Stability and Dynamics of Individual Personality in a Dominance Hierarchy

By Denis Rancourt

First published here:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/01/stability-and-dynamics-of-individual-personality-in-a-dominance-hierarchy/


In this article, I develop a physics model of the bimodal personality of the social animal. The model uses free-energy barrier-crossing theory and provides a new and testable paradigm of individual behaviour and perception in a dominance hierarchy.

A realistic theory of social organization must use a correct model of the individual. The said correct model must not only contain correct elements but it must also be sufficiently complete to be predictive and to produce observed social behaviour.

For example, it is correct to say that the individual is intrinsically driven to seek safety, resources and to reproduce, however actually expressed in society.  By “intrinsic” I mean “hard-wired” or “evolutionary” or “physiologically prescribed”.  But these correct biological characteristics of the individual are not sufficient by themselves to explain that dominance hierarchy is virtually always the organizational type in societies of social-animal species.

Nor do these correct characteristics of the individual explain the long-term stability of a given class-structured dominance hierarchy, or the phenomenon that many individuals in society can choose to forgo reproduction or even forgo striving to obtain optimal levels of safety and access to vital resources.

Having posited the internal drivers for safety, resources and reproduction, the next level of complexity of the model of the individual is to describe the individual’s intrinsic response function to external (i.e., societal or environmental) signals. Such signals include both positive and negative social feedback, and include both aggression and rewards from the dominance hierarchy.

Regarding the individual’s intrinsic response function, in a 2011 article I postulated that the strong causal relation between poor individual health and subjection to dominance-hierarchy stress was a biological reality that both enabled the formation of dominance hierarchy and provided a mechanism to cull burdensome individuals from the society.¹

However, this was a linear response function that incorrectly does not admit any beneficial effect from stressor events, in any circumstances. It also did not make the important distinction that the “stress” that determines health is not an objective consequence of the external stressors but, instead, must be understood as the “experienced stress”. I described the important additional concepts of “experienced stress” and comparative “self-image” in 2014.² These modulators move us towards the needed non-linearity of the response function, and in themselves explain many health outcomes.

Independently, it has been a major theoretical breakthrough, in the area of individual health, to explicitly posit that the individual’s intrinsic response function is not linear and has a “U” shape. This is scientist-reviewer Sapolsky’s “inverted-U” function.³ I have reviewed these advances in my critical assessment of cancer science.⁴  The inverted-U idea is that there is an optimum degree of stress, not too little (isolation) and not too great (overwhelming oppression), which maximizes individual health.

While the inverted-U curve of stress response is a useful unifying concept, it does not account for the capricious nature of experienced stress, which in turn is the actual determinant of health in a given individual.  The same objectively measured external stress can have opposite health effects in different individuals in the same social class, and opposite effects in the same individual at different times while remaining in the same social class, for example.

The above considerations, the overwhelming importance of dominance hierarchy as the main organizational principle in animal societies, and a review of the science of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin in relation to social status, aggression and dominance interactions led me to propose the simplification that “social animals have two modes of being”, which I explained in the following way:⁵

I propose that the animal has two modes of being, which are binary end-points on an attitudinal, self-image and behavioural psychological-state-scape.

I’m not saying that each individual is permanently in one or the other mode of being. Rather, I propose that the individual shifts and slides into one or the other mode depending on his immediate social circumstances and on his history (biological and metabolic memory) of being predominantly in one mode or the other.

The modes of being that I propose map onto the social dominance hierarchy, and are consistent with the roles of different individuals within the hierarchy.

Specifically, one mode is the mode (and strategy) adopted by the dominated individual. This mode is one where the individual seeks “fairness” and minimal aggressions in their environment. The individual seeks a “safe space” and has no actual design to displace dominants. The culture of individuals that coalesce into such a stratum of the hierarchy is one where “kindness” and “being a good person” are the highest social values that are encouraged and rewarded. Altruism and “goodiness” are elevated to a status meriting religious indulgences. Viciousness actuated by enforcers within the social stratum is turned towards violators of this code.

The other mode is the mode (and strategy) adopted by the individual who intends to be and to remain dominant. It is an outlook of waging and winning battles for dominance. This is the climber with a “killer’s instinct”, prepared to joust for relative advantage and eager to dominate.

These modes are distinct mental and physiological states of being. …

In the present article, I want to extend and formalize the proposal of two modes of being by casting it within the physics paradigm of thermally induced transitions between two free-energy minima of different depths. My intention is to optimally capture the biological, metabolic and social dimensions of the problem with a minimalist model that is sufficiently realistic to explain non-trivial social phenomena.

Within this new picture, the individual’s intrinsic response function (response to external signals), realistically depends on the state (or mode of being) that the individual temporarily occupies and on the landscape of possibilities for given expenditures of metabolic energy.

The single-variable “free-energy” function that I will draw has a y-axis labelled “E”, which is excess metabolic energy expenditure that the individual needs to use in changing their circumstances on the road to transitioning between modes of being.  “E” is analogous to the so-called free energy in physics and chemistry. However, it is excess energy expenditure (or effort) and is therefore on a per-unit-of-time basis for the individual. It is a rate of energy expenditure. It is an “excess” rate because there is always a basal metabolic rate of energy expenditure simply to sustain the life of the inactive individual (beating heart, etc.).

In chemistry, one could be looking at transitions between two bonding configurations of a molecule. In physics, one could be modelling transitions between two orientations of a supermoment on a magnetic iron-oxide nanoparticle. In all cases, the x-axis (or variable) in the “free-energy” picture is a quantity that represents the “state” of the system (molecule, nanoparticle, individual animal) at a given instant.

I label the x-axis “S”, for “state”. In the chemistry example, “S” is a parameter that captures the molecular configuration (a bond angle or an inter-atomic separation). In the physics example, “S” is a parameter that captures the magnetic state of the nanoparticle, such as the angular orientation of the supermoment relative to the ambient magnetic field.

In the case of the individual in a dominance hierarchy, “S” is defined to capture the bio-metabolic state of the individual. For example, we could posit that “S” is the concentration in the blood of a neurohormonal substance that determinatively modulates animal behaviour and perception, which in turn can be interpreted to map onto a “mode of being” or some intermediate transitional mode. Several researchers and scientist reviewers have suggested that serotonin is a candidate to be this substance, but the details of the candidate substance(s) or metabolic quantities do not alter my model.

The possibility of transitions controlled by a modulating substance and occuring in a bimodal state-scape was envisioned for animal behaviour in the landmark 1988 article of Kravitz:⁶

Such compounds, therefore, can influence large areas of the nervous system in a way that parallels the manner in which transmitters, acting through second messengers, alter the properties of individual nerve or muscle cells: they bring the system (a cell for a transmitter or a circuit for a hormone) from one stable state to a second new stable state that now shows a changed response to selective stimulation. This is done by the alteration or sensitization of a logical set of component pieces that together modify the output of the system.

To continue, here is my picture of the excess metabolic rate versus the state variable value (E-vs-S) function. In fact, five different E-vs-S functions are represented for five different individuals in a dominance hierarchy, subjected to five corresponding different degrees of perceived dominance signaling from their social environment:

The curves “1” to “5” for the five different individuals are labelled in order of increasing dominance oppression perceived by the individual. In most circumstances (2, 3 and 4), there are two troughs (labelled “L” for “loser” and “W” for “winner”) in the E-vs-S functions, separated by a barrier maximum labeled “B”.

Here, L and W correspond to the “two modes of being” described above. L is the dominated mode, whereas W is the dominant mode.

