intensity in their early childhood. The comics tended to have lower self-esteems and to say bad things about themselves. ...the comedian's focus on his or her smallness may be a result of the reduced significance he or she felt as a child and that much comic behavior is aimed at reducing the discrepancy of smallness between themselves and others. ...they viewed themselves as healers. ...uncovering truths that many people usually try to banish from awareness.'

"The true purpose of power is to have huge vats of the population that you can vomit your own poison into rather than deal with it yourself."

'Buddhism: the doctrine that you are not allowed to protect yourself!' -- Turning the other cheek.

'...parents are the child's most lethal enemy, because inside the parents' psyches lie a powerful, dangerous alter that is their own parent's death wishes toward the child. "To appease the mother she must destroy the child, but the child is a love object too. To preserve the child she must renounce mother... She is trapped in a desperate conflict: kill mother and preserve the baby or kill the baby and preserve the mother." Mothers in the past routinely chose killing the baby, by the billions, driven to it by her devil alter (her own destructive mother image in her head). Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really" belonged to God-a symbol of the grandmother, and that "the child was a gift that God had every right to reclaim." When killing her child, therefore, the mother was simply acting as her own mother's avenger. What helped the dissociation was such beliefs as denying that the babies were human ... during most of history...'

'The act of having a child is, "the most forbidden act of self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable offense," and brings with it inevitable fears of maternal retribution for one's success and individuation. Mothers in antiquity hallucinated female demons were actually grandmother alters in the mothers' heads, so jealous of their having babies that they sucked out their blood and otherwise murdered them. All early societies invented sacrificial rituals wherein babies were tortured and killed to honor maternal goddesses ... vowing that, "although Mommy wants to kill me for having sex and making a baby, if I kill the baby instead [usually the first-born was sacrificed], I can then go on having sex and other babies with less fear of retribution." Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions, depicted in myths as absolutely necessary to save the world from "chaos," that is, from terrible inner annihilation anxiety as punishment for success.'

'Most of the time, parents simply reinflict upon their children what had been done to them in their own childhood. The production of developmental variations can occur only in the silent, mostly unrecorded decisions by parents to go beyond the traumas they themselves endured. It happens each time a mother decides not to use her child as an erotic object, not to hit it when it cries. It happens each time a mother encourages her child's explorations and independence, each time she overcomes her own despair and neediness and gives her child a bit more of the love and empathy she herself didn't get. These private moments are rarely recorded for historians, and social scientists have completely overlooked their role in the production of cultural variation, yet they are nonetheless the ultimate sources of the evolution of the psyche and culture. Childhood must therefore always first evolve before major social, cultural and economic innovation can occur.'

'A goddess is a female deity. In some cultures goddesses are associated with Earth, motherhood, love, and the household. In other cultures, goddesses also rule over war, death, and destruction as well as healing. -- Joseph Campbell: "It has to do with the earth. The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants...so woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female."'

'Nations engage in manic economic and political projects to get a "dopamine rush" that counters the depression and guilt about their success. Political paranoia and slow ego disintegration are seen in conspiratorial group-fantasies, fears of femininity [countered by persecution of homosexuals], imaginary humiliations by other nations [countered by a search for external enemies as grandiosity fails and Poison Alerts and sacrificial group-fantasies proliferate] [and Purity Crusades multiply as anti-modern and anti-child (Bad Boy) movements]. These are countered in the economic sphere by manic overinvestment, risky ventures, excess money supply growth, soaring debt and stock market speculations, and in the political sphere by jingoistic nationalism, expansionist ventures, military buildups and belligerent, insulting foreign affair behavior. As in drug addiction, each dopamine rush leaves a dopamine hangover that requires an even larger manic activity to overcome the resulting depression.'

'...anorexics are dominated by fantasies of persecution by the Dragon Mother, who "gives her child the impossible task of filling her ‘limitless void'" so the child fears being "eaten alive." To prevent this, when these children grow up and try to individuate, they refuse to eat so they won't have any flesh on them for the Dragon Mother to devour. Economic depressions evidence similar group-fantasies of devouring mommies; they are "economic anorexias" where nations inflict economic wounds upon themselves to limit consumption, become "all bones" and not tempt the devouring Dragon Mother. -- One of the best defenses against fears of maternal engulfment is merging with a Phallic Leader to restore potency. The most effective Phallic Leaders [are] "narcissistic personalities ... characterized by intense self-involvement ... lack of empathy ... oscillate between feelings of grandiosity and omnipotence ... inferiority and low self-esteem ... susceptible to feelings of shame and humiliation."'

