We approach Halloween, a festival for commemoratin

So this post will follow a brief history of attempts to bring order to the chaos of human existence.

As for the question that ended the previous post, is this such a surprise when humans kill their own species over six times more than mammals on average do?

Researchers of this data suggest human violence is genetic and adaptive: favouring perpetrators by mates, status, and resources. They add that doesn’t mean it is adaptive in all situations (1). Its usefulness as a strategy in ancestral environments may have been tempered by the prohibition of murder?

PART I: THE PROHIBITION OF MURDER

The Esoteric International Film Festival in Moscow asked me to make a video for a collaborative post with them for Instagram, a copy of which is below.

I didn’t include Moses in my video examples of people having positive unusual perceptions, as for many scholars he is a mythical figure over which the historical accuracy has been contested (2). I include him in this post now, because in religious texts, Moses was linked to an original prohibition of murder.

The religious texts write that as a baby, Moses survived a ‘divine’ royal decree calling for the mass murder of newborn males of his enslaved people, and that he went on to receive the ‘divine’ decree of the Ten Commandments, that transcended his human self, and which included a prohibition of murder. In some Bible versions this was translated slightly differently as ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’.

The Ten Commandments were described as inscribed on stone Tablets of the Law kept in a box made of acacia wood. Laws of the lands that later became the UK, were influenced by these Commandments (3).

The Romans had a tradition of drowning disabled babies, but six years before Rome officially became Christian, this was outlawed (4). 

As the West became more secular many people became negative about religion, including the mathematician Bertrand Russell who published Why I am not a Christian (1927).  He also explicitly advocated eugenics for the ‘mentally defective’ (as did many scientists), internationally used to justify coerced sterilisations and ultimately a Nazi programme that murdered disabled adults, children, and infants, widely considered a testing ground for the Holocaust (5,6,7).

But instead of annihilation, just as a sperm can pierce an egg and they improbably join to create something new, so did sciences fuse with mathematics, to create something new: the system sciences:

Some scholars suggest balancing processes in systems help maintain dynamic equilibrium: a balance between opposing forces that allows a system to operate at maximum effectiveness (8).

So from a dynamic equilibrium perspective could it be suggested that a ‘divine’ prohibition of murder is an ‘opposing force’ to the human predisposition to murder?

Seshat Databank analysis suggests once larger civilisations came into being, intensity of wars was a major driver of ‘moralising’ religions (where a supernatural agent is concerned about human moral behaviour) (9). Lethal violence shot up as hunter-gatherer groups coalesced into chiefdoms and states (1).

In 47BC the only known biological offspring of Julius Caesar (of the Roman Empire) and Cleopatra (who was of the last remaining dynasty of the Egyptian civilisation that supposedly pronounced the ‘divine’ decree ordering the murder of newborn males above) was …murdered. Just as his famous father before him was….murdered. Just as many of his recent royal ancestors had been…murdered (10).

So much murder. The Roman religion was not ‘moralising’ – while the Ancient Egyptian religion was, and frowned upon murder, but there was no direct order from a deity prohibiting it, and it also bestowed the Egyptian royal ruler a divine aspect: that this living human ruler was also a god (11). Neither religion survived.

In the West, by 340 AD, the powers-that-be decided to make Christianity the official religion, and the world’s largest religions today are ‘moralising’ religions (12).

The ancient spiritual practises of shamanism, predate organised religion and do not consider spirits/supernatural agents to be concerned about human moral behaviour. Shamanism survived but mainly in hunter gatherer tribes or smaller groups (13).

When Western anthropologists in the 19th century visited remote tribes, some suggested the ‘shaman’ (spiritual leader) was a mentally ‘ill’ individual who had been able to overcome mental ‘illness’ by the practise of shamanism (!) (14)

Maybe this was an attempted translation of some tribes’ insistence that the only way to overcome the initiatory shaman ‘sickness’ was to become a shaman. They claimed the individual would be tortured by ‘spirits’ indefinitely if they did not agree to take over the responsibility of communing with the ‘spirits’ to assist the tribe. This ‘communing’ was done via a controlled altered states of consciousness (13,14).

Some tribes, on noticing the ‘shaman sickness’ was often associated with near-death experiences, even tried to deliberately bring the ‘call of the spirits’ to individuals: by starving, freezing, or drowning them (15).