At small values of S, such as small blood concentrations of serotonin, say, the individual naturally settles into the L-mode simply by minimizing its rate of excess metabolic energy expenditure. Moderate expenditures of excess metabolic energy do not allow the individual to escape the L-mode, as it simply relaxes back down to minimal expenditure after the temporary exertion.

Similarly, at large values of S the individual naturally settles into the W-mode by minimizing its rate of excess metabolic energy expenditure. Moderate expenditures of excess metabolic energy do not bring the individual into the L-mode.

A winning fight, requiring expenditure of metabolic energy up to the barrier value (L to B) can allow an individual to cross over from the L-mode into the W-mode. Likewise, a losing fight that requires metabolic energy expenditure from W to B can push an individual out of the W-mode and into the L-mode.

Some individuals (curve-1 in the figure) cannot escape the W-mode that, for them, is the only stable mode. This shape of E-vs-S curve occurs for individuals that get constant re-enforcement of their high “dominant” societal status, and that are not subjected to threatening hierarchical oppression. An example would be a high-status government or industry leader that is always accompanied by a small army of ego-boosting sycophants.

Similarly, some individuals (curve-5 in the figure) cannot escape the L-mode that, for them, is the only stable mode. This shape of E-vs-S curve occurs for individuals that are constantly reminded of their low “dominanted” societal status, and that are subjected to threatening hierarchical oppression. An example would be a forced coal-mine worker or a prisoner of war in a forced-labour camp.

Importantly, however, the degree “dominance oppression” that determines the shape of the E-vs-S curve for a given individual is subjective rather than objective. It is the “perceived dominance signaling” from the individual’s environment. As noted above, the said signaling includes both positive and negative social feedback, and includes both aggression and rewards from the dominance hierarchy.

Therefore, a low-social-class individual can be in a stable W-mode although this will be rare, on a population basis at a given time, and so on. Put another way, on a time basis for a given individual, such a given low-social-class individual will, through the metabolic expenditures of interacting, spend most of their time in the L-mode but some of their time in the W-mode. And these outcomes are similar but inversed for high-social-class individuals.

The said “perceived dominance signaling” that determines the shape of the E-vs-S curve for a given individual plays a central role. Let’s simply call it “H”, for the sake of convenience. H is analogous to the ambient constant magnetic field experienced by the nanoparticle in our physics example, and it is analogous to a uniaxial stress (pressure) experienced by the molecule in our chemistry example.

In our case of an individual in a dominance hierarchy, H can be defined as H = fp.Mp − fn.Mn, where the first term is the product of the occurrence frequency (fp) of positive signals and the average magnitude (Mp) of a positive signal. The second term is the product of the occurrence frequency (fn) of negative signals and the average magnitude (Mn) of a negative signal. A signal is a social feedback, such as a facial expression or a look, or an interaction in the dominance hierarchy, including aggressions and rewards.

H has a value that is measured on a certain sensitivity or measurement time (ts) of the individual. The value of H is not sensitive to environmental changes that occur within times smaller than ts, and H may vary in time on timescales larger than ts. The sensitivity time, ts, is the integration time for establishing a long-term memory that modulates perception. For adult humans, it can be as short as days and as long as years. In other words, the frequencies (fp and fn) of signals in the above formula are determined on the time window ts, where fp and fn are necessarily (much) larger than 1/ts.

All this to say that social environmental changes occurring on a timescale larger than ts can change an individual’s E-vs-S curve that in turn determines both (a) the relative amount of time the individual spends in either the L-mode or the W-mode, and (b) the kinetics of the individual’s transitions between the L-mode and S-mode. See below.

The picture I have described so far gives a statistical-mechanics view, based on animal metabolism of a social animal in a dominance hierarchy, to explain an individual’s inertia regarding personality, perception and behavioural changes, and provides a model for an individual’s transitions between the dominated and dominant modes of being, as follows.

If we define a correct “temperature” of the system, then the model will give quantitative predictions for time spent in each mode and kinetics of transitions between modes.

By analogy with the systems in physics and chemistry to which free-energy barrier-crossing theory applies, we can define “temperature” as follows. Let the temperature, T, of an individual in a dominance hierarchy be the mean magnitude of the rate of spontaneous excess metabolic energy expenditure, which is self-generated by the individual (same units as E). This is the rate at which the individual expends metabolic energy to act in the world, beyond just being alive.

Key predictions follow. Let E(L) be the E-value at the bottom of the L-trough, E(W) be the E-value at the bottom of the W-trough, and E(B) be the E-value at the barrier maximum (see figure). And write the natural exponential function (of x) as “exp[x]”.

Then the average time, t(L), spent by the individual in the L-mode before transitioning to the W-mode is given by this simple formula:

t(L)  =  t(TLW)   exp[ (E(B) − E(L)) / T ]

where t(TLW) is the average time between temperature events (of average magnitude T) that constitute attempts to crossover into the W-mode.

The corresponding formula for the average residence time in the W-mode of being is:

t(W)  =  t(TWL)  exp[ (E(B) − E(W)) / T ]

where t(TWL) is the average time between temperature events (of average magnitude T) that constitute attempts to cause cross-over into the L-mode. Here, 1/t(TLW) and 1/t(TWL) are the so-called attempt frequencies of free-energy barrier-crossing theory.

The ratio of residence times is independent of E(B):

t(L)/t(W)  =  (t(TLW)/t(TWL))  exp[ (E(W) − E(L)) / T ]

The latter equation can be tested experimentally, since all the quantities are times and rates of energy expenditure that can be measured.

The above equations may be the first physics equations that predict average residence times of individuals in given L and W metabolic states (modes of being), and that describe the underlying statistical mechanics of animal transitions between the two modes of being.

My model predicts how an individual embedded in a class (characterized by “H”) within a dominance hierarchy is confined to react to their environment to adopt a mode of being. Is your E(L) larger or smaller than your E(W)…? Dominants have E(W) < E(L), whereas dominated individuals have E(L) < E(W), assuming t(TLW) = t(TWL). Arguably, the single number that best characterizes the main coarse features of the individual’s true personality is the dimensionless ratio E(L)/E(W), which largely results from the individual’s environment (H).

The model shows how the dominance hierarchy creates two kinds of individuals that predominantly reside either in the L or W (dominated or dominant) modes of being. In this way, the animal’s intrinsic bio-chemical response to environmental signals provides a foundational mechanism for creating a stable dominance hierarchy, irrespective of the individual health consequences of an individual’s mode of being.

Dominance hierarchies are highly successful from an evolutionary perspective, such that social organization and individual metabolic reaction mechanisms would have co-evolved to be inseparable.
For humans, therefore, while complex institutions, technology and resource extraction efficiency theoretically permit individual emancipation, nonetheless the human animal cannot escape its intrinsic socio-bio-metabolic nature. Dominance hierarchy rules.⁷,⁸

1. “A Theory of Chronic Pain – A social and evolutionary theory of human disease and chronic pain”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, December 26, 2011. []
2. “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014. []
3. “Stress and the brain: individual variability and the inverted-U”, by R.M. Sapolsky, Nature Neuroscience, October 2015, vol. 18, no. 10, pages 1344-1346. And see: “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health”, by R.M. Sapolsky, Science, 29 April 2005, vol. 308, pages 648-652. []
4. “Cancer Arises from Stress-induced Breakdown of Tissue Homeostasis. Part 1: Context of Cancer Research”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, December 4, 2015. []
5. “Social Animals have Two Modes of Being”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, July 2, 2018. []
6. “Hormonal Control of Behavior: Amines and the Biasing of Behavioral Output in Lobsters”, by Edward A. Kravitz, Science, 30 September 1988, vol. 241, pages 1775-1781. []
7. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017. []
8. “Humanity against People. Nature of the maturing geographical and global Western class conflict of Trump and Macron”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, December 16, 2018. []

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is a researcher for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association. He has published more than 100 articles in leading scientific journals, on physics and environmental science. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. Read other articles by Denis.