'That depressions are self-inflicted wounds and not just the results of "mysteriously wrongheaded monetary policies" is still not admitted by most economists. The task of controlling growth panic by depressions is given to central banks, which first flood the nation with low interest liquidity to encourage overinvestment, excess borrowing, inflation and stock market bubbles, and then, when the expansion becomes too sinful for the national psyche, reverse the monetary expansion by increasing interest rates and reducing liquidity ("Taking away the punch bowl when the party gets going.") Depressions come because really people become depressed, reducing their spending and investment, and feel hopeless. ...nations enter into depressions because they feel persecuted for their prosperity and individuation by what Jungians have termed the "Dragon Mother" – the needy, "devouring mother of infancy who cannot let her children go because she needs them for her own psychic survival."

'(3) Internal Sacrifice Solution: If the leader cannot find an external enemy with whom to engage in a sacrificial war, he often turns to an internal sacrifice, either a violent revolution or an economic downturn. As Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon said in 1929 as the Federal Reserve pushed the world into the Great Depression, "It will purge the rottenness out of the system." Business cycles are driven by the manic and depressive cycles of group-fantasy, as manic defenses against growth panic are followed by depressive collapses into emotional despair and inaction. Depressions and recessions are thus not due to "the Invisible Hand" of economics but are motivated sacrifices that often kill more people than wars do, halting dangerous prosperity and social progress that seem to be getting "out of control." Periodic economic downturns are the antidotes administered by sacrificial priests for the disease of "greed." ..."greedy" childhood selves felt to be responsible for the trauma...'

'(2) Martial Solution: If an external enemy can be found who will co-operate by humiliating the nation as they felt humiliated by their parents during childhood, this enemy can now be seen as the source of all their fears, and military action can be taken by the now-heroic leader in order to clear out the pollution and produce a rebirth of national strength and purpose. Wars are often preceded by apocalyptic growth panic movements, "Great Awakenings" and other end-of-the-world group-fantasies. The leader is split into two parts, and the "poison" part is projected into the "enemy" leader, who agrees to engage in a mutual humiliation ritual and then fight the cosmic battle between good and evil and "flush out" the nation's fears. The nation feels often enormous relief by the designation of the enemy, rather than being fearful of war's destructiveness. The finding of an external enemy as a poison container produces a burst of dopamine-filled euphoria.'

'(1) Regicidal Solution: If the leader fails to find an appropriate enemy, he himself can be designated as the enemy of the nation, and a ritual slaying is enacted, either by actual regicide or by throwing him out of office. Should he be reelected at the end of his first term, a symbolic death and rebirth ritual is enacted, and the leader has more time to find a solution to the growth panic.'

'#Strong Phase: The leader is portrayed as grandiose, phallic and invincible, able to ... contain the unconscious anxieties of the nation; #Collapse Phase; #Upheaval Phase: The leader begins the upheaval phase pictured as a wimp, overwhelmed by poisonous forces, impotent to ward off disaster... Anti-children crusades multiply, attacking people's projected inner child for being spoiled, sinful, greedy and out of control. When the growth panic is at a peak, "poison alerts" are declared and fears of maternal abandonment and wishes for maternal engulfment and rebirth proliferate. Rational national progress seems to be unimportant, group-delusions and group-trance projects are at a peak, and action becomes irresistible as the nation searches for some magical restoration of potency. This restoration, rebirth or revitalization wish turns into a group ritual that at times can take one or more of three forms: (1) Regicidal Solution, (2) Martial Solution, (3) Internal Sacrifice Solution'

'The notion that leaders really lead, not follow, is as much a group-fantasy as the leader's charismatic power to command the sun's rise and fall. A leader is a single individual sitting at a desk in one corner of one city. The power we conditionally delegate to him resides in the group-fantasy, since the leader's function is to act as a poison container for our group-fantasies. If he should unexpectedly die, the container disappears and our fears return to us in a rush. Even if he has been a totally incompetent leader, we panic. ...the charisma of leaders is purely a defensive grandiosity of our own, compensating for our feelings of childhood helplessness. Thus a leader's strength seems inevitably to decay. ...there are four phases of group-fantasies about leaders, as they become less and less able to provide grandiose manic solutions to the nation's growing growth panic: (1) strong, (2) cracking, (3) collapse and (4) upheaval.' ...

