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The question of exactly how folk religious beliefs are transmitted has been discussed most effectively in the Cognitive Science of Religion field. I have contributed a bit to this debate with a participation observer ethnography in rural southern Japan. The results of that work were presented in 2014 in summary form here: "Arakabu and the Arakawa Mountain Kami, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (Available online) and other places. The basic summary is that religious type concepts are applied to problems just as any other concept is, though they provide something extra that can be encapsulated in the definition of myth that I hold to: 1) some form of oral transmission; 2) presentation of religious concepts that within the local belief system still maintain a firm grip on the community; and, 3) unfolding events in the story that maintain a clear relevancy to how the community understands itself to be constituted. I invite disagreement, discussion, etc. of any kind. Another angle of this discussion is linked to a documentary film I have just completed called "Dance of the Tanokansa." (Tanokansa is in the southern Japanese Kagoshima dialect the rice god). The ultimate question is this: How do communities maintain traditional beliefs amidst the social environment of modern urbanization and mechanization? I am currently uploading serially sections of the film at my Minds site JcChristopher under the project name 'Rock's Second Blossom,' which is to be a longstanding discussion of myth from the perspective of freedom (Though it is starting now only with the film so that I can get used to the new media). If anyone has interest in this topic, please watch Parts 1-3, now available at the site, and comment here or there. Best regards, JCF

For the past year we've all been watching some really odd and sometimes wretched behavior from what we commonly refer to as "the left". With this whole Hollywood scandal I now realized that there might not be such a thing as "left-wing propaganda". Every movie, every tv-show, every song, every comic, every book that espouse the leftist-agenda has been tainted (I'm not implying the right is innocent). What did J.K. Rowling have to do in order to get published? Or get movies done? What Did Emma Watson have to do in order to get to speak in from of the UN? What did Kimmel do in order to get a late-night show? Meryl Streep? We can go on and on and on with examples. These people have all gave a part of themselves in order to get where they are, they metaphorically sold their soul to the devil (perhaps in some cases not that metaphorically). What would that do to a person? How would a person act towards the innocent knowing deep down that they themselves are wretched? I think it's simple. In their minds they can never be the bad guy so when they see someone that forces them to realize they're evil they will play a sophist trick on themselves and others: they will start changing definitions. Redefining evil as good and good as evil is how these people are able to live with themselves. So leftist propaganda is not for us but ultimately for them. It's an imaginary world of their own making where they're seen as the good, as rebels, as moral pillars, as superheroes. What we have witnessed all this time is their pathology masked in a pretty package. When Roman Polanski won an Oscar, look at Harrison's Ford face as he reads his name. Doesn't it suddenly make sense now why he's so miserable and cynical? People have always complained how he seems to ruin every movie he's in now because he plays each role as the "I really don't wanna be here" guy. Knowing what he knows we would probably be the same. Marina Sirtis (from Star Trek TNG) once broke down at a panel and thanked the fans for giving her the life she has now. After watching Electric Boogaloo you'll know of the other path her career might have taken her. Furthermore look at Patrick Stewart's face at the Emoji movie premiere. Why is Ben Affleck a drunken mess in most of his interviews? What demons is he trying to drown out? Adam Sandler is notorious for making what can be loosely called "movies" and turning a profit every single time. When Al Pacino degraded himself in one of those "movies" people wondered what the hell is wrong with him to willingly take such a plunge? When the top in Hollywood is nothing but a sewer, doing a humiliating Dunkin' Donuts commercial seems pretty clean to me. Mark Millar is as successful of a comic book writer as one can get. In his comic WANTED, also a major Hollywood movie, the main character is an average Joe that's privy to how the world actually works and fully accepts it. It's a superhero comic without any superheroes, it's a world where everything is run by villains and every protagonists is a villain. The main character joins the elite, the high ranking society, and at some point even rapes an A-list celebrity without any consequence. In the Hollywood version of the story everything is turned upside down. They're not villains but assassins (ends justify the means kinda mentality) and the main protagonist is not a villain but a hero. Again, they can't be the villains so they have to put a spin on it. Robin Williams killed himself to avoid to work in that industry. Or what about Leonardo diCaprio? How much does one have to sin in order to feel like you have to save the entire planet in order to atone for them? Even ComicCon makes sense now. I always wondered why would these celebrities and creative types go to such a chaotic place where people pay them to touch them. I'm guessing that taking money directly from fans and cutting out the Weinstein-ish middleman is a breath of fresh air. I wish things were different but ultimately I'm glad I'm finally seeing how the hamburger is made.