Social Animals have Two Modes of Being

By Denis Rancourt, PhD


This article was first published on Dissident Voice:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/07/social-animals-have-two-modes-of-being/


I want to describe what I think is a fundamental truth about the individual bio-psychology of social animals, including humans.

Setting for the model

The setting for my model is arguably the greatest current scientific revolution: The formal realization and empirical demonstration that virtually all of social behaviour and individual psychology is encased in the evolutionary, biological and metabolic reality of dominance hierarchy.

For example, see Sapolsky’s influential 2005 review of primate studies [1], and my critical review of medicine [2]. The metabolism of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin and the associated evolutionary biology is now an established area of science [3][4][5][6]. In my opinion, the said area of science, although far from complete, constitutes a foundational building block of the new tectonic-plate theory of social science, whether social scientists are aware of it yet or not. And it has started to infuse the popular culture [7].

This knowledge implies that the metabolic biochemistry of dominance locks us in. No socialism theory that presumes altruistic cooperation as its organizing principle can ever work. Non-hierarchical anarchism and its libertarian cousin are useful conceptual end-points that can never be sustainably achieved. The best we can do is to have a responsive and optimally (evolutionarily) beneficial dominance hierarchy that is actively prevented from exercising pathological excess [8].

The model

In this setting, I propose that the animal has two modes of being, which are binary end-points on an attitudinal, self-image and behavioural psychological-state-scape.

I’m not saying that each individual is permanently in one or the other mode of being. Rather, I propose that the individual shifts and slides into one or the other mode depending on his immediate social circumstances and on his history (biological and metabolic memory) of being predominantly in one mode or the other.

The modes of being that I propose map onto the social dominance hierarchy, and are consistent with the roles of different individuals within the hierarchy.

Specifically, one mode is the mode (and strategy) adopted by the dominated individual. This mode is one were the individual seeks “fairness” and minimal aggressions in their environment. The individual seeks a “safe space” and has no actual design to displace dominants. The culture of individuals that coalesce into such a stratum of the hierarchy is one where “kindness” and “being a good person” are the highest social values that are encouraged and rewarded. Altruism and “goodiness” are elevated to a status meriting religious indulgences. Viciousness actuated by enforcers within the social stratum is turned towards violators of this code.

The other mode is the mode (and strategy) adopted by the individual who intends to be and to remain dominant. It is an outlook of waging and winning battles for dominance. This is the climber with a “killer’s instinct”, prepared to joust for relative advantage and eager to dominate.

These modes are distinct mental and physiological states of being. They occur inside the individual and cannot always be ascertained reliably from outside indicators. For example, climbers in a corporate or government office hierarchy may achieve success by “kissing ass” rather than by confronting superiors. Advancement in these institutions may arise from actuation of the goodiness mode rather than the competitive mode, or competition within an office level may be the selector used by superiors. Anything is possible in a given corporate enterprise, in terms of utilization of intrinsic human behaviours.

The two distinct modes are real regarding the individual’s experience and bodily biochemistry, in the circumstances, rather than ascertainable from superficial outside features such as house or car or ring size.

The psychological-state-scape is binary in the two modes because the metabolic physiologies of the two modes are incompatible. The holistic state of being cannot be both simultaneously. Different blood biochemistries and tissue and organ responses are in play. It’s one or the other: Vying for dominance or accepting subservience. Fight or flight. Challenge or hide. More than a billion years of evolution ain’t goin anywhere.

“Bosses” will find each other to fight. Subservient individuals, subservient in the circumstances, will lower their eyes, group to the edges of the room and exchange vital information about who is “a nice person”.

Application to politics

The establishment bosses that run the Left, more than the Right, exploit the population of individuals that are most easily corralled into the goodiness mode and seduced by goodiness promises.

The boss propaganda (mainstream media, institutional messaging) is clearly designed in this direction: human rights, minority rights, environmentalism, democracy, participation… whereas the state continues its vicious wars of dominance world-wide and its violent apartheid of aboriginal and low economic classes and of non-violent Criminal Code offenders.

It is a textbook illustration. Extreme social justice warriorism and safe-space obsessionism are, in my opinion, pathological and predictable outcomes of unchecked exploitation by those who ride the Left.

As a backlash against the overly successful establishment Left propaganda and institutional capture, individuals who are inhabited by the competition mode react in revolt by violating the goodiness rules of expression and behaviour, causing generalized and amplified outrage. They break the taboos, express racism, use the N-word, graffiti swastikas, speak their minds, and trigger and troll the masses.

The establishment bosses that run the Right have not been keen to use this relatively unmanageable population and have been only tentative in exploring how to use it. Trump changed that. There is no denying that Trump unsettled traditional Republican forces.

This does not mean that all Right-thinking voters are competition-mode individuals, not by any stretch. Most Right-thinking voters are conservatives who seek the “safe space” of traditional family and religious values. They are horrified at the prospect of an eroded institutional framework that could threaten this safe space and they seek the good-person representatives that would protect them.

The establishment bosses that exploit both the Left and the Right understand that goodiness is a winning electoral formula, since most individuals in a dominance hierarchy are goodiness-mode followers rather that competition-mode individuals who vie for higher echelons. This is the nature of a stable dominance hierarchy: Most people just want to be oppressed fairly, to know their place and to be safe. In a so-called “democracy”, since show elections are required, the only question is the flavour of the goodiness.

A problem arises when the flavours of goodiness are so different that the other side is threatened when institutions are captured. Then many will feel they are in danger and the conditions are ripe for competition-mode redress.

In these circumstances, the Right voters shift to seeking and supporting competition-mode leaders that will fight back on their behalf, and more of the Right adopts a competition-style stance. It could have gone the other way, like it did for decades. The Right could have accepted defeat, accepted the humiliation of being “bad persons”, and sought refuge in their own spaces. The Right could have stayed in a social state with most of its individuals in the goodiness mode being pampered by goodiness-mode representatives promising elusive “justice”.

In Canada, I think Preston Manning was a goodiness organizer (reform by rational argument) whereas Harper organized a coup and dismantled as much Left capture of institutions as possible. The Left stuck with goodiness and turned it on, screaming about the Right’s demolition of “human rights”, “environmental protection” and “democracy”. We got Trudeau. Now the Right is rightly pointing to some of the pathologies of going too far with Left goodiness, and its managers are exaggerating the institutional threats against family and against human nature itself, no less.

So goes the seesaw of political manipulation, perfectly in resonance with the intrinsic modes of being of the individual. The individuals naturally self-organize and are corralled into protective communities, both within and between strata of the hierarchy.

Application to religion

Institutionally organized religion is a perfected system of goodiness rules, which stabilizes and strengthens a dominance hierarchy. Even environmentalism can be understood as such a state religion [9].

Religious belief and practice, for most people, is deeply ingrained in the goodiness mode of being of the individual, as should be obvious from my above description. The rituals of recycling, healthy lifestyle practice, donations to The United Way and so on, while they have no positive effect on population health, systemic negative class bias or “the planet”, nurture and solidify a prolonged and robust adoption by the individual of the goodiness mode of being.

