1000 ways and more to call dead people daddy

 Alt Title: Goddamn these bitches change (good for them, fr fr) 

3 am.  Or, just around 3 am.  

You're not too sure of the exact time, so you squint at the clock hung helpfully in the middle of the emergency ward some more.

You zone out for a bit.  

You blink a couple of times, shake your head a bit.  

3:05.

You look around.  The ceiling is green.  

Well, ok, not all of it is green.  The part, the area, the thingy, where the clock hangs, that's green.  The office space, yes, the office space, the ceiling there is green.  And the rest of the ward remains an off-white.

Your attention drifts again.

You find yourself staring at some saline solution.  Salty water.  Nice.

You try to sleep.  There's this comfortable nook created by computer's swivel arm.  You're still leaning against the wall, but at least your head fits snugly there.  You close your eyes.

And you can't sleep.

You look over your grandfather's vital signs again.  You know that everything's alright and nothing has really changed.  I mean, ok, his blood pressure is elevated, but he hasn't taken his medication yet, but apart from that - anyways, you check his vital signs.  

It was rather awkward when the nurse came over, earlier that night, to fix the ECG electrodes, put on the blood pressure cuff, the lot.  You sorta hung back, unsure if you should help.  You could help, you know how to do it, but what if by some bizarre fit of chance something goes wrong?  Then it'd be the nurse's responsibility for letting a member of the public do - look, it doesn't matter.

So now you look at his vital signs again.  Not expecting anything, but at least you're doing something.

You look at the clock.

3:23 am.

***

There seems to be something immutable about modern man - a sort of mass psychosis where we surround ourselves with self referential nonsense, we fragment ourselves into isolated fan cultures, we drown ourselves in popular media in the face of growing tensions.

It is an unchanging fact that the modern Homo Sapiens is greedy, selfish, shortsighted.  People do not change.

***

You must have heard this in history class a thousand times over.  The modern era follows on from the French Revolution.  It is during this time that modernist ideologies, modernist art styles, modernist modes of thought arose.

Central to modernism is the idea that society improves, that we are progressing towards something good.

Mankind, in those times, hoped for a better future.  

***

In the 20th century, as you know, the First and Second World Wars occurred.  One of the first genocides happened in the first war:  the Armenian genocide.  The war scarred millions.  For the first time, the public at large was exposed to industrialised warfare.  Empires collapsed.

Then, a 20 year break.  A tumultuous time.  The Russians were fighting a civil war.  The Bolsheviks, it seemed, fought everyone, from monarchists to anarchists. You had the Great Depression.  In Germany, the deflationary economic policies helped the Nazis rise to power.  We all know what happened next.

The Nazis committed genocides against the Jewish people, the Romani people, the Slavic people.  The Nazis persecuted homosexuals, the disabled, political dissidents.

In Asia, the Japanese Empire committed atrocities against the Chinese people, the Korean people, the Filipino people, the...the list goes on.

After the Second World War, the world vowed to never forget.  The world vowed that such events would never occur again.

The modernist dream seemed hollow.  

In the years that followed, millions would die in bombing raids, in massacres, in wars.

***

Then of course, we had Thatcher, and Reagan.  They told us that there was nothing else, but this neoliberal world of theirs.  They told us that there is no society, that we are all just selfish actors.

People tried to fight them of course.  You can probably guess who won out in the end.

People, after all, are greedy, selfish, shortsighted.

***

People do not change.  History has ended.  Politics without ideology.

***

These statements are essentially the same.  These statements are not true.  

They cannot be true.  We need only look at history - that which purportedly is dead - to see changes in human nature.  We have seen how the naïve optimism, the fanaticism of modernism crumbled in the aftermath of the Second World War.  We have seen how this ideology of neoliberalism is a relatively new phenomenon.  

Let's move onto something unrelated.

In the days of yore, between the really really old days when we first started living in cities, and today, women were meant to be subservient to men.  If they were married, their husbands.  If they weren't, their fathers.

So what if I said that women are, by their nature, subservient.  

Yikes, right?  

An absurd idea, really only taken seriously by certain conservatives.  But in those days of yore, it would be true, no?  In those days, women were meek, they were subservient.  So did women suddenly stop being meek, stop being subservient?

In this, I am conflating an intrinsic property with a cultural value.  It's a bullshit statement.  

Let's try another statement.  

By their nature, the Chinese are good at math.  

Yikes.

Again, I am conflating a social, a cultural view of a population, with intrinsic traits.  This could apply to any of the so-called "race realist" talking points.

Let's shift onto another topic.

The gays.

Actually, before that, lefties.  As in left handed people.

So by now you must know of that graph of the population of left handed people.  You know, that inflection point, where the population seemed to increase sharply before plateauing.  

We have a genotype, and a phenotype.  That's right, let's get into nurture vs nature.  

Again, I have done a little tomfoolery.  The nature nurture debate doesn't really make sense. 

We know that certain environmental factors, such as stress, can influence the expression of genes throughout generations (see intergenerational trauma, incidentally first researched as a result of the Holocaust).  We know that genetics have a hand in determining biological traits through metabolism rates, predispositions to disease, and more.  Your phenotype arises from interactions between genetics and cultural influences.

When a left handed person is forced into using their right hand, genetically they haven't changed.  But their phenotype has.  

So, the gays, right?  Same as left-handedness.  Broadly speaking.

But what happens when I say that people are by their nature right-handed?  What happens when I say that people are by their nature heterosexual?

What I'm getting at is that describing certain traits as immutable aspects of human existence - human nature, is meaningless.  Rather, when we describe traits as aspects of human nature, whether it is greed, or selfishness, or shortsightedness, we are telling ourselves stories.  It is an intellectual sleight of hand, where the complex interactions between nature and nurture become intrinsic, natural properties of populations.  

We are a social species.  We rely on stories, on myths to make sense of the world.  When someone says that people are naturally selfish, it doesn't matter if what they say is actually based in reality.  They will still interact with the world as if it were true.

But ok.  Where did this idea that humans are naturally selfish come from?

Think back to what I said about women.  If you recall, the social hierarchies informed ideas on women.  The role of women therefore becomes them.

In a neoliberal society, people must be, by definition, selfish.  If all social interactions are derived from market forces, where selfish actors only look after their own self-interest, then people must be inherently selfish.

In a capitalist market economy, where infinite growth must be attained, or the entire apparatus shudders to a halt, people must be inherently greedy in order to ensure that economic growth is achieved.

If your economy revolves around maximising short term growth, then these selfish, greedy actors must be shortsighted.

But this is circular.  This is bad logic.  People are greedy, selfish, shortsighted because the economic structure requires them to be greedy, selfish, shortsighted, and as such people are greedy, selfish, shortsighted because the economic structure requires them to be so, and thus people are

Let's return to where this all began.  Can populations change?

If we see that the attribution of certain traits to populations is the result of feedback loops between physical conditions and our perception of those conditions, then there is no reason as to why populations can't change.

And if we look back through recent history, we can see that people have changed.  Remember the optimism of modernism, the despondent apathy of postmodernism, and the crushing stagnation of our neoliberal present.

People have changed.  People can change.  People will change.  History is not yet over.