Hello all. My first post here, but I can't think of another community on or offline that hasn't drunk the 'family koolaid'. TL;DR: The issue at hand, and I think many of us might have a similar situation, is that my fiancée has an expectation/ desire that my family of origin has a place in our lives together. I think they are really bad people, so damaged that they have no clue how toxic they are. Ironically she wants nothing to do with her abusive mother. I occasionally try to connect with them mostly out of a sense of misplaced duty but I leave every visit angered and saddened. I think I have to explain my feelings towards them by giving some background. As a warning, some of the things I discuss here may provoke either rage, sickness or incredulity so again I warn you and also swear that this is the real truth of my life. My mother grew up as R-selected as you can get: zero male figures in her life, with angry, abusive and neglectful females as her 'caretakers'. This was post-war Germany where sadly stories like this are common. When my mother was 9 her mother died horribly. My mother grew up admiring the USSR and communist ideals, naturally, seeing them as the opposite of the much maligned NSDAP. My mother is extremely foolish as later as an adult some man asked her to have his child and she obliged him even though they weren't married, just assuming he would stay. Naturally he left her shortly after. He died not long after in what is likely a drunk driving accident, leaving my mother with my brother. Four years later she met my father, and older American army officer, himself from an extremely rough background involving whatever abuse and privation you can imagine including frequent familial sexual abuse. He himself I would say now had traits of both autism and sociopathy. I imagine my mother would naturally be attracted to her perfect R-selected match or perhaps to her limited judgement he represented an image of respectability, strength and charm. I don't want to be unfairly hard on them as they essentially experienced hellish lives, but all I mean by that is that I will not exaggerate. I believe cross-cultural matches are dangerous because the language barrier/ culture barrier sort of fogs peoples evaluations of one another relative to their native social context. During my childhood my mother, inspired by feminists in her liberal arts program, decided to divorce my father and excise him from my life. Perhaps it was the propaganda, perhaps it was my father's constant philandering. Regardless of the details, which to this day I can not fully know, I received the wrath of my mother for years as she attempted to indoctrinate me and my brother to believe that everything male was evil, females are 100% good, communism is the ideal society, the sexes are not only psychologically identical but somehow even physically identical (???) as were the races. I was praised as being 'so smart' when I would parrot all this nonsense back to her. The most terrible thing she tried to teach me was that sexual promiscuity was a good thing and a man had no right to expect fidelity from his female partner. Or actually many the most terrible thing was that modern art was supposedly better than classical art -- she literally yelled at me every time I tried to draw a doodle that was remotely identifiable as a real-world object. For fun she liked to invite a series of men of the years to share her bed at the house my father bought for her. She also had zero physical boundaries, often going nude in passing or just barging in when I was using the restroom or shower. I remember just shivering with a feeling of violation as she would demand to inspect my penis' foreskin for phimosis which I know now is a nonsense condition that either resolves itself naturally or may be overcome with simple stretching. No need to slice of 1/3 of my penis which thankfully didn't happen. I had zero trust in her. Compounding this were my own psychological and developmental problems. I couldn't tie my shoes until I was 9, I couldn't really read until I began puberty. I had a violent temper that I would unleash against my pears, hurling invective at them just like my mother would constantly lambast anything American or male related or even anything she imagined was somehow American rather than ubiquitous. I was a small boy for the longest time, skeletally thin or fat and pre-hypertensive due to having little to eat or only junk food to eat (for no good reason as my father dutifully paid child support which my mother used for her own purposes). My mother knew what she was doing and would lie to doctors about the health of my diet. I was always weak and cranky, often nearly passing out upon standing. Ironically my mother was always screaming about how fat Americans were and how fat and calories were so evil. My brother during this time would stuff his face to my mother's criticism while she alternately praised me for how little I took. As I entered puberty, I became aware of my situation. My mental and physical development exploded and I began to assert control over my own wellbeing. I fully recognized that I had grown up deprived of food, sleep, attention, healthy social interaction, community and male role models except for the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Segal, Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme. In a very real and also very sad way, these movie men were my surrogate fathers, serving as my most powerful role models, if not perfect, of what a man can and should do in the world to my adolescent mind. I continued to starve until I was too big to be yelled at for fixing myself a sandwich by my apparently psychotic or extremely cheap mother. I became popular