As long as a majority of citizens reside in the goodiness mode of being, the dominance hierarchy cannot be challenge and major displacements will not occur. Public peace will prevail.

Of course religious seminal texts, nowadays including much of the so-called scientific literature, are more complex than state propaganda and can be used, as needed or desired, to incite individuals into the competitive mode of being, into the confrontational state, to be manipulated by political organizations.

This is actively seen today in Zionist Israel with Torah and holocaust scholarship, where the texts are used to incite and rationalize genocidal displacement, confinement and suppression of the native population. Interestingly, hard science (genetics) has established that white European Jews that have always run the modern state of Israel do not have a relevant ancestry that originated in Palestine.[10] If science mattered.

Conclusion and verification

It is in our animal and human nature — inherited on our evolutionary path — to occupy either the goodiness or competitive modes of being, which represent biochemical and physiological states of either accepting or challenging the dominance of others.

The reality of my model of individual modes of being can be tested (experienced) by experimentation with LSD, which alters serotonin metabolism.[11] A common description of mild LSD experiences is that the subject is able to escape their persona and become conscious of their identity programing and conscious of the identity or motivational programming of others.[12] Dominance hierarchy is dissolved by blocking serotonin receptors on neurons. No wonder that’s illegal.

Endnotes

[1] “The Influence of Social Hierarchy on Primate Health”, by R.M. Sapolsky. Science, 29 April 2005, vol. 308, pages 648-652. DOI: 10.1126/science.1106477. http://pinniped.net/sapolsky2005.pdf

[2] “Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis”, by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, December 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285574571_Cancer_arises_from_stress-induced_breakdown_of_tissue_homeostasis

[3] “Serotonin, social status and aggression”, by Donald Edwards and Edward Kravitzt, 1997, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, vol. 7, pages 812-819. http://animalnecessity.com/doc/research/Serenin/Serotonin-Social-Status.pdf

[4] “Serotonin modulates behavioral reactions to unfairness”, by Molly J. Crockett et al., Science, 2008 June 27; 320(5884): 1739. doi:10.1126/science.1155577. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2504725/

[5] “Serotonin selectively influences moral judgment and behavior through effects on harm aversion”, by Molly J. Crockett et al., PNAS, October 5, 2010, vol. 107, no. 40, 17433-17438. http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/107/40/17433.full.pdf

[6] “Serotonin and Dominance”, by Anna Ziomkiewicz, January 2016, In: Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1440-1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310586509_Serotonin_and_Dominance

[7] “Jordan Peterson and the Threat of Working-class Intellectual and Attitudinal Liberation”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, June 3, 2018. https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/06/jordan-peterson-and-the-threat-of-working-class-intellectual-and-attitudinal-liberation/

[8] “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

[9] “The Climate Religion”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 15, 2016. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/09/the-climate-religion/

[10] “A substantial prehistoric European ancestry amongst Ashkenazi maternal lineages”, by Marta D. Costa et al., Nature Communications, vol. 4, Article number: 2543 (2013). https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

[11] “Serotonin and Hallucinogens”, by GK Aghajanian and GJ Marek, Neuropsychopharmacology, vol. 21, pages 16S–23S (1999). https://www.nature.com/articles/1395318

[12] “Larry Hagman 'All Politicians Should Use LSD'”, interview of Larry Hagman, YouTube, November 24, 2012 upload by xBehindthetruthx. https://youtu.be/UBanX4kpswo

Jordan Peterson and the Threat of Working-class Intellectual and Attitudinal Liberation

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

[This article was first published at Dissident Voice: LINK.]


SUMMARY: Why the industry of glib and vehement mainstream character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson? My examination of Peterson’s “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back” suggests that it is a seminal work anchored in a prestigious body of scientific research that should form the theoretical basis of social science in the coming years. Peterson is simply presenting this nascent scientific paradigm of the primacy of dominance hierarchy directly to the people, without an institutional filter, and using it in a cognitive therapy approach to solve the self-image catastrophe that white males in particular are experiencing. There is no valid basis for the attacks against Peterson, which are motivated by establishment machinations.


I’m a world-class scientist. I’m a physicist with an h-index of 36 (i10-index 81). I was a university professor at 29 and a full and tenured professor at 40. I’ve made discoveries in physics and some of my most cited papers are in soil and environmental science. I’m not clever in navigating society’s dominance hierarchy but I am intellectually honest and I am damn smart when it comes to understanding concepts and recognizing new phenomena.

Only those of my enemies who are professional liars (lawyers) have ever dared to call me stupid: “Mr. Rancourt is an intelligent man Your Honour”, but not repeatedly.

That is why I have been surprised to observe the deluge of strident voices, opinion leaders of our time, who use the establishment’s highest media venues to launch character assassinations of clinical and research psychologist Jordan Peterson based on… nothing.

Peterson is a fascinating media and social phenomenon worth investigating. I looked at his outstanding research record on Google Scholar and read several of his most cited and recent scientific papers. I watched several of his debates against said opinion leaders and several of his pedagogical presentations.

The scientific papers are exemplary, with correct applications of sophisticated statistical, significance and factor analysis tools. I often find sloppy and incorrect applications to be the norm in the medical field,¹ for example, but not here.

In the presentations, I find clear and intelligent statements on the questions related to his many areas of expertise, and ya, some exaggerations and incorrect statements in areas where his gaze has not been objective, it appears.

For example, I don’t understand how an authentic intellectual could read the landmark works of Karl Marx and the critiques of the said work by the great anarchist theorist Kropotkin and not be thoroughly impressed by the genius of Marx, and the elements of his theory that are seminal and fundamental even if incorrectly extrapolated by Marx. I conclude that Jordan has not actually read this stuff or he is being irrational in his evaluation, for whatever reasons related to his personal history.

In my evaluation, however, Peterson’s occasional stupid summaries are entirely a result of his boldness to put ideas out there, on the fly, in his broad and continuous interactions with the world; and they remove nothing from the depth and rigour of his other written and spoken words. Even Einstein wrote naïve and silly things without the prerequisite background study: “Why Socialism?”, 1949.

Next, I decided to get myself a copy of his record-breaking best seller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I’m a slow reader, and I read all the notes and most of the articles themselves that are cited. I have now finished up to the end of: “Rule 1: Stand Up Straight with Your Shoulders Back”.
I thought: “Holy crap. This guy is doing something unprecedented. He is taking a nascent scientific paradigm and bringing it directly to the people, with no institutional intermediaries. Brilliant.”
I’ll explain what Peterson is doing and its significance but before I do…

I next went back to the products of the character-assassination professionals to see what the service intellectuals had said about “Rule 1”, and I looked for “Rule 1” summaries and explanations on line.
I was shocked to find the degree to which the said service intellectuals had done their job. What a distasteful spectacle. Such vile dishonesty. Only an assigned mission and attempts at opinion mobbing could produce such trash, which actually hurts the brain unless your purpose is mindless subservience to establishment spin.

What is the “nascent scientific paradigm”, which threatens key tenets of the current social engineering complex if it is not sufficiently buried? Let me be blunt. In the last decade or more, biochemists, biologists, animal behaviourists and psychologists have established proof of what some astute observers have been saying for centuries: Dominance hierarchy rules, across the animal kingdom and over evolutionary time. It is rooted in a primordial physiology and metabolic biochemistry.