'...the leader is less a figure of authority than he is a delegate, someone who "takes the blame" for us. As poison container for our dissociated social alter, the leader is expected to absorb our violent feelings without collapsing. Many societies actually designate "filth men" to help the leader with this task, relatives who exchange blood with him so they can "intercept" the poisonous feelings of the people directed at him. In modern nations, cabinet members are our "filth men," and are sacrificed when the leader is under attack. This leadership task of being the delegate of irrational desires of the people makes leaders experts in masochism, rather than sadism, as traditional power theory requires. Only by carefully following our unconscious commands are leaders followed. We might follow them into war and lay down our lives to combat an enemy they alone designated, but the moment they try to ignore the group-fantasy and avoid our hidden commands, people simply do not hear them.'

'Political leaders are intuitively aware that their main function is to provide grandiose manic antidotes to growth panic. Every society acknowledges somehow its function as a defense against maternal engulfment. The more primitive the dominant childrearing mode of a society, the more growth panic must be defended against. The fears of abandonment that are triggered by social progress are felt by nations to be dramatized in their relationship with their leader, who is felt to be growing more and more distant and less and less able to provide grandiose manic projects to defend against their growing growth panic. The increasing impotence and weakness of the leader can be seen in the much-watched "ratings" he gets in his public opinion polls, which, after starting at a peak, usually decline during his term, unless revived by some particularly effective defensive manic action that the leader engages in. ...growing growth panic makes [leaders] seem more distant, less potent.'

'Societies whose institutions progress beyond their average childrearing mode become the most fearful and most violent, since their growth panic depends upon both the amount of early trauma and the amount of social progress. Thus unaccustomed Weimar freedoms lead directly to Auschwitz in a Germany formed by brutal childrearing. If there ever were a society where parents really helped their children to individuate, it would be a society without growth panics, without engulfment fears and without delusional enemies. The enemy is a poison container for groups failing to grapple with the problems of an emerging self. The enemy therefore inherits the imagery of their growth panic, so the enemy is usually described in terms of our childhood desires for growth. "They" (for instance, Jews) are imagined to be guilty of the pejorative form of every one of our desires: "greed" (all our wants); "lust" (our sexual desire); "pushiness" (our striving) and so on.'

'The reason small groups and nations are unconsciously experienced as destructive mothers is that group development requires an increase in independence and individuation, as members grow, respond to new challenges and try to change their patterns of behavior. This independence revives earlier feelings of maternal abandonment. The worse the childrearing, the more growth panic is triggered by individuation and self assertion. More advanced psychoclasses cause "too much" social progress for the majority of society. Old defenses become unavailable and people cannot dominate scapegoats—wives, slaves, servants, minorities—in quite the same way as before. These less advanced psychoclasses—the majority—begin to experience tremendous growth panic, and new ways to handle their anxiety must be invented. For them, change is everywhere; things seem to be "getting out of control." This is why growth and self assertion [is] proscribed by the religious and political systems of most societies.'

'The central fantasy function of the leader of any group, small or large, is to defend against repetitions of early trauma and abandonment, along with handling wishes for merging with the terrifying mother. The group is a mouth ...essentially female and maternal... One of the most active, or rather paralyzing, unconscious group representations is that of a Hydra: the group is felt to be a single body with a dozen arms at the ends of which are heads and mouths... ready to devour one another if they are not satisfied. When the leader is imagined to be strong, he can successfully defend against the group's engulfment fears; when the leader appears to weaken, all growth is dangerous, and desires for merging and fears of maternal engulfment increase, so the leader must somehow act to defend against the growth panic. ...the group leader is imagined to have mastered the group-as-mother and thus to have gained some of her [power] for himself. This makes him a threat as well as a protector...'