Some argue shamanism was the earliest form of religion. Religion brings some order to the universal experience of disorder. So does science, but with very different methods. Disorder impinges on humans in many ways, but especially at points of unmitigated suffering, and that ultimate fate which is death.

Sadly, from an evolutionary perspective, any ‘gains’ are not panaceas, but more like walking a tightrope: a balancing act between a flux of dynamic forces. From a religious/philosophical perspective humans were said to retain ‘free will’. And in-group bias (favouring your ‘own’ over ‘outsiders’) can be enhanced by religion, and was occasionally interpreted as allowing for the killing of idolators/heretics/infidels (16). Analysis of data suggests 7% of wars were due to religion (17).

By the 21st century, the atheist evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins released his book The God Delusion (2007) in which he refers to God as ‘an evil monster’ based on the Old Testament, and religion as ‘a significant force for evil in the world’ ..  so perhaps James Clerk Maxwell (one of the most influential scientists of all time) would wonder from the beyond (just kidding?) if this previous Professor for the Public Understanding of Science (at Oxford University) was sharing an emotional judgement rather than careful analysis of scientific data, at this point, because:

Well, I could be offended as a woman, but according to Maxwell if we want to be scientific, any debate shouldn’t focus on morals at all ??!

Murder is currently more common amongst small tribes and chiefdoms than in states ruled by governments where laws are (sometimes violently and involving death penalties) enforced by the state (1). Does this mean humans outside states are less ethical and moral, or is it that maximum effectiveness of function of those more close knit groups bound by kin and less intensive competition over resources, does not require more robust safeguards against murder?

Perhaps there are similar numbers of murderous people everywhere, but states are more effective at locking them away so reducing overall murder rates? 

Alternatively, does human ethics evolve with advancements of civilisation as Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker seems to suggest in his book Better Angels of Our Nature (2011)? Perhaps Australian Aborigines wouldn’t think so?

If moralising religions arose as some kind of a reaction to problems facing larger civilisations, is Richard Dawkins suggesting that once we have been culturally conditioned to view murder as ‘wrong’ (after generations of this idea woven into our legal systems and societies), in secular societies, this conditioning/adaptation will be enough to maintain stability in the longer term (or is this what Steven Pinker is suggesting?). Well, no, what Dawkins explicitly states is that he advocates religion is a ‘misfiring by-product’ of useful aspects of human cognition, with religion itself having had little useful purpose at all. 

In today’s world maybe the wording of my video in support of charity Intervoice seems a bit weird, but the fact is, we are all guided by our perceptions every single day (via our sight, hearing, etc). Just because a perception is ‘unusual’ in form, is there any robust scientific reason it can’t have potential, when the neuroscientist Anil Seth suggests all conscious reality is a ‘controlled hallucination’? (19).

Information gained via both usual or unusual perceptions may be used for creative or destructive outcomes, what causes this difference may be of interest? I speak as someone who has never had an unusual perception nor practised any religion!

PART II: THE PROLIFERATION OF INFORMATION

Millenia passed from the original writings about the Tablets of the Law and strange complex phenomena came into being.

Some of the humans used advances in science to create the COMPUTER, an electronic device that manipulates information (data), and which eventually connected most human beings via the INTERNET.

And ONE of the system sciences, that studies how systems are REGULATED (CONTROLLED) extended a strange theory called ‘information theory’ to form a fundamental principle, formulated by the British psychiatrist Ross Ashby, who called it the: Law of Requisite Variety (20).

Random people on the Internet attempted to translate its mathematical equations into plain English, as it seemed far more complex than the relatively simple Law: ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill/Murder’.

Although Ashby had summarised his Law as ‘Only Variety can Destroy Variety’ (?) the international organisation Principia Cybernetica Project found his summary problematic and invalid, and summarised it instead as:

A CONTROL SYSTEM may be as simple as a thermostat, a machine designed to control only temperature, or as complex as a human being or government – needing to control a wide variety of disturbances (‘perturbations’) for survival.

It’s generally agreed that there is an exponentially increasing variety of disturbances and complexity in our environments, whether relating to industrialisation, globalisation, technology, or climate change (22).

Complexity may ‘feedback’ on itself: the more complex societies became, the more humans gravitated towards electing groups of humans (governments) to regulate society, rather than a single monarch inheriting the right to societal control. 

Conversely, sometimes in response to the feeling of an increasing variety of disturbances, humans attempted to reduce the variety/complexity of their environments, such as when the USA federally restricted its borders for the first time in 1924, and recent attempts to clamp down on immigration. 