The metabolism of the monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin, and the associated evolutionary biology, is the first synthesis of the new tectonic plates theory of social science, whether social scientists are aware of it yet or not. Period.

The metabolic biochemistry of dominance locks us in. No socialism theory that presumes altruistic cooperation as its organizing principle can ever work. Non-hierarchical anarchism and its libertarian cousin are useful conceptual end-points that can never be sustainably achieved. The best we can do is to have a responsive and optimally (evolutionarily) beneficial dominance hierarchy that is actively prevented from exercising pathological excess.²

Jordan is spelling this out (p. 14-15):

This is because “nature” is “what selects,” and the longer a feature has existed the more time it has had to be selected-and to shape life. It does not matter whether that feature is physical and biological, or social and cultural. All that matters, from a Darwinian perspective, is permanence—and the dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real. The dominance hierarchy is not capitalism. It’s not communism, either, for that matter. It’s not the military-industrial complex. It’s not the patriarchy—that disposable, malleable, arbitrary cultural artefact. It’s not even a human creation; not in the most profound sense. It is instead a near-eternal aspect of the environment, and much of what is blamed on these more ephemeral manifestations is a consequence of its unchanging existence. We (the sovereign we, the we that has been around since the beginning of life) have lived in a dominance hierarchy for a long, long time. We were struggling for position before we had skin, or hands, or lungs, or bones. There is little more natural than culture. Dominance hierarchies are older than trees.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. [Footnote 17: “Serotonin and dominance”, by Ziomkiewicz-Wichary, 2016] It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious and weak. If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of fight that life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies. And it is not only the behavioural and experiential similarities that are striking. Much of the basic neurochemistry is the same.

Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in the lobster. Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings (and those low levels decrease more with each defeat). Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency—as anything whatsoever may happen, at any time, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy (and rarely something good). Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan—among humans, just as among crustaceans. Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterized by less illness, misery and death, even when factors such as absolute income—or number of decaying food scraps are held constant. The importance of this can hardly be overstated.

There is an unspeakably primordial calculator, deep within you, at the very foundation of your brain, far below your thoughts and feelings. It monitors exactly where you are positioned in society …

What the ignorant hit men against Peterson have failed to recognize is that Peterson has summarized the greatest scientific advances of the last few decades, which have immediate relevance to human anthropological consciousness—not to mention representing a direct threat to the medical establishment and pharmaceutical industry.²

Peterson is doing this as part of a state-of-the-art cognitive therapy guide or companion.
How can his glib critics be oblivious to this? Simple: Their place and the place of their bosses within the dominance hierarchy are threatened.

Jordan goes on (p. 23-24) to explain the fundamental roles of anger and of fighting back, both as necessary elements of personal liberation and as the fundamental agent to prevent societal spiralling into totalitarianism. His summary on this point is brilliant, and is as seminal as Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology in the geopolitical field.

The same point is also the main thrust of my 2013 book³ and was made in my 2011 blog extract from the book:

There is no denying the first reality about humans. We are social beings, first and foremost regarding the forces that determine our lives. Our societies are hierarchical and, when not constrained by geography or balancing natural forces, spontaneously grow in size towards more hierarchy and fascism.

A recent antidote against the runaway excesses of Western monarchical and religious hierarchies has been the development of an ethos of individual freedom, spawned in the Enlightenment and anchored in mid-layer economic independence from the top hierarchical predators. …⁴

Peterson is not waiting for the social and medical sciences to catch up to the paradigm elucidation that has recently occurred among dominance-hierarchy pioneers. He is taking those discoveries as his world view and as the foundation for his advice to the youth.

The dominance-hierarchy view of nature is powerful and compelling, now supported by a few decades of hard science. It is a predictive model with unlimited capacity to organize our perception of the world. It is a dangerous truth, as is any truth about ourselves, which is not dominance-hierarchy-given but which instead is anchored in objective reality.

In the words of Harold Pinter:

[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
– Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

Peterson is having an impact because his important words are true and because oppressive false words have gone too far.

Goodiness is helpful in stabilizing the domestic dominance hierarchy, but goodiness has been co-opted and used to excess by one side of the establishment forces, the so-called “Left”. In a classic positive feedback loop—not unlike Jordan’s explanation of alcoholism—goodiness (political correctness) has achieved pathological levels and its totalitarianism is spraying dead bodies all over the landscape.

Regular white males are very publicly being told to “check their privilege” (that is, to shut the fuck up), to cower and to apologize and make amends for a historical accumulation of “toxic masculinity”. Privileged (professional class) non-white and non-male service intellectuals are recruited into a deceitful industry of supposedly fixing society by engineering language and by mounting witch hunts against perceived attitudinal blasphemy.

Dominance hierarchy theory tells us that this is a recipe for backlash. Self-image catastrophe is the dominant determinant of ill-health and is accompanied by violent outbursts or self-destruction.⁵
Jordan Peterson is furiously working to prevent and alleviate a violent race and gender civil war, waged by competing hierarchical exploiters, and guided by a disgusting array of careerist social managers.

Jordan Peterson is also fighting for reason and objectivity and against ideological madness.
I mean, come on:

[T]he idea that there is no binary male/female sex divide in humans is simply a vast overstatement of the fact that many other things also occur in the genital and metabolic physiology of a minority of individuals. …

That environmental factors—including culture and the violence or authoritativeness of the local social dominance hierarchy—affect both natural reproduction and the said set of sex-differentiating physiological attributes does [not] invalidate the sex binary in human society.⁶

Jodan’s Rule-1 explanation about gender roles (pp. 15-16) is anchored in science. His Footnote 18 is “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom”, which has:

Combining Bateman’s principles with Darwin’s conception of eager males and discriminating females, the Darwin-Bateman paradigm is now the most commonly invoked concept to explain conventional sex roles (…). Specifically, it provides the conceptual framework to understand two central manifestations of conventional sex roles—female-biased parental care and male-biased sexual dimorphism.⁷

What is next? Are we going to pretend that sexual dimorphism is not real? Or postulate that virtually all animal behavioural studies are cultural fantasies imagined by the field observers? Are we going to throw out evolutionary biology and all of Darwin’s ideas as “male science”? Why not discount Einstein’s theories as “Jew science” while we are at it?

Look, white males are assholes, fine. But the “Words that Wound” industry service intellectuals are going too far.⁸ Establishment “science” can be lethal, as is literally the case with medicine,¹ but that does not negate what we actually know about cell biology and metabolic reactions. Likewise, fundamental empirical discoveries about dominance and sex are not negated because Freud was off and psychiatry is a horror. You cannot simply extrapolate cherry picked scientific reports of anomalies into broad self-serving ideological conclusions.

These are the things that Jordan Peterson is responsibly questioning. Thank god.

1. “Cancer arises from stress-induced breakdown of tissue homeostasis”, by Denis Rancourt, Research Gate, December 2015, DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1304.7129. [↩] [↩]
2. “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, September 7, 2017. [↩] [↩]
3. Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism, by Denis Rancourt, Stairway Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-9859942-8-0. [↩]
4. “Individual freedom versus collective oppression as the determinative conflict in a hierarchical society”, by Denis Rancourt, Activist Teacher, August 16, 2011. [↩]
5. “Self-Image-Incongruence Theory of Individual Health”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, October 26, 2014. [↩]
6. “Respecting ‘Rules of War’ in Societal Battles: Science, Sex and Hate Speech”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, November 8, 2016. [↩]
7. “Darwinian sex roles confirmed across the animal kingdom”, by Janicke et al., Science Advances, 12 Feb 2016: Vol. 2, no. 2, e1500983 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1500983 [↩]
8. “Critical Race Theory and Freedom of Speech” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Chapter 5 in: The Future of Academic Freedom, edited by Louis Menard, University of Chicago Press, 1996. ISBN: 9780226520049; which is a critique of Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, by legal scholars Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlè Crenshaw, Westview Press, 1993. [↩]

Professional Ethics: Psychiatrist Louis Morissette Should Be Barred From Practice

By Denis Rancourt, PhD

This article was first published on Dissident Voice (LINK).