at school as I took the pose of both teacher's pet but also class-clown. During this time my mother acquired another husband, who actually lived with us and off my father's child support payments for a good number of years. This man was a broken shell, a product of a sadistic father and a psychopathic mother. Naturally he was a very malleable doormat for my mother. He was phlegmatic, to a point, but possessed an explosive temper when pushed to his limit, which these days is next to nothing to set him off. Everyone was always screaming: my brother was constantly angry and yelling and slamming doors, my mother with her blood-curdling scream, my step-father a porcupine and me trying my hardest to stay out of the way of these angry, illogical freaks. As bad as this was, this was the least miserable time during my childhood/ young adolescence. As a child otherwise unremarkable or below-average I had been able to speak with adult level sophistication since an unusually early age. Later it really became apparent that I was a 'late bloomer' and my scholastic achievements began to pile up, and naturally my brother, who was always terrible academically, began to hate me. My mother spoke about my achievements to all her friends like she had single damn thing to do with any of it. Seeing myself through my peer's eyes I began over the years to correct my own faults: temper, immaturity, rudeness, fear and to this day I struggle with these behaviors. Having my fiancée with me is a great help in this matter as she is very sensitive and loving -- being with her reminds me of how people are naturally quiet in a library, and our good communication allows me to know when I am unconsciously or even consciously less than fair. I love her so much it brings tears of joy to my eyes. Perhaps it is unhealthy because she is essentially the only psychologically healthy person I know better than an acquaintance, however she has always acted with love towards me and I to her. Besides just her feedback and my self-analysis I make sure to get the correct amount of sleep, avoid blood sugar fluctuations and get plenty of vitamin D and exercise. This continued through my young adulthood. I became extremely intelligent -- so intelligent I wish every day I were an idiot. Workplaces love me -- my peers view me as some kind of sage but I can't connect with them and form real friendships. I built up degrees and honors and pursued my career deliberately in anything as different from art or humanities as I could determine, not because I hate these things but because I hate the people who occupy these fields. My mother took credit and my brother hated me. My mother used my stepfather's eventual relative fortune to buy a series of dilapidated shacks. My brother instead circled the drain of life with expectations completely mismatched to the actions he took. Mostly he partied, drank, slept around and blamed everyone else under the sun why he almost failed out of high school and a third tier state college. He lives at home to this day with my mother's 10 cats, in a pose of codependence, after having lost he job he got through nepotism and that he failed out of through sheer incompetence. My brother especially makes visiting hell because he eagerly consumes pop culture. Every time I challenge him when he brings up a mainstream media anti-Trump or anti-Right smear with widely documented facts, facts my brother doesn't contest mind you, he becomes enraged almost to the point of striking me, accusing ME of starting an unwanted debate and trying make HIM a loser by merely challenging anything he says. His way of conciliation is to demand that I agree that everyone is an idiot, and that I shouldn't try to maintain any beliefs because nobody will ever accept them and that all world views are compatible despite the presence a little thing called state power. What he really means is that I shouldn't directly or indirectly reveal to him how little thought he puts behind things and he doesn't care about right, wrong or even basic societal order. He is also a true-blue leftist. He also criticized me for 'pulling away from the family' -- no shit. Why would I want to spend a second more with three broken gas-lighters so aggressively unintelligent, catastrophically dysfunctional and morally debased that they resist even things like the Non Aggression Principle or the idea that Straw Men are not arguments? I shouldn't be surprised they do given our history. After this rant, the issue is that my fiancée wants my 'family' to participate in our future children's lives. She doesn't blame people for their behavior no matter how long after the initial trauma they maintain the effects. This is probably why she tolerated me during our early days when I was still bad at expressing my feelings productively and took measures to further mature. So basically she is a poor judge of character, luckily and also unluckily for me. But in my family I can't think of people more diametrically opposed to my most cherished values than those people or more toxic to a child that wants to grow up with: objectivity, virtue, a pursuit of belief or non-belief in religion unassailed by ideologues, personal interests, health, safety, joy, comfort, secure love, protection, education and example. What can I do as neither of our families are sane? Can we be just an Island and still be healthy? Especially as a right-wing pro-religion yet paradoxically a classically atheist there are hardly any people like me in our very liberal city. Oddly my fiancée is a recovering leftist from a leftist family but she absolutely loves Ancap ideas when I support them with objective universal arguments and historic evidence that the opposite is demonstrably bad.