'Our social alters contain early levels of our unbearable hurts ("Why didn't mommy want me?" "Why did daddy hit me?"), restaged as fairy tales ("Are there witches?" "Will the monster kill me?") and then as social questions ("Shall we take children away from teenage mothers?" "Is Saddam Hussein a new Hitler who will blow up the world?"). The adaptive function of social alters is that they allow people to go about their daily business without being overwhelmed by traumatic memories... By dissociating early persecutors into our social alters and then identifying with these persecutors in our social lives, human beings manage to live more sane daily lives, while warding off unseen but felt dangers by "feeding" victims of society to terrifying religious, political and economic divinities. So important to our sanity is the social alter that when a poison container for a group-fantasy is removed, tremendous anxiety is aroused that has to be defended against by creating a replacement.'

'It was useless to point out to people who are dissociated and in a social trance that children or other poison containers were helpless human beings who were the victims of their actions. The children were full of our projections; they weren't real to us. Ultimately our social alters merge with the perpetrator of early traumas. In group-fantasy, we merge with the aggressor in order to avoid feeling helpless and then inflict damage upon child-scapegoats under the guise of "saving children." We see this merging with the perpetrator in every scapegoating group-fantasy. When anti-Semites persecute Jews, they are merged with the abusing parent and punishing the abused child. Jews must be persecuted... Adult events, political and economic history, usually provide only proximate causes of scapegoating group-fantasies; their ultimate cause lies in earlier traumatic events.'

'If helpless children of the poor were seen as bad babies, then obviously they were all scapegoats who were "poison containers" needed by the nation to feel early memories of hunger and despair at being unloved and abused. Without poison containers, we would have to feel these feelings ourselves. The childhood sources for Gingrich's political program are so overt they should be obvious to all, yet because we are in a social trance when we hear him we collude to deny them. The media widely reported, for instance, that Gingrich was a child of a teenage mother, but carefully didn't connect it with his speeches on how teenage mothers should be punished... The traumatic events of his infancy had to be restaged and millions of children made to feel his despair because in his social alter the child feels responsible for his or her own abuse and neglect, and so a scapegoat for the child self must be punished. As always in politics, the social alter's primary identification is with the abuser.'

'Social scientists have been puzzled by Milgram's experiments, wondering why people were so easily talked into inflicting pain so gratuitously. The real explanation is that, by joining a group – the "university experiment" – they switched into their social alters and merged with their own sadistic internalized persecutor, which was quite willing to take responsibility for ordering pain inflicted upon others. Their "struggle with themselves" over whether to obey was really a struggle between their social alters and their main selves. The crucial element was the existence of the group-as-terrifying-parent, the all-powerful university. Those who continue to replicate Milgram's experiments and who are still puzzled as to why "the most banal and superficial of rationales is enough to produce destructive behavior in human beings" simply underestimate the amount of trauma most people have experienced and the effectiveness of the social trance in allowing them to restage these hurts.'

'As the group first gathers, people chat, laugh, argue and interact with other individuals from their central conscious selves. At a certain moment, however, "when the time comes for the group to form," individuals switch into their social alters, a social trance forms and the group-fantasy takes over. Language and demeanor change, and people feel somehow detached, estranged from their usual range of feelings and deskilled of critical faculties. A leader is imagined to be "in control" even if he isn't actually present, group boundaries are imagined, work is thought able to be accomplished effortlessly, magical thinking spreads, enemies arise, factions form to act out splits, and empathy diminishes, since others are so full of the group's projections. When the group "ends," often with a trance-breaking clap of hands termed "applause," people wake up, break the entrainment, switch back to their central personalities and the group begins to mourn its own ending...'

'...children whose immature parents use them for their own emotional needs, and who reject them when the child's needs do not reflect their own, develop a "false self," or even multiple selves, which may conform to society but cannot improve upon it. ...social evolution depends upon the evolution of the viable self, which in turn is achieved solely through the slow and uneven evolution of childrearing. Traumas are defined as injuries to the private self, rather than just painful experiences, since non-painful injuries to the self such as parental genital manipulation or being told by a parent that they wished one would die are more traumatic to the self than, say, more painful accidents. Without a well-developed, enduring private self, people feel threatened by all progress, all freedom, all new challenges, and then experience annihilation anxiety, fears that the fragile self is disintegrating, since situations that call for self-assertion trigger memories of maternal abandonment.'