But sadly, as with ‘Thou Shalt not Murder’, the mathematical law of Requisite Variety – and yes, some people claim mathematics is the fundamental language/structure of the universe (23) – was not a panacea. 

A further law was added for EFFECTIVE REGULATION by Frances Heylighen (1992):

‘Knowing’? Many systems evolve via trial and error (24) although there must be some knowledge or a larger variety of actions would make it less likely to hit the right one!

Nevertheless, when a sperm fuses with an egg to improbably start the chain of events that creates a baby or when sciences fuse with other sciences and mathematics to improbably create the multidisciplinary system sciences, and even when a human improbably fuses with ‘information’ gained via altered states of consciousness, this will usually be creating MORE VARIETY? 

PART III: NONE OF IT WILL MATTER?

Well, it is Halloween….

Perhaps unsurprisingly, two out of four of the pioneers of the new system science of REGULATION/CONTROL ….were psychiatrists. As psychiatrists are the only humans who are given state legal powers to directly control the minds of other humans (via access to their bodies) even against those human’s wishes (in UK Law such forced regulation is allowed for reasons of safety/protection or for a person’s ‘health’) (25).

This forced regulation is frequently used for people with extreme altered mental states which may include unusual perceptions.

Surprisingly, given the fundamental principle formulated by psychiatrist Ross Ashby, psychiatry as a medical discipline became somewhat lacking in VARIETY itself. Many of its factions just decided to…ignore each others’ existence.

It didn’t matter that World Health Organisation (WHO) studies and more showed people with chronic extreme altered mental states did better where psychiatry had less influence, than in the West where they were more likely to become chronically mentally disabled (see here for references) leaving them at higher risk of feeling lost, confused, and mentally tortured (translated from medical terminology: mentally disorganised and distressed).

It didn’t matter that a Danish psychiatrist had developed a concept widely adopted in Scandinavia (consistently top as happiest countries in the world) that defined content of many extreme altered mental states as fully determined by traumas, resolving once traumas passed or were ‘adapted to’ ….. as his concept was removed entirely from the two international psychiatric classifications that guide psychiatrists across the world (26,27) despite that for the WHO classification, AngloAmericans were outvoted by other world experts, who wanted the concept kept in (28).

It didn’t matter that one faction’s research had been completed with successful results by an American psychiatrist funded by the US government National Institute of Mental Health and initially published in peer-reviewed scientific journals … because at the local medical library there is not one psychiatric textbook that mentions this research, rendering it practically invisible to training psychiatrists.

His faction viewed that chronic extreme altered mental states can allow for psychological growth, may be viewed as crisis rather than illness, and showed they can be resolved by intensive relational support in a home-like residential setting (29).

It didn’t matter that this research offered a way out of toxic medications that shrunk brains, caused Parkinsonism and grotesque irreversible facial movements, chopped years off lives, and could occasionally kill….( 30, 31, 32, 33) …

…as he claimed he was ostracised by the US psychiatric community, and eventually resigned from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in a huff.

In his resignation letter, he accused the APA of being corrupted by money/resources from drug companies….or was he really ostracised as he insisted non-professionals should be the staff to work in the home-like residential settings, and other psychiatrists felt ostracised/threatened by him?

But were non-professionals strictly necessary when doctors can provide a healing and/or supportive function? Like, the menopause isn’t even an illness, and doctors provide support with that? And psychiatrists could be referred to as mental health doctors, rather than doctors who treat mental ‘disorders’?

Decades passed, the Internet superseded physical publications, and the American psychiatrist’s ostracised faction gained visibility online, with fans, after his death.

So this year, over half a century after this US research was concluded, for the first time, the NHS (Greater Manchester NHS Mental Health Trust) is conducting research to see if his faction is a viable option for the UK.

Back in the USA, it didn’t matter that the most famous political American family of all time, had one of its ‘vibrant’ members permanently incapacitated at the age of 23 by brain surgery carried out by a psychiatrist with no surgical training in 1941 (she was unable to walk or talk intelligibly for the rest of her life) because that very same psychiatrist continued cavalierly doing that very same procedure on thousands, leaving many like zombies, and killing 14% of them, until 1967 (34,35).

