The Psychology of Supremacism: Whether White, Male or Human
White supremacism, male supremacism, and human supremacism have common roots.
What is supremacism about generally? It’s about a fragile sense of superiority (covering a sense of insecurity) that must be actively promoted to be maintained. It reflects a system that is inflexible, rigid, and socially autistic (awkward social relations). These are signs of abrain misdeveloped, of unresolved early life trauma. Males are more susceptible to early experience because their proper brain development is more reliant on caregiving than females whose brains have more built-in integration to begin with (see research on effects of neglect).
I remember as a child the women around me routinely warning each other to not insult the ego of a nearby male. There was a deference to letting the man think he was superior. Don’t let him think you know better. Although this sounds like a slave system, there was some self-protection value in it. If the man’s ego was threatened, he might turn violent and vicious, or lose confidence and not do his job. That would upset the system of balance within the family or community. No point in undermining that. So tiptoeing around his brittleness was preferred.
Unfortunately, tiptoeing allowed the myth of male supremacy to continue, until the feminist movement began to boldly point out that the (male) emperor had no clothes.
Similarly, white supremacy, unfortunately still pervasive, is being challenged by movements like “Black Lives Matter,” who point out the many disadvantages (like being shot) of being perceived as black when going about one’s daily life.
If you have broken through the blinders about male supremacy and white supremacy, it may be time to challenge your notions about human supremacy.
Derrick Jensen(link is external) has torn the lid off of human supremacy. In his forthcoming book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (April 2016), he poetically and movingly outlines all the mistaken notions about human superiority. He describes animals, plants, ecosystems that are much smarter and cooperative than humans purport to be. The “smart” humans dominant today are in the middle of destroying every ecosystem on the planet.
How does a person develop myths of supremacy?
Torture in babyhood—being left alone or being left to cry in distress for long periods. Punishment in childhood. These push the individual to be self-protective—the world, parents, my own urges are not to be trusted. What are the mechanisms?
One of the basic developments in early life with good care is learning to trust the body’s signals, like one’s emotions and needs (e.g., hunger). These are adaptations that helped our ancestors survive. Learning to understand such signals is part of self regulation and relies on caregivers. Caregivers who attend to the signals early help the baby learn to respond quickly to them and eventually regulate them. Multiple systems are learning to self-regulate and self-organize in early life, through epigenetic and maturational plasticity, with multiple sensitive periods that build on one another (e.g., stress response, endocrine system, vagus nerve). When good care is lacking, gaps in self-regulation get built into the individual.
Because of undercare and traumatizing of babies, humanly-normal self regulation is becoming rarer in civilized nations like the USA. Instead, individuals are easily stressed, system homeostasis is thrown off kilter and there are limited skills for restoring it. With appropriate early care, secure attachment develops—a sign of good neurobiological function—and when stress occurs one can think of attachment figures to calm the self down. With poor early experience (common now), secure attachment does not develop and internal mechanisms for self-control are faulty. One then must look outside the self for self-regulation.
Remember the male supremacist of my childhood. He only feels safe when he feels superior. What does he use to make himself feel safe again? Here are a few things:
Lack of trust then is built into the individual and colors all experience. The individual looks for places where he can feel safe. These are then provided by authorities who establish their power and maintain it through the myths they perpetuate. Male supremacy, white supremacy are forms of rigid ideology that show you how to attend to things outside yourself to feel safe (and ignore all the rage and grief you have bottled up from mistreatment).
Like male and white supremacy, human supremacy is also a rigid ideology. It is most evident in Middle Eastern and Western European traditions that contend that humans are the pinnacle of creation or evolution; humans are the technological geniuses of the earth, etc.
Since world societies moved to patriarchy (elder male control of what is valued), “civilized” societies have adopted ideologies and practices that undermine child development in the ways described. Such practices build controllable people. When a society does not follow evolution’s plan for optimal development (which my lab studies, see footnote). This misdevelops brains/bodies in such a way as to make people more subservient to their aggressive tendencies (because controls did not develop properly) and to suggestions by authorities.
The notion of human superiority was taken around the world by European explorers, settlers, missionaries who invaded and took over. The notion of human superiority is a strange notion among indigenous peoples all over the world who often understand humans to be the “younger sibling” of plants and other animals (who have indeed been on the earth much longer). They have been complaining for centuries about the strange white men showing up on their landscape—unable to see the life around them, lacking an open heartsense, focused only on fulfilling his immediate appetites at the expense of future generations and other-than-humans.
These are signs of misdeveloped humanity.
What do we do now? We’ve got to get back to raising human nature for flourishing, the flourishing of All. Join us to discuss next steps at the conference (or watch the videos),Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous Knowhow for Global Flourishing, September 11-15, 2016(link is external).
For more on these ideas, see the book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom(link is external). And an interview of me about the book(link is external)........................
PSA: I don't want this to be a black vs white thread, I just want to hear your thoughts on this
White supremacism, male supremacism, and human supremacism have common roots.