'As one prostitute who had been sexually victimized as a child said, "When I do it, I'm in control. I can control them through sex." ..."the repetition compulsion" [is] a self-protective device, protective against being helpless against the overwhelming anxiety of unexpected trauma. Traumas are therefore restaged as a defense, with the persecutory self as the stage director. Restaging as a defense against dissociated trauma is the crucial flaw in the evolution of the human mind understandable from the viewpoint of the individual as a way of maintaining sanity, but tragic in its effects upon society, since it means that early traumas will be magnified onto the historical stage into war, domination and self-destructive social behavior. And because we also restage by inflicting our childhood terrors upon our children, generation after generation, our addiction to the slaughterbench of history has been relentless.'

'Wars sacrifice youth symbols of our potency and hopefulness because it is our striving, youthful, independent selves that we blame for getting us into trouble in the first place. Wars are always preemptive attacks on enemies we create-enemies we must find "out there" to relieve the paranoia of having enemies "inside our heads" who resent our good fortunes. Most wars start "for the sake of peace" because we really believe we can have inner peace if we stop our progress and individuation, if we sacrifice our striving self. Only if we can stop growing can we protect ourselves from our most horrible fear-the repetition of our earliest tragedies. ...even more effective than sacrificing mothers and children in external wars is the internal, institutionalized wars against mothers and children that nations conduct periodically as social policy. Structural violence (poverty) amount to 15 million persons a year world wide, compared to an average 100,000 deaths per year from wars...'

'The [is a] yearning for a phantom placenta a "poison container" for our dangerous emotions... Leaders are poison containers for our feelings. Poison containers are objects into which we can dump our disowned feelings, just as we once pumped our polluted blood into the placenta, hoping for it to be cleansed. We ascribe to poison containers all kinds of magical placental significances, including the power to cleanse our emotions, which are felt to be like polluted blood in accordance with their fetal origin. When the leader appears unable to handle these emotions, when he appears to be weakening and abandoning us, when our progress in life seems to involve too much independence and we re-experience our early abandonment by our placenta and our parents, we begin to look for enemies to inflict our traumas upon. War, then, is a sacrificial ritual designed to defend against fears of individuation and maternal engulfment by restaging our early traumas upon scapegoats.'

'All religions contain at their center the Suffering Fetus and its Poisonous Placenta, whether it is the dismembered, suffering Osiris or the bleeding Christ on his placental cross... Because the fetus's umbilicus is like a pulsing fifth limb and because the placenta is the fetus's first love object, I believe we so deeply experience the loss of our umbilicus/placenta that we walk around feeling we have still a "phantom placenta" – the same phenomenon as the "phantom limb" and are constantly looking for a leader or a flag or a god to serve as its substitute. Just as gods are imagined as beings "from whom all blessings flow," leaders are seen as beings "from whom all power flows." In ancient Egypt, people saved the actual placenta of the Pharaoh and put it on a pole which they carried into battle; it was the first flag in history. In America, we still ritually worship our placental flag with its red arteries and blue veins at the end of a umbilical flagpole – in public gatherings.'

'...the enemy in war were dominated by an image that was even more widespread than that of the dangerous mommy: it was that of a blood-sucking sea-beast, associated with watery caves or lakes; often with many heads or arms, a dragon or a hydra or a serpent or an octopus that threatened to poison the lifeblood of the nation. This serpentine, poisonous monster I have termed the Poisonous Placenta, since it resembled what the actual placenta must have sometimes felt like to the growing fetus, particularly when the placenta fails in its tasks of cleansing the fetal blood of wastes and of replenishing its oxygen supply ...when the mother smokes, takes drugs or is hurt or frightened or otherwise stressed, the placenta does not remove the wastes from the fetal blood... Under these stressful conditions, the helpless fetus experiences an asphyxiating Poisonous Placenta, the prototype for all later hate relationships, including the murderous mother, the castrating father or the dangerous enemy.'

'...I was puzzled by recurring claims by aggressors that they were forced to go to war against their wishes because "a net had suddenly been thrown over their head" or a "ring of iron was closing about us more tightly every moment" or they had been "seized by the throat and strangled." I piled up hundreds of these images of nations being choked and strangled, "unable to draw a breath," "smothered, walled-in," "unable to relieve the inexorable pressure" of a world "pregnant with events," followed by feelings of being "picked up bodily" in "an inexorable slide" towards war, starting with a "rupture of diplomatic relations" and a "descent into the abyss," being "unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel" as the nation takes its "final plunge over the brink," and even that wars were "aborted" if ended too soon. Given the concreteness of all this birth imagery, I concluded that war was a rebirth fantasy of enormous power shared by nations undergoing deep regression to fetal traumas.'