It didn’t matter that in the longer term this risked undermining people’s trust in medical science in general, and coincidentally, the current US secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy, is from the same family (the tragic lady being his aunt, and sister of assassinated President JF Kennedy) and is said to mistrust medical science.

It didn’t matter that some professionals suggested extreme altered mental states (that they called ‘psychosis’ although this noun had been removed from international psychiatric classifications due to difficulty defining it) had commonalities/were rooted in the experience of shamans, with one psychiatrist even going so far to publish the book Shamans Among Us (2012), where he stated:

….and was attacked on Amazon reviews…because, you know, is that comment really necessary if we view extreme altered mental states (and shamanism) as a process and not an illness?…(psychosis is frequently used in legal INSANITY defence so what is he actually trying to say?)

In the interests of collective sanity most other ignored factions, will now sadly have to be…ignored, as only Nobel Prize winning work may be powerful enough to combat any confusion?

But before that, it didn’t matter that near death experiences were now less common, and traumas linked to extreme altered mental states in the West often included childhood abuse (in war-torn countries they were still associated with child soldiers and war). Time delay (a defining characteristic of system dynamics) until extreme states developed in young adulthood, and as abuse wasn’t present in all cases (as impacts of traumas may be passed to next generations via epigenetics), as well as the eradication of the Danish trauma concept, made it easier to sideline, ignore, minimise, or deny any trauma (36,37,38,39)….

So while some scholars suggest systems have balancing processes to establish dynamic equilibrium (in discrete spaces), other scholars suggest that overall open systems (that exchange matter, energy, and information with others) operate via amplifying processes far from equilibrium at the EDGE OF CHAOS (40). The aforementioned Nobel Prize research showed how amplifying/balancing processes can intersect as follows:

It didn’t matter that this was extended to include biological/social systems (41, 42, 43) as most psychiatric researchers were only interested in the mental disorganisation of chaos (44,45,46) (chaos could go one of two ways: disintegration or re-organisation) although one associate professor of psychiatry published a book detailing  mental re-organisation, in which he referred to the same Nobel Prize research (but he was later removed from his professional positions due to sexual violations with female patients) (47,48).

It didn’t matter that the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, described a phenomenon called repetition compulsion, whereby an individual has the tendency to repeat the circumstances of a trauma over and over again, which may be a form of self-reinforcing rules caused by an original trauma’s impact on a developing mind/body (?) as he linked this to his concept of the death drive (a drive towards self-destruction) which was simply too much for most people to stomach (49).

It didn’t matter that psychologists had done studies that showed delusions (fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence) and hallucinations (unusual perceptions) that psychiatry used to define extreme altered mental states, were similarly present in people living healthy independent lives (50), because while efforts were made to use altered states of consciousness in alternative definitions (51) ‘amplify instabilities’ to extremes was not?

Perhaps it didn’t matter that the Nobel Prize winning research was summarised in a book called ORDER out of CHAOS (1994) because the self-organisation it described was spontaneous (not unlike the self-limiting extreme altered mental states described by the Danish psychiatrist), and most extreme altered mental states in the West outside Scandinavia did not spontaneously resolve (52)?

Professor Ray Ison suggests there is something even stronger than self-organising capability: if the goal of a system in power is to bring more and more under the control of one central planning system then everything down the list, even self-organising behaviour, will be pressured to conform to that goal. If the central planning system involves strong forcing, the forced cycle may start to lose its independence and instead ‘dance to the beat of the forcing’ (53).

It didn’t matter humans with chronic extreme altered mental states had been postulated to be at the bottom of human dominance hierarchies (54) because coerced sterilisations of this group leading up to World War II occurred before a study showing selective breeding of the most dominant chickens over several generations bred killers who hacked each other to death, as well, chickens aren’t humans nor is this an exact equivalence? (55)

It doesn’t matter that humans are being told they face increasing existential threats other than killing each other, such as climate change, pandemics, and exploding artificial intelligence, a time when it is more vital than ever for humanity to operate at maximum effectiveness and that some scientists increasingly suggest all systems are interconnected via a complex web of relationships?

No….

None of it will matter…secular people may say:  because we are all overwhelmed by the proliferation of information ? 

None of it will matter…  religious people may say: because what do you expect when psychiatrists are humans pretty much given the power of a ‘god’,  the story of Moses is an allegory as to the risks of that?

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56. Many thanks to VJ’s Inks and members of the Showman’s Guild of Great Britain for allowing photography/videography by Acacia Khonji