Discussing Nassim Taleb’s Work on Human Domestication with Lynn Lockhart
James,I have been thinking about the Russian hooligan video and also reading Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb and trying to connect some ideas. Without getting into the details of the book, the topic of risk taking is important, and I am not sure you have addressed it in terms of civilization, combat arts, or masculinity. The spectrum of risk taking goes from the pathologically timid, he who fears losing his possessions or injuring his body, across to the reckless, who can't judge the risk or doesn't care. There is also the aspect of gambling, what I would consider as playing games of pure chance, like slot machines or lottery tickets. These are risks with no real investment. I have linked a piece on domestication, or employment as slavery and would love to hear your thoughts.
How to legally own another person, Nassim Taleb
I will include some choice quotes to entice you to read it:
Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you the evidence of submission
...
Evidence of submission is displayed by having gone through years of the ritual of depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, punctual arrival at an office, denying himself his own schedule, and not having beaten up anyone. You have an obedient, housebroken dog.
...
The best slave is someone you overpay and who know it, terrified of losing his status.
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Risk takers can be socially unpredictable people. Freedom is always associated with risk taking, whether it led to it or came from it. You take risks, you feel part of history. And risk takers take risks because it is in their nature to be wild animals.
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So while cursing and bad language can be a sign of dog-like status and total ignorance –the “canaille” which etymologically relates these people to dogs; ironically the highest status, that of free-man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class.
...
Watching Putin against others made me realize that domesticated (and sterilized) animals don’t stand a chance against a wild predator. Not a single one. Fughedabout military capabilities: it is the trigger that counts.
James writes:
This article, Lynn, was extensive and excellent. It is, however, written from an emasculated and materialistic perspective, the two states being very much conjoined in Western Modernity’s witch’s brew of unmanning norms. Taleb does not differentiate between genders, admitting that, in the white collar corporate environment he speaks of, these domesticated and “wild” behaviors cross over the gender line and they do. He probably sees the corporate environment as intrinsically male, according to our false modernist convention, which I do not. Perhaps this is illuminated in his book. Corporate environments are “neuter spaces” defeminizing women and unmanning men.
The imitation of the lower class by the upper is as old as Rome, probably older and signals a society in decline. Societies in decline have always—as far as I have been able to determine—suffered in the masculine sphere. This is simple to track with monarchies as succeeding generations of kings and emperors becoming increasingly effeminate, with a reactionary phase of ultra-masculine revival often signaling a last gasp of the culture.
I will focus on this item and the discussion on swearing in the work place as a wild expression of rebellion and reversal to a wild animal state rather than a domesticated state.
Cursing as Wild Devolutionary Rebellion
Taleb deals with two states, wild and domesticated, just as violence analysts traditionally dealt with two states of aggression response, Fight or Flight. These are both over simplified. Aggression response includes Fight, Flight, Posturing and Submission.
Let us apply these four aspects of aggression to the corporate work place, which is a system of aggression against the individual. Fighting gets you fired, flight gets you to the same place, posturing is demonstrated by misbehaving in the work place as Taleb describes and submission keeps you employed and or employable.
In terms of emasculation, cursing is a symptom, not a cure. Who traditionally curses the most?:
First, sailors, who are the least free and most enslaved military men on the bottom rung, with most sailors of the period in which their swearing was made famous being kidnapping victims or convicts.
The second most famous group of swear mouths is convicts, another frustrated, powerless lot.
The third most foul-mouthed group is black Americans, traditionally at the bottom of American society, bypassed by other ethnicities that have come in beneath them and displaying intergenerational embitterment toward the greater society.
As a person working at the bottom of the economy for 30-plus years, I can tell you that women swear more in the workplace than men of the same class. This makes all the sense in the world when one realizes that the famously foul-mouthed black man is raised, not by a man, but by a woman, who typically displays immense levels of cursing, far beyond any sailor of yore. This behavior is common among women who are forced by circumstance—and this circumstance might be caused by her decision to take government money in exchange for not living with the father of her children—to take on a male role. I can tell you from coaching experience that mothers of athletes are louder and more foul than fathers. Cursing is the classic form of powerless, impotent, rebellion, blaspheming the social norms that one is unable to overcome or succeed within.
Cursing in the work place is not a sign of wildness but of a feral state, with hallmarks of feminine verbosity rooted in the functional chatter of a gathering social animal who must be keyed to raise the alarm and “chimp out” so that the men might come to their aid.
This point will be better understood if we progress to the four masculine states.