'Wars have often been thought of as purifying the nation's polluted blood by virtue of a sacrificial rite... The blood of those sacrificed is believed to renew the nation. The question immediately arises: How do such poisoned blood fears originate? And what is their connection with birth? The answers to these questions will become more convincing only after we have examined a prior question: Why is war so often depicted as a woman? ...group-fantasies of monstrous bloodthirsty women have preceded every war... When war breaks out, these terrifying women images disappear from the nation's fantasy life. The dangerous woman image now is projected into the enemy, so that the war is experienced unconsciously as a battle with a mother-figure. Yet even though we understand that both the Motherland and the enemy in wars are ultimately the early mother, the question remains: what could possibly be the infantile origin of fantasies of the enemy as a poisonous blood-sucking monster?'

'When these abused children grow up, they feel that every time they try to self-activate, every time they do something independently for themselves, they will lose the approval of the parents in their heads—mainly their mothers and grandmothers in the women's quarters. When their cities were flooded with oil money and Western popular culture in recent decades, fundamentalist men were first attracted to the new freedoms and pleasures, but soon retreated, feeling they would lose their mommy's approval and be "Bad Boys." Westerners came to represent their own "Bad Boy" self in projection, and had to be killed off, as they felt they themselves deserved, for such unforgivable sins as listening to music, flying kites and enjoying sex. "America is Godless. Western influence here is not a good thing, our people can see CNN, MTV, kissing…" From childhood, then, Islamist terrorists have been taught to kill the part of themselves—and, by projection, others...'

'The sacrificial war ritual, then, had three main elements: #1. A sinful, polluted world, with a leader who is depicted as becoming more and more impotent in containing the nation's depressed, angry feelings. #2. Terrifying mommy fantasies, with images of angry goddesses threatening to devour the country unless a ritual sacrificial victim is provided, and #3. Sacrificial child victims, whose blood will revitalize the country's emotional life and who ultimately represent the "guilty" child who was the victim of the original traumas. -- 2:1 America felt sinful after the peace and prosperity of the 1980s; 2:2 America felt polluted in 1988; 2:3 Child sacrifice suggestion prior to the Middle East crisis; 2:4 Children were felt to be so naughty they deserved electrocution; 2:5 Bush was seen as a killing doctor; 2:6 Terrifying women were featured in the media; 2:7 Saddam Hussein as Terrifying Mommy; 2:9 Americans felt reborn by war. The war was vicious, as promised. The stock market soared.'

'The genesis and evolution of humiliation.'

'Dissociation can be a response to trauma or drugs and perhaps allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time. Symptoms of dissociation resulting from trauma may include depersonalization, psychological numbing, disengagement, or amnesia regarding the events of the abuse. It has been hypothesized that dissociation may provide a temporarily effective defense mechanism in cases of severe trauma; however, in the long term, dissociation is associated with decreased psychological functioning and adjustment. Other symptoms sometimes found along with dissociation in victims of traumatic abuse (often referred to as "sequelae to abuse") include anxiety, PTSD, low self-esteem, somatization, depression, chronic pain, interpersonal dysfunction, substance abuse, self-mutilation and suicidal ideation or actions. These symptoms may lead the victim to erroneously present the symptoms as the source of the problem.'

"Parental/sibling trauma has to go somewhere. The more it goes into the state, the less it needs to go into religion, which is why marxists were virulently anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-democratic/existing quasi- monarchical governments within Europe in the 19th century. They had given up on God and therefore all of their projections [went] out of God and into the state/corporations – which is why marxists are so virulently anti-capitalist, because the capitalist is the elder sibling and the state is the parent. That's why they focus so much of their rage onto the capitalist because the capitalist is the intermediate power, [the elder sibling who has] more power than the worker [(the younger siblings)] but less power than the state. But they can't focus on the evils of the state because if they focus on the evils of the state, they have no solution because their solution is an ultimate state."

"On the other hand, you would then assume that people who were not religious but also drawn to the same [family abuse] paradigm... that because they don't have God or Satan to project their family/sibling abuses into, they would be far more ferocious about the existing state and existing corporations. So if you're an atheist or agnostic or skeptic or rationalist or non-fundamentalist – then you don't have the big bag of God – therefore your projections have to go somewhere else. Which explains why the more secular, humanistic/left-wing/marxist cadres within society tend to be so virulently anti-corporate and anti- existing state." -- Continues...