What is supremacism about generally? It’s about a fragile sense of superiority (covering a sense of insecurity) that must be actively promoted to be maintained. It reflects a system that is inflexible, rigid, and socially autistic (awkward social relations). These are signs of abrain misdeveloped, of unresolved early life trauma. Males are more susceptible to early experience because their proper brain development is more reliant on caregiving than females whose brains have more built-in integration to begin with (see research on effects of neglect).
I remember as a child the women around me routinely warning each other to not insult the ego of a nearby male. There was a deference to letting the man think he was superior. Don’t let him think you know better. Although this sounds like a slave system, there was some self-protection value in it. If the man’s ego was threatened, he might turn violent and vicious, or lose confidence and not do his job. That would upset the system of balance within the family or community. No point in undermining that. So tiptoeing around his brittleness was preferred.
Unfortunately, tiptoeing allowed the myth of male supremacy to continue, until the feminist movement began to boldly point out that the (male) emperor had no clothes.
Similarly, white supremacy, unfortunately still pervasive, is being challenged by movements like “Black Lives Matter,” who point out the many disadvantages (like being shot) of being perceived as black when going about one’s daily life.
If you have broken through the blinders about male supremacy and white supremacy, it may be time to challenge your notions about human supremacy.
Derrick Jensen(link is external) has torn the lid off of human supremacy. In his forthcoming book, The Myth of Human Supremacy (April 2016), he poetically and movingly outlines all the mistaken notions about human superiority. He describes animals, plants, ecosystems that are much smarter and cooperative than humans purport to be. The “smart” humans dominant today are in the middle of destroying every ecosystem on the planet.
How does a person develop myths of supremacy?
Torture in babyhood—being left alone or being left to cry in distress for long periods. Punishment in childhood. These push the individual to be self-protective—the world, parents, my own urges are not to be trusted. What are the mechanisms?
One of the basic developments in early life with good care is learning to trust the body’s signals, like one’s emotions and needs (e.g., hunger). These are adaptations that helped our ancestors survive. Learning to understand such signals is part of self regulation and relies on caregivers. Caregivers who attend to the signals early help the baby learn to respond quickly to them and eventually regulate them. Multiple systems are learning to self-regulate and self-organize in early life, through epigenetic and maturational plasticity, with multiple sensitive periods that build on one another (e.g., stress response, endocrine system, vagus nerve). When good care is lacking, gaps in self-regulation get built into the individual.
Because of undercare and traumatizing of babies, humanly-normal self regulation is becoming rarer in civilized nations like the USA. Instead, individuals are easily stressed, system homeostasis is thrown off kilter and there are limited skills for restoring it. With appropriate early care, secure attachment develops—a sign of good neurobiological function—and when stress occurs one can think of attachment figures to calm the self down. With poor early experience (common now), secure attachment does not develop and internal mechanisms for self-control are faulty. One then must look outside the self for self-regulation.
Remember the male supremacist of my childhood. He only feels safe when he feels superior. What does he use to make himself feel safe again? Here are a few things:
- Binary social relations:.............. one-up (domineering; you don’t have to figure other people out when you are “on top”) or one-down (submitting; let the authority figure take care of things because figuring out other people is too hard)
- Black and white thinking................... (categorizing people, things, experience so that, again, you don’t have to figure out how to be receptive and attuned to anything)
- Rigid ideology or dogmatism ..........(certainty about a set of unexperienced beliefs; again, you’re off the hook for figuring things out in the social moment)
Lack of trust then is built into the individual and colors all experience. The individual looks for places where he can feel safe. These are then provided by authorities who establish their power and maintain it through the myths they perpetuate. Male supremacy, white supremacy are forms of rigid ideology that show you how to attend to things outside yourself to feel safe (and ignore all the rage and grief you have bottled up from mistreatment).
Like male and white supremacy, human supremacy is also a rigid ideology. It is most evident in Middle Eastern and Western European traditions that contend that humans are the pinnacle of creation or evolution; humans are the technological geniuses of the earth, etc.
Since world societies moved to patriarchy (elder male control of what is valued), “civilized” societies have adopted ideologies and practices that undermine child development in the ways described. Such practices build controllable people. When a society does not follow evolution’s plan for optimal development (which my lab studies, see footnote). This misdevelops brains/bodies in such a way as to make people more subservient to their aggressive tendencies (because controls did not develop properly) and to suggestions by authorities.
The notion of human superiority was taken around the world by European explorers, settlers, missionaries who invaded and took over. The notion of human superiority is a strange notion among indigenous peoples all over the world who often understand humans to be the “younger sibling” of plants and other animals (who have indeed been on the earth much longer). They have been complaining for centuries about the strange white men showing up on their landscape—unable to see the life around them, lacking an open heartsense, focused only on fulfilling his immediate appetites at the expense of future generations and other-than-humans.
These are signs of misdeveloped humanity.
What do we do now? We’ve got to get back to raising human nature for flourishing, the flourishing of All. Join us to discuss next steps at the conference (or watch the videos),Sustainable Wisdom: Integrating Indigenous Knowhow for Global Flourishing, September 11-15, 2016(link is external).
For more on these ideas, see the book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom(link is external). And an interview of me about the book(link is external)........................
PSA: I don't want this to be a black vs white thread, I just want to hear your thoughts on this