The Quebec medical tribunal will decide if psychiatrist-for-hire Louis Morissette was allowed to provide a hatchet job based on hearsay.

The review committee of the medical tribunal of Quebec will decide within 90 days whether or not anyone anywhere, such as a political party or institution or individual in any province or state, can hire a Quebec expert psychiatrist to render a medical opinion about an opponent without interviewing or even informing the individual.

The said medical opinion could be made without any medical record or clinical evaluation or verification of information, and then used publicly or otherwise for political or institutional purposes.
This happened to me, with devastating consequences.

I only found out by chance, years later, thanks to an investigation into my 2008 dismissal from the University of Ottawa, which is still in litigation.¹,²,³

I filed a complaint to the medical tribunal as soon as I could. I have publicly posted the entire complaint, the intake investigator’s conclusions, and my appeal of the said conclusions.⁴

This is what occurred, in the most neutral terms I can muster.

Dr. Louis Morissette, a psychiatrist licenced by the province of Quebec, agreed to conduct a secret medical evaluation of an individual who was critical of his employer.  The psychiatrist evidently agreed to the employer’s request that he work without informing the individual.  The psychiatrist never contacted the individual, never tried to contact him, and never even claimed that he tried to contact him.

The psychiatrist did not use any medical records whatsoever. Instead, he relied entirely on false intimate personal information provided by the employer, which he never attempted to verify, and on media reports selected by the employer.

On this basis alone, the psychiatrist wrongly labelled me a dangerous person, causing me to be exiled from my community, following his definitive recommendations to that effect.  Years later, when I found out that the psychiatrist had medically evaluated me, he refused to give me a copy of his report.
Morissette has a long documented record of evidence-based alleged and proven violations that the Collège des médecins du Québec has ignored.

These include the following that I added to my complaint, with the evidence:

• judicially proven lying while giving expert testimony in court;
• giving expert opinion in a criminal proceeding without consulting the relevant scientific research literature;
• an appellate court finding of his reprehensible behaviour;
• giving an in-court expert opinion of the harmlessness of mass-murderer Karla Homolka based on 3½ hours of interview;
• being in conflict of interest while recommending release of double-child-murderer Guy Turcotte;
• destroying his appraisal-session interview notes immediately and prior to termination of criminal legal proceedings and engaging in such disallowed practice since 1983;
• requesting double payment for the same service by claiming the same accused person both as patient and legal client;
• performing such a large amount of opinion-for-hire contracting for clients as to affect his professional independence, put him in conflict of interest, and influence the quality of his practice; and,
• exercising his profession in a jurisdiction in which he is not a certified practitioner.

After eight months, the medical tribunal’s intake analyst, Dr. Michel Jarry, summarily dismissed my entire complaint, writing that there is no cause to bother the disciplinary committee since I am not a “patient” of Morissette. This remarkable result was handed down despite the many and repeated unambiguous violations by Morissette of the statutory rules of professional ethics.

I filed an appeal on April 2, 2018, and the review committee has 90 days to make its decision about whether this sort of thing is allowed.

It must not be allowed. Otherwise, we are no better than any totalitarian regime that mines rumours and false accusations to legitimize state actions, and psychiatrists are no better than opportunists-for-hire in such a system.

It is also of note that the vice-president-governance of the University of Ottawa who coordinated the collection of hearsay about my intimate personal information, for use by the hired psychiatrist to render his secret “psychiatric opinion”, was Nathalie Des Rosiers.

Des Rosiers subsequently became Director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) for a time and is now an elected member (MPP) of the Ontario parliament and a minister in the government.

The university did not inform me of its actions, and vigorously opposed my access to the psychiatric report until the final hour of an appeal in litigation for access in 2017.⁵

1. “Academic Freedom? How Nasty Can a University Be?” by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, February 17, 2018.
2. “Denis Rancourt’s letter to president Jacques Frémont, University of Ottawa”, with three attached supporting letters from Hazel Gashoka, Jean-Marie Vianney, and Cynthia McKinney, January 8, 2018.
3. “Did University of Ottawa Persecute a Professor on Its Faculty? A Petition in Support of Denis Rancourt”, March 2018.
4. “Book Of Complaint Against Psychiatrist Louis Morissette With Appeal To CdR CMQ”, by Denis Rancourt, April 2, 2018.
5. “Book: All arguments of parties and intervener in Dr. Denis Rancourt’s constitutional challenge of Section 65(6)3 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, at judicial review, in the Divisional Court for Ontario, Court File No.: 17-DC-2279”, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, March 2018.

Manufactured ignorance is a primary function of public education (or, how the world economy really works)

And it works.

By Denis G. Rancourt, PhD


A main function of the public education enterprise, beyond destruction of the personality and individual thought and agency, is to ingrain a camouflaged ignorance that becomes a permanent fixture in the host brain.

One of the best examples of such manufactured ignorance is the widespread ingrained notion that the dominant global military-industrial-propaganda complex does or could allow a large measure of "free enterprise capitalism".

This false notion is one where individual motivation to maximize individual wealth accumulation is the first mechanistic organizational principle at work, which "explains" USA economic hegemony.

This myth of "the invisible hand" as being compatible with reality is so pervasive that it has even penetrated the reinforced stronghold of independent thought that is the Libertarian mind.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

USA economic dominance is imposed and enforced by projected military power, which ensures physical control of both energy resources and trade routes, and which imposes global extortion via control of the world currency and financial transactions (the US dollar printed at will by the boss, and direct control of global investment and transaction conditions).

Projected military power also installs direct corporate exploitation on territories, thus preventing any national emergence. Corporations themselves are not so much for directly making money, but more for directly controlling human and natural resources to prevent local emergence.

Projected military power is visible in military bases in every region, and in a fleet of aircraft carriers, each more powerful than the militaries of most nations.

Macroeconomic hegemony is visible in the existence and operation of global finance instruments (World Bank, International Monetary Found) and in the regular USA use of devastating "sanctions" and associated physical blockades.

That the organizing principle is military-CIA-etc-mediated dominance and exploitation rather than benign self-organization from individual motivation for individual benefit is true at all scales: from "health and safety" regulations that create controlled markets further occupying the mind, to the regulated industry of death, to urban building-zone battles for more isolating and sanitized cubicles, and so on.

The Libertarians detect and denounce personal-scale and nuclear-family-scale oppression but largely accept the myth that a mega-corporation is simply an expression of free will. Many find it impossible to distinguish a small private business from an entangled "public" mega-corporation.

Think of the efficiency of the public education enterprise when even the minds of Libertarians are contaminated to this degree.

Surprisingly, fragments of the actual societal organizing principles at work nonetheless occasionally emerge, even in the academic literature: "Preferences for group dominance track and mediate the effects of macro-level social inequality and violence across societies, by JR Kunst et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.1616572114, PNAS, May 8, 2017."

Paris -- Who made the terror?