"So the more religious [people] are, the more they will tend to be free-market and less afraid of corporations because corporations don't have the projection of sibling abuse... However, Satan and God has all the projections. In the same way, to some degree, it would explain why more religious people tend to be less statist because – in the modern world, the modern libertarian paradigm – they have God into which they place all of their parental projections and therefore they can look upon the state as a thing itself rather than a big bag of emotional projection. So [religious people] can criticize the state because they're not unconsciously criticizing their parents. But if you criticize God, they get very angry and offended because then you are criticizing their parents. If you say God is not virtuous, they hear: my parents are not virtuous on an unconscious level. But because they don't project that onto the state, they can criticize the state very heavily."

"All unprocessed trauma must find a route somewhere, and if it does not find it's route in the truth, then it will find its route in mythology: the mythology of nationalism, of racism, of collectivism, of religion, of superstition, and so on. If trauma is not processed it will find substitutes in mythology. If that is the case – and sibling abuse is the last great unprocessed trauma of society – then this theory is able to explain some interesting set of phenomenon that occur within the realm of libertarianism -to- marxism. -- So Satan is a stand-in for the elder sibling; God is a stand-in for the parent. Corporations are a stand-in for the elder sibling; the state is a stand-in for parents. If that is true then we would expect... that those who are more religious would tend to be less critical of corporations. Why? Because they have the big receptacle, the big black bag of Satan to project all of their sibling trauma into." -- Continues...

"The temptation is to blame the younger sibling as if everything is equal. In this way, the republicans blame the poor for being poor; blame the blacks for being in ghettos; blame women for making less money; and so on. And then the younger siblings say they need the state to protect them from rapacious corporations and polluters and so on – when, of course, the government produces the corporations and polices and regulates them already – so if corporations are doing evil and the government is far more powerful than the corporations and regulates the corporations, then clearly it is not the corporations that are at fault – it is the government that is at fault since it has all the power. But it's far easier to blame the elder siblings and excuse the parents than it is to place the blame for evil within the family where it properly belongs, which is with the parents."

"And we see this repeated over and over in human thought. So when things go bad for government, the statists blame the corporations or they blame the party in power – they can never blame the [state (the parents), or the] principle of coercion which is the foundation of statism. And when things go bad in the world, religious people can't blame God because that would be to question virtue of God and foundation of their propaganda. [So they] invent someone else to blame, and in religion it's all sibling blame. So the elder sibling is Satan and the younger sibling is humanity. Blame the victim is absolutely essential for destructive families and for statism and religion. -- And what about the elder siblings? Certain punitive forms of libertarianism or republicanism which blame the victim are the elder sibling's and/or parent's response to the vulnerability of the younger siblings when they are hurt, ([usually] as a result of the actions of the parent or elder sibling)." -- Continues...

"...given that infanticide was so common throughout history, children who displeased their parents would very often be abandoned or killed. This is why the taboo has remained so powerful into the modern world. Questioning the virtue of parents arouses live and death anxiety for a lot of people. When you have a fantasy of virtue in a situation of evil, the only way that you can maintain the fantasy of virtue is for there to be a stand-in which explains the evil. So in general, whenever you have an absolute power, a non-power, and an intermediate power; parents, younger siblings, elder siblings – the youngest sibling, in order to preserve the illusion of the virtue of the parents, is going to pretend that the evil he's experiencing is coming from the middle power, the elder sibling, and that he must appeal to the parent in order to protect himself... But the reality is that the parents create the abuses of the elder sibling by being abusive themselves. And this is why it doesn't work."

Readings of the research: 'We now are beginning to understand the strong, sometimes long-lasting, effects siblings have one another's emotional development as adults.' -- "This is the level of violence children grow up with and to me it's not at all surprising then that when we grow up we think of using the state to solve problems, we think of violence to solve problems – because that's what we've lived, that's what we've experienced – and until we can start to solve this problem there's no point in trying to fix these social problems – because they arise from the experiences of our families. The state is an effect of the family. And that's why we have to fix our own personal relationships before we can even imagine fixing the state. Once we've fixed our own personal relationships, we won't need to fix the state because it will be gone."