Typified by neglected children and male children raised by animals, or by a castoff feral human bereft of tribal affiliation, some homeless men fit this rare “Tarzanesque” example, in fiction and myth often represented by the monstrous being, existing at the level of the animals below that of primitive man.
Primal:
Disciplined adaptation in the form of learned behavior necessary to prevail over more powerful wild creatures and survive the awesome powers of nature, which, among all Stone Age hunting peoples studied to date, is typified by high functioning silence in the hunting of enemy men and animals and by ritualized noise [music] most often practiced in the presence of women, whereby women gain the impression of men as noisy and hence imitate men’s more verbose at home ritual rather than their functional field behavior.
Domesticated:
Civilized, feminized to varying and usually progressive degrees, until the crucial modern phase when the female too begins to suffer neutering effects.
Feral:
Criminal, corrupted, often ultra-masculine in a narrow sense and unbalanced behaviors, typified by a mix of wild, primal and domesticated traits.
Using Taleb’s example of Putin and your question of the Russian Soccer Hooligans who made such work of normal soccer hooligans, we must understand that the normal human is the domesticated one, the soccer hooligan is feral and the Russian Soccer hooligan is self made and society formed, representing the resurrected Primal practice of training as a unit. Understanding Taleb’s wolf example to be on the mark, one must admit that wolves have a primal culture, a society designed around hunting. This is why they worked well with men and have been venerated in primal cults since the beginning. A battle between drunken British soccer hooligans and trained Russian soccer hooligans is like a battle between a pack of feral dogs and a wolf pack—a rout.
Yes, compared to a Western politician Putin is as a wolf to a lap dog.
Let’s put Putin on a human scale of wildness and domestication.
Homeless, retarded man =Wild dog
Putin = Wolf
Politician = lap dog
Criminal = feral dog
If we have a single elimination tournament which canine wins?
The lap dog is eaten by the feral dog.
The wolf, being shaped into a paragon of wild canine virtues by the pack system [the canine tribe] gets the best of his undisciplined wilder foe.
The wolf and the feral dog is another wipeout as the feral dog is an imitator, a creature beginning an evolution back to wolf kind, pitted against a fully evolved canine predator.
This little worksheet shows Putin’s Russia for what it is, a conscious attempt to rebuild manhood and masculine culture.
Looking at American society via this model we expand the canine metaphor from lap dog politician to law officer as sheep dog guarding the flock, the prize-fighter as pit bull, soldiers as German shepherds, Doberman pincers, Irish wolfhounds and other big breeds used in military action in the past and today, with most Americans typing as some kind of house dog.
Lynn, there is a reason why ancient warriors around the world venerated the wolf, why Robert E. Howard constantly used the wolf as the totemic spirit of the tribal man, why the Wolves of Vinland, founded by neo-masculinity advocates in America have taken the wolf as their symbol. To be accurate, we must admit that the wolf pack is a canine tribal structure with values and shared goals and have evolved far beyond the grizzly bear, another canine that gets along on its own due to immense powers, or the skulking jackal, who remains forever marginalized, the animal that Howard used as the totemic image of the cowardly criminal and that in our time is used to describe CIA hit men.
Let us apply these four aspects of aggression to the corporate work place, which is a system of aggression against the individual. Fighting gets you fired, flight gets you to the same place, posturing is demonstrated by misbehaving in the work place as Taleb describes and submission keeps you employed and or employable.
In terms of emasculation, cursing is a symptom, not a cure. Who traditionally curses the most?:
First, sailors, who are the least free and most enslaved military men on the bottom rung, with most sailors of the period in which their swearing was made famous being kidnapping victims or convicts.
The second most famous group of swear mouths is convicts, another frustrated, powerless lot.
The third most foul-mouthed group is black Americans, traditionally at the bottom of American society, bypassed by other ethnicities that have come in beneath them and displaying intergenerational embitterment toward the greater society.
As a person working at the bottom of the economy for 30-plus years, I can tell you that women swear more in the workplace than men of the same class. This makes all the sense in the world when one realizes that the famously foul-mouthed black man is raised, not by a man, but by a woman, who typically displays immense levels of cursing, far beyond any sailor of yore. This behavior is common among women who are forced by circumstance—and this circumstance might be caused by her decision to take government money in exchange for not living with the father of her children—to take on a male role. I can tell you from coaching experience that mothers of athletes are louder and more foul than fathers. Cursing is the classic form of powerless, impotent, rebellion, blaspheming the social norms that one is unable to overcome or succeed within.