I finally finished editing a new video on the topic of toxic behavior in relationships. Eventually, I decided to divide it into two videos based on the topics discussed there. I am very pleased with the final product, and I can definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. In the first part, I talk about the origins and mechanism of toxic behavior in adult relationships. Questions explored here: How do most people choose their adult relationships? What are the traits they are looking for in others and why? Why do we sometimes treat our close ones worse than strangers? Why do we act out in our relationships in general? In part two, I look at the options available for someone who is in an abusive, unhappy, or dissatisfying relationship. How can a person resolve a situation where they are in such a relationship?

Part three in my three-part article series on the voice of reason. "We’ve already established why and how disconnected people react when in confrontation with reality, and that in order to remain in denial and disconnection one has to ignore trauma and silence reason—that of other people and in themselves. Here, I will talk about the personal and social effects of being a voice of reason." Read more here: http://blog.selfarcheology.com/2016/02/silencing-voice-of-reason-part-3-pros.html

I just finished a new three-part article series on silencing the voice of reason. Here's the first part. "In this series of articles, I will talk about people’s avoidance of reality, and about personal and social outrage when encountering a voice of reason. In the first part that is this article, I will explain the origins of a person’s unreasonable reaction to describing reality and the mechanism behind this phenomenon. I will also talk about the social outcomes of openly describing the unpleasant aspects of reality, especially child mistreatment." Read more here: http://blog.selfarcheology.com/2016/02/silencing-voice-of-reason-part-1.html

Hey, I just made a short new video on the topic of projected anger: what is it, why people have it, and what to do about it.

A quick new video on how and why do people become narcissistic.

The human bond between parent and child presents a path towards the ultimate good, or a path towards the ultimate evil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEYsuOpREE

If exposure to power, parenting, and conditions while growing up have psychological effects that make people project, split, dissociate, suppress, repress various things to ultimately support and justify a state irrationally and emotionally at an unconscious level...then can a parallel effect occur for pushing a person towards anarchy/libertarianism... BESIDES rational objective philosophy? In other words, what childhood experiences contribute to a person being more inclined or open towards an/lib?______________________________ warning: long personal family background dump I grew up very shy, bullied, not very popular with the girls, plagued by unachievable standards of morality which had a strong effect on me because I wanted to follow the rules, to be good, and to strive for perfection just naturally and not as a defense mechanism. I am still struggling with timidness today, although I am much much better. But I upon deep examination, I still have a lot of limiting factors, that the fear is still there, holding me back, not letting me fully go for what I want... etc. I have gotten so good at self-denial that I become complacent. Perhaps that's not correct. PErhaps it's my fear giving me an excuse and falsely attributing it to the virtue of self-denial. Anyway, I haven't had serious relationship to date, and I am really trying to break through currently. I have broken through a lot in the past few months, but I see there is still a lot more. I come back to the same feeling as when I moved in 2nd grade and felt shy and scared and lonely. I guess because I never dealt with it, and for the majority of my life suppressed those emotional challenges, it's just coming back up in the present. There is a lot of fear conquering I have to do.My impression of my dad is irrational, bullying. He would always have to get involved, get mad, lay down whatever he thought was right, pronounce judgement to me and my other family member who I happened to be arguing with. Sometimes he would blow things up that weren't and wouldn't have been big if he would have just stayed out of it. Perhaps I this contributes to the way I view the state: stop meddling - gtfo. you're irrational. you're contrdictory. You're self-righteous and blind to your own faults. I disctintly remember when he would overpower me verbally, impose irrationality, that I would hate him forever. I had that many times, but of course it always went away with time. To this day today, when a disagreement or an opportunity to clarify comes along, I feel like he raises his voice ad escalates things way too prematurely for an unwarranted reason. Conversations blow up way too easily with him. He is always right, always has a comeback, always makes me feel bad. Wow, as i'm writing this, I had the urge to write "I fucking hate his guts". We stay apart most of the time now, but i still see him. I've been contemplating, and avoiding confronting him and being vulnerable about everything as Stefan recommends doing. I also really dislike the image of my dad. and I hate it when I seem like him. I HATE IT.My mom and grandmother gave me very fucking poisonous, meek, terrible fucking advice for life. As I mentioned, I am very principle-oriented, and really adopted every standard I heard to achieve them. My exposure to things wasn't so various, so I only slowly discovered contradictory standards, rather than sooner. I get really easiliy annoyed by my mom. I find myself acting badly taht I wouldn't towards others. It is a combination of already knowing, what she's like and what she will do, as well as the fact that she stubbornly always does the things I object to. She doesn't learn. And the things are like offering me food. supposedly it's for me, so initially, i guilt trip myself for rejecting and saying to stop giving me food. But over time, it's just ridiculous. It's even silly that she keeps doing it "to benefit me", when I'm the one who gets to decide whether it benefits me or not. She actually is quite exasperating, stubborn, and takes very little feedback. Even more frustrating is that she will never be open or explain or respond to my questions or objections or reasoning when i critique her behavior. Why are you doing this? Don't I get to decide if I want it or not? What does it benefit you to offer me food? (She's a terrible terrible cook, literally the worst I've ever encountered - not taking feedback and sturbbornly doing her thing is part of the reason why she is such a bad cook too). She doesn't answer, and keeps things to herself,I know she has thoughts but she won't ever really say. This is all influenced by my overwhelming dad who beats down objections with his self-righteousness and his overwhelming anger and persona (there just are those types of people who can reach into your heart and strike that fear in you... my dad is one of them... my drill seargeant is another. But there are those who don't, no matter how much their words and actions go. But others can just give you that look, use that tone, and really get that into you. IDK if it's a general thing, or if certain people with certain issues are susceptible to certain queues from others). I feel bad about treating my mom that way, but I do think there is legitimate reason to get frustrated at her - she is quite an annoying person. But I KNOW I am in the wrong too. Over time, I see her insecurity grow, which I know I have contributed to. Simultaneously, had i not been assertive (and i know domineering and yelling is different from assertive, but i grew to be like this after a really horribly mentally devastating time in high school. It was and would have been very hard for me to be assertive without also doing wrong under such duress, stress. It was a time i felt all my efforts were in vain, that all of the ideals i've been taught were so wrong, that no one was there to help me, that i was being ignored under all this hardship, that my dad was a worthless body who never taught me anything or had any solutions for me, and would always end up illiciting blame, incompetence, and just generally bad feelings whenever i asked for help. Also, as a teen you really dont go to your parents for help, especially when you think they're the ones who let you down, let alone the whole coolness and feeling like a failure aspect of going to mommy and daddy. ______________________________ Anyway, it's all kind of a random vomit of my family background here. I kind of do see some parallels of my outlook towards govenrment and my family, especially my dad. But I always find psychology and the unconscdious really counterintuitive and confusing. I have a lot of blindspots when it comes to my own. When people make statements like whatever is repressed will be recreated, and whatever is suppressed will be spread, and the state is a projection of your family exprience.s... like.. they don't ring true. I can't see the logical steps with my intuition to see that they're true. They're really unrelated claims that I am seeking to bridge the gap between. Listening to more podcasts helped me understand some of those logical steps, but I find whenever Stefan makes those statements, they aren't in every instance backed up by logical steps. I suppose it's something that rings true with Stefan, and it just comes out as a more emphatic reiteration of the claim, rather than backing htem up logically. He does in other podcasts, but not always. So I'm just pointing out my struggle to understand psychological concepts like those, not necessarily say that Stefan is wrong. I'm sure those statements could be quite reasonable, and perhaps very established in the field of psychology. I am not in the slightest arguing that those statements aren't true. I want to understand how and why they are. So if you guys see things in the limited way I described my family background here, please do share your insights.