By Denis G. Rancourt

 

The US and its allies murdered one million civilians in Iraq, using indefinite sanctions and war, destroyed all public infrastructure, and gutted all institutions. Do you think that would cause some people to be pissed off and desperate?

These “leaders of the free world” went on to inflict the same such “humanitarian” medicine on Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria (by proxy) and Yemen. And these “leaders” condone the regular genocidal slaughters perpetrated by Israel as part of its brutal occupation and program of land seizures.

Do you think some people are starting to grasp the meaning of US “freedom and democracy”?
These wars target the land-based resources and territories of the Middle East, and target the Muslim populations in order to incapacitate them sufficiently not to develop self-governance. As such, these are racist wars, and their impact on populations is necessarily the imposition of extreme racist suppression.

Many Muslims both identify with those directly targeted by the wars and genocides and are themselves subjected to local racist suppression in the same Western countries that are the architects of the Middle East campaigns. The local racist suppression has many forms including: economic apartheid, police targeting, media Islamophobia, second-class citizenry, discriminatory administrative burdens, and daily racism.

An effective state response to diffuse or mask these domestic threats is “multiculturalism”. On the spectrum of state social engineering, this approach is more common in Canada and the UK, and less common in France and the US, which prefer hard-core forced integration and police-state sequestration.

In my view, the relatively high per-capita degree of “Muslim” revolt and now terror in France is a predictable consequence of the combination of French militarism abroad and French structural and societal racism. This creates a fertile ground in which young desperate men (who perceive the Western geopolitical onslaught against “Islam” – against their identity – and against any influence they might have in the world) will want to lash out and act against the perceived oppressor, as violently as possible.

This “fertile ground” can spontaneously create acts of terror that do not have a clear geo-strategic purpose, that are locally nurtured by the physiological “rewards” of action, amplified by the media attention and by the feedback of “solidarity in desperation”. These are features of gang-culture psychology.

The same “fertile ground” can also be exploited and manipulated by state actors, of both the home state and other states. There are two aspects of such exploitation: A state can exploit the outcome of the terror, or a state can more directly covertly influence the execution of the terror, such as by facilitating access to weapons, by infiltration, by entrapment, etc.

The analyst must keep in mind that there is no doubt that a Western home state can perpetrate horrendous acts of violence against its own citizens. In the words of Paul Craig Roberts:

“Some people are so naive and stupid as to think that no government would kill its own citizens. But governments do so all the time. There are an endless number of false flag attacks, such as Operation Gladio. Operation Gladio was a CIA/Italian intelligence operation that relentlessly bombed innocent Italians, such as those waiting in a train station, murdering hundreds, and then blaming the violence on the European communist parties in the post-WW II era in order to block the communists from electoral gains.
A president of Italy revealed the truth about Operation Gladio, and you can read the sordid detail in a number of books and online. The bombings were not done, as was widely reported in the corrupt Western media, by communists. The bombings were done by Italian intelligence aided by the CIA. In one of the Italian investigatory hearings, a member of Italian intelligence said that the sites to be bombed were chosen in order to maximize the deaths of women and children, because these victims were most useful in discrediting the communists.”

With Paris, the home state is already exploiting the outcome of the terror to prop up its image and to justify whatever “responses” it will want to have. France is completely in league with Saudi Arabia in supporting ISIS mercenary thugs to remove Assad, and now it will use this domestic terror as a pretext for more muscular (illegal) military interventions to weaken the state that will be headed by Assad, as the current Russia-backed victories against ISIS continue. This is a disgustingly cynical manipulation of the victims of terrorism by French rulers.

If France wanted to respect the victims of these terror attacks it would stop its callous messaging exploitation, stop creating terror in other nations, concentrate on and allow independent investigative police work that is not politically hampered, be transparent about the results of such independent investigations, and concentrate on repairing domestic social injustices.

Finally, if we wish to theorize about which outside nations would most benefit from covertly facilitating the Paris terror, we need only ask which outside nation or gang would have realistic motives. The terror is of benefit to ISIS for recruiting, no doubt. The frantic police-state reactions are a gift to those who seek the empowerment and adrenaline of direct action. The state reaction conveys fear loud and clear. Just in that regard, the French government is irresponsible, and must next appear to have captured or killed to perpetrators. ISIS also benefits by a multiplication of battle fronts, and the potential to discourage or frenzy the enemy, although that is an unrealistic long shot. Furthermore, ISIS does not have physical access to the “fertile ground”. Thus, in my view, it is unlikely that the terror was directed or facilitated by ISIS.

Another state actor that could obviously benefit is Israel. Israel has been a constant promoter of the doctrine of a “war on terror” and of a constant and global terror threat that can only be solved by removing all the regional nations seeking independence from US domination, which compete against Israeli control of the region (Iran, Syria, Iraq, …) [1]. In the case of Paris, the Western media have already attributed the terror to ISIS, without any actual investigation, and the desired and foreseen or planned response could be a NATO intervention into Syria and Iraq? That would be ideal for Israel, because it would incapacitate any future Syria and Iraq, and would weaken Syrian allies Iran and Hezbollah.

Probably, Germany and other EU nations will see that a such NATO war would be a high-risk venture that can only create more terror and refugees for Europe, all for the benefit of Israel and US geopolitical domination.  Hopefully, Paris will not be a 9/11 event that launches new colonial wars of aggression. Hopefully, Europe will think for itself and not step into another US project of death.

Endnote: My personal and limited knowledge of French society comes from having traveled, lived, and worked in France. I have witnessed the egregious class segregation and extreme racism of that country first hand, and have personally suffered some of its consequences. Within the young professional classes in Paris there is little racism, but between the dominant social classes towards the lower classes there is viscous and palpable racism. The disdain of the elite classes for the working and un-working classes is highly racialized, as is their view of former French colonies. The French ruling and elite classes are extremely chauvinistic and racist. I have not felt anything so palpable in other European countries where I have worked or traveled for work: The Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, UK, … In my view, this determinative class-racism is part of the mechanism that creates this domestic terror, as I have outlined above.

[1] http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/11/10/iran-deal-fallout-clarifies-the-geopolitics-of-apartheid-and-genocide/

Climate stupidity and human survival

By Denis G. Rancourt

This article accompanies a 2-hour public lecture I gave at the University of Ottawa on March 27, 2015, entitled "The science and geopolitics of climate change": VIDEO-LINK-Part-1, VIDEO-LINK-Part-2. The physics calculations of Earth's radiation balance described in Part-1 of the talk are from this paper: Rancourt, D.G., "Radiation physics constraints on global warming: CO2 increase has little effect", archive.org (3 December 2011). Links to my articles and interviews about climate are HERE.

The human animal has an instinct to identify potential dangers and to warn others. It is a built-in survival mechanism of any animal that lives in a group. And it is a strong and constant activity, re-enforced by environmental stressors.

This plays out on several time scales, from the immediate in the case of a potential physical assault, to the weekly in checking the weather forecast, to seasonal in preparing for winter, to life-long in planning for inevitable aging, to leaving good things for our grandchildren...

It is in our fiber to look ahead and to plan ahead, especially in the face of foreseeable or detected dangers.

The whole process can spin out of control when the danger is difficult to perceive yet could be lethal. Think of baboons who are on the lookout for a stalking lion. The slightest shadow movement can make them scream and run for the trees. It's a tense and highly volatile situation.

At this stage in our evolution we are faced with a pathological extension of our collective survival reflex, which is entirely fabricated by our high priests (government funded scientists and talking heads).