Cursing in the work place is not a sign of wildness but of a feral state, with hallmarks of feminine verbosity rooted in the functional chatter of a gathering social animal who must be keyed to raise the alarm and “chimp out” so that the men might come to their aid.
This point will be better understood if we progress to the four masculine states.
The Four Masculine States
Wild:Typified by neglected children and male children raised by animals, or by a castoff feral human bereft of tribal affiliation, some homeless men fit this rare “Tarzanesque” example, in fiction and myth often represented by the monstrous being, existing at the level of the animals below that of primitive man.
Primal:
Disciplined adaptation in the form of learned behavior necessary to prevail over more powerful wild creatures and survive the awesome powers of nature, which, among all Stone Age hunting peoples studied to date, is typified by high functioning silence in the hunting of enemy men and animals and by ritualized noise [music] most often practiced in the presence of women, whereby women gain the impression of men as noisy and hence imitate men’s more verbose at home ritual rather than their functional field behavior.
Domesticated:
Civilized, feminized to varying and usually progressive degrees, until the crucial modern phase when the female too begins to suffer neutering effects.
Feral:
Criminal, corrupted, often ultra-masculine in a narrow sense and unbalanced behaviors, typified by a mix of wild, primal and domesticated traits.
Using Taleb’s example of Putin and your question of the Russian Soccer Hooligans who made such work of normal soccer hooligans, we must understand that the normal human is the domesticated one, the soccer hooligan is feral and the Russian Soccer hooligan is self made and society formed, representing the resurrected Primal practice of training as a unit. Understanding Taleb’s wolf example to be on the mark, one must admit that wolves have a primal culture, a society designed around hunting. This is why they worked well with men and have been venerated in primal cults since the beginning. A battle between drunken British soccer hooligans and trained Russian soccer hooligans is like a battle between a pack of feral dogs and a wolf pack—a rout.
Yes, compared to a Western politician Putin is as a wolf to a lap dog.
Let’s put Putin on a human scale of wildness and domestication.
Homeless, retarded man =Wild dog
Putin = Wolf
Politician = lap dog
Criminal = feral dog
If we have a single elimination tournament which canine wins?
The lap dog is eaten by the feral dog.
The wolf, being shaped into a paragon of wild canine virtues by the pack system [the canine tribe] gets the best of his undisciplined wilder foe.
The wolf and the feral dog is another wipeout as the feral dog is an imitator, a creature beginning an evolution back to wolf kind, pitted against a fully evolved canine predator.
This little worksheet shows Putin’s Russia for what it is, a conscious attempt to rebuild manhood and masculine culture.
Looking at American society via this model we expand the canine metaphor from lap dog politician to law officer as sheep dog guarding the flock, the prize-fighter as pit bull, soldiers as German shepherds, Doberman pincers, Irish wolfhounds and other big breeds used in military action in the past and today, with most Americans typing as some kind of house dog.
Lynn, there is a reason why ancient warriors around the world venerated the wolf, why Robert E. Howard constantly used the wolf as the totemic spirit of the tribal man, why the Wolves of Vinland, founded by neo-masculinity advocates in America have taken the wolf as their symbol. To be accurate, we must admit that the wolf pack is a canine tribal structure with values and shared goals and have evolved far beyond the grizzly bear, another canine that gets along on its own due to immense powers, or the skulking jackal, who remains forever marginalized, the animal that Howard used as the totemic image of the cowardly criminal and that in our time is used to describe CIA hit men.
Lynn writes:
James, I like how far you took the dog/wolf analysis. Canines are like our shadows along the path from Wild and Primal to Domesticated and back around to Feral.
I have also observed that women in the workplace curse more than men, though the foulest mouthed person I knew in my short career in finance was a scouser (native of Liverpool) and probably wished he had been a football hooligan in his early days.
Taleb is fun to read. He knows a lot of history and has made some highly original observations. Perhaps we can come back to some of his other writings.
(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart
James, I like how far you took the dog/wolf analysis. Canines are like our shadows along the path from Wild and Primal to Domesticated and back around to Feral.
I have also observed that women in the workplace curse more than men, though the foulest mouthed person I knew in my short career in finance was a scouser (native of Liverpool) and probably wished he had been a football hooligan in his early days.
Taleb is fun to read. He knows a lot of history and has made some highly original observations. Perhaps we can come back to some of his other writings.
(c) 2017 James LaFond & Lynn Lockhart
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| An example of James' handiwork |
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