If these high priests were not here to tell us that the atmospheric concentration of the minor constituent CO2 is increasing, and that "global mean surface temperature" has increased by some 0.5 C in the last 100 years, then we would never know about these imperceptible causes of our certain eventual collective death as a species.

The priests explain that our certain extinction will occur from a rising sea level and changing regional climates. That these changes will cause mass migrations, ecosystem collapses, agricultural failures, famines, and disease. They also inform us that those who will suffer most are the most vulnerable inhabitants of the planet, as though this were a new feature of the effects of natural disasters.

Therefore, they urge, we must tax carbon emissions, apply cap and trade, and create a global carbon economy to limit CO2 in the atmosphere. And who better to coordinate it all than the World Bank, IMF, and such, given their stellar records in managing equitable development on this little rock. (Or is that economic enforcement of US regime supremacy?)

Forgive me for saying, but this all sounds rather nutso to me.

Nothing could be more like a religion than this crazy movement. We are expected to accept that an essential and growth-limiting plant nutrient (CO2: [1]) is a toxic pollutant, that the world will be destroyed because of our collective and intrinsic wickedness of emitting CO2, via floods no less.   

Take a deep breath (exhale if you dare) and allow me to state a few facts that might help put things into perspective.

The planet has been teeming with life for billions of years.

During that time, the global mean temperature has almost always been some 10 C higher than in the present geologic anomaly [2], in a manner uncorrelated with CO2 concentration [3]. That is the history of this same planet that we live on. During that time, the CO2 concentration has typically been 10 times higher than today's value, and it has rarely been as low as modern values, nor has it ever been lower than modern values.

There is no reason to believe that humans would not fare well on an Earth that is 10 C warmer, never mind 1 or 2 C. Land value would increase in the polar regions, and there would be intense reforestation and forest densification of the equatorial regions, with little possibility for controlling growth where it is hot and humid.

From what we know of our planet and the history of its biosphere, warming is not going to kill us off any time soon. None of the known mass extinctions (a relative term) in Earth's history can be reliably attributed to "sustained warming", whereas ice ages that have occurred recently (during human presence on the planet, in the last 1 M years) are expected to correspond to periods of decreased planetary life density, but saw mammals and human populations completely adapt. Basically, neither warming or cooling can kill us by any know mechanism ever observed. If anything, the opposite of "killer warmth" is observed on today's Earth, where both human populations and living biomass are concentrated near equatorial latitudes:

Therefore, we still have much time left to achieve human extinction by much more direct means than warming (or cooling) of any kind. We also have a lot of time and occasions to practice accommodating mass migrations caused by our wars and economic violence, in order to prepare for the "climate migrations".

Somehow there seems to be more public-opinion, political, and lobbying effort in implementing and developing the instruments of a global carbon economy than in developing the instruments to prevent wars of aggression, to cope with the consequences of natural disasters, to stop displacing and dispossessing local inhabitants, to enforce the Geneva Conventions, to stop the wholesale destruction of entire nations (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran...?), to respect international law, ... not to mention reparations to the survivors of recent slavery, genocide, dispossession, and crass exploitation.

Rather than widespread vehement and actuated insistence on democratic control of local resources and institutions, based on individual realities on the ground, instead we have a sizable yet ineffective population of vocal do-gooders enthralled in spasmodic incantations against atmospheric CO2 emissions, as part of a Gaia-inspired religion perverted by the Christian concept of original sin; all of which de facto supports the carbon globalization schemes engineered by the US regime to attempt to constrain their emerging competitors and extort a development tax.

When has "globalization" ever been about justice, or about anything other than economic predation? When have good-will global efforts ever had any significant positive impact? [4]

Why pollute local struggles and liberation of the individual with tenuous claims about imperceptible dangers? And why put so much energy into insisting that the danger from CO2 is real? This seems like a classic example of seeking an overarching religious belief "solution" to real local problems that one cannot or will not confront.

"Climate justice" needs to be "justice". The comfortable-middle-class fetish for carbon co-opts the analysis, defuses the thrust for defending identity-tied interests, and sends legitimate demands straight into the atmosphere. Or, at best, it is simply irrelevant to real struggles.

In the main population, if all the fanatics that are screaming that the sky is falling would scream to stop the war machine that occupies every corner of the globe, then we could start moving away from the real manufactured disasters that wash over the planet continuously, which don't require satellite spectrometers to detect.

Instead of asking whether we can detect warming, whether intense weather events are actually more frequent, whether species extinction rates can reliably be measured, and so on, why not address the obvious: Humans are exploiting and terrorizing other humans, human conditions are constantly being attacked, and natural habitat is being destroyed for corporate benefit by eliminating local sovereignty.

Why turn to sanitized and intractable up-in-the-air questions when injustice and actual destruction is all around us? And why oh why pretend that humans can manage global carbon fluxes, manage the radiation balance of the planet, and control climate?

It's a planet!

If we are going to have a global religion, why not believe that justice leads to both short-term and long-term safety? Not justice that is planned and given to us, but justice that we acquire through struggle and liberation.

On the other hand if you must be irrelevant and must have your carbon fetish, then at least put it into a planetary perspective [5]:

• The present (2010) rate of fossil fuel burning (0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y) is 8% of global primary production (GPP)
• The latter plant growth (GPP) uses only 0.07% of solar light striking the planet
• Thus, fossil fuel burning represents 8% of 0.07% = 0.006% of solar energy rate of input (the sun is a sun and the Earth is a planet...)
• The CO2 production from the burning of fossil fuel is approximately equal to that from human and domestic animal breathing
• The combined biomass of humans and domestic animals is 0.04% of Earth's living biomass
• Ants have transformed the planet's surface and its ecology far more than have humans
• The total amount of fossil fuel burned to date (historically to 2010) by humans is 3.7 x 10^14 kg-C, less than half of the carbon contained in the atmosphere as a minor constituent gas
• Dissolved CO2 in the oceans is 50 times more than the total amount in the atmosphere
• Living and dead biomass-carbon (in soils, sediments, plant-cover, etc.) is probably much greater than carbon as CO2 in air and water
• Thus, the total post-industrial fossil fuel burned to date represents less than 1% of the planet's global bio-available and exchangeable carbon, not to mention geological sources
• As such, atmospheric CO2 is readily exchanged with and buffered by compartments of labile carbon that are much larger than the atmosphere, via flux mechanisms that science is barely beginning to understand (e.g., [1])

Endnotes

[1] Keenan et al., "Increase in forest water-use efficiency as atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rise", Nature 499, 324-327 (18 July 2013); Donohue et al., "Impact of CO2 fertilization on maximum foliage cover across the globe's warm, arid environments", Geophysical Research Letters 40(12), 3031-3035 (28 June 2013).

[2] Wikipedia article, "Geologic temperature record", accessed May, 2015, see "Overall view". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record

[3] Rothman, D.H., "Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for the last 500 million years", Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 99(7), 4167-4171, (2 April 2002). http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4167.full

[4] Rancourt, D.G., "Some big lies of science", Activist Teacher (8 June 2010). http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2010/06/some-big-lies-of-science.html

[5] Rancourt, D.G., "Is the burning of fossil fuel a significant planetary activity?", Activist Teacher (21 August 2010). http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2010/08/is-burning-of-fossil-fuel-significant.html ; Rancourt, D.G., "CO2 emission from fossil fuel burning is not more than from breathing", Activist Teacher (22 August 2010). http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2010/08/co2-emission-from-fossil-fuel-burning.html


Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, including in the area of environmental science, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism.